Chapter 9 Clara
CHAPTER 9? CLARA
Bluffton, South Carolina
“Mama!” Wynnie’s voice floated above dreams of a garden, a fern-covered dress, waves crashing into a sea cave. Then my neck burned with a twisted ache from sleeping on my bedroom floor, my face squashed on a newspaper. All around me lay the detritus of my mother’s life.
I sat up and rubbed my face.
“I’ll be late for school,” Wynnie said. She looked down at me, dressed in striped-orange pants and a polka-dotted red top. Her hair was wild about her face, and there was a patch of maple syrup on her cheek.
“Oh, ladybug.” I stood up. “I was so tired I fell asleep on the floor.”
“Papa made me breakfast and said to let you sleep.” She was grinning with this rare treat.
“Would you actually call it breakfast?” I asked, and ruffled her hair. “Or dessert?”
“I would call it breakfast, yes.” Her smile lifted. “I have to take my bag to school today because it’s my weekend with Daddy.”
“I know, baby. I know. I called him about the carnival and told him you didn’t want to go.”
She nodded and then asked, her eyes narrowed at me, “Did he listen?”
“Yes, he did. Now let’s get you ready to go.”
Wynnie looked around me. “What’s all this?”
“Old papers about Grandma. I was looking for… something.”
“For what?” She picked up the biography and read out loud, “ Child Genius: The Wild and Tragic Life of Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham .”
I kissed her and took the book from her hands. She did not need to read about her grandmother’s adolescent escapades before she met my dad. “This book isn’t for you or for now.”
“Why not?”
Oh, the everlasting temptation to say Because I said so. I told her, “Another time. Now run and get your bag and let me get ready. We’ll make sure you have everything you need for the weekend.”
“Daddy says he’s bringing his girlfriend, Nicole, and she’s bringing her son, stupid Sam, who wants to go to the carnival.”
“No name-calling,” I said.
“That’s not name-calling,” she said. “That’s just a true fact.”
“Versus a false fact?”
“Exactly.”
She ran off, and in a flash of knowing what to do next, a seizure of understanding, I slipped into Dad’s private study and opened his top desk drawer. In the back right corner, taped down and hidden under a pile of forgotten tax documents, I ran my fingers over the iron key that had been hiding there for the last twenty-five years, the key to a lockbox in Savannah where Mother’s sequel rested in the dark.
I ripped off the yellowed tape and the key slipped out. I folded my fingers around it, as if hiding this act from myself.
“Mama?” Wynnie called for me and I slipped the key into my purse, its weight barely noticeable compared to its import and meaning.
“Coming, love!”
I dreaded my weekends without Wynnie, not only because I missed her, but also because I worried about her with Nat. Even if he’d been gambling-free for a year, there was always a chance for relapse, and I knew too much about it.
When people cluck clucked about my divorce, when they offered sympathy with a false look of pity, I’d nod and say thanks instead of what I really wanted to say: “It’s a relief.” But that relief didn’t mean I liked sharing my girl or didn’t worry every single minute she was out of my sight.
Wynnie arrived in the middle of a full moon April night over eight years ago. When the low pains woke me at two a.m., I let out a strangled noise that roused Nat. “What is it?” he asked, reaching across the warm sheets for me.
“The baby,” I said. “Something is wrong.” Then a warm sensation flooded between my legs and the sheets dampened. I jumped out of bed, tripped in the tangled sheets, and grabbed the bedside table to balance.
The milk glass lamp shattered on the floor; I stepped on a sliver of its shards.
It wasn’t time. Wynnie wasn’t meant to arrive for another two months. Her due date, June 15, was circled in both blue- and pink-colored pencils on the calendar in the kitchen. This was April. Nat hadn’t assembled the crib. I hadn’t bought diapers or finished the Winnie the Pooh mural in her nursery.
These were my inane thoughts as the pain grabbed me again, twisting the center of my body.
I gasped, stumbling, leaning against the wall, bent over as I made my way to the bathroom. Had my water broken?
I’d combed through all of Dad’s obstetrics books and knew about the first sharp pain and the damp run between your legs: “breaking your water.” Now labor will begin .
This was too early—I was doing motherhood all wrong.
I clicked on the bathroom light and looked down. It wasn’t water. Blood soaked the front of my white cotton nightgown, creating crimson dots on my feet and on the pink fluffy bathroom carpet.
Nat was at my side before I could call his name. He wrapped me in towels, picked me up, and carried me down the stairs, murmuring words of comfort. It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll be oka y. He bundled me in the passenger seat of our black Dodge.
He pulled away from the house and I cried out, “I want my mom!” My voice rent the air.
Nat sped through the dark neighborhood streets, flickers of shrimp-boat lights in the bay, a quiet, sleeping world. I was still awake when he screeched up to the blinking emergency sign at the hospital. I was still awake when they put me on a stretcher, and then barely awake as I was wheeled into an operating room. Darkness crept around the edges of my sight.
A quick sting of a needle and the anesthesia flooded my veins. I fought against the oblivion. I would not disappear on my child. I would not leave.
I would not.
When I awoke, the nurse with the swan hat and the crisp uniform was at my side, and the doctor in a white coat leaned over me with the stench of ammonia. I fought through the fog. “Tell me,” I said, my voice broken with fear.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor said in a solemn voice, avoiding eye contact. He adjusted a machine that was tethered to me by a plastic tube that entered a vein in my left arm. “And she is safe in the special baby care unit.”
I sat up and vomited on him, on the blankets, and all over myself. I didn’t pay it any mind. “Take me to my baby.”
The doctor nodded at the nurse and the darkness again encroached, closing in. I scrambled for the needle, scratched to pull it out, and didn’t wake until the next day.
When I awoke, I understood that my mother was right about this: there is an unseen world, a place where phantasmagoric images rise and fall, where light beckons and darkness looms at the boundary of sight. It isn’t so much terrifying as wondrous, or that was my experience.
Which drugs coursed through my veins and created such images? In what everyone believed was sleep, I saw my mother, soft and hazy, alive in this world, not in another. She walked through a woodland and beckoned me forward. She sat in a library and looked up from a stack of books. Her face wasn’t the one I saw in all the photos, black-and-white and young, but that of a woman aged, but not old.
I spent those sleeping hours visiting the places and spaces of dreams. There were estuaries where I played with my childhood friends, nearly all who’d moved away but Lilia. There was my honeymoon with Nat—one we never actually took, but promised ourselves we would one day—a trip to England. There were snakes, a lot of snakes, and in the dreams, I wasn’t fearful.
Before I woke, Mother stood in the woodlands holding out her hand to me. My God, how I’d wanted to take her hand for so long, and there she was reaching for me instead of me reaching for her. Her hand was soft, warm, and alive. Her smile lifted her cheeks, and her brown eyes were deeply warm. She pulled hard, my body jerked, and I awoke in the hospital room.
Mother had often called our existence an earthbound life, and as I fought my way back to the world and to my daughter, I believed Mother was calling me forward to this life.
I’d never told anyone that story, and I never planned on doing so.
It was mine to treasure.
When I opened my eyes, the hospital room was empty but for the beeping machines and the blazing light of the overhead fixtures. My eyes hurt when I focused. Stainless steel and bland beige walls, a Pepto Bismol–colored plastic pitcher, brown-freckled creamy Formica, and a long metal pole that held liquid dripping into my vein. Two plastic prongs in my nose and a tube I could feel between my legs.
My daughter.
I tried to call out, but my voice was trapped.
I must have faded away again because when I opened my eyes, Nat stood next to me, stroking my hair with his eyes closed.
“Nat,” I said.
He jolted, cried out, “Clara! Oh my God, you scared me to death.”
“Our daughter?”
“She’s in the special baby care unit. She’s the tiniest and most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.”
“Is she… all right?”
“They aren’t sure,” he said. “They just aren’t sure. But I believe she will be. She’s strong like you, I can already tell.”
“Tell me everything. And don’t leave a thing out. I need to know.”
And he told me the story of Wynnie’s birth: They’d wheeled me into the ER and performed an emergency C-section, trying to save me and save her at the same time. She’d been blue, and my heart rate was falling. Placental previa. My placenta had ripped from the lining of my uterus, and we were both dying.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Nat. “I couldn’t hold on to her. My God, I am so sorry.”
“No!” he said, and covered my face with chapped-lip kisses. “It is not your fault. The doctor told me over and over that it’s not your fault.”
The way he spoke made me believe that at one moment, or maybe half a moment, he’d believed it was my fault and they’d reassured him it was not.
“There’s something else,” I said. “I can see it in your eyes. What is it?”
“Not now,” he said.
“Now.”
He took both my hands in his, squeezed them. “She is beautiful, and she is ours, and she is going to be okay.”
I closed my eyes and saw my mother’s face, her hand pulling me forward to life. “We’ll name her Bronwyn.”
Nat coughed a laugh. “We are going to name our daughter after your mother?”
“I would like that, yes.” My voice was fading, but my resolve was not.
“We agreed on Marjory, didn’t we? We’d call her Margie after my mother?”
I stayed silent. He wiped the tears from my face. “We don’t have to decide right now,” he said.
I didn’t tell him that I thought Mother brought me back here to this room, to this life with him and with my daughter. I said only one word. “Please.”
Behind Nat, a flash of white and silver. The doctor stood with his lab coat and stethoscope, and I shifted my gaze from Nat to the doctor. His hands slid into the pockets of his lab coat, and his face took on a mask of what I believed was concern. “You have a strong girl there,” he said. “She’s going to be all right, I believe.”
And she was.
I later learned what Nat kept from me that day in the hospital room. Wynnie would be my first and last child. I was also taught about the aftereffects of premature birth. It all paled compared to her life.
She stayed a month at the hospital in an incubator with bright lights to warm her. I held her hand through a hole in the container that resembled a spaceship, and I pumped my breast milk that they then dripped slowly into a tube down her nose until her suck reflex emerged. The first time I held her, I wept so violently they nearly took her from my arms. Her left eye wandered, and her eyesight would always need help.
Dad explained to me that the lungs were the last and most important things in development, and that she might always have asthma or respiratory infections, but it was manageable. Now, eight years later, we had adrenaline shots I carried everywhere, and we had aminophylline pills that melted under her tongue. As for her brain, they said we’d have to wait and see.
Well, wait we did, and what a beautiful brain she had. My girl was whip-smart and curious and quirky. Small for her age, but who cared so much about that? Not me.
Now she sat next to me in the car, wearing her mismatched clothes that she picked out that morning, her pink glasses specially designed in Charleston at the eye clinic, and her feet propped on her weekend bag.
“Mama?” She rested the back of her head on the window and turned to face me.
“Yes?”
“Are you going to call that man back?”
“What man?” I feigned innocence.
“The one who says he has Grandma’s things.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Good.” She glanced out the window. “I bet it’s real this time.”
“Why do you say that?”
She was silent for a few beats and then said, “Emjie thinks so.”
“Well,” I told her as I pulled in front of the school, “I hope she’s right.” I parked the car, and we both climbed out and stood in front of the orange-hued brick building. I looked up at the entryway, at the double doors, at the memory of Dad dropping me off for school instead of my mother.
Wynnie opened the school door and didn’t even look back as she ran off, braids flapping in the wind, her duffel bag bouncing against her shoulder blades. I reached into my purse and felt the heavy weight of the iron key that I’d slipped from Dad’s desk drawer without telling him.
It was time to retrieve the sequel, to set my hands and eyes on the story that haunted our lives with its unreadable words, its secret messages, and its untold story.