The bed sculpture now included a ship of the boy’s pillow. The standing woman had a hand on the stained woman’s shoulder and both were bathed in blue light. The bony old woman lay quietly in her bed, phone inert. She coughed. I stopped and looked in.
She turned her head. She had thin wisps of white hair like bleached grasses growing off her skull.
She coughed at me. Hello, I said.
She didn’t say anything. She coughed again. It wasn’t a big dramatic cough like the ones I’d been hearing all month at school. It sounded more like dry paper flapping against a cactus.
How are you feeling? I asked.
She rubbed the corner of her eye and flapped the cactus again.
There was a pitcher of water on a table near her feet.
I walked in. She muttered something under her breath.
Inside the room, I could hear the machines clicking and sighing, busy at work. She coughed a few more times and put a palm protectively over the glittering rings on her left hand.
I filled a glass from the pitcher, and the water stained as if chlorinated from the light coming off the window.
She watched me, sniffing a little, but she didn’t reach for the 4 glass. Her fingers trembled, stroking the sheets, hardened filaments
of bone. There was a bunch of flowers across from her, a lot s’gn of tall yellow ones and fat pink ones, and a balloon in the shape of a bird that said FLY HOMF SOON! She was hooked up to an IV..
a heart monitor, and a metal box I didn’t recognize.
She scraped out another cough. I brought her the glass. She didn’t move her fingers to take it.
Who the hell are you? she mumbled, coughing.
I stood there with the water.
What the hell are you waiting for? she asked.
Lifting the glass to her lips was hard because her head was so low, The water flowed out, horizontal, dribbling into her mouth and down her neck. She coughed. Sipped again.
I wiped her neck with my sleeve. Mr. Jones’s numbers grazed her shoulder.
Stop that, she said.
After her fourth sip, she cleared her throat and asked me again who I was.
I’m just the math teacher, I said. Her neck was drenched. They’re sending me a math teacher now? she croaked, incredulous.
No no, I said. I’m Lisa’s math teacher.
Lisa? she said.
I’m visiting, I said.
Thank the Lord, she said. I hate math.
She took another sip of water. I watched the green line of the monitor make mountain ranges of her heartbeat. When she’d drained the glass and I’d half-soaked the pillow, she said: Scram, and turned on her side in the bed.
I did the rest of the floor very slowly. The man playing checkers was beating the pants off himself. I finished in the magazine area and just stood and watched the open rectangle that was Mrs.
Venus’s door. I sent a hello on the air to her. I could hear the laugh track of the TV from where I stood.
When I pressed the down arrow for the elevator, it opened right away, and took me back to L. Growing up, I knew those skin-disease photographs by heart. I’d dare myself to look at them, even when I was home alone, but every time the page opened to a person covered in warts, arms so swollen they looked like overstuffed furniture, dot-to-dot faces, breasts lost among larger hives, genital catastrophes, each time I looked I felt the same rush. My friends screamed and ran from the room, but I stayed put. Brought my lips to the page.
Once out of the hospital lobby, I walked into the white sunshine and went straight to a bench. I knocked for a bit, but the wood was weak and mealy, so on the way home, when I passed Mr. Jones’s house, I went back to his front door, and knocked and knocked, pounded that fine heavy oak. I needed it, and I knocked just as I always did, in sets-inhale, knockknockknockknock, exhale. Inhale, knockknockknockknock, exhale. The numbers bounced under my forearm.
I kept going, still knocking, red wigs, still knocking, but even on this good wood, the knocking wasn’t working very well.
I couldn’t stop hearing Lisa’s imitation, her knocking that door frame with me.
I do you, she’d said, for Hands-on Health. After cancer. If there’s time.
I kept knocking, but it almost seemed funny, and I kept going, waiting to see if I could shake the image of her, rapping her knuckles on a table, standing in front of the science class, hands waving in the air. I know! I know! they all yell. Me, in the other room, putting away folders. thinking I could spin myself out privately.
I was trying to get back the release, still knocking, realizing this meant the science teacher knew too, still knocking, when all of a sudden the door opened.
My hand fell forward. I’d been so absorbed with the knocking part that I’d completely forgotten this was a door at all.
Standing in front of me, with slight stubble on his cheeks, eye brows turned in, wearing a 15, was Mr. Jones. Not bloody at all.
Whole and annoyed. My heart ripped up at the sight of him, his lucid stare, his mighty dimensional eyebrows.
What is going ON? he said. My God, I’ve never met a more persistent knocker in my life. What the goddamn do you want.
I stared. I wanted to touch him, push him. He wasn’t dead. I felt my mood lift, double, triple, at the sight of him.
Are you selling something? he asked. I should call the police on you.
Mr. Jones, I said. Where have you been? Mr. Jones!
He started to close the door on me. I don’t want anything, he said.
Wait, I said, it’s Mona Gray. Don’t you remember? Remember? he said. Remember what?
I thrust my hand inside the doorjamb.
I have your 42, I said. Or one of my math students has it. She was in the hospital. It’s my fault. We brought it but you weren’t 2 there. People are stealing from you. I have your 4, 8, 11, 13, 23, 37, and 7 as well. Except the 7 is broken. What happened? I said.
I wedged my foot in the door frame and held up my arm. The numbers moved below, wax wind chimes, clinking and thudding beneath my wrist.
8 Don’t you want these? I asked.
He glanced down and his one visible eyebrow lowered.
I e Sign of Look at that, he said.
It’s almost your whole year, I said. Where were you? I’ve been so worried! The hardware store has lost a ton of merchandise.
Someone stole the clock with the authentic blue glass cover.
He stuck his eye closer to the open crack of the door frame. I was on vacation, he said.
Vacation?
Vacation, he said.
You were on vacation? I asked. You left your store open.
His eye looked right at me, eyelashes thin and widely spaced. I was 42, he said. Who gives a damn when you’re 42 I thought of him on the street that day, the light in his step, the rubies in his walk. Glorious notorious uproarious P My permission slip into the movie theater, into the science teacher’s mouth. Wait, I said, don’t you remember? I grew up next to you. I bought the ax? I said, stomach balking.
He blinked the one visible eye.
I bled on it, I added. Ann’s leg floated up in my mind. He shook his head. Ruins the blade, he said.
The blade is ruined, I said. You were on vacation? Also, I knocked on wood in your math class, Isaid. Do you remember that?
No, he said. I remember no Monas never.
I felt bad. And odd. And suddenly very unimportant. According to my memory, even though he’d ignored me at the hardware store so many times, I’d still figured or hoped he’d once had an altar to me in his living room because I was the best not icer in the land, and I’d imagined that whenever he saw me his heart had risen with pleasure until I spoiled it all for him at age thirteen and then he’d had to rip down the altar and mourn the loss of me for weeks-the only woman who’d understood him.
Perhaps, he said, you used to sell me cookies? I looked at the ground, which read WELCOME.