The Talk-Funny Girl Page 28

  Sands skidded up to the emergency room entrance and snapped off the engine. He took my mother under the back and behind the knees, the blood dripping, her belly looking like a huge egg about to break open, and he ran with her through the automatic doors and into the emergency room. I was a few steps behind. Sands yelled to the nurses that he had a pregnant woman, that she was in trouble, but he didn’t have to do that: Just the belly and the blood showed what was happening, a thin trail of it from the truck into the waiting area, and then in big drops on the linoleum there. A nurse came out and hurried us through a door and into one of the treatment rooms.

  In seconds, a doctor stepped into the room. I looked at my mother’s pale face and closed eyes and begged the nurses to let me stay, but Sands and I were made to leave. We went and stood in the waiting room at first, our clothes crimson and wet, everybody looking at us. “Elaine Archimbault,” I said to the woman who seemed to be in charge. “A nurse here. She’s the sister to that woman all blood. Elaine Archimbault. She’s here working now, a nurse. My aunt.”

  Another patient—an unconscious man with an enormous body and huge, bald head—was wheeled through the entrance. Five or six people who must have been family members crowded in after him. Sands and I stepped outside. Sands moved the truck away into the parking lot, and we stood out there next to it, keeping our eyes on the entrance. I was praying. I watched the nurses in their white uniforms come out and stand not far from the door on their cigarette breaks. I watched ambulances come up to the door, twice, the attendants calmly removing a stretcher from the back and wheeling a patient in. I looked for my father’s truck but didn’t see it and I wondered if he’d run away, or been stopped by the police for speeding, or gotten lost.

  Finally, Aunt Elaine appeared at the automatic door and looked for us. Sands waved a hand. We walked toward each other and met in the middle of the tarred road that led out of the parking lot. “Your mother’s in surgery,” Aunt Elaine told me. She had a hand on my shoulder and was looking up into my eyes and speaking partly in a nurse’s voice, and partly another way. “The doctors are taking the baby by cesarean. They’re both still alive. It’s going to be a while before you can see her, so you should go home and get into some other clothes and maybe have something quick to eat and then come back. Don’t be too long. When you get here, come in the main door and go to the desk there and tell them to call me first before anything else. All right?” She looked up at Sands, and I could tell she wanted to hug both of us but was holding herself away because of all the blood. She squeezed my shoulder with her hand and looked into my eyes. “All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are good doctors here. Don’t worry too much, honey. Pray if you want to. I can’t tell you to do that, but if you want to, pray now.”

  The seat of Sands’s truck was sticky. We had no choice but to sit on it and make the short drive to Aunt Elaine’s. Sands stayed outside while I went in and showered, put my clothes in a plastic bag and threw them in the trash, got dressed, and came outside with a thick blanket. I laid the blanket on the seat and we drove into town and I went in and bought a pair of pants and a shirt and some underwear for him while he waited outside. He had to go back into the store to change. When he came out he was carrying the bloody clothes in a plastic bag, which he threw into the Dumpster. “They thought I’d just murdered somebody,” he told me as I was unfolding the blanket to go under him. “I had to show them my ID, if you believe that, before they’d let me out of the place.”

  At the hospital, I went up to the volunteer at the main desk and said, “Elaine Archimbault,” and waited. In a little while I saw my aunt coming out of an elevator, and I knew just from the first look at her face what the news would be. “Come up,” Aunt Elaine said, putting an arm around my waist. And to Sands, “Could you wait?”

  The hospital elevator was all shining metal. Aunt Elaine had an arm around me, but there were other people in the elevator so we didn’t speak. On the floor where I was to see my mother, I followed my aunt into a small waiting room—four chairs and a table with old magazines on it, no people—and there Aunt Elaine turned me and put both hands on my shoulders and looked up into my eyes. “The baby was born,” she said. “A girl. It might live or it might not. It was born too early and there was some trouble.… Your mother is … There is internal bleeding that they haven’t been able to stop, and she lost a lot of blood before she got here. If she lives it would be a miracle. You can see her but she’s very weak. If you have something you want to say to her, say it this time, all right, Marjorie?”

  “All right.”

  Walking down the hallway, Aunt Elaine held my hand and I didn’t mind that. We turned into a white room. My mother was in the bed there, and beside her stood a nurse doing something with a tube that was snaking into my mother’s arm. My mother was small and thin in the bed. Her face and arms and hands were the color of wet paper, and her hair looked damp and was pushed back from her forehead in a way she never wore it. I moved in front of my aunt, walked up to the bed, and put the fingers of both hands on my mother’s arm. The nurse finished what she was doing and left. Aunt Elaine left. My mother’s eyes opened, closed, opened again. There was a small wrinkle at one corner of her lips. “You Majie,” I thought she said.

  “Ma.”

  Another little twist in the mouth muscles.

  “Ma, the baby’s a girl.”

  It was almost as if she laughed then, a bump in her chest and throat, a faint “huh” escaping from between her lips.

  “Pa … where?”

  “I don’t know it, Ma.”

  There was another bump of sound.

  For probably a minute we didn’t say anything else. My mother was using all her concentration just to breathe. Her eyelids fluttered. I could see that she was afraid, but not terribly afraid, not panicky, not terrified, just struggling to breathe.

  “You were a good ma … to untie me.”

  My mother’s eyes had nearly closed but when I said that she managed to push them open for a few seconds. She didn’t exactly shake her head, but she moved it half an inch to one side, said something that sounded like “Don’t know” or “You don’t know,” then let her eyes close. I stayed there, keeping my fingers on her arms and my eyes on her pale face. She seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. I watched her chest, waiting for it to stop moving, but the breathing went on and on, shallow but steady. I waited there an hour or more, praying in whispers, unable to make myself say anything else though there were things I wanted to be saying. Aunt Elaine came back in and stood quietly for a time, then told me it was all right if I wanted to leave. My mother couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t know we were there. I shook my head and stayed.

  My aunt left and came back again twice. Another nurse came in, then a woman doctor, and I was edged away from the bed and toward the wall so they could work. For a long time I stood there, catching glimpses of my mother’s face over the doctor’s shoulder, feeling Aunt Elaine’s arm around me, praying and praying. “There’s nothing you can do, honey,” Aunt Elaine whispered. “It would be all right to leave.”

  But I stayed, watching my mother, listening to the beep of a machine at the far side of the bed.

  I turned my lips in between my teeth. The sound of the beeping machine changed slightly; my mother twitched but kept breathing. One of the nurses stood back away from the bed like she was giving up, but the doctor was still leaning over my mother, the machine still going along. I listened to it for a few seconds with my eyes closed. Aunt Elaine squeezed my arm. My mother twitched again and let out a groan. I went up to the bed, pushing a little bit to get beside the doctor. I put my hand around my mother’s wrist, looked at her one last time, and then turned away and went out the door. I took the elevator downstairs and sat with Sands in the larger waiting room. After a time he reached out and put his big callused hand over mine, and I turned my palm up so I could put my fingers between his. It wasn’t much longer before Aunt Elaine came out of
the elevator and toward us. She asked if I wanted to come say good-bye to the body. I said that I did not.

  “The baby is alive,” she said. “You could see her. Do you want to?”

  Upstairs we went again, Sands with us this time. We stopped at a different floor, and turning and walking along the hallway, I felt as though I was carrying a huge stone weight in my middle.

  In a glassed-in room, in a glass box with tubes running into it, there was a pink girl so tiny it seemed to me she could fit inside a winter hat. It was warm and light in the box. Dressed only in a tiny diaper, the girl seemed as fragile as a robin’s egg, with miniature hands and feet, and eyes that opened from time to time but didn’t focus on anything. A tuft of damp dark hair showed at the top of her head. She had wires attached to circles of white tape on her chest. I stared at her, felt Sands put his hand on my back. I leaned in for a closer look at the girl’s wrinkled face and heard my aunt say, “The doctor thinks she’s going to live.” And I tried to say a prayer for that, tried to picture a God you could ask for something good like that.

  Late that night the three of us sat at the table in Aunt Elaine’s kitchen and ate Chinese food we’d bought on the way home. Sands had taken a shower. He and Aunt Elaine were drinking beer; I had a glass of Coke. After a while Aunt Elaine got up and poured some beer into another glass and set it in front of me and I took a sip and held it in my mouth a moment before swallowing. As he had been from the time he’d carried my mother into the emergency room, Sands was like a statue of a man, barely speaking. I had a few bites of chicken wings and a few sips of the beer but it was hard for me to eat then. Part of it was because of my mother, but I also had a sense, from my aunt’s silence, and from Sands’s, that there was something else in the air around us. I waited, and waited, and wouldn’t let myself ask. At last Aunt Elaine said, “Your father was stopped on the highway for speeding. When the police saw the blood in the truck they thought something about him that isn’t so, and they arrested him.”

  “Okay,” I said. I had suspected it was something like that. It was as if some other stream of knowledge that had nothing to do with words was already inside me.

  A memory came over me then of my father walking with me up to the north end of Waldrup Road, to the state park line there. This was before Ronald Merwin lived in the only other house on that section of road and before Pastor Schect had come into our lives. I was five or six. My father knew a trail there that led to a very small pond. It was a hot day. He let me take off my clothes and swim and when I came out—naked and cool and happy—he took off his shirt and dried me with it. I remembered how he’d kept his head turned away and then left the shirt over my shoulders so I wouldn’t shiver.

  Sands ate the Chinese food slowly, bite after bite, as if he was very hungry. He didn’t talk and couldn’t make eye contact with me. Aunt Elaine said that she knew it was hard to lose a mother—she’d lost her own mother, too, a long time ago—but I could tell she was only trying not to say anything bad. Very late, Sands said he had to go, and Aunt Elaine asked him to stay and sleep there on the couch but he didn’t want to. “I’m going home to pray a little,” he said. “After a day like this.” We all stood up. Sands hugged me against him for the first time, and hugged and kissed his mother, and then he asked for another blanket for the seat and went out the door and we listened to his truck starting up.

  I cleaned up the food scraps and brought the glasses to the sink in a kind of trance. Aunt Elaine came into the kitchen and put a hand on my shoulder and turned me around. “You come and get me in the night if you want to,” she said. “Think of a name for the baby if you can. Think of a good name for your sister.”

  Thirty

  For a while after that terrible day, we didn’t work on the cathedral. We buried my mother in a cemetery in Watsonboro, without delay and without any church service or any friends in attendance. My father couldn’t be there. It seemed wrong to me, to have a human being go into the ground with so few people watching. I half hoped that someone—even Mrs. Jensen from the 112 Store or a person from Pastor Schect’s church—might suddenly appear as my mother’s casket was being lowered into the ground, but no one did.

  The baby had to remain in the hospital for several weeks, and I went to see her whenever I could. Aunt Elaine let me choose the name. Lillian was what I decided on, after a lot of thought, because I liked the music of it, and liked the nickname she’d have, Lily, and because I didn’t want the girl to have a name that was connected to anyone—not my mother, my father, my aunt, or anyone we knew. I wanted her to have a fresh start in life and not be linked to anything I had lived through or anything about my parents. That was foolish, probably—she was born with so much of my mother and father in her, so much of their confusion and stubbornness. I have seen that over the years. I have lived in the knowledge of it and dealt with the trouble from it. But that was the way I felt at the time.

  The other thing I felt then—this might seem strange but it is true—was an overwhelming sense of relief. I find now that when I think of my mother, I picture a darkness, as if the center of her was a shadow. Even then, before I knew some of the things she’d done on her rides in the country with my father, I thought of her that way. I’ve met plenty of people now whose mothers were loving, caring, giving souls, and I’ve seen, in Sands, how the gift of a mother like that echoes down through the generations, deep in the hidden inner life of sons and daughters. With every ounce of my strength I have tried to be a mother like that.

  But my own mother was a dark ghost who had rare sparkles of tenderness. The rest of the time she sucked the world into herself and turned it to ash. Not that my father was so much better, but in him at least there was a simplemindedness that could occasionally look like compassion. He wasn’t so eager to raise his hand when Pastor Schect asked for a child to be faced. He let it happen, yes, but he wasn’t eager for it to happen. He did evil things, and he would pay for doing them, as he should. But my mother had some other dimension to her, and in the deepest part of me I knew that.

  In the days after her burial, I sometimes found myself wondering if she would pay for the harm she’d done. And if so, how? What did Sands’s kindly God do with a spirit like that?

  Two days after my mother was buried, with Lily still in the hospital, I was sitting on the porch of my aunt’s house when Aunt Elaine came outside with a newspaper clutched in her two hands. She didn’t sit down. She said, “There’s something in here about your father being arrested. I didn’t know if you wanted to read it or not, honey. It’s not easy to read. We can talk about it afterward if you want, but I won’t say anything unless you do, okay? If you don’t want to talk about it for now, I understand. If I can, I’ll try to make it so people don’t come here, and no one calls you, but I might not be able to.”

  My aunt handed over the newspaper and retreated into the house. For a long time I sat holding it and not looking at it, watching people go past on the sidewalk, studying the leaves to see if they were turning yet, smelling the end of summer in the air and feeling a thin film of sweat forming on my palms because that stream of knowledge was working again, and I had a good idea what the article might say. I knew they wouldn’t have kept my father so long just for speeding, or just for having blood on the seat of his truck. At last I took up the paper and opened it. I read the first part of the article, which was on the right-hand side of the front page, and then, after thinking about what I’d read and building up my courage, I turned to a page inside and read the rest. There was a photograph of my father there, taken at the police station, but not one of my mother.

  When I finished, I left the newspaper on the porch, went to my room, and closed the door. I lay down on the bed, faceup, and I began to weep, trying not to make any sound my aunt could hear. I wept for a long time, the tears streaming down and into my ears, and my body trembling and the fingers of both hands clutching the fabric of the quilt. On and on it went, as if all the trouble and pain inside me had turned to liqui
d and was pouring out my eyes. When my aunt came to the door and knocked, I tried to stop myself from crying and be as quiet as a girl sleeping, but I couldn’t do it. Aunt Elaine called my name, twice; I didn’t answer. She knocked again later and asked through the door if I was hungry, but I didn’t answer then either. When I finally stopped crying, I fell into a swamp of thoughts. I pulled out a hundred memories and turned them this way and that in my mind. My parents leaving on their overnight outings. My mother holding the knife and coming for me in the woods. The way she could work my father and work him until she convinced him to do what she wanted. The different looks I could see on my father’s face. The times he had talked to me kindly, taken me into the woods and taught me things, taken me to Weedon’s. The times there had been some peacefulness in the house. The things that had been said at Pastor Schect’s church and the hunger on his face when he came across our threshold. I fell asleep with my clothes on and had the most terrible dreams: girls’ bodies broken into pieces and scattered in the trees, and then a longer nightmare in which I was alone in a house like Aunt Elaine’s, unable to move, and it was dark and there was the sound of footsteps out front. I awoke in my small dark room, shivering. I sat there for a moment, running my eyes over the ceiling and walls, then I went to the kitchen, made myself a piece of toast, and sat there with the light on, looking at it.

  The next day I wandered around the yard in a stupor, replaying the memories again and again, searching through them. When people from the local newspaper and the TV stations came and parked in front of the house and started pointing their cameras at me over the fence, my aunt called me inside. We stayed in the kitchen with the front door locked, and she finally had to call the police to get the reporters to stay off the lawn. She waited until the end of the day to ask if I wanted to talk about it.