Girl Unmoored (28 page)

I nodded. There was no hiding behind this hair, even if it was shorter now.

He started walking down the stairs toward me. “I was pleased to hear everything turned out all right with your grandmother.”

“She’s fine,” I said.

“And you got home with those boys?” he asked, stopping at my pew.

I shrugged. “Chad died.”

“Oh dear,” Reverend Hunter said. And the bees came. I tried to stop the stinging, but there were too many of them.

“May I?” he asked sliding in next to me. I scooted down, letting those drips fall, not even trying to wipe them away. Reverend Hunter clasped his hands in his lap. He smelled like Dunkin’ Donuts.

“You know how you said that it costs a lot to love someone?” I asked quietly.

He looked at me confused for a moment, but then said, “The price we pay. Yes.”

“Well, it seems like God charges some people more.”

“You mean like you and your father?”

I wiped my nose. “And Mike and Chad. They loved each other the best. Better than anyone else around here. And people hated them.”

Reverend Hunter glanced up at the altar. I thought I saw him nod to Jesus before he looked down at his hands again. “I don’t know, Apron. The fact is, tolerance is something we could all use more of.” He looked at me with a small smile. “And sometimes it takes a child to remind us of that.”

“I’m not a child anymore,” I said, clenching my teeth more than I meant to.

He dropped his eyes off me. “Yes. I know that, too. You’ve had to grow up much faster than most of your friends.”

I wanted to tell him that I didn’t have any friends now. Chad and Mike were my last ones. But instead, I looked up.

“Why didn’t he ever save anyone, Reverend Hunter?”

“Jesus?”

I nodded.

“Well he saves all of us, every day, Apron. You, me, your mother, Chad.”

“No, he doesn’t. He couldn’t even save himself.”

“Oh, but he did,” Reverend Hunter said, his voice getting smooth and preachy. “He overcame his fear. By not resisting death, he showed us how to overcome our own fears and choose the opposite.”

“What’s that?”

“Love. The opposite of fear is love, and every minute of every day, we choose between the two.”

It was kind of the same as my free verse poem.

“So how come we always have to see him up there? Stuck like that.”

“Oh, he came down, Apron,” Reverend Hunter said sounding worried that I didn’t know that.

I looked over at him.

“Yes,” he nodded at me. “Look at all these pictures of Jesus back in Heaven.” Reverend Hunter gestured around to the stained glass windows, some high and some low.

“You mean that’s him
after
?” I squinted at the pictures of Jesus with rosy cheeks and thorny crowns, smiling and holding his hands out to people, offering things.

“Yes, Apron,” Reverend Hunter said, surprised. “Maybe you could ask your grandmother to bring you to Sunday School. We have an excellent one you know, for chil-,
young ladies
just your age.”

He looked at his watch and stood.

“Come next weekend, Apron. We’ll talk about it more. I’m sorry about your friend. And your mother, of course.”

I waved and watched him go, then went back to looking around at all the Jesuses up on the walls and inside those windows—everywhere. And each one of them looking just like Mike.

The rain started after I had biked all the way up to Route 88 and back, twice.
Chad and Mike’s going-away party was tomorrow and M still wasn’t home.

I put on my raincoat and walked down to the rocks to watch Sea Glass Cave disappear under the high tide right before my eyes. Every once in a while, it smelled like seaweed left out of the icebox for too long. I picked up a few clam shells on the way back, which I had started putting around my new rose bush.

I was laying down the thirteenth one, upside down so they looked like white stones, when I heard the phone ring. I stood, but stopped when the ring cut off. My dad had been at his lobster reading the paper the last time I saw him.

And then, just when I took a step back to count how many more shells I was going to need to finish the circle, the screen door slammed shut.

“Apron,” my dad said at the top of the porch stairs. “We have to go.”

“Where?” I asked looking up at him, drops of rain stinging my eyes.

“To the hospital. Margie’s in labor.”

I looked at the unfinished circle and tried to think. She wasn’t having that little whatever until the end of September. I looked up at my dad. “But I’m not even back in school yet.”

“I know. But something’s happened and I need you.”

I waited for him to tell me
why
he needed me. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “Now, Apron,” and started down the stairs. Light raindrops landed on top of his red head and stayed there like tiny bubbles. “
Right
now.”

Things moved fast when we got into the hospital. My dad led me straight into the elevator. Everywhere, people were walking fast, squeaking loudly on the wet floor. The elevator was full of people, all of them taller than me, except one: a little boy with no hair, and no raincoat on either.

I smiled at the boy, but he was too busy speeding his plastic lobster boat up and down the wall. So I hoped he had Nurse Silvia for a nurse and looked away.

When the elevator stopped on the seventh floor, my dad nudged me and we stepped off. I pulled my hood down and looked around, but my dad was already walking.

I ran after him until we came to a set of doors that I had never seen before.
Maternity
it said on the wall. All this time, I hadn’t realized that babies were being born right above my mom. Maybe, if I had listened hard enough, I might have heard a cry.

My dad pulled open the door and we walked in. Pictures of babies in duck shirts and fancy hats, smiling big and wet, were everywhere. In between them, the walls were painted with storks, bags hanging from their beaks. After a few more corners, my dad walked to the nurse station and leaned over it, whispering to a nurse back there.

“Apron,” someone said from the other side of the room. Nurse Silvia. She wasn’t in her nurse uniform, just some plain black pants and a light brown shirt. She stood and walked over to me. I hadn’t seen her since M’s wedding day.

“Hi,” she said. Her lips were shellacked with brown lip gloss.

“Hi.”

Two men were sitting together a few seats down reading magazines and another man was lying across a row of chairs with a sweater over his head. I looked at my dad. His arms were moving around while he talked. Then he groaned and stepped back and a nurse with gray hair stood up. I didn’t recognize her. “She doesn’t want you in there, Mr. Bramhall. I’m sorry,” the nurse said with her arms crossed.

“It’s
my
baby,” my dad said.

“I understand that, Mr. Bramhall,” the nurse said dropping her arms. “We’re trying to help you
keep
that baby of yours.”

My dad stood still for a second, but then took off to the right, around the nurse station and in through some doors. I started running after him, but Nurse Silvia grabbed my arm. “You can’t go back there,” she said.

I turned my burning face to her. “Why, because I’m a
kid
?”

“No,” she said looking at me with her soft brown eyes. “She doesn’t want anyone in there, not even your father.” Nurse Silvia spoke English so much better than M that I had to keep reminding myself she was from Brazil.

“What happened?” I asked.

Nurse Silvia looked over to the door where my dad had disappeared and then back to me. “They need to get the baby out right away.”

“Why?”

“Come,” Nurse Silvia said waving me toward the chairs where she had been sitting. They were just as scratchy as they had been before, one floor down.

She started from the beginning, quietly, so no one else would hear: M had been away with Suzanna, visiting one of their nurse friends in Vermont who was going to rotate with Suzanna at the end of the month.

“Are you leaving, too?” For some reason I didn’t want her to say yes.

“I’m not sure yet,” she said looking down. I looked down, too. You could tell there used to be bright orange and yellow half-circles woven into the rug once, but now they were mostly just different colors of gray, faded like Mrs. Weller’s slippers.

But anyway, Nurse Silvia said, this morning, Suzanna heard a crash and a moan and when she went to check on M, she found her on the floor holding her bump, a chair knocked over next to her on the floor.

“A moan?” I asked, pulling away from her. “Like a cat?”

“I don’t know that, Apron,” Nurse Silvia said.

But I did.

“All I know,” she continued, “is that Marguerite told Suzanna she had tripped over a chair on the way to the bathroom, but was fine. Then driving home, Marguerite started cramping and by the time they got back to Portland, Marguerite couldn’t even sit up so Suzanna brought her here. And now she needs to have the baby right away.”

“How did my dad find out?”

Nurse Silvia crossed her legs and looked down at her lap. “I called him.”

I smiled at her, but she didn’t see me.

And then my dad came back out through those doors with another nurse, this one short and fat, but nicer looking than the gray-haired one. They stopped and Nurse Silvia and I both turned in our seats to watch them.

“Because, Mr. Bramhall. It’s too risky. The baby’s already in distress,” the nurse said. She wasn’t as nice as she looked.

“But it’s my
right
.”

The two men looked up from their magazines when he said that. And then listened while the nurse told him that, no, actually, it
wasn’t
his right.

“Look,” she said. “I understand your position, Mr. Bramhall. But you’re
not
coming in. Doctor’s orders.”

The nurse turned and disappeared through the doors again. My dad stayed looking at the wall, clenching his teeth. I locked down my stomach because whenever his freckles popped out like that, something was going to happen.

As fast as lightning, my dad slammed his fist against the wall hard enough for a picture of a pudgy face with a wet smile to fall off and crash on the rug. Nurse Silvia squeaked in her seat next to me. And out the corner of my eye, I saw that sleeping man’s head spring up, the sweater halfway off his face. But I stayed exactly where I was. Even after my dad dropped his forehead onto the wall and breathed and then picked up that frame and hung it up again, I didn’t move a muscle. Not even the tiniest ones that were connected to my blink.

After he turned away from the picture, he put the hand he used to slam the wall with in his pocket and looked over at us. He took a few steps, then stopped. “I’m going to take a walk around the block,” he said, to all of us—even the two men sitting together and the one man sitting up with the sweater on his chest now. He nodded a
stay put
look to me. I nodded back.

A little later, after the two magazine-reading men had been waved in through the doors by a happy blond nurse, and Nurse Silvia had gone down to Pediatrics before her shift started and brought me back a puzzle to work on, my dad returned with his newspaper and some french fries and a lemonade for me.

“Anyone come out for us?” he asked, looking down at me on the floor, sitting in a middle split with almost the whole world between my legs. Hawaii and most of Russia were missing and when I figured out where Brazil was, I threw those pieces back into the box. “No,” I shook my head, watching him sit. I thought I was still too sad about Chad to eat, but after the first speck of salt exploded onto my tongue, I didn’t stop chewing until the paper box was empty.

Finally, when my legs felt like they had grown roots, the nice-looking mean nurse came out of the doors and walked up to us.