When I looked up at her face, I could have sworn that she was a different woman. Her face, which had seemed so stern and disapproving before, with its furrowed brow and pursed lips, was now so gentle and accepting that I started to cry again.

  When she spoke, her voice was so soft and sweet that it almost scared me. Where was that gruff, curt tone that I had come to expect from her? It was nowhere in these words.

  “Young woman, when I say you can’t throw somebody out your heart, I mean it. Back when I was a young girl, just about your LaShawndra’s age, the same thing happen to me that happened to you and your mama.”

  I swung my head up as I heard a gasp. Then I realized it was me.

  “Yeah, Nurse Bloom ain’t always been this upright, dried-up, over-the-hill old woman you see before you.”

  I had to look away for a second, because those were just some of the words I had been using in my mind to describe her. She gave a dry, sad little ironic chuckle and continued.

  “I was living in the country with my grandmother before the First World War, still just a skinny little flat-chested girl without one curve on my entire body, when I ‘broke a leg,’ as the old folks used to say. Grandmama’s the one who raised me, because my mama had gone up north to Detroit to get a job at one of the factories there. What some folks called ‘good jobs.’ She went up there and never did come back for me.

  “My grandmama, she was the community’s midwife, so I had been watching babies developing in their mama’s stomachs and babies being born all my life. So when I came up late in my cycle, I knew right away I was pregnant. And I also had been around enough women who was late, and heard the crazy stuff they had done and the homemade potions they had drunk to get rid of the baby to know what would work and what would kill you.

  “They would come running to my grandmama for her to fix them up after they had messed their insides up with some concoction they drank. Grandmama was so kindhearted she hardly ever fussed at them for what they had tried to do.

  “I didn’t have no husband or no prospects, just this boy named Amos who I’d been messing around with since I was about sixteen. But I had plans. I wanted to go off and study to be a real nurse. I was a bright student, and Grandmama was so proud of me. Always bragging to her women and the white folks about how smart I was. She had been saving up her little egg and chicken and ironing money all my life for my nurse’s training. I didn’t want to make my grandmama shamed.”

  I was afraid to breathe and disturb the scene. I almost reached over and took Nurse Bloom’s wrinkled old hands in mine. But I could feel her back stiffen as I moved toward her. So I just dried my tears, sat back, and let her talk.

  “I screwed up my courage, waited for my Grandmama to be called off in the middle of the night to a woman having a bad time birthing, and took care of it myself. Hardest thing I ever did, drinking that nasty-tasting greenish concoction I had made. It made me sick, too.

  “Grandmama was gone for three days and nights. And I was sick as a dog that whole time. Thought I was gon’ die. But I didn’t. And when Grandmama returned, I was well enough to pretend to be okay, doing my regular chores—feeding the hens, hanging out clothes to dry, cooking our meals—and sitting up reading the Bible to Grandmama before bed and asking about her women patients.

  “When I couldn’t stand the thought of what I had done, I’d say I was gon’ walk into town to the general store for some goods and go way out somewhere and lay in a ditch and cry.”

  I could hardly believe that Nurse Bloom was telling me all this, just the two of us sitting on my green suede ottoman in my living room, me hugging my knees to my chest. I didn’t know what to say or do. But even in that vulnerable state, Nurse Bloom was in charge. I didn’t have to say anything. She just kept on talking.

  “After about four or five days I still had a big old lump in my throat all the time, but I wasn’t going out to cry in a ditch no more. And Grandmama hadn’t said nothing, so I figured she hadn’t noticed. But the next night when I knelt at the foot of her old pine rocker to rub her tired feet, she looked down at me and asked, ‘Where you get titties from?’ And I just broke down crying.

  “I wasn’t with child no more, but my body had changed. And of course Grandmama saw it.

  “I cried all that night in my grandmama’s arms. She kept saying, ‘You didn’t have to do that, Joanna. You didn’t have to go and do that.’ Grandmama was crushed.

  “It was that night back before 1920 that I decided to be a midwife. I devoted myself to that profession. I didn’t get my nursing certificate until much later.

  “I brought countless babies into this world, in and out of a hospital—you was one of them. But I never forgot the one I didn’t have. And I never did become a mother.”

  She stopped speaking for a while, and I just sort of looked down at my hands, now folded in my lap.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look up into Nurse Bloom’s eyes.

  “That’s why I loved helping Dr. Williams to deliver babies at St. Luke’s,” she continued. “Every baby I brought into this world reminded me of the one that I didn’t. And I know I did some good on this earth. I know it. But I could never throw that unborn child, my unborn child, out my heart.”

  13.

  Sitting on that soft suede ottoman in the middle of my nearly empty living room, I was as confused as I had been when LaShawn just up and deserted me when I was stuck out to there, as my grandmother, Mother’s mother, had said over and over whenever I would waddle into a room. “Bless her heart. Look at her. She stuck out to there.”

  I tried to imagine Nurse Bloom young. I tried to picture her lying down naked in some Georgia country field with “Amos.” I tried to imagine her afraid and at her wits’ end, then full of relief and remorse. But all I could see was this stern old woman sitting next to me in a pristine nurse’s uniform.

  Sitting there in my invaded apartment, I felt the weight of Nurse Bloom’s story and of the previous nineteen years like a ton of bricks on my heart.

  I guess Nurse Bloom was right. I could not throw LaShawndra out of my heart. It was LaShawndra who was in a mess. But from where I sat, I felt I was in the middle of the mess right along with her. And the thought of taking on any of the responsibility for the both of us being there scared me worse than the memory of being in that delivery room without LaShawn and with all that blood and pain.

  “Oh, Nurse Bloom, I don’t think I can even begin to think about how I might have had something to do with the way LaShawndra is.

  “I just don’t know which way to turn,” I told Nurse Bloom. And I was being truthful, because I had no idea just what I was going to do with that child.

  “And now it seems as if you’re making me see too much all at once.”

  “Maybe you should look at it one little bit at a time,” she suggested.

  I tried. I really did try. But as I sat there with my eyes closed, LaShawndra’s whole life and my whole life came flooding back on me in too many scenes I wanted to erase forever:

  Me at nineteen throwing myself down Mother’s front staircase trying to make myself bleed the mistake out of my body.

  LaShawndra at four months lying in her crib screaming her lungs out, and me standing there beside her frozen, the scent of Johnson’s baby powder wafting around us, unable to take her in my arms, not wanting to take her in my arms.

  LaShawndra at age eight getting up early one morning to try to fix me breakfast and burning up my only good Calphalon omelet pan. I could still hear the pain in her voice as she slammed into the bathroom muttering, “I was just tryna please you!”

  Me at a fair at Mother’s school pretending I didn’t know who LaShawndra was when one of the other mothers pointed at her and said, “My God, look at that little one over there dressed just like a prostitute! Why would her mother let her come out of the house looking like that?”

  “Oh, it’s too late for this!” I cried in frustration, shaking my head until I almost became dizzy. “LaShawndra doesn’t have a prayer,” I told her.

  Nurse Bloom gave me one of those looks of hers and said, “How you know? You ain’t never prayed for her.”

  And I had to drop my head, because as many times as I had knelt down with Pastor, him clasping my tiny hand in his big one and raising them both to heaven, talking with God, I had never once thought to pray a true, fervent prayer for LaShawndra that did not include the words “Please, Lord, don’t let that girl embarrass me today.”

  Nurse Bloom gave me a long, very thoughtful look—I don’t think she had any other kind—and made a suggestion.

  “Have you thought about calling your reverend friend?”

  “Pastor? Call Pastor? Lord have mercy, Nurse Bloom, you have got to be kidding! I couldn’t tell him about all of this! That my child is a thief and a liar and a little hoochie-mama whore. Hell, I been trying to keep all of my past from him as much as I can. I sure don’t want him to know how much my daughter has messed up. What would I look like going to him telling him all my business?

  “He preaches all the time on ‘generational curses,’ how the sins of the father are visited on the child and continue on from generation to generation.

  “Mother says, ‘Children don’t take after strangers.’ And I sure don’t want Pastor thinking LaShawndra may have taken after me!”

  “But if he is a man of God, pastoring a flock, don’t you think he has heard it all?” she asked. “And if he is as good as you claim he is, what makes you think he’s gon’ condemn you?

  “You got to have more faith in folks you love, and you got to have more hope for your child than faith,” she said.

  “What you gon’ do? Just let her go down the drain like so much dirty bathwater?”

  And I so wished she hadn’t used that analogy, because then I could just see LaShawndra swirling down a filthy drain full of hair and scum and dead roaches, struggling for life and fighting for breath.

  It was a terrible image, an image I felt I had seen and tried to forget before. I dropped my face in my hands and just wept some more.

  I heard Nurse Bloom suck her teeth sharply and say, “Buck up, girl!”

  And that just made me cry all the harder. I put up a good front, but I can’t stand people to be mean to me. Then she softened.

  “You know,” Nurse Bloom offered, “in this life you gotta fight to live. You got to fight for every moment of life in this world. You got to fight for every breath you take. And I know what I’m talking ’bout.”

  When Nurse Bloom said that, I got a picture in my head of the first time I had seen LaShawndra. It was in the delivery room at the Mulberry Medical Center. She was lying in the doctor’s gloved hands, covered in blood and mucus, struggling, struggling with all her little might to breathe. I was pretty drugged up, but it looked to me that there was something over her face hampering her breath. I had truly wanted to reach out and help. I think I even raised my right arm from the side of the delivery table. But then I recalled the last time I had seen LaShawn and felt the sharp hurt again of seeing him duck into the doorway of a religious bookstore—like he was going to be out at the Mulberry Mall buying a Bible—when he had caught sight of me coming toward him. I felt that hurt in my gut right where LaShawndra had been, and I quickly withdrew my hand.

  “But every once in a while you truly need somebody in your corner to fight for you, too,” Nurse Bloom continued.

  “Some of us can do it all alone, and some of us can’t. That’s why we got each other.”

  I was going to remind her that I was a single mother and had done it all alone, but, as Mother says, “When you taking something out the lion’s mouth, you don’t yank your hand out. You eeeeeease it out.” And that morning I certainly had gotten a lot from this particular lion named Nurse Bloom.

  Then she tossed off one of those dismissive waves of hers and didn’t give me a chance. Anyway, by then I had realized two things: I hadn’t done it all alone. And I hadn’t done that good a job with what I had done.

  “Come on,” she said, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece, “it’s going on twelve. Get up, wipe your face, and take me back to town.”

  When I stood, I was so drained that my knees buckled under me. I had to steady myself by holding on to the walls of the hall as I wobbled to the bathroom. As I splashed cold water on my face, I noticed a thick damp peach velour towel the “burglar” had used and thrown in the direction of the clothes hamper and missed. It was just lying on the floor. Since I could still see her dirty shoe marks in the tub where she had broken in the window, I assumed she had only taken a whore’s bath in the sink. And somehow that was as sad as her breaking into my apartment. But I was too exhausted to rail about that and still deal with Nurse Bloom.

  I thought, Lord, now where is this old woman going to make me drive her? I just did not have the strength. Even though she had told me she was on a schedule, I could just see her ordering me around Mulberry until dark, looking for someplace called “Greenwood Bottom.” But when we got in the car, she straightened the white nurse’s cap on her head and said, “Take me back to the site of old St. Luke’s Hospital. Somebody’ll be by there for me at noon.”

  I started up the Mercedes and steeled myself for a lecture all the way back to Pleasant Hill. But she didn’t say a word. She leaned her head back on the padded headrest and closed her eyes.

  She didn’t look nearly so old with her face in repose, her slack skin falling back smoothly toward her gray hairline. I thought, Uh, this old woman was there at St. Luke’s when I was born. I tried to do the math to calculate her approximate age. Now, if she was nineteen before World War I, I thought as I pulled onto Orange Highway, how old would that make her now? I did the math, but then just dismissed my figures. Oh, that must be wrong, I thought. She can’t be that old! She must have gotten her dates mixed up.

  I could hear her snoring softly. I guess she wasn’t as tough as she thought, because it seemed that the morning had worn her out. I know it had worn me out. Between Mother’s early-morning call and the trip to the medical center and the break-in at my house and the burglary at Crystal’s and Nurse Bloom’s confession, I felt as if I could just crawl into a hole for a couple of weeks and pull the top in after me.

  But in spite of my best attempts to distance myself from all that had happened that morning, Nurse Bloom had gotten me to thinking. I hate that. Je déteste ça!

  It took me a couple of minutes to get up the nerve to disturb her. “Nurse Bloom?” I said softly.

  She didn’t stir. I said it again, a little louder this time.

  “Nurse Bloom!”

  “I ain’t ’sleep,” she said with her eyes still closed. “I ain’t slept in the middle of the day since I was a baby. I was just resting my eyes for the trip back to my home.”

  It dawned on me I had not asked her what part of town she was living in or even if she was residing in Mulberry at the moment. But I decided not to go there. I had other things on my mind.

  When she lifted her head from the headrest, I almost giggled, because her nurse’s cap was pushed forward at a comical, jaunty tilt, like a sailor’s on a weekend leave.

  She straightened the cap and looked over at me as I continued to drive back down Orange Highway.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  I realized that my mouth was as dry as a powdered doughnut, so dry you would have thought I was taking my Realtor’s exam for the first time. I swallowed hard, hoping she wouldn’t hear the parched sound I made.

  “I’ve been thinking…” I began.

  “Oh?” she said. I mean, that old woman could not pass up an opportunity to be sarcastic with me. Mon Dieu!

  However, once I had gotten my nerve up, I was not going to turn back. After all, I am Lily Paine Pines’s daughter.

  I forged on.

  “I was thinking, Nurse Bloom, that when we finally find LaShawndra and she comes back and we get all this mess straightened out, maybe I ought to sit down and have a talk with her about myself a little bit, and about her, too.”

  All she did was lift one old eyebrow at me.

  “Not that I haven’t tried to talk to her before—Lord knows I’ve tried a million times to—”

  She cut me off, “All right now, don’t take one step forward and then turn around and run three backward.

  “After all, you are Lily Paine Pines’s daughter.”

  I didn’t know if she was making fun of me or not. Considering our six-hour track record together, I figured she probably was. But I felt in my heart that I was onto something.

  She didn’t say anything for a while as I continued across the Ocawatchee River and toward the top of Pleasant Hill. I figured there wasn’t anything else to say. I needed some quiet time myself, just to think. I believe that for the first time in her life, I truly longed to see LaShawndra’s little face and wished she wasn’t off somewhere, like at Freaknik.

  “See, young woman,” Nurse Bloom said after a few minutes of silence, almost with pride, “there is some hope for you yet.” And that was it.

  When we pulled up to the empty lot where St. Luke’s Hospital had stood, there wasn’t a car in sight. And I began to feel a little uncomfortable about her plans.

  “Are you sure you’ll be okay here by yourself until your ride comes?” I asked as I tried to help her from the car. She wouldn’t let me take her arm.

  “Course I’ll be all right,” she said snappishly, getting out of the car by herself. “It’s almost noon now, isn’t it?”

  She stood on the sidewalk by the empty building site, squinted her black eyes at the hot noonday sun, and shaded them with her hand like an old farming woman, as if the digital watch had never been invented. I could just imagine her back at her grandmother’s place in the country, chopping weeds in a little kitchen garden by the back door, looking up at the blazing sun to tell the time of day. I was beginning to sweat a bit myself in my St. John knit.

  “I don’t need you to be hanging around me like I’m a old invalid. I used to take care of invalids. Besides, I want a little private time here at the hospital site, if you don’t mind.”

 

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