“Ms. Moser,” the woman’s voice said. “Did you have some ice?”
“My stomach hurts,” Tennessee said, surprised that she was able to find the words, but it did hurt, and the pain was both deep and wide.
“It’s your hip.” The woman said it with such simple authority that Tennessee wondered if she had a way of knowing. Her hip hurt, yes, she knew that, but the stomach was something else altogether.
“Stomach,” she said again.
The woman snapped the chart shut, making a breeze that fanned Tennessee’s forehead in a lovely way. “Did you have some ice?”
Drop the curtain. After that there was nothing, maybe some sleep. It was very hard to say what was real sleep and what was a lapse in memory or a smooth slope of medication that strapped her into a luge and sent her straight over the icy edge of a cliff. She knew how to go with it. She did not try to grab hold of anything to slow herself down. When she woke up she was in a regular room again and the blinds were pulled high. She blinked her eyes a couple of times against the honeyed light.
“You can flat sleep,” a woman’s voice said. It wasn’t the one who was asking her about the ice. It was somebody else.
Tennessee ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth in order to loosen up the words. Her teeth felt small and unfamiliar. “How long have I been out?”
The woman got up from the chair where she had been sitting and came and stood beside the bed. She was dark skinned and terribly pretty with her hair in a mop of short, tight braids. She was wearing a pumpkin orange shirt dress that buttoned up the front and a pair of scuff slippers.
It was the dress that was familiar first. Even when she could only see it as a field of color she remembered. Tennessee had loved that dress. The color put out a heat all its own. She would have asked to borrow it but she was at least three sizes bigger, six inches taller.
“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up all day,” the woman said.
It came to her one piece at a time, the dress, the voice. Her vision was blurry from all the sleep but Tennessee in her bed blinked and blinked again. She had no choice but to admit to what she saw. Ne plus ultra. It was a phrase a teacher had used in school. She hadn’t thought of it in years but then she’d had no reason to. There by her bedside stood Tennessee Alice Moser, beloved, dearest and best. Tennessee Alice Moser, who at the greenest age of twenty-five had died of urosepsis in the emergency room of Boston Medical Center before anyone had ordered the tests to figure out what was wrong with her. Her truest friend, Tennessee Alice Moser, the big-hearted, small-boned girl for whom she had named herself, was now almost ten years dead, but standing in this hospital room anyone would have to say she was as fresh as a blade of new spring grass. How perfect she was! The clock had stopped and left her twenty-five and twenty-five was young. Not one bit of her stooped forward. Her eyes were fire bright. Her shoulders were straight and back. She even smiled like a girl. “My God,” Tennessee said. “How sweet you are!”
Tennessee Alice Moser touched the back of Tennessee’s cheek with her hand. “You too, girl of mine.”
“Am I dreaming or dead?” Not that it mattered to her either way. It was fine if it meant getting to see her friend. She was always sorry she hadn’t had those kind of dreams people say they have, the ones where the person you love the most comes back and sits by your bed and holds your hand after they’re gone. She had not had a single vision of Tennessee Alice Moser since she had gone into the little cubical of the emergency room to say goodbye to the body that was there. In that last moment their roles were reversed from what they were now: Tennessee Alice Moser lay in her bed, eyes closed, chin tipped back, and Tennessee sat alongside, holding her cooling hand. Since that night she’d had only a few small photographs kept safe in a Field Guide to North American Fishes to rely on, and to tell the truth she hadn’t looked at those in years. They broke her heart.
Tennessee Alice Moser looked down at herself, smoothed the sides of her dress with her hands. “You are neither one exactly. Sort of in between the two. Or you can think of it as anesthesia.” She leaned over and pushed the automatic button to raise up her friend’s head.
“Is it all right to do that?” Tennessee asked. “I think I’ve just been operated on.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll put you out flat again before I go.”
“Thoughtful girl.”
“That surgery,” she shook her head. “Be glad you weren’t awake to see it.”
“Awful?”
Tennessee Alice Moser squinched up her eyes and then covered her face with her hands. “It was so bloody.”
“You never were any good with bloody.”
She sighed and dropped down into a chair beside the bed. “I was not.”
Tennessee was smiling now and couldn’t stop, thinking of her friend having to watch not only the surgery but everything that happened in her life and in Kenya’s life all these years gone by. “Do you think I’ll live through this?” She had meant to be teasing but Tennessee Alice Moser reached into her own hair and pulled on one of her little braids.
“I don’t know yet. It’s kinda up in the air.”
The vagueness of the answer should have been, at the very least, a cause for more questions but at the present moment Tennessee was easily distracted. “Kenya does that.”
“Does what?”
“Yanks her hair. I could tell her to stop it for the rest of my life and she couldn’t. She doesn’t know she’s doing it.”
“You think she looks like me?”
“Carbon copy, but that’s not even what I’m saying. She is like you. All the little things she does are you. Sometimes I just have to stare at her. It blows my mind.”
Tennessee Alice Moser looked down at her hands in her lap and she smiled.
Her friend in the bed went on, glad to have someone to say this to since she thought about it every day without anyone to tell. “Sometimes I feel like my entire life has been some sort of study in genetics,” Tennessee said. “There’s Kenya doing things like you, and then I wonder if my boys are doing things like me.”
“I imagine they are. I imagine that’s how it works.”
“You should see the way she runs, like it was born in her bones. The coaches always say to me, ‘Were you a runner? Was her daddy a runner?’ She’s eleven years old and I couldn’t keep up with her on a bike.”
“I think maybe Ebee ran. I’m not sure. You just tell them you were Wilma Rudolph in your last life.” She took her friend’s hand in the hospital bed and turned it over. She lined them up palm to palm then entwined the fingers until they were locked up tight.
“In my last life I was somebody named Beverly who had two little boys and gave them up. In this life I’m you and I have a daughter.”
“You have my daughter, yes you do.” Her voice was distracted then, miles away.
Tennessee looked at her friend and worried. She had always worried if she’d done the right thing. “I tried to find Ebee,” she said.
“What would you have done with him?”
“I thought he might have wanted Kenya,” she said, but she really didn’t think he would have. He had hardly even wanted Tennessee Alice Moser. He had been less like a boyfriend and more like a couple of weekends, a couple of good nights out. Tennessee had only met him once in the stairwell. She did not exactly remember his face. What she could remember was Tennessee Alice Moser looking over her shoulder in that pumpkin colored dress that fit her so neatly, her smile wide enough to show even her back teeth. She would not think ill of any man who had made her friend so happy, but who’s to say he would have been interested in a baby he hadn’t known about to begin with? “Here you go, total stranger,” she would say, handing Kenya over. “Here is my beloved baby girl. You take her.” Not that it mattered. She didn’t find him. She searched and did not find.
“No,” Tennessee Alice Moser said. “I don’t think Ebee would have been right.”
“I looked for your mother, too.”
<
br /> “Well, you would have had to look for her where I am now.”
“Really?”
“She’s dead, and one of my sisters, too. I guess we didn’t turn out to be such a hardy bunch. The other sister I would have to say not a chance. I wouldn’t have wanted her to get her hands on my girl.” Tennessee Alice Moser sighed and scratched off a dried clump of blood that was clinging to the bandage on her friend’s forehead. “No, you’re the one I’d have picked if I’d ever given the whole thing five minutes of thought. Unless,” she said, and there she stopped.
“Unless?”
“Well, didn’t you ever think of putting her up for adoption?”
Tennessee was frankly stunned. Kenya, who she had stood by every minute of her life as if she was her very flesh? “Adoption?”
Her friend brushed the surprise aside without even considering it. “It’s not like it’s a completely foreign concept. Your boys did pretty well in the system. They wound up in a big house, they went to good schools. Don’t get me wrong, I think you’ve done a wonderful job and I’m grateful to you, I am. I know you love her and I know that counts for everything, but I have to tell you I’ve wondered. You were the one going back to college. You were the one talking about law school. Then you take my baby and all of that’s gone?”
“I couldn’t give her away. She wasn’t mine to give away back then.” Tennessee worked to keep a steady voice. “I kept thinking I’d find the right person, the person she belonged to. You can’t just take a baby back once you’ve adopted them out.”
Tennessee Alice Moser lowered her eyebrows and looked at her friend hard, just looked at her and said nothing, giving her time to come to her own conclusion until finally Tennessee sighed and picked at the tape that held the IV line into the top of her hand. “Okay, all right. So I didn’t want to give her up. Is that what you want to hear me say? I was terrified that I was going to find one of those people I was looking for. But what you’re forgetting is how sick I was over you after you died, and how Kenya and I made each other feel better. Don’t you remember how good she was? I’d go and pick her up after work and she would just smile and grab for me. I’d pick her up in my arms and I thought I would die for loving her so much. I never wanted to put her down. I wasn’t going to give her away to strangers. Things worked out for my boys, you’re right, but I was stupid then and I was young. I didn’t stop to think about all the really bad people there are out there who could wind up raising your child. I couldn’t take that chance again, even if I had been lucky before. I’d already given up my own boys, you know. I’d given up my family. I’d given up you. At some point it’s just enough.”
Tennessee Alice Moser nodded, looking like the wisest twenty-five-year-old that God had ever created. “I never thought about leaving her. I remember when she was born I looked at her and I thought, I am going to be with you for the rest of your life.”
“Well, you meant to,” Tennessee said.
She brushed her hand against her friend’s forehead. She felt so wonderfully warm. “What am I supposed to call you, anyway?”
In the hospital bed, Tennessee rolled over onto her side. She felt the stiff crunch of the bandages taped to her hip but no pain. There had been such a raging sea of pain and now there was nothing, not even a stitch or an ache. She flexed her foot back and forth to check again. “Beverly? I don’t know. There’s nobody left who calls me Beverly now but I imagine I could answer to it.”
“I’ll call you Tennessee.”
Tennessee shook her head, feeling guilty. “You shouldn’t do that. It’s your name.”
“It’s not like I’m using it for anything.”
Tennessee really didn’t know what she needed to explain to her friend and what her friend already knew. It seemed possible that their lives, Kenya’s and her own, were like a show that Tennessee Alice Moser watched, and all of their details and decisions were already understood. It seemed equally possible that from time to time she could have turned her face away, missing certain days or weeks that were important to the story. “It was all I could figure out to do,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t adopt her myself. It would cost a fortune and take forever and they probably wouldn’t have given her to me anyway.”
“No, you were smart. You were always the smartest person I knew. I really think you would have been a politician if you’d kept up with school.” Tennessee Alice Moser had dreamed big for her friend as was her inclination. “That’s what I think. You always had important things to say. You made a million times more sense than any of those guys you used to go listen to.”
“I was never going to be a politician.”
“You were. You understood the system.”
Tennessee shook her head. “There isn’t any system. I found that out when I took Kenya. The law only goes to a certain point and then it stops. When all this was going on, when I wasn’t finding Ebee or your mother and I knew I wanted to keep her for myself, that’s when I realized there really wasn’t anybody out there watching what we did. I mean, they still watched me in Filene’s, they watched at the grocery store to make sure I didn’t run off with a quart of milk, but take someone’s child? Why, they all but held open the door for me. I left that apartment in Jamaica Plain with Kenya in my arms and moved to Roxbury and not one person had a thing to say about it. Even good old Mrs. Roberts next door who watched Kenya the night you died, she never asked me how I was managing to keep her.” Tennessee closed her eyes and thought about her daughter’s face. It was too open, too bright, too beautiful like her mother’s. “That’s why I keep her so close to me now. I make sure that no one’s going to walk off with her.”
“Maybe you keep her too close.”
Tennessee shook her head. “Forgive me, but you might not understand the way the world is today. It’s a dangerous place. You’ve got to be careful now, especially with a daughter.”
“It’s always been that way with daughters since way before either one of us was born, but that still doesn’t mean you needed to keep her inside so much. You didn’t have to turn her whole life into a big secret.”
“Her life’s not a secret.”
“Sure it is. You drag her around everywhere after those boys. She’s not allowed to talk to them, she’s not allowed to tell anybody what she’s doing. That’s not fun for a little kid.”
Tennessee was hurt. She had only been trying to live her life in balance, to do her best for everyone concerned and that meant all of her children. “You think I should have given up my boys?”
“I think you already did give up your boys. I think you should have paid more attention to the girl you had. If you were going to take on my name and my daughter then I wish you had taken on a little more of me. Instead you went to work some dead-end nursing home job like I had. Did you think that’s what it meant to be like me? You know how much I hated that job. You were a secretary going back to school. You were the smart one. If you really wanted to be like me you could have at least had a little fun.”
Now Tennessee was crying. She kept her eyes closed and let the tears push out the sides. You should have stuck around, was what she was thinking, see if you could have managed it any better yourself.
Tennessee Alice Moser shook her head. She had waited such a long time to come back and now she was being nothing but critical. She had missed her friend terribly, this woman who had done everything she could to do right by her memory. “You must be thirsty,” she said in a conciliatory voice, and her quietly weeping friend admitted that she was. Tennessee Alice Moser poured out a cup of water from the little Styrofoam pitcher on the night table, bending the straw down to reach her lips. “What you realize after awhile,” she said, “is that there are a lot of things you think you’re going to do and it turns out you can’t. I was going to keep Kenya with me but then I died. You were going to keep her with you and you got hit by that damn car. So part of it is intention and part of it is luck. We’ve got very fine intentions but our luck isn’t so great.” She smile
d then, suddenly remembering the way she was wrong. Tennessee opened her lips to take in the straw. “Except we did find each other. That was luck.”
“That was the best luck I ever had.” Tennessee could see them in her mind, two girls in that rotten apartment building in Jamaica Plain, passing each other on the sidewalk in the summer heat, in the hallway in the winter bundled up in scarves, passing each other for such a long time before the constant recognition wore them down and they started to say hello. “I couldn’t get over your crazy name. When you first introduced yourself to me, I thought, who would name their daughter Tennessee?”
“My father used to tell me, just be glad your mama didn’t want to go back to Mississippi.”
“I wouldn’t have gone through with it if they’d named you Mississippi.” Both of them laughed like this was the craziest thing they’d ever heard when really they were just wanting something to laugh at to bring them together again.
“Now you’re living out my curse. Everybody has to ask you the same stupid questions they always asked me.”
“Tennessee like the state. I say it every time.” She reached up and put one finger on her friend’s chin. “You didn’t get old.”
“That’s the way it works.”
“I miss you all the time. I miss you more than I miss my family, my boys.”
“Scoot over,” Tennessee Alice Moser said, and then she climbed into the hospital bed beside her friend. She was always the little one. There was always room for her on the sofa, in a chair. She tucked her head down on the shoulder that she had known best in the world when she was alive.
“How is it being dead?” Tennessee asked.
“It’s good,” she said, but she didn’t look up. “It’s not like streets of gold or anything, but it’s nice. I hardly ever think about being alive.”