Girl on A bike, Boy in Dayton

Jack is sixteen when he sees Marie the first time, then 84 when he sees her again, though he doesn’t know he saw her before, and those caring for him—tolerating him—wouldn’t believe him anyway, for the brain is falling away from the man, who’s always looking blank-inward and couldn’t be seeing much of anything at this point, and clinically sees less every day. But he’s got this crack of a smile lately, thin but it never goes away, as if some long-awaited wish has been delivered and, now that it’s finally here, it can never be taken away.

So weak, this old Marie, and trouble breathing, never without her oxygen tubing, a wispy frail most avoid looking at too long not because she’s not knocking on Death’s Door, she’s pounding on it—so close to stepping through people might fear she’d pull them in with her if they’re too close. But Marie, terrified on her arrival, has calmed; where there was quaking, there is now a gracious serenity. She seems fearless now and…if staff were surprised to see her alive yet one more day, imagine how amazed they are at an insouciant old lady who, despite shuffling to her wheelchair, can’t wait to get out of her room and get to breakfast and then whatever the next thing might be. Carefree, at her age, laughing, even with that old failing heart coming apart like a cheap engine that was never assembled properly to start with.

*

They met in Dayton in 1952 and fell in love in one minute-forty-nine seconds—the duration of their time together. It was a summer trip with his father, checking in on hardware accounts, bring the boy along from Lancaster, let him see some of the world and what his old man did in it.

Girl on a bike, blue fenders, wicker basket leading the handlebars. Green-and-yellow checked dress, blonde braids draping down her back, saddle shoes a lot like his. She kickstanded it carefully out front, Jack watching her from inside as his father showed the owner a new hinge line he repped.

Marie entered and the bell jingled and Jack looked away fast so he could pretend he just happened to look up at the sound but she was onto him even though she was only fourteen—onto him before she realized she was onto him, somehow. There was a snap across the space between them, a cable connecting them and getting tauter as she crossed to the counter and their hearts pounded the same roar.

The owner pushed two quarts and a pint of paint he had mixed forward, then asked if the boy could help the girl load them up. Jack waited for nothing, grabbing the two quarts as she reached in for the pint and body-voltage surged back and forth as his hand grazed hers, then a look, stop-time like in the movies, and he was walking her out front, the two adults going back to their hinges.

After the jolt came bottomless shyness. Whatever this was…it couldn’t be anything, could it—kids, what do they know? The cautious walk side by side, avoiding eyes, then placing the paint in her basket—another hand-graze as crackly as before. Kids, they know nothing, but somehow, they know this is everything. A minute where nothing is said (nothing is ever said, really), then she smiles and nods thanks and mounts her bike and pedals off. Sixty feet away she looks back over her shoulder and there’s Jack, staring, smiling, and she pedals away fast, braids whipping and bouncing on her back in the splashy sun and though they can’t remember it now they also never forgot it.

*

The heart is always at work—monitoring itself for problems and creating solutions. It fixes itself endlessly, a squad of brain, blood, and electricity always working and finding ways to stretch out the beats and outplay the inevitable failure. Marie’s heart started pulling apart when she was eight, but no one knew, it was such a small disintegration—slow, at the cellular level.

She thought he must have moved to Dayton and she would surely see him again. She thought she would go around a corner and there’s that big square face with the apologetic eyes and the farm-boy smile. She thought about him for a long time, but then she stopped thinking about him…but a part of her that she forgot about never stopped thinking about him.

The heart is a genius, but the brain is a hundred hearts—a thousand. So many sectors of Jack’s brain are closed off, nonregenerative, some behind rusted-shut doors that will likely never open again, others down tunnels that have been dynamited and for practical purposes never existed—uncountable collapses that sucked away whole decades of his life, people, places, and emotions included.

But the Ohio girl: the area that holds her is as alive as the day it formed in him—even stronger. Jack forgot about her but it didn’t—it’s independent of him and now, so sturdy and resurgent, when so much of him is gone, it signaled to her; and it signaled, through her, all the people who decide for her. So last week they brought her to this assisted living complex in Pennsylvania, backdropped by the Allegheny National Forest, with a south-facing patio looking onto quilty fields and a lead-gray river.

It signaled to staff to put them, the best-behaved residents in the complex, side by side on the patio, she with the failing but determined heart, he with the addled brain but for the one perfect part.

Marie is too weak to speak; the place he speaks from is dead. But outside in their wheelchairs, faint sun just warm enough, there is no need. They don’t know each other but they know each other completely. They do not speak, they have never spoken a word, but they have also never stopped speaking, across all these years.