Donnie planned to visit the professor during a fall office hour and bring him a loaf of bread from the hospital bakery.

  * * *

  —

  Over the summer, Donnie tried to teach six geri patients to use the bathroom. The key-faced nurse lent him a stopwatch to give reminders. But getting to the bathroom was a production, and they couldn’t go on the hour when they were supposed to. Donnie got to know the signs. Pacing. A twitch in Mrs. Belzer’s upper cheek. Artie’s eyebrows. He cleared the path from the activity table to the restrooms. Still, it was hard for them. He cleaned up matter-of-factly. The key-faced nurse had given him a tip: he dabbed Mentholatum under his nose each day. Donnie put white enamel urine bowls, discreetly, in several places on the ward.

  His mother wore a diaper, too. He didn’t know why—she wasn’t old—but he didn’t ask and he didn’t try to train her. They worked next to each other in the garden for an hour after his shift. He pulled weeds and turned the hard soil with a hoe. He bought fertilizer from a nursery and they scattered the pellets, as if they were feeding ducks. They had done that together when he was small. They talked little. One afternoon, his mother said, “See,” and lifted his arm to point at a bird. Until then, Donnie hadn’t noticed birds, but he became attentive to their differences and eventually found a book in the hospital library. He pointed out birds to her, too. In the dusk, he identified owls calling from a stand of tall redwoods.

  Donnie would offer a comment and his mother would nod or make a noise. Their conversations didn’t catch, the way Lina needed hers to lock and turn. The hour was more than an hour. Clouds stretched thinner. They washed their hands together in the shed when they finished. He took his mother’s hands under the faucet of cold mineral water and scrubbed her fingernails with a brush. He always made her a mug of tea before he left. He set her up with it on a table next to her, in front of the TV.

  “Look,” she said today, making a commotion, pointing to the screen. It was an ad for detergent. His mother gripped his hand and he suddenly recognized the boarder. She held up a plastic bottle and talked with a bright edge. Her hair had been curled and her face seemed different, too. She looked terrified, Donnie thought. But good for her.

  * * *

  —

  All of Donnie’s patients were still there in August. Even Ida Kaufman, the one lady he’d managed to bathroom train. He asked the key-faced nurse if she could call her daughter.

  “Wrote to her already,” she said. “I’ll do it once more the end of September.” She patted Sylvie; even she had come around to her.

  In October, Trish decided it was time for Donnie to move again. “You’ll be starting school soon,” she said, her hands resting on the mound of her belly. But there was no such thing as a sober dorm. Walter would drive him to the hill town to help him find a room. Donnie disliked change, though, and the Humble House was between the hospital and the college.

  “Can’t I just stay there?”

  “Sober houses are expensive. All the supervision. You don’t need that anymore.”

  So he and Walter strolled through quiet streets of the college town on a bright day in October. They saw nine rooms in grown-up people’s houses, all fine. But Walter insisted they keep looking. Donnie could usually tolerate Walter, but today he saw Lina’s point. School, he was beginning to think, might be too much. Walking to the tenth house under a canopy of branches, Walter told Donnie that he had doubts about his wedding. Donnie was seven months sober; he couldn’t imagine getting married. But Susan lived with Walter. She wore Birkenstocks over pedicured toes; that seemed exactly right for Walter. Berkeley and all. But he was talking about a different woman, who worked in a library.

  The eleventh place was a garage that overlooked a garden. Donnie liked the woman renting it, a professor, but young, wearing shorts, and her tanned, muscled legs sparkled with blond flecks of hair.

  * * *

  —

  The geri unit staff celebrated the ninety-first birthday of Ida Kaufman, Donnie’s lady, with a cake and still no daughter. Donnie took pictures, they blew out candles, and then he walked her over to the library, where she could talk to her daughter on the telephone. The key-faced nurse had given him the code to dial long-distance.

  Donnie roamed over to the metal shelves of periodicals to give her privacy, but he could still hear. Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease. Crime and Delinquency. Schizophrenia Bulletin. Community Mental Health Monthly. Suicide Prevention. Neuroanatomy. Donnie came to the library sometimes to sit and think. He’d never been here when the room wasn’t empty.

  Ida was keeping the conversation going. She asked questions. The answers seemed short. Finally, he heard “I love you. I hope so,” and then the phone being put down.

  He asked her if she wanted to walk before going back. She said, no, she was tired. “She does her best, she tries,” she said, apropos of nothing. “You see, I wasn’t a good mother.”

  * * *

  —

  Donnie left his boxes on the swept floor of the new place and went out for a long run. Sylvie had stopped running with him in August, in the heat, and she showed no sign of wishing to resume. So after he showered, he took her for a walk. Contentment fell over him in the soft air from being outside after a shower, his body loose, tugged by the light, roving tension of the leash. He’d done what he could and felt released. A squirrel ran in front of them and Sylvie only looked. Donnie had an idea clear as a voice: Why not live on these warm sidewalks, where he could be enough?

  Sylvie led him to a church with an open door and, inside, a circle of chairs. A meeting starting. Donnie ducked in, looping the end of the leash again over his wrist. That was where he learned his landlord’s name. Caroline.

  A guy Donnie’s age talked about being addicted to sex. It sounded like bragging. But the guy’s own mother had told him to get his head out of his dick.

  A pudgy girl said her real addiction was not to alcohol but to love.

  His landlord didn’t say anything.

  He would go back to school, he decided, but not yet.

  * * *

  —

  “The elderly and the chronically ill,” the key-faced nurse told him. “That’s all we’ll have here, pretty soon. Incurables. When we had weller people, they spent a season or two and then went back to the world—and that was good for everybody.”

  Artie tugged at Donnie, asking for an exorcism.

  Donnie told his inventories to the ones who seemed right in the head. People, when they’re old, will forgive you anything, he discovered, if you sit with them.

  * * *

  —

  His mother was rocking in a chair when he asked, “You going to be okay with me starting back at college? I wouldn’t be able to see you every day.” She stared at her hands, not answering. “I don’t have to go,” he said.

  “I want you to,” she said slowly. “I wish I had gone for a higher degree.”

  “You have a degree. You’re a nurse, Mom.”

  “I wanted to be a doctor. Like Dr. Moss.”

  “You may not have become what you wanted, but what you are gave me my life.”

  * * *

  —

  For a long time, Donnie didn’t talk about his mother in group. She was a box with a lid. Then he finally began. The way he wanted to remember, she was keen-eyed, fun. A very specific person. She didn’t like yellow flowers. How can you dislike a flower? someone asked. But he understood; she didn’t get to make many things. Not much of her time had ever been her own. Her likes and dislikes defined her. She could turn a small room beautiful. That was true. He promised.

  As he was telling these people he barely knew (kids he’d been with in the youth unit were mostly gone) about his mother, he was changing. His life had broken, he’d broken it, it was nearly healed, and now he could feel himself trying to grow. He understood that he would remember this time as the period when his character was formed. This could have happened anywhere, but it happened here, in a run-down never-built-right hospital compound in Norwalk, California. In 1982, the bottom of the world. By the time he met Caroline, he was twenty, sober, incipiently vaguely Christian, and employed. He saw his mother every day through it all. It could have been anywhere, but it was here that he began his second life.

  73.

  Donnie had shaved his head. Her little brother! That was the first thing Lina noticed the day of Walter’s wedding. He didn’t look remotely like himself.

  “A mistake, I hear,” Donnie said. “It’ll grow back. It’s teaching me to be patient.”

  Don’t be too patient, Lina thought but didn’t say. He had tendencies in that direction. He’d moved out of the halfway place and was living in a garage. This was the first month he was even allowed to kiss a girl, Walter said. Not that he had. But he’d shaved his head and apparently learned to live without his beauty. Why couldn’t Lina learn to live without hers?

  She’d landed here less than two hours ago, and already she understood that the black dress she’d brought was all wrong.

  Neither of them had seen Walter yet. Ken had picked up Lina from the airport and taken her to a ranch house in the middle of an orchard. These neighbors were out of town, he explained, before leaving to pick up someone else. Out the back, Lina and Donnie could see the white tent in a field, huge and whimsical, like something drawn. A bonfire was going in a pit, though it was just midafternoon. The flames looked insubstantial against the sky.

  “Why here?”

  Donnie shrugged. “Is this the Central Valley? He was always talking about looking for corners.”

  Donnie had arrived on his motorcycle. “They told me I couldn’t bring Sylvie; I guess someone’s allergic. So why not ride?”

  Lina could think of some reasons why not to ride a motorcycle on an interstate highway, but she didn’t list them. She was trying. “Where’s Mom?” she asked instead. “Is she with Walter?”

  “Julie’s bringing her. That’s a thing. Julie’s invitation came late, because of her new address, and she thought they didn’t really want her, so she sent a big-deal gift; she bought them a whole set of forks and spoons. She told me she and Mom did that together. I guess silver was something people were supposed to give you when you got married. But they were two nurses on their own.”

  “Mom had been married.”

  “Maybe nobody gave her forks and spoons. Anyway, they went out and bought it themselves. They picked the same pattern. Julie made it sound like a happy day.”

  Lina had never particularly noticed their forks and spoons. Where were they now? She looked around the living room; strange, to be among other people’s knickknacks. “Let’s go into town,” she said. “Maybe I can find something else to wear. Something more western. Like Jessica Lange.” Never mind that Jessica Lange was blond and nearly six feet tall. Lina rode on the back of Donnie’s bike and then they roamed through small shops. They bought four antique champagne glasses, each a different clear color.

  Donnie told her a story then, his shoulder blades moving up and down in the sweater. This was how he’d always been, laughing to himself before he told you the joke. He’d been an addict, maybe would be one forever, according to that caseworker, but he was still himself. Thirteen months sober. “I stopped at a gas station twenty miles south. I’m filling up the tank and somebody at the pay phone is saying, ‘There’s this guy with a nice enough girlfriend he sort of loved, but he still pined over a librarian. And unbeknownst to his fiancée he made a secret trip to where the librarian lived. I’m on the way to his wedding.’ She was talking about this wedding.

  “There’s a dean at the college. Very proper. I turned in my papers to register and he saw my name and asked, ‘Do you have a brother?’ His goddaughter knew Walter from Berkeley. The dean said she runs a poetry archive. She’s engaged to an Israeli scientist. He talked about her as if she were a princess.”

  There was no punch line, really.

  * * *

  —

  They put on their wedding clothes and walked toward the tent. Donnie looked better than she did in a suit he’d bought in a college-town thrift shop. Lina was getting used to his head. Her shoes were as stupid as the dress; the heels drilled straight down into the dirt. She’d worn stockings, but halfway to the tent she stopped to take them off. She decided never to wear stockings again. Around the bonfire, they sat on bales of hay. It was still early; except for the caterers, they were the first people there. In a few minutes, Walter loped over the lawn in a suit and tie. “Hey. So glad you guys are here.” He straddled a bale and rubbed his hands together.

  “I hope I’m doing the right thing. You think I am?”

  Lina’s stomach tensed. What could you say? They stared at the fire, which was boisterous and growing.

  “I love Susan,” Donnie said. A romp of mischief flitted over his face. “Anyway, dude, what’s the alternative now?”

  Two girls were lighting torches. Beyond, deep rows of newly leaved trees stood at attention.

  “Where are Mom and Julie?” Donnie said. “They landed?”

  “She wouldn’t get out of the car. Julie called from LAX and we decided: they’re gonna stay there. Watch something on TV.”

  They sat, feeling licks of heat from the transparent flames. So their mother wouldn’t be at Walter’s wedding.

  “Julie bought a dress,” Donnie said. “Where you used to work. Your old boss helped her. The one who helped me with your white coat.”

  “Sue.”

  “She picked Julie’s outfit for the wedding. She picked out something for mom to wear, too.”

  “I should have called it earlier. I went around and around. It’s too much for Mom,” Walter said. “At least Julie could have come, then. Anyway, though, it’s probably better Julie’s with her. And Susan’s planning a thing at the hospital. She’s hiring a photographer, she’ll put on her dress again, and we’ll get another cake. Maybe you guys’ll come, too.”

  * * *

  —

  So she wouldn’t be here. After all Lina’s agonizing. She felt ridiculous, the cause of her own misery. Walter was probably right, as always. Maybe their mother didn’t have to attend.

  “I don’t know if you guys find this, but…I don’t like having Mom around other people who didn’t know her before,” Walter said. “They ask questions.”

  Sacha’s mother had. “All those years, you didn’t notice anything?” Lina had looked across the table to find Sacha to help and saw him waiting for an answer, too. “No, she did a good job,” she’d whispered.

  “In recovery, people are better, but in high school, yeah. I don’t like the questions either.”

  They shook their heads with unanimity. It was impossible to explain.

  * * *

  —

  Lina and Donnie stayed at the fire when Walter stood to greet guests. “It’s pretty wild when you think of it. Marriage is. Forever. Wow. No wonder he’s scared.” This was Donnie’s first wedding.

  “But you can see why people want the guarantee. I never considered her not coming to my wedding. I wonder if that would have made a difference. I think the idea of her there freaked Sacha out.” Lina would have sketched in her notebook after their wedding. That night would have been one way for her, another for him. “I don’t know why he would’ve gone through with it. I guess he always wanted a kid.”

  “Guy did you a favor,” Donnie said.

  “Hey, that coat you bought me. I still have it. Were you already doing drugs then?”

  “Yeah. Probably. Sure.”

  “But you still managed to get me the perfect coat.”

  “I managed a lot of things stoned. Until I didn’t.”

  Lina knew she should feel grateful. For Donnie, even for Sacha leaving her free. She didn’t feel that yet but sensed an opening—an inch more of room inside. This was not the first wedding Lina had attended, but it was the first of theirs. It had always been the three of them. Now there were all these other people. Lina and Donnie stood on the edge of a group around a small trellis, without their mother or Julie, as a short rabbi read the marriage service and their brother promised his life to Susan. Beyond them, the orchards buzzed, settling into evening. They both had the feeling they had already had and that they would again only a few more times in their lives: an emptiness that arrived shoulder to shoulder with the certainty of grave importance.

  * * *

  —

  Lina understood that later it would matter that Walter had married Susan, the way it mattered that her mother had been committed to a hospital and that she had gone to college. But right now, there was nothing or, rather, a field that appeared almost still with thousands of minute movements. For these minutes, she ceased to be herself and blurred into the larger landscape. From this rare point of view, it hardly mattered that their mother wasn’t here. She was still as much a part of this momentous change.

  Julie, too, Donnie seemed to remind her, with a hand on her shoulder.

  What had it taken for Julie to brave the escalator up to Better Dresses at the May Company and ask Sue to help her shop? She would have splurged this time, on a dress, maybe with a cover-up. And now she was babysitting their mother in the parlor of 301. But, Lina reminded herself, she would never really know. Julie may have been happier, the two of them alone, missing the party. Her mother, not Julie, was the one who’d loved to dance.

  * * *