Make Believe

by Joanna Scott

  Or that Carlie Fitzwilliams with the teacup chin was thinking about how hungry she was — she’d been working since three P.M. and hadn’t yet taken her break.

  Or that Gordon, the resident, was making up his mind that the child’s condition indicated X rays but in all likelihood a CT scan would not be necessary.

  Or that Amy Ratigan, the attending physician, would have insisted on a CT no matter what the X rays turned up, but at that moment a triage nurse leaned in the door and asked if she could borrow Dr. Ratigan for a walk-in diagnosis. Since the patient, though disoriented, had been stabilized and the team was working well together, Amy saw no reason not to go.

  What did it matter? Bo was just a baby and couldn’t have cared less who stayed or who went or where they took him, wouldn’t have minded if they spit in his face, and had stopped wanting anything except to be left alone to think his thoughts.

  “My … dog … Blue…”

  “No ID yet.”

  Of course, years later, when he was all grown up, if he were allowed to grow up, Bo might care that Amy Ratigan had left Gordon Metzger in charge, and Gordon Metzger had been trained to avoid expensive tests when there was no specific indication, a sentiment shared by the resident radiologist, Bruce McDonald, who detected no abnormalities in the films.

  “Any deterioration run a CT, otherwise…”

  Otherwise, Bo need not be tested. A nameless kid without any form of health insurance, thanks to his happy-go-lucky mama, who’d chosen to gamble on the health and well-being of herself and her child rather than sign over a hefty portion of her salary for services they’d probably never use.

  Otherwise…

  Just leave him alone! That’s what he wanted. Except when they did finally leave him alone, when they wheeled him out of radiology and into an ED cubicle and pulled the curtain around his bed, he started to remember what he’d been feeling earlier. A hurting in his belly. What was the word for pain? It hurt a little, not a lot, no reason for a big brave boy to cry. But the more he thought about it, the more it hurt. Like someone was grinding a fist into his belly. Stop! How do you say stop?

  “I’ve got a dog and his name is Blue.”

  What?

  “Bet you five dollars he’s a good dog, too. My … dog … Blue…”

  Bo made a deal with himself. He’d open his eyes first, and then the hurting would stop. Okay —

  “Hello there, little man.”

  Who are you?

  “My name is Bart. That’s B as in banana. They call me Mr. O2 Man. You can call me that, too. What’s your name?”

  B as in banana. BBBBBB. Bo remembered that part of his name began with B. But then he became aware of the hurting and felt so betrayed he started crying as loud as he could.

  “Oh no, I didn’t scare you, did I? I didn’t say something wrong? Oh no, I’m just Bart, everybody’s friend, you shouldn’t be scared of Bart, I help kids, I like kids, I may be funny looking but I’m not a bad guy. Gordon — I’ll get Gordon, he’ll give you something to calm you down, he’ll make you feel all better.”

  Don’t go! He wanted the B-man to come back and sing to him again. He didn’t want to be alone anymore. Maybe if he held in the crying. … Yes, this worked, for soon the B-man returned with two of the strangers. They were going to make the hurting go away, they were going to help him, they were going to give him —

  “Something to relax you, sonny.”

  “Poor little angel. Still no ID. Won’t you tell us your name, angel?”

  He could not tell them anything, though he wanted to now. He wanted to tell them his name and to thank them for making the hurting go away. He wanted the B-man to stay and sing to him. He wanted to tell them that whatever else they did, they mustn’t make his mama angry. He wanted to sing them the song she’d been singing before everything went upside down. Now that the pain was relenting he began to understand what had happened, the turning, everything turning one way while he turned another, turning and turning, and all at once he realized that his mama was gone. Not pretend gone. Not playing-like-on-TV gone. Just gone. He understood the fact even if he couldn’t describe it. She was lying somewhere in a ditch, her mouth open, her eyes tiny suckers flecked with green. Gone was gone, and if one morning he got out of bed and snuck downstairs and left the house and kept walking up the street, past Mrs. Kelper’s house to the bus stop and beyond, Mama wouldn’t come after him, she wouldn’t slap him and then cover him with kisses, she wouldn’t say, What a bad boy, bad! She was gone, and there was nothing else for Bo to do except lie quietly and wait for a miracle.

  Drifting. Dozing. Remembering things like how spiders and ants and birds and chipmunks and cats and squirrels and inchworms preferred him to other people. Inchworms dropped from low branches into his hair, squirrels hopped right across his sneakers, chipmunks snatched peanuts from his hand, and all the birds in the world nested in the trees around his house. No one had to tell Hobo Templin that the birds cheeped and chucked and scratched at the rainspout just to get his attention. Don’t wake Mama! Back in his own bedroom he would lift his window a notch higher and stick out his head to see the brown weave of a sparrow nest jutting over the gutter. Psss! That shut them up every time, and Mama had gone on sleeping in her room next door like the robins slept, coiled deep in their own nest in the lilac bush beneath Bo’s window, though sooner or later the baby birds would wake and spend the rest of the day with their mouths wide trying to gulp the blue of the sky.

  What would happen if he dropped pebbles from the window into their open mouths? Plunk plunk plunk.

  What would happen if he jumped out his bedroom window and flapped his arms?

  What would happen if he clicked his mama’s cigarette lighter?

  What would happen if he never took another bath?

  What would happen if he straightened the hook of a hanger and stuck the tip into an electric outlet?

  What would happen if he climbed the chain-link fence, into the Harwood’s yard? The Harwoods had a big black dog that ate whatever it could catch — rabbits, beetles, stray cats.

  What would happen if he shook a branch of the lilac bush? Wake up! One morning not so long ago Bo had reached down from his window and grabbed the tip of the highest branch, making the whole bush tremble, and the mama robin burst in a great flutter from the nest and hid in a tree in Pat and Sonny’s yard next door. The baby birds squirmed like fat red worms, which made Bo want to hold them in his fist. He couldn’t reach them so instead he threw a stale cracker into the nest, but it disappeared into the thicket of the bush.

  Have you ever tossed a handful of glass beads across a room?

  Have you ever put your whole head underwater?

  Have you ever floated in a soap bubble high above the trees?

  In a few weeks the lilacs would bloom and fill Bo’s room with the smell of soap bubbles, and his mama would take him to ride a merry-go-round in the mall. He liked to ride the dancing pig that didn’t dance at all, just grinned its pig grin and stood nice and still. Mama rode a horse that reared up to the ceiling and dove down, up and down, yet somehow Mama managed to stay on and could even balance no-handed — look at me! — while she drew circles in the air with her unlit cigarette.

  Remember?

  From his crayon box Bo collected four crayons — emerald, rose, sky blue, and black — and rolled his rug halfway up, starting at one corner. He always drew the pictures that he wanted to save on the wood floor. So far he’d drawn his house, his gran and pop, his mama, Josie the cat, the lilac bush, and a dinosaur. He added a picture of the merry-go-round with his mama on the horse and Bo on the dancing pig. The dancing pig didn’t really look like a dancing pig once he was through with it, he had to admit, so he took a black crayon and darkened the line of the grinning mouth to make it easier to recognize. When he was through he felt hungry for ice cream, since his mama always took him for a vanilla fudge twist after riding three times on the merry-go-round. He’d be happy with a vanilla fudge twist for bre
akfast. He padded into his mama’s room and stood at the side of her bed, staring at her sleeping face. In sleep, her face stretched lengthwise, and her lips formed a little oval. Bo put the tip of his finger between her lips to feel the breath escape, but she pushed his hand away and told him to get out of there. So he got out of there and went downstairs to the kitchen, where he made himself his own vanilla fudge twist with ice cream and a squirt of ketchup because he couldn’t find the chocolate sauce. Even without a taste he knew he wouldn’t like it. He filled another bowl with three different kinds of cereal, and since he didn’t want to risk spilling milk on the floor he ate the cereal dry. Then he turned on the television and watched cartoons until Mama came down. She made a fuss about his ice cream, so he went outside and sat at the top of the porch steps in his pajamas and watched the older kids waiting up at the corner for the school bus. For fun they threw handfuls of dirt at each other. Bo decided right then and there that he didn’t want to get any older than four, maybe five at the oldest. He didn’t want to ride a bus to school, he didn’t want to feel the sting of gravel against his back, and he always wanted to be small enough to fit on Gran’s pillowy lap.

  Blue morning sky. Hello, sky! He titled his head back and opened his mouth to taste the blue, and his mama leaned over from behind him and kissed him right on the tip of his nose. Then she gathered him into her arms, carried him inside and upstairs, tugged down his pajama bottoms, and sat him on the toilet like he was nothing but a shit-in-the-pants little baby, Mama, he was plenty old enough to do it standing up! But he sat and frowned and pissed, he couldn’t help it, and when he was done he kicked his feet free and threw his pajamas at his mama, who caught them with one hand while she brushed her teeth and twirled them above her head like a lasso, making Bo laugh. He didn’t mind that his mama was his mama or that his daddy was just a name on a stone stuck in the ground or that he hadn’t drawn the dancing pig so clearly or that there was no chocolate sauce in the refrigerator or that he couldn’t see the sparrow’s nest or that inchworms got tangled in his hair or that his sheets hadn’t been washed in three hundred years or that Mama wouldn’t kiss him after she put her lipstick on or that the kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes or that he had five videos but the VCR was broken and would always be broken or that once when he wasn’t yet two he’d stepped on a piece of glass and the blood that ran from the cut had filled up the gutter, the street, the whole town, and he’d floated to safety on a kickboard.

  Bye-bye bahbahbahbah-Bo.

  Remember how Gran wanted to check out the sale at TJ’s? She buckled him in the backseat — she wouldn’t let him ride in the front like Mama did — and drove to the shopping plaza. When she opened the door and unbuckled him Bo dashed off, thinking it would be a fun game to make Gran chase him. He was just three big leaps from the sidewalk when he heard a squeal of tires and saw out of the corner of his eyes what reminded him of the silver buckle of Uncle Danny’s fanciest belt but was really the front bumper of a truck. Bo looked up and saw the driver staring at him, jaw hanging, and then Gran caught Bo by the arm, pulled him to the sidewalk, and gave him a shaking that made him dizzy. The driver drove off without even a friendly toot of his horn, and Bo covered his ears with his hands so he wouldn’t have to listen to Gran tell him that he’d been very bad, though what he’d done, exactly, he didn’t know and wasn’t about to ask and a moment later didn’t even care.

  Inside the store he ran between the aisles of dresses, opened and closed snap purses, tried on dark glasses, and danced on the platform in front of the plate-glass window with the mannequins, flew like an airplane around one long-lashed plastic missus, then hopped off the platform because he thought he heard Gran’s voice behind the rack of raincoats. Peekaboo! But it turned out to be someone else’s grandma standing there, and Bo realized that he’d lost his own, lost her maybe forever, all because he’d done something bad out in the parking lot. What a bad boy, bad! How would he ever get home?

  Gran!

  He must mind her now. No shouting.

  She pinched the fabric of a shiny purple blouse between her fingers. To prove that he was a big brave boy he wandered off again, sat on the platform, kicked his legs, thump thump thump, against the wood until a store clerk told him that he’d have to leave the store if he kept that up. So he wandered with his hands in his pockets all the way to the other side of the store, bending down now and then to look below the hemlines and make sure he could still see Gran’s sneakers and brown legs, wondering what he could do to get in a little trouble but not a lot, wondering what would happen if he gave that stack of shoe boxes a nudge, discovering to his amazement that the whole stack would come tumbling down in a loud avalanche of cardboard.

  He ran back to Gran, found her just as she was passing between velvet curtains into the changing area. When she had on nothing but her bra and underpants he poked his fingers in the wrinkles of her knees, which caused Gran to reach down and give him such a strong hug he couldn’t breathe, so he squirmed out of her arms while she laughed at him, and the half-dressed red-haired lady beside her laughed and two other ladies laughed across the room, heedyheedyhaw, and Bo wondered if he really was what his pop called him sometimes — a regular comedian. He rolled his eyes, then hid behind the wide trunks of Gran’s legs, leaned out, played peekaboo with the pretty red-haired lady, who boo’d him right back and slipped off her store blouse so Bo could see her titties and smooth belly skin that looked so soft he wanted to rub his cheek against it.

  Gran bought one blouse and a pair of felt-button earrings. Afterward they went to the grocery store at the other end of the plaza and ate pizza slices, and then they filled a shopping basket with a carton of milk, chicken drumsticks, Fudgsicles, green beans, Coke, and Pop’s favorite — barbecue potato chips.

  He lay in Pop’s bed because he had a fever, and Pop told him a story about a hungry fox.

  He sat on Gran’s lap and watched game shows on TV until they both fell asleep.

  He dreamed that he could breathe underwater.

  He dreamed that a crab crawled out from the pocket of his baseball mitt.

  He stood on a chair behind his mama and watched her face in the mirror as she brushed her wet hair.

  He found three bottle caps, a pencil, and a garden snail.

  He counted to five.

  He counted to ten.

  He let his cousin Miraja push him on the swing.

  He taught himself to wink.

  He wondered what, exactly, he wasn’t supposed to know.

  He stirred his orange juice into his milk and poured it into the kitchen sink when Gran wasn’t looking.

  It had rained during the night, and when Bo leaned out his window to check on the birds he saw only shreds of mud-caked grass where the nest used to be. He went downstairs and outside by himself, looked all around the grass strip beside the house, and finally found the birds in the hole beside the cellar window. The babies were lying with their beaks open, and the mama was sliced down the middle, with her insides and cords of white bird shit spilled out into the dirt. He knew that the birds were dead — he had seen dead bugs and dead moles and mice and once Ellie Toomer showed him a dead kitten wrapped in a striped rag — but he wasn’t sure what being dead involved. Bo poked at the baby birds with a stick and rolled them from side to side like little sausages in a frying pan.

  Was Mama ticked when she saw how late it was, ten o’clock by the time she woke: she’d be lucky if she kept her job! She stuffed Bo’s clothes into a plastic bag and took him in his bare feet and pajamas to his grandparents’ house, trying to inhale her cigarette in one big suck as she drove. Later, when she drove off to work, Bo watched her from the living room window and knew then that her life would have been much easier if he’d never been born, and he was mad at her for making him think that. He was mad the whole morning, until Gran made pancakes and let him spread the peanut butter himself.

  He was mad when his cousins came over and Gran had to make pancakes for everyone. H
e was mad when he tried to skip two porch steps and fell and scraped his chin. He was mad when it rained. Rain was like a door that wouldn’t open.

  Did Mama have a surprise for Bo! She bundled him in his parka and rain boots, and they drove on the highway for such a long time that Bo fell back to sleep. When he woke they were in a parking lot like the parking lot by TJ’s. Mama unbuckled him and led him by the hand down a path, around a garden terrace, down another path, through a building, onto an elevator with a few other people, and they went up and up to the top of a tower and out into the open air.

  At first Bo couldn’t tell what he was looking at from the top of the tower. Something so hot it was steaming. Hot lava, maybe. But then through the barrier he saw the river pouring over the precipice, and he realized that they were high above a waterfall. Mama stared the way she sometimes watched television, as though the show were her own dream and she could not wake up from it. Bo tugged her wrist when he saw the speck of a boat far below heading straight for the foamy center. The next thing he knew she’d dropped to her knees and buried her face in his shoulder and started to cry. When a policeman tried to lift her to her feet she jerked her arm free. Bo thought the policeman was reaching for his gun then but instead he pulled out his radio, and Bo forgot his mama and the people around them and watched enviously as the policeman whispered into the box.

  Mama stopped crying on her own, and the people turned away, turned back to the steam pit and the tumbling water. Bo peeled his mama’s hands off his arms. She sagged cross-legged onto the concrete floor and sat there looking as though life had been switched off inside her. A second policeman arrived and the two lifted her by the elbows and led her onto the elevator. Bo knew enough to follow. On the elevator Mama said she was sorry for causing so much trouble, explained that her little boy’s daddy and the love of her life had recently died, which wasn’t true at all — he had died long, long ago, but Bo knew better than to correct her. In an office in the basement the policemen asked questions that Bo didn’t understand, but Mama answered calmly, and after a few minutes they were allowed to leave together.