THE TELEVISION WAS ON, BUT SOMEHOW, THE APARTMENT felt quiet. Luther closed the door behind him.
“Thel?” he called. “You here?”
It was late in the afternoon. He was surprised not to see her in the kitchen, getting something ready for dinner. In just the few days his sister had been here, Luther had grown quite used to the idea of having someone else do the cooking, if only because it spared him from having to eat his own. Even after all these years of bachelor life, Luther had never managed to become much of a cook. It was one reason he took so many meals at diners and carryout joints.
Hungry after missing lunch, Luther went into the kitchen and got some bologna from the refrigerator. He thought of frying it, but that was more work than he felt like doing. Instead, he slapped the lunch meat and a slice of processed cheese down on a piece of bread, smeared another piece of bread with mayonnaise, and put it on top. He reached into the refrigerator for a can of Coke, poking two holes in the top with a can opener on his key ring. He noted absently that his sister hadn’t answered him yet. “You not watchin’ the march?” he called, after taking a long pull from the red-and-white can.
Luther took his sandwich back into the living room, sat on the couch, and watched the news for a moment. Still no response from Thelma. Maybe she was out? But why would she leave the television on? Where could she have gone? Wouldn’t she have left him a note?
So she was taking a nap, then. That made sense. Certainly, she was sleeping a lot, lately.
But still …
There was something about the quality of the silence, the oppressive weight of it, that made him uneasy. For a long moment, Luther sat there just listening and chewing, trying to put a name to his anxiety. It was like trying to grab Jell-O in your fist. Whatever it was, his mind could not hold it. It kept squirming free.
“Thel?”
Luther got up and moved toward the bedroom.
“Hey, Thelma, you in there?”
The door to the bedroom was about six inches from the jamb, light from his table lamp leaking through. Why would Thelma be sleeping with the lamp on?
And right then, for no solid reason he could define, Luther felt anxiety twist his gut hard, like wringing out a dishrag. He knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. Then he pushed it open.
In that first instant, he thought she was only napping after all. She lay on her side. Her eyes were closed, her face was at peace.
But there was a stillness about her that unnerved him. And … something, some whitish substance, was dribbling from her mouth, pooling on the coverlet. Vomit. The bottle of pills, open on the nightstand, completed the picture.
The shock of it vibrated Luther’s body like a tuning fork. A taste of copper flooded his mouth. His mind refused to process
could not process
reality had become
too real, too much there
like being plunged face-first into ice water from a dead sleep
Then his mind jolted into gear and he screamed her name, two long syllables of pure anguish. “Thelma!”
Luther grabbed his sister, pulled her to her feet. She was heavy and limp, a sack of wet sand with arms that hung straight down. Luther shrieked without realizing it, bawled like a terrified boy.
He patted her cheeks. Nothing. He slapped her hard. Slapped her again. “Thelma!”
There. Did her eyelids flutter?
Yet another slap, harder still.
Yes, her eyelids definitely fluttered.
“Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God,” whispered the atheist, Luther Hayes. “Come on, Thelma, come on. Don’t do this, you hear me? Don’t you do this!”
Not even in tank battles during the war had Luther felt such raw fear. He didn’t know what to do. Had no idea what to do. What should he do?
The telephone. Of course. The telephone.
No, not the telephone. How much time would he lose trying to find an ambulance service that accepted Negroes? Theoretically, that was no longer an issue since they passed the civil rights law last year, but he wasn’t about to risk Thelma’s life on a theory.
Instead, Luther hoisted the dead weight of his baby sister in his arms. “Hold on, Thelma,” he whispered. “You hold on.”
He carried her through the living room and down the stairs. In the parking lot, he lowered her to her rubbery legs, leaned her against the car and fished for his keys. When he had managed to fumble the passenger side door open, he deposited Thelma awkwardly in the front seat. Above him, his front door gaped wide, and Luther wondered distantly if he would still have a television when he got back home.
But he didn’t have time to care.
The car started with a roar. Luther backed out with a screech of tires, floored it down the short alley, swung a left that made four lanes of Sunday drivers skid to avoid collision. He barely noticed, pushing the accelerator down as far as it would go, weaving in and out of traffic, jumping through red lights. With his free hand, he alternately hammered his horn and slapped Thelma’s cheek. Limp as a rag doll, her body jerked this way and that as Luther yanked the wheel right and left, darting across lanes. Suddenly, some old white man in a pickup truck drifted over in front of him, forcing Luther to brake hard. Thelma’s forehead made a thunk like somebody plucking a watermelon as it slammed the dashboard.
“Oh, shit!” cried Luther, pushing her back, watching the traffic, blowing his horn. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.” But he did not slow down.
Behind him, horns blared. Tires shrieked. People cursed. Luther drove through it all with a single-minded mania. He had to save Thelma.
Unless it was already too late.
This thought kept trying to intrude. Luther kept pushing it back. He gritted his teeth. He snarled. He drove.
It only took six minutes. It felt like an hour, but no, just six minutes, and Luther brought the car to a hard stop in front of St. Martin de Porres, a Catholic hospital for colored. He scrambled out of the car, snatched open the driver’s side door, pulled Thelma into his arms, and began to drag the weight of her toward the building.
He pulled the glass door open, startling a group of white women in white nun’s habits who were talking together at a reception desk. “Help me here!” he cried. “I need help!”
There was a shocked moment when nothing happened. Then one of the nurses, an older woman, started barking orders. “Sister Ruth, page Dr. Sullivan! Sister Miriam, get a gurney!” She turned to Luther. “What happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, helplessly. “She took some sleeping pills.”
“What’s this on her forehead?”
Luther was surprised to see that blood was dripping from a hairline cut. “I guess she smacked it on the dashboard when I hit the brakes. I was driving fast,” he added, his voice apologetic.
“What is her name?”
As Luther was supplying this information, the gurney came, a young Negro doctor in a lab coat trotting behind it. He surrendered his sister to these strangers, and they lifted her up on the stretcher and wheeled her through swinging doors into the exam area, already cutting away her clothing.
Luther tried to follow, but the older nurse held up a restraining hand. “No,” she said, “you’ll only be in the way. Wait over there.” She pointed to a room of straight-back wooden chairs, magazines, and Bibles on the coffee table, a television mounted in a corner. “We’ll come get you when there’s any word.”
Luther tried to protest. “But …” he began.
“You did your job,” she told him. “Now, let us do ours.”
“She’s my sister,” he protested feebly. But the nurse was already gone.
So Luther took a seat on one of the pitiless chairs and there he waited, his arms folded, his head pressed back against the wall, trying not to weep as his mind fed him a litany of horrors.
The doctor and the nurses coming out with grim faces to give him the bad news.
“We tried our best, but …”
“We’re sorry, Luther, but …”
“Maybe if you’d gotten her here sooner, but …”
He had stopped to eat a bologna sandwich while his sister lay dying just a few feet away! A fucking bologna sandwich! The thought made him nauseous. It bloated him with reproach.
And from the television overhead, a chipper announcer promised “shipwreck hijinks” on the next episode of Gilligan’s Island.
What would he tell George? How would he explain?
And how would they break it to Adam?
The strained silence between him and his mother before he left for Selma.… If it turned out that was the last time he saw her, the boy would be devastated. He would be ruined.
No, Luther reminded himself sternly, wiping at his tears. He was way ahead of himself. Thelma had not died. She was alive. She would recover from this and go on to live a long life. This, he told himself, was what he would believe, until somebody came through those doors and told him different. Until then, all these grim thoughts amounted to nothing, just his mind torturing him, like some bad little boy pulling wings off flies. But the pep talk he gave himself didn’t do Luther much good. Fear still rode him like a jockey. It still knifed him like some back-alley mugger. Luther couldn’t help himself. He started weeping again for his dead sister. He wished he still remembered how to pray.
Minutes piled up and became an hour. Luther tried to decide whether it was a good thing that it was taking so long. They wouldn’t still be working on her if she was dead, right?
As if in perverse reply to his unvoiced question, the chipper-voiced man on television now promised “spook-tacular laughs” on the next episode of The Munsters.
Luther wanted very much to throw something through the screen.
Why had she done it? Why hadn’t he realized something was wrong? Yes, he had known she was depressed, but he hadn’t known she felt bad enough to do something like this. That had never even occurred to him. He had completely missed it.
“Big brother has a very important job. He got to look out for the ones under him. He got to take care of them, protect them from gettin’ hurt.”
His father had given him a very important charge. And he had failed. Again.
“Mr. Hayes?”
Luther started at the sound of his name. Somehow, the doctor was right in front of him, but Luther hadn’t even seen him there. He leapt to his feet.
“Did you hear what I said?” the doctor asked.
“N-no,” stammered Luther. “I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t …”
“No problem,” said Dr. Sullivan, pushing a pair of glasses up on his nose. “I’ll repeat myself. It was a very near thing, but we were able to revive her and get her stabilized. We’d like to keep her overnight for observation, but I expect to be able to discharge her in the morning.”
Luther was not certain he had heard right. “She’s going to be all right?”
The doctor nodded. “Yes,” he said, “physically.”
Luther sagged. He felt fresh tears spring to his eyes. “She’s going to be all right?”
“Physically,” the doctor said again, and there was steel in his voice now. “Mr. Hayes, your sister tried to kill herself. That’s nothing to fool around with. My advice would be to encourage her to get some psychological help as quickly as possible. You may not be as lucky next time.”
Luther’s heart thumped hard at the mention of a next time. “You saying she’s crazy?”
The other man shook his head, emphatically. “I’m saying it’s pretty obvious she’s deeply troubled. She’s dealing with emotional issues she can’t resolve and she needs help.”
“Can I see her?”
Sullivan nodded. “They’re putting her into a room. The nurse will come get you as soon as they’ve got her situated.”
“Thank you,” said Luther. He extended his hand and the doctor took it. “Thank you for everything.”
It was another half hour before the nurse—it was the same older white woman who had taken charge when he burst through the door—came for him. She led him up a stairwell and down a long hall. She didn’t say anything until she reached a closed door midway down. There, she stopped and faced him squarely.
“Just so that you know,” she said, “your sister might not be happy to see you.”
“Beg pardon?”
“It’s pretty common in attempted suicides,” she said. “There’s a certain amount of embarrassment at having been caught, having failed, as it were. It usually manifests itself as hostility. I’m not saying that it will, but I am saying that it could. I just wanted you to be prepared. Follow her lead. Don’t get into an argument with her.” Her eyes sought his. “Do you understand?”
Luther nodded. She said, “Try not to be too long. We don’t want to overtax her.” And with that, she pushed the door open and Luther walked through. It was a spartan room. A door in the corner leading to a toilet and shower, a dark, silent television on a wheeled cart, a window looking out on a fleet of clouds sailing the twilight, and, in the center, a bed, where Thelma sat in a white hospital gown, propped against pillows. She looked over at the sound of Luther entering the room. Then she turned away and watched the clouds.
“Thelma,” he said.
She didn’t answer. He moved to a plastic chair next to the bed. He turned it so that it was facing her, took a seat. “How you doing, sis?”
After a moment, she spoke in a dark voice he had never heard before. “You should have just let me die,” she said, still watching the clouds.
Luther was scandalized. “Thelma! Don’t talk like that.”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “It would have been easier on everyone.”
“Wouldn’t have been easier on me,” he said.
“Would have been easier on me,” she replied.
“That’s bullshit,” he sputtered, remembering a second too late the nurse’s admonition against getting into an argument.
But Thelma just glanced at him. “Don’t you see?” she said. “I’ve made a mess of everything.”
He shook his head, emphatically. “You ain’t made no mess out of nothin’. All your life, all you ever done is try to make the best of the situation. That’s all you ever done, Thel.”
If his words made any difference, he couldn’t see it on her face. After a moment, she turned back toward the window. “Are you going to tell George what I did?”
“I ain’t thought about it,” he admitted. “I was focused on gettin’ you here. You don’t think he should know?”
A little shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess he has a right to. Poor George. He’s going to be hurt.”
“Yeah,” said Luther.
“I don’t know how to do that,” she said. “I don’t know how to hurt him.”
Luther spoke gently. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll tell him. Ain’t gon’ be able to reach him till after the march, though.”
“He’s going to think I’m crazy,” said Thelma.
“He your husband,” said Luther. “He love you.” Which, he knew, wasn’t quite an answer.
“This doctor thinks I’m crazy,” she said. “He wants me to see a shrink as soon as I get home.”
“He don’t think you crazy,” said Luther. “He told me that himself. He said you dealin’ with some emotional problem got you messed up inside.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” she said. “It’s been really hard, these past few days.”
“Yeah,” said Luther, “but that ain’t all of it.”
Her gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know these last few days was hard, but that ain’t all there is to why you took them pills. You been sad a long time, sister. I just ain’t realized it before.”
She smirked. “Oh, so you’re a psychologist now?”
Luther shook his head. “No, but I ain’t no fool, neither. I got eyes and ears. Hell, you tried to tell me yourself, that day we talked on the phone and you started sayin’ how you ain’t been a good mother to that boy. You tried to say it, but I just didn’t want to hear. Thelma, you been sad for years.”
Her stare challenged him. Luther wanted to turn away, but that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? Turning away. Him, her, all of them, turning away. So instead, he met the force of her gaze. And he watched as it slowly crumpled, as her lips trembled and her eyes moistened.
The confession escaped her in a whisper. “God, I feel like such a failure.”
“You ain’t no failure, Thel. You the best person I know. And I ain’t sayin’ that ’cause you my sister. I’m sayin’ it ’cause it’s true.”
She gave him a long look. Then she said, “Luther, I’m sorry.”
Now Luther felt his own eyes growing wet. “You scared the shit out of me, Thel. Don’t you never do that again. If you feelin’ that bad, you talk to me. You talk to somebody, you hear me? And if we don’t listen, you make us listen.”
She wiped her eyes. “You sure you don’t think I’m crazy?” she asked, smiling a little to make it a joke.
But Luther knew it wasn’t a joke. He shook his head emphatically. “No,” he said. “It’s the world that’s crazy, Thel, not you. Feel like it’s spinnin’ out of control, and you just out here like the rest of us, tryin’ to hold on the best you can.”
“Well, I guess I’m not doing so good,” she said, through a tiny, reflective smile. “I slipped off today.”
“But I caught you,” said Luther.
A somber look. “You caught me,” she agreed. “I don’t know whether I should thank you for it or not.”
“Thelma,” he said, and then he stopped because he didn’t know what else to say.
His sister regarded him with something like pity. After a moment, she reached out her hand and Luther took it in his own. Thelma gave him a tight smile and returned her gaze to the window. They sat there together for a long time, watching as the day’s last light bled from the sky.