Down by the Riverside

by Jackie Lynn

  I found out that the little girl was on the medical-surgical unit on the third floor. I took the elevator, walked down the hall until I found her room. I tapped on the door and then opened it slightly. She was by herself and asleep. I moved closer to her. There were pillows wedged beside her, keeping her positioned on her right side. Her color was good and I could see that she was being hydrated through an IV line.

  She roused a bit as I stood near her.

  “Hey, there,” I said quietly.

  She smiled slightly, appeared a little disoriented. “Hi,” she replied, and then closed her eyes again. “Rose.”

  I sat down in the chair beside the bed and watched her. She slept easily. A nurse came in and checked her lines and her vitals. She nodded at me, but did not speak. It wasn’t long after she left that Janice came in. She was carrying two large Styrofoam cups. I presumed she had gone to the cafeteria to get Clara something to drink.

  “Hello,” I said, standing up next to the bed.

  “Hello,” the young mother said, looking surprised that I was there.

  I walked around and pulled the other chair closer. Janice glanced over to her daughter.

  “Did she wake up?” she asked, still holding the cups in both hands.

  “Just long enough to say hello,” I replied. “She looks good and she recognized me.”

  Janice nodded and placed one cup down on the bedside table. She sat in the chair closest to her daughter.

  I sat down across from her.

  “She said she wanted a milkshake,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “When did you get here?” Janice asked, taking a sip from the cup she held.

  “Just a few minutes ago,” I answered. “I was at Baptist,” I explained.

  She waited to hear more.

  “Ms. Lou Ellen,” I said. “Do you know who she is?” I asked, thinking that she might not know the office personnel at the campground.

  “Rhonda’s mother?” she replied, “The office manager?”

  I nodded. “She fell this morning, broke her hip. I was with them in the emergency room.”

  “Oh,” Janice answered. “Is she okay?”

  “She had to have surgery, but I think she’ll be fine.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said, placing her drink beside her. “Lucas and Rhonda and Ms. Lou Ellen have been real kind to us,” she added, then asked, “Did you know that Lucas teaches third and fourth graders at the Baptist church in town?”

  I shook my head.

  “They give all the money they make to that church or to folks in need,” she said this like she knew what she was talking about. “Lets the old folks fish at the pond for free.”

  I was surprised to hear this about the Boyds, but I was quickly learning that appearances were sometimes deceiving.

  The young mother sat hunched in her seat. Her shoulders were rounded and her arms hung uselessly at her sides. She was wearier than when I had first met her the previous day.

  “The harvesting go okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, a slight smile moved across her face and then slid away.

  “How’s Jolie?” I asked.

  She turned away and breathed a heavy breath. “They moved her to the intensive-care unit this morning,” she replied. “The chemo made her sick.”

  “She has an infection?” I asked, knowing that was a risk with the strong doses they gave before a transplant.

  She nodded. “Pneumonia,” she replied. “There’s some lung damage, too,” she added.

  I sat quietly. I knew that since Jolie’s condition had worsened that they would have canceled the scheduled procedure, and I was surprised that with the changes and the knowledge that the transplant was no longer a possibility, that they would have harvested Clara’s bone marrow anyway.

  Janice seemed to read my thoughts.

  “She’s doing this for somebody else,” she said, as she turned back around to face me.

  I leaned in her direction. “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “Jolie can’t have the transplant,” she reported. “She’s too sick.”

  I nodded. I had figured out that much of the story.

  Janice reached up and pushed a strand of hair away from her daughter’s eyes.

  She waited and then sitting farther up in her chair, she explained, “Clara said that last night she had a dream.”

  The little girl stirred and we both watched her. She raised her head a bit, but then dropped it down again, still asleep.

  Her mother pulled away from Clara and spoke in a quieter tone. “She said that an angel told her that Jolie”—the young woman stopped and began again—“that her sister wouldn’t need the blood where she was going.” She took a breath.

  I reached across the bed and took her hand.

  She hesitated, and then continued. “That she would be fine now in her new place without the transplant, but that there was another child, a little boy down the hall from Jolie, who would need it, who would stay here where he could use it.”

  Then a few tears fell and the young woman dropped my hand and I could tell she needed a tissue. I handed her the box that was beside the bed. I didn’t know how to respond.

  I knew that if Clara was right then she was saying that her sister was going to die. I tried to imagine how her parents were taking this news, how such a conversation occurred among the family members, how a mother answers a daughter bearing such a painful insight.

  “When did she tell you this?” I asked.

  “This morning, on the way to the hospital.” She dabbed her eyes with the tissue. “I didn’t believe her. I told her that it was just a dream and not to worry, but then when we got here, the doctor came in and told me and Frank that Jolie wouldn’t be able to have the transplant.”

  She wiped her eyes and then placed her hand on her daughter’s leg.

  “And Clara asked the doctor about a little boy. She asked him if there was somebody else who could use her marrow.”

  I waited and then asked, “And was there?”

  Janice nodded her head slowly while she watched her daughter.

  “A baby,” she answered. “He came in yesterday.”

  She leaned forward and picked up her cup. She took a sip.

  “The doctor checked the list of patients and sure enough she was right. The baby, who also has ALL, was a match with Jolie and Clara.” She shook her head as if she still couldn’t believe it.

  “The family came here from the mountains somewhere. The staff had been searching the donor register all night.” She put down the cup.

  “It’s a rare match,” she said and drew in another deep breath.

  “Clara wanted to go ahead and do the procedure this morning.”

  I glanced over at the little girl, wondering how she could have possibly known about her sister, about the baby down the hall, wondering how children can know so much more than the rest of us.

  She stirred again and this time opened her eyes. Janice stood up from her seat and knelt near her. “Hey, sweetie,” she said.

  “Hey, Mama,” she answered. Then she turned in my direction. “Rose came to see me.”

  Janice smiled and glanced at me.

  “Yeah, darling, I know. We were just talking about you.” She rubbed the little girl’s forehead.

  “Did you tell her about the angel?” she asked.

  Janice nodded. I stood up next to her.

  “And she told me how brave you were and how kind you were to give your marrow for that little boy,” I said, gently stroking her arm.

  She closed her eyes. “Jolie told me to,” she answered softly. She yawned and then grimaced as if she felt a twinge of pain. A moment passed and her face softened.

  “She came to me, too, with the angel last night. She told me about the baby.” She opened her eyes, looking around the room as if someone had called her and then she closed them again.

  Janice and I returned to our seats. The room fell silent. I tried to unders
tand the details of the morning, tried to figure out the mind of a child. The young woman finished her drink.

  It wasn’t more than a few minutes later that two nurses came to the door and called Janice outside. I could tell from their demeanors, the way one woman put her arm around the young mother, the awkward way the other stood watching, that something was wrong, that Jolie’s condition must have worsened.

  I heard their low conversation and then footsteps hurrying down the hall. No one returned to the room.

  I reached over and took Clara by the hand.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Jolie and the angel are together now,” she said.

  I squeezed her fingers and nodded.

  “She’ll be happy,” the little girl said, dropping off to sleep, a tear in the corner of her eye.

  I sat in the room while she slept, watching her chest rise and fall, her face wrinkle and relax, and I wondered if the angel and her sister had stopped in this room on the way to wherever they were going, if Clara was hearing a message from the other side, if in her sleep she was being comforted in her loss.

  I wondered if there would be enough solace from an angel and a child to soothe the hard ache in a husband and a wife, fill the empty place in the hearts of a mother and a father, if there was ever enough relief to ease such grief.

  The doctor came in and checked Clara. A deep sadness had fallen across his face. A chaplain visited and prayed in silence. Nurses came and went. All of them trying to assess that the little girl was okay. All of them concerned with how she would take the news about her sister. And all the while she slept, an easy rhythm of breath and dream.

  I waited with her until her parents returned to the room about an hour later and then I left them alone. They were broken, of course, overwhelmed in their sorrow, but they remained steadfast, appeared resolved, somehow at peace as they stood at the foot of the bed of their daughter, who had bridged so carefully the stories of life and death.

  On my way out, as I headed down the hall, I met a couple walking hand in hand toward Clara’s room. I knew when I saw them that they were the parents of the baby who had received the little girl’s marrow, that they were the recipients of an angel’s good wishes. And I thought once again of how deeply we are all connected, how much we rely upon one another.

  I found Tom in the waiting room and we walked to the parking lot without speaking. He didn’t ask me anything as I let the tears fall. I held on tightly to him as he drove us across the bridge to West Memphis. I held on tightly to the depth of feeling I had uncovered in hospital rooms and to the lessons I had learned.

  I held on tightly to what it was I knew I had to do. I wanted to ease the grief of Tom and I wanted to solve the mystery of his friend’s death.

  As we exited near the foot of the bridge, I told him of the next stop I knew I had to make.

  FIFTEEN

  Ms. Eulene Franklin, widowed and now once again bereft since the loss of her oldest child, her only son, was sitting in the kitchen shelling peas when Tom and I arrived. She was a small-boned woman, bent from age and stooped from long hours of work standing over sinks and garden tools. She had a row of braids around her head, all ending in white pearly knots, tiny wisps of hair falling out of the plaits.

  “She’s blind,” Tom whispered to me, as we knocked on the back door of the old wooden house that stood at the corner of Second Street and Pine, right across the road from the offices, chapel, and workrooms of Franklin’s Family Funerals and beside an empty lot overgrown with pigweed and clover.

  “Ms. Eulene,” he called out as he pressed his face against the wire mesh of the screen. “Ms. Eulene, it’s Tom Sawyer.”

  I heard a chair slide across the floor. “Who’s that?” a voice replied.

  “Tom Sawyer, Ms. Eulene, from over at the river.”

  She shuffled across the floor to the door, pulling it open. She wore a flowered housedress and a faded apron. She had on bedroom slippers and dark glasses.

  “Thomas? That you?” she asked as she stood in front of us.

  Tom reached up and touched her on the inside of her arm. “Ms. Eulene, how are you today?” he asked as if had he visited her recently. He kissed her on the cheek and she wrapped her free arm around his waist.

  “Thomas Sawyer,” she said. “You know your mama just left not more than twenty minutes ago.” She held open the door and we walked through. “I should have known that was you on that bike. I can hear you coming four miles away.”

  She turned her head to the side when I walked in. She recognized that Tom wasn’t alone. She waited for the introduction.

  “Ms. Eulene,” he said as he stood by her side. “This is a friend of mine. This is Rose.”

  I grasped the back of her hand.

  “Ms. Eulene,” I said, stepping closer to her. “It’s so very nice to meet you.”

  She raised her chin and then reached up and touched me on the cheek. She dropped her hand, smiled slightly, and then moved away from the screen door and it closed behind us. “Nice to meet you, too,” she answered.

  “Well, do come in, here, take a seat.” She shuffled toward the table and pulled out a chair. “I was shelling some peas that Audrey Timmons brought by.”

  Then she waved her hand toward the counter. “Have you ever seen so much to eat?” she asked. Her voice was tired, but in spite of how it stretched, she was trying to sound upbeat.

  I glanced over and she was right. There were pots and pans and dishes pushed in long rows along the countertop. I wondered how she would remember everything that was there.

  “People been bringing me food for almost a week,” she said as she moved over to her chair. “I don’t know why they think I can eat all that.” She eased herself into her seat, holding onto the table until she got all the way down.

  “Rose, here, sit down over here.” She pointed to the chair beside her.

  I walked behind her and sat down at the table.

  “Thomas, I want you-all to have a plate of food before you leave,” she said. She sounded like a mother speaking to her children. Even lost to her grief, I could tell she was a woman used to taking care of others.

  “Yes, ma’am, we will do that.” He winked in my direction.

  She pushed a bowl of peas away from her and rested her hands on the table. Another bowl was situated between her and Tom.

  “You by yourself?” Tom asked.

  “Uh-huh,” she hummed. “Rusty went over to the office. She’s trying to get things arranged over there.”

  “Rusty is Ms. Eulene’s neighbor,” Tom said to me as an explanation.

  I nodded.

  “Beatrice’s daughter, she stays here with me,” the older woman added. “Lord, I don’t know what I’d do without her right now.” She reached in the pocket of her apron and took out a tissue. She wiped underneath her glasses with it and then kept it balled-up in her hand.

  “Rose, are you visiting West Memphis?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered. “I came from North Carolina.”

  “North Carolina,” she repeated. “I got people in Raleigh,” she said.

  “I’m not too far from there,” I responded. “I’m from the eastern part of the state, Rocky Mount.”

  She nodded.

  There was an awkward pause. She waved away a fly that was buzzing around her.

  “I’m real sorry about your son,” I finally said.

  She lifted her face slowly. “Thomas tell you about it?” she asked.

  “I was at the river when”—I stopped, not sure of how to continue—“when they found him.”

  She dropped her head in her hand. “Just don’t seem right,” she said softly.

  Tom reached out, placing his hand on her shoulder.

  She rocked in her chair, back and forth.

  “I knew there was trouble when he didn’t call me before lunch the day he was supposed to be leaving St. Louis,” she said, as if she was trying to order the tragedy, trying to understand the s
equence of events leading up to her son’s death. I was sure she had already done this several times since his disappearance.

  She pulled the tissue out again, pressing it against her wet cheeks.

  “I told my neighbor, Beatrice, about eleven o’clock that morning that something had happened. I just felt it. I just felt it here.” She pointed to her heart.

  “Then I called Rusty at work and I got her to call his phone.” She rolled the tissue in her hands. “There was never any answer.”

  She shook her head.

  “By the afternoon I got hold of the sheriff. I told him that I just knew Lawrence was in some kind of trouble.”

  Tom patted her on the arm.

  “I know, Ms. Eulene,” he said. “Once I got back from Fort Smith and after we heard from St. Louis that he hadn’t made it to the hospital, we were all out looking for him by dinnertime.”

  She turned away, still moving her body in a rocking motion.

  A car passed on the road outside the house. She lifted her head as if she was listening to see if it was somebody stopping. It came to the intersection and turned toward town.

  “Now they’re trying to say Lawrence took his own life,” she said the words painfully. “It’s just ugly how folks talk,” she added.

  We sat at the table while she wiped her eyes again. Tom and I looked at each other without knowing what to say to the older woman.

  “Ms. Franklin,” I finally asked, even though I knew it wasn’t my place, “why would they say that about your son? Why are they saying he committed suicide?”

  She bit the inside of her bottom lip, shaking her head. “He was on some medicine,” she answered.

  “For depression?” I asked.

  “No, he told me it was to help him to sleep,” she replied. “He was under a lot of stress trying to run the business by himself.”

  She turned toward Tom. “You know, Thomas, it was too much for one man. I tried to get him to get some help and he had gone to visit a cousin in Louisiana about coming to West Memphis, but he liked to do things by himself. You know, Thomas,” she said again.