Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [43]
She raises her head and looks at me warily. “What do you mean?” she asks.
I stand there, my shoulders sloping, my hands at my sides. “I don’t know,” I admit.
With one hand she strokes the tabletop three times, and then she says, “I saw one once. I had . . . When I had . . . You were saved by one once.” I wait for her to go on.
Finally, I say softly, so as not to disturb her, “How?”
The eaves are dripping. “When you were born,” she says, “you were choking to death. That was . . . You were a breech birth, and somehow you got tangled up in the umbilical cord. We thought that . . . so — that it was all over.”
The rain has let up a little. The dishwasher growls. I can hear Paul stomping upstairs. “Your face was blue. Really . . . I mean, blue. It . . .” She looks like she’s about to cry. “A nurse came. She said, ‘I’ll take him. Just for a minute.’ You were dead. You . . . She went into the next room.”
Paul’s radio goes on.
“Suddenly we heard this crying. It was you. She brought you in. She’d brought you back to life. It was . . . I mean, she was . . . It was a miracle. She brought you back.” She has moved closer to me. And softly, urgently, she says, “And you’re so wonderful, both you and Paul. We never could have imagined . . . I asked around, but no one knew who that nurse was. The room was full of people, but no one saw her come or go except your father and me.” Her eyes are wet. “So, yes, I believe in angels.
“Chris, you’re so special, and your father and I are so concerned about you. We might fight, but you don’t know how much we love you. Please, Chris,” she says, shaking her head and pronouncing my name again and again as if each time she were caressing my hair. “Chris, Chris, Chris . . .”
She is so close, and I can tell she wants to take me in her arms like that baby she saw saved. Her upper body leans toward mine, and her hands have lifted off the table by several inches. Her face is pleading.
And I am standing so near to her, thinking of that small smiling family when I was saved from death, years before, and how they couldn’t know what would happen, and how we all just want to be happy. I look at her, and I think we are both looking at each other and almost pleading for something with our eyes.
We stand there like that for a minute, sizing each other up to see who will embrace the other and show affection first, like sumo wrestlers crouching before the clinch.
And then suddenly I see it all — the other room, tangy with disinfectants, the nurse there in the dark, whatever they do to make you one — quickly chanting, or sprinkling me, or biting softly some hidden fold, some pudgy leg beneath the wrap — feeling my little dead toy heart quiver, thump with new life, thump again — how she smiled in the shadows, went out to greet the happy couple — cigars all around —
“Chris?” my mother says, leaning toward me. “Chris, I love you,” she says, sagging toward me, her face exhausted and in baboon folds. I twitch backward.
Quickly I say, “Yeah, well, I don’t believe in them. I mean, I’m not sure. You never know.”
Then I walk toward the door to the back hall where the washer and dryer, old welcome mat, and trash cans are. To my back she says, “Chris . . . ,” and she says it so sadly that suddenly I feel like she is the child, a little girl; it hurts me to keep walking away. But I do.
And now she yells, “Chris. Christopher!”
As I go into the den, I hear her call, “Oh, fine! If you keep pacing, Christopher, if you pace one more goddamn time around this house, I swear I’m going to beat you until you can’t sit down for a week.”
So when I reach the front hall, I make a detour up the stairs to my room.
I lie on my bed with my head like a bat’s.
The rain gets halfhearted as the evening falls. The evening is long and empty.
The yard is choked with water.
“Hello, Clayton police.” Officer Melnikowski answers the phone. He came to our school to demonstrate school bus safety.
I say, “Hi. I’d like to report a vampire god trying to enter this world.”
There’s a silence on the other