Acts of God (3 page)

“What did it feel like?” people kept asking Hardin. “When you picked it up and it was a baby?”

“Like a miracle or like if you hit a ball out of the field in the last inning of a championship game. But more than that. It felt like I'd never known what to think before and all of a sudden I knew exactly what to think. But mostly that he was breathing. You could hear this little, little noise of air coming out of his nose. Like we all do it every day but never listen to it. I don't know. I don't want to talk about it too much. I don't want to lose it all in words.”

“YOU WERE STANDING
there in that old pink bra?” Marie's mother said several times. “I don't believe you were just standing on the street in that grimy-looking pink bra.”

“I got dressed in a hurry when we decided to go,” Marie answered, getting irritated with her mother after she had sworn to stop getting irritated with her since it didn't make any difference to get mad. “The bra was on the floor where Ella throws her clothes when she takes them off. I put it on in a hurry. Listen, Mother, if I don't get a room of my own soon I am going crazy. I'd take that little room off the kitchen that used to be a pantry if I have to but I'm not living in a room with Ella anymore.”

“I'll talk to your father tonight. We can build an addition if we want to. We can afford it. We've just been putting it off. I'll talk to him tonight. I'll see what I can do.”

Her mother turned back to the stove where she was making Courtland stew, her husband's favorite food that his mother from Edinburgh, Scotland, had cooked every week. “I don't blame you for not wanting to have a room with Ella. So I'll try to get it changed. We are very proud of you, Marie. There are not many sixteen-year-old girls in the world that get to save the life of a baby.”

“You save them every day, Momma,” Marie said. “At the hospital. You do.” She looked up at her momma and thought how much she forgot to tell her mother she was proud of her and swore to herself she would not be irritated by a thing her mother did ever again, even if she kept on making that stupid stew just to make her father happy.

Marie walked out of the kitchen and out into the living room where Hardin was getting ready to go to football practice. It was Saturday morning and it wasn't even football season and he still had to go out and practice kicking field goals with his football coach.

“Good luck with your field-goal kicking,” Marie said as she passed through the room. She stopped to say some more, since it felt so good to have decided to be nice to everyone in her family. “I really like to watch you kick them. You get to make points all by yourself that win or lose a game while the rest of them have to run all over the place knocking each other down. I think it's great you can do it. So good luck with your practice.” She smiled her kindest, nicest, not-acting-but-really-smiling smile.

Then she went out the door into the beautiful spring morning to walk down to the square and see if there was anyone else around she could be nice to. But not Ella, she decided, thinking of her older sister, asleep in their shared bedroom with her clothes all over the floor like the mess that was her mind.

The sky was a perfect brilliant blue like the brand-new Izod she was wearing above her cutoff jeans.

I'm lucky today, Marie decided, and stopped to inspect the brilliant yellow forsythia blooming all along Mrs. Collier's fence. I hope Rafael's doing all right. His father said he had two aunts who would help take care of him. I hope he has a good day today and doesn't know his mother isn't here.

God, I have to start being nice to Ella no matter how much I have to try to do it. She might be the only one left to take care of my baby, if I had one, and if a tornado came and killed Mother and Hardin and me.

Now that she had something really good to think about, Marie walked faster and moved down the hill from Duncan Street toward Center Street, thinking all about what it would be like after there was a big funeral and everyone in town was crying and the only ones left to take care of the baby were her father and Ella.

As she neared the square she ran into a teacher she used to have in the sixth grade, and the teacher started asking her all about the tornado in Adkins and what it felt like to be a hero, and Marie started telling her everything that had happened and added some more things she sort of made up.

“So I was in this Monster Truck Madness T-shirt, but I didn't even care. I'm going to give it to the Salvation Army, only I hate to fix it so some poor person has to wear anything that ugly. Maybe I'll just cut it up and make dust cloths out of it. What would you do?”

“Cut it up,” her sweet, wonderful, chubby-faced, old sixth-grade teacher said. “Remember that thing I gave you all to read. ‘Whatsoever things are good, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, think on those things.' ”

“You're right. That shirt is the opposite of pure and good and lovely. Thanks for teaching us that. You were the best teacher anyone ever had.”

Marie hugged her old teacher and patted her on the head, noting that she was now taller than the darling lady who used to read wonderful things to the class every afternoon just when they got to the time when they were so tired of being at Root Elementary School they could die.

Well, what a week, what a month, what a year it was turning out to be, and summer coming soon, wonderful old summer with sandals and short shorts and swimming and, well, chiggers, if you forgot to use
OFF!,
and trips to take and maybe John Tucker finally realizing how much he liked her. After all, he had put that jersey on her after he saw her in her bra.

“I sure bet he didn't notice it was dirty,” her best friend, Abby, told her ten or twenty times. “No guy would be noticing if a bra was dirty if he ever got to see one. You really didn't think about having it on and nothing else?”

“I was thinking about that baby being cold and wet. I was thinking exactly what somebody was supposed to think. It was a training bra anyway, something Ella used to wear to run in. It's really big, bigger than lots of tops or bathing suits girls wear all the time.”

“Don't think about him thinking it was dirty. That's the last thing that was on his mind.”

“We were thinking about the baby,” Marie adored saying every time she and Abby discussed the matter. “We were thinking about Rafael and nothing else. We had cut off our flashlights to save the batteries and it was almost completely dark where we were standing in the middle of the worst mess you could possibly imagine. Just standing there thinking about Rafael flying through the air and landing on a wet mattress with boards all around him. I remember it like it was a moment ago and I will remember it until I die. If I live to be a hundred like my great-great-grandmother that I'm named for, she was French, then Rafael will be about eighty-seven and maybe he'll come to my funeral.”

“The stuff you think about, Marie. You ought to become a writer.”

“No, I'm going to be a nurse like Momma, although she thinks I ought to go on and be a doctor. I might. What do you think?”

“I think John Tucker already knows he likes you. He just can't say it yet. How could he help it? You are the most interesting person anybody knows.” Abby was tired of talking about Marie then, and started a conversation about herself.

They talked about Abby for a while, then went into the kitchen to see if they could find anything to eat.

They found some leftover Courtland stew and put it into a pan and added Cajun Seasoning Salt and butter and heated it and ate it with crackers.

“It's a Scots thing they eat in Edinburgh, Scotland,” Marie told her friend. “The reason there's always some left in the refrigerator is it's so tasteless. My dad likes it that way because it reminds him of his mother. My mother likes the smell of burned toast because it reminds her of her grandmother. Her grandmother read books all the time so she forgot to get the toast out of the oven until she smelled it burning. She'd scrape it off and eat it that way but she never made my mother eat it burned. She always ate it burned with the burned part scraped off and she still does it. They didn't have toasters back then when my grandmother cooked toast for my mother. They just had ovens and you had to watch things that were toasting.

“Think about the things old people have in their memories, just thousands and thousands of days and people they knew and stuff they did and you don't remember much of it. It has to be something like finding Rafael to make you remember what happened on a day long ago. Burning toast and your grandmother yelling and tearing open the oven and getting out the toast and scraping it off.”

“Your mother ate it too? Did she get to like it?”

“She said her grandmother would cover up the burned part with a lot of butter and maybe homemade scuppernong jelly and that she liked it better than regular toast, what with all the excitement that went with it. I remember my mother's grandmother, but only when she was really old, not when she had a kitchen and burned the toast and all that.”

“We'll never forget each other,” Abby said. “We'll be friends forever even if one of us moves to California or Australia.”

“We will,” Marie answered and reached across the table and took her friend's hand. “How do you like the stew?”

“It's okay,” Abby said. “I guess you could get used to it.”

ON APRIL 4,
2009, the Fayetteville Five and John and Tommie Anne Farley's father, Caleb Farley, drove to Adkins to visit Rafael Fernandez and his aunts and father. They were driving in the Jeep Cherokee that had taken them there in April 2008. They were being followed by a Channel Five Television truck with a crew who were going to film the visit for a CBS special on the tornado and the recovery the town of Adkins was making with help from all over the state and the surrounding states too. Governor Beebe was there and Senator Blanche Lincoln and several state representatives.

The Fayetteville Five were being given citations for their work, which embarrassed them all except Marie who actually liked being on television. “It's because you're so photogenic,” Tommie Anne told her. “You'd look good in the Monster Truck T-shirt.”

“You look good also,” Marie said. She meant it. Tommie Anne's mother had taken her to Pink Papaya the day before to have her hair done and had bought her some new Clinique makeup to replace the drugstore stuff she had been using. “Just for this special occasion,” her mother warned her. “So make it last. If you want more you have to use your allowance or babysitting money.”

THE MAIN THING
was seeing Rafael, who was two and a half years old that week, and seemed very happy with his life. He was a smiling, laughing boy with green eyes and black hair and was left-handed, something Hardin was the first to notice since he was also left-handed. “The reason I can kick field goals is because I use my left foot,” he told Rafael's father. “Also, it's a big advantage in baseball and in tennis.”

“I know these things,” Rafael's father said. “I am using left hand, too.” Hardin and Mr. Fernandez laughed together, and Rafael moved in and started laughing with them. “He knows if something is funny very much,” Mr. Fernandez said. “He is always laughing very much.”

Hardin and Marie and John Farley and Jason and Tommie Anne played with Rafael for twenty minutes before Caleb Farley let the television crew come in and photograph them holding him and watching him walk around trying to touch all the camera equipment.

ON THE WAY
home Marie sat in the second row of seats beside John Farley. He never had told her he liked her for a girlfriend or asked her for a date, and he was two years older than she was and getting ready to go to college. Still, she had not given up entirely on something happening between them someday. After all, she was one of the prettiest girls in Fayetteville so tell me he hadn't noticed.

“I wish you'd come by our house sometime and hang out or go for a walk with me. I go up to the university every afternoon and walk for at least an hour. It gets my mind clear for doing my homework and all that. I'm on this campaign to really like the members of my family and know how valuable they are to me.” She had turned toward him and was making him look at her.

“I think anyone who was in Adkins on the day we found Rafael should always stay close friends, don't you,” she added.

“Sure,” he said. “I'll do that. I'll come walk with you one day. I have to get used to the campus since I'm going there in September. Do you know the names of different buildings up there?”

“I can find them out on my iPod,” she said. “I'll start learning them when I'm up there.”

She's going to talk to me all the way to Fayetteville, John Farley decided. Well, she is real pretty and she was there with us. She's right. We ought to keep in touch with each other.

“Good,” she said now. She reached out and touched his hand and patted it for a minute, then took her hand back. “I'm going to consider that a promise. Any afternoon. I'll be waiting.”

He wants me to shut up, she decided. I can quit talking if I want to. I've done it before. I'll do it again. I'll just be thinking about Little Rafael and when he gets big and we go to see him play baseball or tennis. I'll bet he's going to be a star. He's a star-quality baby if I ever saw one.

I need to remember all this. I don't want to forget sitting next to John Farley in the Jeep Cherokee right after we were all filmed for CBS News. I don't want all my memories lost in some fog like most people's are. I am capturing mine every chance I get.

C
arly Dixon was getting ready to go to class when the phone rang and she answered it. “Our unit's leaving tomorrow afternoon for Gulfport, Mississippi,” her unit commander said. “Do what you have to do. We need every man and woman, Carly. This is what we trained for.”

“All right,” she answered. “What do I need to take? I'll need a letter for the college. Well, maybe not.”

“There's a meeting this morning at B gate of the staging area in Springdale. At ten. If you can't make that, there's another one at six this afternoon in Fayetteville at the old basketball arena on the campus. People are dying down there, Carly.”

“I know they are. Okay, I'll make the one this morning.”

“Ten-four.”

“Ten-four.”

Carly took off the short red skirt and white cotton blouse she had been planning on wearing to teach her first Accounting II class at the University of Arkansas School of Business, a class she had been waiting to teach since she joined the faculty and the best job she had ever dreamed of having, and the first time anyone in her family had ever taught at a college or made fifty thousand dollars a year, but she still had to make extra money to pay off the hundred thousand dollars in loans it had taken to get her to the place where she could make fifty thousand dollars a year, so she took off the red skirt and put on the uniform of an Arkansas First Responder in the National Guard and got ready to go join her helicopter rescue unit at the hangar in Springdale where they trained every weekend. She had never gone down in the basket to pick up a wounded or helpless human being, but she had picked up plenty of her fellow first responders who were pretending to be helpless or wounded and she knew she was ready.

She was a triathlete who had run fifteen marathons and ran every afternoon for an hour and a half and worked out at the health club with weights in any spare time she had, which wasn't much as she was teaching two early-morning classes per semester, taking classes in the English Department for a secondary degree, raising her thirteen-year-old son alone and had a boyfriend if you could call an undependable thirty-year-old man who was still in college a boyfriend.

She finished putting on her uniform and went into the kitchen and got her son's breakfast ready. When he came into the kitchen she told him what was going on.

“I have to go to New Orleans to help save those people down there,” she said. “I have to leave tomorrow. I don't know how long it will be. You have to stay with Grandmomma and Granddaddy. Can you do that, Daniel? Can you be my big man?”

“Yes, ma'am. That's good, Momma. I wish I could go. I'd like to see that.”

“I'll take pictures if I can. Do you know how to download them if I take the digital camera?”

“I wanted it for the, well, never mind. That's more important. Will they pay you extra for doing this?”

“A lot, I think. That will be good, won't it? Hey, maybe when I get back you can have a camera, too. I'll get you something nice to pay you back for this.”

“At least Granddaddy's house is close to school. I won't have to get driven every morning.”

“Finish eating. Let's get going. What time is practice over this afternoon?”

“I'll call you and let you know.” He stood up. He was getting tall. Tall and skinny like his daddy had been. And he was a man. No matter what else life had dealt her, it had given Carly a man for a son, and she did not forget to be glad about it.

They went out and got into her Honda and she drove him to school and let him off and then she went to the university to tell them she had to leave. “I e-mailed my students the class was canceled for today,” she told her boss. “I have to go to this meeting.”

“We'll be proud,” the head of the department said. “I'll teach your classes myself. I wanted to send money down there but we're pretty strapped right now with both of our kids in school up north. This will make me feel good. Call when you can and let us know what's going on.” He walked around the desk and gave the lovely, strong young woman a hug and meant every word he had said. “I'll get your schedule and see that the classes are met. You go on.”

Carly left the business school and went next door to Kimpel Hall and put a note in the mailbox of her creative writing teacher, a woman younger than herself who was a student in the Master of Fine Arts program in fiction. “Dear Starr,” the note said. “I've been called to go help my helicopter unit (National Guard First Responders) rescue people in New Orleans. Don't kick me out. I'll really have something to write about now, won't I? Yours sincerely, Carly Dixon (Creative Writing II, 3401, Room 302, Kimpel Hall).”

“BRING BEDROLLS AND
everything you need,” they were told that morning. “There's nowhere to buy anything and there are mosquitoes, so bring insect repellent. I'm not counting on supplies for a few days. We will be staying in tents in Mississippi. We'll do daily runs into New Orleans, then re-stage in Mississippi each night. Don't plan on having electricity. Our planes are bringing our supplies and water. I called Walmart and we are putting our tents near to where they are bringing emergency supplies, so if the government fails us we can always call on Walmart for backup. Questions?”

There were plenty of questions, most of which didn't have answers.

CARLY SPENT THE
evening moving her son, Daniel, over to her parents' house and getting him settled. She had bought him a book of twenty-dollar Traveler's Checks from the Arvest bank. He knew how to use them from a trip they had taken the year before to Colorado. Carly had always been very careful to teach Daniel about money. She didn't want to give her parents money for him as they might be stingy with it.

“I'll come get you in the morning and take you to school,” she told him when she left.

“You don't need to do that. It's only four blocks. I'll walk or take my bike.”

“But I want to see you before I leave. I just think you ought to go on and spend the night here tonight because I have a lot to do.”

“It's cool. Is Charlie coming over?”

“Yes.”

“That's cool. Go on, Mom. I'm proud of you. I told my coach. He said he was jealous.”

“I'll tell him whether to be jealous when I get back. They said there are swarms of mosquitoes and we're sleeping in tents and it's hot as hell. I may wish to God I'd never taken that National Guard money.”

“No, you won't. It's an adventure. Go save some people.”

“I might. I hope I will.” She turned at the door and looked at him. Her man. Her thirteen-year-old chip in the future. It's hard to love someone this much, she decided, and went back into the room and hugged him again. She refused to think about his dead daddy. She just, by God, never thought about his dead daddy. His daddy was dead. That was it. His daddy had run a motorcycle into a tree on the Pig Trail when Daniel was three years old. He had not been wearing a helmet and he was dead and they didn't find the body for a whole day and when they did they called her and she buried him and then she swore she wouldn't think about Dan being dead or think about him being alive because she was going to stay alive and make a life for his son and not be a mourner or a whiner as long as she was alive and she would stay alive.

SHE WENT OVER
to the university track and ran six miles, then she went home and took a bath and put on her nightgown and waited for Charlie to come and spend the night. He was a waiter at a restaurant on Dickson Street and a student in engineering at the university. She had been seeing him for two years without deciding she wanted to get married again.

She waited for him in the darkened living room. She lit three small gold candles scented with pine and lavender. Then she went to the front window and stood in the dark waiting to see Charlie's car come down the street. It was ten after ten. He had said he was going to take off early so they could have the night together before she left.

At ten-thirty she gave up watching for him and went into her bedroom to check the bag she had packed. She turned on the overhead light and went over her supplies. She had tried to pack light, but she had to have moisturizer and sun block and bug spray and lipstick. She took her new Chanel lipstick out of the bag and put a cheap lip gloss in its place. She wasn't ruining a twenty-dollar lipstick when she was going to be living in a tent.

She sighed, trying to decide if three T-shirts were enough. The phone rang. It was Charlie.

“Where are you?” she asked, but it was a useless question. She could hear the music and the noise.

“At George's. Come on down and join us.”

“I thought you were coming here.”

“I was but Mick wanted me to have a beer with him first. Listen, the Cates are playing later. Come on down.”

“I have to get up early. Besides, I'm not going to be around you when you're drinking. I've told you that.”

“I met your writing teacher a minute ago,” he said. “She was telling a bunch of people about you going off to save lives. She's real excited about it. She got your note.”

“You met Starr?”

“She's here with her girlfriend. Come on down. All you have to do tomorrow is fly down there. She wants to talk to you about where you're going. I tried to fill her in.”

“I'm hanging up, Charlie. I don't talk to people when they're drinking. That's it. Good-bye.”

“Baby, calm down, would you?”

Carly hung up the telephone and went into the living room and blew out the candles and put the safety bolt on the front door and turned out all the lights in the house and went into her bedroom and zipped up her duffel bag and threw it beside the door and checked her alarm clock and turned off the overhead light and climbed into her bed and turned on her meditation CD by Dr. Andrew Weil. She skipped the CD to “Guided Meditation with Sound,” closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

SHE GOT UP
the next morning and drove to Springdale for early morning drills and to listen to speeches about how they should conduct themselves in an emergency zone.

At noon she was back in Fayetteville and went by the junior high and took Daniel out to lunch at McDonald's. The school was nice about letting him leave for an hour.

Then she drove back to Springdale and parked the car and reported for duty. Her group of fourteen first responders flew on a National Guard plane to Jackson, Mississippi, where they picked up ten more helicopter crew members and then flew to the airport in Gulfport, Mississippi, where they were met by trucks that transported them to the site of the tent camp that was being constructed by a Coast Guard squadron from North Carolina.

“The newspapers are full of condemnation for the Guard,” their commander told them at the first meeting that afternoon. “The newspapers are mad because we can't put together a rescue operation in less than twenty-four hours so I'm asking you not to listen to television or read newspapers for a few days because I don't want all of you to be as angry as I am. All we have to do is get into our groups and find our aircraft and start fulfilling our mission. There isn't time this afternoon to make a run but I want helicopters in the air before dawn tomorrow. I want everyone in bed by dark tonight. If you need sleeping pills there are medics to give them to you. Get sleep now because in the morning we are heading out. We have four copters and backup pilots. We have enough supplies for a week, thanks to the Alabama Guard, and we're on our way.” He stood back and the technical people turned on the projectors and showed them aerial views of the area where they would be working in the morning. There were people on roofs. There were people screaming for help. It was chaos.

“We are going to save lives one at a time without putting our crews or equipment in danger,” the commander said, stepping in front of the screen. “Remember that. You can not get in a hurry and do something right. We are going to save these people one person at a time, one roof at a time. Got it?”

“Yes,” the teams said back at him.

When they got back to the tents Carly unrolled her bedroll onto her cot, took her cosmetic kit and walked to the prefabricated ladies room and washed her face and brushed her teeth and went back to her cot and debated for a minute whether to take the Ambien she had been given by the medic. She took fifty milligrams of Benadryl instead, getting ahead of the mosquitoes, and put on her pajamas behind the screen, said good night to the woman from Jackson who was in the cot beside hers, put a mask over her eyes, and went to sleep thinking about where she was and what she was there to do. You ought to be here with me, she said sleepily to her dead husband, Dan, breaking her vow not to think about him alive or dead. If you hadn't gone and killed yourself you would be here seeing this hurricane. Goddamn you to hell for getting yourself killed. I take that back. I just hate to think of everything you're missing. He's playing ball on the football field where you played when you were his age. You're missing that and you're missing this. Never mind. Om, mani, padme, hum. Om, mani, padme, hum.

It was a mantra Carly had learned in yoga class at the Fayetteville Athletic Club, where she worked out when she had time. One thing about the National Guard, they gave her better health insurance than she got at the university and they paid her health club dues, not that she ever used the health insurance, because her aunt was a registered nurse and if she wanted to know anything or get any antibiotics, she just called Aunt Roberta.

Om, mani, padme, hum. It was working. Now she was thinking about Aunt Roberta instead of Dan and it was better, a lot better. Her Aunt Roberta helped Dr. Bill Harrison deliver babies. She had helped deliver hundreds and hundreds of babies. Her Aunt Roberta was the best-looking sixty-year-old woman in Fayetteville and had helped deliver half the people in town.

Carly fell asleep laughing at the thought of her Aunt Roberta up at the hospital being the first person to see the face of half the people in Fayetteville High School. Including me, Carly added in her sleep. She helped deliver me.