A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [16]
Dan had his eyes fixed on Lizzy’s face. He was stroking a small patch on her calf, the one place on her body that wasn’t taken up with tubing, the one place he was allowed to touch.
SIT UP, LIZZY. I clapped my hand over my mouth. I wasn’t sure if I had shouted or if the noise was inside my head. No one looked at me and still I didn’t know if it was their failure to register the sound or my inability to make the noise. I didn’t know if I should stand or sit, stay or leave, wait with my eyes closed or open, offer a word, hold still, or move. I wanted to shout at Dan, too. SAY SOMETHING, DAN, OLD MAN. TALK TO ME. I stared at the floor, at the tiles, because Lizzy now looked nothing like herself.
When the Reverend finished with Theresa he came to me. He was twenty-eight years old, just out of school. I didn’t like him, didn’t want to take his outstretched hand. He was acting a part, putting on airs he hadn’t earned, wearing a solemnity beyond his years. He had privately tried to negotiate a land deal with the McDonald Corporation when he first came to Prairie Center several months before. He had proposed selling a wooded area along the highway, part of the fifteen acres behind the church cemetery, for a restaurant and playland. We had stumbled into a prayer about waters upon the fields because it was the only passage he had memorized at seminary, or else he had come directly from a meeting on drought relief and it was fresh in his mind. I could see that he was going to try to comfort me by leading me through a few Bible verses. “You will be in need of the Lord’s help,” he declared.
I’m afraid I had a momentary and reckless urge to laugh, to belt out, “You can say that again, Joe.” I withdrew my hand and turned to the bed to once more find Lizzy, the Lizzy who would soon be well. The tubes were flooding her with nourishment: air and waters that might possibly, with some assistance from the supernatural, convey Lizzy herself, what was spirit and potential, back into the heart and brain.
Reverend Nabor took me firmly by the elbow and led me away. I thanked him and sat down in the lounge chair outside the intensive care unit. Right away I put my head in my hands and prayed. I would pray all day and all night: I would pray for as long as it took, and after it was over as well. I would become a devout follower of Reverend Nabor, waiting in the wings to take over the readings when he became short of breath.
I prayed for the rest of the day, with only one lapse, one short length of time when my mind wandered. I implored the old man, Lord God. I said Please and Please and Please, like a child who isn’t disciplined enough to stop asking. It was all I could think to say, begging He who I hadn’t until that very morning considered, much less believed in His amazing powers. I was saying Please when I remembered the fortune cookie I’d gotten two weeks before, at the Chinese restaurant in Blackwell. I had pulled the strip of paper from the inside of the cookie and read, “Happiness is illusion. Pain is reality.”
I remembered saying to Howard, “This is dessert?” His fortune said, “We come only to sleep, only to dream.” I protested then, saying that I should have gotten his fortune. I told him that I’d been having dreams about being one of his sixty beautiful Golden Guernseys with a big wet brown nose, dewy eyes, and that he of course patted my rump with a special twang.
“It’s hard to imagine what you’d be like as a cow,” Howard had said, slowly, thoughtfully. “What part of your personality is most cowlike. You might be too skittery. I might have to ship you—”
“You wouldn’t ship me! You wouldn’t.”
“Okay,