[title subtitle=”fiction: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
The rock fell. That was all Cookie Whittington knew. It fell from a bridge to the silver Buick below. The Buick that held her Vernon. He was coming to get her. She had called. Distraught. Over the new exercise class that promised to make her look twenty again. How stupid it seemed now, the way she cried in the parking lot, covered in sweat, her hair soaked, her T-shirt straining against her belly. She’d only made it through ten minutes of the class. The rest of the women were gazelles, whippets, or possibly drug addicts by the way they ran and jumped and screamed encouragement at eight o’clock in the morning. The blonde one in the red sports bra kept clapping her hands, yelling, “You can do it! You can do it!” It was obvious Cookie could not. She felt as if she might die. Defeated, she raised her hand for a bathroom break and trotted out of the gym. In the car, she ran her hands over her squishy thighs. She’d had dreams once: her body like a vision; the long line of her sculpted legs peeking through an open trench coat; her waist so small it looked as if she might snap in two.
But that was not who Cookie was. She was a thirty-seven-year-old fatty who’d been steeped in salsa from the local Mexican joint, filled with root beer from the town’s one drive-in, flush with frozen coconut cake she ate from the box, that she bought weekly at the discount grocery store.
And so she called Vernon. She wept, great tears, as if someone had died, when really she had only awakened to her true self. “Come get me,” she said. “I don’t think I can drive.” Just like that Vernon left his cubicle at Ashworth Tile where he’d been hunched over his desk, figuring out how much grout it would take to rework old Mrs. Bondurant’s downstairs shower. Cookie could see him tucking his blue scarf in his coat pocket. She could see the slant of his shoulders as he headed for his car, and the way his slick shoes slid on the circle of ice that had been a puddle just the day before.
In Hobbtown there is a road that ducks under a stone bridge built in 1933. Vernon drove under it and one of the stones fell and crashed through his windshield. Why the rock dislodged just at that time, no one knew. But they would investigate. They would surely investigate! Even hearing this was not enough to prepare her for what came next. For even then, with her phone pressed against her ear, she imagined the rock to be small, the hole in the windshield fixable, her husband stunned but not eternally damaged.
But now she is sitting in a chapel inside Pleasant Hill Hospital with a priest and a rabbi, and she covers her mouth to stop the laughter that always comes when she is nervous. A priest and a rabbi, it sounds like the beginning of a joke. They stare at their feet, and then they tell her Vernon is dead. The rabbi says “passed,” the priest says “gone to his great reward.” But they both mean dead.
Cookie wipes her brow. Her mouth goes dry. Her stomach jumps. She is shaking, visibly, the water inside the cup she’s been handed is a tsunami. The holy men want her to identify Vernon, but she stalls. They will go with her, one or both – her decision – but instead she closes her eyes and refuses to open them again. “Call my mom,” she finally says. “She’ll know what to do.” She is suddenly fifteen again. A ward of her mother’s again, unafraid to say she cannot or will not do what is necessary.
When her mother comes, they take the elevator down to the basement. They pass the cafeteria. The cooks are baking cinnamon rolls, the smell a curtain that falls across her, and for the first time in her life she does not turn toward them. She walks past the clattering trays, the visitors sitting at stunted plastic tables, and she says aloud, “Who puts a cafeteria on the same floor as the morgue?”
Inside the morgue, on a table covered in marble, is her Vernon. She can tell by the wedding ring that bites into his finger. His hand has been placed on top of the white sheet, and Cookie looks no further than his lonely wrist.
She is wearing her exercise T-shirt with the slogan that reads, If I Can Get Through This I Can Get Through Anything. She crosses her arms to try to hide the words. It is as if a cruel prankster has written the script for this entire wretched day. She glances at her mother, who willed herself to look at Vernon’s face, and now her mother is paying for it.
The fluorescent light stutters for a second, turns to gray, then sputters back to life. Cookie finds the door, and then the bathroom, and finally the tile floor, where she plans to stay until someone bigger than she is comes to take her away. And who, she thinks, is bigger than her?
This is where her mother finds her. This is where her mother sinks to the floor beside her, dropping her handbag that slides three feet away. Crawling, she retrieves it, reaches in, fishes for the amber bottle. “Ativan,” she says, and pulls out two pills, taking one and handing the other over. “It’ll make the next few hours easier.” When Cookie hesitates, she says, “I promise.”
At most times the size of your individual parts matters, but there are brief snippets when they do not. Cookie lets her stomach go slack. She slumps against the wall and seems to puddle there. A nurse comes in, looks around, backs away. Cookie and her mom are a sight right now. They are covered in their grief: hollowed-eyed, tortured, tears rolling like a river.
When Cookie finally speaks, she says, “I killed Vernon. He was coming to get me, a grown woman, because I said I couldn’t drive home from my exercise class. Because I was upset over my big behind. Because I was crying over my ruined body.”
Her mother shakes her head. She takes Cookie’s hand. “Our days are numbered from the time we’re born. You couldn’t have stopped today no matter what. We show up on this earth, we muddle through, and one day we’re called to our eternal home. It’s all laid out before we draw one breath.”
Cookie wants to believe it’s not her fault. She tries to imagine Vernon in heaven, but all she can see is him in a nicer cubicle. The monitor on his computer is gold trimmed, and he has wings, but nothing else has changed. Old Mrs. Bondurant still needs grout.
She remembers a day last summer, when she and Vernon were stretched out in their double hammock. He was touching her shoulders, telling her how beautiful she was. She didn’t feel beautiful, and had not since she’d packed on twenty extra pounds that seemed to come out of nowhere.
“You are so wonderfully and beautifully made,” he said, and she swatted his hand away. “Is that Shakespeare?” she asked, and he said, “That’s King James.”
“I don’t think it was written for me,” Cookie said, and Vernon said, “Of course it was.”
My lord, how she misses him.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Cookie asks.
Her mother mistakes the question, thinking Cookie is asking for an immediate plan. “There’s no rule book, baby girl. When your daddy died, I started calling. I had my address book and I went down the list. I even phoned our plumber. I said, ‘From now on I’ll be handling the bills because Alton just expired.’ The plumber was a kind man, and he said, ‘I’ll write that down, Mrs. Dupree. Your husband was a fine man, paid on time, liked to keep his pipes clean. I always appreciated that.’
“I liked what he said. Your daddy did like to keep the house up. And he did pay on time, which shows great character. Mostly, though, folks will say the wrong thing. They’ll tell you to be thankful you had Vernon as long as you did. They’ll tell you you’re lucky because you had a man that didn’t sneak around or ruin your credit. That’ll come mostly from the divorcees. People will come up to you in the grocery store and ask if you’re getting life insurance money. Then they’ll ask you how much.
“None of that matters, though. The important part is to keep letting people talk. They want to help, by and large, they want to take a piece of your grief and carry it for you for a little while. That’s the great mystery of people. Even when they say the worst wrong thing, they’re trying.”
In the hour or so that follows, Cookie lays with her head in her mother’s lap. Already, her thighs are aching from the exercise class. There is a stain on the ceiling in the shape of Texas and Cookie studies it, and she cries until her throat hurts.
There is no way to judge time in a hospital basement, no sunlight to shift through open windows, no clouds to roll past. Cookie does not know how long she’s been there until her mother shifts her weight and looks at her watch. “I think we should go,” she says, and they pull themselves up, using each other and the wall to help them.
Neither are in any shape to drive, so they call a cab. They arrive at Cookie’s house just as the sun is dipping so low in the sky it seems like a memory. Already, there are sympathy cards clipped to the screen door, and two cherry pies are sitting in a cardboard box on the porch. Cookie touches the card in the pink envelope and then takes each of them from the screen. In many, as her mother predicted, her friends and neighbors say the exact wrong thing, but Cookie decides it doesn’t matter. This caring, even in such imperfect doses, works its magic on her heart that was broken like stone when Vernon slipped beneath the Hobbtown Bridge.
