No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  It came to him that this rushing to the emergency room seemed familiar. Not necessarily something he had done himself, though. Maybe it was just that he had read about ER scenes a lot in the suspense novels he used to like. Or maybe he had watched too much television. People were always getting hauled to the ER on TV.

  He wondered again, as he often did, if anybody else’s mind worked the way his did, if other people ever imagined they were writing about their lives as if they were episodes in a book, and as soon as the first few words started forming themselves, he stopped and wondered if any other person in the whole world was using this same tactic right this very moment to distance himself from his trouble.

  He doubted it, although there had been that girl he had met in Natchez years ago, a very intelligent Jewish brunette who used to make up impromptu limericks about the places they went, things they did, people they saw. She was very witty, that girl, and about five times smarter than any other girl he’d ever gone out with. Wasn’t all hung up on the Ten Commandments, either, like you’d expect from a Jew; in fact, she regularly broke several of them.

  Speeding to the emergency room, Bruce remembered a particularly clever Jewish girl from Natchez, who never once, during his acquaintance with her, had kept the Sabbath holy. The words fell together easily. That kind of story opening would tease the reader in both directions, past and future. He wouldn’t ever use it, though, as it might sound a little irreverent. He wouldn’t want to come across as making fun of the Bible.

  Or how about trying a limerick of his own? There once was a mommy named Kim, whose figure was not very trim; She heard a loud crash, she made a quick dash . . . But he stalled on an ending. He tried several, but none of them would work. The mind a fascinating piece of equipment. So much of what it did seemed to be diversionary, to keep from overloading itself with reality. He eased up on the accelerator. It wouldn’t do to get pulled over or, worse, to have an accident on his way to the hospital.

  What he needed to do right now was to pray. He was ashamed that thus far his thoughts had been so scattered that he hadn’t even stopped to form a genuine prayer, only a few frantic help me’s in between everything else. Strangely, though, with every help me he had seemed to hear an immediate response: “Don’t be afraid; I’m here; it’s all right.”

  He thought of his sister and the baby she was carrying. He knew he could play the male role and act strong on the outside for her sake and Madison’s if something bad happened, but he could imagine himself crumbling inside, lying awake at night, walking around like a drugged man for days on end, losing his train of thought right in the middle of explaining genetic mutations to his students and wandering out of the classroom into the hallway.

  He started praying as he drove, then broke off when he heard another siren and saw a fire truck zip by going the opposite direction. So many tragedies overlapping one another. He thought of the pan in Kimberly’s kitchen. He had turned the stove off, hadn’t he?

  His mind returned to the earlier thought—would Madison be all right in Celia’s care? What were they doing right now? Surely Celia wouldn’t treat a child, a baby really, as rudely as she had treated him in the past. Maybe he should have left her with Patsy after all, even though he hated to think of a beautiful, perfect little girl like Madison having to spend even a few minutes with dull, unimaginative Patsy.

  Maybe Celia would play something on her clarinet. Madison loved music. Or maybe she had drawing paper and paints in her apartment and would let Madison finger-paint. Probably not, though. That would be messy. He remembered how tidy Celia’s apartment was, how fastidious she always looked. He remembered an old movie his mother had liked—Father Goose with Cary Grant—in which Leslie Caron called herself a “picture straightener” type. That was Celia. He could imagine her making regular rounds in her apartment to straighten all her paintings. But then maybe Celia had a hidden side. Maybe she secretly loved kids and noise and a little unpredictability.

  He thought of a conversation he had had yesterday with Elizabeth Landis, who had accepted a permanent job at his school a few weeks ago when an eighth-grade English teacher had suddenly resigned due to “health problems.” That was the official announcement at their weekly faculty meeting, though they all knew it had to do with the protracted divorce she was going through. “Severe depression” hardly began to describe the woman’s mental state now, though the way she used to talk about her husband in the teachers’ lounge would have made you think she’d welcome a divorce.

  Elizabeth, who had already been called on to sub for this same teacher many times since school had started in September, had stepped right into the job, and because their classrooms were catty-cornered to each other’s, Bruce and she had fallen into visiting for a few minutes after school each day. She had even volunteered to help with the recent auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was sitting in on some of the rehearsals.

  Bruce judged that Elizabeth was probably a good ten years older than he was, and he had already decided she must have been one of the smart, quiet girls back when she was in school. But not boring, definitely not that. She was a tall woman and pretty in a natural understated way. She had a fertile mind and a quick sense of humor when you got to know her. Married, of course—the good ones always were—but Bruce had thought more than once that if he had been born a decade earlier or she a decade later, he would have spotted her a mile off as somebody worth pursuing, though a smart woman like her probably wouldn’t have given him the time of day, since his attention up until the last couple of years hadn’t exactly been aimed at a woman’s mind. He wondered if Elizabeth’s husband knew what a very nice wife he had. He was a musician, she had told Bruce.

  Elizabeth had come to his classroom yesterday to show him some poems her eighth graders had written. Bruce had been sitting at his desk absentmindedly twirling a ruler around on top of a pencil—the same ruler and pencil he had confiscated from a boy an hour earlier who had been doing the same thing with them. He was thinking about how poorly most of his seventh graders had done on the chapter test that day over the major plant groups, wondering if he was expecting too much to think that they would recall the difference between xylem and phloem, between ferns and club mosses, between gymnosperms and angiosperms, all of which he thought he had made crystal clear in class but evidently hadn’t.

  Elizabeth laughed at him from the door. “Reverting to your childhood, huh?” she said, then came in and sat on one of the student desks facing him. She handed him the poems.

  He could feel her watching him read them. He tried to make a few comments that wouldn’t give him away as a total nitwit when it came to poetry. She told him she had gotten the idea for the assignment from a meeting she had been to recently—a poetry club she sometimes attended. And oh, she said, he’d be interested to know that his next-door neighbor, Celia, had spoken to her poetry club one time back in May.

  Though Bruce pretended disinterest at the mention of Celia, Elizabeth must have read something different on his face, for she paused. “You know, I really think the two of you could become friends,” she said. “I’ve thought that ever since I found out you live right next door to each other.”

  Bruce could still picture the astonishment on Elizabeth’s face as she had stood behind Celia that day in August listening to the two of them exchange insults through the window. “One of you would have to make the first move, though,” she said, rising to pick up the poems from Bruce’s desk. “One person always has to do that.”

  He didn’t say a word, merely shrugged, picked up the ruler once more and gave it another vigorous twirl. First move? Is that what she had said? If she only knew. Elizabeth had heard the argument that day, but she didn’t know about all his first and second and third attempts to be friendly before that. Not unless Celia had told her, and he felt sure she hadn’t. The only thing Elizabeth knew about was that one conversation, white-hot and razor-edged—and whatever else Celia had chosen to tell her, which would be nothing that pa
inted him in a favorable light.

  Before she left his classroom, she paused at the door and said, “Celia is a lot different from your first impression of her. She really is. You need to be patient with her, give her a chance. I think she’s got some things in her background that make her . . . well, let’s say not the easiest person to get close to. I don’t even know what they all are, but I’m working on it. She’s really very nice, Bruce. Very nice. We’re on the same tennis team, you know.”

  And how was he supposed to know that? Bruce thought. He had never figured Elizabeth for a tennis player, though he could see it now. She seemed a lot more languid and low-key than Celia, however, so he wondered how quick she was on the court. Maybe he should play her sometime. Surely he could beat a woman ten years older than himself. That would be pretty humiliating if he couldn’t.

  Not that he had a superinflated ego like some men. He remembered all the mean stuff men had said about the woman golfer who had sneaked into an “open” tournament in Asheville last year and who had placed twelfth out of sixty-two entrants. Vic Darnell, that was how she had signed her name on the registration form, but later it came to light that Vic was short for Victoria. Bruce had applauded her at the time, though he had paused to wonder whether he would feel differently if he had been one of the fifty men who ranked below her.

  After Elizabeth had left his classroom yesterday, Bruce had roused himself to flip through a book he had picked up from the Derby Library, titled Plays for Today’s Young Teens, and right before slamming the book shut, he had come across a play called First Impressions. Funny coincidence. Well, he had certainly not been guilty of forming a hasty first impression of Celia. No, he had remained generously fair-minded, he thought, until the fifth or sixth impression had confirmed the first one: Celia, with her nose in the air, rode a very high horse.

  Bruce suddenly realized he needed to turn on his headlights. Driving along toward the hospital, both impatient to get there and dreading what he might learn, he could hear again the sound of hymns drifting out of Celia’s apartment. He wondered how she knew a song like “The Old Rugged Cross.” Could it be that she knew other hymns, maybe some of the same ones they sang at Community Baptist every Sunday? He wondered if phrases from those songs ever came to her at odd times during the day or night, as they did to him. Surely not.

  He doubted that the two of them had a single thing in common. He couldn’t imagine someone as confident as Celia fretting about past sins, for example, the way he had done late one night recently while eating a miserable supper of canned corned beef hash. He couldn’t imagine her suddenly standing up as he had, pounding a fist on the table and declaring right out loud, “He breaks the power of canceled sin! He sets the prisoner free!”

  Surely somebody as cool and efficient as Celia had never gone on a hike and felt overcome at the sight of a red sunset or a cloudless blue sky or a foggy mountaintop. Surely she had never declared, “O for a thousand tongues to sing!” as he had done the day before on his way to school upon seeing the autumn colors of Paris Mountain. Impossible that someone like her could hear the name of Jesus and think of it as “music in the sinner’s ears.” Though Bruce had no trouble thinking of himself as a sinner in great need of large daily doses of God’s grace, he felt sure that Celia had no such low opinion of herself.

  As he pulled into the parking lot by the emergency entrance of the hospital, he prayed, again. Surely the God who could open the ears of the deaf, touch the eyes of the blind, and cause the lame to leap for joy could take care of Kimberly.

  29

  Deathbeds Are Coming

  When he got to the emergency room, they had him fill out some papers. They told him that emergency room traffic was especially heavy today, that another doctor had just been called to come in. Because Kimberly was considered high priority, a doctor would be examining her as soon as possible, but they had taken her to X ray “for some pictures” a moment ago. “Things are a zoo back there,” the woman at the desk told Bruce, jerking her head toward the double doors, “but have a seat and somebody will be out to take you back pretty soon.”

  The waiting room was crowded. Bruce sat down next to a white-haired man who was opening the lid of a Styrofoam tray. In one section was a mound of spaghetti, in another a lackluster salad that consisted of the palest yellowish green lettuce and two wedges of a hard pinkish tomato, and in the other a piece of toast. The man studied it all silently for a few seconds, then grunted and closed the lid slowly. When Bruce glanced at his face, he saw that the old man was crying. He knew he ought to say something, to offer a word of comfort, but as he opened his mouth to speak, the man got up and shuffled out the door and down the hall, leaving his Styrofoam tray on his chair.

  Bruce realized how hungry he was. He eyed the food tray and wondered if the old man would come back to claim it. Then he remembered some vending machines he had passed down the hall, and a minute later he had returned with a can of root beer and a granola bar. This time he settled into one of the brown vinyl chairs across from the television.

  Two middle-aged women on the loveseat beside him were engaged in a conversation. One of them was wearing a purple raincoat and sneakers, and the other one was dressed in what looked like a square-dancing costume, with a red peasant-style blouse and a turquoise skirt with billows of red petticoats, which she was managing to keep in check only by clamping her hands on top of her chubby white knees. She had on little white ruffled anklets with her black patent Mary Janes and a big turquoise bow in her pouffy bleached hair. Bruce wondered if maybe her square-dancing partner had had a heart attack right in the middle of a do-si-do.

  The two women were talking so loud he couldn’t help hearing every word. They were discussing, of all things, the virtues of various brands of paper towels. The square dancer seemed to favor the pick-a-size kind with the rows of perforations close together so you could tear off just a little strip if that was all you needed, which the other one pronounced too expensive. “Yes, but at least they give you a clean tear,” said the square dancer, “not like those off-brands that rip everywhere but where you want them to.” She had a good point there, the other woman admitted. The cheap ones were bad to tear crooked, but still . . .

  And then they got off on prints versus plain old white, the square dancer suggesting that some of the prints had pictures she didn’t necessarily want in her kitchen. Why, her mother-in-law had given her some with green and orange kangaroos stamped all over them.

  It was all so typically female. How many such conversations had Bruce overheard in break rooms and teachers’ lounges over the years? Long discussions about a difficult pregnancy or somebody’s new dinette set or the look on so-and-so’s face when she said something. He used to like to play devil’s advocate and join in, turning the whole conversation into an argument until the women caught on, which was usually very soon, that he was mocking them.

  One woman had thrown a book at him once, literally—a heavy hardback geography book—and asked him why he didn’t go talk with the men about something really intellectual, like cars or sports stats. “Then for a little excitement, you could all go watch that cop show on TV,” she had said. “You know, the one with high-speed chases and shootouts on the freeway.” She had even added a few sound effects, quite authentic-sounding ones, especially for a woman.

  She had been very funny, that woman. Every time she saw him after that she would ask him if he’d seen any good brawls in basketball games lately or watched any footage of wars. “You men have such important things on your mind,” she’d say. “It’s a wonder you can even hold down a full-time job.”

  The conversation about paper towels stopped abruptly when the woman in the raincoat left. Three other women were sitting in chairs on the other side of Bruce. They were apparently related, since one of them had her feet propped companionably in the lap of one of the others. The two younger ones were probably sisters, he decided, both of them quite large with moon-shaped faces. The one with her feet propped
up had her hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail. The other one was holding a folded-up section of the newspaper, from which she was reading aloud the daily horoscope, sign by sign. The women in this waiting room didn’t seem overly concerned about whatever emergency had brought them here, Bruce thought.

  “Here’s Scorpio,” the sister with the newspaper said. “That’s your sign, ain’t it, Mama? It says here, ‘Changing your focus from yourself to others will bring you good luck in the coming days. Look for ways to do favors, and you will receive favors in return,’” to which the older woman replied dryly, “Well, that’s a pure-D lie. I been givin’ and givin’ and givin’ my whole life, and I ain’t never got nothin’ in return.”

  The one with the ponytail took the newspaper and started reading aloud the letters of the scrambled-up words in the daily Jumble Puzzle. “‘A-B-I-S-S,’” she read, and they all appeared stumped, though Bruce had the answer at once: basis. Just as he was ready to speak up and offer his help, the mother said, “They done forgot to mix up the letters on that one! It’s abyss, A-B-I-S-S. You know, that pit where the devil’s gonna be throwed.”

  The one holding the paper smacked it against the arm of the chair. “Betcha they thought they was gonna fool ever’body on that one,” she said, and she carefully wrote the letters in the spaces. The mother grunted and said, “I hate a person that’s always tryin’ to bamboozle other folks.”

  The third time they called for “Mr. Wilson” in the waiting room, it dawned on Bruce that they might be looking for him. Maybe they had overlooked the fact that his last name wasn’t the same as his married sister’s, even though he had filled out the admitting papers with all the right information.

  He jumped up from his chair and walked over to the woman at the desk, who was writing something on a form. She wasn’t the same one he had talked to when he first arrived. This woman had a severe look about her, one that said life here at the emergency room desk had taught her not to expect anything good. She was wearing a pair of those skinny little reading glasses on the end of her nose, and her lips were pursed as if she were sucking on a sour ball. “Excuse me, did somebody just call for me?” he asked her.