Floating Staircase(59)

Something in her face alerted me to the fact that she no longer remembered who the Steins were. At this, I felt a sinking loss drop through my body. This trip, it appeared, was going to be a bust.

Althea grimaced, scrunching her lips together to start up the motor of speech. When she spoke, her voice was the creaking sound of a coffin lid. “Set it down over here, son, where I can smell the flowers.”

I walked around the side of the bed and placed the potted plant atop a small nightstand piped with industrial steel. The only other thing on the nightstand was a picture of a handsome young boy in a dark blue cap and gown. I wondered if it was her son Earl had spoken to on the phone.

“What’d you say your name was again?”

“Travis Glasgow. I hope I’m not disturbing you, ma’am.”

With fossilized hands, she smoothed out the blankets on her lap. There was an IV attached to one broomstick arm. “I look busy to you?”

I offered her a crooked smile. “No, ma’am.”

Her lower lip quivered as her face folded into a frown. “You say you live where, now?”

“The old Dentman house in Westlake. The one on the lake.”

“The old Dentman house,” she said. In her condition, it was impossible to gauge the tone of her voice.

“You used to tutor the Dentman boy, didn’t you? Elijah Dentman?”

Despite her illness, Althea was no less perceptive; she picked out something unsettling in my question and hung on to it in temporary silence, perhaps going over my question and the reasons for why I’d be here asking such a thing. I listened to her wheezing respiration and did not hurry her. Eventually, she said, “You a friend of the Dentmans?”

“Not really, ma’am. I didn’t even know anything about them until I moved into their house.”

“So why’d you come here? I appreciate the company, Lord knows, but I don’t understand it. All this way to bring me someone else’s plant?”

This made me smile a nervous smile. It made Althea smile, too. She had the yellowed, plastic-looking teeth of a skeleton, a corpse.

My hands, the traitors that they were, had been unraveling a thread from my parka. Suddenly aware of this, I started to unzip my coat but paused halfway. “Would you mind if we talked for just a bit?”

“Only person comes to see me is Michael,” she said wanly, “and he certainly don’t bring me plants. So you’re welcome to stay . . . provided I don’t get too tired on you.”

I took my parka off and draped it over the back of a metal folding chair that stood next to the nightstand. I sat down in the chair, my gaze returning to the framed picture of the handsome young man in the cap and gown. “This is Michael?”

“My son, yes,” Althea said, and this time there was no mistaking the emotion in her voice. “My only baby. He’s a good boy, this one. Got his demons like everyone, sure, but he’s a good one.”

“He’s a handsome kid. Athletic.”

“This here’s his college graduation picture. See that? First in my family to graduate college. On a scholarship. How you gonna like that?”

“Good for him.”

“He just needs to find himself a better job. It’s tough today, kids out of school trying to find jobs.”

“Does he come to see you much?”

“Used to. It gets hard for him. I don’t blame him.”

“My mom died of cancer several years ago. Breast cancer. She hung on for a while. It was rough on her. On my brother and me, too.” This, of course, made me think of her funeral and how Jodie had dragged me out of Adam’s house in a fit.

“Mine’s the stomach,” said Althea. “They been cutting little pieces of me away, a bit here and a bit there, snip-snip, but it really ain’t the pain that’s so bad. It’s the sick. I get really sick in the mornings. Hard to eat food. Sometimes, too, I can’t even sleep at night.”

“There’s nothing more they can do for you?”

“What’s to do? What’s left? Look at these things,” she said, extending her arms with great care. They were as thin and as shapely as the cardboard tubing inside rolls of toilet paper. A network of veins, fat and blue-black, was visible beneath her nearly translucent skin. “Scrawny things. Jab me full of needles, drain me like a sieve.” But her tone wasn’t bitter. In fact, there was almost a sense of humor in it. Then she sighed. “We can put people on the moon and send radio pulses and whatnot into outer space, but we’ve yet to completely explore the mysteries right here on Earth, the mysteries right here inside our own bodies.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “If I’m disturbing you, I’ll go.”

Althea looked like she wanted to wave a hand at me. “Death is the disturbance. People are just passing road signs along the way. But listen to us, sharing cancer stories, trading them like baseball cards. Who wants to talk about cancer?”

“Not me.”

“Me, either.” She looked at me, then the picture of Michael. It was like she was desperate to find some sort of similarity between us, although she would be hard-pressed to find it. “You said you were married, I b’lieve. You got any children?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You wanna stay and chat, you best quit being so damned polite, boy. I ain’t your mamma. It’s insulting.”