"Your face is freezing," I said.
"My face is frozen," he corrected me. "Did you call Manfred? We saw a car go by while we were out there working, and they made it okay."
"I'll call him now," I said, and found I had to leave a message on Manfred's voice mail.
"Probably has it turned off while he's inside the hospital," Tolliver said.
I opened my mouth to ask a few questions about our new relationship, and once again I saw the wisdom of closing it. After all, why would Tolliver know any more about it than me?
I relaxed and let the tension drain away. We would make this up as we went along. We didn't have to send out announcements. I did have a sudden awful thought. "Ah, this new thing we've got may be a little confusing for our sisters," I said.
I could tell from the expression on Tolliver's face that this hadn't occurred to him. "Yeah," he said. "You know…you're right about that. Mariella and Gracie…oh, God. Iona."
Our aunt Iona—well, strictly speaking, my aunt Iona—had gotten guardianship of our two half sisters, who were much younger than us. Iona and her husband were raising the girls in as different a way as possible from the life they'd led with my parents. And in a way, they were absolutely right. It was much better to be brought up as a fundamentalist Christian than as a kid who didn't know what a real meal was, a kid at the mercy of whatever scum our parents let into the trailer. Because that was the way I'd been brought up after my preteen years. Mariella and Gracie were well clothed, well fed, and clean. They had a stable home to come back to every day, and they had rules to follow. These were great things, and if their early years led them to rebel against this regimen now and then, well, so be it. We were trying to build bridges to the girls, but it was uphill work.
Iona's reaction to our new relationship hardly bore thinking about. "Ah, I guess that's a bridge we'll have to cross when we come to it," I said.
"We're not hiding anything," Tolliver said, with sudden firmness. "I'm not going to even attempt it."
That had a very nice permanent sound to it. I'd been sure how I felt, but it's always nice to know your partner is feeling the same way. I let out a silent sigh of relief.
"No hiding," I said.
We ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. "Ted's wife probably whipped up a four-course heart-healthy meal on a woodstove," I said.
"Hey, you eat heart healthy most of the time."
My eating habits had gone by the wayside while we stayed in Doraville, for one reason or another. I'd have to resume them soon. With variable health problems like I had, it paid to stave off as much as I could by following good rules.
"How's your leg?" Tolliver asked, following the same train of thought.
"Pretty good," I said, extending my right leg and rubbing the quads. "I can tell I haven't been running in a few days, though."
"When do you get to leave off the cast?"
"Five weeks, the doctor said. We'll have to try to be in St. Louis then, so I can check with our doctor there."
"Great." Tolliver smiled so broadly that I knew he was thinking of several things that would be much easier when my arm healed.
"Hey, come here," he said. He was sitting on the floor in front of the fire, leaning back against a chair. He patted the floor between his legs, and I eased myself against him. He put his arms around me. "I can't believe I can do this now," he said. If my heart could have wagged its tail, it would have. "It's okay to touch you. I can touch you as much as I want. I don't have to think twice every time."
"Were you really thinking twice?"
"I thought I might scare you off."
"Same here."
"Idiots."
"Yeah, but now we're okay."
We sat there in contentment until Tolliver told me his leg was asleep, and we figured if we were ever going to try to go into town, the time was right.
Ten
SEVERAL times during the trip into town, I was almost sorry I'd turned on my cell phone and gotten Manfred's message. That was the most frightening driving experience I've ever had. Tolliver managed it, but he said every bad word in his vocabulary, even a few I didn't quite understand. We met one other car on our journey, and it was filled with teenage boys, who all have a built-in death wish. As soon as I thought that, I remembered the boys in the frozen ground, and I was sorry.
There were mighty few visitors' cars parked in the hospital parking lot. Snow had covered the sodden yard around the little building, so it looked almost pretty. When we went in, the reception lady was not at her desk, so we wandered back until we found a nurses' station. We inquired there about Xylda Bernardo.
"Oh, the psychic lady," the nurse said, looking a bit impressed. "She's in ICU. Her grandson is in the ICU waiting area, if you want to see him." She gave us directions, and we found Manfred sitting with his head in his hands. He was in one of those waiting areas that's just a little nook lined with chairs and littered with coffee cups and old magazines. It looked as though the hospital cleaning staff hadn't made it in this morning. That wasn't good.
"Manfred," I said. "Tell us what's happening with Xylda?"
He raised his head and we could see his eyes were red. His face was tear-stained.
"I don't understand," he said. "She was better. She kind of collapsed last night, but this morning she was better. The doctor had been in to see her. The minister came and prayed with us. They were going to move her to a regular room. Then she just—I left just for a minute, just to get some coffee and use the phone—and when I came back she was in a coma."
"I'm so sorry," I said. There's really nothing you can say that'll make the situation any better, is there?
"What does the doctor say?" Tolliver asked. I sat beside Manfred and put my hand on his shoulder. Tolliver sat at right angles to us and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. I looked at his face, so serious, so focused, and I felt a wave of love that almost knocked me over. I had to concentrate to get my mind back on Manfred and Xylda's misfortune.
"It's the same doctor that saw you, Harper," Manfred said. "The guy with white hair. He seems okay. He says he doesn't think she's going to wake up. He doesn't know why she took such a turn, but he says he's not surprised. It's all…it doesn't seem definite enough. No one's telling me exactly what's happening with her. I thought medicine was sharper than that now."
"Have you called your other relatives?"
"My mother is on her way. But in the traffic conditions between Tennessee and here, there's no way she'll get here before Grandmother passes away."
This was awful. "Your mom's relying on you to make the decisions?"
"Yeah. She says she knows I'll do the right thing."
What a great thing for a mother to say, but what a huge responsibility.
"I was hoping," Manfred said after a long moment, "if you could go in to see her, you'd be able to give me some advice." He was looking at me when he said this, and he said it very seriously. I understood what he meant, after a moment. He wanted to know if her soul was still there.
Okay. I was cringing inside, but I nodded.
He showed me the door to the ICU unit, which of course was quite small at such a little hospital. I thought Xylda would benefit from going to somewhere larger with more machines—isn't that what it boils down to?—but there was no way to get her there. Nature had overthrown technology once again. That seemed amazing to me, as I looked at all the machines Xylda Bernardo was connected to. They silently recorded everything that was going on inside her; and yet, when Manfred wanted to know something as basic as whether or not his grandmother's soul was still attached to her body, he had to ask me to do it.