Читать книгу One Breath Away - Heather Gudenkauf, Heather Gudenkauf - Страница 18

I know when it’s eleven o’clock because that’s when my mother shows up at the door of my hospital room for the second time each day. She comes right away in the morning at eight, and then at ten she goes for coffee in the hospital cafeteria. She always returns at eleven, and knocks on the doorjamb, pokes her head through a crack in the door and calls out in a cheerful voice, “Is this a good time to visit?” For the first week I didn’t bother answering. Every movement, even forming words, was excruciating. My mother would come in, anyway, pull a chair more closely to my bedside. She brought magazines and her knitting and for the next three hours she would just sit. She didn’t utter a word unless I opened my one good eye, and when I did, the familiar voice of my childhood would settle over me like a crisp, sun-warmed sheet fresh from the clothesline.

“Remember,” my mother begins today, “the time when you were home alone and something spooked the cattle and they somehow got through the gate?” I try not to smile; the muscles in my face screamed with any twitch. I can feel the infection bubbling beneath my skin and wonder what new antibiotic they will try to fight this current setback.

Until just that moment I had forgotten that humid August day the cattle escaped. My parents, along with my brothers Wayne, Pete, Jeff and Todd, decided to make a day trip over to Linden Falls where there was a farm auction. I had no desire to spend my day looking at crappy old farm equipment so I pretended to be sick and stayed behind.

I had lain luxuriously in bed, long after they had left, when I heard the bellow right below my window. I was well accustomed to the mooing and lowing of cattle, but this sound was much too close. I scrambled from my bed, untangling myself from the sheets, and pushed aside my white linen curtains that hung heavily in the humid air. Below me two dozen or more white-faced black baldies wandered lazily in the front yard. I pulled on my barn boots and spent the next four hours trying to corral the cattle. I hollered and pushed and prodded and begged the beasts to return to the pen. Our six-month-old blue-mottled Australian cattle dog, Roo, tried to help me, but after thirty minutes she collapsed in exhaustion beneath the lone crab apple tree in our front yard.

“Oh.” My mother laughs as she also remembers that day. “When we came in the house you were sunburned, bruised and sore from your cattle wrangling, but all of the animals were back where they belonged.” My mother pauses in her knitting. “I remember your father telling everyone he knew about how responsible you were that day. ‘Regular cowgirl,’ he said. He was so proud of you.”

I remember each achy muscle, the way the heat rose from my sunburned skin, the way the ice cream that my father made a special trip into Broken Branch to get just for me felt as it slid, cold and smooth, down my throat. I feel my mother’s hand against my uninjured cheek. “What would you like to order for lunch today, Holly?” she asks me. “Ice cream sounds good, doesn’t it?”

I nod, my cheek absorbing the coolness of her skin against mine. I think of Augie and P.J. so far away, and even though I know it will slow the healing process, I begin to cry. I miss them terribly. Me, the person who could walk away from anyone without so much as a backward glance. “Home,” I manage to grunt.

My mother looks confused for a moment and for a second I know she thinks I’m asking to go back to Broken Branch, but then her eyes clear. “Your house had too much smoke and fire damage. When you get out of here, you can stay in my hotel for a few days, then you’ll come to the farm with me for a while, just until you’re back on your feet. Then we’ll find you a new house. I’ve already started looking in the newspaper.” She doesn’t quite understand what I mean but I’m too tired, the fever has addled my brain so that I can’t explain in words what I mean. And while most of my burns are healing, I know I’m not getting better. No one is even talking about the day I’m going to get out of here anymore. Sometimes home isn’t the house, I want to say, it’s the people. Augie and P.J. are my home and I miss them terribly.