The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [66]
That old man was Padre Pio.
We honor him by imagining wings on our feet. We protect what we love. We wear yellow and walk at dawn or dusk, calling out to the horizon, “I vow that every gift I am given, I will share with the world.” We wink at our guardian angels, saying, “I know we haven’t talked much since we were kids, but I’m willing to be childish if it means you’ll always be with me.”
“Close your eyes.” We stand silent in our own darkness, facing Manny on the other side. A gentle gust of wind seems to push us from behind and we’re carried forward. “Do not waver,” I whisper, and with a sudden gale force like the wind off an open lake, we’re swept through the glass. We stand, encircling mother and child, praying silent crazy desperate to the old man in the brown robe to bilocate from heaven and give us a miracle we can sink our guilty teeth into. “Beloved Padre Pio, today we come to add our prayer to the thousands of prayers offered to you every day by those who love and venerate you. They ask for cures and healings, earthly and spiritual blessings, peace for body and mind. Because of your friendship with the Lord, he heals those you ask to be healed and forgives those you forgive. Beloved and humble…” I imagine Padre Pio in his brown cape, swooping down from the sky like a comic book superhero, his guardian angel at his back, but Padre Pio isn’t the one who shows up.
“How’d she get past the cop?” Paula whispers.
I look up as the heavy body moves through us and toward the white-sheeted bed. “Nana?”
She waves in my direction, but she’s focused on the baby. “He’s in a loneliness awash with light,” she says. “There’s no one to meet him yet.” She kneels down next to Lupe. “Pray,” she commands.
I lean on my crutches at the foot of the bed. “Pray, but how?” And all at once out of my thick blue grief it occurs to me that—messed up as I am, scarred and bandaged, sorry and lost—there exists some small excess of grace that dances like dust particles just above my head. I concentrate on Manny’s figure under the sheets, envision my particles gathering above my head and pouring from me and into him.
The heart monitor: beep, beep, beep.
A nurse appears in white. “There’s too many people in here!” But then she falls silent. “Oh, my God.”
What does she see?
I concentrate on my grace particles. I’d expected to force them all to Manny in an instant, but somehow they just keep flowing, multiplying as they stream from my head to his core.
Pia rises slowly over the bed, and Paula begins to sing her low, sweet hymn.
A rustling from somewhere.
Beep, beep, beep.
“Pray,” my grandmother orders us, a vein of worry cutting across her forehead. “There’s someone coming to meet him now.”
Manny lies cold and still as a museum installation.
The nurse watches, frozen, as the grace particles all stream from our crowns and into the baby.
A knock at the door, three quick raps, but I ignore it, will the sound away, will Sister Death far from this white room.
Wait.
Another sound, but this one like a crystal glass being struck by a metal rod, like a memory of water.
Manny’s body radiates through the sheets and the chemical lemon air, burning through our guilt like acid. He doesn’t open his eyes, but there’s a quick movement behind his lids, like he’s dreaming for real.
“Emanuel?” Lupe whispers.
Pia rises higher as Paula’s song wings to an end.
“Big Bird?” Manny whispers.
My grandmother looks up, her face glowing unwrinkled under the lights. “No,” she says. “He isn’t coming yet.”
“Where’d Big Bird go?” That’s all the baby wants to know when he opens his heavy lids.
“Another time,” my grandmother whispers, touching his forehead lightly with her finger. “Another time, my child.”
Chapter 25
THE CLAY