Burnt Mountain (15 page)

“We do indeed.” My mother smiled. I said nothing. It was bad enough that this was a doctor’s appointment. A social occasion
was infinitely worse.

“Well, now, what can I do for you?” He smiled, looking at both of us. He knew, though. I knew that he did.

“My daughter has missed a period or two and we just thought we should check,” my mother said. She might have been saying,
“I bid two spades,” to the smiling man.

“Yes. Well,” the shark said. “We can certainly do that. If you’ll just sit up here on this table, my dear, we’ll check you
out in no time. Is… ah… the prospective father with you?”

“No,” my mother said. “Yes,” I said over her. “Or at least he will be. He’s in Europe now, but he’ll be home in a couple of
weeks.”

“And is he aware—”

“No,” my mother said, and again, over her, I said, “It’s a surprise.”

“A happy surprise.” The doctor grinned fiercely and then said, “I’d really like to offer both of you something cool to drink.
It’s punishing hot out there. Let me just go tell Becky….”

“I’ll come with you,” Mother said, and followed him out of the room. “Do you want something, Thayer?” she called over her
shoulder.

“No.”

She shut the door behind her and I sat back on the crackling white paper and waited for her to tell him whatever she thought
she should tell him. The office was very cool, and again I shut my eyes.

Whatever it was, the telling of it did not take long. They came back into the room, both smiling, and the doctor said to me,
“My dear, have you ever had a pelvic exam?”

I shook my head mutely.

“Well, they’re not the most fun in the world, but I’ll try to be very gentle. I’ll ask your mother to wait outside, and then
we’ll see where we are. First, though, I want to give you a little IV.”

He gestured to a clear pack of liquid hanging from a stand beside the table.

I sat up in fright.

“IV?”

“It’s just saline fluid, my dear. You are seriously dehydrated; look at the skin of your arm.”

He picked up a fold of it and pinched it gently. It stayed there in a little pucker for a long instant before it sank back
into the smoothness of my arm.

“Your symptoms could just be a matter of dehydration. It’s not uncommon. And if you should be pregnant, the last thing you
and your baby need is dehydration. It won’t hurt, I promise.”

I looked wildly at my mother. She nodded, smiling.

“You’ve been way too hot way too long,” she said. “You’ll feel much better after this.”

I nodded and turned my head away from the needle approaching in the doctor’s hand. First a cold sting of alcohol, and then
the cold and much sharper bite of the needle, and then nothing.

“There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Dr. Condon said around his teeth.

I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t.”

And the next thing I knew I was lying on the papered
table with a sharp pain between my legs and an even sharper one deep in my belly, packed from my vagina to my knees with sterile
cotton pads. In the wastebasket beside the table there were more pads, some of them bloodstained. The doctor was not in the
room. The overhead lights had been turned off and my mother sat beside me, holding my hand.

“Mama,” I said, starting to cry weakly. “Mama…”

“Hush, darling,” she whispered, and there were tear tracks on her perfect cheeks. “You’ll be all right now. Honey, there was
a baby, very tiny, and very badly… malformed. Dr. Condon had no choice but to take it. You could not have carried it; it could
not have been born. So much better now, darling…”

I began to cry in earnest, wrenching sobs, deep ones. They hurt my stomach, but I could not stop.

“Mama, no… no, Mama…”

“Shush, Thayer, you must not cry. You have some delicate stitches and we need to keep you quiet and still. The doctor was
called to the hospital, but his assistant is going to give you something for the pain and clean you up a bit, and then we’ll
go home, and you can have a nice, long, cool sleep. I know it must hurt, but it won’t for long. It was really next to nothing….”

“What will Nick say?” I almost screamed. “We killed his baby! What will he say?”

“Perhaps we’ll never know,” my mother said softly, or that’s what I thought she said, but just then the nurse came in with
a hypodermic of painkiller and a package of large napkins for me to wear and some yellow pills in a vial.

I began to slide away again, on the pain medication. I remember that Detritus came in and carried me out in his arms and put
me into the backseat, where a clean pillow and a blanket waited, and I did not really wake up again until late into that night.

I woke moaning with pain and felt the soft, cool hand of my grandmother and heard her voice, like music and cool water.

“It’s time for another pill, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m taking the overnight. I’ll be right here with you.”

“Grand… there was a baby….”

“I know, darling. I know. I’m so terribly sorry. I know you don’t want to hear it now, but you’ll have other babies, you and
your Nick. Now lie back down and close your eyes. We’ll get through this. We always do.”

I lay back, sinking into cool linen, still holding her hand.

“I want Nick….”

“He’ll probably call tomorrow. It’s the day for it. We’ll track him down. Don’t worry about that.”

“Grand, he’d want to know….”

“Of course he would. And he will. I’ve got my sources. Don’t think I haven’t.”

I let myself slide back into sleep. Grand would fix it. Grand had her sources. Of course she did.

But he did not call the next day, and no letter came from somewhere in Europe, and by the time the great, devouring infection
took me that night I knew somehow that he would not.

And he did not. Not during the long days when I was
nearly delirious in the darkened room and my mother and grandmother and a white-capped nurse flitted ghostlike around me,
and not in the weeks when I was better and could sit in a chair and eat a little, and not even in the days after that, when
I could finally walk and climb stairs and even walk down to the river, leaning hard on Grand.

I never asked but once.

“Did he ever…,” I said to Grand one morning as we sat on the screened porch and felt the cooler breath of early September
kiss our cheeks.

“No, darling, he never did. I am so sorry.”

“I’m not,” I said levelly.

That evening I went to my closet and scrounged far into the back of it and pulled out the sneakers I had worn at camp, the
ones on whose toes Nick had written
Just
and
wait.
I took them down to the river in the twilight and threw them in. They eddied for a moment and then whirled away on the brown
river water. I watched them out of sight.

But still, for a long time, I waited.

I
t is called, variously, Sewanee, the University of the South, the Mountain. But those whose hearts and minds it has truly
captured—and there are many—often call it simply the Domain. There is a stone arch at its entrance, on the flat top of its
green mountain in southern Tennessee, and on it the words
The Domain
are carved clearly and deeply, so that when you roll under it you know by its instruction, as well as by the folk-art beauty
of the campus and its buildings, that you are entering a place of unworldly, living magic. I know that I felt a tiny shudder
of that when Detritus and my mother and grandmother drove me up the mountain to its summit on that day in late September.
And I know that that was what my grandmother intended me to feel.

By the middle of the month I was physically well enough to start packing my clothes for Agnes Scott, but I had not yet done
it. I had spent a lot of time reading in my cool, dim room
or on the screened porch, and I had slept a great deal, great, white, dreamless drifts of it. I read with avidity things that
I would never have considered before: Winston Churchill’s two volumes on World War II; a chronicle of the French Revolution
that fairly reeked of curdled blood on hot paving stones, called
Paris in the Terror; Swann’s Way,
which even my word-bedazzled father had declared the most boring novel in the English language; the collected poetry of Robert
Service. I spent a few faultless blue days down in my little retreat by the river, hoping to recapture some of the sense of
perfect peace and safety I had felt there when I was small, but I usually simply ended up sleeping and woke not to safety
but to tears.

I cried enormously in those first days. I would cry my way into sleep, yearning for its dark relief, and awoke with tears
still wet on my cheeks. I sobbed in the long, still afternoons as the shadows of September lengthened on the lawn. In the
middle of a conversation with my mother or Grand I would feel my eyes fill and my mouth contort and would stumble from the
room and up the stairs to my bedroom. Sometimes I could not, for a moment, even remember what I was crying about, except that
my body felt as if I had thrown up my viscera and it had been replaced with cold, echoing pain. I remember thinking that surely
you could die of such pain but knowing still that people didn’t and wishing that I could. The crying was never cathartic,
only terrifying and ultimately embarrassing. I seldom in my life had cried. I think it was the embarrassment that finally
stopped the overflowing well.

The tears must have, finally, been maddening to those around me, but my mother and certainly my grandmother
never sighed or muttered, “For goodness’ sake, stop that crying.” Grand did not weep with me; she had at times, but now she
simply sat close and held my hand or touched my hair, her face a blanched mask of pain. My mother cried, though. Often I would
look at her and see tears tracking down her faultless cheeks, and sometimes she hugged me hard and said, “So sorry, baby.
So sorry,” and I would feel her tears in my hair. Her tears brought me unease and confusion instead of surcease, but still,
no matter where we traveled afterwards, she and I, I would always remember that in the worst pain of my life my mother cried
for me.

When the crying stopped, it was if a great whirlpool, perhaps made of my tears, had sucked the past summer and everything
in it deep into its lightless maw. It seemed a summer that had never happened; I could consciously remember little of it.
A great, heavy stillness set in and nothing seemed to penetrate it. My mother was fussing about getting ready for college
and finally began simply to pack some of my clothes. I no more noticed the packed suitcases sitting in my room than I noticed
the furniture there, or the columns on the portico of our house. I could not seem to get my mind around the fact that Agnes
Scott College, sitting in its prissy little urban enclave in Decatur, Georgia, was waiting to receive me. Past the day I was
living in there seemed nothing at all.

It was my grandmother who broke the spell. I still do not know if she meant to or not. We were sitting on the screened porch
in the late afternoon, and in the lowering green dimness my grandmother was reading one of my college catalogs.
Better her than me, I remember thinking, turning the pages of
Man and Superman,
which meant nothing to me at all.

“There’s a freshman course at Scott called Southern Folklore and Magic,” she said. “You’d like that, don’t you think?”

The cool, freighted blood sliding through my veins turned suddenly to fire. I felt as if I had swallowed molten lead.

“No!” I screamed. “I would not like it! I would hate it! There is no magic! There was never any magic! Magic is a lie you
tell little kids to make them stop crying! I will not take that damned course and I will not go to Agnes Scott! Nobody can
make me!”

She was silent for a moment and then said, “Of course they can’t make you. I would not permit anyone to make you go anywhere
to college that you did not want to go. That would be a futile and dangerous thing. So what do you think you want to do now?
Is there somewhere else that sounds good to you?”

“I want to get out of this house! That’s all! I have to get out of this house!”

Only then did I realize that it was entirely true. I did have to go. I had known that far down inside me since the day I came
back from the bloodstained Victorian house in Atlanta. I stopped shouting and looked at my clenched hands. I did not know
what to do even in the next instant.

After what seemed a long time, with only the sound of my grandmother’s creaking rocking chair breaking the silence, she said,
“I think I know what you should do. I think I know just where you should go. It’s a very special place. It’s a college, but
not like any other college I know about. I agree with
you, you do need to get out of this house; I would love to see you go there. It’s in another state, on the top of a mountain.
Quite far away.”

She stopped, waiting, I know, for me to reply, to say, What is this place?

But I did not.

“I’ll go there,” I said. “That’s what I want to do. I want to go to college in another state on top of a mountain. I want
to go as soon as I can; I want to go this fall. Can you make that happen?”