Carter Clay Read Free Page A

automobile because, in her fright, Marybelle had wet the seat of the gondola, and both her own skirt and her mother’s were soggy across the back. That was M.B.’s secret; and besides, it always turned out that her audience was scarcely interested in M.B.’s role in the story. What people really wanted to know was: Did the operator die? Recover?
    When she first began telling the story, M.B. answered truthfully: she did not know. She did not even remember the man’s being retrieved from the brush. She remembered only her sense that she and her family had been saved from death, and that she had been embarrassed by her wet skirt. In time, however, she came to see how her audiences’ needs shaped their response to her tale, and when people asked, “What about the operator?” she learned to answer, almost as if surprised, “Why, he was killed instantly , of course.”
    M.B. is now sixty-three. She cannot recall when she stopped caring about the Ferris wheel story, but she is very much aware that for the past two years she has offered it up only as a means of not telling anyone how, on what was to have been her and Lorne’s first morning in their Palm Gate Village condominium, she had reached across to Lorne from her side of the bed and found the cold and rigid object that sent her running up and down the second-floor balcony, calling, “Anybody! Help, please! Anybody!”

    â€œAnd just think: you wouldn’t have needed to be at all afraid if you’d truly been walking with the Lord back then!”
    So said the smiling little organist from Vineyard Christian—no more than four days ago—when M.B. told her the Ferris wheel story. And why did M.B. tell it, then? Was there a lull in the social hall conversation?

    No matter.
    Today, M.B. is empty of any story at all. Oh is the only word M.B. knows today, and here, in the silent hospital room assigned her granddaughter—what will M.B. do if the girl wakes and asks for her parents?—M.B. does not allow herself even to form the word with her lips, let alone make its sound: oh.
    Across the hall, in that bright box of a room that houses M.B.’s daughter, Kitty, it is all tap and rattle, the whir and the suck and gurgle and murmur and the babble and the click of those well-meaning brutes (metal boxes, drip lines, lengths of black hose, plastic tube, wires) that monitor and drain and sustain what remains of Kitty since she was thrown some fifty feet and her skull slammed into the asphalt of Post Road.
    Here, the relative quiet presses its hand across M.B.’s mouth. Here, each breath that comes from the gray, bandaged girl in her slab of bed—each and every breath must be heard, registered, attended to by M.B. so that the next may come. This is all that M.B. knows. Here, where the only windows are walls of glass that open onto the glare of the nurses’ station, it is eternally twilight, and M.B. does not even understand that morning has come again until she sees the aide motion to her from the other side of the window.
    A tiny woman with fuchsia lipstick and almost matching hair, the aide holds up a rumpled doughnut and a cardboard carton of orange juice. “Breakfast?” the aide mouths, then smiles in sympathy as she taps her wristwatch to indicate that M.B.’s fifteen-minute visit is almost up.
    Morning again? Yesterday morning—M.B. does remember that indigestible clump of time because yesterday morning certain people led her out of this building and into the bright day and then into a smaller building where she was asked to look at the body of her son-in-law. Yes. Yes is what M.B. had to say. Then she walked back to the first building to listen to doctors and meet with the mortician, talk casket, plot, flowers. She could not do that now: talk. Even last night, when silver-haired Pastor Bitner of Vineyard Christian came by to speak of accepting God’s will, and of her son-in-law’s