Freedomland by Richard Price

Author:Richard Price [Price, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9780613172394
Publisher: Delta
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

16

Room 907, Brenda’s room on the obstetrics ward of the medical center, was empty, the bed unmade and the injection end of an IV drip lying in a puddle on the tossed blanket. To Jesse, this did not make any sense.

An hour earlier, when Brenda had been laid out here dead to the world, Jesse had stood in this doorway, watched the rising and falling of her chest and, despite a churning desire to spirit her away, did not have the heart to wake her. She had taken up post on a hardwood bench directly across from the room and, settling into the chronic pop and ripple of her own agitation, waited for Brenda to come around.

Facing the recently vacated bed, Jesse deduced the unthinkable—while waiting for Brenda to awaken, she herself must have fallen asleep, and now Brenda was gone. Shooting back into the hallway, moving left, looking right, Jesse collided with a woman, probably recovering from a cesarean, who had been inching her way along the corridor, using her drip stand as a staff. The woman staggered backwards, hooting in pain from the effort to regain her balance. Jesse cringed, whispering an apology through clenched teeth.

On the way to the nurses’ station, Jesse’s eye caught the color-shifting busyness of TV cartoons through the open door of the visitors’ lounge and then caught Brenda, sharing a stained cranberry-colored couch with an elderly black couple. Brenda was staring pie-eyed at the screen, her bare legs fanning under her thin floral-patterned hospital gown. On seeing her, Jesse felt a hum of fulfillment not unlike love. Thinking, How do I approach thee, she tiptoed into the room and sat lightly on the blond wood arm of the couch, her stomach lurching at the sight of the blood still lazily trickling from the gummy patch of forearm where Brenda had torn out her IV.

“I can’t do this anymore.” Brenda gestured weakly to the cartoons, addressing Jesse without looking at her. “I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this anymore,” she wailed in a high, teary whisper, the two old people leaning away from her.

“Brenda, it’s OK,” Jesse murmured back, resting a hand on the nape of Brenda’s neck. The damp coolness that met her touch there was a jarringly discordant sensation at the end of this blistering day.

“You don’t understand,” Brenda continued in that cracked, whispery wail. “He’s everywhere, he’s everything. I can’t even close my eyes, he’s inside my eyes.”

Jesse dipped awkwardly from her perch on the armrest and embraced her, a sour scent of calamity rising from Brenda’s skin, a surge of inarticulate information leaping the breach. Suddenly Jesse felt woozy, felt herself filled with that buzz of connection again, that buzz of Home. “Tell me how to help you,” she asked quietly, honestly, as she pulled back from the clinch.

“I want my mother.” This brought softer looks to the faces of the old couple.

“Do you want me to call her for you?” Jesse asked, wanting a tangible task.

“She’s my mother.

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