Harriet Doerr Read Online Free PDF Page B

flashlight. As she approaches, she notices that the man has had no choice but to stand in the narrow space between the traffic lane and the chain-link fence which bounds it. There is an urgency in his effort to flag her down. She glances at him as she circles past. He is so majestically tall and black that he could be Chamberlain or Jab-bar. Her off-ramp is just beyond. She accelerates, and moves to the right as she rounds the curve, and immediately hits a car which is stopped in her lane, hood up, warning lights flashing.
    She wakes at midnight in a hospital room. Her second self, the observer, has joined her. They are one. There is no one to review objectively the pain in her chest or her head. Her left arm is in a cast. A nurse is holding her other wrist. She shows Ann some flowers on the bed table.
    “Your husband brought them earlier.” She releases Ann’s wrist. Now she wants her to swallow a pill. “The duty nurse asked him to take the wallet from your bag. We can’t be responsible for valuables.”
    She leaves the room on silent white soles.
    Ann closes her eyes. The knife does not turn. In the room’s dim light she sees the flowers. Elliot has brought an arrangement of ferns and yesterday’s white carnations in a brandy glass lined with foil and tied with a lace ribbon bow. She supposes it is the first one he saw at the gift shop near the elevator or the last one left out at closing time. The flowers seem intended for a graduate or someone bereaved. There is no card.
    She becomes aware of a memory pushing up from the bottom of a secret sea, breaking off from the accrued strata, coral hard, lying there unmoved by tides. It fights its way to light and air. When it emerges it is full-dimensioned, whole.
     
     
    It is the previous year, and the month is May. They are on the road from Nice to Genoa. Elliot is driving. She is the passenger. They have just crossed the border. The guidebook says that Ventimiglia is one of Italy’s most important flower markets. Ann has never seen so many carnations. Fields of them rise to the hills on the left and slope to the sea on the right. They line the road that stretches ahead, and she has forgotten where they began. They are being gathered in straw baskets, clove pink, spice red, candy-striped pink and white, pink and red.
    On both sides of the road, men and women sell them at stands. Dozens are tied together to make a single bunch, sometimes all one color, sometimes mixed.
    Ann sees a man standing ahead of them on the right. He is importuning them with all the flowers his hands can hold. Ann supposes that their fragrance hangs about him like incense. He is hatless and wears sandals. They are about to pass him. She hasn’t had time to say “Stop.”
    Then, in an impact as clear and sudden as the clash of cymbals, Ann’s eyes meet the eyes of the vendor. Their smiles meet and fuse. The second is held in timeless suspension, like a rain-drop on a spiderweb.
    His arms, lifting the carnations like lanterns, are open in an encompassing embrace. They hold the terraced vineyards and the twisted pines, they hold the marble figures and the tapestried palace walls, the tile on hillside houses and the stone on Roman roads.
    Long after they have left the vendor behind, Ann turns to Elliot. His lips are moving, and she supposes he is dividing liters of gasoline. She waits for a moment, then touches his arm. “Back there,” she says, forgetting that her vagueness would annoy him. “Back there, we could have stopped. We could have bought flowers.”

3
    The Extinguishing of Great-Aunt Alice

    Great-Aunt Alice broke her hip when she was eighty-two. Walking about her garden one summer night, she fell over a hose that had been left across a brick path. She lay there until morning with her cheek pressed against candytuft and her feet on a clump of white dianthus. Her thoughts, rising like star shells over the pain, were various. She remembered the girlhood excursion when her long poplin