by Lynne Hinton
Beatrice blushed and rolled her eyes.
“Oh yes, I forgot. You’ve been married, what? A month now?” Nadine tried to manage a smile.
“Six weeks tomorrow,” Beatrice responded. “And no, I’m not pregnant. It’s just newlywed weight.” She ran her hands across her belly playfully.
“Beatrice and Dick went to the Bahamas for their honeymoon.” Charlotte reached in her pocket and fumbled with her car keys.
“And it was too hot to be going there in June,” Beatrice said as she slid the bedside table closer to Nadine. “Dick got his head sunburned the first day, complained the rest of the time because the straw hats hurt him. And nude women?” She threw her hands in the air. “I have never seen so much nakedness!” She picked up the flowers and put them next to the breakfast tray. “I think that’s why Dick got burned. Sitting out there at the pool, his brain went soft and his head became a magnet for the sun rays.”
Charlotte ignored Beatrice and noticed the cuts and bruises on Nadine’s face, the IV stuck and taped to her left hand. Nadine met her eyes and the pastor reached out her hand and touched Nadine’s arm.
“How you doing, Nadine?”
Nadine was quiet for a minute before she answered. “Oh, I’m okay, I guess. Broken ribs, ruptured spleen, bruised hip; nothing major.” She seemed disappointed.
“What was it that hit you, honey, a yellow cab or a minivan?”
Charlotte glared at Beatrice as if she couldn’t believe the question.
The older woman continued. “Because I’ve heard both.”
Nadine almost laughed. “It was a taxi, Mrs. Witherspoon, but I’m not sure it was yellow.”
“Baby, call me Bea, and I know your mama’s glad it was only a car because if it had been a minivan…well, let’s just say, you might not be here to tell us about that.” She winked at Nadine and turned to Charlotte, who wasn’t sure what to say next but worried that if she didn’t say something, Beatrice would keep talking.
“You know, maybe Nadine would like something else to eat.” Charlotte was thinking while she spoke. “I bet a milkshake would taste good.” She walked around the bed and stood next to Beatrice. “The cafeteria is on the ground floor. If you go back to the elevator, push the button marked G, you should be able to find it. There’s a snack bar section and I think you can get Nadine a milkshake.”
Quickly, she asked Nadine, “Would you like chocolate or vanilla?”
Nadine was confused. “Um, chocolate I guess.”
Charlotte put her arm around Beatrice’s waist and walked with her out the door before the older woman could even respond. Then the preacher turned around and came back into the room. But before she said anything to Nadine, Beatrice was behind her. “I’ll need my purse,” she said without sounding at all like she realized she was being sent away. She picked up her purse and hurried out the door.
Charlotte sighed and closed her eyes, then pulled up a chair and sat down next to Nadine. They smiled at each other, thinking of Beatrice and how she loved to talk. An attendant came in, took the tray from the bedside table, and closed the door behind him. Then there was a long, awkward silence as the two women sat listening to the sounds down the hall and outside but to nothing from inside the room.
Finally, Charlotte spoke. “They treat you okay here?”
“It’s all right,” Nadine replied. And then another pause. “Some people like this hospital.” She nodded while she spoke. “They say it’s better than the ones in Greensboro.”
Charlotte was at a loss for what to say in response.
“They’re all about the same, I think,” the patient added.
Charlotte fiddled with the hem of her dress. Someone down the hall was calling for a nurse. She decided not to comment. Construction crews were outside. The men were loud, working somewhere just below the window.
“Your mama visit?” Charlotte already knew Nadine’s mother had been at the hospital constantly. That she had been staying at night and still working at her job during the day.
“Yeah. She and my aunts have been here the whole time.” Nadine shifted a bit in the bed.
Charlotte wondered about Ray, Nadine’s ex-husband. She knew they were having trouble before Brittany died. Nadine’s mother had told the pastor before church one Sunday about Ray moving out. She had tried to mention it to Nadine, get her to open up about it; but Nadine didn’t act like she wanted to talk about her marriage. She was as closed about that as she was about most things.
Charlotte liked Ray. He had been good with the little girl, and he appeared to care about Nadine. He came to church as much as the rest of the family. Quiet, hardworking, he seemed to be a solid man, one of those who provided for his family while keeping his own desires at bay.
Charlotte remembered thinking after seeing them together one night that they would be able to work things out, that there was enough familiarity and good intention to buoy the marriage, that somehow in the thoughts of leaving and in the realizing of what divorce would mean, they might find enough to stay together. But then the wreck happened and the one person they both loved exactly the same amount, the one event they both knew was the best of life that they had ever been a part of, the child they had created and protected, was gone. And now there was a space between them, wide and noticeable, so that even when they stood near each other, touched, or held something between them to connect them, they remained out of balance somehow. There was just too much broken on each side to bridge them back together.
Charlotte wanted to ask about Ray, if he had been to visit her, if they were still friends, how he was doing with Brittany’s death. But it just seemed to be another minefield that perhaps should be avoided in this setting.
Nadine faced Charlotte. “It was her birthday.”
Charlotte nodded, startled at Nadine’s sudden openness. She waited, then replied. “I know, the day of the…” she hesitated, “accident.” She finished the sentence.
“Yeah.”
Nadine sat up a little in the bed, pulled the pillow up so that it would be situated behind her head. She flinched as she leaned too much to the right side where most of her injuries were. Charlotte stood up to help her; but then Nadine settled on her own.
“I guess you know I did this.” Nadine said it quickly, matter-of-factly; and Charlotte returned to the chair without saying anything.
Nadine searched Charlotte’s eyes and then looked away. “I guess you think it’s a sin.” She pushed the pillow down a bit with her good arm.
“I don’t think that,” Charlotte said easily. “I think it means you’re in trouble, that you need some help; but I don’t think of it as a sin.”
Nadine did not lift her face. She rolled a little toward her left side.
She said, “I worry that she’s all alone up there. That she had her birthday and nobody remembered.” She brushed her hair out of her face and waited a minute before she continued.
“She loved parties, you know?”
Charlotte smiled, remembering how Brittany had stood up in church one Sunday to announce her party and invite everyone.
“But then I think, how can you have a birthday when you’re dead? I mean, what is it to celebrate your being born when you’re not alive anymore?”
Charlotte took a deep breath and watched life outside the window. The sun was white and high and the sky was clear. She could see the long crooked arm of a crane lifting steel beams to the roof. She could hear the voices of the workers calling out directions to one another. And she could make out the sounds of traffic on the streets below and the calls of birds that flew above and around everything else that was going on.
She thought Nadine’s question was a good one and one that she had never considered. Maybe in heaven or the next life, whatever it is, your birthday is really the day you died, the day you were birthed into another world. Or maybe they do remember the day you were born on earth and you celebrate the time you were there even though the time is over. Charlotte had no idea how to answer
Nadine. And she worried that she was disappointing the young woman with her silence.
“That’s not really the worst part, though.” Nadine followed Charlotte’s gaze and stared into the sun. She stopped for some time while Charlotte waited without a word; and then she went on.
“The worst part is thinking about the minutes before she died, how it was for her when the first piece of glass cut her little face. How I did nothing to keep it from her.” She reached up and slid her finger down her cheek, across her chin, and then dropped her hand into the sheets.
“Or the moment when she was ripped and thrown from her seat, that second when she knew I wasn’t going to defend her. That awful, terrible moment, as quick as it may have been, when she expected me to stop what was happening to her and then knew that I couldn’t or wouldn’t.” Nadine quit talking and the room fell silent again.
Charlotte looked away from Nadine, who lay tormented by what she believed to be a mother’s ultimate betrayal, letting her child die, and down into her own lap and began to study her hands. She thought how useless they seemed, held in each other and resting at the roll of her stomach. She unfolded them and spread them out across the tops of her legs, noticing the lines that ran along the knuckles, the veins that crossed and disappeared beneath the ten-dons. She examined the hairs, the tiny scars, the chipped, splotchy nails.
Charlotte thought about how her hands, like a mother’s hands, touched things and held things but how they had never really saved anything or anyone. She turned them over and noticed the blisters on the flaps of skin between her fingers and thumbs and remembered how she had tried to hoe the patch of ground around the parsonage to plant those few flowers but that the ground had been too hard to dig, the grass and weeds too thick. She thought about how she had started with just the desire to have some color around the house, a little garden to plant things, but how her hands had failed to cut through the years of neglect and disarray and how the flowers now were dead in their little plastic trays, thrown somewhere near the garbage can back behind the house.
She remembered how her hands, just like Nadine’s hands, had not been able to pump life back into the little girl. How they had not wrestled her own sister from the hold of death. How they had not stopped the coming of evil. They were not able to brush away sorrow. They had not healed or fixed or soothed. And Charlotte just sat there, staring at them as the young woman waited quietly in her bed, and she wondered if God had hands or if he had cut them off after he created the world, watching tenderly but powerlessly as it grew and shaped itself on its own. She wondered if Nadine now hated her hands. Then she curled her fingers into fists and dropped them to her sides, out of sight.
She thought of some things she might say. Things like maybe there was no moment like Nadine imagined; that maybe an angel came even before that split second of impact and with angel hands, sturdy yet gentle, snatched the little soul from her body before there was any pain; that Jesus reached into the car with his scarred and holy hands just before that frightening moment and distracted Brittany from her mother’s useless human hands and their inability to save her, and whisked her away to some heaven that makes little girls forget about the things that frighten them and the things they must leave behind.
Charlotte wanted to tell the young mother whose only child was dead that God would not have let the little girl suffer one minute of fear or distress or disappointment; that in that blink of an eye when death came, it was like the light of the sun outside, blinding and quick, and that Brittany passed from this world to the next without even a second of injury.
But the preacher was not sure that this was so; and Nadine didn’t act as if she would listen to such words anyway. So she did not speak of hopeful things or mighty things or comforting things. She did not speak at all, and instead her eyes wandered over to the IV stand beside Nadine and the tiny drops of medicine that fell from the distended plastic bag hanging on the pole by the bed. The clear tiny beads that dripped in rhythm into the bloodstream of a woman who wanted to die. Soft little drops that could melt the pain of broken bones and bruised tissue, and that she prayed, but did not believe, might loosen the grip of grief that wrapped around a mother’s heart.
She studied the IV as it dangled and dripped and she listened to the whirling of its small motor. Charlotte watched attentively while her empty hands lay limp at her sides, wondering if anything would be able to grow from a heart that seemed so void. How does the womb of a mother of a dead child ever become fertile again? she asked herself. How does life begin, then end, then begin again? How does hope ever bloom without first settling into seed? And how does a pastor offer anything meaningful or comforting or faithful in a world of such senseless and desperate pain? Charlotte struggled with something she might say; but before any words came out of her mouth, there was a noise at the door. Beatrice returned.
“Yoo-hoo,” she was calling before she walked into the room.
Nadine wiped her face with the edge of the sheet. Charlotte got up and handed her a tissue.
“I hope you like peach because the chocolate machine was broken.” Beatrice came in with two large cups and placed them both on the table. Then she put her purse down by the chair where Charlotte was sitting, pulled two straws out of her pocket, and punched them both into the tops.
“Peach and vanilla. Which one do you prefer?” The older woman was flushed from the walk but seemingly proud that she had been able to deliver what she had been sent to find.
Nadine brushed her bangs away from her eyes. She tried to perk up a bit. “Vanilla,” she answered. “Let the preacher have the peach.”
“Then vanilla shall be yours.” Beatrice wrapped a napkin around the Styrofoam cup and handed it to Nadine.
“We can share this one if you like.” Charlotte searched the room for another glass so that she could pour some of the milkshake for Beatrice.
“No, I had a Coke while I was downstairs waiting to see if they could fix the chocolate part.”
Charlotte noticed her watch. Although there had not been much of a conversation between the two young women, almost half an hour had passed. She wondered what Beatrice had been doing all that time.
And as if she knew what the pastor was thinking, Beatrice said, “You’ll never guess who I saw downstairs.” She pulled the other chair up to the bed. She waited but neither woman made a guess. “Clyde Barbee!” She said it with excitement.
Charlotte turned to Nadine, who shrugged her shoulders. She was trying to suck the milkshake through the straw.
“Who’s Clyde Barbee?” Charlotte asked as she pulled the top off her cup, stuck the straw in it, and began to stir. Nadine decided to try the same approach.
“You never knew Clyde Barbee?” Beatrice was surprised.
Charlotte shook her head.
“Don’t you remember Reverend Barbee?” She looked over to Nadine, who was finally able to taste the vanilla shake. Nadine raised her shoulders again while her mouth was full.
“He was the pastor before the last one.” Then Beatrice stopped. “Or maybe before that one…I don’t remember.”
Then she thought about Nadine’s young age. “Oh, that’s right, he was there before you were born.” She turned back to Charlotte. “He married me and Paul.” She said this like it would help Charlotte remember him; but the young preacher just dug her straw into the milkshake and pulled it out like a spoon.
“Anyway, he was almost eighty when he left Hope Springs. You can imagine how old he is now.”
Charlotte smiled and nodded without having a clue of how old he might be.
“Still visiting the sick,” Beatrice said. “And raising some kind of dogs.” She stood up and began pulling at her flowers in the vase, lifting them up a bit.
“I don’t know what ministry he can do in a hospital, though, because he can’t hear a lick. I mean I can’t see that he does much good for anyone since I had to scream for him to hear me. Deaf as a door. Can you imagine having somebody come to visit that doesn�
�t listen to a word you say?”
Charlotte lifted her eyebrows and kept drinking the milkshake. It really was quite tasty.
Beatrice tugged at her skirt, pulling it down over her knees. “And mumbles. He just talks so softly I couldn’t make out a word he said. I mean, he never talked loud even for a young man. But now? You can’t even understand him. So I’m screaming for him to hear me and then screaming for him to speak up. It was some conversation, I’ll tell you.”
Beatrice just chattered on while Charlotte and Nadine occasionally glanced over at each other and smiled.
Finally, after twenty minutes of Beatrice telling stories about Pastor Barbee, Charlotte licked the last of the peach milkshake from her straw and threw away her cup. She got up and reached over for Nadine’s, which was empty as well.
“Well, Nadine, I think it’s time for us to go so you can get some rest.”
Beatrice saw the clock on the wall and was surprised at the amount of time that had passed. “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know it was getting to be this late.” She jumped up and pushed both of the chairs against the wall. “Now, these flowers will need a little more water in the morning. Can you remember that or should I ring the nurse and tell her?”
“No, I’ll remember.” Nadine slid down into her bed. She was tired from the visit. “Thank you both for coming.”
Charlotte touched Nadine on the shoulder to say good-bye, but Beatrice walked to the other side, held Nadine’s arm, and reached over the woman in the bed to grab Charlotte’s free hand. She thought the pastor was going to pray so she bowed her head. Charlotte peered down at Nadine, a bit surprised, but then closed her eyes and led a short prayer.
When Charlotte said amen, Beatrice bent down and kissed Nadine on the cheek. “It doesn’t seem like it now,” she whispered, “but one day you won’t be so sore.”
Nadine wondered whether she was referring to the healing of her body or the healing of her heart, but she didn’t ask. She preferred to believe Beatrice had known and meant her heart.