A Summer to Die (11 page)

But they were both shaking their heads. "No," Ben said. "It wouldn't be an intrusion. We wouldn't want just anyone there, and of course you'd have to be careful to stay out of the way and not to touch anything sterile. But you're special, Meg; you're close to us. Someday Maria and I would like to be
able to look back at that moment. We'd like the baby, someday, to be able to see it, too. You're the one who can do it, if you want to."

I wanted to, desperately. But I had to be honest with them, also. "I've never seen a baby being born," I said. "I don't even know much about it."

"Neither have we!" Maria laughed. "But we'll prepare you for that part. Ben will show you our books, and explain everything in advance so that you'll know exactly what to expect when the time comes. Only, Ben," she added to him, "I think you'd better do it
soon,
because I don't know how much longer we have. The calendar says two weeks, but there are times when I wonder if it might be sooner."

I promised to talk to my parents, and Ben said he would, too. Suddenly I thought of something. "What if it's born at night?" I asked. "There won't be enough light. I could use a flash, I suppose, but—"

Ben held up one hand. "Don't worry!" he said. He cupped his hands into a megaphone and held them against Maria's stomach. Then he spoke to the baby through his hands: "Now hear this, kid. You are under instructions to wait until Molly comes home. Then come, but do it in daylight, you hear?

"That'll do it," Ben said. "Maria and I are determined to have an obedient child."

Before I left, I took Ben aside and spoke to him alone. "I'm sorry, Ben, for what I said that day."

He squeezed my shoulders. "That's okay, Meg. We all say things we're sorry for. But do you understand now what I was talking about that day?"

I shook my head and answered him seriously, honestly. "No. I think you're wrong, to anticipate bad things. And I don't understand why you even want to think about something like that. But I'm still sorry for what I said."

"Well," Ben said, "we're friends, anyway. Hang in there, Meg." And he shook my hand.

Will walked me home across the field. He was very quiet. Halfway home, he said, "Meg, you're very young. Do you think it's a good idea, really, being there when that child is born?"

"Why not?"

"It might be very frightening. Birth isn't an easy thing, you know."

"I know that." I dislodged a small rock with one toe and kicked it through a clump of tall grass. "For pete's sake, Will, how can I learn if I don't take risks? You're the one who taught me that!"

Will stopped short and thought for a minute. "You're absolutely right, Meg. Absolutely right." He looked a little sheepish.

I looked around the field. "Will, what happened
to all those little yellow flowers that were here last month?"

"Gone until next June," he told me. "They've all been replaced by July's flowers. Molly's goldenrod will be in bloom before long."

"I
liked
those little yellow ones," I said grumpily.

"'Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?'" Will asked.

"What?" I was puzzled. He never called me Margaret; what was he talking about?

He smiled. "It's a poem by Hopkins. Your father would know. 'It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for,'" he went on.

"Not me," I told him arrogantly. "I
never
mourn for myself."

"We all do, Meg," Will said. "We all do."

That was three weeks ago. July is almost over. Molly isn't home yet. The baby hasn't been born, so I suppose it's following Ben's instructions and waiting for her. I've studied the books on delivering babies with Maria and Ben, and I'm ready to do the photographs. My parents don't mind. When I asked them, they said "Sure" without even discussing it. They're very preoccupied. I know why, finally.

It was a few nights ago, after supper. My dad was smoking his pipe at the kitchen table. The dishes were done; Mom was sewing on the quilt, which is almost finished. I was just hanging around, talking
too much, trying to make up for the quiet that had been consuming our house. I even turned the radio on; there was some rock music playing.

"Hey, Dad, dance with me!" I said, pulling at his arm. It was something silly we used to do sometimes, back in town. My dad is a
terrible
dancer, but sometimes he used to dance with Molly and me in the kitchen; it used to break my mother up.

He finally put down his pipe and got up and started dancing. Poor Dad; he hadn't gotten any better since the last time we did it, and I think I have, a little. But he's pretty uninhibited, and he tried. It was dark outside; we had eaten late. Mom turned on the light, and I could see on the kitchen walls some of the drawings of wild flowers that Molly had been doing, that she had hung here and there. Dad and I danced and danced until he was sweating and laughing. Mom was laughing, too.

Then the music changed, to a slow piece. Dad breathed a great sigh of relief and said, "Ah, my tempo. May I have the pleasure, my dear?" He held out his arms to me and I curled up inside them. We waltzed slowly around the kitchen like people in an old movie until the music ended. We stood facing each other at the end, and I said suddenly, "I wish Molly was here."

My mother made a small noise, and when I looked over at her, she was crying. I looked back at
Dad in bewilderment, and there were tears on his face, too, the first time I had ever seen my father cry.

I reached out my arms to him, and we both held out our arms to Mom. She moved into them, and as the music started again, another slow, melancholy song from some past summer I couldn't remember, the three of us danced together. The wild flowers on the wall moved in a gradual blur through our circling and through my own tears. I held my arms tight around the two of them as we moved around in a kind of rhythm that kept us close, in an enclosure made of ourselves that kept the rest of the world away, as we danced and wept at the same time. I knew then what they hadn't wanted to tell me, and they knew that I knew, that Molly wouldn't be coming home again, that Molly was going to die.

I dream of Molly again and again.

Sometimes they are short, sunshine-filled dreams, in which she and I are running side by side in a field filled with goldenrod. She's the old Molly, the Molly I knew all my life, the Molly with long blond curls and her light laugh. The Molly who runs with strong tan legs and bare feet. She runs faster than I can, in my dream, looks back at me, laughing, and I call to her, "Wait! Wait for me, Molly!"

She holds out her hand to me, and calls, with her
hair blowing around her, streaked with sun, "Come on, Meg! You can catch up if you try!"

I wake up; the room is dark, and her bed is empty beside mine. I think of her somewhere in a hospital I have never seen, and wonder if she is dreaming the same dream.

Sometimes they are darker dreams of the same field. I am the one, in this darker dream, who has run faster; I have reached some misty destination, a dark and empty house, where I stand waiting for her, watching her from a window as she runs. But the flowers in the field have begun to turn brown, as if summer is ending too soon, and Molly is stumbling; it is she who is calling to me, "Meg, wait! Wait! I can't make it, Meg!" And there is no way I can help her.

I wake from this dream, too, in a dark and empty room from which the sound of her breathing in the next bed has gone.

I have a nightmare in which a baby is born, but is old, already, at birth. The baby looks at us, those of us who are there, with aged and tired eyes, and we realize with horror that his life is ending at the very moment of its beginning. "Why? Why?" we ask, and the baby doesn't answer. Molly is there, and she is angry at our asking; she shrugs coldly and turns away from us. Only she knows the answer, and she won't share it with us, although we plead with her.

I wake terrified that it is real.

I told my father of the dreams. When I was a very little girl and had nightmares, it was always my father who came to my room when I cried out. He used to turn on the light and hold me; he showed me that the dreams weren't true.

Now he can't. We sat on the front steps in the evening, and I blew the gray fuzz of dying dandelions into the pink breeze as the sun was setting. The fears that come into my room in the night seemed far away, but Dad said, "Your dreams come out of what is real, you know. It helps, some, to think about what they mean. That you and Molly are going to be separated, even though you don't want to be. That you want to know why, why life sometimes ends too soon but no one can answer that."

I crushed the stem of a dandelion in my hand. "It doesn't help, understanding why I have nightmares. How can it help? It can't make Molly better.

"It isn't fair!" I said, the way I said it so often when I was a little girl.

"Of course it isn't fair," Dad said. "But it happens. It happens, and we have to accept that."

"And it wasn't fair that you and Mom didn't tell me!" I said, looking for someone to blame for something. "You knew all along, didn't you? You knew from the very beginning!"

He shook his head. "Meg, the doctors told us that there was a chance she would be all right. They have these medicines that they try. There is always a chance something will work. There was no way that Mom and I could tell you when there was a chance."

"Then isn't there
still
a chance?"

He shook his head slowly. "Meg, we can hope for it. We
do
hope for it. But the doctors say there isn't, now. The medicines aren't working for Molly now."

"Well, I don't believe them."

He put his arm around me and watched the sun setting.

Then he said, in his quoting voice, "'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' That's Shakespeare, Meg."

I was furious. "What did
he
know? He never knew Molly. And why
Molly?
Dad,
I'm
the one who always got into trouble! I'm the one who threw up on my own birthday cake, who broke the window in kindergarten, who stole candy from the grocery store. Molly never did anything bad!"

"Meg," he said. "Meg. Don't."

"I don't care," I said angrily. "Someone has got to explain to me
why.
"

"It's a disease, Meg," he said in a tired voice. "A horrible, rotten disease. It just happens. There
isn't
any why."

"What's it called?" Better to know what your enemy is before you confront it, Will had told me once.

Dad sighed. "It's called 'acute myelogenous leukemia.'"

"Can you say that three times fast?" I asked him bitterly.

"Meg," said Dad, putting his arms around me and holding me so tight that his voice was muffled, "I can't even say it once. It breaks my heart."

Mom and Dad go back and forth to the hospital in Portland. They don't take me. I am too young, according to the hospital rules, to visit, but I don't think that's the reason. I think they don't want me to have to see Molly dying.

I don't argue with them. All the times I've argued with them in the past: to be allowed to see a certain movie, to drink a glass of wine with dinner, to sit in the back of one of Dad's classes at the university, listening. "I'm old enough! I'm old enough!" I remember saying. Now I don't argue, because they know and I know I'm old enough; but I'm scared. The dreams and the emptiness at home are enough; it takes all the courage I have to deal with those. I'm afraid to see my own sister, and grateful that they don't ask me to come.

When she's at home, my mother stitches on the quilt and talks about the past. Every square that she
fits into place reminds her of something. She remembers Molly learning to walk, wearing the pale blue overalls that are now part of the pattern of the quilt.

"She used to fall down on her bottom, again and again," my mother smiled. "She always jumped back up laughing. Dad and I used to think sometimes that she fell on purpose, because it was funny. Molly was always looking for things to laugh at when she was a baby."

"What about me? Do you remember
me
learning to walk?"

"Of course I do," Mom said. She turned the quilt around until she found the piece she was looking for, a flowered pattern of blue and green. "This was a little dress. It was summer, and you weren't yet a year old. You were so impatient to do the things that Molly could do. I remember watching you in the back yard that summer. You were very serious and solemn, pulling yourself to your feet, trying to walk across the grass alone.

"You'd fall, and never take time to cry, or laugh, either. Your forehead would wrinkle up as you figured out how to do it right, and tried again."

"I'm like Dad."

She smiled. "Yes, you are, Meg."

"And Molly is more like you. I always thought that was an easier way to be."

Mom sighed and thought about it for a minute. "Well," she said, "it's easier for the little things, to be able to laugh at them. It makes life seem pretty simple, and a lot of fun.

"But you know, Meg," Mom said, smoothing the quilt with her fingers, "when the big, difficult things come, people like Molly and me aren't ready for them. We're so accustomed to laughing. It's harder for us when the time comes that we can't laugh."