by Sarah Willis
Sitting in the waiting room with a dozen other sad-looking people, I remembered my mother once telling me that devout Christians believe anyone who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior would go to hell. “Imagine that,” my mother said. “A God that would burn babies in hell for the crime of being born in a place that never heard of Him, not, mind you, that I believe in hell. But such a God, who would believe?” I apologized to God for my mother, telling Him He could do whatever He pleased about all those faraway children, but to please, please, not let my sister die and burn in hell.
Robert and I sat in the waiting room for more than a half hour. Just seven, Robert was all hunched up in his chair, knees bent, head tucked down, arms folded over his head so no one would see him cry. I didn’t want to cry, although somehow my face was wet. I was so scared, fear was a live thing inside me, like a rat gnawing at my insides. I held my arms across my stomach, it hurt so much.
My father returned to the waiting room. Megan’s temperature had been over a 106 degrees, he told us. They had to put her into a tub of cold water, and then they added ice. We would have to wait. My father asked me to move over so he could sit between Robert and me. Then he took my hand in his and squeezed it. We just sat there, holding hands. It was the last time I can remember holding my father’s hand.
I knew Megan would die. I imagined her casket, with a pink satin interior and brass handles. I imagined the funeral, everyone crying. I imagined packing up Megan’s clothes and her toys, my mother asking me if I wanted Megan’s teddy bear. I wanted to say yes, please, but instead I said no. I said it out loud, then I repeated it, because I felt I would burst if I didn’t. “No. No. No. No. No. No.”
“Tamara?” my father said. “Tamara?”
“No, no, no, no, no, no.” I was crying, unable to stop. I was causing a scene. People stared at me. I hated crying. I hated not being able to stop. I hated my sister for dying. My brother stared at me with big wide eyes. I wanted to smash his face. “No, no, no, no, no,” I said. I banged my fists on my thighs. My father tried to grab my hands.
A nurse came over. “Can I help?”
“No!” I shouted. “Go away.”
“She’s upset about her sister,” he said. I hated the apology in his voice. He should be apologizing for himself, for following my mother into atheism, for letting my sister die.
“Could you see how she’s doing?” my father asked.
“Certainly,” she said. She looked at me with such pity, I knew it was because Megan was already dead.
The nurse came back quickly. “Your sister’s doing much better. Her temperature is down. She’s going to spend the night here, but she’ll probably be able to go home tomorrow. Really.” She put her hand on my shoulder. I moved my shoulder away and her hand came off. “Really, she’ll be fine. There’s no reason to be scared, honey.”
Megan came home the next day, just as the nurse said, but I didn’t feel happy or relieved. I was furious at her for making me so scared, for making me feel stupid. My parents treated her like a little princess for months. If she sneezed, they held her in their laps, a palm on her forehead, or read her stories, whispering in her ear, asking me to run for her teddy. “Please find Teddy,” they said, as if he were alive. “Please look all over for Teddy and bring him to your sister.”
I really can’t stand her, my sister. If she had died, I would have loved her.
My father drives my mother to her doctor’s appointment, leaving us behind. She waves from the car, a scanty wave, mostly fingers.
The hospital is in Westfield, a forty-minute drive. The doctor in Mayville works out of his house and my mother says she wouldn’t trust him to stitch a cut.
Today Rusty wants to show me his fort.
I follow him into the woods. The ground is covered with undergrowth, brambles, and fallen trees. Tall thin poplars with white speckled bark stretch up to the sky, vying for light; their round leaves make a shhh sound in the light summer wind. Rusty leads me to the right, past a stand of old pines with broken limbs and through a flat, almost treeless space where mayapples cover the ground like a thick green carpet. There is a well-worn path straight through the center of the mayapples, where they have learned their lesson from Rusty’s feet. Gradually the earth rises and the trees are mostly maple, some ancient, with branches thicker than my waist. Saplings and younger trees grow between the older trees, like thin children. We can see through the woods now, to the top of the hill, where Rusty’s fort is. We make rustling, papery sounds as our feet swish through the covering of last fall’s leaves.
Rusty’s fort is made from a conglomeration of old junk: two wooden doors, a sheet of corrugated metal, a wide piece of knotty plywood, several branches, random boards, and a pale-manganese-blue shower curtain for a door. It’s not round and it’s not square. Maybe octagonal. I don’t think he was trying for a specific shape, just trying to fit it in between some of the trees. Rusty lifts up the shower curtain and we duck inside.
The ceiling is about six feet high, made out of chicken wire, with a shower curtain lying on top of the wire. The shower curtain is clear with bright tropical fish painted on it, and it’s very dirty. Still, some light comes through. It feels a bit like we’re under water.
Inside there are two metal folding chairs, the legs bent at angles that chair legs are not meant to go. I doubt you could sit in them. There is also a beige sleeping bag on a piece of black plastic, a lantern on a wooden box, a cardboard box with kitchen things like cups and bowls, and in one corner is a metal box with a lock on it.
“Neat,” I say. He positively beams with pride.
We sit down on the tattered sleeping bag. Rusty absently runs his fingers along the dirt floor.
“I don’t bring no one out here,” he says.
“Anyone,” I say.
He nods, missing my point. “Yeah, you’re the first.”
This worries me. Doesn’t he have any friends? Which makes me wonder. “Did you know him?” I ask.
He blinks, confused. I’ve thrown him off track.
“The Burns’ kid? The one who died?”
“Oh.” He nods, taking some time to switch gears. His whole face twitches as he thinks. “Well, sure.”
“Was he your friend? What was he like?”
Rusty looks around his fort, sure something went wrong somewhere, then he shrugs. “Well, he was smart, like you, and he was in tenth grade. He liked making stuff, science projects with knobs and batteries and stuff. He said he was going to be a rocket scientist and I sure think he would have. If he hadn’ta died first.”
“Were you two good friends?” I want to know all about the dead boy. I wouldn’t have dared asking these questions in the house, or anywhere within sight of the house, but it feels safe in Rusty’s fort.
“Yeah, well, I’ve known him my whole life. And he was friendly. He liked to show me stuff. We shared comics and stuff. He gave me the idea for this fort when I was complaining about having nothing but sisters driving me crazy. We talked about … things. He never got to come in the fort though. He got too sick to walk this far. You woulda liked him.”
I think I would have. It’s his ghost I worry about.
Rusty continues talking, as if I opened up a drain that had been all clogged. “Timothy was sick for a long time. Didn’t go to school for like half the year. He had leukemia. Cancer in his blood, just poisoning him. It made the Burns get so sad, like they got old real quick. Nobody laughed over there. The Burns used to be real fun, before he got sick. Mr. Burns got drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day and painted the bull’s horns green and stuck apples on them. It was great. Pissed that bull off real bad, but we couldn’t help laughing.” Rusty laughs, then just stops.
“I saw Timothy the day he died. I saw him dead.”
For a quick second I think I’ll say to Rusty that he doesn’t have to tell me any more, but then I know I want to hear this stuff, and that Rusty wants to tell me. I nod.
“Well, I went up to his room, your
room now I guess, and he was all white and his eyes were sunk into his head, like his sockets got big and swallowed them. You could see all the bones on his face. The Burns told me when I was about to go up to his room that they were taking him into Westfield soon, like in an hour, but Timothy didn’t want to go and Mrs. Burns was all red-eyed ‘cause she wanted to do what Timothy asked, since you want to do what your kid asks when he’s sick. While I was upstairs you could hear Mr. and Mrs. Burns talking about it. They both knew they had to go. They’d been there a lot recently and just gotten back a few days ago. Timothy just shook his head when I asked him how he was, and rolled his eyes, which was real gross to watch ’cause they got all white and I thought for a second they wouldn’t come back normal. I tried telling him my fort had all the walls up, and that I’d take him when he got back from the hospital next time, but he didn’t seem to really care, you could tell.” Rusty pauses and bites at a fingernail, working it off with his teeth, then he spits it on the ground and scratches his nose.
“So I sat there and felt stupid, and he kept closing his eyes, so I figured he needed sleep. I told him I was going to go and I’d see him in a couple days when he got back. When I went downstairs, you could tell they decided they were going to take him back, so I asked if I could help some way. Like helping carry Timothy downstairs or something. Mr. Burns said no, Timothy was pretty light now and he was just going to drive the car right up to the door, so I followed him out. Mrs. Burns was packing some sandwiches to eat at the hospital. So I went home.
“But I didn’t go inside, I just sat on the swing waiting to watch Timothy get carried out, just in case they really did need me. But after Mr. Burns backed the car up to the door, he went inside and no one came out. Not for at least a half hour. So I got worried.
“No one ever told me he was going to die. No one said anything about it. We just put him in our prayers, asking God to help him get better, so I figured he would, or maybe if not better, he’d just go on being sick forever. But the Burns must have known. My parents too. They just didn’t warn me.
“So, when I went back over and knocked on the door and asked if I should help, I didn’t believe it when they told me he was dead. I thought maybe they just made a mistake. An ambulance came to get him and I was sure the guy driving it would say, ‘What do you mean? He’s fine,’ but he didn’t. They covered up his face with a sheet when they brought him out, so I guess I didn’t really see him dead, but it feels like I did. I didn’t believe it really until the funeral. Sometimes I still don’t believe it.”
“He’s still there,” I say, not knowing I’m going to say it until it comes out, wishing right away I hadn’t said it.
Rusty squints his eyes at me. “What?”
He’s looking at me like I’m crazy, which makes me mad. “His ghost is stuck in the attic,” I say, a little too loudly for the cramped inside of the fort. It sounds like I’m yelling when I’m not.
“Shit, Tamara, you’re nuts.” He leans back, away from me. He actually looks a little scared.
“I am not nuts! I hear him. I can feel him.”
He folds his arms across his chest, almost like he’s protecting himself from me. “Well, I say you’re nuts. Timothy is in heaven. Helen says so. The minister says so.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, wishing I never started this. I don’t want to fight with Rusty. I want to get kissed, and maybe more. I want to get started on that whole bunch of stuff in the middle. He’s the only boy around, so I don’t want to get him mad at me. “So,” I say, “now you think I’m nuts and you don’t want to kiss me anymore?”
This stops him dead. Now we’re back to where he wanted to be the whole time, but he’s not sure how we got there. Neither am I.
He swallows. I can see his Adam’s apple bob down and up. “I do want to kiss you,” he says.
“So, go ahead,” I say.
I don’t have to say it twice.
We kiss for a long time, trying it different ways. Heads sideways. Heads straight, noses bumping. Mouths a bit open. Hard. Soft. Moving our lips slowly. Hard again. Finally we get tired of it and he figures out a way to make it new again. His hand slides down to my left breast, cupping it real softly as if he’s afraid it might hurt me, or maybe that it might burn his hand. I have conveniently forgotten to wear a bra. I can feel him carefully move his hand around, discovering just that.
All on their own, my breasts kind of arch toward him. I’m embarrassed by this forward motion of my body, but I can’t stop myself. His hand clamps a bit tighter and I moan, right through my lips that are pressed to his, although I can’t really feel my lips anymore; my whole brain has slipped down into my left breast.
Now we kiss, both knowing that the kissing is just a good excuse for him to be feeling me up. We are trying to not move much, because if we do, we could knock a wall down. Still he finds ways to experiment, by squeezing my breast, then letting go, kind of kneading it like warm bread. It’s getting hot inside the fort. I’m sweating and Rusty smells warm, he even tastes a little salty. Then he gently pinches my nipple right through my cotton shirt, and my nipple gets tight and hard and stays that way, and he can tell, because then he concentrates on just the nipple for a while and I know I’m making noises I never made before, except for the time my mother made chocolate truffles. And even then it was just one moan and this is a bunch of them all tied together in what seems to be one long breath, because I can hardly breathe and my heart is banging so hard I think it’s going to burst. I really, really like this, but then I think of God.
I don’t know where the thought comes from, but suddenly I think God is looking right down at me through the dirty shower curtain. He’s got one eye on me and one eye on the rest of the world. He’s shaking His head. I stop kissing Rusty and pull back. His hand tries to stay on my breasts, but I turn slightly away, and he gets the hint.
“Uhhh,” he says. His hand is still in the cupped shape of my breast and his fingers still pulse in little flexes. “What?” he says. “Did I do something wrong?”
It can’t be wrong, I think. It feels too good. But now I’m afraid. I can’t make any mistakes right now, not with my mother on her way to the hospital. Maybe I shouldn’t even be here. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why God would care. I remember my mother saying that if there was a God who cared if you ate fish on Friday, He must be insane and she wouldn’t worship Him anyway. I wish I could ask Helen if God cared about me making out with Rusty, or him feeling me up, but I figure Rusty wouldn’t appreciate that.
“I think we should stop. Before, you know,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to do nothing you didn’t want.”
“Anything,” I say.
“Anything?” he asks, his mouth hanging open.
“No, I mean … Oh, forget it. It was good, Rusty. I have to say I liked it. But I should be watching my sister. I better get back.”
“Oh, okay.” He’s still breathing heavy, still stuck on anything. “Can I just look? Would you? Would you mind?”
I wouldn’t mind at all. I’d like him to. I think about God looking too, but just then a cloud must come across the sun because it gets darker in the fort. I figure God must be shutting one eye for a minute, or turning it somewhere else to where someone’s doing something more wrong than this. I lift up my shirt.
“Don’t touch,” I say, because if I let him touch them now I’ll never get home. Rusty’s looking at my breasts like there’s no tomorrow.
I lower my shirt. “Let’s go.”
“Hot dog! They sure are big!” he says, and rubs his hands together. I laugh. He’s a funny kid. I kind of like him.
Seven
I pick at the peeling wood on the front steps. The dog, Kip, watches me as he lies on the grass a few feet away. He’s always scrutinizing me with a half-wary, half-hopeful look, never getting too close. He’ll let me pet him if I move real slow. Usually I don’t bother.
My father drives up our pebbled drive, braking at the last min
ute before the driveway ends and the lawn begins. I don’t see my mother. She must be lying down in the back seat, sleeping.
He gets out of the car, closes the door, and just stands there. His face is blank. His lips turn neither up nor down. His eyes look straight ahead. He starts to walk toward the house where I’m sitting on the top step, but I don’t think he sees me. I don’t think he sees anything.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask. A quick shot of fear hits me hard. She isn’t in the car. I know it without asking.
At the sound of my voice, he trips, startling himself. He throws out his arms in a swimming motion and manages to straighten up. He turns his head toward the barn, as if he thinks my mother might be there, as if she might come walking out with a big smile and he won’t have to answer my question. My fear turns into a sharp anger.
“Where is she!”
Robert and Megan come out of the house and stand behind me on the porch. The sound of the screen door opening and closing makes him turn. He looks right through us. As angry as I am, I have a very coherent thought: it is amazing he made it back home without having an accident. With my image of him smashed to pieces, anger jumps back and fear jumps forward again. I think I’m going to throw up. I feel like I’m on a teeter-totter and I’m up too high to get off. I’m going back and forth but never down.
“Where’s Mommy?” Megan asks. Her soft little voice just floats in the air; I can hear her words spread out and cover us.
My father nods. He takes a deep breath and nods again, at us as a whole. We are too many to ignore. “Well,” he says. “She didn’t come back with me.”
“What?” I don’t know who says this. Maybe we all do.
“For our own protection.” He closes his eyes and presses his large hands flat against his cheeks, covering his eyes, and he stands like this for a minute or more. We don’t say anything. We are too confused to speak. When he takes his hands down, his eyes are focused. He looks at me, at Robert, at Megan. “Let’s go inside and sit down. I need to sit down.” He is older right now than he was just this morning. His eyes are gray with webs of fine lines underneath and he moves awkwardly, his stride shorter than usual, as if it takes some thought to walk and he has to be very careful. We part to let him open the door and go inside, then we follow him in.
