Beneath the Night Tree (25 page)

The car was still running and Parker had left the heat on full blast. I was gripped by a desire to turn on the air-conditioning or at least throw open the windows, but I shrugged off my coat instead.

“Hot?” Parker looked at me out of the corner of his eye as he backed down the Walkers’ long driveway.

“I’m okay.”

“Don’t say that,” he complained. “You’ve said that a dozen times already tonight. You’re not okay. And you don’t have to be.”

He was right. I wanted to fall apart at the seams. But hearing him prescribe my emotions as if he knew me and knew how I should and should not feel irritated me to no end. “Excuse me? If I say I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“You said okay.”

“Whatever.”

Parker backed off and consulted the map that a nurse had drawn for him.

“Do you want me to drive?” I ventured.

“No.”

“It’s just that you don’t know the area very well . . .”

“I can read a map. Besides, you should sleep. Lay your seat back or something. It’s going to be a long night.”

“As if I could sleep.”

“You could try.”

I exhaled sharply. “I don’t appreciate being bossed around.”

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do,” Parker sighed. His eyes caught mine for a second, and I read sympathy there. Pity? Compassion? Whatever it was, it was rich and heady and dark. He said quietly, “I’m trying to help.”

My blood was pounding in my temples, so I looked away and didn’t bother to answer. We drove in silence, and I stared out the dark windshield at the straight stretch of deserted highway, mesmerized by the way the wind whipped the inch or so of new snow across the road. What had fallen so softly was now lashed in shallow drifts with severe peaks and chasms. It seemed that I could drag my fingertip along the edge and split my skin like the flesh of a ripe peach. Everything felt violent. Harsh.

The world was a very different place than it had been only hours before.

I can’t do this alone,
I prayed without saying a word.
You have to be with me. You have to show me that You’re here.

God didn’t answer, but as soon as my heart said
amen
, Parker broke the stillness with a tentative ahem. “So . . . tell me about your grandmother.”

I squinted at him in the dim interior of the car, uncertain about his motivations. It was a strange thing to ask. But even as I contemplated ignoring him, I found that I wanted to talk about Grandma. Memories bloomed over me, a rush of sudden remembrances that stirred my soul in spite of everything. She was so beautiful. So good and kind and loving. What would she do to bridge the space between? How had she comforted me when Dad was diagnosed with cancer?

Grandma prayed. She smiled. She filled my life with story.

“My grandma raised me,” I said.

Parker seemed to relax a bit. “Go on,” he prompted.

“Really, she’s more like the mother I never had. . . .”

Autobiographies

Grandma pulled through surgery with flying colors. At least, that’s what the doctors said. To me,
flying colors
was a bit of an exaggeration, for in the days following her double-bypass operation, my usually vibrant grandmother seemed as insubstantial as mist. Her hair, which had been the color of silvered granite for as long as I could recall, had turned white overnight. It was as fine and weightless as duckling down, and it feathered across her bleached hospital pillow like a translucent vapor. I smoothed the gauzy strands from her forehead with the barest of touches, my fingertips tracing wrinkles in skin the color of bone and eggshells.

Everything about her seemed white and light and tenuous. Her breathing was so shallow that sometimes I would put my cheek next to her lips just so I could feel the slight puff when she exhaled. It shocked me that even her breath was cool and wispy, weightless—like the frosty air that emanated from the frames of our ancient windows.

Grandma was a winter queen, a sleeping angel, a sweet and fleeting dream.

“She’s going to make it,” the doctors told me.

But I couldn’t help feeling like the woman I had known for nearly twenty-five years was already gone.

The Saturday after Grandma’s heart attack, Michael drove up from Iowa City and surprised me with a quick visit. I was sitting by Grandma’s bedside as she slept, and when I felt the burden of his hand on my shoulder, I knew who he was without turning around. The sob that swelled inside of me was a savage, uncontainable thing, and I flew to my feet and yanked him into the hall, where I could hold him and weep without waking her.

It was so good to feel his arms around me, to inhale the familiarity of his scent and savor the sound of my name on his lips. I never wanted to let go. I could have climbed inside of Michael in that moment. I wanted to peel back his skin and step in, to become a part of something other than myself so that I didn’t have to carry the weight of all my worries alone.

But Michael extracted himself from my desperate grip after a few gulping, gasping moments and led me to the cafeteria. He sat me down at a tiny round table and gave me a handful of napkins to clean myself up. Then he disappeared, mumbling about how I was becoming downright scrawny, and returned with a tray filled with food.

“Chicken soup,” he said, pointing to a bowl of unappetizing yellow liquid. “And a hamburger and fries if that sounds better. Or pie and ice cream.”

“What kind of pie?” I muttered thickly. My tongue felt too big for my mouth, my throat lined with sandpaper.

“Cherry.”

“I’ll take the coffee.” I reached for one of the mugs of oily coffee, but Michael batted my hand away.

“You have to eat something first.”

When I didn’t respond, he lifted the bowl of soup off the tray and placed it in front of me. “Start with this,” he instructed. “We’ll see where we go from there.”

Michael ate the hamburger and fries while I spooned watery chicken broth into my mouth with methodical concentration. Every time he took a bite, I tried to follow suit. But the soup tasted funny to me, metallic and fake, like I was eating reconstituted noodles and imitation chicken. I gave up after a while and soothed my stomach with the mug of lukewarm coffee that he had denied me earlier. It was terrible, but I had grown used to it in a week of eating and drinking little else.

Our conversation was sporadic at best, for what was there to say with my grandmother languishing in a hospital room? We could hardly gab about wedding plans. Or discuss what we wanted to get the boys for Christmas. Thanksgiving was just over a week away, but that seemed completely irrelevant to me. Nothing mattered but the woman in white, my matchless, ailing grandmother.

“How’s she doing?” Michael asked when it became obvious that I had eaten all I could stomach.

“Good, they say.”

“What do you mean, they say?”

I bit my lower lip and traced the rim of my coffee cup with my finger. “She’s recovering as well as can be expected. She walks to therapy every day, and her appetite is starting to pick up.”

“Those are all good things.”

“I know.”

“And she’s out of the ICU,” Michael reminded me.

“Yeah. I don’t have to scrub up to visit her.”

“So why so glum?” Michael reached over and stopped my hand from tracing its squeaky path along the cheap hospital porcelain. He laced his fingers through mine and pulled my hand to the table between us, where he held it fast.

“She’s . . .” I gulped, suddenly afraid I would cry. Not again. I didn’t want to break down again. “She’s just not herself,” I managed in a whisper. Offering Michael a little smile, I sniffed and tried to pull my hand away. He wouldn’t let go.

“What do you mean, she’s not herself?”

I didn’t feel like talking about it, so I used my free hand to lift the dessert plate that contained the uneaten piece of cherry pie. “Want to split this with me?” I asked.

Michael gave me a knowing look, but he seemed willing enough to let me keep my secrets until I was ready to share. Rather than forcing the issue, he abandoned his attempt to get me to talk and gathered two forks from the messy tray. He happily ate more than his portion of the mediocre pie. I swallowed because I had to.

Michael spent the rest of the day by my side. He held my hand, chatted with Grandma when she woke, and even talked shop with the doctor who made rounds in the late afternoon. My fiancé seemed perfectly at ease, and it struck me that he would be an excellent doctor someday. Calm and confident. His very presence a quiet comfort. Pride rose in me like bread baking, but there was a certain maternal quality to my delight that made me realize we hadn’t spent nearly enough time alone lately. Where was the passion? the ache at my center when Michael was nearby? But obviously the hospital was hardly the place for romance. It was nothing but a fleeting thought.

I was grateful that he came and sorry when he went.

Toward the end of Grandma’s second week in the heart hospital, her surgeon informed me that she was almost ready to be discharged.

Although her stay had been a nightmare of uncertainty, of driving back and forth, passing off Daniel and Simon for days at a time, and relying on the goodness of the Walkers, the boys’ teachers, and even Parker to help pick up the slack, I was shocked to think of taking her home.

“Already?”

“There’s nothing we can do for her here that you can’t do for her at home. She’ll have to continue cardiac rehabilitation, of course, and you’ll be in charge of her medications. The nutritionist has drawn up a loose meal plan for the first few weeks, and one of our nurses will be in contact about follow-up visits.”

My mind whirled with the implications of everything he said. Therapy, medications, special meals, more appointments . . . Of course, I would gladly follow each instruction to the letter and do everything in my power to aid in my grandmother’s recovery. But standing in the hallway outside her room, I couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed.

And scared.

When he walked away, I whispered, “Lord, help me.”

I hadn’t heard Grandma’s favorite nurse come up behind me, and I jumped when she wrapped an arm around my shoulders. She smiled a little and gave me a quick, tight hug. “He will,” she told me, her eyes holding mine in a gaze that was both serious and soothing. Then she breezed into the room and left me to wonder how she knew just what to say.

* * *

With discharge only days away, I was forced to focus on my home life. Grandma assured me that she would be fine in the heart hospital alone, and I used the opportunity to throw myself at the responsibilities I had neglected since her heart attack.

My desk at Value Foods was an uncharacteristic clutter of mail and documents and Post-it notes with scribbled pleas from my coworkers. I took the boys along with me one evening and worked until nearly ten o’clock, allowing them to play Uno online while I tried to make sense of my rat’s nest of responsibilities. By the time I left, I only felt more tangled.

But work wasn’t the only thing clamoring for my attention. Though I had e-mailed my professor at the tech school and explained my grandmother’s situation, I still had to complete the coursework. He had gladly granted me an extension, but I knew that if I didn’t get caught up before Grandma came home, it might never happen. The biggest obstacle I faced was my fifth activity: an autobiography.

I was supposed to disclose important family interactions and relationships, as well as analyze my most memorable grade school year and other major life events. It was an easy enough task, but complicated by the fact that nothing about my life seemed simple. What could I say about my early family interactions? Through the lens of my adulthood I could clearly see that my mom was a drifter, a deadbeat. When I was really honest with myself, I was able to admit that she was what the older ladies at our church would call a floozy. And as much as I worshiped my dad, he was an enabler. He loved her, for better or worse, and he put up with things that should have never gone unchecked.

So what was I to write? that I grew up in a family fraught with dysfunction? that I was abandoned and ignored by the woman who was supposed to love me best? that all of my major life events seemed to revolve around the loss of something or someone?

It was too depressing to consider. Instead of examining both sides of the coin that was my youth, I took out the polished side—the surface that played back the shiny memories, the ones I cherished. I spent two evenings admiring the pretty things, the times my dad took me fishing or when my grandma taught me how to bake her secret-recipe peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I smiled as I wrote the paper because I pretended that the flip side didn’t exist. It was all I could do when the best part of my past and present was two hours away in a hospital gown.

What did my future hold?

Simon seemed to be pondering the same question because Grandma’s hospitalization ratcheted him to a new level of angst. It felt more like there was a temperamental teenager in our midst than a fifth grader. He was sullen and petulant, quiet but angry. I hated it. But I didn’t know what to do about it.

“Do you miss her?” I asked Simon one night as we sat watching TV. Daniel was long in bed, and my brother and I were supposed to be enjoying a little time alone. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to be enjoying anything. His arms were crossed over his chest, his features frozen in a grimace that would ensure he had crow’s-feet by twenty. He didn’t even glance up at me when I spoke.