“Yeah . . . but can you picture it?” I take Mara’s hand. “Sitting in the birthing tub looking into your infant’s face, three inches under the surface? You’d have a minute or two. The newborn won’t breathe when he’s still in warm water and the placenta is attached and pulsing. Can you imagine? His little head is cradled in your hands. He scrunches up his face and then opens his eyes . . . luminous, holding all the wisdom of the ages . . .”
Lifeline
I’m in my office at home, answering e-mails on my silver laptop, when the phone rings and I run to answer. It’s Zen calling on his cell from Camp Unalayee in the Cascades, near Shasta Mountain, the same Quaker wilderness camp for kids that Stacy and I worked at years ago. Since our youngest returned from Hawaii, he’s called every week, and this is Sunday, his preferred day, so I take the portable out on the porch and prepare for a cozy chat.
“So, what’s happening?” I’m expecting an answer like “Not much,” but instead I hear . . .
“I was in a terrible automobile accident today.”
“Yeah, right.” I’m not alarmed, the kids like to jive me. “You’re joking. I can tell.”
“No, Mom. I wouldn’t joke about this. Not about this.”
He sounds so serious. I’m starting to believe him . . . “Are you OK?” I figure he is, or someone else would be calling.
“Yeah . . . I’m OK. We were all taken to the emergency room in ambulances. There were four of us. We rolled three times on a mountain road in an SUV. There was blood everywhere. All the windows and doors were blown out. Joplin has fifty stitches in her leg. She and I were sitting in the back. We came out the best.”
I don’t want to ask, but I have to. “Did you have your seat belts on?” Ever since Tom was an EMT, we’ve always insisted our boys wear seat belts. Now that they’re on their own, sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t.
“Yeah, Mom. We all did. Dakota, Joplin’s sister, was driving. The bones in one of her legs are shattered, but they think they can fix them. The other woman, Deidra, who was in the front passenger seat, has a broken neck . . .” A chill runs through me and I grab the porch rail.
“Deidra’s in the operating room now. They took her first. They’re putting a metal plate between two discs to try to stabilize the spinal cord. Her mom’s flying down from Washington. Joplin’s mom is flying up from Mendocino tonight.”
He’s talking like a clinician giving report, but I’m picturing the blood and the fear. The vehicle turning over and over. Bodies smashing against windows. Glass flying. I remember my accident in our first Volvo, the sound of the crash, the reverberation of metal splintering.
“You sound so calm. Did your life flash in front of you?”
“No, Mom. I knew I was going to be OK.” I can hear him smile.
Zen’s near-fatal accident has shaken me the way Willow’s death did years ago. How did he know he would be OK? It could have been the director of the camp calling from northern California, giving us the news that it was our son who had broken his neck . . . or worse.
Orion thinks I need therapy because I worry too much. When I was a flower child, think of the chances I took? But as you get older you see that there are real things to worry about. People die. Tragedy happens. Counseling won’t cure that.
Orion in Ohio, Zen in California, and Mica in Russia. What kind of times are these that we all live so far apart? All a mother wants to do is keep her children safe, but how can I do that in a world with so much danger?
Zen and I hang up. I know Tom will call him when he gets home from the hospital. He’ll want a full medical report.
A small brown fuzzy caterpillar catches my eye as it swings on a six-foot-long thread from the porch eaves. I notice that its black stripe is thick this year. Mrs. Shoepeck would say we’ll have a hard winter.
The caterpillar is futilely trying to inch its way back to the roof on the delicate strand. I contemplate its fate, so vulnerable, clinging there. That’s us, dangling from a lifeline, a filament that could break by a mere change in the breeze.
Fall
CHAPTER 7
Drums of War
“Hey, bud. I found something this morning.” I look up briefly as Tom wanders into the living room, carefully taking off the long apron that Zen gave him; the southwestern design on the front nearly covered with clay. He’s wearing his Bluetooth in his ear and I smile to myself. Once he was practically a Luddite, used only hand-powered tools; now he’s a techie with earpiece and iPhone.
“I was searching through that old box of my journals and I came across this.” I indicate a blue folder with a thick pink rubber band holding it together and a torn orange sticker on front that says FREE BOBBY. “It’s yours. Want to see?”
My husband plops down next to me, picks up the file, and runs his fingers over the faded orange sticker. “Bobby Seale was one of the Chicago Seven, the leaders of the peace demonstration during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.”
“Well, listen . . . this touches me.” I take the notebook back. “It’s something you wrote. ‘Refusing the draft was the most painful thing I ever did. My older brother was a soldier in the jungles of Vietnam. My parents, my pastor, even my Eagle Scout leader supported the war. Everyone thought I was crazy, or worse, un-American. The most unfortunate outcome was that in freeing myself from the war machine . . . ’”
I stop to see if he’s still with me. He stares out the corner windows but flicks his eyes to my face, so I read on. “‘The most unfortunate outcome was I hurt my parents. I did violence to them, in the name of nonviolence . . .’”
When I pause I’m surprised to see that Tom’s eyes are moist. I hadn’t expected this sort of reaction. “You OK?”
“Yeah . . . I was just thinking about my mom and dad and how I wounded them. It still haunts me. You know how I thought about the war, Pats . . . how we all thought. I couldn’t fight there. When I burned my draft card, my parents felt I’d betrayed everything they believed in, everything they’d tried to teach me. Years later, my mom agreed with me, said she saw how destructive it was for that country and for ours . . . ”
A twirl of golden leaves blows off the trees. I’ve known Tom the man, but had forgotten, or maybe never knew, Tom the boy who left his secure midwestern home, everything he grew up with, to create a new world.
TV and movies portray hippies and protestors as kids going crazy with love and drugs, but in reality there was pain everywhere. Pain, on our families’ parts, when they lost their children to a world they didn’t understand. And pain, on our part, when our parents rejected us for not believing what they believed and not wanting to live as they lived.
Pain when we saw the photos of the war on TV. Pain when people we loved were put in jail for protesting or killed as soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam. We put flowers in our hair, partly to celebrate and partly because we’d be too sad if we didn’t.
As I’m putting away Tom’s file in the box of old journals, a wrinkled piece of paper flutters to the floor. It’s a picture I tore from a magazine over thirty years ago, and the war in Vietnam explodes into my office. Shrapnel shatters the framed photographs of my family on the white bookcases. The smell of napalm fills the air.
I remember this photo. It’s of the naked Vietnamese girl, her mouth open as she runs through the rubble of her village after a napalm attack, her face twisted in terror. In the background, American soldiers, boys and men from my country, follow her with guns. You don’t have to understand the politics of imperialism to know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a midwife or somebody’s mother to protest this with all your heart.
I stare at this vision from the past. Where are the eloquent black-and-white photos of Afghan children? Does the media take cues from the Pentagon to shelter us from this war, or are the photos omitted because the public doesn’t want to see? What I�
��m thinking is . . . the drums of war rumble, but they’re not roaring, like in the Vietnam days . . . . or maybe I’m just not listening.
When I glance out the window, the ghost of the little girl limps toward me across the grass. Only this time she’s wearing a burka.
CHAPTER 8
JASMINE
When I enter Room 2, the lights are off. This surprises me, but in the gloom I catch sight of a young woman stretched out on the exam table.
“Hello. Are you OK? I’m going to turn on the lights now.” The patient jerks up. She’s a tall, thin girl with hair like a lion’s mane, golden waves framing her face. A long paisley dress hangs over the guest chair and she’s wearing the blue exam gown.
“Oh, gosh. I’m embarrassed. I thought I could catch a nap.”
“That’s OK.” I glance at the front of the chart for a name. “Jasmine . . .
“I see that you had a positive pregnancy test. Are you happy about that?”
The girl shrugs. “Well, it’s not what I planned, but my mom had me when she was fifteen, and I’m almost seventeen. You might remember her. Dawn Otterman? She comes to you.”
“Dawn?” I calculate back seventeen years ago, when Tom and I ran the teen OB clinic at the university hospital. This is baby Jasmine.
Now that I think of it, she looks like her mother, same hair and dark almond eyes, only Dawn didn’t have a chain of butterflies tattooed up her arm or a tiny nose ring.
“I delivered you!”
The patient grins. “I know.”
I lower myself to my rolling stool. “So have you told your mom and dad about the pregnancy? Are they OK with it? Are you OK?”
“Yeah, sure. My mom wanted to come to my appointment today, but I said no. If I’m going to be a mother, I can’t have my parents hauling me around . . . And Ryan’s happy about it, too. He’s the baby’s daddy, a freshman at the U.” When she says this, her face flushes. You can tell she’s in love. “We’ll probably get married at Christmas. It would help if I knew the due date. My periods are always irregular.”
I do her exam and am surprised to discover that her little tummy is already rounding. Before she leaves, I give her the OB packet with her handouts on nutrition, weight gain, and exercise, then take her to the ultrasound room. “Want to see your baby?”
“Sure! Ryan will be so jealous! He wanted to come, but I said nothing would happen that he’d care to witness.”
It takes me a few moments to find a nice view of the fetus. “Look, you can see arms and legs! He’s waving at you.”
“It’s a girl,” Jasmine says.
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“I had a dream and my mom predicts a girl, too.”
Jasmine is already twelve weeks pregnant, so though I’ve just met her and would like to keep her with me for a few more visits, it’s best to send her on to the midwives who will do her delivery. “Be sure and let me know when you have the baby,” I call as she strides down the hallway, smiling at the photo of her unborn child. “I’ll come over to the hospital to visit.”
I picture the young woman’s mother, Dawn, now a school principal with her master’s degree. She’s only thirty-two and she’s going to be a grandma. It shows you that all teen pregnancies don’t end tragically.
It’s surprising that I can remember Jasmine’s birth at all. There’ve been so many. I didn’t want to tell my patient, but her mother was a terror in labor.
The fifteen-year-old arrived at the hospital in active labor, paced the room like a wildcat, and only allowed the nurse to monitor the baby’s heart rate three times. Her mother and older sister just huddled against the wall and tried to keep out of the way.
Since she wouldn’t let me examine her, I had to go by the sounds she made. High notes, active labor. Frantic notes, transition. Sudden drop to contralto, baby’s coming! The universal birth song.
Dawn insisted on pushing while standing up. The nurse was freaked out. The attending OB, hearing all the commotion, stuck his head in the door and asked if I needed help.
“No thanks. I’ve got it under control.” Ha! There was nothing I could do but glove up and hold on. The baby’s head delivered into my hands, Dawn swung around, took hold of her wet crying infant, cord still intact, and plunked down on the bed.
“It’s OK, Jasmine,” she cooed. “It’s OK.” Then to me and her mother and the RN, she announced, “That wasn’t so bad.”
Now baby Jasmine is going to be a mother, and though she is only seventeen, the way she strides out of the clinic, confident, unafraid, I believe she’ll be OK.
I remember the tattoo, chain of butterflies circling up her arm, spiral of life.
Shadow
“Hey, Tom, did you see the e-mail from West Virginia Patriots for Peace?” I’m coming out of my study. “There’s going to be a demonstration at the courthouse in a few weeks. Want to go?”
“Nah.”
Tom’s slumped in the white canvas chair in the shadowy living room, staring out the corner windows. I suspect he’s brooding about Gladys. As he expected, she’s phoned to protest being fired. The nurses took the calls the first two times. After the third time, he spoke to her himself. True to his word, he didn’t cave in.
“I’m sorry,” he told the patient firmly. “Your drug screen was positive for cocaine and it says clearly in your narcotics contract that you’ll be dismissed if it’s discovered that you use street drugs.” He didn’t let her start begging. “Good luck with everything, Gladys. And have a good life.” Then he hung up, but it cost him . . . Another slice of compassion down the drain.
“What’s up?” I flop down in the matching white canvas chair next to him. In the dim light, it’s hard to tell, but he seems to have a patch of eczema under his right eye, a sure sign he’s under stress.
“Something else has happened at the office.” I hold my silence. “Linda, at the front desk, was at her husband’s company picnic and overheard two women talking in the ladies’ room. The first said to the other, ‘If you want narcotics, go see Dr. Harman. He’s easy.’ When Linda told me, I felt sick.” Tom rubs his hand across his chin as if to wipe off something dirty.
“Did she say who the two women were? Where they’re from?” I’m ready to defend him.
“Don’t get so wired, Patsy. It’s not your concern. That’s why I almost didn’t tell you. You are so hyperreactive and I don’t want to deal with it.” He jerks up, goes into his study.
What’s going on? My husband doesn’t usually shut me out like this. The frown line grows deeper above my eyes. Roscoe, our beagle-basset, pushes her head under my hand. I scratch her ears and wonder what will become of us. These rumors about Tom and narcotics hurt him. For over ten years he’s been running our chronic-pelvic-pain clinic and he tries so hard to be cautious with the patients’ medication. The women sign narcotics contracts, are given only long-acting meds that are hard to get high on. We do routine drug screens, even run a support group at our own expense . . .
Tom’s walking away leaves a hole in me. I used to think we had a close family, but I can’t say that anymore. The boys don’t call. I haven’t heard from any of them since Zen told us about the auto wreck two weeks ago. They don’t e-mail, either, and now Tom withdraws.
Roscoe bumps my hand again. “It’s just you and me, girl.”
Witness
“Peace now!” a short fleshy man in a yellow raincoat yells through a megaphone. “Peace in the Middle East now!”
Crossing Clifton Street by the Mountain State Bank, I catch sight of the ragtag group of antiwar protesters, many with umbrellas like multicolored mushrooms. The group is gathered on the sidewalk in front of the three-story brick courthouse. It’s been drizzling all day.
I’m disappointed that Tom wouldn’t come. Inspired by reading what he wrote about the war
in Vietnam and the photo that dropped out of the old journal, I asked him again to join me. It’s been so long since we’ve done anything overtly political and I know he cares. Stacy, who lives with his wife, Sara Meretti, the donor of our first good Volvo, the one I totaled on the back roads of Roane County, will be demonstrating in Charleston, where they live now.
“Nah,” Tom said. “You go ahead, I’ve got to put spouts on my teapots.” Secretly, I was pissed.
I’m shy in this gathering, surprised that I don’t know anyone here and unsure where to stand, with the older women in the back, holding signs that say GRANDMOTHERS FOR PEACE, or with the enthusiastic young people up front. I step up to the curb and nod at a purple-haired nymph with a nose ring. She holds a sign over her head that says HONK IF YOU’RE FOR PEACE.
The clock over the courthouse says 4:15 p.m. . . . I felt moved to come to this gathering, tired of being so politically passive, but now that I’m here alone, I’m uncomfortable. I’ll stay an hour and then I’ll go home.
A beat-up Suburu passes, with Trish, my friend from the Family Health Care Center, at the wheel. She gets excited when she sees me and almost runs onto the curb. The wispy purple-haired young woman next to me raises her sign, HONK IF YOU’RE FOR PEACE. Beep! Beep! Trish honks back. I wave and throw her a big smile.
More cars, vans, and trucks, with drivers of all ages, go by. They beep, toot, and blare their horns in support. I wave and holler, getting into the spirit. “No more war!” Then a slim, tanned young man wearing a tight tie-dyed T-shirt asks Purple Hair if he can give her a break and hold her sign for her. He smiles, revealing straight white teeth, takes the placard, and climbs up on a newsstand. Suddenly I feel like crying.
The guy has holes in the knees of his worn jeans, like Tom did thirty years ago, and though I don’t find him nearly as handsome as the men I’ve loved, I know that to Purple Hair he’s a hero.
Behind us, under the trees on the square, the grandmothers harmonize. Peace, I ask of thee, oh river . . . I’d like to sing, too, but if I opened my mouth, I would break down.
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