by Lynne Hugo
I fell silent at that, wanting to argue the point, but uncertain anymore what I believed. I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down heavily in it. A breeze ruffled the kitchen curtain. I could actually smell my flowers on it. The heat’s broken some after enormous thunderstorms yesterday, and I’ve got all the windows open for some real air. That’s how I feel, like I just want to get down to what’s actually, really real, and I can’t tell what it is past one moment. Usually I can tell right when it’s happening, but not any farther. Like that one moment in the cemetery, when I took on Maddie’s grief and it wasn’t for show.
“The thing is, look at the little things we do, how they reverberate. I did ask Claire to watch out for Brian. But Maddie made them late, taking some ridiculous number of pictures. And us—you with a kidney condition, me getting pregnant. We didn’t know. I didn’t know, anyway. Look what’s happened to Wayne. I feel…doomed.”
John pulled a chair over next to mine and sat. “If you want to, I guess you can trace the whole thing back and make it my fault. I chased you.”
“Until I caught you.”
“Until I left you,” he said. “See? You can’t look at it that way. Of course we don’t know how things will play out. We’re not God.”
“There’s got to be some way to decide,” I said. “It’s not as simple as just following some code that tells you what’s right and wrong, because I would have decided that it was good to ask Claire to take Brian to the prom with her and Kevin.”
John shook his head, not in disagreement, but with a slight shrug, as if to say, I don’t know either. “Can we have the champagne to celebrate that Claire has a new chance?” he asked. “Even if it’s your fault that she has a new chance?”
“Quit teasing me. This is serious.”
“You’re right. And still, we need to celebrate.”
I tried to put the question up on a shelf, then, the way I put up breakable things when Claire was little, this one like a troubling, sculptured figure that has the mystery and answer locked inside its mute head. On that shelf, invisible to everyone else, it’s watching me, watching me.
Maddie is coming to dinner tonight, before she and Claire have their surgeries tomorrow. Bill and Melody are bringing Jennifer to me later so that she can go to the hospital with us. Maddie actually would have rather she stayed with Bill—so much things change—but Jennifer was insistent. I thought to invite Ellie and Claire, too, but Ellie answered saying just she would come. “But Claire shouldn’t be alone,” I objected.
“I’ll take her to Mama’s,” Ellie said, and what could I say? I’m not in charge.
I’m making Maddie’s favorite foods, my Dijon pork, fresh corn on the cob from Hadley’s farm stand and a rice pilaf. Blueberry pie for desert. A frozen crust, yes, but rolled out and floured, spilling fresh blueberries, and a lattice top. I owe her so much now, it seems almost obscene to make a special dinner, as if I think it will even register on the account.
I’m pleased that she doesn’t ring the doorbell, just opens it and tosses a small overnight bag on the sofa while I’m walking to the front door from the kitchen and she’s calling me at the same time. She feels a little stiff when I hug her, but she doesn’t pull away, and maybe it’s my own guilt making me noodle-like in comparison. The gray in her hair has spread, and I see it lacing the parts that were all dark before, but she looks better. More put-together, and she has coral lipstick and mascara, and blusher that makes the darkness around her eyes less noticeable.
“Something smells wonderful,” she says. “Here. This is the stuff from my refrigerator that’ll go bad if you don’t use it, and I put in a tin of cookies for Jen. Put this away.”
“What is it?” Actually, what it is is obvious: a sealed envelope addressed to Jennifer.
“Just in case.”
“Oh God, Maddie, don’t…”
“I’m not. Come on, I’m starved and I can’t eat after six-thirty.”
“Ellie is coming….”
“That’s okay,” she says, and then we both laugh, the old conspiratorial laugh. “As long as she doesn’t make me listen to ‘Hurt.’”
“I already thought of that. I unplugged the tape deck, so I could say it’s on the fritz.”
“Nice. Remember at that picnic Robbie-Jo had, how Ellie brought that damn boom box and about forty batteries? I thought for sure they’d throw us out of the park.” While she speaks she finishes setting the table, which I’d half done. It feels almost normal; I don’t know if the reserve underneath is from me or her.
Ellie comes, her usual late self, and with Presley on a leash. “You know he’s afraid to be alone,” she says defensively, and slyly, when Ellie’s not looking, Maddie and I roll our eyes to each other. Her hair looks a hundred percent better, though, cut the way it is, stylish and becoming, and I tell her that again.
“Lydie, can I ask you something?” Ellie says while I’m dishing out pie.
“What’s going to happen with you and Wayne? I’m not just being nosy, I do have a reason.”
“Well, just so you know, he’s not staying on with me,” Maddie sticks in. “I’ve told him that I’d appreciate his staying on for a couple of weeks after I get home from the hospital, because I’m not supposed to lift—”
“I’ll come do anything you need…” I interrupt.
“I know, but you know how he is. He wants to, because of Claire and…oh hell, let’s not get into that.”
But I don’t drop it right away. “I know. He’s paying for the apartment, he’ll move your refrigerator, he just won’t talk to me. I have tried,” I say to Maddie. “Ellie, he always knew, in case that isn’t the way you heard it.”
“Gert says that people know what they want to know,” she says cryptically, scraping her fork across her plate. “This is great pie. Anyway, I was wondering if you know if Wayne’s going to keep the apartment for himself.”
“I’d be the last person to know,” I say. “Has he said, Maddie?”
“He’s about as talkative as ever,” she answers with a shrug.
“Because, Claire and I were talking and I’m sort of thinking of keeping it, taking over the rent I mean, and maybe…well, it’s just an idea.”
“Has Claire said she’s staying with you?” I say cautiously.
“She’s still set on going to that college. I don’t know if she’ll make it on time. I guess she can go after Christmas if the transplant…” Ellie says.
I’m digesting that, wondering what to do about the bill for the first tuition installment and trying to sort through the said and the unsaid when the doorbell rings. I open the door expecting the newspaper boy or Hank Schultz with tomatoes from his garden. Instead, it’s Claire, my Claire.
“Hi,” she says. “Ellie said you invited me. Grandpa drove me over.”
“You don’t need an invitation, ever.”
“I already ate,” she says, though she looks shadow-thin in her shorts and red tank top.
“Did Maw Maw give you—”
“Yes,” she interrupts with something between a smile and irritation.
I want to ask about her medicines, but sense that it would push the barrier she’s erected around herself.
“Claire, come in here,” Ellie calls from the kitchen. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”
Claire responds to Ellie’s call with a smile. “Coming,” she says, and, as if there’s a force field around me, she keeps a distance as she makes a quarter circle around me to head for Ellie’s voice. “Aunt Maddie said I should talk to you,” she stops to say.
From behind Claire, following her in, I see Maddie look at her and nod. It seems fraught with the unspoken, but I can’t decipher it.
“Sit down, honey,” Ellie says, sounding for all the world like me.
Then Maddie says, “There’s pie. Want some before Ellie has thirds? We only have another half hour of eating time left, so get busy.”
I am outside their circle; whether it was created in the last fifteen sec
onds or has been rounding itself toward completion for weeks, I have no idea. Claire sits down and Maddie cuts a piece of pie. She lifts it onto her empty plate, complete with blueberry stains from her own piece, licks off her fork, wipes it on her paper napkin and hands it to Claire, who says, “Thanks.” I stand a couple of feet away, braced by the doorjamb, utterly out of place. It’s early twilight, soft, and even cool. My sisters and daughter look like a scene in a movie: the yellows and ambers of the kitchen, Maddie and Ellie’s white blouses subdued by the gold tones of the window light. There are small white candles in brass holders that I’ve lit in the middle of the table, a bouquet of dahlias and marigolds between them, the scene accented with Claire’s red shirt, the darkness of their hair, but all of it blending as if seamlessly composed. Their conversation almost recedes, as though I’m a camera panning back and out. I hear Claire say When we first moved I thought I was going to have to be the world’s first living heart donor because I cleaned the toilet, which you’d think she’d appreciate. But no, just because I left the bleach in it to soak, see, when Ellie peed in it, the water turned sort of red and she thought it was bloody and she’d caught kidney failure from me. Ellie pretends to get huffy and says, What kind of idiot cleans a toilet with bleach? and their laughter merges and separates and merges again. At first, for a moment, I am jealous. But I let their words and laughter blur and become the soothing music of a river moving past me. I put my anger and jealousy on the current’s back and send them on to the sea where I’ve been twice in my life. I’m grateful that Ellie and Maddie and Claire have each other, and let go a little, as if I knew I were dying and that they’d be all right.
It’s Maddie who says, “Hey, Lydie, what’re you doing, trying to hold the wall up? Come sit down.”
When Maddie says that to me, she turns and slides her chair a little, as if to make room. I hesitate a moment, and see her look at Claire.
“Yeah, Mom, come on. You didn’t even finish your pie, and I’m about to fight both you and Ellie for seconds,” Claire says. She gestures at my chair, as if I didn’t know where I’d been sitting all these years, right beside her.
CHAPTER 44
Wednesday, the Wednesday. Lydia and Jennifer wait in a special lounge with Claire, who won’t even be prepped until after Madalaine has been finished, as Dr. Douglas put it. (Madalaine pointed out the unfortunate word choice to Dr. Douglas, who stammered in embarrassment, but Madalaine had been teasing. Nobody thinks she could be teasing anymore, about anything.) Madalaine left them in the lobby when she checked in at 6:00 a.m.; the woman—impossibly young, she couldn’t be but Brian’s age—had seemed almost reverential as she stood and came around her desk to point the way to Same Day Surgery.
On Monday, Madalaine had an arteriogram, and something the technicians called an IVP. Madalaine has forgotten again what those initials stand for, although they explained everything to death. She dreaded those final tests, but they’d turned out to be nothing but boring. Last night, she and Ellie had dinner at Lydie’s, and Madalaine spent the night with Lydie so Lydie could take her to the hospital at six in the morning. They teetered back and forth with each other in bursts of conversation and silences that reached just enough into the space between them that then they’d both speak at once, and then retreat with excessive exhortations. “No, you go ahead. What were you saying?” Then Claire came, and Madalaine knew that it was because she’d asked her to.
“Wednesday’s child is full of woe,” Madalaine recites cheerfully a half-hour later as she’s prepped for surgery. “I was born on a Wednesday, did you know that?” The first shot, the one she gets before the epidural, is kicking in.
“Oh come now,” says the woman in a shower cap and green scrub suit who’s shaving Madalaine’s pubic hair. “Look at what a wonderful thing you’re doing. We don’t have many donors who aren’t siblings or parents.”
“That’s because there aren’t enough lunatics and it’s hardly legal.” Madalaine has swung from terrified to relaxed—and back to terrified. Still, there’s been a strange near-ecstasy, as if it all comes down to being able to do one, clear upright thing for redemption, this is it, and yes, yes, she’s doing it, yes.
The voice wafts up to Madalaine around her own legs to primly correct her. “Now if it weren’t legal, Dr. Douglas wouldn’t be doing it, and neither would Dr. Macao. He’s wonderful.”
“Everybody’s wonderful, I’m wonderful, you must be wonderful,” Madalaine says mockingly, but the teasing part gets lost in her thickening throat.
“Well, thank you,” the nurse answers seriously. “I don’t know that I deserve that, but you and your doctors do. You certainly have gorgeous blue eyes, like an angel.”
“Yeah,” says Madalaine, closing them.
“It’s all over, you’re fine. You’re in the recovery room. I’m Sharon. The operation went great. How do you feel?”
The voice seems to surround Madalaine, the source indistinct. She has to figure out how to open her eyes. There’s no particular pain, just a sense of missing time. A slit of light troubles her and she shuts it out. “Sick,” she whispers as nausea becomes consciousness. “Sick.”
“I know,” the voice says. “That’s normal. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. Claire is about to go into surgery.”
“Sick.”
“That’s called referred pain,” a nurse says. “Just some superficial nerves that serve the leg. They have to be cut for the surgery.” The side she’s lying on is the only part of her really asleep. It wants her to turn over, but Madalaine can’t. A machine to one side of the bed beeps and the nurse appears again. “Your sister is here,” she whispers. “And your mother and daughter.”
“Son. Where’s my son?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think he’s here,” she says, and Madalaine remembers. She pushes the morphine pump, willing her right forefinger, which seems attached to another body, somewhere else. She circles the cosmos again, for Brian.
Madalaine opens onto Lydia’s face, her fingers squeezed too tightly in Lydia’s hand. “Hey, there,” Lydie says. “You did it. You did it. Claire’s okay. She’s already produced a little urine. I just came from her room, Ellie’s with her now. I brought Jennifer with me, she’s out at the nurse’s station, and she’s fine. I thought I should see you first, but I’ll get her in a minute.” Lydia suddenly stops, as if conscious of talking too much, and adds, “How’re you doing this morning?”
“Don’t let Ellie in here,” Madalaine says, but without impact because she manages a smile. “Blood…blood…and throw up. Ellie’s hell.”
“You have a point. I’m still not sure how she helped Claire with dialysis, what with her eyes scrunched into tiny little slits,” Lydie laughs, pushing down her reaction to Madalaine’s appearance, which is cloudy-eyed and white, except for the dark smears around her eyes. “Probably Presley really did it.”
“Presley in Claire’s room?” Madalaine bends her elbows, braces her hands on the bed and begins to pull herself up. Pain. She grunts and lies back down after a brief effort.
“Nope. I do believe she may have left him briefly unattended. Brace yourself. They told me your catheter is out and they’re getting you up to pee and walk pretty soon.”
“No way. My vacation. Not moving. Let them wait on me hand and foot, pee for me, too. Gimme my catheter back.”
Lydie’s face straightens into seriousness. “Maddie. Just now, while we’re alone…thank you for my daughter. Nobody but you can really understand that gift. I know I don’t understand it the way you do, either, but you’ve got to know it’s all I think about.”
“Good. It’s good, then. Something good.”
“Yes. It’s good.”
CHAPTER 45
How unfathomable it all is, how layered, how tilted, how hidden, how tangled. Solitary, connected, guilty, pure: our minds mysteriously mix with other forces that we sense but cannot see or touch, and somehow, blindfolded, we create our lives. I almost said blindly instead of blindfolde
d, and I find I can’t choose between the words. Blindfolded says there’s an obstacle to vision that’s somehow, someday removable. Maybe there’s such a thing as a large context in which one could see how it all fits, how one thing leads to another and then branches out like a vine rooted at your feet and spreads like a maze to the horizon. Blindly? Well, I guess that would be like standing in the middle of the vines while they’re twisted around your ankles, extending as far as you can see in any direction; you can’t see where they’re rooted or where they stop, but you must find your way through them, home. I’ll go with blindfolded, and hope it’s right.
Maybe Brian knows which it is, or maybe poor, lost Kevin. I surely don’t. I’m inclined to believe now that it’s all for good, somehow, in the end, but then I think of those two and I rock back on my heels to uncertain again. But I think of picking berries over at Aggie and Zeke’s when I was little. They used to give me a bowl and take me into their five long rows of raspberry bushes when they were gathering fruit for the preserves Aggie made every July. Once I’d filled the bowl, I was allowed to eat my own fill until it was time to go back to the house. Even though the rows were taller than I by a good deal, and prickly branches grabbed at my hair and skin, I loved the berries, both the way they gave right up and plopped into my hand if they were ripe, and the soft feel of their flesh. And the taste of them, sun-warm and foreign! After I’d done it awhile, I learned that if I went backward through a row I thought I’d just picked clean as morning, I’d see lots that I’d missed. One day, I told Aggie my discovery, thinking to impress her.
“Heavens to Betsy, child. Didn’t I tell you that before? I thought I did. And here’s another trick. Look away, and take a step backward. Then look at a bigger section than the ones right in front of your face. You’ll see ones you’d swear weren’t there a minute ago.”
So I try to do that, walk backward in my mind over where I’ve been, or step back and look at a bigger part. Maybe someday I’ll see Brian and Kevin hanging there, ready to understand, full of good, ripe after all.