Читать книгу The Moment Keeper - Buffy Andrews - Страница 18

I watch Olivia sleep. She looks so peaceful in her pink canopy bed. She always sleeps with her right hand over her heart and the left one down across her belly button or off to the side. I was a Pledge-of-Allegiance-sleeper, too. That’s what Grandma called it.

Olivia is restless tonight. She’s having a bad dream. She’s dreaming that she’s riding her bicycle and a stranger approaches her in a van. She tries to ride away from him but no matter how hard she pedals, the bike doesn’t move. I feel her anxiety and try to will her out of the dream. Sometimes, if I think happy thoughts and direct them toward her, I’m able to disrupt the nightmare. But tonight is a particularly bad one. She and her dad role-played different “bad person scenarios” earlier in the evening and this was one of them. Olivia screams and within seconds Elizabeth and Tom fly into her bedroom.

Tom flips on the light switch. Elizabeth leaps on the bed and wakes Olivia. “It’s just a dream, sweetie. Just a dream.”

Elizabeth holds Olivia in her arms and rocks her gently back and forth. Tom rubs her back.

“Shh. It’s OK. Daddy and I are here.”

“That’s right, pumpkin. It’s just a dream,” Tom says.

They finally get Olivia calmed down and tucked in once more. I continue to record the moments – never stopping, never sleeping.

I remember when I was about Olivia’s age, eight, I had this particularly bad dream. I thought Matt was going to take me away from Grandma and make me live with him. It was after Grandma kicked him out of the house. Occasionally, she would invite him to dinner and hope that he wasn’t drunk. She never stopped reaching out, even though Matt pummeled her outstretched hands time and time again.

This one Sunday, she made her pot roast, which Matt loved, and his favorite dessert, chocolate cake with peanut butter icing. We rushed home from church so Grandma could make her homemade blueberry biscuits. He loved those, too.

Matt was late. Really late. In fact, he was so late that Grandma and I ate dinner and cleaned up. When he did show up, it was late afternoon.

I was playing with my Barbie dolls in my bedroom. Grandma had made me a Barbie house out of a bunch of old cardboard boxes she fastened together. It wasn’t as fancy as the Barbie penthouse complete with an elevator that Tracey Carmichael had, but I liked it better because Grandma had made it. She even made Barbie clothes out of the same material she used to make my clothes so we could match.

I heard Matt first. It sounded as if someone fell against the apartment door.

“Grandma,” I yelled. “Did you hear that?”

I found Grandma snoring on her favorite chair with the Sunday paper on her lap. I shook her arm to wake her.

“Someone’s at the door.”

Grandma put the paper on the coffee table. By the time she reached the door, Matt was inside, swaying and trying to remain on his feet.

“Matt,” Grandma said. “I told you never to come here like this.”

Matt looked at me, clutching my Barbie to my heart. “What ya lookin’ at, kid?”

I looked down at the floor.

His speech was slurred. “Maybe you should come live with me?”

“Sarah,” Grandma said. “Go to your room. I’ll take care of this. It’s not good to see your dad like this.”

“He’s not my dad,” I yelled, and ran to my room, slamming my door and locking it. I could hear Grandma’s muffled voice. It sounded as if she was in the kitchen. Probably making Matt coffee. That was usually what she did. Made him coffee and got him sober enough to ride his Harley home.

Matt left a couple of hours later. I came out of my bedroom and heard Grandma crying. I found her in the kitchen doing the dishes.

I hugged her waist and she bent over to brush the curls away from my face.

“I love you, Grandma,” I said.

“I love you, too, Sarah. I wish you had a better dad.”

“I don’t want a dad. I want you.”

“And you’ll always have me, Sarah.”

“And you won’t let anyone take me?”

“Never.”

That night, I dreamt that Matt kidnapped me while Grandma slept. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed louder. Grandma let me sleep with her. In fact, it was weeks before I slept in my bed. It was the worst nightmare ever and I kept having it over and over until Matt died. I didn’t have it anymore after that.

Olivia sits on the couch next to her dad. Tom puts his arm around her, pulls her in close and kisses the top of her head.

“Do you like helping people, Daddy?” Olivia asks.

“Yep.”

“Then why are you sad?”

“Today was a tough day.”

“Why?”

“You know how when you fall and hurt yourself?”

“Like the time I fell out of Emma’s tree house and broke my arm?”

“Yeah, like that. A doctor fixed your broken arm, right?”

Olivia nods.

“But doctors can’t fix everything. Sometimes a person can’t be fixed. They’re too broken.”

“Like my ball that got run over by the lawn mower?”

“Yeah. Like your ball. Sometimes there’s just too much damage and you can’t make something whole again.”

I wondered why Tom was so sad. It wasn’t like him to be this sad. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him this upset about something that happened at work. He seemed to be hugging Olivia more than usual and I suspected that a child was involved.

“I want to be a doctor just like you,” Olivia says.

“But I thought you wanted to be a ballerina.”

“I want to be a ballerina and a doctor. And a teacher. Like Miss Bogart.”

Tom smiles.

Olivia hops off the couch and returns with her white doctor’s kit she got from Santa. She takes out all of the instruments and places them on the couch beside her dad.

“First, I’m going to listen to your heart.”

She puts the electronic stethoscope that plays a heartbeat in her ears and listens to her daddy’s heart.

“You got a little cough. You need a shot.”

She grabs the squeaky syringe and gives him a shot in his left arm. She places the pretend bandage on his arm where she gave the shot and feels his forehead.

“You feel hot.”

She picks up the thermometer with four temperature readings, holds it up to his mouth and selects the highest temperature. “You are hot.”

Then she wraps the blood-pressure cuff around his arm and squeezes the pump, which makes the dial on the gauge spin. She wraps up her examination by checking his reflexes with the play hammer and his ears and throat with the light scope.

“You need to rest. Doctor’s orders.”

Later that night, after Olivia has fallen asleep beside him on the couch, Tom tells Elizabeth what happened in the ER that day.

“God, Liz, it was awful,” he says. “There were so many bruises on that girl’s tiny body that I couldn’t find a patch of white anywhere.”

Elizabeth dabs her eyes with tissues. The toddler had been bludgeoned to death by her mother’s boyfriend. He had whipped her repeatedly with a video-game controller.

“And just because she had a dirty diaper,” Tom says. “She was two, Liz. Two. And she never had a chance.”

Tom tells Elizabeth that the neighbors heard the toddler screaming for her mother. The mother was in the next room stuffing her face with potato chips and watching the soaps. The screaming got so bad that the neighbors called the cops. But it was too late.

I understood now the depth of Tom’s sadness and anger.

“God, after I pronounced her dead, I went to my car and cried, Liz. I’ve never done that before. But I felt so helpless. How can a human being do something like that?”

“He wasn’t human,” Elizabeth says. “He was an animal.”

Tom leans against her and Elizabeth wraps her arms around him and kisses the top of his head. “I wish I could take away your pain,” she says.

Tom sees Olivia’s white doctor kit on the floor, and he smiles.

I used to love to pretend that I was a doctor. I remember the day we found my doctor’s kit at the Goodwill store. It was brand new. Never been opened. Wasn’t often I found a toy that had never been opened at the Goodwill store, but that was my lucky day. And I was even luckier because Grandma bought it, after she got the clerk to take a dollar less than the ticket price.

I brought that toy kit home and played and played and played with it. Grandma would lie on the couch and I would do all of the things I just recorded Olivia doing – checking her reflexes, temperature and heart; taking her blood pressure; and giving her a shot.

Grandma even put some of the cinnamon candies we used to decorate Christmas cookies in an old plastic prescription container for me to use as pretend pills.

“How am I doing, Doc?” Grandma asked.

“Pretty good. But you need to make more cookies. That would make you feel better.”

Grandma laughed. “Are you sure, Doc?”

“Yes. Making cookies will make you feel better. And maybe some brownies.”

Grandma made the best chocolate-chip cookies in the whole universe. She didn’t buy the ones you break apart and bake like Rachel’s mom. She made them from scratch. And her brownies were good, too. Rachel’s mom bought brownies. They came individually wrapped.

“You rest while I check on my other patients.”

I always placed my dolls and stuffed animals around the room and pretended to do hospital rounds, visiting each patient.

I walked over to my stuffed panda bear, Lucy. “How are you today, Lucy?”

Grandma always provided the voices for my patients. “It hurts when I swallow.”

“Let me check your throat.” I grabbed the light scope. “Open wide. Just what I thought. Strep throat. Here’s a pill.”

I pretended to give Lucy a pill and moved to my next patient, a doll named Suzy who broke her arm. After examining Suzy, I used the roll of toilet paper Grandma had given me to use as pretend bandages and wrapped Suzy’s arm. After seeing my other patients, I returned to Grandma.

“Do you think I could go home tomorrow?” Grandma asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Provided you take this pill and get a good night’s rest.”

I gave Grandma one of the cinnamon-candy pills and she rolled it in her mouth until it dissolved.

“I feel all better,” she said.

And she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, even pretend snoring for more effect.

How I wished I could have cured Grandma with a cinnamon-candy pill when she got so sick that she couldn’t get out of her chair. Funny that as a child I could fix everything and as an adult, very little.