47. Lily
LILY
For the first time in my adult life, I bought a plant I fully intended to keep alive until next winter.
It was a lilac. A bare-root lilac in a black plastic sleeve from a hardware store in Rhinelander, four dollars and ninety-nine cents, and I stood in that aisle holding it for a long time before I understood what the holding was about.
A lilac takes three years to do anything worth looking at. That's the arrangement you enter into when you buy one. You are agreeing to be there in three years, in the same place, to look at it.
I've signed nine leases in two years and not one of them frightened me the way that sleeve of roots did.
Spring came to the north woods the way a bruise heals, all at once and out of order.
The lake went from white to gray to a rotten blue and then, over about four days, to open water that steamed in the mornings.
The road turned to a substance with no name.
Everything that had been buried since before I arrived came out from under the snow at the same time, and half of it was beer cans and the other half was flowers, and I photographed both.
I'm five months along. I have a belly now that arrives in rooms slightly before I do, and I'm at the stage where strangers narrate it to me in gas stations.
I work two days a week at the county clinic in Rhinelander, per diem, on my own terms. Marge's niece put my name in front of the right person in the first week, and the right person turned out to be a nurse manager who had been trying to fill those hours since before the ice went out.
I do triage and dressings and two afternoons of anything that walks in.
It isn't the work I did in the cities and I'm not sorry about that.
Somebody there had my name in her mouth before I ever set foot in the building.
That's the part I didn't expect. It wasn't the job. It was the being expected.
This is what I've learned about being a person who stays.
You start getting mail. People say your name back to you in the middle of a sentence, casually, without any particular event attached to it.
The woman at the pharmacy counter puts your prescription on the counter before you ask for it and mentions that the pears are good this week.
None of it is dramatic. All of it is the thing I've been running from since I was twenty-two, and it is made almost entirely out of pears.
I telephoned my father in the middle of an afternoon with the door shut and Tank lying against it.
I want to be careful about this part, because it didn't go the way it goes in a film, and I don't want anybody reading this to think it has to.
I got the number from a cousin of my mother's in Sacramento who had it written inside a book. He lives in Bullhead City now. He answered on the fourth ring with a television going somewhere behind him.
"Yeah."
"Is this Ray Chen?"
"Speaking."
"This is Lily."
There was a pause. It wasn't a moved pause. It was a man doing arithmetic.
"Lily," he said. "Well, hell."
We talked for nineteen minutes. I timed it afterward off the phone, because I'm my mother's daughter and I count things.
He asked me twice what I did for a living and forgot both answers.
He told me about a boat he part owns. He mentioned, in the ninth minute, and quite lightly, that things had been tight this year, and I didn't offer him anything, and he didn't push it, and both of us understood exactly what had happened in that sentence.
Then I told him I was having a baby in the fall.
"Well, hell," he said again, and this time there was something under it, and I don't know what it was and I'm not going to invent something warmer than what I actually heard.
"There's one more thing," I said. "Mom died two years ago, in the spring. I don't know if anybody ever told you."
The television went off behind him. That's the only reaction I got out of that man in nineteen minutes, and I've turned it over many times since.
"No," he said. "Nobody told me."
"I'm telling you."
"Okay." A long breath. "She was the best of the two of us. I knew that at the time. I want you to know I knew it at the time."
"I know."
"I'm not much good, Lily."
"I know that too," I said, and then, because it was true and because I'd driven eleven towns and two years to be able to say it without my voice doing anything, "It's all right. I stopped needing you to be about four years ago. I just never told you, and it felt rude."
He laughed, and it was a real one, and it sounded exactly like mine, which I could have done without.
We ended it kindly. He asked me to send a picture when the baby comes, and I said I would, and I intend to, and I don't expect anything to come back and I've made my peace with that.
Then I sat on the edge of that bed in the room where I live, and something came at me sideways and took my legs out.
I'd spent two years running from a man who wasn't chasing me.
He hadn't thought about me. It wasn't cruelty and it wasn't on purpose.
He simply hadn't, the way you don't think about a town you drove through once.
Every locked door and packed bag and thirteen-week contract of my adult life had been built to keep out a man who was watching television in Arizona and couldn't remember what I did for a living.
The house I ran out of was empty the whole time.
The rest of it I couldn't do on a telephone.
Halvorsen has a bad chair and a good drawer, and I sat in the chair with my hands on my belly and asked him a clinical question I've known the answer to since my second year of training.
"How often do they wait?"
He put his pen down. He didn't ask me what I meant, and I would like every doctor in this country to learn that from him.
"For the room to empty?" He took his glasses off. "There's a word for it in the literature and the word is not good enough. It happens more than any family is ever told. I have sat with people for four nights who went in the nine minutes it took a daughter to walk down to a vending machine."
"Give me a percentage."
"There aren't any honest ones, and you know that, and you're asking me for a number so you can argue with it." He put the glasses back on. "So here is what I will give you instead. In forty years I never once saw a person die in front of somebody they were still trying to spare."
I didn't cry in that room. I did it in the truck, in a parking lot, with a bag of groceries melting on the seat beside me, which is where all of the important things in my life have happened.
My mother died at four in the morning. I was ninety feet down a corridor with my coat over me, asleep on vinyl for the first time in two days. At ten she had told me she was fine and that I looked like something the cat had brought in.
She sent me out of that room.
I've known for two years that I let her die alone. What I understood in a parking lot with the ice cream going soft was that she didn't die alone. She died having got the one thing she was still able to arrange, which was her daughter asleep and out of the way of it.
She wasn't spared the hour. She spent it buying me one.
I told Sacha that night, out on the steps, with the frogs going insane down in the wet ground and the light not gone until nearly nine.
He listened all the way through. He has learned that from me and he learned it fast.
"You told me something in this house in the winter," he said, when I had finished. "You said there is no arithmetic that gives a boy back to his mother."
"You said that. Not me."
"I said it out loud. You put it in my hands about four weeks before that and I was too proud to use it." He turned his head. "There is no arithmetic that puts you in that room either. You cannot go back and be awake. You can only be awake now."
I've turned that sentence over more than anything else he has ever said to me, and that includes what he said out on the ice.
The darkroom I didn't ask for.
He built it in nine days while I was away doing my two shifts, and he never said one word about any of it. I want to describe how I found out, since it is the most Sacha thing that has ever happened.
He put a hook on the outside of the woodshed door and told me the hook was for the dog.
No version of that hook is for the dog.
I opened it while he was down at Earl's collecting something, because I'm not a saint.
He had closed the whole shed in, insulated it, lined it, and hung a light-tight door on the inside with a rubber gasket he had made himself out of something.
The bench sits at exactly my height, because he has measured me.
A sink comes off the kitchen line with a mixing valve, running water, and a thermometer clipped to the tap.
He had wired in a safelight. He had strung a drying line and put the clothespins on it already, spaced evenly, and the clothespins are the detail that finished me off.
Under a bedsheet at the far end stood an enlarger, secondhand, out of an estate sale in Wausau, with the lens capped.
I sat down on the floor of my own darkroom in the sawdust and put my forehead on my knees for a while.
When he got back I was still in there.
"You left the hook undone," I said.
"I did not."
"You left the hook undone, Sacha."
"I have never in my life left a fastening undone." He stood in the doorway with the light behind him. "The gasket needs a week. Do not use the sink until I have run it."
"Come here."
"That is not necessary."
"Come and stand where I can reach you, and let me thank you, and you can be as uncomfortable about it as you like. Then we will both get on with the afternoon."
He came and stood where I could reach him, and he was every bit as uncomfortable as advertised.
"Thank you for building me a room."
"It was already a shed."
"It was a shed with a hook on it for the dog," I said. "Now it's a room."
I developed my mother's last roll one evening, in the dark, on my own, since it wasn't a thing anybody else could be in the room for.