Louise Read online

  Maybe she should get a job in a hospital, she thinks, and be a receptionist or an orderly. Or go to culinary school—she enjoys helping Elizabeth make pastries with spun-sugar wraps. She likes to read, so maybe there is something in that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Tom visits his sister at Warner’s house. He is on summer vacation from college and wants to help.

  Warner’s house is twenty minutes from the beach, so Tom drives Louise there and they stick their plastic chairs in the sand. The winds are high, and tiny grains are blowing everywhere, but Louise wants to tan, so they stay.

  Tom doesn’t know how to talk to his sister anymore. Since she got sick, she doesn’t want to hear anything positive. She shoots down any optimistic comment he makes, about anything, which was understandable for a while, but Tom had assumed that after the surgeries, her attitude would be better. If anything, it’s worse. She’s jealous of all her friends, their careers, their relationships—everyone but her seems to be moving into nicer and nicer apartments, moving up. They are all beautiful, every one of them, she says. Her bad eye bounces up and down as she complains.

  Tom is three years younger than Louise, and three years older than Michael. Tom and Louise were in college together for one year, when Tom was a freshman. He tutored her in math. She became frustrated so easily, slamming the book shut and swiping it off the table. Tom has to be careful not to raise his voice to Louise in any manner. Sometimes, feeling brave, he asks Louise softly to please be a little pleasant.

  At the beach, sitting stiffly in her fold-out chair, Louise says she wants to start driving again. She says that if she passes a special driver’s education program for disabled people, she can get her license back.

  “Paraplegics drive,” she says. “I could get a handicapped pass and park anywhere I want.”

  Tom does not know if she should be thinking about handicapped passes.

  •

  Tom makes a corner of Warner and Elizabeth’s basement into a painting studio for Louise. He arranges a card table with some watercolors in a plastic palette, a jar of brushes, and a short stool. Louise has not painted since she was a kid, but Tom did not know what else to do, and thought she might like it. She looks at the table, then looks at him, and goes back upstairs.

  Warner is not doing much painting either. When he does work, he makes watercolors of the brain, giant and multi-colored. He walks around the house in socks while Louise watches the big TV screen. Tom gets depressed watching them. Elizabeth bakes pear tarts. She smiles a lot and brings home gifts. But nothing helps much.

  Tom remembers when he was in middle school, seeing Louise, a teenager, pour vodka from their mother’s liquor cabinet into a water bottle. It was a winter day after school, just them in the house, and the living room was filled with sunlight bouncing off snow. He’d been shy at that age, uninterested in team sports and skateboarding like all the other kids at school. Louise used to taunt him, ask him why he didn’t have any friends and what he did all day. All he had done that day was walk in the living room and see her in the liquor cabinet, but she’d grabbed him, hard, and told him to shut up and go away, as if he’d been spying. He never told on her.

  Another time, in college, Louise had invited him to a party. The apartment had been full of sweaty drunks, and Louise was wearing a sparkly tank top and lots of makeup. When she handed him a drink, he said no thanks. It was his first semester.

  “You’ll never make any friends here,” she’d said, and handed the cup to someone else.

  Tom does not want to remember these things. He wants to connect with his sister the way they used to, as kids, before she became a moody teenager, and then this. He would like to tell her about his new girlfriend. About his housemates at the scholarship house—a place where they all pitch in and do chores to keep the place running. But all Louise talks about is her physical therapist, her breakup with Claude, and how nothing will ever get better. “You don’t believe that,” he tells her. “Sometimes I do,” she says. “And sometimes I don’t.”

  •

  In Michigan, the family goes to an animal shelter. A kitten will make Louise happier, everyone agrees. Louise will be responsible for feeding it, filling its water bowl, and scooping the small litter box. It is an experiment.

  Louise chooses the cat that meows the loudest. A volunteer tells them the sad story of how the cat got there: It was put into a paper bag and thrown into the local river. A man walking his dog saw it happen and pulled the cat out. Louise smiles and kisses the cat’s ears. Her wrists are already bleeding in little pricks from the cat’s claws. She names it Ivan.

  “Ivan the Terrible,” she says.

  Tom remembers the family cat they had to put to sleep. It had been attacked by a Rottweiler in their front yard and its intestines were on the outside, touching the grass. Janet had rushed it to the vet, and Warner took Tom and Michael to pick up Louise from a birthday party at the mall. Louise had been eleven, and came out holding a giant jawbreaker.

  At the vet, Louise held the cat’s paw, sobbing as it was injected. On the way home she held Tom’s and Michael’s hands in the backseat of the station wagon and stared out at the dark. Tom remembers her friendship bracelets and lace glove.

  Now, Louise keeps the kitten in a small room in the basement, away from Warner and Elizabeth’s two older, bigger cats. She spends lots of time in that room. Sometimes Tom stands at the top of the stairs, listening to her talk to the kitten, even laughing at times. As he packs up to go back to school, Tom thinks, everything is okay now. Next time I see her, she will be stronger than ever before.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  It is Louise’s fifth month at her father’s house in Michigan. Warner and Elizabeth go away for two days, leaving Louise alone. This is another experiment. For the first time since her illness, she makes herself coffee. She does her own laundry. She makes an omelet. At night, she locks up the house. She washes the dishes carefully, one at a time, soaping up each glass and plate and spoon and setting them all on a towel to dry. It is exhausting. It is a big step for her, everyone says. Learning to live alone will teach independence and instill confidence.

  Right, Louise thinks. But my face still doesn’t work.

  Louise finds an old deck of tarot cards in the basement. She had been looking for something to guide her. She does not believe in God. She does not believe that Jesus or some other benevolent witness is watching. Jesus has failed her whole family, and for that reason, she decides to give the cards a try. Maybe there is an energy or force that ties all things together. Maybe the cards will help her see into the unknown. It has never been failure or rejection that scared Louise—it was always the unknown.

  She learns how to do readings with a book: The Everything Tarot Book: Discover Your Past, Present and Future: It’s in the Cards! She learns the different spread types: the Immediate Situation Three-Card spread, the Practical Advice Five-Card spread, and her favorite, the General Life Conditions spread. She practices them on her bed, well into the night. Her question is always the same: What happens next?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Books Louise has bought or been given:

  —How to Heal a Broken Heart in 20 Days

  —The Purpose-Driven Life

  —I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse?

  —A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing

  —Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside

  —Don’t Leave Me This Way, Or When I Get Back on My Feet You’ll Be Sorry

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Louise calls Janet and announces that she is moving back to Kansas, to the college town where Tom lives. Janet is stunned. It’s October, only six months since the craniotomies. Janet knows she still walks with a limp. Warner says Louise cannot stand up from a chair without tipping over, or sip water while walking. “I don’t know about you living alone,” Janet says. “Too late—I’ve already signed the lease,” Louise says. “Well, you al
ways were headstrong,” Janet says, and realizes what a great thing it is, to be able to say that Louise is still Louise.

  When Janet sees Louise on moving day morning, Louise is wearing the big, grey orthopedic shoes Janet ordered her. She is trying to be fashionable in dark jeans and a pretty blouse, big earrings, but her glasses are still taped. The left side of her face is still paralyzed. Janet strokes her daughter’s hair, which is now shoulder-length and layered, and notices the scar from the incision, pink and shiny. Just be upbeat, Janet tells herself.

  The whole family, Warner and Elizabeth included, spend the day moving Louise into her new apartment. “New” isn’t the word, Janet thinks, as she looks around the wobbly complex with wood panels down the front, like a bib. The place is crammed with college kids probably not old enough to drink. Janet cannot picture Louise making friends with any of them. Every balcony is cluttered with miniature grills, stereo speakers, and empty beer bottles. Louise says she picked it because it is right next to the university where she will start classes soon, the same school she went to as an undergrad, but Janet wishes she would have tried a little harder to find a better place—maybe she could rent a room in a kindly professor’s house? It’s like she’s trying to insert herself in her old, party-girl life again.

  Louise roams the place happily, dragging herself along the walls. “Look, all the rooms are painted different colors! The bedroom is bright pink and the kitchen is electric blue! There’s a closet, and over here a little shelf!”

  Warner, Elizabeth, and Janet look at each other. Janet whispers, “What a dump.”

  Warner has brought books for Louise that he stacks on a sticky shelf: a self-budgeting workbook and pamphlets on home repair and personal safety. Elizabeth has pulled some items from their basement: towels, framed pictures, rugs. Tom carries the heaviest ends of mattresses and boxes. There isn’t much to carry: a friend’s couch, a lamp, some plastic dishes with roses on them. Janet puts on rubber gloves and cleans under the kitchen sink. Of course she finds mice turds and cockroaches.

  No one wants to leave. They stand around in the little main room and talk, their voices echoing off the walls.

  As Janet gives her a good-bye hug, she asks Louise if she has any food.

  “We just ate,” Louise says.

  “I mean in the cupboards,” Janet says. She takes Louise to the grocery store and they buy organic everything, cartons of eggs and bags of bright fruit. Once they are back and it all is put away, Janet has no choice but to go. Her new boyfriend tries to comfort her on the way back to their small town, but Janet just rests her forehead on the window. She keeps thinking of Louise sleeping in that place, and having to get up in it in the morning, alone.

  •

  Warner spends most of the moving day putting up blinds, touching up grout in the bathroom, checking the smoke alarm. He walks around the place with a large ruler, making sure all the pictures hang right. He still doesn’t understand what Louise will do, really, or how she will do it. He feels as if Louise is a teenager leaving home for the first time, only worse. Warner does not really remember the first time Louise left home for college. She suddenly was just gone, and he’d never had to worry about her at all, not about drinking or smoking or grades or boys. Why is that? Why hadn’t he worried?

  As they drive away, he and Elizabeth glance through the rearview to see Louise bent over a box. Warner feels he is doing the wrong thing but keeps on driving away. He does not know what else to do.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Tom’s scholarship house is a ten-minute walk away from Louise’s new place. He often rides his bike to see her, propping it on the communal porch that’s trashed with watery puke stains and soggy paper bags. Girls in tight jeans and pastel fleeces slam doors and run up and down the stairs, which are outside, like a fire escape. Sometimes, in the small, dead yard, a few guys without shirts grill hot dogs and drink from red plastic cups while a football game plays on the radio.

  He remembers when Louise was a senior in college, and he was a freshman, living in a skyscraper-like dormitory full of guys who did things like blow pot smoke through dryer sheets. He didn’t smoke, or drink, and wasn’t making many friends. His roommate had a girlfriend, and they always were in the top bunk and under the covers together. Louise rarely called Tom, but one day she invited him over to her place for dinner. Tom was so happy that for once he did his homework without letting the sounds of sex distract him.

  He’d been late. Spanish Club had run over, and he had to bike a long way with a giant bag of tortilla chips balanced on the handlebar. No one answered his knock. The door was open, and he ran up the stairs calling out, Sorry, sorry! but still no one answered. The place was huge—the largest room had a pool table, fluorescent lights, and a black-and-white checkered floor. In the kitchen piles of dirty dishes were everywhere. He had missed it. He’d checked his cell phone. No call.

  The people in her new place are just like her old friends. But Tom cannot see his sister with any of these people now.

  •

  Tom takes Louise to the public indoor pool, which she hates by now. He knows this, but she at least goes—she won’t go anywhere else to work out. Janet and Warner keep telling him that Louise needs to exercise every day, but she says walking outside on the sidewalk is humiliating, the gym is crowded, yoga class is too quiet. But at the pool Tom doesn’t think she tries hard enough. She gets stiff and impossible after a few minutes and sinks to the bottom if he tells her to lie back and float. Her arms are thin but flabby, her tummy soft. She needs muscle, Janet and Warner say. Make her build it. It’s the only way her walking is going to get better, the only way she’ll get rid of that cane. Tom tries to show Louise the strengthening moves that are illustrated in her physical therapy binder, the strokes. His limbs are smooth and slow, as if swimming through gel. He demonstrates a Soccer Kick, a Bicycle, a Mermaid. He does the Boxing Punch. Louise’s swimsuit—bright blue with skinny straps—looks bad. It was last used on a spring-break vacation to Jamaica where she paraded down the beach with her girlfriends. Now it sags and puckers. She holds a kickboard across her chest like it is a stuffed animal and sits on the gutter. Tom swims back and forth down the lane, hoping he is being a positive role model.

  On the way home she doesn’t look out of the car window. Not at the fraternity and sorority mansions with Olympian pillars, not at the man on a street corner meditating on a bed of nails, not even to see the people next to their car at any stoplight. She keeps her eyes on her hands. Tom notices that Louise now always wears sweatpants and bright T-shirts. Stretchy shorts. He wonders where all her real clothes went.

  He asks her what’s wrong, and she tells him about how, on her first night in town, after everyone left, she wanted to go out, but couldn’t think of anyone to call except a guy she knew from the school newspaper who almost died from a bacterial infection. He had lost almost all of his fingers and toes and had prosthetics. In his specially outfitted car, they drove downtown to a bar and talked about how hard life was for them. Louise says they depressed each other, and that she hasn’t called him since.

  Tom doesn’t know where Louise falls on the disability scale. She is not as bad as that guy, is she?

  •

  Janet and Warner call Tom early in the mornings, when he is still under his Mexican blanket, the room a dreamy dark. They ask questions about Louise, so many questions. They mail him checks so he and Louise can eat at tablecloth restaurants. Janet mentions she bought an air mattress for a weekend trip up. Tom isn’t used to all this attention, all these gifts, all this contact with his parents. He tells them there’s no need to visit. He has it under control. He is Louise’s brother. He was there when she crumpled on the grass in Alabama. He can help now.

  •

  Tom’s girlfriend, a short, motivated girl who is a teaching assistant for a human sexuality class, wants to meet Louise. She and Tom are both members of an experimental church called The Center. It is close to downtown in an old community
rec center. Tom’s girlfriend has cropped hair and does not wear bras or use deodorant. Tom has always liked how sweet his girlfriend is, how she gives everyone hugs and cheek kisses and remembers birthdays, but he is not sure she should meet Louise. Louise does not like to smile—because it makes the paralysis more noticeable, she says, which Tom supposes is true. Tom thinks that maybe, though, the three of them could watch a movie, or make some goals for Louise, write them on a marker board. They could get frozen yogurt.

  Tom brings his girlfriend to Louise’s place. They bring bags of vegetable juices, vitamins, and essential oils. The gifts seem to upset Louise—she leaves them, unopened, on the kitchen counter. Louise has prepared some sort of salad for dinner, and the conversation goes okay, Tom guesses, but honestly he was too nervous to remember what was said. They try to decide what game to play after dinner. His girlfriend suggests Pictionary. Tom says okay.

  “Okay?” his girlfriend asks. “You hate Pictionary.”

  “I want to play what you want to play,” he says.

  “Don’t be such a pushover,” Louise says.

  “Seriously,” his girlfriend says. “Stand up for yourself.”

  Glad you’re getting along, he thinks.

  After the game, Tom tells Louise he has been seeing a therapist. Louise asks what they talk about. “A lot of things—school, my relationship—you,” he says.