Heads of the Colored People(51)
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Alma carried Ralph into her apartment, which overlooked a small man-made lake, and took off his coat. Ralph, eighteen months old and stocky, had stuffed four yellow and two pink sweetener packets into his pockets. He clutched a red coffee straw the entire ride home and even now in the house, and while she undressed him and wrestled with his nose and the aspirator, he sang in shrill but contented tones. “Go play with some of your toys, Ralphie,” Alma said after she changed his diaper. She left the door to his bedroom cracked and settled into the eat-in kitchen.
Bette would think she was crazy; she should have told her about the lack of sleep, at least from the medication. The night terrors she would keep to herself. Terry frequently visited her in them, but increasingly lately so did her patients from the critical care unit, and even trauma patients she’d only heard about in the hallways but didn’t actually work with were making appearances. They—Alma, her mother, her sister, Lisette, and Terry’s girlfriend, Katrina—had buried Terry seven years ago at age twenty-nine after a shoot-out with the police. That was the term the papers had used, “shoot-out,” but Terry had been unarmed. The legal cases were closed, his casket open, his nighttime visitations to Alma frequent but no longer alarming. He didn’t seem to be trying to tell her anything she didn’t already know about the circumstances of his death. She kept a piece of his femur wrapped in acid-free parchment in the downstairs closet. She had washed it clean herself, a personal request she had made of the coroner. Her mother and sister and Katrina had kept his other remains, clothes, books, guitars.
But why was he visiting with the children, the ones from the hospital? Three weeks earlier, it had been the boy who ran in front of the police car, two months ago a girl whose brother was playing with their mother’s gun.
Ralph cried from behind the cracked door, wanting her to pick him up. And though he could walk—he was just stubborn—Alma picked him up and carried him into the family room, presenting him with two shortbread cookies and a paper plate full of cheese crackers.
Alma used to imagine her life something like sensual, frets and strings and wires that in the right combinations produced beautiful chords, slow, whining blues. Now it was also shrieks in the middle of the night and whimpering at a moment’s notice. It was all bodies—the ones that came into her unit with bullet holes, kids as young as eleven and twelve, hoodies soaked—and the ones dressed for the funerals, their holes plugged and covered with their finest dress clothes, often purchased at the last minute by mothers struggling to keep spaghetti noodles with butter on the table.
When Alma first started at the hospital, some of the nurses taught her to pray for the children according to severity. A level one meant pray that the child would be well; level two meant pray for decreased pain. Alma was slow to understand level three—praying that the children would die, that mercy and grace would shorten their suffering—but she had come around to it a few months into her job, when the boy with the shattered face was wheeled in. His mother’s eyes convinced Alma that sometimes you suffered more the longer you lived.
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THERE WERE SO many bodies in Alma’s everyday life, even Ralph’s undersize one, alternately leaky then stopped up with bronchitis, bronchial infections, chronic sinus congestion that colored his nostrils green and yellow and made him throw up in the middle of the night to keep from suffocating. Alma would bathe him and try to go back to sleep, grateful that he hadn’t choked.
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THE PHONE RANG, and Alma debated ignoring Bette’s call before she answered it.
“I’m okay,” she insisted when Bette offered to come over. “I’m going to get us ready for bed early and enjoy my day off before it’s over.”
His birth certificate read Ralph Boaz Parr, but Alma called him her Samuel, because while her womb was still contorted around her bowel, she promised the Lord that if He blessed her with a child, she would offer the baby back up to Him. After two laparoscopic surgeries—one to remove a six-centimeter fibroid with teeth and hair—a D&C, and a round of fertility treatments, she conceived Ralph with the help of her friend Danny, who’d agreed to serve as a sperm donor but not a parent, as a father but not a dad. That was fine with Alma, then. Now the adhesions were back—she could feel them pull in her left side—and Alma took the drugs to delay another surgery. She wondered what might have happened if she had chosen to have a baby the traditional way, if Danny had been the dad, even the husband, and not just the father. She might have more support, or maybe Danny, finding the caretaking of Alma and Ralph unbearable, might have left her as alone as she was now.
Ralph had worn a white suit and bonnet to his christening, which Danny did attend, three months earlier, around the time the night terrors intensified. At the christening they hadn’t fully immersed Ralph but sprinkled him with water and anointed his head with blessed oil, in the Pentecostal tradition. Alma kept a portion of the blessed olive oil in a narrow glass bottle etched with swirls under her bathroom sink.
Alma didn’t go as far as her mother in her use of blessed oil. Her mother applied it to the posts of the house, walked around muttering incantations, and suggested that the baby could use a dab on his forehead if he started to act fussy. Still, for her performances, Alma anointed her own head with oil and said a quick prayer that she would, in humility, comfort these families and friends, that they would remember the encouragement of the lyrics, and be settled by the melodies. Without the oil—though she couldn’t be sure of any of this—her performances seemed less palliating, and left grit in what should been salve. It’s not that her songs sounded any less beautiful, but after she sang without the anointing, the families smiled at her and clasped her hands as though she were the one who needed consoling. Yes, she must have forgotten to use the oil before she sang her set at the Madison boy’s funeral. That must be why, despite their compliments, she felt so unsettled.