The Used World (42 page)

“C
AN
I
COME IN?”

Rebekah pulled back the curtain around her bed to see who it was. Just a puff of orange hair was visible. “Hazel! Come in!”

Hazel fussed around the room a moment looking uncomfortable, as if she wanted to lie down on the bed and cry with relief but instead would just move the breakfast tray over, and then also adjust the chair. “Do you remember seeing me last night?”

Rebekah shook her head. She didn’t remember anything. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She had come to consciousness a few times, but there had been tubes in both her arms, she had been catheterized, and a pump beside her released morphine into one of her IV drips. Rebekah opened her eyes every few hours and like a goldfish in a hospital bowl, each time was the first. She would awaken and think, There is Claudia, it worked. How utterly amazing. Then she would sleep, a dark, chemical tumbling from which she brought back nothing. Hours later she would think, There is Claudia, the phone worked. How amazing. Only this morning she had realized the same thing had happened many times.

“Well, it’s a good thing you don’t remember—I was a fright. You can’t imagine what an entire day of torrential rain does to this hair.”

“I can well imagine it,” Rebekah said.

“Have you seen the baby?”

“He’s”—Rebekah lowered her hands to the bed, studied them—“he’s still in the NICU.” Sometime in the night she had felt a hand on her shoulder—Gil, as it turned out—and she decided to tell him about the fascinating things that had happened to her. But he wanted to do the talking. He said something about toxemia, preeclampsia, an intrauterine infection. All possibilities. He said the baby’s clavicle was broken, he was almost four weeks premature, and he was suffering from cephalohematoma. Gil repeated the condition, said it in tongues,
cephalohematoma,
told her there was a blood lake over the infant’s skull. Rebekah could see it clearly, the blood lake, and tried to nod. It made perfect sense to her. Unfortunately, she had no idea what baby he was talking about, and believed the clavicle to be a musical instrument. Sad that the baby’s was broken. Maybe later his parents could get him a small piano, or a recorder. Claudia was holding Rebekah’s feet and it was three in the morning, if not in Indiana, then somewhere. Rebekah turned her head from side to side, tried to open both eyes. She focused on Claudia, opened her mouth and tried to say,
There’s been an accident.
She meant…she didn’t know what she meant—a train wreck, a fallen sky. She couldn’t move her legs or feel Claudia’s hands on her feet, although she knew them to be there.
Her baby,
that was what she realized with a jolt that cut through the fever; the morphine; her swollen, inert body. Gil had been talking about her baby, the gifted SeaWorld creature who had performed his tricks for months, and then, without warning, had broken through the gates. Rebekah had never stood on a seashore, but thought she was standing there now, watching him swim and swim away.

“Have you seen him?” Rebekah asked.

“I peeked through a window and saw the little cooker he’s in, and then I marched to the nurses’ station and told them I didn’t want him someplace any Tom, Dick, or Harry could just clap an eyeball on him.”

“What did the nurse say?”

“She ignored me.”

“Hazel,” Rebekah asked, “have you ever felt like—has anything ever happened to you and it pushed you so far outside yourself that you almost didn’t…I mean, have you ever wanted to stop people from going about their daily business, just so you could say to them, I don’t know, something like, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve survived something terrible, and I am not a normal person.’ Something like that?”

Hazel waited a moment, said, “Once.”

Rebekah sighed, looked back down at the bed.

“You know, don’t you, that the baby is going to be fine? He came into the world a little bunged up, it’s true, but he’s—”

“I know. I know you’re right.” A tear rolled down Rebekah’s face. “He’s fine and I’m fine, but barely. If it weren’t for Claudia we’d both…”

“But you are.”

“But almost.”

“I see. The Other Universe, right? Right now you are safe and healthy and so’s the baby, but in the Other Universe it didn’t turn out that way?”

“Yes. Yes! We were so close it might as well have turned out bad as good. And I know you’ll say, But it didn’t.”

“No, I’ll just say this: the world is probably divided, like glass-half-full types, between those who, when faced with salvation, revisit the scene and imagine they weren’t saved. And the others, who weren’t saved, and revisit the scene and make it right.”

“So is my glass half full, or half empty?”

“Ha! That’s the thing. Your glass is completely full, and you look at it and say, ‘What if I’d dropped this just now as I was carrying it from the kitchen? Then it wouldn’t just be empty, it would be broken.’”

Rebekah let her head fall back against the bed as she laughed.

“You look good,” Hazel told her.

“Thanks, I…” Rebekah looked down at the bed self-consciously. “A nurse helped me shower this morning, and Claudia went home last night at some point and brought back this nightgown. She’d been saving it.”

“I see.”

“And these flowers.” Rebekah gestured toward the bouquets on either side of her. “This one is from Claudia and Oliver and Bandit, these are from Millie, who wrote on the card,
Please come home, I like you so much better than Claudia,
and these are from Pete Senior, and Kathy.”

Hazel raised an eyebrow.

“Claudia called them last night. I thought she’d done it to be kind—doesn’t it sound like something she’d do, be nice like that?”

“It does.”

“Well, that wasn’t the only reason, I guess.” Rebekah lifted her damp hair out from behind her gown. “Kathy was a huge mess when she was here this morning, crying like I’ve never seen, saying that Peter had left them
a note
—she was desperate for me to understand that. He’d left it on Pete Senior’s car the night he left for Florida, but apparently that big windstorm blew it away.”

“We’ve had a lot of wind.”

“The note said he was sorry but he had to go, and that one of them should get over to check on me right away, as I wasn’t feeling well when he left. She wanted me to know, too, that Peter didn’t have the phone disconnected—he just didn’t pay the bill.”

“Very nice. A good man.”

“Yes. I said to Kathy, a note?!? You’re asking me to forgive him, and to forgive you, because of a note?”

“Good for you.”

“But of course I do.”

“Do what?”

“Forgive them. I mean, my goodness, I’m not their responsibility. I wasn’t even his, that was all just…it was just a mistake, easy to make.”

“Are you anybody’s responsibility?”

Rebekah studied Hazel’s face, thought about it. “It seems Claudia has always thought I was hers.”

“But that only works if she is yours, too, I think. Otherwise.”

“I know. I know that.”

“And what did you decide?”

A nurse bustled in, pulled back Rebekah’s curtain with a loud snap. Hazel and Rebekah were silent as blood pressure and temperature were taken. The nurse wrote the numbers in Rebekah’s chart, hung it back on its hook. “Grandma, you’ll want to be getting this suitcase out of the hallway as soon as you can.”

Rebekah covered her mouth, laughed with a sound like a sneeze. “Grandma,” she said, pulling her sheet up over her face.

“Don’t get started, you.” Hazel groaned a little as she stood. She stepped out into the hallway and came back with a trunk on a set of wheels used to pull luggage.

“I’ve seen that before,” Rebekah said, studying the gray trunk with tarnished brass corners. “That’s what Claudia and I went downtown to pick up for you, from that—”

“Second Chance. Right. It’s yours, actually.” Hazel lifted the trunk up and put it on the foot of the bed, released the spring handles. “When Tony and Gretchen, the couple who found this at the dump, went through it, they found letters with my name in them. So they called me, told me I could have it if I’d come get it.” She lifted the lid.

Rebekah sat back, took a deep breath.

“Seen a ghost?” Hazel asked.

“Yes.” Rebekah reached out, picked up a doll’s dress. “I made this. It was the first thing I ever sewed by myself. And this one, too.” She turned the tiny hems over, marveled at her small stitches, crooked as they were. “I don’t…”

“Your mother saved them.”

“My mother? This box belonged to my mother?”

Hazel nodded. “It did.” She lifted out a battered cookbook.

“I”—Rebekah pressed a hand against her forehead—“never thought I’d see that again. And you say, I’m sorry, you say that your name is in here?”

“I knew your mother.” Hazel moved aside a baby’s quilt, pulled out a stack of letters bound in a faded yellow ribbon. “We corresponded for a few years, just before you were born and while you were a little girl.”

“Hazel?” Rebekah dropped the doll clothes. “Look at me. In five, almost six years you don’t tell me this?”

“That’s right. It wasn’t the right time.”

“Not the right time.”

“Correct.” Hazel lifted her glasses, cheerfully looked for something at the bottom of the box. “Here it is.” She pulled out a shoe box.

Rebekah leaned back against the bed, just enough to signal a recoil. She knew it happened all the time in books and movies, that a blood test shows your father couldn’t be your father, or the person you thought long dead strolls into a restaurant where you’ve come by accident, but it didn’t need to happen to her. It didn’t need to happen today. “I don’t want to see this,” she said.

“I believe you,” Hazel said, lifting the lid of the shoe box. “Now this, this is a story.” She took out Rebekah’s baby book, the one in which nothing was written. “And it starts,” she said, her glasses pushed up on her head as she flipped through the blank pages, “with her.” From the very back, farther than Rebekah had been able to go in that long-ago hour, Hazel removed a black-and-white photograph.

It was of a thin, pretty woman standing in front of Sterling’s Department Store in what appeared to be a mild season. Her hair was cut in a bob and it curled under her ears. She was wearing a lovely dress with a tuck-waisted white blouse, a full dark skirt, white gloves. In one hand she was holding a small dark clutch purse; with the other she was waving shyly. “Oh,” Rebekah said, running a finger over the woman’s face. “Sterling’s.”

“Now this”—Hazel lifted something else out of the shoe box—“is your baby book.”

The pink satin cover was faded and stained, the book itself so full of envelopes and letters and cards it was at least three times its original thickness. “This is mine—me? This one is me?”

“Yes.”

“Then this”—Rebekah lay her hand on the cover of the empty book—“was my brother’s?”

“That’s right. Your mother found out she was pregnant with you and she wrote to me, without telling your father, of course, and asked me about her.” Hazel pointed to the woman in front of Sterling’s. “I wrote her back and that began a correspondence that lasted years. I loved Ruth. She taught me a great deal about humility and kindness, obedience.”

Rebekah snorted. “Shame you didn’t practice any of it.”

Hazel shrugged. “Life is short. These”—she pointed to the letters in the yellow ribbon—“are just mine to her, but I’ve put hers to me in the box, too, in a blue ribbon. Now”—Hazel stood up—“don’t tend to this today. You’ve got some long nights ahead of you, years and years of long nights.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll find it all interesting.”

“And I can ask you anything?”

“You can ask me anything.” Hazel packed the last things in the trunk and closed it. She straightened her lime-green T-shirt, had just settled her voluminous purple skirt in the chair when the door opened and Claudia came in with Amos Townsend. Hazel watched the two of them duck through the doorway, said, “Oh good, two of the Pacers have come to visit.”

There was a flurry of activity, a burst of radiance just like the one that follows any disaster averted. Who survived, who chose wisely, who would find a way to live by her own daily lights? Rebekah watched the others talk, Amos describing some mishap at the post office, Claudia laughing that full-throated way that was so rare it felt to Rebekah like the sighting of an endangered bird. Hazel, gathering up her things, getting ready to sneak out of the room. And down the hall, baby David in his special hat, getting baked a little longer in his warm bed. Rebekah knew then that if she taught him only one thing—if there were room for only one—she would tell him to trust her: What feels like the end of the world never is. It
never
is.

I’m grateful, as ever, to the fine people at The Free Press and at Simon & Schuster, who demonstrate their support for me in countless ways. I would like to particularly thank Dominick Anfuso, Martha Levin, Carisa Hays, Suzanne Donahue, and Amber Qureshi, for the extraordinary line-edit she did on the third revision of this book.

Fifteen years ago Tom Koontz wrote a poem called “Old Woods,” which I told him would make a fascinating novel. He asked me to write it. I tried then and failed. All these years later, two images from that poem have made their way into Hazel’s story: Marguerite Post in her rocking chair, and the baby’s coral bracelet. I am grateful to him for the depth of that omen, which haunts me still.

This is my fifth and final book with my editor, Amy Scheibe, who has moved on to another publishing house. We have had an enviable professional relationship; Amy gave her heart (not to mention her time) to making each of my books the best it could be. I can never thank her enough for the ways she changed my life.

One image in this book—the dogs running circles into the frozen ground at Cobb Creek—is an homage to Sherwood Anderson’s far superior story “A Death in the Wood.”

Dear Marcel Proust believed that friendships were a distraction for the real writer, and certainly they can be. That said, I’d rather keep my friends than ever write another book. Thank you: Leslie Staub (who if I never saw you again, you would be the one) and Tim Sommer, Diane Freund and Joe Galas, Beth and John Dalton, Jody Leonard and Lisa Kelly, Ben Kimmel, Don and Meg Kimmel, Fred Neumann, Suzanne Finnamore, Lawrence Naumoff, Larry Baker, Jay Alevizon, John MacMullen, Tessa Joseph and George Nicholas, my beloved niece, Abby Lindsay.

I owe a much-belated debt to Frank and Barbara Watson. What they gave me and what they taught me is a story in itself. They know.

My eternal love and thanks to my Otters, without whom…I can’t imagine what. I would be a ruined, leaking basket of crazy and loneliness. Christopher Schelling, Robert Rodi (who was so kind about an early draft of this book, I threatened to have his comments tattooed on my human body), Jeffrey Smith, Dennis Pilsits (Honorary Otter), and Augusten Burroughs, who is my soul’s twin, except I have all the hair.

My mother, Delonda Hartmann, reads and reads and reads the drafts of my books and she never tires of them and she never complains and she always makes me feel like a genius, even though she is smarter than I am and a better writer to boot. For that she deserves some huge sparkling award and as soon as I can find one, it’s hers.

If I write for one person—if there’s one person I really want to please—it’s my sister, Melinda Mullens. Anyone who has read my other books knows she often pinches me and calls me names but she loves how I write so it’s okay about how mean she is. Thanks to her husband, Wayne, too, who—the first time he saw me after thirty years—said, “My God, I haven’t seen you since you were on a bicycle in your slippers and your hair was out to here!”

I’ve already said everything I can say about my husband, John Svara, but I’ll say it again: beautiful, beautiful, you are like Proteus in that old myth. You became exactly the man you wanted to be, and you carried me through that refining fire until what was left was sublime and for the rest of my life.

And finally, I thank my children: the ever-hilarious Obadiah (who never bothers me when I’m writing and makes me laugh like no one else) and my perfect new baby, Augusten James-Anthel, who already shines with some celestial light. But mostly I want to thank my daughter, Kat Romerill, who is the love of my life, the most highly evolved, funny, wicked, brilliant, compassionate woman in the world. How I got to be her mother I can only attribute to my great and rare luck.