“You know how you said that it costs a lot to love someone?” I asked quietly.
He looked at me confused for a moment, but then said, “The price we pay. Yes.”
“Well, it seems like God charges some people more.”
“You mean like you and your father?”
I wiped my nose. “And Mike and Chad. They loved each other the best. Better than anyone else around here. And people hated them.”
Reverend Hunter glanced up at the altar. I thought I saw him nod to Jesus before he looked down at his hands again. “I don’t know, Apron. The fact is, tolerance is something we could all use more of.” He looked at me with a small smile. “And sometimes it takes a child to remind us of that.”
“I’m not a child anymore,” I said, clenching my teeth more than I meant to.
He dropped his eyes off me. “Yes. I know that, too. You’ve had to grow up much faster than most of your friends.”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t have any friends now. Chad and Mike were my last ones. But instead, I looked up.
“Why didn’t he ever save anyone, Reverend Hunter?”
“Jesus?”
I nodded.
“Well he saves all of us, every day, Apron. You, me, your mother, Chad.”
“No, he doesn’t. He couldn’t even save himself.”
“Oh, but he did,” Reverend Hunter said, his voice getting smooth and preachy. “He overcame his fear. By not resisting death, he showed us how to overcome our own fears and choose the opposite.”
“What’s that?”
“Love. The opposite of fear is love, and every minute of every day, we choose between the two.”
It was kind of the same as my free verse poem.
“So how come we always have to see him up there? Stuck like that.”
“Oh, he came down, Apron,” Reverend Hunter said sounding worried that I didn’t know that.
I looked over at him.
“Yes,” he nodded at me. “Look at all these pictures of Jesus back in Heaven.” Reverend Hunter gestured around to the stained glass windows, some high and some low.
“You mean that’s him after?” I squinted at the pictures of Jesus with rosy cheeks and thorny crowns, smiling and holding his hands out to people, offering things.
“Yes, Apron,” Reverend Hunter said, surprised. “Maybe you could ask your grandmother to bring you to Sunday School. We have an excellent one you know, for chil-, young ladies just your age.”
He looked at his watch and stood.
“Come next weekend, Apron. We’ll talk about it more. I’m sorry about your friend. And your mother, of course.”
I waved and watched him go, then went back to looking around at all the Jesuses up on the walls and inside those windows—everywhere. And each one of them looking just like Mike.
51
Soror
Sister
The rain started after I had biked all the way up to Route 88 and back, twice. Chad and Mike’s going-away party was tomorrow and M still wasn’t home.
I put on my raincoat and walked down to the rocks to watch Sea Glass Cave disappear under the high tide right before my eyes. Every once in a while, it smelled like seaweed left out of the icebox for too long. I picked up a few clam shells on the way back, which I had started putting around my new rose bush.
I was laying down the thirteenth one, upside down so they looked like white stones, when I heard the phone ring. I stood, but stopped when the ring cut off. My dad had been at his lobster reading the paper the last time I saw him.
And then, just when I took a step back to count how many more shells I was going to need to finish the circle, the screen door slammed shut.
“Apron,” my dad said at the top of the porch stairs. “We have to go.”
“Where?” I asked looking up at him, drops of rain stinging my eyes.
“To the hospital. Margie’s in labor.”
I looked at the unfinished circle and tried to think. She wasn’t having that little whatever until the end of September. I looked up at my dad. “But I’m not even back in school yet.”
“I know. But something’s happened and I need you.”
I waited for him to tell me why he needed me. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “Now, Apron,” and started down the stairs. Light raindrops landed on top of his red head and stayed there like tiny bubbles. “Right now.”
Things moved fast when we got into the hospital. My dad led me straight into the elevator. Everywhere, people were walking fast, squeaking loudly on the wet floor. The elevator was full of people, all of them taller than me, except one: a little boy with no hair, and no raincoat on either.
I smiled at the boy, but he was too busy speeding his plastic lobster boat up and down the wall. So I hoped he had Nurse Silvia for a nurse and looked away.
When the elevator stopped on the seventh floor, my dad nudged me and we stepped off. I pulled my hood down and looked around, but my dad was already walking.
I ran after him until we came to a set of doors that I had never seen before. Maternity it said on the wall. All this time, I hadn’t realized that babies were being born right above my mom. Maybe, if I had listened hard enough, I might have heard a cry.
My dad pulled open the door and we walked in. Pictures of babies in duck shirts and fancy hats, smiling big and wet, were everywhere. In between them, the walls were painted with storks, bags hanging from their beaks. After a few more corners, my dad walked to the nurse station and leaned over it, whispering to a nurse back there.
“Apron,” someone said from the other side of the room. Nurse Silvia. She wasn’t in her nurse uniform, just some plain black pants and a light brown shirt. She stood and walked over to me. I hadn’t seen her since M’s wedding day.
“Hi,” she said. Her lips were shellacked with brown lip gloss.
“Hi.”
Two men were sitting together a few seats down reading magazines and another man was lying across a row of chairs with a sweater over his head. I looked at my dad. His arms were moving around while he talked. Then he groaned and stepped back and a nurse with gray hair stood up. I didn’t recognize her. “She doesn’t want you in there, Mr. Bramhall. I’m sorry,” the nurse said with her arms crossed.
“It’s my baby,” my dad said.
“I understand that, Mr. Bramhall,” the nurse said dropping her arms. “We’re trying to help you keep that baby of yours.”
My dad stood still for a second, but then took off to the right, around the nurse station and in through some doors. I started running after him, but Nurse Silvia grabbed my arm. “You can’t go back there,” she said.
I turned my burning face to her. “Why, because I’m a kid?”
“No,” she said looking at me with her soft brown eyes. “She doesn’t want anyone in there, not even your father.” Nurse Silvia spoke English so much better than M that I had to keep reminding myself she was from Brazil.
“What happened?” I asked.
Nurse Silvia looked over to the door where my dad had disappeared and then back to me. “They need to get the baby out right away.”
“Why?”
“Come,” Nurse Silvia said waving me toward the chairs where she had been sitting. They were just as scratchy as they had been before, one floor down.
She started from the beginning, quietly, so no one else would hear: M had been away with Suzanna, visiting one of their nurse friends in Vermont who was going to rotate with Suzanna at the end of the month.
“Are you leaving, too?” For some reason I didn’t want her to say yes.
“I’m not sure yet,” she said looking down. I looked down, too. You could tell there used to be bright orange and yellow half-circles woven into the rug once, but now they were mostly just different colors of gray, faded like Mrs. Weller’s slippers.
But anyway, Nurse Silvia said, this morning, Suzanna heard a crash and a moan and when she went to check on M, she found her on the floor holding her bump, a chair k
nocked over next to her on the floor.
“A moan?” I asked, pulling away from her. “Like a cat?”
“I don’t know that, Apron,” Nurse Silvia said.
But I did.
“All I know,” she continued, “is that Marguerite told Suzanna she had tripped over a chair on the way to the bathroom, but was fine. Then driving home, Marguerite started cramping and by the time they got back to Portland, Marguerite couldn’t even sit up so Suzanna brought her here. And now she needs to have the baby right away.”
“How did my dad find out?”
Nurse Silvia crossed her legs and looked down at her lap. “I called him.”
I smiled at her, but she didn’t see me.
And then my dad came back out through those doors with another nurse, this one short and fat, but nicer looking than the gray-haired one. They stopped and Nurse Silvia and I both turned in our seats to watch them.
“Because, Mr. Bramhall. It’s too risky. The baby’s already in distress,” the nurse said. She wasn’t as nice as she looked.
“But it’s my right.”
The two men looked up from their magazines when he said that. And then listened while the nurse told him that, no, actually, it wasn’t his right.
“Look,” she said. “I understand your position, Mr. Bramhall. But you’re not coming in. Doctor’s orders.”
The nurse turned and disappeared through the doors again. My dad stayed looking at the wall, clenching his teeth. I locked down my stomach because whenever his freckles popped out like that, something was going to happen.
As fast as lightning, my dad slammed his fist against the wall hard enough for a picture of a pudgy face with a wet smile to fall off and crash on the rug. Nurse Silvia squeaked in her seat next to me. And out the corner of my eye, I saw that sleeping man’s head spring up, the sweater halfway off his face. But I stayed exactly where I was. Even after my dad dropped his forehead onto the wall and breathed and then picked up that frame and hung it up again, I didn’t move a muscle. Not even the tiniest ones that were connected to my blink.
After he turned away from the picture, he put the hand he used to slam the wall with in his pocket and looked over at us. He took a few steps, then stopped. “I’m going to take a walk around the block,” he said, to all of us—even the two men sitting together and the one man sitting up with the sweater on his chest now. He nodded a stay put look to me. I nodded back.
A little later, after the two magazine-reading men had been waved in through the doors by a happy blond nurse, and Nurse Silvia had gone down to Pediatrics before her shift started and brought me back a puzzle to work on, my dad returned with his newspaper and some french fries and a lemonade for me.
“Anyone come out for us?” he asked, looking down at me on the floor, sitting in a middle split with almost the whole world between my legs. Hawaii and most of Russia were missing and when I figured out where Brazil was, I threw those pieces back into the box. “No,” I shook my head, watching him sit. I thought I was still too sad about Chad to eat, but after the first speck of salt exploded onto my tongue, I didn’t stop chewing until the paper box was empty.
Finally, when my legs felt like they had grown roots, the nice-looking mean nurse came out of the doors and walked up to us.
“The procedure is over,” she said.
My dad let the newspaper fall off his lap when he stood. “Can I see her?” he asked, extra nicely this time.
“No,” the nurse said, turning. “Not yet. But I’ll come back when you can.”
My dad took a step closer to her. “Is she going to make it?”
The nurse glanced back at him. “You’ll have to talk to the doctor, Mr. Bramhall.”
“Please,” my dad groaned from his chest, the way Nutter begged when Mrs. Weller tried to make him sleep in his doghouse. “Is she going to make it?”
The nurse stopped and turned around to face him, “Fifty-fifty,” she said quietly. Then she disappeared through the doors again.
My dad squeezed his head in his palms, then shook out the hand he had hit the wall with and sat down again, stepping on top of the newspaper when he did, ripping it. That sleeping man had left for a while but was back now, lying in the same spot with the sweater back over his face.
“Dad,” I said carefully. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Apron. These nurses won’t tell me anything.” He slumped back.
“Is M?” I said, but stopped. Then I took a deep breath and started all over again. “Is Margie going to be all right?” Her name tasted like sour milk.
My dad looked at me with his forehead squeezed together. “Margie?” he said sitting up. “It’s the baby we’re talking about. She’s ten weeks early, Apron. She’s a preemie.”
“A preemie?” I pulled my knees up, destroying all of Africa.
“Yes,” he said, looking away and staring at something. “I sat right there, too,” he said pointing to the man with the sweater across his head. “When they came out to tell me about you.”
I looked over and smiled. “Really? You sat there the whole time?”
“They wouldn’t let the husbands in back then. I told your mother I was going to pay one of the nurses twenty bucks to videotape it for me.” He smiled, thinking about it. “She told me she’d cram the thing down my neck if I did.”
My dad got lost in his remembering and I didn’t want to interrupt it.
I looked down at the world again, like the way God must do every day when he wakes up and looks out his window. From here, it seemed like all you really needed to do was stay on the green parts not to drown. You couldn’t see all the other millions of places just waiting for you to fall in.
After a few more moments, I lifted myself up next to my dad. And we sat like that, the blood finding its way back into my legs, while outside, the sky flashed.
It took a while for the thunder to come, but when it did, the bangs were so loud it sounded like someone’s room was blowing up above us. Outside the window, if you watched long enough, you could see the whole sky light up before the next crash. My dad didn’t look up once, though, so I watched it alone.
52
Fac ut vivas.
Get a life.
A doctor was standing above us. For a few blinks, I thought he was one of Chad’s friends. But then he said, “Dennis?”
“Yuh,” my dad answered, rubbing his eyes and standing. We had both been asleep for a while, you could tell by the sour ball in my stomach.
“You can see her now.”
“Great,” my dad nodded, looking at me then back to the doctor. “Can my daughter come, too?”
I knew what that doctor was going to say. But he said, “yes,” instead.
When I stood, my legs were so wobbly my dad had to grab my arm. We walked like that through the doors. It smelled like Band-Aids mixed in with chicken broth in the hallway. Doors were lined along the walls, all of them shut with Delivery written across them. But further down there was another one that said Pediatric ICU with a long window after it. The doctor stopped in front of it, tapping his finger lightly on the glass.
“Over there,” he pointed. “In that incubator.”
My dad and I put our hands up to the window but there were so many incubators in there, we couldn’t tell which one he was pointing to.
“Which one?” my dad asked.
The doctor tapped on the window harder this time and a thin nurse looked up. Her face changed when she saw it was the doctor, pointing and waving. He dropped his hands, but my dad and I kept ours flat on the glass. We watched the nurse walk over to an incubator by the wall and start wheeling it closer, through the baby traffic, until she stopped below us. Then she turned the whole thing around.
Under the blanket, there was a bump the same size as a loaf of banana bread, with a purple teardrop for a nose and two puffy wrinkles for eyes.
“Three pounds, two ounces,” the doctor said. “She’s stabilized.”
“Stabilized,”
my dad repeated quietly. “She looks all right, right?”
She looked like she was made out of play dough.
“She’s okay, Dennis. Better than she should be really. Abrupt deliveries don’t always end up like this. We got lucky.”
But I didn’t even know what they were talking about. Lucky. That purple banana bread of a baby had tubes sticking out of it everywhere. I stepped back.
The doctor told us to go home now, there was no need to stay.
My dad turned to him and said, “What about Margie?”
“She’s fine, Dennis. Tired, but fine. And still not talking.”
My dad shook his head.
“I’ve seen it before,” the doctor said. “From a steering wheel. The mother was driving and she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.”
“Did the baby make it?” my dad asked. Way in the distance I heard another crash in the sky.
The doctor looked at me and then him. “For a little while,” he said.
I stared down at the old gray half-moons on the rug. The doctor told us again that we might as well go home. My dad sighed, “Thanks, Doctor,” but stuck his hands up on the glass again.
The doctor started to walk away. Until my dad said, “Hey. Look at that,” quietly, like he might be watching a butterfly land on a petal.
The doctor turned back to the glass and I stepped forward again. The nurse had lifted up the pink cap slightly, and underneath it there was a flash, a tiny taste, of red.
53
Tempus fugit.
Time flies.
In the morning, when I opened my eyes, a long triangle of sun was covering most of my bookshelf again. The thunder and lightning from last night were gone. I closed my heavy eyelids. I missed Chad in the same way that I missed my mom now: always.
I turned to my clock radio. 11:09.
I threw off my sheets. I had a good-bye party to get to. I pulled on my Avon lady dress and slid into my flip-flops.