NEENA TOOK THE long away back to her hotel. She stopped once again at the pay phone in the hotel lobby. Knew by now that Tish’s answering machine picked up on the fourth ring. Held her breath after the second when the ringing stopped. Damn. Not Tish though. Again, not Tish. Tish’s husband answered, Malik. Neena had never met Malik. Knew only that he was raised in Willingboro, New Jersey, and that he was a cameraman for the local news station where Tish was the noonday anchor. Neena remembered hearing about how they’d met in graduate school. She’d seen pictures, wedding pictures from a year ago. They’d gotten married in Hawaii, Tish had said, because they just knew too many people, wouldn’t be able to cut the guest list below five hundred. She remembered how ebullient Malik and Tish appeared in the picture as they cut their wedding cake. What a cutie you married, Neena had said in the note that went with the Waterford goblets she’d sent. She imagined his cute face now as he said hello, his light brownish eyes and light-colored skin and head full of throw-back nappy hair. Tish had said the wedding hair was a compromise; he usually wore corn rows.
She fixed on a laminated parson’s table holding an artificial potted peace lily as she introduced herself to Malik, said she had spoken with Nan a couple of nights ago and she was calling again to check on how her sister was doing. “Is Tish there? May I speak to her, please?” she asked, trying to keep the desperation from her voice. She listened to his pause, how heavy it was.
“Hey, yeah, Neena,” he said, and she could hear how hard he had to work to lift the pause, voice sounding like someone in the midst of weight training. “Yeah, it’s good to finally hear your voice, yeah, Tish talks about you nonstop.”
“Is she all right?”
“We’re praying, Neena. Yeah. Been running her back and forth to the hospital and she’s there now, you know in the hospital—”
Neena sucked her breath in hard and quick as if her pinky finger had just been severed, grabbed her finger because it really did throb all the way up to her chest. “And what?” she said, when she could talk again. “I mean, their prognosis? You know, what are they saying?”
“It’s like neutral at this point. The good news is that Tish should be okay. They’re trying to save the baby though, you know, trying to help her hold on to him for four more weeks. You know, it’ll still be touch and go, but they say if she can hold on to him for four more weeks he can be viable. So that’s basically where it is. We’re just trying to help her get there. You know every day he’s with her is like you know, I’m celebrating and praising God.”
“Him. A boy?”
“Yeah, a boy,” he said, and Neena heard his voice crack.
“A boy.” Neena repeated it, felt dizzy from the sudden surge of emotion. “What hospital?” she asked. “Can she have visitors?” That heavy pause again. “Or at least phone calls?”
“Yeah, like this so awkward, Neena,” he said, and Neena concentrated on the tweed couch in the hotel lobby; it was cream-colored and leaned to one side as if a heavy body sat there sleeping or already dead. She guessed another month at longest before the Queen Anne–style couch leg broke finally under the invisible weight. She’d rather play with that idea than listen to what Malik was saying; she could have finished his sentences for him but she allowed him to continue.
“But yeah, you know your grandmother, Nan, I mean of course you know her, but she’s got it in her head that any kind of surprise is gonna force Tish into a labor that they won’t be able to stop. Anyhow, I’m not entirely convinced, but you know, what do I know? And your grandmother’s citing all these midwifery type stats so I’m not trying to go up against all of that on the off chance that she could be right. So, I guess what I’m saying is that whatever I can do, I mean for you to be kept up with how Tish is doing, you know, just give me a number and I promise, you know, God, I feel like such a sellout doing this ’cause I know how much you mean to Tish. I know I’ma catch hell when she’s back in the black and has a healthy baby and hears that I got in the way of you seeing her. God, I’m just, you know, kinda scared, Neena.”
His voice cracked again, wider this time. She couldn’t fault him for keeping Tish unreachable to her. Though she couldn’t console him right now either. “Listen, thanks for your time,” she said. “My sister married well, I’m glad for that. I’ll call again soon to check on how she’d doing.”
“Well wait, Neena,” he said. “Do you want to leave a number? That way, as soon as there’s, you know, any change in her condition, I can call you.”
“No thanks, really, I’ll be in touch,” she said as she started again to move the phone toward the base. Then she heard him calling her again to wait.
“Uh, your grandmother said if I spoke to you to give you a message, she said—”
Neena cut him off. “Tell my grandmother to go to hell.” She hung the phone then repeated it into the lobby air. “Go to hell, Nan,” she said over and over; “Nan, go to hell.” Said it even as she pulled the coffee-stained yellow pages from the ledge below the phone. Looked up the entries for hospitals. Didn’t realize how many there were in the area. She hated to waste her phone card minutes but she would call each one until she located Tish. Scanned the list and narrowed it down to the four most likely. She started with HUP. Her grandmother was brand loyal and had proclaimed more than once that should she ever become incapacitated, don’t take her anywhere except the University. Surely she would insist that’s where Tish should go. And Tish had always done whatever Nan suggested of her.
Neena’s heartbeat stepped up as she was connected to patient information and gave them Tish’s name. Bingo. Tish was there. Her condition, please, she asked, her voice shaking. Fair. Thank Goodness, not critical or grave. Fair. Average. The phone number, please, yes, are you crazy, of course connect me, she almost shouted into the phone. And there it was. Tish’s voice in her ear just like that. Such a weak voice, as if she was eighty and had just had a triple bypass. Not a fair-sounding voice at all. Neena got the thought then that Tish might in fact be close to losing the baby, the thought wrapping itself around her larynx thwarting speech. “Hello,” Tish said again and Neena tried to pull up her own voice before it sank further into what was now a pit of quicksand filled with her second-guessings. Suppose Nan was right. Suppose the shock of hearing from her right now did in fact cause Tish’s uterus to contract and push the baby out too soon. She should have called more than a few times a year so that her voice on the other end of a phone line was part of the normal routine of Tish’s life. Should have called daily. “Hello, hello,” Tish said again. And Neena was picturing again what she imagined to be the guest room in Tish’s new home. The slant of the morning sun hitting the side wall the way it did in that childhood bedroom she and Tish had shared at Nan’s. Selfish of her to put Tish in jeopardy for the chance to soften her own situation. Should not be Tish’s emergency that she, Neena, had only two nights left in this fleabag hotel. Now there was another voice in her ear. Nan’s. Who is this please? Nan’s voice demanded and Neena tried to fix a rock in her stomach to anchor her to get the words out, to say to Nan, Happy now? She heard a click in her ear before she could utter a mumbling word. Then a silence fractured by her own hard breaths.
Now she rifled through her purse looking for that lawyer’s card, the one who Bow Peep had introduced to her the night she arrived here. She’d told herself on the bus ride from Chicago that she was finished being a confidence woman, she’d even visualized herself sprinkling talc over that part of her life the way she would over a grease splatter on good silk to lift the stain so that even the heavier jagged outlines of the stain disappeared. But now she had to admit that even then she’d been holding the idea in a dark crevice of her brain of pulling in just one more man. Knew when she’d asked for the lawyer’s card that she had this very thing in mind. Just one last time she told herself now. Just to get enough money to legitimize herself for good. Then she could move to a place like North Carolina where the cost of living was cheaper than here, where she could buy a little town house on a new development and put up a swing set in the backyard for the children she was sure Tish would have. Allowed the idea of one more hustle to peek its head outside of the crevice, allowed the dingy light in this lobby to enlarge the idea even as her insides grew teeth and gnashed at the lining of her stomach. She pulled up the Jesus Loves You tracts and bunched them in her hand. Dug some more through her purse looking for the card, the nice heavyweight linen with raised lettering.
Her heart was beating double-time as she talked herself in and out of calling him. The pencil image of the sad-eyed Jesus stared up at her from the brochure. “Do you know that he loves you?” the caption on the brochure read. She smoothed the edges of the tracts and placed them in a neat pile on top of the coffee-stained yellow pages phonebook. Remembered then that she’d taken the card out and slid it under the lamp on the particle board nightstand. She headed to her room to retrieve the card. She walked across the lobby and got into the elevator, a tight four-person-capacity crypt with faded red indoor/outdoor carpet for wall covering, a scuffed vinyl on the floor. She wouldn’t go for an outrageous amount from him. Just enough to start her new life in North Carolina. She was picturing already the boy-books and baseball mitts she’d buy for her nephew. She could return to school, she told herself. She could maybe combine an arts degree with psych courses and counsel black women living in shelters, maybe teach them how to bend wire for bracelets and earrings, how to glue chips of Austrian crystal, how to market the handmade jewelry to local retailers. Imagined the internal glow she’d get from helping the down-and-out women to positions of restored dignity.
She imagined how her mother would smile. There it was, her mother’s smile. The power of its absence had hung over her and directed the course of her life as she’d moved to those places where she thought her mother might be. No indication of Freeda in North Carolina, though. She braced herself for the way the elevator rocked from side to side on ascent. Held her breath so she wouldn’t inhale the musty air as she walked the few steps to get to her room. Allowed her chest to open finally once she’d unlocked the door. The inside of the room smelled like her, like pink Dove soap and cocoa butter lotion and the VO5 conditioner that had dressed her hair since she was a child.