The Animators(36)

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

Mel reaches into her shirt pocket and produces her Camels. “So,” she says. “I’m sorry if I hassled you too hard about the journal. Guess I got excited when you started drawing again. Got carried away.”

“It’s fine.”

“Did not mean to make you hork. How are you feeling?”

“Just had a stroke. No jazz hands yet.”

“Heh.” She exhales a plume of smoke. “There’s that knife-sharp wit. You’re still sparky.” She flicks ash into the grass. “You know what I’ve been thinking might make a good project? The stroke. I mean, that’d make a hell of a story, right? You’re going to have to relearn a lot of your skill set. Why not make that, you know, the project? Could be really interesting.”

I make a guttural sound. Shake my head. Say, “Don’t want people to know.”

Mel coughs softly.

“What.”

“Avoiding the Internet, I see.”

“What.”

“I kinda hate to tell you this, but word’s out. Thirty-two-year-old artist, at the top of her game, has a stroke. It’s sort of made you famous.”

“Fuck,” I say.

“That the only word you know anymore?” She raps my head gently. “You’re so brilliant, your brain exploded, superstar. Nashville Combat was so real it made you stroke out.”

I look down. My knees are skinny beyond recognition. I go, “Guh.” Shake my head.

“Is that a no?”

“No,” I say, slow and strong.

She let it drop for a moment. We watch an ambulance cruise up, turn off its lights. Go still. Then she says, “Making the movie was hard. I’ll give you that. Probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Couldn’t do anything else, work on anything else, until it was all finished. But then it’s out in the world. And it’s yours. Closest I’ll ever come to giving birth. It’s yours, too, you know. It’s as much yours as it is mine.”

It makes my face heat, to hear this. Makes me feel bumbling and sheepish and warm to hear Mel praise something I do. Every time.

She puts her head down, rubbing her neck slowly in thought. “There’s this weird thing people tend to do, I think, when they’re working something that hard,” she says, “where they’ll kind of disassociate. And that worked, some days. Just separate your feeling self from the rest of your head and plow through. But most of the time, I hated my life then. I lived in the only way I knew how, and honestly, I only got a couple of ways. When your day is filled with digging through all the interior shit you could never handle otherwise, your nights are going to consist of trying to get away from the day. And I will admit that I went overboard. With the drinking and stuff. It messed things up with you. It messed up a lot.”

I think: discorporate.

She gives her Camel one last pull—her second, lit off the first—and crushes it under her heel. Tilts her head from side to side, stretching, then slumps over, props her chin on her hand. Says quietly, “You could be dead right now. You know that? This has been—I don’t know, man. When it happened, they weren’t sure you weren’t going to be a vegetable. And when they told me, you know. That you might not come out of this. It was like, fuck. Too late.”

She swallows hard, nods at the ground. I think of the night we watched our Kotex commercial. She misses what I miss, too. Our life. Working.

I don’t know what to say. I reach into my bathrobe pocket, bring out the spring-bound hand clench. I squeeze it with one hand, then the other.

“And look at you,” she says. “Almost two months later, you’re walking. You’re talking. You’re drawing. This is an opportunity to do something big. Don’t you think this is the time to be brave, and make something scary and new and incredible?”

“I don’t feel like me,” I say. I point to myself. Try to say it with my hands. Give up.

“But you will,” she tells me. “I know what you’re capable of. You are this story, man. We got some good ideas, but this is the best.”

She pauses.

“Whatever you become, whatever you decide,” she says finally. “That’s the story.”

“What will I be.”

“Better. Stronger. Faster.” She gestures to my hands. “See? Holy shit, look at those hands. Those are choking hands.”

I swat her on the back of the head.

She laughs and stands, tan and muscular, to stretch. Her cheeks have filled out. She’s been eating again, smoking less. Taking runs. “Want to hear something weird? I started getting the shakes watching Nashville Combat. During panels and stuff.”

I nod. Say, “The flask.”

She tilts her head back, unsurprised that I saw. “That’s one way to deal with the shakes.” She holds her hand out. “Got something for you out in the car. Come on, Mamaw.”

I take her hand, heft myself up, and we shuffle to the rusted Mazda she bought for four hundred dollars the week after my stroke. She wrenches the trunk open and grabs a box. Holds it out.

I fumble with it, hands trembling. She gently reaches over and pries it open for me. It’s a new MacBook Pro, sleek and silver and heavy.

She carries it for me as we walk back inside and step into the elevator. “My advice,” she says before she leaves, “if I’m in a position to give it. Start brainstorming stuff. Just write shit down without thinking about it. Plug in as many details as you can. You’ll be surprised how little things turn into big things. Okay? Just try. It’s like exercising.”