by Lisa Wingate
“No, Teddy. Don’t do that. Get down,” I called, careful not to startle him, remembering the time I’d hollered at him for climbing impossibly high in a tree at the playground. When he saw me below, he let go and fell all the way to the ground. It was the first time I’d ever allowed myself to fully comprehend that Teddy might never be able to see to his own safety. How could a child almost eight years old not understand that a fall so far would be dangerous?
My dream moved suddenly to the playground. I was running toward the tree, watching Teddy’s body smack the branches, falling, and falling, and falling, while I remained powerless to stop it. My legs were leaden, refusing to move normally. “Teddy, no!” I cried. “No!”
“Mrs. Parker … Mrs. Parker …” A voice came from somewhere in the distance, luring me away from my struggle to reach Teddy. “Mrs. Parker … It is all right. ’Tis all right. You are having a dream, missus. Wake up.”
I can’t, I thought, fighting to get back to the park, but it was slipping away as Teddy fell. I have to reach Teddy. I have to help him. Can’t you see he’s in trouble?
The voice called to me. “Wake up. ’Tis only a dream, missus.”
Dragging my eyes open, I saw the second-shift nurse, Ifeoma, standing above me, checking my chart. “You cried out in your sleep just now. Do you feel pain?” she inquired in the thickly accented English of her home country, Ghana.
“Noh-oh-o-o,” I answered, trying to make the sound emphatic, even though a part of me wished she would bring a sedative, so that I wouldn’t hear the moaning of the patient down the hall, the nurses clanging by with their carts, the clock softly ticking away the hours.
Ifeoma paused to reposition my body, then straightened the coverlet, something she didn’t normally do. “Your daughter is here, missus. She is in the administrator’s office just now.”
The muscles in my legs tensed, or maybe it was only my imagination. A soft groan passed my throat. Ifeoma raised a brow, then efficiently smoothed a last wrinkle from the cover before turning to leave the room. “I am certain she will come to you soon.” She left the door partially open, in anticipation of a visitor.
I wanted to rise from the bed, go over and close the door, tell Rebecca that she wasn’t welcome, wasn’t needed. Why, after all these years, did she have to come now, when I was like this? I couldn’t possibly face her in this condition.
CHAPTER 3
Rebecca Macklin
All the self-assurances that I was ready to face Hanna Beth Parker couldn’t stop my heart from hammering as I prepared to enter her room. Despite the fact that I was an adult now, and she was elderly and powerless, my fingers froze on the door frame, and I stood unable to move forward. I was the twelve-year-old girl waiting beside my mother’s car on the curb of what had been my front yard, our front yard. My life lay scattered in pieces on the lawn—bicycle, antique French-white desk and chair, the frame to the four-poster that had once made me feel like a princess but now seemed ridiculous. Boxes of clothes and dolls, various paintings, vases, carvings, and dishes from our time in Iran and Saudi. My mother had claimed those exotic treasures in the divorce, and my father hadn’t argued. He felt guilty, no doubt. He deserved to feel guilty. A forty-two-year-old man who suddenly ditches his family for a woman ten years younger should feel guilty.
Hanna Beth came onto the porch unexpectedly. My mother stiffened, swiveled toward Hanna Beth with her mouth slightly agape. She hadn’t imagined that we’d drive up and find the woman already there, already settling into our house before the transport company had even finished removing our things. But it figured that she would be there, on the porch gloating. She’d won, after all. She had my father, our house, our life. She had everything. It figured that she would be the one supervising the movers. My father was probably at work, safely detached.
My mother swept past Hanna Beth, went into the house without a word. Hanna Beth didn’t follow, just stood out of the way by the railing. She was smaller than I’d anticipated, not the formidable enemy I’d pictured. Her slender, willowy body was clothed in a lightweight sundress too summery for the early March day. She was beautiful, with large brown eyes and auburn hair that hung in ringlets down her back. The dress swirled around her long, slim legs as she walked. The workers took note, passing by with their boxes. She stood uncertainly at the top of the stairs, the sunlight glinting on her hair, outlining her form beneath the fabric.
At any other time, in any other place, I would have liked her, admired her beauty, the way she moved, her steps silent and graceful, like those of a dancer, unassuming, as if she wasn’t aware of the picture she made standing there in the yellow dress. She held a flowerpot in her hands, and there was dirt on her hem.
She was planting flowers in our garden. I hated her like I’d never hated anyone. I wanted to dash across the yard, throw open the back gate, and rip the flowers from the ground one by one. I wanted to shred them into tiny pieces, destroy the roots, poison the ground, so that nothing could ever grow here, so that Hanna Beth could never make a beautiful life in this big house, while my mother and I were moving to an apartment in Santa Monica, California, a place I’d only visited on occasional vacations to see my mother’s family.
Teddy came out the front door, pushing one of the moving dollies, making the men laugh, because, even at fourteen, he was clumsy with it. Spotting me by the curb, he let the dolly fall upright, then waved and hollered with a big, stupid smile, like he was trying to catch someone’s attention from a half mile away. I was glad my friends were in school, the street quiet. Before his mother could stop him, Teddy dashed down the steps and started across the lawn in a gangly, lumbering run, still waving. “Hi, Bek-ty, hi, Bek-ty. Bek-teee, hi-i!”
Hanna Beth bolted after him, catching up as he reached the car. I’d backed away, grabbed the door handle, uncertain, afraid.
Hanna Beth took his flailing hand, encircled it with hers, calming his frenzied movements. Patting his fingers, she smoothed tangled blond hair from his forehead. He tipped his chin toward her, and for just an instant he looked normal, like the boys I went to school with. But if Teddy had been in my school, he would have been in the special class—the one they kept hidden off the end of the gym, where they taught things like making ham sandwiches and buttoning your own shirt.
“Rebecca, this is Teddy,” his mother said, and smiled at me like she was making a presentation. “Teddy’s been very eager to meet you. We both have. We’re very much looking forward to your coming this summer.” The words were proper, crisp. She sounded like a teacher, which she was. She worked as a live-in at the special school a few miles away, where brick buildings from another era crouched behind a rusty iron fence. The kids I hung around with made jokes and told Frankensteinian stories about deformed children locked in the basements when we passed by that place. My father frequented the coffee shop across from the gates, which was how he’d run into Hanna Beth, a little over six months ago, now. By unfortunate happenstance, they’d renewed an old acquaintance, initially formed in childhood when Hanna Beth’s father worked for the oil companies. He wasn’t an engineer like my father and grandfather, just a rig manager. Her family lived off Blue Sky Hill, in the neighborhoods of small three-bedroom bungalows the residents of Blue Sky Hill thumbed their noses at during dinner-party conversations. Hanna Beth and my father had always known each other, and when they crossed paths in the coffee shop, they knew each other again, and our lives were ruined.
“I got f-owas,” Teddy said, his face contorting as he worked out the words. “Plant in f-owas deep.” He nodded earnestly, making the motion of digging a hole, and putting in a seedling, then flailing his free hand toward the backyard. “Wanna see?”
I yanked the door handle so hard it ripped through my fingers, bending the nails backward. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was get away, get into the car and lock the door, lock them on the other side of the glass.
Hanna Beth didn’t protest, but just stood there holding Teddy’s hand, looking
sad. Turning him away, she started toward the house. He smiled and waved cheerfully over his shoulder, too stupid to understand what was happening. “Bye, Beck-tee, bye-eee! Have fun!”
I hated him.
I made up my mind that he and Hanna Beth might have everything else, but they wouldn’t have me. The courts could do their worst—lock me in jail, throw me in juvenile hall, line up custody orders from here to California—but I wasn’t coming back to Dallas this summer, or any summer. It wasn’t as if my presence in his house, in their lives, would be missed. My father and I had become strangers who passed in the hall. I doubted he would fight to enforce the custody agreement. He proved me right, of course.
Now Hanna Beth’s stroke had accomplished what thirty-three years and a court order could not. I’d come back.
Unfortunately, the pain had traveled with me across the country, across the years, and as I stood outside her door, it was as fresh and as much a part of me as it had been that twelfth summer. It stabbed as sharply now as then—like a chronic injury, reawakened by a careless movement, a sudden strain caused by the burden of picking up something too heavy. Its intensity surprised me. I’d expected, in this adult body, safely entrenched in a life that was completely separate from that of Hanna Beth and my father, to be able to maintain a comfortable detachment, a reasonable objectivity. Instead, I wanted to lock myself away someplace quiet, and nurse the raw spot until it stopped burning.
In the midst of that realization came a new one. Was this what lay ahead for Macey? Would she stand outside a door someday, halfway through her life, a grown woman with a damaged little girl inside? Would she feel for Kyle what I felt for my father? Would her confident smile, her openness, her self-worth slowly diminish until she found trust a struggle, faith a chore? Would she always feel vaguely inadequate, unworthy, as if she had to prove something, to be more than she was, because no one could love her just for herself?
I didn’t want Macey to feel those things. I didn’t want to feel them. You’re forty-five years old, Rebecca, it’s time to grow up, I told myself. Some part of me sensed that, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, closure of a sort might lie beyond the door, in Hanna Beth’s room.
Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself and stepped through the opening.
The room was quiet, with a stale, medicinal smell. I moved into the alcove between the bathroom and the wall, let go of the door. It creaked partway closed behind me, then hung ajar. I paused at the sound, waiting to see if she would say something, ask who was there. It occurred to me that she probably couldn’t. The nursing center administrator had referred to her as having suffered a stroke in the brain stem, resulting in a coma of short duration. She was making progress since being transferred from the hospital to the nursing center, but she would require ongoing rehabilitation in a supportive and low-stress environment. The administrator looked pointedly at me when she said the words “supportive” and “low-stress,” letting me know she suspected that our family situation wasn’t conducive to either of those things. The remainder of our discussion was clinical, to the point, yet I walked into Hanna Beth’s room expecting to find a formidable enemy—the beautiful woman in the yellow sundress. In my mind, Hanna Beth was unchanged by the passage of time. She was still that ethereal, but devastating vision.
When I turned the corner, the woman in the bed was small—a pale, white form, wrinkled and twisted, bleached out like a paper doll wadded up and left in the sun. She seemed as much a part of the bed as the sheet and coverlet themselves, as if she’d been there long enough to have been absorbed by those inanimate objects, to have taken on their characteristics.
Her face was turned toward the window. I moved to the foot of the bed to see her, to allow her to see me, to take her in and satisfy a morbid curiosity as to whether anything remained of the person I remembered. Perhaps if the answer was no, I could look at her objectively, consider her predicament, my father’s, and Teddy’s as if they were strangers, caught up in a tragic circumstance for which there seemed to be no easy answer.
Her eyes were closed. She didn’t react as my toe bumped the wheel of the bed, rattling the frame. Apparently, she was sleeping.
A disproportionate sense of relief washed through me. Resting my hands on the railing, I stood observing her, trying to see Hanna Beth Parker, but I couldn’t. This was merely an old woman, her silver hair in a disarray of tangled curls against the pillow, her skin nearly translucent, her face hanging slack. Her arm, bent and curled, dangled off the bed, pinched between the mattress and the security rail in a way that looked uncomfortable. I should have moved it, picked it up and tucked it in with her, but instead I stood frozen, maintaining a safe distance.
She’s just an old woman, I told myself. She’s harmless, powerless. Helpless. Stepping around the end of the bed, I leaned closer, hesitated, afraid that if I touched her, if I bridged the space between us, repositioned her hand, something unexpected, unwanted, might happen. Jerking away from the bed, I stepped back, then turned, started toward the door. An old man passing by in a wheelchair stopped to peer into the room.
He smiled at me. “Hey, there. Looks like we got a visitor here. You Birdie’s daughter?” He nodded toward Hanna Beth.
I shook my head, stepping aside as he struggled to move through the doorway. The metal rim of his chair collided with the frame in a resounding clang. I was aware that the noise might wake up Hanna Beth, and then I would be trapped here with her, this stranger blocking the escape route.
“I was just on my way out,” I said, pushing the door fully open so that it caught on the rubber stopper.
The man nodded, craning to look at me as I fidgeted, unable to slip between his chair and the wall. “You Birdie’s daughter?” he repeated, with an amiable smile.
“No, I …” Suddenly the air in the room, Hanna Beth’s presence, the scent of stale linens, bedfast bodies, and antiseptic was too much. I couldn’t think. “Stepdaughter,” I said finally. I’d never in my life, not even in my mind, used that word to describe my relation to Hanna Beth. In my mind, there was no relationship between us. “She’s my father’s wife.”
The man nodded. “Oh, well, ain’t that nice? She don’t get many visitors. Used to be a gal stopped by—her housekeeper, I think—but I never did get to talk to her, really. She ain’t been here in a while, though. I’ll bet Birdie’s real glad you come.”
A hot, uncomfortable flush pushed into my cheeks. “She’s sleeping, I think.”
He peered past me. “Hmmm? Well, that could be. Them physical therapy sessions can sure wear a body out. They got a big German gal does the work here. Got arms like a scullery cook and looks like some of them nurses the Luftwaffe had in their secret hospitals, back in the big war. I was in the army at the end of it—drove them trains after VE Day. I ever tell you about that? I started out runnin’ them trains after the war, and when I come home, I got on with the A & NR Railroad, down in the Piney Woods. Drove them lumber trains for fifty years. Good life back then, bein’ a company man. Not like it is for young folks now.” He paused as a woman in a long denim skirt and a flowered scrub top passed by, leading two little boys by the hands. Rolling the chair backward slightly, he turned to intercept her. “Well, how-do, Mary-not-contrary. Why are you still here this evenin’?”
The young nurse’s aide—Mary, her nametag read—glanced at me apologetically. “Waiting on a ride home with Dottie, Mr. Fisher. She doesn’t get off until seven.”
Mr. Fisher scratched his chin, frowning at the two boys who were eyeing him and the chair with interest. “Thought I saw your husband come by a while ago. Don’t he usually take the bus from here and leave you the van?”
Mary shifted self-consciously, her gaze darting toward the window, then back. “We had a little mix-up with the van, that’s all.” She jostled the boys’ hands, as if she were trying to bolster them. “It’s okay, though, we got to eat in the cafeteria, didn’t we, guys?”
The older boy nodded shyly, and the younger o
ne yawned, rubbing his eyes. He looked like a child who ought to be home slipping into a warm bath, putting on a fluffy sleeper with feet in it, and snuggling into bed.
Mr. Fisher ruffled the boys’ blond hair, then pointed at Mary. “Those are fine young fellas. I bet you’re mighty proud, havin’ a pair of handsome boys like these.”
They looked up at their mother, and she smiled down adoringly. “I sure am, Mr. Fisher.”
“They got names?” Mr. Fisher rolled his chair back a bit more, allowing me an exit path. I took advantage of the opportunity to step into the hall.
“Brandon and Brady,” Mary answered, indicating first the older boy and then the younger one.
“Guess I should shake your hands, then.” Lifting his arm from the wheelchair, Mr. Fisher greeted Brandon, then Brady. The conversation seemed to run out temporarily, then Mr. Fisher waved a thumb toward Hanna Beth’s room. “Y’all ought to go on in and say hi to Birdie. Bet she’d like to see these fine-lookin’ boys. I opened her blind in there for a while, earlier on. Nurses shouldn’t shut them things where a body can’t even see the sun. Sunshine is a healin’ force. Kills germs, too. Back in the army, if we didn’t have any other way to get the vermin out of our bedrolls, we’d air ’em out. Works pretty good.”
Mary glanced at me, clearly wondering who I was. “Rebecca Macklin,” I said, extending my hand.
Mr. Fisher seemed to recall my presence. “Well, land’s sakes, pardon me. This is Birdie’s daughter. She just come to see her mama.” He turned from me to Mary. “This is Mary. She’s your mama’s nurse aide during the day.” He held a hand beside his mouth. “Best one here, but don’t tell the rest I said so.”
