Heads of the Colored People(50)
“Beautiful job. We’ll see you at the house for the repast,” a tall man, one of the uncles or cousins who helped with the burial, said from the moving line.
Alma smiled. She had worked the crowd; that was her gift, ironing out their sleepless stirring from the night before, if only temporarily. She performed “See You When I Get There” along with standard funeral fare. The boy’s parents specifically requested that she avoid “I Believe I Can Fly.” Funeral singing required the same skills she used to soothe friends in waiting rooms or console husbands at the bedsides of their wives. The crowd had “mmhmmd” and “amened” and sung along with “Since I Laid My Burdens Down” and waved their respective right hands in agreement with “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It had been a dignified funeral, without loud wailing or weeping, but something about the lack of the usual tensions—the absence of wailing or obvious signs of physical trauma—made Alma feel sick, the cold bloating her stomach like a fibroid, tying knots around her knots like so many adhesions.
The medications had caused her to gain twenty pounds in two months, on top of the baby weight she hadn’t lost from Ralph, and her original face floated in her new face. The gonadotropin and antidepressants her OB-GYN and colleague Dr. Brown prescribed weren’t working to ease her pains, but she took them anyway to feel like she was doing something. She woke up drenched in cold sweats, kept fresh sheets and a clean gown in the nightstand next to her bed for 3:00 a.m. changes, could time the palpitations in her chest and the pains around her hip bones. They had induced early menopause at thirty-five to stop the growths, and these symptoms she had anticipated. What she didn’t expect was the intensity of the night terrors, keeping her up after the sweats dried, creeping into her waking hours. And what was she to do about the baby, draped over Bette’s shoulder, who was also sick and tired of being sick and tired and whose snot had caked and crusted around both of his nostrils so that all he could do was wheeze from his mouth, the baby who was appearing more frequently in her terrors?
“Let’s get out of here,” she told Bette.
? ? ?
At the diner on Ashland, Alma and Bette settled into a booth and sat Ralph perpendicular to the table in a high chair. He whimpered, and Alma gave him the box of sugar and sugar alternatives to play with.
“You get his nose checked yet?” Bette said, stirring creamer into her coffee. She was a year older than Alma with no children of her own and often babysat Ralph when their shifts in the critical care ward didn’t overlap.
“Same old thing,” Alma said, staring into her tea.
Bette was saying something about how cute Ralph was and how his little dress shirt and burgundy tie made him look like an old man and how she could just eat him up.
You could have him, Alma thought. Then she said it out loud. “You could have him.”
“And I would take him, too,” Bette cooed at Ralph. “Yes I would, yes I would.” She reached for one of the yellow sweetener packets, which Ralph had spread out on the high-chair tray. He grunted at her, snatching it back. “Be nice, Ralphie.” Her voice sounded like the pink packets. “Be nice to Auntie Bette.”
Alma made her own voice go high and light to affect the air of a hypothetical question. “But what would you do if I just left him, like at your doorstep?” She laughed a little.
Bette stopped smiling as she worked a packet out of Ralph’s fingers, quickly emptied it into her coffee, and returned it to him. “I would take him, but I’d be concerned. What is it, Alma, the funeral, the funerals?”
“But how would you keep him safe?” Alma said.
“We live in a good neighborhood,” Bette said, the other half of “we” referring to her husband, Justin. “Heck, you live in a good neighborhood.”
“But how would you protect him?” Alma said.
“To the best of my ability,” Bette started, but she finished with, “Maybe we should get back so you can get some rest. It’s been a long week. I can take Ralph for the evening if you need a break.”
Alma shook her head.
When they parted, Bette gave Ralph an extra hug and a “Be nice to Mama, sweetie,” and said she would check in on Alma later.
? ? ?
In the terror from two nights before, Alma’s brother Terry appeared with the boy from room 26, playing a guitar duet and singing a mishmash of Terry’s favorite old songs. Patches of dried blood checked the boy’s faded green hospital gown like gunshot wounds, and though his dark skin looked pallid in the fluorescent lights of the room, he played the electric guitar vigorously, howling with demented fervor.
Oh, what’s a man to do?
What’s a man to do
If I can’t have you?
If I cant—
They sang with none of Terry’s typical levity when reciting the medley, their faces angry. The boy put his guitar down suddenly, and reaching into the breast pocket of his gown, pulled out a scalpel and approached Alma.
“I’m going to make an incision on your right side from about here to here,” the boy said, pointing from one of his narrow hips to the other. “I’m going to pull you out a baby, name him something old-fashioned, like Ralph.”
Alma looked to Terry for help, but he lay in the boy’s bed with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together, as he had in his coffin. She tried to scream, but all that came out was a song. The nightmare ended abruptly with Alma drenched in her own blood, but when she touched her hips, there was only sweat.