No one shooed us out this time. The room
was crowded with people touching each other – hugging, or holding hands, or perhaps
with just hanging on to a sleeve or resting a hand on a neighbor’s shoulder. My
parents almost never touched each other, but my father had my mother’s hand in
his.
Grandma was lying in bed, her eyes closed.
The machine next to the bed was making loopy, graceful waves, whose peaks were
stretching farther and farther away from each other. She opened one eye, then
the other, and looked straight at Ray Green, who looked young and nervous, his
eyes very wide and his back very straight. One of her hands lifted slightly and
Ray was there, holding it and talking to her, very quiet and very fast. He had
the most beautiful smile.
Noreen looked at me, then at the window.
Everyone was looking at my grandmother, and Noreen went and put her hand on the
pillow, and one finger on Grandma’s cheek. It made a lovely picture, even for
those who couldn’t see the American soldier, his long black fingers resting
gently on an old woman’s palm. I edged to a window, which looked like it hadn’t
been opened in years, and nudged it up an inch or so. It squeaked, but one of
the cousins and my mother was crying, and no one seemed to notice. Grandma’s
fingers curled around Ray’s, and she died.
I didn’t look then. I didn’t want to see
whose ghost it was who had joined Ray, rising from the bed. So I don’t know if
Annie Wilk, eighteen, walked by me, her short curls bouncing, or the old woman,
a bit stout and short of breath, who made wonderful scones on Sundays and knew
without being told that the gift I wanted most of all when I was seven was a
jackknife with two blades and numerous attachments, including a little scissors
and a fish-scaler. There was a touch on the back of my head as they passed.
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