The Sisters (36 page)

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Rainey said. “This has happened before. You haven’t been here to see it.”

“Liuh.”

Bertie felt Lynn’s touch on her shoulder. “Yes, we love you, too,” Lynn said.

“Liuh. Riah.” Bertie shook her head in frustration.

“I think she wants to ring for the nurse,” Rainey said, coming now to the other side of the bed and pressing the call button.

Bertie groped in the air, trying to catch at Lynn’s hand. Oh, where was Grace? Grace would make them understand. “Gace,” she said.

At last, Lynn’s hand closed over hers. But when Bertie tried to pull Lynn’s hand toward Rainey’s, Lynn released her grip and Bertie groped the air again.

“Her face is getting all red,” Lynn said. “Where’s that nurse?” She reached across the bed and pressed the call button.

Bertie waved both her hands now, trying hard to make them move toward each other, as a signal to Lynn and Rainey, but the hands moved by some wild design of their own that had nothing to do with her will.

“Mother, try to calm down,” Rainey said. She was staring anxiously at the machine beside the bed. “Please, try to calm down.”

“Yyou,” Bertie said. The ceiling pressed down on her chest and she was being pushed deeper into the bed, through the mattress, down and down and down.

“Yy … gv.” She was crying now, dry tears deep inside. Lynn and Rainey still stood beside her, but she was vanishing like Wallace, like Hans, like Mabel.

Somewhere far above her, a small red light pulsed, and there was a wailing sound, like a high, long scream, holding and holding and holding on the air, but all the time fainter until it was so faint it was only the memory of sound.

T
WENTY

Accounting

Late Winter 1994

Cincinnati, Ohio

ALMA

February

O
NCE AGAIN, A FIGURE APPEARED
in the waiting room door, and Alma put down her magazine to look up in hope, but it wasn’t Milton. This time it was another young man, twenty-five at most, wearing a faded yellow hospital smock that had been pulled on hastily over his bloodred T-shirt. His face shining with sweat, he stood speechless until a middle-aged couple noticed him and leapt up, crying in unison, “Boy or girl?” Tangled in an embrace, they all three managed to wedge back through the door to scurry off down the hall, laughing and crying.

For the first time since her 4:00
A.M.
arrival, Alma was alone in the waiting room. Milton had called them in McAllister a little before one o’clock to say Penny had gone into labor, three weeks early, and that they were on their way to the hospital. “Meet me there,” her son had said, and she’d started flinging clothes into her suitcase while Gordon was still trying to wake up enough to grasp the news.

“It’s probably a false alarm,” Gordon said. “I’m not driving two and a half hours to Cincinnati in the middle of the night for a false alarm. They’ll have sent her back home before you get there.” He rolled toward the wall, pulling the blankets over his shoulder. “What do they need you for anyway?”

“You go back to sleep,” Alma said. She was too happy to try to reason him into happiness. A baby! Her grandchild. “I’ll call you when I get there.”

“It’s over.” Milton now stood in the waiting room door. His voice was dry. “A girl.”

“Milton!” Alma went to him, lifting her arms to wrap around his neck, but then she thought better of it. Her son had never liked being hugged. With a quick, light touch on his arm, she said, “A girl—how wonderful!”

Nervously, Alma waited for Milton to smile and give her more details, but he did neither. How tired he looked.

“Son?” she said at last. “The baby—she’s all right? Isn’t she?”

“Oh, fine,” Milton said, and Alma breathed again.

“What are you calling her, dear?”

Milton picked up Alma’s coat and purse and handed them to her. “Sarah, I think. That’s the one Penny picked.”

Alma flushed, embarrassed by her forgetfulness. “Oh, Milton, I’m sorry. How is Penny? Let’s go to her.”

“She’s asleep,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. “I‘ll get my coat and we can go. You can follow me to the house.”

“But, Milton…” So many words rose up, demanding to be said, that Alma couldn’t get hold of any of them. He wanted to leave now? He wasn’t going to stay the night with Penny? What about the baby?

Milton returned his keys to his pocket and sighed. “I guess you want to see her. Well, come on, then.”

He led Alma down the hall, through several turnings, and down other halls, but finally she saw the windowed wall of the nursery and pushed ahead of her son. “Where is she? Oh, where is she?” Alma scanned the rows of little cribs, each with its tiny swaddled bundle, and then at last—
Baby Girl Crisp
—a little redder than the others, being the newest, with just a few wisps of silky hair. Alma pressed her hands to the glass and leaned in, steaming the window with her whispered declarations of love.

“Are you a grandmother?”

Startled, Alma looked up to see one of the maternity nurses leaning out the door.

“Is this your mother, Dr. Crisp?” asked the nurse. “Well, we can bend the rules for her.” She motioned for Alma to follow.

A moment later, Alma was covered in a smock and being led by the nurse through another door into the nursery.

“She’s a little small,” the nurse said, bending into the crib, “but not bad for a preemie. She’ll be able to go home when her mother does.”

And then the baby was in Alma’s arms. “Sarah,” she said, more tenderly than she had ever said anything. “Sweet, sweet baby.” She caressed her granddaughter’s velvety little head with her cheek, wet from tears she couldn’t stop—tears she never wanted to stop. From somewhere inside her, a tune rose, and even as she began to hum it, thinking,
Sarah, Sarah,
she tried to recall what it was. A lullaby? No—an old song from the radio. “Blue Moon.” Something Daddy used to sing. As she hummed it through, the story of the song nudged up to her through the melody—and suddenly she knew that, until this moment, she had been that person, longing beneath that lonely moon, waiting for the love of her heart.

Alma sang softly on. She no longer noticed the lights, the low talk of the nurses, or the cries of another baby just waking. There was nothing in the world except this child in her arms. She gazed into the tiny face, dancing her darling in dips and sways, the two of them, together, under the blue-black sky, bathed in the brilliance of the newly golden moon.

Safely wound in her blankets, Sarah stirred like a leaf in a breeze, and Alma kissed her once, twice, three times.

So this is what a soul feels like
, Alma thought—weightless but solid, a mystery that could warm beyond its warmth. Here was love that expanded. Love that multiplied, past measure.

March

It had surprised Alma—surprised her, but also made her proud—that Milton wanted to go right back into the office the day after Sarah’s birth. “I have patients scheduled,” he said. “If I cancel them, I’ll have to double-book for the rest of the week.”

“Of course, dear.” Alma poured him another cup of coffee. “I understand. Your father never liked to let his patients down, either. I’ll go to the hospital to help Penny.”

“I want you to come to the office with me,” Milton said. “Judy can’t check everyone in and do all the triage, too. You can go pick them up at the hospital after work, if it pleases you.”

Much as Alma had longed to return to the nursery—to hold little Sarah, to rock her and tell her of all the things they would one day do together—she was touched by her son’s need of her. Not that
need
was a word he had ever been able to say to anyone. Naturally, it was too short notice for him to hire a temporary replacement that first day, but he made no mention of it for the next day or even the next week. It was his way of showing Alma he trusted her. Like Gordon, Milton had always been strong, in control, incapable of showing vulnerability. It would have been unfeeling of her to press for explanations at that moment, when everything about his life was changing.

Though still it tore at her when she had to leave baby Sarah behind each morning, now, nearly five weeks after she’d arrived in Cincinnati, Alma had to admit she enjoyed replacing Penny as Milton’s office manager. In all his years of practice, Gordon had never asked her to tend his office for him, not even for the short while between one girl quitting and another hiring on—sometimes as many as four or five in one year.

That first day, as Milton showed her around the front office, she’d found herself growing excited about her new responsibilities.

“The patients’ medical files are organized by last name in the green filing cabinets, and,” Milton said, tapping a few keys on the computer, “in the files here, on the hard drive.” He pointed to a set of low black cabinets with double-width drawers beneath the window. “The insurance records are in there, filed in numerical order by the patients’ Social Security numbers. You won’t need to bother with those. Penny will catch up on all that when she’s back full-time.”

He plucked three black pens from a cup on the desk and fixed them in his jacket pocket. “All you have to do is check the sign-in list when someone comes in, pull the patient files, and leave them on this ledge for Judy. She’ll do the rest. If I’ve asked the patient to schedule another appointment, Judy will tell you that. There’s no reason for you even to open the folders.”

“What about billing?” Alma asked.

Milton shook his head. “When Judy hands the folders back to you, put them here.” He lifted a portable file case from the top of the nearest green filing cabinet. “I’ll take them home to Penny. She’ll transcribe my notes, put everything on disk, and on Saturday, you can stay home with Sarah while Penny and I come in to transfer the files and do the billing.”

Alma had never been happier, but Gordon was furious with the arrangement, especially after Milton told his father over the phone that it wasn’t worth hiring someone else, since Penny might decide anytime she was ready to go back to work. “He wants to talk to you,” Milton said, handing Alma the phone. When Gordon had blown out the worst of his fury, she did her best to explain to him how to do the laundry and prepare simple meals for himself. Ten days later, he showed up at Milton’s, grumbling that he had run through all his clean clothes and swearing he would never eat another frozen lasagna. Once he settled in, though, it wasn’t any more difficult to tend to Gordon than it would have been at home, and Alma simply set about establishing a pattern for their blended household.

In the mornings, she got up first, lightly bouncing Sarah in her arms while the bottle of formula warmed on the stove. Then Alma would make the coffee, wake the others, and start breakfast. When she’d finished loading the dishwasher, she would go and get dressed for the office, check Sarah’s diaper, and sit with her for a few moments in the rocker before handing her off to Penny, who seemed to appreciate the orderliness of the schedule, taking the baby into her arms with mechanical efficiency.

When Sarah woke in the night, Alma—remembering how exhausted she had felt as a new mother—would slip carefully out of bed so as not to disturb Gordon, stop outside Milton and Penny’s closed bedroom door, and say quietly, “I’ll see to her. You two need your rest.”

After work, she’d do the grocery shopping, then come home to cook dinner, cleaning up the kitchen afterwards while the others relaxed in front of the television. More often than not, Sarah lay in her carrier, cooing and blowing bubbles, perched safely in the center of the table while Alma put away the dishes.

How strong she felt—
invigorated
. Back in McAllister, she had always been exhausted by seven or eight o’clock and struggled to stay awake until ten so she’d sleep through the night. Now sometimes she didn’t lie down until past midnight, and even if she’d been up with Sarah two or three times, she would wake again at five thirty, perfectly refreshed.

“You look younger every time I see you, sweetie.”

Alma looked up to see Mr. Radford, who came in once a week to have his hemoglobin and his blood pressure checked. He was eighty-seven and was dropped off by the downtown shuttle from the Senior Center, where he spent the days while his grandson was at work.

“I’ll tell Judy you’re here, Mr. Radford,” Alma said, starting up from her chair.

“No, no,” he said, laying a bundle of papers on the counter, frayed from having been folded small enough to fit his back pocket. Alma now remembered it wasn’t Mr. Radford’s usual day.

“I need you to look over these papers for me,” Mr. Radford said. “Gladys says she thinks they’re not right.” Gladys, Alma knew, was Gladys Bishop, a friend of Mr. Radford’s from the center and another of Milton’s weekly patients. Mrs. Bishop had to watch her blood sugar.

Mr. Radford unfolded the papers and smoothed out the creases with his fist. “It’s the insurance has made the mistake, but they won’t talk to me about it—just treat me like some old fool that doesn’t know what’s what.” When he grinned, Alma caught a flash of the gold crown he’d shown her once to prove that his teeth might not be what they’d been when he was twenty, but they were all still his own.