Authors: Alice McDermott
“I’m all right,” she said, but Pam held her arm anyway. Tomorrow they might no longer need her.
Sheryl was dressed and sitting in a chair in one corner of the room. The other three beds were empty. Her labor had been long and difficult, but she had gotten through it quietly. The doctor had praised both her courage and her youth. She was wearing one of the plaid maternity blouses Pam had made for her but the change in her body was clear, and although she still held her hands over her stomach, as she had taken to doing during the past few months, her face, suddenly thinner, suddenly seeming to fit properly under the heavy makeup, told them that she was finished with the ordeal.
“I have to ride down in a wheelchair,” she said as they entered, and Pam answered—she had been in this hospital herself when her own children were born—“That’s standard procedure.”
“They don’t want you to fall,” her mother added.
Sheryl held out her hands to show them she was not carrying anything.
She hadn’t wanted to see the child. She’d told them there was no point in it. But Pam was persistent, certain it was this, the children she had held in her arms, that carried her into her own future when the chasm at the heart of her daily life drained her of hope. She asked a nurse she remembered to give the girl another chance.
Sheryl had just finished her first breakfast when the nurse walked halfway into the room. “Just a peek?” she asked.
Sheryl merely nodded.
The thing was incredibly small and ugly and would not open its eyes.
Sheryl unwrapped it and touched its elbows and knees, the waxy remnant of its cord. His skin was pale and tinged with yellow and his fingers were tightly closed. She pressed her lips to the top of his head, brushed them against the fine dark hair, touched the eyelids and lips in a kind of blessing. Then she closed up the blanket and handed the child back to the nurse. The first and last time she would see him.
They brought the wheelchair to the door of the room, and Sheryl stood slowly, her cousin and her mother at her elbow. “I’m all right,” she told them.
Out in the corridor, other women in nightgowns and slippers, blue or pink ribbons in their hair, walked slowly up and down, touching the walls. They looked carefully at Sheryl, only a small suitcase in her lap. She was wheeled the long way around to the elevators, avoiding the nursery.
Pam ran ahead to pull the car up to the hospital’s entrance. Sheryl and her mother and the orderly who pushed her waited together in silence. She was surprised to see her aunt and her grandmother and the three children in the car. She could tell already that her grandmother had tears in her eyes.
There was a great fuss about who would sit where, and Pam swept all the children out of the car as if she were rearranging the luggage in a small trunk. She sent two of them around to the other side as the grandmother moved into the middle and then, as Sheryl got in, lifted the youngest child into her lap. “You don’t mind,” she said. “Watch your fingers,” and shut the door.
Sheryl’s mother and aunt rode in the front seat beside Pam. Her grandmother’s fleshy elbow pushed into her side. The child squirmed on her lap. Outside, the streets they passed were dull with winter, the lawns gray, and the remaining Christmas decorations, strings of lights and plastic Santas and Nativity scenes littered with scraps of snow seemed, as they always seemed in those days after Christmas, colorless and limp. Next year they’d look new again.
Her little cousin felt the tag on her wrist and began to finger it. Next year she’d be in her new house and her new school. The child—traveling now in another car, in the arms of a woman who, Pam had told her, had nearly given up hope—would be nearing its first birthday.
She bowed her head and put her lips to her cousin’s fine hair. The woman who had nearly given up hope, Pam had told her, would be pushed from the hospital in a wheelchair, the baby in her arms, just to make the picture complete.
Sheryl brushed her lips against her cousin’s hair, his determined squirming like an echo of the child she had carried. What she thought of then was not the nights they had shared, or of all that had insinuated itself between them since the door flew open and her life began again. What she thought of instead was summer. Another summer evening on our street. The dinnertime stillness slowly giving way, the sound of chairs scraping away from tables and, through window screens and opened doors, of dishes tumbling in sinks full of water. Children, numbed briefly with food and already taller than they had been, stepping out into the new light, walking carefully into the cooled air, across the lengthening shadows. Her father’s death still new to her; her throat still strained with the effort of not calling out his name.
The three females linger at the table. The plates before them are full of food, only the crumpled paper napkins and the empty glasses and the silverware crossed over each plate mark the time that has passed since they sat down. Her grandmother says, “Too hot to eat,” although there is only cold meat and salad. Her mother wipes her throat with a napkin. “There was a breeze,” looking toward the dining room ceiling, into the still air, “but it’s gone.” Her voice saying of course. Of course there is no relief.
Sheryl moves her bare thighs, pulling them from the sticky plastic seat. “Can I go?” she asks, and her mother nods and tells her somewhat indifferently to be home by nine. Then something in her face seems to relent.
“There’s a movie on TV tonight,” she offers in a way that implies she is doing her best, but it’s hard enough keeping herself alive. “When the ice-cream man comes, I’ll pick up some ices.”
Sheryl shrugs and pulls herself from the chair. She climbs the stairs slowly, her hand trailing along the banister.
The lights of her vanity mirror seem dim in the red evening sunshine that fills her room. She sits before it, carefully studies her face, then reaches for the thick blue compact. With one hand steadying the wrist of the other, she draws a careful black line across each eyelid. She lifts a hank of hair, rats it vigorously, wets it with hairspray. Her lipstick tastes of peppermint although no one has yet to share the flavor. She slips a thick plastic bracelet over her wrist, and then another. The sound of them, she knows, will reach the boys, make them turn away from their cars. She practices a slow, wise smile.
She wants to love someone else. This emptiness left like an impression by the way she loved her father must be filled or else it will be as though he never lived.
Downstairs, her mother and grandmother are watching an unfamiliar program on TV, thrust a half an hour too early into their evening because there were so few dishes to be done. Her grandmother clucks her tongue when she sees her tight clothes. Her mother says only, “Nine o’clock,” no kindness in her voice now, only the sense that she had once thought her children would save her but there is no relief.
She leaves by the front door, going quickly down the three steps and across the lawn. Jake stops on his bicycle to watch her. My parents peer over the rhododendron. Mrs. Evers, eyeing her carefully, knowing what she is dressed for, says “Hi” as she brings her garbage to the curb.
The air is still hot and her shoes echo against the pavement. There is the pale swish of lawn sprinklers, children appearing here and there, in trees, behind fences, across the grass, as numerous as fireflies.
Angie is waiting for her at the corner. Sheryl greets her with a piece of gum and the two girls turn, their hips bumping and their shoes scraping over the sidewalk, and once more head for the schoolyard, where they know the boys will be.
The miracle, then, was not the door banging open and filling the small bloody room with hot sunlight, bringing her more life; the miracle was that, despite all she had lost, despite all she knew was no longer true—her love alone was not enough, it would always, eventually, come to nothing-still, there was the blind, insistent longing, stirred now by the child in her arms, that this emptiness be filled again.
In the front seat, Pam, her mother and her aunt were keeping up a bright conversation to which the three children added their own bright and nonsensical things. Sheryl pulled her small cousin closer to her, held him more tightly in her arms. She tossed her hair back over her shoulder as Pam drove out onto the highway and the car picked up speed.