The Last Odd Day (4 page)

I see now that it was not the best way to begin my life as an adult, as a married woman; but I played with the cards I got. I know I gave the Witherspoon family the best of who I was. I worked hard. I caused no conflict. I did as I was told. But even though I left home and was miles away from the mountains of my childhood and years away from the influence of an elementary grade teacher, I never forgot where I came from and what I had learned.

My family was bonded together, across life and across death. We shared a past. We had a common story. Dr. Lovella Hughes made me think I was capable of greatness. And even though my sister died young and greatness never came about for me, because of them I am a stronger, better person. So I wanted my baby to have that too, the bond of family, the possibility of greatness.

Emma Lovella. I gave her the name of more than just a sister, more than just a teacher and mentor. I gave her the name of a force. In the end it didn't matter; but when I was big and full of plans, it meant the world.

Emma Lovella Witherspoon, that's the name I chose for my baby because that is a name with history and hope. It is a name of promise. And for my daughter, when I was planning her life and calling her by name, when I was dreaming my dreams for her, giving her a path to follow, helping her begin, it was everything I could want.

I was awake and up at exactly the moment the snow fell. The TV weather forecasters in North Carolina give reports all night when a winter storm is passing through. And when they're right and precipitation really does fall, they follow it as it makes its way across the state.

“Notice on the satellite radar how the snow is falling over Tennessee and making its way east. It should be here in the form of sleet or freezing rain in about four hours.” Then they'll show pictures of a storm from last year and interview the transportation crews to find out which roads they clear first. Next half hour, it's the same thing.

They track it like it's a hungry beast walking toward us, threatening us, bearing down upon us. They make it
seem that if we know exactly when it makes its way down our driveway and along our streets, we'll be safer and more sound than if we were met by surprise. “The snow should fall in the southern piedmont in thirty-seven minutes.” No thief coming in the night here. The television stations will make sure of that.

I was not out of bed timing the storm. I just happened still to be awake and decided to open the blinds on the front window and check outside. It was 11:51 p.m.

Even in the dark I could see the heaviness of the clouds. The squeeze and grasp of the atmosphere to hold its breath. The burden of the weight. Clutching, clenching, gripping, it fought to keep itself together. Then finally in the time it takes only to blink one's eyes, only to be caught off guard, a quick jerk of your head, the clouds burst at the seams and there came a violent release. A bounty of white flecks shaken from the ripped belly of the sky.

Snowstorms in the mountains, when I was a little girl, were as frequent in the winter as the visits of mice in the storeroom. We expected the ground cover from November to March, sometimes April, to be crunchy and white. And because this is what I was accustomed to, I never thought much about it. Winter was white and brisk and stark. It was just the season, like dogwood flowers
and daffodils in the spring, june bugs and squash blooms in the summer, rich golden leaves and dark green moss in the fall.

Now that I have been away from the mountains and their winters for so long, I am as surprised at the changes in the landscape when a storm rolls through as are the kids who grew up at the beach.

I never considered the splendor or the shield of the mountains until I left them. And the first five years I was married and away I did not sleep an entire night. I didn't understand for the longest time why I was restless. But then I realized that I felt exposed, uncovered. I would get up and check all the locks on windows and doors even though O.T. said they had never had a theft or break-in as long as he was alive. I couldn't help it because I felt bare without the presence of the hills around me. Unprotected and loosed in a way that kept me off center. I missed the boundaries of the Smokies, the edge of the peaks, the mounds of earth that separated me from whatever might bring harm. That's what I grew up thinking was on the other side.

I remembered, of course, all the things my mother had told me. I knew the stories of families hiding in the caves, fighting mountain lions and bears for food, the smallpox and pellagra and pneumonia that haunted the bands of
displaced Indians trying to find a resting place for their ancestors' spirits, a home for themselves. I knew about the rampages and the thefts and the burnings.

I knew then and I know now that evil festered even within the protected place. That Shelly Threehawks was raped by the white deputies. That Lapis Gulley beat his wife and children, leaving marks on them that could not be denied. That the preacher lied to obtain land for his own house and farm. And that when my father was a boy he was forced to ride and break a horse that everyone knew was not meant to be kept. He was thrown then, knocked in the head, and made blind. That the Cherokee watered the evergreens with their tears.

But in spite of all that I knew then, all that I defined as truth, I grew up believing that evil was what happened beyond the green and sturdy summit. That bad things could not find their way across the rocky elevation. I believed that the hills were a fortress defending goodness and that what you did not name could never be called into existence.

Even today, more than fifty years since my leaving, snow reminds me of the mountains, which remind me of my childhood, which reminds me of the false but deeply regarded notion I held that harm and turpitude lie on the other side of what I cannot see. For a very long time I lived with that magical way of thinking and convinced myself that as long as I did not bear witness to betrayal
or malice or vice, then I could pretend it would never reach me. As long as I never came face-to-face with trouble, it would not find me. And as long as I hid from the things that hurt me, I could hide from hurt.

I realize now, however, more than half a century beyond those sheltering mountains, that the most damaging belief that I brought with me from the years I lived in the shadow of the hills was thinking that as long as I did not lay open my heart and uncover the grief that collected there, as long as I did not share it, pour it out and bathe in it, as long as it was never discussed, it would not disturb the heart of anyone else. If it remained concealed, I believed, my sorrow could not harm the one I loved. It was a false belief.

I did not make it to Sunhaven the following day because of the weather. I called the nurses' station but the phones were not working. I could not stay connected long enough to have someone go to O.T.'s room and see if the woman was there.

The next day the roads were still icy so I had to wait another day before I could go. By then it was too late. Karen had asked the woman too many questions and scared her off. When I arrived early that third morning she appeared to be staying away.

If O.T. knew about her and missed her, he never let on. He never called out for her or spoke of her sudden
disappearance. He did not seem distressed or anxious. It wasn't long after the storm, however, that his condition worsened and he became mostly unresponsive. They reinserted the feeding tube and moved him to the floor where higher-need patients resided. The top floor, the last stop on the way to heaven, one of the nursing assistants had said on the phone to a friend when she thought no one else could hear her.

I knew by the slowing of his breath, the blank stare from deep within his eyes, the unwillingness to participate in even the smallest gestures of life, that he would not last until spring. Having lived with my father after my mother passed, I knew all too well the decision one makes to die. And just as I could not alter the events of our past, I could not change what he was deciding to do.

There was no hill to hide behind. Death was marching toward us like clouds of snow being pushed across the horizon. And I would not take his choice away.

I think about Emma and wonder whether she chose not to be born. If she had a prophetic moment there in the warm dark pool inside my womb, envisioning herself in my arms, as my child, that she decided, seeing what she saw, knowing what she knew, that it was not what she wanted to do. Or if she was still in the hands of some other world that called her back because she was not ready or because she was too ready or that something was wrong with me.

“Failure to thrive” is how they define it when a baby, a born baby, chooses not to seek nourishment. It is not an uncommon experience. And I sometimes wonder if Emma just failed to thrive a little sooner than the others.
I wonder if it was only some undetected pregnancy disorder or if my baby decided not to be mine.

“Fetal demise” is what they called it. That's the medical terminology, what was written on my chart. That's the name the experts give the experience of a baby born dead. And I guess that definition makes it easier for the doctors and nurses to deal with paperwork and the tedious cavities in their own hearts. I never asked who came up with such a term, only what it meant when I signed the forms to be released.

“It means your baby died,” the young woman said, her eyes down and studying the words on the clipboard instead of focusing on me.

“Oh,” I replied, remembering the word
demise
was also used in a court case Mr. Witherspoon was involved in after his father passed. It had meant that part of the farm had been transferred by lease. “Or maybe she was just loaned out for a while,” I added.

The discharge nurse glanced up then and awkwardly handed me my copy.

I knew that she was dead when I woke up that morning. And even though there were no specific details that I could tell the doctor over the phone when I called with my concern, I knew it. It could only be described as feeling like part of myself had drifted away.

Certainly, there were physical changes. My breathing was different. My appetite had lessened. The lower back pain and the heartburn were gone. But mostly there was just the sense that something, somebody apart from me who was still of me and who, for more than half a year, had been living off what I took in, what I ate and drank and touched, surviving off my blood and my body, existing off my hopes, my breath, my will to live, that this somebody had now gone and had left me to myself.

I knew without ever having an exam or medical verification that Emma and the perpetual state of motherhood were no more. And though I was still as round and full as I had been just a few hours before when she kicked me so hard my knees buckled under me and I fell on a kitchen chair, I was now empty of life, void inside.

I left home without O.T. and drove myself to the hospital. I should have waited for him to return from Raleigh; he asked me to. I could have stayed and received some comfort from the other person affected by this loss. I could have shared that long bitter moment of disappointment; but I didn't. I walked out of the house, the bed made, the dishes washed, my overnight bag packed, the morning sun bright and promising, and drove to Mercy Hospital completely and undoubtedly alone.

I remember that a light frost had spread across the tops of trees, along the fields of forgotten gardens. I remember faces, people walking on the side of the road, waving hello and good-bye to one another, children riding on bicycles, to school, I suppose. And I remember how it seemed as if everyone standing or moving along the street where I drove noticed me as I headed toward town, a pregnant woman with a dead child.

I worried that if I lingered too long at an intersection or turned my head to acknowledge the curious stares, I would create some mass display of pity, some unnecessary situation of being assisted. So I drove in pretense that nothing was out of sorts. That everything I was doing—driving myself to the hospital, my belly too big to fit beneath the steering wheel, bearing the knowledge that my unborn baby was dead, choosing to make this journey by myself—was normal. I drove ahead, death frozen beneath my ribs, as if everything was as it should have been.

Once I got to the hospital and began to consider what would happen next, I assumed there would be an operation. I just figured they'd put me to sleep and take her out, cut me like she was twisted or I was too small, a cesarean section. Go to sleep eight and a half months pregnant, wake up sliced and childless. I mean, I wasn't the most clear I had ever been, but I do remember thinking, It's over, it is at least over.

But it wasn't. It wasn't close to being over.

How does a mother describe what it is like passing death through her body? How could I, in a lifetime or beyond, ever tell somebody else what it is like to stretch and tear and shatter inside just to let that which is already dead out into the air and expectation of life? How can a woman string the words together to let another know how it feels to do what is natural in a state of unnaturalness? To bring forth one's dead child and then to keep on living?

I have learned from my marriage to a combat soldier damaged in war that there are things that cannot be spoken. Things so terrible they cannot be named. And on my own battlefield I cried and begged and prayed for mercy—to die, to be wrong, to be delivered of all of myself, dead and dying. But I labored on without relief. Nurses stayed near but would not touch me, as if this death coming from inside me was contagious; I might infect their own mother dreams.

A doctor stood between my legs, the mind of a technician, the heart of a man who will never know. And I went from trying to keep her inside me to trying to get her out; and it seemed as if I were being split, broken, and pulled in two. Finally, when the doctor could no longer bear the wailing and the screaming, the agony of one more unproductive hour, he reached inside me with
his clean and uncompromising hands and took her from me. Then he walked away, he and the nurses and my baby, leaving me opened and alone, having given birth to the only part of myself that I truly loved.

The next day I got up from the bed, my clothes neatly packed in my suitcase, a few papers in my hand, a blanket carelessly wrapped around me, and drove myself home.