Ordinary Beauty

by Wiess, Laura

  If it wasn’t so frigid in the winter and crawling with rattlesnakes in the summer, I would have slept in one of the old junk cars outside. If the snarling, barrel-chested Rottweilers they kept out front weren’t so starved, vicious, and eaten up by fleas, I would have slept in their doghouses with them. If one of the bigger, stronger girls hadn’t stolen the afghan from my bag of stuff, I would have holed up out on the porch or on the corner of the living room floor.

  In the end, I sneaked into the room where my mother and Bobby Fee were, crept into the closet, hollowed out a spot among the dirty clothes, covered myself with a flannel shirt from the mess scattered across the floor, and slept.

  They knew I was there, or at least my mother did because she was awake the next morning when I crawled out, stiff and dazed, and she gave me a look but didn’t say anything, and so I ended up sleeping in there every night.

  I caught the bus to school with the other Fees and still had enough of my grandmother in me to be humiliated by the bus driver’s raised eyebrows when she saw me trailing on after them. I was tired and hungry, and that bad, cat-pee smell pervaded everything, so even though I washed what few clothes I had, the odor never really came out.

  I remember how hot it was in that farmhouse with the woodstove burning nonstop in the winter and how bad the place reeked in the summer. I remember the brothers counting out a big wad of cash, heading out in their pickups, and coming home with three new plasma TVs. I remember the bug strips thick and wriggling with hundreds of caught flies hanging from the kitchen ceiling, guns on every shelf, and the washroom sink littered with lighters and tinfoil, tampons and dozens of used needles, and always that terrible, throat-burning, eye-watering smell coming from the lab out back. I remember how all of the Fee toddlers were bruised and filthy, and how every so often I’d see Candy or one of her sisters-in-law put a little meth in the kids’ soda so they’d stop fussing and not be hungry all the time. I remember the phones ringing nonstop, the smell of burnt coffee from a pot that was never washed, how Bobby Fee loved Kit Kat bars and how every so often he would toss me a five-dollar bill in passing.

  I remember how two of the brothers plowed up the whole sunny side of the yard one day and planted dozens of tomato and pepper plants, watermelon and bean and okra and cucumber seeds. I remember Candy’s father’s fiftieth birthday party, when they roasted a whole pig outside over a fire to celebrate. There was food and drink everywhere, and I remember that my mother was still kind of pretty in spite of being scrawny and gap toothed, and that she was laughing, drinking beer, wearing cut-offs and a blue halter top, and dancing in the grass with Bobby Fee to Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” Everyone was telling stories and smoking and getting along, and even the whining Rotties got more than their share of gnawed bones with meat left on them. I remember how the birthday boy, Candy’s blind and burned parolee father, with his scarred sockets, and lumpy, red-and-white skin that looked like it had melted and slid down his face, slobbered when he ate the potato salad because his bottom lip was gone and so were his teeth, and his top lip was thick and mangled and flopped uselessly because the nerves were damaged.

  I don’t know how long we would have stayed there on the ridge, or how emotionally dead I would have been inside if that June Bobby Fee hadn’t sold his product to a couple of bright-eyed, sparkly college girls who were so busy laughing at the rednecks and text- ing their friends on the drive back down the mountain that they took a turn too fast and wiped out half the guardrail going over the bank. One died, and the other was pretty battered and had to be Life-Flighted out to a bigger, city hospital. The state troopers found a lot of meth in the wreckage and the girls’ distraught parents, all important townies, demanded someone be held accountable and so the troopers and HAZMAT geared up and raided the Fees’ lab one day while half the Fee kids and I were at summer school, mostly because we all got a free lunch.

  We were called down to the office, where a tired-looking woman from social services was pacing and talking into her cell phone, saying that every one of the adults at the raid was in custody, and she needed to find the lot of us emergency foster homes.

  And that was how, when everything was darkest, I ended up away from the Fees and sent to stay in a cozy little house on Sunrise Road with a good-hearted lady named Miss Mo and her pretty young daughter. They gave me a hot, delicious grilled-cheese sandwich and a bowl of creamy, homemade rice pudding, a vanilla-scented bubble bath, a pair of too big pink cotton pajamas with red print hearts all over them, a feather-soft double bed all to myself in the guest room, and a view out the window to a pretty white farmhouse in the distance that would someday be both the shining nirvana and the absolute despair of my life.

  Chapter 13

  RED LEANS ACROSS THE TRUCK’S CAB, opens the glove box, and hands me a packet of tissues. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make things worse.”

  “It’s not you,” I manage to say, wadding a tissue up my nose to stop its leaking.

  “Is it your mother?” he says as the plow truck crests the big hill and off in the distance the hospital lights shine.

  Yes. No. Yes. I don’t know.

  Yes.

  “I stopped by and sat with her for a while this past week,” he says.

  I drop the tissue and gape at him, shocked. “In the hospital?”

  He nods, his gaze focused on the road. “The chapel there tries to provide every terminal patient with spiritual comfort, and since Reverend Marshall is over in Malaysia working with a lay ministry, I’m standing in and—”

  “Wait,” I say, twisting my hands in my lap. “You said t . . . terminal? For real?”

  “Yes, Sayre,” he says gently. “Hasn’t anyone spoken to you about her illness?”

  “No. I mean I know her liver’s bad and we met with the transplant team and she doesn’t qualify but I thought . . .” What did I think? I don’t know. That despite how sick she is she’ll just go on forever because she’s always been sick and she’s always gone on? Yes. That’s exactly it. My head is spinning and I can’t seem to make sense of this news rushing at me. “She’s really dying? I mean, now?”

  “Yes. Her liver is irreversibly damaged by chronic alcoholism and drug abuse,” he says. “Her kidneys are failing, too. I spoke to her doctors, and you’re right, she’s not a candidate for the transplant list. Her addiction aside, she’s not even physically strong enough to withstand the medical-testing portion of the initial evaluation. I did some research after I spoke with the team and there aren’t enough donated livers for everyone who needs one, so the ones they receive are precious. Quite a few people who do manage to pass the strenuous evaluation and make the list still die waiting for a healthy liver, so . . .” He sighs and rubs his bearded chin. “She signed a DNR—a do not resuscitate order—and said she doesn’t want any type of extraordinary measures taken, so the end-of-life care staff has made her as comfortable as possible. Now it’s just a matter of time.”

  “Wait,” I say faintly. “She signed . . . I just saw her like, two weeks ago and she was bad, yeah, but she wasn’t dying . . .” Was she? Could she have been? Had I just gotten so used to seeing her always sleeping, her body skeletal and emaciated, her face sunk in on itself, the yellow eyes and incessant trembling . . .

  Was that her dying, because if it was, she’d been doing it for a long time, and right in front of me.

  “Great,” I say numbly, and when Evan’s hand touches my sleeve for a second, his arm stretched out from the backseat and trembling with the effort, I barely acknowledge it. “Now what?”

  “Well . . . now we try to find a way to help you cope with what’s coming,” Red says, slipping a pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket, shaking one free, and lighting up. “I won’t lie to you, Sayre. It’s going to be rough, but I’ll be there if you need me. You won’t be alone. And if you ever want to talk, I can listen and advise you as your minister or, unofficially, as your friend. It r
eally does help, Sayre. Sharing pain lessens the burden and sometimes it makes it more bearable.”

  Sharing pain? Saying it out loud? I wouldn’t even know how to begin.

  “That goes for old wounds, too, you know. I really wish we’d had the chance to talk before this,” he says, cracking the window so the smoke can escape. “There’s a Longfellow quote I have stuck on my bulletin board at the church office—‘There is no grief like the grief that does not speak’—and it’s true. I’ve found that keeping pain inside doesn’t give it a chance to heal, but bringing it out into the light, holding it right there in your hands and trusting that you’re strong enough to make it through, not hating the pain, not loving it, just seeing it for what it really is can change how you go on from there. Time alone doesn’t heal emotional wounds, Sayre, and you don’t want to live the rest of your life bottled up with anger and guilt and bitterness. That’s how people self-destruct.”

  I glance down at my hands, clenched so tight they ache.

  “Let me tell you,” Red takes a long drag on the cigarette, and blows the smoke toward the open window, “nothing about growing up here in Sullivan prepared me for being deployed to Iraq. It was a whole different world. Brutal. I can’t erase what happened there. Can’t bring back the buddies I lost. I can’t forget what I saw and what I did, or what they did to us. It was crazy. By the time I came home, I didn’t want to feel anything anymore. Nothing. The whole thing changed me, and not for the better, or so I thought.”

  “My cousin’s over there now,” Evan says in a hoarse voice. “He says his nerves are shot.”

  Red glances into the rearview mirror. “How you doing back there, buddy?”

  Evan grunts.

  I glance over my shoulder, but his eyes are closed. I wait a couple of seconds but they don’t open.

  “Well, when your cousin comes home you tell him to come see me, and we’ll talk,” Red says, flicking his ashes out the window. “It’s the best thing he could do.”

  “So wait, I have a question,” I say, turning to Red when it becomes apparent that Evan isn’t going to respond. “How did you go from coming home and not wanting to feel anything at all to becoming a minister and hanging around with dying people?”

  Red smiles slightly. “Would it be a cop-out to say that God works in mysterious ways?”

  I give him a look.

  “All right, then, here’s the abbreviated version: If you ever need a reminder to celebrate your own life, spend your time with the dying. Whatever problems you think you have, they’d trade you for in a New York minute. It’s one helluva reality check.”

  “More reality,” I mutter. “What fun.”

  “Seriously, it puts it all in perspective. I’ve learned a lot from the end-of-life patients,” he says, stubbing the cigarette out in the ashtray. “It’s pretty amazing, the internal and emotional stages people go through when they know they’re dying. Did you know that the first thing they usually do is deny the news of their impending death? ‘What? Dying? Not me!’ They struggle against it, deny it like it’s a temporary setback and make big plans for the future that anyone can see are impossible. It’s like they need to believe that by not acknowledging death, it won’t happen.”

  So what else is new? My mother’s been in denial her whole life.

  “The second stage is anger,” he continues, downshifting to slow for a sharp bend. “They feel helpless and out of control because the time has come, they’re actually going to die, and there’s nothing they can do to change it. It’s no longer a vague, someday idea but an immediate reality.”

  I fold my arms across my chest and stare out at the snowy night.

  “The third is the bargaining stage, where they try to make deals with God, the universe, anyone who’s listening. They’re willing to compromise, change their behavior, do anything for another chance.” He glances over at me. “I’ve sat and prayed with a lot of people in the bargaining stage, Sayre. It’s pretty heartrending.”

  “Does it ever work?” I say dully.

  “No. At least not the way they want it to.” He blinks his lights at the only other vehicle on the snowy road, another plow truck headed in the opposite direction. “The next stage is depression, and guilt at the pain they’re causing their family.”

  The CD player cycles and Simon & Garfunkle’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” flows softly from the speakers.

  “Oh, come on,” I say, giving him a look. “Don’t you ever listen to anything cheery?”

  He smiles. “Ah, Sayre, we each find comfort in our own way. Your mother said as much, too. Right before I’d gotten there they’d given her a bath and the aide was very gentle, and your mother said being warm and clean and tucked into bed with a blanket made her feel safe and cared for, just like a child again.”

  “Yeah, unless that child was me,” I mutter, scowling. “I was just SOL.”

  “Hmm.” He gives me a considering look. “Well, she must have done something right because you turned out to be a strong, smart, brave girl—”

  “That’s because of my grandmother and Miss Mo and Aunt Loretta, not because of her.” And then because I just want this whole conversation to be over, “So what’s the last stage?”

  “The last stage is acceptance. They become calm and less emotional, have little need for the outside world and turn inward, searching their souls, finding peace, and just being with themselves. Their bodies are shutting down in preparation for death and they accept that the battle is almost over. They actually become ready to die, and are all right with it.”

  “What about making peace with everybody they hurt?” I say. “What stage is that?”

  Red hesitates. “Everyone is different, Sayre. Your mother is an addict and that’s a category unto itself. I don’t pretend to know what she’s thinking or feeling now. I only know that she wanted to see you.”

  “But why?” I cry in frustration, spreading my hands. “That’s the part I don’t get! Why?”

  “Maybe she just wants to say good-bye,” Evan says quietly from the backseat as we top the next hill and the lit-up hospital grounds spread out before us.

  Sunrise Road

  RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING IT WAS Miss Mo, my new emergency foster mother, rescuing me from the Fees, talking to me in a kind voice, making a place for me at her table, and singing a rich, haunting “You Bring Me Joy” as she cooked in the kitchen.

  That first morning, with the sun streaming in through sheer white curtains.

  Waffle-maker waffles with butter and syrup for breakfast.

  Barn swallows diving and swooping in a brilliant blue sky.

  The edge of the pasture next door outlined with billows of Queen Anne’s lace.

  Following Miss Mo’s daughter, Mareene, out to pick rainbow zinnias from the garden.

  The both of them digging through Mareene’s outgrown clothes to find me a wardrobe that wasn’t so shabby.

  Finding out that Miss Mo and Mareene had moved up here ten years ago from Atlanta, and they still weren’t used to the deep cold of our winters.

  Being asked to help Miss Mo tuck her silky black hair up beneath the hairnet she had to wear when she served food down at the mission, and saying shyly, “It’s really soft,” and then listening to a story about her Muscogee Creek great-great-great-grandfather and her Creole great-great-great-grandmother who’d fallen in love and eloped, and who had almost nine feet of long, shiny black hair between them.

  Getting a smile at lunch and a kiss on the forehead at bedtime, right after Miss Mo reminded me to say my prayers.

  Mareene and me, sitting on the back porch in the sun drinking iced tea and watching the fawns frolic down by the wood line.

  Miss Mo giving me a haircut, and Mareene fixing the bangs.

  Carrying plates of fried zucchini blossoms, deviled eggs, and macaroni salad across the grassy acres between Miss Mo�
��s little house and the sprawling Sunrise Farm to have a Sunday picnic out under the willow trees by the pond with a plump, elderly gray-haired lady they said I could call Aunt Loretta, and her tall, serious-looking grown son, Beale.

  Thinking Aunt Loretta’s fried chicken was the best I’d ever tasted.

  Thinking Sunrise Farm, which grew and sold raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, apples, peaches, asparagus, sunflowers, and pumpkins was the most beautiful place I had ever seen.

  Being quiet and wary around Beale because he was a man and the ones I knew didn’t want to hear what a kid had to say, and then changing my mind when he tilted his John Deere cap back on his head and, smiling, said, “So Miss Sayre Bellavia, how about helping me with a chore?”

  I said, Um, okay, and he told me to scrape all the meat scraps onto one paper plate and follow him to the edge of the lawn near the old cooler house. When I did, he set the plate down and in a high, silly voice sang, Here, kitty, kitty, kitty and like magic, a half dozen mewing, multicolored balls of fluff came tumbling out, tails high and heading straight for us. I dropped to my knees in the warm, sunny grass, enchanted, and when I looked up, laughing and surrounded by mischievous, romping kittens, he was smiling right back.

  Hiding my surprise as he sat down alongside me and let the kittens crawl all over him, chuckling as Aunt Loretta called from her seat at the picnic table, “Aren’t they sweet? They’re to be Tabby’s last litter. She’s going to Doc Wendell’s on Tuesday to be fixed. It’s time for her to retire,” and then she said something in a low voice to Miss Mo and they burst out laughing, the happy sound ringing out on the breeze like church bells.