The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

A blind went up in room 12. Then one in 16. A man in a red flannel robe stood at the window of the day room with both hands on his walker. Two women I knew by sight had pulled chairs up to the glass in the front lobby and were sitting there with their coats in their laps, like people waiting for a parade.

I held up the glass bird.

Irene did not say anything right away. Her hand came off the glass and went to the collar of her housecoat.

“Where did you get my bird?”

“You gave it to me,” I said. “Our first Christmas. You took it off your own tree and clipped it on ours.”

“I know I gave it to you.” She sounded almost cross. “I mean where has it been?”

I did not answer that. I was not going to say trash bag through a nursing home window to a woman of eighty-eight.

“It’s been waiting,” I said.

“Put it where I can see it from the bed.”

I handed it up to Marcus and pointed, and he clipped it to the end of a branch about nine feet up, right in line with her window, where the red bulb behind it would show through the glass.

Then I went to the second basket, and the first thing in it was the shoe.

I had wrapped it by itself in a washcloth. I unfolded it, and I held it up by the ribbon, and I looked at Irene.

She knew it from twenty feet away. Of course she did. She bought it.

Our first baby was a girl. We named her Katie. She was born on the thirtieth of October in 1994 with a heart that was not made right, and she lived nineteen days, every one of them at the children’s hospital in Cleveland. She never came home to the room we had painted.

Irene had bought the shoes at Penney’s in September, before any of us knew. White leather, the kind that lace, no bigger than my thumb.

Katie wore them one time. The hospital chaplain baptized her on a Sunday afternoon, and Irene put those shoes on her feet with her own hands, because she said no granddaughter of hers was going to meet the Lord barefoot.

When it was over, Irene kept one shoe back. She wrote the year on the sole with a pen from her purse and she tied it to a ribbon.

“One goes with her,” she told me. “One stays with us.”

It hung on our tree for twenty-six years after that. I always hung it. Paul could not. He would go out and shovel a walk that did not need shoveling, and when he came back in it would be up near the top, close in to the trunk, and neither one of us would mention it.

I stood on that lawn with the shoe turning on its ribbon.

“Bring it here,” Irene said.

“The window only opens…”

“Marcus.”

He was down the ladder before she finished saying his name. He went inside, and through the glass I watched him talk to the nurse at the hall station, and I watched the nurse shake her head, and then look past him at Irene, and then nod.

It took them ten minutes. When the front doors opened, Irene came through them in her wheelchair wearing her good wool coat, a knit hat, a scarf wound up to her chin, the afghan and two blankets from the warmer. Marcus was pushing. The nurse walked beside her with a third blanket.