(2006) When Crickets Cry

by Charles Martin

  Sometimes I think that every time Emma looked out upon her life, she did so through the prison bars and barricades that others had welded around her. Don't let her get too ... was a daily phrase, uttered in defense of her as if she might break. I'm not accusing anybody in particular, we all felt that way. Afraid that she might chip or break, like a dainty china cup, so we put her on a shelf, and it was there that she lived. Most days, I wonder if we kept her from ever pouring water.

  Her mom dropped us off at the skating rink, and we bought our tickets, laced up our skates, and waited on the bench until the Df switched to slow music, the kind where couples were invited out onto the rink. Then I led Emma onto the floor. She turned around, then faced me, a little wobbly on feet that rolled. She placed her hands on my shoulders, fearful yet trusting, and smiled for eight tenuous laps while the DJ played a love song.

  When the couples skate was over, the tempo picked up and the kamikaze kids erupted back out onto the floor. I led Emma over to a bench, and she sat breathing heavily, yet smiling as I'd seldom seen her. She was winded, would need a good nap, and she was finished for the day. But the look in her eye told me that more good had occurred inside her than would result from the medication she'd take all month. There was a slight sparkle that told me her hope hadn't died, but was still simmering beneath the surface. As I untied her skates, she tapped me on the shoulder and then placed her palms around my cheeks. She lifted my face to hers and kissed me. I don't mean she just pecked me the way you do when you kiss your mom good-bye before school; I mean, Emma spoke to me. Her lips were wet and soft, and her hands trembled slightly.

  We turned in our skates, bought a Coke, and waited on her mom outside. I remember that day for two reasons. First, the kiss. If I close my eyes, I can feel it still. Even after we married, Emma didn't let a day pass that she didn't place her palms on my cheeks, force my tired and worrying eyes to meet hers, and then place her lips to mine.

  And second, I learned something that all my reading and all my studying and all my professors would never teach me. Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it. I think sometimes that I spent so much time worrying about how to protect and strengthen the flower-even going so far as to graft in a new stem and root system-that I forgot to simply water it.

  WHEN I PULLED INTO THE FINGER CREEK THAT LED TO MA house, Cindy and Annie were sitting on the beach where they had taken up residence in their beach chairs. Annie looked like she was in between naps, looking out between the bars that framed her life, passively watching the activity on the lake, while Cindy had her nose buried in Robinson Crusoe. Judging by the speed with which she was flipping pages, and the few that remained, she was nearly finished.

  When I stepped out of the boathouse, she sat up and hollered at me. "Sal came by to check on Annie, so we thumbed a ride when he left. We won't bother you-we just couldn't pass up a day like this"-she waved her arm out across the lake-"without sitting in chairs like these."

  "Make yourself at home. I'll be working on the Hacker for most of the afternoon. Get whatever you need; the house is yours. Holler if you need me."

  I went upstairs to change into some work clothes and make sure the office was locked. That done, I tiptoed back down to the workshop. A few minutes later, bare feet shuffled on the sawdust behind me. I was putting the finishing touches on their table, but I wasn't quite ready for them to know that yet. I had hoped it would be a surprise.

  Annie eyed the power tools lining the wall and unconsciously began running her fingers up and down the vertical scar on her chest. "Reese?" she said, almost in a whisper.

  I threw a tarp over the table, walked around the bench, and stood in the doorway where the breeze touched my face. "Yes?"

  Her bathing suit looked as if it'd grown bigger. "You ever been sedated?"

  I shook my head and sat down on an empty upside-down fivegallon bucket. "No, I haven't, but," I assured her, "I've heard you can't feel a thing and you really don't remember much."

  She took a few more steps, eyeing the sanders and cordless drills. "I have," she said flatly.

  On the wall above her hung a Bosch jigsaw and Milwaukee Sawzall. Both were handheld saws made for cutting complicated cuts in tight places-a lot like a sternal saw, which is used to cut through the sternum before a spreader is placed in and cranks open the human chest.

  "And I remember a lot of it."

  "You were probably just dreaming," I said, trying to shrug it off and change the subject. "Anesthesia can give people weird dreams."

  Annie walked down the row of tools, studying each one, and said, "Yeah, but I wasn't dreaming."

  Her tone caught me, and I began listening more intently now.

  "Before we met Dr. Royer, I went to another doctor in Atlanta. He was always real busy. We'd wait a long time to see him, and then he was always in a hurry. I didn't like him very much."

  Annie talked like a seasoned patient, no longer a kid. Somewhere in that distant memory, the girl in the yellow dress selling lemonade had been whisked away on the same wind that spilled her Styrofoam cup.

  "He did a surgery to give me a few more years to wait on a heart. I don't know how many operations they were doing that morning, but it felt like that barbershop where Aunt Cici takes us to get our haircuts. Always a big line of customers." She began rubbing the back of the sandal wrapped around her neck.

  "Somewhere during the surgery, the anest ... the anesth ... the-" Annie shook her head. "The person who put me to sleep was shuffling between two or three different surgeries, and must of forgot to check up on me. At least she didn't come back when she was supposed to, and I sort of woke up."

  I almost fell off the bucket. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and the emotional wall I used to protect myself was crumbling like Jericho. If Annie had knocked on my city gate that day at the lemonade stand, then she'd just splintered it with the battering rain that was her heart.

  "I remember being kind of fuzzy, and all I could see was blue. I thought maybe I had woken up in heaven, but then I focused a little and saw that the blue was a sheet taped up over my face. I didn't know where I was or why all these tubes were jammed down my mouth and nose or why I couldn't move my arms and legs. I could see a bunch of lights, and somebody standing over me was talking to somebody else, but I couldn't understand what they were saying, and I remember feeling a lot of pressure in my chest and then being real cold."

  I sat still, remembering the horror of other such stories I'd either read about or been told firsthand by patients around the country. For each of them, their worst nightmare had come true. And for each of them, going back under the knife was the most difficult thing they'd ever done. Many refused.

  "Then this nurse looked under the sheet, sort of just checking on me, and there I was, looking right back at her. I don't know who was more scared, her or me."

  Annie walked out on the dock, where the sun's reflection off the lake lit her pale frame, making her look like an angel who'd flown too close to the ground. She turned deliberately and said, "Dr. Royer wants me to go have some test on Friday. He says he needs to know something about my heart, and the only way he can know for sure is to put me asleep and then run this wire camera down my throat and next to my heart."

  I nodded. She walked over and sat on my lap. Her legs were bare, like she'd just shaved them, but I knew she never had.

  She looked around the lake again, up at Charlie's dock and house, and then at me. "You think I should let him?"

  For a girl who was literally wasting away before my eyes, she felt heavy. The weight of her pressed my leg into the ground and pinned me to the earth like a tent peg. "Yes," I said, offering nothing more.

  She looked down at the dock and the two large carpenter ants that were circling her foot. "Would you?" she said, while her eyes followed the ants and her thumb unconsciously rubbed the backside of the golden sandal hanging around her neck. />
  I took a deep breath. "I don't know, Annie. I can't answer that."

  She hung her arm around my neck, like she would a teammate on her softball team while they watched the last inning, will or lose. She nodded and blew a baseball-sized bubble with the wad of bubblegum filling her right cheek. Finally she looked at me. "Could you come with us?" She looked out the door toward Cindy, then back at me. "I'm not sure how much more of this Aunt Cici can take. The last bank just turned down her loan request."

  I nodded. "Yes."

  She hopped off my leg and walked over to the steps leading up to my hammock. "Can I nap in your hammock? I won't mess it up."

  I nodded one final time, and she began a slow climb to the top of the boathouse. Halfway up the first flight of steps, she stopped to look for fish below and catch her breath. I carried up a fleece blanket and pillow, but when I got there, she was almost asleep. I covered her, propped up her head, and watched her elevated heart rate rhythmically pulse through the carotid artery on her neck. After counting her pulse and watching her quick, short breaths only partially fill her lungs, I returned to my bucket where the sun was beating down.

  I don't know how long I sat there, looking out over that water. However long it'd been, it was long enough for Annie to fall asleep, for clouds to block out the sun, and for Cindy to finish Crusoe. When I looked up, a lizard was climbing across my feet and shins. Cindy was standing in front of me, leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed, looking out over the lake.

  Too skinny, eyes sunk too far back in her head, Cindy was starting to show some wear and tear, but she could not hide the fact that beauty lurked just below the surface. It struck me that was the first time I'd thought such a thing about anyone since Emma. And that thought in itself scared me.

  Cindy had wrapped a towel around her waist, but had evidently grown comfortable walking around me in her bathing suit. As bathing suits go, it was conservative, same halter top and bikini bottom, but it was still a bathing suit. And bathing suits and underwear are basically the same thing; we just wear them in different settings. When you boil it down, the deciding factor is geography.

  She didn't look at me but just stood quietly, as if doing so was comforting and had become easy. That too scared me. Finally she spoke. "You said make yourself at home, so I went looking for some aspirin. Found it in the upstairs bathroom. I love the tub. 'Magine your wife did too."

  I nodded, wondering about my locked office door.

  "I finished your book." She pointed toward the chair, then looked back out over the lake. "I can't imagine what it must have been like to be him." She shook her head and pointed her big toe at an ant that was walking around her feet.

  I didn't follow. "What?"

  "Crusoe."

  "Oh."

  "One minute he's sailing along, not a care in the world, the next his ship is going down, he's tossed about like Jonah, and then ... the island." She wrapped her arms tighter about herself.

  I stood from my bucket and hung it on the wall behind me. My signal that this conversation was about to be over. I don't know why I said what I did, other than that I'd had a long time to think about it, and maybe because I was starting to remember. "Cindy?"

  She looked at me.

  "We are all shipwrecked. All castaways." I took a few steps forward, toward the boat launch and the edge of the dock. I dug my hands in my pockets and then turned, my eyes meeting hers. "One day, we all wake on the beach, our heads caked with sand, sea foam stinging our eyes, fiddler crabs picking at our noses, and the taste of salt caked on our lips." I turned slightly, glancing up at the shadow of Annie's frail frame swinging gently in the hammock, rocked by the wind. "And, like it or not, it is there that we realize we are all in need of Friday to come rescue its off this island, because we don't speak the language and we can't read the messages in the bottle."

  I walked out to the edge of the dock, the corner closest to Charlie's house, and sat on the ledge, dipping my feet in the water. Moments passed before Cindy sat beside me. She sat down close, her shoulder and thigh rubbing against mine. She was entering my personal space, suggesting that, at least in this moment, it was space that we shared. More ours than mine or hers. Her touch was friendly and knowing, not invasive. But it was also terrifying.

  She wiped her eyes, which were red and wet, and would not look at me, but studied the water below us. Our feet looked green and distorted. Below them, bream sped past followed by two good-sized bass.

  "Did your wife teach you that?" she asked quietly.

  "No," I said, shaking my head, "her absence did."

  Chapter 45

  riday morning I woke early, got on the water with Charlie long before the sun was up, and left Royer a voice mail telling him when we'd be at the hospital. I also told him a couple of other things. Actually, I asked.

  I asked that he perform Annie's procedure in one of the rooms near an exit and not on the cardiac floor-preferably the children's floor, where the walls were painted to look more like a child's room and less like a hospital. The less stress we inflicted upon Annie, the better.

  There was an obvious benefit for me too, but I addressed the root of that one with my next question. I asked him to use nurses and other staff who had never met me. His staff, our staff, was loyal, and according to the records I'd been snooping into, I still knew most by name. In spite of my haggard appearance, they'd recognize me much the same way Shirley had in town. I wasn't ready for that, and I knew he'd understand. Finally, I asked him to check with accounting, and said he'd understand why once he did.

  I picked up Cindy and Annie at their house just after daylight. They both slept most of the way to Atlanta. When I drove through Starbucks and ordered a latte, Cindy held her hand up, and her two fingers made the peace sign. I changed my order and asked for two.

  Royer himself met us in the parking lot. He was standing behind a wheelchair, smiling. Inside the seat of the chair sat three stuffed animals: Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, and Eeyore. Annie stepped out the car and promptly hugged him, a sight that caused me to remember that Royer was everything good in a doctor.

  Cindy grabbed her purse and introduced me to him. We shook hands, his engulfing mine, and exchanged formal pleasantries. Then he led us into the service entrance, up the elevator, and off at the children's floor, where we were met by bright walls, butterflies, and a hallway that looked like the yellow brick road. Annie lit up.

  Royer steered us down a short hallway and into a large room in a corner of the hospital. It was perfect: a couch, an easy chair, a television with VCR, and a window that looked out over the northwest side of Atlanta. The room had been painted to look like the Hundred Acre Wood and Pooh's house.

  Annie hopped up on the bed and grabbed something. "Look," she said, pointing it to Cindy, "our own remote control."

  Cindy looked at us, embarrassed, and shrugged her shoulders. "The simple pleasures in life."

  Royer pulled Cindy to the doorway and whispered just loudly enough for me to hear him above the cartoons Annie had selected. "Nurses will be in shortly to get her IV line in and take her vitals. I'll be back in about thirty minutes to drip some sleepy stuff down her arm."

  Cindy crossed her arms and nervously scratched the outsides of both.

  Royer continued, "The procedure might take all of fifteen minutes; then we'll let her sleep it off and spend the day parked in front of that TV." He put his hand on her shoulder and said, "Don't worry. Hang in there."

  Cindy nodded and pulled on the tattered sweater she'd been carrying since the car.

  I grabbed a magazine, tried to look dumb, and kept my glasses on until I was certain I'd never seen the nurse before. As other nurses came in, dressed in clown-printed scrubs and colorful plastic shoes, each talked with Annie. If Annie was nervous, she didn't show it. They got her into a gown, helped her put on her big red Clifford slippers, and swabbed her arm with alcohol.

  She winced when they inserted the IV needle, and a tear slipped out of her left eye and
down her cheek. Cindy, biting her own lip, caught it, and sat on the other side of the bed holding Annie's hand. I stood against the far wall, pressing my back hard against the window for fear that I might launch myself across that room and start acting like the someone I used to be.

  They began a fluid drip to keep her hydrated and brought her a cup of ice, which they told her she could chew on. She didn't touch it, but quietly watched the television above us. After a few minutes of cartoons, she mashed the power button on the remote and then pressed the button on the side of her bed to raise her head. The mechanical bed raised her to a sitting position, and then she looked at me. "Reese?"

  "Yeah," I said, prying my back from the wall and pulling up a chair next to Annie's bed.

  "You be here when I get back?"

  I nodded, afraid to speak for fear that my voice might crack.

  She held out her hand, and I placed mine in it. She leaned closer and twitched her head, pulling me closer as if she wanted to tell me a secret. I leaned in, and Annie's eyes darted to Cindy, "Don't let her sit here and worry while I'm gone. There's a really good cafe on the third floor, so get her a piece of chocolateraspberry cake with the yummy raspberry dressing."

  I nodded and smiled.

  "Oh, and-" She raised her hands around her neck and took off the sandal necklace. She unlocked the clasp, slid it from around her neck, and then laid it in my open palm. Her hands were shaking. "Hold this for me 'til I get back."

  I looked down and held the small sandal in my hand. I ran my fingernail through the edges of the letters and raged against the torrent of tears that was spilling over the dam inside me. I will give you a new heart ...

  "You know what my mom told me when she gave it to me?"

  I shook my head.