Rise Page 3

  She took only what she needed. Almost every month she wrote a few checks to herself. It wasn’t hard because she knew the requirements for setting up small businesses. She named them JB Holdings and JB Services and JLB Supplies, and she set up accounts at the Exchange National Bank and the Ent Credit Union on Wahsatch. She had so many accounts and so many names, and she tracked them all on spreadsheets. She paid her taxes, too, because that’s how they got Capone. He shot people with his Tommy gun, but they nailed him on his returns. She set up those accounts and made out the checks, and she should have felt bad when Mr. Fitz worked so hard to keep the family business going. He didn’t complain when she took vacation time or left early for her appointments. She was a thief, and she should have been ashamed.

  Mr. Fitz was getting angry behind his door. His voice always changed when he called the guys at the plant. The kiln was down again, and it would be another week before they got the coils. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “Can’t you do it right for once? Can’t you take care of a single goddamn thing?” His chair rolled across the plastic mat that protected his green carpet. She could hear the wheels going back and forth, and his face was probably pink by now. He’d be in there for hours.

  Carol finished all the checks before he was done with the call. He was really yelling now. Someday he’d have a seizure if he wasn’t careful. Someday his heart would stop. She signed the checks and set them in envelopes. She took the real ones to the mailbox, and then she went back to the message boards and looked for some new names.

  Dr. Ashrawi mapped all the places for the needles. His eyes were the color of walnuts, and they looked serious even when he smiled. He had done his training in Beirut. Women came to see him from Cairo and the Gulf, and he was only in Denver for the winter. He was teaching at the DU Medical School. He catered to the ladies in Cherry Creek who were tired of their hands. Whose skin was dried as jerky from all their tennis games.

  “Relax, Ms. Bishop,” he said. “Listen to the music.” This was the moment. It was always the moment when the world narrowed to a point. She knew the sting when it came. She knew the needle and the burning. This is what it feels like when there’s a fire in your veins. The walls were gray like her baby’s eyes. There were lilies on the counter. She could smell them from her chair. That sweet smell and the cleaners, too, and gentle music through the speakers. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” “Light My Fire.” Just the melody and no words. Rick had loved the Doors. He’d danced to them when they first bought the house. There was no furniture in the living room, not even a pillow or a rug, only the Sansui quadraphonic system in the middle of the room. He turned the volume on high because that’s what people did when they had no neighbors through the walls. He slid along the floor in his wool camping socks. We’re home, he said. Every brick belongs to us. He swung his arms around, and there was nothing graceful in how he moved and that was why she loved him.

  The Nagys came and the Biedelmanns and all the neighbor boys. They made a fan and walked the fields behind the Emerson Middle School. Rick led them like a captain, Rick who had two teenagers now and lived up in Fort Collins. He drew circles on the map, and the circles kept getting wider. The police came with their dogs and volunteers on horses, and nobody found a trace. The Christmas trees came down and her baby was gone. In April the tulips broke through. She kept the hairs from Jenny’s bristle brush. She kept the dirty laundry and the bed just as it was. She’d pestered Jenny to make her own bed. You’re almost seven, she’d said. You need to learn to clean your room, and now she left it messy. She was grateful for the clutter and the marker scribbles on the wall. Grateful for the chipped baseboards because these were the things her girl had touched.

  The dishes stayed in the washer for weeks. It was hard to turn the dial to make it run. The leaves weren’t raked and the bills went unpaid and it was hard to remember what day it was or why they were together. She saw Jenny everywhere she looked. She’d tell Rick to stop the car, to turn, to look where she was pointing. A girl walking in the mall who tilts her head the way she used to. A mother pushing a stroller. She looked for Jenny in every mother’s face and in every nursing baby. In all the fields outside of town where they were building those new houses. Especially in the fields because that’s where she was sleeping.

  You’ve got to stop, Rick used to say. It’s not healthy what you’re doing. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white, and he didn’t slow down to look, not even when she cried.

  She stopped by the old house. She went there after every procedure. Her hands were wrapped up tight, but she could bend her fingers. Five couples since she’d sold it and at least two single mothers. Eleven children between them, and this new couple was the worst. Look at the weeds in the gravel bed and how the trim was peeling. The garbage can was tipped sideways on the curb, and that was where it stayed. She parked across the street and watched the kids play in the yard. A fat little girl and her blond brother. The mother didn’t watch them the way she should. They chased each other up and down the sidewalk, and she needed to be more careful.

  She opened the car windows because it was getting warm. She leaned back in her seat, and she felt the blood beating in her hands. It hurt more than the other procedures, even more than when they lifted her jaw and set the hooks behind her ears. It hurt and the sky was clear and how many hours had she spent in that yard planting bulbs with Jenny. How many summer afternoons running through the sprinklers. The first lilies were blooming on the corner where old Mrs. Lucas used to live. She worked the beds every day and that was where they found her. The neighborhood was the same, one brick rancher after the next, but the city was growing around it. All those new wood houses with their pastel colors and dirty asphalt shingles. They spread over the fields where the cottonwood trees used to flower. Every day the concrete mixers drove up and down Academy. They poured the slabs in the empty fields and the city unfolded itself like a map. It pressed against the mountains. The concrete covered all the places Jenny had ever been and the place where she might be.

  She was having a bad reaction. Two weeks of swelling, and her hands were wrapped in gauze because she didn’t want to see them. Two weeks of dropping the phone and fumbling with the doorknobs. Her mother came and washed her laundry. She brought lentil soup and garlic mashed potatoes.

  “I just don’t understand you,” her mother told her. “I don’t think I ever will.”

  They ate together on the sofa, and Carol dropped her spoon. She picked it up and wiped it on her shirt, and her mother shook her head.

  “You can’t go on like this,” her mother said. “You’re oranger than a pumpkin.”

  Carol blew over the surface of the soup the way she used to when she was little.

  Her mother was wrong. She could go on like this forever. “You oversalted it this time,” Carol said. “Or maybe it’s the ham.”

  Her mother did the dishes. She ran the vacuum, too, and mopped the bathroom tiles. “Quit punishing yourself,” her mother said. She knelt in the shower stall, and Carol felt ashamed to see her mother working the brush. Her hip had gotten worse. The doctors were saying it was time to get a new one, but her mother said it was a racket. Those joints were probably made in China and they’d break easier than bones. They’d chip like teacups. She cleaned the shower and scrubbed the toilet bowl because it was getting a ring, and Carol stood beside the bucket with her bandaged hands.

  “They found that girl in Littleton,” Carol said. Twenty years in a garden shed, and the police brought her back home. She was alive and her baby was, too, and time had stopped for her while she was gone. She came out, and the world was changed. Who knew if she recognized her mother’s face.

  “They need to leave those folks alone.” Her mother pushed herself up, and her hip cracked just like a shot. “Always following them around with cameras.” She started in about the cemetery again. How Carol should go visit. It was healthier than watching all those crime shows. It didn’t matter if the grave was empty. P
eople didn’t go to the cemetery to visit the dead. They went to visit their memories. She talked to Herman every week there and told him about his girl. How she was a bookkeeper and how she’d worked her way through college.

  Her mother rested on the sofa when she was done cleaning. She propped up her hips with cushions. Carol sat beside her, and the light was gentle in the room. “He’d be proud of you,” her mother said. She stroked the hair from Carol’s eyes. “He always said you were good with numbers.” She held Carol’s hands, but gently, gently. She pressed them against her heart.

  The blood came back once the swelling had subsided. It found its way to another vein, and that vein broke through the surface. She went to see Dr. Ashrawi as soon as she saw the bulge inside her skin. “That can happen,” the doctor said. “I see it in twenty percent of patients.” He looked at her right hand because it was worse than her left. He held it like a suitor asking her to dance.

  He talked about other options and diminishing returns. They could try sclerotherapy. Just a couple of injections and the vein seals shut. It turns into a scar beneath the skin. There could be cramps after the treatments and a few broken blood vessels. “The results are typically good,” the doctor said. “But there are no guarantees.” His voice was deep and wavered a little, and she wondered what he sounded like when he spoke his native language. It was probably sunny in Lebanon. The women were all beautiful, and the air smelled sweet from the oranges.

  Sclerotherapy or maybe vein removal. They could cut them out, all of them, and her hands would be smooth, but then she’d have some scarring and pain from the stitches. The doctor talked and he looked only at her for those few minutes. The world slowed, and the phones went quiet in the hall. It was just the two of them and nobody else, not even his pretty receptionist who looked like one of the ladies in the brochures. Her perfect oval of a face and skin that never saw the sun. Her mother talked about Dr. Dyer and finding your way forward, but the answers were all right here. In this quiet office where the ladies sat in plush chairs and waited for their consultations. Vases with orchids submerged in water and soft music coming through the speakers and she’d stay here all day if she could. This doctor would help her and if he changed his mind, she would find another and another. She had a high pain threshold. She never felt a thing.

  She wrapped her hands when she got to the car. She didn’t want to see them. She should clean her apartment and pay her bills and wash her dirty Jetta. All these things, and she drove instead. It was April, and in another month her girl would be twenty-nine. Whole satellite cities had grown up north. More people were coming from California, and pretty soon there’d be no place to put them. Down the freeway and off at Academy and back to the old neighborhood. Past the old house and the medical buildings where the Kmart used to be. Past the Printers Home and up the winding street and through those iron gates. Of all the empty fields in the city this is the one where she knew she wouldn’t find her girl.

  Paradiso, Himalayan Black. Indian Aurora. The stones came from India and Greece. The sun warmed them when it shined. She touched them as she walked the rows. She’d picked the prettiest one. She’d spent hours with the brochures. The grass was wet from the sprinklers, and her boot heels sank into the muddy patches. Let it be warm where her baby was. Her baby whose hands were always cold. Who needed the heavy blanket even in summer. She slept like an Egyptian with her arms folded across her chest. All that granite and the winters didn’t touch it. Not the April sun.

  She read the names and the dates, and they all had lived longer than her Jenny. One woman two rows over was born in 1897 and Jenny was lost before her. Soon there’d be no one who would remember her. Her grandma would die and Carol, too, and Jenny would die with them. She had no brothers or sisters. Every person who walks the earth leaves behind a mark. Her mother said this, and maybe she believed it. But what mark could Jenny leave when she was only seven? Her classmates were parents now and her teachers were all retired, and nobody would remember her in another thirty years. No one would say her name.

  She pressed her hands together. The blood comes back when you’re living. It always finds its way. The city was pulsing around her. The cars drove by so fast just outside the gates. The Cinema 70 was a Kawasaki dealership now. The movies they’d watched together, and all those velvet seats were gone. Sirens sounded from the fire station down on Circle, and she felt her heart beating. Her mother was almost eighty, and her grandmother had been ninety-four when she passed. The women in her family lived to an old old age.

  She sat down on a bench across from Jenny’s marker. It was noon and the sun was shining, and one of the maple trees was early and coming into bud. Conjure the memories. Bring them to the surface. This was the city where her girl was born. Her name was Jennifer Lee Bishop. She was a second grader at the Monroe School and she swung on the monkey bars. Her hair flew upward in a tangle. It smelled like berries from her shampoo. They went to Fargo’s for their pizzas and the numbers appeared in the mirror. Skating at the Broadmoor rink before they tore it down and Jenny had bumped into Scotty Hamilton there once and spilled Pepsi on his jacket. She never watched where she was going. Both her front teeth were chipped. This was the city and these were the things her girl had touched, and she looked at her wrapped hands.

  Nod

  By the third night he was certain he’d never sleep again. She lay there breathing just inches from his side. She pulled the blanket away from him and turned toward the wall, and the dogs in the alley were barking again. He listened to them and waited for the sun to rise, and he wasn’t entirely awake and he wasn’t sleeping either. He was deep inside that fog. Three days it had followed him to work. It hazed his vision and nothing helped, not the treadmill and not the energy drinks he’d started buying. He’d never liked coffee or soda pop, and now he was drinking things that tasted like chemicals and burning hair. He couldn’t focus anymore. The spreadsheets all looked the same. He’d sit at the keyboard and try to clear his eyes, but the clouds stayed even after the second can.

  He went out to the living room and turned on the TV. Today they were hunting black bears. Somewhere in central Oregon. He watched his shows every day. They were recording while he worked. They’d be waiting for him when he got home, and it didn’t matter if Becky complained. He’d watch them anyway. Accounting theory and business law couldn’t compete with survivalists who ate lichen and those guys in Idaho who’d stalked an elk for days. They were wild-eyed when they came back across the ice. They looked like visiting prophets.

  The sky was always gray in Oregon. This was how it seemed. A gentle drizzle was always coming down, and the hunters went along the clearcuts and fields of blackened trees. The bears liked the damp ground where the huckleberries grew. They liked abandoned orchards and acorns from the tanoak trees. Another month and they’d be sleeping. All that work overturning logs and looking for grubs, finding the last of the berries and fallen fruit, and they’d sleep it off. If they weren’t fat enough by November, they’d die in their dens. He closed his eyes and lay back against the chair. He covered his legs with the chenille throw.

  She’d started talking about his birthday this week. She loved having something to plan. It’s coming up, she’d say. It’s just around the corner. What do you think about Toscanini’s? They do a nice job with the platters.

  She meant well, but all her talk about parties just made him nervous. Forty-three wasn’t a big year. There wasn’t any reason to celebrate, and she went on and on. She was thinking of a carrot cake and bottles of the house merlot, and was there anyone from work he’d like to invite. There was space for twenty in the big room, maybe twenty-five. She was sweet the way she smiled. Her front teeth overlapped a little, and her hair never stayed the way it should, and all these things she hated were the ones that he loved best. He should go back to bed. He should lie down beside her and pull her against his belly, but he stayed in front of the TV. He lay there, and it pushed down on him. The weight of all that air. He felt it and
he closed his eyes, but he didn’t fall asleep.

  The city was its own wilderness. It was wild like the forest or the mountaintops, and they’d need equipment to survive. Last August a transformer blew on the corner, and the power crew didn’t come when he called. No electricity for three days, and by the end the apartment smelled like garbage and sweaty socks. All their food went bad, and they had to toss the top tier of their wedding cake she’d been saving for years. That was when he started with the catalogues. Really started. He applied for a Cabela’s charge card. He bought hand-crank radios and water purifiers and bear spray because it was on sale. The gear outgrew the hallway closet. Boxes sat on the kitchen table and behind the bedroom door, and Becky wasn’t happy. He’d started watching his shows in a camping chair, and she looked lonely on the sofa. Sometimes she even cried. I got you one, too, he told her. Look how nice it is. It has these cup holders on each side, but she looked at the piles and the new Pertex sleeping bags and stayed just where she was.

  Four days without sleep. Four days and his eyes were gritty. It hurt to blink, and his throat had that metallic feel. His boss Marshall was waiting for him to finish the boxes. Thirty-six boxes still needed coding, and the interns in the conference room looked lost behind the papers. Marshall wasn’t happy. Fish, he said, you’re taking too long. You’re making it much too hard. And what good did it do to explain, when Marshall hadn’t done any real work in years. It takes time to build a database and to review all those company files. Time to find the things that matter, and Marshall didn’t understand. He sat behind his desk surrounded by pictures of his cranky children and a wife with beetle eyes. All around him people were moving rocks. That’s how Fish thought of it, moving rocks across a field from one end to the other. He sweated and worked and carried those rocks, and there were always more. They grew and multiplied.