Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

for money in Uncle Mike’s couch. Nana reassured us that everything was okay, preferring to lie to us than to worry us, but I knew better. Dad stayed at the hospital with Mom, wearing only scrubs when his clothes became too dirty. Shuffling in sterile fabric that had to cover his hair, his feet, and his mouth, he visited her room and his son in the neonatal ward. Most of the babies, explained the nurses, were born to mothers who were drug addicts or were born dying. Dad called Nana’s house to give updates on their conditions: Jared kept pulling the ventilator out of his lungs, and Mom was weak but awake.

One day in August, he creaked open the gate to Nana’s backyard and walked up the sidewalk to her door. He moved slowly, slower than my grandparents, thin and hunched and wearing the sunglasses I’d last seen him in. A new cigarette swayed in his mouth, nodding up and down as he told us to get in the car. We played games the whole ride up, familiar with this stretch of highway from trips to Charlotte, and begged Dad to stop at the fireworks stands on the side of the road. We knew that we were getting close when we passed what could have been a white-trash mirage of highway shopping in the middle of the swamp where Francis Marion hid out so long ago. Billboards of fading cartoon sombreros capped the letters of the South of the Border signs that began to crop up on roads that led to North Carolina. Fireworks and gambling were not legal in that civilized northern state, and the crumbling advertisements for what would be contraband in a hundred miles were markers we knew to look for. In this particular marker, there was a boiled-peanut stand called Jimmy Carter Land, and his squinting caricature looked down on the cars passing. We didn’t know Jimmy Carter as the former president. To us, he was only the face welcoming us to the petting zoo, fireworks outlet, doughnut shop, and a XXX video store that also offered lacy lingerie.

Dad told us to be quiet and to behave once we got to the hospital, but he didn’t say much else. He seemed changed already. For the first time, hints of a resemblance to his father peeked through his exhaustion. How tiring to fight the nature that you don’t care to claim. Everything about the hospital seemed advanced, shiny, and technological. That lives were saved here, you could tell from the road. It felt not at all like the hospital in Myrtle Beach. Dad told us not to touch her, just to hang back on the sides and talk. She’s been asking about you, he said. I was not prepared for the relief of seeing her, or for the way she looked, still bloated and gray. She lay completely horizontal in the hospital bed, hooked up to the machines around her, and her voice was too soft to hear when she spoke. We stayed only a few minutes in her room, the blinds closed so she could rest. It was the only time I’ve seen her sleep without the television running in the background. Justin and Jason remembered Dad’s instructions, but I hopped forward to touch her. My hand rested on hers briefly before, uncontrollably, I started to fall into a cramped hug. Dad grabbed my arm and whispered, “What did I tell you,” in a hissing tone I had heard before, but not from him.

A nurse recognized Dad and waved us forward. She handed out sets of scrubs to me and to my brothers. For the first time, we would get to see Jared. I walked along the cracks of tiles to steady myself, despite years of mental drilling. Don’t step on a crack. The refrain was a frivolous precaution at this point. Mom had already cracked open. Then there he was. Arms and legs squirming feebly among the wires. His chest rose and fell to the rhythm of the ventilator beside him. “He’s strong,” my dad murmured over and over. “Look how strong.”

The nurse delivered Mom to us in a wheelchair, a sight more unnerving than that of her in the hospital bed. The day she was released from the hospital, my brothers stayed at Nana’s house. The boys were too much to handle. She slept deeply and with the television playing in the background. I walked over and turned the set off, watching to see if the sudden absence of dialogue or the high pitch of static would wake her. Her physical fragility came through to me as I watched her sleep. I thought of her at home before Jared was born: skin pink and radiant and the heaviness of her pregnancy fixing her to the ground. It was a different kind of broken than the sadness I tried to prevent by following her around, no less permanent but still somehow more terrifying, after seeing her so close to vanishing permanently to a place where I would never find her. I watched her chest rise and fall and half expected her to float away.

I tiptoed out of her room and crossed the den to my bedroom, not knowing what to do with such a thought. I knew Dad would return from his cigarette run any second, but I climbed under the blankets on my bed, covering my whole self with their weight and lying in the comfort of darkness. As the knocking began and grew louder, I only wanted to hide. The doorbell started to sound, one ring on top of another, and I could tell he was angry. And suddenly, it stopped. I held my breath, hoping maybe he had gone away or that I might fall into sleep myself. That I would never be asked to do anything so big as be responsible for my mother again.

But then my door flew open. The sheets were ripped off the bed, clumsily they caught on