Waiting for Sparks. Kathy Damp
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PEERED INTO her grandmother’s hospital room where monitors glowed and beeped. Chet sat next to the narrow bed, his arms folded on the railing, head pillowed on them. Sweet Chet. The only person in Heaven who wasn’t afraid of her grandmother, other than Emma’s childhood friend Zoo. Emma stepped forward.
Nomi looked old. Her face, usually bright with vigor or pique, hung sallow. So many machines connected, like when Grumpa was here. So still. Had she—? Nomi moved her right leg slightly under the sheet and blanket.
Letting out the breath Emma didn’t know she’d been holding, she moved over to Chet and touched him on the arm. He jerked, then straightened.
“E?” Worry creased his wrinkles into gullies while his remaining white hair stuck up at every angle. She managed to lift her lips into a semblance of a smile as he gripped her hand. “Thank the good Lord you’re finally here.” No judgment sharpened his words, merely relief. If Nomi had said the same thing, it would have been clear that Emma had taken too long and someone else had had to shoulder her share of the burden.
Nodding toward her grandmother, Emma returned Chet’s squeeze. “How is she?”
“I’m scared, E.” He related the few details he knew: she fell, someone—nobody knew who—called the paramedics, and they brought her to Regional. She was stable. “I’ll leave you alone with her and wait outside.”
Her grandmother stirred. Picking up Nomi’s hand, Emma held it as Nomi lay unresponsive. “Tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she whispered.
Nomi’s lids rose slowly. “Trr-ouble,” she whispered through dry lips. Emma reached for a plastic glass with a flexible straw. Her grandmother sipped with shallow swallows.
“Yes,” Emma whispered back, a tear sneaking out of her eye. “It’s trouble, but you’ll be fine. You always are.”
“Sparks. Sparks.” Naomi’s head jerked against the pillow.
Had there been a fire the night of the stroke? Emma’s eyebrows slammed together.
“Take care of...trouble...” Her grandmother’s attempt at speaking alarmed the monitors. Emma stroked Nomi’s arm. Her grandmother would survive trouble. A plan of action for every crisis.
At Emma’s touch, she quieted and appeared to fall asleep.
After watching her grandmother to make sure her sleep was peaceful, Emma joined Chet in the hall. They walked silently through the hospital out toward the parking lot.
As long as there were memories, Nomi and Grumpa were in them. When a fireman came to school in second grade, some kid had asked her if her smoke jumper daddy had been a hero. She wasn’t sure, so she asked her grandmother. Nomi had hesitated, her hands stilling on the fridge door. She’d just returned from her office where she served as mayor and was pulling leftovers out for dinner.
“He did what he felt he had to do,” she’d answered, then she’d told Emma to go set the table. Heroes did what they had to do. Emma had decided if you couldn’t have a father, at least you could have a hero father in heaven. The other heaven.
Emma rubbed the vertical line between her brows that matched her grandmother’s. She knew little of her father, other than he’d left to go smoke jumping and had died.
As a child, she’d been told her mother—whoever she was—had had to go away, asking Nomi and Grumpa to take care of her. Grumpa had said that, so it must be true.
Emma had learned a little more as an early teen. Evidently, her mother had been too much of a teenager herself to handle a baby. Despite the fierce love of her grandmother and the gentle care of her Grumpa, a certain emptiness in Emma had never filled, the being left part. Being left had rendered her unable to call the town home. It set a pattern in motion. Temporary relationships only.
After hugging Chet in the hospital’s parking lot, she slid into the Omni and drove to the house where she’d grown up. She pulled the car onto the double-cemented lines of the driveway. Tomorrow she’d find out her grandmother’s details—or rather, checking her watch, later today—and head back to Salt Lake.
Straightening up, with her stomach continuing to grumble as it had in the hospital, Emma resolved to explore her grandmother’s fridge.
Movement next door at Feral Beryl’s drew her glance. Naomi’s archenemy had peeked out the kitchen window above the Berlin Wall, a tall wooden fence between the two properties. More than a property divider, it divided the have-not Beryl Winsome from the have-it-all Chambers. Beryl was a singularly unpleasant woman.
Emma pulled out her suitcases and approached the bungalow. Fatigue dripped down her neck like perspiration, and her suitcases, rolling behind her, weighed a ton. Lilac bushes that were as high as her waist as a child now towered over her five foot something. They glowed in the dark, lighting both sides of the flagstones to the house. Although chokecherry bushes almost past blooming partially blocked her view, the porch swing peeked through.
Back in the day, when Grumpa could get Nomi to “stop doing and come out and just be,” the three of them would sit in silence on the porch. Grumpa and Emma would be on the swing, Nomi sitting on the floor with her head against Grumpa’s knees. Nomi would jump up for something; Grumpa would say in the voice Nomi called his “bank president” tone, “Leave it, Naomi. The child’s more important.” And Nomi would sit down again.
Her grandmother, never quiet for long, would commence talking about how important it was that Emma make good choices. Clearing his throat, Grumpa would interrupt with another story about the fierce Lady Emma, a young girl extraordinaire who fought dragons and won. When his deep voice finished the story, silence would surround them like an old afghan. Until Nomi would make a surprised sound and exclaim, “Raymond, Emma is beyond bedtime!”
“Come along, Miss Beyond Bedtime,” he would say, and carry her off to bed. They would pray, her last sight Grumpa’s silhouette in the doorway. “Remember, I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck, Lady Emma.”
Smiling now, Emma walked through the open side gate, around the corner of the house and up the back steps. Sure enough, the door was unlocked, as were most houses in Heaven. She was in before she heard a new sound: a low growl and light panting.
THE HEADACHE HAD disappeared by the time Sparks awoke later that morning. While orienting himself to yet another new ceiling, he rubbed his neck reflexively. Traveling often left him muddled about which state, which city, even which country he’d landed in. Then, as he stretched his arms over his head, his muscles rushed to remind him, prompting him to recall as well the woman who’d rescued him.
First, there was the immediate intimacy of the little car and how careful she was to keep to her side. Second, her genuine concern for his head, those watchful side glances from the hazel eyes. Where had she been going with such intensity? He groaned again and rolled out of bed.
After a quick shower and shave, he dressed and left his room for the Dew Drop. He needed to get the scoop on Naomi, Emma and the Jamboree deal, and a local diner always had folks in the know. As he stepped off the curb, he winced. Better keep moving today or those muscles would stiffen up.
The pungent mixture of strong coffee and grease filled his nose not unpleasantly as he opened the diner’s glass door and stepped inside. Although Sparks had eaten some great food in great places across the planet, he still preferred American cardiac-zone cooking.
Most of the booths were full, and the counter didn’t have an empty swivel stool. The clatter of plates, silverware and voices rang against the red-wallpapered walls and aluminum wainscoting. A Coca-Cola clock from years past hung over the half circle of counter space.
“Coffee?” A middle-aged woman waved a coffeepot at him as she caught his glance. He shook his head no, Coke being his caffeine of choice, and continued to look around. When he spotted three men in work clothes