We Are All Welcome Here

by Elizabeth Berg

  I went into the kitchen and refilled her glass, and it came to me that the temperature of the water was up to me, and she would say nothing about it being too warm or too cold—she never had. I looked at my reflection in the window above the sink. Her daughter. I stared while the water ran over the top of the glass, and then I turned off the tap and brought the glass out to her, stuck the straw in, and let her drink. I wondered how long she’d been thirsty before she asked for anything.

  We sat in silence for a long while after that. At one point I asked if she was asleep, and she said no. I heard her bedside clock ticking, the night wind blowing, the creaks of the house, the whirring of the fan, the usual sounds of her respirator, my own breathing. We shared the silence in a way that felt like talking.

  Around three, she called my name, checking to see if I was still awake. “Why don’t you go to sleep now?” she said. “I think you got the point.”

  “What was your very favorite thing to do when you were my age?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer for a while, weighing whether or not to let me stay up, I knew. Then she said, “I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at what my favorite thing to do was.”

  “Why? What was it?”

  “I liked to make little tiny cities,” she said. “Outside, in the dirt. I made roads, I built houses out of cardboard, I used wooden blocks for cars. I made telephone poles from branches and used my mama’s black sewing thread for wires. I made holes in the ground and filled them with water for little lakes—my daddy would get so mad at me for digging holes.”

  “Were you afraid of him?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “He wasn’t a mean man, just righteous, you know? Church-righteous—that man never did sit any way but straight up in his chair. And my mama was a lot like him. I didn’t feel…I guess I just never felt like I belonged to either of my parents. I mean, I didn’t biologically, of course. But I didn’t in any other way, either. It was just a bad fit.”

  “We’re a good fit,” I said, and she said yes we were.

  A little after three, I felt an odd rush of energy. “I’m not tired anymore,” I said.

  “Yes you are,” my mother said wearily.

  “I’m not! I broke through it! I’m fine! Let me just finish the whole night, please? I can do it. I want to.”

  “All right,” she said. “But you are tired, believe me.” And then she told me about how when she worked nights as a nurse, the first night was awful. That there was always a point at which you thought you’d come out of the fatigue, but then it would come back, worse.

  About this she was right, too. Just before six, I ached all over—even my kneecaps hurt. I felt nauseated again, too. I felt like I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I saw the sky lighten, and the birds begin to fly from branch to branch in the backyard. I had always thought of dawn as bursting forth, delivering a new day with Disneyesque optimism. I felt none of that now. Now I sat on a wooden chair by my mother’s bedside, rubbing one arm and seeing the world as in resentful orbit, creaking and groaning as it forced into existence one more day. Here came the sun, starkly and uncaringly revealing our house, so small and different from the people’s whose lives and fortunes were far better than our own. But I had done it; I had lasted the night.

  When we heard Peacie coming through the door, my mother said, “All right. Now you really must go to bed.” Her voice was croaky now, and she had deep circles under her eyes. She looked about as bad as I felt.

  I started for the stairs, and Peacie narrowed her eyes at me. “What you up to?” she asked. I walked past her. “Vixen,” she said, and then I heard her say to my mother, “Good God almighty, what happened to you?”

  A little before noon, Peacie shook me awake. “Don’t,” I said. “I’m sick.”

  “You ain’t sick. You hungover. Now wake up, I got to talk to you.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the sheet up over my head. Peacie yanked it off and then grabbed me by the shoulders to sit me up. Reflexively, I reached out and slapped her. For a moment, we both sat still, staring wide-eyed at each other. I feared for myself. Surely she was going to slap me back, or worse.

  But she only said, “Get dressed. Your mother is sick, she got to go the hospital. Riley ain’t there, so I called over the hardware store. Brooks out to lunch, so Dell on the way over. You got to pack her things and help me get her in the car.” She walked out of my room and quickly back downstairs. I lay still, listening to her talking to my mother, and heard my mother’s weak voice, talking back. Then my mother began coughing. And coughing. I knew Peacie would be turning up the positive pressure on the respirator, forcing more air into my mother’s lungs. If she didn’t stop coughing, Peacie would have to fling herself across my mother’s midsection to try to help bring up secretions.

  My fault.

  Outside, it rained. Perfect. I struck my chest with my fist, hit myself again. Then I got up, got dressed, and headed downstairs.

  My mother was lying in bed, her eyes closed. Everything about her looked fragile and illuminated, like Mary in a holy card. “Mom?” I whispered.

  She opened her eyes. “I’m fine.”

  She was not. I recognized the signs of respiratory distress: the labored exhalations, the sunken eyes, the off color.

  “I’ll pack some things for you,” I told her. “Dell’s going to take us to the hospital.”

  “Is he?” she asked, and closed her eyes again.

  I packed quickly. Into the blue suitcase she kept under her bed I put her photo of me, her favorite lap quilt, and the bed socks she liked to use whenever she had to go into the hospital. Her medications and the complicated list of instructions for taking them. Her toothbrush and makeup. When I picked up her hairbrush, I began to cry. Peacie came into the room and spoke quietly. “You can shut them waterworks off right now. This ain’t no way ’bout you. She got enough to worry about.”

  “It’s all right, Peacie,” my mother said, but her eyes stayed closed and she spoke as if she were in a dream. I hoped she was. I knew how much she hated going to hospitals. I wished she could stay asleep until she came home again. Somewhere around the edge of my brain a thought flitted in and out: She might not come home. This was how people with polio often died, a respiratory infection that couldn’t be controlled. And this was the sickest I’d ever seen her.

  Peacie had gone back into the kitchen to gather up her own things. I went to sit at the table. “Peacie?”

  “What.” She wouldn’t look at me. I saw her anger in the flaring of her nostrils, in the deliberateness of her actions. I wanted to lie on the floor and prostrate myself, to beg for her forgiveness and, by extension of course, my mother’s. Outside, thunder cracked as though someone were weighing in on the idea. Huge drops of water pelted the window.

  I wanted to suggest that we put the shower curtain over my mother when we took her out, but instead I heard myself saying, “Is this because she stayed up all night? Is it my fault?”

  Peacie turned to the sink to wash her hands, then to look at me, drying her hands slowly on her apron. She was chewing something—her anise seeds, I thought. She crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow, studying me. I sat still, my hands folded in my lap, an awful weight expanding inside me. Finally, she stopped chewing and spoke. “Well. Ain’t that something, that overnight you done become God almighty. Ain’t that something! Since you so powerful, maybe you can make it stop raining, it’s gon’ be hard enough, move her around. Now stop your useless fancyin’ and come help me get her bundled up good—last thing she need is to get wet.”

  “Should we cover her with the shower curtain?” I asked.

  “That’s a good idea,” Peacie said, and a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding released itself. “Sometime your brain in good working order, give us both a shock. Go and get the curtain. And then go look out for Dell. When you see him, give a holler.”

  “Okay,” I said, unhappy with the inadequacy of the simple phrase when my desire for service, for
retribution, was so fierce. “I’ll do it now!” I added.

  “I don’t believe I was talking ’bout you doing it next Friday,” Peacie said.

  I headed for the bathroom and heard Peacie saying, “Paige? Paige?”

  I stopped dead in my tracks until I heard my mother respond. “Are we there?” she asked.

  “Lord, Lord,” Peacie muttered. “When that Dell get here?”

  When I brought in the shower curtain and handed it to Peacie, my mother seemed more alert. “Get me a drink of orange juice, Diana,” she said.

  “I’ll get it,” Peacie said. “I want Diana watch for Dell. I want him get the car ready, we gon’ take you right out. You gon’ be just fine.”

  “Peacie,” my mother said. “Take care of Diana.”

  “What you worrying yourself about? Don’t worry ’bout a thing. You know I’m gon’ take care Diana.”

  “Don’t leave her alone,” my mother said. There was a reaching quality to her voice, the equivalent of a hand on an arm.

  “I ain’t goin’ to! I am well aware of recent developments that should not have been undertook by certain among us.” Peacie looked over at me, her eyes like glittery black beads.

  I stepped out onto the front porch, where rain drummed so powerfully I feared for the roof. Drops hit the asphalt hard enough to bounce up before they fell down again. Our yard was a gigantic mud puddle. Down the street I saw a van belonging to the hardware store coming quickly toward us, its windshield wipers thunking out a frantic rhythm. I knew that van—Brooks had used it to deliver our icebox to us. It had a ramp. We could roll her right up into the back and not have to transfer her from her wheelchair into a car seat.

  “Dell’s here!” I yelled. “He’s got the van!”

  “Tell him come in and help me lift her into the wheelchair,” Peacie said. “I can’t do it alone today.”

  “I’ll help,” I said, waving at Dell and holding up my finger, telling him to wait one minute.

  “Not this time you can’t,” Peacie said.

  I hesitated, then motioned to Dell to come inside. He rushed past without even looking at me. It made me sick how that hurt my feelings, how even now I could not keep myself from the center of things.

  The phone rang and Peacie yelled, “Answer it. Might be the doctor.”

  It was not. It was Suralee, and I told her I’d call her back.

  “When?” she asked, and I said I didn’t know, I had to go.

  “Oh, come on, get over it,” she said.

  I hung up.

  Many hours later, at Peacie’s house, I lay on her sofa, weeping. I cried about how my mother had looked when the nurses transferred her to the bed in the emergency room, her eyelids half closed, her brows knitted with the effort of breathing. I cried about how kind Dell had been, how when he’d come into the house, he’d leaned down and put his hand to the side of my mother’s face, looked into her eyes, and said, Hey there, so gently. He’d lifted her into the wheelchair by himself. Then, after he got her into the van, he’d jumped into the driver’s seat to take us quickly to the hospital, where he waited with us for hours.

  I cried over the fact that LaRue wasn’t going to be home until tomorrow, and here I was with Peacie with no buffer at all. I cried over how sick I felt; my head throbbed, my stomach ached. But mostly, I cried about my selfishness and pride, which, to my mind, had brought this on. I hated the front of me and I hated the back of me.

  Finally, I had no tears left. I sat up and looked around the tiny living room. In addition to the sofa, there were two armchairs, dressed with doilies. A small footstool sat in front of one of the chairs; an end table was placed between them. On the table was a worn Bible, an empty ashtray, and a small lit lamp with a ruffled shade. There was a rag rug and a wooden crate holding magazines. A framed photograph hung on the wall, some colored woman in a dress with a high collar. She wore rimless glasses, and she was not smiling. Rather, she wore a fierce expression much like the one Peacie often had, only worse. I stared at her face and the hairs on the back of my neck rose.

  I went into the kitchen, smaller than our own, but with a nicer-looking refrigerator. Peacie sat at a square metal table, playing solitaire. I sat opposite her and surveyed the cards. “Black eight on the red nine,” I said, pointing.

  “I know that,” she said, and moved the card. Then she sat still, considering. I saw another move but kept my mouth shut. In a moment she saw it, too.

  “Bet you’s bustin’ tell me ’bout that one, too.”

  “Didn’t see it,” I said.

  “Lie like a rug.” She leaned back in her chair and regarded me. “You ’bout done with your own private wailing wall?”

  I nodded.

  “Then get back in there and wring out that sofa ’fore it float away.”

  I smiled at Peacie, grateful for her attempt at humor. Behind her, at the window, were some yellow curtains with little white polka dots, tied back with matching bows. I recognized them as having been in a recent donation bag. “Are those from us?” I asked.

  Peacie looked behind her. “What? The curtains?”

  I nodded.

  “Y’all gave them to me. Y’all didn’t want them.”

  “They’re pretty.”

  “You ain’t taking them back. Ain’t from you, anyway. They from your mother.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted them. I said they were pretty.”

  She stood and pushed her chair in, leaned close to my face. “I see you coming and going, Diana Dunn.”

  She was right. I did want the curtains back. When we’d given them to her, they were wrinkled and dirty, raglike. Now they seemed cheerful and sweet.

  “You hungry?” Peacie asked.

  “No.” We’d eaten from the vending machine at the hospital, chips and candy bars and packages of crackers and cheese.

  “I believe I’ll check in on your mother, then.”

  She was overly casual saying this; it made me worried. Peacie went to the wall phone and dialed a number, then straightened as she spoke into the mouthpiece. “Yes, I’m calling to inquire about a patient y’all have there, Miss Paige Dunn, room 507…Yes, ma’am.” She waited, her fingers drumming on the counter, then said, “Yes?…Yes, ma’am, I am a relative, I’m her sister, Betty Dunn, from New Orleans, calling long distance, so—yes…Oh, really, when was that?…I see…. Allright, then, I’ll try later.” Peacie hung up the phone, went to the already clean sink, and started wiping at it.

  “What,” I said.

  “What, ‘what’?” She wouldn’t turn around.

  “What did they say at the hospital?”

  “They say call back later, which I will do.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to my mother?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Peacie?”

  She turned around. “Now don’t be carrying on. She went to the ICU. Cain’t talk to her now.”

  I swallowed, then stood up. “Let’s go. I want to go there.”

  Peacie came over to the table and pushed me gently back down into the chair. “Now look here at me. You know same as me we cain’t go in there. She gon’ be fine. She in the best place she can be at. You know she do this sometime, get all sick and then she come home fine as pie, ain’t nothing to it.”

  “If she’s in the ICU, she’s really sick!”

  “Well, where you want her to be if she that sick! The ICU! ICU mean…Instant Cure Underway, that is exact and precise what it mean.”

  “It means Intensive Care Unit. And half those people never come out.” We stared at each other and then, miserable, I said, “When are you calling back?”

  Peacie thought for a moment, then said, “Can you be a doctor?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean can you call and act out you a doctor? Just like the play. Then they tell us how she is exactly.”

  I was seized by fear, but in a calm voice I answered, “Yes. I can do that.”

  Peacie handed me the phone and began di
aling the number again.

  “But what do I say?” I whispered.

  She shrugged. “You the doctor.”

  When the hospital operator answered, I lowered my voice and identified myself as Dr. Halloway, then asked for the ICU. When a woman there answered “ICU” in a quick and nearly breathless way, I said, “Yes. Yes! I’m Dr. Halloway, calling to inquire about my patient, Paige Dunn.”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “Uh…” I leaned against the counter, frozen and wild-eyed.

  “How she doing,” Peacie whispered. “How she doing?”

  “How…is she doing?”

  “She’s stable, Doctor. Spiked a temp up to a hundred and four, but we’ve got her on a cooling blanket and it’s down to a hundred one.

  She’s a little tachycardic, but her pressure’s back up and the other vital signs are okay. Urine output’s fine. Sputum results aren’t back yet, of course.”

  “Of course, of course,” I said. “And when do you expect she’ll come home?”

  There was a pause, and then the woman said, “Well…that will be up to you, of course…. Did you say you were Dr. Halloway?” I couldhear her rifling through some pages. “Are you on staff here?”

  I hung up. “Her temperature was high, but it came down,” I told Peacie. “She’s on a cooling blanket.”

  Peacie nodded. “All right. Good. We call back later, Doctor.”

  “I don’t want to be the doctor anymore,” I said. “You do it next time.”

  “You should feel better, Diana. That’s the right direction she going in! That’s good news we got.” She laughed. “Dr. Halloway! Hey, Doctor, I got a pain in my Archilly heel, can you fix it?”

  There was a loud knock on the door, and Peacie looked up at the kitchen clock. Nine-thirty. “Stay here,” she told me, and went out into the living room.

  “Good evening,” I heard her say. “How you doing this evening?”

  Good evening? I went to the threshold of the kitchen to see who had come. It was Sheriff Turner at the door. His hat was far back on his head, and he stood with his legs far apart, his hands on his hips. He was a handsome man, but he always made me feel squirmy inside.