Mercy Train (21 page)

“He didn't choose you,” Sam said softly, her anger honed to a fine, sharp point.

Iris's head lolled against the seat belt. She was asleep.

The following day, at her weekly hospital visit, Iris, dehydrated, her weight plummeting, her heart skittish, had been outfitted with a feeding tube. She refused hospice. Sam fed her with nutrition shakes and crushed pills every four hours, a varying mix of Roxanol, Ketamine, Clodronate, Colace, Haldol, and Ambien.

“Bottoms up,” Sam would say, her mother most of the time too sick to smile.

Iris had amassed the morphine pills to kill herself, but she needed Sam to administer them.

“I won't,” Sam said again and again, but she knew she would do what her mother asked of her. She would be the approval-seeking daughter to the end.

In the evening, the smell of hibiscus and orange trees mixed with the sea air. Sam parked Iris's wheelchair in front of the open French doors so she could watch the colors of the sky change; she said it was one of the things she loved about her life in Sanibel. Sam sat next to her and placed her mother's hand on her belly to feel the baby's quick pitter-patter of hiccups.

“How much do I give you?” Sam asked.

“I have a pill box in my nightstand.”

“What will happen?”

“I'll fall asleep. And then you'll call Dr. Jones.”

“He'll know.”

“I was supposed to die three weeks ago, honey.”

Sam spoke to Jack each night after Iris went down for the night. But she hadn't told him of her mother's request. Somehow it felt like her burden, her responsibility, and she didn't want to talk it out, didn't want to hear his level-headed wisdom, didn't want to share it. He was her husband, but Iris was her mother.

“Mom, please. Can't you just wait?” Sam asked, fear and frustration leaking into her voice.

The bougainvillea that wrapped around the edge of the balcony rustled quietly in the breeze.

“Samantha. I have lived a life. Two days or two weeks more in this ruined body won't matter much to anyone. I'm still an atheist, you know. I haven't had one of those last-minute conversions.” She shrugged. “Death is death. I'm ready.”

Who was this woman? She was her mother, who'd driven her to and from ballet and tennis, never made a cake from a box, always driven the speed limit, bargained hawkishly with antique dealers, been cool with her maternal affection, stayed in an unfulfilling marriage for a lifetime, and, in the end, moved away to be alone. And yet here Sam was. Part of her was glad she'd been chosen. She would take what she could get.

It would be tomorrow, then, in the morning. Sam felt there was everything to say and nothing. She had been a little relieved. She had wanted to go home, to hear the baby's heartbeat, to let her mother go.

*   *   *

The TV was on in Ted's house—
Oprah
—but he wasn't in the front room. Sam knocked, holding the pound cake like a football, the letter in her back pocket.

Ted came bouncing out from the kitchen in an apron with a giant lobster on it.

“Hiya, Sam. Come on in.”

Sam had never been inside his house. It was dark but not unpleasant. A stack of logs near the fireplace. An old plaid couch. A burnished tree-stump coffee table. A carved wooden cuckoo clock on the wall.

“Nice apron.”

“I just put a meat loaf in for supper.” He rubbed his hands together. “What brings you over?”

“I made you a pound cake,” she said, handing it to him.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I wanted to make it, to see if a pound each of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs would actually work.”

“Did it?” He unpeeled a corner.

“You tell me.”

“Oh, this smells wonderful. We'll have some now.”

“No, no.”

“I insist. The baker has to sample her work.”

He bounded into the kitchen and came back with a knife, forks, and plates.

“That reminds me, I need to give you guys some eggs. The girls are on a roll. A man can only eat so many omelets.”

The cake was divine. Sam ate it fast and took a second slab.

“How's it going over there with your mother's things?”

Sam raised her hands and let them fall.

“I know, I know,” he said.

“I did find something intriguing, though. A letter.”

“Yeah?”

“Would you mind taking a look?”

She smoothed the letter against the coffee table in front of him. He pulled off his thick plastic glasses and rubbed his eyes—bare-faced, his eyes looked smaller and younger—before replacing them and fixing his gaze on the thin, pale paper.

“Mrs. Olsen is your mother's mother?”

Sam nodded.

Ted looked again at the letter and scrunched his face. “How old would she have been in 1910?” he asked.

“Twenty-one. I don't know a lot about her, but I thought she grew up here.”

“She probably did,” Ted said, rubbing his chin. “After age eleven. But I'm afraid I'm a little stumped by the rest of it.”

“No one's alive who would know anything about it,” she said.

He glanced over at the clock on the wall. “It's too late tonight, but I bet they could help you out at the Historical Society. They're real detectives over there. I found an eighty-year-old postcard behind my refrigerator once. They told me everything about it. Written to the original owner of my house, a doctor of dubious reputation. He supposedly kept the Eastside in liquor during Prohibition.”

“What was on the postcard?” Sam asked.

“A painted scene of New Orleans. The sender's name was illegible. But it said in part,
Happy days. I'll be home soon.

“Do you still have it?”

“I sent it to one of the doctor's great-grandchildren. A guy just over here on Morrison.”

“Sorry I ate half the cake I made for you,” she said.

“Nonsense! Everything is better with company.”

*   *   *

She and Iris had spent the early morning side by side in the rising sun, Sam on a chaise, Iris wrapped in a comforter in her wheelchair, the seagulls' piercing cries overhead as they flew from one side of the island to the other. Between dread and the baby kicking, Sam hadn't slept. She nursed her cup of coffee as Iris drifted in and out of a stupor, her breathing irregular and sharp. A neighbor dumped a bag of bottles into a recycling bin, and the clanging finally roused her.

“Happy Birthday, Mom,” Sam said.

Iris rolled her head toward Sam and smiled with the corner of her mouth.

“I'm glad you'll get to go home,” she said, her tongue thick.

Sam looked away then, without any idea how to talk on this last day of her mother's life. Everything seemed trifling or melodramatic or false.

“You make beautiful things, Samantha. I don't know if I have told you that.”

“Thank you,” Sam said, willing the rawness from her voice. She fretted, picking at her fingernails.

“You will never know how I love you until you have your baby.” Iris dozed again, her face in drugged serenity.

Sam touched her mother's limp hand and thought, I have waited for that my whole life. She let out a whispered “no”—a useless protest.

The appointed hour was noon. At 11:30, Sam pulled the box of pills out of her mother's nightstand and placed it on the kitchen table. And then she threw up in the kitchen sink. Her hands shook as she crushed the pills with her usual implement, a stainless steel cup measure, and brushed the white dust into a glass, careful to wash her hands afterward, lest her unborn child be delivered a dose of morphine.

When Theo called, she tried to sound normal.

“How is she?” he asked.

“How do you think she is?” she clipped.

“I know it's stressful taking care of her, okay?”

“Sorry. She's really sick. This is it for her, Theo.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He thought she would die weeks ago.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Should we come down there?”

“Yes.” Her anger was steadying. She felt, at last, that she could do this.

“We'll be there tomorrow. I'll call you with our flight stuff. Can I talk to her?”

Sam walked out to the balcony and gently squeezed her mother's frail shoulder, placed the phone at her ear, and closed the door behind her.

She went into Iris's bedroom and lay back on the bed, her belly heavy against her back, taking in her mother's view: a watercolor of sea oats and sand dunes, a beveled mirror above the white wicker dresser, the sky out toward the sea. Next to the bed was
To the Lighthouse
, which Sam would not bother returning to the library. There were no photographs, no tchotchkes. There would be little to clean out when she was gone.

Sam heaved herself off the bed and went back to her mother, who held the phone on her lap.

“It's time,” Iris said, almost dreamily.

“Theo will be here tomorrow.”

“I said goodbye.”

“You didn't tell him.”

“No.”

Iris turned and stared off into the white sky, the wind warm and strong, the sun high and taunting overhead.

“It was beautiful, where I grew up,” she said. “The river was so cold. Even in summer it would numb my feet.” She smiled. “I used to lie in the sun on this one smooth boulder and watch the treetops and the sky. The rushing water blocked out all the other sounds. I'd pretend the earth had dropped away.”

It was as if she were already gone, nostalgic for when she was alive.

“Okay, Samantha,” she said.

Sam did not cry. She wheeled her mother into the house, into the kitchen, and attached the feeding tube. She filled the glass of crushed pills with water and stirred the thick and cloudy poison. It was a series of steps, tasks to complete. She held the funnel and, without waiting for a final signal from her mother, she poured.

Once she got Iris on the bed, she pulled the covers up and got in with her, spooning the wasted frame, the baby between them. They did not say goodbye. Sam placed her hand on her mother's and waited. Death was not silent and swift, and in those terrible moments when Iris's body bucked, unable to get air, Sam held fast and closed her eyes and screamed.

*   *   *

Outside it was close to dusk, the sky a bruised purple beyond the scuttling clouds, and Sam's tears began before she could get next door. She cried for her grandmother and for her mother, for their loss, and for all the stories they didn't tell.

She thought back on the year since her mother's death. She didn't like who she had become. The petty grievances against her husband were mere diversions. It was her own shame she couldn't face and couldn't share with him.

Her breath eased out of her lungs in one long lugubrious hiss. She'd never told Jack about how Iris died. At the time she'd felt confused, twisted with grief, and she had told herself it was something no one needed to know. She convinced herself that she and Jack didn't see things, life itself, in the same way—that was the ultimate fear in a marriage, wasn't it?—and she wanted to let it lie. But the shame for what she had done—the first baby, her mother—had slowly dug a trench around her, cutting herself off from him. She had been hiding alone, deep within the silence. And she was tired of it.

She needed her baby. Sam's heart lurched at the thought of Ella. And she needed to talk to Jack.

 

VIOLET

Fairbury didn't look much different from Sheridan: a small town square, low buildings, empty sidewalks. The sky was swollen with rain, the clouds dense and dark overhead, casting a light that made the fields look an eerily bright shade of green, the buildings like cardboard cutouts. The children were tired and bedraggled. What had been anticipation in Sheridan had turned to toe-dragging defeat as they shuffled over to the meeting hall under the first plump drops of rain.

The proceedings weren't as heavily attended as they had been in Indiana, and the townspeople who did show up were disgruntled by the lack of selection. The children stood in the center of the room, and viewers circled around them. Some quickly left. Two of the older boys, number twelve included, Violet noticed, were nabbed by a farmer and his son. Elmer went happily with a well-dressed couple—a judge and his wife—and another boy of eight was taken by a kindly looking older widow who waddled in her calico dress.

“Are you good with babies?” a woman asked the meek girl, who looked down and nodded. The girl was fourteen, with a heavy bosom and a high forehead, and Violet had not yet heard her speak.

“Okay, then,” the woman said. “I'll fill out the application for you. Number seventeen.” She had not asked the girl's name.

“Illinois will not be a dumping ground for the filth of New York City!” a man in a suit yelled from the crowd. “Go back where you came from!”

The kids looked up, but they had all heard much worse as immigrants or orphans or street urchins. Mrs. Comstock bustled among the visitors, making assurances. As the man was escorted out of the hall he looked back, and Violet stuck out her tongue at him.

“Ain't you a picture,” a man said to her. His face was sunburned and creased, his hair greasy. “Open your mouth.”

“Pardon?”

“I said, open your mouth. I need to make sure you ain't sickly. I got a farm to run. Let me see your teeth.”

Violet went to speak, and he jammed his sour tobacco-stained fingers in her mouth to feel around.

She gagged and then bit down as hard as she could, grinding his knuckle between her teeth before he could get his hand out, screaming. He hit her face with the back of his other hand and knocked her to the floor. Mrs. Comstock ran over, waving her hands.

“How dare you hit this child?” she said. “I must ask you to leave, sir.”

“She bit me,” he said, holding up a bloody finger.

“Violet?” she asked.