Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  He went. He put the baby to bed early, at eight, which gave him an hour to drive over before visiting hours ended at nine. Mrs. Blessing turned on the baby monitor and placed it by the chair in the library, and Skip left a bottle in the kitchen refrigerator just in case. He’d wound the mobile before he came downstairs, but the tune was starting to slow already. “She won’t wake up,” he said as Mrs. Blessing cocked her head. “I’ll be back soon.” Not much time to visit, which was fine with him. There was a picture of Mrs. Blessing’s father in the lobby of the hospital. He looked like an actor in a period film, a high stiff collar, a mustache, and a level look from beneath a thatch of thick light hair. He was holding a shovel the way a man does who has never used one. “Time flies,” Mrs. Blessing had said he’d had carved on those benches out by the apple trees. When he’d given them ten thousand dollars in 1925, the Mount Mason infirmary had been in an old colonial house. Then it had become the Mount Mason Hospital in a collection of sullen brick buildings with too-small windows, and now it was the Mount Mason Medical Center, and looked like an airport for a smallish town. The lobby was called the Blessing Lobby in the hope that a testamentary bequest would follow the compliment. Skip would bet money against that one.

  You just couldn’t get away no matter how hard you tried, he thought when he walked into Chris’s room. There was Ed, and Ed’s little brother Sam, and Joe, and Debbie wearing her waitress uniform, going right from the hospital to McGuire’s. Actually they were probably all going straight from the hospital to McGuire’s. There was Shelly, at least twenty pounds heavier, in stretch exercise shorts and a big T-shirt that wasn’t improving things one bit, holding a bald baby dressed in a diaper and a shirt that said “Little Dear” with a picture of a fawn on it. And there was Chris’s mom in a slippery white polyester tunic, smelling of bleach and beer, sobbing into the shoulder of his shirt as she hurled herself at his chest: “… could have been killed … stand to lose him … happy you’re here … my baby … my baby.” Skip patted her lightly on the back, the way he burped Faith.

  “What’s up?” Chris whispered, squinting at him through blackened eyes.

  Skip was shamed by his first thought: that if Chris had taken it a step further and bought the farm, Spencer’s Funeral Home would have had a tough time making him look presentable for his mother. He had two cuts on his face closed with stitches, long train tracks along his forehead and one cheek. Both eyes had gone black and he had big fish lips. His leg was in a cast. Skip felt weary, looking at him.

  “This is why they passed helmet laws, man,” he said.

  Chris nodded and looked at him. “Everybody wait in the hall,” he said. “I got business with Skipper.”

  “I have to leave soon, honey,” Chris’s mom said. “I got late shift at the nursing home.”

  “Go to work, Ma. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bring me some glazed doughnuts, okay, and some decent coffee from that place on Main Street. The rest of you I’ll see tomorrow, whatever. Sit down, Skip. Man, I haven’t seen you in a couple weeks. Ed says you hired his old man to put a roof on the old lady’s barn.”

  Skip could hear everybody talking out in the hall. Chris’s mom was sobbing, saying something about glazed doughnuts.

  Skip nodded. “It’s a strange roof, kind of like an upside-down boat or something. He said you can’t work it with a scaffold, only ladders.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Chris said. “I had to deliver chicken wire up there one day, before I got fired at the hardware store. That’s some sweet piece of land.”

  “So,” Skip said.

  “So,” Chris said, his fingers drumming on the top sheet. “I got such a jones for a cigarette I’m going mental.”

  “Don’t look at me.”

  “Yeah, well, next time. Here’s the deal, dude. I figure this was a wake-up call. Like I have to get my shit together. You’re the only one who would get that. And part of the deal is, like they say in AA, to make things right with people you screwed up with.”

  “You’re going to AA?”

  Chris laughed. “Man, I said a wake-up call, not a brain transplant. No, remember, I went out with that girl Kris, she went to AA. Or NA or Al-Anon, whatever. She told me you’re supposed to make it up with people you screwed. The whole time I was in the ambulance—oh man, wait, I need to tell you, one of the ambulance guys was that kid Shorty, remember, that we stuffed in the urinal that one time after gym? He looks at me lying in the road and I swear to God, he got a look on his face like, if I didn’t have this other EMT here, I’d just let your ass bleed to death.”

  “Yeah, well, we kind of made a mistake with him. He was four feet tall until he was fifteen. Then all of a sudden he was six-three.”

  “And he lifts, man. He’s got upper arms on him like iron.” Chris lifted his own arm, then let it drop. “I’m gonna be so out of shape when they let me out of here. I’m gonna look like shit.”

  Skip tried to look at his watch without looking like he was looking. Chris saw him. He put out his hand. Skip could tell just by looking at what he’d done to himself that he’d put the bike into a skid and flipped onto his left side.

  “The cops run a blood alcohol on you?” Skip asked.

  Chris grabbed his hand, tight, and squeezed, and his eyes filled. He nodded and bit his lip. “The weirdest thing is, I was stone-cold sober. I got work bringing in hay at Jensen’s farm, and because of the weather forecast they made us start really early and work all day. We were still mowing when the sun went down. Then Mrs. Jensen, she brings out this big picnic thing, like chicken and potato salad and big jugs of lemonade. They’re Mormons or Moravians or something, I can’t remember, but they don’t drink, and some of the other guys are like, man, I want a beer. But she made biscuits, too, and cake, and I figured I’d go to McGuire’s later, because all I could think was that I hadn’t had a dinner like that in I don’t know how long. Ed’s mom used to make us pretty good dinners when we were kids, remember, but they won’t even let me in the house now, his parents. And Joe’s mom is like my mom, you know, she thinks it’s a big deal if she puts frozen pizza in the microwave. I must have stayed there until ten, sitting in the field, feeding chicken to the cats, just chilling, you know, looking at the stars and shit. I just hit the curve too fast on the way home, and then there was a raccoon or something in the road, and the next thing I know I hear this noise and feel this hard feeling and I’m looking up at the sky and I can taste my teeth, isn’t that weird? All I can remember at first is tasting my teeth, then seeing Shorty and thinking, oh, man, I am screwed.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive, man.”

  “I know, I know. That’s the point. If I’d checked out, I’d have felt really bad about the way I left things with you. I would have felt bad that I didn’t say, you know, I’m really sorry, it was really whack, how that whole thing came down, how you took the weight for all of us.” Skip shrugged. “Yeah, I know you’re still pissed. But I just want you to understand that I get that, and I screwed up, and I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Yeah, okay, that’s enough of that shit. What’s up with you? You give Ed’s old man work after how he’s treated you?”

  He shrugged again. “He does good work,” Skip said. “I got to go.”

  “Busy man,” Chris said. “So, are we cool?”

  “Sure. Sure. No problem.”

  “Jesus, I’d kill for a beer, man,” Chris said.

  “Get him a beer,” Skip told Joe out in the hall. Shelly was looking at him, trying to pretend she wasn’t, certain that he was going to yell at her in the hallway of the hospital, hoping he would so she could talk about it at McGuire’s for the next month, a little drama in a boring life. Skip walked over and looked at the baby. It had whiteheads on its cheek and was sucking on a pacifier. Pacifier to cigarette to Budweiser, Skip thought, and sighed.

  “About six months, right?” he said.

  “Next week,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, you might want to lo
se the pacifier. Those things are really bad for the shape of their mouths,” he murmured.

  “Who asked your opinion?” Shelly said. She smelled sour, or maybe it was the baby, or both of them. He could tell by the smudges beneath her eyes that she was still wearing last night’s makeup.

  “When he starts walking you’ll have to pin it to his shirt.”

  “Who the hell asked you?” Shelly said.

  “I’d throw it away now,” Skip said.

  “Come out with us, man,” Ed said. “Come have a beer.”

  “I’m not going anywhere he’s going,” Shelly said. “God. Who the hell does he think he is?”

  “I’m going home,” Skip said. “I got to go home.”

  He had pulled the truck around so that the cab threw a thick divot of shade on the ground, and he had placed Faith there, faceup, out of the late August sun. Her eyes seemed to follow the motion of the apple trees as the twisted branches moved slightly in the occasional breeze. Once or twice she smiled crookedly at nothing.

  “How old did you say she is?” Mrs. Blessing said, looking down, leaning as lightly as she was able on the old gnarled stick with a silver lion’s head that had been her father’s as she lowered herself into a canvas folding chair. That had been her father’s, too. He bought it at Abercrombie’s just before the war, just before all the canvas was set aside for the army.

  “Ten weeks, give or take a couple days,” said Skip. “She should have gotten her shots. I don’t know what to do about that. It says in the book that she should get her first shots at six weeks. I don’t think I can afford to take her to a doctor.”

  “I may be able to manage that,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I know a doctor who will come here.”

  “But then—”

  “He’s very discreet. Doctors tended to be so in my day. There wasn’t all this talking about things, cancer and so on. I don’t know about these younger doctors. I saw one for my arthritis and I didn’t care for him a bit. Korean, I think he was, and spoke as though he had mush in his mouth.”

  “Like Nadine.”

  “I can understand Nadine perfectly well. This man couldn’t say a consonant to save his soul. Dr. Benjamin will come out to examine her. He’s a good plain speaker.”

  “I want to see him first. The books say you should interview the baby’s pediatrician to make sure you like him. Or her.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said tartly.

  “I guess.”

  Mrs. Blessing herself had never really read books about child-rearing. There had been one that had been popular when Meredith was young, that said spanking was a sin and would break the spirit, but Mrs. Blessing had thought that was nonsense. She had let Nanny paddle Meredith whenever she was badly behaved, just as she herself had been paddled. It had not happened often in either case. Only Sunny had been disciplined by a parent: her father, by the barn, with a belt. It had happened three times.

  “I ruined my good linen shorts with blood,” was all Sunny said the second time, when he was thirteen.

  She had not been back to the orchard in so many years. The last time she could remember being there, Jess had persuaded her to pick fruit for pies. But the apples had been pocked, stunted, deformed somehow, and she and Jess had been younger women then, their hair stippled dark and gray instead of silver. It had never occurred to her that decades would pass before she would go again this far back into her own land. When she had first come out to Blessings to have her baby her world had been confined to Mount Mason. Then slowly she had stopped going to town much, and her world had been confined to Blessings, then increasingly to the house, and in the house to her room, the living room, the study, and the den. The dining room had the downcast look of rooms no one used anymore. That long expanse of polished cherry with the twelve waiting chairs made her feel lonely, though she preferred to think of herself as someone who merely lived alone.

  Skip placed Faith on Mrs. Blessing’s lap, and she held the child tightly around the waist, encircling her with her arms. One fist closed reflexively over Mrs. Blessing’s index finger, and just as reflexively she began to stroke the small hand with her thumb. The baby felt warm on the hot afternoon, but with a different sort of warmth, the warmth of life, the same warmth that slipped from the body when life was gone. Mrs. Blessing thought of Sunny and shuddered. Her head dropped and her lips touched the light down on the small round head, and one of the baby’s hands came up and grabbed at her hair.

  “No no no, Faithie,” Skip said.

  “It’s all right, Charles. She’s simply exploring.” A jay flew by and Mrs. Blessing felt the baby turn with its trajectory, her eyes on it until it was gone.

  The trees had aged as she had, slowly, inexorably, indubitably. She could remember them as they had been after Papa had first seen them come into flower and then fruit, sixty of them planted over five acres beside the creek. The project had proceeded in fits and starts, as most of them had, because her mother would pay, then not pay, then pay again. “I’ll not have him spend my money, the son of a bitch. Not if he can’t keep his hands to himself,” her mother had muttered one evening years later in the nursing home when her dementia was far along. Edwin Blessing had put a bench at either end of the orchard so that he could come out and sit in the evenings. “I can hear the fruit ripen,” he had said once. Carved in the high backs of the benches were the words “Tempus fugit.”

  “What do you think?” Skip said, looking around at the trees’ misshapen limbs and broken branches.

  “I am not a botanist,” Mrs. Blessing said. Nadine’s eyes had burned with anger when he had come into the kitchen, said that he wanted not only to see Mrs. Blessing but also to take her with him in the truck to look at the apple orchard, which he felt needed special attention, spraying, pruning, more than he could manage. “My truck can handle the back drive fine,” he’d told her. “It goes right up into the middle of the trees. You won’t even have to get out if you don’t want to.”

  “Almost lunch,” Nadine had muttered.

  “Nonsense, Nadine, it’s just past noon. I won’t eat for an hour at least.”

  “Too old!” Nadine shouted suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon,” Mrs. Blessing said stiffly. “Charles, go to the umbrella stand by the front door and bring me the walking stick. Nadine, I hope it has been polished recently.”

  “Crazy,” muttered Nadine. “Crazy people.”

  The worst moment had been climbing into the cab of the truck. She clutched the edge of the door, her foot raised. It was high, higher than she thought she could manage. She was almost defeated, not by her body but by her mind and her memory, which could see herself—no, feel herself—leaping into the passenger seat with one swift easy motion. She could feel the girl and the younger woman, and she wanted them suddenly, terribly, as she had not wanted them before. It was as though all the people she had once been were contained inside her failing flesh, the watchful child in buckled shoes, the young woman leaning back against unfamiliar pillows to open herself up to Frank Askew, the new mother amazed and terrified by the indelible product of those covert meetings, the older woman waiting for something unexpected to happen in a life set in stone so long ago. Sunny’s sister, Jess’s friend. Benny’s wife. Perhaps it was the memory of all of them that helped her to place the hesitant foot firmly and pull herself, with a sound like a sigh, into place. Behind the seat was a long basket covered with a striped dishcloth, and when they had taken the road behind the garage Skip reached back and pulled the cloth away so she could see Faith, blinking, big-eyed.

  “It seems to me that she has exceptionally long eyelashes,” Mrs. Blessing said.

  Skip smiled. “That’s what I was thinking. But maybe they stop growing, and by the time her face is adult-sized they won’t look so long. I keep thinking of all these things I don’t know. It’s weird that I wasted time learning algebra in high school and yet they didn’t teach us one thing about children. And there were plenty of girls in the class, to
o, and a lot of them have babies now and they’re just as ignorant as me. You said she ought to get out more, so I’m trying to get her out more. The book says she gets vitamin D from the sun. Now, see, they should have taught us that. No wonder so many kids in Mount Mason are all pale and sickly-looking, like they live under a rock. I really do want you to look at these trees, but I thought it might make a change, too, you know, to sit outside and just watch her play in the middle of the day.”

  “She’s too young to play, surely,” Mrs. Blessing said, looking into the basket.

  “You’d be surprised how much fun she has just looking around. Right, Faith? Right, Faithie?”

  “That is a pretty name,” Mrs. Blessing said.

  When she had come to Blessings to wait for her own baby to arrive she had found something called The Mother’s Encyclopedia on the shelves near the back stairs. In the blue light of an early snowfall she had sat by the fire in the library and tried to read it. Mrs. Foster brought her tea and toast on a tray. “I pray every day for your young man,” she had said.

  The set of books with the red cloth covers and gilt letters on the spines had been as much a part of her girlhood as prams in the park and lavender sachet pillows in her underwear drawer. D for diaper rash; O for obedience and otitis media (ear infections). She had found only one section underlined in pencil; after meningitis and money came a chapter on “Mother’s Job,” and someone had drawn a heavy gray bracket around “Can Love Be Compelled?” and underlined the sentences “for the mother, poor girl, is frightened at herself for not wanting the baby; she feels that she is a criminal and no one else was ever like her; perhaps she has even wished that it might die, and here it is now, rosy and sweet, kicking its heels and making funny amiable noises at her.”

  She was certain her mother had underlined the passage. She remembered the night she and Sunny had snuck out and slept in the boat. There was still a small gash in its prow to mark where they’d drifted hard into the far bank in the dark and been jarred awake by the impact and the willow branches trailing like fingers over both their faces.