Vital Signs Read Online Free PDF

a face, as though the real her had caught her physical self off guard, as though she knows it’s all a joke.”
    “Everyone does that, Dad, don’t you?”
    There’s a misshapen silence between us. I rerun Anna’s “and you do the same for me one day” from the night we met. My guilt sickens me.
    “Charlotte’s leaving, and I think Fred is too. Dad … Charlotte said something a minute ago,” Sasha begins, but then breaks off. Her eyes are glassy. “Is there something she’s angry with you about? ‘He won’t stay alonelong,’ she said.” Sasha sneaks a look behind her toward the kitchen, to make sure she’s clearly out of earshot. I hear the muffled sound of Anna and my distant daughter laughing.
    It’s Charlotte I’ve disappointed the most.
    “Sometimes, when she feels most strongly, she has to lash out,” I say to Sasha, and I realize that I have invented this version of Charlotte and that in fact I know nothing about her at all.
    “Let’s go in,” I say, wiping more blackflies off my neck.
    When I return to the table and sit down, Anna and Fred emerge from the kitchen and sit with me. Sasha pulls out a chair and we wait, silently, for Charlotte to join us, but when that wait feels too long, Fred asks Anna if she has made up her mind.
    “It’s important to act quickly,” he adds. “There’s no time to waste, and even so, if you tell them now, there’ll be a waiting period. Scheduling, tests, preparation, pre-op stuff …”
    “I know,” Anna says clearly and forcefully. “And if the buckets are filled …” She hesitates, and I hold my breath, “the farmers in the park become sugar for the king. You mustn’t hobble them up in the rickets and make wretches of them. It’s the law, and when riches sway and the moon makes its choice, well then, feet will rock, lemons will fall—”
    “Mom, it’s your decision, and your time,” Sasha says abruptly, a horrified look on her face, corking the flood of her mother’s nonsense.
    “Sasha, please, cut the airy-fairy crap,” Fred cuts in.
    Charlotte enters then and stands behind Fred. The two of them seem to breathe in as one, positioning themselves as their mother’s sentinels.
    “Remember, Mom, this thing will get worse, not better,” Charlotte says, and shifts the weight on her feet.
    “And the technology these days …” Fred adds.
    “We have a stake in it, too—”
    “Charlotte, you selfish bitch!”
    “Sash, please,” Fred says. “If you recall—”
    “I CAN REMEMBER THE FIRST WAS TREES!” Anna’s raised voice cuts Fred off. “If the storm was France’s creamy hotel, it would not smell like this. Don’t you see the smell, the way it makes everything cold?” She stops herself, then looks at her fingers collected together obediently on the table. “I remember,” she says, her voice now barely audible, but still insistent.
    Charlotte glares in my direction, as if Anna’s two keenly whispered words support her accusations against me. Charlotte is the one who most resembles her mother.
    “Dad,” Fred mumbles, and begins to walk towards the kitchen.
    I push my chair back and follow my son.
    “I spoke to Dr. Mead,” he says, in a hush like a cop-show coroner. “Jargon aphasia is what it’s called. It’s semantic jargon, but not yet neologistic or even phonemic.” He nods like one of those toy puppies in the rear window of cars whose necks are suspended on springs.
    I have no reply.
    As the blonde Tuesday turned into three months of Tuesdays, I watched my stomach flatten, my arms tighten; I felt my senses return to their peak
.
    “It means it’s not just confabulations, but something associated with aphasia—the temporal gyrus or the posterior parietal operculum … it means that it’s possible there’s more pressure than Gottlieb can fix.”
    It’s not that I don’t want to speak. I do. But I can think of absolutely nothing to say.
    Charlotte comes into the kitchen and pats Fred on the shoulder as a