After decades of being married to him, she had apparently forgotten his name.
Brettigan grasped her hand and lowered his right arm to her waist, feeling her weight falling against him, as if she could no longer support herself. At first she seemed capable of walking, but as he retraced their steps up alongside the creek bank, he noticed that her steps had grown more uncertain, more like the steps of a toddler, less balanced. After a minute, her feet were stumbling in the sand, leaving the trace of dragged lines. Where were the other visitors to the park? The people who might help? They were gone, all of them. They always disappeared when you needed them. Alma’s weight fell against him. She muttered unintelligible words.
“Help!” he cried. Then louder, “Someone please help!”
He reached into his pocket for his cell phone, but as he touched a collection of furry, linty coins, he remembered that he’d left it behind at home on the dresser: in his mind’s eye he saw it residing there, charging up, useless. With each passing moment, Alma’s deadweight was growing deader. Brettigan cried out for help again, and this time the two young people he’d seen earlier blowing and popping soap bubbles appeared from behind a tree almost as if they’d been hiding there, but, no: behind the tree was an open field where they’d been congregating.
“Here,” the young man said. He drew Alma’s right arm around his neck, and together he and Brettigan brought her up the stairs, back to the picnic tables where they had been before. The young woman had taken out her cell and was now talking to the 911 operator, describing Alma’s symptoms.
When they reached the shady spot where they’d been before, Brettigan and the young man lowered Alma to a sitting position. All at once she opened her eyes and said, “What just happened?”
“You fainted,” Brettigan said to her, sitting beside her, holding her hand. “I thought you’d had a stroke.” He noticed absently his wife’s hand, to which, in all his confusion and panic, he had held firm.
“Well, maybe I did.” Turning toward her husband, she asked, “Who are you?” When he gave her a stricken expression, she said, “Kidding!” Pivoting in the direction of the young man, she said, “And you? Who are you?”
“Ludlow,” he told her. The boy’s face had a triumphant, transparent absence of guile: from his straw-blond hair, to the blue eyes, and the vague affability visible in his open, brilliantly white smile—he looked like an actor in a toothpaste commercial—and the tattoo on his left arm that said, YOU’RE WELCOME! he appeared to have no agendas, hidden or otherwise, except to enjoy himself in the company of people who were as guileless as he himself was. He gave off an aura of sloppy and slightly unintelligent benevolence: an adult child, a plaything, someone’s toy. “My name’s Ludlow.”
“Unusual name,” Alma said, patting away the dampness from her forehead with a hankie she had produced from somewhere. “And you?” she asked the young woman. “Who might you be?”
“He’s Ludlow because he’s a Luddite,” the young woman said, rather sharply. Brettigan quickly examined her. She, too, had blondish hair—Minnesota had a contagion of these stubborn blondes; they were everywhere—and she carried herself with an upright, regal bearing, the perfect posture of a ballet dancer, but her eyes had none of Ludlow’s guilelessness. Instead, she projected a quiet, commanding authority on the cool side of the spectrum, as if she were accustomed to giving orders and having them followed and in addition always kept a trove of carefully considered punishments ready to be deployed whenever correction might be necessary.
“Didn’t I see you last week?” Brettigan asked her, as the EMS siren became audible from the distance, drawing up in the nearest possible spot, the siren’s wail abruptly silenced as the medics hopped out and ran in the direction that a third man, who was formally dressed, had indicated. “I saw you at the mall. I read your pamphlet. You’re the Sun Collective. You want to befriend the poor.”
“No,” she said, “that wasn’t us. That was somebody else. But, yeah, we’re part of that, too. Everybody is a child of the sun. Including you. Both of you.”
* * *
—
And then everyone was talking at once: the EMS technicians were speaking to Alma, holding three fingers in front of her and asking her to count them, taking her pulse and her blood pressure, inquiring if she felt light-headed and could stand up or would be more comfortable lying down, while Brettigan described his wife’s fainting fit and made an effort to explain why he hadn’t let her sit by the creek but had, instead, tried to make her walk back to the picnic area in the fireman’s carry he’d used; and the young woman, seemingly oblivious to the medical emergency taking place in front of her, said to Ludlow, “What now?” while he doggedly grinned at her as if he didn’t understand English; and meanwhile a small crowd had gathered and then dispersed.
After a few minutes, the EMS guys asked Alma to stand, and she did. She announced that she felt fine. With a few blunt but polite phrases, she refused to be taken anywhere for further observation. She had had a little episode, she said, and she wished to be left alone now. “Thank you,” she said to the two EMS technicians, one of whom was speaking to someone else on a headset, “and now please go in peace.”
Go in peace? She must still be out of it. She never used such phrases.
But there still remained documents to sign. Both Brettigan and his wife had to apply their signatures to them, agreeing to this and that, and as they did so, the young woman glanced down to witness it. She interrupted what she was saying to Ludlow and turned to Brettigan.
“So it says here you’re Harold Brettigan,” she said, “and so you’re Alma, his wife,” locking eyes with the two of them, taking them in. Instead of saying, “Nice to meet you,” or some other clichéd civility, she lowered her head to study her fingernails. All she seemed to want were their names, stripped of pleasantries.
“And who might you be?”
“Christina,” the young woman said, after a hesitation. “Brettigan, Brettigan, hmm: Is your son the actor? I saw him once years ago, in Chicago.”
“Really? You did? Well, everyone has a name,” Alma remarked, “and that’s ours, and that’s his.”
“Okay, and thank you for your help,” Brettigan said. After having walked arm in arm with Alma back to their picnic table, he began now to gather up their picnic things: the slippery, sweating, chilled wine bottle, whose exterior moisture seemed excessive; the brown picnic hamper with its remnants of sandwiches; the uneaten peaches and cookies; the paper napkins folded into halves. As he put the odds and ends back into the basket, Brettigan glanced over at his wife, who was smiling in no particular direction: first at the trees, then at the sky, in a kind of outdoors charm offensive. But it was a smile without an audience. A mood had come over her, as if she were thinking of a topic that she would not broach just yet; nevertheless, she had the look of someone who is preparing an announcement of the greatest possible importance.