Be Not Afraid (22 page)

I stayed there for the rest of the night, sitting in a chair pulled close to the bed, resting my head on the only available inch of mattress space, Nan’s soft hand in mine. Dad came back after a while, settling into the soft blue chair in the corner, but I did not lift my head, did not acknowledge him. I dozed off and on, waking when another one of Nan’s unconscious moans sounded, a gasp here, a low, wet rumble there. Then I would stare at the purple wound of her heart, my eyes boring into the ripped mass under the bandage, unable to look away. I fastened my gaze on it in a way I never had before, in a way I knew I might not ever do again, all the while holding her hand, pressing my lips, the side of my cheek against it. There was no reason for someone like Nan, who had done nothing but good things all her life, to have to bear this kind of pain. Life was hugely, breathtakingly unfair. And the worst part was that there was nothing I, or anyone else for that matter, could do about it.

We would just have to wait.

Again.

I squinted as a shaft of light gazed in from between the hospital curtains and then opened my eyes all the way. Morning.

Morning!

I sat up and looked at Nan. Her eyes were still closed,
but a little bit of pink was back in her face, as if someone had pinched her cheeks, and her breathing didn’t seem quite as shallow. The machine behind her bed was still beeping, but faster now and without any hesitations. Most shocking of all was the shape inside her chest cavity; it was half the size of the one that had been there last night, the once-tattered material now a smooth, slick band of muscle.

I stared at it for a moment, as if I might be imagining things, but no. It was better. I could see it. It was
better.
I rubbed my eyes and got up out of my chair. My back was stiff, and my neck hurt. I could hear water running in the bathroom. “Dad?” I whispered.

He opened the door, wiping his hands on a piece of paper towel. His eyes were bright, but the circles underneath said otherwise. “She made it. She made it through the worst part, Marin.” His voice shook. “She’s gonna be all right.”

I nodded, willing it to be true. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” He threw the wad of paper into a wastebasket. “The woman’s an ox. Always has been. I wouldn’t be surprised if she sits up in the next ten minutes and asks for breakfast.”

“No bacon and eggs for a while!” A nurse with curly red hair appeared in the doorway. A tiny blue disk wedged itself along her thumb where the cuticle was bleeding. “I’m Sharon,” she said, shaking Dad’s hand. “The day nurse. I’ll be taking care of things in here today.”

I tried to keep quiet as the nurse examined Nan’s tubes,
pressing a button on the heart monitor, inserting a thermometer into one of Nan’s ears. Then: “She’s doing okay, right?” I couldn’t help myself, still didn’t trust what I saw beneath her hospital gown. “Even though she’s not awake yet? She’s still doing all right?”

“She’s doing very well.” Sharon smiled and folded back the edge of Nan’s blanket. “Much better than expected, actually. She’s a fighter, this one.”

“When do you think she’ll wake up?”

“It’s hard to say.” Sharon took a chart off the wall behind Nan’s bed and opened it. “It’s different for everyone. Sometimes the older folks need a little extra time to come out of it.” She wrote something inside the chart and then closed it again. This time, she looked at Dad. “You know, the night shift told me you’ve been here all night. Why don’t you two go home and shower? Try to get a few hours sleep, if you can. We can call you when she wakes up.”

Dad hesitated.

But my reaction was immediate. “No,” I said. “I want to be here when she opens her eyes. I want to be right here.”

“Okay.” Sharon’s tunic was dotted with a horde of multicolored balloons, each one dangling a string. Clown shoes. Balloon shirts. This place was a circus. “Your decision, of course. But it might be a while.”

“Come on, Marin.” Dad moved his head, gesturing toward the door. “She’s right. At the very least we can get cleaned up, have something to eat. Then we’ll come right back.”

“I’m not hungry. And I don’t care about being clean right now.”

“Marin.” He looked defeated, exhausted. Was it because he’d barely slept? Because he’d waited up all night, waiting for his mother to live or die? Or was it from this constant back-and-forth between us? I felt drained, too, just thinking about it.

“All right,” I said. “But not too long.”

“An hour,” Dad said. “I promise. Tops.”

Neither of us spoke on the ride home, the momentary exhilaration replaced by the usual awkwardness. Some things never changed. I sat close to my door inside Dad’s truck, as if I might disappear through the other side, and watched the inside of town as we passed through it. People rushed here and there, their faces pinched with anxiety and distraction, different colored orbs glowing out from under their skin. I looked at them carefully, trying to gauge whether their pain looked unusual, but nothing stood out. Nothing seemed different than what I saw on any other day.

I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. Had Nan’s heart really looked different just now? Or was I imagining things? There was no way I could bring it up to Dad; my uncertainty was bound to upset him
even further—especially if I was wrong. And what if I was wrong? What if I just wanted to be right so badly that I was overlooking all the other stuff that said I was wrong? I wondered if the sudden urge to laugh was the result of exhaustion, or if the absurdness of the situation had started to get the best of me after all.

I took a long, hot shower at home and tilted my face up against the stream of water, letting it run down my face, my chest, all the way down to my toes. God, it felt good. On days like this, water could feel like a salve, or a cocoon, enveloping all the aches and bruises, holding them tight inside the warmth. I wondered when Cassie had last showered; was such a routine thing even possible for her now? And what about food? When had she eaten last? Could she even swallow anymore?

The kitchen was full of morning light. It settled over everything like an invisible film, illuminating the copper teakettle, brightening the handles on the cupboards. Dad was at the stove, cracking eggs into a frying pan. His hair was wet, and he had changed into jeans and a white collared shirt. On the counter, the coffeepot gurgled.

I opened one of the cupboards, took out a mug.

“You want some eggs?” Dad asked, not turning around.

“No, thanks.” I filled the mug almost to the brim, added a splash of cream, three sugars. “I’m not hungry.”

“You should eat something.” He lifted the pan and slid the eggs onto a blue plate. “Even if it’s just a piece of toast.”

I leaned against the counter, sipping my coffee as Dad
sat down at the table and began to eat. He stabbed one of the soft yolks with the corner of his toast, and I stared at the yellow blood as it began to spread against the plate, ooze along the edges. I looked away. “You think she’s awake yet?”

Dad withdrew his phone from his front shirt pocket and checked the screen. “No one’s called.”

I nodded, picking at the chipped rim of my mug. “Where’d you go last night for so long? I mean, when you left Nan’s room?”

He didn’t answer right away, chewing with a new ferocity, the muscles in his neck straining. “I could ask you the same thing,” he said.

“I just went outside. Sat on a bench for a while. Got some air.”

He nodded. “Me too.”

Something rose inside at his words. Maybe we were not so different after all, not so far apart. I sat down, arranging my hands over the top of the mug. “You see the moon?” I asked. “It was full.”

He glanced up, exhaustion etched on his face. “I don’t remember.”

I looked down again.

“I was kind of in a daze, I guess,” he said. “I’m pretty sure people were walking in and out; cars were pulling up and driving away.” He shook his head. “But I can’t remember what any of them looked like. It was like I was in a
tunnel or something. I don’t even know how long I was out there.”

Eleven months and twenty-six days,
I thought to myself.
Since the day Mom jumped. That’s how long you’ve been out there.

He got up to refill his coffee cup. When had his jeans started hanging around his waist? And why hadn’t I noticed? “Dad.”

“Hmmm?” The sound of liquid pouring sounded in his mug. He set the coffeepot back.

“It hurts.”

His eyes creased. “What hurts?”

I stared into my cup, blinked back tears.
Just say it. Out loud. Just let each other know when it hurts.
I’d just done that. So why did I have to explain it? Didn’t he know that it hurt even more when I had to go into details, that it felt like something was ripping inside when I had to say the words? Out loud? “My head.” I rubbed my temples. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you stay up all night running around town.”

“Yeah.” I got up from my chair and walked across the kitchen, then stood for a moment against the counter. Dad’s dirty frying pan was sitting in the sink next to me, the edges already crusty with dried egg. I put my coffee cup down and curled my fingers around the plastic handle of the pan. For a moment I just left it there, feeling the
blood course through my arm and under the thin skin of my wrist, down into each of my fingers until they tightened their hold and squeezed, and then I lifted the pan and hurled it with all my might across the kitchen. It bounced off the wall, leaving a wide, scalloped dent, and then slid across the floor, scuttling like a large insect before coming to rest again under the table.

“Jesus
Christ
!” For a split second, Dad ducked, and then he jumped out of his seat, his eyes large as quarters. “What the hell is
wrong
with you?”

“I hate you!” I screamed.

“What are you talking about, you hate me? What did I do?”

“Nothing!” I shrieked. “That’s the problem! You never do anything!”

“About
what
?”

“About Mom! About us! About anything!” I could feel the rage in me ebbing as I spoke, as if making room for the grief, and it came all at once, a hurricane of trembling and tears. I hung on to the counter so I wouldn’t fall over.

“What do you mean, about Mom? You want to talk about Mom right now, Marin? Is that it?”

Oh my God. I hated him so much. Why couldn’t he just take me into his lap and hold me and tell me that he knew what I was feeling, that things would take a while but that they would get better? They would, they would, they would. I stared at him, willing him to see what I needed, daring him to give it to me. But he only shook his head at
my silence, then leaned down and picked up the frying pan. “Do you know what could have happened if this thing had
hit
me?”

“I wasn’t aiming for your head.”

“Oh.” He nodded, sputtering. “Well, I guess that makes it okay, then.”

“Do you want to know the only person I hate right now more than you?”

He shrugged, placing the frying pan back in the sink. “Sure. Why not?”

“God.”

I could tell by the look in his eyes that my answer was unexpected. Maybe he thought I would say no one. Or Cassie. Or even Sister Paulina. He walked back over to the table and pulled out a chair. Sat down. He set his elbows on the table and linked his fingers together. Then he looked up at me. “It’s not God’s fault that Mom did what she did.”

No. It was mine.

“I didn’t say it was God’s fault.” The words felt like marbles in my throat. “I just said I hated Him.”

“Because of Mom.”

“
Yes,
because of Mom, okay? What kind of God lets someone suffer like that and not do anything to help them? Nan’s always saying that God can do anything, that He even knows what we’re thinking. So what am I supposed to think of someone who lets a person kill herself?”

He sat back in his chair, regarding me for a moment.

“You don’t know, do you?” I pushed myself away from the counter, crossing my arms over my chest. “You don’t have an answer.”

“People have choices, Marin. They make up their own minds.”

“He could have changed hers!”

“How? How could God have changed Mom’s mind?”

“
I
don’t know! He’s supposed to be able to do anything, isn’t He? She was one single person in the whole world! It wouldn’t have taken Him more than three seconds to help her start thinking differently. Why couldn’t He do that? Why couldn’t He do that one single thing for her?”

“I don’t …” He stopped, bringing his hands to his forehead. His fingers clutched at the hair on top, rooting for something, and then released it again. “Jesus, Marin.”

“Yeah, Jesus.” I kicked a cupboard door. Behind it, a pot rattled. “That’s always what people say when they don’t have anything else to say. You just don’t have an answer.” I walked out of the room. “No one does.”

I could feel his eyes on me as I pushed through the back door, could feel the weight of them along the length of my shoulders as I ducked my head and started walking. It was still cool enough to make me shiver, and my wet hair didn’t help matters. I wrapped my arms around myself, moving in an unknown direction, and then stopped when I reached the garden, regarding the edge I had kicked to pieces just two days before. What a mess. All of it. Such a frigging,
goddamned mess. And yet, I didn’t want to go, didn’t want to turn my back on it just yet.

I walked to the middle of the plot instead and lay down. Above me, the sky was a robin’s egg blue, the smooth curve of it dropping off in the horizon. I could smell the loamy scent of dirt as it pushed into my hair, could feel the coldness of it as it pressed against my back.
She was just one person, one single person. He could have helped her. It wouldn’t have killed Him to help her.
But that’s what we all were, weren’t we? Just one single person. Why was one of us more important than the other? Who was to say that Mom’s needs were any more pressing than someone else’s?

I stretched out my arms, grabbing handfuls of the moist earth, and squeezed it hard inside my fingers. What did any of it matter, really, if we all ended up back here, buried in the ground, disintegrating into nothing? What was the purpose of any of it if that was what we had to look forward to? Where was the hope, if such a thing even existed? Where was hope when Mom had needed it? When I did?