Beyond the security guard Jimmy Joe could see the lady in the pink pinafore hovering, holding open a door marked, Hospital Personnel Only. From the pink in her cheeks and the smile on her lips, it looked like she might have warmed toward him quite a bit since she’d spoken to him last.
The security guard touched Jimmy Joe’s elbow and raised his voice and said, “Okay, folks, that’s all. You want to step aside and let us through, please?” He ushered Jimmy Joe through the door and the pink-pinafore lady closed it smartly after them. Jimmy Joe could just imagine her glaring in frosty triumph at the thwarted reporters left on the other side.
Left alone with the security guard, he didn’t know exactly what to expect-whether he was about to be hustled out the nearest exit, or what. It sure wasn’t to have the guy clap him on the shoulder and say, “Son, I’d sure like to shake your hand. That was a wonderful thing you did. God bless ya.”
Feeling too dazed and confused to argue, Jimmy Joe muttered some sort of thank-you and shook the guy’s hand, which was about the size and texture of an old fielder’s mitt. For some reason that made him think of his dad, and that brought a lump into his throat.
Maybe it’s just being in a hospital again, he thought as the guard whisked him past offices and through storerooms and up an echoing concrete stairway, through clanging steel doors and then down polished corridors that smelled the way hospitals always do. Like most normal healthy people who don’t actually work in one, Jimmy Joe wasn’t fond of hospitals. Which wasn’t surprising, considering that with one exception, his associations with them, starting with having his tonsils taken out when he was seven, were all pretty bad. The arm he’d broken playing football hadn’t been serious enough to get him past the emergency room, but then there had been his dad’s first heart attack, and then the last one. He remembered the long night in the waiting room, he and his brothers and sisters sprawled and draped over every available piece of furniture, and at dawn, the doctors coming with headshakes and expressionless faces. And the worst shock of all had been watching his mama’s face turn old before his eyes.
Not very long after that, there had been Amy-the first Amy. And then, for a while, regular visits to a different kind of hospital, where patients shuffled aimlessly through the corridors or sat and looked out the windows with blank faces and empty eyes. Then there had been the exception-JJ.’s birth. But even that hadn’t exactly been a happy time in his life. That had been almost eight years ago, and he’d done his best to avoid hospitals ever since.
“She’s been askin’ for ya,” the security guard told him as they turned down a corridor painted in cheery shades of rose pink and aqua green. Jimmy Joe could hear trays clanking and people laughing. And mixed in with the regular old hospital smell was a new one, one he remembered well-diapers. “We’ve been tryin’ to keep that horde downstairs away from her until she’s had a chance to rest up a bit. Here ya go-you can go on in.”
And suddenly there he was, standing outside a closed door that he knew Mirabella was on the other side of, and he didn’t have a single idea in the world what he was going to say to her once he opened it. He felt like it had been days, maybe even years, since he’d seen her, instead of just a few hours. In his truck, it had seemed as if they were the only two people in the whole world, and that somehow the two of them and Amy Jo and everything they’d been through together had gotten woven into one whole cloth, like a beautiful tapestry, or one of those Navajo rugs he’d brought back from his trips. For some reason he’d thought they would be that way forever.
But from the instant that helicopter had set down in the rest-stop parking lot, he’d known it hadn’t been real, and that the world didn’t belong to just the three of them, after all. This was somebody else’s world, and he, for one, didn’t feel real comfortable in it. In this world, Mirabella and her baby girl were a media event, and everybody was trying to make him out to be some kind of hero. Well, he sure didn’t feel like a hero. What he felt like was a man who’d just lost something precious to him-something so rare and beautiful he was afraid he wasn’t ever going to come across it in his life again.
The security guard waved to him and moseyed off down the corridor, nodding to a couple of nurses along the way. A nurse bustling by did a sort of double take when she saw Jimmy Joe, and smiled, her face lighting up like a Christmas tree.
“It’s okay,” she chirped. “You can go on in. She’s been waiting for you.”
He nodded his head, took a big breath, and tapped on the door. A voice-like Mirabella’s, and yet not quite hers-said breathlessly, “Yes-come in!”
The wide hospital-room door swung open and a woman he didn’t know stood there beaming at him. She had shiny brown hair cut short but in a way that nicely suited her features, and greenish-blue eyes that crinkled at the corners. And although the two didn’t have one single feature in common that he could see, he knew this woman was Mirabella’s mother. In some strange way he couldn’t put a finger on, she just reminded him of her.
In a hushed and excited voice, like someone trying not to wake a sleeper, she said, “Hello-you must be Jimmy Joe. The front desk phoned to let us know you were on your way. Oh, I’m just so happy to meet you. Bella,” she called softly over her shoulder toward a partly drawn curtain, “you have a visitor.” And then back to Jimmy Joe again, taking his hand and towing him inside. “Please, come in. I’m Ginger, by the way-Bella’s mom.”
“Ma’am,” Jimmy Joe mumbled politely. As the door whisked shut behind him it occurred to him that he’d never felt so awkward in his life, or more conscious of the quarterinch of stubble he was wearing on his face. Why hadn’t he thought to bring something-flowers, maybe, or a baby gift?
And then Ginger was pulling back the curtain, and there she was. And he suddenly remembered how he’d thought her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life before. And forgot he’d ever held her naked body in his arms, massaged her feet or whispered love words into her sweat-damp hair. It was all he could do to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth long enough to mutter, “Hey, there, Marybell, how’re you doin’?”
Chapter 13
“Man, that is a sight for sore eyes. ”
I-40-Texas
“Other than the fact that my insides feel like jelly, I’m fine,” snapped Mirabella, and she could just see her mother’s eyebrows arching at the way she sounded, so brusque and cranky. So typically Mirabella.
She didn’t mean it, of course; she almost never did. No one knew that sometimes it was simply the only way she could get a word out without her voice shaking, or how important it was to her pride and self-esteem that she always appear calm and completely in control.
Even more so now, considering the state of near panic she’d been in the last time she’d seen Jimmy Joe. And considering that not ten minutes ago she’d been in a similar state just because she couldn’t shower and wash her hair.
“What am I going to do? I look like hell!” she’d hissed in a burst of tearful hysteria that was completely foreign-and consequently utterly bewildering to her. “Mom-quick-let me have your brush! Do you have any lipstick? Oh, no…I’ve lost my hair thingy. I look like a wet cat. Oh, God, I can’t let him see me like this!”
“Bella,” her mother had said, laughing in amazement, “since when do you care? Besides,” she’d added dryly, “I imagine the man has just seen you looking a lot worse.”
“That was different,” Mirabella had snapped, feeling free to behave like an unreasonable and obstinate child as long as there was no one but her mother to witness it.