Джойс Оутс - Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars

“Maybe, honey. But not right now.”

“Is it a—heart attack, Mom?”

“No. It’s a stroke.”

“Oh. A stroke.” Again the voice went small, frightened.

“You know what a stroke is, don’t you?”

“Y-Yes. Sort of…”

“Grandpa has had neurosurgery. He’s still unconscious.”

“How sick is that?”

“How sick ? We really don’t know, honey. We’re waiting.”

Very sick. His brain has been bleeding.

Not so sick, Grandpa is “improving.”

“Is Granma Jess OK?”

“Granma Jess is OK.”

Beverly heard herself say in her heartening-mother voice: “You know Grandpa Whitey, he’d never complain. Except he’d hate to be cooped up in a damn old hospital bed and he’d want to come home right now.”

It was a breathless outburst. Beverly steeled herself for the girl’s response— You are so full of shit, Mom! What d’you think I am, a little kid you can bullshit like that?

But Brianna said, in a rush of words, bravely, “T-Tell Grandpa we love him. Tell Grandpa get well soon and come home .”

Beverly could all but see tears shining in the girl’s eyes. Oh thank God after all she was a mother.

IT WOULD BE SEVEN HOURSand forty minutes before Beverly returned to her own house on Stone Ridge Drive, to her sober-faced husband and teenaged children who’d waited up for her past midnight.

Whitey was out of surgery and in Intensive Care, still alive if not (yet) conscious; the prognosis was “guardedly optimistic”—his condition was “critical, but stabilized.”

How did Whitey look? Well—not like Whitey.

Yes, you could recognize him. Of course! But (maybe) Whitey wouldn’t have recognized himself.

Very bruised, battered-looking. Welts in his skin like burns—his face, neck. For (police officers had reported) he’d crashed the Toyota Highlander at the side of the Expressway, and the air bags had “burnt” him.

Alive. Dad is alive.

Still alive! We love him so.

Before returning to her own home Beverly had driven back to the family house with the others to see their mother to bed—by that time everyone was there, all five McClaren children—Beverly had not wanted not to be with them —and she was now staggering with exhaustion. Yet her brain felt perversely clear to her, bright-lit, as if it had been hosed clean, a terrible instrument of clarity.

She needed Whitey in her life, desperately. They all did, but Beverly most of all.

Without Whitey to give a sort of anchor to her life—what would be her life? And an anchor, a rightness to her marriage. Steve admired and feared his father-in-law in about equal measure and without Whitey as a presence in their lives, without the support and approval of both her parents, Beverly’s own family, including even the children she most loved, would not seem altogether—(Beverly hesitated to think this)— worth it.

Oh but she didn’t mean any of this. Just—tired, and scared.

Pleading with God to Let Daddy be all right. Oh please!

NEXT MORNING AT 6:30 A.M.as she was hastily leaving the house Beverly happened to notice, blown against the side of the garage, a scrap of paper. Grunted to pick it up, and saw to her mortification that it was a note from Virgil after all.

Must’ve stuck it in the door, and it had fallen out.

DAD IN HAMMOND GENERAL

THINK IT’S A STROKE

WHY’D YOU HIDE FROM ME BEVERLY

Hey! Let me explain.

But it isn’t clear: What can Whitey explain?

Problem is this burning sensation in his throat. No voice.

Eyesight all blotched. Like someone has rubbed ashes into his eyes.

And—breathing? Was he breathing?

Something is breathing for him. Like force-feeding. Pumping air into his lungs in an ugly chuffing like a bellows.

What happened was…

… struck by lightning.

Confused memory of his vehicle bouncing, jolting along the shoulder of the highway. Potholes, the kind you don’t see until it’s too late, God damn you can ruin a tire that way but you won’t know it immediately, the air will hiss out slowly and one day (soon) the (not cheap!) tire will be flat.

Trying hard to remember why he’d stopped. Leaving the highway at a high speed (?). Trying to remember what happened next.

Trying so hard, the effort is hurting his brain.

(But why assume that something actually happened ? Maybe this condition he’s in is just— him .)

(Always liked to take the contrary position, if there was one. Even as a kid. Schoolteachers, smiling and shaking their heads at Johnny McClaren—long-ago as grade school. Flattering to Whitey all his life to be told he sounds like a lawyer. Except he isn’t a lawyer.)

Last memory has to be a face: glimpsed at a distance, as in a telescope in reverse.

Dark-skinned face. Dusky-skinned.

Stranger’s face. He thinks.

(Or were there more than one of them?— faces .)

Face recognition at birth. He’d read. Infant’s neurons “fire” at the sight of a human face.

Because survival can depend upon recognizing a human face. Does depend.

Is that true at the end—also?

End? Of what?

Can remember, must’ve been junior high, reading Scientific American . “Steady-state universe.”

Well, that was comforting. Never had to wonder what had come before the universe, or what would come after. Universe just was.

Made more sense than that God had “created” the universe in a few days like a stage magician pulling things out of hats. Even as a kid he’d never taken that seriously.

But then, the big bang was—(how’d you phrase it?)— discovered.

So the universe isn’t “steady”—isn’t a “state”—but erupted out of nothingness at a point before time began and is still exploding outward billions of years later. Are its components rushing away from the center, and from one another, forever and ever?—or just for a fixed time?

Not a theory. He thinks. Proven fact: Hubble telescope.

Jessalyn laughed and pressed her hands over her ears. Oh, Whitey! It makes me dizzy to think about that.

Think about—what?

Eternity.

This was a surprise to Whitey. Hadn’t expected to hear his young wife utter such a word, and the expression in her face suddenly serious— pained .

Hadn’t known that’s what they’d been talking about— eternity.

In fact he’d just been talking. Something out of the newspaper. Like Whitey McClaren, every crazy thing sifts through his brain and awakens some spark there.

It was like her, though. The young wife. Say something to her, any random remark, off-the-top-of-his-head, in Jessalyn it acquired meaning, gravity.

Other girls he’d joked with. Liked to laugh.

But with Jessalyn Sewell, you didn’t. Not much.

Hearing himself say What the hell, maybe we should get married and another girl might’ve laughed knowing it was, or maybe was not, not-serious but Jessalyn lifted her beautiful eyes to his— Yes. All right.

That look, piercing him to the heart. He’d felt it—actually: not a mere figure of speech—beneath his breastbone. Tough muscle-heart, pierced with certainty.

For he’d known (hadn’t he) from the start. Only one person like Jessalyn Sewell in his life who could make John Earle McClaren a better human being not (merely) accept him as he was, who could love him for what he might be, his deepest self. In this individual the gravity required to keep Whitey McClaren’s helium-soul from drifting up into the clouds, and lost.