One Heart (23 page)

I left work early one day because Bernadette Myerly's husband called on the phone and said Moses was a little under the weather, and he really wanted me to come get him. As it turned out, Mr. Myerly was sugarcoating the truth so that I wouldn't drive like a maniac and get in a wreck.

Moses had slipped through the railing and fallen off the black flat-top roof of the Myerlys' house. Bernadette had turned her back for three minutes in the TV room because she'd gotten a phone call from her mother. Moses wandered out of the TV room and walked up the narrow stairs that led out to the black tar roof, where chairs were set up for the Myerlys and their friends to enjoy the city lights in the evenings. Bernadette heard footsteps, hung the phone up, and rushed upstairs, but it was a second too late. Moses crawled under the railing, and fell two stories down to the sidewalk, and lay there unconscious.

They had him rushed to the hospital. I got to the Myerlys' and Mr. Myerly told me the real story, then drove me over to the hospital, where I had to wait for over two hours before I saw him, before he was assigned a room. And when I saw him, he was a ghostly white, still unconscious, dressed in a tiny blue gown, with a plastic bracelet on his wrist just like when he'd been born, and nobody could predict when he would wake, and though they weren't yet using the word
coma
, it was stuck in my mind and stomach, believe me, and it grew louder and bigger like an echo until I felt like I lived inside it. I called Hambone from the hospital, and he came as soon as he could. He was not a good support because he was so afraid. I wanted to cry whenever I looked at Hambone, who stood biting his nails and rocking from side to side, because I'd never seen him that way before, and it scared me.

He went and fetched some peanut butter crackers and Cokes for us to share. “What else can I do?” he begged. He wanted to be busy, couldn't stand sitting there by the bed where they had Moses on an IV.

I looked at him and said, “Call my friend Gladys.”

“You want me to call Gladys?”

“Yes, Gladys. Tell her to come. Just tell her I need her to come because it's an emergency.”

I wanted her there, that's all I knew. I guess I imagined she was someone who would understand how terrified I was. Gladys was still in my heart almost the way she was when I was a child writing her letters. I have that sort of heart, once you're in, you're in. I didn't want to call my father; he wouldn't have known what to say, what to do. Even if he was straight, he would've needed my comfort. Gladys, on the other hand, was Gladys. When she came into my mind in that hospital room, my heart pounded. I thought, She'll understand. Gladdy is the one who will understand me now. I was so relieved it was like I thought her understanding could give me the strength to wake my son.

But I didn't really think she would come.

She arrived the day after Hambone called her. She'd asked no questions. And she brought James, who I had never met. He was a handsome man in my humble opinion, tall with windburned cheeks and lines around his serious-looking eyes, his hair not entirely gray; his hands were strong with long fingers, and rough from work. He stood blinking in the doorway while she walked into the hospital room. I was sitting in a chair with my head in my hands and didn't see them at first.

“Raelene?” she said, and stopped walking toward me when I looked up and saw her. She was like the sun itself. I got out of my chair and went over to her and I wanted to throw myself on her, but stopped for a second, sensing she wasn't real comfortable. But then, she must have sensed
me
, or the terrified feelings inside of me. She must have sensed it, and recognized it. And she stepped up and pulled me toward her and held me for a moment. It was a hard, stiff hug, and when she let me go I looked in her eyes and saw she had backed off from the intensity of that hug, and she was somehow trying to escape from the room. I wanted to cry. She turned toward the doorway.

“James, this is Raelene,” she said.

James came over and shook my hand. He looked at Moses in the bed, then looked back at me. He said, “Can we get you something to eat or drink?” and I said no, and then I was overcome with a sense that my fear had not been settled at all by their coming to the hospital, but only seemed deeper, now that I'd had that moment with Gladys, that minute of human contact that seemed hard to hold on to. A big gap opened up between us, while they stood and talked awkwardly about the traffic on the way, and talked about the weather, and how Philadelphia was more crowded than they imagined. They'd gone to the house and found a sleepy Hambone, who had told them how to get there.

It was like I began to sink into a hole. And in that hole I thought of Charlene, the girl I worked with in the home for unwed mothers, the kinds of breaks she had never been given, and how my own life, hard as it had been in ways, already had a ton of luckiness too, considering how I had been given a good brain, a decent personality, good friends, a healthy baby, and it struck me hard for the first time that of course I could lose my boy, of course whatever God there was could easily let him slip out of this world, since after all, these things happened every day to people, and that was just the nature of life. I didn't deserve any special treatment. Why had I ever thought I did?

And when I looked at Gladys, I imagined for the first time that I knew what the inside of her heart felt like. I wanted to look over and say, “Gladys, now I understand you,” but in the same moment I wanted to push that understanding away, with all my strength, so I did.

Because her child had died. Her child was lost to her forever. I felt sick with a terrible confusion; a part of me regretted calling her now, like her life was contagious. It was like now that Gladys was in the room, my little boy would drown inside of himself, never to open his eyes again.

I sat down in my chair and looked at Moses, and suddenly felt just like I was paralyzed. I couldn't take my eyes off him, or even shift in the chair. I felt the most terrible, unjust kind of emotion toward Gladys now, a resentment that she was in the room, she who had lost her girl who was just a year older than my boy, she who had slept while that little girl drowned.
How can you live with yourself now? If my boy dies, I'll die with him. I'll just die with him
.

Gladys was standing beside my chair now. She put her hand on my head. James had left the room.

“I was surprised when Hambone called. Surprised to hear from him. But I'm glad to be here,” she said. She cleared her throat.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, but I felt that if she left her hand there for one more second, I'd have to reach up and push it away.

She did not move her hand, and I just didn't have the nerve to push it away, so it sat on my head, contagious, burning, so heavy I felt my head would split open.

Finally she lifted her hand. “Moses will wake up,” she said. “He will?” Every emotion but hope disappeared inside of me, and I sat looking up at her. It was like I was hanging on her words as if she were some kind of prophet.

“Moses will wake up,” she said again.

“What makes you think so? Why do you say that?”

“I have a strong feeling about it,” she said. “Very strong.”

And when I looked up at her, her face seemed unbelievably strong, and the strangest thing was, it was circled with some kind of light. Maybe it was real light, from another plane of existence, or maybe it was just what I needed to see at that time. It doesn't matter in the long run.

The nurses made me go home and sleep. Four of them together had to work on convincing me to leave. They assured me I would be called the second he woke, and it was this kind of assurance that made me leave because hearing the words “the second he wakes” rather than “if he wakes” shot me full of wild joy.
The second he wakes
, I kept whispering to myself.
The second he wakes I will hold him and hold him and hold him
. Gladys and James and I left in James's car, and went back to my house.
Pick him up and kiss him and never let him go
. They walked around my long, narrow room looking at the pictures of Moses on the wall, and Gladys kept going back to the one of Moses in the flat field with the huge windy pine tree behind him, a black and white I took myself when he and I went camping for his first birthday when we still lived out west. Moses had just learned to stand. It was spring, and the world behind him looked huge and filled with all this positive energy. And Moses seemed a part of it. Gladys smiled at the picture, and showed James. He took it in his hands and stared at it a long time, so long I almost asked him why he found it so interesting, but something told me not to intrude.

The next morning it rained, and we left for the hospital before dawn, the three of us in the rainy dark of James's car, me huddled right between the two of them in the front seat, the morning news on the radio. I could feel the exhaustion and stiffness of their bodies; they were in their fifties, and James had slept on a pull-out couch in a tiny room off of the kitchen, Gladys on the sofa in the main room in flannel pajamas. I'd offered to help pay for a hotel, but they said they weren't picky. I was always so lucky with friends.

Gladys had fixed us each a cup of coffee, and I had to hold James's mug for him while he drove, along with my own mug, and when he took the curves I looked down at the coffee in the two cups, one yellow and one blue, and I thought,
Okay, God, if nothing spills out of these mugs, that means he's waking up today
, and nothing spilled until the very last moment when I was getting out of the car in the parking garage, and I told myself that didn't count.

At the hospital that rainy day, something interesting happened between Gladys and James. I think about it whenever I think of Gladys, which is often.

James sat on one side of Moses' bed, and Gladys sat on the other side. I sat in the chair at the foot of the bed, reading a magazine, just waiting and praying. I stole looks at Gladys and James for a while, hardly knowing I was doing so until finally it registered that the two of them were talking quietly to each other, and that those quiet words were crucial, so crucial the room's atmosphere changed. Yet when I overheard some of the words they confused me because they were so simple. “Potato chips” and “rain all day” and “dogs” were some of the words I could pick up, and I almost laughed because the contrast of what they were saying and how they were saying it was so extreme. Finally I was staring at them, and I trusted what I felt more than what I saw, for what I saw was simple enough.

They looked at each other with naked faces. You know how a face can be naked. Like whoever lives in the face is right there, pressed up against the face's window. They held each other's gaze for a long moment. Then James reached his hand out across the bed to Gladys, and her hand met his. She squeezed his hand hard. They held hands like that, and James winced, as if the moment was just too much for him to bear.

Then Gladys stood up from her chair, and walked out of the room, and James followed, his head held high, as if he were still bracing himself against all the emotion. I waited for a second, then got up from my chair, and went to the door, and watched the two of them walk down the hall together, a space between them just big enough for a young child, and for a split second she was there. Their girl. And for another second, Wendell was there too, and he turned to look at me with the same soldier's face I'd known as a child who had his photograph, a girl who had imagined she loved him. And when both of them disappeared, I could still sense their spirits, hovering around James and Gladys, and then the two of them turned the corner. Maybe it was just me and what I was feeling. But it seemed real.

Two hours and twenty-five minutes later, Moses opened his eyes and said, “Mama.”

In my mind, Gladys had something to do with this. I don't pretend to understand it. But it felt like Gladys had something to do with my son waking. I believe that feeling. So I'll always miss Gladys. I'll always wish she lived down the street.

That night we celebrated in the hospital with Moses, who had lost much of his ability to speak, but they told me this damage was temporary, and his eyes were nearly as happy as they had been before his fall. We filled the room with balloons, and fed him green beans and chocolate cake, and I brought his tape recorder in along with his favorite music (Bob Marley) and his Pooh books, and after an hour or so we were told he had to sleep, he had to be quiet and heal, and that everyone should go home but me, though they advised that I also leave.

I couldn't leave. I couldn't yet trust that he'd stay awake, that he wouldn't slip back into the dark. But Gladys and James said they were going back to New York, and each of them gave me a kiss good-bye, and kissed Moses. They left quickly, it seemed, and when they were gone I felt afraid and the room felt hollow for a moment, but just as quickly it was filled up again just as if the sun was shining, because my boy was awake, and pointing to a Big Bird balloon on the ceiling, trying to say one of the words he had mastered months before. “Look! Look!”

In less than a week, Moses was home with me. The Myerlys, who had sent flowers and offered to pay the hospital bill, had called me, asking if I was planning to sue them. I told them of course not and a week later received a check for two hundred dollars in the mail, which at the time seemed like a huge sum. It came with a note telling me to do something nice for Moses, and that they missed him. See what I mean about luck? I collected unemployment for two months, and then the nuns decided I could come back and work night shift, and bring Moses along with me. He played with his cars and coloring books in the kitchen at the long wooden table, and lightened the mood in that room for the girls who were on dish duty. Later, he would sleep on the gray cushioned bench in the front hall beneath the bad painting of Saint Theresa, who'd been given a goatee by one of the girls. They'd cover him up with this red homemade quilt.