Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“What does that mean?”

“Something called a ‘rogue wave.’ They found the body just before sunset.”

Even once they were fully awake, this did not seem possible. His mom was eighty-six years old, but when she visited the farm, she seemed unchanged and unchangeable, permanently determined to do what she had decided to do. Once Jesse’s dad had told him how they came to marry — all his mom’s idea, she was twenty, and it had worked out (here his dad had given him a bear-hug — odd thing for a farmer). It might be that some kids (Felicity, for example) analyzed their parents’ marriages looking for signs and symptoms, but Jesse had never done that. The only evidence of Lois’s age was her obsession with trying this delicacy or that, and not just at Lunds or Whole Foods, but wherever they were “sourced,” as she called it. She had gotten obsessed with smoked oysters, gone to Scotland — there had been a little accident on that trip, driving on the wrong side of the road, that scared the pants off her and the driver of the car she didn’t quite hit (a little scrape, knocked off the sideview mirror). She had gotten obsessed with lobster, gone to Maine; gotten obsessed with barbecue, gone to Kansas City. They had joked at Christmas — was she going to get obsessed with tomatoes and go to Hoboken?

And then she had to try abalone before she died — all the items on her bucket list were food. Annie had agreed to take her to Monterey, Jesse had agreed to contribute some money and forgotten all about it.

The next day, there was more information, but none that made his mom’s fate less spooky. The beach was called Monastery Beach, south of Carmel. It was notorious for these events — its dangers were frequently underestimated by tourists because nearby beaches were safer. Annie was out of her mind, not exactly at the surprise of it, but at how it fit their mother’s personality, just to be swept away like that, doing something she was determined to do.

And Jesse had to ask the question that would have seemed trivial to everyone else in the whole world: “Did she get to eat the abalone?”

“No,” said Annie. “She got to look at them, because there is an abalone farm on the wharf, but the restaurant wasn’t serving any right then. She loved the sand dabs, though.” There was a long silence and then they hung up.

After the service, a week later, Jesse had the box of ashes buried beside his dad’s box, as far as possible from Uncle Frank. His mom hadn’t liked Uncle Frank, thought he had ruined Aunt Minnie’s life.

—

JANET HAD no idea where she picked up the infection. She would have had a little cut, maybe from stepping on a stone or a shard of glass, and then the cellulitis spread from her instep, over the top of her foot, and up the inside of her ankle, at first only red, hardly swollen, but then red, hot, painful, sometimes as if invisible knives were stabbing her. It was Saturday. Eliza, at the knitting shop, made her go up to Seton Medical Center, which was a bit of a drive in the weekend traffic, and she had to cancel the afternoon dog walk (four dogs plus Antaeus), that was forty dollars down the drain. And then the antibiotic, erythromycin, wasn’t cheap, either. The scary part was when the doctor said that if there was no improvement in thirty-six hours she should come back. She did not call her mother, she did not call Jonah, she did not call Emily, because she knew that if she did they would look on the Internet and see what she saw — faces destroyed, legs swollen like homemade sausages, the words “flesh-eating bacteria.”

There was no improvement Tuesday morning, and the doctor, whose name she now knew, Dr. Dalal, changed her antibiotic to doxycycline hyclate. It was very expensive, and the brochure included said that it was used to treat malaria, which somehow made her leg, now swollen to the knee, throb. She was to come back on Thursday if there was no improvement, or, to be safe, even if there was improvement.

There was no improvement. In fact, once she was staring at her leg along with Dr. Dalal, she noticed blisters beginning to form under the skin, and when Dr. Dalal touched the largest of them with her gloved finger (it was maybe the size of a BB), it seemed to open up. Dr. Dalal was sending her to Stanford Health Care by ambulance, thirty miles away. While she was telling Janet this (Janet could not drive, because her infection was in her right leg; best not wait any longer, just to be sure), Janet sat there nodding and throbbing, almost in rhythm, and then she texted Mary to please take charge of Antaeus. (“Sure! You off to somewhere nice?”) When the two nurses helped her to the ambulance, she could hardly put weight on her right foot, even though she had gotten up, made her coffee, and driven to the hospital without much difficulty an hour earlier. Janet hadn’t been to Palo Alto since emptying her house seven years before. She always left the coast through Santa Cruz or Daly City, picturing the ridge that 92 crossed above the Crystal Springs Reservoir as a kind of Berlin Wall that she dared not breach.

The ambulance wasn’t screaming, just transporting. It was the kind with a window, a tricked-out Ford truck, so Janet could see the eucalyptus groves. Normally, she hated eucs and never minded going into a diatribe about why they were the worst possible tree to import to California, but now she appreciated, even loved, the sunlight speckling through the branches, perhaps a sign of mortality. Her leg throbbed the affirmative, and she cried out. “Almost there,” said the EMT — oh, Rob, his name was, right there on his shirt. Was she becoming delirious? One thing that could happen with cellulitis was an overwhelming massive infection, foot to leg to liver to heart to brain to grave. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that another of her conversational themes was that she was old enough to die, sixty-eight. The last thing she wanted to do was end up like her mother. She said that all the time.

They came down the mountain and she lay back, watching the reflection of the reservoir ripple across the ceiling of the ambulance.

And then they were flying down 280, and then there she was, being wheeled into the very emergency room where she had nearly given birth to Jonah, and what was the difference, birth, death, a mere twenty-four years, nothing really, nothing at all.

What was different was that, once she was hooked up to the drip and on some sort of painkiller (she ignored everything the doctor said about which antibiotics and which painkiller they put her on, and so what if they decided she was demented), she actually looked around, first at her room, then out the window at the top of one Norfolk pine, several eucs, and the sky. Those three days here with Jonah she remembered not at all, except the sight of Jonah himself, lanky, cross-eyed, darling as could be. And the sight of her own nipple disappearing into his tiny mouth. When the administrative person (not quite human, but humanlike) came in late in the afternoon and asked for her contact information, she gave him Jared’s name and a phone number that was possibly correct. He handed her her bag; she gave him her Medicare card. She was lucky to have that; soon, the Republicans would be in control and repealing all forms of Socialism. She scowled at the thought and the doctor scuttled out. She was alone in the room, and, she thought, the thing that was giving her reason to live was that view she had seen through the ambulance window of the light at the crest of the mountain, the trees through the ambulance window, something beautiful that had nothing at all to do with Janet Langdon Nelson.

The hours passed eventlessly but strangely, the pain coming and going randomly, the heat in her leg seeming to flow here and there, the certainty in her mind rising and falling about whether she would lose her leg or lose her mind or lose her life. She had no computer, and she discovered, as soon as she got some time to herself, that her phone was dead. All the better. She thought about Lois, though she hadn’t seen her in years and could only imagine her young — younger than she herself was.