Booker smiled.
“No question. No question at all.” He leaned in and kissed her nose.
Queen licked her dry lips, closed her eyes again and began to snore.
When Bride returned to relieve him and he told her what had happened, they celebrated by eating breakfast together in the hospital cafeteria. Bride ordered cereal, Booker orange juice.
“What about your job?” Booker raised his eyebrows.
“What about it?”
“Just asking, Bride. Breakfast conversation, you know?”
“I don’t know about my job and don’t care. I’ll get another one.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. And you? Logging forever?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Loggers move on after they destroy a forest.”
“Well, don’t worry about me.”
“But I do.”
“Since when?”
“Since you broke a beer bottle over my head.”
“Sorry.”
“No kidding. Me too.”
They chuckled.
Away from Queen’s hospital bed, relieved about her progress and in a fairly relaxed mood, they amused themselves with banter like an old couple.
Suddenly, as though he’d forgotten something, Booker snapped his fingers. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and took out Queen’s gold earrings. They had been removed to bandage Queen’s head. All this time they had been in a little plastic bag tucked in the drawer of her bedside table.
“Take these,” he said. “She prized them and would want you to wear them while she recovers.”
Bride touched her earlobes, felt the return of tiny holes and teared up while grinning.
“Let me,” said Booker. Carefully he inserted the wires into Bride’s lobes, saying, “Good thing she was wearing them when the place caught fire because nothing at all is left. No letters, address book, nothing. All burned. So I called my mother and asked her to get in touch with Queen’s kids.”
“Can she contact them?” asked Bride swerving her head gently back and forth the better to relish the gold discs. Everything was coming back. Almost everything. Almost.
“Some,” Booker replied. “A daughter in Texas, medical student. She’ll be easy to find.”
Bride stirred her oatmeal, tasted a spoonful, found it cold. “She told me she doesn’t see any of them, but they send her money.”
“They all hate her for some reason or another. I know she abandoned some of them to marry other men. Lots of other men. And she didn’t or couldn’t take the kids with her. Their fathers made sure of that.”
“I think she loves them though,” said Bride. “Their photographs were all over the place.”
“Yeah, well the motherfucker who murdered my brother had all his victims’ photos in his fucking den.”
“Not the same, Booker.”
“No?” He looked out the window.
“No. Queen loves her children.”
“They don’t think so.”
“Oh, stop it,” said Bride. “No more stupid arguments about who loves who.” She pushed the cereal bowl to the center of the table and took a sip of his orange juice. “Come on, hateful. Let’s go back and see how she’s doing.”
Standing on either side of Queen’s bed, they were extremely happy to hear her speaking loudly and clearly.
“Hannah? Hannah?” Queen was staring at Bride and breathing hard. “Come here, baby. Hannah?”
“Who’s Hannah?” asked Bride.
“Her daughter. The medical student.”
“She thinks I’m her daughter? God. Drugs, medicine, I guess. That stuff confuses her.”
“Or focuses her,” said Booker. He lowered his voice. “There was a thing with Hannah. Rumor in the family was that Queen ignored or dismissed the girl’s complaint about her father — the Asian one, I believe, or the Texan. I don’t know. Anyway she said he fondled her and Queen refused to believe it. The ice between them never melted.”
“It’s still on her mind.”
“Deeper than her mind.” Booker sat in a chair near the foot of Queen’s bed listening to her persistent call — a whisper now — for Hannah. “Now I think of it, it explains why she told me to hang on to Adam, to keep him close.”
“But Hannah isn’t dead.”
“In a way she is, at least to her mother. You saw that photo display she had on her wall. Takes up all the space. It’s like a roll call. Most of the pictures are of Hannah though — as a baby, a teenager, a high school graduate, winning some prize. More like a memorial than a gallery.”
Bride moved behind Booker’s chair and began to massage his shoulders. “I thought those photos were of all her children,” she said.
“Yeah, some are. But Hannah reigns.” He rested his head on Bride’s stomach and let the tension he didn’t know was in him drift away.
Following a few days of cheer-inspiring recovery, Queen was still confused but talking and eating. Her speech was hard to follow since it seemed to consist of geography — the places she had lived in — and anecdotes addressed to Hannah.
Bride and Booker were pleased with the doctor’s assessment: “She’s doing much better. Much.” They relaxed and began to plan what to do when Queen was released. Get a place where all three were together? A big mobile home? At least until Queen could take care of herself, without delving too closely, they assumed the three of them would live together.
Slowly, slowly their bright plans for the immediate future darkened. The carnival-colored lines on the screen began to wiggle and fall, their sliding punctuated by the music of emergency bells. Booker and Bride took shallow breaths as Queen’s blood count dropped and her temperature rose. A vicious hospital-borne virus, as sneaky and evil as the flame that had destroyed her home, was attacking the patient. She thrashed a bit then held her arms raised high, her fingers clawing, reaching over and over for the rungs of a ladder that only she could see. Then all of it stopped.
Twelve hours later Queen was dead. One eye was still open, so Bride doubted the fact. It was Booker who closed it, after which he closed his own.
—
During the three days waiting until Queen’s ashes were ready, they argued over the choice of an urn. Bride wanted something elegant in brass; Booker preferred something environmentally friendly that could be buried and in time enrich the soil. When they discovered there was no graveyard within thirty-five miles, or a suitable place in the trailer park for her burial, they settled for a cardboard box to hold ashes that would be strewn into the stream. Booker insisted on performing the rites alone while Bride waited in the car. She watched him carefully, anxiously, as he walked away toward the river, holding the carton of ashes in his right elbow and his trumpet dangling from the fingers of his left. These last days, thought Bride, while they were figuring out what to do, were congenial because their focus was on a third person they both loved. What would happen now, she wondered, when or if there was just the two of them again? She didn’t want to be without him, ever, but if she had to she was certain it would be okay. The future? She would handle it.
Although heartfelt, Booker’s ceremony to honor his beloved Queen was awkward: the ashes were lumpy and difficult to toss and his musical tribute, his effort at “Kind of Blue,” was off-key and uninspired. He cut it short and, with a sadness he had not felt since Adam’s death, threw his trumpet into the gray water as though the trumpet had failed him rather than he had failed it. He watched the horn float for a while then sat down on the grass, resting his forehead in his palm. His thoughts were stark, skeletal. It never occurred to him that Queen would die or even could die. Much of the time, while he tended her feet and listened to her breath he was thinking about his own unease. How disrupted his life had become, what with caring for an aunt he adored and who was now dead due to her own carelessness — who the hell burns bedsprings these days? How acute his predicament had become by the sudden return of a woman he once enjoyed, who had changed from one dimension into three — demanding, perceptive, daring. And what made him think he was a talented trumpet player who could do justice to a burial or that music could be his language of memory, of celebration or the displacement of loss? How long had childhood trauma hurtled him away from the rip and wave of life? His eyes burned but were incapable of weeping.