The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [72]
Her eyes lifted to mine. She said, “I expect to be.” I stopped walking and looked at her, then started again. She looked away and shrugged. “The flu always hits me like a ton of bricks.”
“I didn’t have it too badly. Maybe this one is worse for children than adults.”
“But you never really get sick. I always think there’s a kind of purity about you. Untouched. You remind me of some kind of flower.”
“A flower?”
“I don’t mean that you aren’t masculine. You know that. I don’t know.” She looked out the window, speculating. “You know when you lean down and look right into a tulip? You know the way the petals look thick with color, but thin with light, permanent and delicate at the same time?”
“I suppose.”
“That makes me think of you. Always has.”
“Do you think of me?”
She looked back at me. She smiled slightly and said, “I have been lately, for some reason.”
“Dana—”
“I better go and release them from bondage, or they’ll be furious for the rest of the night.” And then the whirlwind swept us up again.
However the flu took Leah, with nausea she couldn’t puke out or give voice to, with aches and pains, with lethargy, it took her for three days, and I walked her for most of those three days. At first I was tired and bored: she was heavy, and the urge to put her off was more pressing than hunger, more like a raging thirst. I would panic at the thought of the hours, even the minutes, before me, of walking and carrying until my whole left side, the side she leaned upon, was numb, and my legs were leaden. After a while, though, say late Sunday night, it was as if Leah and our joining had sunk more deeply into me, so that I only did it, didn’t think about it, didn’t rebel against it. They say that this happens with the KGB, too.
Dana had gone to bed, leaving one lamp in the living room dimly lit. I remember looking at my watch, at the way the time looked there, eleven fifteen, and the previous four weeks of nights, myself lying awake in fear or hope or whirring thought, suddenly seemed like a deck of shuffling cards to me, and yet each moment had been a lengthy agony. That was why the face of my watch was so familiar to me—I had looked at it repeatedly in disbelief at the tormented slowness of time. Then I remember looking down at Leah, whose face, as familiar as the face of my watch, glowed with fever and sleep. Her mouth was partly open and she breathed at me. I felt the tiny rush of it on my lips, where the nerves cluster, on my cheeks, like the first breeze after you have shaved your beard, even on my forehead. There was a fragrance to it, too, sour and pungent, the odor of sick child, but so familiar, so entwined with the lasting pleasure of holding the child’s flesh to your own, that I drank it in. I lifted her higher and kissed her hot cheek, hot silk against the searching ganglia. I shifted her over to the right and she settled in. It seemed to me that I had never loved anything—object, or feeling, or person—the way I loved her right now. Love is in the body as well as the mind, a rush of blood to the surface, maybe, an infinitesimal yearning stretch of the nerve endings. I looked at her without seeing her, blinded by the loveliness of her nose, the grace of her forehead, the curl of her upper lip and the roundness of the lower. I will never see her, hard as I try to look past love. My eyes will always cast a light over her, and I will always think that this love, mine for her, is a dear thing. But it is as common as sand, as common as flesh.
After all, it was harder to cherish hers for me. Hard to appreciate the way she climbed the stairs looking for me, held my leg when I was trying to walk across the kitchen, yearned for my presence in the middle of the night, hard even to appreciate her glances into my face, her man-pleasing chatter, the stroke of her baby fingers on my forehead. And these hours of walking were unbearable, although I was bearing them. I stopped and looked down at her, thinking, Open your eyes. After a long while, she opened her eyes with a sigh, and I said, “Leah, it’s time for bed.