Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Nothing rattled him, so long as Barbara was there. In small steps, she got him reading again. She tricked him into picking up a book he’d refused to crack when required back in high school. My Antonia. “Very sexy story,” she assured him. “About a young Nebraska country boy who has the hots for an older woman.”

He got fifty pages in, although it took him two weeks. He confronted Barbara with the evidence, betrayed. “It’s not about what you said at all. It’s about immigrants and farming and drought and shit.”

“That, too,” she admitted.

He stuck with the story, to protect his investment, throwing good hours after bad. The book’s ending confused him. “You mean he goes back, after they’re both married and she has all those fucking kids, just to hang out? Just to, like, be her friend , or something? Just because of what happened when they were little?”

Barbara nodded, her eyes filmy. Mark put out his hand to comfort her.

“Best obsolete book I ever read. Not that I got it all, exactly.”

She took him on long walks under the summer sun. They wandered, parched yet sticky, July threatening to rasp on without end, with nothing they could do but endure and keep walking. They spent hours touring the ignited wheat fields, like local farm agents responsible for monitoring the region’s harvest. They took the dog, Blackie Two. “This cur is almost as good as mine,” Mark declared. “Just a little less obedient.” Now and then he let Karin tag along, if she kept quiet.

Barbara could listen to Mark go on about modding vehicles long after Karin numbed. “I can never leave a car stock,” Mark declared. He launched an extended anatomy of the vehicle he was building in his head: Rams, Bigfoots, and Broncos all spliced together into a monster hybrid. Ignored and invisible, tagging along fifty yards back, Karin studied the older woman’s technique. Barbara absorbed and deflected him, drawing him out. She listened, rapt, to Mark’s recited parts lists, then lifted her finger, as if in passing. “Did you hear that? What was that sound?” Without his realizing, she’d have Mark listening to the cicada choruses that he hadn’t heard since fifteen. Barbara Gillespie had the lightest touch known to man, a self-possession that Karin could dissect and even imitate for short stretches, but could never hope to embody. It saddened her to see, in Barbara, what she finally wanted to be when she grew up. But she had no more chance of becoming Barbara than a lightning bug had, through diligence, of becoming a lighthouse. The other woman now belonged here more than she did.

Mark would do anything for his Barbie Doll. Karin came on them late one afternoon at his kitchen table, heads bowed over an art book, looking for all the world like Joan Schluter and her final pastor poring over Scripture. The book was called A Guide to Unseeing: 100 Artists Who Gave Us New Eyes . Some volume from Barbara’s secret, surprise shelf. Karin drew behind them where they sat, afraid Mark might flare up and banish her. But he didn’t even notice her. He was hypnotized by Cezanne’s House and Trees . Barbara’s fingers draped across the image, twining with the tree trunks. Mark had his face up to the page, following the scrape of the palette knife. He struggled with the picture, something forcing up from inside him. Karin saw at once what he wrestled with: their old farmhouse, the lean-to against the precarious years of their childhood, the house whose mortgage their father tried to pay by dusting crops in an ancient Grumman AgCat. She couldn’t stop herself. “You know where that is, don’t you?”

Mark turned on her, like a bear surprised while foraging. “It’s nowhere.” He pointed wildly at his own skull. “It’s fucking fantasy, is where it is.” She shrank back. He might have stood and struck her, except for the graze of Barbara’s fingers on his arm. The touch threw a circuit breaker, and he turned back to the print, rage dissolving. He grabbed the pages and thumbed them, flip-book style, five hundred years of painted masterpieces in five seconds. “Who’s been making all this stuff? I mean, look at this! How long has this been going on? Where have I been all my life?”

Minutes passed before Karin stopped shaking. Once, eight years ago, he’d split her lip with a backhand when she’d called him an unreliable asshole. Now he might truly hurt her, without even knowing. He’d be stuck like this for good, even farther gone than their father was, unable to hold down jobs, watching nature shows and browsing art books, reacting to the smallest impediment with cloudbursts of fury. Then turning away, puzzled, as if not quite believing what he’d just done.

It wrecked her: he’d be dependent on her forever. And still she would fail him, as she had failed to protect her parents from their own worst instincts. Her ministrations were making Mark even worse. She needed him to be a way he would never be again, a way that she was no longer sure that he had ever been. She hadn’t the strength to cope with his crushing new innocence. She lowered herself into a folding chair. The arc of her own life no longer led anywhere. The years ahead collapsed, burying her under their dead weight. Then the graze of fingertips on her forearm took her out of herself.

She looked up into Barbara, a face whose gaze seemed equal to any behavior. Barbara retrieved her hand from Karin’s arm and continued to walk Mark through the calming book. She seemed to know all the painters’ names, without even looking at the captions. Did she extend this care to all her discharged patients? Why the Schluters? Karin didn’t dare ask. The visits couldn’t last much longer. But there Barbara was at Mark’s kitchen table, keeping him company in his unseeing.

The two women left together that evening. Karin walked Barbara to her car. “Listen. I don’t know how to say this. I am in your debt. I’ll never be able to thank you for this. Never.”

Barbara wrinkled her nose. “Pff. Hardly. Thanks for letting me drop in.”

“Serious. He’d be lost without you. I’d be…worse.”

Too much: the woman cringed, ready to flee. “It’s nothing. It’s completely for me.”

“If there’s ever anything — anything at all — please, please…”

Barbara held her eye: There might be, one day . To Karin’s surprise, she rushed out, “Who knows when we’ll need someone looking out for us?”

Not even the Muskrateers rattled Barbara. When their visits overlapped, Rupp and Cain enlisted Barbara in rounds of five-card stud or two-hand touch. Whatever game the boys were playing, Barbara joined. Mark came out of his maze for as long as she was nearby. Cain couldn’t resist drawing her into running debates — the war on terror, the necessary curtailment of civil liberties, the invulnerable yet somehow infinitely threatened American way of life. He was one of those stubby, apoplectic debaters who jabbed out statistics, richly detailed and constantly mutating. Barbara pummeled him. Unsportsmanlike, even letting Duane into the same ring with her. Once, he cited some newly upholstered article from the Bill of Rights, and she countered with the entire document, memorized. He fled the room at peak decibel, shouting, “Maybe in your Constitution!”

Rupp hit on the woman conscientiously, duty-bound, resorting to increasingly desperate supplications: help with his pet ferret. A model rocketry excursion. Licking envelopes for a mass fund-raiser. Her job was the cheerful slam. Muzzle it. Try a solo lift-off. Get stuffed. Everyone waited for the next escalation. Everyone except Mark, who begged them, eyes wet, to quit.

Karin gave what he let her give. She loved to run the taxi service to the hour-long cognitive therapy sessions that Mark increasingly resisted. Taking him home after the third appointment, so casually she wasn’t really breaking the hospital’s orders, she sounded him out again. “How are things going with you and Dr. Tower?”