The radiator in the corner of room 214 has this steady, rhythmic clank that sounds just like the iron pump we had out on the back well back in the seventies. I lie here staring at the acoustic tile ceiling counting the pinholes because if I look at the wall clock the minutes crawl like beetles. My legs don’t remember how to hold me up anymore. Dr. Henderson came in on Tuesday morning with his little metal clipboard and told me what the blood work meant in that soft, careful voice doctors use when they are trying to let you down easy.
He said weeks, maybe a month if I keep fighting the pudding they bring for lunch. I told him I haven’t fought a thing since my husband Arthur passed away six winters ago, and I certainly wasn’t going to start over gelatin. He smiled that tight little professional smile and transferred me down the hall to the hospice wing where the air smells faintly of lavender floor wax and old paperbacks.
It was quieter here. That was the first thing I noticed. Out in the regular medical ward you hear the call buttons chirping every three minutes like mechanical crickets, but here the nurses wear soft-soled shoes and talk in low murmurs that blend right into the hum of the air conditioner. I spent Tuesday afternoon watching the gray shadows of the oak branches outside the window stretch across the blanket until they looked like skeletal fingers. I was thinking about the old house on Miller Creek Road.
I was thinking about the wallpaper in the spare bedroom upstairs. It wasn’t fancy paper. It was cheap pulp from the hardware store down in town, printed with little faded buttercups that matched the gingham curtains I sewed on my mother’s old Singer.
My mind keeps drifting back to that one particular week in January 1976 when the snow piled up four feet deep against the back porch and turned the world into a howling white blank. Arthur was out in the shed trying to keep the tractor block from cracking in the frost, and I was standing at the kitchen sink scraping lard into a skillet when I heard it. A dull, heavy thud against the wooden screen door. Not a knock, exactly. More like someone leaning their weight against the wood and sliding down.
I wiped my hands on my apron and threw my heavy wool shawl over my shoulders because the draft from the back entry could freeze the breath right out of your lungs.
When I pushed the door open, the wind caught it and shoved it back against the siding with a bang.
There was a girl sitting right there on the braided rug inside the mudroom. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her hair was matted with wet snow and frozen stiff around her face like wet felt, and she was wearing a thin brown coat that was soaked clear through to the lining. Her belly was swollen tight under the cheap cotton dress, pushing out against the fabric like she was carryinga bowling ball. She didn’t look up when the door opened. She just sat there shivering so hard her teeth clicked together like dry kindling in a stove.
“Well,” I had said, because my mother always taught me that people in trouble don’t need a speech, they need a chair. “You’re going to freeze solid if you stay out here on that rug. Get on up now.”
Her name was Loretta, or at least that was what she whispered when I finally got her sitting by the kitchen wood stove with a mug of hot broth between her freezing palms. She wouldn’t tell me where she came from or who put that ringless silver band on her finger, and I didn’t press her. In a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business, and sometimes a girl needs a place where nobody asks a single question. I gave her the spare room upstairs with the yellow walls. She stayed there all through the deep freeze of February and the muddy thaw of March, helping me shell peas on the back porch and reading old paperbacks from Arthur’s boyhood. When April came around, the labor pains hit hard and fast in the middle of the night, and Arthur hitched up the truck to get us down to the county hospital before the spring rains washed out the creek bridge.
She had a little girl with a shock of dark hair and a cry like a healthy kitten. But three days later, when I walked into her hospital room with a thermos of fresh coffee and a bag of cinnamon rolls, the bed was made up tight with hospital corners. The crib was empty. There was no note propped on the metal tray, no goodbye whispered in the hallway. Just an empty room and a nurse telling me the young mother had signed herself out an hour before dawn. For forty-nine years I carried that ache in my ribs, wondering if she walked right out into a snow squall or if some man came looking for her with a bad temper and a closed fist. Every Sunday at St. Jude’s, I dropped two names into the quiet box by the back pew. Loretta and her baby.
Thursday morning started out like any other gray hospice day until the door clicked open at 8:15. A nurse stepped in with her rolling cart, checking the plastic drip bag hanging from the metal stand. She had neat gray hair pinned up at her temples and kind, tired eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. She didn’t look up right away as she reached out to check the plastic name band strapped around my frail, bruised wrist. Then her fingers brushed the letters of my name. Ruth Henderson.
Her hand stopped dead against my skin. The metal clip on her stethoscope hit the chart board with a sharp clink.
She stared down at my arm, then up at my face, her breath catching in her throat so hard I could see her collarbone jump beneath her blue scrubs.
“It was you,” she whispered, her voice shaking like a leaf in an autumn gust. “The yellow room. Mama always said the woman who saved us was named Ruth.”
The monitors beside the bed seemed to fade into a distant hum. My heart gave a hard, painful lurch against my ribs, and for a second I thought I was dreaming it all up from too many sleeping pills.
“Loretta’s girl?” I managed to get out, my voice cracking into a dry rasp.
The nurse didn’t answer with words. She reached up with trembling fingers, slipped her hand inside the neckline of her scrubs, and pulled out a small, worn sterling silver cross on a braided black cord. She laid it right in my palm. The bottom corner was bent flat, exactly where I had dropped it on the concrete floor of my pantry back in seventy-four before sliding it into the pocket of Loretta’s damp coat.
“I’m Ruthie,” she whispered, tears spilling over her lashes and cutting clean tracks through the powder on her cheeks. “Mama kept this cross on her nightstand every single day of her life. She told me the story every night before I went to sleep. She said an angel in a house with yellow buttercup walls gave us a roof when the whole world wanted us dead.”
She sat right down on the edge of the narrow hospice mattress, pulling me into her arms as gently as if I were made of old glass. She told me how they had walked out that April morning because Loretta saw her abusive uncle’s pickup truck parked outside the county courthouse down the street, and she ran to keep him from finding us and bringing violence to my front door. She told me how Loretta worked three jobs as a seamstress, raised her right, and spent her dying breath ten years ago blessing the name of the woman who didn’t ask questions.
By Friday afternoon, the hospital administration had signed the papers moving Ruthie over to my care rotation. She pulled a worn leather diary from her bag and read me entries in Loretta’s shaky, beautiful cursive, pages filled with gratitude for the grease fire we put out together, the loaf of soda bread we baked, and the quiet safety of those yellow walls. As the late afternoon sun slanted through the hospice window, it caught the pale paint on the wall and turned it into the exact, radiant shade of those old buttercups. My wrinkled hand rested peacefully against the white bedsheet, wrapped securely inside the warm, steady hands of the child I sheltered nearly half a century ago.
