My mother looked at her watch. "This is as good a time as any, I guess. You're all right?" she said to Sister Evangeline.
"I'm popular," she said. "There'll be girls in and out of here all day. You two go."
So my mother and I headed off to the car. I didn't say anything on the walk over. I was superstitious. I believed that the secret was to do our talking in the car. Outside of the car we should remain as normal as possible, which is to say, not talk.
I got in on the driver's side, turned the key, and slipped into reverse.
"What are you doing?" my mother said. "The car isn't warm."
"Sorry." I could actually feel my heart beating faster. I checked both my mirrors and sat up straight. I waited until the idle dropped and then I slowly backed out of the garage. Then we were out in the bright field. I went all the way around without saying anything. I tried to look like someone who was concentrating hard on her driving.
"That's good," my mother said.
I went around another half field for good measure. "I've been thinking about your father," I said, keeping my eyes straight in front of me, my speed down.
"My father?"
"Well, yeah. I mean, he would have been my grandfather. I've been thinking about that. I was wondering what his name was."
"Calvin," my mother said.
"How old were you when he died?"
"Three, I guess." My mother straightened out her skirt with her hands. "I used to think about him a lot when I was growing up, when I was your age, but then I stopped. Sometimes, every now and then when I read about someone in the paper who died in a car accident, then I'll wonder about him." She stopped and shook her head. "This is a morbid topic of conversation to have during a driving lesson."
"Did your mother ever get married again?" Every word out of my mouth felt like a step farther out onto the ice. I kept thinking she would tell me to pull the car over and just get out. She would just take her history and her privacy back to the kitchen.
"My mother did get married, but not for a long time." She stopped and thought about it for a minute. "It was almost twenty years, I guess. I'd already left home. It was good for her, though. I think she was happier being married." She leaned her head on her hand.
What I wanted to know about the most was her mother, but I couldn't imagine her ever telling me anything about that. My mother stared out her window, watching the same things go by again and again. I wondered if she was thinking about her father.
"I used to drive a lot," my mother said.
"Where did you go?"
"Anyplace. That was never the point. I just liked going. I used to go anyplace that I could get to in a day."
She trailed off and was quiet for a while. I didn't so much care about my mother's driving, but I wanted her to keep talking. "Where was the best place you ever went?"
"I drove all the way to Carmel from San Diego once. That was pretty great. I rented a hotel room by myself and sat on the bed for about five minutes, and then I checked out and drove all night to get home again. It was a stupid thing to do. I was so tired by the time I came in. But I think about that hotel room all the time. It was so nice. There was a bed near the window and you could open the shutters and look at the ocean. Carmel-by-the-Sea, that's the full name of the town. Do you ever wonder why you remember some things so well and not others?"
"Sure," I said, but I never had.
"You asking about my father makes me think of that. I don't remember him, but I could tell you everything about this hotel room I stayed in for five minutes eighteen years ago. There was a wood floor with a blue braided rug. Brass bed, white chenille spread. It was room number twelve. Why in the world would I know that?"
I felt like she was really asking me, and I didn't know what to tell her. "Maybe it was a lot of fun," I said.
"It was," she said, looking out her window. "It was fun." We were quiet for a while, and I knew that pretty soon it was going to be over for the day, and maybe tomorrow she wouldn't be talking. I wanted her to tell me everything. "I've about had it with this field," my mother said. "I think it's time we branched out a little."
I stopped the car and turned to face her. "Where do you want to go?"
"I don't know," she said. "It doesn't really matter. Let's just get on the road."
"Road driving?"
"Sure." She reached over to me and for some reason I jumped back. It caught me off guard. "God, you're nervous," she said, and looped a piece of my hair behind my ear.
I pulled the car onto the dirt road that ran from my mother's house down to Saint Elizabeth's and out onto the Green River Parkway. We passed my father and I waved to him from my open window.
"I'm driving, Dad!" I called out, and he waved back.
I pulled up behind Saint Elizabeth's and stopped again. "Let's get Sister Evangeline," I said. "She never goes anyplace. Let's take her with us."
"Wait here," my mother said, and got out of the car. She ran up the front steps and I waited for her, the car idling. I was as happy at that moment as I could ever remember being in my life. I slapped the steering wheel with my palm and turned on the radio, but I couldn't get anything to come in.
Then my mother was there, holding Sister Evangeline in her arms like a bundle of laundry. Her arms were around my mother's neck. "Open the door," my mother said.
I got out and ran around to the other side of the car. Sister got in herself, and my mother leaned over and got her settled. Then my mother and I got back in. We were laughing, the way girls laugh when they're doing something bad. It wasn't bad, but it felt that way.
"Look at this," Sister Evangeline said as I pulled out onto the road. "Cecilia driving."
"You bet," I said.
"Where are we going?" she asked, leaning forward for an answer.
"Nowhere," my mother called back loudly so that the sound of her voice wouldn't all fly out the window and onto the road.
3
MY FATHER walked in the front door just as I was getting ready to go out. His face was covered in blood. His hands stayed at his eyes. He kept wiping them over and over again just to see for a second. His white shirt was dyed red, starting at the neck. It was soaking down, making the bib of his overalls a dark blue-brown. There was blood in his hair and on his shoes. He took one step inside the house, realized that he was getting blood on the floor, and stepped back out onto the porch. I didn't know whose blood it was at first. It didn't occur to me for a full minute that it could have been his.
"Dad?" I said, and held out my arms to him. He wiped his eyes again and again, trying to see me there. He cocked his head to one side. He looked like he almost remembered me. Like he couldn't quite place my face.
"Cecilia?" he said.
Then he fainted there on the porch. He didn't go over straight, he just sort of folded, sank to his knees and then to his hands and then fell over to one side. He turned over a chair on his way down, one that he'd been working on refinishing in the evenings. He'd been holding onto the back of it to help him stand up. It wasn't until my father said my name that I could really register what was going on, how bad it was. My father had never called me Cecilia in his life.
I started doing a million things at once. I squatted down beside him and then stood up again. I pulled his legs out from under him so he was lying flat on his back. I touched the top of his head. I ran inside and took three pillows off the sofa and put them under his head. I ran into the kitchen and then just stood there for a minute, looking around, trying to find something that would help. I looked at the teakettle and the potholders hanging over the stove. I looked at the tablecloth. I saw the blood on my fingers and wiped it off on my shorts. I got a glass of water. I took the dishtowel off the refrigerator door and wet it, then I started to go outside again. I came back and pulled the tablecloth off the table, sending the blue china sugar bowl flying halfway across the room. When it broke the sugar swept over the floor like a layer of frost.
I ran back to my father and put the glas
s of water beside him. The red was working its way across the pillows now, turning all the flowers and leaves a darker color. I wiped his face with the dishtowel. The blood had caked at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. His forehead was cut clean across in a straight line and the blood was still pulsing from the edges of the cut. I couldn't imagine where he had cut himself like this, if he had fallen and hit his head on the front steps, if there had been an accident. I lifted up his head in my hand. It was so much heavier than I thought it would have been and that's when I first realized I couldn't move him inside. My father was the one who picked people up. Always when a girl's time came and she felt she couldn't walk, my father carried her to the car. He carried me everywhere when I was little. I saw him picking up Sister Evangeline in her chair and moving her across the room like it was nothing. But who in the world could carry him? I slid the tablecloth under his head and wrapped it around like a towel, making it as tight as I could. Maybe it hurt him, because he raised up his head and opened his eyes a little.
"Lie still," I said, even though he wasn't trying to go anywhere.
"You all right?" he said.
I nodded. He was asking me because I was crying.
He took hold of my hand. "Get your mother," he said. But I just sat there, stupid. "Go," he said.
At the word go I was up like a shot, running down the front steps. I slipped on something wet and came down hard on the path, on my knees and one hand. The gravel dug into my skin and I tried to get up again. I was clawing at the steps to get up and then a second later was running on the goat trail that connects our house to Saint Elizabeth's. I was running as fast as I had ever run anywhere in my life. I wasn't wearing my shoes.
I came up the steps of the back porch and through the door like a shot. I came into the kitchen wild, out of breath, yelling for my mother.
"Cecilia!" Sister Evangeline said.
"Where's Mom!" My voice was so loud. It had to be loud enough to be heard over my breath.
"What's happened to you?"
"Dad fell," I said, though I didn't know if he had fallen. "Dad's hurt."
"Your mother isn't here." She stood up, shaky, and came to me. "She's gone with Mother Corinne and Sister Bernadette to take some girls to the doctor." She took my hand and turned it over, palm up. When she touched it I sucked my breath in. A pain went all the way up my arm. "Call an ambulance," she said.
I went to the phone by the door and dialed the hospital in Owensboro. We all knew the number. Girls had babies around here every day. We all knew the number by heart.
"I'm in Habit," I said when someone answered, but then I was crying and I couldn't make myself stop. Sister Evangeline took the phone from my hand.
"We're at Saint Elizabeth's," she said. "We need an ambulance." There was a pause and I looked at her. "Yes," she said and waited. "Yes." She put her hand over the receiver. "Can you drive there? He says it will be a lot faster if someone can drive him up."
"Mom's not here," I said.
"Can you drive there?" she said to me again.
I looked at her. Her face was clear. She was looking at me so hard that it made me calm down for a minute. "Yes, I can drive."
"She'll drive him there," Sister said into the phone. "Yes."
Sister Evangeline hung up the phone and put a hand on each of my arms. "Listen to me, Cecilia. You pull yourself together right now. You're the grown-up now. Do you understand me? No tears." She wiped beneath my eyes with her thumbs. "I'll wait for your mother. I'll send her up just as soon as she comes, but for right now it's on you."
I nodded at her.
"Go on now," she said. "Give your father my love."
I went out the kitchen door, fast but more careful, and who was standing there but Lorraine.
"Sweet Jesus," she said, looking pale herself.
"Come on," I said. "Help me."
We went up to the shed and I backed out the car. I did what my mother said. I looked behind me. I kept it straight. It was strange to feel the rubber pedals under my bare feet, and I curled my toes around the top of them. Lorraine sat beside me, looking at me like I was a maniac. "What's going on here?" she said.
"My father's been hurt," I said. "We have to take him to Owensboro."
"Hurt," she said. "Hurt like how?" She reached over to wipe off one of my knees with the hem of her skirt.
"He cut his head," I said.
"Oh," she said, sighing. "It's not like a heart attack or anything."
"No," I said, and felt better then for some reason, thinking of something worse that it wasn't. "Do you know how to drive?" I asked her, suddenly hopeful.
"No," she said. "Christ, don't you?"
"Yeah," I said.
I cut across the back pasture, driving through the dried creek bed where the spring used to be. I was too scared about other things to be scared about driving. I pulled the Dodge right up to the front steps and got out of the car. I left it running, the door wide open. Lorraine crawled over the bench seat and out my side. My father was still there. I don't know why this surprised me. I had been afraid for some reason that he'd be gone.
"Dad?" I said. I tried to kneel beside him but my knees hurt when they hit the wooden planks. I came up again then squatted down on my toes. The tablecloth was red in the front, but not all the way around. I took this to be a good sign. "Dad," I said again, "Lorraine's here."
"Hi, Son," she said. All of the girls called my father by his first name.
Dad's eyes blinked open and he smiled at me. "I'm feeling better," he said. "Hi, Lorraine," he said. He didn't look at her.
"You're going to have to help us get you in the car," I said. "Can you get up okay?" Not that I knew what I was going to do if he said no.
"Sure," he said, keeping still. "I just passed out. The sight of blood always gets to me, even when it's mine. I don't think it was anything so big." He sounded so conversational, chatty, like we were talking about baseball scores or something. "Is your mother here?"
"She'll be right behind us," I said. I looked up at Lorraine, who was holding onto the porch railing, looking sick.
"I'm not so good with blood myself," Lorraine said.
"Get over it," I hissed at her. "Come here, get on the other side of him." Lorraine came and stood on the other side of my father. She stared at me like an idiot. "Take his arm," I said.
I counted to three and then Lorraine and I pulled and Dad sat up. He touched his hand to his head. "I'll be fine," he said. We got him on his feet and over to the porch railing. We were only steadying him. We stood beside him, one on each side, and helped him down the steps. He put his arm on my shoulder and leaned into it with his hand. "Lie down in the backseat. Put your head up against the door." My father seemed so relieved once he was actually in the car. I got one of the couch pillows, one that wasn't as stained as the others, and leaned over the front seat and put it under his head.
"This is good," he said to me. "Everything will be fine now."
Lorraine got in on the passenger side and I closed my door. I remembered again that I didn't have any shoes on and thought for a minute about running upstairs for some, but I just wanted to go. I turned the car onto the dirt road and headed out past Saint Elizabeth's to the Green River Parkway.
Once you get on the parkway, it's pretty much a straight shot up to Owensboro, but I was used to driving with my mother. She told me when to speed up and slow down, when it was safe to go.
"You really shouldn't be driving, honey," my father said from the backseat.
"I thought you knew how to drive," Lorraine said. "Look, I'm going to have a baby—"
"Don't be stupid," I said to her. "I'm driving, aren't I?" I should have been nicer to Lorraine. The truth was, I needed her.
"She's a good driver," Dad said. He was coming around, I could tell by his voice. Dad had never driven with me before.
"What happened to you?" I said, glancing back at him in my rearview mirror. There were too many cars on the road. My hands were sw
eating. I thought there was a chance I would kill all of us, me and Dad, Lorraine and her baby.
"It was just dumb," he said. "I went into the basement without turning the lights on and I walked straight into a low beam. Forty years I've been going into that basement. You'd think I'd know where everything was by now."
"You cut your head at Saint Elizabeth's?" I couldn't believe this.
"In the basement," he repeated.
"And you walked all the way home? Why didn't you go upstairs and get help?"
"I didn't think it was that bad. I knew it was bleeding and I didn't want to walk in and scare one of the girls."
"That's so nice," Lorraine said.
"It is not nice!" I said. I was panicked. I saw my father walking across the back pasture, half blind. I saw him falling down in the grass, nowhere close to the house. I wanted to pull the car over to the side of the road and scream at both of them. "What if I hadn't been home?" I said. "You could have bled to death! You could have just lay there on the front porch all day." I tightened my hands around the steering wheel.
"Don't get so upset," my father said. "Nothing bad's happened."
But something terrible had happened. I was driving a car I wasn't so sure how to drive to a place I'd never driven to. I had seen my father covered in blood. I saw him fall down right in front of me. I saw that he was old and that I couldn't pick him up. I saw a way that he could die.
"I've never been to Owensboro before," Lorraine said. "I was sick the last time everybody went up for mass."
There were signs for the hospital. I didn't have any trouble finding it. I pulled into the emergency entrance, barely missing a parked car on my left side. There were men there waiting with a wheelchair. They didn't look like they were waiting for anyone in particular. One of the guys was sitting in it, smoking a cigarette. They helped my father in while Lorraine and I stood and watched. I gave one of them the car keys. I was happy to be rid of them.
"I love this hospital," my dad said. "This is where you were born."