Miriam's Well (14 page)

“Pelham, Miriam Berkeley, type O +.” I'd looked at a bracelet just like this one hundreds of times when I'd been in the hospital before, as if it could give me clues to why all this was happening to me.

“What kind of a middle name is Berkeley?”

“My father's. Pelham is my mother's family.”

Adam read while I had the lab work-up. I peeked out the door of the bathroom and waited until he was absorbed in the magazine before I tiptoed out with my urine sample. I would have died of embarrassment if he'd seen it.

They took me into a little room and laid me on a table for the dye injection. The room smelled of refrigerated air. As the needle pricked my skin, I felt a revulsion as if I were being forced to eat raw meat. After the initial rush of heat, then cold, they said I wouldn't feel anything, but I sensed the dye spreading through me like snake venom. What came to mind was the life-size diagram in the biology lab at school of the miraculous circulatory system, with all the major and minor and hair-thin blood vessels. In place of crimson blood, I saw purple dye jetting into every blood vessel, polluting God's perfect universe of the human body.

After a while, they let me stand up, and then led me back to the lounge. I wore one of their stiff green cotton wraparounds that crinkled whenever I moved. I said nothing to Adam about my anger and revulsion. I smiled like a brave little camper. We staked out a corner of the bone scan waiting room. I'd hidden the puzzle under a chair, and now I pulled it out and turned the picture toward Adam.

“Hey, that's Vincent van Gogh.”

I'd picked out the puzzle at K Mart not because he was a great painter, but because I liked the haunted face, the ripples of smoke from the pipe, the rough fabric of the coat, even the blood-red background. He struck me as a man who was forced to do something he didn't want to do.

“Yeah, that's the looney tune who cut off his ear. Look at the bandage around it. There's no ear under there.”

“I thought that was just a scarf that was keeping his ears warm.”

“
Ear
,” Adam said. “That's the point. The other one's a goner. He sliced it off.”

“Oh, that's sick!”

“And guess what he did with the hunk of ear,” Adam said, relishing this whole perverse story. “He wrapped it up and gave it to a whore. Oops, what's a decent word you can relate to?”

“A prostitute? A harlot?”

“Yeah, a harlot. I don't know why he gave her the ear. Maybe he was short of cash, and they didn't take Visa in those days.”

“Oh, Adam, that's crass.” I couldn't believe I was a party to this whole rude exchange. Adam was infectious, like laughter.

We put the puzzle together quickly. It was Adam's style to start from the outside and work in, but I was drawn to the stark blue eye at the center of the puzzle. I began with the eye and built the face around it. We met at the pipe and worked up the brown stalk of it that led to the artist's lips.

“What would make a sane man cut off his ear?” Adam wondered.

“Maybe he wasn't sane.”

“What did the harlot say when she opened the box?” asked Adam. “Give up? EAR-rational! Highly EAR-regular!”

“EAR-resistible!” I quipped. Me? Making jokes? Puns?

Adam pulled back my hair. To make sure I had both my ears, he said. What a weak excuse. A shiver ran down my back when he touched me. With his hands behind my neck, he pressed his lips to mine. I'd never held my breath so long, but as soon as he began to pull his lips away, I shamelessly inched toward him for more.

Then they came to get me. Adam was nervous as they led me away. I don't think he was worried about me as much as he was afraid to be in a place like a hospital, all alone. He called after me, “Don't do anything EAR-regular.”

“You're getting EAR-itating, Adam. Go down and stuff your face in the cafeteria while I'm gone. I'll meet you there.”

The laughter evaporated in the scan room, where everything was cold and mechanical. I climbed onto the table, feeling a slight stab in my back from those stiff muscles. Another day of sit-ups ought to take care of that. I lay immobile on the table, with just a thin gown on, shivering not just from the chill of the morguelike room, but from an unwelcome fear that stole into me. I prayed and chased it away. I was sure that nothing would show up on the bone scan. The longer Adam and I had been together, the more sure I had become. True, I knew that nothing could be hidden from the penetrating eye of the scanner, which would aim for my weak spots as surely as the nozzle of a rifle. But Brother James had said, “Remember, Jesus goes with you as your rock and your savior. Lean on that rock. Have faith in that savior.” And I believed. I prayed silently while the huge drum hung above me and moved over my head, keeping me in its line of vision every second. It clicked steadily, reporting whatever it spotted in its cross hairs. The drum moved down over my neck, my shoulders, my chest, up and down each arm, taunting me as it got closer and closer to the target.

Click, click, the steady rat-a-tat-tat gave the word to the screen, as the machine moved down my left side to my toes, then up my right leg. And then the clicking picked up its pace, like a Geiger counter that's found uranium, and I willed myself to look up at the screen. There was a patch, the size of a marble, and black as the midnight sky.

What would I say to Adam, who was waiting for good news in the cafeteria? If I told him the bare truth, he would say that I'd lost valuable treatment time, that my prayers had been wasted, like the better part of an apple tossed in the trash; that Jesus had just plain let me down.

But he didn't know. He didn't know that I'd eased up on my prayers since witnessing in church and during the days I'd felt so good. Sometimes you only ask for things when you need them and only make promises for earthly rewards. I was ashamed that I hadn't been fair to Jesus. I resolved to pray with more dedication. I would be entirely faithful, and Jesus would heal me, as He had before.

And then, while I was dressing in the women's locker room, I had a frightening thought. What if Jesus were mad at me because of Adam, because in my heart of hearts, in the deep of my night, I dared to think “love” about someone who did not love Jesus? But He didn't hold grudges. He was telling me, with this knot in my bones, that He was giving me another chance. Finally, it was clear to me that I had to do two things: I had to pray constantly for my healing, pray with the spirit and pray with the mind, as Brother James had always told me to do; and I had to bring Jesus and Adam together.

And so, I told Adam, when I was done with the bone scan, that everything had tested out perfectly.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Told by Adam

Who did she think she was fooling, telling me everything was okay? The doctors gave the news to my father, and he told me. He figured I already knew, and because I didn't, I was even madder.

“So, are you happy now?” I shouted, pacing back and forth in our family room. “Your brilliant prediction's come true. What are you giving her, six months?”

“Sit down, Adam,” my mother said quietly. “It's unfair, I know, but it's not your father's fault.”

“Oh, really? He's the one who's making sure the doctors can't get to Miriam.”

“I am not, Adam. What I am trying to do is preserve freedom of religion and, secondarily, family rights as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.” He flipped to the back of a book on his desk. “The First Amendment, in the Bill of Rights, states, in part, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Then Article Ten says, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'
To the people
, Adam. To Miriam's family.”

“Oh, great! Miriam can die and rot in the ground, but all you care about is the First Amendment. I've heard First Amendment, Tenth Amendment, like chapters and verses of the Bible, all my life. I hate your stupid Bill of Rights, Dad, got that?”

“Stop pacing, Adam, you're driving me nuts,” my mother said. I sank into a chair. “Better. It's all right, you can take your anger and frustration out on the American Constitution. It's held up more than two hundred years. It'll probably survive your attack.”

Dad said calmly, “But it will not hold up if people do not struggle to keep it alive in cases like this. I realize you can't understand this just now, but preserving collective civil rights has got to be more important than one unfortunate Miriam Pelham.”

“Well, Sam, maybe it's a little harsh to imply that the girl's life isn't important.”

My father's head snapped up from his papers. “The girl's life is vitally important. If we win, we lose. God, Abby, how did I ever get into this business? I should have been a chicken farmer.”

“You could still get out of it,” I retorted.

“Don't think I haven't considered it every day since it began,” Dad said. “Every day. But I just can't leave the case. I'm sorry.”

“Sorry isn't enough.”

“I'll get some cookies,” my mother offered.

“Cookies, Abby? Now?”

“Mint deluxe brownies. I have some in the freezer. Listen, boys, I come from a long line of women who pacify their men with food. Indulge me.” She left me alone with my father, who was suddenly a stranger to me, and neither of us spoke. I studied the dirt under my nails, my shoelaces, a headline on a page in the
Newsweek
magazine at my feet. My father caught me looking at the magazine.

“His top aide has resigned, did you see?”

“Whose?”

“It doesn't matter whose. What matters is that you and I can have some mutual respect for each other over this Pelham case.”

“You mean, I can respect you.”

“It's important to me.”

“Well, it's hard for me to be as coldly analytical as you are, Dad. I like the girl.”

“I like her, too,” he said, with a deep sigh. “We'll pray it all comes out well, whatever the hell that means.”

“Yeah, well, I never really learned how to pray. She does it just like breathing.”

“So you'll start with a deep breath.”

“Wow, is it ever heating up,” Diana said. “It's almost too big for Wichita.” It's all we ever talked about, now that Miriam was back in the hospital. Somehow, Miriam's health had become Diana's personal cause. Her Bahamas tan hadn't faded at all since she'd been back. She was golden brown and more beautiful than ever. In Nassau she'd picked up a flowery basket purse, nearly large enough to be a suitcase, and she had it stuffed full of newspaper articles on Miriam, interview notes, reprints from medical journals, and a paperback Bible she'd highlighted in yellow.

We sat on a stone bench having lunch outside Eisenhower. Diana paraded papers under my nose. “Dr. Simon Greenwood, of M.D. Anderson Tumor Institute in Houston, says that the particular form of cancer that Miriam has, localized in the pelvic bone and growing at the rate of …”

A wave of nausea dizzied me. “Could we just eat?”

“Oh, sure.” She stuffed all the papers into her basket. “I'm ruining your appetite. I'm sorry, Adam.” She leaned forward and took a bite of my baloney sandwich, leaving her lipstick on my Wonder Bread. “It could use Grey Poupon,” she announced, like a TV gourmet cook. She wore a knockout red and purple and orange sweater that I'd never seen before and that she filled to distraction. I pictured the sweater on Miriam, and it didn't translate well. The sleeves would be too long, the shoulders too broad, the colors too flashy. Now Diana propped her feet up on the bench and pulled the sweater over the mountain of her knees. “The thing is, Adam, this is a time bomb right in our community. Journalists from all over the country have their eye on us. Doesn't that titilate you just a little?”

“Not really.”

Diana pouted. “Nothing does, anymore. Are we still boyfriend and girlfriend, or did someone forget to mention that it was over? That would be rotten for my ego, Adam, because I've never actually been dumped before.”

“I'm not dumping you.”

“Then what's the deal?”

“I'm just preoccupied, I guess.”

“Twenty-four hours a day? How do you have time to shower? You haven't phoned me in nine days; I've been calling you. And in case you didn't notice, we never made it to the Thanksgiving dance.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Oh, but I'm giving you another chance,” Diana said, raking her long, bright pink nails down my chest. “But only because I'm crazy enough to be crazy about you.” Her fingers slipped in between two buttons of my shirt, and when she touched my skin, I shivered.

“That's better.” She leaned forward and kissed my ear.

“No PDA's,” snapped Coach Ortega, who appeared out of nowhere, on bush patrol. “That's Public Displays of Affection, kiddos. Save it for Saturday night.”

Diana pulled back. “Right, Coach,” she said, flirting like crazy.

Coach Ortega grinned, patting his hard belly. “Hormones,” he muttered, moving on to the next group of offenders.

“But as I was saying, Adam, things are really heating up. I'm doing this massive, supercomprehensive article for the
Vantage
, and I think the city paper will even want it. It's a big, impassioned plea for medical attention for Miriam. I've got stats on life expectancy, specs on drug dosage, case histories, the works. I'm talking Pulitzer quality, Adam. I'm blowing this story out of the water.”

She would, I knew, and I was scared to be around for the tidal wave that would follow. I couldn't stop her, any more than I could stop Miriam from believing her God would cure her.

If only I could stop wishing Diana's fingers were still under my shirt.