Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  And he had been profoundly changed. Everyone around him looked at him differently, and in the mirror he looked different to himself.

  But this photo had been taken before that day. Bewildered, he flipped the pages again, but yes, he remembered that photo very well, because of Shelly Williams, because of the irritating neckline, and because it had been that shirt, the same shirt that he’d torn the day that Ira died.

  And he’d already changed.

  Grandmother Tobias had been talking during Marshall’s frantic page-flipping, but he’d barely heard what she said, something about his mother sending the photos, but rarely any proper letters, and how her own letters went unanswered and how her son had forsaken her. Long, rambling, righteous talk that reminded him of when she’d sat at the table and told them that she’d not have whores and fornicators in her house.

  He turned the page again. Meghan had started showing up. Baby pictures, pink blankets, tiny hair bows that he remembered his mother struggling to fasten with Velcro in Meghan’s fine hair. School pictures, Meghan’s eyes already sad, long before she had anything remotely like Ira happen to her.

  She’d never had anything like that happen to her.

  But then, nothing like that had really happened to him, had it? After all, he was not the one hit by the train. In fact, nothing had ever really happened to him. And Meghan had. She’d almost died when she was little more than a baby.

  He hadn’t been home when the babysitter gave her the peanut butter. He’d been at school. All he’d been told was that she’d gotten sick, and then his parents were busy with her. He hadn’t been jealous; in fact, he’d felt heady with independence. He spent a lot of time with Ira and his parents, sure, but he’d also taken care of himself. He’d felt grown-up.

  Photos started appearing that he didn’t recognize, photos without him in them, photos with his father and Meghan, rarely ones of his mother, but of course she’d been the one behind the camera. Meghan grew up within a few pages, and the last one in the book was her current school photo, her eyes wide, as if someone had surprised her just as the camera went off.

  It wasn’t a great picture. And he knew Meghan hated it. She was so sensitive. A splotch appeared on the plastic over her face, and he hastily wiped it away, hanging his head and turning away from his grandmother so she wouldn’t see him crying. He closed the photo album as she noted that Meghan looked like her mother, but that she’d gotten her father’s nose.

  He nodded, agreeing with the genetics lottery, letting her talk, and stared out the window at Ada, her better knee bent up into the sun, her bandaged one hidden in the thick grass.

  “You told Ada that we weren’t going on the same road together,” he said, interrupting her.

  She stopped talking and was silent for a moment before nodding, slowly. “That’s true. That’s what I believe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what God told me.”

  “God told you that?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What else did God tell you?”

  She looked at him steadily for a second, her eyes full of certainty and what felt to him like a solid judgment, heavy, pushing against him, knowing that he was questioning her.

  “You’re in trouble, son. I know that. Don’t know exactly what it is, but I imagine I’ll be finding out soon enough. That one there,” she said, nodding out the window, “she’s something different from you. She’s got trouble, too, but she’s . . . alone with herself. She’s alone, Marshall, and that means she’s not with you.”

  He wanted to protest. Not against Ada being alone, but at the assumption that he wasn’t. The only times he hadn’t felt alone were the times he’d been with Ada, the times he’d held her, the times they had prayed together.

  He’d always been alone.

  “What did God tell you about me, besides me being in trouble?” he asked, hating the quiver in his voice.

  “Well, that’s something between me and God, I guess,” she said. She patted his back and hauled herself off the sofa. Marshall winced as her joints cracked and studied her as she limped into the kitchen with their empty glasses. “She did a right good job on these fish,” she called to him, and again, he considered what he didn’t know about Ada.

  He opened the photo album to the last page to look at Meghan and her sad eyes, and wondered how alone she felt.

  Fourteen

  AGAIN, after Cal left I tried to resume some sort of normal relationship with Meghan. It was easier now, without the respirator, though everything else was still hooked up, the catheter, the GI tube, and the transducer. Still, things seemed different without the respirator. The nurse brought me a shower cap, an ingenious little thing that she heated in the microwave and had a no-rinse shampoo built into it. I washed Meghan’s hair, trying to believe that somehow she felt and enjoyed the pressure of my fingertips against her skull, knew that it was me and felt safe.

  Years ago, after they called off the search for my parents’ boat, effectively declaring them dead, I spent days curled up in bed. Cal never entreated me to get up, and he never appeared surprised or irritated when he came home and found that I hadn’t moved all day. Instead, he came home from work on the fourth day, still smelling of the Gulf and sunscreen, and kissed me gently on the forehead before he went to the bathroom and ran hot water in the tub.

  He lifted me from the bed and stood me in the tub, drawing the T-shirt of my father’s that I had been sleeping in over my head, and then silently lowered me into the water. It was so hot that it stung, driving the breath from my lungs as I sank down, but I never flinched. And when my chest slid under the water, finally extinguishing every bit of oxygen from my body, it was as though I were born again, taking in a great gulp of air, as if it were my first on this Earth without my parents in it.

  He’d let me soak, changing the sheets on the bed, laying out a new T-shirt, one of his, on the bed, before coming back in and cupping the back of my head to support it while he dipped it beneath the water, then raised me up and lathered my hair with strawberry-scented shampoo. His fingers on my scalp made things start to make sense again.

  I hoped that would happen for Meghan. For the first time in my life I did not bemoan my bitten-short nails. I knew I wasn’t hurting her, pressing my fingertips through the plastic of the bathing cap. I wasn’t afraid to use some pressure, and I watched her forehead move with my ministrations, pulling her eyebrows, tugging her eyelids up. She looked alternately hopeful and surprised, and I fully expected her lids to fly open at any moment.

  It did not happen.

  And that was okay. That was okay for the moment. Because I had this project, this cleaning up to take care of, the way I hadn’t been allowed since she’d turned eight. I pulled off the cap and towel-dried her hair, letting it fall in wavy wisps around her face.

  One of the nurses helped me bathe her, using the same sort of no-rinse bathing cloths, and she showed me how I could do this myself next time—how to hold her up, how to use my own body as a prop for hers. It was easier than I would have thought. She was still so small, so light.

  We dressed her in a new gown, and then the nurse left and I did Meghan’s nails. Meghan had just recently started getting interested in the feminine side of life. She’d spent so long trying to catch up to Marshall, chasing after her daddy, and she had been rightly called a tomboy. But along with developing her flirtatious glances, she’d also begun pilfering nail polish and lipstick from my jumbled drawer of rarely used beauty products.

  And so I painted her feminine. I glided the shiniest shell pink I could find across her nails, reacquainting myself with these little bits of her, remembering how I’d held her feet in my hands and kissed her toes until she screamed with delighted laughter when she was a toddler, how amazed Cal had been with the sharpness of her tiny fingernails when she was an infant. We’d had such fun with her when she was a baby, so thrilled when she came along so many years after Marshall, an accident we joked at first. />
  I hadn’t even known I’d wanted another baby until I was already pregnant. It was heavenly to enjoy those nine months the way I hadn’t when I was pregnant with Marshall. I’d been so convinced that something was going to go wrong with him, and I exhausted the library books about all the rare ailments and desperate situations of childbirth.

  After Cal paged through a couple of them, he’d looked at me in horror and then refused to allow me to read any more. I had resorted to sneaking them up to my studio and reading them on the sly. I thought that if I were prepared, if I knew what the tiniest symptom might mean, then I would have time to save my baby.

  I blew on Meghan’s nails, as if she might move and smudge her polish, and knew that no matter how many books I’d read about food allergies I could never have predicted this. I couldn’t possibly have known that Ada was a symptom, a glaring one.

  “If you opened your eyes, you could see what a fabulous mani and pedi I just gave you,” I said to Meghan. “Heck, this is probably a perfect opportunity to pluck your eyebrows, isn’t it? That’ll make you open your eyes.” I grinned, looking at her thick eyebrows, carbon copies of my own at that age. I’d finally plucked them myself, badly, at thirteen, mortifying my mother and sending my father into paroxysms of laughter.

  I ran my finger across Meghan’s, and then suddenly leaned forward and whispered fiercely into her ear, “Dammit, Meghan, open your eyes. Come on! Open your eyes, baby, please. Do it!”

  Nothing.

  I sniffed, not even aware that I had begun to cry. “You look so pretty, sweetie,” I said. “When you’re through all this, we’ll get your hair cut. And—”

  A soft knock at the door startled me, and before I could say anything it opened a crack, then slowly eased forward just enough that I recognized Sandy. I jumped from the chair and met her at the door, as reluctant to allow her in Meghan’s room as I’d been to allow Hernandez and Rhoades into my home.

  “Chloe,” she whispered. She looked into my eyes, not trying to look past me to Meghan. “I—is this a bad time?”

  What was I supposed to say to that? Was it a bad time? Could there be a worse time? Her shoulders rounded and her chest caved in as she sighed.

  “Such a stupid question,” she said.

  I nodded. Yes, it was a stupid question. And I had thought that I would never want to see Sandy again, but there was suddenly nothing in the world, besides seeing Meghan open her eyes, that I wanted more than to have a friend, and Sandy was the closest thing to a friend I’d had in years. If she’d held her arms out, I would have fallen into them.

  “Come on,” I said and opened the door. It felt as though a sweet breeze came with her.

  She stepped across the threshold without hesitation, as though she were a nurse, a doctor, someone well acquainted with hospitals and broken people. And when I closed the door and turned to her, she did open her arms, and I did fall into them.

  But it was brisker than I imagined. I did not cry, and she did not rock me as a mother might a child. Instead she squeezed tightly enough that I felt compressed, and then lighter when she released me, as if I’d just cracked my back after a long day bent over a painting.

  She held my shoulders in her hands and scrunched down to peer into my face, searching for I didn’t know what. I felt embarrassed, as if she were about to kiss me, and my gaze slid to the side, toward Meghan.

  “You look okay,” she finally stated, releasing me. “Tired, but okay.”

  “Well, I’ve been sleeping in that,” I said ruefully, pointing to the recliner. She didn’t bother looking at it.

  “Cal?”

  I was torn. A part of me ached to be petulant, to explain how he had left me here, left me alone with our daughter, left me alone to take care of Marshall’s situation. But even as the wailing sentences formed in my mind I knew I couldn’t do it. I could paint him a monster in my head because I knew I could change my mind, and because I needed that target, but I could not paint him a monster for someone else, no matter how pathetic I felt.

  “He’s on the boat,” I said. “I told him to go.”

  She nodded. “Kevin told me he was taking a tour for him tomorrow. I imagine all this is going to be pretty expensive.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Yes. Of course it was. And what do you do about that? Tell them to stop?

  “We’ve been taking up collections,” Sandy said, reaching into her purse.

  “Oh, no,” I said. One hand covered my mouth and the other reached out to stop her from going any further. I did not want to see an envelope stuffed with the creased bills of fishermen and housewives, of the neighbors we barely knew and the parents of my children’s classmates. No, this was not a step I was willing to take.

  She looked up at me in surprise. “We thought—”

  “I know, I know.” I slumped into the chair Cal had been using and covered my face with my hands. “I—thank you, Sandy. That’s such an amazing thing to do, and I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. I just—I don’t think we need it yet. I mean, there are so many people who do. We always try to give to St. Matthew’s or the Guadalupe Center in Immokalee. Maybe you should give it to them.”

  She tilted her head, much like a puzzled puppy that can’t understand why you wouldn’t want your shoe vigorously chewed upon. But she didn’t argue and pulled her hand from her purse before sitting in the recliner next to Meghan and finally looking at her.

  “I think I’ve gone about this the wrong way,” she murmured. “And I’m sorry. Again. Chloe? What do you need? Tell me how I can help. Please?”

  I considered that. People say those things a lot in a crisis. And you answer in nothings. You say things like Pray, or I don’t think there’s anything, or We’re just glad you’re here. But the truth is that we want people to intuit what we need and then just do it. We want people to see our needs as easily as they would hear us if we cried them out loud. Don’t you see what I need?

  How often are solid answers given to these inquiries?

  I sighed. “I need Meghan to open her eyes. I need to find my son. I need to read my husband’s mind. I need to go home and climb in bed and pretend that none of this is happening,” I said softly. “I need for this to be over.”

  Sandy pulled her lower lip into her mouth and held it there. It was as good as biting her tongue, I imagined.

  “I can’t do any of that,” she finally said, as though we had agreed on something. “What else?” she asked.

  I gestured at Meghan. “Ask me about my daughter.”

  She looked at her and considered. She took in every detail, and I felt some sort of satisfaction for that. Yes, I thought, bear witness, maybe this is what I need. See her.

  “How is Meghan?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “Nobody does. Her body seems to be recovering. But we have no idea if she’ll wake up. And if she does, there are no guarantees that she’ll even be . . . Meghan. If she’ll have lost motor control, language, everything, or nothing. All of this,” I said, waving my arm around the room, “seems temporary. But it might not be. I might just sit here for the rest of my life. Well, that’s not completely true. They won’t let us stay here forever. At some point they’ll want us to move somewhere else. A nursing facility or something.”

  She nodded. “What do they think the chances are that she’ll wake up?”

  I shrugged. “They give us statistics, but everyone seems very careful to make sure that we know that they can’t tell us. A neuropsychologist from Miami has been in once to evaluate her and talk to us. But he says it’s too early to know anything. I keep asking her to open her eyes.”

  “I wonder if that helps,” Sandy said. “May I?”

  “Go ahead,” I said, and watched as she leaned in toward Meghan and talked to her.

  “Meghan, it’s Sandy. Now, come on. Open up your eyes. Your mom misses you. Everybody misses you. Now open your eyes and look at me.”

  I stood and walked over to Meghan’s other side, a
nd we talked to her together, imploring, and cajoling, and making vague threats about missing school and good meals and fishing trips.

  And nothing happened. But at least there was someone else there for nothing to happen to. At least there was someone who simply shared this part of it with me, this part that seemed so pointless when I did it alone. And in a way, it was like praying, and I started to understand why people gathered together to pray, why two voices were better than one, and suddenly I was filled with hope that an entire congregation, small though it was, was praying for Meghan every Sunday.

  “Sandy,” I said, “I think I know how you can help.”

  “Just tell me,” she said.

  “When y’all say a prayer for us, for Meghan, could you be specific? Ask for her to open her eyes? Just . . . open her eyes.”

  I called Cal twice that night. We said little, but I heard anguish in his voice, and I don’t imagine I was able to keep it out of mine either. I continued to try Marshall, both at home and on his cell phone, leaving brief messages, and finally I slept, just Meghan and I and the endless stream of nurses in and out.

  Waking early was no longer a problem for me, and I was showered and dressed when Tessa Barker arrived. She was too young to look as tired as she did. She was slight enough that I wondered if she had an eating disorder, but her grip on my hand when she shook proved there was no weakness there, no frailty. She might not have much meat on her bones, but the bones themselves were like steel.

  Unlike Sandy, she went right to Meghan’s bedside and stood looking down at her with an indecipherable expression. “So this is Meghan. How long has it been?”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by “it,” but I assumed she meant the coma. “A week now,” I said. “Not that long, according to the doctors.” Sandy’s visit the previous day had brought me back to the idea of time, and despite the fact that it seemed as though Meghan’s eyes had been closed for years, it had been, indeed, only a week.

  “A week,” she repeated, then raised her voice and said, “Meghan, I’m Tessa Barker, and I’m here to talk to your mom. You go ahead and listen in, and if you have something to add, if we’re getting something wrong, I want you to open up your eyes and let us know. My son’s name is Owen and he has allergies, like you. I don’t want this to happen to him, Meghan, and I know you don’t either, so I want you to come on back to us as soon as you can and give us a hand, okay?”