The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 477
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 39: Colors of the Past 14
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part Two
Chapter Four
The water on the lake was calm as George weaved his new Chevrolet through the slower moving traffic on Lake Shore Drive. He had not taken the time to put down the convertible roof but wished now that he could feel the bright sun and early spring air on his face. He loosened his tie, wiped his brow with the back of his hand and angled the small, triangular window so that the air blew directly into his face. The cold air stung his cheeks and moistened his eyes until a few minutes later he closed the window again.
The car screeched to a stop where the highway abruptly curved into the city. George took a cigarette from his breast pocket and lit it. He stared at the car ahead and tapped his foot against the accelerator to listen to the motor race.
The light changed and he turned north. The traffic was heavy and at Thorndale moving slowly. He cursed James for taking Susan to a hospital in Evanston as he cursed the driver of the car ahead and all of the other drivers that were holding him back.
As he tapped the tip of the cigarette nervously on the edge of the ashtray, an airplane glided silently overhead. He leaned into the steering wheel to watch and for a few minutes forgot where he was. The small plane seemed to hang effortlessly in the air. When it disappeared to the east, he wished that he were in it.
For half an hour the traffic did not move at all. He started to back up and the car horn behind sounded angrily before he had moved a yard. Through the rearview mirror George swore at the driver, who only smiled with a shrug in return.
A police cruiser and an ambulance screamed slowly through the center of the street, forcing the cars into even tighter formation. The driver behind got out of his car and went on foot to see what had happened.
George lit another cigarette when he finished the last. A woman and a young girl walked slowly toward him on the sidewalk. The woman was heavy-set and dark-skinned. She wore a thick cloth coat and a black hat pulled down over the top of her head.
The girl was tall and slender and about fifteen years old. Her skin was brown and she wore only a light sweater whose sleeves were too short for her long, spindly arms. Her tight, threadbare slacks hung only to her ankles.
The girl was talking excitedly to the older woman as they passed George’s car. Her voice was high and she spoke in fast, choppy syllables. He reached across the car to open a crack in the window and tried to listen to the words but they were gone before he could make sense of them.
Without realizing what he was doing, he followed their path with his eyes. The woman glanced suspiciously toward the car but the girl seemed aware of only the words she was saying. George watched their backs through the side mirror until they turned a corner and were finally out of sight.
He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger and the face of another young girl appeared. She had been not much older than this girl, not much more than a child. He had taken her into that dreary hotel and she had looked at him in the dark room through eyes that had seemed not fifteen years but fifteen centuries old, if she had looked at him at all.
But he had looked at her and had touched her soft, young skin with his fingers and had kissed her bony cheek and neck. He had held her close so that he could not escape the exotic smell of her body, so that he could feel the wiry texture of her hair against his face.
She had lain beneath him with her eyes closed and her lips pressed together until the moment had come when he no longer needed her. And then she had spoken in a voice similar to that of the girl who had just passed on the street, spoken as if nothing had passed between them and nothing ever could.
“You gonna come back,” she’d said and he couldn’t tell if she were asking or predicting.
“Maybe.” He got up and began to dress.
“If your friends let you.”
He gave her twenty dollars.
“Hey, it’s forty.” She seemed unaware that she still lay naked before him and that this was what the money was for.
He laughed. “You already have the lighter.”
“That don’t count. Where’s my money.”
He leaned over the bed and pulled her head back by the hair. “I thought you wanted me to come back.”
She held her breath and closed her eyes.
“Here.” He let go of her hair and dropped his cigarettes onto the bed. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”
She pulled the sheet to her chin and waited for him to leave.
George flicked his cigarette butt through the small window into the street and wished he had not spoken so harshly. Something had passed between them, something as profound and miraculous as what was waiting for him now at the hospital. He had never seen her again and yet it was possible that in that brief moment they had created a new life together.
He pushed down hard on the horn. The man in the car ahead raised his hands.
A sense of urgency welled up at the thought, a thought that had recurred in the year and a half that had passed, sometimes during the day when the work in front of him would disappear in an explosive flash, sometimes during the night when he would be startled into waking and forgetting. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs and press down on the accelerator so that all of the obstacles in his path would disappear.
He looked into the side view mirror again but the sidewalk was empty.
The intersection ahead was strewn with glass. An old car rested grotesquely with its front tires on the curb and its two left doors crumpled inward. A crowd had gathered on all four corners to watch. Beyond the accident the street was empty.
He parked a block from the hospital and walked briskly toward the entrance. The air felt cooler here than in the city. He looked back at the shiny mint green car he had bought the week before. He had bought it on a whim and was glad now to be starting new. The vision of the old, wrecked car was fresh in his mind.
James was standing on the steps outside the entrance to the hospital. He was smoking a cigarette.
“How is she?” George asked as he drew near. He saw that James had been watching him.
“The doctors say she’s doing fine.”
“Have you seen her?”
“She was asleep. She’ll be asleep for another hour or so.”
George took a deep breath. He stood on the bottom step and looked back down the street. A wide, black Cadillac was parked in front of his Chevrolet. He could see only the edge of the white convertible roof.
“Your daughter was born an hour ago,” James said, “at three-forty-four.”
“There was a traffic jam at Broadway,” George said and thought of the girl on the street. “I couldn’t get out.” He turned back to the older man. “Did you see her?”
James shook his head. “But the doctors say everything is fine. You may be able to see her now when you go upstairs. They’re on the fifth floor.”
“It took me two hours to drive up here,” said George. “There was an accident that tied up traffic for an hour.”
“That’s not important now, George,” James said and put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “What’s important now is for you to be with her.”
James remembered the day that Susan was born. He had said the same thing then to Richard. The same anxiety and uncertainty he had seen in Richard’s eyes he saw now in George’s. In Richard it had turned to desperation and finally despair.
“You should be there when she wakes up to tell her that everything went well. She won’t remember anything. She was asleep the whole time. She’ll want to see you as soon as she wakes up.”
George started up the steps without replying.
“I’m going home, George,” James said. “Tell Susan I’ll come to see her tomorrow when she’s feeling stronger.”
“All right, James. I’ll tell her.”
As James started down the steps, the Cadillac pulled into the street and then up to the curb. James disappeared behind the dark windows of the rear door and the car glided away as silently as the plane in the sky. George watched from inside the hospital doors. He took one last glance toward his own car but the view was blocked now by a wing of the building.
In the elevator he tried to imagine what his first child would look like but could see only a small, nondescript face. It was a girl and would have Susan’s dark eyes, perhaps made lighter by his own, and Susan’s delicate jaw and chin, disguised now beneath the round, pudgy form of a new-born, but as he put the pieces together in his mind, it wasn’t Susan’s babyish face that he saw. It was another face, a darker one that came from somewhere else in his past. When he closed his eyes, he was thinking of the dark-haired girl back east, as he had thought of her often since the night before the wedding.
On the third floor the doors opened and a nurse stepped in. She smiled without speaking before turning her back to him. George stood behind and stared at the crisp, white collar of her uniform next to the deep olive-brown of her skin and thought of the belly dancer. He had thought of her the night after the party and had wished then that they had not let her go so easily.
At the fifth floor, the nurse started out.
“Excuse me,” George said.
She turned back. “Yes?”
“Can you tell me where room 507 is?”
“I’m sorry, sir. There are no visitors allowed just yet. Visiting hours are from six to eight.”
He followed her into the hallway.
“You don’t understand. My wife is in room 507. She had a baby a little while ago. I want to see her now.”
The nurse turned back again and smiled this time. “What is the name?”
“Grange. George Grange.”
“Oh,” Her eyes widened. “You’re Mr. Grange?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the lady’s husband?”
“Yes.”
The smile disappeared.
“She gave birth earlier today. I had an important meeting and wasn’t able to get away in time.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Grange.” She was no longer looking at him. “If you’ll follow me.”
She started down the hallway.
“How is she?”
“Your wife?”
“Yes, my wife,” George said and felt the same exasperation welling up inside that he had felt in the car.
“She’s fine, Mr. Grange,” the nurse said without looking back. “When I checked on her a few minutes ago, she was still asleep. I wouldn’t expert her to come out of it until five-thirty or six and she’ll probably be groggy for a little bit, but that’ll wear off, too, in a couple of hours.”
She stopped in front of the desk.
“It’s the third door on the left right there.” She indicated the direction with a nod of the head. “And the baby is right over there in the nursery. I’ll point her out to you right now if you like.”
“Thank you but I’ll check on my wife first.”
George walked on down the hall. The nurse watched for a moment and then turned in the opposite direction.
As he passed the nursery, a baby was crying. Though it was muffled behind the glass that separated the newborns like specimens in an untested experiment, it was a shrill, piercing sound that reached up and down the hallway and through the closed doors of the rooms. He could not imagine that it was his own child that he heard ….