Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [136]
22
There was no stopping Aunt Raylene. When the doctor insisted I stay overnight, she planted herself in a chair by my bed and refused to move. She held my hand all night while I lay unsleeping and restless. My arm throbbed, and my mouth was so bruised I could only whimper.
“I can’t give her anything,” the nurse told Raylene each time she checked on us.
“I know,” Raylene nodded. “Just give me a straw, why don’t you?” She fed me sips of Coke and hummed quietly while I stared up at the ceiling.
In the morning, the doctor felt all over the back of my head while Raylene glared at him from her chair. I was numb with exhaustion and pain, couldn’t even smile when he grumbled and signed the release forms. The nurse took me to the entry in a wheelchair. I could see the photographer waiting outside, but Raylene just harrumphed and picked me up like a baby doll, not looking left or right as she carried me out to her truck.
Raylene settled me close to her right hip before she started the engine, but I slid away, over to where I could hang on to the door and look out through the window. I could not look at her, could not listen to the words she kept trying to speak softly in my direction. Murmurs of comfort, meaningless phrases that did not register. The one thing I wanted her to say went unspoken. Where was Mama? What had happened to her?
When we pulled up in Raylene’s yard, the sun was beating down on the muddy spring grass. The river ran flat and fast, and there was no breeze at all. I wiped sweat off my neck and watched a big unfamiliar yellow dog creep out from under the porch and stand by the steps with his head canted to one side. Raylene sighed and cut the engine.
“I need to say something to you.” Raylene sounded uncertain. “The thing you need to understand, that’s the one thing I’m afraid you’re too young to hear.” She didn’t look at me. Her words came out in a rush. “But it’s simple enough, and one day maybe you will understand it.” She turned to look at me then.
“One time you talked to me about how I live, with no husband or children or even a good friend. Well, I had me a friend when I was with the carnival, somebody I loved better than myself, a lover I would have spent my life with and should have. But I was crazy with love, too crazy to judge what I was doing. I did a terrible thing, Bone.” Her skin looked tighter over her cheekbones, as if her whole frame were swelling with shame. She shook her head but didn’t look away from my eyes.
“Bone, no woman can stand to choose between her baby and her lover, between her child and her husband. I made the woman I loved choose. She stayed with her baby, and I came back here alone. It should never have come to that. It never should. It just about killed her. It just about killed me.”
Aunt Raylene covered her eyes for a moment, then pushed her hair back with both hands. “God!” She dropped her hands and turned back to me. “We do terrible things to the ones we love sometimes,” she said. “We can’t explain it. We can’t excuse it. It eats us up, but we do them just the same. You want to know about your mama, I know. But I can’t tell you anything. None of us can. No one knows where she’s gone. I can’t explain that to you, Bone. I just can’t, but I know your mama loves you. Don’t doubt that. She loves you more than her life, and she an’t never gonna forgive herself for what she’s done to you, what she allowed to happen.”
Aunt Raylene gripped the steering wheel fiercely and stared at me. “I shouldn’t talk so much. I’ve said enough.” She wiped her mouth. “We need some time. You need some time. You know what you look like, girl?”
I turned away. I knew what I looked like. At the hospital when they had left me alone in the bathroom for a minute, I had looked at myself in the mirror and known I was a different person. Older, meaner, rawboned, crazy, and hateful. I was full of hate. I had spit on the glass, spit on my life, not caring anymore who I was or