The song ended, and Bruce realized he was standing dead still again, staring into space. Quickly now he headed toward the garage on the other side of the backyard, stopping briefly to blow a few new leaves off the patio. That was the way it went this time of year. You got the yard cleared one minute only to see it start filling up again the next. As he turned from the patio, he heard a noise at the upstairs window and looked up to see Maddy’s face, at least the top part of it, peering out at him. She had both her palms raised and was slapping at the window.
“Hey there, Maddy!” Bruce called. “Uncle Brucie is coming up for supper!” He lifted the leaf blower and waved it back and forth. He even turned it on so she could hear it. Madison loved loud mechanical noises, which was only one of the many ways she was unique. She clapped her hands whenever he raced the engine of his pickup or ran the lawn mower. Airplanes and big trucks seemed to fascinate her, and she went into fits of giggles when Bruce made machine gun noises. She even liked the sound of thunder. While Bruce himself would scramble to get inside, Madison would look up into the sky wide-eyed, hoping to see it.
But she didn’t seem to be smiling now. He could only see her eyes, though, so he wasn’t sure, but it almost looked as if she was crying. He turned the leaf blower off. Madison was batting at the window with her fists now, and Bruce could hear her wailing.
Bruce felt himself getting irritated the way he always did when Kimberly took too long to attend to Madison’s needs. Surely she must hear her crying and banging on the window in the nursery. He knew he ought to cut his sister some slack. After all, she was probably in the kitchen putting his supper together. But good grief, couldn’t she stop for at least a minute? Maddy was throwing a regular little fit up there.
“Hold on, Maddy!” Bruce called. “I’ll be right there!” He set the leaf blower by the door and raced inside. It would be a lot quicker to go upstairs through his apartment than to go around to the side and through the kitchen.
28
Music in the Sinner’s Ears
As he took the stairs three at a time, Bruce could still hear Madison crying in the nursery, as well as a new sound—a high-pitched whistle, which turned out to be the smoke alarm. There was no sign of Kimberly in the kitchen, and she was obviously not going to come anywhere close to meeting her announced suppertime of six o’clock. The only indication that the meal was underway was the smoke billowing from an open pan on the stove, where the ground beef had gone far past the browning stage.
Bruce grabbed the pan and set it in the sink, then turned the stove off and headed for the nursery. “Kimberly! Where are you?” he called as he raced down the hallway, noting the empty bathroom on the right and living room on the left. “It’s okay, Maddy! Uncle Bruce is coming!”
His first impression upon entering the nursery and seeing Kimberly lying on the floor was that the cat was somehow to blame because he was crouched only inches from Kimberly’s face, his tail swishing slowly as he studied her intently. Bruce had seen cats position themselves that way after wounding a chipmunk or bird, waiting for it to move so they could pounce again. Madison came toddling toward him from the window, her arms outstretched, crying, “My mommy! My mommy!” On the floor were scattered what had to be hundreds of marbles. The big tin can Kimberly stored them in was overturned, its lid having rolled halfway across the floor.
Bruce knelt over his sister. “Kimberly! Can you hear me?” He thought he saw her eyelids flutter, but she made no other move. She was lying on her side, a peaceful look on her face as though she had just lain down for a short nap in her oversized red sweats, which were about the only thing she could fit into these days. Madison threw herself against him, wailing, “Mommy! Mommy fall!” Bruce pulled her close with one arm and tried to comfort her while he brushed Kimberly’s thick hair back off her forehead.
“Everything’s all right, Maddy, Uncle Bruce is here,” he said in one breath, then in the next, “Kimberly! Kimberly, can you open your eyes?” Still no response. He felt for a pulse. Faint but steady. The smoke alarm was still squealing out in the kitchen.
It must have been the marbles. They were everywhere. He imagined the scenario. While he was blithely blowing leaves and daydreaming outdoors, Maddy had obviously awakened from her nap and started playing. Kimberly was in the kitchen, no doubt having gotten sidetracked from her supper preparations and now scrambling to get the beef stroganoff started, when she must have heard the crash of the tin of marbles.
Somehow Maddy, agile little monkey that she was, must have pulled it off the top shelf of the bookcase, where it usually sat. It would have made quite a crash against the hardwood floor, a sound which probably filled Madison with glee. That, plus the cheerful bouncing of the marbles in every direction, had surely rendered her awestruck. Bruce could envision her watching the popcorn effect of the marbles, her hands clasped under her chin and her eyes shining like dark little marbles themselves. She may have even shrieked with the thrill of it all, which had probably alarmed Kimberly further.
And when Kimberly dashed in from the kitchen, it must have been like one of those funny movies, like when the bad guys get outfoxed by the kid’s booby traps in Home Alone, except it wasn’t at all funny, because this was real and Kimberly was his sister and she was six months pregnant. He turned quickly to Madison. “Let go a minute, sweetie,” he said, peeling her off him. “Uncle Bruce has to get help.”
He had never dialed 9–1–1 before but had imagined doing so and had come close one time while helping to judge a science fair over at Berea High when a kid named Hardy Biddle had faked a seizure. Then when Bruce realized it was only a joke, he had jerked him to his feet with such violence he thought the kid really might need an ambulance by the time he was through with him. That was one unforgettable boy. You met him once and immediately had a new understanding of the term “problem child.”
Several times while watching TV programs in which emergencies were reenacted, Bruce had wondered what it would be like to be a 9–1–1 telephone dispatcher. He had always thought he’d be good at calming distraught callers and sending help on its way.
He grabbed the portable phone from the kitchen wall now and dialed the numbers as he ran back to the nursery. Madison was kneeling beside her mother, patting her head, actually smacking at it quite hard. “Mommy! Get up, Mommy!” she said tearfully.
“Let’s don’t touch Mommy right now,” Bruce said as the dispatcher answered. But amazingly, right when he opened his mouth and started talking into the phone, Kimberly’s eyes flew open. He heard Madison catch her breath and whisper, “Mommy!”
Kimberly didn’t try to get up or move, though. Without raising her head, she cut her eyes all around the room, taking in Madison, Bruce, the nursery walls, the marbles on the floor all around her. Fear suddenly filled her face as she heard Bruce’s words to the dispatcher. She put a quick hand to her stomach.
“Don’t move, Kimbo,” he said. “They’re sending an ambulance.” Bruce answered a few questions, and the dispatcher told him EMS was on the way. And indeed, only seconds after hanging up he heard a distant siren. Surely they couldn’t be responding already, could they? But as he listened he heard the siren growing louder and louder. He had read something in the paper recently about a proposed salary raise for paramedics, and he thought now that whatever raise was being considered couldn’t possibly be enough for these people who rushed so promptly to the aid of their fellowman at all hours of the day and night.
He was kneeling beside Kimberly again, his hand lightly rubbing her forehead. Madison was pressed against him on the other side, peering around at her mother’s face. The cat had retreated and was perched on the windowsill, observing everything with characteristic feline passivity. “Hang in there, sis,” he said. “It’ll be okay. They’ll be here in a minute. Hear the siren?”
He kept listening, barely allowing himself to breathe, as the siren got closer, until it sounded like it was turning onto their street. “Stay right here, Kim, don’t move. I�
��m going out to let them in.” He picked Madison up and carried her with him, stopping long enough to sweep aside the marbles around the doorway with his foot. He surely didn’t want the ambulance workers to trip and fall. It was a wonder he hadn’t gone sprawling himself, the way they covered the floor.
As he headed toward the front door, his thoughts were springing in every direction, just as the marbles must have done. What should he do next? Should he go to the hospital with Kimberly? They would probably let him ride in the ambulance. But what about Madison? He couldn’t take her along. You didn’t take a two-year-old on a trip like that. But he couldn’t leave her at home by herself.
He thought of Matt across the ocean, totally oblivious that his pregnant wife had fallen. As Bruce had wondered for many weeks now, why wouldn’t a husband do everything in his power to stick right by his wife’s side while she was carrying his child? Why would he fly across the Atlantic Ocean when so much was at stake at home? But Matt was in Germany—that was an inalterable fact. So who could help out right now?
Amazingly, unlike his disorderly thoughts, the events that followed seemed to unfold exactly on cue, not at all as he would have expected at a time like this. As he opened the door, the ambulance pulled up to the curb, much like a well-timed film script, and two paramedics came trotting across the front yard, cutting right through Kimberly’s island of azaleas. The one in front, a burly man, carried a large medical satchel. Bruce felt Madison clutch his neck tighter. She had never been this close to an ambulance before.
Bruce saw Patsy Stewart standing in her front yard, stalwartly taking it all in. He quickly stepped out onto the porch and swung the screen door open. “Straight through to the hall and then left,” he said to the paramedics, and at that very minute an idea presented itself to him: Maybe he could leave Madison with Patsy Stewart. No doubt Patsy would still be out in the yard when the ambulance left. She had the look of a Buckingham Palace guard, spine ramrod straight, chin lifted, a look that said, “I will not leave my post.”
In the nursery the paramedics were asking Kimberly questions, checking her vital signs, jotting things down. Bruce stood in the doorway holding Madison. The house still smelled of burned meat, but the smoke alarm had finally given up. The cat on the windowsill was leisurely licking a paw, indifferent to the crisis at hand, the very tip of his black tail flicking sporadically. Bruce thought of his father’s shotgun downstairs on his apartment wall. He’d like to pick that smug cat right off his comfortable perch with a single bullet. Stupid cat. Kimberly hadn’t even settled on a name for him yet, kept trying different ones out and discarding them as unsuitable. She didn’t like his suggestion of Dumbo.
The woman paramedic, who had the sharp popeyed look of a small hairless dog and who certainly didn’t look strong enough to hold up one end of a stretcher, had stood and was speaking into her phone, all crackly with static, condensing the situation into sentence fragments.
The male paramedic, who was kneeling beside Kimberly, glanced up at Bruce. “Something burning?”
Bruce shook his head. “Not anymore.”
“Let’s get the stretcher,” the woman said as soon as she finished talking on her phone, and when she hurried past Bruce at the doorway, she flashed him a sympathetic smile. “Don’t you worry, hon, we’ll take real good care of her,” she said, and suddenly Bruce changed his mind about her. He could understand perfectly how some man could love this woman with her nearly bald head and her little Chihuahua face. You could give up a lot in the area of looks for a woman with a warm heart. He hoped this one had a good husband and grateful children.
Soon the paramedics had returned, and within seconds they had moved Kimberly and were carrying her out on the stretcher, one end of which the woman held up with perfect ease. Dickson County Hospital—that’s where they were taking her. Bruce had asked twice just to be sure, had promised to follow in his pickup as soon as he took Madison next door.
Patsy hadn’t moved an inch. She was still standing in the Stewarts’ front yard like a piece of lawn statuary. Bruce saw that Celia had also come outside but was standing off by herself closer to the driveway, her arms folded tightly in front of her. She had on a pair of faded blue jeans and a red flannel shirt. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her so dressed down before. Somehow the outfit wasn’t what he had envisioned when he had heard her playing the clarinet earlier, although he wasn’t sure what proper clarinet-playing attire would be.
He suddenly remembered seeing a contestant in the Miss America Pageant on TV years ago playing a clarinet during the talent portion, wearing a long black dress, slightly flared at the bottom, with silver buttons all the way down the side, so as she played she looked something like a tall slim clarinet herself, which was probably the whole idea behind her choice of a costume. Funny the things you thought about at a time like this.
He was surprised to see Celia. Didn’t she know that by coming outside she was appearing to care about what went on in someone else’s life?
“What happened?” Patsy called to him. For the briefest instant Bruce wondered why Milton wasn’t outside, too. Then he remembered that Milton had told him he was going to visit his nephew in Hendersonville for a few days, to help him rewire his house. His nephew was an amputee, Milton had said, and competed in wheelchair sports. Bruce took a deep breath and started down the front steps toward the Stewarts’ yard, shaking his head to try to clear any other irrelevant thoughts from his mind. He couldn’t let himself dawdle. He had to hurry. He had to streamline his thoughts. Kimberly might need him.
The steps, which he had blown clear of leaves just a half hour ago, were now littered with several new ones. That very leaf, that big hand-shaped one right there, Bruce thought, could have detached itself from the sycamore tree at the very moment Madison had tipped over the marbles, and by the time it had drifted its lazy way down to the front step, Kimberly could have been lying unconscious on the nursery floor. So much could happen in the time it took a leaf to fall.
Even as he started across the lawn toward the Stewarts’, he had no idea that he was going to do what he did only seconds later. “My sister had an accident,” he called out to Patsy as he reached the driveway. “She’s expecting a baby, you know.” Funny, too, how you instinctively tailored your speech to your audience even in a crisis. Somehow he knew Patsy Stewart would be of the mind that pregnant wasn’t a word to be used in public, especially by an unmarried man. It might be the twenty-first century, but this was still the South.
She spoke again, maybe even asked another question, but he didn’t hear her clearly. Something was suddenly shifting around inside his head. He started across the driveway, then stopped. Celia was standing down to his right on the other side of the driveway, Patsy in the front yard, up the slight grade to his left.
Madison raised her voice, twisted around in his arms to look directly at Celia, and said clearly, “My mommy fall down.”
“Fall?” Patsy said. “Did she say fall?” When she didn’t get an immediate answer, she said, “Did she hit her head?” Then, “How far along is she?” and “Are you going to the hospital?”
The questions were coming too fast. Bruce could think of only one thing to say, and he said it: “Yes.” And even as he said it, he felt his feet make a slight change in direction so that he found himself walking straight toward Celia. It was a strange moment as he approached her, the look on her face almost as panicky as the one he had seen on Kim’s face as they strapped her onto the stretcher. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Celia had raised her hands and stepped back, shaking her head no, or if she had turned around and bolted for her apartment. But she didn’t. She stood absolutely still and watched him get closer and closer, her eyebrows drawn down, her mouth slightly open, as if groping for words that wouldn’t come.
And when he handed Madison to her, she took her with a small resigned sigh, almost as if she had known this time would come, as if she had been dreading it like an old nightmare. Madison stared fixedly at Celi
a, their noses not three inches apart. “My mommy fall,” she whispered, and Celia nodded, still frowning.
“I’ll come back and get her as soon as I can,” Bruce said. “I don’t know how long. I hope it won’t . . . I mean . . . hey, I know, I’ll leave my apartment door open so you can get inside and . . .” He made a face. “She might need a diaper. They’re upstairs in the nursery. But watch out for the marbles.” Celia looked puzzled. “You’ll see them,” he said. “Oh, and she hasn’t had supper. Wait, maybe I should . . .”
“No, you go,” Celia said. “You go take care of your sister.” Bruce thought he might have imagined it, but it really did sound like she put a little extra stress on the word sister. He didn’t have time now to wonder about it, but later it would be worth mulling over the very remote possibility that maybe she felt the least bit sorry about their argument through her kitchen window that day, about her misjudgment of him and her testy words, some empty threat about how she’d better never see that cat hanging around her apartment again. Or maybe her threat had been directed at Bruce himself. Thinking back, he couldn’t remember exactly who had said what that day.
* * *
On his way to the hospital only minutes later, Bruce couldn’t help worrying about Madison. Had he done right in leaving her with Celia? Would Patsy have been a better choice? If he ever had a child of his own, he knew he’d never be able to trust anybody as a baby-sitter, not even a nun or a Girl Scout leader or a grandmother with umpteen grandchildren. He thought of the scowl on Celia’s face when he had handed Madison to her. He hoped she wouldn’t forget to feed her. He should have told her how much Madison liked applesauce, grits, and dark brown toast. Those would be easy to fix.
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