Ties That Bind (27 page)

As she pondered the intricacies of the case she was involved in, she found she also had a lot of questions about her mother’s history. The unknowns and missing pieces swirled in Sam’s brain like a puzzle that just wouldn’t fit together.

Her mother had been an only child, born and raised in abject poverty in Manassa, Colorado. Manassa’s claim to fame appeared to be the fact that Jack Dempsey, a famous boxer, was the local hero. Sam had no idea who he was.

Sam’s grandfather Ezra Bean Paulsen had been a miner and had died of black lung disease when Ruthie Paulsen was only a child; her mother had struggled with her health and barely managed to put food on the table.

Sam opened to the next entry and positioned the diary among the papers on her desk.

Pigweed for dinner again tonight. I went out and picked as much as I could find, because Momma is sick. It grows up close to the Conejos riverbanks, and the ones closest to the water are the best. There’s no other food, but we are lucky. I can pick this just about anytime in the spring and summer and it makes a good meal.

We still have a little salt left from when those nice ladies in town brought us some food, and that makes it taste really good.

My mouth waters when I think of the bread they brought us, but that was months ago. When they found out Momma was sick because I passed out at school. The nurse said I just wasn’t eating enough. I didn’t dare tell her I rarely eat at all, but she must have known. She had kind eyes that looked at me with pity, but I could tell she cared.

The next day a group of three ladies came to our door. They didn’t tell me who they were, but just dropped off some food, and invited me to come visit their church, First Assembly of God in Manassa.

I never went there, of course. Although I was tempted to go, just to see if they had that good bread. I pictured elegant ceremonies and a man who looked like Jesus standing on a podium, and everybody just waiting for the chance to eat the good bread.

But I didn’t have a dress to wear. Not one good enough for a church where a man like Jesus would be preaching.

Momma had a Bible, and it had some pictures in it. That man looked glorious to me. I wanted to reach out and touch him, and I stroked the pages over and over again, as though some of his beauty, his light, would find its way into my pitiful small body.

I sometimes thought about passing out again at school, even if I just had to fake it. Anything to ease that gnawing ache in my stomach during lunchtime, when everyone else had a lunch bag and I went outside as though I didn’t care. Most days Momma didn’t even know I was gone. She barely woke when I came home.

I could only get her to eat a few bites of the pigweed, no matter how hard I tried.

No matter how good I told her it was.

I usually finished it all myself.

Sometimes I got a stomachache after I filled myself up too much, and then I had to throw up in the backyard, crying and sobbing as the food came up. I didn’t seem to know when to stop, because I was always so hungry.

Sam rubbed her eyes. Her mother, eating too much—then having to vomit it up—made Sam uncomfortable. Surely this couldn’t be hereditary? This inability to keep food down.

Sam knew her anorexia/bulimia had a psychological basis, but she was a little stunned at this revelation.

She didn’t even know what pigweed was, but she had grown up with a healthy meal on the table every night, even if it was just corn fritters and syrup. What would it be like to have to go pick weeds for dinner?

The Mormon missionaries were here again. The cute one with the dark blue eyes and nice smile was extra kind to me. They brought bacon and some beans, and some flour, sugar, salt, and some of that maple syrup, along with a recipe card with directions on how to make pancakes. My mouth waters just thinking about it.

They keep talking to me about their church, and how the Lord blesses those who live the Gospel, and part of those blessings are enough food to eat. It certainly seems to be true, because every time they come to see me they have more good food than I have ever seen in my life. Last time they came, in addition to the other stuff they brought a plate of cookies. With real chocolate chips. Well, chocolate chips. I’m not sure I would know what a real chocolate chip was, but they sure tasted good. After the missionaries left, and after they gave Momma a blessing, I ate the whole plate of cookies.

Then I got sick.

But I couldn’t stop myself. They tasted so good. I must be a bad person that I can’t eat good food and keep it down. Something must be wrong with me.

But I swear on everything that is holy that if I have kids they will never, ever go hungry. I will do whatever I have to do so they have food, and never know that gnawing ache.

Momma wasn’t better after the blessing. She muttered and tossed and turned, like always, and I put a cool washrag on her head. It seemed to soothe her. She is nothing but skin and bones. I know she is dying. No preacher blessing is going to change that.

I remember when I was younger and she sat with me every day, an hour before school started, and went over my grammar lessons with me.

“We might be poor, Ruthie, but we are smart. And we will never act stupid or take charity.”

She’d been a schoolteacher before she took sick, and before my daddy died. And I knew that what these missionaries were doing was charity, but I couldn’t say no. How could I say no? I didn’t want to die … I knew she was already close to gone. Did I have to go, too? Was that how life worked?

And if I didn’t, what would happen to me when she died?

I would be completely, utterly, alone.

The missionaries continued to bring food to Ruthie and her mother and even arranged for a doctor to pay several visits, but there was nothing that could be done. A bad heart, they said, a result of a bout of untreated scarlet fever as a child. And after Sam’s grandmother—a woman she had never known—died, the missionaries arranged for Ruthie Paulsen to live with a Mormon family in town. She’d been just sixteen years old. She didn’t say much about them but wrote about the food they served for each meal and the sack lunches that she was able to take to school.

She never wrote about feeling loved or accepted or even named the people who she lived with. But they had what, to her, was a bounty of food, and she wrote about it in great detail.

Eventually, the missionaries who had befriended her finished their callings and returned to Utah. And they arranged to bring Ruthie Paulsen with them.

In Utah, she lived with another Mormon family, was baptized, and a year later married one of the missionaries who had been responsible for bringing her to Utah.

The cute missionary with the dark blue eyes was Sam’s father.

Sam, who had inherited those same dark blue eyes and blond hair, reread the passage she had marked with a torn scrap of paper from a notebook, much later in the journal.

Why? This question needs an answer. And what? What does this God expect of me? The brothers and the sisters of my adopted community come to me, and they say, “It was God’s plan. God wanted her. He needed her.” God needed my daughter to hang from a tree? He needed my daughter, barely a teen, to be cut down? Literally. A hacksaw chewing through the rough cord that bound her, dangling, lifeless, hanging from a tree. In her prime, just a girl still, although she wanted to be more. She had a body she didn’t understand, a core she couldn’t reason with. God wanted her to die like this, her face blue, her ears bleeding, because she spread her legs for boys who tempted her with the wiles of this world?

This is what my husband tells me. The man who brought me to this community. To this belief system. And God help me, I believed. For a long time, I really did. For the God they spoke of brought me food, and children, and a home, and a peach tree in my backyard that bore the most luscious fruit I had ever tasted. All I had to do was go to the temple, to swear to never reveal the secrets, to praise Him, to pay a full tithe. All it took to have this life, this paradise, was complete obedience.

Except this is no paradise.

Now, all is bitter, all false. Even the beautiful peach tree bears nothing but rotten fruit, for my daughter died hanging from it. Died because she couldn’t live up to what someone else wanted to her to be. It was nothing but a façade.

Who is this God? Why did I ever believe in Him? I don’t understand how any God could expect this of any mother. I’ve lost my daughter, and
he
acts as though this is all a part of God’s great and glorious plan. He feels like it was all good. God’s vengeance for the things that are wrong.

What plan? How could this be great or glorious? How could this be predestined? How can people pray to find their lost keys and claim, ‘Hallelujah, after I prayed I put my hand in my pocket and they were there,’ and yet my daughter dies hanging from a tree, probably praying for help the whole time? Praying to a deaf ear. What kind of world is predestined anyway, that people cling to it as though it were glue? What sort of God would help someone find their keys when they are lost, but let a child die without stepping in to save him or her? What’s so important about choosing who or what you were or are?

What’s wrong with just coming into life and seeing what happens?

What would be wrong with that?

I guess what’s wrong with that is my daughter is dead, and I’m supposed to believe that God had something to do with it.

This. Is. Not. My. God.

Sam put the book down so it lay open on her desk, and wiped away a tear. She didn’t know this mother. This was not the woman Sam had lived with for so many years.

That woman played board games with Sam, and worked on her lessons before school and stopped to hug her when she caught her daughter watching her. Reaching out and just pulling Sammy in, holding tight, laughing as she tried to squirm away from her mother’s kisses.

Why did Sam have so few memories of this mother? Why was it all coming back now?

Sam’s mother’s writing was clear and literate, and it belied the rural education she had undoubtedly received, growing up poor in a small town.

Circumstance had left Ruthie where she was alone and vulnerable. And it went a long way in explaining to Sam why her mother had converted to this church.

The more complicated answers to her past had died with her, unless there was more in the journal.

Sam heard D-Ray getting out of his chair and slammed the diary shut.

“Man, Sam, what is up with you?” D-Ray said, poking his head around the corner. “Normally you’d be all over my ass with a comment like that. Instead, you just ignore me. I think I prefer you as a smart-ass. At least I know I’m real, and not a ghost like Bruce Willis in that one flick.”

“What comment?”

“I asked you if … Never mind.”

“Look, my mom just died, D-Ray. Not sure why you expect me to be normal.”

D-Ray looked chagrined and looked away for a moment, then made eye contact with her, and she saw his sincerity. “I’m sorry ’bout your mom.”

Sam didn’t know what to say, so she ignored his comment. Her cell phone rang. She answered, “Montgomery.”

“Sammy. Oh, Sammy, She’s waking up. She’s opening her eyes.”

Susanna’s voice rang loud and clear through the phone line, and it seemed as though a miracle had happened.

Or it did it just mean life and mortality was random? Gambling. Sometimes you took a hit when the cards were seventeen and you got an ace or a two or, best of all, a four.

And sometimes you got a ten.

*   *   *

Sam and D-Ray rushed to Primary Children’s Medical Center, and Sam jumped up and out of the car as D-Ray pulled into the roundabout in front of the hospital. She left D-Ray to park the car, and hit the stairs running instead of waiting for the elevator. She made it to the PICU, where she had to stop and call in through a phone on the wall.

“PICU,” said a voice on the other end.

“I’m here for my sister. I mean I’m here for my niece. Whitney Marcusen.”

The door buzzed. Sam dropped the phone without replacing it on the base and made her way to Whitney’s room. There Sam saw a body, or the shape of a body, covered under a sheet, no machines beeping life. No movement. No hope.

Her heart seemed to stop—literally, like she’d read about in books—and she felt the blood drain out of her face.

“Hey, can I help you?” asked a kind-faced nurse with dark hair, a harried but concerned look on her face, and a clipboard in her hand.

“My … my niece. They said she was waking up. They said she was doing better.”

“Name?” asked the nurse.

“I’m Sam Montgomery.”

“No, no, the patient’s name.”

“Oh, sorry, Whitney Marcusen.”

“Oh yes, Whitney. She’s over here in room two-oh-four. Sorry, in PICU we move them around all the time. We need different rooms for different stages of care.”

Sam’s heart started to beat a regular rhythm as she stared at the small sheet-draped body on the bed.

“I … I thought she—”

“Yeah, sorry. It happens a lot. I’ll show you where your niece is.”

“Who is—”

“I can’t really say. I’m sorry. Patient confidentiality and all that.”

Sam nodded and followed the petite nurse to Whitney’s room, where she encountered a wild scene.

She was glad to see Whitney active and thrashing, not a small, dead shape on a gurney. But Susanna was distraught.

“She wants me to help her,” Susanna said, staring at Sam, boring through her with sleep-deprived eyes and the angst of a helpless mother. “She wants the tube out, and they won’t take it out.”

Sam moved forward and grasped Whitney’s flailing right hand, holding it in hers. Stroking her fingers, Sam moved in so Whitney could see her eyes.