The Knitting Circle Page 23

  Her mind drifted to Beth’s children standing solemnly at the funeral two weeks earlier. She had noticed how the youngest girl’s braids were uneven, the surest sign to Mary that Beth was really gone. Standing there clutching a well-worn stuffed tiger, Beth’s Stella had looked terrified rather than sad. But Mary knew that soon Stella would be playing on the swings in the backyard, making friends in school, having tea parties and sleepovers and, eventually, boyfriends and college roommates. Life was like that. Time kept moving and swept you right along with it.

  Mary hit the print button on her computer and watched as her latest restaurant review came out. Then she picked it up and carried it down to Eddie’s office, where Jessica teetered on too-high heels in front of his desk, complaining about the mayor.

  “Are you taking any time off? At all?” Mary asked her.

  “I don’t believe in it,” Jessica said.

  Up close, Mary could see the blue veins running along her belly. She looked away.

  “Have you read The Good Earth?” Jessica was asking.

  “I guess so,” Mary said.

  “Then you know that in China, women work in the fields, go inside and have their babies, and get right back to work.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Mary muttered. She placed the review on Eddie’s desk. “Sayonara,” she said.

  “Don’t go,” Eddie said.

  Mary realized Jessica made him uncomfortable too, and she grinned. “Actually,” she said, “that’s the name of the restaurant. It’s awful.”

  “Do you ever like a restaurant?” Jessica said.

  “She has good taste,” Eddie said.

  Surprised, Mary looked at him. He needed a shave. And a haircut. He was wearing a polyester striped shirt with a run down the front.

  “Why, thank you,” Mary said. “Now if you two lovebirds will excuse me, I’m going home.”

  “Hey, Mary,” Eddie said. “I think it’s time we revisited that steakhouse you like so much.”

  “Really?” Mary said. “You want to come?”

  “Yes,” Eddie said.

  “Not tonight,” Jessica said. “We have our Lamaze class.”

  “How about those people in The Good Earth?” he asked her.

  “They didn’t have to take classes, did they?”

  “I’m leaving before you change your mind,” Mary said.

  “Don’t leave me,” Eddie said.

  WHEN MARY WALKED in the house, the phone was ringing. If it was Dylan on the other end, asking to come back, what would she say? This was a game she sometimes played these days, ever since he’d called and told her that he was not with Denise. “Why? Did she have a bad day or something so you had to dump her too?” she’d said.

  “Do you have to be so mean?” Dylan had asked her. “Maybe it didn’t work out because she’s not you,” he added.

  Mary chewed her lower lip.

  “Mary?”

  “You had me,” she said finally. “Remember?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He hadn’t said he wanted to come back. He hadn’t even called again. But if this was him and that’s what he wanted, she would say no. She would say we have lost too much now.

  “This is Saul Byrd calling from San Miguel, Mexico,” a man said when she answered the phone. “Your mother’s in the hospital. She’s had a pretty bad heart attack. You should come right away.”

  The trembling began somewhere deep inside Mary, then quickly spread throughout her body so that it was difficult to hold the telephone or to speak. She had felt this before, that night in the hospital when the doctor had looked at her and said that Stella was not going to make it. Now, like then, a buzz sounded in her head, constant and persistent, as if her brain was short-circuiting.

  Saul was giving her flight information and Mary wrote it down on the palm of her hand. Ridiculously, she reminded herself that she needed a pad to keep by the phone. Then she started to cry.

  REMARKABLY, MARY MADE the flight. Remarkably, she slept the entire way. Perhaps her whole body had short-circuited. Like a sleepwalker, she changed planes in Houston and then went right back to sleep.

  Mary took her own small overnight bag from under the seat, then she followed the crowd off the plane, through Customs, and into the fluorescent lights outside the airport.

  The sky was ink black, but the glare of the lights made everyone look ghoulish. When a small blond woman touched Mary’s arm, Mary actually yelped.

  “I’m Kay,” the woman said. “Your mother’s friend.”

  Was everyone her mother’s friend? Growing up, Mary had never known her mother to have even one friend. She didn’t go out to lunch or play bridge or even sit around a neighbor’s kitchen table sipping coffee and eating doughnuts like all the other mothers. Suddenly, she had friends.

  Kay patted Mary sympathetically. “She’ll be okay,” she said unconvincingly.

  THEY DROVE OUT of the airport into the darkness. A large factory spewed foul-smelling smoke.

  “Hold your breath! Toxic fumes!” Kay said.

  Obediently, Mary did.

  Along the road, teenage girls hitchhiked in short skirts.

  “They work at the factory,” Kay explained.

  Then, miles and miles of nothing. Mary looked out the window anyway. She thought of her mother. Not of the mother she was about to see—she didn’t want to imagine that. No, she thought of her beautiful mother.

  Like Grace Kelly, everyone used to say. Your mother looks just like Grace Kelly. To Mary, she looked like a princess, which was the same thing. Shiny blond hair, smooth white skin, blue eyes the color of a summer sky. In her mother’s bottom dresser drawer lay carefully folded sweaters, arranged by color. Hidden beneath them was her wedding album: ivory, heavy, monogrammed. If Mary turned a small silver key, a music box inside played the song “Always.” Mary was afraid to turn the key, afraid her mother would hear the tinny song playing and get angry at her.

  Still, there were times when Mary could not resist and she turned the key and mouthed the words to the song. When the music box wound down, Mary replaced the key, her heart beating hard against her chest until it was safely put away.

  Inside the album were pictures of her mother looking like a princess, in a wedding gown with a long train and other beautiful women carrying that train. The photographs had vivid unnatural color, so that the women’s cheeks were too red, and their velvet gowns too green. But they still all looked lovely to Mary. And her mother looked the loveliest. Exotic flowers formed a wreath on her hair. No matter how hard she studied those flowers and searched her Little Golden Book of Flowers, she could never identify what they were. Just rare, exotic, beautiful things, like her mother herself.

  Mary used to wonder what had become of those women. They never visited or sent Christmas cards. Instead, they seemed to exist only in the heavy ivory album. Mary’s mother did not like for her to ask questions. But sometimes, if her mother seemed calm or nice, Mary would ask. She would start with something small and harmless.

  “How did you meet Daddy?” she’d say.

  Often, her mother would shoo her away. “I don’t have time for that nonsense,” she’d say. Her mother was certainly always busy. She dusted and washed and ironed and mopped, constantly.

  But sometimes she’d get a far-off look in her eyes and sigh and say, “We met at a dance. At the country club. I was the guest of my friend Violet Addison and he was visiting her brother. They were roommates at Amherst College.” Then her mother would sigh again and get back to work.

  “Did you get married in winter?” Mary might ask, remembering the velvet dresses, the possibility of snow out the church windows.

  “December ninth,” her mother would say, if Mary was lucky.

  “Was Violet Addison there?” Mary once asked, pushing her luck.

  Surprisingly, her mother had gotten teary. “Yes, she was. And Brenda Devine and Barbara MacNally. All of my friends from school were there.”

  Then when Mary stared a
t those pictures, she tried to figure out who was who. Who had a brother who went to Amherst and roomed with Mary’s father? Who had the Veronica Lake wave in her hair? Who was the sultry dark-haired one? Of course, that was when her mother still talked and cried. Over time, she retreated. She drank more and more and went into rages or passed out on the sofa.

  “We’re here,” Kay said, touching Mary’s arm gently.

  Dawn was cracking the dark sky, showing streaks of pink and lilac. But stars still glowed beside a crescent moon.

  “You want me to go in with you?” Kay asked. She had a nose that looked like it had been changed, made smaller perhaps, and now it didn’t seem to be on the right face.

  Mary shook her head. “Thank you,” she said. “But I want to go in alone.”

  “Room 208,” Kay said. “That’s where she is.”

  Kay leaned across the front seat and hugged Mary. She smelled of roses.

  Mary thanked her again, and got out of the car. She stood in front of the hospital, counting two floors up, guessing which window was her mother’s and wondering what she would find when she went inside.

  Kay rolled down the passenger window and called to Mary. “You want me to take you in?”

  “No,” Mary told her again. “Thanks.”

  Then she turned away from the car and from Kay, and began to make her way toward her mother.

  ALL HOSPITALS SMELLED the same, Mary thought as she navigated the dim corridor that led to Room 208. A hospital in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, smelled exactly like the children’s hospital in Providence. The smells made her shudder, sending goose bumps up her arms.

  This hospital was run by nuns in white habits with pointed white hats that made them look like angels from behind. Whenever Mary passed one, the sister bowed her head and avoided eye contact as if it were rude to look directly into the eyes of a patient’s family member.

  At the nurses’ station, a nun dozed. She sat in a chair behind the desk, her head thrown back, her mouth open, snoring lightly. A second nun tapped away on a computer. As Mary rounded the desk she saw that the nun was playing a computer game in which a slow-moving hook attempted to pick up what appeared to be nuggets of gold.

  “Shit,” the nun muttered.

  Room 208 was right across from the nurses’ station. The door was half open, and Mary walked in, afraid of what lay on the other side.

  The familiar sound of machines—the steady measurements of heart rate and blood pressure, the hiss of oxygen—made her weak-kneed, and she sat immediately in the cracked vinyl chair beside the bed. The bottom cushion let out a low hiss.

  Her mother was gray-faced and still, but other than the two slender plastic tubes delivering oxygen in her nose and an IV hookup with a fat bag of clear liquid slowly dripping into her arm, she seemed surprisingly all right. Flashes of the ICU, the bright lights, the multitude of machines and tubes and staff, made Mary shiver again and she rubbed her bare arms to warm herself and to erase the images.

  Soft footsteps approached. Mary turned, expecting one of the nuns. But instead, a round-faced woman with long salt-and-pepper hair stood in the doorway.

  “Mary?” the woman whispered in a stage whisper.

  Mary stood nervously, as if she had done something wrong.

  “God,” the woman said, “I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.” She had the voice of someone who had been smoking forever. “You look just like your father,” she added after studying Mary up close.

  Another friend of her mother’s, Mary thought, and shook her head. Miss Popularity all of a sudden. “So I’ve been told,” Mary mumbled.

  The woman took Mary’s hand in hers and shook it firmly, sending the collection of bracelets that lined her arms into a noisy jangle.

  Mary glanced at her mother, but there was no response.

  “Coma,” the woman said matter-of-factly.

  Mary heard her own sharp intake of breath and the woman gave a throaty laugh. “Sounds worse than it is. They expect her to come out of it. It’s like a restorative coma.”

  Again, Mary glanced at her mother, watching the even up-and-down of her chest.

  “Let’s get some coffee,” the woman said.

  Mary followed her past the dozing nun, down the corridor and two flights of steps, and outside. The woman had on a purple gypsy skirt and a white embroidered blouse. Leather sandals. All those bracelets. She jangled up a short steep hill and into a café that was just opening.

  “Buenos días, Violet,” a young woman sweeping the floor said.

  “You’re Violet Addison!” Mary said. “I can’t believe it! When I was a child, I used to fantasize about you. My mother had this wedding album and there was a picture of her with her friends, her bridesmaids.” Mary shook her head. “Not that she showed it to me or anything.”

  Violet spoke sharply. “Your mother never recovered. I don’t know if I could have.”

  Mary frowned at her. “Recovered? From the drinking, you mean?”

  Violet didn’t answer right away. “Of course,” she said finally. “The drinking.”

  Even when Mary pushed her to explain, Violet just said, “No, no, of course. I’m sorry.”

  On their way back to the hospital, Violet told her that she had moved here in 1959. “Right after you were born,” she said. “My second husband was an artist, and we moved here in 1959 and never left. Well, I never left. He up and died on me. Drowned in the hot springs. Seems like a lifetime ago, but at the time, it was pretty awful. Everyone told me to come back home. Except your mother. She said, ‘Violet, if I could pick up and leave and move to Mexico, I’d be right behind you, girl.’ So when she could, after you were gone and your father died, she came. Just like old times, having Mamie down here with me.”

  “I wondered why she wanted to move so far away,” Mary said.

  Morning had arrived while they had breakfast. The small streets were crowded with children on their way to school and small carts selling fried dough and tamales and flowers.

  “You go on in,” Violet said to Mary. “The rest of us will come later.” She squeezed Mary’s hand. “She’s been wanting you to come. I guess I know why now.”

  “Do you mean she knew she was sick?” Mary said.

  Violet laughed. “Oh no. This heart attack surprised the hell out of your mother.”

  Even the nurses’ station outside her mother’s room was noisy and active. When Mary went to open her mother’s door, a hairy hand stopped her. A doctor began speaking to her in Spanish.

  “I don’t understand!” Mary said.

  “Ah! You are Señora Mary Baxter’s next of kin?” the doctor said, grinning. His teeth were yellow and stained with nicotine.

  It had been so long since she had heard anyone call her mother Mary that she paused before saying, “Yes, I’m Mamie Baxter’s daughter.”

  The doctor looked down at the clipboard he held and made a note. “Mamie,” he said under his breath. When he looked back up, he grinned again.

  “Your mother, Mamie Baxter, she’s going to live,” he said.

  “Yesterday, I’m not so sure. Last night, I think probably. Now I know yes.”

  Mary grabbed both his hands. “Thank you,” she said. She imagined a different mother waking up. One who would come home. One who would take her in her arms and comfort her. She imagined the mother she’d always hoped for.

  “You go inside,” he said, nudging her forward. “We’ll talk later.”

  Mary stepped into the room, expecting to see her mother awake, sitting up in bed. But she looked exactly as she had a few hours ago. The machines, the IV, the gray skin.

  Once again, Mary sat in the vinyl chair. The chair hissed. Mary sat, and waited.

  “SO THIS IS what a person has to do to get you here,” her mother said. “Have a heart attack.” Her voice was raspy, but not weak.

  Mary had fallen asleep after two nuns brought in lunch. “How about some water?” her mother said.

  “I’ll get some out of
the bathroom,” she said when she couldn’t find any.

  “Not from the tap, Mary,” her mother said. “You’re in goddamn Mexico.”

  “You sure sound like yourself,” Mary muttered.

  Her mother squinted out at her. “Isn’t that a bottle of water right there?”

  Mary poured some into a paper cup and held it to her mother’s lips to drink.

  “So,” her mother said when she was done, “they accepted the ticket?”

  Mary nodded.

  She sat back down and the chair hissed. Even though it happened each time, Mary giggled, out of relief perhaps.

  “Don’t be so silly,” her mother said.

  “Violet was here,” Mary told her.

  When she didn’t answer, Mary continued. “I remembered her name from a long time ago. Remember how I always used to ask you about your wedding? And you told me that you met Dad through Violet Addison’s brother?”

  Mary stared down at her mother. She had gone back to sleep.

  “HELLO, BEAUTIFUL!”

  Mary knew immediately it was Saul Byrd standing in the doorway shouting. He held a big bouquet of flowers and did a fancy dance step toward her mother.

  “Saul!” her mother said, suddenly awake.

  Mary had read three People magazines from 2001, the only English-language magazines she could find, while her mother slept. Bored, she’d even done the crossword puzzles in the back.

  “You look so good,” Saul said. Then he noticed Mary. Immediately, he gave her a hug. He smelled like pipe tobacco and hair tonic.

  “You’re not at all what I expected,” he said. “I thought you’d be blonde. Like your mother!”

  “She looks like my late husband,” Mamie explained. “He had that same mouth.”

  “Thanks for arranging everything,” Mary told Saul.

  “What do you need?” he asked her mother. “Those tamales you like? The ones María Domingo makes?”