Free The Banks of Certain Rivers by Jon Harrison Page B

pair of
scissors. He clips off one of the hydrangea stalks and tucks the
cluster of blossoms into a pen-filled mug in front of Shanice,
causing her mouth to fall open in an exaggerated expression of
surprise. Chris bites his lip, like he can’t believe he’s
just pulled off this crazy smooth maneuver, and starts to blush as he
slinks off to his mother’s room. Shanice lets out a low whistle
as he goes.
    “Damn, Mister K.,” she says. “You’re raising
that boy right!”
    It’s dark inside Wendy’s room. The sounds are there, the
sounds I’ve tuned out, the beeping machines, the wheezing
machines, the gurgles and the hisses. They’re just extensions
of the body at the center of it all, and you ignore them after a
while, just like you ignore the sounds of your own living form.
    The body at the center. Wendy. My wife. Her mouth hangs open in the
dark, and her eyes stare at nothing above sharp cheekbones. Both
fragile wrists are curled from atrophy, and her left middle finger,
eternally bent backwards from the break it endured when it was
wrenched from the pool grate, points up at the ceiling.
    Christopher has pulled a chair to the side of his mother’s bed,
and he leans close to her and whispers things I can’t hear.
There’s a new donated quilt covering her bed, and Chris
straightens it out before placing his paper bags on top of it. He
pulls a tomato from one of the bags and holds it under his mother’s
nose.
    “Smell this, Mom. Tomato. Smell it? I got it at the farmer’s
market this morning.”
    I rub Wendy’s bony ankle and grab her chart. I’ve gotten
pretty good at reading it. Caloric intake, normal. Bilirubin
elevated. Bedsore on right lower flank almost healed. Weight as of
yesterday: ninety-two pounds. And so on. It’s like a
conversation. Through these statistics, my wife manages to speak to
me.
    “This is rosemary, Mom. The herb. You can smell it better if I
rub it between my fingers like this.”
    It’s impossible not to miss the similarities between the boy
leaning forward and the woman in the bed. They have the same rounded
faces, the same fine, dark hair. Chris got his mother’s brown
eyes, but not her fair, freckled skin. Instead he carries my
almost-olive cast, quick to darken in the sun, and the contrast is
evident as he brings his face close to hers.
    I peek through the window blinds into the courtyard between Long Term
and Palliative. A young man is out there, talking on a cell phone
with a hand to his forehead like he’s trying to shield his eyes
from the sun.
    “This is cheese. I forget what the guy called it. It smells
good though, doesn’t it? Here, I’ll try some and tell you
how it is….”
    And so on.
    I step out of the room and walk down the hall. I want to give Chris
some time alone with his mom, but also, to be honest, I can’t
always handle seeing them together like this. It can be too much, so
I decide to take a lap. It’s a pretty busy day in Long Term,
Saturday morning and all, and many of the rooms are populated by
ambulatory visitors. I recognize some of them and we smile and nod to
each other. That’s as close as any of us get; there’s a
distance we maintain in this place. Outside one of the rooms, a man
stares at me with a stunned expression, like he’s astonished I
could be so casually strolling along. Family member of a new
resident, obviously. He hasn’t learned the drill yet.
    Lesson number one comes from the name of the wing: Long Term .
Settle in, buddy.
    He’ll figure it out soon enough.
    Just beyond the man in shock, one of the new aides, Irina, a tiny
bleached-blond woman clad in pink scrubs, is typing something into a
computer on a rolling cart in the corridor. I greet her as I walk
past.
    “Hello, Mr. Kazenzakis,” she says, my last name rolling
off the tip of her Eastern European tongue. “Mrs. Kazenzakis is
looking very good today, yes?”
    I smile and nod. The man in the hall stares at us like he can’t
believe this is actually happening