The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel and Rick Moody Page A

orange juice over his head, and when I started after him, he said, ‘Raining?’”
    “‘Raining?’ That’s what he said? The kid is a genius,” I told Dale Anne. “What Art Linkletter could do with this kid.”
    Dale Anne laid him down in the middle of the couch, and we watched him or watched the sky.
     
    “What a gyp,” Dale Anne said at dawn.
    There had not been a comet. But I did not feel cheated, or even tired. She walked me to the door.
    The knitting bag was still in the hall.
    “Open it later,” I said. “It’s a sweater for him.”
    But Dale Anne had to see it then.
    She said the blue one matched his eyes and the camel one matched his hair. The red would make him glow, she said, and then she said, “Help me out.”
    Cables had become too easy; three more sweaters had pictures knitted in. They buttoned up the front. Dale Anne held up a parade of yellow ducks.
    There were the Fair Isles, too—one in the pattern called Tree of Life, another in the pattern called Hearts.
    It was an excess of sweaters—a kind of precaution, a rehearsal against disaster.
    Dale Anne looked at the two sweaters still in the bag. “Are you really okay?” she said.
     
    The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? “Four,” she will say, “—three,” and years later, “Three,” she will say, “—four.”
    It’s the little steps that help. Weather, breakfast, crossing with the light—sometimes it is all the pleasure I can bear to sleep, and know that on a rack in the bath, damp wool is pinned to dry.
    Dale Anne thinks she would like to learn to knit. She measures the baby’s crib and I take her over to Ingrid’s. Ingrid steers her away from the baby pastels, even though they are machine-washable. Use a pure wool, Ingrid says. Use wool in a grown-up shade. And don’t boast of your achievements or you’ll be making things for the neighborhood.
    On Fair Isle there are only five women left who knit. There is not enough lichen left growing on the island for them to dye their yarn. But knitting machines can’t produce their designs, and they keep on, these women, working the undyed colors of the sheep.
    I wait for Dale Anne in the room with the patterns. The songs in these books are like lullabies to me.
    K tog rem st. Knit together remaining stitches.
    Cast off loosely.

Going
    There is a typo on the hospital menu this morning. They mean, I think, that the pot roast tonight will be served with buttered noodles. But what it says here on my breakfast tray is that the pot roast will be severed with buttered noodles.
    This is not a word you want to see after flipping your car twice at sixty per and then landing side-up in a ditch.
    I did not spin out on a stretch of highway called Blood Alley or Hospital Curve. I lost it on flat dry road—with no other car in sight. Here’s why: In the desert I like to drive through binoculars. What I like about it is that things are two ways at once. Things are far away and close with you still in the same place.
    In the ditch, things were also two ways at once. The air was unbelievably hot and my skin was unbelievably cold.
    “Son,” the doctor said, “you shouldn’t be alive.”
    The impact knocked two days out of my head, but all you can see is the cut on my chin. I total a car and get twenty stitches that keep me from shaving.
    It’s a good thing, too, that that is all it was. This hospital place, this clinic—it is not your City of Hope. The instruments don’t come from a first-aid kit, they come from a toolbox. It’s the desert. The walls of this room are not rose-beige or sanitation-plant green. The walls are the color of old chocolate going chalky at the edges.
    And there’s a worm smell.
    Though I could be mistaken about the smell.
    I’m