Marsha, the new shift nurse, knocked on the door and poked her head in. “I’ve got papers for you to sign, Tess. You’ll need to be checking out of your room.”
“That’s fine,” Tess said, sounding as if she were pleased to be bending everybody’s will.
“I do have a car seat you can borrow,” Mrs. Whitsitt said, her voice sad.
And with that, their future changed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There is a Scripture in the Bible that Nora kept thinking of as she watched Ben slice open the huge cardboard carton and begin to yank out the skeletal pieces of the white baby crib.
“Hm-m-mmm,” Ben said as he held two pieces together to see if they would fit. “That looks right, don’t you think?”
“I think you should read the instructions.”
“There’s a plastic bag in here with the nuts and screws. Have you seen anything that looks like that?”
“Be careful, Ben. Don’t scratch the paint.”
The story Nora kept thinking of was the tale of the widow from the town of Nain who happened to be leaving through the town gate, a large crowd of mourners carrying high the body of her dead son. Nora imagined how, just as the gate swung open to let them out, Jesus and a large crowd of his joyous followers began to come inside.
That’s what Nora’s heart felt like on this day, those people, those extreme emotions, sorrow and joy jostled together, tight in a small place.
“Maybe this part fits into this piece,” Ben said. Then, “Do you remember? Is the end for the head taller than the end for the feet?”
“Honey, you’re going to have to look at the picture.”
It had been Ben’s idea to buy the bed and mattress. Within the hour after they’d gotten Tess settled with the baby, he had suggested they drive to Wal-Mart and pick out something pretty. Although he hadn’t said it, Nora knew exactly what he must be thinking. We’ll buy a piece of large furniture. Something permanent. Something that, when it is put together, won’t fit through a door or into the back seat of a car.
In the town of Nain, so the story goes, the people jostling through the gate grew quiet when Jesus said to the woman, “Don’t cry.” Suddenly, everything stopped. It was a ridiculous thing to say to a mother who had lost her child. Don’t cry.
Nora had heard this sermon so many times, how Jesus knew the woman’s heart. How he never blamed her for giving up, but had compassion because of the grief she felt.
“Many times the first word Jesus speaks to us is not about a physical change but about a heart change. He changes us and not the situation,” Pastor Franklin liked to say from the pulpit. “If we don’t let His change come into our hearts, then His changes won’t ever come to our lives.”
How much more changing do I have to do? Nora wanted to know.
Ben had found the bag with the nuts and bolts and screws. He tore it open and began to arrange the hardware beside the list that read: YOU SHOULD HAVE THESE ITEMS. Nora pressed her spine against the closed door. Of course, she thought. We already have our change, don’t we, God? She was born yesterday. Healthier than any of us ever dreamed.
“I’m missing this one wing nut,” Ben said, sifting through the pile of hardware. “Have you seen a wing nut? This thing says I’m supposed to have four and I can only find three.”
Thank you for the baby’s health, Lord. Oh, thank you for that. Thank you thank you.
“Maybe it rolled under your foot or something. Can you look?”
“Ben?” she asked, ignoring the wing nut completely. “What do you think she’s going to do? Do you think she is going to stay?”
“I don’t know, Nora.” Ben’s voice had a weary tone. “I honestly don’t know.”
“She’s beating us up with our love for her. Do you know that?” Nora began to cry, muted desperate sounds which she tried to hide behind her hands. She felt unmoored, as if she were floating away from something. Every time she thought the Lord would help her, she lost her grip; her own faith shredded, fraying like old rope, in her hands. “She holds us hostage. No fair, how everything she does makes us change what we’re going to do, too.”
“I know that.” It took Ben a long moment to rise. He had parts of crib spread out from one side of the room to the other, some of them propped against him. When he stood up, parts of the baby bed fell inward, propped against each other like a Boy Scout bonfire.
“What if the baby isn’t safe?”
“Shhh.” He took Nora’s shoulders. “She’ll hear you.”
“I don’t care.” But Nora crammed the back of her hand against her mouth, trying to muffle her own grief. “I don’t understand what God is doing!”
“But you’re the one who knows God so well.”
Nora raised her teary face to her husband’s. “I don’t. Oh, I don’t. I just keep asking and asking for God to change her—”
“I know I fuss about going to church with you—”
“—and nothing ever happens.”
They stood, holding each other up, while Nora untangled her words from his.
“I say the wrong things to Tess. I close myself off from you.”
He gave a sharp laugh. “Okay,” he said. “Yes. Yes, you do.”
As if this discussion made her aware of Ben now, she began to work her way out of her husband’s grasp.
“I admire you, Nora. I admire your morality. I admire that you stood beside me and told Tess what you knew was right.”
“That thing you lost has to be around here somewhere. What was it? A wing nut?”
Ben said, “You guessed better than I did what the cost would be.”
Beloved.
But Nora didn’t hear anything.
Beloved, there is something inside you that you can’t see. Something that keeps you from freedom, from being everything that you want to be.
“I throw out my prayers and I go through the motions, but there’s nothing there.” She went down on her hands and knees and started searching for baby furniture parts. “We’ve got to make her stay, Ben. It’s the only way that baby is going to be safe. We have to keep her safe.”
Let Me show you yourself, beloved.
Ben bent beside her on the sewing-room floor and finally opened the instructions.
IN NORA’S DREAM, Tess was leaving. Tess with diapers in her bag, trying to convince someone she could take care of Tansy herself, that a baby wouldn’t be too much trouble nor make too much noise. There was always a car waiting outside, loud shouting, a baby crying, slamming doors. She lay there in the dark, not knowing what awakened her. Had it been her jerking movement or the brush of Ben’s thumb against her cheek? Her eyes adjusted to the moonlight spilling across the room. The pounding in her heart began to slow. There were dents in her palms where her fingernails had cut into them. She’d been hanging onto her pillow.
The brush of Ben’s knuckles, light and wonderful against her skin. He was staring at her through the darkness. “You cried out.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
She squinted, her arm up over her eyes, trying to get her bearings. “I guess I was dreaming.”
With Tansy in their house these past three nights, neither of them had slept enough to have dreams. Each time the baby began her faint, urgent crying, they listened for the rustle of Tess’s sheets, the padding of her feet across the carpet, the chair creaking, the silence again.
Nora had found Tess crying the first night because her nipples ached and bled as she nursed. “This happens. We’ll fix it,” Nora had said, and she’d given Tess acetaminophen, a warm, wet cloth, a glass of ice chips, and some of the lanolin cream they’d sent home for Tess from the hospital. Last night Nora had wanted to rock the baby when she wouldn’t sleep, when she cried for three frantic hours, but Tess wouldn’t let her.
“I’ll do this, Mother,” Tess had said, so far asleep in the chair that she might have fallen out.
Ben’s hand lay close along her hip and the notion of that changed Nora’s
breathing. She covered his hand with her own, threaded her fingers between his. His shoulder grazed her shoulder. His ear lay beside her ear. She heard the workings of his throat. “Grandma,” he whispered, tracing her lips. “Grandma.”
“Grandpa.”
They were still marveling at the magnitude of this when the bleating noises began in Tess’s room. Nora’s ears played tricks. Did she hear the bed linens being thrown back? The thump of feet?
The baby was still crying. Nora smiled apologetically at Ben, raised herself with one arm. “Tess? You in there?”
No answer.
“Tess?”
As if in answer a truck passed on the highway in the distance, grew fainter, fainter, until it was gone. Nearby, one cricket chirruped and was joined by a throng.
Nora willed her insides to be still.
Ben sailed covers toward the foot of the bed. “I’ll check.” His feet hit the floor hard. But before he could get to the bedroom door, they finally heard the guestroom bed creak. There was a thud when Tess must’ve run into something in the hallway, the kitchen faucet running, and the bleating stopped. Tess, determined to do it herself tonight. Nora didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The telephone rang at 4:00 A.M., a shrill, violent awakening that sent Ben staggering to a standing position and Nora sitting up, trying to figure out where she was.
“We’re doomed. We’re never going to get any more sleep, not as long as we live,” Ben said ruefully, looking down at her.
Nora clutched the blankets against her chest. “It’s never good when the phone rings in the middle of the night.”
“I hope there’s nothing wrong with my mother. I ought to have gone to visit this week,” Ben said.
“No,” Nora argued. “I could have done it, too. But you know how I hate to fly.”
Ben felt around the bureau for the ringing phone while Nora fumbled for the lamp switch. “Hello?” she heard him say, and then a long moment of silence while he listened to whoever was talking on the other end. “You don’t say.”
Their bedroom door slammed open. “Who is that?” Tess asked bleary-eyed, her comforter wrapped around her middle. “Why did the phone ring?”
“I don’t know,” Nora whispered.
“Tansy didn’t wake up. It’s a good thing. She’d sleep through a tornado if she wasn’t hungry.”
“I heard you get up with her.” And, if Nora wasn’t so frightened for Tansy’s safety, if she wasn’t so sure Tess had done the selfish thing not letting her be adopted, Nora could have almost said, Tess, I’m proud of you. “Honey, I—”
But Ben hung up the phone. Tess stepped toward him. “Who is it, Daddy? What’s wrong?”
Ben touched her shoulder. “That was Claude Simms down at the end of the street, our neighbor.”
Nora’s heart felt like it had stopped beating. “Is Lavinia okay?”
“Lavinia’s fine. Claude’s got a mockingbird up there that’s been chasing his other garden birds away. He was up before dawn trying to find out where it roosts, thinking he could trap it and cart it down to the city park.”
“He called us about his mockingbird?”Nora asked.
“No, he called us because there’s a strange car parked in front of our house. He saw it when he went outside after that bird. There’s someone walking around out there.”
“Ben!”
“I know. This isn’t good. Claude thought we ought to know.” He began yanking on his sneakers.
Nora’s next thought was of Tansy. “Is the baby safe, Tess? Don’t you think you ought to get her?”
“She’s fine, Mother. Better to leave her asleep.”
“We ought to call Bill Mott or Merrill Horn. Get somebody over here from the sheriff’s office.” But Nora knew that would be a lost cause. The same way Ben didn’t care to ask directions or read instructions, he would handle some prowler in their front yard himself.
Tucked behind the winter coats on his side of the closet, Nora knew Ben kept his Ruger .22 pistol. He’d bought that gun for $54.95 when he’d been fourteen, using all of his paper-route money. He dug it out now, unzipped its tan plastic case with pride. He rummaged on the closet floor again and came out with an ancient box of .22 cartridges.
Tess darted toward the window. “No.” Nora pulled her back by the hand before she could raise the shade. Tess’s hand felt cool and bony in her own. “You mustn’t look out there. It would give your father away.”
It would still be a good hour before the night would begin to lift. The endless black visible between the shades and the sill looked impenetrable as iron. Nora’s teeth chattered; she couldn’t get warm. The fear sank cold deep into her bones.
“Mama, you get the phone,” Tess whispered. “I don’t care what Dad says about taking care of himself. We ought to call someone for help.”
“You’re right. Ben, we ought to call.” For a split second, Nora thought about turning on another light. They should have set every light in this place ablaze the moment Claude phoned. That might have frightened their unwanted visitor away. But then they’d have tomorrow night to think of. And the next night. And the next.
One at a time Ben had been loading cartridges into the Ruger. He popped the magazine in, ready for action. “I can handle this,” he said in a low, authoritative voice. “You girls wait here.”
BEN SNUCK OUT through the back patio door. Beside the patio, there was a huge bank of laurel shrubs growing against the façade of the house. He could hear the shrub rustling as if something were hiding there. Something skittered away from his feet in the grass.
He flattened his spine against bricks that still held the heat of day, his own breath roared in his ears, and he had the odd feeling that everything about to happen in their lives was aiming at him, like a rockslide. At the corner of the house he could see the one square of light from their bedroom, sending a gold shaft onto the lawn. The sharp shadows made his weed-free Bermuda grass look like a bed of razors.
Ben inched away from the wall toward the broad cement step that aproned the spot where, in the evenings after dinner, he and Nora liked to sit out and watch the squirrels and eat bowls of Bluebell ice cream. When his Nikes sank into the turf, he felt like he had stepped away from security. He was a macho character in an action movie. Skulk around the corners. Let the barrel of the gun lead you.
The crickets hummed so hard that he could literally feel the pulse in his ears. His tongue felt coated with metal shavings. His eyes had begun to adjust to the light. As he sprang around the corner ready for a show-down, Ben saw a figure poised in the side yard, one arm raised toward the kitchen window, knees locked, both legs together, its head wearing some odd-shaped hat. “Hey! Get away from my kitchen window,” he wanted to shout. But the dry metal in his mouth wouldn’t let him.
Oh, that he could be like Nora and turn to a higher power at a time like this. What had she taught him about prayer? Ask and ye shall receive.
Well, he didn’t know if he’d call that his first prayer or not. But no sooner had he thought those words then the paper boy started up the street. When Ben had been a paper boy, he’d ridden his bike the length of ten city blocks every morning before going to school. Nowadays the paper boys’ mothers drove them while the boys reclined in comfort on the open tailgate of a Chevy Suburban. Headlights from the Suburban glanced off the figure he’d been about to tackle and Ben saw, instead of the outline of an intruder, the spindly shape of the maple he’d planted and staked up last spring. Nailed in the crook of its branches, almost too large for the fledgling tree, was the arched, head-like birdfeeder Nora had given him for his birthday last fall.
The wave of lightheaded relief hit so hard that he chuckled. So old Claude must’ve been seeing things. There can’t be anyone prowling in my yard. But before that thought was out, Ben heard a smattering of stones against the house, the sound of someone diving into the dirt for cover. Three houses down in the Weesners’ yard, a dog began barking
and jumping against the fence. A sedan of some sort—looked like it had to be a GM—had been stashed curbside.
Ben stopped. His chest was tight. “I know you’re there,” he shouted, his heart pounding in his chest. No one moved or made a sound. “I’ve got a gun.”
A mosquito whined somewhere close to Ben’s ear. When the hum stopped, he knew the mosquito was enjoying a feast on some bare section of his skin. But that was in another world, happening to someone he didn’t know. Something bumped the screen in the window behind him, a silky whisper, one of those huge night moths, no doubt. Ben took one more step forward and would have been almost to the center of the yard, almost to the blue-yellow circle given off by the gaslight, except for the fist, wide and hard, that hit him on the side of his face.
Ben lost the Ruger as he went down with a cry of surprised outrage. At the next instant, something struck him on the back of the head and he saw blinding lavender light even in the darkness. He shook his head. It cleared well enough to see the dirty sneakers standing just beyond his nose.
Seek and ye shall find. In a move that would have made the wrestling coach at Butlers Bend High proud, Ben went for the takedown. He clamped his hands around the guy’s knees and brought him to the ground hard with a thud—ugh. In the split second that gave him, Ben rolled to grab his gun and came down hard. He shoved the Ruger into the knobs of Dirty Sneakers’s neck and growled, “Let’s get acquainted, son. Who do you think you are?”
When the fellow tried to scramble out from under him, he sounded like an armadillo scratching for bugs. Ben shoved him hard onto his belly again and the air went out of his chest in a sharp guttural ooof.
“You’re—you’re not a cop,” the guy said, his chin working against the dirt.
“No, I’m not.”
“Wouldn’t have hit you if I’d known you’re not a cop. Can’t get arrested again—”
“You’re full of great choices, buddy.” Ben had the guy’s wrists twisted together now in one hand, his trusty old $54.95 .22 in the other. “You just give me one reason why I shouldn’t call the sheriff.”
If I Had You Page 12
