Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum Page A

had to get her information from her social worker.
    Trudy nods.
    That’s nothing new, she says. But thank you for telling me.
    Again, that glance of compassion. Then the nurse walks away, the rubber soles of her sneakers creaking on the linoleum.
    Trudy waits until the nurse has turned the corner. Then she takes a deep breath and opens her mother’s door.
    Oh, Mama, she says softly.
    Anna is asleep in a hospital bed, the light bar over it casting a white glare on her face. If they are so adamant about Anna getting her rest, why is this on? Trudy wonders. She steals across the room. At least Anna is hooked up to nothing more dire than an IV. There are no tubes snaking into her nostrils, no beeping machines. Trudy lifts a plastic chair to the bedside. She sloughs her coat and sits as near to Anna as she dares.
    Trudy has not seen Anna since Anna’s seventy-sixth birthday in August, and she is shocked by how much Anna has changed in three months. Failing , the older New Heidelburgers would call it. Trudy catalogues with indignant sorrow the weight loss, the age spots, the spreading bruise on her mother’s hand from the IV. They are frightening and unfair, the ravages time wreaks. Yet even now, Trudy is struck by the extraordinary geometry of her mother’s face: the sculpted cheekbones and square jaw. The pleasing symmetry of widow’s peak and pointed chin. In Anna’s gray hair, the light streaks—once blond, now white—providing the touch of oddity without which real beauty is incomplete. Ever since Trudy can remember, whenever Anna made one of her rare forays into public, people would gravitate to whatever room she was in, just to look at her. But they never got too close. Anna’s loveliness, combined with how little she talked, set her apart from ordinary folk. Made them clumsy. Suspicious. Shy. Resentful: Oh, she’s stuck-up, all right. Thinks she’s so much better than us.
    But Trudy knows there are other reasons for Anna’s silence. Now Trudy inches farther forward and squints, as if by concentrating she could penetrate the surface to what really interests her: her mother’s skull, hard as the casing of a walnut. And within this, like the meat of a walnut with its complicated folds, her mother’s brain. What information is encrypted in that soft gray matter? Trudy wonders. She watches Anna’s eyes roll back and forth like marbles beneath their papery lids. What is Anna seeing now as she sleeps? What scenes so shameful that she will never speak of them, has never spoken of them, not even to her own daughter? What memories so tormenting that they have finally—perhaps—become unbearable?
    As if she senses this invasive line of questioning, Anna jerks and wakes. She focuses her pale eyes on Trudy, who is reminded of the ghostly stare sometimes seen from a dead relative in an old photograph, a gaze from which one can’t turn away.
    Trudy hastily sits back. Anna looks at her, or perhaps through her to somebody who isn’t there.
    Mama? How are you feeling?
    Anna doesn’t so much as blink. The familiar silence spins itself out, so complete that Trudy can hear the faint and insectile buzz of the fluorescent bar over the bed.
    Won’t you talk to me, Mama?
    Anna says nothing. Trudy waits. Then she touches Anna’s hand, carefully, mindful of the tubing threaded into the vein.
    Please, Mama. Was it an accident? The house, I mean. The fire. Or . . . I’m sorry, but I have to know. Did you— Did you set it on purpose?
    Anna turns her face away. Then she rolls her head to the center of the pillow, her eyes once again closed.
    After another minute or two, Trudy stands and collects her coat from the chair.
    I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mama, she says. I’m leaving now. But don’t worry. I’ll be back soon. And I’ll take care of everything.
    She leaves the room, quietly shutting the door behind her, and walks through the trauma ward to the reception desk.
    The nurse glances up and sets her romance novel