Sway

by Amber McRee Turner

“The deal is…” she began.

  And then, behind that wall of motor home, the gap between words was unbearably long and deafeningly quiet. Every eyebrow-tug I made was loud in comparison. Say it, say it, say it, went my pulse.

  “The deal is, I’m going alone,” Mom finally said. “Just me. Not we.”

  It was her worst rhyme ever.

  But…I thought.

  “But…” my dad said.

  “That’s the plan.” Mom trampled our buts. “Me, alone, in Florida.”

  “You alone, huh?” said Dad, the energy draining from his voice. “This isn’t about orphans at all, is it, Toodi?”

  With that, this sickly stillness washed over everything, and I couldn’t tell if it came from outside or within me. It was like this thing I’d heard about called “the calm before the storm,” when the sky gets eerie-green and even the crickets have an intermission. From the midst of that terrible calm, I heard my mom let out a little sob.

  “I hoped we could avoid this conversation for a couple of weeks,” she said, all hushed and blubbery. I waited for her crying to be muffled by my dad offering his shoulder to her, but it stayed very much unmuffled.

  “I hoped we could avoid this conversation for a whole lifetime,” said Dad, sounding like he could use a shoulder himself.

  “So go ahead,” he said. “Tell me his name.”

  “Douglas, don’t.…” said Mom.

  “The least you can do is tell me his name.” Dad said it like his back teeth were pressed together.

  “Ken,” she finally answered, and for such a tiny word, it sure was heavy. Just saying it made my mom cry even harder. While she did, I desperately searched all my memories for a Ken, but couldn’t find one. Could Ken be the guy who ran the orphanage? Was there a Kenneth, Missouri? Couldn’t there, oh please, couldn’t there have somewhere been a Hurricane Kenneth?

  And then there came a storm so fast and scary, like when a wall of rain overtakes you on the playground. The green sky cracked right in two as a tornado of awful words whipped up beyond The Roast. A twister of whispers with words like cheat and how and betrayal and lies all spun up with ones like intentions and loss and needs and boring. But no shred of a sorry or a stay. It was more vicious than raccoons fighting over garbage, and it gave me a bellyache worse than bad mayonnaise ever could.

  As the storm raged on, I heard my mom say, “What about Cass?” sobbing my name into three syllables. “What do we tell her?”

  My dad answered with the terrible words, “Toodi, maybe we are not what she needs.…It sounds to me like there is no more we.”

  Hearing that, I figured I had a choice to make, and quick. I could pull out enough eyebrow hairs to grant an army of wishes. I could crawl into the bathtub and drag a mattress over myself until it all blew over. Or I could run right out there and perform my first-ever storm rescue. Before I knew it, I’d jerked a fistful of blank pages from my journal and was headed for the door, planning first to tell them both to Can it! and then to tell Mom all the amazing things she and I could fill those pages with. Things that had nothing to do with anyone named Ken.

  I dashed outside so fast I didn’t even notice the abandoned cell phone that sat there waiting for revenge. Tripping over the phone and skinning my hands and knees on the gravel, I watched the blank pages swirl in the gust stirred up from my mom’s car as it squealed out of the driveway. Her taillights shrank away to nothing at the end of our street, and my dad just sat like a lump on the front bumper of The Roast.

  “Where’s she going?” I said. “What did you say to her?”

  While Dad perched there noiseless with his head bowed, Toodi Bleu Skies took off for the ocean, without even one piddly wave to spare for me.

  I should have crawled into the bathtub and drug a mattress over myself.

  Oh please, won’t some kind of superhero fly around the globe so fast that it’ll spin in reverse and make time skip back? That’s what I was thinking as I limped all the way to my bed, where I wrapped up tight in my blanket and tried hard to drown out my thoughts with the whistling in my nose. Not even a minute later my dad crept into the room. Looking much like a ripe tomato, his eyes all swollen in the red glow of my alarm clock, he laid a crumpled pile of journal pages and that stupid beat-up phone on my dresser.

  “You okay, Cass?” he said. “Are you hurt?”

  He should have known the answer to that. It was as dumb as asking Are you a girl?

  “Where did she go?” I asked, hoping he’d say that Mom was just testing out the new tire or getting some fresh air.

  “Florida,” Dad said, using his Uncle Clay’s in the hospital voice. “She’s gone to Florida.”

  I tried to remind myself that Mom had been gone and come home many times before, but something in Dad’s voice made this one sound different. Like the superglue version of gone.

  “Truth is, I’ve had a bad feeling about things for weeks,” he said.

  “So why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

  “Because I just kept praying that I was imagining things,” Dad said.

  “Who’s Ken?” I said.

  “You heard us?”

  “Some.”

  Dad sighed what seemed like four lungs’ worth of air.

  “Ken is a man who lost his wife. And your mom, well…I guess sometimes compassion can lead you down the wrong street, Cass.”

  And thus began the worst bedtime story ever told. No frilly princesses, no white horses, no pointy castles. Just a Storm Rescue Barbie who wants to help a Storm Victim Ken rebuild his life without the help of her boring other family. While Dad talked, I stared at my bedroom wall, watching the shadows of the pipe cleaner people grow.

  “But why’d you make her go?” I asked.

  “She was going anyway, Cass. She only wanted the two weeks to pack all her things and to…” He stopped short.

  “To tell me?” I said. “Why didn’t you let her tell me?”

  “Cass, you need to understand—”

  “I could have changed her mind,” I said.

  “You need to understand that your mom’s mind has made some real bad choices,” he said. “And she’s likely to keep on piling them up.”

  “But what about the orphans?” I asked.

  Another even bigger sigh from Dad. “I think this Ken has kids who lost their mom. I guess that’s who she was talking about.”

  Suddenly, the long thin shadows of my pipe-cleaner people turned scary, stretching up the wall like they were trying to tear it down.

  “But she’ll just be with them until they find their own new mom, right?” I said. “Right? I mean, isn’t there an end to every rescue?”

  Dad took half of forever to answer.

  “Cass, there’s something pulling on your mom real hard right now,” he said. “It’s like she’s gotten herself all tangled in the fresh start of a new place and new people. Like she’s gotten addicted to being Toodi Bleu Skies.”

  “How did you know about her statue name?”

  “I heard you two talking.”

  “And you still busted in before I even got to ask her,” I said.

  “Ask her what?” said Dad.

  “Nothing.”

  That’s about all I could stand to hear from Dad, and I think it was just about all he could stand to say. Short of stopping time and dragging my bed to Syd’s storm cellar, faking sleep seemed the best way to avoid any more awfulness that night, so I breathed in and out so deep and so regular I made myself woozy. My dad sat wedged in my purple papasan chair with his face in his hands for hours, while I stayed low under the covers to avoid catching glimpses of a sniffly man in my dresser mirror.

  When Sunday morning arrived without the Whew, it was only a nightmare wake-up I’d hoped for, I peeled the sheet unstuck from the scab on my knee. Dad was stretching awake, still curled up in the toppled chair. I had to step over him on my way to the hallway, where I found one of Mom’s framed awards lying on the floor with its glass cracked in half. I picked it
up and propped it against the wall before going to the kitchen for a breakfast of baby sweet pickles. While I ate them straight from the jar, a big fat fly stomped around in a drip of sweet on the table.

  “You going to eat that last one?” Dad said, groggily stumbling over the laundry basket and catching himself on the edge of a chair.

  “You can have it.” It was a shrively brown pickle anyway.

  Dad sat down and rubbed his face. We both stared at a bottle of Tabasco. The fly rubbed its feet together.

  “Did you know I was your mom’s first-ever rescue attempt?” Dad said, thumping crumbs across the table.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yep, I turned my head to get a look at her and stumbled into a puddle deep as my shins,” he continued. “She came all the way across the road, took me by the hand, and helped me to my feet. I remember that the first thing she ever said to me rhymed. ‘I’ll help you out of this crunch in exchange for some lunch,’ I think it was. They had to mop up the mud at the Burger King after our first date.”

  Dad ricocheted an old Cheerio off the fridge and said, “So, to answer your question, Cass…maybe there is an end to every rescue after all.”

  “That one doesn’t count,” I said. “That wasn’t even a real rescue.”

  I hated how he was talking about Mom like she had vanished into thin air. Like we were as powerless as a couple of poopy pansies to get her back again. I looked Dad square in the eyes for the first time since yesterday.

  “You broke her certificate,” I said.

  “What?” he said. “That wasn’t on purpose, Cass. I knocked it off running in to check on you.”

  “So then why didn’t you run after her?”

  “Because car-chasing is best left to dogs,” he snapped. “And mainly because your mom made it real clear she didn’t want that.”

  Dad waved the fly off the jar lid.

  “But she was going to teach me to rescue,” I said. “And now she’s gone, and I’ll never get to go to wherever and help anybody. And I’ll for sure never ever have a statue.”

  Sure enough, my summer suddenly felt like it had become a hidden-pictures puzzle in a magazine. One that some kid had already made into a circled-up mess. Like there was nothing good left to find. That there’d never be anything permanent in my whole life that was worth noodling on a wall.

  With that thought, another cry came squeezing at my throat.

  “Why couldn’t you guys just put it all in the storm cellar?” I said. “Why couldn’t you just can it?”

  But Dad only made a sad little snicker at my suggestion.

  “Because, Cass,” he said. “It seems you can’t really can a Ken.”

  The deflated I give up tone in his voice made my anger swell up high inside me. From the overflow came just two mumbled words.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “For what?” he said.

  “For ruining my chance of ever being a hero because I’m stuck here in my own shoes eating other people’s stupid potpies forever.”

  I scooted my chair back so hard it went up on two legs.

  “And you did knock it off the wall on purpose!” I shouted with all the volume I could muster, turning to run from the room. But Dad grabbed me by the elbow just in time.

  “Now listen up, Cass,” he said, sounding like something might be squeezing at his throat too. “Do you remember that time your hair got spun up in that minifan and I had to cut you free?”

  Of course I did. I remembered him singing every Gordon Lightfoot song he knew to try and calm me while he snipped off half my ponytail bit by bit with a pair of nail scissors. I remembered Syd turning purple with the laugh he was holding in. I remembered thinking I’d look like a haystack forever.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, I know this all seems sudden and scary and hopeless,” Dad said, his words slow and deliberate. “But I promise I’ll get you out of this terribleness too.”

  With that, he smashed the fly so hard with his palm, it made the little wooden letters leap off the Scrabble board, and sent a mean splash of pickle juice straight into my eye.

  Dad got up to wash his hands as I made a squinty dash to the bathroom, where an unexpected discovery totally distracted me from my stinging eye. The pink plastic beauty box. I couldn’t believe Mom hadn’t taken it with her. And gut-wrenching as it was to find it there, in a weird way it was also kind of comforting to have a little box of momness left behind. So I immediately ran to my room to bury it under a stack of old stuffed animals at the bottom of my closet. Then, after the burial was complete, there was nothing left to do but flop onto my bed and lie there for hours, switching positions only when my hair started to hurt.

  Every time I rolled onto on my side, I could see my dad standing on a chair in the backyard, his bottom half sticking out from under the hood of The Roast. To me, the motor home had become as unappealing as a milk jug left in the garbage too long, and I hoped hard that Dad was getting the useless old thing ready to be recycled. What if Dad hadn’t upset Mom with his bad plan? I would have had two whole weeks to change her mind about leaving.

  All day long I lay there and wondered. Wondered if maybe she’d left behind a long red finger-string for me to follow. Or a trail of cotton balls. Or at least an unused wish or two.

  I didn’t even remember getting the phone off my dresser, but I found myself holding it, smushing the MOM button again and again, like I needed to report to her that my head had fallen off my shoulders. The cracked phone just sat there dead in my hand, so I clicked it onto the charger just in case it could maybe be revived. In the shuffled stack of in-between pages Dad had salvaged and left on my dresser, I found the torn entry from the day before. I grabbed a pen, and for the first time ever, couldn’t come up with a single noodle.

  At dinnertime, from the other side of the wall, I heard my dad searching for the Beefaroni pan as if he were juggling everything metal in the kitchen. My head throbbed with every clank. Minutes later, when the smoke alarm sounded, I rubbed my temples like grown-ups do when they’re plain old fed up.

  “Hey! Pssssst! Cass!” All I could see of Syd were his eyes and nose above my windowsill.

  “Syd, I’m really not in the mood.”

  Truth is, I was a little glad to see Syd in the window, the scene being like a repeat of life as I knew it yesterday. I just didn’t want to have to tell him how the scene ended.

  “What was all that fussing about last night?” he said.

  “And what in the world is that noise?”

  Syd’s bull’s-eye questions meant there was no putting it off. Jagged and painful as my words were going to be, they had to come on out.

  “My mom is gone,” I said. “And burned Beefaroni.”

  Syd raised up on his elbows. “Get out dot com!” he said. “What do you mean Aunt Toodi is gone?”

  “I mean gone,” I said. “She went to live with another family for a while.”

  Just saying it out loud made things more sickeningly real.

  “You…don’t…mean…it,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, my dad said sometimes compassion can take you down the wrong street,” I said, trying to sound like I remotely understood how doing good for people could turn so bad. Syd was silent so long, I thought he’d passed out standing up.

  “That’s weird,” he said. “Compassion comes with a compass right there in it. Shouldn’t compassion always lead you in the right direction, then?”

  Syd’s unwelcome opinion made my ears itch like crazy.

  “Besides, can you already have a family and get another one?” he said.

  “Can you be nosy and obnoxious?” I tugged hard at my earlobe.

  “I mean, isn’t that like having a new heart installed and forgetting to take the old rotten one out?” he said.

  “Are you calling me a rotten heart?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and then got quiet again. “You staying in bed all day?”

  “Maybe all week,” I said.
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br />   Syd looked like he was searching his mind top to bottom for something suitable to say.

  “Hey, you know what, Cass? I heard about this guy in Miami that got all shark-bit,” he said. “They kept him asleep for a month until his body could handle the pain.”

  “Sharks aren’t the worst thing in Florida,” I told him.

  The smoke alarm went off a second time.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  Fighting back tears and befuddled by the alarm, I took a deep breath.

  “Look, Syd,” I said. “Thank you for checking on me and all, but it’s real hard to talk about this right now, okay? I mean, let’s just say that there was a whole oceanful of wrength at my house last night.”

  Syd got all squirmy with speechlessness. I could tell I’d pushed him beyond the level of tenderness that a twelveyear-old boy is comfortable with.

  “Well, all I know is, you better not lay around all week while I’m sitting in summer school,” he fussed. “That would be big-time unfair.”

  “Can it, Syd.” I rolled over and faced the dresser, trying to pretend I couldn’t see my cousin’s sun-speckled face in the mirror as he stood there and watched me like I might just fade away.

  Just then, there came a buzzing that was so weak and so hard to hear over the blaring smoke alarm, I thought I was imagining it. That is, until Syd’s reflection said, “Well? Are you going to answer that?”

  I didn’t have the time or the presence of mind to tell Syd how glad I was he’d stayed in the window. Instead, I bunched my bedspread and sheet into a pile on the floor, trying to get at the cell phone to answer it.

  “Mom?”

  “Cass? Baby?”

  Crackly as it was, the sound of her voice gave me such a dizzying relief, I sank to the floor in the corner of my room. My thoughts raced. She’s sorry. She’s coming back. She’s turning around.

  “Mom! I can barely hear you.”

  Through the open window, Syd gave me a double okay sign, and I shooed him away.

  “Mom, where are you?”

  I shooed Syd again.

  “Cass, baby, listen to me good, okay?” she began. “Your dad won’t let me talk to you on the other line, so I thought I’d try this one real quick.