were currently standing on the other side of it.
With the infants were two crèche nurses. They had heard the shouting, then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene’s advice than Lois had been.
Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn’t hurt the babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital staff that he could find.
Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant—and fretted about those they were forced to leave behind. Frightened by a second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.
The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly man slept on unaware.
A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with insectile energy.
Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together until Charlene heard sirens in the distance. This welcome wail drew her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.
Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby, crossing the rain-washed blacktop. He looked, she said, like a figure in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you might see on the night that the world ended and cracks opened in the foundations of the earth to let loose the angry legions of the damned.
Charlene is a transplanted Mississippian and a Baptist whose soul is filled with the poetry of the South.
Beezo had parked at such a distance that through the screen of rain and under the yellow pall of the sodium-vapor lamps, the make, model, and true color of his car could not be discerned. Charlene watched him drive away, hoping the police would intercept him before he reached the nearby county road, but his taillights dwindled into the drizzling darkness.
With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad’s thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rumpelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.
Later my father would confirm that the minute of my birth, my length, and my weight precisely fulfilled the predictions made by my grandfather on his deathbed. His first proof, however, that the events in the intensive care unit were not just extraordinary but supernatural came when, as my mother held me, he folded back the receiving blanket, exposing my feet, and found that my toes were fused as Josef had predicted.
“Syndactyly,” Dad said.
“It can be fixed,” Charlene assured him. Then her eyes widened with surprise. “How do you know such a doctorish word?”
My father only repeated, “Syndactyly,” as he gently, lovingly, and with amazement fingered my fused toes.
Syndactyly is not merely the name of the affliction with which I was born but also the theme of my life for thirty years now. Things often prove to be fused in unanticipated ways. Moments separated by many years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying. People unknown to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.
Surgeons repaired my feet so long ago that I have no slightest memory of the procedures. I walk, I run when I must, I dance but not well.
With all due respect for the memory of Dr. Ferris MacDonald, I never became a football hero and never wished to be one. My family has never had an interest in sports.
We are fans, instead, of puffs, éclairs, tarts, tortes, cakes, trifles, and fans as well of the infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies and the Reuben sandwiches and all the fabulous dishes of table-cracking weight that my mother produces. We will trade the thrills and glory of all the games and tournaments mankind has ever invented for a dinner together and for the conversation and the laughter that runs like a fast tide from the unfolding of our napkins to the final sip of coffee.
Over the years, I have grown from twenty inches to six feet. My weight has increased from eight pounds ten ounces to one hundred eighty-eight pounds, which should prove my contention that I am at most husky, not as large as I appear to be to most people.
The fifth of my grandfather’s ten predictions—that everyone would call me Jimmy—has also proved true.
Even on first meeting me, people seem to think that James is too formal to fit and that Jim is too earnest or otherwise inappropriate. Even if I introduce myself as James, and with emphasis, they at once begin addressing me as Jimmy, with complete comfort and familiarity, as though they have known me since my face was postpartum pink and my toes were fused.
As I make these tape recordings with the hope that I may survive to transcribe and edit them, I have lived through four of the five terrible days about which Grandpa Josef warned my father. They were terrible both in the same and in different ways, each day filled with the unexpected and with terror, some marked by tragedy, but they were days filled with much else, as well. Much else.
And now … one more to go.
My dad, my mom, and I spent twenty years pretending that the accuracy of Josef’s first five predictions did not necessarily mean that the next five would be fulfilled. My childhood and teenage years passed uneventfully, presenting no evidence whatsoever that my life was a yo-yo on the string of fate.
Nevertheless, as the first of those five days relentlessly approached—Thursday, September 15, 1994—we worried.
Mom’s coffee consumption went from ten cups a day to twenty.
She has a curious relationship with caffeine. Instead of fraying her nerves, the brew soothes them.
If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a windowpane. If she doesn’t pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake, so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.
Dad believes that Maddy’s topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate Nō-Dōz caffeine tablets as if they were candy.
Maybe so, Mom sometimes answers my father, but what are you complaining about? When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.
As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father’s worry expressed itself in fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and crème brûlée that had a sandy texture. He could not concentrate on his recipes or his ovens.
I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well. In the last two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs. And I do admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena’s foot while trying to hang a picture for her. But it was her foot, not her head, and the one instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight of steps and didn’t break anything.
