“Me either,” Zeke said. “Let’s go to the park and get milkshakes like you promised and ride the train again.”
We had traveled so far, but I felt the same urge as the boys. Run. Now.
“What’s this? The Cooper boys aren’t feeling scared, are they?” I placed a hand under each of their chins, tilting them upward so they had to look at me. “Where is my Superman? Where is my Captain Marvel? Anybody gets scared in there, what word can we think of to say?”
The boys looked at each other. “Don’t be scared?” offered Ezekiel.
“That’s a sentence. I’m looking for one word. A magic word. SHAZAM.”
This got a smile. Ezekiel seemed surprised that I knew the favorite saying of one of their heroes, a result of comic books being the only reading material in the outhouse.
I rang the bell. When the door opened, the three of us walked in, Carter tucked between his brother and me.
Dr. Allen was a tall, thin man. In a too loud voice, he told the boys to stay in the waiting room with the pale-faced nurse while he and I talked. The office smelled of leather, rubbing alcohol, and cigar smoke.
“Dr. Grady sent me your son’s medical information, Mrs. Cooper. But I’d like you to tell me more about the case of rubeola he contracted as a small child.”
I told him how Carter woke up in the middle of the night screaming, his little body burning to the touch. “He spent two weeks in the hospital. Before he went into the coma, all they did for him was put that poor baby in ice bath after ice bath. I never want to see ice anywhere near my boy again, Dr. Allen. I can tell you that much. I can still picture the way Carter looked at me when the ice water touched his baby skin.”
The doctor folded his long, skinny fingers on the top of his desk. “I’d like to run some tests on Carter.”
“What kind of tests?”
“I won’t be using any instruments on him, if that’s what you’re worried about. I want to see how Carter’s brain works. We’ll get better results if you remain in the waiting room while I perform the tests.”
I asked if his brother could be there. Dr. Allen shook his head.
“Carter’s not going to like that.”
He patted my hand, the pressure staying a second longer than necessary. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Cooper. It’ll be fine.”
I drew my hand back as if he’d slapped it. I doubted that anything was going to be fine.
Carter must have been in that office for over an hour. Ezekiel kept asking me what the doctor was doing to his brother. I said he was giving him a special kind of test.
“What kind of test? I want to take it, too.”
I shooed him over to the toy box and told him to play. Finally, the door opened and Carter came out. He ran straight into my arms and said, “Don’t like tests.” I kissed him and looked over at the doctor. He nodded for me to come back in the office. Before closing the door behind us, he asked the nurse to bring us some coffee.
I sat in a red leather chair across from Dr. Allen’s desk. He ignored me while he finished writing notes in a file. The nurse brought coffee. She poured two cups, never looking at me or the doctor. The sweat began to drip behind the knees of my crossed legs. Dr. Allen put his thick black pen down and asked if I wanted cream or sugar. I shook my head.
He handed me the delicate china cup and saucer. It was his mother’s china, he said. His wife hadn’t taken a shine to it, so he brought it to the office.
“What do you think of it?”
“Beautiful.” I took a sip, the coffee’s bitter taste flowering against my tongue.
My hand shook just the slightest bit and I tried to quiet the scared inside me. I didn’t know how much longer I could sit there before I tore out of the chair, grabbed him by the lapels of his white coat, and demanded to know what was wrong with my boy.
“Are your sons identical twins?”
Strangers asked the question at least once a week. From a distance, they looked identical. But up close, you saw Carter’s eyes were brown like his daddy’s and Ezekiel’s were blue like mine. Their build was different, too. Broader through the chest than his brother, Carter had always been a good five to ten pounds heavier and a couple of inches taller than Ezekiel.
“No, sir. They’re fraternal.”
He took off his glasses, setting them on the desk. “Fascinating. I’m assuming your other son has exhibited normal brain function. He hasn’t shown any of the signs that give you cause for concern about Carter?”
I tried to untangle his words. Normal brain function. Cause for concern. A question about Ezekiel. He asked it again. Did Ezekiel appear normal?
“Ezekiel didn’t get that high fever with the rubeola like Carter. Zeke already knows how to read.”
“Good, good. That’s a blessing for you. In my experience, God rarely closes one door without opening another. Even if it’s only a crack of light shining through.”
Dr. Allen fancied himself a preacher as well.
“Please tell me what the tests showed.”
He drained the last of the coffee from his cup before setting it back on the saucer, the sound of china meeting china a soft clink in the small room. The window behind him opened onto the street below. Footsteps pushing off the sidewalk and cars honking made me long to be outside again, to escape this room and this man.
“Mrs. Cooper, in my years of experience with dealing with children like Carter, there is no easy way to tell a parent of my diagnosis. In the early years of my practice, I tried to soften the blow with kind words and hope. But I’ve learned that I have never been wrong about a child’s potential and that it serves neither the parent nor the child to paint the diagnosis with a gentle brush. So, I will be blunt. I believe the encephalitis Carter suffered as a result of the measles affected his brain, preventing it from developing in a normal fashion. Your son is what we call a retarded child. It is my belief that he will never be capable of learning to read or write or lead a life of his own without your supervision.”
The thought of words damaging a person had never occurred to me before that day. Guns, knives, balled fists—those could hurt you. Words were only pieces of breath strung together.
I stared at the desk in front of me, noticing how the granite pen holder and nameplate, engraved with gold letters, were perfectly lined up beside each other. Not a speck of dust covered the blotter or any other part of the desktop. I imagined the rest of Dr. Allen’s life must be just as orderly. No messy retarded children at home to deal with. No tired wife sweating over an old stove making dinner. The small photo on his desk showed a smiling wife wearing an evening gown with flowers in her upswept hair.
“Do you have children, Dr. Allen?”
A look of surprise crossed his face. “No, Mrs. Cooper, I don’t.”
“Let me ask you this,” I said, the question forming on my lips as I spoke, “if you could choose between having no children or having a retarded child, Dr. Allen, which would you choose?”
He pushed his chair away from the desk and came around to my side, mumbling that he knew I must be very distressed. His arm snaked around my shoulders and landed near my right breast. I shook the arm off with enough force to slam it into the wall. He winced and retreated to his seat, though he didn’t sit, just placed his hands on the back of the chair. “We do not get to choose these things, Mrs. Cooper. God decides. Our job is to accept his decisions.”
Chicken, I thought. He could hide behind his God.
“You’ll need to discuss the issue of institutionalization with your husband. Sooner rather than later. This will only get more difficult as your son grows older. I can recommend several in the state, if you’d like.”
I walked out of that office without saying a word, grabbing my boys in the waiting room as I went. The nurse called to us in the hallway.
“Mrs. Co
oper! Mrs. Cooper! There’s the matter of the bill. And we need to schedule your next appointment.” Her heavy white shoes squeaked across the wood floor behind us.
Carter looked up at me and shook his head. What choice did I have? He was my baby boy. I stopped, took the money out of my wallet, and gave it to her without a word. The boys and I walked fast to the front entrance. We were through the doors and then the outside rushed into my lungs, filling them with fresh, clean air. The sun shone down on us and I was grateful for its heat. This was the way things were supposed to be. The doctor’s office almost disappeared into the summer haze rising from the sidewalk.
A pharmacy sat at the end of the block, and I took the boys inside for a real restaurant lunch. They sat at the counter and had chocolate shakes, cheeseburgers, and French fries. I watched them devour it all. Matching brown mustaches formed above their top lips. Ezekiel dripped ketchup down the front of his nice shirt and I didn’t say a word. Carter kept stealing fries off of his brother’s plate, laughing every time. It was the sweetest hymn.
Twenty-One
The doctors want to schedule the surgery soon. They say it’ll only be a matter of months before I’m dead if I don’t. Daisy and Violet want me to have it. And why not? It’s not their ribs the doctors will break before they pry apart my chest to get the poor little tired lung out. Now, to be fair, if they had told me not to have the surgery, the girls would have always wondered whether I might have lived longer. The funny thing is I don’t care. Either way I’m going to end up in the same place. Eventually.
My sister, Charlotte, visited this week. Kept telling me how good I look. What does she know? She looks so worn out it hurts my eyes. Six kids for her, one more than me. And all of hers still living. Half of them still living with her. A nice quiet evening for Charlotte is when none of her boys is drunk and the grandbabies she looks after aren’t sick. When we were young mothers with unlined faces and babies balanced on still-slim hips, I asked her if this was all there was to our lives—taking care of the house, the kids, the cooking. What else do you want, Lilly? More, I said. Like what? Anything.
Back then nobody asked a woman what she wanted. Didn’t matter. One day you were a little girl with dreams woven through your pigtails and the next day you were a wife and, if you weren’t careful, a mother, too. I guess my girls didn’t get asked what they wanted, either. But my granddaughters will. Those girls are our best hope for making something of the Cooper women. Especially that Honora. She’s got magic dust in her. Just like her grandma.
Grandma. I glanced in the mirror the other day to see if I looked like a grandmother. The hair is a little gray on the account of me missing my last dye appointment. But if you look me in the eye, you’ll see this isn’t a grandmother in here. This is a fifteen-year-old girl. Prettier than all the other girls in town, and the best damn singer in the county, maybe even the state. That’s who’s I am, underneath the wrinkles that even Oil of Olay can’t help now.
Every Sunday I’d step up to the front of First Baptist and sing, all the love I had to give rising up inside me, spilling through my voice in perfect round notes. I always closed my eyes when I sang, liking the way everything else fell away but the music. When I opened them one Sunday morning after singing “Tell Me the Story of Jesus,” I saw Preacher Dawson wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
After the service, he stopped me on the front steps, grabbing both my hands into his. “Child, your voice opened our hearts to the Lord today. God bless you. What a gift. Praise the Lord.”
Momma nodded at him but pulled me along, her fingernails pressing into the soft flesh of my arm. She whispered in my ear, “Don’t you start thinking too highly of yourself now. I don’t want you singing anywhere but in this church.”
Preacher Dawson’s words had made me feel like I was holy and had something special to offer the world. As long as I was singing, I was happy. I just wanted to breathe music into the air.
What did I know? I liked to burn with this thing. I’d lie awake at night, my sister sleeping beside me, and dream of singing at the Grand Ole Opry. My daddy always played the radio while he was working in the yard, and I kept him company, singing along with “I Only Have Eyes for You” by the Flamingos or with Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday on “Pennies from Heaven.”
And then Carter Cooper showed up. At eighteen, he was all blue eyes and long legs. We met at church. The first time he heard me sing, he said it was so pretty it just about broke his heart. He knew right then, at that second, that he would marry me. That he had to marry me.
It took Carter a good two months of heavy pursuing before I finally broke down and let him walk me home from church. Another two months later, I was pregnant with Violet. Fifteen, pregnant, and still wanting to be a star. I didn’t tell anybody about the baby. Not even Carter. And then one Sunday morning, when he came by to pick me up for church, I was gone. Nobody knew where.
I made it as far as Chattanooga. I almost threw up the minute the bus left the station over at the crossroads. My Violet has never enjoyed a road trip, not even when she was growing in my belly. But I bit the inside of my lip the whole way to distract myself from feeling sick. When I got off the bus to go to the bathroom, Carter was sitting in the station playing a game of solitaire while he waited for me to show up. The guy who sold me the bus ticket at the Mabry station knew my daddy’s family and had called the house to tell them where I was headed. Somehow Carter convinced my parents to let him come get me. I didn’t even put up a fight. Not really. I knew New York was done. But I knew this man loved me. And I thought it would be enough.
I haven’t opened my mouth to sing in thirty years. The last time I remember was at Leroy’s funeral. I know Carter thought it strange that I carried on like I did over Leroy’s passing. But I still think my husband had no idea about Leroy and me.
Adultery is a sin. I won’t argue that one. Particularly when you’re sinning with your husband’s brother. The apostle Peter was right about beseeching us to abstain from fleshly lusts, which “war against the soul.”
It’s a crime against the souls of your children. See, Ezekiel figured out what was going on with me and Leroy. I know that now. He never told me he knew but he did, kept it to himself all these years. Daisy told me Ezekiel knew, a few years back when she came to me about feelings she was having for a male friend of hers who was not her husband. I think she wanted me to tell her to go ahead and follow her feelings. Instead I told her to never speak to the man again. End of story.
I loved my husband. But if I’m being truthful, and I am trying to be truthful these days, at least with myself and the Lord, I never forgave Carter for getting me pregnant with Violet. I was only fifteen, for God’s sake.
Momma never told me more about making babies than “just wait until you’re married, Lillian.” And I’d always ask, “Wait for what, Momma?” Well, I found out. I know it wasn’t my husband’s fault, not really. It’s just—I had ideas. Good plans for my life and not a one of them ended up happening. And don’t you just want to blame somebody?
For a long time, I tried to make my life work, to make our family work. I got tired, though. Five children wears you out until the only thing left inside of you, the only thing you’ve got to give, is a memory of what you thought you’d be.
And then Leroy looked at me funny one day. It was the Fourth of July picnic, the year I turned thirty. The whole family was over at our house, eating barbecue and potato salad and the kids climbing all over everything. I went into the kitchen to bring out more lemonade when Leroy stopped me in the doorway.
“Lillian,” he said, “I reckon you could still look pretty even when the rest of us done wilted.”
That was all it took. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Carter used to say stuff like that. But when your husband says it year after year, and your hips keep spreading after each child until you think they’re going to end up over in
Arkansas one day soon, you think he’s lying. When Leroy said it, I believed him.
And I needed to believe someone still saw a spark in me, something that didn’t have to do with Carter or the children. Maybe that’s why most married people have affairs. Because the affair is separate from the family; it’s just about you.
Of course, in the end, it winds up right back with the family.
Twenty-Two
Violet knows now. She knows where Leroy was headed that day, almost thirty years ago now, when he came down Five Hills Road too fast. Too drunk. Daisy told her. They were having a fight about the lung cancer. Daisy didn’t tell me everything, but I imagine she said something like The old woman deserves it. Then Vi probably said, Daisy, that’s awful. How can you say something like that about our mother? And Daisy, who has had enough of her big sister being the good daughter for decades, finally broke down and told her. Told her what only she and Ezekiel figured out years before.
Violet showed up on my doorstep not long after. Knocked loud and insistent. When I opened it, I knew what she was there for. I saw it on her face.
“Is it true, Momma?” She looked at me with more hurt in her eyes than I could stand.
“Is what true, honey?”
“Leroy, Momma. Is it true Leroy was on his way to see you that horrible day?”
Guilt can wrestle down a person’s voice, her breath. They told me later I collapsed in the doorway, hit my head on the handle of the screen door as I went down. This was more proof for my daughters that even when confronted with my own unspeakable sin, I put the attention back on myself. Me. Look at me.
When I woke up in the hospital that night, I didn’t know my own name. Recognized nobody. And it wasn’t exactly a bad thing. In fact, it was a kind of relief. So when the memories flooded back—they came a few days later, in one solid whoosh like those pictures in the paper of the Des Plaines River surging over its banks and taking out whole towns—I decided to give myself a rest and pretend, just for a little while, that they hadn’t.
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