story

by Amy L. Cornell

Ouroboros

He built a ramp. That’s the first thing Don did after Matty had her stroke and he knew she wouldn’t leave the wheelchair. He built the ramp himself because he needed to find absolution. Matty had fallen and hit her head and lay for who knows how long—maybe hours—while he taught high school biology a few blocks away. That day he had been absorbed in a lab on cellular biology, the one where his students got to examine strands of their own hair and fingernail clippings. Every year he knew this lesson would catch their attention, even his own attention, in these waning years of his career, so he used the opportunity to drive home messages about human cells and the miracle of life, right down to the very hair on their heads. But while he taught and examined life, his wife lay unconscious on the cold tile of the shower. He understood on every sensible level that he was not to blame, but he felt the need to atone for something.

The ramp he had built wound around their house from the driveway in back to the front by the hydrangeas and up onto their wide porch. He painted the ramp white to match the house and the gate, and he installed nonslip stickers and a handrail with the hope that she would eventually stand and walk.

Now Don’s sing-song voice exposed his nervousness as he pulled up to their house for their first test of the new ramp, built just this spring when he came home from visiting Matty at the hospital. “We’re home sweetheart, let’s give this a try.” He parked the van and they both sat for a minute and stared at their beloved beach shack, as they jokingly called it.

Their house had started as small—a two-room house on a nondescript plot, rotted floors and salt-scrubbed siding, within spitting distance of the ocean, but they had lived in it and built onto it as the seasons and their finances allowed. Their once-shack was now a home out of a design magazine with the wide white porch and the hardwood floors and the expanded main room that had grown around them. Don had added windows on all sides, so they could see the beach and their garden and the ocean from all angles. If you stretched the right way, you could see the tiny South Dunes fishing pier and marina that Don and his boys had fished from every chance they got when they were younger. Don had anticipated taking his grandkids there when they came for a week at spring break, but before the week had arrived, Matty’s stroke upended their plans. Suddenly, Don wasn’t sure how their place could continue to hold them in their declining years. This trip up the ramp would be the first test.

Don had built the ramp with all the wood he had purchased to build a treehouse for his grandkids. He had rearranged furniture in their house to accommodate a hospital bed and wheelchair. Now, instead of planning what to fix or add on to their beautiful home, he needed to figure out how he was going to care for Matty every day. This was not his area of expertise at all. Their older son, Blake, had already suggested they sell the house, but Don wouldn’t consider the idea. Their hand-crafted coastal paradise could not belong to anyone else. They lived here; they’d die here. Besides, they had a pact with their neighbors and best friends, Marge and Henry Ryerson, to never sell so that they might all grow old together as they watched the sun rise over the ocean every morning. Don paused a moment remembering Henry’s funeral and wondered if that nullified their friendly agreement. He hoped not.

He placed a hand gently on Matty’s leg to tell her to relax while he ran around to unfold her wheelchair. The physical therapist had suggested they wait a few months before ordering a motorized chair. “Maybe,” the therapist said, “she might not need it in a few months, or maybe you’ll move and need something else.”

Don lifted Matty out of the car. She hadn’t said a word all the way home. Her speech had been affected by the stroke, but the speech therapist thought she would regain her voice, her words, before too long. Don knew Matty recognized him and their kids. She could express happiness, and she laughed. At her last session she squeaked out his name and then the word “home.”

“Okay, sweetheart, let’s figure this thing out,” Don said as he gazed up the ramp, which seemed to glide off into the ocean. Her body had always been thin, and lowering her into the chair he felt she might actually break in two. She sighed a bit as he dropped her body into the seat. He imagined she was glad to be home.

He pushed her chair into a headwind coming over the ocean and even though the ramp had the smallest incline imaginable, he struggled to push the chair. Matty leaned forward into the wind and he thought of her smiling at the feel of the breeze on her face as she always did.

“You okay there?” he said into her ear, expecting something in response but having to make sense of what her thin breath might be telling him instead.

Normally they would enter the house from the back near the kitchen, but he hadn’t been able to figure out how to build a ramp there, and then it became too complicated to navigate the little steps and crooked floorboards due to years of adding on and remodeling. The chair would never fit into the house through the back door, and it wouldn’t fit into the kitchen from the front of the house. Don had decided it didn’t matter because he doubted that she’d be cooking or baking much while she used the chair.

As he pushed her toward the porch, he spied two rat snakes entwined rolling in a swirl over and over again, like the stripes of a barber pole. He normally would stop and watch. Show someone. Make a lesson out of mating snakes. Observe their spots. Maybe with this camera always in his pocket he should take a picture of this odd sight, or better yet a video. Snake porn. But today with the heat and the heft of the chair, the sight of those snakes living life gave him a weird kind of nausea. He couldn’t wait to pass them. He resisted the urge to run over them with the chair. Instead, he nudged them with his foot until they dropped off the ramp. Coitus interruptus he thought, and he paused to take out his handkerchief and wipe the sheen of sweat from his forehead.

“Almost there,” he said to Matty. He picked up a stray piece of paper off the front doormat and paused to look behind them at the ocean. She’d been away for two months now, and he hoped she’d be happy to be back. He had insisted she return home even though Blake had presented them with a brochure for an assisted living facility in the next town.

“With what you could make off selling the house and property you could easily afford to live in the nicest suite in the place and have a private nurse take care of Mom,” Blake had said. “Dunes Villas is brand new and has beach views. You won’t even feel like you’ve moved.”

Don wouldn’t look at the brochure. “It’s not our time,” he’d said to Blake. Don noticed that the brochure had ended up in Matty’s bag, and he tried not to be pissed off at his son.

Don looked at the white piece of paper from the doormat again. He clutched it tightly in his hand. He expected it might be a flyer for the season’s offerings at the Vanderbeek Theater. He vaguely recalled that the season was A Midsummer Night’s Dream (couldn’t have a summer theater program without Shakespeare), The Crucible, Grease, and some new experimental thing out of New York. The Vanderbeeks always brought in some absurdist play every summer. Something that never made any sense to his scientist mind. He glanced at the paper and was surprised to see a handwritten note. He looked again to see who wrote it. What was it?

Someone had written in their best penmanship what looked like a poem by a woman named Mary Oliver. “The Summer Day.” He felt the title of the poem in his sternum, right in the place he took his breath. Here he was on this fine day, about to wheel his beloved wife into their home where she would live so meagerly. He thought about the summer without his wife’s garden or her beachcombing for little treasures which she liked to line up playfully on all the windowsills of the house: bits of beach glass, a Barbie doll shoe, bottles with other languages etched on them, and odd shells. Perhaps she would still sit on the porch with her binoculars and watch the birds. But the summer day was about to change drastically for them. He took another minute to read the poem, pausing while he read the part about the grasshopper. Scratching his own jaw while he considered the intricacies of this beautiful bug chewing a blade of grass. He waved off the sudden reverie as he prepared to face whatever life he would now lead on the other side of the threshold. He took a deep breath and pushed her into the house and left the poem on the front door table with his car keys on top of it.

Today was an almost perfect summer day. The sky was a shade of sapphire blue, the breeze not too strong but enough to cool them. The ever-present gulls circled overhead. He moved Matty forward into the living room, which was clean and smelled like Lysol. He had hired Summer Jones, Wanda’s daughter, a senior from his cell biology class to dust and vacuum everything. He glanced appreciatively at the knick-knacks and photographs around the space that his family had accumulated over a lifetime. The relief of a clean house washed over him.

He let the screen door bang behind him and watched Matty take in the large, windowed area where they could see the world, where they planned their gardens all winter and watched the tides roll in and out. He loved this place, the heartbeat of their life at the beach. The last time she had been here, she had been doing the crossword, months ago, and had left it neatly folded on an armchair. The puzzle was still there waiting for her to finish it. He would never touch it.  

Matty tugged his sleeve. “What is it?” he leaned close. “Do you need to lie down? To pee?”

She’d had a catheter in for a long time, and even though the doctors said she had control of her bladder, he wasn’t so sure how he would get her to the toilet in time, let alone fit her in the small bathroom on the first floor. When he built the bathroom, he was proud of the extra convenience he had added into their home. No one downstairs would need to run upstairs—so easy—but now the tiny bathroom mocked him. He would need to assist her on the toilet, and the room barely fit one person.

Matty pointed at the bonus room, the sunny room off the side of the living room that he had added to keep all her houseplants. He had put her new hospital bed there since he wasn’t sure how he would get her upstairs to their bedroom. He knew she had missed her sunny plant room and would be happy to be in the light surrounded by her flowers and greenery. On second thought, he noted that it might be too light for her to get any decent sleep. He sighed and postponed the problem until tomorrow as he wheeled her into the plant room. She lay her hand on the bed indicating that she wanted to lie down.

“Do you want to use the toilet first?” he asked.

She shook her head no. He had never liked the term adult diaper, and he cringed thinking of once changing his son’s diaper. His soft bottom clean and pink sprinkled with powder and now he knew he would need to find a way to clean his wife’s behind and leave her with some kind of dignity. Was that even possible? Once her lover now her nurse. He closed his eyes for a moment.

He picked her up out of her chair. She wasn’t a heavy woman, but he did have to lower the hospital bed as far as he could and let gravity do most of the work of getting her into rest position. He took a beat or two to figure out how to do it without hurting her. As he lowered her, the elastic-waisted pants pulled down and exposed the thick folds of her paper diaper. He hated this for her. He felt his back stiffen a bit. Lifting her up and down was not sustainable. He might end up in bed himself. Once she was settled, he used the controls to raise her back up and then he put the handrail in place so she wouldn’t fall out.

Don heard their dog scratch at the kitchen door. He’d left it closed on purpose, so Daisy wouldn’t come out and knock something over or jump into Matty’s lap. The dog scratched and whined to get out and greet Matty, who didn’t seem to register the commotion.

“How does this feel? Are you comfortable?”

He pushed at the pillow behind her head as she nodded and closed her eyes. Don watched her fall asleep. He pulled the afghan from the sofa over her, and she began to breathe heavily. She was supposed to take some pills, but he wasn’t going to wake her for that.

He wandered back into the main room and stared out at their small piece of ocean. He grabbed his keys to head out the back door and move the van into the better parking spot when he saw that piece of paper with the poem.

He sat down in the chair by the door and picked up the paper and turned it over. Mary Oliver, he said to himself. He had never heard of her. Was she someone who lived here in their little beach town? Was it one of his former students? He vaguely remembered a Mary who liked insects from his AP class a few years back. Perhaps she wrote this? He stood and read the poem again and looked up to take in the panoramic view of the beach. The sounds of the surf picked up as the tide came in. His dog scratched at the kitchen door. His nearly paralyzed wife snored in the little alcove next to him. He felt the small, small weight of those two entwined snakes on his foot as he kicked them off the ramp. The thousand questions about how he would get Matty in and out of bed and on and off the toilet and give her meds and feed her raced through his mind. How would he do that every single day? And who wrote him this poem? Who left it here? Why? Was it a message for him? A welcome home for his wife? He rose and opened the door to let Daisy into the living room. She bounded out of the kitchen and put a paw on Don’s knee as he absently scratched her head. Daisy, their black and white border collie, more at home on the beach herding crabs than at the farm with the cows where they first adopted her.

The paper with the poem became thin in his sweaty hand. Perhaps Blake left the poem to inspire him to sell their house? No, Blake was not a poet.

He gazed at Matty and watched her chest move up and down. Her hands perfectly folded at her stomach. Her slender fingers, which were forever digging in the dirt without gloves, now held only a slim loose wedding band. The hardness of her bones, the very sensibility of who she was to him rested in those hands. At that moment he longed not for her or her food or her treasures or her bright summer azaleas but only the familiar way she clasped his hands when she asked him for something or promised him something or laughed. Was that lost to him too? The poem slipped to the ground. Who were they? He didn’t know anymore. He stood perfectly still as all these questions and noises and the million lives he’d led in this place swarmed around him. This question fed him somehow: What would he do with his one wild and precious life? The possibilities seemed endless.

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Amy L. Cornell lives in Bloomington, Indiana. She is the chair of the board of Women Writing for a Change-Bloomington—a non-profit arts organization dedicated to helping people transform their lives through the practices of writing and community. She loves her cats, family game night, and rye toast. "Ouroboros" is part of a story cycle that features characters who are transformed when they find poems left mysteriously on their porches.