On Shifting Sand

by Allison Pittman

  Nurse Betty carries a short-legged tray, which she places squarely over my lap once I’m again in a sitting position. “Beef broth,” she narrates, pointing to a bowl filled with a steaming, sloshing liquid. “Cherry-flavored Jell-O, and a big glass of milk. How does that look?”

  My first answer would be unappetizing, with the exception of the Jell-O, which looks cool and inviting in its quivering mass, but the doctor’s threats echo throughout my empty body.

  “Delicious. Jell-O? What a treat.”

  “Thought you might like that.” She unfurls a napkin, tucks it into the neckline of my gown. “Put a special request in with the cook the moment you come in.”

  “That was very kind of you.” Finally I feel my body holding enough moisture to produce tears, but I keep them back, lest Nurse Betty see me as weak. In the wake of the doctor’s visit, strength—at least the appearance of it—is vital. “I’ll save it for dessert.”

  “That’s what I’d do.” She hands me a spoon. “Now, eat up, ’less you want to say a blessin’ first.”

  Feeling her insistence, I bow my head and offer a short prayer of thanks, including a request for a blessing for all who saved me. Amen.

  “That’s nice.” Nurse Betty sits on the chair last occupied by Russ, and it strains and creaks in response.

  “You’re staying?”

  “Have to make sure you clean your plate. Bowl, in this case.”

  “Surely you have other patients to care for. This poor woman in the next bed—”

  “Is doin’ fine, for now at least. Lord bless her soul. We don’t want none of this to go wastin’.”

  “I wouldn’t waste a thing.”

  “Not with me watchin’, you won’t. Now, trust me when I tell you, you don’t want that beef broth gettin’ cold. You gonna spoon it for yerself? Or do you need some help?”

  “I’m fine.” I dip the spoon within the deep-brown broth and lift it to my lips. The first taste is salty and hot, leaving a savory trail trickling across my tongue and down my throat when I finally find the strength to swallow.

  “Good girl,” Nurse Betty says, and I know for certain she is somebody’s mother.

  CHAPTER 19

  I EAT. AND I EAT AND I EAT. For the first day, nothing but broth, meant to “awaken” my appetite, according to Nurse Betty. Before my first night’s sleep, the needle is taken out of my arm, disconnecting me from the constant drip of fluid, and the next morning I am given a scrambled egg and a dish of canned peaches. And coffee, and milk, and Jell-O. Then a soup made with soft vegetables, and a warm roll to sop up the broth. And Jell-O. Eggs again for supper.

  I tell myself I am hungry. Tell myself this food is a gift, not to be wasted. Tell myself there is nothing wrong, not really. Not anymore, now that Jim is gone, and I hardly ever think about him at all. I bask in Russ’s attention, his face beaming with pride and relief every time I clean my plate. I watch him turn on his heel to chase down a nurse when I wonder if I can’t get a second dish of Jell-O. The last time he was this attentive to me was during the days following my second miscarriage. He was at my side every waking moment. Sleeping moments, too, until I had to insist that he go take Ronnie out to play and leave me be for some peaceful contemplation.

  During my days in the small Boise City hospital, I never contemplate sending him away.

  “I was so afraid I’d lost you,” he says—more than once. Holding my hand, stroking my hair. “I don’t know how I couldn’t see . . .”

  Over and over, he asks my forgiveness, each request like a burning coal dropped at the top of my throat. I swallow my shame, though, with the same reluctance as I swallow broth and cream, and soon the nutrients take purchase.

  Everything becomes clear. My thoughts run a course to completion instead of swirling upon themselves like dust devils in my mind. Even better, they run forward. Since the day of Rosalie’s funeral, all of my mental discourse has circled back to that afternoon with Jim. If I tried to clean my house, I thought only of my own filth. When I willed desire for my husband’s touch, I experienced the betrayal of my flesh again. When our congregation prayed for rain, I silently crept away from agreement, fearing the rebirth of Featherling might bring him back. And when I prepared food for my family, I refused it myself, thinking that if I could not bring myself to let Russ know the truth about his wife, I would make her disappear instead. Little by little. Worn down, and worn away.

  On the morning of my third day, I am given a robe and allowed to walk out onto the hospital grounds. The day is hot, but clear and still. The grass on the hospital lawn might be brown, but it is still grass—brave, brittle blades like I haven’t seen in over a year. The sky is dotted with the kind of white, wispy clouds that so vex the farmers as they float and taunt our parched land. My ears fill with the sounds of life—automobiles, voices, even a rhythmic pounding from a construction crew not far off. For so long I’ve been surrounded by silence—albeit an audible silence brought on by the constant, unbroken wind. I’ve seen nothing but dirt, layered an inch thick over our paved streets, drifted up against the sides of our buildings. We’ve seen homes buried up to their windows. Full-grown trees looking like shrubs poking out of dunes.

  I can see; I can breathe—neither of which have been reliable luxuries of late. I even welcome the immediately oppressive heat from the sun, knowing I can easily avoid its blinding power within the shade of a covered patio, where the contrasting coolness refreshes me to an unexpected degree. I’m wishing I had the foresight to bring a cool glass of water with me, when Russ comes through the screened door.

  “There’s my girl,” he says in a way that brings back memories of courtship. Then, as if reading my mind, he presents me with a tall, white glass, sweating in the contrasting heat.

  “What is this?” I ask, taking it from his grip.

  “Egg cream.” A taste has spilled over onto his thumb and he licks it off. “From the diner, just over there. And if the doctor gives his permission, I can bring you a hamburger for supper. How does that sound?”

  I don’t want to diminish his enthusiasm by telling him the truth, so I mutter an appreciative sound as I pucker my lips around the waxed-paper straw. The taste that hits me is sweet and cold, effervescent with flavor, and I am about to declare it sublime when Russ beats me to it, using the very word.

  “Sublime, isn’t it? I thought you deserved a treat.”

  “Not all of it,” I say, holding the glass to him, offering to share.

  “I treated myself to one yesterday. And I’ve felt guilty ever since.”

  “Guilty?” I take another sip. “Why?”

  He looks past me, out into the sky. “It’s another nickel we don’t have, at least not to spend on this kind of extravagance. And then, thinking, the difficulties you’ve had. I felt . . . disloyal.”

  “That’s silly.” Already the drink bubbles in my stomach, threatening to burn its way out, each sip diminished in sweetness.

  “So you’ll forgive me?”

  I lay my hand on his knee. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “There’s so much.”

  “There is,” I concede, “but it’s me.” I set the glass down on a small iron table next to the bench and go to my knees, clutching both of his hands in mine. When I look up, he appears a mountain of grace, and I know I have to take this first small step to claim it. “You have to forgive me.”

  The minute he parts his lips, I know it will be in protest. Even more, I know his protest will weaken my resolve, so I rush on before he can speak.

  “No, Russ. Listen to me. What I’ve done—”

  “You were sick.”

  “I wasn’t sick.”

  “The doctor said—”

  “Not the whole time. Not always. Not before.”

  “It’s understandable. We’ve lost so much—the store, so many in the church, Rosalie. I know nothing’s been the same since we lost her. She was such a wonderful wife, and a good friend. A good woman.”

  “Bet
ter than I am.”

  “Nola—”

  “Stop. Stop!” The unforgiving concrete of the porch brings a distinctive pain to my knees, but I imagine it as nails, boring through my bones and anchoring me in place, not to leave until I have laid my sin at his feet. “You have to know. I have to tell you because it’s killing me, Russ. It’s killing me inside, and if I don’t—if I don’t tell you—”

  “Darling.” He works one hand out of my grip and cups the back of my neck, his thumb nestled into the hollow behind my ear, where I know my pulse pounds against it. “I know.”

  During the course of my impassioned plea, I’ve risen up, as if my spine has been infused, bone by bone, with steel, until I am ramrod straight before him. Those two words, I know, reduce my knees to something like the gelatin with which I am far too familiar, and I collapse into a puddle at his feet.

  “What?”

  “I know.” He says it again, this time with more weight, before lifting me up to sit beside him.

  Both of us now look out onto the lawn, watching two men in the standard stark-white uniform push two patients in wheelchairs along the path that winds around what must have been a flower garden at one point. They—the patients—appear to be elderly women, their faces sunken in with toothlessness and thirst. Neither speak, but one soon erupts in the familiar cough and brings a handkerchief to her mouth to trap it. Not an elderly woman, but Ladonnna, looking twice her age in the glaring light of day. Here, by the strength of sunlight, her demise looms large. I watch as the attendant parks her under a tree, while the other goes on with his charge. Within the seconds it takes me to absorb what Russ has said, a passel of children, shepherded by an exhausted-looking man in a sweat-stained blue shirt, pour themselves onto the grass around her, clambering upon her lap despite his protest.

  I can sense her smile from here. Surely none of the children notice how quickly she tucks the handkerchief away, how she sits up straighter in her chair, how her body shakes with disguised spasms the minute the youngest is enticed away to fetch a ball.

  This is a woman fighting for her family, facing down the demons of disease to claim one more day. Perhaps one more moment. I draw on her strength, trusting it far more than my own, as my heart has come to a crashing halt. True, I’ve longed for this moment to shed its burden, and yet here I am so unprepared. I envy her slow decline, her time to coach her children in the ways they will survive without her. I had no such premonition with my own mother, and now, after this conversation, neither will my own children. All they’ll know is that their mother fell down, hit her head, and never returned. Because Russ knows. And because of that, I resolve to fight to survive—as his wife, and as their mother.

  With caution, I launch my first defense. “What do you know?”

  “About Jim.”

  I’ve listened to this man speak the equivalent of years, and no single word has ever worked its way beneath my skin like the way he said that name. Jim.

  About Jim.

  I myself haven’t uttered it once since he left, for fear that speaking it aloud would reignite the power the man held over me. Nor can I say it in this moment. Tears spill from my eyes, land salty on my lips, mixing with the lingering sweet, and I bring my free hand—the other still trapped in my husband’s grip—up to wipe them away.

  “It’s all right,” he says, his voice gentle as the breeze newly arrived to rustle the trees. On the lawn, one of the children shows his mother a picture, and it gets caught up and blown away. I can hear their laughter as the littlest one catches it.

  “How—how—?” Jim must have betrayed me after all, a bitter irony. Or perhaps Russ has simply known. Seen something in my eyes, felt it in the way I’d worked so hard to shrink away.

  “How did I know?”

  “Yes.” I swallow, part of me so thankful that I didn’t have to voice it all on my own.

  “Mrs. Brown—”

  Everything blurs as I spin my head to look at him. “Mrs. Brown?”

  “Please, Nola. I don’t want you to think it was any sort of gossip on her part. She mentioned, a while back, actually, before your Pa came to live with us, that Jim might be inclined to—how did she put it—be forward with you.”

  “Forward.” I return my gaze to Ladonna’s family on the lawn. Forward. The word is so insulated with puritanical innocence, I know he knows nothing.

  “I understand the temptation,” Russ says. “On your part, and his. You’re a beautiful woman.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that again.” Then I wonder. “What do you mean on my part?”

  The wind picks up, as evidenced by the fluttering hems on the little girls’ dresses. Back home we’d be feeling the first stinging bites of dust, but here on the covered porch, we are spared for a time. The father gathers his children to him—after each has given Ladonna a dutiful peck on the cheek—and the hospital attendant comes walking out at a brisk pace to retrieve her.

  “We should go back inside,” Russ says, preparing to stand.

  I don’t budge. “What do you mean on my part?”

  He tries one more time to encourage me to get up, but then, with an obviously reluctant resolve, uses his body as a frame to protect me from the ever-strengthening wind.

  “I hadn’t seen him since before the war. Looking back, it seems like we were practically kids. And he said he was wounded, and drifting. Couldn’t keep a job. I wanted to do what Christ would have me do. Help the weak, give shelter to the alien. I’d envisioned him as being something less than what he turned out to be. I thought I could somehow make up for the fact that he went and I didn’t.”

  I’ve always known this to be a shame my husband carried, and until this moment, I always sought to soothe it with words of comfort and reassurance. “Our country needed men of God too,” I’ve said countless times whenever we stood—he with his head held low—watching veterans march in flag-waving parades. Not until this moment have I seen us as allies, each carrying a shame we don’t dare voice for fear of accruing further judgment.

  “You couldn’t have known,” I say, stepping right back into my role as comforter, swinging the illumination of my regret to his.

  “I should have seen—how could I not see—the way he looked at you.”

  I touch his face. “Because you are a good person. With a good heart. It’s hard for the rest of us, sometimes, to live in the shadow of so much goodness.”

  “And that’s why you wanted me to send him away?”

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “Well, now he’s gone, isn’t he?”

  “And he won’t be back?”

  “Not if I have a say. And never close enough to touch you. Say you forgive me, Nola.”

  I start to say, again, that there is nothing for me to forgive, but I can see in his eyes that he will accept no such answer. This will be the price of my freedom—yet another lie to carry. But as with any burden, I’ve grown used to the weight, and I take it on, saying, “Of course, darling Russ. I love you so much.”

  The wind by now blows with a familiar strength, and the forgotten egg cream glass rattles on the table. With a final “Inside, now,” Russ scoops me up in his arms and carries me across the winding pathway to the door that opens to my hallway. “Don’t want you to blow away.”

  I wrap my arms tight around him and bury my face in the hollow of his neck. With total trust, I close my eyes and feel my body fly through the storm.

  The doctor is kind enough to release me after I’ve gained only four pounds, having witnessed what he determined to be a “remarkable change in behavior and enthusiasm.”

  Nurse Betty announces the news after an afternoon meal consisting of a cheese sandwich and a dish of canned pears—neither of which are appealing, but which have been consumed with uncharacteristic compliments and gusto. She carries my housedress draped over her arm; it is freshly laundered and smells like the industrial detergent used on every sheet, pillowcase, and gown in the hospital.

  “Somebody’s g
oin’ home!” She announces it to the room, getting very little response from the other patients. I’ve been surrounded by the sounds of coughing from those in with varying stages of dust pneumonia, the quiet moaning of those in with an array of “womanly concerns,” and the stunned silence of women who—like me—have taken it upon themselves to seek inward solace.

  “Pity I couldn’t stay for supper,” I say, reaching for my shoes. “I’ve grown a bit spoiled here.”

  “Doc left something for you at the front desk. Care package of sorts. Now, honey, I have to ask you—” she pulls the privacy curtain and sits on the edge of the bed, our professional interactions officially at an end—“do you have enough? At home, I mean. I know you have kids—”

  “We have plenty.” Which I thought was true, until I came here.

  “You can’t have no shame in askin’ for help if you need it. People, neighbors—they want to help.”

  “Our neighbors have been wonderful to us.” I think about Merrilou Brown and her generosity with both her pantry and her opinions.

  She pats my hand. “You remember to take care of yourself. You don’t want them kids growin’ up motherless, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Hard enough when the good Lord takes us on his own accord—we don’t need to be rushin’ into his arms ’fore our time. Speaking of which, Doc wants you out of here by two. Need the bed.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “As for your other worries,” she says, stepping closer, “there’s more’n one way for a child to lose a mother. You have a good ’n’ kind husband. One of the best I ever seen. Be thankful to God for blessin’ you there.”

  I nod, unable to speak, and stay perfectly still as she draws me in. I do not remember the last time I was folded into so much softness. Surely not since I was a child. The whiteness of her uniform and the powdery essence of her skin take me to a place of my own innocence. I don’t want to leave her arms. Not for Russ or for my home or for anything beyond the sound of her gentle hush.