A History of the Present Illness (20 page)

He held the outfit against his body in front of the mirror. She'd always had a good eye for style.

He sat down on his bed to change. Midway through untying the laces of his sport shoes, he stopped and looked up. “I appreciate the help, I really do. And I'm very grateful. But it doesn't change anything.”

“I didn't imagine it would.”

He wished she'd turn on her television the way she usually did, blaring the absurd food shows one after the other as if to reprimand him for taking her away from her kitchen and her favorite restaurants. But she just sat in her wheelchair studying him.

He pulled on his trousers, careful not to wrinkle the linen, then buttoned the shirt and secured his belt and tie.

Ruth gave him the once-over. “Handsome,” she declared. “You'll stand out in the crowd as usual.”

He checked himself in the mirror, pleasantly surprised that she was right. If he hurried, he might still be in time to have his choice of seat and seatmates.

She kept her head down as Zeni rolled her to Jerusalem, not that anyone was likely to recognize her. At the synagogue,
they slipped in through a side door; it would be just like Harold to be watching the main entrance. Inside the temple, the fluorescent lights and heavy, stale air surprised her. At the New Israel, it seemed, worship took place in a room that looked and smelled like a high school gym.

She easily spotted Harold's blue shirt in front on the left. He was surrounded by women. She pointed to a spot in the same section, far enough back that Harold wouldn't see her and close enough that she'd be able to wheel herself to the front. Zeni parked her there and pretended to set the wheelchair brakes before touching her shoulder and walking away.

And then Ruth waited, watching as late arrivals crowded into the wide, windowless space and scanned the room for the best of the remaining tan folding seats. Her neighbors, with their round faces and heavy sweaters, appeared to be Russian. She nodded and smiled, and they did the same, so either they weren't Russian or Harold was wrong about San Francisco's most recent Jewish immigrants. But since no one said anything, not even hello, there was no way to know.

A walker squeaked as its owner hurried by. Every few seconds she touched the wig on her head, the huge glasses that actually did help her see, and the corners of her lipsticked lips, but everything had stayed in place.

The lights flashed off and back on. At the front of the room, a stylish Filipina lit the candles and the rabbi signaled to a young man who lifted the huge double-twist shofar to his lips and blew: a piercing, primitive blast that echoed through the room.

One of her neighbors reached up to adjust his hearing aid. Seconds after the sound ended, she continued to feel it in her chest. Maybe that was what life was like at the end: one long cry that wiped out everything else.

The next blasts were shorter, nine staccato sobs that sounded as if they came from deep inside a wounded animal. Harold was right that sometimes instruments were more eloquent than words. How often she had wished she could make such a sound herself.

As the shofar's last note faded, she reached for the cool metal on either side of her chair and pushed. The wheelchair rolled down the side aisle faster than she would have thought possible. They had always been different, she and Harold, and she hadn't put up with him for so long to end up like this.

The rabbi moved to the podium and adjusted the microphone.

As she reached the front of the room, one of the women beside Harold leaned over to whisper in his ear.

The rabbi cleared his throat.

“Wait,” she called. “Me first.”

Only then did she realize the fault in Zeni's plan. In her wheelchair and with everyone seated, only those close to Harold would see what happened next. That would ruin everything. But if she stood up . . .

Harold saw her then. His mouth opened.

The wig shifted on her head as she rose.

Harold jumped to his feet.

The plain gold band slid easily from her fourth left finger, and she held it out to him even as she felt her legs give way.

He stayed with Ruth all night at the hospital, as much to have time to sort out what had happened as to monitor her condition. Had she hoped the fall would kill her? Or had she gambled that it wouldn't? She would have known that he would never walk away if she were injured, and also that he'd blame himself for not understanding her as fully as she understood
him. With the entire community as witness, she had known that her downfall would become his as well.

It was lunchtime when he got back to the New Israel. He entered the Jaffa dining room with his back straight and his face closed like the heavy wooden doors of a boardroom. Crossing the short distance from the doorway to his table, he walked a gauntlet of whispers and stares. Even the Russians looked away when he glanced in their direction.

“Afternoon,” he said to Stanley and Gisela. He didn't say
good
.

“That it is,” Stanley replied, holding out a hand, though they didn't usually shake except at council meetings.

Gisela took a bite of her sandwich.

“Soup? Sandwich?” asked a server once he'd sat down.

He nodded, then looked over at their table's empty chair. “Late again?”

“Mary moved to table six,” Stanley said. “At breakfast this morning. She insisted.”

A second server put a bowl and plate before him. His favorites: tomato basil soup and grilled cheese on rye. He tried to feel pleased but failed.

“So,” Gisela said, “have they told you much?”

He poured himself some water. “She's got a broken hip, a broken arm, broken ribs, and a concussion. She's in intensive care.”

“Conscious?”

He shook his head. “Sedated.”

Stanley stroked his mustache, his index finger tracing from the center down one side, then the other. “It's always something in a marriage,” he said. “No way to be ready.” Stanley's wife, in her thirteenth year with Alzheimer's, had been moved to Masada 4 that summer.

He didn't tell his friends the worst of it, that the doctor had said the fractures wouldn't kill Ruth, only make her more fragile. That she'd need lots of help from him through the months, and possibly years, of her recovery.

In silence, they ate. He chewed and swallowed, tasting nothing, and then began again, moving his spoon from bowl to mouth and back, repeating the motions of eating as he would be repeating the motions of his life from here on out.

Wednesday, the day the boy fell, Perla Weldon walked her afternoon dogs out over the saddle of Bernal Hill. Because it was early December, after the first of the El Niño rains, the mud was orange brown, slippery in some places and as thick as peanut butter in others. It clung to her boots and splashed on her jeans as she threw sticks and rocks for her charges. Perla and her dogs covered most of the hill's twenty-four leash-free acres that day, from the Monterey pines in a lonely cluster on the highest peak to the grassy eastern slopes and short red rock bluffs to the west. She praised the dogs in her usual voice—which was childishly high—and reprimanded them in deep tones that required her to lower her chin to her chest. Heading back to the K9 Safari truck, they walked along the cliff path that would be closed off three hours later and planted with indigenous grasses the following week.

I watched as a group of neighborhood volunteers planted the grasses. Perla had told me her version of the story by then, and my wife had read the brief account in the
Chronicle
aloud
one breakfast as a warning to our boys, but I wanted to get a sense of the place for myself. Leaving work early, I drove to the gate at the top of Bernal Heights Boulevard and retraced Perla's route. I wondered how many afternoons she had passed the boy, walking home from school with his friends. The paper said the friends always walked together, Maya Cohen and Jessica Fernandez, both age ten, and Dylan Hunter, age eleven, who had been admitted to San Francisco General Hospital in critical condition. Perla had said she couldn't remember seeing them, but she didn't pay much attention to kids unless they were harassing her dogs. Children, she believed, were cute one minute, unspeakably cruel the next, the demands of their bodies and imaginations endless and unpredictable. She much preferred animals.

In the parking area, I imagined Perla's K9 Safari camper truck with its trademark paint job: frolicking canines and squat, flat-topped trees on a background that was savanna tan on the bottom and the brilliant blue of African skies on top. Then I pictured Perla coming down off the hill toward the truck. She glanced at her watch and, instead of opening the tailgate, whistled that unique series of notes all her dogs knew. Standing alone on that flat stretch of rocky rubble a week later, I could almost hear the sound—the pitch rising, then retreating, then rising some more, like a complicated question.

The dogs looked at Perla sideways, the whites of their eyes showing and their tails poised in midair, equally prepared to drop or wag, depending on her command. Having made good time that afternoon, she owed her pack and their owners another thirteen minutes, long enough for a jog down the pedestrian-only portion of the boulevard that runs through the park below the cliffs. Feigning indecision, she made the dogs wait an unnecessary second, their bodies tense and trembling.

Moments like that one, she had said while telling me the story, reminded her why she loved dogs, their complete engagement and unrestrained joy in the face of life's simple pleasures.

Perla pointed past the gate at the pavement curving north down the hill. The chocolate labs, Silo and Seamus, barked, and a black-and-white collie named Bailey turned circles. The others sprinted forward with raised tails and lowered shoulders, and Perla ran with them, enjoying the stretch of her legs and the catch of cold air in her chest. She ducked under the gate. Beside her, Taco's nails clicked on the blacktop. They passed the patch of giant cacti and the graffiti-tagged view bench that looked west toward Twin Peaks. At the curve, Perla heard her own panting, the swish and rustle of the wind in the eucalyptus, and just beyond the Esmeralda Street steps, an abrupt, high wail that stopped her mid-stride.

She registered only color and motion at first, something bright red tumbling past the yellow grass and orange rock. Then, twenty yards down the road, the figure rolled off the cliff, and a second after it landed, she heard the thud of skull on asphalt.

Some people would have run to the boy right then. They would have forgotten themselves and their usual responsibilities and just reacted. Perla noticed a plane buzzing overhead and the wind blowing strands of hair into her face. She said that even at a distance she could see that the body was small, with a red sweater and long blond hair.

The dogs stopped running when she did. Now they sensed Perla's tension and hovered close. She ran a hand along Taco's trembling back and let the beagle crawl into the space between her feet. Just then, several people—an older man, two women pushing strollers, a teenager—hurried by, headed toward the body.

Rasta stiffened.

“No!” Perla snapped. “Come.” She tapped her left thigh twice with her hand. In slow motion, ears low and flat, the shepherd slouched forward and sat on her left side. She gave him a hunk of the cheese she kept in her zipped upper coat pocket for emergencies. The other dogs stared at her without blinking, licking their lips. She led them into the small clearing off the road beside the steps, made them sit, and gave each of them one of the small training treats from her lower pocket. A trickle of sweat rolled down her neck and into her shirt. Unless the kid needed CPR, she reasoned, little could be done until rescue arrived.

Though she didn't say so, it seems entirely plausible that Perla hoped an observer—and surely some of the people going by recognized her bush jacket with its dog-and-baobab-tree logo—might believe she was doing her part by keeping her pack out of the way. But then she came to her senses. She checked her watch; the human brain can survive only six minutes without oxygen.

Perla told the dogs to stay and moved, faster than walking but slower than a jog, toward the crowd. People stood in two clusters, one around the boy, another a little farther away. She pushed through them without looking up. A heaviness slid into her shoulders and neck.

The boy lay completely still but for the rise and fall of his chest. When she saw that he was breathing, she realized she was not and took a big gulp of air. Blood, already clotting, pooled around his left ear. A man Perla recognized knelt at the boy's side, his eyes wide and mouth slightly open. She knew his yellow Happy Tails truck, that he walked large and small dogs separately, drank too much coffee, and didn't do
weekends, but she'd never bothered to learn his name. As she dropped to a crouch opposite him, he leaned forward toward the boy's small ear.

“It's okay,” he said. “You're okay. We're getting help.”

Perla reached for the child's wrist. He'd landed perpendicular to the road, with one leg caught beneath him and his arms flung to the sides. At his feet, a woman wearing a tapered navy skirt suit and bright purple five-toed running shoes pointed at the silver earpiece and microphone that curved over her cheek in front of her mouth. “Nine one one,” she said. Then she cocked her chin at the child. “How old do you think she is?”

“He,” said a man carrying infant twins, one on his chest, one on his back.

The boy's pulse fluttered under Perla's fingertips, rapid but regular. A tiny tuft of saliva hung from the corner of his mouth. She stared at the pretty face and delicate hands, at the low-riding jeans, red V-neck sweater, and unlaced high-tops.

Sirens sounded from somewhere down the hill in the Mission. People exchanged quick, relieved smiles.

The Happy Tails man said, “She's a girl, definitely.”

Perla moistened her lips with her tongue. “A boy,” she said. “A ten- or eleven-year-old boy.” His chest rose and fell. His heart raced. The scalp wound had slowed to an ooze, and there was no other visible bleeding.