A Month of Summer (6 page)

Her face was turned toward the window. I moved to the foot of the bed to see her, to allow her to see me, to take her in and satisfy a morbid curiosity as to whether anything remained of the person I remembered. Perhaps if the answer was no, I could look at her objectively, consider her predicament, my father’s, and Teddy’s as if they were strangers, caught up in a tragic circumstance for which there seemed to be no easy answer.

Her eyes were closed. She didn’t react as my toe bumped the wheel of the bed, rattling the frame. Apparently, she was sleeping.

A disproportionate sense of relief washed through me. Resting my hands on the railing, I stood observing her, trying to see Hanna Beth Parker, but I couldn’t. This was merely an old woman, her silver hair in a disarray of tangled curls against the pillow, her skin nearly translucent, her face hanging slack. Her arm, bent and curled, dangled off the bed, pinched between the mattress and the security rail in a way that looked uncomfortable. I should have moved it, picked it up and tucked it in with her, but instead I stood frozen, maintaining a safe distance.

She’s just an old woman
, I told myself.
She’s harmless, powerless. Helpless.
Stepping around the end of the bed, I leaned closer, hesitated, afraid that if I touched her, if I bridged the space between us, repositioned her hand, something unexpected, unwanted, might happen. Jerking away from the bed, I stepped back, then turned, started toward the door. An old man passing by in a wheelchair stopped to peer into the room.

He smiled at me. “Hey, there. Looks like we got a visitor here. You Birdie’s daughter?” He nodded toward Hanna Beth.

I shook my head, stepping aside as he struggled to move through the doorway. The metal rim of his chair collided with the frame in a resounding clang. I was aware that the noise might wake up Hanna Beth, and then I would be trapped here with her, this stranger blocking the escape route.

“I was just on my way out,” I said, pushing the door fully open so that it caught on the rubber stopper.

The man nodded, craning to look at me as I fidgeted, unable to slip between his chair and the wall. “You Birdie’s daughter?” he repeated, with an amiable smile.

“No, I . . .” Suddenly the air in the room, Hanna Beth’s presence, the scent of stale linens, bedfast bodies, and antiseptic was too much. I couldn’t think. “Stepdaughter,” I said finally. I’d never in my life, not even in my mind, used that word to describe my relation to Hanna Beth. In my mind, there was no relationship between us. “She’s my father’s wife.”

The man nodded. “Oh, well, ain’t that nice? She don’t get many visitors. Used to be a gal stopped by—her housekeeper, I think—but I never did get to talk to her, really. She ain’t been here in a while, though. I’ll bet Birdie’s real glad you come.”

A hot, uncomfortable flush pushed into my cheeks. “She’s sleeping, I think.”

He peered past me. “Hmmm? Well, that could be. Them physical therapy sessions can sure wear a body out. They got a big German gal does the work here. Got arms like a scullery cook and looks like some of them nurses the Luftwaffe had in their secret hospitals, back in the big war. I was in the army at the end of it—drove them trains after VE Day. I ever tell you about that? I started out runnin’ them trains after the war, and when I come home, I got on with the A & NR Railroad, down in the Piney Woods. Drove them lumber trains for fifty years. Good life back then, bein’ a company man. Not like it is for young folks now.” He paused as a woman in a long denim skirt and a flowered scrub top passed by, leading two little boys by the hands. Rolling the chair backward slightly, he turned to intercept her. “Well, how-do, Mary-not-contrary. Why are you still here this evenin’?”

The young nurse’s aide—
Mary
, her nametag read—glanced at me apologetically. “Waiting on a ride home with Dottie, Mr. Fisher. She doesn’t get off until seven.”

Mr. Fisher scratched his chin, frowning at the two boys who were eyeing him and the chair with interest. “Thought I saw your husband come by a while ago. Don’t he usually take the bus from here and leave you the van?”

Mary shifted self-consciously, her gaze darting toward the window, then back. “We had a little mix-up with the van, that’s all.” She jostled the boys’ hands, as if she were trying to bolster them. “It’s okay, though, we got to eat in the cafeteria, didn’t we, guys?”

The older boy nodded shyly, and the younger one yawned, rubbing his eyes. He looked like a child who ought to be home slipping into a warm bath, putting on a fluffy sleeper with feet in it, and snuggling into bed.

Mr. Fisher ruffled the boys’ blond hair, then pointed at Mary. “Those are fine young fellas. I bet you’re mighty proud, havin’ a pair of handsome boys like these.”

They looked up at their mother, and she smiled down adoringly. “I sure am, Mr. Fisher.”

“They got names?” Mr. Fisher rolled his chair back a bit more, allowing me an exit path. I took advantage of the opportunity to step into the hall.

“Brandon and Brady,” Mary answered, indicating first the older boy and then the younger one.

“Guess I should shake your hands, then.” Lifting his arm from the wheelchair, Mr. Fisher greeted Brandon, then Brady. The conversation seemed to run out temporarily, then Mr. Fisher waved a thumb toward Hanna Beth’s room. "Y’all ought to go on in and say hi to Birdie. Bet she’d like to see these fine-lookin’ boys. I opened her blind in there for a while, earlier on. Nurses shouldn’t shut them things where a body can’t even see the sun. Sunshine is a healin’ force. Kills germs, too. Back in the army, if we didn’t have any other way to get the vermin out of our bedrolls, we’d air ’em out. Works pretty good.”

Mary glanced at me, clearly wondering who I was. “Rebecca Macklin,” I said, extending my hand.

Mr. Fisher seemed to recall my presence. “Well, land’s sakes, pardon me. This is Birdie’s daughter. She just come to see her mama.” He turned from me to Mary. “This is Mary. She’s your mama’s nurse aide during the day.” He held a hand beside his mouth. “Best one here, but don’t tell the rest I said so.”

Mary and I exchanged greetings.

“Excuse me for not standin’ up.” Mr. Fisher patted the wheelchair, and I blanched. Swatting my arm, he laughed. “That was a joke, hon. One thing essential around here is a sense of humor. Ain’t that so, Mary?”

Mary nodded indulgently, recapturing the boys’ hands as Brady wandered toward the door to Hanna Beth’s room. “We all need to have your attitude, Mr. Fisher.”

He gave a throaty chuckle, squinting down the hallway. “You know, when I was a young chap, my pap told me no matter where you are, keep your face to the light and the shadow’s gonna fall behind you. I always remembered that. There’s light somewhere in every situation. ” Rubbing a hand across his five o’clock shadow, he pointed at Mary. “I ever tell you I drove them old steam trains after the war? I bet these boys would like to hear about that.”

Brady perked up. “Ohhh, I wike twain,” he breathed. “I got Thomas twain.”

Mr. Fisher turned his attention to Brady. “I seen that show down in the TV room just the other day. They was some kids visitin’ their grandma, and they watched it. Reckon if we could go check? Maybe we could find it on TV.” Mr. Fisher and both boys turned to Mary expectantly.

I took advantage of the chance to exit the conversation. “I was just on my way out,” I said to Mary. “But I’d like to talk with you about Hanna Beth’s condition, when we have the chance.”

Mary focused on me, ignoring Brady, who was trying to pull her toward the commons area. “I’m here every day . . . but you might want to talk to her attending physician or the physical therapist. I’m just a nurse’s aide.”

“Don’t let her kid you,” Mr. Fisher interjected. “She’s the one does all the work around here.”

Mary stumbled forward, both boys tugging her hands. “Boys!” she scolded.

I waved her away. “No, it’s fine. We can talk another time.”

“It was nice meeting you,” she said, then followed Brandon and Brady down the hall, her feet dragging, unable to match their enthusiastic pace after a long day at work. I knew the feeling. Many was the day I worked late wading through the latest Immigration Services e-mail bulletins, filing with Immigration Court on behalf of internationals in imminent danger of deportation, or facilitating visas for multinational corporations impatient to import foreign executives, software designers, and engineers. At the end of an extended day at the firm, I arrived home feeling a sense of accomplishment, only to be quickly mired in parental guilt because the au pair had fixed Macey’s supper, helped her with her homework and her bath, then put her to bed. Part of me was glad the house was quiet, the sofa waiting for me to crash, but part of me realized I’d missed the evening with my daughter. We hadn’t talked about what happened at school, or who’d been in trouble in the lunchroom, or how gymnastics or dance had turned out that day.
Having it all
was part of the modern myth, the self-inflicted curse that tried to swallow working mothers in a pit of guilt-induced exhaustion.

I’d finally settled for the reality that you could have all of one thing, all of the other, or some of both. Macey was an incredible kid—secure, well-adjusted, smart, with aspirations of becoming a biochemist or Olympic gymnast. It was hard to argue that we hadn’t struck a functional balance. I was glad I wasn’t in Mary’s position, stuck at work without transportation, trying to see to the immediate needs of two young children when my mind and body were tapped out for the day.

As I left the nursing center behind, I wondered, just briefly, if Hanna Beth had felt the push and pull of that struggle. What must life have been like for her? Before she married my father, she was a single mother, teaching at the institutional school, struggling to raise a developmentally challenged son in some tiny faculty apartment on campus. Did she worry about Teddy when her time and energy were taken up with caring for the monumental needs of students more severely handicapped than he? Did she feel that she should be spending more time with her own son, that she couldn’t teach at the school and give him everything he needed? Was that why she quit her job as soon as she married my father? Was that the reason she took my father away from us?

I’d never, ever considered the difficulties of Hanna Beth’s life. Even now, thinking of it felt like a betrayal of my mother, of our family before Hanna Beth. Our lives were good then, privileged. Happy.

My mind slipped back in time, and I lost my way temporarily, drove through the urban streets of Deep Ellum, where old speakeasies and the black jazz clubs of the Prohibition era were being converted from abandoned, run-down buildings into trendy restaurants, art galleries, and nightclubs. When I was young, in the days before downtown revitalization, my mother avoided those areas assiduously. She was uncomfortable even with the aging neighborhoods around the Blue Sky Hill area—where the home my grandparents built with oil money had been passed down to my father. Mother filled out applications to transfer me to a private school with other kids from the privileged bubble of Blue Sky, drove to Highland Park to shop, and tolerated the surrounding neighborhoods as an inconvenience of this temporary location for our family.

It turned out to be temporary in a way she hadn’t anticipated.

In the years I had been away, Deep Ellum, Uptown, and Lakewood had clearly undergone death and resurrection. The streets were now an odd combination of old buildings renovated to contain up-scale loft apartments and shops, and new construction on streets where Prairie and Craftsman-style homes built in the thirties and forties had been bulldozed to make room for McMansions and condominium complexes suited for urbanites seeking an uptown lifestyle.

Driving along Greenville, I passed by Vista Street without recognizing it at first. The huge blue gingerbread-encrusted house that had always marked the turnoff was gone. A quaint shopping center and matching condominium complex stood in its place. I looped around in the parking lot, thinking that if my mother could have seen the condos, she would have been shocked. One of her comforts in leaving the house to my father and Hanna Beth had been her conviction that the entire area was
going bad
, and eventually even the property on Blue Sky Hill would be worthless. It was probably better that she’d never known about the resurgence in the shadows of downtown. Such knowledge would only have goaded her.

Memories assaulted me as I continued up Vista Street to Blue Sky Hill Court. I could feel my childhood wrapping around me, changing me, taking me back to those months before the divorce. I wasn’t driving, but riding in the back of my parents’ car, traveling from the airport, seeing for the first time in recent memory my own country. The trees, the grass, the hedges and flower beds with their bright colors were startling, the humidity oppressive after the years I’d spent in the desert.

Even compared to our fairly luxurious accommodations in Saudi, the neighborhood on Blue Sky Hill was impressive, my father’s house at the end of the road awe-inspiring, with its expansive lawn, wraparound porches, tall wrought-iron fence, and high leaded-glass windows. I could recall visiting my grandmother there, playing in the third-story attic and the garden house in the backyard, and walking down to the wet-weather creek to watch minnows swim and dragonflies skim the water.

That first day back in the States, as we stopped in the driveway, I bolted from the car and ran through the grass, feeling that I was finally home. The sensation enveloped me once again as I rounded the corner and the house came into view at the end of the street. After the long day of travel, the wild storms of emotions, the unanswered questions, Blue Sky Hill felt like a sanctuary.

As quickly as the sensation developed, it faded. This wasn’t the home I remembered. The house in general lacked the meticulous care of years past. The window frames needed cleaning. The screens were rusted and torn. Around the garage doors, the wooden trim had sun-baked to a crackle, and high on the eaves, long strings of peeling paint hung from the attic dormers. A triangular piece of the leaded glass had fallen out, and no one had bothered to cover the hole.