A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  Maybe later in the afternoon, she and Samantha could drive up to Moose, to the entrance to Grand Teton National Park and the little log Chapel of the Transfiguration. Maybe they could stand in the front gateway of the church and they could yank the chain on the bell and, after the sound clanged across the river and echoed back from the Cathedral Mountains and across Jenny Lake, she would say to Sam, “I heard once that forgiveness is like a bell. God’s the one who makes the bell ring. But it doesn’t stand a chance of making a sound if we’re not willing to pull the rope.”

  Abby picked her way back down the trail, shivering. Even though it was mid-July, the temperature hovered around freezing this early in the day. She opened the Suburban door, checked the seat for the cell phone, and realized she hadn’t pitched it in. Well, she’d have to do it the old-fashioned way and use the pay phone. She gathered up all the loose coins she could find in the cup holder, walked to the front porch of Horse Creek Station, and began to feed in coins. She stopped short once to check the sun. It would be okay. Baltimore was two hours ahead. It wouldn’t be too early to call.

  She dialed information for the 410 area code and asked for a listing for Charles Higgins. When the operator announced the number, Abby foraged through her purse for a paper and pen.

  She found a pen in time to jot down the number on her arm. She hung up and stared at her hand for a long time before she fed in more quarters.

  “Y-ullo?”

  “Is…is…” She hated herself for her voice sounding so small. She cleared her throat and tried one more time. “Is Charlie Higgins there?”

  “Who’s this?” asked a male voice she didn’t recognize.

  “It’s… well, it’s Abigail Treasure.”

  “Who?”

  “Could you… could you just get him? Please?”

  A long wait in which she plunked down more money. Then, “Y’ullo?”

  “Charlie?” she asked. A pause. “Dad?”

  A drop in tone. “Who’s this?” But of course, of course, he already had to know.

  “It’s Abigail.”

  Silence.

  “I just… wanted to talk.”

  “Abigail?”

  She clutched the receiver with both hands, hoping. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Well, sheesh. It’s been years.”

  “Yeah.”

  What could she say? She had never been a part of his life again, not really, after he’d gone away. He’d gotten married again, had a batch of kids she hardly knew, and for years she’d been the outsider.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “I’m calling to apologize, Dad. To ask you to forgive me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m calling to tell you how sorry I am.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe you weren’t a very good father. Maybe you really hurt us. But I wasn’t a very good daughter, either. I held a lot against you.”

  “Abigail.”

  “I should have done something. I should have phoned way before now.”

  “Well,” he said quietly. “Isn’t this something? Isn’t this just something? You still got that crazy rabbit’s foot I bought you that time?”

  “I do,” she said, the hollow in her heart growing to the size of the Bighorn Basin. “I’ve kept it a long time. I have somebody I’ve decided to give it to.”

  “Well, isn’t that just something? Can’t believe you’ve kept that thing all these years.”

  For the time being, there seemed nothing more to say. Abby waited. And, on the other end of the line, Charlie Higgins waited, too.

  “Dad?” she asked just before she hung up. “Can we talk again sometime?”

  “Sure we can,” he said. “You want to give me a number?”

  “You’ll call me?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She gave him the number. Then, just before she told him good-bye, she added one more thing. “I’m not out to prove I’m right with this. I just… well, I think it’s worth working toward something. Not deciding who’s right and wrong. Just… finding out who we still are with each other.”

  “Yes,” Charlie Higgins said. “Yes.”

  She hung up and saw that the sun had topped the trees. A beautiful thought came to mind as she turned the key in the Suburban and then inched out onto the road toward Hoback Junction.

  You’ve been going through a desert, beloved one. I’ve been watching you journey for a long time. It won’t be much longer before you get to the water.

  Will I? Father, it hurts so much to even hope.

  She signaled to the right, turned toward home.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Oh, David.” He could tell she was self-conscious when she walked back inside their door. If she hadn’t been, she would have dropped her purse on the couch and knuckled away those first tears.

  “Ab. You’re back.” David’s words held the weight of the world in them.

  “Yeah, I’m back.” Then, “You won’t believe it. After seventeen years, I called my dad.”

  He stared at her, thinking how something subtle was changing, something he didn’t understand. “Ab, are you nuts? When?”

  “At Horse Creek. I stayed there for a while.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Where’s Sam?”

  “Asleep. Last night was a little rough on her.” He took a step forward. “Maybe a little rough on you, too.”

  “It’s been seventeen years since I’ve talked to him,” Abby said again.

  “I know that.”

  “We’re going to talk some more later. I gave him the number.”

  “You think he’ll use it?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’ll be a start.”

  “Are you going to tell your mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  David stood across the room from her, the sunlight streaming in the window. Across the living room, it dusted the folds of the afghan strewn across the ottoman and lay in a rectangle upon the floor.

  “I think…I—I mean…I don’t…”

  “Abby, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  She stared at him as if she was seeing him for the first time. “David, when we first got married, I didn’t trust anything. I said I did. I wanted to. But wanting to do it and doing it are two very different things.”

  “I’m sorry about your dad, Ab.”

  “What I’m trying to say… what I’m trying to say… I think I closed you out when I was preg-…pregnant. Because, with what happened with Dad, and all the responsibility of a baby, I was just so scared.”

  “I know that’s been really tough.”

  “What I’m trying to say is… when you started reaching out to Susan, I think that happened because of me.”

  “Look,” he said, wanting to shake her. “Look. It wasn’t you.”

  Her shoulders shuddered with her gasping breath. He watched her fight her own grieving down in silence. She turned fully toward him, shivering even though it wasn’t cold. Her face, her entire silhouette, was nothing more than shadow to him against the sun. “I don’t know why, but I’m not seeing what you did anymore, David. God’s showing me things in myself.”

  Braden Treasure began praying for his sister, Samantha, on the day that the Jackson Hole All-Star Little Leaguers brought home the state championship trophy. He prayed the day his mother came home with an X of white medical tape crisscrossing a cotton-ball in the crook of her arm.

  “What’d you do, Mom?” he’d asked, readjusting his Elk’s baseball cap to one side of his head.

  “You know what I did, Brade,” she told him. “Something I should have done at the same time you did yours.”

  He touched the bandage. “Did it hurt?”

  “Only for a second. That’s all.”

  Braden kept praying. And this morning, while Braden watched his dad hold the telephone receiver against his ear with both hand
s, sounding concerned, he prayed the hardest of all.

  “Yes? Yes… I see… A week. Not much time, then?…We’ll be there. She would want us to be there. We’ll get a motel in Portland.”

  Braden stood holding his mom’s hand with his heart poised in his throat. David hung up the phone and turned to them. “We’ve got to pack our bags,” he said somberly. “We’re making a trip to Oregon.”

  “David. Tell us.”

  “Dad, what is it? Is she okay?”

  Braden’s dad smiled. With one hand, he clamped down hard on Braden’s shoulder. “It’s good news, sport. They’ve found a transplant. Almost an identical match.”

  “What?!” Abby shrieked. Braden couldn’t keep from leaping up and down. Brewster barked the way he always did when his family got this rowdy. Braden saw his dad staring gratefully out the window, up toward the summit of the mountain.

  “Will it work, Dad?” Braden must have asked a hundred times while they drove west on the highway, through American Falls and Meridian, the four-lane winding down deep, curvy plateau edges as they headed toward Pendleton. “Do they know it’s going to help?”

  “They think it’ll help. They can’t be sure,” David answered. Braden didn’t know what to do to make the time go faster. He counted mile markers as they disappeared along the pavement.

  Road-worn and travel-weary, they all helped read the maps and point out the street signs to help David find the way in Portland. They got stuck on the wrong interstate going the wrong direction at least two different times.

  When they got to Sam’s room in the hospital, they had to put on masks. “Can you believe it?” she asked. In her hand, she was holding the old dusty rabbit’s foot his mother had given her. When she hugged their father, Braden noticed she had tears in her eyes.

  During the entire process, things changed and got harder every day. Braden stayed with his sister, talking and waiting, finding things to do with Sam for as long as they would let him. He brought her a Slinky and some Silly Putty.

  He got into trouble for the Silly Putty because it stuck to the bed.

  On the opposite wall from Sam’s pillow, Dr. Riniker hung a chalkboard where nurses wrote down numbers after the doctor tested her blood. “You’re doing a good job,” Braden heard him say to Sam one day after she’d stopped feeling very good. “I know the chemo’s tough, little one.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “My brother’s here.”

  While Sam lay there, her brown hair, which he’d liked so much in her pictures, fell out in big clumps.

  For a few days after they arrived in Portland, Sam’s room seemed like a party. Friends stopped in to visit. Get-Well cards lined an entire wall. Flowers topped every surface and bouquets of balloons bobbed beside the bed. But then, as time passed, things had gotten quiet. The green, pink, and purple lines on the Hewlett Packard monitor moved in mesmerizing waves. Occasionally, when a beeper went off, a nurse would rush in and adjust a setting on Sam’s oxygen.

  Braden knew, without anybody telling him, that this had become very frightening and serious.

  Dr. Riniker measured Sam’s blood early on Tuesday morning. He scribbled figures on the chart, and the nurse erased the numbers on the chalkboard and wrote, “Red-.01. White-.01.”

  His sister didn’t wake up that morning to play tictac-toe with him or to make the funny, bare rabbit’s foot of his mother’s scamper without its body across the blanket. She kept sleeping all day.

  “She’s almost down to zero,” Braden overheard a nurse say to Sam’s mother. “What’s done is done now. There’s nothing left to do. Only time will tell.”

  And Braden kept praying.

  As the hours progressed for Samantha, Abby watched Susan forget that anyone else was in the room. She only left when she needed to remove her mask. Sam’s immunities were so low from the chemo, the doctor made those who entered keep their faces covered.

  Abby watched Susan go without meals because she didn’t want to leave her child.

  She listened as Susan sat close beside her daughter’s head against the pillow, not knowing whether she could hear or not, while she sang “Day O” through her mask just like Harry Belafonte.

  Abby watched while Susan swept her hand across the dome of her daughter’s head as gently as if she was rearranging downy fuzz on a baby’s head, making herself remember, as if she had sculpted the smooth shape of it herself.

  As days passed, Susan stood at her daughter’s bedside, more isolated and friendless than anybody Abby had ever seen. “It was an anonymous donor,” she said aloud once, even though she’d never glanced in their direction. “We don’t even know where it came from. Maybe Jackson Hole.”

  “You’ll never know, will you?”

  “Probably not.” Another stroke on Sam’s head. Another, while she read Sam’s sleeping face. “We’ll always be so grateful.” Then, with eyes raised to David, “What if she doesn’t survive this?”

  “I don’t know. I just keep praying—”

  “It’s an awful thing to watch her body go through,” Susan said, her voice twisting with pain.

  When Abby turned toward David, his entire stature registered the same shock and sadness as Susan’s.

  Abby watched him glancing at Samantha’s still face whenever he thought nobody saw him.

  She watched him sit down and stand up, sit down and stand up, desperate to do something that no one could do.

  Whenever a nurse or an orderly entered the room, Abby saw David hoping someone might be able to tell him something.

  “Hey,” he said to Abby as she brushed against him, reaching for the water pitcher on the nightstand beside the bed. “Those pants make you look like Julia Roberts.”

  Abby straightened, the pitcher in her hand. “You like these?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Across the room, Susan lifted one of the slats on the window blinds and bent to peer out. Abby and David’s gazes locked. She remembered something Viola Uptergrove had told her once. Hardest thing you’ll ever do, being a Christian, Viola had said, is to keep believing in believing. You’ve got to expect things from Jesus, and then start looking for them.

  Abby followed David’s gaze across the hospital room, saw him watching Susan, and felt a sense of rightness. She wrapped both hands around her husband’s arm so he’d know she was sure. “If you want to hold her during some of this, I’ll understand,” she whispered. “She’s so alone. I think she needs you.”

  “Ab?” he whispered a question.

  “I know what we’re working toward, David,” she said without a doubt in her voice. “I know I’m your wife. I also know that Susan will always be Samantha’s mother.”

  “Abby,” he said with the depths of his soul in his eyes. “Thank you.”

  The bag of marrow for Samantha was brought in almost as unceremoniously as a rack of ribs into a smokehouse. “Here it is.” Dr. Riniker hitched it up on an IV stand and let it swing there, a long narrow baggie with rich, red thickness inside. He attached it to a port that had been in Sam’s chest since they arrived. “The gift. It drips in like this. And it’s amazing; this stuff finds its own way into the depth of the bones.”

  “How long will it take before we know anything?” David asked.

  “A few days,” the doctor said. “It’ll take hours for this to drip in. Tomorrow we’ll start with the blood markers again. If those numbers go up, we’ll count it a success.”

  Braden stood by his sister’s bedside for the next few days and watched Samantha struggle. There were good days and bad days, victories and defeats. There were days when Sam was smiling even though she was too weak to raise her head. There was a day of fever, when nurses brought ice in and put it on her and her mother, Susan, cried.

  Always, always there was the chalkboard. Every day Dr. Riniker would check Sam’s blood and the nurses would write the numbers on the board. It got to where Braden couldn’t understand their words anymore; he could only understand the numbers. Every day, the nurse wou
ld write “Red-0. White-0.” and he would know that nothing had changed. Every day, he would wait for the board to be erased, and he would try to guess at the numbers before she wrote them down.

  But it was always the same. Zero. Always zero. Until, one day, when Dr. Riniker smiled. He gave the nurse his papers and she picked up the chalk for the board.

  Our Father, who art in heaven, Braden prayed. Please. Take care of my sister.

  The nurse wrote, “Red-.03. White-1.”

  For a long time, everybody stared at what she’d written. Another nurse said, “Well, that’s interesting. The markers have started to climb.”

  Dr. Riniker stood back and crossed his arms over his chest with pleasure. “That’s progress,” he said. “That’s certainly progress.”

  Samantha’s mother wiped away tears. Braden’s dad scrubbed his eyes with his fingers. Braden’s mom sat down hard in a plastic chair beside the bed.

  “I’m pleased,” Dr. Riniker said. “She’s moving in the right direction.”

  Braden stood beside the bed where he thought nobody could see him. He wanted to cry and laugh all at the same time.

  “Hey, sport. Come over here with me.” His dad gestured and slapped his knee.

  Braden climbed into his father’s lap with pleasure, and they held on to each other for a while. “I love you, son,” his dad whispered.

  Then, unable to contain their emotion, they started wrestling and knuckling each other’s hair until they couldn’t stop laughing, and both of their heads looked like Don King.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Samantha Roche, standing four-feet-four with her toes curled deep into the sand, and healthier than she’d been in eighteen months, gave her brother Braden—who hadn’t seen the ocean during his entire life—a tour of her favorite place. Even though jewel-sun mornings can be rare on the Oregon coast, today the light glittered on the swells and dips of the water. The sky was crisp and broad and glorious with blue, a gift from a heavenly Father who delighted in the treasure of His children, both the young ones and the grownups, who had sought Him even though it hadn’t always been easy or felt right, and were letting Him prove Himself faithful.