Strange but True (42 page)

The nurse's expression becomes more apprehensive then, causing her faint resemblance to Gail Erwin to fade away. She seems wary of Melissa, far less gentle as she rattles off a list of questions: “How many months has it been since your last period? … How long since your water broke? … Are you allergic to any medicines?” In the midst of all this chaos, yet another nurse appears with a clipboard in one hand and a chewed black pen in another. In a harsh, nasal voice, she badgers Melissa about insurance information, which she doesn't have. “Okay, let's back up to the beginning. I need you to give me your full name.”

“Melissa Ann Moody.”

“Do you spell that M-O-O-D-Y?”

“Yes.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-three years old.”

This begins an endless session of questions and form signing, interrupted only when Melissa feels another contraction coming on. She informs the nurse with the papery skin, who begins timing. After the pain rises up in Melissa and then subsides, the woman with the clipboard resumes her questions. At the same time, the orderly gives a push and the rubber wheels of the chair start to move. Melissa leans her head back and stares up at the white squares of light in the ceiling, blurring into a single streak. Her thoughts grow hazy and white. She finds herself slipping out of the present moment only to be thrust into the clarity of a distant memory. In this memory, she is sitting alone in the living room of her cottage on Monk's Hill Road late one afternoon last spring. She is listening to her Jewel tape while numbing her ear with an ice cube in order to give herself another piercing. Just as she is about to stick the needle into her lobe, there is a knock on the screen door. She looks up to see Mr. Erwin's lined face on the other side.

“Hey,” she says and puts down the needle while absently holding the ice cube in one hand.

“How you doing?” he asks, smiling so big and wide that his yellow teeth can be seen through the mesh of the screen.

At the sound of his gravelly voice, Mumu wakes from her catnap and leaps from the sofa, scurrying down the hall the way she always does when Mr. Erwin comes around. On the stereo, Jewel somberly croons about a boy who broke her heart. It used to be one of Melissa's favorite songs, but lately she has grown tired of this album, so she doesn't play it as often as she once did.

“I'm okay,” she tells Mr. Erwin and means what she says.

More and more, there are days like this one when the sun is shining, and a breeze moves through the windows of her cottage, and she feels a shift in her spirit. It is the feeling of happiness returning to her life after all this time. It's not that she has forgotten about Ronnie, but Melissa has begun to lose faith in the notion that he might return to her somehow. As a result, those prayers she says by her bed each night are beginning to grow shorter. Some evenings, she finds herself praying for different things altogether, like guidance about what she should do with the rest of her life. She has even started looking in the paper for a job she might like better than washing sheets at that ratty motel in Conshohocken and answering phones for those grouches at the insurance company.

“I brought you flowers from the garden,” Mr. Erwin says, and holds them up so she can see the bulbous white tips of a dozen or so tulips through the screen. “If I leave them in the ground, the deer will get to them. So I figured I'd gather some up for you.”

Melissa feels a sudden, wintry pinprick against the top of her bare foot. Startled, she looks down and sees that it is nothing more than drops of water from the melting ice cube in her hand. She puts what's left of it into a glass on the coffee table, then goes to the door and pushes it open. Mr. Erwin steps inside, his presence so large and hulking that it never fails to make the cottage feel even smaller. He glances around at the piles of dirty clothes and books and tapes on the floor, the framed pictures of Ronnie that Melissa has only recently considered removing from the mantel. Even though the Erwins have assured her that they don't care how she keeps the place, she sometimes gets the feeling they don't like the clutter—especially Mrs. Erwin, who keeps their house neat and organized. “Sorry about the mess,” Melissa says.

“Don't be sorry. It's your place, so you do as you like. Heck, if it wasn't for Gail, I'd be living in a pigsty next door.”

Mr. Erwin hands her the tulips, and Melissa sees that his fingers are caked with soil from the garden. She thanks him then goes to the kitchenette to look for something to put them in. Since she doesn't own a vase or anything remotely like one, Melissa settles on a large pasta pot. When she fills it with water and places the flowers inside, the white heads barely peek out over the top. Still, they look pretty to her. If there is one lesson she has learned in recent years, it is to find the beauty in life's imperfections. Melissa sets the pot on the counter beside a bottle of wine she uncorked a short while ago, since she likes to have a glass while doing her piercing. Bill Erwin's gaze lingers on the bottle, so she asks, “Would you like some?”

He glances at the window that looks out onto his and Gail's house. It takes him a long moment to answer, but finally he tells her, “Yes. A glass of wine sounds good to me.”

Melissa opens her eyes.

Her thoughts return to the present, where she feels her next contraction coming on. The lanky young orderly is still wheeling her toward the elevator. Two of the nurses still flank her, but the woman with the clipboard is gone. Melissa tells them what's happening, and the lumpy nurse holds her hand as the pain rises up inside of her until it is almost unbearable. When it recedes, they inform Melissa that the contractions are coming less than three minutes apart, so they need to move quickly. At the elevator doors, the woman with the clipboard appears again and says that she forgot to ask Melissa if there is anyone she would like the hospital to notify that she is here. For a fleeting instant, Melissa actually considers giving her parents' phone number. It's been years since she felt even the slightest pang of longing for their presence in her life, but something about the chaos of the present moment has her missing them—especially her mother. But then she thinks of the way they punished her after that day in the cemetery when her father caught her with her arms around Richard Chase. They locked her in her room. They refused to speak to her. They took away her television and phone. All of that was unfair, but none of it was as cruel as what her father did on the ride home from the cemetery. What Melissa cannot and will not ever forgive for as long as she lives was the way he struck her countless times—the back of his hand becoming a sort of frantically spinning windmill that slapped and slapped and slapped against her face, which was already in so much pain.

“You can contact Gail and Bill Erwin,” Melissa says when the memory becomes too much to take. Even though some part of her is still angry and confused about that eviction letter Mr. Erwin explained away as a mistake, Melissa gives their phone number instead.

The elevator doors finally part, and they move inside the boxy silver space, large enough to fit a small car. The button for the eighth floor is pressed. The doors close. The squat, lumpy nurse says, “I'm going to talk you through what's about to happen, Melissa. We're taking you up to the maternity ward, where Dr. Halshastic will examine you to determine exactly how dilated your cervix is. If you're dilated more than ten centimeters, then we're going to begin the birthing process. Do you understand?”

Melissa tells her that she does. Then she takes a breath and looks toward the white light on the ceiling. Her thoughts go spinning backwards again to that afternoon last spring.

When she finishes pouring the glass of wine and hands it to him, Melissa asks where Mrs. Erwin is at the moment. Once more, his gaze shifts over her shoulder to the window. “Home cooking dinner, I suppose.”

“What's she making?” Melissa asks, simply for something to say. In all the years she has lived in the cottage, never once has she felt nervous around Mr. Erwin. Today, though, she senses an odd tension in the air as he clenches and unclenches one of his soiled hands, and his eyes stay fixed on that window.

“Nothing fancy. Probably just some burgers or fish sticks.” At last, he looks toward Melissa. “You're not going to make me drink alone, are you?”

She already had one glass before he arrived, but the tense feeling is enough to make her pour another. “Of course not,” she tells him.

“That's more like it,” he says, then raises his glass in the air. “To your pretty new flowers.”

Melissa raises hers too. “To my pretty new flowers,” she says.

He takes a gulp, then another, before making himself comfortable on the sofa. Melissa stands by the counter, feeling awkward still. A warm breeze cuts through the cottage, and the late afternoon light fills the room, casting a brilliant orange glow on everything. It makes her think of the renewed sense of happiness she has felt lately, the sense that she might be okay after all. Melissa recalls an ad she circled in the paper for a job working at a veterinarian's office. She has yet to call, but she thinks the position might suit her, since the animals won't care about the way she looks.

“So what are you doing here?” Mr. Erwin asks, pointing his thick, dirty index finger at the needle on the table. “Surgery?”

Melissa swallows her wine, which tastes bitter in the back of her throat. “I was piercing my ear.”

He stares up at all the studs and crosses already cluttering both her ears. “Looks like you've got plenty of holes in you already.”

At one time in her life, this sort of comment would not have bothered Melissa. After all, she and Stacy used to insult each other on a regular basis. Now, though, the slightest mention of her appearance leaves her feeling bruised. Mr. Erwin must read the hurt on her face, because the next thing he says is, “I don't mean any offense. They look real nice on you.”

Melissa shrugs. “Well, it's just a hobby, I guess. Some people like to garden or go fishing or read those strange but true stories from the newspaper the way you do. Other people cook and clean, like your wife. And I like to—”

“Put holes in yourself,” Mr. Erwin says, dropping his voice lower.

Maybe it is the wine, but something about the statement strikes Melissa as funny. She leans her head back and releases a laugh, not bothering to cover her mouth with her hand the way she normally would to hide her missing teeth. Mr. Erwin laughs too. And this begins an unexpected fit of giggles between them. As Melissa stares up at the ceiling, which is blotchy from so many leaks, she says, “That's right. My hobby is putting holes in myself.”

The elevator releases a high-pitched ding when it reaches the eighth floor, summoning Melissa back to the present. The doors part and the orderly pushes her out into the hallway. The two nurses follow at her sides still, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking against the speckled floor. As they move through the maternity ward, Melissa smells a flat antiseptic odor in the air as well as a scent that is something akin to boiled corn. Both smells are familiar to this building, though she'd forgotten them until now. She thinks of the bland food and ever-revolving shifts of listless nurses and hurried doctors the last time she was here. The biggest difference Melissa notices is that the maternity ward is quieter than intensive care had been with its beeping machines and the constant clamor of the staff. Here, they pass room after room where the lights are off, and only the occasional television flickers inside.

“The last time I was in this hospital it seemed so noisy,” Melissa says out loud without really meaning to.

“Excuse me?” the lumpy nurse says.

“I said, the last time I was here, the place was so noisy.”

“When was the last time you were here?”

“Five years ago,” Melissa tells her.

“And what was that for?”

“An accident,” is all she says.

The discussion is cut short because they have arrived at their destination. The orderly wheels her into a large room where the walls are bright green and a series of blue curtains divide the space. Melissa eyes a cluster of machinery that is similar to what she remembers from intensive care—a heart monitor, an IV rack, and dozens of other pieces of equipment she doesn't know the names of. A nurse she has never seen before approaches as the others cross the room to talk with a bearded man who Melissa guesses is her doctor. This new nurse is a kind-faced black woman, with thick eyebrows and a broad smile. She wheels Melissa behind a curtain to help her change into a hospital gown. It takes some time, though, because of another contraction. This one sends an agonizing spasm into the deepest part of Melissa's body. She feels the urge to push but does her best to hold off. When the feeling finally passes, she returns to the task of slipping on the thin gown. The nurse takes her blood pressure, then taps the veins on Melissa's arm, before hooking up an IV. Just as she is taping the tube to Melissa's skin, the bearded man appears in green scrubs and one of those familiar plastic ID tags hanging from his neck. Melissa reads his name at the same time the nurse says, “This is Dr. Halshastic.”

“Hello, Melissa.” He is talking to her but staring at a clipboard in his hands. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she says.

This answer causes him to look up. Melissa sees that familiar, startled expression on his face, before his gaze drops to the vicinity of her chin. “Well, I'm happy to hear it. Now listen, we are going to ask you to lie back on this table so we can determine how far along you are in the labor process. Is that okay?”

Melissa nods.

“I'd like it if we could make a deal. I'm going to need you to speak to me when you answer. No nodding. All right?”

“All right,” she says.

“Good,” he tells her. “If we do this as a team, I'm confident that things will go smoothly.”