The hospice wing at Mercy General always smells faintly of boiled cabbage and floor wax, no matter what time of day they mop the linoleum. By Friday morning I had stopped counting the ceiling tiles, mostly because the yellow water stain near the smoke detector looked just like the map of Arkansas if you squinted at it right. Dr. Henderson came in around 8:15 with his little clipboard and his shoes squeaking against the tile.
He didn’t sit down. Doctors never sit down when they are about to tell you that your calendar has fewer pages left than a five-day pocket diary. He just stood by the foot of the metal-framed bed and told me in that level, professional voice they teach in medical school that my kidneys were finally throwing in the towel. He said weeks, maybe a month if the morphine held the pain down. I nodded at him and asked if the kitchen could send up a bran muffin that wasn’t hard enough to crack a walnut. He smiled a thin, tired sort of smile, made a little tick mark on his chart, and walked out to the next room.
I don’t know why I keep thinking back to the winter of 1976 when my own kitchen was drafty enough to freeze the dish soap in the bottle. Back then, my husband Dale was still hauling gravel for the county road department, and our little white farmhouse out on Route 4 sat four miles from the nearest blacktop.
That February brought forty-eight hours of steady freezing rain that turned the gravel lanes into gray grease. I was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table darning a pair of Dale’s wool work socks when the back screen door banged open once, sharp and weak all at once. I figured it was just the wind catching the latch, but then I heard that thin, shivering breath on the other side of the wood. When I pulled the door toward me, there she was standing on the cedar mat with snow melting straight down into the cracks of her tennis shoes.
She was sixteen, maybe seventeen at the very most, and her heavy winter coat wouldn’t come within six inches of buttoning across her stomach. Her face was the color of skim milk, and her lips were cracked raw right down the middle where the wind had chewed them up. She didn’t say a word, just stood there shaking so hard her teeth clicked together like loose change in a tin cup.
I didn’t ask her name, and I didn’t ask where her people were because I could see the terror sitting right behind her eyes like a cornered rabbit. I just reached out, grabbed her by the sleeve of that soaked cotton jacket, and pulled her straight into the kitchen where the cast-iron cookstove was throwing off enough heat to make the kettle sing. I sat her down in the wooden rocker with the blue cushion and poured her a mug of warm milk with a pinch of nutmeg.
We put her in the spare room upstairs, the one with the pale yellow paint Dale and I had rolled on ourselves the summer before we lost our second little one. It wasn’t much of a room, just a narrow iron bed with a patchwork quilt my mother had pieced together out of feed sacks, and a small dresser where the drawers stuck if you pulled them too fast.
She stayed in that yellow room for six weeks while the snow melted into mud and the spring peepers started up in the creek bottom. She didn’t talk much about her family, just told me her name was Mary once when I brought her a plate of scrambled eggs and toast. She said her folks lived up near Harrison, strict people who weren’t about to harbor a girl with a belly and no wedding band. I didn’t press her. A house gets mighty quiet when you spend your days alone while the men are out on the grading rigs, and having a young girl around the place, even one as quiet and jumpy as Mary, gave the walls a reason to hold their breath.
By April the daffodils down by the well-sweep were yellow enough to hurt your eyes, and Mary was bigger than a house. On a Tuesday morning when Dale was already out past the river bridge with the grader, Mary started having sharp pains that came every four minutes by the kitchen clock. I hitched the old Ford pickup because Dale had the truck, and I drove twenty-five miles over the washboard roads to the county hospital in Batesville, holding my breath every time the transmission slipped. She had the baby right there in the charity ward before noon, a little scrap of a girl with a head full of black fuzz that didn’t weigh five pounds soaking wet. I stayed right by her side through the whole business, holding a cold wet rag against her forehead and telling her she’d done a fine, brave job.
The next morning I went home to feed the chickens and gather up a fresh set of flannel sleepers I’d washed the night before. When I drove back up to the hospital parking lot at nine o’clock, her bed was made up tight with clean white sheets and the metal bedside table was completely empty. The head nurse at the desk didn’t look up from her paperwork when she told me Mary had signed herself out an hour earlier against medical advice, taking the baby and the discharge papers with her. There wasn’t a scrap of paper left on the nightstand, not even a scribbled name on a napkin. I drove around the back roads for three hours looking for a girl walking along the shoulder with a bundle in her arms, but the fog had rolled in off the White River and the world was just gray as far as you could see.
For forty-nine years I kept praying for that girl and that baby every single night while I rubbed Jergens lotion into my knuckles before turning off the bedside lamp. Dale passed away back in ninety-four, and after the farm went to the county for back taxes, I moved into that little brick apartment down on Elm Street where the radiator clanks like someone hitting a pipe with a wrench. I never forgot the yellow room. Even when I painted over those walls with a sensible beige back in the eighties, I still called it the yellow room in my head. Whenever I saw a young girl walking along the highway with her shoulders hunched against the rain, my chest would tighten up like I’d swallowed a peach pit. You don’t just forget a face that looks at you like you’re the only dry piece of land left on earth.
By Friday afternoon the pain in my lower back had settled into that dull, heavy throb that means the morphine is wearing thin again. I was staring at the water stain on the ceiling, trying to remember if we planted the yellow roses before or after the big ice storm of seventy-five, when the door gave a soft little click. A nurse I hadn’t seen before walked in with a plastic tray holding three tiny paper cups of white pills and a small paper cup of tepid water. She had her silver-streaked hair pulled back in a tight knot at the nape of her neck, and she wore silver wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down the bridge of her nose. She reached for the chart hanging at the foot of my bed, her fingers moving with that quick, certain efficiency you only get after thirty years of working twelve-hour shifts on a linoleum floor.
She flipped the front page back, her eyes scanning the nurses’ notes until they hit the yellow identification band around my wrist. I watched her hand stop dead in the middle of the plastic clipboard. Her fingers didn’t shake, but her whole body went stiff as a fence post, the way a horse does right before it smells timber wolves in the brush. She raised her head slow, very slow, and looked right into my eyes. She didn’t look like a nurse doing her morning rounds anymore. She looked like a girl standing on a back porch in the middle of a freezing February rain.
“I know those eyes,” she said, her voice dropping down to a raspy whisper that sounded like dry leaves sliding across a concrete walk. “I’ve looked at them in a photograph on my mother’s dresser every single day of my life.”
I couldn’t draw enough air into my lungs to make a sound. My throat felt like it was lined with dry sand. I just lay there against the flat hospital pillow, my hands twitching once against the blue cotton blanket.
She stepped closer, dropping the clipboard right onto the foot of the bed with a dull plastic clatter that made the water cups rattle. She reached out and touched my wrist, right over the blue ink of my name on the band, her fingers warm and steady against my thin skin.
“It was you,” she whispered, and her chin started to quiver just a little bit before she clamped her teeth down hard to steady it. “The yellow room. Mama always said the woman who saved us was named… Clara.”
The room tilted once, slow and greasy, and then settled right back down where it belonged. I didn’t cry. An eighty-year-old woman in a hospice wing doesn’t have enough water left in her to waste on crying, but my chest felt like a heavy stone had finally rolled off it after nearly half a century. She stood there by the bed with her mouth half open, her eyes shining behind those wire-rimmed glasses, looking at me like I was something she’d thought was buried in a deep hole somewhere and never coming back up.
“She’s downstairs,” the nurse said, her voice catching on the edge of the word like a rusty hinge. “She’s eighty-two now, and her knees are shot, but she’s down in the lobby waiting because I told her the name on the chart before I came up the stairs. She said if it was you, I had to come get her myself.”
I didn’t have to answer her. I just squeezed her fingers back with what little strength I had left in my right hand, feeling the small, hard bones under her skin just like I’d felt Mary’s bones back when the snow was piled high against the back door. The afternoon sun through the wired glass of the hospice window caught the yellow paint on the wall near the doorway, turning it the exact shade of those old daffodils down by the creek. The door stayed open wide, and down the long, quiet hall, we could hear the slow, heavy click of an old woman’s cane coming closer step by step.
