(2008) Down Where My Love Lives (52 page)

I SAT NEXT TO THE BED, REACHED BENEATH THE covers, and touched Maggs's hand. She was hot to the touch, and her face was flushed. When she opened her eyes, they were glassed over and heavy. The machine on the wall told me her fever was now only 102.5. I rubbed her hand gently and tried to open my mouth, but the words wouldn't come.

She fidgeted, but her ribs were tender, making movement difficult, and her face was still puffy, slow to heal. She saw me struggling and touched my lips with her fingers. "I was having a dream about you."

"Yeah?" I tried to smile.

"You were sitting on the tractor with our daughter, driving to the river. She was blonde, had your eyes, my toes."

I bit my lip, gritted my teeth, and tried to hold back but could not. I choked and wiped my face with her sheet. Maggie eyed the wall, her temperature, and then me. Her movements were slow. She looked as if she'd just delivered a child and run a marathon.

I tried again. "Dr. Frank had to ... you see ... we were ... you...

She breathed deeply and turned toward me, pressing her forehead to mine. She placed her palm on my cheek and whispered, "Shhh." She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry.

I held the glass of water while she sipped through the straw, then she pulled me close. I held her several moments, her eyes studying mine, mine studying hers.

"I want to grow old with you."

"Maggie," I stuttered, "we were having twins."

Her eyes narrowed, and her head tilted like Blue's when he didn't understand. I could see the pieces falling into place.

"The second baby got caught in your tube, and it was just growing and ..."

Maggie shook her head vehemently, placed a flat palm over her stomach as if it could tell her the truth, and started whispering, "No. No. No!"

I placed my hand on her shoulder. "Honey, Dr. Frank had to remove your ..."

The words I'd spoken registered somewhere in her foggy mind, and she laid her head on the pillow, unable to hold back the sobs. They came loud and in waves. I tried to hold her, to wrap my arms around her, protect her from the world and take away the pain, but I had no defense strong enough. She rolled into a ball and pounded the bed with her fists.

Amanda came running, pulled a syringe from her pocket, and quickly inserted it into Maggie's IV. The medicine hit her veins, and within thirty seconds her eyelids were heavy and her movements slow and incomplete. They'd given her medicine for the pain in her ribs and the stitches in her uterus. But Maggie was teetering on the edge, and only the oblivion of sleep could give Maggie respite from the pain in her heart.

The last words she screamed before the lights went out were unintelligible. Lost in transmission. But while I couldn't understand the words, I understood the emotion.

MAGGIE LEANED AGAINST ME, THE AIR-CONDITIONING cooling our faces as Amos drove us home slowly in his truck. He pulled into our drive and around back, where we climbed out and stood looking at the house. The smell of smoke, burned pine, melted rubber, and soured water met us under the searing heat of the sun.

Maggie couldn't hide her shock. She was too tired to be angry, but that was there, too, just beneath the surface. A blue tarp covered half the roof, the screen door had been torn off, about half the windows were broken, and black smoke scars stained the upper portions of the windows, eaves, and soffits.

She turned and studied the rolling pastures. On one side grew the corn-tall, green, and tasseled out. On the other sat the cotton. She looped her arm inside mine, and we walked toward the rows and finally between them. She chose the cotton, waist-high and gently swathing our legs. Maggie ran her fingers across the tops and then scanned the horizon where the pasture bled into the trees almost a mile away.

In a manner of speaking, cotton is the only flower that blooms twice from the same bud, or "square," as it is technically called. A cotton flower blooms, or opens, only for twentyfour hours, during which time it must be fertilized by a pollen grain to produce the cotton. When the flower opens, it is white; a day later it turns a fleshy pinkish red; and after four or five days, it turns a crispy mauve or purple. At the end of the first week, the petals litter the row in which it grows. Depending on growth conditions, it takes another month or more before the seed capsule, called a boll, develops and opens like popcorn.

Maggie turned, teary and tired. "Did you know that cotton is in the same family as hibiscus?" She pointed without looking toward some shoulder-height bushes planted against the house.

I shook my head.

"When the flower opens, it has exactly twenty-four hours to be fertilized by a single grain of pollen, or there will be no cotton."

I said nothing.

She nodded and picked a fallen flower off the soil. "It's pretty."

I looked at my wife. "Yes."

Maggie walked into the house behind me, followed closely by Amos. She went into the nursery, stood a moment, placed a hand on the crib, and shook her head. Then she walked into our bedroom and stood beneath the tarp where our bed lay. Water dripped off the tarp and splattered about her feet. She took a deep breath, walked back to the doorway, and eased her shoulder under my arm.

"Amos?" She looked around the house, then turned and poked him in the chest. Her voice grew strong and direct. "You catch the people who did this to my house. You hear me?"

Amos nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

He walked out onto the porch, and I laid a watermelon in the back of his truck. "You mind taking this to Vince? I owe him." Amos nodded and pulled out of the drive.

Maggie stood on the porch and looked at me through squinted eyes. "Why do you owe him?"

I retrieved the shotgun and showed her the barrel. She eyed the change, and I didn't need to explain. I held it out. "You remember how?" She palmed the shotgun and slid a shell in the chamber while I placed the smallest of the melons on the grass in the yard.

I eyed the target and then behind it, which was eight hundred yards of corn pasture down to the river.

Maggie shouldered the shotgun, clicked off the safety, and squeezed. The watermelon exploded into a million red and green pieces and sent Blue scurrying under the porch. She ejected the shell, smoke rising from the chamber, handed me the shotgun, and walked toward the barn.

ALTHOUGH I'D OFFERED TO MOVE HER TO A HOTEL, Maggie didn't want anything to do with that. The electricity had been restored, and we still had a phone line and plumbing. I agreed to stay with one stipulation. "You point," I said. "I'll clean."

Knowing she was far too weak to dive into a house renovation, she didn't argue. We walked into the smoke-stained kitchen, and she said, "I'll put on some coffee."

While she filtered through the kitchen, I unlocked the closet, knelt beneath my desk, and pried the board loose with the tip of my knife. I lifted the silver box, opened the lid, and breathed more easily knowing my manuscript, wrapped in a dry plastic bag, lay safely inside. Somehow, being below the house, it had survived.

It took me almost two days to haul out all the wet, burned, or otherwise ruined stuff from our house. I carried everything into a pile out back, and on the second night we lit it and roasted marshmallows.

THE SUMMER BETWEEN MY JUNIOR AND SENIOR YEARS IN high school, Papa let me turn the hayloft into my bedroommy first real foray into independence. We cut in a window, added a wall, stuffed insulation between the studs, put up drywall, carpeted the floor, and inserted an air-conditioning unit that blew both hot and cold air. We found some used furniture at garage sales and a four-poster queen-sized bed that looked as though it had come out of some Russian palace. It didn't fit Digger, but at twenty bucks, it fit my budget. When finished, the room looked a lot like an upscale garage apartment and would probably fetch a goodly sum in some place like New York.

Since Maggie and I had married, I'd used the loft to store stuff, but with the house uninhabitable, I got to work. We moved out the stored stuff-old furniture and boxes-and hung a ceiling fan. We bought a new-used mattress and even bought Blue a new bed and laid it alongside ours. I caulked some of the cracks in the floor and walls, rolled on a fresh coat of paint, laid new carpet, and replaced the ladder with steps.

The bathroom was little more than a thin-walled closet in the corner with just enough room for a toilet, a sink, and one person. I repiped the fittings to the water supply, installed a new wax ring at the base, changed out the flushing mechanism so it'd quit running, and put a 40-watt bulb in the fixture above the sink. Within a couple of days, our one-room flat was livable again.

Granted, it was not our house, but because of the height above the ground, the angle at which it faced the rising sun, and the unobstructed view to the river almost a mile away, it had one feature possessed by few homes anywhere. Each morning, when the sun came up over the river, it would light the pasture in that blueberry haze that occurred as the fog was lifting. It then crawled like a wave across the landscape to the barn, where it climbed up the sides, pierced through the window, and took your breath away.

I had swept the floor and adjusted the bed so Maggie wouldn't miss the sunrise. Below the loft, on ground level, I laid a pallet that allowed for better drainage and dragged Maggie's green garden hose through the window and fitted it with a soaking watering head. I hung a piece of cracked glass on the wall, to show half my face when I shaved. While our morning showers were cool to cold, by late afternoon the sun had heated the hose and provided about five minutes of lukewarm water-which I seldom had a chance to experience, thanks to Maggie.

I didn't really care. If Maggie needed hot water, I'd shower in ice cubes.

During all this, Blue chased something he shouldn't have, stuck his nose too close to its back end, and got sprayed. He then went and rolled in the dirt for about an hour trying to rub out the smell. When he finally made it to the house later that night, he was in a bad way. He came walking slowly up to the barn, dirty as he'd ever been and smelling worse. Even Pinky turned away.

Maggie got one whiff of him and gagged. "Oh my," she said. "Your dog needs you."

I grabbed some dish soap from under the sink and every can of tomato soup I could find out of what used to be the pantry. We cleaned him, then scrubbed the soup into his pores, turning our hands and his skin red. When we finished, he smelled like spaghetti sauce-which was better than the alternative. Midway through the scrubbing, I clipped a clothespin on my nose. Blue spent the next day licking himself and lying across the porch. He was red from head to toe and looked as though someone had played a bad trick on him.

OUR THIRD MORNING HOME, I STOOD IN THE SHOWER, leaning against the post while the water soaked my back. I reached up, cut off the water, and looked at myself in the triangular shape of glass I'd tacked to the wall for a shaving mirror. Pinky was looking at me through the slats in her stall like I'd lost my mind. She was probably right. I eyed a few nicks from a dull razor and settled on the wrinkle that had developed between my eyes.

A car engine startled me. I dried, dressed, walked out into the sun, and was met by a man wearing a suit and tie. He explained that he was with my insurance company. After showing him around the house, he expressed his condolences and wrote me a check for $5,000.

"This will get you started. We can get the other half to you just as soon as I file my report."

"What do you mean, the other half?"

"Well, your particular policy allows for $10,000 in replacement due to theft or fire."

"It does?"

He nodded and continued his explanation. "The police say their investigation is over, that arson is to blame, and that clears us up to get started here."

I thanked him, although I didn't feel very thankful, and told him I'd be in touch, and he drove off. I was headed back into the loft when a second car turned into the drive. This time a lady, maybe midforties, stepped out, wearing a pantsuit and carrying a clipboard.

She reluctantly shook my hand. "Are you Dr. Dylan Styles?"

"Yes, ma'am."