That Old Cape Magic

snowed that last two weeks?
    Did he ever. Giant drifts of powder banked two-thirds of the way up the hospital window. Laura’s flight out had been one of the last before the airport closed, and it hadn’t reopened until Christmas Eve. Twice Griffin had to walk a good mile from the hospital to his motel, the roads impassable, his car plowed in.
    In the days following Laura’s surprise visit, his mother became increasingly agitated. The morphine calmed her breathing, but something was clearly troubling her that had to do with her granddaughter, Griffin suspected, though he had no idea what. “She’sso …,” she began several times, her thought always trailing off, as if she were trying to articulate something just beyond her grasp. The oxygen made her mouth dry, so Griffin gave her some ice chips to suck on, thinking that might help, but they didn’t. “She’s so …”
    “She’s so what, Mom?”
    She fell asleep, still struggling, and Griffin drifted off as well, awaking to the sound of her voice.
    “She’s so …
kind
, isn’t she?”
    Kind?
That
was the word she’d been straining to locate? It was as if the concept were fabulously exotic, one she’d read about but hadn’t personally encountered until now. Either that or she’d done a quick genetic scan, looking for and not finding a familial antecedent.
    “Yes,” he said, feeling his throat constrict with pride. “She is that.”
    “She makes me almost”—she was struggling again now, and Griffin guessed that another unfamiliar concept was groping blindly toward articulation—“ashamed.”
    The next day, however, she was more herself. “She’s not brilliant, though, is she?” she said, staring off into space. They’d been sitting quietly for the last hour, each in private thought. “I doubt she’ll go back to school.”
    “Actually, she’s smart as hell,” Griffin told her, instantly angry. “More important, she’s
happy
, Mom. She’s going to marry someone she loves and who loves her.”
    “Happy,” she repeated, catching his eyes and locking in. “Only very stupid people are happy.”
    A few short hours, Griffin remembered thinking. That’s all it had taken for her to reflect upon kindness in general and her granddaughter’s in particular, then to discard it as a cardinal virtue.
    They didn’t discuss Laura after that, but he continued to feel the ghostly residue of her visit, and unless he was mistaken, his mother did, too. Her decline seemed more rapid now, though overthe long days that followed she rallied several more times, much as the doctors had predicted. The peaks weren’t nearly so high, however, and the valleys were lower. The morphine necessary for her breathing, in ever larger doses, made things weird, then weirder. Each time a dose was administered, her breathing became less labored and she was calmer, but not, somehow, any more at peace.
    “She’s battling something,” one of the nurses remarked. “That’s not unusual at this stage. We may never know what it’s about.”
    When she let him, he read to her or they watched television listlessly until the morphine took her under. He’d brought “The Summer of the Brownings” with him from L.A., and he worked on it while she slept. Something about his mother’s frail condition, together with the small, rhythmic sounds of the hospital room, made the story accessible in a way it hadn’t been the summer before on the Cape. At one point, though, his mother had awakened unexpectedly and asked what he was working on so intently. “Oh, them,” she sniffed when he told her, clearly disappointed by his choice of subject matter. Thinking it might please her, he said she’d been helpful. “You told me last June that it was asthma the little Browning girl suffered from, and about Peter eventually dying in Vietnam.” But she claimed to have no memory of the conversation. “How would I know what happened to those people?” she said when pressed. He couldn’t figure out what to make of it. His mother’s usual MO was to feign knowledge she didn’t have, not to confess ignorance.
    As Christmas bore down on them, his exhaustion, fueled by sleepless nights and cafeteria food, began to take its toll, and Griffin felt his tenuous grip on reality begin to fray, as if he, too, were being dosed with morphine. He found himself sleeping when she did, dreaming fitfully, the Browning story in his lap. More than once he awoke with his mother’s eyes on him, an