Heads of the Colored People(52)
“Let’s get you in the bath,” Alma said, turning on some music and carrying Ralph to the second bathroom.
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That night, she applied castor oil to her abdomen, starting with her right side, massaging the liver, and working her way down her belly to each hip and then back to her flanks. As with the blessed oil, her body reminded her when she forgot to complete the ritual. The toxins seemed to accumulate faster, her digestion became sluggish, and the pain—which never fully left but liked to remind her it could become worse—wrenched around in her abdominal and pelvic cavities. The castor oil packs were supposed to shrink all the growths, the Internet said, and despite her research training and her misgivings, Alma coated herself with the cold, viscous oil each night and waited for signs of improvement. She laid a heating pad over herself and wrapped her torso in old cloths. The oil stained her sheets anyway, leaving a thick smell behind. That was her life, the residues you could wash out and the ones you couldn’t.
She didn’t sleep. She could never sleep after performances, no matter how well they went and especially now. She anticipated Terry and thought the Madison boy, under the lid of the casket, would accompany him. But it was Ralph who appeared with Terry in the terror this time, not singing but crying with a gravely voice, “How will you keep me safe?” His face and clothes were soaked, as though someone had submerged him in water.
Alma got up and checked on Ralph, who lay wheezing softly in his crib. When she returned to her room, she knelt at her bedside and said an extra round of prayers. She turned her television on mute and played music from her phone with the volume low. She sat upright in her bed and worried over her shift four hours away, her life, her pelvis.
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WHEN ALMA STARTED as a wedding singer, single and childless, business was slow, but it was her passion, not just a side hustle; she didn’t need the money. Some of her clients—who learned about her through word of mouth at the hospital and the sample CD she passed out during consultations—found her riffs and runs too much for the occasion, preferring something more Episcopalian than Church of God in Christ on their special day. As a funeral singer, she had more gigs than she wanted and paid for the fertility treatments on her own with the profits, though it seemed wrong to call them that.
Her sister and mother couldn’t understand why Alma would go through the rigorous treatments to prep her womb only to be a single parent. But they never brought up the untraditional means by which Ralph was conceived once they saw “that precious baby boy, looking just like his uncle Terry.”
Even detached as he was from her uterus, and even with her solid network of supportive family and friends, Ralph felt sometimes to Alma like another adhesion, a growth on her future happiness.
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Alma gave up on sleep and sat in the kitchen after she sensed Terry and Ralph coming to her once more. It was still dark out, and the lake rippled under a distant streetlamp. She checked on Ralph in his crib again. His diaper and the bottom half of his onesie were soggy, and something white and oozy curdled around his chest. Alma thought she might cry as she made her way to the second bathroom and drew a bath.
She should call Bette or maybe the hospital, or even her mother.
She did not pause to pull the baby tub that sat inside the larger one out of the cabinet. She ran water, testing the temperature with her elbow. She took Ralph from his crib, and he fussed and whimpered for a moment, then looked into her eyes as if to say, “Why did you wake me?”
She attempted to compose a text message in her mind, some sort of explanation or apology, but she couldn’t settle on the right words. Ralph clapped his hands together before and after she pulled his shirt over his head. She undressed him and then dressed him in a white linen suit she had bought for an upcoming vacation trip. She blessed his forehead with olive oil.
A song came to her, something Terry used to play on his acoustic guitar when she was six or seven. She would get ready for work when she finished with Ralph—she could work on less sleep than this—and tend to the boy in room 47, maybe pray a level three for him and a level two for herself.
When she covered Ralph’s head with the warm water, she reasoned that at least it wasn’t freezing. At least it was shallower than the plunge from the side of a slave ship. At least it was more comfortable than forcing him to float down the Nile in a woven basket. She dunked him once and counted to five. Had there been time for Terry to cry out as the bullets shattered his right leg, his chest? Would she preserve any part of Ralph? Their faces were blurring together. She wept in terror and allayed her guilt by singing soft phrases, “his bones will be unbroken,” “there’ll be no more crying there.” She could do this—eleven, twelve, thirteen. By fourteen, doubt had begun to creep in. Shouldn’t Ralph have a choice, now that he was already here? Who was she to snuff out his life for fear that someone else would? Would Terry want this for his nephew?
She yanked Ralph from the water, his eyes wide, her count long lost. She feared the damage was already irreparable and listened to his chest. Alma was frantic, but the muscle memory took over, and she began pumping for CPR. What if her baby did not wake up, and even then, would he be vegetative for the rest of his life?
She had only pumped once when Ralph gurgled, spat water, and cried. He was used to barely breathing.
Alma exhaled for the first time in months.
She didn’t know how they would get through the night, let alone years; one or both of them might end up with their heads underwater some other day. For now, she would monitor Ralph and herself, perhaps call Bette. She gently pinched Ralph’s chubby leg. She felt something like sunlight on her neck and torso, saw a hot flash of heaven or hope in that baby’s wet face, and redressed him and herself for bed.