by Cheryl Reid
“I’ve not been a good mother,” I said. “Let me try to do better.”
“It’s too late.”
Michael stepped out onto the porch. “Marina, you ready to go?”
Slowly, she lifted herself from the rocking chair. He stooped to support her.
“You don’t remember the good,” I said. “Remember when I taught you to swim. Remember the treats, and the times we went for walks.”
“What you’ve done has destroyed the good.” Her voice was dispassionate. “I want you to leave.”
Michael said, “Marina, stay calm.”
“I’m fine, Michael.”
“You never walked across the railroad tracks to go to school. You never worked a day in your father’s store or helped me bake one loaf of bread.” The bitterness in my voice weakened my argument.
“I was in your way,” Marina said. “If I made a mistake, you let loose on me and sent me to her so you could work in peace.”
Michael took a deep breath.
She was right. It had been easier to give her to Nelly than to risk losing her without warning.
“Say what you want, Mother. Cry at his funeral for everyone to see.” She ratcheted herself to standing. “But I know what you are.”
He put a hand on her forearm. “Let’s talk tomorrow,” he said, trying to temper her words.
“You are upset.” I straightened the sleeves of the suit. Michael’s blue eyes watched me. “I know how you feel. My mother was gone when you were born. I had no one.”
“We’ll have that in common. My mother will be gone too.” Marina and Michael locked eyes, and I felt the price I would pay.
Michael crossed between us. “Anna, we will see you at the church.” He was ending the conversation. His wide forehead wrinkled above cool, blue eyes. “Is there anything else I can do before we go?”
“No,” I said.
“You’ll excuse us, then?” His hand on my shoulder was gentle, but he was dismissing me. “It’s been a long day and I need to get her home.”
I stepped out of the way. I could tell he knew everything Nelly had whispered in Marina’s ear.
“I hope you can rest.” His words, kind in tone, had a physical effect on me—like Elias’s knee in my chest, pressing the air out of my lungs. Like my father doubting me. I would not rest knowing how Marina felt.
Marina wobbled to their car. She was out of my reach, like long ago when she was sixteen and marching, twirling a baton in the Fourth of July parade. I saw her first and pointed her out to Elias. The parade headed down Main Street, past the store, toward the old courthouse and town square. Marina threw the silver baton and it flashed in the sun. Her dark hair fell and bounced about her shoulders. Her green eyes were striking, even from a distance. She caught the baton like there was nothing to it. She had grit and worked hard to be good at what she wanted. Another toss behind her back, she spun around, and the white skirt filled with air like the dome of a bell. The baton landed in her hand.
Elias’s hand rested against the small of my back. He felt proud like me. I shifted from his touch, but the heat from his body shrouded me. As he took a deep breath, I could feel his chest expand. For a moment he held his breath, and his shirt brushed against my back. The sight of her paralyzed him, made him forget to breathe. He loved her. That was true. He exhaled, and the hot air from his mouth rushed past my shoulder. His body was so close, and I wished his touch was true.
I was surprised to see, at a certain angle, my likeness in Marina’s face. She was graceful like my mother. She moved toward us as the bass drum pounded the marching beat. The next moment, it was Elias that I saw in her features.
She turned and twirled, jumped in the air as the baton rose higher and higher and then fell into her grip. She was neither of us. She was her own person, moving gracefully, purposefully, solidly onward. She tucked the silver baton under her arm and waved to the crowd flying small American flags on sticks. She marched near us, and I wondered if she would afford me the same jubilant smile she gave the crowd or if she would offer me more—a special wink or an intimate nod—because I was her mother. Then, I feared she would look past me, around me, as if she did not recognize me at all.
“Beautiful girl,” someone said to us.
Elias’s hand automatically returned to my back. The other hand squeezed my arm. “We’re very proud,” he said. His touch was kind, and his voice was true, honest, loving when he spoke of Marina.
She passed. Her legs pumped up and down in the short white boots. She must have seen us in front of the family store, but nothing changed in her demeanor—the same smile, the same heartfelt wave, but no special recognition—no wink, no kiss blown into the air, no greeting muffled by the beating bass drum. So close, I could have taken a few steps to touch her flushed cheeks or to swipe aside the strands of hair stuck to her face, but I feared her smile would disappear if I crossed the boundary between us.
And then she was gone, out of sight, followed by the marching band and a shiny, red convertible with Miss Jubilee sitting high and blowing kisses. Elias went back inside. The parade was over. I stood in the same spot, listening to the droning beat of the bass drum and longing for another glimpse of my daughter.
The Hospital
I stood on the porch and listened to the night birds warble and the cicadas thrum. I did not want to be alone inside the house with his body. Gus would be back soon, and his presence would help cool my thoughts after the burning exchange with Marina.
A bright-green leaf as large as my hand fluttered past my head. I watched it float inside, toward the candle near the casket. It was not a leaf, but a golden luna moth with wings shaped like ginkgo leaves. The moth was looking for a place to lay its eggs and it landed in a spot of candlelight on the golden wood of the casket. I followed it inside and blew out the candle, then scooped the luna in my palm and released it on the bark of the pecan tree.
Outside in the dark, I was happy, away from him, away from the confines of the house, and I slipped off my shoes to spread my feet on the cool grass.
The phone rang and I hurried to answer it in case it was Marina or Eli calling.
Gus’s voice said, “It’s Papa. I found him and brought him to the hospital.”
Cold ran through me like Elias’s ghost. “Is he okay? Are you there now?”
“He’s had a heart attack.” Gus sounded frantic. “They put him in a room.”
I drove toward the hospital, and the cover of night cooled and lulled me as if no badness lurked. Surely he was fine. Surely it was the heat, the worry, the scuffle with Ivie. I had never known my father to be sick. I parked and locked the car with the money still hidden in the trunk. Papa wanted me to go, but I was here, tied to Marina, to him, to this town.
Inside the hospital, my eyes had to adjust to the bright lights. The sharp smell of alcohol burned my nose. I followed a nurse in a white uniform to Papa’s room and my footsteps echoed down the green-tiled halls. He lay, a mound of flesh covered in a plastic tent, and his stillness frightened me.
Gus sat on a cushioned bench and he sprang up when he saw me.
“What happened?” I looked at Gus’s swollen lip.
“I found him sitting on the curb. He was screaming, ‘Vega is gone. Vega is gone.’ I told him, ‘Mama died a long time ago.’ He said, ‘We have to find her, tell her to go to my people up north.’” Gus’s sleeves were rolled and the veins in his forearms bulged.
“He didn’t know me,” Gus said. “Didn’t know my name.” He looked scared. “He tried to hit me. He said, ‘You took Vega.’ I told him, ‘No,’ and got him in the truck, but he started again. He jerked my arm and I almost drove off the road.”
“Vega is my name.” I led Gus to the bench and we sat. “He was talking about me.”
“I know.” Gus looked at me with sad eyes. “I tried to calm him. I told him she’s not going anywhere, and he said, ‘I should have killed him.’ I told him not to talk like that and he got angrier. He said, ‘Who the he
ll are you?’” Gus pulled out a pack of cigarettes and knocked a single out. He could not smoke for the oxygen in the room and he put it back in the box.
I went to Papa’s bedside and he looked at me through the plastic sheet. His eyes were big and frightened like a deer’s.
“Ivie did this to him.” Gus stood and paced the tile floor. “I didn’t know what to do so I brought him here.”
“You did the right thing,” I said. “Did you call Lila?”
He nodded. “After I called you.”
Papa’s eyes followed the sound of our voices as if our words were clouds floating above his face.
Gus added, “Papa kept saying, ‘My heart is breaking.’ It was more than just him being upset. I told him to show me where it hurts. He couldn’t lift his arms and then his eyes rolled up and all I could see were the whites of his eyes. So I came here. They gave him some fluids and a shot so he could rest and they put that tent on him.”
Papa brushed his fingers against the plastic and moaned when he could not touch me.
“I’m here,” I said.
His eyes were like small pools of dark water. Gravity pulled the flesh of his cheeks toward the pillow. “Where am I?” he asked, sounding as though his tongue were heavy and thick.
I could not tell him he was in the hospital, because he thought hospitals were where people went to die.
His eyes searched my face. “Vega,” he said. “Vega.”
“Yes,” I said. Hearing my name, I felt how tiresome the name Anna had been for so long, that refusal of who I was, my mother’s daughter. I was Vega, not Elias’s wife, not after twenty-seven years, two children, and countless nights. My father knew me. He had known me before I had known myself.
“A big dog got in my way on the route.” Papa spoke slowly, his words choppy like the river on a windy day. “I had to stand my ground and wait for it to back down. Then it left and I went to the next place.”
“You’re dreaming, Papa,” I said. “From your peddling days.”
“No, no,” he said. He tried to sit up, but he could not get his arms beneath him. “I came round the bend and the river. There was your mother. Little children around her.” His words slurred with the palsy in his face, and I had a sinking feeling he was dying.
I reached beneath the curtain and made him lie down, but he was feeling agitated and restless. I touched his pale forehead.
Papa was still trying to sit up when the nurse came to check him. “Lie down, Mr. Khoury.” She told me, “Leave the curtain down. He needs the oxygen.”
I stepped away and Papa lay patient and quiet while she took his vitals. He looked small, a bald head floating on a bed of white. “He’s very sick,” she said to me. “He’s had a heart attack.”
His eyes searched the ceiling, the nurse’s face, my own. “Vega,” he whispered. “Vega. Vega.” The name tumbled from his lips like pebbles dropped on the road. “Vega, I’m sorry,” he said. “Will you take me home?”
The nurse tucked the sheets tightly around Papa’s legs and then wrote on his chart.
Gus paced and his dress shoes clapped against the tile floor. The noise agitated Papa, and he knocked the plastic as if he were knocking on a door. I told Gus to be still.
The nurse said, “If your father doesn’t settle down, we’ll give him more medicine in an hour. The doctor will see him in the morning.”
Papa wrestled beneath the sheets the nurse had tucked and tightened.
“You need to rest,” I said. “You are okay.” I held my hand against the plastic and he tried to place his shaky hand on the opposite side.
The nurse saw the stained bandage on my hand. “Let me see that.”
I held it out to her. “He’s confused,” I said. “He doesn’t know where he is. He thinks I’m my mother.”
“The medicine should settle him down soon.” She unwound the bandage with a gentle touch.
I looked at Gus, half dozing on the bench. I could sleep there and he could go home.
“That’s a nasty cut,” the nurse said. “I’ll stitch that up while you’re here.”
“Is it that bad?” The wound oozed clear liquid from the split flesh. I thought of Ivie pushing me into the broken glass and his drunken insistence that I must leave.
“If I don’t stitch it, it’ll get infected. I’ll be back after my rounds, and we’ll fix you up.” She gave me fresh gauze to hold over the wound. Her rubber-soled shoes made almost no sound as she crossed the room and closed the door behind her.
I sat next to Gus. I watched Papa’s breathing and whispered, “He looks bad. I’m afraid he could die.”
“We are all going to die,” Gus said. “But not yet.” Gus patted my knee.
“Look how shallow his breathing is.”
“The medicine is doing that.”
“I made him sick to death,” I said. “Papa told me to leave, but I can’t go with him like this.”
Gus opened his eyes. His temples throbbed. “Elias was a goddamn bastard, and Ivie is too. They are the ones who did this to Papa.”
I looked at Papa’s chest rising and falling. He’d slowed down with age but I had never seen him on his back. Always, he was busy in the garden or the store and he never sat except to do the books. “Ivie won’t rest ’til I’m gone.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Gus rubbed his eyes. “You’ll stay with us or we’ll stay with you.”
“For a day or two.” My bones felt tired.
“Listen,” Gus said. “Ivie will never open the store, and if he does he’ll go off on a bender after a day of hard work.”
We sat quietly for a long moment, and then I said, “I have always envied birds, how they can pick up and go where they want.”
“You can’t go anywhere with Papa like this.” His voice broke. Gus would fight for me until he could not fight anymore. When we were kids, he came out swinging if anyone was mean to me, and I had played the little mother and loved him, read to him, and sat with him all those nights when he woke up afraid and wanting her. We had taken good care of each other.
“I won’t go with him like this. I want to stay to be with Marina.”
“I won’t let them hurt you.” He leaned his head back, closed his eyes again. “You’re my sister.”
“You can’t fight Ivie every time he comes around,” I said. A thin line of blood rose in the cleft of the cut. The truth seemed as heavy as the casket in my house. “Marina is angry with me. I have so much to repair.” I felt scared for Papa’s life. I felt scared for her. I remembered well now how it felt to lose a parent, and I had done so little to comfort Marina.
Gus stood and stretched. “I need a coffee.”
“Okay,” I said. “Go, while he is resting. Get me one too.”
Gus left, and Papa moaned from beneath the plastic tent. I went to his bedside, and he turned his head and blinked as if his eyelids were weighted.
“I want you to know.” He cleared his dry throat.
I shushed him. “You need to rest.”
“She was afraid.” He blinked and swallowed and shook his head. “The doctor told me to stay away from her. No more babies.” His words were slow and cumbersome, muffled by the plastic tent. “I thought she was strong. I thought that doctor was just worried. But he was right.” He had lived all this time blaming himself.
“You need to rest,” I said.
With a trembling hand, he touched the plastic between us. “There is more.”
I shook my head and tried to shush him.
“I remember,” he said, “when you were a girl, you and your mother fed the ducks. This crow watched and followed you and you tossed it some bread. The next morning, he left you a present on that spot. You fed him and for weeks and he brought you little scraps of things—a piece of tin, a mussel shell, a marble, a broken piece of jewelry, a ribbon. You kept the treasures in my peddler’s box.”
I did not remember the crow or the treasures. I wondered if the medicine was making him dream.
His hazel eyes searched the tent for someplace to rest his gaze. “My brother and I peddled all different places. We passed through the valley, the hills.” His speech was slow, slurred.
“You need to rest,” I said.
He said, “The sun will come and go. The moon will change.”
“Please rest, Papa.”
“The sky will rain and rivers will rise. You will be hot one day and freezing the next.” He shut his eyes and swallowed. One side of his face drooped. “It will pass. God willing.” His voice trailed off.
“Rest.” I wanted him to get stronger, to get better. I did not want to hear deathbed talk. “I know your peddling stories,” I said. “You and your brother migrated south like a pair of birds not knowing where you would land and roost. You passed the cougar drinking from the mountain stream, and you saw a black bear stealing honey from a beehive, both of them too busy to notice you. You slept in barns and did odd jobs for money or dinner. That’s right?”
He blinked open his eyes. “You draw your breath, do your work, and pray to God. Troubles will pass. That is what I thought. We were young. We were not afraid.”
I wanted to hold his hand, but I was scared to lift the tent.
“We were too young to know fear.” Papa’s hazel eyes fixed on me. “But I am old now and I know too much.” He closed his eyes.
A moment later, Gus walked into the room with two Coke bottles and two packs of M&M’s in his hands. “I went looking for coffee, but this is all I could find.”
I said, “Should we call Father McMurray?”
Gus sat and I joined him. “Not yet.” He handed me the bottle of Coke and the candy. It tasted so sweet and good and reminded me of all the days Gus and I drank sodas and ate candy from Papa’s shelves.
Gus ate his candy and drank in long gulps. “I could use a real drink.”