mix-up. When I told her that Little Richard’s heart was bigger than hers, she broke all our dishes.”
As she watched Little Richard, his eyes fixed on Ed, his left front foot tapping Ed’s wristwatch, Faith was convinced he understood, and she was suddenly happy he would be forever freed from his fishbowl, his glass house, his observation tank. She thought of her neighbors then, how she’d allowed their stares to penetrate her skin, how she had put herself on display, made herself vulnerable by obsessing over what others thought.
Faith placed her hand on Ed’s, and Little Richard stepped onto it slowly and carefully, his head jerking to the sunset tunes of crickets and bullfrogs, dragonflies and peepers. “Are you happy?” she asked Little Richard. Just then he flicked his tail and opened his mouth wide, revealing a small red tongue, little serrated teeth, a razor-sharp smile.
The sun hung low in the sky, casting small shadows across the water and the stunted trees that fringed the pond.
“Well,” said Ed as he leaned toward Little Richard and stroked his chin, “I guess this is arrivederci. Happy trails, big fella.” He sniffed, rubbed his nose with a balled fist.
“We don’t have to do this,” said Faith.
“Yes,” said Ed. “It’s the only thing to do.”
Little Richard jolted upright in Faith’s palm, and she imagined she felt his heart beat as she spoke to him silently of fresh grass, of murky water, of freedom in all its pain and possibility. This is your chance, she thought. Here is a fresh start. For a while Little Richard stayed, rigid and immobile, his feet hooked in, rooted to his past like a myth. But when the moon took the sky and the sun bowed in homage to a new day, he sprung skyward, over the embankment and toward the water, falling forward into a new life.
turn of the wind
Ben was sixty-four, stubborn. Unprepared. He’d been tired, disoriented, and irritable for months, although the latter symptom was nothing unusual. When he finally visited Dr. Ludrow, the man promptly ignored his request to go easy on the tests, ordering a spinal tap to see if it was meningitis, an MRI to check for tumors or strokes, and psychological and cognitive tests to uncover depression. “And if it’s none of those,” he said without batting an eye, “then it’s probably dementia.” Three weeks later Ben sat opposite Dr. Ludrow in his oak-planked office holding a form that summarized the test results, one that diagnosed a high probability of Alzheimer’s. Ben made a copy and gave it to the research supervisor at the lab where he had explored the complex nature of solid matter for the past forty years.
“I’m not giving two weeks’ notice,” he said. “I hope you understand.”
“But, Ben,” she said, “your project is just taking off. We can accommodate your treatments, your schedule, whatever.”
“I don’t think I can—”
“Of course you can,” she said. “Take a few days off. Relax. We’ll talk about this next week.”
Phone against her ear, she marched from the lab as if it had all been settled. Ben wondered if she believed that relaxation was a remedy, that a few days off would cure Alzheimer’s, but he knew better. His work drew funding like a magnet, and while he’d always known that this is all that mattered, his supervisor’s blatant admission infuriated him. He stalked to the storage room, yanking a cardboard box from a high metal shelf before emptying file cabinets and loading crystal specimens inside. His arm, as if by its own volition, swept across his desk and sent pens and framed photographs flying. The lab techs looked up from folders and computer screens at the sound of shattering glass, but none dared approach.
As he drove home, the large box propped on the passenger seat beside him, Ben understood that no one had his experience or expertise and that they would struggle to continue his projects. The techs had watched him countless times as he tested unconventional crystal hosts in large glass cases, but it was the times they couldn’t watch—when he rushed to the lab at night or during weekends—that made him certain they could not continue his work. But he didn’t care. Why should a young upstart take credit for his innovations while he sat, glassy-eyed and drooling, unable to comprehend his former genius?
BEN HAD BEGUN HIS GROUND-BREAKING research two years earlier by testing environments that favor crystal growth—first water, then sediment, and finally gel mixtures—and found that the crystals prospered in outlandish materials. He grew calcite crystals in peaches, lead iodide in grape jelly. He found that growing crystals in gel is disarmingly simple, inexpensive, and effective as gels allow crystals to grow while offering enough resistance to keep them from mutating out of control. Crystals grown slowly and thoughtfully, he learned, were almost always more perfect than those grown in haste. His method had opened new avenues for research on many substances that had never been grown in single-cell form, fostering the discovery of how to make drugs found only in plants and microbes synthetically by learning the drug’s growth pattern which, like all solid matter, begins with a solitary cell. Things were, as his supervisor so eloquently stated, taking off.
It was painful to leave behind the hope of discovery, but what more subtly nagged him was that he couldn’t allow anyone else that hope. Being selfish and proprietary are traits not uncommon in scientists, but Ben knew that he was acting like the angry child in possession of the only ball on the playground. It was his, after all.
For weeks he stared at the cardboard box, convinced that tucked into the crystals’ translucent folds and angled pleats were answers to age-old medical questions and refutations to long-held theories that could be extracted only by someone fully connected to his intellectual and emotional faculties. But if that someone couldn’t be him, it would be no one. He hid the box in the barn and tried not to think about it.
BEN HAD ALWAYS LOVED WORKING with his hands, playing with Tinker Toys as a child, building models with his father, constructing crystal replicas for investors from Sony and directors of the American Medical Association. Dr. Ludrow recommended that he take up some sort of craft, claiming that the concentration required in the physical act of creation would relieve his stress by focusing his attention on something other than his deteriorating brain.
“So I can slip into mental oblivion unawares?” he asked.
“Something like that,” the doctor said absently.
He was a busy man, but Ben resented being dismissed while still in possession of his rational mind. “Young man,” he said, “let me tell you something: I am a research scientist. I have contributed to the perfection of the instruments you shove down peoples’ throats and up their asses in the name of medicine.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”
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