Dicey's Song (23 page)

But help her with what?

“Gram?” Dicey said. Her voice croaked a little.

“They just called me this morning,” Gram announced. Her mouth moved but none of the rest of her face did, and neither did her hands clasping the purse, nor her feet in stockings and loafers. Gram had placed her feet neatly side by side, like empty shoes in a closet.

Dicey wanted to say to Gram, Can I help you? But she couldn't do that; Gram wouldn't tell her. She sighed and put her nose back against the window.

The plane finally moved, taxied out of its parking slot and down to the end of a long runway marked by lights. When the big machine started down the runway, Dicey was pushed back in her seat by the speed. As it lifted off the ground, she could feel how it turned from heavy to light. She had a sensation of free flight. The plane soared up, and Dicey soared up with it.

“Can you
feel
that?” she said, without turning her head. Gram didn't answer.

A stewardess, with her face painted on and her hair painted down neat and her uniform as perfect as if it had been shellacked into position, brought them each a little plastic tray of juice and one pastry sealed into plastic. Gram also got a cup of tea.

Dicey ate the pastry, even though she wasn't hungry. She ate Gram's pastry too and drank both their glasses of over-sweet juice. When the stewardess at last came back to take the trays, Dicey turned her attention back to the window.

If she had a map, she would know what those cities below were. If she had a map, she could trace their journey northward. If she had a map, then she would ask Gram about where they were, and the two of them could talk instead of each sitting there, locked into her own silence.

In Boston, Gram waited by the baggage claim, pointed out their suitcase to Dicey without a word, then strode out the exit to find a cab. She gave the driver an address. By that time, Dicey was getting sleepy, but she still wondered how Gram knew where she was going.

City streets passed by the cab windows, most of them empty of people but marked by the lit signs of stores and the illuminated plate glass display windows. Dicey felt the cold on the outside of the tightly closed car windows. Their driver was a dark shape at the front of the car. Gram was a dark shape beside her.

Gram took them to a motel, two stories high and with some cars parked in front of it. The motel faced onto a busy street. Gram went into the office, where she filled out a form and took a key. She led Dicey, whose hands felt too cold to retain their grip on the suitcase, up some stairs, and down an open walkway to a door. She opened the door.

The room was square and green. It had a huge TV set attached by a chain to the wall, two beds, each covered by a green bedspread, and a table between them upon which a black telephone sat under a lamp.

Dicey put the suitcase down on the top of a low bureau. She caught sight of their reflection in the mirror over the bureau, both of them pale and stony-faced. Gram sat down on the bed, her purse still in her lap, her feet close together. She seemed to be thinking.

Dicey found the bathroom and used it. She thought about taking a shower, but decided she didn't want to. She returned to see Gram standing in a long flannel nightgown, about to get into bed. Gram had folded back the spread on Dicey's bed. Gram went into the bathroom.

Dicey stripped down to her underpants. For a top, she wore one of her shirts. Gram didn't say anything. When Dicey was settled in the strange bed, Gram reached over to turn out the lamp.

The room wasn't quite dark, because the light from the motel's fluorescent sign slipped in through a crack in the curtains. The noise from the highway outside pushed in too. Dicey lay on her back and looked up at the ceiling. “What about Momma?” she demanded harshly, across the darkness.

No sound marked her grandmother in her bed, as if Gram was lying like Dicey and staring at the ceiling.

“Gram?”

“Tomorrow,” her grandmother said.

Gram woke Dicey the next morning. Dicey changed into clean underwear and a fresh blouse. She pulled on her high socks and tied her sneakers. She washed her face and brushed her teeth before putting on her jumper. Gram was entirely dressed by the time she had finished, dressed and standing by the door. Dicey grabbed her jacket. Gram wore an old blue wool coat, with big round buttons up the front, which hung tired from her shoulders.

They had a quick breakfast in a coffee shop just down the street. Then Gram headed up past the motel, walking so fast Dicey had no time to notice what they were walking past. “How do you know where you're going?” she panted. Her breath came out of her mouth like smoke. She jammed her hands into her pockets and noticed how white and cold Gram's fingers looked on the hand holding the purse.

“He gave me directions.”

“Who?”

“The doctor.”

Two blocks up from the motel and one block off the busy street, Gram mounted cement steps to a square brick building. She entered through the heavy wooden doors that swung out into the cold. Each door had a green wreath on it.

Dicey scurried after her. Why had Gram told her to come along, she wondered angrily. She might as well not be there, for all the attention her grandmother paid to her.

The building looked like it had once been a school. It had a broad central corridor. A woman sat at a long desk in the middle of this, with chairs lined up in rows on either side of her. All of the chairs were empty. Gram marched up to the woman. “I'm Abigail Tillerman,” she said.

The woman's face registered no expression. She was a soft-looking woman, with her hair in white waves and a light sweater over her creamy blouse. Her nails gleamed pink. “Yes?” she asked politely.

“My daughter —” Gram began.

Understanding flashed across the woman's face. She put one hand on the phone beside her. “Yes, of course, Mrs. Tillerman. Dr. Epstein is expecting you. You'll want to go down the hall, take the second door on your left, and the fourth door on your right after that.”

“I want to see my daughter,” Gram said.

“But Dr. Epstein — and it's not visiting hours —” the woman mumbled. She still had her hand on the phone. Then she said, “All right. The little girl can wait down here. It's the fourth floor, the ward on your left. I'll call up to tell them to expect you. The elevators are back by the entrance, you can't miss them.”

“The little girl,” Gram said, “will come with me.”

Dicey almost smiled in her relief at Gram acting normal again.

“If you insist,” the woman said. Her worried eyes went from Gram to Dicey and back to Gram.

Gram didn't say anything.

“They're self-service elevators,” the woman said weakly.

It was a large elevator, about as big as Dicey's bedroom at home. Two young men in white pants and doctors' shirts were on it, but they didn't say a word and got off at the third floor. Dicey and Gram got off at the top and walked down a central hallway that matched the one downstairs. The linoleum had been laid on in blocks and worn down colorless. The place smelled of cleansing liquid and the empty hall reverberated with muffled sounds.

As they came to a set of glass-topped swinging doors, a nurse came through them. She stepped out into the hallway. Her uniform was crisp, and she wore a white cap on top of her brown hair. She had a heavy, strong face. “Mrs. Tillerman? I'm Preston, the floor nurse.” Her voice was soft and sweet, like a summer breeze. As soon as she heard the nurse's voice, Dicey felt better, as if things couldn't be so bad after all. Preston's voice didn't match at all with her face or her mottled red hands. It would be soothing to hear her voice, Dicey thought. If you were sick.

“And you must be the oldest girl, Dicey, wasn't it?” Preston asked. Dicey looked up, and then looked down again. Her tongue was twisted in her mouth, but she couldn't answer.

“Just come with me then,” Preston said.

It was a big room, where the light was tinged with yellow from the yellow shades halfway down over the windows. After the nurses' desk, with a counter and a phone, with cabinets filled with bottles, the room was filled with beds in rows. Each bed was surrounded on three sides by curtains.

Some of the beds had people lying flat in them. Some had people drawn up, knees drawn up, hands drawn up around knees, bodies drawn up back against the headboards. One of the figures, which Dicey saw out of the corner of her eye as they walked past, was so small she couldn't help staring at it. It was a kid, a little kid about as big as Sammy. The little figure curled back against the pillows, staring blankly ahead. Dicey had never seen anybody so still, not even Sammy deep asleep.

“Here we are,” Preston said. She stood aside.

Gram went to one side of the bed. Dicey stood at the foot. Inside her, her heart was squeezed tight against her chest. She stood and stared. Her heart was squeezed so tight it broke into pieces, sharp pieces that cut against her lungs and throat and stomach.

Momma.

M
OMMA LAY absolutely still, with her arms down beside her body. The veins along the back of her hands stood out blue. The sheets were pulled up over her chest. Her neck looked small, too small to ever have held up her round head. Her head lay back on the pillow, surrounded by an aureole of honey-colored hair. The bones in her cheeks and her forehead and along her jaw were covered by such thin skin that it looked like a pale veil fitted around her, not like skin at all. She lay still, absolutely still.

Dicey could see the fresh white sheets rise and fall, just slightly, as Momma breathed.

Well, Dicey said to herself, she'd known it was bad news. She could see what was happening, and she knew why Gram had rushed up here. Momma was dying.

Dicey felt herself begin to shake, inside where it didn't show to anyone. Gram stood at the side of Momma's bed, looking down at her, as motionless as her daughter. Dicey stood at the foot of the bed, shaking so hard the pieces of her heart almost made a noise she could hear. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. Dicey stared at the blank face, willing Momma to open her eyes and look at them.

Gram didn't say a word, but when Dicey looked back at her she had tears coming out of her eyes and sliding down her cheeks. Dicey wanted to say something to her, but she couldn't think of what to say. It wasn't like Gram to cry.

You don't know anything about her, really,
Dicey shouted to herself inside her head.
You don't know what she expected to find up here, yet you don't know what she's thinking about.

Preston came to put a chair down beside Gram. She handed Gram a tissue. Gram wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She took off her coat and put her purse on the floor. She sat down on the chair. Preston put another chair on the other side of Momma, and Dicey moved stiffly over to sit on it. After that, they were alone in the thick silence of the ward, Gram and Dicey, and Momma.

Gram reached out for one of the still hands. She held it in both of hers. “Oh Liza,” she said. Dicey had never heard anything sadder than her grandmother's voice.

“I have them with me, Liza,” Gram said, in the same voice. “They're all home with me. Dicey and James, Maybeth and Sammy. I'll take care of them, I promise you. I wish you had come with them. I wish you had come home years ago. I miss you. I missed you the day you left, and every day since then.”

She stopped, took a breath, then started talking again. “I've got Dicey here with me now,” she said. She talked and talked, about the children and what they looked like. She told about how they had arrived. She talked about what they were doing in school, at home. Dicey watched Momma's unresponding face and did not listen.

Dicey felt as if she was broken into pieces and didn't know how to gather herself together again. She was angry at herself about this. It wasn't as if she hadn't expected bad news. It wasn't as if she had ever expected to see Momma again, not after the way Momma had wandered off and forgotten them. There was no reason for Dicey to feel so sad and hurt.

Dicey unbuttoned her jacket. She was too cold to take it off, but the air in this room was close and stale and choking. The curtains that separated their narrow cubicle from all the other narrow cubicles were white, faded to pale yellow.

Momma's eyelids never moved. Her pale eyelashes rested on her cheeks. Maybe, Dicey thought to herself, while Gram's voice talked on, maybe it was so hard because this was really Momma, not some idea of her. All the time Momma had been gone, Dicey had carried around an idea of her. The idea was of Momma sleeping, and behind that were all the ideas of Momma that Dicey had saved up over her life. But idea wasn't the same as real, and real hurt.

Because she remembered Momma moving around. She remembered Momma's voice singing. She remembered Momma's eyes looking glad or worried, or laughing. She remembered Momma bringing Sammy home from the hospital. Momma was tired, then, and worried about how to take care of them; but she was still glad to have Sammy, and James and Maybeth and Dicey too. Momma loved her children. You could tell in the way her hands rested on their heads. (Dicey could still recall the feeling of Momma's hand resting on her head.) And in her voice when she talked to them. You could tell in how long she tried, how hard she worked.

Dicey wondered if Momma had known that she was worked out, and tired out. If she had felt herself crumbling at the edges and that was why she had started them on the road to Bridgeport. Trying to get them to a safe place before she crumbled away.

A hot flame of anger shot through her: Momma was good, and she didn't deserve to be dying here. She deserved to be with her family, at Gram's house, seeing how things were working out all right. There was no call for Momma to die, no reason for it, no good to come of it.

“ . . . paper mulberry tree,” Gram was saying. Dicey caught the words. “You remember that, surely. Where John built you the platform so you could get away when they got too rough for you. Your brothers, your father, your mother, too. I remember that. That was a fine thing John did, I thought. And telling Bullet never to go up there, because it was your place. He stood up to your father, too, and made him give the lumber.

“Your father is dead. He's buried next to Granny — you remember, in the cemetery by the Methodist church where we used to take flowers. It was a heart attack. Quick, and that's good. Bullet too — he's dead too. In Vietnam. They said, should they send him home, and I said, ‘Why bother now. What difference would it make.' John was gone by then. After he took that job in California he just stayed out there. I guess. He sent me an announcement, about getting married — oh, years ago, and we didn't answer. I have it somewhere. There have been sad times, Liza.”

The body on the bed made no response.

“But good times too. Then, and now again, with your children. I was alone for a long time, and there were good times in that, too. I keep thinking.”

Preston's voice interrupted Gram. “Dr. Epstein's here. Mrs. Tillerman?”

Gram lifted her head. “I don't want to leave her alone.”

“It doesn't matter to her,” Preston said. Her voice made the words gentle.

“It does to me. Stay with your momma, girl,” Gram said to Dicey.

Dicey nodded. Gram let go of the hand she had been holding. She put the arm down flat and got up. Dicey reached out to take the hand on her side of the bed. It was cool, unresponsive. She leaned over toward her mother's still face and began to talk. “Momma? We're fine, really. We're going to live with Gram.”

Somehow holding onto the hand, she had the same impulse Gram had had, to talk. Talk was reaching out to the form on the bed, even though you knew it couldn't be called back. Dicey began to tell her mother what had happened to them, after the last time they had seen her.

After a while, Gram came back and sat down again. She looked at Dicey across the bed. “You might want a word with him yourself,” she said. “She's dying.”

“I can see that,” Dicey snapped.

Gram just nodded, and that made Dicey sorry she'd snapped. But she didn't know how to say so to Gram. Gram opened her purse and took out her wallet. She gave Dicey five twenty-dollar bills and the key to the motel room. Dicey took them in her hand.

“It's almost Christmas,” Gram said. “See if you can find something for your brothers and sister.” She looked down at Momma's face. “Have a good walk. If you find something for yourself. . . . “ Her voice drifted away. She reached out and took up Momma's hand again. She glanced at Dicey. “I knew this was going to happen. But still. . . . ”

Dicey sat, her hand clutching the money and key.

“Get off now, girl. There's nothing to be done here. Nothing but wait.”

Dicey fled. Outside, in the corridor, a doctor stood. He was smoking on a thin cigar. He wore a white coat and was a slim, mouse-faced man. Dicey was about to turn down the hall to the elevator when he said her name. “Dicey Tillerman?”

She went over to him. All she really wanted was to get away and walk fast. There was pain in her that needed walking out, or burning out. Because it was Momma lying there in that bed, far away and going farther.

“Did your grandmother tell you?”

Dicey nodded, biting her lip.

“We did everything that could be done with the resources we have. She never really responded. She was undernourished, too, when she arrived here. Maybe she'd starved herself. She never
tried.
Never responded to any treatment, medical or psychiatric. We're surprised she even held on this long.” He sighed. He seemed to want to say something that would comfort. Or something that would explain. “Maybe it's better this way,” he said lamely.

Dicey could feel her eyes burning up at him. She wanted to ask,
Why? How?
How could someone die of just being crazy, the kind of sad, faraway craziness that Momma had?

But he didn't seem to know what else he wanted to say. He drew back, away from her, as if he was afraid she might hurt him. Dicey almost told him not to worry, the only person she was hurting was herself. But she didn't feel like bothering.

“I don't know why your grandmother insisted on coming up,” he complained.

Dicey waited.

“Believe me,” he said, almost pleading. “It is better this way.”

Dicey just stared at him; and then she walked away.

She burst out of the building. She hadn't buttoned her coat and the air was freezing cold. At the sidewalk, she stopped to push the big buttons through their holes and to look around her. Her fingers were numbed by the air, and she noticed a rim of dirty gray snow by the side of the road. Pieces of paper blew around on the sidewalk until they came to the edges of the buildings. There they nestled up forlornly.

Dicey didn't have a hat or mittens, she didn't have shoes that kept the cold from coming up through the soles of her feet. The icy wind stung at her cheeks. That was all right with her. She had an angry fire now, inside of her. She didn't know who she was angry at, that doctor, or the whole hospital, or even Momma. She had trouble breathing deeply as she strode along, with her head down against the wind. And she was angry at herself too: because it wasn't as if she hadn't guessed this, it wasn't as if she'd ever thought Momma would come back. So why should it bother her so much? She was being stupid. She didn't believe that Momma had meant to go away like this, she didn't think that Momma wanted to.

But just the same, she had.

Dicey wasn't hungry so she turned down a street that had a lot of stores on it. She had a pocketful of money. She didn't know why Gram had given her so much. Probably it was a mistake.

Dicey walked down the street, fast, looking in the windows. Then she walked up the street. People jostled past her, but she couldn't be bothered to get out of their way. If someone shoved her she shoved back, not looking.

This street had small stores. Dicey went into a toy store, where Christmas carols filled the air inside. It had dolls and games, stuffed animals and building sets and airplanes, toys that little children could pull, and wooden trucks painted in bright colors. She thought Maybeth might like a fancy doll, but she couldn't find one that didn't have an empty, simpering face. Some of the dresses the dolls wore were beautiful and fancy, but all of their faces had blinking round eyes and little turned-up noses, and if they were real faces you wouldn't ever like those people. Dicey couldn't buy something like that. She thought James might like a game, but she didn't know what except maybe chess. Chess was for smart people. But the chess sets had lightweight plastic pieces, and she didn't like that. She thought Sammy might like a teddy bear, but she thought he wouldn't like to be given one.

How was she supposed to buy these things? Dicey demanded, her anger spreading to include Gram. And they should be buying something they needed.

They were always buying things they needed, Dicey thought angrily to herself, leaving the toy store abruptly.

She looked in the window of a store that sold things made out of wood. There was a huge toy train, with an engine and a coal car and a passenger car and a freight car and a caboose; it was big enough to let a little kid push it along with his feet as he rode on it. The grain in the wood swirled around. It reminded Dicey of the sailboat, and she knew that if she went inside and touched the sides of the train cars, they would have the same silky feel as the sides of the boat that Sammy had sanded down for her. Standing up on racks, a couple of wooden plates next to a wooden goblet caught her eye. It wouldn't be bad, Dicey thought, to eat off wooden plates. They were surely pretty, with a deep, polished gleam to them. She wondered what would happen if she didn't paint the sides of her boat. She had a glimpse of how it might look, bobbling beside the dock with the sails rolled up and the wooden hull shining. She guessed she would have to varnish it, and varnish cost more than paint.

The next store she went into was for ladies. She went in because her hands were cold and she saw gloves in the window. The pair she liked weren't fancy, just plain leather. Inside, when a woman with a doubting face approached her, Dicey asked to see them. She slipped her hands into them. The gloves were lined with something warm and woolly. On the outside, they were soft brown leather, and the thick seams looked strong. Dicey looked at her own hands and measured with her memory's eye. They would fit Gram.