Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “What sort of loan would you be applying for?” The woman laced her long fingers together atop the desk.

  “For the hospital where I work. If I could borrow a few thousand dollars to donate to the hospital’s burn center, it would help them so much. I can pay it back in a year, a little bit every week from my paycheck.”

  “Most of our consumer loans are secured loans, first or second mortgages and car loans,” the woman said stiffly, and then she relaxed her tone. “Couldn’t you just donate a little at a time instead of taking out a loan?”

  “There’s so much need there, ma’am. You wouldn’t believe. As kids grow, they need more surgeries because their scar tissue doesn’t stretch. Even adults can barely stand the pain.” Marika wished she’d brought a burn-center brochure with her, because her words didn’t feel convincing. She thought of the boy’s raw skin pushing against the white gauze, his crowded teeth. “I just want to help,” she concluded.

  The woman declined Marika’s request graciously and rose to her great height to shake Marika’s hand again. Marika felt sorry for her, so tall and strong, in charge of a vault full of money but unable to do good with it. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring; perhaps she was widowed or divorced, left behind by someone.

  “If you ever need blood drawn at the hospital,” Marika said as they clasped hands, “you can ask for me.” It was all she had to offer.

  THE AIR WAS fresh and wet, just above freezing, so she didn’t zip up her parka. As she waited at the corner outside the bank for the walk signal, she saw a familiar figure approach from the other side of Michigan Avenue, cutting through the traffic. He was probably only in his fifties, but his face was weathered and spotted with precancerous skin lesions. His flyaway hair was pure white, and his combed beard was filmy, almost translucent. He was dressed for summer, in a T-shirt, with the blazing sun logo of a local beer called Bell’s Oberon. She’d never seen him without a confusion of nurses and other hospital staff surrounding him. When he stepped out into traffic, a small white truck screeched to a halt about a foot away from the man, who then reached out and placed a flat hand deliberately on the hood, as though absorbing energy from the truck’s engine or maybe sending energy into it.

  “The apocalypse is upon us!” the man shouted at the driver of the white truck.

  She knew Lightning Man from his hospital stays for dehydration and exposure, but in the past he’d usually been making pronouncements about the weather or the alignment of the sun and moon and planets. The first time he came in, two men from transport and a nurse held his arms and legs as Marika took his blood. Her presence had calmed him; when she’d touched his arm, he’d sighed and said, “This one understands.” His skin had been hot with fever, and because his gown was slipping off, Marika had seen intricate red ferns stretching from his shoulder and over one side of his chest, designs so blood-dark she’d thought they were tattoos. “Lichtenberg flowers,” the nurse had called them, caused by capillaries bursting during electrical burns, though the doctor had been unable to confirm he’d actually been struck by lightning as he claimed. On his subsequent visits, the red ferns were gone. His blood, however, was always hot in the vial.

  “At midnight lightning will come down from the heavens!” Lightning Man shouted now in the street, his voice an authoritative rumble. When he lifted his hand off the truck, the driver sped around him as though energized. Lightning Man continued toward Marika, halted at the curb before her. He looked down into her face with glowing blue eyes. “You understand. We must prepare for the cleansing millennial fire! Blood must flow, but don’t be afraid.”

  With his eyes glued to hers, Lightning Man reached out, slipped his bare hand through the collar of her jacket and under her lab coat to grasp her bare shoulder. The contact shocked her, but then was warm and soothing. Through his fingers, electricity trickled into her, traveled under her skin and up to her face, which she could feel was flushing pink. The warm energy snaked down into her belly and nestled between her legs. She couldn’t look away from his eyes, where she now saw the blue was rimmed with orange. He continued to hold her shoulder, pressed his fingers into her, infused her with soothing knowledge. The end of the millennium was not about a computer bug, he seemed to be telling her, but about the culmination and resolution of all the pain and suffering in the world.

  “When the clock strikes midnight, all will be laid bare,” he said in a quieter, more intimate voice. “Each of us must choose to see the light or else be plunged into darkness. Will you choose the light?”

  Marika thought of how the boy in his hospital bed ached for a simple gesture of human contact—this man would not have been afraid to give it.

  “Yes,” Marika whispered. Of course this world could not go on as it had.

  “This one understands!” he shouted at the sky, which was overcast. He slid his warm hand out of her parka and moved away from her toward two women in knee-length skirts and snow boots. Marika’s body was shaking, and she imagined her shoulder was imprinted with red flowers. The light turned to walk, but she couldn’t step off the curb.

  One of the skirted women yelled at Lightning Man to leave her “the hell alone,” and the force of her voice threw his willowy frame against the glass doors of the First National Bank building as it might have in a cartoon. He turned around and flattened his hands against the glass and repeated to the doors what he’d said earlier to the truck. Marika imagined the doors heating up, maybe the whole building, too. She studied his shoulder blades poking out against the back of his shirt like wings, his arms striped with the kind of veins that were easy to draw blood from. The light said walk and then don’t walk. And walk again. She considered following Lightning Man to listen further, to try and understand what exactly was going to happen, but people needed her at the hospital. The hospital was where she could do the most good.

  All that afternoon, her heartbeat felt erratic, and she had to focus hard to keep her mind from wandering, even while she was drawing blood. She skipped her break, taking only a few minutes to eat some crumbling Christmas cookies someone had left in the lounge. Some of the work orders seemed apocryphal: conjoined twins had been born this morning, and they needed to be drawn separately. Also, there was a lockdown on One North because a man on crutches was roaming the halls, his tubes dangling, demanding the return of the leg that the doctors had just amputated.

  After her hospital shift was over, Marika worked for an extra hour to enter everything into her computer and then headed to the Good Works Kitchen. The sign across the street that had been counting down the days for three months was gone, leaving only an empty place in the dark window.

  A New Year’s Eve meal at the Good Works Kitchen always involved turning away people who’d been drinking, and tonight the anxiety level would be high among those who thought they might be getting their last-ever supper. The volunteer coordinator put Marika in the kitchen instead of in the dining area, for her safety, he said, and she didn’t complain, tried not to show her disappointment. She loved welcoming each down-and-out man and occasional woman with children, loved watching people grow warm after coming in from the cold, seeing their hunger diminish, loved seeing them softened by generosity and gentle treatment. The lines in their faces smoothed out, their shoulders relaxed, their breathing slowed. Tonight, she wished she could touch every person and pass on Lightning Man’s soothing energy to help them through whatever was coming.

  The kitchen was so hot she had to strip down to her tank top, though her plump upper arms, sprinkled with acne, were not something she wanted to show to people. Her skin grew blotchy and she had to keep wiping sweat from her forehead. She couldn’t seem to calm her own breathing, and every time a steel spoon hit the side of the beef stew pot or the rice pudding vat, her heart jumped. When Zach, the college-boy volunteer with the goatee, dropped a steam pan of mashed potatoes, the clatter was terrible, and she imagined sparks flying all around, blue and orange. What color were the burned boy’s eyes? she wondered. Would it say
on his chart? She studied the side of Zach’s face as he cleaned up his mess to the sound of the classical music they always piped in. She imagined Zach was wrapped in flesh-colored gauze that would peel away at midnight to reveal miraculous new skin without the little beard. In the dining room, the men moved through the food line, and Marika searched each face as it passed the kitchen doorway, imagined rough and chilblained skin sloughing off to reveal something pure and new beneath. Her own pocked skin, too, would peel away to reveal a clean slate. She was glad these hungry people didn’t have to be alone tonight.

  At eleven p.m., after the kitchen was closed down for the night, while Marika was wiping the stainless steel surfaces, she thought of the crucified chimpanzee from the brochure, imagined it had somehow survived, was wrapped in gauze bandages in a hospital bed, suffering but alive. Zach returned to the kitchen with a bouquet of flowers in a juice bottle and put them before her: a pink carnation and some miniature red roses, surrounded by baby’s breath.

  “Somebody left these on one of the tables. They’re for you.” Zach towered over her.

  Another time she might have first insisted somebody else needed flowers more than she did, but tonight she accepted them. When she finished cleaning up, she put on her parka and headed to the hospital. She pressed the bottle of flowers against her breast to protect them from the freezing air, but she found the cold wind on her face refreshing. There were no clouds to speak of, and the moon was a modest crescent over the hospital’s parking structure. Little showers of colored sparks peppered the sky in one direction and then another, and each time they were followed by a pop-pop. She heard some shouts from the downtown New Year’s event. If everyone in the world had to make a choice tonight, she hoped they would all choose light over dark, kindness over cruelty.

  She held up the flowers as she passed the information desk and then put them on a table in the waiting area, out of sight of the receptionist—flowers were never allowed in the burn unit. She found the hospital quiet and dim and the elevator empty. All down the hallways, nurses and aides were bunkered behind glass walls, clustered tightly around desks in offices decorated with silver paper and twinkle lights, sipping from paper cups—she sensed they didn’t want to be alone at midnight. Nobody from the burn center staff noticed her as she donned a sterile blue gown, mask, and gloves from the isolation cart, nor when she slipped into the boy’s room, where he snored gently in the dark. She knew she should let him sleep, but she wanted to hear his voice again.

  “Tiny?” she whispered. It was hard to tell, but she thought he might be only a few inches taller than she was.

  “Is somebody there?” he asked and tugged against his wrist restraints. “Are you a lady?”

  “It’s me, Marika,” she whispered, fearing he could hear her heartbeat. “I took your blood before. I knew your family couldn’t be here, so I wanted to say Happy New Year.” The darkness of the room reminded her that the young man had been living in darkness since he’d been here. He couldn’t see her face, or anything.

  “Will you touch me? Please.” His slow voice clicked inside her.

  “Shhh,” she whispered, and she could barely hear her own voice over the humming of her body. She gripped the metal rail of the hospital bed, and when it began to vibrate, she let go and reached up and touched the bag of IV fluid, which then glowed slightly. Car lights outside showed blue and orange, and the green lights on the monitor smoldered in the dark. She moved closer, so her thighs and belly were pressed against the bed frame, and let her gaze rest on the boy’s soft mound. She reached out and touched the inside of his elbow below the bandage she’d put on him after drawing his blood this morning. His flesh went to goose bumps. Hers did, too.

  “Please touch me, Marika.”

  “I am touching you,” she whispered. She heard two shots from a gun in the distance. Or fireworks. Or a car’s backfire. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth shot.

  “What color is your hair?” he whispered.

  “Dark blond.”

  “Is your hair long? Please. I don’t want to die alone here.” He slowed down the word die so much it seemed like a real possibility.

  “I wear it in a long braid. But I don’t think we’ll die,” she whispered. “If anything happens, I think the world will be remade, better than before.”

  “If you could just put your hand on me for a second.”

  She looked out through the open door and saw nobody in the hall. Earlier she’d said she couldn’t touch him, but all day long she’d tried to puzzle out why not. Why couldn’t a person touch another person to bring him comfort in a difficult time? She’d known about the healing energy in human contact, had always put her hands on her patients, but she was starting to understand how touching might be more important than all the money she didn’t have to give. When Lightning Man had reached inside her parka, the universe cracked open to reveal a brightness beyond any description.

  “Can you see the fireworks?” he asked. “The nurses said there’d be fireworks.”

  “Yes,” she said, but she was lying. His room was on the wrong side of the hospital to see the downtown display.

  First she thought she might lay her hand on top of the sheet, but she knew her touch would be more powerful with nothing between his skin and hers. She slid off her left glove. Her fingers brushed Tiny’s thigh, which turned to gooseflesh. When she rested her hand on his soft mound, he sighed deeply and terribly, as though he were being released from a suffering she couldn’t fathom. At first what she felt around the catheter was cool and toad-squishy, but under her touch it warmed and became the most delicate thing in this world of vulnerable creatures, more vulnerable and naked than that poor chimpanzee. The boy groaned, and Marika’s body flushed and buzzed with the electricity she’d been carrying inside herself all afternoon and evening. Her capillaries swelled against her skin.

  “Rub me, please,” the boy breathed, more desperate than before.

  She squeezed slightly. He was a stranger here, alone in a dark world that might be about to radically transform. She could ease him through to the other side. More gunshots or fireworks sounded in the distance. As if switched on, the thing in her hand came to life, pushed back against her palm, pushed and swelled. Even without money she could alleviate suffering, and maybe she could infuse with life that which seemed lifeless.

  Marika knew that at the stroke of midnight, as the fireworks display lit up the sky over Kalamazoo, a hurricane or tornado could hit this hospital just as easily as any other place and send this boy’s body and the bed it was strapped to flying through the air, or floating onto the floodwaters. Gale-force winds could then open up a closet containing the healing ointments that would spread themselves across the water, so that the flood itself would become healing medicine. She palpated the flesh in her hand, imagined the sky brilliant with orange, gold, and red light. Flames, perhaps, or the new sunrise.

  She almost didn’t hear his moans over the sound of her own breathing. Then she was gripping something that was slipping away. She grasped more tightly what she was losing and felt her own body shudder. She slumped over the bed and envisioned the bricks falling away from the walls of the hospital, bricks and blocks falling off all the buildings downtown and becoming rubble. Lightning could split the First National Bank building right down the middle, short-circuiting the electrical system. Once the power was out, the bars guarding the vault at the heart of the bank would slide open. Lightning storms could strike banks around the world. Bill Gates’s private vault, too, could crack open like a giant egg hatching, and inside would be plenty for all. Humanity would become like Noah’s Ark, navigating the flood of need, with people one by one climbing on board and helping rescue those still floundering. Noah’s boat would be built bigger this time, big and solid enough to save the whole world. The loan manager from the bank would pour coins into cupped hands and press fistfuls of cash toward mothers swaddling hungry babies. As the sun rose on the new millennium, there would no longer be rich or poor, wea
k or strong. Strangers would embrace and heal one another with touch. Marika was more than ready to ladle out nourishment, to accept blood from those who needed to give, to unashamedly comfort the suffering in any way she could.

  She heard the popping of the fireworks, the beep of Tiny’s heart rate monitor, and knew it was connected to an alarm, but she was taken by surprise when the overhead light came on. She blinked and felt herself bursting open like flowers in sunlight, overflowing into the new millennium.

  Children of Transylvania, 1983

  Breakfast this morning in the hotel was mmlig, a firm cornmeal mush, served not with liquid sheep’s cheese as the previous morning, but with a slick of pork fat over the top, as clear as the poured-glass windows of the Moon Church they’d visited. Joannah spooned the grease into an ashtray in the center of the table while their guide, Bogdan, assigned to them by the Romanian national tourist bureau, watched. Then he mixed his own shiny fat right into the corn mush and took a big spoonful, and another. He would go on to devour the bread, which was heavy and dirty tasting, as though baked inside factory smokestacks.

  “No, thanks,” Joannah said after one bite.

  “Cornmeal mush is pretty good biking food,” said her sister Clarice, who was sitting between herself and Bogdan at the eight-person table in the town of Dr. Petru Groza, named for the first Communist prime minister of Romania. Margie, her other sister, was whispering in an agitated way with her husband. Joannah’s sisters were sixteen and eighteen years older than she was and had always seemed as much like aunts as sisters. Occasional bike rides along Lake Michigan were the only thing they’d had in common, besides their parents, and Joannah had been only five when their dad died.

  When Joannah had expressed an interest in the trip her sisters were taking to Transylvania, they had suggested she come with them. When they learned that Joannah was sleeping with sixty-five-year-old David Masters, a friend of their mother’s, and had no intention of moving out of their mother’s senior housing apartment, they pulled out all the stops, paid her way to come along with them. She’d needed a break, they said, from caring for Mom; they acted as though they were saving her soul. If left to her own devices, Joannah would’ve stayed in Chicago reading vampire romance stories and sitting in a chair wrapped in blankets beside their ma, who had just been moved to a long-term-care facility, the thing she’d railed against as long as she could remember who she was. Now, after ten years of caring for her mother—full time since graduating from college—Joannah didn’t know what to do.