Cavedweller (47 page)

To earn a little more to help out, Amanda baked sheet cakes for other women in Michael’s congregation—sheet cakes for birthdays, celebrations, and parties, reassembled in elaborate shapes, Christmas trees, valentine hearts, a Jacob’s ladder of alternating angel food cake and dark layered sponge cake. Her cakes were wonderful, and for a little while quite the rage, but there were cheaper sheet cakes at the Piggly Wiggly, so Amanda’s orders were sporadic and mostly came at holidays or for church events. Amanda did not complain. She simply made more careful lists and plans.

Sometimes, in the middle of checking her lists, Amanda would stop and bend forward from her waist, pain in her middle like an earthquake at the earth’s core. Unstoppable, irresistible, agony stayed her until it eased enough for her to pull up and pray out loud in a hoarse, demanding whisper.

“God, God spare my family.” Since Gabriel’s birth, it had gotten steadily worse. Cancer she knew. Death for sure. Her belly, no doubt, was eaten half through. And no, she would not pray to God to cure her. She looked forward to what she anticipated, vindication as certain as the fact that when the pain caught her she could not stand up straight. Sometimes, after a bad attack, Amanda stopped in at the Bonnet to look at Delia’s face. Sometimes she went by the convenience store and bought some little thing she did not need at all, just to see Dede stick a cigarette in her mouth and glare. Once or twice she had even driven out along the old highway toward Little Mouth looking for Cissy’s stubborn bent head. Her death, she knew, would teach them all what she had not been able to show them alive.

 

 

D
elia had started running after her first grandson was born. She had not thought she would keep it up. It was just a way to be alone and fight off some of the desire to drink which had come back with a vengeance after Amanda married and moved out. Delia kept thinking she would stop running eventually, but the nagging desire for a shot of tequila would not go away, and after the first few months the pattern was set. Every time the urge to get a drink came on her, Delia would change her shoes and head out. Sometimes she would just walk, head-down, oblivious and intent. But sometimes her muscles would knot up so bad, running was the only answer, running until her pain was purely physical, a matter of muscles and ligaments and sweat.

Delia liked best to run at sunset, the time of day when her thoughts became so tangled that running took her out of the confusion. The dogs loved it, Delia running by just when they needed a little diversion, a little after-dinner exercise. She carried a stick and waved the dogs away, but eventually switched to early morning and the dogs lost her scent. Delia found that she liked the dawn, liked even the permeable darkness just before dawn. She told Dede how intoxicating it was, moving up Terrill Road with only the sound of her breathing and the smell of her sweat.

“Healthy,” she said. “I smell healthy. I smell better all the time.” Dede had blinked, uncertain if Delia was teasing.

Delia was fast. One of the high school boys timed her. He hoped to be able to tease her, that grown woman in the cutoff shorts who thought she was such hot stuff. The joke turned when he saw how fast she could go, as fast as he was and maybe a little better.

“I was a sprinter,” Delia told Dede. Back in school, but never very seriously. Running again, Delia started to feel like she had more stamina, more than she remembered having when she was a girl.

“Back then it was all different. Nobody did it but the track-and-field guys, you know. There wasn’t no track meets for girls back then. Didn’t even have regular meets for the boys. Cayro has always been a pitiful county.”

She wiped her neck, full of pride at this revelation of her earlier life. “They made us run laps in school gym classes, you know. I’d run for the pleasure of it. And then later I found out there were women runners in the Olympics. Thought about that for a while. I’d liked it that much, but what could I do?”

Dede nodded. What could you do?

“But I liked being fast.” Delia gave a wry grin, a half wink. She dropped her head, embarrassed. “You never know,” she said. “But I’m not so fast anymore. I just like it, the way it feels.” She extended her arms, her skin flushed with the satisfaction of the speed she had managed, the three miles she had run, three miles without once thinking of Dede or Amanda or Cissy.

“You never know,” Delia said again.

Dede smiled tentatively as if she wondered what she did know. In all the years she had known Grandma Windsor, that old woman had never moved faster than at a stroll, an arthritic woman’s careful, steady forward motion, hips locked in grinding pain and teeth set in stubborn disregard. To go from shuffling along behind her grandmother to watching Delia step out all sinew and muscle ready to run was like jumping from a wagon to a train. Dede found herself looking down at her own body in a different way, seeing in her long leg bones the vision of Delia in motion, and in her small hard breasts the shape of Delia’s, which were the same size but softer with babies and a hard life.

Amanda scowled when Delia went out to run in her cutoff jeans or cotton shorts. “You’re too old to be going out like that,” Amanda said, but Dede watched Delia go out with a face full of awe and longing. As hard as it was to imagine, that was her mother—flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone. My God. My God.

 

 

A
fter Gabe was born, Amanda started doing her family’s laundry every day, sometimes twice. She would collect all the dirty clothes every morning, strip the mattresses, and grope under the beds. By nine, or as soon as everyone had showered, she had the washing machine going. She never let clothes lie in the hampers. Sometimes she undressed the boys right by the machine, their little shirts and socks going directly into the soapy water. Two color loads, one white every other day. Sometimes there was another load to be done late at night.

“I like things to be done right,” Amanda said when Delia told her she was looking tired, but it was more than that. Things had to be done exactly right. Bad days, days when the pain in her belly got so intense that her teeth started to echo its pulse, Amanda pulled the thermal blankets out of the closet and put them through a cold wash. The worst days, when the muscles in the back of her neck seemed to be pushing her head forward and down, she could not make her body lie flat, and as soon as Michael was breathing steadily, she would roll off her side of the bed and head for the laundry room next to the kitchen. She would turn on the iron, shake out the tiny boys’ T-shirts, and set the radio to pull in a talk-show host from Phoenix, one known for preaching directly from questions raised by his call-in congregation. While the muscles in her neck burned, Amanda would slide the iron forward and back. Cotton, cotton blends, linen and rayon blends, while that voice echoed all the way from Oklahoma City, everything smoothed out under a fine mist of distilled water. The aluminum crescent of the iron pushed heat through the fibers, evaporating what could not be flattened and shoved aside.

Some nights, while everyone in her house slept, Amanda would drive over to the twenty-four-hour grocery on the Cayro highway. Her cupboards had index cards affixed to them, listing everything inside. Lightbulbs, four each: 60 watts, 75, 100. Toilet paper: an even dozen rolls. She always had more than the lists indicated; the indexed numbers were minimums. If the four-pack of 100-watt bulbs fell to three, Amanda went out in the night to bring back another pack, a little more laundry soap, another two or three boxes of Kleenex. She would move up and down the aisle with her list, looking past it to Band-Aids, Bisquick, canned hams. Her family needed something, and she wanted to have it to hand. Michael did not earn enough for backups and duplicates, but no matter. What Amanda had to have, Amanda had to have. She clipped coupons and hunted down discount sales. She kept notes, she planned ahead, but sometimes in the middle of the night she would go out anyway, looking for that thing not stored in her cupboards, not found on any shelf, the thing she had forgotten.

I am not going to be with them long, Amanda told herself. I have to do what I can while I can. Over and over again she prayed, “Help me, Lord, with my fear. Take away my fear of death and make me ready.” Over and over Amanda prayed, never asking for the most essential, the most basic thing—the life she was sure she was losing. When she was gone, she thought, as she leaned over the open cabinet doors, they will know who I was. Praise God, then they will know.

 

 

I
t was Saturday, and Amanda could hear the boys babbling and Michael laughing. There was the clatter of plastic cups and bowls, a roar of giggles, and Michael’s mock-stern voice: “Now, boys, Mommy’s resting.”

Oh yes, Amanda thought, lying in her bed. She wiped sweat off her face and pulled her legs up tight to her breasts. She was on her back, wrapped loosely in a towel, knees bent and bobbing above her as she tried to curl herself tighter still. She had showered twice, but the pain in her belly had not eased at all. She would catch her breath and stand up, and the scythe would swing through her again.

“Take me, Jesus,” she pleaded. Tears trickled down her cheeks into her ears. Lord, how she hated crying. Amanda wiped her face and tried again to relax and pull a little more air into her lungs. She could not get enough. She just couldn’t get enough.

“I will not put up with this,” Amanda hissed, emphasizing each word separately. She set her teeth and rocked to one side. Slowly she unfolded her legs, sat herself up, and put her feet on the floor. She paused to breathe a few times, then pushed up harder and stood. When she was supporting her weight with her feet flat on the floor, Amanda managed to draw a full breath of air in and out, then in and out again. “I will not. I will not put up with this.”

She was steady. She was breathing. Think on Jesus. She dropped the towel and ignored the dizziness. Anything was possible with faith. Deliberately she stood up straight and pulled on her bra. Will not. I will not. Slowly, slowly she got dressed. If God was going to take her, he could do it now. Dressed and ready, she inhaled deeply and gratefully. With a prayer of stubborn love, she swung her head and wiped her face again. Will not. Will not. She combed her hair back and looked at her plain features. Amanda knew herself to be ugly. She did not care. God knew her heart. When she got to heaven, Jesus would take her up like the sword she was.

“Praise God.” Amanda whispered the words, standing upright with her back straight. She pushed her hair back one more time using both hands, then sighed deeply and put on her ferocious smile. “Praise God.”

When she opened the bedroom door, she was holding that smile. Michael and the boys looked up expectantly. Proudly Amanda beheld her family, the boys messy, pink-faced, and beaming, while Michael mopped up milk and tried to look like he was in control. She said, “Now what are you all doing out here?” She stepped forward, holding that smile, and passed out cold.

 

 

“G
allstones.” Dr. Brown said the word with dire emphasis. “Not that unknown in young mothers, specially women who have children close together.” His head bobbed up and down. “I do not know how she has been walking around this long with them. Pretty big stones.”

Michael leaned back against the green-painted walls of the hospital corridor. His face was pale and haggard. The last few hours had been a horror. He had been sure Amanda was dying. He had not known what to do first, whether to pray over her, or get the boys away, or call for help. He still was not sure which he had done first, but somehow he had managed. Somehow they were safely in the hospital and the doctor was going to take care of Amanda. She was going to be fine, the doctor had promised. He had said a lot, actually—that it was not even so bad a thing, gallstones. Just horribly painful, and there was no telling what Amanda had thought was happening, but Michael knew instinctively what it was Amanda had been thinking. She had been ready to die, ready to go to face her God. She was ready now.

“She’s very strong-minded,” Michael said.

“She’s stubborn as a rock.” Delia hugged Michael once and turned her full attention to the doctor. “You’re sure you can fix this?”

“Oh yes.” He nodded strenuously. “No question.”

“Surgery?” Michael looked even more upset. “Amanda hates the idea of surgery.”

“Well, fortunately, in this case it’s not necessary. We can use the new procedure on these. Sound waves. Pulverize the stones. It’s a very quick recovery. Best thing all around. You sign the forms and we can do it in the morning.”

“Shouldn’t she sign?” Michael was hesitant. “Amanda would want to be the one to sign. Can’t we talk to her?”

“Michael.” The doctor put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Your wife has been in mortal agony for I don’t know how long. Right now I’ve got her comfortable, and I do not want to do anything that would make her suffer one more moment of pain than is necessary. You can sign for her and she can do all those things tomorrow evening.”

Michael nodded but looked over at Delia. He needs a woman to tell him what to do, Delia thought, understanding in that moment more about Michael than she wanted to know. “It will be all right,” Delia said to him. “It will be fine.” Michael smiled gratefully.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll sign anything, but I want a chance to pray with her before the surgery. Even if she can’t hear me, the Lord can. And I know Amanda would want me to do that.” He bobbed his head in unconscious imitation of the doctor.

Oh Lord, Delia thought, watching them nodding at each other. What has my girl gotten herself into?

 

 

A
manda was floating. An Ace bandage cushioned her arms while the metal frame that held the clear bag of saline and morphine swung above her. She knew the bag was there, just as she knew she was in a bed and the needle was pumping relief into her veins. At the same time, she knew she was somewhere else entirely, somewhere safe and happy and gorgeous past her ability to express it. It was a good place where she was, the outer gate of heaven surely. She rocked back into the surface on which she lay and thanked God for bringing her here.