“You don’t sound happy.”
“Sometimes people cry when they’re happy.”
“What made you so happy?”
“Seeing you and your father together at the same table, talking and telling each other things.”
“Uh-huh.”
Branwyn turned to her son and looked into his eyes.
“Would you want to live with your father if you had the chance?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Would he come an’ stay at our house?”
“No. We’d have to move away from Minas and Eric.”
“Could Eric come live with us?”
“No. He’d have to stay with his own father.”
Thomas thought and thought, standing there in the refrigerated room. He thought about his new father and his brother, Eric. He thought about his mother crying and wished that she didn’t have to be so happy.
“Maybe Daddy could come and visit sometimes,” he said at last. “And then I could still go to school with Eric and read with Dr. Nolan.”
A f ew we e k s after Thomas had broken the greenhouse window, Eric came down with the flu. It was a bad flu, and he had a fever of 105. Minas was worried, and Ahn kept boil-ing eucalyptus leaves and bringing the steaming pots into the 3 5
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boy’s room. Eric was shivering and crying all through the night. He was in pain, and only Branwyn’s company would calm him. She sat up with him for most of three days. At the end of that time, Eric was laughing and playing and Branwyn was very tired, and so she went to bed.
The next afternoon, when Thomas and Eric got home from first grade, Thomas went to his mother’s room and found her still in bed.
“You tired, Mama?” Thomas asked.
“Very much, baby. I sat up so long with Eric, and now all I want is to sleep.”
Thomas and Eric spent many hours at her side that afternoon and evening, both of them trying to make her laugh.
She kept her eyes open as long as she could, but more and more she just slept. Minas wanted her to go to the hospital, but she refused.
“Hospital is just a death sentence,” she told him. “All I need is rest.”
On the third day Branwyn was not better. Eric heard his father tell Ahn that Branwyn had agreed to go to the hospital in the morning.
The blond tank rumbled up to his brother’s room and said,
“They’re taking Mama Branwyn to the hospital in the morning. We should pick flowers for her so her room’ll be pretty.”
“The hospital?” Thomas said.
Thomas hated the hospital. He’d been there half a dozen times that he could remember. Twice for pneumonia that had developed after he’d come down with chest colds, twice for broken bones, once for a cut when he fell down on a broken bottle, and one time when he fainted in school for no apparent reason. Every time he went they gave him shots, and twice he’d had to spend the night. He knew that people 3 6
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sometimes died in the hospital, and so when he went to bed later that night, he couldn’t go to sleep. He sat up remembering the stories of how his mother came every day and they looked at each other through the glass bubble. He believed that she had saved him by being there, and he wondered who would be there for her if he was at school.
Thomas went to her room after midnight. Branwyn stayed in her own bedroom when she was sick. She needed everything quiet and “no man kicking around in the bed.”
He climbed up quietly on the bed and stared into his mother’s face. At first he planned just to look at her as she’d told him she’d done when he was asleep in the ICU.
“Didn’t you wake me up?” he asked her.
“No, baby. You needed to sleep to get better and so I just sat there, but I’m sure you knew I was there in your dreams.”
Thomas planned to do the same thing, to sit so close that his mother’s dreams would drink him in. But after a few minutes he worried that maybe she had died. She was so quiet, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
“Mama?”
She opened her eyes and said, “Yes, baby?”
“I know how to answer the story.”
“What story?”
“The one Daddy said.”
“What is it?”
“First you take the rooster to the other side an’ leave him there. Then you come back and get the fox and bring him to the other side. Then you put the rooster back in the boat and take him back and leave him on the first side and you take the corn over to where the fox is. Now the corn and the fox are together but that’s okay, and so you can go back an’ get the rooster.”
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“You’re so smart, Thomas. Your father will be very happy.”
“Will you be okay now that I said it?” the boy asked.
“Why you cryin’, honey?”
“Because you’re sick and I don’t want you to die.”
Branwyn sat up. Thomas crawled up close to her and leaned against her slender shoulder.
“Are you scared ’cause I’m goin’ to the hospital?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s only for some tests,” she said. “Will you do what Dr.
Nolan tells you while I’m gone?”
“Yes.”
“And do you know that I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not gonna die, baby. I’m gonna go in there and stay for a day or two and then I’ll be back here and wide awake.”
“But sometimes people die in the hospital,” he insisted.
“Sometimes,” she agreed. “But even when they do they don’t really die.”
“What happens to’em?”
“They just change. They’re still here in the hearts of all the people that loved them. Your grandmother says that she talks to granddaddy every night before she goes to bed. He’s still there for her whenever she gets sad.
“But you don’t have to worry about that. I’m still strong and healthy. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. You know that, right?”
“I guess.”
“Come here and lie down next to me,” she said. “Sleep with me in the bed tonight.”
And Thomas nestled up next to his mother, and they whis-3 8
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pered secrets and little jokes until he finally fell asleep in her arms.
Th e ne xt morn i ng Thomas went to wake up Minas Nolan in his bed.
“Mama won’t wake up,” he told his mother’s lover. “But she said that it’s okay ’cause nobody never dies.”
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Ahn set up a cot in Eric’s room for Thomas—not for the sake of Branwyn’s son but for the doctor’s boy. Eric was desolate over the death of the woman who was the only mother he ever knew. He understood that she was sick, but he never thought about her dying. Thomas, on the other hand, thought about death all the time. The dead bugs and small animals that he’d find in the garden fascinated him. And his many months of isolation in the intensive care unit had often been the topic of conversation between him and his mother.
“What would have happened if Dr. Nolan didn’t say for you to take me out of there?” he’d ask.
“Then you would have stayed small and gotten smaller,”
Branwyn told him. “And if you stayed long enough you would have probably died.”
“And then would you come to the cemetery to visit me?”
“Every day for my whole life.”
At night Eric sobbed in his bed, and Thomas would come sit next to him and tell him stories about their mother.
“She was always talking about having a small house near the desert where we could grow watermelons and strawberries,” Thomas said.
“Just you and me and her?” Eric asked.
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“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied. “And Dr. Nolan too.
And maybe Ahn if we were still little.”
“How come you don’t call Daddy ‘Daddy,’ Tommy?”
“Because I have a father, and he’d be sad if I called another man that.”
“Are you gonna go live with your father now that Mama Branwyn’s dead?”
Thomas had never thought of this before. Would they make him go live with the man that taught him the riddle?
He didn’t want to go. And he couldn’t see why they’d make him if he just said that he wanted to stay with his brother and Dr. Nolan and Ahn.
“I sure miss Mama Branwyn,” Eric said.
Thomas put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“She’s not gone away . . . just in her body, she is. But she’s still in the world lookin’ at us and smilin’.”
Th e f une ral was three days later.
By then Eric had recovered from his deep sadness. Thomas sat up with him every night telling him all the things about Branwyn he never knew, or at least never paid attention to.
Eric was a strong boy filled with energy. He loved rough-house games and running, and though he could be very sad for short periods, he always came back laughing and running hard. So when he woke up on the morning of the funeral, he was happy again, with Branwyn’s death behind him. He told Thomas that he didn’t need him to sleep in his room anymore. He helped his diminutive pretend sibling carry the cot back to the attic where Ahn had gotten it.
When Thomas went back to his bedroom, he realized that 4 1
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something was different. It was as if there was a film over his eyes that made everything just the slightest bit darker, like a lightbulb dimming when lightning strikes outside or a cloud coming close to the sun but not enough to make real shadows.
Thomas tried to look hard at things around him, to make them shine as they had done only a few days before, but the luster was gone. He sat down on the floor in the center of his room, looking around at the new world he inhabited. He tried to remember how things had looked before, but slowly the memories of the glitter he’d always taken for granted dissipated and all that was left was what he could see.
After a while he forgot what he was looking for. When he tried to remember why it was that he sat there, he thought of what his mother had told him: I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin. And he thought that he was waiting for his mother to tell him more.
Sitting there on his knees on the floor, Thomas felt the world settling around him. It was completely still, but he knew that over time all things got heavier and sank into one another until they became one thing rather than many. He didn’t remember where he’d learned that — whether it was from Dr. Nolan or big Ira Fontanot, his mother’s friend. But he knew that it was true and that if he sat in that room long enough, his knees would bond with the floor and he’d know everything that happened in the house. And the house would become part of the ground, and he and the house would be a part of the whole world. Once this happened he would be joined with everything, and then he would know where his mother was and they could talk again.
So Thomas closed his dimmed eyes and waited for his knees to become one with the floor. He heard the wind rattle a loose pane of glass in the window and, every now and then, 4 2
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the hard thumps of feet through the wood. Dr. Nolan’s meas-ured pace was continual as he moved around on the distant first floor. Ahn’s tapping footsteps could often be heard. The loudest footfalls were Eric’s. He would run hard and then stop and maybe leap, landing with a loud thud that shook the house, if only slightly. Thomas felt that he was already becoming a part of everything. He raised his head, expecting his mother to appear to him at any moment. Then came a quick tapping and the whine of his door opening.
“Tommy,” Ahn said in her clipped voice. “You not ready.”
He opened his eyes and saw her. He wanted to explain that things were not the same and that he was trying to find his mother in the wide world. But he didn’t have the words or the heart to try.
“Get up,” she said. “Put on your clothes. We have to go say good-bye to your mother.”
The nanny was wearing a one-piece black dress that buttoned down the front and went all the way to her feet. She had a boy’s figure and was very short, though still taller than Thomas.
“Hurry, hurry,” the nanny said.
“Did your mommy die one day, Ahn?” Thomas asked, not moving from his place on the floor.
There was a long black shawl hanging from Ahn’s tooth-pick-thin shoulders. She came up next to the boy and descended to her knees. She put her arms around him and hugged him to her bony chest. After a while Thomas could feel her body shivering, and he knew that she was crying for his mother.
“I was born in a war, Tommy,” she whispered to him. “I remember being a child. I was very frightened, and we were running down a dirt road. It was my mother and father and 4 3
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older brother, Xi’an. There were big bombs falling, and everywhere they fell fire went up like dragons in a child’s story-book. And we ran and ran, and I wondered, even when I was running, where was I coming from? Where was I going?
“And then my father fell down. I tried to reach for him, but my mother grabbed me and pushed me to run. And then my big brother fell and later my mother. And then I was running all by myself and I didn’t know where I came from and I didn’t know where I was going. There was blood on the American T-shirt that I wore for a dress. It was my mother’s blood. I still have it in a chest in my closet, the dress that has my mother’s blood on the hem.”
Then Ahn took Thomas by his shoulders and brought her face up close to his.
“You are like I was,” she said. “Your mother has fallen and you must go on. You have to keep on going even though you do not know where you go. It is all we can do. Do you understand me?”
Thomas understood her fingers digging into his skin and her desperate eyes still looking for her mother somewhere in his. And so he nodded and said, “Yes, Ahn. I know.”
“Then put on your nice clothes and come down and go to the funeral.”
The last time Thomas had worn nice things was to see his father in the hotel restaurant. He dressed himself and went downstairs. Ahn, he knew, had gone to Eric’s room to help him dress. Eric didn’t need her, but she always helped him anyway.
They all got into a long black car driven by a black man who wore a cap with a shiny black brim. They drove to a big church in a neighborhood where there were mostly black people like him and his mother walking up and down the 4 4
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street, sitting out in front of their houses laughing and talking, even delivering the mail. Not just black-skinned people but brown too — all kinds of browns. Maple-syrup colored and redbrick brown, the brown you find in every wood from pine to cherry, oak to ebony. There were people that looked as though they had deep tans and some that shone like gold and copper and bronze. People of color. The phrase came into Thomas’s mind. He had heard it in school, and he knew that it applied to him and the people around his mother’s funeral.
The church was big and cool, with a dozen stained-glass windows that had pictures of Jesus and other dignitaries from the Bible. Many a black and brown woman came up to him and called him “poor darling” and “little lamb” while he and Eric walked together, looking around at the vastness of the house of worship.
Most of the people inside the church were of color too.
Thomas wondered if all these people knew his mother. Most of them he didn’t recognize. But there were a few familiar faces. He saw his grandmother Madeline, and there was Ira Fontanot, whom he recognized from the Rib Joint. For a brief moment he saw his father, Elton, standing along the side of the pews.
Ahn rushed the boys along until they were sitting in the front row. There, before them, was a coffin set upon a dais under a podium on a pulpit.
“Ma
ma Branwyn’s in there,” Eric whispered, an uncommon awe in his voice.
A minister in long black robes edged in red came up to the podium and said Branwyn’s name and then sang a little. Then he said things about Thomas’s mother that the boy didn’t understand. They were nice words, but they had little to do with the mother he knew. It wasn’t so much what he said but 4 5
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all the things he left out. He didn’t say, for instance, how Branwyn was so good at seeing faces in the pitted surfaces of stones.
“You see,” she’d say, “there’s the nose and here’s the eye.”
“But he on’y got one eye,” Thomas had said. “Where’s the other one?”
“He’s standing sideways and you can only see his left eye.”
This made Thomas laugh so much that his mother called him silly.
He didn’t talk about when she would pull on his toes when he was going to sleep at night, counting them — one, two, three, four, five. Or when she’d pick flowers and put them into her hair and take Dr. Nolan into her arms and dance him around the kitchen.
The minister called her a good mother and devoted daughter, but he didn’t say how she’d stay up all night with him and Eric when they were sick. He made her sound like a flat picture in a book rather than his mother with her warm skin and sweet breath.
Somewhere in the middle of the long sermon, Thomas started crying. He wanted Dr. Nolan to go up there and tell everybody what his mother was really like. He wanted to go home and let his knees sink into the floor.
“Do you want to go up and say good-bye to your mother?” Minas Nolan asked Thomas when the sermon was over and the organ player had started her sad song.
“No,” Thomas said.
“Are you sure? It’s your last chance to see her.”
“I can’t,” Thomas said in a high whine. “I can’t.”
Dr. Nolan began to cry. He picked up the boy and rushed out of the church. He brought Tommy to the long black car and got in with him in the backseat.
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