Mr Hands

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Lucy felt as if she were folding in on herself; the pain was still screaming through her center, the nausea was still rising, and the shaking had only worsened. “I d-don’t know. I think I c-could maybe use some help.” Then came the dizziness.

  The next few minutes were a feverish blur: Mom’s voice, Mom’s hands helping her to sit, to move, then the smell of exhaust fumes and a strange man’s voice saying, “Is she gonna make it?” then a second pair of hands, hard and calloused and strong, helping her into the back seat, then motion, sick-making motion that caused her to leak all the more, so wet down there, so warm and wet so why did she feel so cold?...

  ...voices and images, people in a drunken pain-dream swarming around her...

  ...bright lights, other voices, other hands, squeaking wheels and faster motion, her clothes taken away, sterile smells, pain still there, still leaking, her legs gently lifted, ankles into cold stirrups, a needle in her arm, a plastic mask placed over her mouth, numbness, my baby, oh Mom, empty, empty, empty...

  * * *

  A previously undetected defect in the fetus was the explanation the doctors gave to her. They were all very nice and showed the proper amount of sympathy and concern but, despite their words of comfort and their patient explaining of all the medical jargon and Mom’s reassuring pats on her hand (“You can still try again, someday”), all she heard was Empty, empty, empty...

  * * *

  We don’t need to dwell too long on what actually happened, do we? The doctors’ explanation was—to coin a phrase—an old stand-by, an ace-in-the-hole, a backup used when the fact was they had no rational reason for what happened. Lucy was a young, strong, healthy woman with no physical or physiological abnormalities, no viruses, no environmental factors that could have contributed to the miscarriage—but of course you can’t tell such a thing to a young woman who’s just lost her first child, you can’t just shrug your shoulders, shake your head, and say, “I have no idea what caused this”; so you make an informed guess, you hypothesize and hope that will be enough.

  What happened was: when Ronald James Williamson lay his hands on Lucy, he felt a Hurting beyond any he’d encountered before, one so black and hopeless and filled with physical suffering he almost cried out from the sheer agony of it, and Knew that Lucy’s unborn child was, at a very young age, going to suffer a death that would be slow and terrifying and too horrific for any human being to face. He couldn’t allow that to happen, and so made his Wish to stop the Hurting.

  But there was more to it than that, some new facet to his power that Ronnie didn’t understand at the time; something about this incident felt different from the others, and it would be several years before this new facet made itself clear to him; he would, in fact, awaken at four in the morning, soaked in sweat, alone in a motel room somewhere in Kentucky, knowing that he had only a small handful of hours to get back to Cedar Hill and find Lucy Holcomb (for that would be her name then).

  Right now, though, we need to get back to Lucy.

  * * *

  She came back from the hospital dazed and tired, weak and enormously sad. She tried to remember if she had ever experienced such deep emotional pain before, then decided it didn’t matter. The loss was great and complete in the way only death is. For the first few days she couldn’t talk to anyone, but at the same time it hurt too much to be alone. She would just cry and cry without stopping; over this, she had no control. One of the clearest reminders that she was no longer pregnant was the speedy change her body went through. Within three days her breasts, once tender and swollen, were back to their normal size; her stomach, which had grown hard, was soft again. Her body was no longer preparing for the birth of a child: It was simple and blatant and cold. And then there was the bleeding. Her body would not let her forget. Mom and Aunt Eunice didn’t know how to help, and she didn’t know how to ask for it. They were much more comfortable talking about the physical and not the emotional side of the miscarriage. She needed to talk about both, but words seemed so pitifully inadequate to express her feelings. She understood the depth of the loss but realized she had never experienced the depth of the joy that should have been hers all along.

  One night she imagined the baby was still inside of her, and slept easier for the imagining.

  Mom had been right. It took exactly seven days for Dad to crumple. When he showed up on Eunice’s doorstep there were no apologies from him—the phrase “I’m sorry” had never been part of his vocabulary. He looked at Mom, then Lucy, and said, “You two coming home, or what?”

  He insisted on helping Lucy to the car. “You’re still pretty weak. I’ll not have people saying you made yourself worse on account I wouldn’t help out.”

  Things at home got better after that.

  Not a lot. Just a little.

  Sometimes Dad still whispered whore under his breath.

  But things were a little better.

  At least she was back home.

  * * *

  Although the child she’d lost was a boy, Lucy had always assumed she was carrying a girl. At no point during the three brief months (well, the ten brief weeks) she’d had a new life growing inside of her did she ever want to know the child’s sex; she wanted it to be a surprise.

  It had been a boy, but she kept telling herself it was a girl.

  So, in an effort to help “heal” herself (a word used time and time again in the self-help books that cluttered her bookshelves) she took the advice of one over-hyped Ph.D. and wrote the following letter to her unborn child:

  My Dearest Daughter, Sarah:

  Tonight, on the night of your birth, I wanted to write you a letter for your future—to tell you of my hopes and plans for you. They probably won’t work out as I hope they will (a mother’s plans rarely do, but that’s the way of things), but I can’t help trying to secure your future for you.

  I’m glad you’re a girl. I think I would have had trouble relating to a son. But I feel I can help you through your life.

  I’m told that you’ll ask what I was like. Well, most people who knew me will tell you that your mother didn’t usually say much but she saw and listened a lot. I was a quiet girl and hope that you’ll learn the value of silence as you grow. Don’t feel that you have to fill the gaps with meaningless words and pointless conversation; say only what is in your heart, and say it as well as you know how to. It may take a while but people will listen to what you have to say, so never be afraid to share your feelings and ideas with friends or people you hope will come to matter in your life.

  I want all I have seen and learned and heard to be of help to you in the years ahead that will be more difficult, exciting, infuriating, and wonderful than you can possibly imagine. I hope you will believe in the equality of men and women, and will learn to look for the person inside, to be as sex-blind or color-blind or religion-blind as any person can be. What I mean is, I want you to be without hate. I look at you—so tiny, so helpless, so new—and wonder how so lovely a baby could ever learn to hate. But if so many others can learn, then so can you.

  Your mother is an idealist, a dreamer. I hope for a perfect world. I see the mistakes I have made (you are NOT one of them) and hope that you will be wiser.

  I love you very much, my dearest Sarah, and hope the enclosed picture of me will be enough for you to remember me by. I don’t have much more time to write or room on these pages, so I have to choose only one thing to tell you about. I think I have chosen the most important.

  The love between a man and a woman.

  Someday you will meet a boy and you will have certain feelings for him, feelings that you’ve never had toward anyone else, and in parts of your body that have never made you aware of them before. You will be young and vibrant and curious about the angles and curves of the male body you have not seen before. His hand in yours will be like music to your soul. Just seeing him walk into a room will cause your heart to beat faster. And when he kisses you, you will feel more alive than you ever have before. The two of you will l
ay down together, and you will make love, and it will be wonderful. Don’t be afraid to be playful when you do this; but don’t be frightened of baring more than your body to him, either.

  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that this kind of love-making is dirty. Sex is not dirty in itself, but it can be made dirty by people who don’t value it properly. Treasure your sex, and his, and what they become when the two of them meet. Be truthful, but always remember to keep a private place inside of you just for yourself. Not a “secret” place—that means you are being deceitful—but a private place, a place to know the feeling of yourself, and what it means to be alone, and a woman, walking on two legs instead of four. If he loves you, he’ll understand, because he knows there’ll be a time when one of you will be gone, and what will happen to the one left behind if all of your I’s have always been we’s? Touch each other gently, and always speak truthfully, and remember to treasure every moment that you are together, even the ones that aren’t so great (and there’ll be plenty of those), so when you’re old and the beauty of youth has faded, your love will burn warmly within you, like a candle on a winter’s night, and your memories will hang around your neck like pearls instead of chains.

  The life ahead of you will not always be easy, but there will be many joys if your heart is true. I will always regret that we never knew each other, never sat down together for a cup of coffee, never went out and pointed at boys and men we thought were cute, and were never there to hold each other when tears and bad times came along, but I will love you forever, my daughter, my dearest Sarah, and I shall pray that these few scribbled words will help you on your way through life, with hope, smiles, comfort, encouragement, and much, much affection and love.

  Be strong, my daughter. Be well, and happy.

  With All My Blessings and Hopes,

  Your Mother,

  Lucy

  * * *

  A few nights later, having gotten up in the middle of the night to get herself something cool to drink, Lucy’s mother, Henrietta, found her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, quietly weeping.

  “Oh, hon,” said Henrietta, pulling out a chair beside her daughter and sitting down, “what’s wrong? Wait—I know, I know, that’s a dumb question, we both know what’s wrong. I’m always doing that, aren’t I? Asking a question I already know the answer to. It gets worse the older I get. I’m sorry, hon. I guess what I meant to ask is…is there anything I can do to help?” She reached over and took hold of Lucy’s hand.

  Lucy looked at her mother, smiled in the darkness, and then shook her head. “No…but thanks, Mom. I was just thinking about…oh, never mind.”

  “C’mon,” said Henrietta. “You was just sitting down here thinking about what?”

  “About the souls of unborn children.”

  “Well, now…that’s maybe not such a bad thing to be thinking about, is it?”

  Lucy shrugged. “Depends on the direction your thoughts go.”

  “So which direction are yours going in?”

  “I…God, Mom…I really...I mean I don’t want to…”

  Henrietta’s voice became softer, even more caring than it usually was when she talked to her daughter. “Please tell me about it?”

  Lucy considered this for a few moments. Her mother was a very religious person—not fanatically so—her advice to “…read your Bible and be Christian…” was the closest she’d ever come to lecturing Lucy about religious beliefs—but, still, she said her prayers every night, went to mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days (especially at Easter and at midnight on Christmas Eve). While Lucy had always secretly considered herself an Agnostic, she’d never told her mother because she did not want to hurt Henrietta’s feelings; but in this case, right here, right now, with the emptiness and sadness still very much a part of her, diminishing her, gnawing at her, threatening never to go away or allow her a few minutes’ peace, she felt not the least bit guilty about swallowing her concern for others’ feelings and concentrating solely on her own.

  “I’ve been sitting here for about an hour,” she said to her mother, “and I think I finally figured something out. I think the Church has it wrong; stillborn or miscarried babies, embryos…they don’t go to Limbo—they become angels. That’s why angels look so terrifying—and they have to look terrifying, or else the angel that appeared to the shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth would not have said ‘Be not afraid’ right away, you know?

  “If the miscarried, the malformed, or…or the incomplete babies, the unformed ones, the ones that didn’t grow into what they were supposed to be…if they go to Heaven and keep the physical form they were in when they died, they’d be creatures no one would be able to look at if they encountered them on a city bus. Someone who doesn’t live past birth is spiritually unblemished because they’ve never been hurt or hurt somebody else. They’ve never sinned, or been sinned against, they’ve never been selfish or unreasonable, they’ve never disappointed anyone, or been disappointed. They are pure, untainted, theoretical Possibility—the souls who could become President, or an astronaut, or a genius, even if they do have messed-up genes or major chromosomal abnormalities.

  “But because they’ve never lived as a human being, never laughed or cried or been surprised, never been beaten down by life, they are fundamentally inhuman…or maybe unhuman would be a better way to put it…I don’t know…but because they’re like they are, I don’t see how it’s possible for them to have genuine sympathy for the everyday human condition. My sitting here crying right now, you holding my hand, how much we love each other, how much we miss a child that was never born…none of this makes a damn bit of difference to the soul of my daughter. She’s an angel now, and the angels, they have more important things to concern themselves with than an unmarried girl with the blues.”

  Henrietta stared at her for several seconds, then squeezed her daughter’s hand. “I can’t say I agree with everything you say, hon—I mean, I think every Heavenly soul cares about the people they left behind, even them ones they didn’t live long enough to meet—but I think you’re right about the angel part. Don’t that make you feel even a little bit better?”

  “Not really, no.” Then she saw the hurt in her mother’s eyes and felt guilty; here the woman was, probably so tired she could barely stand, and she was trying to make her daughter feel better, and all her daughter could do was throw it back in her face. No wonder the woman hardly smiled anymore.

  Lucy forced a smile onto her face. “I didn’t mean that, Mom. This is helping a lot. I really appreciate you listening to me.”

  “You’re my flesh and blood, hon, of course I’m gonna to listen to you. I love you more than anything.”

  The tears she’d been holding back since her mother had come into the kitchen finally began flowing from Lucy’s eyes. “I love you too, Mom. I really do.” She leaned forward into Henrietta’s embrace.

  “You’re going find yourself a good man someday soon,” said Henrietta, “and you’re going to be real happy, and you’re going to make me a grandmother—and I’ll have you know that last one’s an order, because I plan on being a breathtaking grandmother who’ll spoil them kids rotten. And just so you know, I expect you to give me at least two, a boy and a girl. You want to give me more than that, well…that’d be all right, too. The more the merrier.”

  “Say that when it comes time to change the diapers.”

  Henrietta laughed. “I’m a world-class diaper-changer, hon. When you was a baby, I could change your diaper in less than a minute—and that was using cloth diapers and safety pins. These disposable diapers they been comin’ out with, them ones with the tape—hell, twenty seconds, tops. And that’s including having to wipe off the baby and use baby powder.”

  Lucy laughed. “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

  Henrietta kissed her daughter’s cheek. “Just wait ‘til you see me in action. You’ll eat your words.”

  “Eat what words? I never said I doubted you.”


  “Oh, I know. But I can’t wait to see the expression on your face when you see how fast I am. Like ridin’ a bike—you never forget.”

  “Will you teach me how to do it?”

  “If you’re nice to me…maybe.”

  Now both women laughed, and it was a fine sound, a happier sound, a sound of healing.

  Lucy did feel better eventually, and she did find a better man than Larry Parre (who was shot to death before his twenty-ninth birthday during a botched liquor-store robbery attempt, unemployed and trying to get enough cash together to pay for an abortion for his girlfriend), and she and her new husband, Eric Holcomb, gave Henrietta a beautiful granddaughter who she named Sarah, after all, and who Henrietta, true to her word, spoiled rotten every chance she got.

  And, yes, she did show Lucy her diaper-changing method, which left Lucy awestruck.

  At the moment of Sarah’s birth, the best six years of Lucy’s life had begun.

  Chapter Three

  During the ensuing years, things weren’t all that bad for Ronnie, either. Though he had to take the Hurting away from more children than he would have liked, he also took it away from several animals, as well, and each time found that he was gifted with the memories of each and every animal and child, as well as the visions of what would have happened to them, had not he come along to save them.

  The first and most painful of the children had been the eleven-month-old baby outside the Kresge’s Department Store two weeks before Christmas when Ronnie was ten. Its mother had come outside, weighted down with packages, and realized that she’d left her purse on the checkout counter. Setting down the boxes and bags, she went back inside and left the baby alone in its stroller. Ronnie (who’d been downtown doing his own Christmas shopping with the twenty-six dollars he’d saved from his allowance) walked over to the stroller and looked down at the baby, then made the Puffy Face that always caused babies to laugh, but this one didn’t. It just looked at him, expressionless. It didn’t even so much as smile and make the goo-goo noise. This was not right. The Puffy Face always worked. Always.