Quit acting like you’re dead already,” Ethel yells, tying the curtains back. “Open your eyes!” The sun blazes onto the bed. I throw my hands before my face. “I’m not letting you get away with this another day,” she barks on.
I touch my forehead, my temples, and find nothing attached to me. No impatient nurses press down on my head, my shoulders, my legs. I taste no rubber mouth guard. The room around me is not stifled by stainless steel; it is my own. But I shake with convulsions, little earthquakes rippling down from my brain to my toes. And then my arms go numb. “Ma-dera?” I ask her. I cannot finish the sentence, or even finish the thought.
“Oh, don’t go starting on all that again. All you do is talk about the dead in vain. You outlived Doc Madera—don’t you remember? He’s been gone for years. Then it was just Mr. Simon feeding you those pills morning, noon, and night, like it was bread and water. I didn’t need an Ivy whatchamacallit degree to know his medicine was no good. He always thought he was so smart.”
I shake my head, not at what she is saying but because I cannot respond in any other way.
“Anyway, Madera’s gone,” she replies. “He had a terrible cancer. You got some other doctors now, but you still been callin’ them all Madera.”
Ethel sits down on the bed. She hums a familiar song. Mmmm aaah mmm la deee laa. A lullaby. Her voice has the sadness of summer’s end. I want to ask her to keep singing, but my mouth will not move. Today will not last. By evening, time will have fortified its silence around me. And time is moving ever faster, because it is ending.
“I’ll be darned, ’cause I might just need a head doc myself. I had a dream last night that won’t let me go,” Ethel says. “You wanna hear about it?” She grows frustrated, unaware I cannot answer her. “You keep shaking your head, but what’s it gonna be? Yes or no?”
I say nothing, apparently, as she continues.
“Hell, no one wants to hear about anyone else’s darn dreams, but I’m gonna tell you anyway, ’cause you was in it. We was out in the marsh watching the fireworks like it was the Fourth of July—that’s right, your birthday. Real pretty ones, like weeping willows. And we could hear children in the distance laughing and going on with themselves. You said to me, ‘Ethel, look again,’ so I did, and there in the sky, made of the same pretty light as the fireworks, was my ma and also my pa. And then I saw Elijah. It’s hard to describe it. Always is, them finicky dreams. And I woke up this morning just crying, ’cause at the end, right beside Elijah, I saw the baby I lost.”
Ethel with child? No memory comes. But then, yes: a party, many Saturdays ago, on the brink of winter. Candlelight. Someone passes me an old-fashioned, my stomach curdles, my throat burns. I look away from the conversation and there Ethel is, at the edge of the yard, looking into the distance. She sees something I cannot. Blurred light. Her hands go to her lower belly, that protective gesture a woman instinctively makes. She is bigger there, yes. But out of propriety, I never ask after it. The blue shifts across her face. Something is in the trees. She is gazing into the end. And then: a young man, his face obscured by the passage of the years, dangles an empty glass in front of her face, then drops it. The night shatters. “Run, girl, run.”
Simon, what’s Clarke’s boy doing over there with Ethel?
How should I know, Elle? This isn’t our world. I’m sure she knows how to protect herself.
That boy is always bothering her.
“I never even told Elijah, you know that? Well, I was suspicious about it. My mama told me, when I was little, I was too witchy and badly behaved for the Lord’s blessing in my womb. I thought she was right when it took so long. But then finally my belly grew and all that sickness came. Well, one night you had some sort of to-do, like you always was having in those days, for Clarke Senior’s birthday. And you know how his boy liked to drink, and still do. Well, after he was good and liquored up, Clarke Junior liked to play a game in his daddy’s Chrysler. We’d all heard about it up north. You know, one of those with a type he didn’t like to admit to nobody, even though I was near old enough to be his mama. And so I ran and I ran from him, hiding in and out of the trees, and he didn’t get me. That fool never got me, all those years he tried. But that night, when I got back north, Elijah went out with the rifle and asked me who he was gonna have to kill ’cause down my dress the blood was just coming and coming. I tried to stop it. Oh, I hated it. I prayed to every angel, but the blood kept coming and my baby came down with it.
“In my head, I told myself my mama was wrong. But in my heart I thought she was right,” Ethel goes on. “Somehow I had caused it. So I never told no one about it. I reckon I told you now, because tomorrow you won’t recall what I been saying. I like telling you my secrets now. It’s like a confession. Back then I never even thought to blame that Clarke bastard himself—but now I do. Boy, now I do and I wish I’d let Elijah’s rifle find its lawful shot.”
It’s not right, Simon. I’m going to say something to him. I think she’s with child.
The world has never been right, my dear Elle. You can’t fix it.
“Don’t rush and say nothing, Elle. I don’t need your pity. I don’t want anyone’s pity. Like Jesus said: Let the dead bury the dead. I told you because what’s bothering me about the dream is, I saw something like those firework lights that night.” Ethel stands and closes the curtains again, as if in a trance. “The night I lost the baby. I shoulda known they was a bad omen. Just before I went running from Clarke Junior through the woods, I saw them flickering out in your yard. I thought it was some witchery Clarke had done to the world or to me or to something I drank, but that wouldn’t be the last time Clarke chased me and I learned he couldn’t even pronounce a string of prayer, let alone draw some blue light ’cross the universe. I wished I shielded my eyes and sent Mr. Death back on his way, but I just kept looking, ’cause it was the prettiest thing I ever saw. Now I know the blue was Mr. Death. He was traveling through me that night. And I let him. I looked too long. You see? It’s no different than diving in too deep for those gems. Just the thought makes me thirsty for something painkilling. But, like I said, it’s all in the past. And I’m a rickety old woman now. Dead gotta bury their dead. Seeing those lights in the dream just made me wonder. That’s all.”