by Annabel Lyon
“Excuse me,” I say again.
At the table next to his sits a pair of Indian women in saris, with their hair in neat buns and their feet in sandals. Both of them have diamonds in their noses. They’re surrounded by bags of shopping and seem to be going through a list together, crossing off what they’ve bought. When they hear my voice they look up at me and smile.
“Excuse me,” I say, very loudly this time, standing at the Buddha’s elbow, and then I start to cough. He looks up at me. Then he gets up from his chairs and goes over to the sleek black table with the milk and cream and half-and-half and soy and white sugar and brown sugar and honey and clear glucose syrup and artificial sweetener and brings back a paper cup of water, which he gives to me. I sip it and the coughing goes away.
“Are you lost?” he asks.
“Is she lost?” one of the Indian women asks.
I start coughing again, and all the tables and chairs and people slip sideways in my vision. I’d fall over but the Buddha puts his hand on my shoulder to make me steady.
“Be still,” he says.
Which is exactly what the Buddha would say.
“Where is your mummy?” the Indian woman asks. She has an English accent, like the people who call the tennis matches on TV that Dad likes to watch. Twenty-love, second service. Nice shot, that. Lovely.
“I don’t know,” I say.
The Buddha closes his magazine. “Should we call security?” he asks the Indian women, as though they’re all together and not strangers. This is nice of him, though I’m not sure why.
“Did you come with your mummy today?” the Indian woman asks me again.
“And my sister,” I say.
The Buddha nods thoughtfully and says he’ll get security. He gets up from his two chairs and tells me I should sit down and wait with the ladies until he gets back. Gratefully I climb up onto one of the chairs, which is warm from his sitting on it. For a minute I close my eyes, and then I start coughing again. The Indian women cluck sympathetically, and one of them reaches over and touches my forehead and clucks some more. Then she starts pulling things out of her shopping bags to show me. I understand the woman is trying to make me smile. She pulls out a pair of socks and tears off the tags and the sticky paper holding them together and slips one over her hand to make it a puppet. She calls the puppet Freddy. Freddy pretends to eat my finger, and then he pretends to sip the woman’s coffee. “Oh, oh, oh,” the woman says in a funny voice that’s supposed to be Freddy’s voice. “Tummy ache! Do you have a tummy ache too?”
I shake my head. I know the woman is being nice, and I don’t want to risk being rude by telling her I’m too old for sock puppets named Freddy. The woman seems to take the hint, though, because she pops the sock off her hand and back into a bag. From another bag she starts pulling out stuffed animals and explaining these are for her nieces and nephews. “Now, I know you’re a big girl,” she says. “But can you remember when you were little? Which one would you have liked best?”
Admittedly, this is more interesting. I try to focus on the mounds of plush. There’s a bear and a raccoon and a hot pink hippo and a glittery fish. Then, to my horror, the woman pulls out the creepy-eyed gray elephant from the card shop.
“He’s so cute,” the woman says, pretending to make him walk across the air toward me. “Look at him. Isn’t he cute?”
I nod, then shake my head, then blink several times and slide off my chair to the floor, where I land with a thump just before everything goes black.
On Christmas morning, I lie on the sofa while Mom and Dad and Dexter bring my presents over to me. This is a change from the usual rip-roaring, hair-flying, tornado-raising creature that’s me under the tree at six thirty in the morning while everyone else struggles to act awake, but I’m still not My Old Self, as Mom puts it. My new self sleeps in to nine o’clock and then nests on the sofa with a blanket and pillows, gazing sleepily at the blinking lights on the tree more than at the presents under it. Mom and Dad make tea and coffee, and Dexter peels us each a mandarin orange. Dad lights the fire he laid last night, with about as much mumbling under his breath as every year as match after match extinguishes itself with nothing to show for its efforts. Finally the fire catches, blue and then orange, and everyone has something hot in a mug (even I have tea), and Dexter asks me if I want to start and I say no, that’s okay, Dexter can start. Then everyone gets concerned again and says they’ll bring my presents over to me.
Still, I’m getting better. I’m not nearly as sick as I was in the days immediately after I fell off my chair in the coffee shop and woke up in a bright white room. Mom and Dexter and a man I didn’t recognize were leaning over me with worried looks on their faces. “Mommy,” I said.
“Hi, sweetie,” Mom said. I could see the worry lines on her forehead and between her eyebrows.
“I saw Zeus and Mercury and Ganesh and the Buddha,” I said. “Grandpa’s in the underworld. Next time I want to try coffee instead of a Julius, like Dex.”
“She’s delirious,” the strange man said. Afterward, Mom told me he was in charge of the mall, and we were in the first-aid room, next to the cinemas, which most people never get to see.
“No she isn’t,” Dexter said, looking at me closely, but not in a mean way.
After I fainted, the Indian women quickly arranged their coats for me to lie on and put something soft under my head. The big man returned with two security men and a stretcher, and they took me to the little room, where Mom and Dexter had been waiting. They had gone to security as soon as they realized I was missing. After we got home, I had a fever for a few days and got to drink lots of soup and ginger ale, which came out about as fast as it went in. For the first time in the history of the world as I knew it, I didn’t help decorate the house but watched from the sofa until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I also fell asleep during my favorite videos, card games, stories and meals.
Still, I slowly got better. My temperature came down and I was finally able to explain coherently about the various ancient gods in the mall. I reassured Mom that I knew they weren’t really gods (just as the witches had not really been witches), though they had certainly seemed like gods at the time. Mom seemed to understand. Even Dexter listened to me with unusual attention and refrained from making fun of me. When I quietly pointed this out to Mom, after Dex had gone for one of her sessions in the bathroom, Mom told me I had really been pretty sick and had given everyone Quite A Scare. No one ever asked me what I meant about Grandpa being in the underworld, which made me kind of glad. In the end I just signed my name to the card our whole family sent, to go with a collection of old records Dad found in an antique store. They were a kind of music called swing that Dad said Grandpa loved and would help him remember good times. So I’m not the only one who thinks about these things.
By Christmas morning even my voice is back to normal and all I am is tired. So gift giving, this year, is a staid and proper affair. Gifts are unwrapped decorously, one by one, exclaimed over, and the paper refolded for next year before the next gift is handed out. My favorite gift comes from Dex. This in itself is not all that unusual since—whatever her other faults— Dexter gives considerate presents. But this year, when she hands me a plain envelope, quite small, with just a little drawing of holly in one corner, at first I’m disappointed. What can something as small as my hand and as flat as a sheet of paper possibly contain?
It turns out to contain exactly that: a sheet of paper. Specifically, it’s a coupon for a free drink at the coffee shop in the mall.
“What’s a lat?” I ask.
“Lattay,” Dex says, watching my face to see if I like it. “It’s spelled l-a-t-t-e. You pronounce the ‘e’ like an ‘a.’ It’s coffee with milk, like I always get. You said you wanted to try one like mine next time.”
I smile, and Dexter smiles too. Then we go back to ignoring each other because that’s less embarrassing.
“I almost forgot,” Mom says later, when she’s tidying up the last
of the ribbons and cards and wrap. “This came for you while you were sick.”
It’s a Christmas card, still in a sealed envelope, with my name and address and a stamp, meaning it’s real mail. I don’t get much real mail, except for postcards when Grandma and Grandpa go on holiday.
“Who’s it from?” Dexter asks.
I look at the return address. “Robert!” I say.
Dex and Mom look blank.
“You remember,” I tell Mom. “In the summer, at the lake. We caught the fish.” Then Mom remembers too, but Dex, of course, doesn’t know who we’re talking about and makes fun of me for getting a card from a boy. As if Robert was what Dex would think of as a boy. Ridiculous.
The card shows a reindeer trying to change the burnt-out red light bulb in his nose while the other reindeer stand around the sleigh, frowning impatiently and tapping their hooves on their hips.
Dear Edie, the card says. Well, it is Christmas I guess so here is a card. I hope you remember me. If you saw me you might not recognize me anymore. My mom makes me go to Weight Watchers now and I lost twenty pounds. I’m not allowed to eat Christmas treats, only turkey and salad. If you could eat a sugar cookie and think of me, I guess I would like that. Maybe some time you could go to the planetarium and come to my house after. If you can’t remember who I am, remember the fish? Well, this is certainly the worst Christmas ever. I hope yours is better. Maybe I’ll see you again next summer. Your friend, Robert.
“I want a cookie,” I say and add loyally, “Stupid Christmas.”
I fall asleep on the couch then and have a half-dream, half-memory of the time Grandpa took me to the planetarium, just him and me. It was only last year, when he could still drive the car and remember the names of things and teach me about the stars. We sat in the chairs that tipped way back and held hands while the lights went out, and then Grandpa said, “Open your eyes, Albert, this is the best part.” I opened my eyes and saw the stars come on one by one, until thousands of tiny lights prickled against the black velvet of the night sky. A man’s deep voice came on over the loudspeaker to explain how the ancients believed that stars were the souls of people who had died and gone to the next world. Grandpa held my hand through the whole show, even after I stopped being afraid.
Dancing with Mean Megan
The phone rings in the middle of the night, and after a few minutes it rings again. Dad, who is dreaming of sitting in a deck chair with a newspaper while Dexter and I shriek and laugh together down by the lake, hears it and wakes. Mom, who is dreaming of the house she grew up in, in St. John’s, and the smell of pumpkin pie, hears it and thinks, It’s a wrong number, let the answering machine get it. Dexter, who is dreaming a complicated whirling dream with colors and flavors and smells, all pink and purple and fruity, with sparkly clothes and music and dancing, hears it and moans and rolls over and tries to burrow back into her dream. I, who have been dreaming comfortable Edie dreams of dark rainy afternoons at home with books and cats and cheese sandwiches, hear it faintest of all and am asleep again before I even know I’ve woken.
Only Dad gets out of bed.
At the breakfast table, Dexter sits alone. She’s set two places. When I sit at my chair, she coaxes a crumpet from the toaster with a fork and puts it on my plate.
“OH MY GOD,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “You’re making my breakfast.”
“I’m in charge,” Dexter says.
Normally I would dispute this kind of claim loudly and lengthily, appealing to Mom, and Dad too if he hadn’t already left for work. But there’s an eerie quiet to the house this morning, and Dexter has not automatically told me to shut up, which is bizarre. She also looks tired, more tired than her normal just-rolled-outof-bed tired, and her mouth is a bit raisiny, like Mom’s gets when she’s worried or annoyed.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask.
“They had to go to the hospital,” Dexter says. “We have to get ourselves ready for school.”
I look up at the kitchen clock, at the big slice of pie the hands make—quarter to eight—and the second hand sweeping so slowly you have time to think about every single second and the eternity of space in between.
Mom sits at the kitchen table. Her face is white with tiredness, but her voice is still the same. When I got home from school and saw her face, I was afraid everything might somehow have changed.
“Grandpa’s stable,” Mom says. “That means he’s not getting any worse. Grandma is with him now.”
Mom and I are alone in the kitchen, sitting on the bench in the kitchen nook; my car pool got home before Dexter’s. I snuggle right up against Mom and hook my arm through hers.
“How was school?” Mom says, so I tell her about this month’s volunteer time: helping the grade twos make Valentines with red construction paper and fat colored markers and scissors and glitter glue.
“You could make a special get-well Valentine for Grandpa,” Mom says. That’s what I’m doing when Dexter gets home and Mom goes into her bedroom with her to tell her the news about Grandpa, closing the door behind her because there’s no need to distract me from my project, Mom says.
Dexter is crying. Her eyes and nose are red and her shoulders are shaking, but she doesn’t make any sound. “Ssh,” Mom says, over and over. We’re sitting in the kitchen all together now. Dexter burst out of her bedroom and ran to the bathroom, startling me. She slammed the door behind her and blew her nose and flushed the toilet about a hundred times while Mom stood outside, talking to her in a low voice. When she came out, Mom led her into the kitchen and sat her down on the bench next to me. Mom put milk in a pan on the stove for hot chocolate while Dexter snuffled and shivered and tried to calm down. I feel my own face trying to cry too, even though my brain doesn’t want to. Wordlessly I pass my sister my last uncut piece of red construction paper and some other supplies, and after a minute Dexter folds the piece into smaller and smaller squares and starts to chop at it with her scissors. I’m about to complain to Mom that I was just trying to be nice and Dexter is ruining my very last piece of good paper when I realize she’s treating her Valentine heart like a snowflake, cutting tiny decorations into the folds. When she opens it out she’ll have something very beautiful and lacy and perfect and terribly, terribly fragile.
“Please,” Dexter says. “Please,” I say.
“Help me, Jamie,” Mom says to Dad in the private adult voice that excludes Dex and me even though we’re all in the same room.
“It’s all right,” Dad says to her in the same voice, and then in his normal voice he says, “Mom doesn’t want the two of you to get upset. But I know Grandma and Grandpa would both like to see you very much. Only you have to remember it’s only for a very short visit because Grandpa gets tired very quickly. He won’t be able to talk to you but he’ll know you’re there, and that will make him feel much better. But you have to be on your best behavior in the hospital. No fighting with each other or loud voices or bouncing around.”
“I never bounce around!” I say indignantly, because he’s looking especially at me for this last part.
“Get your coats then, quickly,” Mom says, and Dexter and I rush to get our coats and shoes while our parents, already dressed to go out, wait by the front door. Dad has the car keys in his hand, and Mom has our homemade Valentines in one of the big mustard-yellow envelopes Dad uses for work.
Grandpa lies in a room that has three other beds. Two of them are empty; the third one has a curtain like a shower curtain drawn all the way around it so we can’t see who’s inside. Grandpa has a needle attached to a plastic tube taped to his arm, and he wears pale blue hospital pajamas with short sleeves that stick out from his shoulders like awkward little wings. The skin on his face looks like clay someone has pushed all out of place. His mouth won’t close, and he looks angry. His eyes follow us, but he doesn’t talk. The only noise he makes is when Dad shows him our Valentines and then puts them on the bedside table, where Grandpa can’t see them. He makes a moaning noise and jerks his head until Dad pu
ts the cards on his chest, tucked under the arm without the tube, and then he quietens down again.
Grandma thanks us for the lovely cards; she says she knows that’s what Grandpa is thinking. Dad tries to persuade her to go down to the cafeteria to get a coffee and a sandwich, but she won’t go. In the end, Dad goes down himself and comes back with the coffee in a paper cup and the sandwich in cardboard and cling-wrap and sets them by Grandma’s chair. They’re still sitting there when visiting hours end and it’s time for us to leave.
“Tae kwon do?” Mom asks, her pen poised over the rec center catalog. “Beading?” Dexter and I are picking our spring activities. Or, rather, I’m picking while Dexter sits with us doing her math homework, since Dexter always chooses the same activity: Advanced Ballet.
I shake my head and look at the window. Valentine’s Day is over and Easter is still far, far away. Grandpa is still in hospital, but he’s too sick for any visitors except for Grandma and Dad, who goes every evening after work and comes home after my bedtime. Rain runs down the windows, making blurred swoops on the glass. Beyond the window the sky is gray and the trees waver like kelp in an aquarium.
“Poetry?” Mom turns a page. “Yoga? Popcorn Crafts and Fun?”
“Dance,” I say.
Mom’s and Dexter’s heads snap up like they’re puppets whose head-strings have been jerked.
“What?” Mom says, which is so unusual she even corrects herself. “Pardon?”
“Dance,” I say.
“You hate dance,” Dexter says.
“You tried once, remember?” Mom says more gently. “With Madame Elenskaya? You didn’t like it at all.”
This is true. I tried Beginner Ballet about half a million years ago, when I was five and really wanted a pink tulle skirt like Dexter’s. I went through a phase, believe it or not, of wanting to be like Dex in every way. But there was no tutu in Beginner Ballet, only gym clothes, shorts and T-shirts, and bare feet. I thought the barre was a monkey bar, which didn’t endear me to Madame Elenskaya. We had a further difference of opinion about exactly how many times a person should be made to do second position before she was good enough to move on to third. So I dropped out after a couple of weeks, and my fascination with all things Dex waned from that moment.
