Beauty of the Broken

by Tawni Waters

  Iggy just stares.

  It goes on like that for a long, long time. Momma and me asking Iggy questions. Iggy answering by barfing and staring. Daddy must still be too drunk to hear anything, because we’re making enough noise to raise an army of dead men, but he never comes in. Thank God. The last thing we need is to deal with his ugly face.

  It seems like forever before Momma says, “Get dressed, Mara.”

  “Why?” I ask. Something tells me I should remember her words. Something in me knows they will change everything. Nothing will ever be the same again.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” she says, and chokes a little, like she’s going to cry, but doesn’t. She takes the afghan Grandma made Iggy from the chair in the corner and wraps it around him. “Come on, baby,” she says. “Let’s get you to the doctor.”

  She doesn’t tell Daddy we’re going. I worry. I wonder what Daddy will do when he finds us gone. I wonder if he’ll kill us all. Never in our lives has Momma ever done anything without Daddy’s permission. Iggy stumbles to his feet, shuffles along beside Momma as she leads him down the stairs, her arm around his shoulder.

  “If I could pick any boy in the world, it’d be you,” she keeps saying.

  He never stops staring.

  I follow them, watching Iggy’s head nod like one of those bobbers on a fishing pole. “Momma, I’m scared,” I say.

  She says nothing.

  CHAPTER 2

  IGGY IS LYING IN A hospital bed. sitting in a chair beside him, I wonder what he’s looking at. The yellow walls? The bluebird hopping on his window sill? The gauzy curtains? Whatever it is, it must be interesting. He never stops staring.

  He’s been like this for twenty-seven hours and six minutes. That night he got sick, Dr. Groves said he had a bad concussion.

  “What happened?” he asked, looking at Iggy’s bruises, his busted finger.

  When Momma said Iggy fell out of a tree, Dr. Groves didn’t bat an eye. I wondered if Dr. Groves just went along with Momma’s story because he and Daddy played high school football together. Either way, no one called the cops. But Dr. Groves was serious and sad. He said Iggy might not live. I started to cry when he said that. Iggy was the one light in my whole world. Without him, everything would be dark.

  “Someone has to watch him, make sure he doesn’t sleep. If he goes into a coma, he may never come back to us.”

  When Dr. Groves said that, I jumped right up. “I’ll watch him,” I said.

  And so here I am. Momma and me have been taking turns watching Iggy. It’s my turn now. Momma went home a few hours ago to get some rest. Daddy never showed up, even though Momma called and told him that Iggy might die.

  I try to talk to Iggy, but he doesn’t answer.

  “What does a blue jay sound like, Iggy?” I ask. He’s real into birdcalls. Usually he’d be all over that question. But he just stares.

  Momma comes stumbling in. With one glance I can tell she’s drunk. She’s wearing a pair of Daddy’s overalls, which is strange. Usually she’s dressed up like she’s ready to be interviewed for the five o’clock news.

  “Hey, Momma,” I say.

  She smiles. Too big. Gleeful, almost. “Why, hello, darling,” she says, and she wanders to Iggy. “How you doing, sport?” she asks, rumpling his hair.

  Iggy stares.

  She’s holding two paper bags. “I made you both sack lunches,” she says. “This hospital food is shit.”

  I jump a little at that. It’s the first time in my whole life I have ever heard my momma cuss. All the cussing I know I learned from school. And Daddy. Daddy can cuss up a blue streak when he’s mad. I take both lunches and set Iggy’s on the table beside him.

  “Thanks, Momma,” I say. My voice sounds flat.

  I open my sack and peer inside. A sandwich. Bologna, by the smell of it. An apple. Cookies. Home baked. They look like chocolate chip, Iggy’s favorite. I squeeze the sack shut, hating Momma for thinking she can fix this mess with lunch. Iggy might die, and she thinks cookies will make it better. I want to strangle her.

  She goes to Iggy’s bed and sits on the edge, brushes his hair from his bruised face. “I love you, Iggy,” she whispers. “So fucking much.”

  Twice. She cussed twice in one day. Heck, twice in five minutes.

  Hearing her swear scares me. It scares me more than the way Iggy is staring. It scares me more than Dr. Groves did when he told me Iggy might die. Iggy is gone, and now so is my momma. I need her the same as she’s always been. Messed up as she is, she’s all I got.

  I go sit down by Momma, wrap my arms around her, bury my head in her shoulder. She smells dirty, like she hasn’t showered in days. Most times she smells perfume-y and sweet. My broken heart almost explodes. It hurts so bad, I start to cry. Momma wraps her arms around me, whispers, “Mara, Jesus, Iggy, I’m sorry.” Her breath smells like rum, but in that moment, I need her to be the good guy, so I forgive her anyway.

  “It’s not your fault,” I say.

  “It’s not your fault,” Iggy says.

  Me and Momma jump.

  “Iggy!” Momma screams.

  “Iggy!” I scream it too.

  We turn toward him. We’re the ones who are frozen now, staring. He looks at us, and for a minute his eyes are the way they used to be, see-clear-through-you. Smart. “Nothing is anyone’s fault,” he says.

  “Iggy, you’re back,” I say, laughing and crying at the same time. I throw myself on his chest, tasting my salty tears and snot, feeling the safe beating of his heart.

  Finally I pull away and hold his face between my hands. I get scared again. He’s not staring anymore, but his eyes aren’t see-clear-through-you either. They’re somewhere between here and there, somewhere far away.

  “Iggy?” I ask.

  He smiles, lopsided. “Hey, Sis,” he says, but it doesn’t sound like him.

  “Iggy?” Momma says.

  “Hey, Momma,” he answers back. His words are too slow.

  “Dr. Groves!” Momma yells. “Nurse! Someone! Iggy’s back!”

  A minute or so later Dr. Groves runs in.

  “He doesn’t seem right,” I tell Dr. Groves. I sound desperate, even to me, but I’m hopeful. Maybe Dr. Groves is a miracle worker. Doctors know things, right? They have pills and fancy machines and stuff. They can make people better.

  Dr. Groves does his magic. Shines lights in Iggy’s eyes, asks him to count, stuff like that. After a minute I can’t watch. It’s hard for Iggy to count. He can’t remember his birthday. “We’re both Pisces, Iggy. Remember?” I say, hoping to prod him into recollection. Dr. Groves gives me a look that says I’m not helping.

  I glance out the window. A raven is pecking at something dead in the parking lot. I read once that the only difference between crows and ravens is that ravens are loners. They’ll kill anything that gets close to them. If you see a gaggle of black birds, you know they’re crows, because a raven would be running alone.

  I look back to Dr. Groves.

  “Your boy has been in one too many scrapes,” he says to Momma. “These concussions can be cumulative.”

  “What does that mean?” Momma asks. She balls up her fists, looking mad, as if Dr. Groves is being confusing on purpose.

  I look back at the raven. It pulls something long and stringy from the dead thing. Dead things are made of string, I think. It sounds crazy, even to me. But I’m often crazy inside my own head. I wonder if everyone is.

  Dr. Groves rustles around in the pocket of his lab coat, looking for answers. “What it means is that your son has suffered multiple concussions, and this time, he has . . . sustained quite an injury.”

  “He fell out of a tree,” Momma says, too quick.

  “I understand that,” Dr. Grove says. “Whatever the case, his brain has been injured badly. Now, usually after a concussion, the brain goes back to normal. Within days. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months.” He’s silent for a moment. He looks at Iggy, who is fidgeting with the hem of his hospital
gown. Dr. Groves clears his throat. “Sometimes never.”

  “Never.” The word explodes like a grenade.

  That is the moment my whole wide world goes black.

  CHAPTER 3

  NEVER.” IT WAS A BIG word. I never forgot it. Dr. Groves was right. Iggy was never the same. Once in a while his see-clear-through-you eyes would come out and you’d think for a second the old Iggy was back, but he’d always leave again. I hated Daddy even more after that day. It’s been six months since our trip to the hospital, and Iggy still isn’t Iggy.

  As if things couldn’t get worse, Daddy drowned my kittens this morning. He took our barn cat Rapunzel’s babies to the river in a sack. Said there’s enough strays running around these hills without us adding our passel to the fray. I’d already given them names: Mary Magdalene, Simon, Garfunkel, Picasso, and Elvis. Now they’re pushing up daisies at the bottom of the river, even though I’m well aware that daisies don’t grow at the bottom of rivers. It’s just an expression, and my kittens are dead. Don’t expect me to think too clear right now. I’ve been crying since I woke up, and Rapunzel keeps coming to the door and meowing, asking where her kittens are. I don’t know what to tell her.

  I guess I sorta think they’re coming home too. I keep glancing out the window, looking for them. Instead I see the corn plants cut to the ground and shivering in the frost. I button the black silk dress I borrowed from Momma’s closet, the one she bought for her aunt’s funeral. Three days before my sixteenth birthday, and I’m going around mourning those poor cats, wearing black up to my chin like a nun or something. Just call me Sister Mary Mara, for God’s sake. I don’t think Momma would like it if she knew I was wearing her dress, but what she doesn’t know won’t kill her. She’s always asleep when we leave for school these days, so there’s not much chance of her finding out. I slide into my hiking boots and plod down the stairs.

  My party invitations are stacked on the table by the front door, right by the change jar Daddy keeps filled to the top with quarters. For a rainy day, he always says. I dream about stealing those quarters and buying myself something nice, but not today. Today all I can see are those invitations waiting for me to take them off to school and give them to my friends.

  Most of the kids in school send e-vites, but Daddy won’t let me use the computer, so Momma made my invitations with her scrapbooking kit. Sweet Sixteen they say on the front. There’s a picture of birthday cake underneath. I’m kinda embarrassed, but what am I supposed to do? Tell my momma I won’t use her invitations? That will send her on a bender for sure.

  Mostly I just want Xylia to like the invitations. I think about the way her upper lip is just a tiny bit bigger than her lower one. The way she lisps a little when she talks, not enough so everyone would notice, but enough that people catch on if they’re paying attention. I notice because I’m always paying attention to Xylia, even if she doesn’t know I’m alive, which I’m pretty sure she doesn’t.

  I reach out to grab the stack of envelopes when I see Momma sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window, floating in a cloud of smoke. My first thought is that she’ll kill me if she sees me wearing her dress, but the way she looks, I know she won’t care about anything. Her hair is mussed, and her nightgown is bunched around her waist, revealing lumpy thighs. She clasps a glass of something brown in one hand, a cigarette in the other. A piece of pink paper lies on the table beside her. It smells like rosewater, even from far away. This is what I’ll be someday, I think, and it scares me so much, I forget all about Xylia.

  “Good morning, Momma.” My voice is quiet, even though I don’t mean for it to be.

  When she looks at me, her eyes are empty as ghost towns.

  “I do these things,” she says, and she wads up the paper. “I do these things, and I don’t even know why.”

  “Do what, Momma?” I move toward her, reaching for the paper.

  “Don’t you dare, missy,” she says. “Don’t you dare pry into my secret dreams.”

  I stop short.

  She uncrumples the paper and reads it, her lips silently forming the words. I watch them moving, but I can’t make out what she’s saying, except that she repeats “Iggy” over and over again. “I meant it when I said it,” she whispers. “I meant it, but now, I don’t know what I mean.” She crosses her arms on the table and plops her head on them.

  “Let’s get you to bed, Momma.”

  She sits up, her head tilting to one side, like it wants to fall off. “It’s just now morning. See, the sun’s coming up.” She points at the window, at the eyelet-lace curtains glowing gold with the sun’s first light.

  She’s right. The bright orange sun is peeking up over the hill. Naranja, I think. I learned the word in Spanish class. I’m crap when it comes to verb conjugations, but I’m okay with vocabulary words.

  She looks back at me. “You should do something with your hair. It’s as rebellious as you are.” She has said this to me a billion times. She knows I can’t do anything with my hair. It does what it wants.

  “Momma, you’re sick,” I say. This is what we call it when Momma gets like this. Sick. Though she has never been sick this early in the morning. Usually we find her this way at midnight, wandering in the yard, muttering secrets to the moon. “You should sleep.”

  She nods. “I am sick, sweet thing,” she agrees. “Sicker than a frog in heat.”

  This perplexes me. As I help Momma out of her chair, I wonder if frogs do go into heat. And if so, do they get sick from it? I don’t know. Whatever the case, I give her points for originality, the way Mr. Farley did on career day, when I told the class I wanted to be a painter, but not the kind that has caterpillar eyebrows, like Frida Kahlo. I was trying to make people laugh, but no one ever laughs at my jokes. No one ever talks to me, really. I’m pretty much invisible. Well, except to Elijah Winchell, who is the preacher’s kid. He is the last person in the whole world I want to notice me.

  “Come on, Momma.”

  She stands, wobbling a little, but doesn’t fall. I take her by the arm.

  As we pass Daddy’s picture in the hallway, she whispers, “Damn that man.”

  “Damn that man,” I whisper too, hoping my words are a magic curse that will send Daddy straight to hell for all eternity. Even though I know he’s in the barn, I’m scared he’ll hear me when I say it. I take her to her room and tuck her beneath the rose-covered comforter. “Night, Momma.” I kiss her on the cheek.

  She has that bitter smell again, the one that comes from the rum. “Night, lover girl,” she says, slurring her words.

  The sick taste comes into my mouth as I watch her lying there, face slack, eyes staring but seeing nothing.

  “Sweet thing, bring me my glass,” she tells me.

  “ ’K, Momma,” I say. I won’t, but she’ll forget she even asked. I head back to the kitchen and the note Momma was writing.

  “You don’t have to be cruel to rule my world!” Iggy shout-sings behind me.

  I startle so hard, I drop the paper. It falls by my feet. “For God’s sake, Iggy,” I snap, picking it up. “You scared the crap out of me.” I know the paper is important and probably says something ugly, since that’s the way things are going for me these days. I uncrumple it. Dearest William, I start to read. I get nervous. William. Who’s William?

  “Don’t have to be cruel to rule my world!” Iggy scream-sings again.

  “It’s ‘you don’t have to be cool to rule my world,’ ” I say, shoving the note in my pocket. I’ll read it later when Iggy isn’t so busy being an asshole. I hate the way he always sings the stupid songs Momma listens to on the radio, songs from the eighties that sound like idiots wrote them. He used to hate them, but ever since his brain broke, he’s all about them.

  “I got you,” Iggy squeals, laughing until he doubles over and a little line of snot slips out of one nostril. All six feet two inches of him quiver with joy. “I scared you good. Twice!”

  “Don’t hyperventilate,” I tell hi
m. He doesn’t stop. “For God’s sake, you sound like a donkey braying.”

  He gulps and wipes at his nose with his fist, still smiling. “I got you good, Mara.”

  When my heart stops pounding, I don’t feel mad anymore. “Yeah, sport, you got me good.” I reach up and rumple his hair.

  Iggy laughs again, but this laugh is too tiny for his big, lanky frame.

  “Did you pack a lunch?” I ask. I remember when I didn’t have to remind Iggy about anything. It was only six months ago, but it feels like a million years. It’s as if my big brother turned into my baby brother.

  Iggy looks at the floor and shuffles his feet. “I forgot.”

  “Of course you did.” For a second I hate him. I hate him for being what he is now instead of who he used to be. I stomp to the fridge and pull out the bread.

  “Rena’s family don’t keep the bread in the fridge,” Iggy says. Rena is a girl from his special-ed class, his only friend, as far as I can tell.

  “It keeps better that way.” I pull the peanut butter and honey from the cabinet and slap a sandwich together.

  “Did you make me a double-decker?” Iggy asks as I shove the sandwich into a baggie. Iggy loves double-decker sandwiches—three pieces of bread, two layers of peanut butter and honey.

  “No, Iggy. We don’t have time. We’re already about to miss the bus.” I dump the sandwich and an apple into a plastic grocery bag and hand it to him.

  “I want a double-decker,” he whines.

  “Too bad,” I say.

  He looks inside the bag. “No dessert?”

  I bite back a swear and go to the cookie jar. “Here.” I pull out two store-bought chocolate chip cookies and push them into the bag, not even bothering to wrap them to keep them fresh.

  Iggy grins.

  “Don’t have to be cruel to rule my world!” Iggy screams behind me.

  “Don’t have to be cool,” I say, spinning toward him. The smear of chocolate on his chin tells me he’s already eaten one of the cookies. I think about getting him another for lunch, then decide he doesn’t deserve it. “Can we just go now?” I head for the door, and Iggy follows.