At the Scent of Water (36 page)

Forty-two

Annie left Mary’s soon after that and drove back to her father’s house, trying to decide what this new event would mean, both in the abstract arena of the heart and in the practical realm of travel arrangements. She postponed any decision past the obvious one that had occurred to her when she had heard the news. She would perform this last task, this favor for Sam. She would leave him this parting gift that would, perhaps, ease a little of his pain. And it would be a gift to Rosalie Cubbins, as well. Perhaps it would soften her heart, would cause her to grant the request Annie would make of her tonight. It didn’t take long to write up what she had gathered. A few notes, but most of it was in her memory. She wrote quickly and easily, the words flying from her heart through her fingertips onto the computer screen. When she finished, she printed out the piece, then set out for Knoxville. For Varner’s Grove. For the scribbled address on the card that Griffin White had given her, the address of Rosalie Cubbins, Kelly Bright’s mother.

There was little traffic. She rolled down the window and let the dry hot wind beat in. It felt good, somehow, against the chill that had settled in her bones. She found the address after stopping once for directions. Kelly Bright had lived in a run-down boxy house, one of a block of others just like it. The projects, as Jordan Abrams had said.

Annie knocked and waited. She could hear a television, the sound of feet, and then Rosalie was there. She stared, a puzzled look on her face, but after a second she opened the door, perhaps accepting this incongruity as one more in a lifetime that tended more toward absurdity than sense. “Come in,” she said, and walked away before Annie could speak, waving her cigarette toward the couch, leaving a stream of smoke behind her as a trail for Annie to follow.

“I’m sorry to intrude on your grief,” she said. Such banal words. And so meaningless, for that is exactly what she had intended to do.

Rosalie lifted one shoulder and let it fall. She was dead-eyed, tired-eyed, and Annie didn’t know how much of it was from the loss of the child and how much had been there before, since she was a child, perhaps. Her hair was two lank strands that fell down on either side of her face. She rubbed a hand across her eyes, and Annie noticed her fingernails. They were bitten, raw, red.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, inestimably weary.

Annie’s mouth was suddenly dry, for she realized where she was and what she was doing. She took the two things she had brought out of her purse. She handed Rosalie the sheaf of papers first.

“I didn’t tell you everything when I met you before,” she said. “I’m a reporter.”

Rosalie’s eyes clouded with cynicism. The jaded reaction of someone who had been betrayed before.

Annie shook her head. “I’m giving this just to you,” she said. “It’s not going into any paper.”

Rosalie looked down at the papers, and the hand with which she was holding them shook. She began to read, her lips moving slightly. She set down the cigarette and picked up a crumpled tissue from the table. She read some more. She turned over the first page. After a moment the second. Then the last. By the time she finished, her face was wet with tears.

“You’re not going to print this?” she asked quietly when she was done.

“That wasn’t my intention when I wrote it,” Annie said.

Rosalie didn’t answer, just leaned over the end table, picked up a school picture, and held it out to Annie. “Here she is. My baby.” She sniffed.

Annie took the picture, cardboard framed. Kelly was about nine or so. She had freckles. Clean brown hair, parted straight in the middle, then immediately falling into disarranged waves. Her eyes were bright, her skin clear. She wore a cheap cross necklace, a pink T-shirt, and had braces on her teeth.

“How long had she had braces?” Annie asked.

Rosalie shook her head, blew out another stream of smoke, blew her nose clumsily into the shredded tissue. “Those things. She was supposed to get them off six months before the accident, but she never wore the head brace thing. Had to sign on for another round. I had to do an extra shift a week to pay for them.” She dissolved into tears again, and Annie knew what she was thinking.
Oh, how I wish I had that duty now. How I would gladly trade a shift, a day, a week, my life, for you to have yours back
.

“Oh, God,” she wailed. “Oh, oh, God.” She bent at the waist, pressed her arm against her stomach as if she were in great pain. She rocked back and forth, and her cries filled up the little house.

Annie moved close and put her arms around the shaking shoulders. She held her until she stopped crying.

“I never should’ve let him pick her up. I should’ve known.” She bent her head and cried again, and Annie knew what she was feeling. Knew it because she had felt it, as well. Still felt it, that curious, torturous sense of prescience, that conviction that if she had only been paying attention, if she had seen what anyone else would have seen, if she had not been distracted by the glaring, all-absorbing ME, she would have done what was necessary to protect her daughter. To save her.

“It was an accident,” she said to Rosalie. “Just an accident. Sometimes you don’t see how things are going to turn out. Sometimes you can’t help it.”

Rosalie shuddered quietly and pulled away from Annie’s arms. She went into the other room and came back with a roll of toilet paper. She blew her nose. She picked up the papers again and looked them over slowly. She smiled a few times as she read the words, and when she was finished, she put them down and spoke decisively.

“I want people to know my daughter like she was,” she said. “I want you to put it in the paper.”

Annie nodded. “All right. I think I can arrange that.”

“Can I keep this?”

“Sure,” Annie said, then took a breath for what she must say next. “I’m not just a reporter,” she finally said, her voice low and hesitant. She had been staring at the floor, at a matted spot of faded brown carpet. Her eyes lifted to Rosalie’s confused face.

“I’m Sam Truelove’s wife.” The pending divorce an irrelevant detail.

Rosalie stared, not comprehending, and it suddenly hit Annie as supremely ironic that Rosalie did not recognize the name.

“My husband,” she said, and there was that word again, sliding from her mouth as easily as if it were true, “my husband was the surgeon on call the day your daughter was injured.”

Rosalie sat back on the couch, her face twisted into an expression Annie couldn’t read, and Annie, not knowing what else to do, began to talk. Random words, but things she had been turning around in her own mind for the last days and weeks.

“My husband gets up every morning at four-thirty,” she said softly, remembering, as if just this morning she had reached out her hand and felt the warm place beside her in bed, as if she might rise up and walk into the next room and see him there, measuring out his coffee, going over his charts one more time before the long drive back to Knoxville. “He goes to the hospital, where he spends most of his time. He doesn’t sleep much, especially the night before he does a surgery, because he goes over and over the procedure in his mind.

“He used to be a different person than he is now. He used to go to the hospital in the evening because that’s when the parents were there. ‘They need to see me, Annie,’ he would say. ‘They need to look at my eyes and touch my hand and feel my hope. That’s the only way they can endure it.’ He used to go to the hospital and read all their charts, then go to his office and see them. Oh, it would break your heart to see what he sees,” she said. “All those little broken children. I don’t know how he bore it. He said the Lord helped him bear it with them, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. I suppose he needed a corner of his life that grief hadn’t touched.”

Rosalie was staring at her now, her mouth slightly open.

“He would go to his office and see his patients, and some days he would be in surgery all day. He told me he never felt much when he was there. No pain. No fatigue. Time sort of stopped for him. Nothing was there except him and the thing he was trying to fix. It was like a contest, he said. Between him and death. Like he had stepped into the ring, and only one of them would win. He would stay there in that operating room sometimes six, eight, ten hours before he would stop. He would come home those nights so empty, and I would cook for him and he would eat and I could see him fill up, recharge, but he never told me much about it.

“The hardest days, though, were the funeral days. He went to the funerals. Nearly every one. He said it was his duty to walk the path with them. It was the burden the Lord had placed on him.

“He needs to go to your daughter’s funeral, Rosalie.” And she could suddenly see him in his black suit, starched white shirt, square competent hands folded, face worn and solemn. His shoulders slumped, the lines appearing from nose to mouth the way they did when he was worried or sad. “He needs to be there. I know he would want to come. If you would let him.”

There was a silence. She was finished. The quiet rang loudly in the small living room. The television’s buzz accentuated more than eradicated it.

She reached into her purse and brought out the last thing she had. She handed it to Rosalie and saw her unwrap it, saw her gaze at the face of Jesus the good shepherd, saw her turn over the plaque and read the back. Her eyes filled up with tears again.

Annie rose up, suddenly wanting to be out of this place, this sad, sad place. Rosalie didn’t follow her to the door. She stayed on the sagging couch, but after a moment she spoke.

“Okay,” she said, and that was all.

Annie nodded and she felt a sudden kinship with her. The kinship of a love that hadn’t gone quite far enough. She took one more look at the bright face in the picture, all that remained of Kelly’s warm flesh, her laughter, her cartwheels and sass. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” she said.

Forty-three

It was a moving, tender piece and painted the picture of a young girl’s life as well as any she’d ever written. The ending was her favorite part.

Kelly Bright’s mother wanted people to know about her life, not only her death. How she loved a good joke and had a collection of red clown noses and whoopee cushions. That she’d once gone along on one of her uncle’s dates, hidden in the backseat, jumping out at a tender moment.

She loved to French braid her hair, and she collected pretty rocks. “She had a rock from every place we’d ever been,” her mother said.

She had different tastes in music than most children her age. She loved Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, but her film collection tended mostly toward Veggie Tales.

She liked cooking. Her sister said she made the best pancakes she’d ever eaten. She sewed a dress once but wouldn’t wear it because the collar was crooked.

She went to church. She took her brother and sister and held out hope for her mom and dad. Pastor Jordan Abrams remembers her as a child whose heart was soft. “She told me the Lord had spoken to her,” he said, “and told her that all her family would come to the Lord.” He still hopes that prayer will be answered and takes heart that Kelly’s mother called him to her daughter’s bedside just before the end.

Those last hours were sweet. Her forehead was anointed with oil by her pastor, and a small gathering of family and friends prayed for her healing. Sometime that evening their prayer was answered as Kelly’s spirit slipped free of the body that had so long encumbered it.

“We’ll see her again,” Pastor Abrams said.

“She’s at home now,” Kelly’s mother said. “She can finally be at peace.”

Annie was technically without an employer, but she offered the story to the
Los Angeles Times,
and they consented to having it run in the
Knoxville Statesman Review
and the
Varner’s Grove Gazette
. As it turned out, the Associated Press picked it up. It ran on the wire, and most of America read about Kelly Bright’s short life over their Sunday morning breakfast.

She delayed her return to Seattle until after the funeral. She called Jason Niles, who was understanding. Would another week give her time to settle her affairs? Of course, she assured him, and herself. She felt a tension that she was sure would be relieved when she was gone, when everything was over.

At the funeral Annie stood in the back beside Sam. She watched as Jordan Abrams prayed and preached, telling people about Jesus, as Kelly would have wanted. When it was over, she watched perhaps the most courageous thing she’d ever seen, for Sam left her side and walked past the knotted crowds toward Rosalie, stood before her, and bowed his head. She couldn’t hear what was said, but she saw Rosalie reach out her hand and grip his. She rose, he bent, and the two ended in a tight embrace. Cameras flashed, and that picture appeared along with Kelly’s profile.

Forgiveness Reigns at Tennessee Girl’s Funeral
ran the headline in the
Los Angeles Times
.

They drove home from the cemetery without speaking. She went into her father’s house and fell into bed, exhausted.

****

Sam didn’t know how long he stayed out on the ridgetop praying that evening after the funeral. It was hot and dry and still as the sun set. The thunder beat every few minutes or so, a bass drum to his cries. And he did cry out. The small valley echoed with his voice, raised in lament and grief.

The winds began slowly, a breeze of warm air ruffling his hair and the leaves on the trees, but soon they picked up intensity and dropped in temperature, and by the time he opened his eyes, they had become great whipping gusts. He searched the dark sky as the wind swept his bare arms.

He felt a chill as familiar words occurred to him, and he thought of the prophet Elijah praying for rain. “I see a cloud as small as a man’s hand,” he murmured aloud, for there it was, that cloud, and as he watched, the sky swirled around him, and the stars disappeared under their blanketing. More scuttled across until the sky was full of the soaked sponges.

He watched in awe, breath held, and one great spattering drop landed on his face, then another on the rocks at his feet, and then there was another and another and then too many to count.

The rains had come.

He bowed his head then and bent his will before the God who had made him, who was still making him. Who had given and who had taken away. He prayed again and quoted the words of Job. He asked forgiveness for his arrogance and bitterness. “You do all things well,” he finally said, his voice hoarse and ragged but full of the faith he had thought he would never feel again. “Thank you, God,” he said softly. His hands fell down to his sides, and he raised his face, and it became wet with the pelting merciful rain as well as his salty tears.

It rained for four days and five nights. Not a vicious pounding gully washer, but a steady, heavy downpour that drummed on the tin-roofed farmhouses, soaked through the matted grass and dusty, cracked soil, filled the underground aquifers and lakes. It caused the rivers and creeks to rush again, swirling white and foamy over their rocky, desolate beds. It greened the plants and the flowers and trees and washed the dusty haze from the air. It caused the springs to shoot forth again with their pure, sweet water.

****

Annie never dreamed. She had not dreamed in years, at least nothing that remained in the morning for examination. But on the last night of the rains she dreamed, a vivid Technicolor drama of light and sound. She was walking, and suddenly there was a little house, and it looked a bit like Grandma Mamie’s, she realized, and all around and inside it were the things that Margaret had loved. The scenes changed quickly, one after another.

There was the slide at the park. The one Margaret insisted on sliding down alone. “She’s like her mother,” Sam would say, shaking his head, walking along the side, never more than an arm’s length away. There was her sandbox with her bucket and pails and muffin tins and spoons. Then she saw the kitchen stool where Margaret had helped her make whatever she was cooking. The tree swing. The playhouse. Her pink bed. Her dolls and toys. All of her things were in this place. Everything she loved. Everything she would need to make it home.

And then the scene changed in that way dreams do, and it was as if Annie was on the outside of a window looking in, and there she was, her own Margaret, fuzzy red hair a cloud around her face, sitting at a familiar oak table playing with buttons. The quart jar of them that Grandma Mamie had kept, and they were spilled out onto the table. She saw Grandma Mamie herself, then, standing at the stove behind Margaret, and she saw her own mother with them both. They were talking and laughing, and though she could hear the sound of their voices, she couldn’t make out their words.

Then the warm little scene shifted again, and she was inside. Grandma and Mama were gone, but Someone else had come. There were just the two of them and Margaret. Annie never saw His face. Just His hands as he pointed toward Margaret. “Give her to me,” He said gently to Annie, and she watched as she herself reached down. She picked up her daughter, hugged her sweet neck, felt those soft lips brush her cheek. She held her tightly for a moment, feeling her breath, the warmth of her skin. She pressed her face against Margaret’s soft cheek and said the good-bye she had never been allowed. And then she handed her daughter to Him. Margaret smiled at Him and held out her arms, and as He reached across to receive her, Annie could see the scars on His palms.

She was back outside then, looking in, and she wept because she couldn’t be with Margaret any longer. For she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to do more than watch and this would be the one last glance. She pressed her hands against the glass and cried, but then a voice whispered to her, and she had to stop her sobs to hear it.

“She’s safe with me,” He said.

She woke up slowly. And this waking was different than the others. She woke without the usual heaviness, without the half-remembered darkness creeping over her mind. She shuddered from crying in her dream. It was done now, she realized, the tears coming afresh. Her daughter was gone. Margaret wasn’t coming back. Of course she had known that, but now it felt as if that truth had worked its way from her head down to her heart, felt, in fact, as if a great barrier had been removed between those two, as if for the first time in many years her thoughts and heart could speak.

She cried a little more then, but they were clean tears, and inside she felt as if they cleansed rather than burned. When she was finished, she got up and washed her face and dried her eyes. She dressed quietly, as if preparing for a solemn occasion.

She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. The rains had stopped, but they had done their work. It was a fine Carolina morning, and oh, how she had missed them. She had missed the creeping moisture in the tall grass. The song of the birds in the stillness of the woods. The rustle of the breeze through the pines. The tall rustling stalks of corn and the plump curling tendrils of the cabbage. She walked for a moment, crunched along the gravel, and surveyed the scenes of her childhood. The sheep pasture, the garden, the cornfield, the creek. She walked along the road for a bit, and the red dirt was moist under her feet. It had been stuck in her throat for these last long years—the dust of home. She had stayed away, but He had come after her, and suddenly music played in her mind, the high sweet voice of invitation.

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me. See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching, watching for you and for me
.

She stopped, listened, and in her mind’s eye she could see Someone standing so far away she could barely make out His figure. Who knew how long He had been standing there, patiently waiting? But instead of the stern, harsh, crossed-arm figure she had imagined, she caught a glimpse of His face now, and it was longing, loving, yearning for her to return to Him.

Come home, come home. Ye who are weary, come home
.

And she realized now that she had been weary. Oh, so weary. She had been weary of trying to stay a step ahead of sorrow and regret, and she had finally discovered the truth—the only way to be free of it was to let it catch her.

Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling—calling, “O sinner, come home.”

Oh, with what tenderness He had called her name. He hadn’t pretended He didn’t see her sin, her hatred and futile bitterness, but He had urged her to bring it all home. To come dragging it behind her. To let Him take it away. How ruthlessly He had caught at her heart and kept pulling.

She walked toward the edge of the woods and stopped. She felt the cool breeze ruffle her hair. Droplets of rain were still set on the leaves and wild flowers, glittering like diamonds in the bright morning sun. A blue jay swooped through the sky, and she remembered what He had said.
I will refresh the weary
. And she realized that although she was surrounded by pieces yet needing to be woven together, it was Truth. She had been weary, but she was refreshed, and she was alive. She had been given this day, this fine morning, this arching, dew-struck container of hope. She was refreshed, and she heard His promise whisper there, just inside her ear.
I will satisfy the faint
.

She prayed then, as she had not prayed in years, and when she was finished, she got into her car and drove fast, feeling as if something that had been binding her had been snapped. She arrived. She parked the car.

She passed the blooming tree, climbed the steps, turned the knob, and pushed open the door. It smelled musty and closed off compared to the scoured air she’d left outside. She walked straight to Margaret’s room. She opened the door and stepped in and looked around, and as she stood there, surrounded by her daughter’s toys, her blankets, her clothes, all the accoutrements of her brief life, for once she was not struck with hopelessness and grief, but instead she felt a settled peace, an acceptance of what was.

She wept more tears for the child she loved. She would always love her, would she not? For what mother ever forgot her child? But she felt somewhere deep within her a seed stirring, a strong curling tendril of hope thrusting up through the breaks in her heart.

She left the door open as she went out, and as she passed once more through the hallways and rooms of this place, it suddenly seemed small, much smaller than she remembered, and she realized it was because it was empty, filled only with objects, and warm, living, breathing people in a room make it larger somehow.

She stepped out onto the porch, and then he was there, standing quietly, as if he’d been waiting for her. She went to him, she took his hands in her own, and she spoke the words that had been pressing to find their way out for all these many years.

“I love you,” she said to this man, to her husband. “I want to come home again.”