18
Then i was on the sidewalk beside Mother, sitting there holding her hand, while the officers went around making notes and taking flashlight pictures. Then a guy was there, asking who called for a bullhorn. “I did,” said Mr. O’Brien, appearing from somewhere, “but it won’t be needed now. Take it back.” I began kissing Mother’s hand, and then began kissing her, on the mouth, I mean, but it was so cold I was terrified and started to wail. I wailed louder and louder and louder, like some kind of a banshee, and heard Mr. O’Brien say, “This girl is in pretty bad shape, and I’m taking her to Prince George’s General.” But I kept right on wailing while he stretched me out on my back and tried to get me quiet. Not that he did, at all. Then an ambulance was there, and two guys lifted me onto a stretcher and tucked a blanket around me. Then I was inside the ambulance, and then in some kind of a room with women and kids and guys with bandaged heads — the accident ward, I guess. But Mr. O’Brien was there and got action on me pretty quick. An intern bent over me, where I was still on the stretcher, and then had me carried away by orderlies in green smocks.
Then I was in bed, in a room, with my clothes all taken off, and he was jabbing me in the backside with a needle. Then he said to Mr. O’Brien, “That ought to do it for a while.”
Next thing I knew, I was lying under a sheet, with a hospital gown on that barely came to my waist, and I was sobbing into my hands, which I was holding over my eyes. And I heard some woman say, “That girl in the other bed is driving me insane. All she does is whoop and holler and bawl. I can’t read, I can’t sew, I can’t sleep, I can’t think!” Then another woman said, “It’s OK, I’ve arranged to move you out, into another room. Now!” When I looked a nurse was there, helping a woman get up from the other bed, put her kimono on, and leave. I was alone for a minute, but the crying kept right on. Then another nurse came in, carrying a bottle, and she threw back the sheet and took off my hospital gown, so I was naked. She said, “Now you have the room to yourself, and I’m going to give you a massage — that ought to quiet you down. But if it doesn’t, if you still can’t get control, then I have to slap you. Do you hear?”
“Yes, Miss, I hear.”
“Not as punishment. It’s the indicated treatment.”
“I’ll do my best, I’ll try.”
“You can if you make yourself.”
So she started the massage, slobbing the lotion on, which was what she had in the bottle, witch hazel I think. And I tried to hold in, but pretty soon the sobs broke out once more. Then pow, here came the slap, and then another and another. But I didn’t like it too much and started to scream. She slapped me still harder, but then suddenly she stopped. Then I heard a man’s voice say, “Perhaps if you leave me with her, I can get her quiet. It’s all right, I’m her father.”
When I twisted around to see, she was leaving and Mr. Wilmer was there. “What do you mean you’re my father?” I yelled at him. “You’re nothing but my stepfather, the guy that married my mother... and she’s dead!”
I really came out with it, but he took me under the arms, the way you take a child, lifted me up, and carried me to a chair, where he sat down with me in his lap. Then he reached for the sheet and pulled it over me, for warmness, but the part next to him was naked. Then he whispered, “If you want to cry, little Mandy, OK, let it come, nobody’s going to slap you. But don’t be surprised if I start crying too. I’ve had about all I can take, and I loved her too, you know.”
“When did you get back?”
“This morning.”
“What time is it now?”
“Just after two o’clock.”
“And what day is it?”
“Wednesday.”
“Then, it was last night that it happened?”
“That’s right. I was so glad, coming off the plane, that I’d be seeing her soon, and you, and then I was paged at the airport. When I went to the office, Clawson’s wire was waiting for me.”
Suddenly I realized I wasn’t crying anymore, and asked, “Why did you say you’re my father?”
“Mandy, I am.”
“We fixed it that Steve was my father.”
“I know about that. But I am.”
“I asked you why you say so.”
“It started when I was eighteen, gassing up in a filling station, when a girl ran in off the street, a teenage girl in slacks, to get a Coke from the machine. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and as she started out I said, ‘Hey.’
“‘Well, hey your own self,’ she answered.
“‘Where you think you’re going?’
“‘Well, it’s Saturday, isn’t it?’
“‘And what does that have to do with it?’
“‘On Saturday you wouldn’t know where you’re going.’
“‘Then, that means you’re coming with me?’
“By that time she was at the door of the car looking me over and held the Coke bottle at me for me to take a swig. About that time the guy came with my change, and she helped herself to a dime. She put in a call, then came and got in beside me. She said, ‘I told Mother I’d run into friends, and she gave me till six o’clock.’ I swore to have her back on time and ran her down to our beach house, one that my family had on the Bay, between the bridge and Annapolis Harbor. But it was late September, and we had it all to ourselves, the happiest day of my life — completely silly and mad, with that mad, wonderful girl. We went swimming, she in my mother’s bikini, I in my own trunks, and then we came back to the beach house. I got her home at six sharp, and her mother came out to shake hands and congratulate her on having ‘punctual, dependable friends.’”
“OK, and what happened then?”
“I had to go off to college. Yale.”
“Well? And what happened then?”
“Mandy, you know, don’t you?”
“Steve told me a little.”
“Then there’s no need for me to say more. I was stunned when she married Vernick. But, say this for her: she’d been going with him and honestly thought he was the one.”
“And when did you find out that you were?”
“The second I laid eyes on you.”
“Last week, you mean?”
“You’re the image of my little sister, whom your mother never knew, as she died before that day at the beach. And that same day I proved it by watching your lips, how they trembled, like hers used to do, when I made you recite that day. Remember? ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’? You looked like a cute little bunny, a rabbit eating lettuce. That night I convinced your mother, and we were going to tell you as soon as that mess was over.”
“Is that the surprise you had?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I went nuts trying to guess.”
“Mandy, you also look like your mother, and that’s what cost her her life. That boy mistook her for you. She died that you might live.”
“It’s what makes it so hard for me.”
He held me close, and I knew, of course, it was true, that I’d found my father at last, and was glad, but not very much. Actually, I didn’t feel anything, perhaps on account of what I’d been through. He began talking some more, about Steve, and the “glory-hole scapula he wore around his neck, a card with that title, which directed that he be cremated if he got killed in a crash and his ashes scattered on Number One. So his family are doing that.” And he also mentioned Rick, “whose family claimed his body and are burying him in the plot that they have in one of the cemeteries. I don’t know which one and really don’t much care.” I said I didn’t either and to please not talk about it. But he said, “I’m leading to something, Mandy: her I want near us, where we’ll be living now — at the house on the lake, our home, the one I had with her, that she helped build and lived in just one night. I want to bury her on our island.”