She watched now for a shift in Esther's eyes. There was no sign of acknowlegement and yet the eyes were deceptively lively. Emma could not recall the details of the story. Had Sleeping Beauty pricked herself with a sewing needle, or was it a poison apple?
It was a calling, and of the places to practice it, this was among the better. The little ICU was not designed to do any more than stabilize someone who had coded, keeping them alive long enough to be able to ship them out to somewhere else. It was among the unusual privileges that Esther enjoyed that she could stay here.
Enjoyed? Hardly. And yet there was a special status. The facility wasn't set up for this kind of maintenance. The young doctor chanced some explaining to the review committee and the auditors in coming months. Already he was feeling the pressure for staffing the ICU. Flynn had to act before the doctor could not help. There wouldn't have been the ICU here at all if it hadn't been for the largesse of the federal government in the boom years past; when the title grants went out, institutions like this got all that they could possibly get, right down to the monitors and crash carts and dark brown tiles.
"I remember your father," Emma said to Esther, "He was a very tired man at the end, he had come a long way and he was enough of a guide -- he had lived long enough in his body, to know how close he had come."
Emma glanced away from the wide eyes to the sinusoidal wave of the monitor. There was no alteration, no radical swing in the digital read-outs of the vitals. Esther watched innocently mute. Her life was in Emma's hands now, not because of the healing, but because Emma had convinced the duty nurse to take a break from the station.
They knew her here. She had been a regular visitor to the care center for years now, sometimes bringing Molly with her, leaving her to play baseball alone on the empty diamonds.
It had begun as a mistake, a foolish notion stolen from the pages of women's magazines. Yves left her for a summer woman, someone from New Rochelle who wanted new cupboards on her island. Each weekend her husband would fly up from his brokerage in a small jet, spend the weekend prowling for fish, tanning on his boat. Each Monday the frenchman would return. It became a likeable arrangement, but ended when the summer did. By then, however, Yves was gone from Emma, she would not have him back.
She went back to teach in the Fall, a single mother with a custody agreement and fictional child-support payments scheduled. Yves made little money after autumn.
"I went quite mad," she said simply, "You'll understand what I mean, I think, Esther, when I say I was someone else despite myself. You've seen enough of that in your time here, haven't you darling?"
No response. The sinusoidal marched across the screen in the up-down hills of television cartoons. The IV drip kept time.
"Everyone had suggestions. Sister Therese was the principal then, and she advised putting my soul in the hands of the Blessed Mother... she meant it well, it wasn't so silly as it sounds. Another teacher, a friend until then, suggesting putting other things in his hands..."
The monitors told her that she had only imagined laughter, still Emma smiled, felt the blushing. She was always surprised by any humor in herself.
There was someone there. Despite the machine waves, the dripping fluid, the soft rush of the air into the nostrils, Emma knew that Esther was there.
"You're hiding, aren't you?" she said "I suppose you've spent a whole life like that, always taking in... Jack tells me you used to be quite girlish, he says you always liked to laugh."
She patted the hand strapped to the IV board, warm. Took the stone bean from under her tongue, put it in Esther's other palm, folded the fingers around it.
"The world," she said, "I've given you the world to hold."
The words had come, it would have been an embarassing thing to say otherwise. You trust yourself to your guiding, Flynn's father knew this. To him at the end she had said: "It is a beautiful, sunny day outside. Jack has gone to eat, the fish have moved off the spawning beds to deeper water. Esther is near, your son and your wife await you."
His breath had caught in the way she recognized as the end. Something in what she said was enough to satisfy him, he had committed to the tunnel of light. She pressed the nurse-call and shouted out, but she could not leave. It was important to maintain human contact at the end, she held the guide's hand in hers, the breath caught again.
When his father died, Jack had been an instant late. Emma was humming and still holding the hand, the nurse held the other hand.
"It was very peaceful," the nurse was saying as Emma silently excused herself and left the room, removing the scapular as she went.
"I know," Flynn had said, "I could feel it when I came back in. He is still here..."
Only then had his voice cracked and the weeping come. Oh Dad, he sobbed, and folded himself across his father's body. He hadn't really seen Emma, the scapular had hidden her.
"It was a mistake, you see," Emma told Esther. "This article said you should immerse yourself, do volunteer work, whatever. I was raised a good Catholic girl, and so I took the advice. I began to visit patients. In time, I found there were courses, medical social work. I had no plan. They paid you more money at the high school if you had graduate credits. I was only doing it for that I thought, and to help me be a good volunteer..."
She laughed. Oh Esther, I have needed someone to talk to.
You know, don't you? You have been a woman longer than most of us, taking it all in, always taking it all in, your huge skull filled with the buzz of it.
You want to know what kind of girl I was? A giant, I was a big, hulking giant, five foot eight at sixteen, frightening to them and yet afraid of everything. It was my mind, you see, I hated my mind. You have that blessing -- it is one, you know? for you, it is-- but I always saw something. I always was the great good girl with good grades, handsome and homely behind wire-rims, ratty hair pinned up in a snarled nest, my whole self all unfurled like roses in the heat. When we graduated I had all the honors, all the honors except maybe the home economics prize. When I was coming off the platform with my diploma, Mother Superior raised her hand for silence and called me back. I was afraid she was going to take my diploma back, afraid they had discovered it was all a mistake and I was a fraud. She said some words about my accomplishments and my face stung with the blushing. I was mortified. I stood there, even then not knowing what to do as the applause lapsed. She had to gesture for me to continue down the stairs from the platform. When we marched out, I ran off to the bushes and cried. My parents couldn't find me for a full half an hour, by then everybody was gone. I am used to hiding too, you see.
I was always off crying in the bushes. I remember the tea dances. For some reason I always wanted to go to them, I was always excited for days before. Always it was the same disappointment. Standing there in the dim light at the edge of the grand parlour, not even near the punch table, the usual station for girls of my type, towering above them, blinking out at them, and feeling so, so alone, Esther. So alone...
Sooner or later, I'd give up on it and run off to the bushes and cry, damning God and everyone for my graceless body, my awful mind...
Can I tell you something awful? Can I tell you what a woman my mother was, what awful love she had for us? The senior dance she made my brother take me to, she insisted that I go and that he take me, and that we tell no one who he was. She made a dress of drab lace, with ribbons strung through the waist and bodice, and she bought him a new blue suit. We posed for pictures beforehand, both of us grim and frightened.
If you knew the world, Esther, you would know this is not an unusual story, you would know this happens more than people know. What makes it unusual, however, is what happened when we came home that night. We alone it seemed not joining anyone else for breakfast, or swimming, or carriage rides through the park afterward...She sat us down and brought out a board of meat and cheese she had fixed for us, all sorts of meats and cheeses and pickles and different breads and small rolls and vegetables and dip in a fancy bowl, just like you would do for a girl and her date. She sat with us while we ate, asking questions about the decorations, the music, the other girls' dresses.
"I have never stopped crying about this, Esther, the awful love my mother had for us, a love that wouldn't believe anything but that life can be beautiful, that her daughter was a special woman. A meat and cheese platter, for god's sake..."
And so when in later years the beauty came, when the ugly duckling became the swan which the impossible story had promised, it was not a blessing but another weight upon me. I knew who I had been and was. Yves, the dashing frenchman with sex in his fingers and mad songs on his lips, could not fool me. When he left, when he was gone, I understood. I am not saying that I was a victim, Esther, I am only saying I understood that there was more to it than it seemed.
She felt a coolness drifting through the corridor and in the door. The ICU was air-conditioned, but the suite outside was not. The coolness entered from outside as if a shadow passed over the buildings or the weather had turned with the coming twilight. Down the corridor in the staff dayroom, someone had been watching the game of the week on television; now the television was off, the corridor silent. Only the hissing oxygen, the rubber valve of the respirator working up and down on its chrome harness.
"So, when he left, you can imagine the hunger... For a time, I took all offers, do you see, Esther? Even the man with the hands..."
She laughed again, the laughing echoing against the tiles.
"How is it the song goes? 'O the married men, makes me feel like a girl again, to run with the married men...'"
Again. Laughed. Her eyes were a great cavern, a great calm.
I wasn't sure, you see, when they offered me the job through Catholic Services. By that time I was what you would call a satisfied sinner. Or mostly satisfied, anyway.
But then I just couldn't see why I should abandon God to the non-sinners, can you understand that, Esther? I had a calling, do you see?
Will Jack?
I had a daughter to raise and the pay was good and the hours were flexible, and so I took it. Later I even entered a healing order.
That's what it is, she thought, what we each of us are seeking now. The secret of the roses is that they require constancy and patience, otherwise they frighten. Old woman know this, you see them move through the gardens in the dying light of evening. Flynn gave a life to patience, and now he wants it all at once in his new life. Molly too wants too much.
Order heals. We enter into it, we women. Not the orderliness of what commonly goes by that name, but the order of change. The patience of a watching woman, the sinusoidal wave, dark eyes, and the world in her hand.
The nurse was coming back from the dayroom, squeaking down the corridor on foam soles. Emma kissed the open eyes.
"God love you, my sister," she said, "We will know soon, Esther darling."
When she got back to Chippewa Bay it was nearing dusk and they were nowhere to be seen, although the boat was back and had been for more than a hour according to the lovely small woman with the roses.
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