They’d moved a wheeled hospital bed onto the porch; it must have been Rose’s main form of transportation these days. Annie’s nursing hadn’t changed. The bed had been made up in white sheets and a pink blanket so neatly that Rose looked like a love letter waiting to be sealed and sent. A child’s Mickey Mouse doll with a plush body and a plastic face had been slid under the covers next to her, his head on the edge of the pillow. That embarrassed me more than anything else.
“Hey, kiddo,” I said. “How’re you feeling?”
“Like springtime.”
“You look it.”
She coughed, but her voice didn’t sound so bad. Annie gave me her chair, then went into the house to get another.
Rose said, “Now if I could only get that doctor to leave me alone.”
“He bothering you, kid? Point him out and I’ll take care of him for you.”
“He just got ahold of my ovaries. I told him, ‘Put them in a jar so we can keep them on the mantelpiece.’”
“Rose!” Annie said, from inside the house.
“Well, I miss them,” Rose muttered. “I suppose I was done with them, but still.”
“I’ll punch his lights out,” I said.
“Thanks. Hand me that glass of water on the table? I think he’s got one of those treasure maps left over from your movies, except it’s of me, so he keeps digging.” She accepted the water with one hand, and with the other traced two lines on the blanket above her torso. “X marks the spot. What movie was that?”
“Yo Ho Ho.”
“Yo Ho Ho,” she said. “I liked that one. I wish you’d make movies like that one again.”
“Like what?”
“You know. Silly. Broad jokes. People falling down. Whales blowing water in your face. You were good at that. Oh, I’ve hurt your feelings. I mean, I like the movies you make now, but I liked the old ones too. Nobody makes stupid funny movies anymore.”
Annie’s face appeared briefly at the window; she was giving the two littlest kids some time alone. I never palled around with Rose when we were young — Hattie, of course — and now I wished I had. She’d offered to be my vaudeville partner once, and now, partnerless, I wanted her to offer again.
“You didn’t hurt my feelings,” I said. “I’m serious about punching your doctor. He’s not a big guy, is he?”
She shrugged in slow motion. “Who knows? I haven’t met him when we’ve both been standing up. Oh!” she said. I jumped to my feet.
“What’s the matter?”
She began to cry, just slightly and silently, and I thought she must be in terrible pain. Where was Annie?
But Rose said, “Jessica died. Annie told me, and then somehow I forgot, and I’ve been sitting here talking about myself like some jerk. What is wrong with me?”
“It’s okay, Rose,” I said.
“You must really hate me.” She picked up Mickey Mouse and threw him across the porch into a screen, where he frightened several insects.
“Rose, Rose, of course not.” Actually I liked it (though I never would have said so) — I’d found a place where it seemed possible for minutes at a time for me and anybody else to forget that Jess had died. I had work here. Grief makes you do things, pick up knitting, weed the yard, keep your hands busy, but best is talk, jokes, X marks the spot. She was funny, my kid sister. Surely Rose was the one we couldn’t spare. I remembered her wanting to be on the radio as a teenager, how I’d teased her, how she’d put the idea of vaudeville back in my head. She’d run away from home, but only got as far as Kansas City before being snatched back by Annie. You didn’t run far enough, I wanted to tell her. You should have come with me. That wasn’t fair: now she had Ed, and dying in California was no more picturesque than dying in Valley Junction, I knew that much.
I picked up the doll and tucked him back into bed. Of course I didn’t hate her. “I love you,” I said, smoothing the sheet over the doll’s disturbingly pink stomach.
This took her by surprise. She said, somewhere between laughing and crying, “You love Mickey Mouse?”
“I love Mickey Mouse,” I said. “And I love you, Minnie Mouse Dubuque.”
“Who is,” she said, wincing but definitely laughing, “a pain in the ass.”
I said, “Rose, ssshh. Don’t give your doctor any ideas.”
When Jessica was sick—
I can’t.
When Jessica died, when she died, when the nurse came out of her hospital room, from which I had been banished minutes before (one o’clock in the morning, they let me sleep there) and told me she was dead, I got in the car and drove around and then I called my children and then I was occupied for a great deal of time, which was good, because while she was sick I kept extremely busy all the time doing things for her and at one in the morning what seemed terrible was that I had suddenly run out of things to do, as though I’d been handed my pictures. Fired. Let me cut down on the euphemisms. This isn’t a vaudeville house, I can say anything I fucking well please, as Rocky would tell me. Then we had the service and then I arranged for her to be flown back to Des Moines, which was the first time Jessica had ever been on an airplane — she once said, “The only way I will ever get on a plane is if I drive somewhere far away and die and they have to fly my body back,” and I’d always loved this fear, even though it made travel difficult — we drove and took trains and steamers and ferries, and sometimes I flew and she and the kids would catch up in the car. My darling, let me kiss your phobia.
I remember everything. Her shoe size, her dress size, the seventeen times she winked at me in our thirty-two years of marriage—“Only seventeen?” Rocky, a spendthrift winker himself, would have said, but Jess knew if she did it more often it wouldn’t mean anything, each time I had forgotten that it was something she did, but then we’d be separated in a crowd, and maybe I was bored or maybe I missed her, and she’d look at me and wink.
I just always had a crush on her.
“I’m going, my darling,” she’d said the day she died. “Where are you going?” I asked. She took my hand and said, “Out the window on gossamer wings.”
And now here I was alone in Iowa, an out-of-work actor. I considered staying. “I could help with Rose,” I told Annie later that afternoon. “I’ve picked up a few nursing skills lately.” And I could make jokes, I thought, all day long. I’d dig up every slapstick routine I could.
Annie kissed my cheek. “Sweet boy. No. If you stay around she’ll think she’s dying for sure.”
“I’m sure she knows.”
“Don’t say that. She’s better some days. Go on home to your kids. How many times a day do they call here? And you think they can spare you?”
“I guess not,” I said, and she said, “Ed’ll drive you to the airport.”
I packed my little leather bag in my father’s empty house. Years of vaudeville had made me proud of how little I needed to travel. Ed picked me up in a new Chevy, which I admired.
“I’ll park and come in,” he said at the airport curb, but I waved him away.
“No more big good-byes,” I told him.
Inside the airport, a tired young woman in an airline uniform leaned on the ticket desk, a red cloth flower in her buttonhole. Apparently, I was the only person leaving Des Moines today. I thought of Rocky — I often thought of Rocky — running away from home. He’d been gone eighteen years now, and had stayed in touch with people just enough to make it clear that somewhere he was alive. He’d called Tansy, drunk, from a pay phone four years ago, mumbling about a comeback. He sent Rocky junior postcards that had been hand canceled, no legible city. (“Do you think he’s in town, and just slips them into my mailbox?” Junior asked. “I think he’s charmed a postmistress,” I answered.) He never called me. He never wrote. “I’m beginning to think you don’t love me,” I said aloud.