Run (25 page)

Tennessee Alice Moser looked down at herself, smoothed the sides of her dress with her hands. “You are neither one exactly. Sort of in between the two. Or you can think of it as anesthesia.” She leaned over and pushed the automatic button to raise up her friend’s head.

“Is it all right to do that?” Tennessee asked. “I think I’ve just been operated on.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll put you out flat again before I go.”

“Thoughtful girl.”

“That surgery,” she shook her head. “Be glad you weren’t awake to see it.”

“Awful?”

Tennessee Alice Moser squinched up her eyes and then covered her face with her hands. “It was so bloody.”

“You never were any good with bloody.”

She sighed and dropped down into a chair beside the bed. “I was not.”

Tennessee was smiling now and couldn’t stop, thinking of her friend having to watch not only the surgery but everything that happened in her life and in Kenya’s life all these years gone by. “Do you a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 196

think I’ll live through this?” She had meant to be teasing but Tennessee Alice Moser reached into her own hair and pulled on one of her little braids.

“I don’t know yet. It’s kinda up in the air.” The vagueness of the answer should have been, at the very least, a cause for more questions but at the present moment Tennessee was easily distracted. “Kenya does that.”

“Does what?”

“Yanks her hair. I could tell her to stop it for the rest of my life and she couldn’t. She doesn’t know she’s doing it.”

“You think she looks like me?”

“Carbon copy, but that’s not even what I’m saying. She
is
like you. All the little things she does are you. Sometimes I just have to stare at her. It blows my mind.”

Tennessee Alice Moser looked down at her hands in her lap and she smiled.

Her friend in the bed went on, glad to have someone to say this to since she thought about it every day without anyone to tell.

“Sometimes I feel like my entire life has been some sort of study in genetics,” Tennessee said. “There’s Kenya doing things like you, and then I wonder if my boys are doing things like me.”

“I imagine they are. I imagine that’s how it works.”

“You should see the way she runs, like it was born in her bones.

The coaches always say to me, ‘Were you a runner? Was her daddy a runner?’ She’s eleven years old and I couldn’t keep up with her on a bike.”

“I think maybe Ebee ran. I’m not sure. You just tell them you were Wilma Rudolph in your last life.” She took her friend’s hand in the hospital bed and turned it over. She lined them up palm to palm then entwined the fingers until they were locked up tight.

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“In my last life I was somebody named Beverly who had two little boys and gave them up. In this life I’m you and I have a daughter.”

“You have my daughter, yes you do.” Her voice was distracted then, miles away.

Tennessee looked at her friend and worried. She had always worried if she’d done the right thing. “I tried to find Ebee,” she said.

“What would you have done with him?”

“I thought he might have wanted Kenya,” she said, but she really didn’t think he would have. He had hardly even wanted Tennessee Alice Moser. He had been less like a boyfriend and more like a couple of weekends, a couple of good nights out. Tennessee had only met him once in the stairwell. She did not exactly remember his face. What she could remember was Tennessee Alice Moser looking over her shoulder in that pumpkin colored dress that fi t her so neatly, her smile wide enough to show even her back teeth.

She would not think ill of any man who had made her friend so happy, but who’s to say he would have been interested in a baby he hadn’t known about to begin with? “Here you go, total stranger,” she would say, handing Kenya over. “Here is my beloved baby girl. You take her.” Not that it mattered. She didn’t find him. She searched and did not fi nd.

“No,” Tennessee Alice Moser said. “I don’t think Ebee would have been right.”

“I looked for your mother, too.”

“Well, you would have had to look for her where I am now.”

“Really?”

“She’s dead, and one of my sisters, too. I guess we didn’t turn out to be such a hardy bunch. The other sister I would have to say not a chance. I wouldn’t have wanted her to get her hands on my girl.” Tennessee Alice Moser sighed and scratched off a dried clump a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 198

of blood that was clinging to the bandage on her friend’s forehead.

“No, you’re the one I’d have picked if I’d ever given the whole thing five minutes of thought. Unless,” she said, and there she stopped.

“Unless?”

“Well, didn’t you ever think of putting her up for adoption?” Tennessee was frankly stunned. Kenya, who she had stood by every minute of her life as if she was her very fl esh? “Adoption?” Her friend brushed the surprise aside without even consider-ing it. “It’s not like it’s a completely foreign concept. Your boys did pretty well in the system. They wound up in a big house, they went to good schools. Don’t get me wrong, I think you’ve done a wonderful job and I’m grateful to you, I am. I know you love her and I know that counts for everything, but I have to tell you I’ve wondered. You were the one going back to college. You were the one talking about law school. Then you take my baby and all of that’s gone?”

“I couldn’t give her away. She wasn’t mine
to
give away back then.” Tennessee worked to keep a steady voice. “I kept thinking I’d fi nd the right person, the person she belonged to. You can’t just take a baby back once you’ve adopted them out.” Tennessee Alice Moser lowered her eyebrows and looked at her friend hard, just looked at her and said nothing, giving her time to come to her own conclusion until finally Tennessee sighed and picked at the tape that held the IV line into the top of her hand.

“Okay, all right. So I didn’t want to give her up. Is that what you want to hear me say? I was terrified that I was going to find one of those people I was looking for. But what you’re forgetting is how sick I was over you after you died, and how Kenya and I made each other feel better. Don’t you remember how good she was? I’d go and pick her up after work and she would just smile and grab for me. I’d pick her up in my arms and I thought I would die for loving her so much. I never wanted to put her down. I wasn’t going to give r u n

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her away to strangers. Things worked out for my boys, you’re right, but I was stupid then and I was young. I didn’t stop to think about all the really bad people there are out there who could wind up raising your child. I couldn’t take that chance again, even if I had been lucky before. I’d already given up my own boys, you know. I’d given up my family. I’d given up you. At some point it’s just enough.” Tennessee Alice Moser nodded, looking like the wisest twenty-five-year-old that God had ever created. “I never thought about leaving her. I remember when she was born I looked at her and I thought, I am going to be with you for the rest of your life.”

“Well, you meant to,” Tennessee said.

She brushed her hand against her friend’s forehead. She felt so wonderfully warm. “What am I supposed to call you, anyway?” In the hospital bed, Tennessee rolled over onto her side. She felt the stiff crunch of the bandages taped to her hip but no pain. There had been such a raging sea of pain and now there was nothing, not even a stitch or an ache. She flexed her foot back and forth to check again. “Beverly? I don’t know. There’s nobody left who calls me Beverly now but I imagine I could answer to it.”

“I’ll call you Tennessee.”

Tennessee shook her head, feeling guilty. “You shouldn’t do that.

It’s your name.”

“It’s not like I’m using it for anything.” Tennessee really didn’t know what she needed to explain to her friend and what her friend already knew. It seemed possible that their lives, Kenya’s and her own, were like a show that Tennessee Alice Moser watched, and all of their details and decisions were already understood. It seemed equally possible that from time to time she could have turned her face away, missing certain days or weeks that were important to the story. “It was all I could figure out to do,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t adopt her myself. It would cost a a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 200

fortune and take forever and they probably wouldn’t have given her to me anyway.”

“No, you were smart. You were always the smartest person I knew. I really think you would have been a politician if you’d kept up with school.” Tennessee Alice Moser had dreamed big for her friend as was her inclination. “That’s what I think. You always had important things to say. You made a million times more sense than any of those guys you used to go listen to.”

“I was never going to be a politician.”

“You were. You understood the system.”

Tennessee shook her head. “There isn’t any system. I found that out when I took Kenya. The law only goes to a certain point and then it stops. When all this was going on, when I wasn’t fi nding Ebee or your mother and I knew I wanted to keep her for myself, that’s when I realized there really wasn’t anybody out there watching what we did. I mean, they still watched me in Filene’s, they watched at the grocery store to make sure I didn’t run off with a quart of milk, but take someone’s child? Why, they all but held open the door for me. I left that apartment in Jamaica Plain with Kenya in my arms and moved to Roxbury and not one person had a thing to say about it. Even good old Mrs. Roberts next door who watched Kenya the night you died, she never asked me how I was managing to keep her.” Tennessee closed her eyes and thought about her daughter’s face. It was too open, too bright, too beautiful like her mother’s.

“That’s why I keep her so close to me now. I make sure that no one’s going to walk off with her.”

“Maybe you keep her too close.”

Tennessee shook her head. “Forgive me, but you might not understand the way the world is today. It’s a dangerous place. You’ve got to be careful now, especially with a daughter.”

“It’s always been that way with daughters since way before either r u n

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one of us was born, but that still doesn’t mean you needed to keep her inside so much. You didn’t have to turn her whole life into a big secret.”

“Her life’s not a secret.”

“Sure it is. You drag her around everywhere after those boys.

She’s not allowed to talk to them, she’s not allowed to tell anybody what she’s doing. That’s not fun for a little kid.” Tennessee was hurt. She had only been trying to live her life in balance, to do her best for everyone concerned and that meant all of her children. “You think I should have given up my boys?”

“I think you already
did
give up your boys. I think you should have paid more attention to the girl you had. If you were going to take on my name and my daughter then I wish you had taken on a little more of me. Instead you went to work some dead-end nursing home job like I had. Did you think that’s what it meant to be like me? You know how much I hated that job. You were a secretary going back to school. You were the smart one. If you really wanted to be like me you could have at least had a little fun.” Now Tennessee was crying. She kept her eyes closed and let the tears push out the sides. You should have stuck around, was what she was thinking, see if you could have managed it any better yourself .

Tennessee Alice Moser shook her head. She had waited such a long time to come back and now she was being nothing but critical.

She had missed her friend terribly, this woman who had done everything she could to do right by her memory. “You must be thirsty,” she said in a conciliatory voice, and her quietly weeping friend admitted that she was. Tennessee Alice Moser poured out a cup of water from the little Styrofoam pitcher on the night table, bending the straw down to reach her lips. “What you realize after awhile,” she said, “is that there are a lot of things you think you’re going to do a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 202

and it turns out you can’t. I was going to keep Kenya with me but then I died. You were going to keep her with you and you got hit by that damn car. So part of it is intention and part of it is luck. We’ve got very fine intentions but our luck isn’t so great.” She smiled then, suddenly remembering the way she was wrong. Tennessee opened her lips to take in the straw. “Except we did find each other. That was luck.”

“That was the best luck I ever had.” Tennessee could see them in her mind, two girls in that rotten apartment building in Jamaica Plain, passing each other on the sidewalk in the summer heat, in the hallway in the winter bundled up in scarves, passing each other for such a long time before the constant recognition wore them down and they started to say hello. “I couldn’t get over your crazy name.

When you first introduced yourself to me, I thought, who would name their daughter Tennessee?”

“My father used to tell me, just be glad your mama didn’t want to go back to Mississippi.”

“I wouldn’t have gone through with it if they’d named you Mississippi.” Both of them laughed like this was the craziest thing they’d ever heard when really they were just wanting something to laugh at to bring them together again.

“Now you’re living out my curse. Everybody has to ask you the same stupid questions they always asked me.”

“Tennessee like the state. I say it every time.” She reached up and put one finger on her friend’s chin. “You didn’t get old.”

“That’s the way it works.”

“I miss you all the time. I miss you more than I miss my family, my boys.”

“Scoot over,” Tennessee Alice Moser said, and then she climbed into the hospital bed beside her friend. She was always the little one.

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head down on the shoulder that she had known best in the world when she was alive.

“How is it being dead?” Tennessee asked.

“It’s good,” she said, but she didn’t look up. “It’s not like streets of gold or anything, but it’s nice. I hardly ever think about being alive.”

“But you must think of it a little bit,” Tennessee said. “I mean, you’re here now.” She put her hand on the back of her friend’s head, touched the little ropes of hair. She was here. She could feel her.