Girl Unmoored (29 page)

“The procedure is over,” she said.

My dad let the newspaper fall off his lap when he stood. “Can I see her?” he asked, extra nicely this time.

“No,” the nurse said, turning. “Not yet. But I’ll come back when you can.”

My dad took a step closer to her. “Is she going to make it?”

The nurse glanced back at him. “You’ll have to talk to the doctor, Mr. Bramhall.”

“
Please
,” my dad groaned from his chest, the way Nutter begged when Mrs. Weller tried to make him sleep in his doghouse. “Is she going to
make
it?”

The nurse stopped and turned around to face him, “Fifty-fifty,” she said quietly. Then she disappeared through the doors again.

My dad squeezed his head in his palms, then shook out the hand he had hit the wall with and sat down again, stepping on top of the newspaper when he did, ripping it. That sleeping man had left for a while but was back now, lying in the same spot with the sweater back over his face.

“Dad,” I said carefully. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Apron. These nurses won’t tell me anything.” He slumped back.

“Is M?” I said, but stopped. Then I took a deep breath and started all over again. “Is
Margie
going to be all right?” Her name tasted like sour milk.

My dad looked at me with his forehead squeezed together. “Margie?” he said sitting up. “It’s the baby we’re talking about. She’s ten weeks early, Apron. She’s a preemie.”

“A preemie?” I pulled my knees up, destroying all of Africa.

“Yes,” he said, looking away and staring at something. “I sat right there, too,” he said pointing to the man with the sweater across his head. “When they came out to tell me about you.”

I looked over and smiled. “Really? You sat there the whole time?”

“They wouldn’t let the husbands in back then. I told your mother I was going to pay one of the nurses twenty bucks to videotape it for me.” He smiled, thinking about it. “She told me she’d cram the thing down my neck if I did.”

My dad got lost in his remembering and I didn’t want to interrupt it.

I looked down at the world again, like the way God must do every day when he wakes up and looks out his window. From here, it seemed like all you really needed to do was stay on the green parts not to drown. You couldn’t see all the other millions of places just waiting for you to fall in.

After a few more moments, I lifted myself up next to my dad. And we sat like that, the blood finding its way back into my legs, while outside, the sky flashed.

It took a while for the thunder to come, but when it did, the bangs were so loud it sounded like someone’s room was blowing up above us. Outside the window, if you watched long enough, you could see the whole sky light up before the next crash. My dad didn’t look up once, though, so I watched it alone.

A doctor was standing above us.
For a few blinks, I thought he was one of Chad’s friends. But then he said, “Dennis?”

“Yuh,” my dad answered, rubbing his eyes and standing. We had both been asleep for a while, you could tell by the sour ball in my stomach.

“You can see her now.”

“Great,” my dad nodded, looking at me then back to the doctor. “Can my daughter come, too?”

I knew what that doctor was going to say. But he said, “yes,” instead.

When I stood, my legs were so wobbly my dad had to grab my arm. We walked like that through the doors. It smelled like Band-Aids mixed in with chicken broth in the hallway. Doors were lined along the walls, all of them shut with
Delivery
written across them. But further down there was another one that said
Pediatric ICU
with a long window after it. The doctor stopped in front of it, tapping his finger lightly on the glass.

“Over there,” he pointed. “In that incubator.”

My dad and I put our hands up to the window but there were so many incubators in there, we couldn’t tell which one he was pointing to.

“Which one?” my dad asked.

The doctor tapped on the window harder this time and a thin nurse looked up. Her face changed when she saw it was the doctor, pointing and waving. He dropped his hands, but my dad and I kept ours flat on the glass. We watched the nurse walk over to an incubator by the wall and start wheeling it closer, through the baby traffic, until she stopped below us. Then she turned the whole thing around.

Under the blanket, there was a bump the same size as a loaf of banana bread, with a purple teardrop for a nose and two puffy wrinkles for eyes.

“Three pounds, two ounces,” the doctor said. “She’s stabilized.”

“Stabilized,” my dad repeated quietly. “She looks all right, right?”

She looked like she was made out of play dough.

“She’s okay, Dennis. Better than she should be really. Abrupt deliveries don’t always end up like this. We got lucky.”

But I didn’t even know what they were talking about.
Lucky.
That purple banana bread of a baby had tubes sticking out of it everywhere. I stepped back.

The doctor told us to go home now, there was no need to stay.

My dad turned to him and said, “What about Margie?”

“She’s fine, Dennis. Tired, but fine. And still not talking.”

My dad shook his head.

“I’ve seen it before,” the doctor said. “From a steering wheel. The mother was driving and she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.”

“Did the baby make it?” my dad asked. Way in the distance I heard another crash in the sky.

The doctor looked at me and then him. “For a little while,” he said.

I stared down at the old gray half-moons on the rug. The doctor told us again that we might as well go home. My dad sighed, “Thanks, Doctor,” but stuck his hands up on the glass again.

The doctor started to walk away. Until my dad said, “Hey. Look at that,” quietly, like he might be watching a butterfly land on a petal.

The doctor turned back to the glass and I stepped forward again. The nurse had lifted up the pink cap slightly, and underneath it there was a flash, a tiny taste, of red.

In the morning, when I opened my eyes, a long triangle of sun was covering most of my bookshelf again.
The thunder and lightning from last night were gone. I closed my heavy eyelids. I missed Chad in the same way that I missed my mom now: always.

I turned to my clock radio. 11:09.

I threw off my sheets. I had a good-bye party to get to. I pulled on my Avon lady dress and slid into my flip-flops.

In the mirror, my tired eyes looked like Grandma Bramhall’s, small and hidden inside a few piles of skin. My new layers of red were all over the place; one side was curled under my ear like Mrs. Perry’s, and the other side was sticking out in a J. But of all the things that were staring back at me, it was the dress that looked the worst.

So I pulled it off, walked over to the trash and dropped it in there, forever. I put on blue jeans and a white T-shirt, instead. Except for the layers of red and my freckles every second, I might look like a smaller version of Mike.

My dad’s door was wide open and his room was full of sun. Last night, after we finally climbed up our porch stairs, I was so tired it felt like I was walking underwater in Grandma Bramhall’s pool. My dad looked just as tired but said he had some things to take care of before he went to bed. “See you in the morning, Apron,” he said.

But now, downstairs, I didn’t see him anywhere. And I had forty-five minutes to get to the party.

“Dad!” I yelled through the screen door, but the only thing that answered was a seagull and Mr. Orso’s lawn mower somewhere on the other side of his house. And when I stepped outside, I saw my dad’s car was gone. I ran down those stairs and over to Mrs. Weller’s lawn, but her orange love bug wasn’t in her driveway either.

So I ran back up our porch stairs and into the kitchen. My dad hadn’t even left a note. I tried not to, but my skin prickled with it anyway: he was probably with M and the little whatever—his new family, all made up and happy at the hospital. I looked at the clock and pulled out the bus schedule. Another one was coming in seven minutes.

I ran so fast up our dirt road that even the chipmunks couldn’t keep up with me. A few times, I twisted my ankle on some rocks that I hadn’t seen coming, but I didn’t stop, I just put my chin down and pumped my arms and legs faster.

At Route 88, I took a right and kept running. A few seconds later, my hair blew up and the bus flew past me. I waved my hands and screamed at the top of my lungs, but it just kept getting smaller and smaller in front of me. And when I took in another burning breath, I had to slow down.

Until way up ahead at the bus stop, I watched the back lights flash red.

I clenched my teeth and picked up speed again. My lungs felt like they were pulling in glue instead of air. A red pickup truck like the one Mike used to have sped by me and then veered around the bus, which was still waiting at the empty stop. I pumped my arms harder. But just as I got close enough to yell for the bus driver again, the red lights went out and the bus started moving forward again.

I threw my hands up in the air. Then I screamed so loud that even God up there, sitting by his pool, could have heard me. “
Stop
!”

But it didn’t.

I bent over and tried to catch my breath.

Brakes screeched. When I looked up, the bus
had
stopped. I started running again.

When I got to it, I stood panting in front of the door, which stayed closed. I knocked on it and finally the bus driver lady noticed me and opened it.

“Hey, Raggedy Annie,” she said. “Are you all right?”

I opened my mouth to say yes and thank you, but nothing came out except air.

“Hey, did I just drive past you back there?”

I nodded. She waved me in. “I didn’t recognize you with your fancy new hair
do
.”

When I went to put the money in her meter, my hand stopped above it.

“Forget something?”

“Yes,” I panted. I didn’t have any money. I sighed and looked down toward the back of the bus. Five people were looking back at me, and two people weren’t.

“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” she whispered.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for stopping.”

“Don’t thank me, honey,” she said pointing to the front window. “Thank him.” Out there, that red pickup truck had stopped in the middle of the road. It didn’t just look like Mike’s old truck, it
was
Mike’s old truck, the ORD UCK still on the back. It was tilted down to one side now, with a gray-haired man standing next to it. “I wouldn’t have seen you at all if that guy hadn’t blown a tire.”

I glanced up at the sky. Maybe God had been watching after all. But then the bus driver lady told me to go sit down, so I did.

It wasn’t the same bus. The graffiti was different. But still, I watched the world whiz by and got my breathing back down to normal.

At Scent Appeal, the door was open and the window was fixed. Nothing was written across it now so you could see people inside. Chad’s friends, Marcus and Chris, were there and so were Patty and Trisha. But I had never seen the rest of the people standing around, talking loudly. Most of my flower arrangements were standing tall, though.

“Sorry, love, they’re closed,” a man with bright yellow pants said when I walked in.

“I’m here to see Mike,” I told him quietly and kept going.

It was way too hot. I had to dodge clear plastic cups with tiny umbrellas sticking out of them with every step. It was weird, to think that Mike and Chad had so many friends. When I bumped into one man, he turned around and I saw he was wearing blue eye shadow and red lipstick. “Ooo, honey,” he said pulling his drink up to his shoulder. “Watch the punch.” Then he turned back to another man wearing earrings. Inside the sea of people, there wasn’t one Mike.

When I got to the counter, The Boss was gone. He wasn’t by the cash register either. Or by the sink. I squeezed my way through more people to the apartment door, but it was locked. Then I stood there, hot and dizzy and short. No one had told me about The Boss. No one had told me. I didn’t even get to say good-bye.

I leaned back against the door. After all that running, my legs felt like someone had poured sand into them now. And the more I looked around, the more I wanted to leave.

I squeezed my way up to Marcus or Chris, I couldn’t remember which one was which, standing in a circle of people, laughing. “Excuse me,” I said.

“Oh hey, kid,” whichever one it was said.

“Do you know where Mike is?”

“Yeah,” he said turning to another man, who come to think of it,
did
look familiar. I couldn’t remember where I knew him from though. “Didn’t Mike say he had to go somewhere?”