Delicate Edible Birds (17 page)

This was a surprise to you, too. You started and almost dropped me, then filled our new house with your honking laugh, populating it with an invisible skein of ducks, until I had to laugh, also, at your joy.

 

AND THEN, THE DENOUEMENT.
One week and two days after the wedding, you were in your work clothes, crouching in the living room to put in a baseboard over the freshly painted walls. Outside it was raining, of course, but harder than it had rained for the past few months, so thickly we couldn't see out the windows at all. I had squelched through the mud with eight sacks of groceries and had just finished putting them away in our cabinets.

My flu had redoubled: I saw the world through a feverish haze. I hadn't slept in what felt like weeks and had reams of thank-you notes to write, never actually written. Exhausted, I put my head down on the counter and began to cry.

You heard and came in, alarmed. What? you said. What's wrong?

I don't know, I said. I'm just so sad here.

Here? you said, looking around with dismay. In this house?

In this whole goddamn town, I said. I'm so freaking sick of it. I hate it, I hate everything about it. Freaking small-minded people, fat stupid idiots.

You hate everything about this town, Celie?

Everything, I said, savagely. Everything. The stupid grocery store where they don't even have portobello mushrooms. God forbid a freaking mango. God forbid an open mind. Only things they can think about here are sex and hunting and football. I
hate
it here.

You looked at me coldly, jaw tensed and eyes narrowed. I'm so sorry, Ms. Big-shot Storyteller. I guess it's all my fault, you said, huh? Dragging you away from civilization?

I hated the coldness in your voice, what I took to be a sneer on your face.

Yes, it's all your fault, I said. Hurt, I burned to hurt in turn.

And that was it, a petty quarrel when I was soaked and sick and overwhelmed.

You dropped the hammer on the ground, where it made a dent in the floor that's still there; you went outside, leaving the door open to the wickedly driving rain. I couldn't see the truck or hear it pull away, but I felt it. Later, I'd hear that mine had been the last car they'd let over the bridge on my
trip home from the store. After me, the swollen river was too dangerous and they closed it off. I like to think I would have run after you had I remembered the policemen in the orange vests, the sacks of sand they were dragging, that I would have tried to chase down the truck, apologized. But I was sunk in my misery, my flu, my soaking clothes. When I had cried myself out, I stood and shut the door and went into the bedroom and took a long nap, only to awaken to the phone call almost exactly an hour later.

 

A RIDDLE: WHAT HAPPENS
when a lake and a river both overflow their banks, forming a pond where the bridge should be? When an angry man drives too quickly away from his harpy wife, from the house he worked so hard to build for her, when he turns the bend and hits the water and hydroplanes? When the old red truck blasts into the stand of trees and a branch goes through the windshield, through the man's chest; when, at the same time, his head hits first the steering wheel and then the seat back, hard? When, a half hour later, someone comes along and sees the wreck, and pulls the man from the red truck, with the branch still in his chest? When the ambulance arrives the long way, the bridge out, and wails off to the emergency room, and the doctors on staff are so worried about the stake through the lung and the loss of blood that they don't do a CT scan for about eight hours, all the time it takes to extract the branch and bring the hysterical new wife in, and draw enough
blood from the shaken family for a transfusion, for his blood type is hard to match, and there isn't enough in the banks for him; and then, when he's stable, they finally figure out that he is in the deepest sort of coma, a three on the Glasgow Coma Scale, no eye-opening, no response to physical stimulus or verbal cues? What happens when the doctor puts up the results of the CT scan and his eyes narrow and he looks at the ghostly vision of the brain on the screen and claps his hand over his mouth? What would be the most fitting, apt, apposite diagnosis in this set of circumstances? The punch line at the end of the joke for a man at whose wedding a little more than one week earlier it had rained and rained and rained?

The answer: Hydrocephalus, of course.

 

I SAT IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM
with the town around me, your family (father weeping, smelling of roses), your shaken buddies pale and trying to hold it in with whispered jokes and chewing tobacco, your mother blissed out on tranquilizers, my family a protective ring around me. My father was giving me the rundown on hydrocephalus in a whisper, and I was dry and dim and stupid, but drinking it in.

There is a fluid in the brain and spinal cord, my father said, called cerebrospinal fluid, which is constantly created throughout the day. Normally, this can be flushed by the body, but when someone has a hemorrhage that bleeds into the subarachnoid part of the brain, the fluids can't drain, and
so they build up pressure in the ventricles. The pressure can cause damage. The neurosurgeon, as soon as he gets here, is going do a procedure called an endoscopic third ventriculostomy. They put a hole in the ventricle and a shunt in the hole. The shunt drains the pressure. My father paused, and looked at me.

Will he be all right? I said. Will he be the same?

My father blinked rapidly and took off his glasses. He wiped them with his sleeve, and when he put them back on, he took my hand. I don't know, he said, looking away. It's too soon to know.

 

THE NEUROSURGEON DID HIS WORK
late into that first night, until the sky was just turning the viscous gray of yet another rainy day. He was a tiny man who looked the way I thought a priest should look, ashy and stern and ascetic. He took my hand in his small, cool one, and pressed it.

I've done my best, he said. We'll have to wait and see.

I looked through the little porthole and into the scrub room, where the nurses were wearily taking off their paper gowns and hats and masks. You were in there, I knew, tubes perforating your wounded flesh. My hand in the doctor's shook, and I squeezed until I could feel my fingernails press into his soft skin.

Wake him up, I said. Make him wake up.

He patted my cheek with his other little hand, and said, I wish I could, darling. When he pulled away, I could see my
nail marks like little crescent moons in his skin. He flexed the hand I had gripped all the way down the hall. I hoped I had cracked those delicate bones.

 

THE FIRST TWO DAYS
in the hospital I couldn't eat, though people pressed food on me. I put the cups of coffee and doughnuts and apples underneath my chair, and paced some more. I liked the harsh rasp of thirst in my throat, the way that it hurt every time I swallowed. My body soured and whenever I moved the smell would rise up in a wave and wash over me.

When your parents and I were at last allowed to go into the room and see you, I took a step inside and then turned around and around and around in a little circle on the floor. Your mother pushed past me and began a dovelike sobbing,
hoo-ooh-ooh,
sinking into a little chair, and your father walked back out of the room.

I went over to you and took your cold, stiff hand in my own. I kneaded it, staring down at the mass of purple and red and yellow and blue that they said was my husband, at the white bandages and the tubes sucking fluids out of you, putting other fluids in. That first visit I almost said nothing, although the nurse had told us we should talk to you, that it was possible you could hear. We sat there, your mother and I, until the end of the visiting hours.

When we were asked to leave, I leaned close. You didn't smell like yourself; you smelled of gauze and something bit
ter and wet. I said, Damn you, and left that ugly little present in your ear.

 

IN THE MIDST OF EVERYTHING,
I would go outside the hospital and the world would be swollen, juicy, runneling. The sky overhead a warm wet washcloth pressed to my brow, the trees lascivious with wet. Everywhere, the smell of things awakened; the fevered ground, the upswell of mud. Down the hill was the river, the breeding carp pushing against the dam's concrete frame.

I understood in those moments all those surreal ancient stories: water flowing upward from earth to sky, rains of blood, plagues of frogs. Abominations or miracles seemed likely in those hours. In the Canticle of the Sun, Saint Francis of Assisi praises God for water:
Praised be Thou, O Lord, for sister water,
he says,
who is very useful, humble, precious and chaste.
But I would stand there, my head bowed to the rain, eyes closed, braced between each thunk of each fat drop of rain on my skull, each a blow, hard to predict, a punishment.

 

AFTER FOUR DAYS,
no sleep, little food, no showering, no improvement in your condition, I began to see things that didn't exist. Rats scuttling across the floor, gray curtains flapping at the edges of my vision. Infants with your face, beard and all. Many of your friends had returned to their lives, coming to the hospital periodically with grave faces
and comforting things in their hands. I paid no attention to them. I was concentrating, as if listening for music very, very far away, which if I heard it, would make everything all right.

On the evening of the fourth day, my father helped my mother sneak me into the attendings' locker room, where there were showers. I let my mother bathe me, as if I were a little girl, and put lotions on me, and dress me. Her face was pinched and gray; she looked old, I noticed with surprise. I could have done all of this myself, but I was concentrating too hard on the impossibly distant music.

You appeared before me in the murk and cold of my mind, your dark body. Over and over again my hands grasped your arm and I began to pull you upward, airward, skyward, again.

When I was clean it was time to visit. I went in and began to tell stories. I had grown used to this changeling in the bed where my husband should have been, and told him stories he had told me. But I embroidered them, perverted them, willing him to wake up and correct me. The first time he killed a deer, a twelve-point buck. The first time he ever had sex with a girl (Jinny Palmer, on the Fairy Springs docks, in broad daylight). That crazy night in his freshman year in college when those boys did everything they could to get arrested, short of murder or rape, and were never caught.

Did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm? The flicker across the face? The swallow? Did I imagine you would open your eyes and wheeze out, That's not the way it went, not at all? Did I hope you'd be angry when you opened
your eyes and say, You have the story all wrong, Celie, you have it all wrong?

I did. I do.

On the fifth night there was a commotion, running, loud beeping noises. My father was summoned from my side in the waiting room, where he and my mother were spelling each other, and he was gone for quite some time. It was very late and your family was at home, trying to sleep.

When my father came back, his face was red. Oh, honey, he said. I'm so sorry.

Just say it, I said, my voice rough with thirst.

He said, A mistake. Too much drainage. The vesicles collapsed. He's gone. I'm so sorry.

Dead? I said, very calmly.

Oh, said my father, stricken. Oh, honey. Not entirely. But in a way, yes.

 

WHEN YOUR FATHER
heard he roared. He stomped down the corridor, shouting, We're suing, we're suing the goddamned pants off this goddamned hospital, until my brother, home from Boston, slipped a tranquilizer in his iced tea and put him out for a few hours.

When your mother heard, she pulled herself up and nodded, and went out for a walk that lasted four hours. When it grew dark we sent teams out to look for her and one of your friends found her sitting on one of the boulders at the lake, shuddering in the dusky drizzle, and staring at the swollen
water. She was soaked when she came back, and came over to me, lifting her hands like cold wet lumps of paper to my cheeks. She opened her mouth and everyone hushed to hear what she was about to say. But she just breathed and blinked and closed her little mouth again.

 

GRIEF IS
becoming a stranger to oneself. It is always a surprise to see how old, how womanly, one actually is. The crow's-feet by the eyes, the lines by the mouth, how, translucent, a woman's temples bare their tender blue veins to the world. That gold band hanging loose, so much flesh lost over the past few days. Down the empty corridor, ringing with voices and distant sounds of the hospital, steel and mop and rubber shoe. Into the vague green room, thick with shadows that waver like seaweed in the corners.

See the strange woman look around, make sure all are assembled. On the other faces, there is more than fury and sadness. Also a fatigue, a relief. The darkened room. The quiet machines. The sheet pulled over the body that is only flesh, over the bruised face. The turning away.

 

I SEE YOU NOW
just leaving rooms I am in. The hem of your khakis flashing beyond the door frame. The wind in the room still shifting. The smell of you, musk and clove and even the stink of your fatigue when you've come in from a long
day outdoors, hunting or snowmobiling or cross-country skiing; all this, a moment before I turn around.

Is that you? I call, but there's no answer. Just this house still empty of furniture. I turn to my books but can't read. Maybe the telephone rings then and breaks the jangling quiet, or a crow flies past the window with a songbird in its beak; carrion comfort. I hold on to the tiniest of visions for as long as I can, savoring them like the aftertaste of a long-gone cup of tea.

 

OUR DIVER FRIEND,
the one from the wreck and the falling dive buddy, changed his song. He chose an odd moment for it, at the wake, avoiding my eye over the cold cuts (funeral meats, I thought; terrible expression). He grabbed my elbow hard, whispering urgently. I let him. There was a comfort in his wine-tart breath in my ear, and I watched the window as he whispered to me. Outside, it still rained and rained.