At times the entire floor resounded with sounds of anguish. Dolores heard sobs, wails, and sometimes screams rattling up and down the hall. But for all that, it was still a step above Dolores’s house: a place where all she could hear or see or smell was babies, on and on, forever. Her mother called now and then and the background of each talk was overlaid with the sound of Dolores’s children screaming and fighting, and her mother’s voice, like a solitary cry from the wilderness, asking when are you coming home? After each talk, phone tucked into its cradle, Dolores felt those children’s voices wash away from her, leaving her rinsed and light as air.
A couple days after Dolores arrived she was watching TV, and in the middle of Wheel of Fortune, Lana propped herself up and said, “You know, I’m gonna die soon.”
Dolores slowly turned from the set and looked her over, trying to tell if she was bluffing. “What is this. What’re you talkin’ about? The doctor tell you that?”
Lana blew a stream of smoke through her nostrils. She had three cases of filterless cigarettes stashed under her bed. “Naw, these people don’t know about nothing. They scraped out my below-boards to which I say good riddance to bad rubbish. But the real problem is I got tar paper for lungs. My days are most certainly numbered, hon.” She took a long drag and held it for a moment before blowing the smoke out in a luxurious column. “And I wanta go the way I wanta go, so says Lana.”
DOLORES THOUGHT IT would be perfect to die to The Right Price or The Six Million Dollar Word, or, for that matter, to any of the other afternoon shows, the soap operas and talk shows. The programs gave a cadence to her life, a sense of momentum, like waves on the ocean—just as soon as one story spilled out, another was gathering force. It was so different from her life in Euclid, where everything detracted from the pure pleasure of watching one show after another, straight through the days, where the problem was the day itself, the late welfare checks, the broken TVs, the babies. Nothing changed; her home was a house of mirrors, repeating itself at every turn. In the midst of all those children, she had turned toward the curving trailer walls, felt a silence stirring dangerously, in isolation, in her center: a flame, like the one at the end of her Bic lighter, touched to a curtain, an upholstery ruffle. Every day she saw Lil’ Lulu’s Garage, Jesse, Owen, and Fergyl working on the same cars that wouldn’t stay fixed; she saw the same pickups parked in the lot of the Key West Bar; she saw Harvey, the one-armed pool player, watching nothing happen from the window of the Euclid Inn.
At the hospital they told Dolores she was in recovery, but as long as Lana was fading, Dolores thought she’d go along for the ride. Dying hadn’t frightened her for a long time. It was like the people on that show Back from the Grave last night said. All those heart-attack people saw the same thing: a tunnel with light at the end. Like her hospital room, a tunnel of sheets and magazines, blank walls like her mind, no men, no chores, just a light at the far reach of awareness, the television, drawing her farther and farther from herself.
That is, until that nurse came back.
Head Nurse Melvina Ramoud was the first person Dolores had ever met who meant business. It figured, Dolores thought, that she would have to return when Dolores was involved in dying. Dolores was on a floor far from her office in Critical Care, and hadn’t seen Melvina since her admission days earlier. She liked the angry light in Melvina’s eyes, the way she held her neck and shoulders like a warrior, like Dolores would have if she’d had the strength. Dolores had always been attracted to trouble. Melvina sat on the edge of her bed. She was carrying a clipboard and drummed a pencil against it.
“So, Dolores Otts,” Melvina said, ticking her pencil over and over. “Dolores, Dolores. Did you know your name is Latin for ‘sorrow’?”
“Well, does that surprise me one bit?” Dolores said, trying to laugh. “No. That’s just the name for how my life goes. Not much else to add to it. I was named after Grampy Otts’s ferret who used to nip people.”
Melvina nodded, then she said, “Maybe I’m thick. I simply don’t get it. Explain to me, please, why a person would ever want to die. I mean, want to. To put themselves in the way of death. I try and try because there really isn’t that much that I don’t grasp—but this one particular…phenomenon. Don’t they care about the people they leave behind? What about them?”
From the other side of the room, through the curtain that nurses pulled for privacy, Dolores heard Lana start hacking, a telegraph they’d worked out: Don’t let the bastards trick you!
Dolores knew she had nothing to fear. At that moment she felt as if she’d never feared anything in her life. Her body was slight, emptied of care, and she floated, suspended in lovely weightlessness between Lana’s warnings and the nurse’s questions. The nurse, she knew, was looking, trying to bring her back, but it was too late. Nothing really mattered anymore. She folded her arms and looked Melvie in the eye, amazed at the power dying gave her.
Melvina stared back, then said, “Wait a second.” She left the room. Then she returned with a hairbrush. “Our mother liked this, I think, I remember….”
The brush passed through Dolores’s hair, soft bristles taking Dolores down into herself, separating her into fibers, each worry and memory and name falling down the gentle slope of the brush through her hair, and that woman’s hand upon it. Dolores sat up a little. She could almost feel it. It was almost like peace.
THAT NIGHT, DOLORES was transfixed by the TV and her roommate’s perpetual groaning and muttering. Though Dolores stared at the screen, there was something different in her head. When they shut off the lights at night she saw it more clearly on the ceiling. It was her son, Wally, on a bicycle. He had never owned a bicycle, but in this picture there he was, flying along, arms extended. And she was standing there hearing him scream, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! as she’d heard so many times before. And she was hating him, wanting to knock him down and break that word in two. Dolores closed her eyes against the picture, but the screaming went on and on like the sound of game shows.
Two days later Dolores refused to stop ringing her summons bell until the head nurse was brought to her.
“That’s right,” Lana coached from across the room. “Demand your G.D. rights. They’re gonna kill us anyways, they got to do it on our F-ing terms.”
When Melvina was finally located, Dolores could hear her steps clicking all the way across the ward. Dolores’s hand fell from the summons bell, and for a moment all she could think was, where were you before I got here, when I really needed you?
Melvina appeared in the doorway and said, “Ms. Otts! You are creating havoc and total disruption on this floor. This behavior is counterproductive and will not be tolerated! There are two nurses and, if necessary, an entire station already designated to attend to your needs.”
“Okay, okay,” Dolores said, letting her head fall back among the pillows.
Melvie moved closer then, staring. “Look at you, what’s wrong with you?” she cried. “Look at the color of your eyes. And your skin!” Melvie looked Dolores over deftly, checking breath and pulse. Then she went to the chart on the opposite wall. Her eyes ticked over the information and Dolores watched as Melvina seemed to read the whole story there.
Their regular day nurse came in and Lana cried, “Here she is, The Terminator.”
Melvina scowled at Lana, then towed The Terminator out to a whispering consultation in the hallway, just close enough for Dolores to make out crackling phrases:
“Why didn’t you—”
“—need that bed—”
“What, is this a war movie?”
“She’s a faker—”
“—jaundice!”
“—no insurance, a self-pay—”
“—call yourself a nurse!”
The words danced, little sparks. If Dolores squinted, she could see her death out there, in the fields, waiting. They would send her out to meet it, out behind the trailer, among the nests of baby shit and cans of spaghetti sauce; she could see it, a shard of glass on an
empty hillside. Live by garbage, die by garbage, she thought, then wondered if she’d heard that on TV.
Melvina reentered the room, staring at something that didn’t quite seem to be Dolores’s face. She said in a tired voice, “Dolores Otts.”
Dolores closed her eyes and said, “Okay, I just want one thing.”
Lana hacked loudly: Go for it.
“I’ll have to hear it first, Ms. Otts.”
“I want you to get Peachy into college.”
Lana coughed again, but a quick, short one, an accident, as if she didn’t know whether to be disgusted or proud.
Dolores had surprised herself, too. But the more she thought about it, the better she liked the idea. She was very taken with it. “I mean, what if she has a brain in her head? We should see about it,” she said.
Melvina seated herself at Dolores’s side, “Well,” she said, “certainly there are all sorts of vocational programs—training schools—or community col—”
“No!” Dolores said. Lana was nodding her head, holding back the curtain and watching. “I want her to go to the university. To Syracuse. I want her to join one of them things? A fraternity? And wear pink and date boys and have one of those hairy coats and wave one of those flags like I saw that guy—what’s his name with the sweater in the movie yesterday?” she asked Lana.
“Yeah, Jimmy Stewart.”
“Yeah, like he was doing. All of that!” she cried, the idea glowing in her now. She loved it; it was beautiful. She looked at the TV and saw Peachy at her graduation in gown and mortarboard, holding a scroll covered with writing. Peachy, savior of the Otts family, the sparrow that would rise on a warm current and float past them all, up so far above Euclid that the scrap heaps and car graveyards and sewers would vanish. She would forget it all, forget pissing in buckets and throwing it out the back door, forget the things that Dolores guessed their brother Joe had done to her when she used to get home first from school. “I want her to go to tea parties and wear white socks and to—I don’t know—get her head full of all kinds of stuff, about math and reading. Maybe she could even teach me then.”
Chapter 21
IT WAS THE second Monday in June, two weeks after Uncle Fouad arrived, and Melvie had run into Jem’s room at five-thirty in the morning, on her way to work, clapped her hands together in four smart cracks, and barked, “Up! Up! Up! Up!” She’d noticed Jem was starting to get a hangdog look and knew it was up to her to snap her out of it.
Melvie liked to compare herself to Atlas, whose huge wrought-iron likeness in front of the European Health Spa she’d admired for years. Without people like her or Atlas, the earth would cease to turn as efficiently and consistently as it had done. She saw to it that hearts ran on time: a heart in every chest and a stomach in every belly. She was there, also, to see that people thought the right thoughts, felt the right feelings, and that Jemorah didn’t go off track. No one understood Melvie, this she knew; it was a given. She was like a deer in the woods; her true nature fluttered from behind dark shapes and obstacles in flashes, the white beam of a tail lifting as the deer flees. Even in her own mind this was true: she fled from herself.
She expected that when she died she would trade in her job with Atlas for a position with St. Peter, in charge of moral accounting. She was as well versed in the responsibilities of death as in those of life; she had met with death personally. When she was two and a half she’d sat up in her crib in her parents’ bedroom in Jordan and watched it come in through the window.
It had cascaded through the air in a veil, like the ones that flew around belly dancers, a veil like Salome’s. It turned over and over, tumbling in folds over their heads as Melvina kept watch. Though this was long before she became a nurse, even then she knew instinctively, inarticulately, that death came to people in personal guises: one would see a fly where another saw a fish or a star. This veil, she understood, would be the way death revealed itself to her. She had kept the memory of that night intact, complete in its detail.
The veil fell lightly toward her mother, and behind the bars of her crib Melvie was helpless to move her out of the way as she would push someone out of the path of a truck. She watched it settle in the shiver that crept over her mother and glazed her sleeping skin; she watched the veil work its texture into the skin and through the body as if flesh were made of air. And it was as if some part of that veil had fallen over Melvina, too, covering her with the memory, a network of sensations that she could never tear away.
She claimed that from that night on she knew she was called to pursue the greatest of professions, the most physically, emotionally, and intellectually demanding of any field, the most misunderstood and martyred, the closest to divinity: nurse.
People flourished under her care. Patients thought to be inoperable were restored, the suicidal regained hope, the lingering ill were healed. Not so many that anyone called Melvina a miracle worker, but enough that the staff in her hospital and the hospital community at large knew and respected her and honored her commands. Doctors consulted her as a matter of course. Patients and their families sent her flowers, chocolates, even jewelry—which she promptly returned, not wishing to appear compromised. She could look into a patient’s face, read the irises, lips, the confluence of thought and shadow, and recognize an illness.
There were also those who had evaded her.
Melvina referred to death as her Achilles’ heel. It caught her off guard. Jem, on occasion, pointed out that Melvie’s feelings might be a natural response to death, but Melvina always said, “I’m a nurse, not just some person.” She believed that the pang she felt over it was the one flaw that prevented her from being the Total Nurse. “In hospital personnel, regret is a form of secondary complication, like infection,” she’d said. “It must be flushed out.
“Nurses must strive for complete inner harmony,” Melvie said. “Their minds and hearts as clear as light, water, and fire. They have to be truthful and spontaneous, so the clean blade of knowledge and action can flash from them to patient without interruption.”
Daily, death pressed on her from newspapers, radio, television.
She remembered an article she had read four years earlier about a boy who’d gone walking on the ice of Lake Ontario. Ice-walking was the bane of the small college that was perched on the lip of the lake. Out of cabin fever perhaps, or natural curiosity, many students were enticed out on the frozen borders. The boy Melvie read about had worked as a photographer for the student paper and, even though being caught on the ice meant automatic expulsion, he decided to chance it and went with a friend to take pictures.
They went out too far—someone always did—out to where they could see the belly of Ontario still uncovered by the ice, deep and wild enough to resist freezing. It was as if the lake itself had dared them—its waves lifting a hypnotic voice—to go on and on, to discover its secret life under the frozen dead sheets. Once the boys were out far enough to spot the waves, they heard a loud crack under their feet. One boy was able to run to more solid ice, but the photographer began to drift away on a small floe. His friend hurried to shore for help.
Campus security backed an emergency boat off the end of a pier where lake water ran channels between frozen currents and they motored toward the boy, chopping their way through the loose ice with axes and the hull of the boat. The boy was difficult to spot through the wind and snow. One moment, they saw him crouched on the slippery floe, the next, he was in the gray waves. His boots and winter clothes were instantly waterlogged, dragging him down, but he kept his head above water, and, as the boat came in, he was still able to lift his hands for the rope and life preserver they threw him.
Though they cut the engines, the boat stirred up water, and as the boy laid his hands on the preserver, the hull smashed through two great sheets of ice. Massive shards broke free, rushed at him, and the light went out of his eyes as he was crushed in half at the waist, pinned between ice panes. They dragged in his head, arms, and torso with the skin of his palms
frozen to the preserver; his hips and legs went down. The place where he had stood was already mending, ice knitting back to ice.
Every year students were lost to the lake, just as in other places, people fell down gorges or were caught in undertows. In the graying, crystallizing darkness, when Onondaga Lake went still and the bowl of land seemed to swim with its ghosts, Melvina thought of the boy she’d read about. She thought about the future he might have lived and imagined the possibilities trailing after him, and she marveled at what little power to protect others anyone had.
MELVINA DREW BACK and snapped the stone, then watched it skip once, twice, three times over the lake. “This is salt water,” she told Jem. “Syracuse used to be called ‘Salina’—salt. At one time it was the world’s biggest salt producer.”
Jem looked at the water. “Now it’s not worth much, huh.”
Melvina looked at Jem sharply. “Don’t say that, Jemorah.” She looked over the water. “That’s a defeatist attitude. Move toward your light energy. This is practically saline solution, almost blood.”
“Hemo the Magnificent,” Jem said, remembering the health movie they showed at Clay Elementary on every assembly day. That and Treasure Island.
Melvina reached down to her big, white patent-leather pocketbook propped between some rocks and pulled out an envelope. She handed it to Jem. It said Syracuse University Office of Undergraduate Admissions. “I just walked over to the admissions office after work and picked this up. Do me a favor,” Melvie said. “Fill that out and sign Peachy Otts’s name to it.”
Jem sat on one of the flat rocks that flanked the lake. She’d never heard her sister say or do anything dishonest; Melvina was as righteous and unyielding as Moses. Jem shaded her eyes and gazed at Melvie. The sun reflected brilliantly against her uniform. Jem thought perhaps that the mosaic of lights, the blowing trees, had confused what she heard.
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