Bride and Booker ran to the Jaguar and followed the ambulance.
Once Queen was admitted, Bride spent the days with her, Booker the nights, three of which passed before Queen opened her eyes. Head bandaged, its contents drugged, she recognized neither of her rescuers. All they were able to do was watch the tubes attached to the patient, one clear as glass turning like a rainforest vine, others thin as telephone wire, all secondary to the white clematis bloom covering the soft gurgle from her lips.
Lines of primary colors bled across the screen above the hospital bed. Transparent bags of what looked like flat Champagne dripped into a vine feeding Queen’s flaccid arm. Unable to rise to a bedpan, she had to be scoured, oiled and rewrapped—all of which Bride, not trusting the indifferent hands of the nurse, did herself as tenderly as possible. And she bathed her one section at a time, making sure the lady’s body was covered in certain areas before and after cleansing. She left Queen’s feet untouched because in the evening when Booker relieved her he insisted, like a daily communicant at Easter, on the duty of assuming that act of devotion. He maintained the pedicure, soaped then rinsed Queen’s feet, finally massaging them slowly, rhythmically, with a lotion that smelled like heather. He did the same for Queen’s hands, all the time cursing himself for the animosity he had felt during their last conversation.
Neither one spoke during those ablutions and, except for Bride’s occasional humming, the quiet served as the balm they both needed. They worked together like a true couple, thinking not of themselves, but of helping somebody else. Sitting among other people in a hospital waiting room with nothing to do but worry was an ordeal. But so was staring helplessly at the patient noting every stir, breath or shift of the prone body. After three days of waiting broken by what acts of comfort they could provide, Queen spoke, her voice a rough, unintelligible croak through the oxygen mask. Then late one evening the oxygen mask was removed and Queen whispered, “Am I going to be all right?”
Booker smiled.
“No question. No question at all.” He leaned in and kissed her nose.
Queen licked her dry lips, closed her eyes again and began to snore.
When Bride returned to relieve him and he told her what had happened, they celebrated by eating breakfast together in the hospital cafeteria. Bride ordered cereal, Booker orange juice.
“What about your job?” Booker raised his eyebrows.
“What about it?”
“Just asking, Bride. Breakfast conversation, you know?”
“I don’t know about my job and don’t care. I’ll get another one.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. And you? Logging forever?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Loggers move on after they destroy a forest.”
“Well, don’t worry about me.”
“But I do.”
“Since when?”
“Since you broke a beer bottle over my head.”
“Sorry.”
“No kidding. Me too.”
They chuckled.
Away from Queen’s hospital bed, relieved about her progress and in a fairly relaxed mood, they amused themselves with banter like an old couple.
Suddenly, as though he’d forgotten something, Booker snapped his fingers. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and took out Queen’s gold earrings. They had been removed to bandage Queen’s head. All this time they had been in a little plastic bag tucked in the drawer of her bedside table.
“Take these,” he said. “She prized them and would want you to wear them while she recovers.”
Bride touched her earlobes, felt the return of tiny holes and teared up while grinning.
“Let me,” said Booker. Carefully he inserted the wires into Bride’s lobes, saying, “Good thing she was wearing them when the place caught fire because nothing at all is left. No letters, address book, nothing. All burned. So I called my mother and asked her to get in touch with Queen’s kids.”
“Can she contact them?” asked Bride swerving her head gently back and forth the better to relish the gold discs. Everything was coming back. Almost everything. Almost.
“Some,” Booker replied. “A daughter in Texas, medical student. She’ll be easy to find.”
Bride stirred her oatmeal, tasted a spoonful, found it cold. “She told me she doesn’t see any of them, but they send her money.”
“They all hate her for some reason or another. I know she abandoned some of them to marry other men. Lots of other men. And she didn’t or couldn’t take the kids with her. Their fathers made sure of that.”
“I think she loves them though,” said Bride. “Their photographs were all over the place.”
“Yeah, well the motherfucker who murdered my brother had all his victims’ photos in his fucking den.”
“Not the same, Booker.”
“No?” He looked out the window.
“No. Queen loves her children.”
“They don’t think so.”
“Oh, stop it,” said Bride. “No more stupid arguments about who loves who.” She pushed the cereal bowl to the center of the table and took a sip of his orange juice. “Come on, hateful. Let’s go back and see how she’s doing.”
Standing on either side of Queen’s bed, they were extremely happy to hear her speaking loudly and clearly.
“Hannah? Hannah?” Queen was staring at Bride and breathing hard. “Come here, baby. Hannah?”
“Who’s Hannah?” asked Bride.
“Her daughter. The medical student.”
“She thinks I’m her daughter? God. Drugs, medicine, I guess. That stuff confuses her.”
“Or focuses her,” said Booker. He lowered his voice. “There was a thing with Hannah. Rumor in the family was that Queen ignored or dismissed the girl’s complaint about her father—the Asian one, I believe, or the Texan. I don’t know. Anyway she said he fondled her and Queen refused to believe it. The ice between them never melted.”
“It’s still on her mind.”
“Deeper than her mind.” Booker sat in a chair near the foot of Queen’s bed listening to her persistent call—a whisper now—for Hannah. “Now I think of it, it explains why she told me to hang on to Adam, to keep him close.”
“But Hannah isn’t dead.”
“In a way she is, at least to her mother. You saw that photo display she had on her wall. Takes up all the space. It’s like a roll call. Most of the pictures are of Hannah though—as a baby, a teenager, a high school graduate, winning some prize. More like a memorial than a gallery.”
Bride moved behind Booker’s chair and began to massage his shoulders. “I thought those photos were of all her children,” she said.
“Yeah, some are. But Hannah reigns.” He rested his head on Bride’s stomach and let the tension he didn’t know was in him drift away.
Following a few days of cheer-inspiring recovery, Queen was still confused but talking and eating. Her speech was hard to follow since it seemed to consist of geography—the places she had lived in—and anecdotes addressed to Hannah.
Bride and Booker were pleased with the doctor’s assessment: “She’s doing much better. Much.” They relaxed and began to plan what to do when Queen was released. Get a place where all three were together? A big mobile home? At least until Queen could take care of herself, without delving too closely, they assumed the three of them would live together.
Slowly, slowly their bright plans for the immediate future darkened. The carnival-colored lines on the screen began to wiggle and fall, their sliding punctuated by the music of emergency bells. Booker and Bride took shallow breaths as Queen’s blood count dropped and her temperature rose. A vicious hospital-borne virus, as sneaky and evil as the flame that had destroyed her home, was attacking the patient. She thrashed a bit then held her arms raised high, her fingers clawing, reaching over and over for the rungs of a ladder that only she could see. Then all of it stopped.
Twelve hours later Queen was dead. One eye was still open, so Bride doubted the fact. It wa
s Booker who closed it, after which he closed his own.
—
During the three days waiting until Queen’s ashes were ready, they argued over the choice of an urn. Bride wanted something elegant in brass; Booker preferred something environmentally friendly that could be buried and in time enrich the soil. When they discovered there was no graveyard within thirty-five miles, or a suitable place in the trailer park for her burial, they settled for a cardboard box to hold ashes that would be strewn into the stream. Booker insisted on performing the rites alone while Bride waited in the car. She watched him carefully, anxiously, as he walked away toward the river, holding the carton of ashes in his right elbow and his trumpet dangling from the fingers of his left. These last days, thought Bride, while they were figuring out what to do, were congenial because their focus was on a third person they both loved. What would happen now, she wondered, when or if there was just the two of them again? She didn’t want to be without him, ever, but if she had to she was certain it would be okay. The future? She would handle it.
Although heartfelt, Booker’s ceremony to honor his beloved Queen was awkward: the ashes were lumpy and difficult to toss and his musical tribute, his effort at “Kind of Blue,” was off-key and uninspired. He cut it short and, with a sadness he had not felt since Adam’s death, threw his trumpet into the gray water as though the trumpet had failed him rather than he had failed it. He watched the horn float for a while then sat down on the grass, resting his forehead in his palm. His thoughts were stark, skeletal. It never occurred to him that Queen would die or even could die. Much of the time, while he tended her feet and listened to her breath he was thinking about his own unease. How disrupted his life had become, what with caring for an aunt he adored and who was now dead due to her own carelessness—who the hell burns bedsprings these days? How acute his predicament had become by the sudden return of a woman he once enjoyed, who had changed from one dimension into three—demanding, perceptive, daring. And what made him think he was a talented trumpet player who could do justice to a burial or that music could be his language of memory, of celebration or the displacement of loss? How long had childhood trauma hurtled him away from the rip and wave of life? His eyes burned but were incapable of weeping.
Queen’s remains, touched by a rare welcome breeze, drifted farther and farther down-current. The sky, too sullen to keep its promise of sunlight, sent hot moisture instead. Feeling unbearable loneliness as well as profound regret, Booker stood up and joined Bride in the Jaguar.
—
Inside the car the quiet was thick, brutal, probably because there were no tears and nothing important to say. Except for one thing and one thing only.
Bride took a deep breath before breaking into the deathly silence. Now or never, she thought.
“I’m pregnant,” she said in a clear, calm voice. She looked straight ahead at the well-traveled road of dirt and gravel.
“What did you say?” Booker’s voice cracked.
“You heard me. I’m pregnant and it’s yours.”
Booker gazed at her a long time before looking away toward the river where a smattering of Queen’s ashes still floated but the trumpet had disappeared. One by fire, one by water, two of what he had so intensely loved gone, he thought. He couldn’t lose a third. With just a hint of a smile he turned around to look again at Bride.
“No,” he said. “It’s ours.”
Then he offered her the hand she had craved all her life, the hand that did not need a lie to deserve it, the hand of trust and caring for—a combination that some call natural love. Bride stroked Booker’s palm then threaded her fingers through his. They kissed, lightly, before leaning back on the headrests to let their spines sink into the seats’ soft hide of cattle. Staring through the windshield, each of them began to imagine what the future would certainly be.
No lonesome wandering child with a fishing pole passed by and glanced at the adults in the dusty gray car. But if one had, he or she might have noticed the pronounced smiles of the couple, how dreamy their eyes were, but would not care a bit what caused that shine of happiness.
A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath.
So they believe.
Sweetness
I prefer this place—Winston House—to those big, expensive nursing homes outside the city. Mine is small, homey, cheaper, with twenty-four-hour nurses and a doctor who comes twice a week. I’m only sixty-three—too young for pasture—but I came down with some creeping bone disease, so good care is vital. The boredom is worse than the weakness or the pain, but the nurses are lovely. One just kissed me on the cheek before congratulating me when I told her I was going to be a grandmother. Her smile and her compliments were fit for someone about to be crowned.
I had showed her the note on blue paper that I got from Lula Ann—well, she signed it “Bride,” but I never pay that any attention. Her words sounded giddy. “Guess what, S. I am so so happy to pass along this news. I am going to have a baby. I’m too too thrilled and hope you are too.” I reckon the thrill is about the baby, not its father, because she doesn’t mention him at all. I wonder if he is as black as she is. If so, she needn’t worry like I did. Things have changed a mite from when I was young. Blue blacks are all over TV, in fashion magazines, commercials, even starring in movies.
There is no return address on the envelope. So I guess I’m still the bad parent being punished forever till the day I die for doing the well-intended and, in fact, necessary way I brought her up. I know she hates me. As soon as she could she left me all alone in that awful apartment. She got as far away from me as she could: dolled herself up and got some big-time job in California. The last time I saw her she looked so good, I forgot about her color. Still, our relationship is down to her sending me money. I have to say I’m grateful for the cash because I don’t have to beg for extras like some of the other patients. If I want my own fresh deck of cards for solitaire I can get it and not need to play with the dirty, worn one in the lounge. And I can buy my special face cream. But I’m not fooled. I know the money she sends is a way to stay away and quiet down the little bit of conscience she’s got left.
If I sound irritable, ungrateful, part of it is because underneath is regret. All the little things I didn’t do or did wrong. I remember when she had her first period and how I reacted. Or the times I shouted when she stumbled or dropped something. How I screamed at her to keep her from tattling on the landlord—the dog. True. I was really upset, even repelled by her black skin when she was born and at first I thought of…No. I have to push those memories away—fast. No point. I know I did the best for her under the circumstances. When my husband ran out on us, Lula Ann was a burden. A heavy one but I bore it well.
Yes, I was tough on her. You bet I was. After she got all that attention following the trial of those teachers, she became hard to handle. By the time she turned twelve going on thirteen I had to be even tougher. She was talking back, refusing to eat what I cooked, primping her hair. When I braided it, she’d go to school and unbraid it. I couldn’t let her go bad. I slammed the lid and warned her of the names she’d be called. Still, some of my schooling must have rubbed off. See how she turned out? A rich career girl. Can you beat it?
Now she’s pregnant. Good move, Lula Ann. If you think mothering is all cooing, booties and diapers you’re in for a big shock. Big. You and your nameless boyfriend, husband, pickup—whoever—imagine OOOH! A baby! Kitchee kitchee koo!
Listen to me. You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent.
Good luck and God help the child.
Toni Morrison, God Help the Child: A novel
(Series: # )
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