(2006) When Crickets Cry (31 page)

Cindy sniffled and said, "Good night," and Annie protested, "But you didn't finish."

"Sometimes, you say all that needs saying. Now, good night, and go to sleep."

Cindy walked out Annie's bedroom door, and I set the monitor down. She met me at the front door, and I saw that she'd been crying. She looked embarrassed. "Sometimes that kid prays the darnedest things."

I nodded and walked out the door.

She tugged on my shirtsleeve and stopped me. "Can I ask you something?"

My mouth and my heart had two competing reactions, but my mouth spoke before my heart could stop it. "Sure."

"Dr. Morgan called today, said he wants to run another test on Annie sometime next week. She'll have to be sedated. We'll probably be in the hospital most of the day, and I was wondering if ..."

I stopped her. "Yes." My answer sounded harsh, almost medical. I softened. "Sure. I can drive. When?"

"I'm not sure. Can I let you know?"

I nodded and walked toward the car. "Good night."

She walked up behind me again and put her hand on my shoulder. When I turned, she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. But it was a double kiss. The first part landed on my cheek, and the second part landed more on the corner of my mouth. "Thank you for today," she said.

"It was noth-" I started.

But she put her hand to my lips and said, "It was everything to that little girl in there, and because of that, it was much more than nothing. Both ... to her and to me. Thank you, Reese."

I nodded again. "'Night."

Charlie and I started out the drive. We didn't get too far before he decided to get in his two cents' worth. "Those baby monitors really are something, aren't they?" He turned a bit in his seat and adjusted his seat belt. "They seem to pick up every little sound and ... man! They can project too."

I just shook my head. "You don't miss much, do you?"

"When it comes to sound, no, I don't."

"I'll say. That's bionic."

Charlie turned, smiled toward me, and said, "I'll trade you."

We drove for a moment in silence, a few winding uphill turns followed by a short downhill and then a long uphill straightaway. The Suburban downshifted into low gear and began making a grinding climb. When the road leveled, I pulled off to the side.

"Charlie," I said, wrestling our past and looking for the words, "if I could give you my eyes, I would."

Charlie sat a moment, his thumbs climbing over and diving under each other. "I don't want your eyes," he said, his face pointed out the front window, "but you could use my ears."

When I climbed into bed somewhere after midnight, I replayed the day in my mind. Charlie had been unusually quiet, which, once again, told me more than his speech, and Termite had enjoyed himself-I think even letting the rest of its cast anchor somewhere near his island. Somewhere in there, I realized we had not gone fishing. Somehow the time had passed without my worrying about it.

Trapped in their mesh tube on the porch, the crickets chirped up and sounded like a freight train sawing through the floor of the living room. I carried the wire tube outside, slid off the lid, and watched each one jump to freedom. Within seconds, the cage was empty. I returned to my bed, closed my eyes, and listened. They hadn't gone too far.

he outskirts of the lake, away from all the tubers, kneeboarders, and skiers, lay peaceful against a backdrop of hilltops and cemeteries. A century ago, when people learned that Burton was to be drowned beneath some hundred feet of water, the locals began burying their loved ones atop the hillsides, where the edges of what would become Lake Burton would never reach them. Others dug up those who had been buried and moved their thin boxes with mules and wagons. Confederate soldiers, kids wiped out from some epidemic, women who died in childbirth, all re-laid to rest in the cool air and sunshine along the ridges.

As a result, the current developing sprawl had grown up around and now encircled most of the cemeteries, making it difficult to drive around the lake-in either boat or car-without passing half a dozen graveyards. I turned the boat lazily, following my curiosity, and everywhere I went, the ducks seemed to find me. The glassy green water spilled off the sides of the cutwater like the drips off the magnolia leaves that hung over the porch where I grew tip.

When Emma and I were thirteen, I once asked her mom if I could take her roller-skating.

Miss Nadine put her hand on her hip, looked out through the kitchen window where Charlie was shooting bad guys from the crow's nest of his fort, and then put her finger to her mouth. gust don't let her get overextended," she finally said. That was her way of saying, "Watch out after her, and don't let her expend more energy than she should."

Sometimes I think that every time Emma looked out upon her life, she did so through the prison bars and barricades that others had welded around her. Don't let her get too ... was a daily phrase, uttered in defense of her as if she might break. I'm not accusing anybody in particular, we all felt that way. Afraid that she might chip or break, like a dainty china cup, so we put her on a shelf, and it was there that she lived. Most days, I wonder if we kept her from ever pouring water.

Her mom dropped us off at the skating rink, and we bought our tickets, laced up our skates, and waited on the bench until the Df switched to slow music, the kind where couples were invited out onto the rink. Then I led Emma onto the floor. She turned around, then faced me, a little wobbly on feet that rolled. She placed her hands on my shoulders, fearful yet trusting, and smiled for eight tenuous laps while the DJ played a love song.

When the couples skate was over, the tempo picked up and the kamikaze kids erupted back out onto the floor. I led Emma over to a bench, and she sat breathing heavily, yet smiling as I'd seldom seen her. She was winded, would need a good nap, and she was finished for the day. But the look in her eye told me that more good had occurred inside her than would result from the medication she'd take all month. There was a slight sparkle that told me her hope hadn't died, but was still simmering beneath the surface. As I untied her skates, she tapped me on the shoulder and then placed her palms around my cheeks. She lifted my face to hers and kissed me. I don't mean she just pecked me the way you do when you kiss your mom good-bye before school; I mean, Emma spoke to me. Her lips were wet and soft, and her hands trembled slightly.

We turned in our skates, bought a Coke, and waited on her mom outside. I remember that day for two reasons. First, the kiss. If I close my eyes, I can feel it still. Even after we married, Emma didn't let a day pass that she didn't place her palms on my cheeks, force my tired and worrying eyes to meet hers, and then place her lips to mine.

And second, I learned something that all my reading and all my studying and all my professors would never teach me. Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it. I think sometimes that I spent so much time worrying about how to protect and strengthen the flower-even going so far as to graft in a new stem and root system-that I forgot to simply water it.

WHEN I PULLED INTO THE FINGER CREEK THAT LED TO MA house, Cindy and Annie were sitting on the beach where they had taken up residence in their beach chairs. Annie looked like she was in between naps, looking out between the bars that framed her life, passively watching the activity on the lake, while Cindy had her nose buried in Robinson Crusoe. Judging by the speed with which she was flipping pages, and the few that remained, she was nearly finished.

When I stepped out of the boathouse, she sat up and hollered at me. "Sal came by to check on Annie, so we thumbed a ride when he left. We won't bother you-we just couldn't pass up a day like this"-she waved her arm out across the lake-"without sitting in chairs like these."

"Make yourself at home. I'll be working on the Hacker for most of the afternoon. Get whatever you need; the house is yours. Holler if you need me."

I went upstairs to change into some work clothes and make sure the office was locked. That done, I tiptoed back down to the workshop. A few minutes later, bare feet shuffled on the sawdust behind me. I was putting the finishing touches on their table, but I wasn't quite ready for them to know that yet. I had hoped it would be a surprise.

Annie eyed the power tools lining the wall and unconsciously began running her fingers up and down the vertical scar on her chest. "Reese?" she said, almost in a whisper.

I threw a tarp over the table, walked around the bench, and stood in the doorway where the breeze touched my face. "Yes?"

Her bathing suit looked as if it'd grown bigger. "You ever been sedated?"

I shook my head and sat down on an empty upside-down fivegallon bucket. "No, I haven't, but," I assured her, "I've heard you can't feel a thing and you really don't remember much."

She took a few more steps, eyeing the sanders and cordless drills. "I have," she said flatly.

On the wall above her hung a Bosch jigsaw and Milwaukee Sawzall. Both were handheld saws made for cutting complicated cuts in tight places-a lot like a sternal saw, which is used to cut through the sternum before a spreader is placed in and cranks open the human chest.

"And I remember a lot of it."

"You were probably just dreaming," I said, trying to shrug it off and change the subject. "Anesthesia can give people weird dreams."

Annie walked down the row of tools, studying each one, and said, "Yeah, but I wasn't dreaming."

Her tone caught me, and I began listening more intently now.

"Before we met Dr. Royer, I went to another doctor in Atlanta. He was always real busy. We'd wait a long time to see him, and then he was always in a hurry. I didn't like him very much."

Annie talked like a seasoned patient, no longer a kid. Somewhere in that distant memory, the girl in the yellow dress selling lemonade had been whisked away on the same wind that spilled her Styrofoam cup.

"He did a surgery to give me a few more years to wait on a heart. I don't know how many operations they were doing that morning, but it felt like that barbershop where Aunt Cici takes us to get our haircuts. Always a big line of customers." She began rubbing the back of the sandal wrapped around her neck.

"Somewhere during the surgery, the anest ... the anesth ... the-" Annie shook her head. "The person who put me to sleep was shuffling between two or three different surgeries, and must of forgot to check up on me. At least she didn't come back when she was supposed to, and I sort of woke up."

I almost fell off the bucket. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and the emotional wall I used to protect myself was crumbling like Jericho. If Annie had knocked on my city gate that day at the lemonade stand, then she'd just splintered it with the battering rain that was her heart.

"I remember being kind of fuzzy, and all I could see was blue. I thought maybe I had woken up in heaven, but then I focused a little and saw that the blue was a sheet taped up over my face. I didn't know where I was or why all these tubes were jammed down my mouth and nose or why I couldn't move my arms and legs. I could see a bunch of lights, and somebody standing over me was talking to somebody else, but I couldn't understand what they were saying, and I remember feeling a lot of pressure in my chest and then being real cold."

I sat still, remembering the horror of other such stories I'd either read about or been told firsthand by patients around the country. For each of them, their worst nightmare had come true. And for each of them, going back under the knife was the most difficult thing they'd ever done. Many refused.

"Then this nurse looked under the sheet, sort of just checking on me, and there I was, looking right back at her. I don't know who was more scared, her or me."

Annie walked out on the dock, where the sun's reflection off the lake lit her pale frame, making her look like an angel who'd flown too close to the ground. She turned deliberately and said, "Dr. Royer wants me to go have some test on Friday. He says he needs to know something about my heart, and the only way he can know for sure is to put me asleep and then run this wire camera down my throat and next to my heart."

I nodded. She walked over and sat on my lap. Her legs were bare, like she'd just shaved them, but I knew she never had.

She looked around the lake again, up at Charlie's dock and house, and then at me. "You think I should let him?"

For a girl who was literally wasting away before my eyes, she felt heavy. The weight of her pressed my leg into the ground and pinned me to the earth like a tent peg. "Yes," I said, offering nothing more.

She looked down at the dock and the two large carpenter ants that were circling her foot. "Would you?" she said, while her eyes followed the ants and her thumb unconsciously rubbed the backside of the golden sandal hanging around her neck.

I took a deep breath. "I don't know, Annie. I can't answer that."

She hung her arm around my neck, like she would a teammate on her softball team while they watched the last inning, will or lose. She nodded and blew a baseball-sized bubble with the wad of bubblegum filling her right cheek. Finally she looked at me. "Could you come with us?" She looked out the door toward Cindy, then back at me. "I'm not sure how much more of this Aunt Cici can take. The last bank just turned down her loan request."