by Sara Polsky
The hallways suddenly empty out with only a minute to go before the late bell. I stop across from the art room, diagonal to the window in the wooden door, and look inside. Ms. Triste stands at the board, back to the door, all in black with her short curls bobbing around her head. Next to her is one of her paintings, a canvas taller than she is with red and blue squares fading into each other, soft and mesmerizing.
Something crosses my vision—a dark stripe that doesn’t belong in Ms. Triste’s painting. I refocus my eyes and the stripe is a person, one of my classmates, Natalie Greenberg. She’s shorter than me, so I can see where the blue streak in her hair begins at her scalp. We’ve been in the same art class for two years, but we’ve barely ever spoken.
The late bell rings.
“Are you coming in?” a voice asks, and I realize Natalie is talking to me. She has one hand on the half-open door, one of her feet in its combat boot already in the classroom.
I shake my head at the same moment that a voice calls down the hall, “Hey, Sophie!”
I turn my head just as James skids to a stop on the tile floor next to me, his hair still flopping.
I look down at the floor, then look up again when I hear a soft click. Natalie has disappeared into Ms. Triste’s classroom. From the other side of the door, she glances quickly back at where James and I are standing, but I can’t read her expression at all. Is she going to tell Ms. Triste I’m out here?
“Hey,” James says, looking curiously at the door and then at me. “Where are you heading?”
His real voice is deeper than the little-kid voice he’s had in my head all this time. When he says hey, it’s like I can feel his words rumbling up from my chest.
I take a deep breath. Then I shrug.
“Nowhere,” I tell him.
I can almost see the words yeah, right cross his face. But he doesn’t say them.
A memory hits me suddenly, socking me in the gut from out of nowhere. Leila and James and I are eight, playing in Leila’s backyard after school. When we set off into the woods behind her house for hide-and-seek, James follows me, even when I remind him we’re supposed to be hiding. He reaches out and grabs my hand, his sticky from the candy he’s always eating, and I start to blush, imagining Leila teasing us. But I don’t actually mind and I don’t let go. I follow him farther into the woods, to a pair of barbed wire fences standing there between the trees, guarding nothing. They’re covered over with vines, like a tunnel, and when I follow James inside, I know Leila won’t be able to find us here. When she comes looking, maybe we’ll jump out and surprise her. We sit in the shade from the vines, splitting a stack of Oreos and playing tic-tac-toe on a grubby napkin.
It feels like a very long time ago.
“You rushed out of English like something was wrong,” James says now. “And Leila said you were staying with her, and I was coming down this hallway and saw you, so I wondered…”
You wondered what?
I wonder if Leila told him anything else about why I’m staying at her house. But I can’t tell from looking at him exactly what he knows. He’s always been like that, quiet and slightly hard to read. When we were younger, I liked that I was one of the few people he talked to. But now one of Mr. Jackson’s vocabulary words, one of the few things I heard last period before the voice took over my brain, pops into my head: inscrutable.
I think of the sentences I tried out in my head when Ms. Wilkins asked me about my year so far. My mother is in the hospital for a little while, so I’m staying with Leila and her parents. I think about saying that to James, telling him I’m on my way to see my mother now. Telling him there’s a voice in my head reminding me about the way I found her yesterday, lying still across her bed. Wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t found her.
But there’s still that rusty door in my mind, with its heavy padlock and no key. All of the words I’m thinking are hidden behind it. Just imagining what I could say, my stomach starts to cramp nervously. And I can’t picture how James would react. Would he ask questions? Or would he look as if he’d always suspected, from his glimpses of my mother when we were kids, that something about her wasn’t quite normal?
So instead I just ask, “Don’t you have a class?”
He shrugs. “Band, but they’re working with winds for the first half of the period.”
Band. In fourth grade, we were allowed to choose instruments for band and orchestra. I played violin for two years until they let me quit. Leila only ever wanted to audition for chorus. And James picked drums. Before the teacher called his name to start drumming at the tryouts, he just sat quietly on the stool behind the set, looking down from beneath his hair the way he always did. He and I were usually as quiet and calm as Leila was loud, until we were by ourselves—then we could start talking or playing a game and be as noisy as she was. But when the band director gave James the cue, he threw himself into the rhythms and became the louder, fiercer version of himself, right in front of everybody. Now, I wonder if the people who play in the school band with him think he’s like that all the time.
Maybe these days he is like that all the time.
For a second, I see it: James as the mysterious, inscrutable rocker dude with dark hair that swings around as he bangs his head while drumming. For some reason, the thought makes my cheeks feel warm, and I look quickly at the floor.
But James doesn’t take the hint to leave, even when I glance at my watch and tap my foot. We stand there facing each other in the hall, which is now completely empty, all the classroom doors shut. I think he’s looking at me, but I don’t look back. I stare slightly to the left, a strip of his arm and the corner of his T-shirt sleeve, fluttering and dark blue, at the edge of my vision.
“So, you’re in our English class now?” James says. “Mr. Jackson can be ridiculous sometimes, but he’s not so bad. Mostly he lets us read what we want to and work with our friends.”
I shrug again, cross my arms, and say nothing. I’m not going to leave the school until James isn’t looking, and I’m not going to tell him where I’m going.
Finally, he sighs and turns around.
“See you,” he mutters, his voice surprising me again. I think he mumbles something else, but I can’t make out the words. I don’t say anything, and then he’s walking away.
As I hit the metal bar in the center of the exit, unlocking it with a thunk that echoes back into the hall, I hunch down under my backpack. I pull it up so it’s almost over my head and tell myself no one—not James, not any teachers who might happen to glance my way—can see me.
—
There’s not much to look at on the route between school and the hospital. Just houses neatly lined up at a precise distance from the sidewalk, with each one getting smaller the closer they are to the center of town. The trees in people’s front yards still wear their summery green even though there’s a chill in the air that says fall.
At first, as I walk to a soundtrack of cars and lawnmowers and barking dogs, I try not to think. I study each house as I pass it, whether the colors of the plants outside match the shade of the paint, whether the front door is a staid black or an offbeat purple. I imagine the inside of each house, whether the furniture is antique or square and modern, what colors people picked for their walls and carpets.
Even though I try to distract myself, I check my watch again and again, estimating each time when I’ll finally get to the hospital.
But between glances at my wrist, my mind keeps turning back to my conversation with James. I wonder why he was in that hallway at all, why he followed me to ask where I was going. Why Leila told him I was staying at her house.
Before today, James and I have barely spoken for six years.
The last time we did was the first day of sixth grade. In the hallway next to my locker, James and I held our schedules up side by side, the edges of the pages overlapping. No classes together
.
“I already checked with Leila,” James said. “We’re in most of the same ones.”
I frowned. I hadn’t seen Leila in a few days, since my mother took us out for that drive. When I’d called to ask about her classes, Aunt Cynthia told me Leila was busy getting ready for the first day of school—I pictured her curling her hair with her new curling iron and trying on makeup, which she said everyone started wearing in middle school—and that she’d call me back later. But the only person who called was my mother’s social worker, Jeanine, whose “How are you, Sophie?” sounded far too grown-up to be Leila on the other end of the phone. My mother finally made me go to sleep, promising I’d see Leila at school soon enough. But I hadn’t found her in the halls that morning either.
The bell rang then, and James and I jumped back as a torrent of people rushed past us. Most of them carried identical bright pink schedules, which flapped where they’d been folded into thirds and stuffed into envelopes. The other sixth graders clutched their schedules tightly; the seventh graders tried to be less obvious about double-checking their classroom numbers on the way to first period.
James and I headed in opposite directions for class, James calling over his shoulder, “See you at lunch, I guess?”
“Okay,” I called back, grinning in his direction over other people’s heads. I couldn’t tell whether he heard me through all the noise.
But when I got to the cafeteria, all the seats around Leila and James were already full. They took up two tables next to each other, with some of the boys James knew from band—the people he hung out with when he wasn’t with us—surrounding him, and a few of Leila’s louder, peppier friends clustered around her. And then there were people from other elementary schools who I’d never seen before, but who had somehow already found their way to Leila’s table, as if she were a magnet pulling them in. I tried to catch her eye, but she didn’t look back at me. With her new purple eye shadow and curly hair and her loud laugh, she seemed like a stranger.
As I squeezed past everyone, looking for an empty chair and holding my lunch tray up so it wouldn’t spill, Leila’s friend Kelly, who was sitting next to her, leaned across the table toward me.
“Hey, Kelly,” I said. I stopped with my tray over the head of the girl across from her, hoping one of them would move their bags off the chairs so I could sit down.
“Sophie. Hi,” Kelly said. But her voice was stiff, only fake-friendly. I recognized it because it was a voice Leila sometimes used when she was talking to someone she didn’t really like. Kelly’s eyes flicked away from me, back toward the girl I was standing behind.
I opened my mouth to ask Kelly if I could take the seat next to her. But then she glanced at me again. She lifted up one finger and circled it around her ear, making a few loops—the universal sign for crazy.
She mouthed something to her friend too, but I didn’t even try to decipher it. My brain could come up with enough of its own words. Words like wacko. Insane. Bonkers. Even once Kelly stopped, I kept seeing those spirals, her finger circling around her ear, sending me a message. I didn’t know whether she was talking about my mother or me, but I was sure she meant one of us.
I stayed where I was, my tray with its square slice of pizza and carton of milk still suspended over everyone’s heads, my next breath frozen somewhere in my chest. I waited for Leila or James or anyone to ask Kelly what she was doing or tell her to stop or even just invite me to sit down. But no one said anything.
I called James that afternoon, wanting to ask if he knew why Leila hadn’t saved me a seat or returned my calls. But when his mom told me he was at Leila’s, I hung up without leaving a message, and he never called back.
Nine
Until I get to the hospital, I’m half convinced my mother somehow won’t be there, or that even if she is, no one will let me see her. But when I tell the gray-haired woman behind the information desk that I’m there to visit “Canon, Amy,” she doesn’t ask me any questions. She just holds out a pink laminated visitor pass that gives me access to the eighth floor.
“Go right on up, sweetheart,” she says, pointing. “Just walk around that corner for the elevator.”
I blink when she calls me sweetheart, but I don’t say anything. I just put out my hand and take the pass.
—
I walk halfway around the eighth floor, circling the nurses’ station twice, before I find my mother’s room. A small bronze plaque hangs next to the doorway, and I linger, reading it. In Memory of Tanya Wilson.
I trace my index finger along the indented letters, from the bar at the top of the first I all the way to the bottom point of the n. I wonder vaguely who Tanya Wilson was, why her name is next to this particular door. Did she stay here? Would she be okay with the world knowing that she did?
I don’t actually care enough to find out; the wondering is just an excuse not to go inside. Now that I know my mother is here, I don’t feel panicked anymore. I’m just anxious and on edge, and I trace my fingers over the letters in Tanya Wilson’s name again, going in reverse this time, from the end of the n back to the top of the T.
But the voice in my head is still whispering its questions, and I know only one way I can get it to leave me alone. So I take one deep breath and one long step. And then I’m in.
—
An empty bed. That’s what I see first in the room the receptionist said is my mother’s, one extra-long empty bed covered with a single white sheet. I zoom in on it and the panic in my stomach is back. The voice in my head is anxious and loud. Did they move her but the woman downstairs just didn’t know? Or is she really not here at all? Then where is she?
I force myself to breathe and look up, and that’s when I notice the drawn curtain on the other side of the bed, a sheet of yellow fabric that’s an old, worn yellow, not a cheerful one. I step over and pull it back, and there’s my mother. She’s on another bed with plain sheets, covered in layers of white knit blankets. Under them, her legs make two hills. A mini mountain range of mom.
She’s sleeping.
I think she’s sleeping.
“Mom?” I say, so low she probably wouldn’t hear it even if she were awake. I think of yesterday, when I had to check for her breath by putting my ear right over her mouth.
This time I step close to her and stare until I’m certain her chest is moving up and down. Then I take an inventory of the rest of her, from top to bottom, studying her as if I’m going to turn what I see into a sketch. Her hair is still bedraggled and uneven; her face is pale, but not as pale as it was yesterday. Her left arm sits on top of the blankets with an IV attached to it. The IV looks empty, but when I peer at it closely, I see some kind of clear fluid. I watch it trickle down until I realize I’m breathing at the same pace as the drip.
The blankets hide the rest of her body, but I see its outline: her other arm, her hand, her torso. Two legs and two feet. All in order. I want to step closer, to reach out and make sure she’s really, solidly there, but I don’t want to wake her up or disrupt the careful arrangement of hospital tubes.
So I move back. I’m already reaching behind me for a chair when my legs start to feel wobbly. I fall into the chair instead of sitting, suddenly feeling completely wiped out. But I’m still watching my mother, fascinated by how silent and motionless she is. After how quickly she’s been moving and talking for the last week, I’m surprised to see her just sleeping. Like a completely normal person except for the hospital room around us. Mom, I want to say, as if the nightmare is actually over, you scared me.
I wonder if, whenever she wakes up, she’ll be depressed, her voice slow and dull, instead of manic, as if the mysterious inner switch that controls her moods tips when she’s asleep. How else could it happen?
At home, I can tell whether my mother is depressed just by looking over to her side of the room when I wake up in the morning. She’ll be lying there flat on her back
, one arm or maybe a pillow thrown up over her face. She won’t whisper to me about breakfast. She won’t move, but she’ll still radiate something, some kind of invisible Sophie-frequency wave that tells me what kind of day she’s about to have: not a good one.
“Mom?” I’ll call softly from the doorway on those days. “I’m going to leave for school in a minute. Here’s your medicine.”
I’ll set the glass of water and the plate of pills on her bedside table, following another of the instructions she gave me when I was eleven: Help me make sure I take my pills, Sophie. I’m going to take them, but just in case I forget sometimes, or tell you I don’t need them, I want you to remind me. Okay?
Okay.
“Do you want anything for breakfast before I go?” I’ll ask. She won’t answer. I’ll try to keep my voice from sounding impatient, exasperated, even on the days when that’s how I feel. I end up sounding the same way I do when I babysit our neighbors’ kids, like I’m in charge and pleading with them at the same time. “Mom?”
Sometimes, when I remind her, she’ll sit up and take the medicine. Other times, nothing I say gets her to move. I tell her what I just ate and ask her if she’d like some. “If you eat now, you can go back to sleep as soon as you’re finished,” I say. “I promise when I get home I won’t make you tell me what you did all day.”
Or I try to joke with her. “My name is Sophie and I’ll be your server today. Can I tell you about our specials?”
I offer eggs, toast, cereal, orange juice. Smoothies made from frozen fruit or store-bought waffles warmed in the toaster and covered with syrup. Ice cream with chocolate sprinkles, to see if she’s actually paying attention. (I always make sure we have sprinkles, just in case one morning she actually wants some.)
But she never cracks a smile. Sometimes she shakes her head, a slight movement that I catch only because I’m looking for it.
Most of the time, she just lies there. Her arm hangs off the bed as if it’s too heavy for her to lift those last few inches. I can’t see whatever’s weighing her down, but I can almost feel it, a solid presence in the air. Standing there, waiting for her to respond, I start to wonder whether someday I’ll be lying there instead.
