be able to move for a little while. I’m still having a hard time believing that you’re in the hospital fighting for your life. I was given a picture blown up from my birthday of your family and me, every time I look at your beautiful face I can’t believe something awful could happen to our darling Molly. You are such a blessing to know and I can’t wait to see you alive and well. I love you. God, please heal Molly and help her family to be comforted.14
Daddy says that his father never, never talked about the war. There is a bronze medal in a box with his uniform, a compass, a knife. Poppy mentioned once that he had been attacked with the knife in face to face combat, and now he is holding the knife that was held to his face.
They swathe me in ice like a dead fish, which reduces the swelling in my brain, and keeps it within reasonable limits. I am always cold.
He ran out of his shelter into the snow of German fields once in his socks, almost dragging his best friend—wait, I’m putting on my boots—before he could put the boots on, the camp was blown apart, Henry watching.
And I live.
Aug. 31, 2002
Dear Molly,
I am so excited that I was able to see you today! I was able to sneak in under the nurse’s nose and see you. You look so peaceful. I could only see your nose up and your hands. You have so many tubes coming out of you, to help you breathe, suck out your stomach acid so you don’t vomit from hunger and just a whole bunch of tubes that I don’t know what they do. The doctors shaved a square on your head to put a brain pressure antenna thing on your head to read your brain’s pressure. The nurse put your hair in pigtails, you look cute. When we prayed your dad said I could hold your hand, it was so soft and cold, your hands are always so pretty and soft. Your brain pressure is at 10–18 but it jumped up to 20 and dropped to 2 (when they were sucking the phlegm out of your lungs so you wouldn’t get pneumonia). Normal is -2 to 2. Your parents stroke you and play soft music to make the pressure go down. The doctor gave you an EEG test to see if your brain works or not, and it came out positive! Get well my dearest Molly.
God hears us, trust Him.15
Mere was a WAC, one of the info girls in the army who wore those adorable olive shifts and sifted through important information and decoded messages. At a ball in D.C., she danced with distinguished generals and charmed a European prince.
These days I am waking up on a kitchen counter, and I close my eyes so they won’t know that I am awake because I don’t want to talk. The room closes around me like a curtain, like I am a child squinting out from under the covers, trying not to be seen by the babysitter. People move through the shadowed whiteness of the plastic-smoothened room. Here I am, peering out from under the blankets at them, and they don’t even know it. Bright white people dressed in white dress-suits, the kind from Dillard’s that old ladies wear with gold jewelry, stop whispering in the background and move closer, so close that I know they’ll pinch my shoulder like an old man, and then so close again that I realize I’ve closed my eyes — so I open them again and up goes the room.
After the war, Mere went back to Tulane to get her masters in biochemistry. When she ducked out of the program to get married, her professor railed at her — you’ll have eight children and you’ll deserve it for leaving! Guess I will! Said Barbara. And she left to marry Henry, and had eight children. My father is the youngest.
August 2, 2002
Dear Molly,
Today, your brain pressure is sticking around 10, which is good! You have an ever so slight fever, but not a bad one. I heard you opened your eyes and looked around today, but they couldn’t tell if you could see or not. You are able to move and crossed your feet and such. They hope to take you off the sedative slowly and have you wake up! Love ya.16
I remember floating at the level of Daddy’s head at the wake, seeing my grandfather in a box. It was the first time I had ever seen Daddy cry; I could not bear it. People think there is no way that I could remember Poppy; he died when I was one and a half. But he called me Molly Ellen. I remember him catching me with his feet, tickling me from his Laz-Y-Boy by the door, teasing us cousins on the front porch, and how he looked in his box at the funeral.
Some people remember every moment of being in a coma, not being able to speak, the trap, the muzzle of silence. One gentleman lived for 23 years trapped within himself, clinically dead, until a physician worked with him and he communicated that he was alive beneath it all, trapped, trapped. He cannot get out. He cannot get out — 23 years. Now he is writing a book by signaling.
What is it like? Not horrific. It is a string of real-to-life, realer-than-life, dreams, bringing me back to places that I haven’t been to in years. I am ten years old and find a dumpster with a bear in it in Grand Lake, Colorado. I am four years old and cross a bridge over the monkey house of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.
Passing through hallways and tunnels of darkness and light, falling down a hole of life like Alice in Wonderland.
Mere’s funeral was in the spring in the Abbey, which always reminds me of Easter. At the wake, my sister younger fought my third cousin because she said her shoes were prettier. My cousins and I played cards behind the curtains until we were too noisy and attracted an aunt, and I cried at the graveside.
At Aunt Dolly’s funeral — that woman was a saint — her daughters asked us to kiss her cheek. A band broke out into When All the Saints Come Marching In when the pallbearers carried her up the aisle, and we all sang along and ate cake with blue frosting.
I almost died too. But — I lived. I was 4, but now I am 15, again, oddly enough, and starting over, against the odds. Despite the odds. The hospital calls me the miracle girl. I am a miracle.
All the time — every five, ten waking minutes, they tell me the story again and again. I shall not die but live: and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not given me over to death. I was crushed by a flying boat and here I am. Life is a paradox that doesn’t fit in my hatbox, and death is only the beginning of it.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
