Let me keep going. Don’t try to stop me. You, nurse. Let go of my blouse. I’m going over here to look under these lids at what’s in there. Maybe there’s something good, like a plate of cookies or some bread I can give to the birds. I like to watch them peck at the crumbs. I like to feed things. The ducks walk funny. They’re like little people who don’t know as well as I do what’s needed. They’re dignified, and they’re trying their best, but without my help they wouldn’t make it. Yet look at the way they float, how upright! We should take a lesson from them. We don’t try hard enough, which is why you nurses should let me keep going. Let me go, don’t pinch at my sleeve! I’m trying to help the ducks so they can keep being tidy, which is more than I can say for you.

I haven’t seen my favorite duck, the lady with the tag on her ankle. Mrs. Lovitz says my duck is at the hairdressers. I know she means well, but I don’t feel any better.

Some of them have tufts of white feathers against their blackness, as if they haven’t groomed themselves well. This isn’t for lack of trying, but because it’s hard out there. They can’t do it. They need help. Maybe they have lice or some other bug. They’re trying, with dignity, to keep going but opportunists get under their feathers. This gentleman duck looks like the elder statesman of the group, so it’s all the more upsetting that there’s something ruffling his feathers. He carries on, and they all seem to respect him because in some way or another, all the ducks have been disheveled. It’s not right. They don’t deserve it.

When a car or a golf cart comes along the road, they waddle out of the way just as fast as they can, which isn’t very fast, like the people that eat too much pushing their carts at the supermarket. When was that? I used to tell them, don’t eat so much. After my dinners, I walked around the track at the high school so I wouldn’t be like them. When was that? Before here.

There are tan ducks and there are white ducks, and there are white and tan ducks. This is how it should be. It wasn’t always this way. White ducks used to have to be over there and tan ducks used to have to be over there and God forbid you would have them together. Things are better now. Only, most of the nurses that lift me at night are tan and most of the ones that take my temperature in the daytime are white.

The man in the blue shorts tried to help me find my duck with the tag this morning. He said don’t worry, sometimes the ducks spend time at the pond at the golf course.

Once a duck walked through the doors that open and close. Everybody talked about that for days. I tried to walk the other way through the same doors but alarms went off. You have to be supervised. Everyone who lives here who can walk on two feet has tried to go on their own. They just make a U-turn when the siren goes off, like it’s no big deal. They try again and again and again, and the siren doesn’t say “Danger!” It seems to say “Ha-ha you fool, better luck next time.”

My daughters hung a mobile of old photographs near my bed.

Some pictures I wish they would take down.

In one picture I’m holding a brand new, red-faced daughter and smiling for the camera. He is next to me, holding a ham swaddled in a dishtowel. His lips are puckered, like he’s going to kiss it. Everyone laughs when they see that picture. They think the punch line is the ham, but it isn’t. It’s the kiss. In the morning when I count the tiles in the ceiling, air from the vent twirls the picture towards me. I squint my eyes closed, so I don’t start to think God damn him, God damn him. That’s no way to start a day.

As long as I am angry, maybe my duck stays away.

At lunch Mrs. Lovitz said her grace. She’s a good girl and I’m a bad girl. I must try harder. Instead of grace, I put my hands together and say, “Study, study until you are old. A good education is better than gold. Gold and silver may wither away, but a good education will never decay.”

She asked me politely what we were eating. I said duck and she said “No,” like she believed me. I meant chicken, but now my words come out wrong when they come out at all. Only the old sayings are all right. I hope she didn’t believe me about the duck. We wouldn’t eat that here. Good thing, with them outside, staring in through the windows, hoping for scraps.

It’s not right, to stop me from doing what I do. They’re out there waiting. If I can’t open lids, I won’t fill my bag, and then what will happen to the poor things? We sit in a semi-circle watching the cooking lady on TV or the man in the vest who comes with his electric piano. I can’t stop thinking about my ducks. I have work to do, and all the nurses want is for us to sit here. When we wave our arms to music, I try to make excuses so I can go but they stop me.

Some days of the week, I’m saved. A nice, loud, tan nurse comes to walk with me outside. She talks so close to my face, I blink. I bring the bags of bread I have hidden in my drawers and under my pillow and in the corners of my room. She helps me.

Others don’t.

“You’re fooling no one,” the big nurse said.

Sometimes she opens my drawers and starts messing my things.

I couldn’t stop myself from yelling at her the last time she did it.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!”

She kept going. I took my nail and put it across her arm. She pushed a button on the wall and other nurses came and tried to hold me. All the bags went into the trash. Four days of work. Foraging, searching. The bagel the nice man brought me. The piece of roll I found, what a prize it was. Untouched. I grabbed and they pulled the bags away. I heard the word “unsanitary,” I heard the word “daughter.”

The big nurse had them all around her, swabbing her arm like I was a vampire bat.

I marched down the hall and straight through the doors but not dignified and slow, like a duck. No easy U-turn like it was only a joke when the alarm went off. Two nurses grabbed me and stuck me in the arm with a needle. I had a terrible headache after.

It takes me a long time to build back up to what would be right for the ducks. On the days when my head hurts and there are no savings for them, I feel like I’m suffocating. I lose heart. The last time I had a headache, I skipped lunch. Mrs. Lovitz came up to me and held out her shiny, big-knuckled hand and pressed something crinkly towards me. Oyster crackers. She was already down the hall when I could finally close my mouth and look up after her and try to call out.

My ducks are an audience. They’re a following. The group of them, first the sharp ones, seeing me coming out of the sliding doors, but then even the slower ones, the dim-witted ones, bringing up the rear, following suit, being led by the leaders, over the arched bridge of the pond, a promenade, of pomp and circumstance, a procession toward what they are rightfully entitled to. I give. I reach my hand in and I grab crumbs and I give, I give.

Two people have come today. They’re female, they look like one another, they speak in the same voice. They smile at me and talk to me like I won the lottery. One needs to eat more bread and the other should not eat so much bread. It’s not healthy to eat that much bread. The one that needs more, it’s not healthy to eat that little. You can see the green long things running under her arms. I think I might offer her some of my savings for the ducks, but in my heart I can’t do it. The ducks stand upright with long necks and silly human little nostrils in their beaks and self-respect and ridiculousness and they must be taken care of. The thin one here, she talks like it’s all cause for celebration. I can remember that she’ll take her foot and push it against the pedal of her car and, zip, why should I give her what she can get herself? The other one, the round one, she’s more like the ducks because she can’t see how silly she is. Maybe I will slide her a crumb when the fast, hungry one isn’t looking.

The nurses say to me how nice it is to see both of my children in one day, “the oldest” and “the baby” but I know this isn’t true. They don’t understand. The thin one is the oldest, but the round, younger one is in the middle. I wish they would stop calling her my baby. I can only blow a long breath out from my mouth.

In the gazebo where my nurse and I go some afternoons, there are leavings from the ducks. The man in blue shorts has a hose that makes a loud sound and we can’t go in it today. We watch the people on the putting green. I look for my duck but I don’t see her. Clouds as big as Broward County hover above the men with their putters. The white ball rolls and I’m told not to pick it up. I clam up because I wasn’t going to pick it up, does she think I’m stupid, I wouldn’t pick it up. I only pick them up if they’re forgotten. I have a drawer that is so heavy with them it slides out sometimes in the night while I’m sleeping. She tells me all about a thing that will solve the problem, a shim. She keeps saying we’ll get one. I don’t know what that is but it must be hard to find.

Sometimes the ducks get snippy with each other. They bicker. But they never fight, not like dogs or bears or other bad animals that deserve no bread. Bears forcing themselves against each other with the flapping of blubber in their legs, pushing and biting. I’ve seen it on television. Animals, to behave that way. I would send them to bed without supper.

A duck will turn its head away from you in order to look at you better with one eye or the other. It is not snubbing you, it’s trying to see you. Sometimes a duck will pull its head back and grow tall in the neck like it’s showing you it has self-respect, like you have offended it. When you’ve spoken to the girl in the kitchen on their behalf. When you’ve been scolded again and again for their sake. You learn not to expect gratitude. They are only ducks. They don’t know how.

The pond stops shimmering. The sky rumbles a little, but no one goes inside.

Little ones! Little ones! And who is leading the way down the bank? My own special lady! Onto the water and fanning out. Powder puffs gliding on the surface of the water. Not even making a mistake, not even going the wrong way. They fan out behind her, perfectly, without tooting their own horn, without asking for praise. Is it a joke to you now, you nurses who throw away what I store?

Where are the witnesses? It’s not enough that it’s just the loud one and me. There have to be more! I can show them. And when she holds her silver gizmo up to take a picture, I veer off and go inside as fast as I can. My middle girl is sitting in a small pink room with a nurse. The nurse is showing her pieces of paper. I tug at the sleeve of my middle girl to come see.

“What?” she says.

Nothing is more important than that she come with me right now to see the little ones. She sits there doing something dumb, something stupid, her glasses on, leaning over to look at the papers the nurse has and it’s just a game she’s playing to exclude me, to make me feel dumb, but it’s the game that’s dumb and if she doesn’t hurry up and come she won’t get to see the great thing! She is laughing a little and glancing at the nurse like the two of them understand something I don’t.

But if she won’t come, I may never get the chance again. Maybe there were times I wanted her to come places that weren’t important. Maybe I pulled too hard sometimes and now she won’t come. If I could tell her in words I would, but I don’t have them anymore.

Thank God the thin, oldest girl comes in because she takes me by the shoulders and says, in a voice like I just painted the Mona Lisa, “What is it, Mom?”

“She won’t go,” I say.

“How about I go with you?” she says.

I hate the fat, middle one. She doesn’t listen to me. She looks down on me. But I love the oldest, the thin one, so much and pull her through the doors while my nurse pushes on a button to stop the alarm and we are outside in the new wind, crossing in front of a golf cart and over the arched bridge and they’re still there! One in front and now we are counting together, there are sixteen in all.

It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle. No one gets eaten or lost or loses tufts of feathers to bugs. No one’s hungry, and it isn’t cold. No one clamors for a Dad, who sneaks them candy that rots their teeth and plays their buddy so that the mother duck is the bad guy. God in heaven has not taken any of them, as Mrs. Lovitz would say.

I’m glad she is not here to say it and make me mad and then feel sorry. The mother duck leads them through the black satin water. God isn’t the one who kept them from the hawks and the hurricanes. My lady duck did it with her natural goodness. Look how silent she is. Not having to say drink your milk in order to live. Not having to say don’t eat too much candy. Not failing to find the right place between too much and too little. Not touching her baby with infected fingers.

She’s her own miracle. No one else to thank. She did it all herself.

After we’ve counted the ducklings again and taken many pictures, after the middle one has come and seen, the two of them kiss me on the cheek and say, like it’s a good thing, “Goodbye, Mom.” I don’t understand their meaning or their smiles or the nurse’s treating them like they were the one given a bad shot and deserved sympathy, bread crumbs. But they’ve both seen my ducklings, and that was more than I could have hoped for, waking up to a man with a ham, turning. They won’t blame me for what I must do anymore. They have seen my ducklings.

The wind blows my hair.

“Let’s get you inside,” my nurse says.

I feel like I’ve climbed Mount Everest.

At night I count the tiles on the ceiling. One two three four, and then I’m asleep. But tonight is different. The wind moans in the palm trees. Mine is not the only room that hears it. The thunder goes on and on. It covers the humming of the refrigerator, the beeping of my neighbor’s machine, and the mumbling of the loud dreamer across the hall. When you can’t hear the black silence between those things, it is not as lonely.

Hard rain now. It sounds like applause.

When it rains they pull down the plastic flaps on the golf carts so the people can get from building to building without getting wet. They are crinkly from being rolled up and smell sharp and clean and I don’t like it. Tonight I can almost feel it, the clear thick crinkly plastic. I dream I’m in my bed and they’re putting it over me, like a tent. And then it’s not me inside the plastic anymore but a little doll with porcelain skin and bright blue eyes that I’m not allowed to touch. In the dream I want to touch her but I also don’t want to touch her, I want to go away from her, I don’t want to even look at her. They let me go away.

I went away from a daughter once. I know I’m not dreaming now because my eyes are open. When the lightning flashes I see the tiles on the ceiling, and the pictures of the mobile, turning. I went away from my baby. I played tennis and drank gimlets and talked about a person named Linus Pauling so that the people in white shorts and shirts, holding racquets, would know I cared about the world. I talked like I was interested in the world so they would not put their hands on my back and make me feel like a little thing that needed help, like a duck. While the little doll daughter lay in plastic in a hospital, I spoke of the Nobel Peace Prize so they wouldn’t put their hands on my shoulder. Please. No talk about God. No hands touching me, no hands that I can’t stop myself from pushing off me while the warmth rises in my face. I talked so they wouldn’t see me knowing the hands of nurses reaching into plastic gloves built into the sides of the tent, feeding her, wiping her, scratching the soft skin of her forehead with their plastic kindness. Linus Pauling, Linus Pauling, so the people in white would not comfort me like they knew I would never touch my baby again.

In the morning, when I wake, I look up at the tiles and feel like I’m wearing half of the porcelain mask of my bright, blue-eyed doll. The nurse comes to lower the railing. She can’t tell I am wearing a half-mask, because my daughter and I look so alike, except that my daughter’s eye always looked toward something to come and mine does not look at anything at all.

Bright today. She puts a hat on me, and sunglasses. Because of it, I get the thumbs-up from all the nurses.

There is only one duck by the bridge. I drop bread around her. The sun dances on the water, blinding her. She turns like the needle of a compass, to the North and to the South and to the East and to the West, wondering where everybody has gone.