Matters of Faith (31 page)

Gold light fell out of the open kitchen door, unrestrained by the screen, glowing upon the steps as if beckoning me back inside with the promise of a home-cooked meal, a pleasant evening, a happy family. I realized I was breathing heavily enough that I was rasping deep in my throat. I dropped the handful of dead purple queen stalks I'd been clutching and took a deep breath.

It was almost eleven o'clock at night. I was not going to mow the lawn, or edge the drive, but I wasn't quite ready to walk through that golden light into that lie of a house. I walked over to my car and studied it for a moment before carefully stepping up on the bumper, crawling across the hood—hearing it buckle beneath me slightly—and up onto the roof where I lay, gazing at the stars for long enough to catch my breath.

Then I slid down the windshield and off the edge. I stared at the rectangle of light and then walked into the house, where I pulled the tomatoes out of the blue bowl, and threw it into the garbage, where it lay there, upside down, rebuking me.

I fished it out. I couldn't throw it away. It had been my mother's, now it was mine, and one day it would be my daughter's. Maybe I thought of Ada when I looked at it now, but maybe one day I wouldn't think of Ada for any reason.

I dragged a chair over to the refrigerator and climbed up to open the cabinet above it. All of the little items we never used but I couldn't bear to toss were stored in there. I slid some old wineglasses over and pushed the bowl to the back of the cabinet. It would be there for Meghan when she was ready for it.

I closed the cabinet doors softly and returned the chair to its place, the kitchen almost in perfect order but for the full garbage, something that had always been Cal's job. I tied the red plastic handles tightly together and hauled it out to the big, green garbage can beside the outbuilding. The garbage would be picked up in the morning, so I tilted it onto its big, black rubber wheels and pulled it to the curb, dropping it with a
thunk
next to the mailbox.

It had been years since I'd taken the garbage out. What a simple, satisfying chore. Why had wives encouraged this division instead of, say, cleaning toilets? I checked the mailbox, knowing it was unnecessary, Cal had been picking up the mail to take care of the bills, but it seemed a waste to not check since I was all the way out there.

I slammed the door on the empty box, marched back up the shell drive without flinching, through the door with its promise of family, and up the stairs, where I stripped out of my dirty pajamas and put on jeans and a T-shirt. And then I drove back to the hospital.

He'd almost expected Grandmother Tobias to get all flustered and start hustling around getting things ready; cooking, cleaning, maybe nervously talking about how she wished she'd had time to get her hair done. But in the time he'd been there he should have realized that his grandmother never had been, and was not now, a typical woman. Instead, she got a gleam in her eyes and immediately pushed him into the truck to go fishing.

She didn't want to greet her son with cakes and a nice manicure, she wanted fresh fried fish and homemade ice cream and, based on the way she thumbed through her Bible and moved worn Post-its around, a few appropriate verses. He wondered what kinds of things she'd found that she wanted to make sure she remembered enough to bring her Bible along in the canoe, but he didn't ask and she didn't offer.

What he did do, though, was try to record everything in his mind that he could about fishing this creek. The light was different from the coast, and even from the bay. This central Florida light was softer and more golden than the bright, white heat on the Gulf of Mexico; heavier, closer than the air on the bay.

He filed the color of the water away, absent the deep blues and greens he was used to, and though the browns and yellows of it initially seemed somehow intrinsically wrong to him, he'd come to appreciate its layers, the clear iced-tea sparkle on the top, the deceptive depths where the big fish hovered.

He could not see, despite what his grandmother said about people who belonged always coming back, that he would ever return. If there had been something to glean from his family about faith, he had already gotten it with the early morning visit from his grandmother.

If someone who claimed to hear God's voice could not satisfy him, he did not know what could, and so he tried to remember the light and the color and the flash of the fish and the air on his skin.

His grandmother had already moved beyond his presence. In the same way that he had been hurt when she seemed to be more interested in Ada than in him, he felt that same sullen irritation now. He'd been interesting after Ada left, and now that his father was coming, it was as if she'd forgotten him, and forgotten the fact that the only reason his father was coming was because of
him
.

They arrived back at the house about three hours before his father was due to arrive, and his stomach began to lurch around the three-hour mark. It got worse with every half hour that passed and by the time his dad was due to turn into the drive he'd had three bouts of diarrhea. There was only one bathroom in the house, and it was pretty difficult to hide the fact that he was afflicted with nerves in this humiliating way.

Grandmother Tobias didn't say a word, but she looked at him knowingly over her glasses whenever he reappeared in the living room. He finally took to avoiding her, lying down on the guestroom bed, sweating in the heat and the still air before rising again for another trip across the hall.

When his grandmother called to him to ask for help cleaning the fish and he stood swaying over the sink, he actually thought that he might have to add fainting to his list of embarrassing symptoms.

But not only did he live, and somehow manage to stay on his feet, it appeared that his hearing improved, because the old, wood-rimmed clock that hung in the living room ticked incessantly throughout his remaining time.

THE nurses smiled wearily at me as I passed the station. Neither of them commented on the fact that I was supposed to be spending the night at home, and I imagined that they saw a lot of well-intentioned promises to family and friends broken.

I dropped my purse into my chair and leaned over the rail to kiss Meghan, slipping my hand across her cheek and back into her hair, tucking it behind her ear, the way that used to make me crazy when she did it herself. It fell forward, and I tucked it more firmly this time.

And her hand moved.

On purpose, not one of the twitches we'd gotten used to. It raised up, as if to brush my hand away from her ear.

Her right hand definitely moved. Her manicure had never chipped or worn, because of course she hadn't used her hands in weeks, but had just grown out so that she had little semi-circles of bare nail in front of each cuticle. When her hand moved,
raised
, it led from the thumb, and the bit of pink iridescent polish flashed in the low light.

I quickly, frantically, took inventory of my movements and how they might have caused the movement, but I hadn't tugged on the sheet, hadn't jostled the mattress, and it had moved
up
. Nothing could have done that. I held my breath for a moment and then whispered, “Meghan?”

Then quickly on the heels of the whisper I nearly yelled, “Meghan! Meghan, move your hand again!” while I jabbed at the nurse button on the railing. Reva, the nurse on duty for the past two nights, hurried into the room.

“We okay?” she asked.

“She moved her hand,” I cried, “she moved her hand!”

Reva immediately began to work. She pulled a small flashlight from the pack she wore about her waist and checked Meghan's eyes, then grabbed her chart and began to take all her vitals.

“Tell me what happened,” she said, as I hovered around her.

“I kissed her cheek, I touched her face, and then I tucked her hair behind her ear, and I saw her hand move, like she wanted me to stop. What's happening? Is anything different?”

“Not yet,” she said, her eyes intent on the numbers on Meghan's transducer. “Which hand moved and how did it move?”

“Her right hand,” I said, holding up my hand and showing her the motion, demonstrating over and over again. “Like this, like this.”

“How many times?”

“I—once. I only saw the once,” I said, desperately wanting to lie, to tell her it was four times, seven times, just to make sure she took it seriously.

“Okay, do what you did again,” she said, making notes on the chart and stepping back, motioning me forward. “Do it again exactly the way you did it the first time.”

I took a deep breath and tried to still my shaking hands, clenching and releasing them several times while I tried to remember exactly what I did, in what order, with what pressure and speed. As I gathered my courage to start, the other nurse, Jessica, slipped into the room.

Reva glanced at her and quietly said, “Her hand moved.” I heard Jessica's little gasp, and had I not been steeling myself to lean over the railing at the perfect degree I would have hugged them both to me. Reva had not said, “She
thought
her hand moved,” and Jessica's gasp had been a hopeful, optimistic sound. Neither of them thought I was deluded, and I was suddenly very glad that I had not lied.

I did it. I leaned over, I kissed her, ran my hand over her cheek, then back into her hair, tucked once lightly, tucked a second time, harder. I kept an eye on her hand. It didn't move. “Meghan,” I said, “move your hand again. Do it, honey, move your hand, please.”

“Do it again,” Reva said quietly.

Lean, kiss, hand on cheek, into hair, tuck once, tuck twice. Nothing. I started trembling, and realizing that I'd been holding my breath, I let it out in a rush and then inhaled again quickly, feeling light-headed.

“Again,” Reva encouraged.

Lean, kiss, hand, cheek, hair, hair.
Nothing
. Oh, God. I groaned in frustration and began to do it again, did it three more times before Jessica silently backed out the door and Reva finally put her hand on my arm and handed me a tissue from the box on the side table. I hadn't even realized I had tears on my face.

I fell back into my chair and dropped my head into my hands as Reva rubbed my back. “Okay,” she said. “It's okay, I know it's hard.”

My usual anger at anyone telling me that they “knew” anything about this, about me, didn't flare at all, in fact, all I felt was relief and a desperate longing to turn into her arms and let her tell me it would be okay for a few hours. Instead, I took a quivering breath and said, “Thanks. Should I keep doing it?”

“I certainly don't think it could hurt,” she said. “I'm going to call Dr. Tyska and let him know what's happening. Buzz me if anything happens again, okay?”

I nodded, a little surprised and excited that she didn't just believe me, didn't think it was the desperate imaginings of a broken-hearted mother, but that she believed me enough and felt it significant enough to call the neurologist at a rather ungodly time. I thought about calling Cal, but he'd be rising just after four for a full day on the water, making our only paycheck.

If it had happened again, if it had turned into anything, if the nurse had said anything particularly hopeful, then I would have called him. As it was, I thought it kinder to let him sleep. There could be a hundred little instances like this, a hundred little hand motions that meant nothing. Would we call every time?

I kept my eyes on Meghan while I pulled my purse out from behind my back, where it was lodged uncomfortably. As I did I felt something come with it and stood to clear out what I thought was a newspaper Cal had left behind.

But it was a manila envelope filled with paper, and I remembered Cal telling me he'd printed out some information for me. The bag he'd told me he'd left was beside the chair, unnoticed by me in the excitement of Meghan's hand, and I pulled it onto my lap as I started reading, stopping just long enough to peer into it and see two pieces of wood, a small flashlight, and more music CDs.

I lowered the bag to the floor and settled back to read Cal's research, regularly looking up to check on Meghan, and occasionally rising to repeat the whole lean, kiss, cheek, tuck, tuck process, with no luck. An hour later, I was rubbing my eyes, but fascinated by the things Cal had found.

In many ways I felt good about the fact that I had spent so much time at the hospital. I was doing the only thing I thought I could for Meghan, the only thing I thought I could for me. But seeing the amount of information Cal had managed to put together made me feel short-sighted.

I could have spent some time at home, researching on our computer. I knew I didn't use our computer the way other people did, and I couldn't blame it on age. I was only forty, certainly young enough to have been fiddling around expertly on the Internet for years now. But, as evidenced by our dial-up connection, I took a certain amount of pride in my Luddite status.

I didn't need to get online to know how to manage a particular shade of green, and Cal certainly didn't need it to find new types of fish. Our professions did not rely on, or even benefit from, computer use. The kids used the computers at school until we got a laptop for Marshall when he was a senior, and Meghan had no use for high-speed access yet.

But had I known how much was out there, I could have been learning more than I had been from the library books Sandy brought me. This was real information, things I could be doing, and he'd even printed out pages of parents' conversations, actual back and forth between mothers and fathers whose children were in the same or similar situations.

I was determined that I would ask Cal to show me how to use the new laptop and leave it with me so I could put any downtime to better use than I currently was with alternately feeling sorry for myself and angry at everyone else.