IT WAS THE second Monday in June, two weeks after Uncle Fouad arrived, and Melvie had run into Jem’s room at five-thirty in the morning, on her way to work, clapped her hands together in four smart cracks, and barked, “Up! Up! Up! Up!” She’d noticed Jem was starting to get a hangdog look and knew it was up to her to snap her out of it.
Melvie liked to compare herself to Atlas, whose huge wrought-iron likeness in front of the European Health Spa she’d admired for years. Without people like her or Atlas, the earth would cease to turn as efficiently and consistently as it had done. She saw to it that hearts ran on time: a heart in every chest and a stomach in every belly. She was there, also, to see that people thought the right thoughts, felt the right feelings, and that Jemorah didn’t go off track. No one understood Melvie, this she knew; it was a given. She was like a deer in the woods; her true nature fluttered from behind dark shapes and obstacles in flashes, the white beam of a tail lifting as the deer flees. Even in her own mind this was true: she fled from herself.
She expected that when she died she would trade in her job with Atlas for a position with St. Peter, in charge of moral accounting. She was as well versed in the responsibilities of death as in those of life; she had met with death personally. When she was two and a half she’d sat up in her crib in her parents’ bedroom in Jordan and watched it come in through the window.
It had cascaded through the air in a veil, like the ones that flew around belly dancers, a veil like Salome’s. It turned over and over, tumbling in folds over their heads as Melvina kept watch. Though this was long before she became a nurse, even then she knew instinctively, inarticulately, that death came to people in personal guises: one would see a fly where another saw a fish or a star. This veil, she understood, would be the way death revealed itself to her. She had kept the memory of that night intact, complete in its detail.
The veil fell lightly toward her mother, and behind the bars of her crib Melvie was helpless to move her out of the way as she would push someone out of the path of a truck. She watched it settle in the shiver that crept over her mother and glazed her sleeping skin; she watched the veil work its texture into the skin and through the body as if flesh were made of air. And it was as if some part of that veil had fallen over Melvina, too, covering her with the memory, a network of sensations that she could never tear away.
She claimed that from that night on she knew she was called to pursue the greatest of professions, the most physically, emotionally, and intellectually demanding of any field, the most misunderstood and martyred, the closest to divinity: nurse.
People flourished under her care. Patients thought to be inoperable were restored, the suicidal regained hope, the lingering ill were healed. Not so many that anyone called Melvina a miracle worker, but enough that the staff in her hospital and the hospital community at large knew and respected her and honored her commands. Doctors consulted her as a matter of course. Patients and their families sent her flowers, chocolates, even jewelry—which she promptly returned, not wishing to appear compromised. She could look into a patient’s face, read the irises, lips, the confluence of thought and shadow, and recognize an illness.
There were also those who had evaded her.
Melvina referred to death as her Achilles’ heel. It caught her off guard. Jem, on occasion, pointed out that Melvie’s feelings might be a natural response to death, but Melvina always said, “I’m a nurse, not just some person.” She believed that the pang she felt over it was the one flaw that prevented her from being the Total Nurse. “In hospital personnel, regret is a form of secondary complication, like infection,” she’d said. “It must be flushed out.
“Nurses must strive for complete inner harmony,” Melvie said. “Their minds and hearts as clear as light, water, and fire. They have to be truthful and spontaneous, so the clean blade of knowledge and action can flash from them to patient without interruption.”
Daily, death pressed on her from newspapers, radio, television.
She remembered an article she had read four years earlier about a boy who’d gone walking on the ice of Lake Ontario. Ice-walking was the bane of the small college that was perched on the lip of the lake. Out of cabin fever perhaps, or natural curiosity, many students were enticed out on the frozen borders. The boy Melvie read about had worked as a photographer for the student paper and, even though being caught on the ice meant automatic expulsion, he decided to chance it and went with a friend to take pictures.
They went out too far—someone always did—out to where they could see the belly of Ontario still uncovered by the ice, deep and wild enough to resist freezing. It was as if the lake itself had dared them—its waves lifting a hypnotic voice—to go on and on, to discover its secret life under the frozen dead sheets. Once the boys were out far enough to spot the waves, they heard a loud crack under their feet. One boy was able to run to more solid ice, but the photographer began to drift away on a small floe. His friend hurried to shore for help.
Campus security backed an emergency boat off the end of a pier where lake water ran channels between frozen currents and they motored toward the boy, chopping their way through the loose ice with axes and the hull of the boat. The boy was difficult to spot through the wind and snow. One moment, they saw him crouched on the slippery floe, the next, he was in the gray waves. His boots and winter clothes were instantly waterlogged, dragging him down, but he kept his head above water, and, as the boat came in, he was still able to lift his hands for the rope and life preserver they threw him.
Though they cut the engines, the boat stirred up water, and as the boy laid his hands on the preserver, the hull smashed through two great sheets of ice. Massive shards broke free, rushed at him, and the light went out of his eyes as he was crushed in half at the waist, pinned between ice panes. They dragged in his head, arms, and torso with the skin of his palms frozen to the preserver; his hips and legs went down. The place where he had stood was already mending, ice knitting back to ice.
Every year students were lost to the lake, just as in other places, people fell down gorges or were caught in undertows. In the graying, crystallizing darkness, when Onondaga Lake went still and the bowl of land seemed to swim with its ghosts, Melvina thought of the boy she’d read about. She thought about the future he might have lived and imagined the possibilities trailing after him, and she marveled at what little power to protect others anyone had.
MELVINA DREW BACK and snapped the stone, then watched it skip once, twice, three times over the lake. “This is salt water,” she told Jem. “Syracuse used to be called ‘Salina’—salt. At one time it was the world’s biggest salt producer.”
Jem looked at the water. “Now it’s not worth much, huh.”
Melvina looked at Jem sharply. “Don’t say that, Jemorah.” She looked over the water. “That’s a defeatist attitude. Move toward your light energy. This is practically saline solution, almost blood.”
“Hemo the Magnificent,” Jem said, remembering the health movie they showed at Clay Elementary on every assembly day. That and Treasure Island.
Melvina reached down to her big, white patent-leather pocketbook propped between some rocks and pulled out an envelope. She handed it to Jem. It said Syracuse University Office of Undergraduate Admissions. “I just walked over to the admissions office after work and picked this up. Do me a favor,” Melvie said. “Fill that out and sign Peachy Otts’s name to it.”
Jem sat on one of the flat rocks that flanked the lake. She’d never heard her sister say or do anything dishonest; Melvina was as righteous and unyielding as Moses. Jem shaded her eyes and gazed at Melvie. The sun reflected brilliantly against her uniform. Jem thought perhaps that the mosaic of lights, the blowing trees, had confused what she heard.
Melvina skipped another stone hard, six hops, and Jem knew she’d heard right. “I’m amazed…I mean…you…not to mention we’d never get away with it,” Jem said. “Melvie? What is it?”
“It’s just—I don’t know how to do this, and if I don’t do this, I think she’s going to die. It’s going to happen again.” She skipped another stone, turned her face into the wind.
“Who? Peachy’s going to die?”
“Dolores Otts.”
Jem thought a moment, trying to remember. She recalled a pale blonde girl, swollen with pregnancy, standing at the windows of the Otts’s house, waving to the bus she should have been riding. “I didn’t know she was one of your patients.”
Melvina sat opposite Jem and pressed her knees against her sister’s. “She just can’t die. She’s got her whole life ahead of her yet. I won’t let her, not this one.”