Walk Two Moons

37 A KISS

Phoebe was stunned and angry, but she was braver than I was. She could watch, but I could not. I assumed that Phoebe would follow me, but I didn’t look back. Down the street I tore, trying to remember where the bus stop was. It wasn’t until I saw the hospital that I realized I must have missed the bus stop. I ducked inside and was surprised that Phoebe was not behind me.

What I did next was an impulse. A hunch. I asked the hospital receptionist if I could see Mrs. Finney. She flipped through a roster. “Are you a family member?” she said.

“No.”

“I’m afraid you can’t go up then,” she said. “Mrs. Finney is on the psychiatric ward. Family only.”

“I was looking for her son. He came here to visit her.”

“Maybe they went outside. You could look out back.”

Behind the hospital was a wide, sloping lawn, bordered by flower gardens. Scattered across the lawn were benches and chairs, most of them occupied with patients and their visitors. It was a scene much like the one I had just left at the university, except here no one was studying, and some of the people wore dressing gowns.

Ben was sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a woman in a pink robe. She fidgeted with the sash. Ben saw me and stood up as I crossed the lawn. “This is my mother,” he said. I said hello, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she stood and drifted off across the lawn as if we were not there. Ben and I followed.

She reminded me so much of my mother after she returned from the hospital. My mother would stop right in the middle of doing something inside the house and walk out the door. Halfway up the hill, she would sit down to catch her breath. She picked at the grass, got up again, and went a little farther. Sometimes my mother went in the barn and filled the pail with chicken feed, but before she reached the chicken coop, she set the pail down and moved off in another direction. When she could walk farther, my mother rambled over the fields and meadows, in a weaving, snaking pattern, as if she could not make up her mind which way to turn.

We followed Ben’s mother back and forth across the lawn, but she never seemed to notice our presence. At last I said I had to go, and that’s when it happened.

For one quick moment we both had the same agenda. I looked at him and he looked at me. Both of our heads moved forward. It must have been in slow motion, because I had a split second there to be reminded of Mr. Birkway’s drawing of the two heads facing each other, with the vase in between. I wondered, just for an instant, if a vase could fit between us.

If there had been a vase, we would have squashed it, because our heads moved completely together and our lips landed in the right place, which was on the other person’s lips. It was a real kiss, and it did not taste like chicken.

And then our heads moved slowly backward and we stared out across the lawn, and I felt like the newlY born horse who knows nothing but feels everything.

Ben touched his lips. “Did it taste a little like blackberries to you?” he said.