For now, she is sitting in chain restaurants with photos of food on their laminated menus, reading used pulp mysteries bought for twenty-five cents off a cart in the hospital lobby. She is sucking relentlessly on small hard candies she keeps in her pockets, leaving their crumpled cellophanes behind wherever she goes. She is going to matinees, for the discount admission and chunk of time it kills. She is checking her office voicemail, e-mailing updates with brief declarative sentences to her parents. She is seeing the sights: the Arch, the plane that Lindbergh flew, the world-famous Botanical Garden. She goes to a riverboat casino that calls Twain to mind, methodically inserts twenty dollars’ worth of quarters in a slot machine, and leaves without winning or losing another cent. She is eating frozen custard, which people here seem to eat a lot of, even as the weather is turning chill. People in the Midwest in general seem very large to her. She wonders how the local Neptune Society deals with this. If all that fat makes it harder to do their job. Her uncle has gotten fatter, too, in the dozen plus years since she saw him last, waving good-bye to her from his car, his fishing hat askew, although he seems shrunken at the same time; she remembers him as jolly-fat, energetic, always proposing to the child her some fun game they could play together, some special adventure they could go off on, just the two of them, alone. She hopes the guy with the pizza slide won’t have a problem getting him to burn. She knows no one in St. Louis except, of course, her uncle and, now, the doctors and nurses. She goes to the hospital for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening to check on How He’s Doing. It is Any Time Now, they tell her. It is A Waiting Game. She is called upon to do nothing; there are tubes going in and tubes going out, the pillows and sheets are arranged, and the meds, now, keeping pain managed, organs running hydrated and calm. She sits in a chair in the corner of his room, listens to his shallow breathing, to the beeps and faint hospital-speak PA announcements, and reads until the next quarter hour. Sometimes she brings chocolates or little hard candies to the doctors and nurses. They’re sure he knows she’s there, they tell her, despite his incomprehensive gaze and his incomprehensible mumbles. She’s relieved he is incapable of actual speech. The nurses tell her he is lucky to have such a wonderful niece. They asked, when she first arrived, if there were other family members they should contact.
No, she told them. We have no other family. It’s just the two of us.
She makes very sure, each time she leaves, that they have her cell number.
SHE LIKES THE Botanical Garden. There’s an Orchid House, and a section devoted to mutant roses, and a lily pond with enormous flat fronds the pamphlet tells her native women used to let their babies sleep upon while they pounded clothes clean. There’s a Shakespeare Garden, with multiple references to Ophelia. There’s a Japanese section, with bonsai and small beds of pebbled sand raked into rows to evoke Zen. She takes deep breaths as she strolls here; this place should bring peace of mind, without asking, like flight attendants bring the beverage service at twenty minutes in. A diminutive river flows along, a clear green swath. There are a dozen varieties of koi, here at the Missouri Botanical Garden, the pamphlet tells her. She’d like to see them and their dozen varieties, but there is always a throng of tourists clogging the red wooden footbridge, usually couples and families with small children, and they’re always very loudly engaged by the fish, laughing and pointing as they throw food. The children jump up and down. It’s now her third trip to the Botanical Garden, and she’s increasingly annoyed by this agitation. The Japanese section would be very peaceful, if it weren’t for all the squealing and fish-pointing. The camera-clacking. She can’t remember her family ever taking little sight- or fish-seeing excursions like this. Perhaps when she was very small. She tries to recall. All those smiley photos her uncle had taken and kept, yes, the outings as a family group. But she more readily pictures the moments left unshot, unsnapped. Her sister’s attention-demanding tantrums in shopping malls and amusement parks that provoked their parents to hurried exits, without anyone getting the promised roller-coaster ride or the art supplies needed for school. She thinks of her brother’s inevitable asthma attacks and inconsistent food allergies, the relentless parental attention to air quality and the ingredients of his meals, the usual vomiting of popcorn or jelly bellies or carrot sticks wherever they went. She remembers cleaning up his colorful vomit. All the turmoil and fuss. This time, she decides, she will claim the bridge for herself. She wants to feed the fish, too. It is her right, after paying her Botanical Garden admission fee. Feeding the fish, quietly, will bring the peace, will be the Zen thing to do.
She waits for the crowd to move off in their two- and three- and foursomes, which takes a very long time. She resolves to wait it out. She paces a side path by herself, she taps her foot. She reads about the beauty and tranquillity of koi in the pamphlet. She coughs loudly. She buys, to be at the ready, a quarter’s worth of fish food from the small gumball-looking machine: a handful of grainy brown crumbles, suspiciously fish-scented. She wonders if the Botanical Garden grind their dead fish into fish food. She wonders if this causes mad cow disease among koi. Under the right conditions, koi have a possible lifespan of one hundred years! the pamphlet tells her. Unlikely, then, that they’re forced to feed on their dead own.