Rise Read online

  He delivered the Gazette in the morning and for a while he delivered the Sun, too. That was back in the late 1970s when the Springs still had two daily papers. He threw the papers from his bike without even slowing down. He knew just how to toss them so they landed on people’s front steps and not in their flower beds. She waited sometimes to see him go by. She stood behind her screen door, and he cycled past with an athlete’s grace. What was it like to move like that, to never be still and never be tired? He stood on his pedals and pumped them hard, and the other boys were so ordinary compared to him.

  The Lord ordered Michael and Raphael to kill the nephilim one by one. To bind their fathers under the hills for seventy generations. The crops could grow once they were gone. The trees could push out shoots. Hunger is a terrible thing, her mother had told her more than once. It’s like a hot rock in your belly and you can feel it burning. She knew this from her childhood in Nebraska. The days so black you couldn’t find your way from the steps to your front door. The wind blew the seeds right off the field, and days later the alfalfa sprouted in barnyards and distant cemeteries where the seeds had scattered. Hunger has no mercy when it comes, she’d say. But hunger was their burden, and they should have carried it.

  He bought Mrs. Dillman’s old ’72 Gremlin the week he turned sixteen. It was butterscotch gold with racing stripes, and he waved at Freda when he drove by. His arm hung out the window, and he was proud as Hannibal coming over the Alps the way he raised his hand. He used cloth diapers and three coats of Mothers Wax to bring out the luster. He installed a fancy K&N air filter, and every day after school he was out there in the driveway. He rolled back and forth under the car, and his sister stood beside him and handed him the wrenches.

  That’s where he was the day his mother left. Freda saw the truck when it pulled up. Teddy brought the suitcases out to the curb and hoisted them into the bed, and he held the door for his mother. He didn’t cry and he didn’t wave when the truck rounded the corner. He kept on waxing his car. So many coats Freda lost count, and he was still there working the diaper when the sky was dark and the driveway floodlights came on. His mother had a boyfriend and his mother was gone, and Teddy was still there working when Freda went to bed.

  He painted her trim the summer before his senior year. He sanded her gutters, too, and painted them chocolate brown. He cut down a broken branch from her maple tree and brushed sealant on the open bark to keep the fungus out. She looked for jobs to give him because next summer he’d be gone. He was a cadet in the Junior ROTC, and he’d be going away to college. Up to Boulder or Greeley or maybe to Fort Collins. He did pushups and jumping jacks on his front lawn, and once his sister sat sidesaddle along his back to make the pushups harder.

  He sealed the cracks in her driveway and painted her cement steps. All she could do was watch. She leaned on her walker like it was a banister and told him what to do. The juniper bushes needed trimming and some of her window well covers were cracked, and after he was done the house looked as nice as it did when her parents were alive and still working in the garden.

  She kept her household money in a Folgers Coffee can. He came inside with her and poured himself a lemonade from her pitcher while she counted out the bills. Somewhere up the street there were children shouting and the sounds of splashing water. Mrs. Dillman had an above-ground pool she filled every summer for her grandkids. Freda took ten five-dollar bills and set them on the table. Her walker scraped across the linoleum as she pulled it around. The kitchen felt so big when he was there beside her.

  “I think the rubber’s loose.” He pointed to the bottom of her walker. “I can glue it back on for you and then it’ll be real smooth.” He leaned in to get a better look, and Freda caught his chin and cupped it in her hand. That face she’d known since he was little. That sad face and those eyes that slanted downward. She wanted to remember him. He wasn’t even gone yet. He was right here in her kitchen, but she was seeing him from some distant point ten or twenty years in the future. She was seeing him in her memory standing by her table. He was seventeen and in a dirty white T-shirt and his skin was pink from the sun.

  In her memory she kissed him. His lips tasted like lemons. In her memory he didn’t pull away. She felt so small there beside him, small as a girl when he touched her cheek. His hands were callused from the shears, and all her life she’d never know anything more perfect than his breath against her skin.

  Her mother said a heart at peace gives life to the body. Also, we are all small in the eyes of the Lord. Don’t listen when they call you names. How could they know what it’s like? She heard her mother’s voice those nights when the air was still. Those summer nights when she could feel her jawbone growing. She was almost fifty and the radiation wasn’t working anymore. Her teeth were starting to spread, and her features were getting coarser. She didn’t look in the mirror when she washed her face. She closed her eyes, but she could feel the ridge across her forehead where the skin had started to thicken. Her mother’s voice came back to her after all these years. Don’t be afraid, she said. He raises us upward. He carries us inside His palm, and sometimes Freda could feel her mother’s fingers press against her cheek.

  He took a pretty girl to the prom. But you already knew that’s how things would go. He took a pretty girl with tiny wrists and ankles, and there were more until he found the girl who was meant for him. She wasn’t the prettiest in the group, but she looked like him, how her eyes slanted. She was a good three inches taller than him even in her Converse sneakers. She wore his denim jacket and his plaid flannel shirts and he opened the car door for her and closed it again, and they drove together like they’d always been a pair.

  Somebody tied her feet to the ground and her hands to the wooden wheel. Somebody else worked the wheel and pulled her upward, stretching all the muscles around her sockets. It was her companion, this feeling. She couldn’t call it pain. It was the pulling she felt in her bones. Sometimes it carried her upward, and she knew her mother was right. Sometimes it pulled her the other way. She moved downward through the dirt where her flowers had once grown, down to the rocks that would become the mountains, and she was so small beside them.

  All beautiful things go away. Everyone knows this is true. Their son looked like him, and he rode a bike just like him, too. They were back for the first time in years. They came to check on Grandpa Fitz. They weeded his rock beds and adjusted the sprinklers, and Teddy’s wife was out there in her capris, trimming back the hedges. Freda rolled closer to the window so she could see them better. That boy with eyes like his daddy and those skinny brown legs. His hair almost white from the sun. Every year it would get a little darker. And her Teddy was out there cutting the elm tree back from the power lines. His son ran circles around him and pointed to the sky, and he didn’t listen when Teddy shouted. His momma had to pull him away from the falling branches. Teddy was almost thirty. How could that be. He was a first lieutenant. She knew this from Mrs. Dillman’s youngest daughter. In another few years he’d be a captain because anything was possible in this world. He sat up there in the branches, and his back was so straight.

  He came by in the evening with a jelly jar full of flowers. Snapdragons and tiger lilies and snowfire roses. His wife had put ice cubes in the water to keep the blossoms fresh. Teddy knocked on her door, and when she didn’t answer he knocked a little louder. She could see him from the window in her living room. He was standing on the wheelchair ramp, and his boy was there beside him. He waited a good five minutes before he set the jar outside her door. He wouldn’t have said anything about her jawbone or her bent fingers or how her back was shaped like an S. He would have taken her hand and knelt down to greet her, but she stayed in her spot by the window. His face was like a mirror, and it was better not to look.

  Galatea

  She used arnica and bromelain to minimize the swelling. Vitamin K and quercetin and silicone dressings. As soon as she’d healed from one procedure she went back for another. The doctors tightened up he
r neck by cutting downward through her chin. They cut her eyelids, too, and they used thread to lift the muscles in her cheeks. It was strong as fishing line, and sometimes she felt it above her jaw. This tiny filament that kept her face from falling. Every month there were advances. Lasers to burn away spider veins and brown spots and injectable filler. She wanted all these things. She lurked on message boards, and the women there talked like lovers about their surgeons. She wrote down all the names.

  Her mother said she was starting to look a little Slavic. She stood at the stove with a wooden spoon. “It’s not natural what you’re doing,” she said. “Just look how your eyes are slanting.” Her mother’s face was spotted from all those years in the garden. She hadn’t worn a sunhat back then because nobody did, and she didn’t wear one now because what did it matter. She was almost eighty, and her hair was white around her face and soft as cotton balls. You were a good girl growing up, Carol. That’s what she always said. Don’t make me worry now.

  They sat together when the eggs were ready. Carol went to visit every Sunday. She wore sunglasses because her eyes were still sore from the needle. The doctor had massaged the droplets once they were inside. He kneaded her skin like dough. She told her mother about the new doctors up in Denver. They had offices in Aspen and California, too. They were always taking planes. “They’re the best in the country,” she said. The light was starting to come through the café curtains, and they were the same ones from when Carol was in college more than thirty years before. The sun had bleached them a paler yellow. The Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar was the same, too, and the refrigerator magnets with faded columbines. A picture of Jenny from the second grade. Her hair was tied up in ribbons. She looked just like Carol had when Carol was a girl. “They specialize in veins.”

  “You could see the pyramids if you wanted or those volcanoes in Hawaii.” Her mother stirred Splenda into her coffee. Her hands were spotted just like her cheeks. They were speckled as robin eggs.

  “They worked on Sharon Stone.”

  “Can’t you take your glasses off? I can hardly see your face.”

  Carol shook her head. The sun was really shining now. Another windy December day, and she didn’t want to squint. The room smelled of coffee and eggs overcooked in butter. Her mother always overheated the frying pan because eggs carry diseases. Five hundred people a year died from salmonella, and probably more the news won’t tell us. Her mother knew the numbers. She spent hours on WebMD.

  “Someday they won’t need scalpels. They’ll go straight to the genes.”

  “God help us then,” her mother said, and she took the remote from the table. It was almost nine o’clock, and she never missed Dr. Dyer. He talked about how the spirit is all around us, how it fills us from inside and we can find it if we look.

  Carol pushed her plate away before it was empty. Aging was a disease, and they were working on a cure. There were entire villages in Japan where people lived to a hundred and twenty. All they ate was fish. “Those scientists at Berkeley were just on TV again. If we starve ourselves we can live forever. That’s what they were saying.”

  “None of it will bring them back.” Her mother shifted in her chair. She winced a little because her right hip was bad. The socket was starting to fail. “Be grateful for what you have.” She raised the remote like a wand and aimed it over Carol’s shoulder.

  •

  Stop the clocks and turn them back. Stop the changing of the seasons. Another gray winter and her girl was gone. Another muddy spring. Change the bulbs from white to pink. Use dark shades to diffuse the light. She learned about lighting from the boards and her rejuvenation magazines. Candlelight was gentlest of all, and she had scented pillars on all her tables. The apartment was hushed as a church when she lit them at night. It was sweet with the smell of roses.

  The specialist in Denver looked at her hands. He held them in his and raised them up to the light. The veins looked so blue, and Carol felt ashamed. They rose like rivers beneath her skin. There were ads on the walls for eyelash conditioners and Juvéderm, and the women in the posters were perfect. They were brown and ivory and gold, and they looked past the camera when they smiled. They had no pores and no wrinkles, no dark spots from the sun. Their whole lives they’d never know the touch of unkind hands.

  The doctors were using Radiesse at the clinic. Just a few injections along the bones where the skin had gotten thin. The veins were trickier, but endoscopic lasers helped. They used a wire thin as any filament and it burns them from inside. She knew these things. She had her list of questions ready.

  The doctor in charge was named Mittelman. He was probably fifty, but his hair was still dark. He looked like a character from Days of Our Lives. “It’s hereditary,” he said. “Some people just have thin skin.” He pressed his fingers against her veins, and the residents leaned in to see. They were so serious with their clipboards, and one of them was a girl in high-top tennis shoes. A medical student who wasn’t older than twenty-six. They might have been classmates once, Jenny and this girl. They might have known each other as children.

  Mittelman looked right at Carol when he talked. His eyes were pale in the light from the window, and she wondered what he saw. The surgeries she’d had, the lasers and the doctors with their needles. Surgeons were like artists and like painters. They knew each other’s work.

  “Come closer,” he said, and he motioned toward the residents. They gathered around, those young heads, and Carol felt a tightness in her chest. Her eyes began to brim. Who could say why the tears came. There wasn’t any logical reason. She thought of Jenny and her gray eyes. Pale as sea glass and fringed with those dark lashes. There was a terrible silence in the room. The doctor stepped back and the residents looked down at their notebooks, and Jenny was alive in another place. Maybe she lived in Boulder. That’s where the young people went. There were coffeehouses on every corner.

  “I’m doing this for myself,” Carol said. She wiped her wet cheeks with her palms. She knew the things she had to say. The surgery wouldn’t change her life. She had realistic expectations. “It’s for my birthday. It’s a gift I’m getting for myself.” She said these things, and the doctor saw right through them.

  She’d let go of her baby’s hand. It was only for a minute. Four days until Christmas. The mall was crowded with crying babies and mothers pushing strollers. People didn’t apologize if they hit you with their bags. She let go of her baby’s hand and looked for her car keys. She reached inside her purse, and her Bic pen had broken and the ink was puddled at the bottom. It was leaking through the leather. She knew the moments now. She knew them all as if they were showing on some white screen, and she watched them as they happened. She looked over her shoulder and a little boy was screaming in the aisle. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he clenched his fists like somebody having a seizure. He’d be twenty-two now, maybe twenty-three. He’d be graduating from college. His mother was on her knees trying to calm him down. People fussed with their bags and their winter coats, and her baby wasn’t there. “Jenny,” she said, and her voice was shrill. “Jenny, come here.” She turned in circles, and she saw a half dozen little girls, but none of them wore a red jumper. They didn’t have ribbons in their hair.

  The security guards came first and then four policemen who’d been eating at Wendy’s. They smelled like onions from their burgers. The policemen and the fire truck and her husband who drove straight from his office at the Schlage Lock company. They walked through the mall, endless loops around the food court, and Santa was there with all the little kids waiting in line. Around the parking lot and up Chelton where the snow was melting beside the curbs. Up and down the streets and back to the mall where the stores were closing for the evening and all the stars came out and they didn’t sleep that night or the next. The hours stretched and contracted and time stopped without her baby. The sun didn’t rise or set.

  Three days later or maybe it was a week, and her fingers were black from the ink. She scrubbed until her s
kin was raw. Until Rick took away the scouring pads. “What are you doing,” he said. “You’re bleeding on the rug.” She kept washing because her hands were never clean. Lava Soap and Comet couldn’t take away the stain.

  The bosses were in a meeting. She made sure they had their coffee and their French crullers. Mr. Fitz the owner was picky about his donuts. What would we do without you, he told her more than once. You keep this office running. She was a bookkeeper and not a secretary, but she didn’t mind the work. Marnelle the secretary was out on maternity leave. Last month she had twin baby girls, and Carol had the place to herself. She watered the ferns and cleaned the betta fish bowl because the water always got cloudy.

  Fitz looked contented when he came out of the conference room. His shirt strained around his belly. “By God you’re a hard worker,” he said. “That look of concentration.” He stopped in front of Carol’s bay and rapped his knuckles on the counter. He was losing all his hair. He was the grandson of the original owners. It was Fitzes all the way up the company tree. Concrete runs in our veins, he’d say. That’s why we’re all so heavy. He laughed each time he said it, as if the joke were new.

  She waited until he was inside his office. He had golf balls in plexiglass domes from every course he’d ever played and pictures of his chubby daughters. Mahogany furniture and green felt coasters and a miniature Mount Rushmore cast in cement. The door closed and his chair creaked when he sat down, and that’s when she turned to the accounts.