Blue Sky Hill [01] A Month of Summer

by Lisa Wingate

  I love you. Even though I’d just bought them with a DVD, the words felt good. They were the salve I needed. “I love you, too. No more late nights, okay?”

  “ ’Kay, Mom. Bye.”

  I said good-bye and hung up, then sat on the edge of the bed feeling vacant and exhausted. Picking up the sandwich plate and tea, I studied the partially open door. The hallway was dark, the house quiet. There was no sound of a TV, or anyone moving around. I set the sandwich and drink on the night table, stood up, then crossed the room and peered out. At the end of the hall, the bedroom door, open earlier, was closed now, the threshold dark underneath. I tiptoed out, descended the stairs, and went through the entryway to the living room. The chairs were empty, and my father was snoring in the master bedroom. I walked to his door, looked in, saw him lying in the king-sized bed with his back turned toward the wall. On Hanna Beth’s side, a nightgown lay neatly atop the covers. My father’s arm was stretched over it. I stood watching, not knowing how to feel. Had Teddy told him I was here? Did he understand?

  Finally, I went to the kitchen, rifled through the refrigerator, the pantry, the cabinets. The shelves were bare save for bags of macaroni, beans, flour, and rice. On the counter were two loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter. When I opened the refrigerator, the stench was overwhelming, even though it was empty except for a jar of jelly, something molding in a casserole dish, and a cache of rotting produce in the vegetable drawer. My stomach rolled over as I closed the door, then stood looking at the piles of dirty dishes in the sink, on the countertops, on the breakfast table. Every dish in the house must have been used.

  Bracing my hands on the counter, I let my head sag forward. There was no way I could sort this out tonight. I needed to go to sleep, attack the problem in the morning, figure out … something.

  I couldn’t imagine what something might be.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hanna Beth Parker

  I heard a thunderstorm rumbling in the distance and thought of Teddy. Teddy hated thunderstorms, especially at night. I hoped that, at home, he was sleeping soundly.

  The first muted rays of dawn were peeking through the window when Betty, the third-shift nurse’s aide, came to clean the bed and change my sheets. Betty was heavyset and less than five feet tall, with a scraggly graying bouffant that added several inches to her height. The bouffant was so tall and thin that when she entered with the hallway light behind her, the hair formed a translucent web of tangled strands. As she approached the bed, the hair solidified, so that she seemed to grow taller the closer she came.

  As usual, Betty couldn’t be troubled with niceties. She yanked back the covers, rolled the top sheet into a wad and threw it in her laundry cart, then shoved me roughly to one side, slid a plastic pad under me, ripped off the adult diaper, wrinkled her nose and scowled at the mess.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she grumbled as she rolled me over again, so that I collided with the rail hard enough that I felt it. Wadding the pad into a ball, she tossed it into the trash, replaced the bottom sheet, then changed her gloves, checked her cart for something, and walked out the door, leaving it hanging open so that people in the hall could see everything. A man pushing a laundry cart passed by, and I pressed my eyes closed, heat rushing into my face.

  “Git outa here,” Betty snapped as she whisked in with another disposable undergarment, letting the door remain ajar. Without looking at me, she grabbed my arm and measured my pulse, then glanced down at my body, said, “Looks like we’re dry now,” and slapped on another diaper. Covering me with a new top sheet and blanket, she grunted as she folded the corners, propped up my knees with pillows, and slightly lowered the head of the bed.

  “Stinks in here,” she muttered, and pulled out a large white spray bottle. A cloud of aerosol followed her as she pushed her cart toward the door.

  In her wake, I tried to catch the scent of Mary’s little boys, but all that remained was the antiseptic.Outside in the hall, Betty hollered at Claude Fisher. Apparently, he wasn’t supposed to be up and around this early. Betty wanted to know how he’d gotten out of bed. She’d put him back once already. He told her he was old, not an invalid, and she instructed him to go back to his room.

  Claude returned to his room next door, and I closed my eyes again, trying to find the scent of little boys as the aerosol cloud faded. There was nothing. No trace of sweet-smelling memories.

  In my legs, the charley horses were running wild. Betty had whipped them into a frenzy, and I felt as if I might lose my mind. I wanted to scream, but I knew all I’d manage was an unintelligible groan. A wave of helplessness and loneliness and misery swept over me. I wanted to be home. I wanted life to be normal again, but I didn’t think I had the strength to get from here to there. It was too hard, too far uphill.

  I started to weep. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t. It would be easier to die right now and be done with it.

  “Hey, Birdie, don’t cry.” Claude’s soft voice came through the darkness, through the haze of pain, a focus point of light, drawing me out. “I got somethin’ for ya. Watch this.”

  Catching a breath, I blinked away the blur and watched him shuffle across the room, dragging his chair to the window. Soft pink light poured in as he raised the blind, then secured the cord with three pushpins. “Stole these from the bulletin board. Betty’s picture kind of slipped down behind the CPR chart. I reckon they’ll find it one of these days.” Sitting back in his chair, he admired his handiwork and grinned mischievously. “Birdie, just look at that sunrise. Ain’t that a promise to behold?”

  I turned to the window as much as I could. Outside, the sky was ablaze with shades of amber and crimson, amethyst and rose against pure turquoise blue. The clouds that had dimmed the light and threatened rain had passed over, creating a dazzling panorama of shape and color, a glistening shore filled with possibilities.

  I was reminded of something Edward said to me once, when we climbed the scaffold of an old drilling rig and, together, watched the sun descend. The most beautiful sunsets begin with the passing of a storm… .

  Edward was always such a wise and sentimental man. He would not have shown that side of himself to others, but he never hesitated in opening it to me. We were always safe with each other. Watching the sun awaken, I imagined I was sitting with him on the patio, enjoying a summer morning, fresh mugs of coffee steaming into the air. I knew how the garden would smell. I drank it in, felt the dew in the air, tasted the faded scent of night-blooming jasmine as it turned shy in the early light.

  By the window, Claude sat silent, as if he were imagining something, too. Finally, he excused himself, saying he’d better take his usual stroll before breakfast. He smiled and patted the edge of the bed as he went past, leaving me to watch the dawning sky alone.

  The sunrise had come and gone by the time Betty returned. She breezed into the room, then repossessed the pushpins and lowered the blind. “Who the heck did this?” she grumbled, making it clear that the blind, and everything else in the room, myself included, was too much trouble.

  “Nnnoooo,” I protested as she closed off the sky, relegating me to a narrow view of the parking lot through the broken slats.

  Betty glanced over her shoulder, seeming peeved that I had some speech returning. “Hush up, now. You better rest. You’re set for a swallow study today. That oughta be somethin’ to look forward to.” The blind fell the rest of the way to the windowsill with a slap, and Betty muttered to herself, “Just what I need—one more off-the-peg tube and on mush. Like I got all day to sit around and spoon-feed people.” An irritated puff of air escaped her lips as she yanked the covers back over my legs. “G’night, Irene,” she said on her way out the door, and I listened as her spongy white shoes squeaked out of earshot.

  I lay wondering if Rebecca would come again today. Had she gone to the house to see Teddy and Edward? If so, I hoped Edward was having a good day. On good days, he didn’t mind new people. Evenings were not his best time, though. It was as if the Arice
pt and his other medications wore off by evening, leaving him confused and restless, wandering the house but unable to remember why. Sundowner’s syndrome, the doctor called it. Kay-Kay would explain all of that to Rebecca, of course… .

  Maybe, if she could convince Rebecca to help her, Kay-Kay would bring Teddy and Edward to the nursing center to see me. It was probably too much for Kay-Kay to accomplish on her own and that was why she hadn’t brought them to visit already. I hoped that was why. I hoped Edward’s state hadn’t worsened. If he was worse, surely Kay-Kay would have come to tell me. When had Kay-Kay last been here? Or had she been here? Had she come since I’d been transferred from the hospital? It was all such a blur—the time in the hospital, the time here. The days slid together like spills of wet paint, drab colors swirling and mixing until they formed a quiet gray. I remembered Kay-Kay standing over my bed, telling me everything was all right at home, promising she would take care of Teddy and Edward.

  I hoped she had the dishes cleaned up, so Rebecca wouldn’t see the place a mess. Kay-Kay could be a little lax about the dishes sometimes… .

  For a moment, I was back in the kitchen. My kitchen. I was home, and I could clean up the dishes myself… .

  The door opened, the sound forcing me back to the nursing center. Claude came in with a new supply of pushpins. He raised the blind and secured the string to the wall again, carefully pressing in the pins. “Gret’s picture fell off the bulletin board, so these wasn’t bein’ used.” He sat back and again admired his work. “Reckon she’ll notice?”

  I imagined Gretchen’s picture in the dusty crevice behind the CPR chart. It was a wickedly pleasant thought.

  Glancing over his shoulder at me, Claude blinked in surprise. “Why, Birdie. I think you’re smilin’. ’Course, that out there’s somethin’ to smile about. Hear all them birds singing? Every bird in the air’s come down to join the choir.”

  I breathed deeply of the new day and listened to the birdsong in the Bradford pear trees outside. My mind slowed, my body relaxed, and the tightness Betty had left behind ebbed away.

  “Silver linings.” Claude leaned forward to take in more of the sky. “Normally, it’d be red sky in the morning, sailor take warning, but I seen mares’ tails out there last night, and there’s even a few this mornin’.” He pointed out the window, but my view was limited. “See them high, thin ones that start at a little tip and whisk upward into the last of the pink? Mares’ tails. The mares are runnin’ happy this mornin’. They got their tails flying up in the wind. Farmers know what that means. When the mares’ tails point down, watch out, but when they’re runnin’ up, good day ahead. My pappy always watched the mares’ tails.” Rolling his chair back, he turned to me. “Why, Birdie, I believe you got the prettiest smile I ever seen.”

  Dimly, I could feel movement tickling my lips. I wondered if Claude was flirting with me, but the thought seemed foolish, considering our present situation. Aside from that, he had to be well over eighty, far older than me, and I was a married woman.

  Claude swiveled the wheelchair and returned to contemplating the sky. “My pappy believed in working smart and working hard.” He paused to take a hankie from his pocket and wipe a disemboweled fly from the window glass. “He was forty-eight years old when I was born. My folks’d long since give up on ever having kids before they had me and my twin sister. My mama nearly didn’t make it through the birth, and the doctors thought we wouldn’t make it, either. Back then, they didn’t have all the medicine like they do now.” A chuckle slipped past his lips and he patted his stomach, which was thin and sunken like the rest of him. “As boy children go, I was a pretty poor disappointment, kinda scrawny, but my pappy never let me know it. He loved us both, just like we was strappin’ and perfect.”

  Claude went on with the story about the farm where he grew up. I heard it only dimly. I was thinking of Edward, and what a good father he’d been to Teddy. He’d never made Teddy feel any less than perfect. It was sad that Rebecca didn’t know that part of her father. I’d so tried to discourage him from giving her up to her mother, but he let it happen out of guilt, as a form of penance for leaving Marilyn. There was so much Rebecca didn’t know, so much she didn’t understand about her father and the events of that year.

  Claude was rambling on about the trains when Ifeoma walked in. I was glad it was she and not Betty who discovered him. Ifeoma must have been working an extra shift, which she often did. As far as I could tell, she was a single gal with no family to go home to. I supposed she needed the money additional work could provide. Perhaps she sent it back to someone in Ghana.

  Bracing her hands on her hips, she frowned, towering over Claude like a parent correcting an errant child. “You are not to be here, Mr. Fisher.”

  Claude smiled up at her like she’d said something nice to him. “I was just telling Birdie about my trains.” He watched her expectantly as she circled the wheelchair and grabbed the handles. “Ifeoma, did I ever tell you about my trains?”

  “Maaa-ny times.” Ifeoma sighed, turning him toward the door. “Out wit’cha now. You cannot go about waking all the others—do you hear?”

  Putting his feet on the footrests, Claude folded his hands over his stomach and sat back for the ride. “All right, but if Nurse Betty ain’t gone home yet, just put me in the closet ’til she leaves.”

  “Betty must complete her work,” Ifeoma defended. “She has no time to chase around an old man.”

  “If she wouldn’t be so hateful to me, I might not hide from her,” Claude protested. “I don’t never hide from you, Ifay. Back in Buffalo River School, my first-grade teacher had a sayin’—Squawking bird’s unwelcome soon no matter the color the wing, but songbird, plain gray, is welcome long as she sings, and sings, and sings.”

  Ifeoma rolled her eyes, her habitually formal posture softening slightly. “In Ghana, we have also a saying—Old rooster, he loud on the fence, quiet in the stew.”

  Hooking a finger in the neck of his robe, Claude loosened it like a hangman’s noose. “That’s a good sayin’, too. If you give me my medication, Ifeoma, I won’t even fuss.”

  I heard myself laughing before I felt the muscles contracting, puffs of air lifting me off the bed.

  Ifeoma raised a brow at me, surprised. Her full lips parted into a wide, slow smile that was dazzlingly white against her mahogany skin, and she threw her head back, laughing as she went out the door.

  I listened as the sound drifted away. It was good to hear someone laugh with abandon, a real laugh, not the forced, controlled kind reserved for places where no one is supposed to be too happy. The picture of her smile stayed with me as I turned back to the window, watching the third-shift staff go home and the day shift come in. I waited for Mary to arrive. She and her little boys would ride the DART bus in at seven. They’d get off at the stop out front, then wait until the day-care van came at seven thirty. She was late today. The bus came and went, and then the day-care van, with no sign of her. She’d never been late before.

  Ifeoma came back in and took care of providing my breakfast through the peg tube, and I surmised that she was covering for Mary. As efficient as Ifeoma was, I wanted Mary. The prospects for the day would be dimmer without her.

  When Gretchen showed up with her cart, her brawny form blocking the light from the hall, the prospects dimmed further yet.

  “You’re first on the list today,” she informed me brusquely. From her box, she whipped out the wide leather therapy belt she used to move people around. “I hear you been holding out on me. Let’s see what you can do.” There was axle grease under her fingernails.

  I jerked my leg away as she came closer. The movement surprised me.

  Gretchen was pleased. Her pale gray eyes sparkled with enthusiasm for her work. “Well, lookie there. That’s something new.” After lowering the bed, she grasped the belt between her hands and stood over me like Dr. Frankenstein about to flip the switch and illuminate his helpless creature like a Christmas decoration. “Betcha there
’s more where that came from.”

  “Don’t let her whup ya, Birdie,” Claude’s voice came from the doorway.

  Gretchen glanced over her shoulder. “When I need your opinion, I’ll ask for it, Fisher. You better head on back to your room now. I got some special exercises planned for you today.”

  I had the vague sense that Gretchen was trying to make a funny, and I started laughing again.

  Gretchen squinted one eye and peered at me through the other. “Mmm-hmm. Well, look at this. A cheerful patient. I love a cheerful patient.” She cracked her knuckles in preparation and closed the window blind. She held the pushpins up, studying them for a moment, then glanced speculatively toward the doorway before tossing them into the corner, where someone could step on them later. “Let’s see what else we can do, shall we?”

  Our session began whether I wanted it to or not, and within a half hour, Gretchen had explored every inch of my abilities. We’d discovered that some motor control was coming back in my right leg, and I could squeeze the fingers of my right hand a bit. At least Gretchen said I could. I couldn’t feel it, really. The fiery muscle cramps started, and I closed my eyes, groaning.

  “Looks like we’ve got some involuntary muscle activity here,” Gret observed. “Feel like you’ve got kind of a charley horse in there?”

  Kind of ? I thought. Kind of ? “Eeeehhhsssh,” I groaned.

  “That’s good.” Gretchen was delighted. She began kneading my leg between her brawny hands like a long, white lump of dough. The pain ebbed with amazing speed, and for a short while Gretchen and I were on good terms. Then Gretchen grabbed the therapy belt, yanked me onto my side, and pulled me into a pro wrestling move similar to the ones Teddy watched on TV.

  “Aaahowww,” I moaned.

  “Gotta keep those muscles stretched,” Gretchen said, then propped me high on the pillows and slipped off the therapy belt. Without a word, she packed up her tools and left the room. If I never saw her again, it would be far too soon. Even as that thought crossed my mind, however, there was a sense of accomplishment, a still, small voice telling me that finally this work and suffering were leading somewhere. These were baby steps, but they were steps.