Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [101]
He slept, and she woke him three times—once for water, once for the sound of his voice, once for a bedpan. For the bedpan she insisted that he call one of the girls. He climbed the stairs in the dark, hesitated at Mary’s door, and then woke Margaret. While she helped her mother he stayed in the living room and kept himself awake by watching a pattern of leaves moving over the Persian rug. Then Margaret came back out and tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you want me to take over?” she asked. “You look dead on your feet.”
“No, I’m all right.”
“I called Emmeline. She won’t come,” Margaret said.
“We’ll find someone.”
“Matthew, you know that I could change Elizabeth’s mind. Mary didn’t put it to her right.”
“No,” Matthew said.
“I could have her here in an hour, if she took a plane.”
“There are agencies all over Baltimore that can help us out with Mother,” Matthew said.
He went back to the easy chair. Its rough fabric had started prickling through his pajamas, and he kept shifting and turning and rearranging the afghan while his mother lay tense and wakeful at the other end of the room. “I want—” she said. But in her pause, while he was waiting for her to finish, Matthew fell asleep.
He awoke at dawn. Every muscle in his body ached. “Oh, Matthew,” someone said, and for a moment he thought it was his mother, finally getting around to saying his name; but it was Margaret. She stood over him, fully dressed, holding Susan. Susan wore a romper suit and straddled her mother’s hip with small round legs still curved like parentheses. She looked down at him solemnly. “Hi there,” he told her. “Matthew, you look terrible,” Margaret said.
“I’m okay.”
He looked over at his mother. She was watching them out of eyes the same as Susan’s—round and pale blue and worried. “How you doing?” Matthew asked her.
“I fool—”
“You feel?”
“I fool I’m—”
She flattened the back of her hand across her mouth. Tears rolled down her stony face, while she stared straight ahead of her. “Mother?” Matthew said. He struggled up out of his chair, but then there was nowhere to go, nothing to say. He and Margaret stood there in silence, already defeated by the day that lay ahead of them.
Everyone agreed that Matthew should go to bed now—even Matthew himself. But first Mary brought him a breakfast tray in the sunporch, and while he was buttering a roll his head grew so heavy that he laid his knife down and leaned back and closed his eyes. He felt the tray being lifted from his knees—a falling sensation, that made him jerk and clutch at air. “You should go upstairs, Matthew,” Mary said. But he only slid lower in his seat and lost track of her voice.
He dreamed that he was in a forest which was very hot and smelled of pine sap. He was walking soundlessly on a floor of brown needles. He came upon someone chopping wood, and he stood watching the arc of the axe and the flying white chips, but he didn’t say anything. Then he felt himself rising out of sleep. He knew where he was: on his mother’s sunporch, swimming in the bright, dusty heat of mid-afternoon. But he still smelled the pine forest. And when he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Elizabeth in a straight-backed chair beside his mother’s bed, whittling on a block of wood and scattering chips like fragments of sunlight across her jeans and onto the floor.
12
The first thing Elizabeth did with Mrs. Emerson was teach her how to play chess. It wasn’t Mrs. Emerson’s game at all—too slow, too inward-turned—but it would give her an excuse to sit silent for long periods of time without feeling self-conscious about it. “This is the knight, he moves in an L-shape,” Elizabeth said, and she flicked the knight into all possible squares although she knew that Mrs. Emerson watched in a trance, her mind on something else, the kind of woman who would forever call a knight a horse and try to move