The Smile of an Angel

by Peggy Webb

  Are they still in bloom? I don’t even know what’s blooming in my own garden. I have to bite my tongue to keep from yelling at Michael, “WAKE UP! CAN’T YOU SEE WHAT THIS IS DOING TO US? TO ME?”

  I don’t even want to call him “darling” anymore. He doesn’t call me pet names. He doesn’t call me at all.

  Is this normal? This rage?

  Maybe I should talk to somebody about it. A professional. This is not something I can share with my children, even Daniel who is trained to know about such things. They’re worried enough about their father. They don’t need to worry about me, too, a perfectly healthy woman who can walk and talk and bathe herself.

  That’s another thing. I won’t let anybody bathe Michael except me. He’s such a private man. Having a stranger lift up the sheets to wash him would be the ultimate indignity.

  I don’t even let Daniel do it.

  He left this morning, going back to Atlanta. Undaunted, it seems, by the lack of progress here. We have to have faith, Mom, he told me when he came to say goodbye. And then he prayed the most beautiful prayer. I wish I could remember all of it. Part of it went like this: “God, we place your child Michael in your loving arms and ask that you keep him safe from harm until he’s ready to come back to us.”

  Daniel’s faith never wavers. I wish I could say the same for myself. Last night when I tried to ask for healing, I found myself, instead, hurling accusations. How-could a benevolent God let this bad thing happen to Michael, of all people? He’s a good man, a kind, generous man who loves his wife and adores his children. He’s a good citizen who votes and pays his taxes and gives to charity.

  Why did he get caught in an avalanche, instead of somebody who goes around shooting up public restaurants and breaking into houses?

  I don’t know. I just don’t know anything anymore.

  Except that I must go back to Belle Rose, at least for a little while. I need to feel my china teacup in my hand. I need to smell the coffee perking each morning. I need to stand on the balcony and look down at the curve where the Mississippi meets the Yazoo and feel that I’m part of something real.

  I’m beginning not to feel real anymore. I’m beginning to lose myself in this impersonal place.

  Besides, if I don’t get my life back to some semblance of normal, Emily and Hannah will feel obligated to keep staying at Belle Rose. I won’t let them do that. Hannah has another assignment—out in Yellowstone, I think she said—and Emily needs to be back in Tallahatchie River Bottom among the trees and woodland flowers and animals so she can heal.

  She’s broken. She tries to hide it, but I can see through her. She and Jake haven’t seen each other in two weeks.

  Oh, they’ve talked. Briefly. Not every day the way Michael and I did when we first met. That’s what lovers do. They can’t bear not to hear the sound of their beloved’s voice, even for one day. Sometimes the talk is as inconsequential as the weather, but still, you feel the connection. The heart tug. The wonderful yearning. And the beautiful sense of promise.

  Here’s a man who loves me, you say to yourself when that phone call comes. Here’s a man who can’t wait until he sees me again. He can’t wait another minute before telling me how much he wants to see me. How much he wants me.

  That’s the way it was with Michael and me.

  Who knows about Jake and Emily? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I only saw what I wanted to the day they met, but I would swear I saw true love.

  Yesterday I said to Emily, “Love is easy when everything’s going smoothly. The real test comes when bad things happen, when there’s sickness or death or financial disaster. Even a string of small day-to-day disappointments and irksome circumstances can put a strain on a relationship.”

  “But that didn’t happen to you and Dad, did it?” she asked me.

  “Are you kidding? There was a time when Michael and I almost broke up.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” I told her. “Every relationship has problems. If it doesn’t then something is wrong. Somebody’s not telling the truth.”

  It amazes me that even my own child thinks love is some kind of magic potion that banishes all problems. It’s not. I said to my daughter that there will always be little hurts and misunderstandings in a relationship. The real trick is not in overcoming them, but in knowing if the relationship itself is real.

  There’s so much more I need to tell Emily, to tell all my children. I guess if I had to sum up true love in one sentence, I would say it creates an environment where a person can live fully and with passion, not just of the body but of the soul and the spirit.

  Michael and I have always had that. I guess we’re lucky. I’ve seen so many people chained together in marriages that crush the spirit and kill the soul. Why they stay is beyond me.

  I refuse to live in a narrow, boxed-in way. Even now, with Michael unable to take me in his arms and tell me he loves me, I still feel cherished. I still wouldn’t trade places with anybody else. With anybody whose husband is present in body and mind but not spirit, a man who lacks that essential quality—the ability to live passionately. No, more than just the ability. The hunger.

  The nurse will be coming soon to turn Michael. They’ve put lamb’s wool underneath him to protect his skin.

  “Feel how soft it is, Michael,” I told him last night as I cuddled beside him with my hand on his chest and my head on his shoulder. (They removed the chest tube last week, thank God.) He didn’t say anything, and I simply lay there listening to the beat of his heart.

  Did he feel mine, I wonder? Did the pulsing of my blood rouse something buried deep in him? Memories? Desire? Anger?

  I wish he’d get mad. Mad about the hyperalimentation line (a fancier thing than the old feeding tube) and the daily parade of nurses with crepe-soled shoes. Mad about sleeping the summer away, missing so much of his life.

  I can’t write any more about anger. My hand is starting to shake.

  Tomorrow I’m going back to Belle Rose. At least for lunch. Maybe I’ll even spend the night. I think it would do us both good.

  Maybe Michael can’t come back because my expectations are too heavy for him. I expect him to wake up whole, all his memories intact, all his desires, his humor, his love of life.

  Maybe when he wakes up, he’ll be a different Michael. Reduced, somehow. Memories stripped away. Humor forgotten. Desire gone forever.

  I won’t think about that right now. I’ll think about going home and being a mother. Hannah needs me to tell her to take that assignment out West. Emily needs me to send her back to her animals. She needs my counsel.

  I’m going to give her some diary pages to read. From that time I almost lost Michael. Or, as he said, he almost lost me.

  I’ll have to remind him of that. I’ll have to tell him he’d better not even think of staying in that coma. “You’d better wake up, Michael,” I’ll say, “because I don’t intend to lose you again.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  These days, every time the phone rang Emily jumped out of her skin, expecting it to be either the hospital with bad news or Jake with good. She didn’t know exactly what she expected from Jake. Something along the lines of, I can’t stand another day without you, Em. I’m coming over to see you. Or, Why don’t you hop on a plane and fly in for the weekend, Em? I’ve been doing some thinking, and I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing can keep us apart.

  None of these conversations ever take place, of course. That was why Emily snaps at Hannah over the least little thing. Like not putting the top back on the peanut-butter jar. As if it matters. As if a lifetime of sisterhood boils down to nothing more than a jar of dried-out peanut butter.

  All these thoughts tumbled through Emily’s mind as she tore lettuce for salads. Anne was coming home for lunch today. Finally. And if Hannah and Emily could talk some sense into her, she’d stay the night.

  The phone cut into her reverie.

  “I’ll get it!” she yelled, and then breathless,
Emily picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Emily. It’s Jake.”

  Emily hooked a bentwood bar stool with her toe and dragged it over so she could get comfortable, then settled in for a long conversation. She hoped.

  “How are things in Atlanta?”

  That was what she asked. A foolish question whose answer didn’t matter a flip. What she really wanted to know was this: when are you coming to Mississippi?

  “Fine,” he said. “How are you, Emily?”

  Was that a real question, or was Jake merely being polite? How she was, was awful. She felt like a cracked china plate that had been patched together with glue that might not hold her through the next meal. And certainly wouldn’t hold her through a dishwashing cycle.

  “Good,” she told him. “I’m hanging in there.”

  God, she hated trite expressions. And now she’d reduced herself to one.

  “Any change in Michael?”

  “No.”

  What else was there to say? I hope he’ll wake up soon? Everybody hoped that. Even Jake. Especially Jake.

  “I’m sorry, Em.”

  The sudden silence between them was wide and deep. Emily twisted the phone cord around her finger, waiting for it to end.

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  If she responded to that truthfully she would say, You can come and hold my hand till it’s all over. The thing was, nobody knew when it would all be over. Nor how it would end.

  “Sure,” she said.

  And then he said, “Goodbye, I’ll be seeing you,” and she sat on the bar stool with the receiver in her hand listening to the sound of an electronic voice saying, “If you wish to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”

  “I can guess who that was.”

  Hannah was standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

  “Don’t,” Emily said.

  She spoke more sharply than she’d meant to, and Hannah didn’t say anything. She just went to the cabinet, got out a knife and started chopping vegetables. Hard.

  Emily started making tea, slamming the teapot on the burner, banging the cabinet door open, throwing ice cubes into the glasses…feeling perfectly justified. Two could play the same game.

  The silent battle raged through the kitchen, and all of a sudden Emily felt ridiculous. And small.

  Hannah was her sister. Her best friend. She remembered the day she’d seen a red feather drift to the ground, and how she’d raced to tell Hannah, then together they waited under the spreading canopy of the oak tree in the front yard, hoping to catch a cardinal in the act of shedding another feather. For good luck, they’d told each other. And so Hannah could have a feather to stick in her baseball cap, too.

  Emily had kept that feather for five years, believing for at least three of them that it really did bring good luck. Then one day it had drifted away on a breeze while she was rounding third base, making for home plate in the baseball game that had won a championship for her junior-high school.

  Nobody ever found it. That was the funny thing. Later Hannah swore she’d seen it fly all the way up to the heavens, fly so high it had gone beyond the treetops directly into the path of the sun.

  Emily set the teapot up to steep. Carefully this time.

  “Remember that cardinal’s feather, Hannah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to it.”

  “Jimmy Buskirk put it in his pocket.”

  “You never told me. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You’d have bloodied his nose. Besides, didn’t you like the other version better?”

  “Yes… Hannah, I’m glad you’re my sister.”

  “Me, too, kid. But I’m your older sister…”

  “That doesn’t mean you know everything, especially what’s best for me.”

  “I’m not saying I know what’s best for you, Emily, but in this case I can certainly see things that you can’t or won’t see.”

  “Such as?”

  “A man who is interested in a woman will find a way to be with her, no matter what.”

  “Good Lord, Hannah. I can’t believe you. You’re beginning to sound like Grandmother Beaufort.”

  “As a matter of fact, she did say that. And in this case it’s painfully obvious.”

  Emily was about to take umbrage again. She could feel it in her face. Her nose always swelled and turned red when she got mad.

  Any minute now their mother would be walking through the door, and she wasn’t about to be caught in a tussle of words with Hannah. Furthermore, she knew her sister never held her tongue under any circumstances, so why should she expect her to start now?

  “Maybe you’re right,” Emily said.

  Hannah gave her this squinty-eyed, suspicious look, then burst out laughing.

  “All right, Em. I’ll let you play possum this time. But don’t expect me to keep my mouth shut much longer.”

  “That would be a first.”

  “Have you tried that stinger on Jake? Maybe that’s what he needs to get his butt in gear. That is, if you want him to get it in gear… Do you, Em?”

  There was the heart of the matter.

  Had they wounded each other too deeply? Could they ever overcome their circumstances? Would they ever be able to come together without guilt?

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  All she knew was that she wished she had a red feather…and that it really did bring luck.

  After a lunch that lasted well into the afternoon, Anne decided quite suddenly to spend the night at Belle Rose. Much to the delight of her daughters. Of course, most of the credit belonged to Hannah, who said she was going to the hospital that night regardless of what Anne decided about staying home, and knowing her oldest daughter as she did, Anne acquiesced.

  Now Emily and her mother were sitting on the love seat in Anne’s suite, eating popcorn from a blue bowl, the way they’d done on so many evenings. It felt good. Emily was the first to admit it. Out loud.

  “This is great, Mom. It feels almost like old times.”

  “It does, doesn’t it.”

  “I’m glad you decided to stay.”

  “So am I. I’ve been thinking…Em, how would you feel if I stopped staying at the hospital every night?”

  “Maybe it’s time you did, Mom. For the sake of your health, if nothing else.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean I wouldn’t still spend most of my time there. I was thinking…I could go every morning and help Michael with his bath, then come home for lunch and go back midafternoon. Take a book from the library to read to him, take fresh flowers from the garden. Bake bread and let him smell the fresh yeasty scent. That sort of thing.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Sometimes I wouldn’t come home, of course. I need to be able to reach out and touch him at night. I…need to sleep with him, Em.”

  Emily thought of a book she’d read, When Elephants Weep. She thought of how some animals mate for life and will stay for days at the side of a fallen mate, even after the body has grown cold.

  Then she was horrified that she’d thought of her father as nothing more than a body growing cold.

  “You do whatever you need to, Mom. I’ll be here to help you.”

  “No. I want you to go home, Emily.”

  “I do need to get back to my work. As long as Hannah’s here…”

  “I want her to leave, too. I want her to take that assignment.”

  “And leave you alone?”

  “Yes.” Anne caught her hands. “Emily, we don’t know how long this is going to go on. I won’t have my children putting their lives on hold. This is my problem…and Michael’s. He’s my husband.”

  “You know we’re not going to abandon you and Dad.”

  “It’s not abandonment, Emily. It’s living. Besides, you have another problem that needs your full attention.”

  “Jake?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not so sure abou
t that. I don’t know how to interpret his silences. At this point I don’t even understand my own feelings toward him.”

  “Maybe this will help you.”

  Anne reached into her desk and handed Emily a sheaf of yellowed pages from her diary. “Not that I claim to be an expert. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But sometimes the words and deeds of those who have gone before us can act as a beacon to light our path.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  December 1, 1966

  I am so mad I don’t know what to do. Michael left for Italy to film in the Dolomites two weeks ago, and the only word I’ve had from him has been from Sam, the cameraman. He called today to say that Michael had met with a little accident in the mountains. Of course, I nearly died when he said that. I think I screamed, “Is he dead?” And Sam told me, “No, just banged up, fell and broke his collarbone, but it could just as well have been his neck.”

  Well, I certainly didn’t need that information. What did the idiot think I thought about every minute while Michael was on that mountain? Or any mountain, for that matter.

  Disaster. That’s what.

  And now it has struck.

  “Where is he?” I asked Sam. “I’ll be right there.”

  And then this Sam character said the thing that changed me all of sudden from heartsick and scared to mad as an old wet hen. He said, “Michael doesn’t want to see you. He asked me to tell you not to come. Said it would be better this way.”

  “Better what way?” I asked Sam, but he hemmed and hawed and finally said, “None of this is my business. I just made the call, that’s all.”

  I would have felt sorry for the poor man if I hadn’t been feeling so sorry for myself. What I was thinking is, all these months of loving a man have come to this: me on one continent and Michael on another, and him hurt and saying don’t come.

  Well, if he thinks I’m going to sit still and let the love of a lifetime slip through my fingers, he’s got another think coming, as Mother always says. I know she wouldn’t approve, but the minute he gets back to the States, I’m going to have a showdown with him. He can’t simply vanish from my life without a word.