Part 35 (2/2)

”I'll put some cream on it,” she said. ”I should probably take my sleeping pill.” She went back to her room and a moment later the volume on her TV went up. Screaming and crying and gunfire poured out of the television all night, but I didn't see her again until six o'clock in the morning-one hour after I'd gone to sleep-when she knocked on my door yelling, ”Free continental breakfast!”

My eyes were red and swollen with dark circles under them, and I was still wearing my clothes from the day before. Deborah looked at me and laughed.

”We're a mess!” she said, pointing to the hives now covering her face. ”Lord, I was so anxious last night. I couldn't do anything with myself so I painted my fingernails.” She held out her hands for me to see. ”I did a horrible job!” she said, laughing. ”I think I did it after I took my pill.”

Her nails and much of the skin around them were bright fire-engine red. ”From a distance it looks okay,” she said. ”But I'd get fired if I was still doin nails for a living.”

We walked down to the lobby for our free breakfast. As Deborah wrapped a handful of mini-m.u.f.fins in a napkin for later, she looked up at me and said, ”We're okay, Boo.”

I nodded and said I knew. But at that point I wasn't sure of anything.

CHAPTER 35

Soul Cleansing

By later that day, the hives had spread across Deborah's back, her cheeks were splotchy and red, and long welts filled the s.p.a.ces beneath each eye. Both lids were swollen and s.h.i.+ning like she'd covered them in blood-red shadow. I asked again and again if she was okay and said maybe we should stop somewhere so she could see a doctor. But she just laughed.

”This happens all the time,” she said. ”I'm fine. I just need some Benadryl.” She bought a bottle that she kept in her purse and swigged from all day. By noon, about a third of it was gone.

When we got to Clover, we walked along the river, down Main Street, and through Henrietta's tobacco field. And we visited the home-house, where Deborah said, ”I want you to take a picture of me here with my sister.”

She stood in front of the house, turned both photos of Elsie so they faced me, and held them to her chest. She had me take pictures of her and Elsie on the stump of what used to be Henrietta's favorite oak tree and in front of Henrietta's mother's tombstone. Then she knelt on the ground, next to the sunken strips of earth where she imagined her mother and sister were buried. ”Take one of me and my sister by her and my mother grave,” she said. ”It'll be the only picture in the world with the three of us almost together.”

Finally we ended up at Henrietta's sister Gladys's house, a small yellow cabin with rocking chairs on its porch. Inside we found Gladys sitting in her dark wood-paneled living room. It was warm out, sweats.h.i.+rt weather, but Gladys had her double-wide black wood-stove burning so hot, she sat beside it wiping sweat from her forehead with tissue. Her hands and feet were gnarled from arthritis, her back so bent her chest nearly touched her knees unless she propped herself up with an elbow. She wore no underwear, only a thin nightgown that had ridden above her waist from hours in her wheelchair.

She tried to straighten her gown to cover herself when we walked in, but her hands couldn't grasp it. Deborah pulled it down for her, saying, ”Where everybody at?”

Gladys said nothing. In the next room, her husband moaned from a hospital bed, just days from death.

”Oh right,” Deborah said, ”they at work ain't they?”

Gladys said nothing, so Deborah raised her voice loud to make sure Gladys could hear: ”I got a Internet!” she yelled. ”I'm going to get a web page up about my mother and hopefully be getting some donations and funding so I can come back down here put a monument up on her grave and turn that old home-house into a museum that will remind people of my mother down here!”

”What you put in there?” Gladys asked, like Deborah was crazy.

”Cells,” Deborah said. ”Cells so people can see her multiply.”

She thought for a moment. ”And a great big picture of her, and maybe one of them wax statues. Plus some of them old clothes and that shoe in the house. All that stuff mean a whole lot.”

Suddenly the front door opened and Gladys's son Gary came inside yelling, ”Hey Cuz!” Gary was fifty, with that smooth Lacks skin, a thin mustache and soul patch, and a gap between his front teeth that the girls loved. He wore a red and blue short-sleeved rugby s.h.i.+rt that matched his blue and red jeans and sneakers.

Deborah squealed, threw her arms around Gary's neck, and pulled the photo of Elsie from her pocket. ”Look what we got from Crownsville! It's my sister!” Gary stopped smiling and reached for the picture.

”That's a bad shot,” Deborah said. ”She's crying cause it's cold.”

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