“Jill says she’s worried you’re depressed.”
“I’m not depressed at all.”
“You don’t seem depressed. I think Jill is depressed.”
“I think Jill is depression.” When Bob made Maria laugh, he felt proud. Maria couldn’t speak to the others like this, and Bob understood and appreciated he was one apart.
All in all, he was happy at the center, except that he still found himself harassed by thoughts of Connie. His desire was to learn where she was, and how she was faring, the hopeful idea being that to flesh out her narrative might bring him solace by way of closure. But none of the residents or nurses knew the first thing about it, and Bob felt it would be conspicuous to ask Maria. Eventually, though, his curiosity bettered his modesty and he requested a formal audience with her, presenting her with the story of his marriage, more or less in full. Maria was floored. By this time her trust and affection for Bob was total; at the completion of the tale, and in answer to Bob’s questions, she gave him Connie’s transcripts. This was not just against the rules, but illegal; Maria asked that he take it to his room, to uncover its cold informations in private.
These are the things Bob learned:
In the years following Ethan’s death she worked as a substitute teacher, and then a full-time elementary school arts teacher, and eventually as a public school administrator. At the age of fifty she quit and took a job at a nursery in the southeast quadrant of town, where she worked for fifteen years, all the way up until her retirement.
Bob learned that her catatonia was not symptomatic of dementia, as he had assumed, but was a result of brain trauma suffered after a slip-and-fall accident on the walk out front of her house. She had been perfectly healthy before the injury, apparently; but the blow to her head had led to clotting, which led to stroke, which led to the diminishment of her capacities. She had been a resident at the Gambell-Reed Center for two years before transferring to a facility on the Washington coast.
Bob learned Connie’s Portland home had been less than five miles from his own. This prompted Bob to think of the years after Ethan’s death, the years of wondering when he would see her again. There were some mornings, as he was shaving or making his bed, when he would intuit Connie’s approach, that that would be the day she would walk through the door of the library to see him, and he recalled how distracted he would be, all through his shift, looking up at each person coming in. After he understood she was not going to visit the library, then came a period of ten or more years where he believed fate would intervene on their behalf. He would see her in the market, in the park, somewhere. He would pick out her set, cold expression in a crowd and she would sense his attentions and turn to meet him, and when she saw him the coldness would come away from her face and she would change back to the way she was before, a sort of lighting up, the way she used to look at him when she came through the doors of the library, and she loved him.
Bob was grateful to have accessed Connie’s transcripts, but he also was wounded by the collective information. No matter that the notion of fairness was a child’s; what had happened to them wasn’t fair, and there was nothing that could make it so. He gave the transcripts back to Maria and thanked her. She could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t wish to speak of what he’d learned. Most of her patients had areas of their lives that were too painful to be discussed, and she never pried, respectful of the boundary. Maria understood that part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.
BOB WOKE UP FROM AN AFTERNOON NAP TO FIND MARIA SITTING ON THE edge of his bed, and she had a look on her face as if something was the matter. “What,” he said. “Chip’s son is downstairs, Bob,” she answered. “Connie’s son. I hope you don’t mind my telling you but I figured you’d want to know.”
Bob sat up. “What’s he doing here?”
“He came by out of the blue asking for his mother’s transcripts. I told him they were in storage off-site and now he’s waiting around for them to be brought over.” She was proud of this subterfuge, but Bob didn’t understand her motivations, and asked her why she would tell him such a thing. “I thought you might want to come down and say hello,” she explained.
“Why would I? He doesn’t even know who I am.”
“You can tell him.”
“What if he doesn’t want to know?”
“Then he can tell you. He’s really a very sweet man, Bob. And I know I’m being a busybody, but there’s always the chance your meeting him will be a helpful thing. Look, if you don’t come down, I’ll know you’re not interested. But I’ll stall him as long as I can, okay?”
She patted Bob’s arm and exited and Bob stood up from his bed and paced and considered the situation. He did not want to go downstairs, but that wasn’t the same as deciding it was the wrong thing to do. When it occurred to him that this was almost certainly the only time in what remained of his life that he would know any direct connection with Connie, then did he find himself reaching for his shoes, and he pulled on a suit coat and combed his hair and brushed his teeth. As an afterthought, he sought out the short sheaf of snapshots from the Connie days, slipping the envelope into his coat pocket before striking out for the elevator.
He entered the Great Room to find Connie’s son sitting alone at the long table and looking at his phone. He wore the same work-worn canvas coat he’d had on before, a bandage on one of his fingers, and gave the impression of a laborer or tradesman on his lunch break. Bob stood on the opposite side of the table; when Connie’s son looked up, Bob gave a small bow and asked if he might sit. Connie’s son nodded vaguely and went back to his phone. Bob sat down. “You favor your father,” he said. Connie’s son had no reaction; he was texting. Bob continued, a little louder: “Your father and I were friends, you see. Ethan. If I may, and in my way, I was responsible for your mother and father coming to know one another.”
Connie’s son again looked up. “My parents met on a bus.”
“Yes, but they were both coming to visit with me at the library. In a way, then, they met under my auspices.” At the naming of the word library, Connie’s son’s gaze sharpened. Actually, he looked somewhat frightened, and he set his phone on the table, sat up straight, and said, “Oh my God, you’re Bob Comet.”
CONNIE’S SON’S NAME WAS SAM, AND HE WAS SURPRISED, IMPRESSED, and a little upset that Bob should suddenly present himself, at this late date and in this particular location. Bob also was surprised, also impressed, but not upset, or only very slightly. Sam wanted to know what Bob was doing there; Bob wanted to know how it was that Sam knew his name and history. They were just beginning to formulate these questions for one another when Maria came by with Connie’s transcripts, lingering as long as she might, to bear witness and generally take the temperature of the summit. But her nearness was an inhibitor, and Sam proposed that he and Bob take a walk. Bob made a counter proposal, which was that they should walk to the diner, and they did this, settling into a booth and each of them ordering coffee and pie. The waitress knew Bob on sight, as he and Linus and Jill had taken to visiting the diner two to three times each week.
“What are you all spiffed up for?” she asked. “You going to a cotillion ball?”
“I am. And I thought you might like to come along with me.”
“Let’s see how you tip first. But I’ll say this: you clean up nicely.” Turning to Sam, the waitress stared. “You could use a little help, sweetie,” she said, and she reached down to smooth his hair. Bob found this uncanny; but he saw that Sam was less aware of the power of his physicality than his father had been — probably a good thing when one considered the misery Ethan had doled out.