Mother Knows: 24 Tales of Motherhood

Karen Outen

What’s Left Behind

He sweeps by me. My husband, Dizzy, rushes past me with his arms outstretched like a preacher at altar call. He sweeps by nearly on his back. His lower body is invisible beneath the water. I’ll never forget his face: raging against this sudden tide. He is stunned to leave me this way. Take my hand, he screams to me. He sweeps by. I will never know if he meant so that I could save him or follow the flow. My family is driftwood floating by: daughter, daughter, husband. I hold tight to the car. I am strapped into the backseat, held in place by the water that rises against my chest. Trying so hard to recount: how did we get here?

Moments ago, in what I see now as a past life: we are in the car. Dizzy drives us home from Keisha’s music lesson, Geena’s ballet class, a trip to the hardware store. He says: Look at Main Street. It’s all crowded. A little rain and folks act too scared to take their known roads. So we take our usual road, an old back road that is unusually deserted, even considering how small this town is—small and quiet, tucked beneath the mountains that lend a kind of awe and benevolence to our lives. We are insignificant in the world. We know it, and go about our small business easy as you please. We drive pretty slow here. By and large, Sundays are for morning church and afternoon visiting. This town, Ladyslipper, knows her limits, I believe. No fast food, no high rises. Only 2,000 people live here, half of them driving ten-, fifteen-year-old cars.

So in our old car we take our old road because the rain has stopped finally after four days, and the kids have stopped bugging me to read about Noah’s Ark. I sit on the backseat behind Dizzy, as usual. Keisha’s up front and Geena’s beside me. We bump on the soggy road. The baby inside my womb kicks a swift protest. Then we hear the hard Bang! loud and shocking as a cannon, as we lurch forward and down into a deep pothole. We bounce and jerk there a minute. My forehead slams the headrest in front of me and tunnels of pain shoot through my head. My girls scream. I feel sick. Our front tires are stuck so deep that the back tires don’t touch the ground. We’re rutted midway up the hubcaps.

Goddamn! Dizzy says, It’s a wonder we didn’t flip! His nose is bloody. He holds his chin. See? See, girls? he says. That’s why Mommy and Daddy make you wear seat belts. He reaches for Keisha, who’s beside him: You’da gone right through the windshield without that seat belt. Damn. That’s the axle gone, I’ll bet.

I throw up in my lap, into my maternity pants and thin sweater. I hardly hear them get out of the car, the girls running behind Dizzy, anxious to see a broken axle, whatever that is. My seat belt loose but still buckled, I swing my legs out of the car. Hold tight to the door and put my head near as I can between my knees. My feet swing above the ground.

Look, look, Daddy! The car’s off the ground. Wow! The girls run to the back of the car, peer under the tires; it’s so unusual to see them off the ground. I remember Dizzy was driving slow over the potholes, fifteen miles an hour. Maybe we’d all be dead now if he’d gone faster.

Dizzy says: Listen. What’s that? I listen but my head aches too much to hear anything. I shrug: I don’t hear a thing. A few minutes later, still inspecting the back of the car and pinching the bridge of his nose to stop the bleeding, he says it again: What’s that roar? Listen. I hold tight to the door to steady myself. I’m still shaken. Look up and catch his eyes, the two gray lashes on his left eyelid, that spidery brown mole in the white of his eye. This look I remember now as a caress.

I hear a roar, and the world explodes. Not a warning drop, but a solid wall of water hits us. The car tilts forward. My legs and crotch get soaked. I hold tight to the car doorjamb as the water grabs at my legs. The car door slams wide open. Dizzy is screaming to my children. Screaming with the conviction that his voice could be a life raft.

Geena goes first—six years old and tiny, even as an infant too thin for Pampers. She flows off backward, mouth open wide and speechless. Facing me. Her braids are soaked. Quickly, she’s just a head bobbing on the water. I think how hard a time I’ll have combing her hair now that it’s wet and nappy. Water around my pregnant belly. Grip the inside door handle. My brown knuckles nearly white from strain. Can’t remember: can she swim? Was it Geena I took to the Water Babies swim class or Keisha?

Keisha: Dizzy grabs her collar with one hand and the car bumper with the other. Water pulls her away, a great tug-of-war and Keisha’s eyes are squinted tight. Dizzy bites his lip and holds on, trembling…one, two, three…It goes so slowly, so fast…four, five, six…I kick my legs up and fight with the water. I rise, my legs pulled straight out and splayed open…seven, eight, nine…She glides to me, arms first. Dizzy grips a purple scrap of her shirt. He holds it fierce as she grabs for me: Hold Mommy’s leg. Keisha pulls tight, and I stretch long and rubbery. One hand down to her around my swollen belly. Our eyes lock. She is my determined child. The one who learned to throw herself out of the crib when she did not want to nap. I stare into her eyes. Reaching. The baby in my womb is in the way. I cannot bend, only pull myself lopsided. Come to Mommy, Keisha. The seat belt remains tight. Dizzy put in an extension last month to fit around my high, round belly. Keisha slides. My pantyhose rip. I slap at the water. We hold hold hold our eyes. She slides, grabs my shoe. I grip my toes. But the shoe comes off and she sets sail, whirling away. Holding my shoe, a makeshift steering wheel, she zigzags side to side. And he sweeps by me. Calling me to him. How can I not follow? I hold tight to the door frame. Slammed hard by the water. My legs are sucked beneath the surface. The water rises quickly against my chest. I am still strapped in. The car is rutted deep, the rear of it pushed ever higher by the water. While its joints sigh and moan, the car door hangs open, an unhinged mouth. The baby in my womb closes itself as a fist.

Open my eyes at the hospital. The ambulance stops and out I pour. Cameras pointed at me. I lie still, though I am jostled on the stretcher. Cameras lean over me, hot and bright. I hear them say: This is a good one. Feed it through to the networks. Get the shots of her in the water. An ambulance attendant runs beside my stretcher and tells the doctor about me, about what has happened to me—what has happened to me. what has. happened. to me. The doctor looks deep into my face, retrieving my girls, my man. He talks to me but he asks nonsense: Do you know where you are? What’s your name? Is there anyone we can call? Are you in any pain? I answer in order. Yes. Mommy. No. Yes. He looks back at the ambulance attendant: Flattened affect. Shock, he nods, and pats my arm.

In high school, before Dizzy, I dated a guy who had been flattened. Run over at a slight diagonal up the center of his body: through the crotch, over his stocky torso and his collarbone, and just missing his head. The school-bus tire left ugly tracks, three serrated rows like a zipper. But he lived, after five months of traction. He came back to school slightly taller, crooked, and very thin. I think of Mose Job like I saw him then: on the blacktop in front of our school, lying there inanimate and sticky with blood. And stunned—why is that? Why aren’t we ever prepared? That sometimes it’s us.

AMERICA TODAY

FATHER, 2 CHILDREN DROWN IN SWOLLEN RIVER

Ladyslipper—As a pregnant 31-year-old woman watched in horror, her husband and their two young daughters were swept away as the Mehosehannock River spilled over its banks. The family’s car had apparently stalled in the path of the oncoming flood. The woman, identified as Maggie Barnes, was rescued by helicopter an estimated 10 minutes after the accident. Flooding caused widespread property damage over a 15-mile area. The Barneses are the only known fatalities.

Day. Night. Day. Night. I think I am awake continually, but the time flashes so quick between light and dark that I suppose I sleep. It is light and a cluster of nurses stands at my door, huddled close to one another. In the dark, someone holds my hand. Light. A nurse says: Sheriff’s here. Can he come in? How ’bout your pastor? Dizzy’s aunt? No, no, no. I hear her say later that in my sleep I tremble and gulp like I’m choking. Two old women stand at the head of my bed on either side of me, day and night. They are sentinels in pale blue aprons and white uniforms and old-fashioned nurse’s caps, stiff and pointed. They coo to me and stroke my brow. Their skin is the color of mahogany wood and finely textured with lines and spidery veins. I stare at them, picking a new wrinkle or crease to follow each day.

When I dream, I see these women wearing angels’ wings. They have come to steal me away to my family. But mostly I dream of Mose on the blacktop. I see rescuers peel him off like PlayDoh. On TV, they show pictures of my empty house, the newspeople camped out around it. One night I hear the big nurse who cries over me say that they’ll release me the next day. So when it is dark and my sentinels doze, I rise and dress quietly. I slip past the nurse at her station, glued to the local TV news and the endless interviews with my children’s teachers, my husband’s boss. I’m the one you see on TV. Look-look-look—oh my God, that poor woman.

THE STATE CAPITOL TIMES

FLOODING HITS HOME IN LADYSLIPPER

Ladyslipper—Each year scores of Americans are killed in flash floods. But it’s never happened here, until now. Since the tragic drowning of Keisha Barnes, 8, her sister Geena, 6, and their father, Dizzy, the town of Ladyslipper has grieved openly for the first children it has lost in eight years. Tucked west of a range of mountains known simply as Bobb’s, this sheltered hamlet is working class and close knit with a nearly equal number of black and white residents. Their grief for the Barnes family, who was black, crosses racial and gender lines—Tragedy ain’t just doled out according to skin color, Delilah Pyles admonishes a reporter.

It’s a shock, says Norma McInierney. Feel just like somebody hit me. Everybody knows them. My husband was Dizzy’s high-school coach. The thing is, a warm night like this, those little girls would be playing jump rope in my yard right now. She shakes her head, I can just see ’em.

Those are my goddaughters and my best friend, says Sheriff Jonah Kind in a halting voice. I don’t know what to do. I keep going by the house to see if it’s not some mistake. Some awful mistake.

Mose answers his door. His face holds a terrified calm. The nurses looked at me frightened, too, as if I were contagious.

Good damn, he says, then shakes his head: Oh, Maggie, Maggie. He holds back awhile, then pulls me to him. We rock back and forth, a pitiful box step. Mose never could dance. You’re all over the TV, he says when we part.

I nod: I know. Can’t go home. Saw them waiting there.

Inside his house, I dangle on a rope inside his TV. Snatched from the water. I remember the rope around my chest. The rubber-padded man, life vest, helmet. I rose heavy. I look away as my TV self parts the water. I collapse on Mose’s couch and sigh.

He sits next to me.

There’s nowhere else to go, I say.

I know it, he answers.

This is awkward, or rather it should seem more awkward. I have not really talked to Mose for years and years. But I don’t feel it, really. I don’t feel much at all.

On TV, a fat woman in her twenties with a Life’s a Beach T-shirt takes up the screen: I got two babies of my own. I’m from right here in Ladyslipper. You’da had to shoot me if this was to happen to me. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take it, she wails. She scoops up her toddler, hugs his cheek to her mouth, startling the baby until he cries.

Mose takes my hand. And oddly, I am comforted by his scaly skin, by his dusty smell and the smell of his house, which seems to have been closed tight for years. Old newspapers stand along the walls in dozens of neat, tied stacks. Cardboard boxes with lids are topped with glass or plywood for tables.

Haven’t had company, he says, and I know he means forever. And I think about him coming back to school, finally, after his accident. With a cane in his hand and his father at his side—his father who was the oldest man in town, nearly eighty-three when Mose was seventeen, and called Mose by his whole name from birth: Mose Job! Mose Job! Come to supper. Mose Job! Pull my car around front. Mose limped into school. Half of us were silent and scared. The rest of us giggled nervously. His skin seemed taut, and he really was taller. All his pants were highwaters. He walked down that long hallway, and we stood in rows by the lockers, all of us: black and white, underclassmen and seniors, staring like a hearse passed us. Staring at Mose Job and his ancient father. They looked alike for the first time. His father had been set apart by his crooked body—even his fingers bent, with the tips jutting forward. But that day Mose Job and his father both leaned forward on canes like sick, tired trees; they matched. A cold dead air fanned behind them as they passed. Until somebody said: Gumby’s back! And we laughed so that the air we expelled pumped into Mose’s lungs, heated up that deadly pall around him. Until he laughed, too, then waved his long fingers. We brought him back to us—laugh-two-three, laugh—c’mon back, Mose Job.

Mose is sitting beside me when I wake up. I look long and hard at his face. His lips are full and smooth, his thick eyelids darker than his skin so that they seem shaded. It’s an expressive face, full of tenderness and sorrow. I study him. I am sorry I never loved him fully. I feel great sadness at that, something desperate and shameful.

He makes me mush and corned-beef hash and biscuits. Only ever cooked for my pops, he says. He ain’t have no teeth left.

I eat it. Because what do I care about taste? And, truth be told, it’s not bad. But then I notice it for sure. That it’s wet in my seat. Not sopping, but wet. While Mose clears the table, I reach inside my panties. A steady trickle of clear liquid seeps out of me. Fishy liquid. It’s not my baby’s water breaking—no. Something else.

Mose, I say, I need to go in town. To the drugstore.

We walk down the gravel path leading to Peggy’s Neck Road. This path, now muddy and calf-high full of water, is the only place I’ve glimpsed him since I married and had babies. Sometimes driving by I’ll see a skinny man darting through the trees, a hand rising through the branches to wave. I know he’s lived here alone since his papa died, and he works at the factory in Slippery, next town over. I remember suddenly, startlingly, being here with him one night fourteen years ago back when we were best friends, and more. Here in his field, I took off my panties, rolled my white knee socks down to my ankles, and pushed my blue plaid skirt above my hips. On a blanket, I sat spread-eagle around him, impatient for him. We were eager to become lovers, but doomed: we took useless turns kneading his crushed penis, and we both fought tears. How angry I was with him.

We cut into town mostly through farmland and people’s backyards since the main road, Route 78, is flooded. We walk slow and with purpose. But we can’t take shortcuts on the side streets because of the police barricades. And the noise, the noise: the car horns, the hideous rush of water—

Stop walking; I grab Mose’s arm. I hear Dizzy say: Listen? What’s that roar?

We stand on Side Street in front of Jo-Ellena Fabrics, a two-story whitewashed store that used to be the Pentecostal church. A woman touches me. Clutches my arm. Praying loud. Another one gasps and runs by me to her husband, who stands at his car. She falls into his arms, crying like a baby. I do not recognize Ladyslipper. There’s a new attraction: a natural disaster. Main Street, which ought to spread itself out wide two blocks ahead, seems gone. I can’t see the Woolworth’s, the Baylor’s Drug, the Miss June’s Ice Cream tucked neatly beside it, or the three-story, fully stocked Kiddie Town on the corner.

We can’t cross to Main. Ahead of us, a river rushes down Gulph Street, which is a perfect riverbed. It’s a wide street that dips deep in the middle. Police guard it, pushing people back from the brink of the water—all of our police are here, regulars and auxiliary. Even kids from the high-school police club are here, dressed in dark blue shirts and ties and tan pants, and police caps that sometimes swim on their heads. They look solemn and say softly: Please keep back, ma’am. Townspeople stand against the yellow wooden police barricades and dip their hands in the water. Or throw in flowers. I see small placards and big, gaudy funeral flower arrangements: a broken circle, a teddy bear with huge, tiger-lily eyes. All have this message: God bless you, Keisha and Geena. Nobody mentions Dizzy. Women weep over the water. They wear cotton flowered housedresses or dark knit stretch pants. They share the same face, black or white, old or young, the same look of Ladyslipper: loose, fleshy, like well-worked bread dough. They dimple and crease, slide in and out of sorrow. The women lean on the barricades and sob. They throw not only roses and baby’s breath into the water, but kiddie bookbags, hair barrettes and bows, Legos, Barbie dolls, baby dolls. And us. Us.

There are pictures everywhere: Keisha and Geena on lapel pins. On black-and-white posters in store windows. On flyers that say, Pray for our girls, Ladyslipper. Or, Remember Keisha and Geena. Drive with care. They have been in my house, in my things. I cry out, and they see me. They reach for me, pulling at the hem of my tunic. Grabbing at my arms. Mose holds me. Thin Mose. They seem to reach through him. We look at each other in sorrow. Helpless. I pray for those girls, someone yells. God bless you. Be strong! My sleeve rips as once more I am engulfed. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Suffer the little children to come unto me.

A woman I don’t recognize steps forward swiftly and slaps me hard twice: You bitch! You could’ve saved them!

I sink back into Mose. She is snatched by people on either side of her. They pull and jostle her, swear at her. Mose and I push out of the crowd. My nose bleeds where she hit me. The police scramble, unprepared. Ladyslipper has had one mugging and three robberies in five years. Never an angry crowd.

Water leaks between my legs in stingy drops. It smells like this makeshift river: angry, briny. The clouds hang low and soiled gray, rising just off Bobb’s Mountain to the east. I won’t get to see Main Street, Miss Hannah’s Studebaker parked below her sign: Hannah’s Good Eats. Instead, helicopters circle Gulph Street’s river, newscopters that trouble the water with their whirly-burly. My children flow by. First, Geena, her braids a thick raft. Then Keisha, steering by my shoe. And Dizzy, sweet Dizzy, calling my name. I am sane now for one reason: I did not see them go under. Only sweep away wild and sudden, his arms open to me, their tiny girlish heads bobbing above water.

THE TIMES OF LADYSLIPPER

LOCAL LANDMARK DESTROYED

Miss Hannah’s 1957 Studebaker was destroyed last night in a collision between two news vans. Vans were racing to Gulph Street where Maggie Barnes was spotted, sparking an uprising among the crowd. Miss Hannah’s mint-condition Studebaker has been parked outside the diner since her husband, the late Jenkins Jones, drove it here from the factory in Detroit. As in most of northern Ladyslipper, the diner and car had been spared from flooding.

It was my daddy’s dream to own a car, not just a hauling truck. He was so proud when he come home with it, said Lloyd Jenkins Jones this morning.

Miss Hannah was too distraught for comment.

Mose was some kind of celebrity as Gumby. The newspapers wrote story after story on his progress. No other kid in the state had survived being run over by a bus. In the hallways at school or in town, it was: Hey, Gumby Man, what’s happening? I tutored him in English so I was one of the few who knew how changed he was. Something about a damaged optic nerve. He could barely see out of his left eye. And I knew he lost his balance a lot. Sometimes he just fell over for no reason. But when he was Gumby, he had this status he hadn’t had before the accident. He had been just this shy, average-looking guy who always wore dusty brown penny loafers and corduroys. But not quite a nerd, because he could set a whole class to laugh with his deadpan humor and blank face. He could joke a teacher out of giving the class detention. Nobody even teased him much about his ancient daddy, even though they could have: Mose Job could never much fight. But as I say, as Gumby, everybody wanted to take a picture with Mose, or invite him to their parties. Or court him. Shy Mose—there he is, at the Superfly party in his flannel shirt with the white T-shirt peeking through. He’s standing against the wall, smiling shyly at our polyester double knits and wide lapels. He’d stumble out at some respectably late hour and everybody’d joke that he was so quiet in the corner: Must’ve been getting high, Cool Mose. So I’d go behind him, lead him by the arm. He’d told me that the strobe lights in these dark cinder-block basements made him night-blind. After a while, he’d just linger near a door ’til I came for him. I’d walk him through the tall alfalfa grass near his home and let him kiss me in the dark. Cold sloppy kisses, nearly swallowing my bottom lip. I was never excited so much as patient and glad. Glad he had somebody to kiss in the dark. I remember his wet, sorry kisses and the breeze in the grass, the way the lower mountains cut a jagged line across the sky. I had some feeling for Mose. Not love. Not pity. Some feeling.

THE HERALD TIMES MAGAZINE

A FLOOD RUNS THROUGH IT

Ladyslipper—This is normally an ordinary town of winding back roads and farmland. Today, however, a visitor finds those roads transformed into canals, into a stark set from a futuristic sciencefiction movie where dogs paddle by languidly, followed by small chairs and particle-board tables, stuffed bunny rabbits, an occasional dead bird. And where old women gather at the graveyard.

Miss Janice Hoover, 70, the former principal of the Colored Normal School, helps her 89-year-old mother navigate the flood waters. They have visited the grave of Miss Janice’s father every day for 23 years. This day will not be an exception. The Hoovers occasionally identify the belongings they pass—Miss Norrisson’s side chair, Mr. Waples’s cane stand—as they wade in thigh-high water that is cold and nearly still.

At the end of New Deal Street, they reach a plot where the brown water is filled with muddy, half-submerged headstones. Two police deputies sit on the hood of a stalled car, and old women—black and white—are camped out on either side of them. Some sit in the high cabs of pickup trucks with oversize tires. Others sit atop the hoods of stranded cars and recline against the windshields. Some knit, some read from their Bibles, others just keep company. As the Hoover women approach, the deputies help them climb aboard.

So many of our porches done flooded or collapsed, says Sudie Nickels, 81. We don’t have no place to gather. Plus, it’s sort of keeping watch on our children, those babies and their father what was lost. It’s our way to sit a vigil at the wake, and since we got no bodies, we’ve got to do it this way. I was their great grandmother’s best friend, you know, God rest her soul.

I lay on Mose’s couch. It’s nighttime and the dusty windows absorb the darkness…. Next, I am leaning over the creek behind the house, my face inches from the water, my nose touching it. Mose lifts my shoulders, wipes my face, guides me back to his house. It is so dark. I am confused and I long for moonlight. Mose, Mose, I call. Yep, he answers soft.

Again, I must recount: how did I get here? I was on the couch, still soggy and soft between my legs. I concentrated on Mose’s house, which smells like Ben-Gay and old newspapers. I thought: I can’t sleep here. But I suppose I did.

Back in his house, Mose sits me in a hardback chair and peels the nightshirt from me. He washes my feet and legs, slow, gentle rubbing. My hands smell surprisingly of fish. We both look at them with anger.

Mose went from being Gumby to Mose Job the Fish on a class trip to SeaLand. There we stood in a dimly lit room full of fish swimming behind glass walls. Who saw it first? The blue fish with striped gills, its back arched like a football. And flat as your hand. So odd surrounded by fat fish who swam faster. Who said it? Look. Look, y’all, it’s Mose Job. Flat and blue lying there on the blacktop: CPR, electric shock—how do we get this boy to breathe again? Look, y’all, Mose the Fish. He looked at it, such a sad startled look. He shuddered. We nudged him: Say something. But Mose and this fish were locked in, somehow. Say something clever, Mose Job. He touched the glass and pulled his hand away quick and walked away. Walked out of our lives.

I sob suddenly into my hands. My fishy hands. He takes them, too, soaks them in lemon juice and a little ammonia, then dresses me in a fresh nightshirt. I look down at its old threads, weak and soft.

Papa’s, he says.

He makes up the couch again, straightens my sheets, fluffs my pillows, which ooze their stuffing white and silky; they are lost clouds come to make my bed. He stands holding the blanket to put over me. I think of his sweet, messy kisses and shake my head. He mimics me, confused. I point to his bedroom. He drops the blanket and sinks down on the couch.

Not a good plan, he says weakly.

Maybe ten minutes, maybe half an hour, we sit. Nothing happens or moves, except the smell of this house seeps into me. Already there’s a layer of dust or sediment that seems to coat my lungs. Sometimes I cough to see what rises from my alluvial soil. Finally he gets up. I feel him before I see him. Leaning over me. He takes my hand and leads me to his bed. Feels like a pile of three or four old mattresses. We sink in and cover ourselves with moth-eaten wool blankets, their satin edges frayed.

He takes my hand and strokes it, wonderful, like these are his first fingers, the first flesh he has known. I kiss him. He lifts my hand and places it on his side: See, he says. Used to be my spleen. Gone.

He moves my hand down to his groin. Moves my fingers under his penis, which is moist, prickly, and cool. Our fingers grope his empty sac.

They’re retracted. Pushed inside I don’t know where. Maybe where my kidney used to be. Ain’t nothing like it was.

My fingers swim in his empty space. I move them over the wide vein of his penis, up to his soft patch of hair. Baby’s hair, curly, thick, and strong. I brush my cheek against his shoulder. The skin is scarred where it was grafted. Also, dry and ashy. I sigh and the moist air I exhale softens his skin, makes it tender and almost for a moment like he’s fifteen years old again. But he is right. Nothing’s as it was. I hold the base of his penis, this delicate, wilted flower.

Later, Mose takes my hand and pulls me from the bed. He helps me put on shoes and an old flannel work shirt over the nightgown. There is still no moonlight as we walk. We step high in the tall grass. Mud oozes into my shoes and chills me. Mose holds my hand so tight. We walk a mile, grass whisking against us—shushh, shushh. The slender grass feels like tiny hands across my thighs, my baby, my arms; it brushes against me and I feel comforted. The blades of grass are small and yielding as babies’ hands, old women’s hands, patting me, soothing me—shush, shushhh, shushh—my baby folds itself in prayer—shush, shushhh—we find solace, as if all of Ladyslipper hides in this grass, comes to guide me—shush, shushh—it is my people, my Ladyslipper I find here. The tall grass moans and bends to my aid.

Beyond us, the river looms closer as we walk. Closer, louder. I pull back once, but Mose comes for me, his arms around my shoulders; he pushes me on. Eerie now, my comfort gone. The river swallows and gulps. I think of the nurse who said I gulped in my sleep. A stench overtakes Ladyslipper, so strong and sour that my eyes burn. We cross the parking lot for the new Baptist church, the majority of which has peeled away and slid down into the river. The remainder of the church sits sliced clean open, its pews and altar bowing down toward the water. Mose stops walking. I turn to him.

It’s a comfort, he says: That it couldn’t happen again. You’ll see.

He folds his body down, sinks onto the cracked pavement, and stretches full out, arms to the sides, legs apart, head turned hard to the left. So hard that his face presses into the pavement; hard enough to smell the school-bus tires: rubber, sulfur, and traces of manure from the country roads. He closes his eyes.

I walk toward the stagnant water. Glance back at Mose, who watches me now. Straight on to the flow. I feel a deep terror. I stop. I step gingerly to a large rock. A skinny but sturdy tree grows behind it and drapes down over the water. Fearful, then defiant and unflinching, I struggle for balance on the rock—I see myself plunge backward into this open wound of a river, I sink then rise in a long purple robe, belted in gold threads; yes, that was me, twelve years old and baptized here, flung in a sinner and retrieved in salvation. My mother and father were still alive then, and they wept on the shores as I rose, whole and new.

I waddle on this solid rock, squat my knees for balance, and latch on to the tree. Nervous, I sweat and feel chilled. Excited, I am light-headed and mocking disaster. Hold tight and stretch out, wrap my bare arms around this splintery tree trunk. Water floods my shoes, pulls at my legs, swipes at me furious. I feel a sinking fear but I see: I am safe. I cannot be had this time—this time! What washes over me is a strange relief. A sudden shame. It is done, and still…I survive.

Mose has been answering the phone a lot this morning. Outside there’s a ruckus. He says: They found us.

I sit down at the kitchen table, which is piled high with cakes, pies, a glazed ham, a homemade loaf of wheat bread, some kind of noodle casserole. Found ’em on the steps, he says: Folks are kind.

The phone rings. Mose talks briefly and then comes to the table. We sit facing each other. Sipping strong coffee in our nightshirts. Perfectly quiet. Perfectly removed. There’s a sort of comfort and woe I cannot describe. Shut up in this house. Listening to the crunch of tires on gravel. Heavy-handed knocking on the doors. We’re sealed tight behind dingy gray windows. So little light in here. I wipe my hand across the kitchen table. Looks to have a thick coat of gray dust, but nothing wipes off on my hand. Should we let people in? I look around. The couch still holds my bedding, the armchair’s leg is broken and it leans heavy to the right. What passes for an ottoman is really just a stack of tied magazines with a scarf thrown over it. I won’t let anyone in. They wouldn’t understand this home…home. Mine has Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid, Princess Jasmine, a harem of Barbie dolls, hair barrettes and ribbons hidden all over the house like Easter eggs.

He answers the phone. Pitifully thin Mose standing sideways and bent, patting his foot, nervous. He turns to me: You should take this one. It’s not the talk-show people. It’s Jonah Kind.

He holds the phone up to my ear. I clutch the coffee cup in one hand, rub my neck with the other.

Maggie? Maggie? Jesus—I didn’t know where you were. Are you all right? Oh, Maggie…Listen, I’m sorry to have to ask this, but I’m gonna have to ask you to come in to the station. We need some kind of formal record of the accident. It’s just my job. Maggie, I apologize, Jonah mumbles into the phone.

I move my head away from the receiver. Mose says to Jonah: Fine, but all these news folk are here. How we gonna get out?

I’ll come for you then, Jonah tells him, and it booms out of the phone.

I wonder what he does now at night, I say.

Who?

Jonah. He used to come by every night. Walk in and go straight to the refrigerator like he was home. Or go tuck in the girls when Dizzy worked late. Listen to my stories about my day. Mose?

Yeah?

What d’you suppose he does at night now?

Mose blinks fast, then turns away.

I get dressed to go to the police station. Dressed in the same thin sweater and soiled maternity pants I wore That Day. But my clothes are clean. Mose has washed them by hand, scrubbing them with even strokes on an old washboard. I watched him, though he didn’t see me—watched how gingerly he touched the polyester silk of my bra and the cotton of my sweater, how he clutched them to his face a long time. I wear Mose Job’s daddy’s boxer shorts for underpants and I still drip-drip my water. I am never quite dry. I come into the kitchen. Mose slices ham, shoves thick slabs between wheat bread, heaps collard greens and kale onto paper plates. One by one he passes them out the living-room window. Thanks, they say. Much obliged. The window’s open just enough to fit hands and paper platters through it. It brings a slender ribbon of light to cut across the room, a sudden brightness that I can’t bear. I rest flat against the wall, which is easy because despite my high, full belly, I