by Beth Kephart
“What happened to you?” she asks me.
“Be nice,” Bettina tells her.
“It’s a question,” Autumn says, “is all.” And now she curtsies again, pinches the red puff up into her skinny fingers, cracks her legs at her knees, and says, her voice gone solemn, “Welcome to State.”
I nod, but when I nod, my teeth start to chatter, and now Bettina and Granger, no warning, scoop me up from the chair and lay me down on the cot. The sheets smell like some other person.
“Roomie number seven,” Autumn declares, queen-like, and I close my eyes so that I can’t listen, so that everything around me goes to mumbles. All I see is Baby, and how much Baby needs me. Baby and her yellow sock, the little knobs of bone that are her ankles.
“You rest up, now,” Bettina says, stepping away now, seeing Granger out before she closes the door behind her. “And Autumn, you know the rules. Let her be.”
The door shuts. The lock turns. The elevator pings down the hallway. The cot beneath the curtsy creaks. It’s Autumn’s feet sweeping the floor.
“Lucky you,” she says.
Lucky me?
“They got you your own special chair and everything.” She slides into the plastic seat and I peel my left eye open. She’s nearly bent in two as she studies the gadgets, her poufy skirt spilling everywhere. She has a Band-Aid on one elbow, a bruise on her knee. “You need a chauffeur?” she asks. “For getting places?”
“I’m not staying here,” I tell her. “Not staying long.”
“Between now and then, then,” she says. As if it’s decided.
Sophie
“Mother,” I say. “Mother, what’s wrong?”
“Exhaustion,” she says, like the word is a mile long. She must have iced her knees in the middle of the night, because parts of the La-Z-Boy swim and parts of it leak and the two plastic bags are knocked to the floor like balloons whizzed empty. Her name runs ninety degrees wrong on her cashier outfit. Her collar is crushed and stained. Her hair has gone whiter overnight, the white hair yawning away from her head.
“Have you eaten, Mother?” I ask her.
“Not since yesterday, noon.”
“You have to keep your strength up,” I tell her. “Remember?” I head for the kitchen and the Styrofoam boxes, open the cold oven door. The turkey meatloaf has turned to cardboard in the oven; the potatoes are stones. “Milk?” I ask her, coming back, standing above her, because we have that, we have milk at least, which I can serve her hot or cold. But she says no. “Rice?” I ask. “Tomatoes?” From the people who lived here before.
“Not today, Sophie.”
“I’ll go out,” I say, “and get something.”
“You will not.”
“You aren’t well, Mother. Let me do something.”
“Just sit here, Sophie. Tell me a story.”
“A story?”
“Didn’t you say you were working on Kepler? Read it to me, what you have.”
“Now, Mother?”
“When else? I am your audience.”
She smiles, and her smile is thin blue. She looks at me, and her dark eyes mist. Outside, the crows are busy in the tree and the bees swarm and the acorns are back at their battle, splatting the hard gray slate walk. Mother’s next shift is the eight o’clock shift, and here she is, feet up, name crooked, La-Z-Boy growing beneath her like a lake. “We need to get you ready,” I say.
“I’m calling it in.”
“Calling it in?”
“I need a break, Sophie. I can’t stand there, with my knees like this, splitting their dollars with change.”
“It’s a new job, Mother. It’s your work. Don’t you say, ‘New job, best effort’? Isn’t that your motto?”
“I’ve done my best, and they’ll understand, and if they don’t, then it’s a big too bad.”
“Too bad for who, Mother?”
“Too bad for whomever. Exhaustion like this, you can’t fight it.” She closes her eyes and goes back and forth with her head in the leatherette neck rest, as if she’s shaking off a dream or bad weather. She lifts one hand and reaches for me. I pretend that I don’t see.
“You’ll feel better after you eat,” I say, heading for the pantry, for a box of rice, for the can of soupy tomatoes, a little round rust across the top.
“I need to sleep, Sophie. Sleep. Don’t bother in the kitchen.”
“But, Mother.” I grab the rice box and read the instructions. I find the measuring cup, the stick of butter. I pull the pot from the lazy Susan drawer, and Mother calls out to me, “What did I say, now, about bothering?”
“Strength,” I say.
“It’ll be like old times,” she says. “You and me, Sophie. A day off. A spontaneous together.”
But it’s not old times; it’s now. It’s the Rudds next door and my heart tugging on lemonade and custard, acacia and Cather, Joey owing me the pitch and the wild sweet of his curls. Mother can’t lie here all day, saying she wants Kepler and not wanting Kepler and not planning to keep to her business, which is leaving for work so that I can leave this place, too. She cannot. I spigot the water into the measuring cup, put the pot on the stove, dial around to medium high.
“I’m not eating any rice,” she warns me. “Not at seven in the morning, I’m not.”
“What else, then?” I ask. “Tell me what else.”
“Warm me some milk,” she says. “But not yet. I need to wake to it.”
“You’re not awake?”
“I’m resting, Sophie, if you don’t mind. As if I haven’t earned it. As if …”
“We’re halfway to rice here, Mother. According to the instructions.”
“I’d prefer milk,” she says. “Warm. In an hour. Milk, when I’m ready, would be better. Bring me the phone, will you? The cord’s long enough for the stretch.”
“You’re calling it in?”
“Have you been listening, Sophie? To what I’m saying?”
“You’re going to sit here all day?”
“Until I can stand up, I will.”
“But, Mother. What will happen then?”
“Have I not taken care of you, Sophie? From the start, have I not? Have I not earned your trust?”
“But, Mother.”
“Warm milk,” she says. “In an hour.”
The priest in the hills, I think. The custard like ice cream. Joey to school and Joey home, and my mother sitting here.
Emmy
When I wake, she’s still there, at the end of my cot, haunched up on the wheeled chair, rubbing my casted foot with tiny fingers.
“They were turning blue,” she tells me, meaning the toes, I guess, stuck out over the boot of the cast. I feel little sizzles wherever her fingers go. I feel cold when her touch works away, my teeth still chattering.
“Who are you, anyway?” I ask her, shivering. She’s thrown a sweater over her shoulders, a silver sequined thing with all but a lonely button missing.
“Autumn,” she says. “You already forget?”
“I wasn’t meaning your name,” I say. I look up, and the ceiling is those ceiling tiles, like school. I look to the walls, which are gray. I look over the sheets, which are brown. I look to the crown of goggles on the globe. I keep the tears where they are, not falling.
“What were you meaning, then?”
“Just, you know: Who?”
She says nothing for a long time, staring—the side of her hair catching the window sun all lit up and the other side curling past her shoulders. She’s got freckles in the valleys beneath her eyes and fringe lashes. She’s got ears too big for her head. She’s the thinnest girl I’ve ever seen, the part stuck above her elbows thin as the part that swings below.
“I am the luckiest thing that ever happened to you, that’s who,” she says, then blows through the horn of her giggle. “Psshhhahh,” she says, shaking her head. “Didn’t no one tell you? I’m the only genius at State.”
“The only one?”
She smiles and her s
mile is a big upside-right U. “I never lie,” she says, raising her arms quick as a surprise, then dropping them quicker so that she can spin herself a whole circle in the chair, like she’s been practicing her spin work while I’ve been sleeping. “Cool wheels,” she says when she’s done.
“Wheel’s broken.”
“You don’t like broken things, you shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s right,” I say. “I shouldn’t.” I feel the first tear fall and then the next one. I swat them away. They keep coming. Autumn stares at me, and then she watches the sun, the milk of it pouring through the thick-as-walls window.
“You’re in for a ride now,” she says at last, “rooming with me.” She spins—one, two, three—then stops. Dead, cold, perfect stop. Something with her hands she does, something with her feet, to make the wheeled chair start and stop. “You know why I’m so good at this?” she asks.
“Don’t know.” My voice sounds funny, like it’s full of sidewalk cracks.
“It’s my pilot training,” she says. “Also my skydiving.”
“Is that a fact?” My tongue sticks and unclicks from the roof of my mouth.
“Most certainly is.”
“You wear pouf skirts when you’re flying?”
“I wear whatever I want.”
“How come?”
“How come what?”
“They let you wear that, and I’m wearing this?” I look down at the thin bit of nothing they put me in. A dress tied with strings at the back, no collar. Degradations, is what it is. Wronged up and uglied. Stolen from.
“Infirmary tricked you out,” she says. Starts laughing. Stops.
“Where are my real clothes?”
“Heck if I know.”
“I need my real clothes,” I tell her. “So I can get out.”
Her eyes go sky wide. “You leaving? So soon?”
“Best as I can.”
She stares at me, screws up her nose, too little a nose for all its freckles. “Me, too,” she says finally. “Leaving right with you. Up. And. Out.” She whirls herself, makes a circle. She slumps down, makes like exhaustion. “I have a degree in the color blue,” she says. “And once”—and now she leans in toward me, plants her elbows to the right edge of my bed—“I fell through nine completely separate clouds in a single afternoon, a world record. Don’t believe me, look it up. You will find it to be true.” She points at the globe behind her with the goggle crown, like that’s proof enough of her story.
“What are you doing here, then?” I ask her, the way I would have asked the snobby girl in school, back when there was school, back when I had choices and made the wrong one.
“Big mistake,” she says. “Right same as you.” And there’s nothing I can say to that, and nothing I say, period.
“So. You going to tell me now?”
“Tell you what?”
“How you banged yourself so pretty? You fall from the sky? You forget your chute?”
“I can’t,” I say. “I can’t tell you.”
Her eyes go wide, so blue. “Is it a secret, what you can’t tell?”
“Worse than a secret,” I say, and I don’t know why I say it, why I confess, to Autumn, the crazy and the skinny, but when I say it, when I know it to be true, the tears start coming and they will not stop and suddenly I am howling animal howls and suddenly I am screaming and I am yelling at Peter, and I am yelling for Baby, and I am yelling at Arlen to find her, Arlen, who thought he could save me, who wouldn’t believe me, who stood there afterward, yelling, “I’m so sorry.” I see everything that was and everything that’s wrong and all the people in the world who could have Baby and what are they doing to Baby? Where is my Baby? How many houses in the whole wide world will I have to search through to find Baby? And now Autumn goes to blur and she’s gone, and now she’s beside me—down the narrow rim of the bed, lying near. I know that it’s her. I smell her hair. She holds me strong as a thin girl has no right to.
“You can tell me,” she says into my ear, but I can’t, can’t even breathe, and now she takes the fingers of my ruined arm and counts them, one two three four five one two three four five one two three four five, until I can breathe and I am not so close to drowning.
“I have worse than secrets, too,” she whispers, and that’s all she says, and then we lie there like that, together on the bed, her frizzy hair my pillow, her count the way I breathe, until from outside, in the long hall, I hear Bettina calling.
“What is going on in here?” she demands, bursting through.
“She needs me,” Autumn says.
“Julius reported a ruckus.”
“There was no ruckus.”
“Don’t lie to me, Autumn. Do you hear me?”
“It wasn’t her,” Autumn says. “I swear it wasn’t. She’s been sleeping.” And she’s holding me tight, and I’m counting to myself, one two three four five one two three four …
Sophie
She stays home and stays home, lives in that chair. Drinks the milk warm, eats the rice cold, gets up only and slowly to pee or to run her finger down the crack in the curtains, then throw the curtains tight again, as if she’s being hunted by weather, as if being hunted makes her so tired out that all she can do is sit back down in that chair. Sometimes, after three, the Rudd door slams and Harvey slides across the porch with his long scraping paw nails, and then the door will slam again and it will be the sound of Joey thumping down the alley. “For the love of God,” Mother will moan, “will they be quiet?” It’ll take her a long time to settle, but she does, and when that happens, I tiptoe up the stairs, rush across the pink, throw my head out the window toward Joey, whispering, “Hey,” until he looks up and says, “Hey,” in a soft shout right back, and after that, today, he says, “How is she?”
“Sick,” I say. “Real sick.”
“Sleeping sick or awake sick?”
“Little of sleeping and awake.”
Joey bounces the ball and Harvey steals it. Harvey skiddles across the alley and then returns, dropping the ball at Joey’s feet. Joey retrieves it, turns, and pitches hard, and Harvey barrels down the alley so fast that his legs get in the way.
“We’re holding the Cather on you,” Joey tells me.
“You’re doing that?”
“Aunt Helen insisted. Says she’ll dream on it until you return. She doesn’t want you missing out on the story.”
“You’ll give her my thanks?”
“You come over here and give it. She’s missing you.”
“But I’m just right here.”
“Three stories up. Like Rapunzel.” Joey shadows his eyes and squints. “You should grow your hair, at least, so I could climb it.”
“That was a fairy tale,” I say. “You can’t climb hair.” I laugh, and then Joey’s laughing, and then, remembering my mother downstairs, I say, “Shhh,” with a finger to my lips.
“It’s an idea, anyway,” Joey says in a whisper-shout. Harvey has returned the ball and dropped it at Joey’s feet. He squeaks like a wheel and waits for the pitch, until Joey delivers a nice long one and the dog’s off. “You should call a doctor,” Joey says now, “if your mother’s so sick.”
“She wouldn’t have it.”
“Why not?”
“She’s a private person.”
“So what?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You should have Aunt Cloris take a look. She’s half a nurse or something.”
Harvey returns the ball, and now Joey starts tossing it high—up above his head toward the clouds. Harvey runs in circles. Higher and higher, Joey tosses the ball. If my arms were forty feet long, I’d reach and swipe the soaring thing clean out of the sky.
“Sophie?” I hear now from down below. “Sophie Marks?”
“Joey,” I whisper-shout. “That’s my mother.” I wave my hands, but he’s too busy with the ball, too coiled up in Harvey’s barking, and even when I lean out far as I can go over the window ledge, he doesn’t see or hear
me. He tosses the ball and tosses the ball, and Harvey grows wilder at his feet, and my mother keeps calling me, louder. I close the window: snap. I hurry across the beams, tiptoe the outside of the attic stairs, then walk-run the rest of the way down the stairwell’s center, making as much noise as I can so it’ll sound like I’m coming from the bedroom. Outside, I hear Harvey going wild. Inside, I hear my mother, and when I reach the first floor and glance toward the La-Z turtle, it’s empty. She stands by the front door at the window wearing her white nightgown, her hair streaming down her shoulders, her one hip jutting. She’s split the curtain by just a crack. In the angle of sun, dust hangs.
“Were you sleeping?” she asks without turning.
“No, ma’am.” My heart’s up in my throat; it’s pounding. I think of all the what-ifs, the consequences. What if she’d parted the curtain on the alley side and not the street side, seen Joey looking up, talking to someone? what if she’d come up the stairs dragging her knee, and I didn’t hear her? what if she turns around right now and sees the lying in my eyes and says, “we’re moving”?
“You sure took a long time coming,” she tells me now.
“Maybe, come to think of it, I was sleeping. Maybe I was.”
“Were you or were you not?”
“At the very least, I was daydreaming.”
“Your mother’s sick,” she says, turning and rolling her eyes at my mixed-up confessions. “Have some heart.” She faces back toward the window and sighs as if it’s my fault all these days are wasting.
I cut toward her, across the room, and stop. I feel the dust bits on my skin, close my mouth tight. I wait for Mother to say something more. She doesn’t. She stares instead.
“I wouldn’t have moved in here,” she says at last, “if I had known about that dog.”
“He just gets excited,” I say, and then add, at once, to correct myself, “I mean I guess.”
She turns, looks over her shoulder, stares me down. “There are no excuses,” she says in a low voice, “for an animal like that.” She makes sure that I understand, then turns back toward the window, wobbles, catches herself against the sill with a pinch of both hands. The sun pushes past her. The dust bits dance.
