by S. M. Hulse
The surroundings feel blessedly unfamiliar, the hot-air balloons painted on the walls bright and fresh, recent. I can’t remember what was on the walls when I was here as a girl, but it wasn’t hot-air balloons. Farm animals, maybe. I think I remember a cow with eyelashes and lipstick. “Thank you for coming,” Asa says, as I stop near him. I nod. The truth is, despite agreeing to Asa’s request on the phone, I wasn’t certain I was going to come. Not yesterday, not this morning, not even in the parking lot. Only now, in the hall outside Emily’s room, do I know that whatever reasons Asa has for wanting me here outweigh the reluctance I feel. His body is blocking the doorway, and I’m grateful for these final few seconds’ reprieve before he goes into the room and I have to follow.
Emily doesn’t look dead. A ridiculous thought, maybe, but my relief makes me realize I’d been worried about it. I could be wrong. I’ve never actually seen anyone dead, though I passed within inches of two bodies that night in the house. (Close your eyes, Sweetie, one of the paramedics told me. I didn’t, but because I was strapped to the backboard all I saw was the blood on the ceiling and walls. Great arcs of it.) But no, there’s the rise of Emily’s chest beneath the blanket, the gentle fall a second later. Tubes snaking from beneath the edges of the blanket, but nothing in her throat, nothing obstructing her placid face. A girl with her hair in long braids on either side of her head, a stuffed dog propped at her side, a blanket tucked neatly beneath her armpits. She might be sleeping, nothing more, if not for the bandage around her neck. It stands out starkly, the same titanium white as the bleached sheets. I hear lyrics in my head, something from an old hymn. Crimson sin washed white as snow. I’ve never liked that imagery. Blood doesn’t cleanse. It stains.
“She looks,” I say, and then am not sure how to finish the sentence. “Like her picture.”
Asa nods, goes to a chair on the far side of the bed. We’ll have to talk across it, our words passing above Emily’s still form.
The room is nothing like the sterile hospital rooms that appear on the television programs I watch at Hawkins’s house: every flat surface is inhabited by stuffed animals of all sizes and species; the walls are papered with dozens of greeting cards; a crowd of Mylar balloons just beginning to surrender the buoyancy of their helium is slowly sinking from its position above the television set mounted in the corner. My own hospital room had been well adorned with gifts, too, but not so lavishly as this. Some of these must be from people who don’t even know Emily, who saw what happened on the news. I take the plastic palomino horse from my bag, hand it across the bed to Asa. I’ve touched up the paint, given the horse a new glossy finish that highlights the yellow-gold color of his coat. “Not sure you’ll find anywhere to put it.”
He places the model on the table beside his chair, next to a book whose gilt edges betray its holy nature. “I’ll donate most of this,” he says, gesturing to the gifts. “But I want her to see them all if she wakes up.”
The word—if—sounds sharply in my ears. I’ve been so alert for it in my own thoughts, so eager to eliminate it, I can’t possibly miss it now. Asa puts his hand over his face, bows his head. “When,” he says, and I barely hear him.
I try to muster the sort of purposeful cheerfulness my nurses used when I was a child. “You said things were the same,” I remind him. “She’s still doing fine.”
“They are the same,” Asa agrees, “but she is not fine.” He takes his daughter’s hand in both of his own, leans his elbows on his knees. “Every day things are the same, they’re worse,” he says. “Every day things don’t change, they do.”
Twin impulses pull at me: flee, comfort. I suppress the first, cling to the second. “You have faith things will get better,” I tell Asa.
“Do I?”
“Yes,” I insist. “You do. I know you do.”
Asa meets my eyes for a moment, fleetingly, then suddenly stands and strides out of the room. I hesitate, glance at Emily—she is so still she seems almost like a doll, like one more beautiful gift crowded into this room—then follow Asa. I find him a couple yards down the hall, propped awkwardly against the wall, one leg bent at the knee, the other angled in front of him, as though he started to slump to the floor and stopped himself but can’t summon the energy to straighten.
“I can’t say things like that in there,” he says, his voice only a shade louder than a whisper. “I can’t say if. She could hear. They say people hear what goes on around them when they’re in a coma. I can’t say things like that in front of her.”
“It’s all right.” I almost say I’m sure Emily didn’t hear, but realize that won’t sound like comfort. “Do you want to go to the cafeteria, get some coffee or something? Just for a few minutes,” I add, when his eyes dart back to the doorway.
The cafeteria fulfills the hospital cliché: in the basement, lit by flickering fluorescents, stocked with burnt coffee and plastic-wrap-smothered sandwiches. We both get coffee—Asa almost dumps the contents of a salt packet into his before I stop him—and I buy a chocolate chip cookie with too few chocolate chips. I break it in half and put it on a napkin on the table between us.
“You stay the night here?” They didn’t allow that when I was a child, but I think they do now.
Asa nods. “I haven’t slept at home since the bombing.” He stirs his coffee slowly, watches the tiny whirlpool chase the little balsa-wood stick around the cup. He looks like he could use something stronger than coffee; every time I see him, it’s as though something else has been whittled away, hollowing him out from the inside, so much gone now he’s starting to crumple. “Sometimes I leave for a few hours, but I never go home.” He glances up. “It’s one reason I was eager to help you at your place. I worried the whole time, every time, being so far away in case something happened, but at the same time sometimes I want to get on the freeway and drive as far away from here as I can. When you called me that first day, it was such a relief to have a reason to be gone. An excuse.” He puts a hand to his face, speaks from behind its shield. “It’s horrible to admit that. I’m a horrible father.”
“It’s not,” I say. “You’re not. You’re absolutely not. It must be so— I can’t even imagine how it must be to see Emily like that.” If Samuel had known—if he could have seen what his bomb would do, what effects it would have—he would never have made it. I’m sure of it. Have to be sure of it.
But he does know. The thought arrives immediately, clear and true. I have been Emily. I have been the little girl in this hospital. For all I know, I have been the little girl in that very same room upstairs. And just as I have been the little girl in the hospital bed, Samuel has been the man in the chair at her bedside. He has spent time in this basement, forcing sustenance into a stomach churning with anxiety. The fear Samuel felt for me, and the hatred he felt for the man who had put me in that hospital bed, must both feel very familiar to Asa. And there is another parallel for Samuel, isn’t there? He has been the man beside the bed, and he has been the man who put a child in it. I want nothing more than to not think about that, here, now, but I know I must. Know I can’t let myself put it out of my mind.
A man in scrubs passes our table with a tray of food, nods to Asa. He lifts a couple fingers from his coffee cup in a stunted wave. “They all know me now,” he says. “They didn’t at first. I was down here a few days after the bombing—it was the first time I’d left Em’s side—and I sat right over there”—he nods toward a table across the room—“and I was picking at a sandwich and heard this group of nurses talking about Emily. They didn’t call her that. ‘The girl from the church,’ they said. They all agreed she’d never wake up.”
“They were wrong,” I say immediately. “I hope you reported them.”
Asa shrugs. “People gossip. There’s a reason there are so many verses about it in scripture.”
I take a sip of my coffee. I’ve missed the window to drink it: scalding at first, it’s already passed through hot into lukewarm.
“I was angry at the time
,” Asa continues. “Furious. But now there’s part of me that’s almost glad they said it. I can’t admit it’s a possibility. Not out loud. Not to anyone. I won’t even admit it to myself most of the time.”
“She’s going to be fine, Asa.”
He jerks his eyes away from his coffee, to me. “Let me say what I need to say. I know you know it’s a possibility, Jo. I see the fear that she won’t wake up all over your face whenever you mention her.” The words are sharp, but I almost welcome their sting; Asa’s anger feels safer than his despair. “I keep having these thoughts I don’t want to have. Not the obvious ones, not just, My God, what if she dies? But other thoughts, things like, I’m glad she still has Sunday school faith.”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“She’s right at that age where she’s going to start asking questions,” he says. “She’s going to notice the apparent contradictions in the stories she’s heard, start paying attention to the harsh tales as well as the beautiful ones, wonder about all the things most of us wonder about if we think about God. Most of which ultimately amount to: If He loves us, why does He allow terrible things to happen?”
Because he does not exist. Asa glances at me as though I’ve spoken aloud.
“They’re good questions,” he says. “People should ask them as they mature in their faith. They should think about them, talk about them. I want Em to do that. I don’t want her to be afraid of doubt. I want her to know it’s okay to wrestle with it. But she hasn’t gotten there yet, and while I hope—so much—she still gets the chance to get there, I’m glad she hasn’t yet.” He pulls the stir-stick from his coffee; it leaves a trail of droplets across the tabletop before he sets it on a napkin and the liquid soaks and puckers the paper. More stains. “In the church … after the bombing, after she got hurt … when she was bleeding—so much—she was afraid she might die. I know she was; I could see it.” He looks at me again, and I am struck, suddenly, by how young Asa must have been when Emily was born. No older than me, probably, and maybe younger. “I hope you never know what it’s like to see your child fear her own death, Jo. No one should know what that’s like.” He pauses, clasps his hands on the table. Maybe I should put my own hand out, offer a comforting touch, but I don’t know if he would welcome it, and I don’t want to interrupt him if he’s praying. When he speaks again, he does so without lifting his eyes. “I told her she was okay, and I think she believed me. She has always believed me before. But if she didn’t … and if she’s aware now, if she’s able to think the way … the way she is now … I’m glad she believes in Heaven, a literal Heaven. I’m glad she believes she’ll see her mother again. I’m glad she believes that if she dies, Jesus will be there to meet her.” His voice has lost the steadiness it gained from anger; the words tremble as they rise from his tongue.
“You believe those things, too, don’t you?”
“I believe there is an afterlife,” Asa says carefully. “And I believe we will be united with or separated from God after our deaths. Most days I believe that. I want to.” More quietly: “I used to.” He picks up his coffee, puts it back down without drinking. “Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe there’s nothing.”
“But you healed that boy,” I remind him. I worry the words might sound false coming from my lips, but he seemed so sure when he told me about it, and I try to remember his quiet confidence.
“You don’t think I did,” Asa says flatly. “And maybe you’re right. I was still a kid myself when it happened. Come on, Jo, I spent my entire childhood at revivals. My father might have been a fraud, but I believed it. Real or not, what other frame of reference did I have? I laid on hands, the boy lived, I must have healed him, right? What would you have thought in that situation?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do.” He laughs once, an unpleasant light in his eye. “A coincidence. An injury that must not have been as bad as it looked. Maybe you would have even thought of it as a miracle, but not a real, capital-M miracle, just something you couldn’t explain, but who cares because it all worked out for the best.”
I take a deliberate sip of my coffee. Cold, but it buys me a few seconds. Asa doesn’t shift his eyes from mine, and I see anger there, a fury fueled by a dwindling faith. “I don’t know what really happened with that boy,” I finally say. “But I know you believed you healed him. You believed it so strongly it changed your entire life. It made you reject your father’s charlatanism. It made you become a pastor. Whatever happened, it was powerful. I don’t think you should give that up. Not if you can help it. Not right now.”
Asa stares at me for several long seconds, and I watch the fire fade from his eyes. The weariness returns, and with it a sort of disappointment. He nods, but it’s an automatic gesture, meant to placate. Another thing to worry about. Another harm I hadn’t imagined when I first heard about the bombing. The specter of physical death is alarming enough; I don’t want to think about spiritual death, too.
“I know there probably isn’t,” I say, “but is there anything I can do?”
Asa is silent for a long time, and I let myself hope he won’t speak at all. There is nothing I can do; I know that. The only thing I think he might ask is for me to pray with him, and I do not want to do that. I want to avoid it so badly I almost didn’t ask. It’s one thing to scrawl Our prayers are with you on the bottom of a get-well card, or even to promise prayers the way I did in the statement I wrote after the bombing, but it’s another entirely to agree to pray with a man who has formed his life around the church, believes the laying on of hands can heal, and is praying to save the life of his only child.
When he finally speaks, his words are very quiet, but very hard. “You can come upstairs,” he says, “and see—really see—what your brother has done to my daughter.”
I have not known what to say to Asa before, but never like this. Never have I been speechless in this way; never have I been faced with such a void in my mind when I search for words.
Asa seems to expect it. I think I see a hint of reluctance in his expression, some slight acknowledgment that this anger is not really for me, but his eyes betray no sympathy.
“I saw her,” I start.
“You looked at her,” he corrects. He glances away for a moment, returns his gaze to mine with a bolstered resolve. “I know you aren’t your brother, Jo. I know that. But I don’t think you fully understand what he’s done. I don’t think you’ve really let yourself understand it.”
I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off, and after a moment I realize I’m glad; after a moment I realize he’s right.
“I know you aren’t your brother,” he repeats, and I wonder if he’s trying to persuade himself. “But he’s not here.” The words hardly contain his anger, and the syllables strain and snap beneath the hoarse burden of emotion. “I don’t know where he is. No one does, they’ve told me.” His voice drops. “I wonder. You’ve said nothing about it. But I wonder.”
I wince at the implied accusation, try to reassure myself. I don’t know where he is. It doesn’t work as well as in the past; the semantics are failing me, the distinctions between know and suspect and guess beginning to lose their significance. But I can’t tell Asa about the mountains now. I don’t know what he would do if I told him now.
So again I have nothing to say. I can’t take on Samuel’s sins for him. Even if I wanted to—and I might, if only because it would give Asa a target, one he doesn’t need to feel reluctant for hating, if only because then he could seek from me whatever it is he needs to seek from my brother—even if I wanted to, I can’t. It’s not possible.
“I will look—see—her again, if it’s what you want,” I tell him. “But I can’t be him. I can’t stand in his stead.”
Asa’s jaw works, and he looks down at his cold coffee, back at me. When he speaks the words come so quietly, so deliberately, so calmly and without any trace of anger, that I know he did see me wince earlier. I know he no longer trus
ts me, if he ever did. And I know his words are for me, not my brother. “He must face what he’s done.”
* * *
I pull off the road halfway home, in a dirt semicircle carved into the bank above a narrow, sharply curving river. I did go back up to Emily’s room with Asa. I tried first to see her as she might have been before the bombing, but I had not known her before, and I could not. I felt the kind of sympathy for her I would feel for any injured child, with whatever extra poignancy my guilt might add, and with a visceral understanding of what it is to be a little girl in a hospital bed. But I did not see Emily as Asa wanted me to.
So I spent the next minutes seeing her as a painter—an artist—might. I looked for shapes and shades and shadows. I saw curves and lines, darkness and light. It sounds abstract, but it’s the deepest way I know how to see. And I will remember what I saw in those moments, will be able to recall Emily’s face forever, to imagine how it might look wearing different expressions, or at different ages. But that is not what Asa meant me to see.
I tried again, and I still don’t think I saw Emily the way her father intended me to, but what I did see was that there was no way to undo what had been done. No way to go back and say whatever I should have said to Samuel, to see what he had planned, to stop him. To save her. To save him.
And that, I think, is close to what Asa wanted.
I watch the river now. It is dappled, low sunlight filtering through evergreens to the water’s surface, lighting patches of the water and leaving others in darkness. The sunny spots look backlit, the light penetrating rather than reflecting, and I watch those spots, so much water passing through them, yet looking like it isn’t moving at all.
I wonder if this water comes from the mountains. If it originated near my brother, has sustained him these last weeks. If it flowed past the house in my creek, where I blended it with its sediment and dipped my brush into it. If it carries the weight of those places and their people in its currents. How I wish I could get down the steep bank to the river’s side to trail my hand in the frigid water, feel the force of it. How I wish I could borrow its strength.