Periscope

Anne Elliott

Her children were clipped to the mirror above her head. The mirror was tilted, to let in the rest of the ticking room, but Caroline Mack did not look up into the glass much. The view in the glass was narrow and backwards, a small wedge of the crowded isolation ward: the clock on the opposite wall with its steady, thin second hand stepping the wrong way; the small, sweating heads of patients in the next row, patients she did not know. Sparse groups of parents and visitors passed through her scope on their way to the exit, leaving their progeny behind. Her tired eyes kept returning to the still pictures around the mirror frame. The pictures gave her more than the room.  

A silver print of Junie—who could bear to look at Junie?—serious little face, white cotton bathing costume, perched on the edge of the dog-shaped rock, readying to jump. Caroline looked at the rock. The rock was dirty. She stared at the dirt. She felt a deep affection for the dirt, how it used to blacken the soles of her feet. If she shut her eyes, the contour of the rock stayed burned in, like sunburn, sore and beautiful at the edges. Blackened soles, yes, and the running leap from the nose of the rock, into the cool hug of Lake Barrow, and her legs pushing against water, bringing her lungs back up to the light, to gulp the hot summer air.

A summer at the lake; a summer without war. Independence Day, and everyone swam, and everyone knew better.

Clipped next to Junie was a crayon portrait, by Carl, of the dogs. Caroline missed those webbed Labrador feet clapping the floorboards, and their tracks in the mudroom, all of their tracks, human and canine, big and little, wet clay from the banks of the lake. The drawing was on Robert’s old letterhead, tanned onionskin, and the lake was a blob of blue next to the watermark and Robert’s name. The dogs were nose to tail, a clutter of legs in motion.  Caroline could see Carl’s arm in motion too, drawing each leg, naming each part of the picture aloud, while the dogs sat and panted, stopping to cock heads at the sound of their own names, at the sound of Carl’s beloved, breathless voice.

Tonight, her head was full of bees. Inside the steel tank, her feet were cramped and curled. Her legs were sandstone. She could feel her hands clutch each other, heavy on her belly, where the nurse had left them. The cool compress on her forehead had slipped. If she looked down her nose, she saw only the rubber cowl, tight around her sweaty neck, puffing the machine’s meter, relief in metronome. Between rubber and skin was damp cotton gauze.  It rubbed her neck red; it thickened the seal between head and body, eyes and hands. It left a sore edge. She could not remember what she was wearing.

Her summer clothes had gone straight from washline to firepit, Robert had said, while Carl and Junie watched, in pajamas, from the picture window. She could see their watching faces, sealed inside the house, mirrored in the glass. She did not need them described. Carl’s eyes would reflect the fire right back, that fascination with flicker and disintegration, but Junie would watch Robert blow the bellows and toss the articles in. Junie would inventory the disappearance of Mother part by part: the blue gingham pants Mother wore in the garden, the cotton cardigan she held on with a chain between button and hole, the sunhat, the culotte, the kerchief. The artifacts would smolder and smell of nothing but themselves, and the sky above the sealed house would darken, warning the healthy away. Junie would take note of all of it, from behind the glass, silent and grave.

Caroline listened to the bellows under her bed, drawing and blowing air. The room asserted itself, always, its rhythmic hiss and pop of machinery, the anti-lullaby of metal cocoons, rows of them, each containing a complicated person. The last of the visitors had left, and the nurse had dimmed the lights, but never turned them off all the way. Caroline missed the true dark, and the sleep it gave her.  

She turned her head, wishing for a window. A ceiling fan paddled the humid air. A pair of moths courted in the dim glow of a wall fixture. Smell of wet wool and disinfectant. Over the other beds in her row, other mirrors loomed, festooned with Sunday comics and construction paper promises of home. Caroline was the oldest one here, Robert had said.  The ward was elbow to elbow, he had said, tank to tank, thirty-two tanks, which they were lucky to have, none empty. “What if more are needed?” Caroline had asked—Robert could be trusted to answer when doctors wouldn’t. But he hadn’t answered. He just kissed her forehead through his flimsy, bleached mask. Goodnight.

Goodnight. Sometimes, like tonight, the respirators all fell into sync, like a shop full of cuckoo clocks, if you were to stop and listen, if you were to listen and wait. Everyone exhaled at once, spoke at once, at the mercy of machine. Then quiet—the shared inhale, the hiss and push—then another, metered surge of the collective voice. “This reminds me of choir,” said young Mae Gunder, in the next machine, and Caroline wanted to laugh, needed to, but had to wait for the next push of the diaphragm, the bully conductor, to signal the end of the rest.

“You like to sing?” she asked, then waited with Mae for the breath to answer.   

Caroline looked at the girl’s shadowy outline in the mirror overhead. Mae lay on her side, facing Caroline. One of Mae’s tight braids flopped over her pillow, a clumsy antenna. A nosegay of pink balloons was clipped to her mirror; all the children had them. The balloons were several days old, had shriveled near the ribbons, where a friendly stranger’s breath had leaked out.  

Children all around her, and not the two she loved. Thank God Carl and Junie were not here, and she wished they were here, and she could kill herself for wishing, and she wished she were there, and she wished there were not there, sealed behind signage, none going in, none going out, and breath going in, and breath.  

“I’m in Adult Choir at church,” said Mae Gunder, who was not an adult, not quite. “Do you sing, Mrs. Mack?”

They waited. Again. Waited for air. The rubber cowl puffed. “We don’t go to church,” Caroline said, then realized how cold she sounded. No breath was left to equivocate. Just wait. Wait for the next. The machine took its time. “I do like to sing, Mae,” she said, when she finally could.

To sing was not about church. To sing was to sit at the piano, to share the bench with Junie and flip through the Fireside Book. Junie’s shoulder still fit in her armpit, and Caroline’s long arms reached easily round to the keys. Junie would choose a dirge, the kind where girls tie their aprons high, and boys run away, and girls leap pregnant from cliffs into high rivers, and boys are dreadful sorry, and girls disappear and haunt and burn their first names into permanence. Oh, June. What about a Valderie, Valdera? For tonight? A Funiculi, Funicula?  Like the restaurant? What kind of child doesn’t like spaghetti?

What kind of child? It was Mae’s turn to speak, Mae who surely loved spaghetti. From her mouth came not a word but a note—no consonant, only vowel, high and clear soprano. It was an invitation. Caroline joined. She could not help herself—the same vowel a fourth lower, where altos float. Caroline held her note, as long as the machine would let her, and Mae did too. While they waited, silent, for the next breath, their eyes locked in the mirror.  

Now Caroline was not an adult either. Their game was defined. It was a game of tuning.  With each new breath, they surprised each other, a new vowel, a new note, intervals sometimes dissonant, sometimes haunting and plain, or accidental unison. Others joined—one anonymous voice, then another, and the chorus grew. Some were breathless and strained, but earnest; others were high and elfin, kids no bigger than little Carl. The room was filled with their intention. They drowned out the machinery. They swam in their own cleverness. 

“Shush. Caroline. Caroline. Mrs. Mack. Mae, dear. ” It was Miss Whittaker, a portly nurse with a white mask covering her ruddy face. She glared down at Caroline with dark-ringed eyes, sympathy long expired. “Mightn’t we set an example for the younger ones?” The din quieted right away, as if all of this were punishment, all of this just desserts, and worse was promised.

I am older than you, masked lady. I am older than you and I don’t even know your first name. But the nurse exited before Caroline could speak. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble, Mrs. Mack,” Mae whispered.

Caroline felt a pool of spittle in her throat. She would need Miss Whittaker, or another one like her, to suction it out. “Don’t worry, Mae. I get myself in trouble plenty.” The biggest trouble of all—she was submerged in it now. She was in a tank of it. She was Carl’s bathtub submarine, pointing her periscope where she could, silencing her sonar. The enemy was everywhere.

They did not speak for several breaths. Caroline could not tell if Mae was asleep, so she whispered. “Mae, you know, I do go sometimes.” It was true, she did go, on occasion, without Robert’s knowledge. To listen to the wind through the pipes of the grand organ. “Not to pray.  Just to listen.” The voices in the ward had gone quiet. The ventilators had fallen out of phase again. It was just a clutter now, a roomful of hissing equipment. “I’m sorry. I should stop. We need to sleep.”

“I don’t want to,” Mae said. “I’ll only dream.”  

Caroline knew this feeling. Fear of falling asleep in the tent, for the bears outside. Fear of falling asleep indoors, for the bears already in her mind.

The whites of Mae’s eyes glowed in the half-light.“Doctor Abrams always looks at my…at my chest during the treatment.”

“Oh, Mae.” Caroline looked up in the mirror, at the girl, all play now dead. Poor kid, with her kid braids, lying on her side in a steel tank, body probably curled into a question mark, banished from the risers of Adult Choir. Poor girl couldn’t even bring herself to say breasts. She was pretty. She was old enough. Her mother was surely frightened to death.  Caroline wanted to hug her, way over there. Her hands held still on her belly.

“Anywhere else,” Mae Gunder said, then spent the rest of her lungful on a sigh. She shut her eyes, and kept quiet the rest of the night.  

Caroline kept quiet too. The children needed their rest. She didn’t tick her tongue for the nurse’s attention. She wouldn’t. In a roomful of poor little things, the kind thing is to keep quiet.    

This. This is how we disappear. This is how we drown.