Tiger Lillie (9 page)

Daddy’s dead brother played the drums.

A little drum, a little bass, a little playing of the keyboards and so shall your joy come on you like a rush of wind. But, no, the service is just too early and the drive too long after a night in the emergency room. Sorry, Daddy.

Some months ago, I flipped by that charismatic network featuring the makeup lady with the pastel hair, and she said that God inhabits the praise of His people. You can take it from me, despite her error in fashion (and for me to even notice, it must be bad), she’s right at least about that.

The first wave of sound from the paramedics’ siren jiggles my eardrum. Cristoff lies quiet now, but I could wake him if I chose. He’ll have lost track of time, be fuzzed up mentally, and try to do whatever I say.

The paramedics knock on the jamb of the open door. “Hello? Paramedics!”

Thank you, God.

“Back here!”

I jump to my feet, leaving him there on the floor. Man, I hate to do that. Sorry, honey. And I just stand out of their way and answer questions while they do their thing. One of the paramedics is a “little person.” It’s a shock at first, but he knows his stuff, moves his small hands with skill, and keeps up a genial conversation about his life in Edgewood.

When he finally comes to, Cristoff wants to know what is going on. I run back to his bathroom, examine his pill organizer, and realize that he’d taken his medication that night.

Darn.

Seems as though they haven’t regulated the correct dosage of his new meds yet. And he’d been so excited to get off that Stonehenge Dilantin he was taking for years due to that ancient neurologist of his. Of course, I found him a new one. Dr. Tyler rocks.

He’s cute, too.

And married.

Figures.

“First clear thoughts I’ve had in years!” Cristoff had said a few days after starting the Topamax. He’ll be furious about this breakthrough seizure once he comes around enough to care.

Off to the hospital.

Grandma’s quilt and my pillow lie on the car seat beside me, and I follow the ambulance to Bay View Hospital. The visit won’t take too long, unless we’re confronted by a burgeoning emergency room. Outside my window the moon shines full in the sky.

Oh well.

Knowing Cristoff will be fine, I pray anyway that God will grant me a lonely waiting room, a silent television, and three armless chairs sitting in a row where I can curl up with my quilt.

Tacy

I dressed carefully the last day of my junior year because since the seniors already graduated, I was actually a senior. I felt older and excited and ready to take over C. Milton Wright High School. Rawlins, still withholding his kisses, but obviously not his future, called me the night before and said to look outside my window as soon as I woke up. My birthday wasn’t until the next week, but he wanted me to have the present for the last day of school.

Mom and Dad and Lillie all heard my scream when I saw the Range Rover, white with tan interior, sitting in the driveway. I was the hit of the class. Rawlins knew I would be. Times like that supplied with me sufficient blinders, I guess.

Oh my. I see nothing but sky. And Hannah Grace? Is she all right? Where’s Lillie? Rawlins screams again. Shut up! Just shut up!

I remember the Christmas Eve I read the first chapter of Song of Solomon and how it changed me forever, how I realized the Lord felt such intimate love for me and how I longed to feel that for Him. Maybe I should have thought of Rawlins as I read it, but something didn’t ring true when I placed him in the shoes of the lover.

Daddy collapsed the next day on Christmas, two hours after Rawlins, down on one knee, presented me with an engagement ring. All my worrying was for nothing. My father spent a week in the hospital and the tests showed all sorts of things. Chiefly the need for open-heart bypass surgery.

While they were taking care of Daddy, Rawlins accompanied me to the canteen. I put some change into the sandwich machine and began to punch in the numbers for a chicken salad on wheat.

Rawlins pulled my hand away from the key pad, pushed “clear,” and punched in a new code. “You’ve gained some weight over the holidays, Anastasia.” He slid open the clear plastic door and removed an apple.

“Rawlins, I haven’t had anything since breakfast.”

“You want to end up with arteries like your father’s?”

The next week was a blur of hospital waiting rooms and magazines, conversations with strangers, and counting the squares in the carpet patterns. Dad made it through surgery looking pale and bloated, then pink and skinny.

Mom pulled me aside on New Year’s Day and asked me how everything was with Rawlins. The message was clear enough.

I spun my engagement ring around my finger and told her not to worry. I would always make sure everything was okay. After he changed my sandwich for an apple, I began to have my doubts. But it didn’t matter, did it? And the key in the lock on my cage turned.

The last Sunday of that January, Rawlins asked Daddy’s permission for me to begin going to church with him from then on out. Daddy complied, but it hurt him. I know he figured that another sheep would be added to the congregation, not one taken away to another shepherd’s flock.

“You’ll love Pastor Cole,” Rawlins told me as we walked through the bare woods behind the manse, several cardinals coloring the scene. “Now there’s a man close to the Lord. A real prophet. I actually saw him work a miracle once.”

“You’ve never talked about him before.”

He squeezed my hand. “You weren’t ready. But with our marriage in six months, it’s time we built our household. That’s the way God would have it.”

Today I know that he should have said, “the way Alban Cole would have it.” But I had no idea what had been happening to my husband-to-be. And I was blinded by his looks, his money, and the things he bought me, like me security I saw in the eyes of my mother.

As it turned out, we didn’t really attend The Temperance Church of the Apostles, as the membership was limited and exclusive. But he did a study with the pastor every Sunday afternoon while I sat with two of the women from the church and prayed for the two men inside the pastor’s study. I asked Rawlins why we couldn’t go to Saint Stephen’s in the morning and, boy, did I wish I hadn’t. We’d go out for breakfast together instead at what I dubbed Church of the International House of Pancakes.

Lillie

Cristoff is a very private person, bodily speaking. I’ve never seen him without a shirt on. Never! In all these years! So when the time came for the exam, I squeezed his hand, kissed his cheek, and asked him if it was just the same to him and all, could I go out and get a breath of fresh air?

I like to give him control. I do. After all he’s been through, he deserves a life on his own terms.

One time, shortly after he escaped New York City, he told me, “Lillie, you’re the only person who has ever understood me.”

Too true.

Cristoff doesn’t appear conflicted, but inside, he’s the Somme all over again.

Realizing fresh air might be a boon, I amble outside the hospital, cross the wide expanse of dewy lawn, and maneuver onto the ledge of concrete that overlooks the I-895 expressway. Even viewed through chain-link fencing, I adore the traffic of Baltimore City. The concrete road reclines in the desolate gloom of the highway light, but every so often diamond headlights travel their way past, fading momentarily, then flaring to life in the shining ruby of the taillights. Precious people living their lives, probably hurrying home to a family reminiscent of George Bailey and his crew.

Man.

Squeezing the metal links beneath my knuckles, a hollow feeling empties me further. My planner lies forgotten back at the house, nothing scheduled between now and the time they’ll finish up with Cristoff.

I look to my left.

About twenty feet away stands a tall man in jeans, a leather jacket, and a very white T-shirt. Easily as tall as Teddy. Hands jammed down in his pockets, standing there hunched-shouldered, he stares at the cars too. Really stares. I watch him. For a while. He stands so motionless it scares me a little bit and I yell out, “You okay?!”

I mean, he appears middle-aged, so I figure he won’t think I am on the make or anything, and besides, alleviating unscheduled loneliness is worth the risk of potential humiliation.

As though I pushed a button at an animated wax museum, he comes to life, but without the thunks and whirrs. “Yeah, thanks for asking!”

Wow. How cheerful. He’s smiling. I can see the white of his teeth in the darkness.

“How about you, miss?”

“I’m fine.”
Miss.
Oh brother. I’ve obviously got “spinster” written across my forehead.

He turns and ambles in my direction, walking with that peculiar limp that speaks of an artificial leg. Must be a scrappy type. Must have survived something and still found enough left over to be happy about. Must be that I take way too much stock in my abilities to read someone accurately at first impression.

“You visiting someone?” he asks.

“No. Just brought my friend into the emergency room. Epileptic.”

He nods. It’s hard to see much more than his receding blond hair in the darkness. The hair is shorn close, lending his head the overall appearance of a velour bowling ball.

“What about you?” I ask.

He draws closer. Man, he looks familiar.

“My brothers in there. He’s helping me refurbish my old house. Fell off a ladder. Think he might have sprained an ankle.”

I cross my fingers and hold them up. “Hopefully no broken bones.”

“All you can do is pray when they re in there and you’re out here.”

He possesses a weathered air, a worldly way of easing himself into conversation, a confidence one doesn’t come across even once a year. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so comfortable in his own skin. And judging by the way that bleached T-shirt achieves some convexity above his belt, I’d say he had learned lessons about what was important well before that leg came off.

So shut up, Lillie. He’s said two sentences.

This type of speculation… well… it’s why I hate myself when it comes to men. I just don’t know how to handle their presence. Maybe I could blame it on my dad. But how can anyone blame anything on a man like my father? But most likely Teddy’s to blame. Loving someone for so long during such formative years tends to stunt the development of proper mating instincts.

Or maybe some of us are born awkward and that’s that. What can you do, right?

“You going to be here long?” he asks.

“Hard to say. There were about five patients ahead of him, I guess. Your brother going to be all right?”

He waves a hand. “Oh yeah. Stan’ll be right as rain soon enough.”

Right as rain? That’s cute.

He shifts more weight off his prosthesis.

I say, “Speaking of rain, I was just about to get a soda from the machine in the waiting room.” I figure I’ll extend him an out of the conversation.

“Great. I’ve worked up a bit of a thirst myself listening to Stan ream himself out for not being careful.” His accent possesses an odd cadence. It sounds basically American but different. I can’t peg it. “I’ll walk you back over.”

Well, okay. I mean, why not? This isn’t the best neighborhood in the world. It’s not the worst either for that matter. Oh, who cares? Why do I need a good reason? He seems safe enough.

Boy, he really looks familiar, even in the dark. But I’d remember that voice if I’d heard it before.

Tacy

On a day in early February Rawlins showed me abound the place we would soon make our home as husband and wife. Rawlins gave, me the most wonderful bracelet that morning. A solid gold cuff. We were lying in the barn on the property he inherited the previous year from his grandmother, It had been her father’s farm and had gone into disrepair, but Rawlins had worked hard, and it was scheduled to be finished just in time for us to move in, and indeed it was. I lay there in his arms beneath several soft, old quilts, fully clothed of course, but I relished in the closeness. I thought he thought of me as a precious flower, that we were gardeners in charge of rare blossoms. I thought he treated me like the most fragile of treasures. He strummed a note deep within the raw part of me and kept me yearning. I remember once hearing a song I thought I’d never heard before, and saying to Mom, “That reaches a place inside of me I didn’t know I had.”

“It is the “Hungarian national anthem.”

I convinced myself I felt that way with Rawlins. He, of course, told me all the time we were destined from before the foundation of the world to spend the rest of our lives together. He even hoped we’d die together, which I couldn’t help but find romantic then. But now…

I’m ready for this ending now, so very ready.

We lay down together in the barn that April afternoon, and he reached behind him. He pulled a solid gold bracelet out of his pocket. I could smell newly cut hay and fresh coffee in a thermos nearby. A horse whinnied in its stall.

“Rawlins! It’s beautiful.”

“Put it on, Anastasia. I want to see it on you.”

I did. Right around my wrist. He reached out and caressed me from collarbone to wrist, then lightly slid the bracelet up to rest above my elbow. He squeezed it, and although it didn’t pain me, or bite into my flesh, it hugged my skin.

“It’s beautiful. I love this, Rawlins.”

He kissed me then, for the first time in many months, his tongue rounding the corners of my mouth as though we’d never stopped.

I kissed him back passionately, wanting to reassure him that yes, I was his. But truly, I was only a little bit his. I had another love who came to me in the nighttime and told me I was His own. One who had broken the bonds of slavery and called me to be His bride.