Song of Renewal (14 page)

For Liza, it was as if the words came from a far distance, echoing in her head, bouncing around. Spinal cord injury Spinal cord…if she lives…Angel won’t dance again. Might not even live. It bounded about in her brain. And then
Garrison’s leaving me…leaving me...
joined in the mêlée. Strobe images…shouts, “
Mama! Where are you going, Mama?” Charlcy’s screams...”Please don’t hit Charlcy anymore, Mama! Pleeease!”

Liza grabbed her head with both hands, squeezing, squeezing.
If only I can stop it!

Then blackness.

“Liza?” Garrison’s voice.

She cracked her eyes and his blurred features swam above her. She cut her eyes to the side and saw white. A hospital curtain. Her fingers sensed fabric. Sheets. She rolled her head over and realized she was in a hospital room…bed.
Garrison’s leaving me but….

Her voice came out whispery, wispy as spun cotton. “You… didn’t leave?”

“No.” Pain flickered across his features. “You passed out.” His voice was gentle. She peered bleary-eyed at him, feeling extremely fuzzy. His deep voice soothed her. “You’re all right. You’re just sedated.”

How he knew her. How he sensed her fears and knew how and when to reassure her. The thought lulled her. “Just rest. Doctor’s orders. You’re experiencing a little shock, is all. But you’ll soon feel better. Sleep, honey.”

Honey.
She felt so exhausted. Drained. Her eyes closed… sleep….

“What have I done?” Garrison groaned. He watched Liza’s still, pale face.

Why hadn’t he seen it coming? Why hadn’t he known? She’d been so brave through everything. She’d put up with his coldness. Had allowed him to jerk her emotions around. And then she’d felt completely abandoned tonight when he told her he was leaving. Why hadn’t he remembered her fear of abandonment, remnants of her ill mother’s lifelong disappearances?

Add to that Angel’s cardiac arrest and the grim revelation of Angel’s other injuries. He took her slender, icy fingers in his hand. They did not respond to his attempt to warm them. They lay there still, lifeless. She seemed so far away just now. Inaccessible.

“God, how I love you.” The words slipped out, unbidden, from his very soul. And in that moment, he realized the depth of them. His throat ached as tears gathered and prickled behind his eyes.
How many times during this devastation have I pushed you away? How unconscionable, how cruel of me.

“Liza…can you hear me?” He leaned in closer and saw her eyelids struggle to open as her breathing deepened. “Honey? I’m so sorry. Please…forgive me?” Her eyelids remained sealed as his wife’s lovely features slackened into deep, deep slumber.

He laid his head on her bosom and wept.
Will you ever forgive me?

chapter eight

Liza insisted upon visiting Angel the next day. She couldn’t bear not seeing her daughter. The strong tranquilizer Dr. Abrams prescribed to spring Liza from the state of shock had, at first, spiraled her down, down, downward through many stratums of anxiety – terror, fear, apprehension, disquiet, tension – all in a few minutes. The free-fall sensation was fierce and succinct.

The magic capsule then propelled her on a smooth, level ride of tranquility, where she remained oblivious to anything and everything cerebral. She felt mostly, for the next couple of days, languidness in her bones that, once she sat or reclined, lulled her to sleep. She could have, at any time or anywhere, slithered to the floor in a snoring heap. She didn’t worry about anything because she couldn’t remember anything.

For two days, she existed in the vacuum of otherness. “Dr. Abrams is testing Angel today for – what is it, Garrison?” She slightly slurred the words as she relayed an update to Penny in the ICU waiting room. Angel’s friend watched her apprehensively and shot Garrison alarmed glances.

“Those tests were done yesterday, Liza,” Garrison clarified gently.

“You told me about the tests two days ago, Mrs. W.,” Penny softly reminded her.

“You sure?” Liza squinted at Garrison. She would have sworn that the doctor told her that very morning. Would have bet her life on it.

“Positive,” he said and smiled at her. The smile, she noted, was indulgent.

She blinked away at the stupor, still doubting their version. “I don’t like this,” she grumped petulantly.

“It’s helping you to heal, Liza. You need to heal.”

“You need to heal, too, Garrison.” The words slid over her tongue like melting butter, completely bypassing her brain. Childlike. The medication deleted her inhibitions. “It’s not healthy to be unforgivin’.”

Garrison shot Penny a look of appeal.

“Uh,” she shot to her feet, “if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go get a Coke.”

“Now, what did you do that for?” Liza drawled, her eyelids blinking in slow motion. “Sending Penny away?”

Garrison pulled his chair closer. “Liza, I’m trying to…be healed, too. It’s just taking time. I love you. I know that beyond a doubt. And I want you well. I can’t stand to see you like you’ve been.”

Liza gazed blearily into his eyes for a long time. “H-how have I been?” she finally said, her tongue barely touching the consonants.

“Unhappy. Sad. And not just about Angel.”

“Tha’s ‘cause you won’ forgive me. You wanna leave me.” She was being matter-of-fact, as open as a barn door. She looked more deeply into his troubled eyes. Delving, plundering. Then she slowly shook her head. “It’s still there. In your eyes.” The ingenuous statement hung in the air between them, heavy and dark.

“What?” Garrison husked, the hair on his neck rising.

Liza gave him a sad, groggy smile. “Con-dem-nation.”

In that one moment of crystal clarity, she decided. “Don’ need pills. I can do it myself, Garrison.” She blinked slowly and sighed. “Won’ depend on anybody.” Her head tipped back and plopped softly against the wall behind the waiting chair. Her eyelids slid shut.

“Liza,” Garrison leaned close and murmured, “Liza...you can depend on me. Don’t ever forget that. I’m trying to work all this out inside. And I do know how very much you mean to me. Please, believe that.” She didn’t answer.

“You hear me?” He looked closer and saw that her mouth had grown slack and her breathing deep and even. Liza was asleep.

Garrison handled Liza with the utmost gentleness in the following days. Though not happy with it, he grew accustomed to her eerie silence, one she maintained even when in the ICU with Angel. Dr. Abrams said it would take time for her to heal from the breakdown.

“Cut her lots of slack. She’s going to need it,” Dr. Abrams had cautioned. The good doctor was not happy with Liza’s decision to go off the tranquilizer, but told Garrison, “She’s leveled off and will probably be okay if she isn’t exposed to undue additional stress.”

So far, Garrison had managed to protect her. It wasn’t easy. She’d become more and more prickly as time passed.

Garrison ran her warm bathwater one evening and added her favorite lavender bath beads. “I’m going to take a shower,” she declared when she saw what he’d done, and promptly did so, though he knew she was not a shower person.

Later, he fastidiously prepared a lovely salad plate with choice meats, cheeses, and fruits he knew she loved. It was, if he said so himself, an artistic masterpiece. “I don’t want salad tonight,” she said and scrounged in the fridge for leftover Chinese noodles.

“You’re crowding me,” she said to him tonight, nudging him when he spooned against her back in bed, their customary position all through the years. She tugged his arm loose from around her waist.

He knew the cause of her reactions to him.
He
was that cause. He’d created a monster.

Garrison tiredly rolled over and sat up. “I’m moving my things into the guest room, Liza. You need space and I’m giving it to you. When you’re ready to have me back in your bed, let me know.”

So it was that he ended up in the attic later, after sleepless tossing and turning on the guest bed’s uncomfortable mattress. Wide awake he plundered through photos and memorabilia. There, amid things of the past, he came across his artsy black-and-white prints, a bygone fad, and saw a photo of the three of them in happy days.

He remembered a summer picnic at The Oasis. The air was sweetened by the fragrance of water lilies and soft breezes off the water…sunshine on their skin and shade to cool them… their laughter as they munched Liza’s fried chicken with her incomparable potato salad…little Angel’s exuberance as Daddy carved her name on the Love Tree to join Liza’s and his own….

He didn’t know he wept until a tear plopped, then trickled down the photograph. He snuffled and returned the album to its storage shelf.

His venture continued and he discovered his easels, canvas, paints, and worn brushes. He even found his old, clean artist smocks folded neatly on a nearby shelf.
Liza’s touch is everywhere
.

In a sudden splash of inspiration, he hauled his paraphernalia to Angel’s large bedroom where, within minutes, his easel and canvas claimed an entire corner of the room, whose pastel walls and décor lent an aura of peace and tranquility. Here he felt close to his daughter. Here, he would do what he could to will her back to this world.

Tentatively, he began sketching. While doing so, he found himself transported back to when he and Liza met and fell in love. He’d walked past the University of South Carolina dance department late that afternoon and saw her at the ballet barre. God, she was beautiful…lithe and supple.

“Hi,” he’d said boldly, though the butterflies in his stomach raged. “I’m Garrison Wakefield, an art major. Would you mind if I sketch you while you dance?” He smiled at her then, beguiled by her innocent regard of him, amused at the flicker of wariness from blue, blue depths. Long, thick, amazingly black lashes framed the entire pool of delight and he already, in his mind, mixed Prussian Blue with a small puddle of Ultramarine Blue paint for their extraordinary transition on canvas. “Uh, I need some sketches in the study of anatomy, for required credits.”

When she still looked a bit guarded, he said, “You would be contributing to a worthy cause. It pays well. A Coke in the snack shop after I sketch you each time.”

Then he saw it, the blush tingeing her smooth, porcelain cheeks. And his heart nearly stopped. Was the emotion that painted them anger? Offense? Had he been too pushy? Too presumptive?

She’d laughed then, a spontaneous peal of delight. Then, as though embarrassed at the display of emotion, she lowered her astonishing eyelashes and shifted her near willowy, yet supple frame.

“Would you mind?” he muttered in soft appeal.

“N-no…I suppose it’ll be okay.” Then she’d looked up at him and startled him with the direct honesty in her near translucent gaze. “But wouldn’t you rather study rugged male muscles? I mean – ” she shrugged.