The Penny (19 page)
W
hen we neared Garland’s room, I turned to Miss Shaw to see if she’d come inside with me, but she was already nixing the idea.
“You go on,” she said, giving me a fresh dose of encouragement that she must have known I needed. “I’ll wait right here.”
Still, I hesitated.
“Go on, Jenny Blake. This is a time for family.”
“But I’m not—”
“Not what?” she inquired. “Not family? Maureen called you, didn’t she?” I’d shared parts of Garland’s story with her on our way up the elevator and along the unending hallways. Now that we’d found the right hospital wing, Miss Shaw hung back and inclined her head briefly, which meant
keep on going.
“Why don’t you step inside there and find out?”
“You sure?”
She shot me a bright smile that made her more beautiful than I’d ever seen her. “I’ll be right here.” She slapped the seat of a plastic couch beside the wall. “Right
here
.”
My lone footsteps resounded to the end of the corridor and back, although I tried to keep my loafers silent. I read the names posted beside each doorway, trying to remember where the nurse told me Garland would be.
The hushed voices of the members of Antioch Baptist Church created a warm hum in the quiet hospital. As I rounded a corner and ran into the full gathering, I felt unworthy to come closer. Sure, they’d let me step inside their church with Aurelia and listen to the message about the Holy Ghost and receive Jesus, but this was a whole different, personal,
exclusive
matter. Some folks sat against the wall staring at nothing. Others chatted just the same as if they’d been at a Sunday picnic. Most were teary, dabbing at their eyes with wadded Kleenex.
Two ladies hung onto each other and prayed. The men gathered in their own tight group, their weight shifting from one hip to the other when they got uncomfortable, their conversation coming and going like a string of rainstorms, words pouring down, letting up when there was nothing left to say. Somebody was handing out egg-salad sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. It seemed like, no matter what else went on in the world, there was always somebody ready to eat.
Now that I knew so much about Miss Shaw, I understood that there were two sorts of living: one where you ran away from things that hurt too much to look at, and one where you looked at those hurtful things and kept right on going forward anyway. God’s willing to show you your own heart if you want to see it. God’s willing to take hold of what’s there and fix you up when you’re ready. Every trek starts with putting one foot in front of the other, just one stride at a time. The moment I took my first step toward those strangers, that’s when I found the first familiar person in the crowd.
He stood square-shouldered, and his eyes, the clear-shine color of maple syrup, drew me like a beacon. I recognized him by his hair parted on the side and his sizeable nose and the curls overlapping his collar and the way he held his hand toward me. He wasn’t wearing his satin stole or his robe, but he stood out just the same. He was the one who’d first started telling me Jesus stories. Reverend Monroe.
“Garland’s been asking for you, girl. Maureen said you’d come if you were able to.”
I waited for him to say something like,
That’s why we want you around here. She told me what you done. She told me you made them stop all that rocking.
I was all ready to answer,
But I didn’t stop it. And even if I did, I didn’t stop it soon enough. You should’ve seen me shoving and pushing the portable alongside the rest of them.
But Reverend Monroe mentioned nothing about my presence being wanted because of something I had done. I waited for it, but it never came.
Finally I asked, “Is he in there?”
“Yes.” Reverend Monroe gave me a nod. “You go right on in.” Then, “We’re mighty glad to see you, Jenny—mighty glad. My, but the Crocketts love you, child.”
People stepped aside and left me a path to the door. As I went forward, I couldn’t help overhearing the whispers:
Haven’t told the boy how bad it is in his head. . . . Lord, have mercy. . . . He’s just this side of death. They think he’ll pass before morning.
I smelled Aunt Maureen’s sweet hair gel before I saw her. Next thing I knew, she’d enveloped me in her arms, and Darnell straightened up where he’d been leaning against the wall and Eddie stood near the bed with his empty shirtsleeve tucked into his pocket. Looking at Eddie’s empty shirtsleeve, I thought how it didn’t seem fair, some people didn’t do anything to deserve difficulties and they raked in more trouble than they could bear.
“You find yourself a place with us,” Eddie directed. “Get over there close to Garland so he can see you.” It swept me up in such a feeling of
belonging,
their welcoming me to suffer this with them. Looking at the glad reception on their faces, I began to understand love.
Garland sat cross-legged in the center of the bed. He wouldn’t lean against the pillows even when you told him to. The doctor had wound white gauze around Garland’s head, so thick it looked like a turban. On top of that, someone had taped an ice pack to the side of his head. His skin was dark chocolate against all that white gauze and bed linen. His hand against his knee was only about as big around as a dogwood leaf. Garland took one look at me and said, “You didn’t tell me there was a big spear sticking out of my head.”
“Nope.”
“Aurelia didn’t tell me, either.”
I told him no, she sure didn’t.
Garland said, “You didn’t have to worry. You were holding my hand. I wasn’t scared.”
When the nurse came in to check something with Aunt Maureen and Eddie, Garland spoke under his breath so nobody but me could hear.
“Everybody’s trying to keep me from knowing it, but I do. Something in my head got rattled.”
“You just don’t listen to what they say.”
“They don’t think I got it figured out,” he said in a whisper. “They don’t think I know what’s going on.”
Later on, someone would tell me that the metal windowsill didn’t have much to do with Garland’s problem. The wound bled plenty when the doctor pulled out the lance, but the metal had only nicked an outer layer of bone from Garland’s skull. He didn’t have a concussion, either, which was a miracle after all that shaking around. It was a blood vessel that had burst, but no matter how much ice they packed on his head, it wouldn’t clot up. A boy’s brain can only function so long, being flooded with blood like that.
“Aurelia’s scared,” he told me. “She’s scared of losing you. You got to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
I glanced across at Aurelia. Aunt Maureen and Eddie Crockett and Darnell were putting up a much better front than she was. Of all the Crocketts, Aurelia looked the most wrung-out and afraid. She kept turning away so Garland wouldn’t see her crying.
When Garland winced sharp and threw up, Aunt Maureen held up a pan he could get sick into.
“Promise me Aurelia won’t lose you,” he said, grabbing on to my hand again while Aunt Maureen wiped his face with a towel.
“You just get better.” I told him I’d promise him anything.
Miss Shaw once told me that God still works miracles today the same way we read about in the Bible. I lived in a house where I longed for the miracle of Daddy’s never coming to my bedroom. But I had not seen any of the miracles Reverend Monroe had talked about yet. That night at the hospital, while Garland drifted in and out and I fought to keep my eyes open, Miss Shaw came to find me and insisted I stretch out so I could rest. (“I don’t need to rest,” I argued. “I can sleep the rest of the week. I need to be with Garland.”) She told me she’d phone my parents and tell them where we were so they wouldn’t worry.
I remembered the shredded cord, the telephone’s clattering faceplate. “I don’t think we have a phone,” I told her.
But Miss Shaw managed it. After asking the names of the families in our flat, she got the Shipleys to relay the message.
She claimed a corner of the couch in a hallway waiting area and let me get comfortable in her lap. I drifted in and out, expecting any minute to see Daddy burst through the doors that had a sign reading QUIET PLEASE. Expecting him to grab me up by the collarbone, shaking me and shouting, “What do you think you’re doing, trying to get away from me? What do you think you’re doing, trying to get away from me, just like your sister did? You think I’d let that happen again?”
But as the night wore on, I drifted to the gentle melody of someone singing outside Garland’s door, the wordless tune of some hymn I didn’t know but would never forget. At one point in the night, I awoke to find Miss Shaw sitting over me, her bare fingers stroking my hair, her eyes seeing beyond the window behind the nurse’s station. Who knew what she could be thinking of? I woke later to find her chin planted forward and her eyes closed, her snores as soft as cotton, but snores just the same. A strand of hair had escaped from her salon coiffure and fell limply beside her jaw.
Her hand lay beside my cheek, and I examined it, the scars from her burns stretching red and fiery and tight along her fingerbones, as if the heat had caused her skin to shrink. I did not stop to think; I was too sleepy. I only remember pulling her hand to me, floating off again, her cool, rough touch a pillow beneath my ear.
I moseyed in and out of dreams. As I unfolded my legs and dimly noticed the ache in my hip, I realized what the wakeful hours of the night could best be used for. I prayed as hard for Garland to live as I had ever prayed for Daddy to stop hitting me. I prayed for Jesus to touch Garland’s head and make the broken pieces join up. I’d jerk awake and realize that sleep had made me abandon my post, and I’d start to have it out with Jesus about Garland all over again.
You have no right,
a dark voice warned me.
What makes you think your praying makes a difference when there are thirty others down the hall who’d be better at it than you are? What makes you think God will listen when your own life’s so dirtied up that you haven’t found your way out yet?
I shoved that voice aside and kept right on going.
The next thing I knew, Eddie Crockett jiggled my shoulder. I lifted my head to see Miss Shaw doing her best to smooth down her disheveled hairdo.
“Jenny,” Eddie whispered. “Sweet Jenny, you better come around.”
It was still dark outside the hospital window, too early for anything good. At first, I felt guilty because I’d been carried away from my prayer duty by sleep. I shot up fast and asked, “Was it . . . ? Did he . . . ?” Then, “Where’s Garland?”
“Garland’s right here,” Eddie said carefully, as if merely looking at Garland might give me a fright. And he
was
there. He was sitting in a wheelchair in his pajamas with his head unwrapped and his favorite blanket balled inside his arms. A nurse rolled Garland in the chair. Aunt Maureen toted her travel case like they were all planning on going somewhere.
I scrubbed my eyes. “What?”
“They’re all gone,” he said. “Reverend Monroe said to tell you it would please him no end if he had a chance to see you next Sunday at church.”
“All those people left? Why did they go? I don’t—”
Aunt Maureen propped her bag beside me. Darnell spoke with slow emphasis, obviously impatient.
“We’re . . . going . . . home.”
Eddie said, “They don’t know what made his head stop bleeding. They don’t know why Garland’s brain absorbed all the blood on its own. But it did. All they know is there’s no reason for our Garland to be taking up space in a hospital bed anymore.”
“Jenny.” Aurelia’s words finally made the truth sink in. “The doctors don’t understand it, either. But he’s going to be okay.”
He’s going to be okay.
I hadn’t realized I had a crushing weight in my chest until it broke free and lifted. Relief washed over me. The thought of something being okay for a change, the thought of something being
miraculous,
being
good,
left me feeling dizzy. And it was
Garland
. I had to remind myself over and over again that it was true.
Garland’s going to be okay.
After we all hugged each other good-bye and Miss Shaw and I headed out to climb into the convertible again, morning was just starting to tinge the St. Louis sky with a first hint of radiance. I kept whispering over and over to Jesus,
Thank you for Garland. Thank you. Thank you.
In every tree, the sparrows were setting out to sing the world awake.
“I’ll get you home,” Miss Shaw said, “but maybe you shouldn’t try to sit through a school day. You must be exhausted. I don’t see how you could possibly make it through.”
I knew she was trying to be nice, but it didn’t make any difference. I’d have to get through the day in the way Daddy insisted, no matter what the night before had held. I glanced at Miss Shaw, praying that she’d never know how Daddy would punish me in spite of the phone calls she’d made and the messages she’d gotten the neighbors to deliver.
My mind searched for a change of subject. I couldn’t help myself. “You were snoring,” I said.
“Me? Snoring?” She shook her head at me like I was crazy and touched her chest in feigned horror. “I don’t snore.”
She had donned her gloves again, and her elegant little hat, which I guess she always wore when she ventured out into the fashion realm.
“I’m too much of a lady to snore.”
I laughed. “Don’t worry.” I gave her a slight hug of appreciation. “Some things I’ll never tell.”
You’d think by now I could turn off my ears and not listen to the things Daddy said about me. But of all the men alive on earth, he was the one who had given me life. Of all the words flung toward my heart, his were the ones I had taken for truth from the beginning.
When the police came and set the portable school building aright before the movers hauled it away, the outside looked almost untouched except for the few panels of corrugated metal that had been pried loose. Only a few wrinkles remained on the outside to show that the place had been in danger of collapsing in on itself. The damage was mostly on the inside, sort of like me.