Laugh with the Moon (19 page)

Dad sets Innocent down on bed number eight, right beside a little girl. He disappears into the hallway and returns with a pair of rubber gloves and a stethoscope. After he listens to Innocent’s heart, he pulls up Innocent’s eyelids one at a time.

I shudder. For a second, Innocent looks dead.

Dad calls to the nurse, who’s on the other side of the
ward placing a blue mask over the face of a baby. A tube connects the baby’s mask to a bag the nurse has in her hand. She opens and shuts her fist. Opens and shuts it, trying to send air from the bag into the baby’s lungs.

With the other hand, the nurse holds up a finger, telling us to wait. But we can’t wait. Not a blink, not a heartbeat, not a breath. Doesn’t she know?

Dad pricks Innocent’s finger, draws blood.

Then,
clang!
The nurse wheels a metal pole across the room. The pole has a bag filled with liquid attached to the top of it. Memory and I scramble to the end of bed number eight, out of the nurse’s way. We watch her push a long needle into Innocent’s arm and tape it there so it won’t fall out.

“He’s getting fluids now,” Dad tells us. “The blood test will be done soon. Then we’ll know what type.”

“What type?” I say, not understanding.

I look at Memory. Her eyes are wide. She is very still.

“What type of malaria. I’m afraid Innocent has malaria. He’s in a coma.”

“That’s it?” I scream. “That’s all you can do? Give him some fluids?” Here’s Innocent in a hospital bed, lips parched, eyes half shut. The boy who cried because he thought I was a ghost. The boy with the dimples who stared at my freckles. The boy who stood in the standard one doorway, arms and legs stretched wide, blocking my escape. I wanted to run from Innocent that day. But I’ll never run from him now. “Do something!” I shout. I’m burning up. Really burning up. “Operate! Give him a shot!”

Dad puts his arms around Memory and me as the nurse slips a blue mask onto Innocent’s face.

T
he chills are back. The nurse says to ride them. I ride them
.

Around and around
.

I close my eyes, watch them prick circles around my belly. Around my back. All around me. I’m freezing. Freezing cold. “The window,” I say. I think I said it. “The window.” But my lips are stuck together. Dry
.

When I wake again, I’m burning. I remember the lake. A lake of boiling water. A big lake of hot Banja tea. I’m falling. Into the lake
.

Falling
.

“Save me,” I say. I think I said it
.

“Sweetie,” Mom says. She has a paintbrush in her hand. She sets it down next to the canvas on the easel. There’s a basket of apples on a table. Mom’s painting a still life. Back to basics, after so long
.

I inhale acrylics. I love that smell. The smell of desert turquoise, lemon yellow, Mars black. The smell of secret colors no one knows but us
.

Mom kisses the top of my head. She sets a cool washcloth on my forehead. “Quite a day!” she says, and laughs, a deep belly laugh
.

Mom’s always here when it counts
.

Count sheep
.

Count scorpions
.

Count all the wild beasts while my ears ring, ring, ring
.

Later, I wake up in a puddle of sweat. A breeze blows through the window. Dad sits in a chair beside me. “It’s horrible,” he says into his cell phone. “The worst.”

I swallow. Well, I try to swallow. But I can’t. I reach for my phone. I need to call Memory. To tell her the news: I’m dead
.

Maybe it will be too much
.

I cry a tear. At least, I think I do. I stick my tongue out to taste it, but it isn’t there
.

“Hey, Mom,” I say
.

She turns from the canvas
.

“If a tear falls and no one feels it, did it fall?”

Mom smiles. “Great artists ask great questions,” she says, and turns back to her painting
.

No more apples
.

Only planets
.

And stars
.

I
t takes a few days, but eventually I realize that it wasn’t me who died.

“Where am I?” I ask.

“Sun Private Hospital, Clare, in Blantyre.” Dad takes my hand. “I’m so sorry, but Innocent died that night. There’s nothing else we could have done. You passed out, so I brought you here.”

My heart cracks along the same lines where it was just starting to heal from my mother’s death. Tears pour down my face. I’m a river. A river of tears. There’s nothing holding my sorrow inside anymore. No skin. No bones. There are no borders to my pain. It’s everywhere. It’s in me. Around me. On the metal rails of the hospital bed. In the cardboard hospital toast. I inhale it five times a day through the oxygen concentrator until Dad and I finally talk—really talk—about what happened.

The tests show that I have pneumonia. “You were probably sick before you even went to the lake. That cough you had wasn’t allergies. It was something called walking pneumonia. Looks like you were carrying the virus around in your lungs.” Dad says that soaring down the road on the moped swallowing dust turned the virus into something more serious. “I feel awful,” he says. “I should’ve known.”

At night the nurse comes to give me pills. I swallow them and drink the tiny cup of water, but I’m still thirsty and the nurse has already gone. Dad’s next to me, dozing in the chair beside the bed. “Dad!” I say. “Dad!” He doesn’t move, so I reach out and touch his elbow. He still doesn’t stir, so I poke him a few times in the arm.

“Mmmm.”

“Water, Dad. I need water.”

“Right, right.” He jumps up. “Water.” He dashes into the hall.

Sun Private Hospital is night-and-day different from the government-run hospital where Dad works in Machinga. Here, patients get their own rooms, plenty of medicine, and food from the cafeteria. So why didn’t Dad bring Innocent to this private hospital along with me? Is it only because I’m a doctor’s daughter that I can get this kind of special treatment? Or is it because I’m a
mzungu?
If I had stayed in the Machinga District Hospital, would I be dead too?

Dad returns from the hallway with a whole bottle of water. I take a few sips. “
Zikomo
, Dad,” I say. I feel hot all over. I’ve been in the hospital four days already. Four days
too long. I need to get out, so I ask him: “Why’d you leave Innocent at the hospital in Machinga?”

“What, honey?” Dad sits down.

I cough. “Why’d you leave Innocent there?”

He reaches over and holds my hand.

“Why didn’t you bring him to this hospital? With us?” Thinking about Innocent, I feel too heavy to move.

“Clare,” Dad says, “it’s complicated. And besides, even though we got him breathing again, he’d slipped into a coma. It was too dangerous to transport him then.”

Innocent’s voice plays in my ears
—I one the cake … I eight the cake
—and his laugh, like wind chimes, when he finally figures out what that means.

I
’ve already missed Innocent’s funeral, which is bad enough. Now I’m desperate to get back to the village to check on Memory, but Dad says that’s out of the question. “You’ve got to take it easy, honey. A few more days on the oxygen. You know your lungs haven’t cleared all the way.”

“A few more days!” I feel like a dead leaf being stepped on again and again. Mr. Special Kingsley will have to tell the standard one students that our play is canceled. We’ve missed so many days of rehearsal. Besides, I would never recast Innocent’s role. I can’t even imagine what that would do to Memory. To me.

“Pneumonia’s serious stuff,” Dad says.

Every morning after I get hooked up to the oxygen machine, Dad and I spend hours playing checkers and Othello, the two games the hospital keeps on hand. In the
afternoons, he drives to the Royal Malawi Hotel to rest for a few hours while I sketch in the pad he brought me. But each time I try to force myself to draw, my pen drifts off the page along with my mind.

Today Dad returns from the hotel with a big smile on his face. “I’ve got something here that’s going to cheer you up,” he says. He opens his briefcase and takes out a stack of paper. “A messenger delivered these to the hotel. They’re for you.”

He fixes the pillows behind my head so I can get a better look. My Bingo cards! They’ve been turned into get-well cards for me. Each and every one has a message on the back.

On the top of the pile is a card that says:

I can’t believe so many people at Mzanga have noticed I’m gone. I want to flip through them all to see if Saidi has written me a note, but my father is watching, so I turn over the cards in order from top to bottom. Every once in a while, I read one out loud.

Sickness wrote:

On the other side of the paper, she drew a scarf around the head of the lion I sketched on the Bingo board.

Norman’s card says:

Halfway through the stack, I see a card from Saidi. It says:

I read it over twice before I look at the next one. I’m almost at the bottom of the pile when my throat tightens. I haven’t seen a card from Memory yet. I turn over the very last one. It’s from a girl named Jelly. I don’t even know who she is. All it says is:

I cry. I can’t help it. I’m afraid Memory hates me. If I were her, I’d hate me too. Hate me because of where I was born, how much money I have, and how I get treated to a whole other kind of medicine, a whole other chance at life. But when I tell Dad why I’m crying, he says, “Think of what she’s going through, Clare.”

And suddenly I burn with shame at how selfish I am to even think she could make a card for me, when she’s probably having enough trouble just waking up in the morning. I know that after Mom died, whenever I opened my eyes, I would get confused and think,
This has got to be the nightmare. Now let me wake up to my real life
.