The Center of Everything

by Laura Moriarty

  “You know we’re going to move far away from here when we get married,” she says. “Somewhere warm. By the ocean. Maybe Florida, or California. We’re not even going to tell my grandmother or anyone else where we’re going. But I’ll tell you. You can come visit us.” She rolls over and leans her head off my bed, her face upside down, her dark hair hanging to the floor in a way that makes me think of the tiny trolls attached to key chains for sale in the Kwikshop. She closes her eyes and smiles. “No more snow and no more cold.”

  She reaches over to pick at a strand of my hair, and I know she is doing this to check for split ends, the damage done to my hair from the terrible perm she tried to give me, which is only now starting to relax. I pull my head away. “Deena, you might want to double-check those plans with him again.”

  She rolls back up on her stomach, and I watch the color drain out of her face, down her neck, her hoop earrings falling back into place. “Why? Did he say something to you?”

  “I just…I’m not supposed to say anything. I just think he’s been thinking.”

  Her eyes stay on mine. “Evelyn? What did he say?”

  I hesitate. I am not supposed to tell, but I feel bad for her. She shouldn’t be whiling away her days dreaming about the life she and Travis are going to have by an ocean somewhere when he is thinking about college and Australia. I’m doing her a favor, although looking at her now, I can see she doesn’t think I am.

  “I just think he’s going to keep his options open,” I say.

  “When did you talk to him?”

  “A few days ago. Don’t tell him I told you, or he won’t ever tell me anything again.”

  She is still looking at me, eyes narrowed. I find it hard to look back. I have watched my mother long enough to know that there are all kinds of ways of being smart. Just because Deena reads slowly doesn’t mean she can’t see the little part of me that is happy about what I am telling her now.

  “I’m only telling you this so you don’t get too carried away, Deena.”

  But she’s looking over my head now, out the window, past the ice-covered parking lot to Travis’s dark window, though his shade is pulled all the way down.

  My grandfather will turn sixty this February, and Eileen wants us to come to the party. There will be balloons and cake, she says. It won’t last long. And it will mean so much, she adds, to him.

  My mother’s right eyebrow goes up. “Did he say that?”

  Eileen nods, avoiding my mother’s eyes. For her New Year’s resolution, she is trying to quit smoking, and already she has bitten off all the white of her fingernails. “He said he’d be glad to have you, Tina. You and Evelyn and little Sam.”

  My mother frowns, looking down at Samuel. Now that he has learned to use a spoon, she is upping the ante: he has to answer her questions. She has attached a tray to his wheelchair, with a green circle taped to one side that reads YES and a red square on the other side that reads NO.

  “Sam, we’re going to have some ice cream,” she says, speaking directly into his ear. “Would you like a bowl?” She takes his finger and points it in the direction of the green circle. “Yes?” she asks. She takes his finger and points it in the direction of the red square. “Or no?”

  We wait, watching his hand slowly slide across his tray to the YES, like an oracle on a Ouija board. When his finger touches YES, Eileen claps. My mother scoops out two bowls of ice cream—one chocolate, one vanilla. “I have to offer him choices,” she tells Eileen. “All the books I’m reading say that this is what’s really important.”

  Verranna Hinckle has been giving my mother books to read: The Special Child, Communicating with Your Child, A Doctor’s Take on the Non-Verbal Child. Each time she finishes one, Verranna Hinckle brings her another.

  We wait again, watching Samuel’s hand move slowly in the direction of the chocolate ice cream.

  “Thank you for telling me you want chocolate, not vanilla,” my mother says, the words loud and slow, like someone is standing behind us, holding a cue card for her to read. She slides the bowl of chocolate toward him and clasps his hand around his spoon. Eileen says I should have the bowl of vanilla. But I don’t want it, and neither does my mother, so Eileen takes it for herself.

  “Honestly, Tina,” she says, waving her spoon at my mother. “You’re doing such an amazing job with him. Really.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’m trying hard.” I see the ends of my mother’s mouth twitch, almost a smile. She is hearing things like this more and more. Last week, Verranna Hinckle brought two other women from the university over with her, and they watched Samuel feed himself and point at what he wanted. They used the same word—“amazing”—as if he and my mother had performed a magic trick, pulled a rabbit out of an empty hat. I don’t think my mother knows what to do with these compliments when she gets them, especially from Eileen. She’s like a person without any hands getting flowers.

  “So you think you might come?” Eileen asks. “To the party?”

  My mother sits down in the chair next to Samuel. “No. I’m sorry, Mom. But no.”

  Eileen takes a small swallow of ice cream and sets the bowl back on the table. “It’s his birthday, Tina. Just a couple of hours. It wouldn’t kill you.”

  “It might,” my mother says. She reaches over and dabs a napkin at Samuel’s mouth. “I wish you’d leave this alone. If he wants to come out here and try to talk to me, he can. He knows how to get here, and he’s a grown man.”

  “But maybe it’s difficult for him to tell you how he feels, Tina!”

  My mother laughs. “Actually, Mom, I think he’s always been pretty good at that.”

  Eileen leans back in her chair, her arms crossed in front of her. She is finally starting to look older, like a real grandmother, the lines around her mouth growing deeper. My mother says it’s from the cigarettes. “You know, Tina, you are a real puzzle to me. I find it hard to believe that you can be so kind to your little boy and have absolutely no compassion whatsoever for your own father.” She points her spoon at my mother again. “He’s going to be sixty, you know. His heart is bad.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” my mother says. “Look, I’ll tell you how it is. I just can’t. Not with Samuel. Okay? I know how he’ll look at him.” She shakes her head, wincing as if she can actually see all of this in front of her, like a movie projected on the wall behind Eileen’s head.

  Eileen sighs, reaching over and pulling her fingers through Samuel’s hair. “What about when he dies, Tina? How are you going to feel about you being so petty—”

  “I’m not being petty. If he wants to call me and talk to me about it, he can. But it’s a little hard to make peace with someone who doesn’t actually think of you as a person. And you can’t forgive someone who isn’t even sorry in the first place.” She shrugs, looking back at Eileen. “If he dies, he dies. I’ll be okay.”

  Eileen makes a face like the kind you might make if you accidentally drank soured milk, or found a dead mouse behind the refrigerator. “That’s a terrible thing to say, Tina. A terrible thing.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “No. You’ll look back and you’ll be full of regret. And it’ll be too late.”

  I try to imagine the scene in Eileen’s head, what she’s imagining—my mother, dressed in black, reaching for her father’s casket as they lower it into the ground, pounding her fists against the metal, crying, I’m so sorry. You were right. I’m not a person. I was a horse all along.

  “You will, Tina,” Eileen says, reaching into her back pocket for the cigarettes that are no longer there. “You’ll feel awful. But when death comes, it comes. And then it’ll be too late.”

  My mother pulls Samuel out of his chair and onto her lap, pecking him lightly on the top of his head. “Well,” she says, carefully. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Traci Carmichael is dead.

  I am sitting in Mrs. Geldof’s bright room, looking at Mrs. Geldof’s watery eyes and the map of the world on t
he bulletin board behind her, the United States in the middle, Kansas in the middle of that. Traci’s desk is empty, and so is Libby’s.

  There has been a car accident, Mrs. Geldof says. Yesterday, on the way home from school. Adele Peterson was driving, and she’s dead too. They were going too fast, not wearing seat belts. Libby is alive, but badly hurt.

  “What?” Ray Watley asks. There is a ripple in his voice, and although I think it’s just because he doesn’t believe what Mrs. Geldof is saying, it comes out as a laugh. “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” Mrs. Geldof says. She blinks, and there are tears. “No, honey, I’m not kidding.”

  I can feel my arms turning cold, someone running a feather lightly across my skin. I saw them yesterday, all three of them. Adele honked twice when they pulled up alongside the bus in the next lane. Traci’s arm was hanging out the window, fingers snapping to the radio, three pink plastic bracelets around her wrist.

  But I remember now. There were sirens only a few minutes later. Travis and I were still on the bus, laughing about something. Not about Traci. Something else. When we got to the street where the accident was, there was already a detour set up. We had to take another route, and it took longer. We got home late.

  “They’re dead?” Ray Watley asks again. Mrs. Geldof nods.

  No one says anything. The truth of it, what this really means, starts to settle in slowly, moving into us through our open mouths, seeping in through our eyes when we look at the empty desks.

  Ray Watley is quiet, not laughing now, his hands still on his desk in front of him. Deena turns around to look at me. She is already crying. Other girls are crying too, and I understand that I should be crying, that this is the appropriate response. But I am still just sitting and blinking, doing nothing, like a cartoon character hit on the head with something large. Even when people start to get up and move toward one another, clasping hands, I just sit there, still and dumb.

  Mrs. Geldof comes over to me and pushes her wet cheek against mine, her arms tight around my rigid back.

  “I know, honey,” she says, still crying. “I know.”

  There is a picture of Adele’s crumpled Honda in the newspaper. The front end is completely smashed in, the windows shattered. My mother moves around me quietly, making lunch for Sam. We’ve been given the rest of the week off from school.

  “Evelyn, sweetie, don’t look at that anymore,” she says. “Put it away.” She tugs on a corner of the paper, but I hold tight. According to the article, Adele was making a left turn after the light had already turned red, and the Honda slammed into an oncoming car, head-on. Traci actually survived the wreck, and was airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Kansas City. Adele died on impact. The driver of the other car broke her foot in two places, but that was all. Libby Masterson was, of course, in the backseat, and is still in the hospital, in stable condition.

  Libby had not been wearing a seat belt either, and Mrs. Geldof told us that the only reason she was alive was physics, a question of who was sitting where. The rest of us should not count on such luck and should wear our seat belts. Libby, Mrs. Geldof said, again and again, was very lucky.

  “Yeah right,” my mother says. “Tell that to the shrink she’s going to need.”

  On Monday, we are supposed to go back to school, but I don’t want to. I tell my mother I’m not feeling well. She holds her hand against my forehead only for a moment, biting her bottom lip.

  “Evelyn, I can see you’re upset.”

  I roll my eyes. “I’m just sick. I wasn’t friends with any of them.”

  “I know. I know. But still, honey. I can see you’re upset.”

  I go back to my room and lie down, and she brings me a 7-UP, plugs her tape player in next to my bed. But I don’t play it. I know I am not really sick, but it is all I can do to just lie here and look up at the star chart on my ceiling with no sound around me at all.

  I am trying to figure out whether or not I’m a bad person. There are some points that argue that I’m not: One, I did not make Traci and Adele die. They were in a car, going too fast, and I was on the bus. Two, just because Traci is dead now does not mean that she was a nice person before she died. Just because she is dead now does not mean she was never phony. All it means now is that she’s dead.

  I stare up at the star chart. I cannot go to sleep.

  In driver’s ed last year, Mr. Leubbe rigged up what he called a Seat Belt Convincer to the back of his truck. He made us all try it, one at a time, buckling each of us into an old car seat that slid quickly down a two-foot ramp. I had been amazed by how much it hurt, the strap holding me back as the rest of my body went forward. I had a red welt across my neck that stayed there for two days.

  “You kids think you’re immortal,” Mr. Leubbe had told us. “You think you’re going to be able to put out your hands and save yourself,” he said. “But it happens too fast. That was only eight miles an hour. Try it at fifty, and your arms will break like twigs!” He had clapped his hands together, loud and sudden. “Your teeth will hit the pavement before you can think to shut your mouth. You’ll bite off your own tongue!”

  It is difficult to imagine Traci Carmichael like this, her blue-gray eyes hurled into the pavement and ended, just like that.

  I lie there, still and silent for hours, until I hear my mother tell me good night, wheeling Samuel into their room. Only when the light in the hallway goes out do I get up and move across my room to my dresser. The clothes are still there, in the bottom drawer, underneath my own sweaters and shirts. The white jeans are still smooth and new-looking, creased where I folded them years ago, but the palm trees ironed onto the sweatshirt are cracked, starting to peel. And I am amazed by how small everything looks. The red shoes are so tiny, just half the size of my foot now.

  I reach into the pocket of the jeans, and feel it there, the locket, a heart-shaped coldness between my finger and thumb, still hanging on its golden chain.

  seventeen

  FOR A WHILE, I AVOID Travis. A lot of our jokes aren’t funny, now that Traci is dead. I feel a pain in me all the time now, a dull rock in my stomach. I don’t want to feel bad about anything else.

  The Saturday before Easter, I wake to the sound of a gentle rain hitting the roof, and then yelling, repeated knocks. Samuel is crying in my mother’s room, but it’s a woman yelling, not my mother. It’s coming from outside. I move the sheet away from my window and see it’s Deena’s grandmother, already up and wearing the dress with the zipper, banging on the Rowleys’ front door.

  My mother peeks inside my room. “Evelyn? You awake?”

  I nod, yawning.

  “What’s going on out there? Is Travis even home?”

  “I don’t know.” I really don’t.

  “Is Deena over there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She reties the belt on her robe and sits down on my bed, ducking so she can see out my window. Two of the cats stay just outside my door, eyeing the doorway with interest. My room is the one room they are not allowed to come into, and so this is the room they want to come into the most. I wave my foot at them. “Shoo, kitties,” I say. “Shoo.”

  Deena’s grandmother continues to knock, steady and strong. We realize she is not using her hand, but something metal and sharp, a large cooking spoon.

  “I don’t know what this is about, but she woke up Sam an hour early,” my mother says. “I’m going over to her house tomorrow with a skillet.”

  The Rowleys’ door opens, and we can see Mrs. Rowley standing in her doorway, holding Jackie O. Jackie O is old now, blind, her eyes clouded with cataracts. She barks at Deena’s grandmother, her head turned in the wrong direction.

  “No again!” Deena’s grandmother yells, pointing as Mrs. Rowley’s chest with the spoon. “No again!”

  My mother and I look at each other, and then back out the window. Deena’s grandmother does most of the talking, the rain falling on the shoulders of her zipper dress. When Mrs. Rowley opens her mouth to sa
y something, Deena’s grandmother raises her voice and keeps talking, so Mrs. Rowley has to just stand there and listen, her hand over Jackie O’s muzzle. The cats creep slowly into my room, sniffing the carpet carefully. Just this once, I let it go.

  “Huh,” my mother says, squinting out the window, nodding, as if she can hear what they’re saying. “Huh.”

  Deena’s grandmother turns suddenly and hobbles down the steps, crossing the parking lot back to Unit A. The Rowleys’ front door slams shut. There are loud thuds, more yelling. Travis yelling. We can hear Mrs. Rowley crying when she crescendos up, so shrill it makes the cats tilt their heads up to the window, searching the sky for birds.

  The Rowleys’ front door opens again, and Travis sort of falls out onto the balcony, wearing only shorts, no shirt, no shoes, the door closing behind him. He runs back and tries to open the door. He bangs and kicks, rain rolling down his naked back. The door opens again, and Mrs. Rowley throws a shirt and a pair of shoes down the steps to the parking lot. She slams the door shut, and he throws himself against it, kicking at it so hard we can hear the glass in their windows rattle.

  Sam wheels into my room, bell ringing. He is wearing his red flannel pajamas, pointing in my direction, looking at the floor. The cats watch him, their eyes large with interest. “Glad you could join us, babe,” my mother says, hooking her foot around his, pulling him the rest of the way.

  Travis moves slowly down the steps, picking up the shirt his mother threw, already wet from the rain.

  “Can he come inside?” I ask.

  My mother frowns. “If he’s all done kicking things.”

  I follow her out of my room. We are like a parade. Samuel jingling behind me, the cats bringing up the rear. I stop in the bathroom to brush my teeth and hair, keeping the door open to listen.

  “Hey, Tex,” my mother calls out, opening the door. I don’t know why she calls him this. I don’t think Travis has even been to Texas. “Why don’t you come in here and warm up for a while? You can dry off. I’ll make you some pancakes.”