The Sunflower Forest (26 page)

All around one side of the room were traces of my father’s lengthy vigil. Newspapers, a soft-drink can, numerous empty coffee cups, a paperback book with its cover bent, half a dozen cellophane salted-peanut bags wadded into balls, a crumpled, half-eaten packet of jelly beans. His watch was there too, apparently taken off at some random moment, set on the bedside table and forgotten.

When I came close to Mama, I saw the tangle of modern technology spilling out the far side of the bed, like spaghetti. She had a tube in her nose. It was connected to a bottle on the table that frothed and foamed with the private workings of her stomach. A bag of blood hung above the bed on my side. Across from it were two other bags filled with clear solutions. The wires of the heart monitor went down through the sheet and out by the railing on the far side of the bed.

Cautiously, I put my hand into the snarl of tubes and wires to touch her face. She was flushed, and when I touched her skin, I could feel the fever. Looking around the room to see if there was a cloth somewhere that I might be able to dampen with cool water, I saw none. I was afraid to go out and ask the nurse for one, in case she wouldn’t let me come back in. So, instead, I dipped my fingers into the pitcher of icy water on the bedside table and wiped the perspiration away from her hairline with my fingers.

‘Mama? Can you hear me, Mama? It’s Lesley. Can you hear me?’ My fear was that locked within an inert body, she might be aware. She would be terrified by all this, to be here alone and in pain and without us and her familiar things around her. I knew Daddy had that concern as well, because he’d been so adamant about being allowed to stay with her, even in intensive care. I was overwhelmed with an urge to get into the bed with her and put my arms around her. Instead, I leaned over and kissed her. On the forehead. On the cheek. I wanted to kiss her on the lips, but with the gastric tube, I couldn’t. Then I sat down in the chair beside the bed.

She moved. In a slow, ponderous motion, she turned her head and opened her eyes. She tried to speak but no sound came out.

‘Do you want a drink, Mama?’ I asked. I looked for a glass but there was none. Only the pitcher. Then it occurred to me that with the tube she couldn’t drink anyway and the water must have been for my father. Her lips were cracked with fever, and I thought perhaps the coolness might make her feel better. So I fished a piece of ice from the pitcher with my fingers and put it in her mouth. The suction jar made a loud, obscene gurgle next to me. Startled, I jumped. Mama smiled.

There were a hundred million things I wanted to say to her. I stood over her, watching her, putting small bits of ice between her lips, and I was desperate to talk. I wanted her to know that it didn’t matter to me what she had done. I loved her. I didn’t care about the horrible things people were saying. Nothing mattered at all except that she get better and come home to Daddy and Meggie and me. I wanted her to be assured that I hadn’t really minded all those days of staying home from school with her. I hadn’t minded any of the things I had complained about. Not really. They were nothing. She was everything.

The problem was, I couldn’t speak. There was the fear far back in my mind that I would be making peace with her, and if I did that, she could die. But if I didn’t, somehow she would have to survive so I could tell her later. The bigger problem was that I just could not get the words into my mouth or my mouth open. So I stood, mute.

‘Where’s O’Malley?’ she whispered.

‘He’s at home right now, Mama. With Meggie. They’re going to take you to St Joseph’s. To Wichita. So you’ll get better faster. You’re going in a helicopter, and Daddy wants to take the car over so that he will be there when you arrive.’ I managed to smile. ‘Have you ever ridden in a helicopter before? I haven’t. It sounds exciting, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m tired,’ she said and closed her eyes.

‘You can sleep, if you want, Mama. I’ll stay with you. And you can sleep. I’m here.’

She struggled against the tube for a deeper breath. Reaching through the rail to take her hand, I realized I was shaking. Afraid she would notice too, I pushed my other hand through to keep the first steady. But she noticed nonetheless, turned her head and looked at me.

‘I’ve got to admit, you’ve sort of scared me, Mama, getting hurt like this,’ I said. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to you. I love you.’

‘
O Liebes
,’ she said. ‘Come down here, baby, and let me touch you.’

I put the railing down and sat in the chair beside the bed, my head on the sheet. She lifted her hand into my hair, and the tubing from the IV dropped across my face. Silence too lay down upon us like a comforter, and we did not speak for a very long time. I simply lay with my head against her, the familiar weight of her hand over my ear and through my hair.

‘Can you see now, baby?’ she whispered to me.

I didn’t know what she was referring to. I was too overpowered by emotion at that moment to be able to ask, and when I finally moved to see her face, I saw she had slipped back into the sleeplike state.

My memory pulled me back just then to that very long ago time in west Texas when I was lost in the sunflower forest, when she had crashed in among the stalks and saved me and lifted me high up on to her shoulders so that I could see beyond the flowers.

I don’t suppose that’s what she meant when she spoke. I don’t really know. But as I sat in thick and grainy April twilight, those were the thoughts I had.

T
he next morning I came into the kitchen to find Auntie Caroline making porridge for breakfast. No one in the family liked it except Mama. The porridge oats were hers. None of the rest of us ate porridge and Megan in particular loathed it.

I watched Auntie Caroline for a few moments. She was still wearing her bathrobe and she bustled around the kitchen as if she’d been in it for years.

‘Megan doesn’t really like porridge,’ I said.

‘No wonder everyone in this house looks like sticks,’ Auntie Caroline replied.

‘I could scramble her an egg or something,’ I offered. I was not up to the scene Megan would create if she got nothing for breakfast but porridge. Megan wasn’t given to scenes about food, but on top of everything else, I knew she wouldn’t tolerate this.

Neither would Auntie Caroline. ‘I’ve put raisins in it. I’m sure she’s never had it with raisins and she’ll like it just fine.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘Well, if she doesn’t, she can just go hungry.’

Hands in the pockets of my jeans, I stood there. Neither Megan nor I was going to school and suddenly the day seemed to stretch out for ever.

‘Auntie Caroline, may I ask you something?’

She turned. One of the curlers in her hair sagged over her left ear.

‘How come you came? I mean, if you don’t like being with us, how come you came in the first place?’

She smiled. It was a soft smile, disarming in its suddenness. ‘I do like being here, Lesley. And I came because your father asked me. Because we’re family, no matter what, and this is what families are for. But I’m not going to treat you special, if that’s what you mean. I’m planning to treat you just the way I’d treat my own children. Just because your mother did what she did, that’s no excuse to feel sorry for yourselves. She did that because of her particular problems. You have your own lives to get on with.’

I turned away and went to the table to sit down. A wave of depression overtook me. ‘I wasn’t asking for special treatment, Aunt Caroline. I just wanted eggs instead of porridge. We don’t like porridge. Nobody does. Except Mama. They’re Mama’s oats and not ours. They’re for her.’

Auntie Caroline re-rolled the loose curler and put the pin back into it. Then she sighed and looked over at the stove. There was a long minute’s pause. ‘Well, I suppose just this once. It’s good for you; mind you, you should be eating it. Skinny as pencils, every one of you. Cowan worse than anybody. Probably anaemic. But I suppose just this once we could skip it.’

The day was intolerable. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, both Megan and I were soon miserably bored. Neither of us could concentrate for long. Twice we got out board games and started them. Twice we had to put them away unfinished. We turned the television on but were too restless to watch.

About eleven Auntie Caroline and I heard a terrific clatter from overhead and went upstairs to discover Megan in the hallway with the sewing machine. She had spools of thread and cloth and patterns strewn all over the floor of the hallway and down into her room.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Look at the mess you’ve made.’

‘I was going to set up the sewing machine. Mama said she’d make me a stuffed dog from this pattern, remember? I was just going to cut out the material for her.’

Hands on hips, Auntie Caroline shook her head, then went to relieve Megan of the machine. Megan would not give it to her.

‘Your mother is not going to be in any position to be sewing, Megan. Now, let’s just put this away for the time being.’

‘I want to cut the pattern out.’

‘You can do that downstairs. We’ll get you the scissors and the pins and you can take the material down to the kitchen table. Now, let’s put all the rest of this away.’ Auntie Caroline was still trying to wrest the handle from her.

‘Oh Megan,’ I said, ‘Mama wasn’t even going to do it for you. You know that. She said maybe. And when’s the last time you saw Mama sewing?’

‘She made one of those dogs for you, Lesley.’

‘Cripes, that was years ago. Geez, like 1965 or something.’

‘Well, if she made one for you, then I want her to make me one too.’ She still clung tenaciously to the sewing machine, her face set in a petulant expression. Auntie Caroline gave up and went past her to pick up all the paraphernalia Megan had strewn about.

‘Megan, I was littler than you are when Mama made me that dog.’

‘So?’

‘So, grow up, Megs. You’re nearly ten. You don’t need to bug Mama about making you some stupid stuffed toy.’

‘But I want one. You got all the things done for you when you were little. Mama never does those things for me.’

‘Oh Megan, for pity’s sake. Mama isn’t even here.’

‘But when she comes back, I want her to make me a dog. To go with Big Cattie. You know. So I’ll have a cat and a dog. Mama said she would.’

‘She said she
might
,’ I replied. ‘That’s hardly the same thing.’

‘Girls, girls,’ Auntie Caroline said, returning to us with her arms full. She put everything back into the hall closet. ‘Don’t argue.’

With rude loudness Megan burst into tears.

‘Megan Mary! I’m surprised at you,’ Auntie Caroline said.

‘Come off it, Megs. What are you crying for? Some stupid dog pattern? Jesus Christ, Megan, Mama is a hundred and fifty miles away in the hospital and not about to make you some stupid stuffed animal now anyway. Don’t be such a big baby.’

Her bawling escalated. Dropping the handle of the sewing machine, she kicked it savagely.

‘Megan Mary O’Malley!’ cried Auntie Caroline in horror. ‘You stop that this instant.’

Still screaming, Megan plunked down right in the middle of the hall floor.

‘Well, I never,’ Auntie Caroline said. ‘Look at you. A great big girl like you having a tantrum.’

‘I
want
a tantrum!’ Megan screamed back.

At lunch Auntie Caroline suggested that perhaps Megan and I ought to go back to school. We were so restive and disordered that she thought school might help. Besides, she said, it would be better to get it over with, to face the music, as she put it.

I couldn’t bear even to consider it. I just could not imagine sitting in German and answering Mr Tennant’s perennial Monday afternoon question, ‘And what did
you
do this weekend?’

Megan responded to Caroline’s suggestion by being sick all over the kitchen floor.

As the afternoon wore on, my thoughts grew increasingly troubled. The numbness that had initially protected me from the horror of what my mother had done began to erode. Gruesome reality was beneath it. Images of Toby Waterman with his blind-dog eyes and his brash, vaguely sinister innocence kept forming. Thoughts of the murders themselves had dogged me for some time. They skulked quietly in the back of my mind until I was off my guard and then they returned, the way thoughts of owed money do, dragging with them that weary, inescapable burden of being true.

I could picture the physical minutiae of the killings quite vividly. I pieced together what I’d read in the newspapers, my own knowledge of the Waterman place and my imagination, creating a very realistic-seeming scenario. Mainly, it was Toby that I saw. In my visions he was always already dead, his colourless eyes open, his face covered with blood, like Sissy Spacek’s in
Carrie
. Intellectually, I knew that, in spite of how realistic these impressions were, they probably weren’t very accurate. But that didn’t seem to matter. Like film in a broken projector, over and over the thoughts played in my mind.

Bizarrely yoked with these horrific visions was an ever-increasing anxiety about what was going to happen to my mama. I was sitting in the living room, watching out the window that afternoon, and the longer I sat, the more upset I felt. What would they do to her? Where would they take her? Even if they realized she was as much a victim of what had happened as the Watermans, the authorities weren’t going to simply forgive and forget. Not for something like this. Finally, I asked Auntie Caroline as she passed through the room on her way up to see Megan. What did she reckon would become of Mama? I asked. Would they send her to prison or to the state hospital? I asked her which she thought would be a better place to go. Auntie Caroline froze mid-step, her mouth dropped open in a shocked expression, and she told me what a coldhearted child I was to think of things like that so analytically. I started to cry. Auntie Caroline’s features softened in sympathy and she came and put her arms around my shoulders. She told me not to brood about it. She said we didn’t know, did we? So there was no point in worrying before we had to.

I worried anyway. I was nibbled, gnawed and devoured by worry. All afternoon I could think of nothing else.

Two matters kept surfacing. One was that this was going to be the second time my mother had lost her liberty. There seemed something cruelly unjust about that to me, because if there hadn’t been a first time, there probably wouldn’t have been a second. The other was my awareness of Mama’s intense pleasure in mundane things. Mama was constantly conscious of the difference between her life with us and her life during the war. Of all the knowledge that she’d passed on to Megan and me, nothing was more important to her than that we realize what a very special gift an ordinary day was. And Mama so cherished her little freedoms. The big ones didn’t matter as much to her. I reckoned she could survive being confined to a building or grounds somewhere. But she would be tormented by not having the liberty to make a cup of coffee when she wanted one or to wash her hair or otherwise order the small details of her day.

My thoughts were tortured by the innocent cruelty of the system. Her preferences, her pleasures, her feelings would not carry any weight in an institution. She’d be nothing more than just another middle-aged woman to the staff working there. She would be treated much like the ladies I had worked with in the nursing home. Gotten up in the mornings, hurried through the day to someone else’s schedule, fed, prodded, taken to the toilet, watched like a distrusted pet. We laughed at them behind their backs, at their silly, senile ways. Not to make fun of them but simply because they were funny and we didn’t love any of them. They had no dignity in our eyes. They were our work. We treated them well but indifferently, even the best of the girls did.

My father didn’t come home at all that day. Instead, he remained in Wichita with Mama. He phoned to tell us he planned to return in the morning. Then he’d take Megan and me back with him to see Mama. We could stay overnight and come home on the bus. I asked him how Mama was. Better, he said. She was conscious most of the time now. Was she scared? I asked. He said no, he didn’t think so. Then he laughed self-consciously, saying Mama was being stronger about this than he was. Which was probably true.

Auntie Caroline talked with him. She told him about the two news reporters who’d knocked on the door after supper, and about Megan, who had been vomiting all afternoon. It still sounded peculiar to me to hear someone call my father Cowan.

When night came again I was unable to sleep. I was tired enough. In fact, I felt crawlly with nervous exhaustion. But long after getting into bed, I was still awake.

Megan continued to be very sick, which made sleeping even more difficult, because I could hear her every time she went into the bathroom. Auntie Caroline was up with her once, and they stood in the hallway outside my bedroom and talked. Megan was bawling again, afraid she wasn’t going to be allowed to go to Wichita with Dad in the morning because she was so sick. Auntie Caroline, in a gentle, motherly voice, was telling her not to worry about things that hadn’t happened yet and no doubt, come morning, she’d feel fine. Megan obviously was not believing her.

Long after Auntie Caroline had returned to her bed in the study, I could hear Megan still crying in her room. The study was at the opposite end of the hallway, so Caroline probably was not aware of how upset Megan was. Finally, after listening to her get up and vomit again and then go snuffling back by my doorway, I rose to go see about her myself.

I sat down on the bed next to her. ‘Do you want me to get you some ginger tea or something, Meggie? Some Seven-Up?’

She shook her head.

‘Here roll over. I’ll rub your back. That’ll make you feel better.’

‘No.’

‘That’s what Mama would do.’ I reached out to stroke her hair. ‘Come on. Roll over.’

Reluctantly, Megan complied. She had Big Cattie with her, its furry ears pressed against her cheek.

‘You know what?’ she said to me as I rubbed her back.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s my fault.’

‘What is?’

She shifted away from me and pulled the covers up. ‘That Mama did that. That she went out and shot the Watermans.’

‘Oh Megan, it’s not. How did you get such an idea?’

‘I made Daddy take me downtown, remember? He was just going to drop me off and go right home, but I made him come in. I said, you got to come with me, because really what I wanted was for him to see the sandals they had too. I wanted him to buy those and the running shoes both.’

‘Megan, that doesn’t have anything to do with what Mama did.’

‘Yes sir. If I hadn’t done that, he would only have been gone a teeny-weeny bit of time, like he intended. He would have got back before she could have gone out there. He would have caught her. If I hadn’t made him stay.’