As inviting as everybody found the water, Shreveport was a fish-in-the-lake city, not a jog-around-the-lake city, and they hadn’t put in a path for running along the shore—you might try dancing up the wooden ties, football player–style, on the stretch of railroad that kissed the east side of Cross Lake on its way to Mount Pleasant or Dallas, but that did not seem realistic. Instead I crossed Milam Street and made a loop east of the lake, on an old path partially submerged in dirt and dandelions.
That day I had decided to be ambitious and take a more challenging route farther away from the lake, four miles in total, as opposed to my usual three. As I passed the local high school, a hint of dizziness entered my head. That didn’t bother me at first. The beginning of any run always made me short of breath, and I became conscious of my heart jiggling against my rib cage like a water balloon. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and spat and breathed in through my nose and told myself, Keep going. My tongue seemed to swell in my mouth, though, and my left arm tingled uncomfortably.
I looped around the high school, turned back in the direction of the lake, and ran toward a bowl-shaped embankment with a group of trees and a telephone pole. A huge convention of grackles had gathered there, as usual for that time of day, chittering and squawking in their peculiar way. The tingle in my arm became a throb. With all I have been through, I laughed to myself, one morning jog is not that much to bear. I gathered strength by thinking of Eddie and Ruth and little Nathaniel, how they would someday see me at my best and bring me back into the family. I was curious to know what my best even looked like! My heart wobbled and my head felt light as I thought of the joys ahead. Thanksgivings and Christmases together. Thoughtful gifts, homemade potato salad, loving embraces.
At the same moment I reached the point where Ford Street parted ways with Route 173 and the sidewalk abruptly ended in a lawn, a semi barreled around from the left and nearly blindsided me. The truck sounded its implausibly loud horn, startling not just me but hundreds of those birds, who collectively fluttered into the orange sky like flecks of charcoal rising from a campfire, as if the deafening noise had broken some invisible force that had bound them to the trees. I leapt back from the street almost involuntarily and jogged in place for a second, regaining my composure. I looked both ways down the street twice before crossing. Shaken, winded, I took a deep breath and found it shallower than I’d expected. Keep going, I told myself, no matter what. I set my jaw and swallowed the trembling surge that rushed from my chest into my head, inflating the veins in my temples, stealing my breath. My windpipe constricted, and a sharp pain spiraled up my left arm, but I didn’t consider stopping. Can’t give up now, I said to myself. My eyes narrowed as I peered down the street to where the asphalt seemed to come together. I’m almost there, I thought. Almost home.
Next thing I knew, I was regaining consciousness in a bright green room with a tube in my arm and another in my nose. I heard machines behind my temples, buzzing and chiming. A nurse poured water into a plastic tumbler and asked me if I wanted a glass of water. I nodded, or tried to nod, anyway. As she lifted the glass to my lips, it occurred to me that my life had just gone into overtime.
29.
Daydreaming
Eddie heard thirdhand about his mother’s heart attack after a friend from her program found Bethella’s number and called her. Despite Darlene’s six months of sobriety, and her frequent pleas, through Eddie, for amnesty, Bethella still refused to speak to her sister, but she passed the information on to Eddie, who decided to visit. It wasn’t that his newly expanded hardware store had begun to make a profit and left him feeling flush enough to spring for a plane ticket, it was that the news had given him a number of unnerving premonitions: that his mother might not survive, that she might not want to survive, and that she might die alone. Although he had only the name of the hospital to go on, and though his one phone call to her room had gone unanswered, he flew to Shreveport anyway.
He found his mother sharing a room with a high-school girl also recovering from heart surgery—an athlete, by the looks of the sports-themed decorations around her bed, which sat on the window side of the room, where hazy brightness spilled in through the vertical blinds. The girl or her family had taped greeting cards all over her headboard and pinned many more to the wall; arranged a line of plants on the windowsill, their pots wrapped in colorful foil; left shiny gift bags littering the floor, the chair, the food tray. Above the bed, a banner told her GET WELL MINDY in metallic block letters.
The corner-store daffodils Eddie had brought, their silky white petals supporting orange cups, seemed clownish by comparison. On Darlene’s side of the room, the bluish curtain remained half closed, blocking most of the small amount of light her area received, and the only objects in her vicinity were a glass of water on the nightstand and a phone. She had an oxygen tube under her nose, and the monitor beside the bed whirred quietly.
The differences between the two sides of the room suggested to Eddie that his mother had tried, in her usual fashion, to tough it out by herself, doing it her own way without admitting how often her own way went express to Failure. At this late date, it would seem cruel and pointless to harp on her self-destructive patterns; by now even to her they must have felt as obvious as a freight train barreling toward a car stalled on the train tracks. The bare room meant either that Darlene had called no one or that she had, but no one cared. Eddie wasn’t sure which was the sadder scenario.
Only when he stepped across the threshold, though, did he feel as if he’d made a mistake. That surprised him, since he’d had so much time to consider his options, his motives, and the possible reactions of his mother.