Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,54

didn’t register my coming in. A plastic tube was sunk into his throat, and an IV was stuck into his arm. The EKG beeped.

On the bedside table, a small collection of framed photographs had been set up. First a young man with a young girl, posed romantically. Then a slightly older man with a young girl, still posed romantically. Then an even older man with a young girl, only now the pose was merely familiar.

Maybe it wasn’t her in all those pictures. Different members of the same family can sometimes look pretty damn similar. My mom has this one photo of my great-grandfather up in the kitchen. He’s eight years old, posed with his schoolmates. It was taken in Colombia, back in the 1920s or something, but the crazy thing is he looks exactly like I did at that age. My mom even taped up one of my own little class photos next to it, so you could see the resemblance.

But as I grew up, the physical similarities between me and my grandfather-as-a-boy had faded, whereas the girl here remained a dead ringer for Zelda in every photo. Always the same tiny mouth, the same silver hair, the same oceanic eyes. And who was this guy she was looking at like he was the best thing since the jelly doughnut? Could it really be the same old man who was lying in this bed? I stared at him, trying to find the parallels, but he was skeleton skinny and his face was a back-of-the-cereal-box maze of deep wrinkles. I needed to talk to him, to find out the truth once and for all. I touched his arm as gently as I could. Skin like tracing paper someone had spilled little pools of green and purple ink on. Nothing. I tried again, even shaking his shoulder a little bit.

“He’s comatose,” Zelda said. I jumped at the sound of her voice.

She shut the door behind her. In her hand, she held a wet washcloth. “I don’t even know if he can feel this.” She sat down at Nathaniel’s side and began to dab at his forehead. “He started getting really sick at the beginning of the year, but we didn’t move back to San Francisco until August. He wanted to be back in the place where he grew up.” I stood totally still, not trying to sign or write anything, as if I could apologize for what had happened at the Palace by just shutting up and letting her talk. “I lost him for good a few days ago. They told me he’d probably slip away on his own. That was the phone call I was waiting for.” She’d begun to cry, and though I wanted to reach out to comfort her, I held myself back. “But I just spoke to the doctor. It seems Nathaniel’s stabilized. That was the message they left for me last night. He could stay like this for months before he goes. So now I’m supposed to decide when to—because I’m listed as his granddaughter and only surviving relative. Can you imagine?”

She dabbed at her eyes with the washcloth, then set it aside.

I felt my faithometer rushing forward. All these photographs of a girl who never seemed to age. 60 percent. The stubborn way she’d held to her story all day, no matter how many times I accused her of lying. 70 percent. Her encyclopedic knowledge of art and history and scotch, her maturity and sophistication. 80 percent. The stupid way she danced. 90 percent.

Zelda used her fingers to wipe the wet strands of silver hair off the old man’s forehead, with a tenderness that was more than daughterly, and the last of my doubts melted away. Everything she’d told me was true. She’d been born two hundred and forty-six years ago in Germany, and the man in this bed was her husband, and when he died, an hour or a day or a year from now, she had every intention of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. And hadn’t we read in biology class about a woman in France who lived to be 122? Zelda’s story had never been strictly impossible—just really, really, really unlikely.

I believe you, I wrote in my journal.

“Good,” Zelda said.

But now I’ve got about a million questions.

“Can they wait until morning? I think I should stay here tonight.”

Okay.

“You can stay too, if you want. It’s not very comfy, but I’ve slept in these chairs before, and it’s survivable.”

I pointed at Nathaniel and