The Half Brother (32 page)

May laughed a shaky laugh. “Fending off Celia Paxton,” she said.

“It’s her dream! And Minnie’s! Every girl’s! After this they’re all going to say ‘We slept with Mr. Satterthwaite.’ It will be the high point of the year. Right, Mom?” I drew my chair closer to Anita’s bed and reached out and stroked her forehead. “Right?” It was strange to get no response. Her presence was still so strong; I felt it; so how could she also be turning into an object? “Nicky’s at school, Mom. He’s snowed in. Up here. Up north. He’s got teenaged girls all over him, Mom. It’s a panic. He’ll tell us all about it.”

“Charlie,” May said.

I kept stroking. With one hand. Wiped my eyes with another. “I know,” I said. But of course I didn’t.

I HAD SENT MAY
to go rest, on the sofa in front of the fire. I dozed off in the chair next to Anita’s bed, listening even in my sleep for the continuing, irregular breaths. When, in the middle of the night, I jerked awake, I thought it was because of Anita: she was silent; I felt my heart begin to seize in my chest—and then a long rattling breath came. Then another. They had changed, become more guttural. Gradually I realized I was also freezing. The lamp I had left on wasn’t on, and the red numbers on the digital clock had gone dark.

The stairs creaked and then May was at the door, or a shape something like her, wrapped in a blanket. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I fell asleep.”

“You were supposed to. I did too.”

“Has the power been out long?”

“I don’t know.” There was another rattle from Anita’s bed. “I think this just started.”

We listened to two more breaths. They were impossibly far apart.

“It’s so cold,” May said. “She needs more blankets.” She unwrapped the blanket from herself and spread it on the diminished shape of my mother.

In the dark I gathered up all the bedding I had from the other bedrooms and brought it to May, and then felt my way downstairs. In the kitchen I found the flashlight and checked my watch: only midnight. Wasn’t there some theory, some statistic, about when people were most likely to die? Wasn’t it the middle of the night? I gathered up candles and flashlights, took them upstairs, and then came back down to stoke the fire. It had nearly gone out while May had been sleeping.

May on the couch behind me.

I crumpled newspaper, shoved it under the grate. Stacked wood over kindling and fatwood. The fatwood caught and the dry wood blazed up, and I sat on my heels, watching the flames, just a moment, just a
moment, conscious I was playing hooky, May was upstairs, May—I didn’t know if it was the dark or the deep unfamiliar cold, or being interrupted in fitful sleep, or the hours of crisis that had settled down into a waking dream, but absolutes were dissolving in my head and when I heard the stairs behind me creak my heart leapt.
Ah she is walking into the room
. No.

“Charlie,” she said softly, as though over a great distance. “It’s too cold. I think we need to move her.”

“Yes. That’s a good idea.” I prayed she couldn’t feel the air around me trembling.

“I’ll make up the sofa.”

“Help me move it first.”

I dragged the coffee table out of the way and then, wordlessly, we each took an end and pivoted it ninety degrees, until it was parallel to the fire.

Then I went to carry my mother downstairs.

May had just changed her. The room smelled of baby wipes and air freshener and the sick undercurrent of waste, and the scent seemed stronger in the dark. The candles on the bedside table made tall shadows. I folded back the thick layer of blankets, then realized I was on the wrong side and went around to the other side of the bed—because I had to have the shorter leg closer to me, the longer leg bent over my arm, for balance. I remembered how easily Nick had lifted her, when he had to. How she had looked at him with that fleeting wonder before stoicism had overtaken her face.

May said, “Are you all right?”

She meant logistically. Engineering-ly. We had become only practical: move from point A to point B. “You should spot me,” I said. “On the stairs.” The stair chair wouldn’t work without power.

I heaved Anita up into my arms. In these situations you’re supposed to say someone is no heavier than a child; but I wasn’t in the habit of carrying people of any size around. Calmly, however, I readjusted her. Her head lolled back; May reached forward and propped it against my shoulder. On the stairs, she backed down in front of me. Such caution. I was carrying remnants, pure need. Comfort—warmth—was all we
could give to my mother and we approached the arrangements now with the urgency of a military operation. I crept down one step at a time. “May. Hold on.”

She was holding the flashlight above us, looking only at Anita’s blank face. She reached out and grasped the banister. “I am.”

May had made up the sofa with sheets and blankets and a waterproof pad. Anita the nurse would have approved. We laid her down and May tucked her in, tucked all around, slid another pillow under her head. We had candles on the mantel and we each had a flashlight, but in the wavering shadows I couldn’t tell if my mother’s hands were blue or not. They were cold, but everything was cold. She drew another rattling breath.

The fire was going well but still I added more wood, and it roared up, a column of flame into the chimney.

May sat on the floor at Anita’s feet and I sat at her head. One side of my face tightened from the heat of the fire, but all around us, I could feel the wall of cold from the rest of the house. Snow had drifted up the windows. The floor was hard and after another minute I went upstairs and wrestled a twin-size mattress off the guest room bed and brought it down, and we wedged it between the fireplace and the sofa. We each huddled at an end. May leaned her head against the side of the sofa. “You should sleep,” I said.

“I’m all right.”

“Stretch out. There’s another pillow.”

She hesitated, then unfolded herself onto the mattress, wrapped the blankets around her again.

“I’m sorry you have to go through this,” I said.

“Please don’t say that again,” May said. “I am so glad I’m here.”

I had no answer for that, nothing that could be said aloud.

For a long time the only sound was the fire crackling. Then May said, “Charlie, do you think your parents were actually married?”

I waited a long time to answer. “I only know what Anita told me,” I finally said.

Her voice was dreamy. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mind. What did she say?”

“She was just telling me about when she came to Atlanta, after he’d
died, and when she was interviewing for a job, and I just got a feeling. How she said the supervisor was looking at her hand, and how she was glad she had a ring. How she was asking about her family.”

“She had a ring,” I said. “I remember it.”

“Oh.” She was on the edge of sleep.

THE NURSE SUPERVISOR
who hired her was named Ann Fusco. Anita never forgot her name.

Ann Fusco asked who was going to watch the baby when it came. Anita said she’d put an ad in the paper to find someone. She said it as confidently as she could. “Don’t you have family?” Ann Fusco said.

“No ma’am.”

Miss Fusco did not look skeptical; she just looked, and did not stop. “They’re back home,” Anita said. “They didn’t want me to marry my husband.”

“I see. I’ll ask around for you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“You know you will not be paid while you’re gone.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have savings.”

Preston’s check. “Yes.”

“What is your family, Mrs. Garrett?”

It took Anita a moment to understand the question. “Just my grandparents,” she said.

“They raised you? I see.” Ann Fusco’s eyes flicked to Anita’s ring finger and back. Although the look was quick, it wasn’t hidden. Anita looked down at her hand; the gold band gleamed dully. It was surprising how many wedding bands you could find at a pawnshop. If you attached each ring to a person, to a family, it was heartbreaking. If you let yourself think that way.

“You know you don’t have to keep the child,” Miss Fusco said.

“Yes, ma’am. I know.”

The supervisor considered her for a moment. “I don’t mean to sound cold.”

Anita shook her head, mutely.

“You also know, Mrs. Garrett, better than many, that things can happen to a woman giving birth.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I want you to write a letter to your grandparents and give it to me. Sealed, of course. I will only mail it if absolutely necessary.”

Anita had known Ann Fusco for a week. She had met with her once before, and when she’d seen Miss Fusco taking note of her thick waist, she’d thought that would be the end of it, but here she was. She knew no one to ask about Miss Fusco. She had only her own instincts.

Ann Fusco’s rather plain, middle-aged face was neither smiling nor judgmental nor superior nor kind. It was simply, utterly fair.

“Yes, ma’am,” Anita said.

“All right then.”

Anita wrote the letter and on her first day of work she put it in Miss Fusco’s box at the nurses’ station. They did not speak of it again.

I GOT UP
to stoke the fire. I fell asleep and woke to May murmuring to me, or my mother. May fell asleep and I talked to Anita, feeling shy, finding nothing much to say beyond
Mama, Mama, it’s me. It’s Charlie. It’s okay
. Sometimes I said,
Nicky is coming. Nicky is on his way
. I said,
I’m sorry it’s cold. You’re here with me. We’re together
, I said.
Mama. It’s Charlie
.

Sometimes I sensed impatience, and who could blame her? She was all unconscious forbearance. I thought each of her breaths was her last and then, an agonizing five, ten, fifteen seconds later, another would come. How laborious it was to shut oneself down.

I would fade into strange dreams and then start to full consciousness, and everything would be the same: glowing fire, agonal breaths, cold, May in miraculous, dangerous proximity.

And then finally I woke and it was light, almost blinding through the windows: the sun was shining on the snow outside. The storm was over.

May was asleep and I looked over at my mother and she was breathing, regularly, her chest going up and down, a gentle tidal sound again, waves plashing at sunrise. I watched her hard, finally reached over
and touched her. Still warm. I was so confused. I felt the night hadn’t happened. Maybe I’d missed a miracle—but no, her leg was still gone, she was still unconscious, still dying, and so I stood up and reanchored myself to the world. Mother, house, death, May; sun, snow, cold. Morning. No Nick. I put more wood on the fire and went to boil water on the gas stove for coffee. I felt an unaccountable, shameful sense of letdown.

Then I began to dig us out. I shoveled the front stairs and the walk and dug out my car—more useful than May’s, since it had four-wheel drive. I stared hopelessly down the driveway and then began digging again. There was no way of getting out, no way to clear the entire thing. We were marooned, we were good and fucked, no question about it, but I was in such a fog of sleeplessness and upset that I kept digging, because there was nothing else to do.

Soon I’d go in to check on Anita—to check on the ladies, I thought. Dear Lord. I was getting used to having a dying mother in my house. Was that possible? Could this keep going on and on? How long? But it seemed nothing would ever change; I was lodged quite firmly and with a weird equanimity in the present and nowhere else. I was worried only about the cold. Nick only every few minutes. I would forget about him and then look up at the slightest sound, realizing I’d never forgotten about him at all—expecting to see his car miraculously slipping down the driveway, or maybe Nick on foot, on snowshoes acquired who knows where, and he would fling an arm in the air in greeting,
Heigh-ho!
And we would all be together, and somehow Anita would know. Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord. The silent agitation, the waiting, would float away, the room would be filled with peace. He would have had his whole crazy journey to reconcile himself; he would just be glad he’d made it in time. And we would be together.

As the sun rose through the trees I grunted and sweated and watched for him. But there was no striding figure. No car.

When I went back up the steps May was waiting for me, just inside the front door; she’d seen me coming. My heart clenched but she said, “She’s the same. Come inside and rest.”

“We have to get Nick.”

“I know. I’ll go.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. I waved out at the mountains of snow. “You can’t go out in that.”

“Neither can you,” she said, and her voice quavered up, nearly out of control.

“May.”

“What has
happened to him
!”

“He’s stuck just like we are.”

“He won’t be able to stand it! He needs to get here in time! If he doesn’t—he—”

It was as if the night had never happened. She had forgotten all our calm, all my excuses for him; her panic was fresh. I hugged her. I knew she was right; I had no words of comfort. Nick
would
fall apart. He
would
disintegrate. “May, you’re so cold. It’s so cold in here.”

“I’m okay.”

“Go shovel. Look, I’m sweating. It will warm you up. You can’t just keep sitting. I’ll stay with her. I should anyway. I need to.”

May nodded and turned away, not looking at me.

She suited up and went outside and I went and sat on the mattress on the floor next to my mother. “Wood’s getting low,” I said. “I’ll have to go get some more.”

Silence, of course.

I didn’t like the daylight. I wanted night to come back. It had felt holier. My mother’s chest moved gently up and down. Every now and then the urge to speak came over me but I tamped it down: it was just fear. Ordinary fear of the extraordinary. If death could be called extraordinary—which, of course, it could not. There was nothing more mundane, more of the world, than leaving it.

As I sat there with my mother as she lingered, endlessly, on the threshold, I gradually began to realize her presence was changing, that what emanated from my mother and filled the room was an agitated impatience. This was why May was upset. She had felt it too. Gradually it overtook the holiness, the peace. It roiled it up. It became a wind, and then nearly a gale, roaring about my ears, urging me in some direction I could not identify.
I can’t go with you. I don’t know what you want
. I didn’t say it aloud.