7. Marisol at Thirty-Two

The flight from Denver got into El Paso at 11:40 on a Wednesday in October, and Marisol picked up the rental — a white Corolla that smelled of the previous person’s cologne — and drove north on I-25 with the windows cracked. The Organ Mountains came up outside Las Cruces and she did not, this time, pull off at the overlook. She had stopped in 2016, the year Pop stopped recognizing her at the door and started recognizing her about ten minutes in, which was its own kind of arithmetic she did not want to do in a parking lot with a view.

She had told Andrea, on the phone the night before, that she would call when she got to the hotel. Andrea had said take your time, take all of it, don’t pre-budget your feelings, in the voice Andrea used when she had spent the day with ninth-graders and had a little of the teacher left over. Andrea taught English at a public high school in Lakewood. They had been together five years; they lived in a house in Wheat Ridge with a fenced yard, a redbud, and a mortgage that was, week by week, getting less abstract.

The facility was called Mesilla Vista, which it did not have a view of, and it sat on a flat parcel north of the city with a circle drive and a low stucco wing and a single cottonwood in the courtyard that someone had clearly fought the architects to keep. The director was a woman named Pilar who had been there longer than Pop had, and who hugged Marisol in the lobby with the brisk efficiency of a person who hugged a lot of people for a living and meant every one of them.

“He’s having a soft day,” Pilar said, walking her down the hall. “Not bad. Soft. He ate his breakfast. He asked about the dog twice.”

“Lucha’s been dead nine years,” Marisol said.

“I know, mija.” Pilar squeezed her elbow without slowing down. “We just say she’s outside.“

Pop was in the day room in a chair by the window, in a denim shirt that someone — not him — had buttoned wrong, and a pair of khakis that were not his khakis, and a pair of slippers that were. He was looking at the cottonwood. His hair had gone all the way white in the last year, and the back of his neck was thinner than she remembered, the tendons doing more of the work. She stood for a second in the doorway and let herself look at him before he knew she was there, a small private greedy thing, the way you might look at a photograph before you were going to have to put it back.

She came around into his sightline. His face did the thing it had been doing for two years now — a slow opening, a small frown of effort, and then a giving-way, recognition arriving from somewhere down a hallway inside him. He said, “Mija.”

“Hi, Pop.”

He held out his hand. It was cool and dry and the knuckles were larger than they used to be. She put both of hers around it. He said, “You came.”

“I came.”

“That’s right,” he said, looking back at the cottonwood. “That’s how this works.”

She sat down. Pilar, in the doorway, made the small flat gesture with her palm down that meant I’ll leave you, and was gone. The day room had a television on low at the far end with a Spanish-language morning show, and a man in the corner was building a tower of dominoes with great concentration and knocking it down and starting again. On the shelf above the activities cart there was a glass-art owl about the size of a grapefruit, the cheap kind sold at souvenir stands, a tan body with green inset eyes and one wing chipped at the tip. Marisol noticed it the way she noticed clocks in rooms, briefly and without comment, and looked back at her grandfather.

They sat. After a while Pop said, “Your mother.”

“She’s good, Pop. She sends her love. She’ll come at Christmas.”

“That’s right,” Pop said. “Christmas.” He nodded as if a question had been answered and went back to the cottonwood. The leaves had not turned yet; they were still the dusty green of a New Mexico October, and they made the small dry rattle they had always made. Marisol thought briefly of the cottonwood at the house, cut down by the new owners in 2014, and did not say anything about it; Pop had been told about the cottonwood three times and had grieved it three times and the fourth was not hers to spend.

She stayed two hours that first afternoon. She held his hand and told him about Andrea, even though he had stopped, somewhere around 2017, being able to hold Andrea as a piece of information; she told him anyway, because she had decided a long time ago that the telling was for her and not for him. She told him about the redbud. She told him about a patient she had scanned the week before, an old rancher from near Steamboat who had reminded her of him in the cap — a Lotaburger cap, which Pop, sitting in his chair in October 2019, did not respond to at all when she said the word, and Marisol filed that away too, the small daily inventory of what had gone.

At four-thirty she kissed the top of his head, which had gone almost weightless under her lips, and told him she would be back in the morning. He said, “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Don’t drive in the dark, mija.”

“I won’t, Pop.”

She drove to the hotel in Las Cruces, a Hampton Inn off the interstate, and called Andrea from the parking lot before she went in, because she wanted to do it in the car where she could cry if she needed to without anyone needing her not to. She did not cry. She told Andrea about the buttoned shirt and the slippers and the dominoes and the cottonwood. Andrea listened the way she listened, without interrupting and without performing the listening, and when Marisol was done she said, “Eat something with vegetables in it tonight. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

She did not. She ate a turkey sandwich from the gas station next to the hotel and fell asleep at nine-thirty with the lights on.

—

Thursday was the day she walked the property.

The grounds at Mesilla Vista were not extensive — a courtyard, a back lawn ringed by a low adobe wall, a gravel path that went out through an open gate into the desert behind the facility for a quarter mile or so before it stopped at a sign that said RETURN TO BUILDING. Pop, that day, could not walk; he was in the chair, foggier than the day before, and after an hour of sitting with him while he watched the cottonwood and said her name twice and her mother’s name once, Pilar caught Marisol’s eye from the doorway and tipped her head toward the back doors in a way that meant go, get some air, he’ll be here.

She went out and across the lawn and through the gate in the adobe wall and onto the gravel path. The desert past the wall looked, to a person who had grown up in Phoenix and then lived ten years in Colorado, like a held breath: low creosote, a few yucca, the long pale alluvial reach back toward the foothills, and overhead a sky so uncomplicatedly blue it seemed almost like a decision someone had made.

She walked. Her boots made the small crunch boots made in gravel. She thought, in the loose roving way she thought when she walked alone, about whether the bathroom remodel was going to come in under budget (it was not), about whether to call her mother that night or wait until Friday, about a coworker at the hospital who had given her two weeks’ notice. The thoughts moved at the pace of the gravel.

Around the place where the path bent slightly south to avoid a clump of mesquite — about three hundred yards from the wall — she stopped walking.

She stopped because she had felt something. She did not have a word for what she had felt. Her first thought was that her blood sugar had dropped, but she had eaten the hotel waffle and a banana and she knew the feeling of low blood sugar and this was not that. Her second thought was that she was about to faint, but she was not about to faint; her vision was clear and her pulse was steady. She stood in the gravel and turned her head slowly and tried to put the feeling next to a name.

The light was wrong.

That was the closest she could get. The sun was where the sun should be, and the shadows were where the shadows should be, but the light itself, the way it was settling on the creosote and on the pale soil and on the back of her own hand when she lifted it to look at it, was the light of a slightly different afternoon than the one she was in. As if the room she was standing in were the wrong shape by a quarter inch. As if the air had been swapped, while she was walking, for air of the same temperature and pressure that was nevertheless not the air she had been breathing thirty seconds before.

She stood there for perhaps a full minute. She made herself breathe slowly, because she had been trained to make herself breathe slowly. She looked at her hand. The hand was her hand. She looked at the mesquite. The mesquite was a mesquite. A flock of small birds went up out of a yucca to her left and landed in another yucca twenty feet on, and the going-up and the landing were correct, every detail of them was correct, and the wrongness was not in any one detail.

Then it was gone.

The light was the light. The air was the air. She was a thirty-two-year-old MRI tech standing on a gravel path behind a memory-care facility north of Las Cruces in October of 2019, and her boots were full of small stones, and she had been holding her left hand in front of her face for no reason she could explain, and she put it down.

She walked the rest of the path to the RETURN TO BUILDING sign and then turned around and walked back. By the time she was at the gate she had filed it, the way she filed things — not under anything she could name, but in a drawer she kept for the small unaccountables, of which over the course of her life there had been perhaps fifteen or twenty, none of them connected to each other in any way she had ever bothered to look for. It was just a thing that had happened. It went in the drawer.

She did not tell Andrea about it on the phone that night. She told Andrea instead about the dominoes man, who had built a tower seventeen high, which Marisol had counted while pretending to read a magazine.

—

The clear hour was Friday.

It was late afternoon, around four. She had been there since one. Pop had been somewhere underwater all day — not unhappy, just deep, his hand cool in hers, his attention occasionally surfacing for a few seconds and going under again — and she had stopped trying to bring him up, because she had learned that the trying was hers and not his. So she had just sat, and read to him from a National Geographic about a kind of bee in Patagonia, and she did not know if he was listening, and that was all right.

Around four she felt his hand change in hers. It got, a little, warmer. He turned his head and looked at her, and the look was a look she had not received in two years. It was the look from the hallway in 1998. It was Pop, fully, in his face, like a tide coming back in.

He said, “Mija.”

She said, “Hi, Pop.” Her voice did the thing voices did. She held very still, because she had been told by Pilar and by every nurse at every facility that you did not chase these, you let them sit on your hand like a bird.

He said, “How long have I been here?”

“At Mesilla Vista, Pop?”

“Yes.”

“Four years next month.”

He took that in. He looked at the cottonwood. He said, “That’s a lot of cottonwood.”

She laughed. It came out a little wet. He smiled, the one-sided slow smile he had always had, and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

He said, “Your grandmother.”

“I know, Pop.”

“She was wearing the red skirt. I told you. At the dance. In Las Cruces.”

“You told me.”

“You remember?”

“I remember.”

“Good.” He nodded. He looked at her again, the full look, and he said, “Andrea.”

She had not expected the name. She had said it to him so many times over so many years that she had stopped expecting it to land, and here in this hour it had landed, and she could not have said how. She said, “Yes, Pop. Andrea.”

“She is good to you.”

“She is so good to me.”

“Good,” he said again. “Good, mija.”

They sat. The cottonwood did the small dry rattle. The man with the dominoes had been moved, that day, to a different chair, and was building a new tower out of plastic cups. The aide at the television had turned it off. The light in the day room was the regular light.

Pop said, after a while, in a voice she could only describe later as careful, as if he were lifting something out of a box without looking at it, “There’s a man.”

She said, “What man, Pop?”

“There was a man. I used to — ” He paused. His mouth worked. He found the word. “I used to work for him. Not for him. With him. Around him. You understand.”

She did not. She said, “Yes, Pop.”

“I think he’s having his time now.”

She said, “His time.”

“His own time. The time where it comes back.” Pop looked at her, and his eyes were entirely Pop’s eyes, and entirely present, and entirely sad. “The work I did. The people I called. There was a man who did more of it than I did. I think he is having his time, this week, this month, somewhere. I have been thinking about him.” He paused. He looked at the cottonwood. He said, “You don’t know him.”

“No, Pop.”

“Good. That is good.” He squeezed her hand. “I just wanted to say it to somebody.”

She said, “It’s all right.”

He said, “I know it is.”

He held her hand for another little while. He told her, in his clear voice, that the food was acceptable, that Pilar was a good woman whose mother had been a teacher, that the cottonwood was a relative of the cottonwood at the house. He told her she looked like her grandmother around the eyes, which he had told her every visit since she was nine, and which she had decided long ago to keep believing whether or not it was true. He told her to tell Andrea to come down at Christmas if she could, and that he would try to remember who Andrea was. He said try without any self-pity, the way a man says he will try to remember to pick something up at the store.

Then, the way a tide goes out, he went. His face softened. His eyes unhooked from hers. His hand cooled. He looked back at the cottonwood, and the cottonwood, evidently, was all he had now.

She sat with him another hour. She kissed the top of his head. She told the night nurse, on her way out, that he had had a good hour and that she was so grateful, and the night nurse, who was named Yolanda and who had hugged Marisol twice already that week, said, “We do get them, mija. They come.”

She drove back to the hotel. She sat in the parking lot. She wrote down what Pop had said, in the notes app on her phone, as close to the words as she could get, because she had a feeling — the kind of feeling she had had perhaps fifteen or twenty times in her life — that she would want to have the words later. She did not know later what. She wrote: There’s a man. I used to work with him. I think he’s having his time now. The work I did. The people I called. She read it back. She did not know what to do with it. She filed it in the drawer with the gravel-path afternoon and with the truck in the driveway at midnight in July of 1998, which she had not thought about in nine years and did not think about now either, exactly; she just put the new thing in the drawer with the other things, and shut the drawer, and called Andrea.

Andrea said, “How was he?”

Marisol said, “He had an hour. A whole hour. He said your name.”

Andrea was quiet for a second on the other end. “Oh, baby.”

“He was so much himself. I forgot how much him there was.”

“There’s still a lot of him,” Andrea said. “He just keeps it somewhere harder to get to.”

—

Saturday was the last day. Pop was foggy again, foggier than Wednesday, as if the clear hour cost him something he then had to repay. She did not mind. She had what she had come for.

She sat with him through the morning. She brushed his hair, which was a thing she had started doing the previous year. She read him the back of the National Geographic, which was about a kind of frog. At noon she helped him eat a cup of chicken and rice and a small dish of lime Jell-O, and when he was done he looked at her with the soft far look and said, “Mija,” and she said, “I’m here, Pop,” and he said, “Good,” and went away again.

At two she had to leave for the airport. She knelt in front of his chair the way she had knelt as an eleven-year-old in front of a dog under a cottonwood — she did not, at the time, make the connection, but the body remembered the shape — and she held both his hands and said, “I’ll come back, Pop. In the spring.”

He looked at her. He said, “You promise.”

She said, “I promise.”

He said, “Good girl.”

She kissed the top of his head, which was the part of him she had been kissing for thirty-two years and which she would kiss for not quite three more, and she got up and went out into the hallway and down to the lobby, and Pilar walked her to the car and hugged her again and told her to drive safe.

In the rental, she drove south on I-25 with the Organ Mountains on her left and she did not pull off. The sun was high. The light was the light. She kept the radio off because she wanted to hear the engine and her own breathing, and at some point near Anthony she said out loud, to the inside of the car, “Okay, Pop,” the thing she said to him out loud when she could not say it to him in person, and she said it the way you say amen at the end of something you have not, exactly, prayed.

She returned the car. She flew home. Andrea picked her up at the curb in the Subaru with the dog in the back and a coffee in the cupholder for her, and she got in and put her hand on Andrea’s thigh and did not say anything for the first three miles, and Andrea did not ask her to.

In the drawer in Marisol’s mind, with all the other things, the new things sat. They did not connect, because she had not yet learned how to look at them, and she would not, for a long time, learn. She drove home through the early dark with the woman she loved, and she thought about her grandfather, and she thought about nothing in particular, and somewhere very far west of her, in a hotel room she could not have named, a man she had never met was writing down what he could remember, which was, that week, almost all of it.