“Yeah,” he said, tossing the stone out into the lake. Only when she heard it splash did she lower her arms. God, was she stupid.
What he couldn’t get out of his mind was the look of dumb gratitude on her face. Or who knew? Maybe it was love. Or something with no name. Whatever it was, it was what he hated most and what allowed him to do what was necessary. Because of course he’d picked up two stones, not one, and the second, the heavier, perfectly round one, was still in his fist.
He felt bad, though, about hitting her so hard, about how hard she went down, ass first, reducing that dock to kindling, her fat butt in the water, her arms sticking straight up. No chance she could stand up whenever she came to. Nothing to do except shout her head off until somebody heard her. And the whole time she’d be thinking it was because of the clips and the Pringles. He’d told her it wasn’t, but that was the thing with women. You were better off saving your breath. He thought about the waitress at that diner he and his father had stopped by that time, the one who’d given him a look like his whole pitiful life was visible to her. He wondered what had happened to her. Nothing good, he hoped.
Motion
AFTER LEAVING CLIVE JR. at the Sans Souci, Sully dropped Rub off at the trailer with bowls of food and fresh water and spent the rest of the afternoon making the rounds of places where a man like Roy Purdy might surface, but no one had seen him. Somebody reported spotting the Cora woman’s car at the reservoir, so he drove out there, went up and down the dirt parking lot and didn’t see it. He stopped in at Gert’s twice more, but he swore neither Roy nor Cora had shown up. Over the course of the afternoon it had come home to Sully that his search might be an empty gesture, the sort of thing a man does to convince himself that doing anything at all, even the wrong thing, is preferable to doing nothing. Staying in motion was easier than sitting vigil at the hospital, rotating in and out of Ruth’s room with her daughter and granddaughter and husband, staring at her ruined face, waiting for her to open her swollen eyes, fearing she wouldn’t ever again.
So by early evening, exhausted and with nothing to show for his efforts, Sully reluctantly concluded there was nothing further to be done, at least not by him. If Roy and that woman were still in the area, they’d eventually surface. If they’d fled, her car would soon give them away. When he passed the county home for the third time that day, it occurred to him that maybe he should do something difficult. See if the path of maximum resistance yielded different results than the more familiar path of least.
“Are you family?” the woman at reception wanted to know when Sully told her who he was there to see.
“Not exactly,” he told her. “We used to be married, though.”
She was squinting at her computer screen now. “It says here that her husband is deceased.” She peered at him over the rims of her glasses, as if to inquire whether he was claiming to be dead.
“That’s her second husband, Ralph,” he explained. “I’m Donald Sullivan.”
“Sullivan,” she repeated. “There’s a Peter Sullivan on her visitor list. Also a William.”
“Our son,” he said. “And grandson.”
“But no Donald.”
“I understand. There wouldn’t be.”
“But you want to see her.”
Well, not really, but he didn’t contradict her.
She returned to her screen. “Do you understand that your ex-wife is nonresponsive?”
Still?
“By which I mean she doesn’t recognize anyone.”
Promise?
“And even if she did recognize you, she no longer has the power of speech. You won’t be able to converse.”
Well, we never could. “I understand,” he told her.
The woman studied him carefully. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this.”
That makes two of us.
—
BEFORE GRANTING HIM permission to see his ex-wife, the nurse on the dementia wing prepared Sully for what — rather than who — he would find. The person he’d come to see wasn’t really here anymore, she informed him. Today had been one of her good days, actually, but that just meant he was unlikely to witness the agitation and, often, anger that characterized the latter stages of her illness. He might glimpse in the odd physical gesture some vestige of the woman he’d been married to, though anything beyond that would be his imagination at work. She was no longer capable of eating solid food, didn’t even understand what food was for and was as content to chew on a wristwatch as a carrot. He wasn’t to give her anything to eat or drink, as swallowing no longer came naturally, and she might gag.
The volunteer who showed Sully to Vera’s room couldn’t have been over seventeen. “I’ll wait out here in the hall,” she said.
When the door swung shut behind him and Sully saw the mummylike, slack-jawed creature that once had been Vera, he nearly lost his nerve. His ex-wife had been situated in her wheelchair so she could look out the window at the central courtyard, where several picnic tables formed a circle around a concrete fountain, which happened to be dry. Was it always? Sully wondered. Was water a danger in this place? “Hello, old girl,” he said, his voice sounding strange, unnatural, like someone speaking in a room without furniture. Her eyes flickered in his direction when he pulled up the chair, then quickly returned to some unfocused middle distance. Beneath her thin housecoat, Sully could tell, little remained but skin and bones. When it entered his mind that this was the same woman who’d been his lover when they were both young, he quickly banished the thought, feeling embarrassed, indeed unclean, that it should have occurred to him even fleetingly. Most alarming was her hair, which Vera had always permed to a fare-thee-well, not a strand out of place. Now it looked natural, real hair at last, and yet wholly unnatural for her.
“I just came by to see if you were still mad at me,” he said. That was what he’d been dreading, of course — that Vera’s resentment, nurtured over the long span of years, might persist after every other aspect of her personality had faded away, but he saw now that he’d been fearing the wrong thing. Had she been furious with him, at least she would’ve been Vera. “You must be pretty tired of all this,” he said, looking around the spare, institutionally impersonal room, this most house-proud of women. Though it wasn’t her surroundings that he meant so much as existence itself. “I know I would be.”
Her expression didn’t change.
Then a door on the far side of the courtyard opened, and a small child burst forth, a girl, soon trailed by a young woman who had to be her mother. Vera’s eyes registered the movement but with nothing akin to cognition or pleasure. A moment later the grandmother, clearly the genetic baseline for the other two generations, appeared in the open doorway. Somewhere inside, Sully suspected, was the great-grandmother all three were visiting.
Not knowing what to do with his hands, he shoved them into his pockets and felt Will’s stopwatch, which he took out and studied. “This look familiar?” he said, holding it out in front of Vera. “Remember that Thanksgiving?”
Peter, who’d come with his then-still-intact family, had invited Sully for dinner but neglected to tell Vera, never dreaming that he’d actually show up. Everybody in the house was quarreling: Peter and his wife, Vera and Ralph, Will and Wacker, his little brother. Sully had shown up just as the shit started hitting the fan. Will had actually climbed out the bathroom window, stowing away in the back of his truck. After beating his own hasty retreat, Sully found him under a tarp hiding from his feuding parents and little brother, the source of his terror. That was the night Sully’d been inspired to give him the stopwatch so he could time himself being brave.