The Gold Coast

72

About the time Dennis is called into Lemon’s office to hear the bad news, Jim gets a call from Lucy. “Are you coming up to dinner tonight like you said?”

Oh, man— “Did I say tonight?”

“I’ve made enough for three already. You said you would, and we haven’t seen you in weeks.”

Uh-oh. That tone in her voice, the ultimate Lucy danger signal.…

Very reluctantly Jim says, “Okay.”

“And did you visit Uncle Tom like you said you would?”

“Oh, man. No. I forgot.”

Now she really is upset. There’s something wrong there, up at the folks’. “I didn’t go this week because of the funeral,” she says, voice strained, “and you didn’t go last week when I thought you did—no one’s been down there for almost three weeks. Oh, Jim, you get down there today and then you come to dinner, you hear me?”

“Yeah! I hear you.” He doesn’t want to cross her when she’s in this temper, when her voice sounds like that. “I’m on my way. Sorry, I just forgot.”

“You don’t just forget things like that!”

“All right. I know. I’ll see you for dinner.”

“Okay.”

So he’s off to Seizure World, which in his mood is the last place in the world he wants to be, but there he is and in a black mood indeed he slams his car door and goes to the reception desk of the nursing home complex. “Here to see Tom Barnard.”

He’s sent along. In the hall outside Tom’s room a nurse stops him. “Are you here to see Tom?” Accusation in her eyes. “I’m glad someone finally came. He’s been having a hard time.”

“What’s this?” Jim says, alarmed.

Hard glance. “His respiration has gotten a lot worse. I thought he was going into a coma last week.”

“What? Why wasn’t his family told about it?”

The nurse shrugs, the gaze still hard. “They were.”

“The hell they were! I’m his family, and I wasn’t told.”

Another shrug. “The front desk makes the calls. Don’t you have an answering machine?”

“Yes, I do,” Jim says sharply, and moves by her to Tom’s door. He knocks, gets no answer, hesitates, enters.

Inside it’s stuffy, the bedsheets are rumpled. Tom is flat on his back, his breath harsh and labored, his skin gray, his freckled bald pate yellowish.

His eyes slide over in his motionless head to look at Jim. At first there’s no recognition, and this sends a stab of fear so far down into Jim that nothing else in the past miserable week bears any comparison to it. Then Tom blinks, he shifts awkwardly on his bed, says, “Jim. Hello.” His voice is a dry rasp. “Here. Help me up.”

“Oh, man, Tom, are you sure? I mean wouldn’t it be better for you if you stayed flat, maybe?” Desperate fear that Tom will overexert himself somehow, die right here in front of him.…

“Help me up. I’m not a Q yet, no matter, evidence to the contrary.” Tom tries pulling up onto his pillow himself, fails. “Help me, boy.”

Jim holds his breath, helps Tom up so that his shoulders are on the pillow and his head leaning against the wall behind the bed. “Let me get the pillow behind your head.”

“No. Bends my neck too far forward. Need all the airspace I can get.”

“Ah. Okay.”

They sit there and look at each other.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been by in a while,” Jim says. “I—well, I’ve been busy, Mom’s been busy too. I was supposed to come last week but I forgot. I’m really sorry. The nurse says you haven’t been feeling well.”

“Got a cold. Almost killed me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. Stupid to die from a cold. So I didn’t.” Tom chuckles and it makes him cough, all of a sudden he’s hacking for breath and Jim, heart pulsing right there in his fingertips, helps him back down onto the bed and turns up his oxygen flow to maximum. Slowly, painfully, Tom regains control of his breathing. He stares up at Jim and again his eyes don’t register any recognition.

“It’s Jim, Tom.”

“How are you, Jim?”

“I’m fine, Tom, fine.”

“Little trouble breathing. I’m okay now. The nurses never come when you ring. Once I was dreaming. I flailed out at something. And knocked this oxygen out of my nose. Pain woke me up, my nose was bleeding. Suffocating in here, regular air now and I suffocate. Can you imagine that? So I rang the bell. And they never came. Managed to pick the tube up. Stuck it in my mouth ’cause my nose. Bleeding. Stayed that way ringing the bell. Nurse came at seven when the new shift started. Graveyard shift sleeping. I did that myself, working at the Mobil station. Around three all the work done, no one awake. Whole town quiet and foggy, streetlights blinking red. I’d sleep by the heater under the cash register. Or walk around picking up cigarette butts off the asphalt.”

“When was this, Tom?”

“But when I wake up it’s only this room. Do you think they put me in prison for something? I do. Public defender for too long. I’ve seen too many jails. They all look like this. People are cruel, Jim. How can they do it? How?”

Tom stops, unable to catch his breath anymore, and for a while he only breathes, sucking the air in over and over. Jim holds on to his clammy palm. It seems he has a fever. He rocks his head back and forth restlessly, and when he talks again it’s to other people, a whispered outrush of words punctuated by indrawn gasps, incoherent muttering that Jim can’t make sense of. Jim can only hold his hand, and rock in the chair with him, feeling like a black iron weight will expand out of his stomach and fill him and topple him over.

The old man looks up at him with a wild expression. “Who are you?”

Jim swallows, looks at the ceiling, back at Tom. “Your great-nephew, Jim. Jim McPherson. Lucy’s son.”

“I remember. Sorry. They say the oxygen loss kills brain cells. According to my calculations, my brain is ten times gone.” He wheezes once to indicate a laugh. “But I may be off by a magnitude.” Wheezes again. He looks out the window. “It’s hard to stay sane, alone with your thoughts.”

“Or in any other situation, these days.”

“That so? Sorry to hear you say that. Me—I try not to think too much anymore. Save what’s left. Live in, I don’t know. Memory. It’s quite a power. What can explain it?”

Jim doesn’t know what to say. Nothing explains the memory, as far as he knows. Nothing explains how a mind can cast back through the years, live there, get lost there.…

“Tell me another story, Tom. Another story about Orange County.”

Tom squeezes his eyes shut. Face a map of raw red wrinkles in gray skin.

“Ah, what haven’t I told you, boy. It’s all confused. When I first came to Orange County. The groves were still everywhere. I’ve told you that.” He breathes in and out, in and out, in and out.

“Our first Christmas here there was a Santa Ana wind. And there was a row of big eucalyptus trees behind our house. Our street stuck right into a grove, the first thrust. And the trees squeaked when the Santa Ana blew. And leaves spinning down. Smelled of eucalyptus. And—ah. Oh. It was the night we were supposed to go Christmas caroling. My mom organized it. My mom was a lot like yours, Jim McPherson. Working for people. And mine was a music teacher. So all the kids were gathered, and a few of the parents, and we went around the neighborhood. Singing. Only half the houses in the development were finished. That wax is hot when it drips on your hand. And the wind kept blowing the candles out. It was all we could do to light them. Made shells of aluminum foil. And we sang at every house. Even the house of a Jewish family. My mom had some secular Christmas carol ready, I forget what it was. Funny idea. Where she found these things! But everyone came out and thanked us, and we had cookies and punch afterwards. Because everyone there had just moved out from the Midwest, you see? This was the way it was done. This is what you did to make a place a home. A neighborhood, by God. Because they didn’t know! They thought they lived in a neighborhood still. They didn’t know everyone would move, people be in and out and in and out—they didn’t know they had just moved into a big motel. They thought they were in a neighborhood still. And so they tried. We all tried. My mother tried all her life.”

“Mine too.”

But Tom doesn’t hear, he’s off in a dark Santa Ana wind, muttering to himself, to his childhood friends, trying to recall the name of that carol, trying to keep the candles lit.

So they hold hands and look at the wall. And the old man falls asleep.

Jim frees his hand, stands, checks to see that the oxygen line is clear and the tank over half-full. He straightens the sheets the best he can. He looks at Tom’s face and then finds he can’t look anymore. In fact he has to sit down. He holds his head, squeezes hard, waits for the fit to pass. When it does he hurries out of the place and drives home to dinner.