Nearer Than The Sky

by T. Greenwood

  In this particular dream, I cannot find the puzzle piece that explains what Ma was doing to Lily inside the orange daisy room in the middle of the night. So, instead I grab a dark jagged piece from the puzzle box and make it fit into that crack under the door so I don’t have to see the bright light or hear my mother’s apologies.

  I got up early, just past six o’clock, but Rich had already left for work. Lily had squeezed fresh orange juice with oranges from the tree in the front yard. There were eggs Benedict with hollandaise sauce and fresh paprika sprinkled on top of perfectly round poached eggs. Freshly ground coffee with real cream.

  “What time do you want to go to the hospital?” I asked.

  “Rich said he’ll take you when he comes home for lunch,” Lily said, refilling my juice glass.

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “I really can’t leave,” she said. “I should stay here with Violet.”

  “Why doesn’t Rich watch her?” I asked. I held my fork tightly and stared at Lily, who would not look at me.

  She shook her head. “Besides, you’ll just pick her up and bring her back here. The hospital’s close. It’ll only take a couple of minutes. Ma knows I’m not coming.”

  “Did you talk to her?” I asked, wondering how I could have missed this conversation unless Lily was on the phone with Ma in the middle of the night.

  “I called the hospital this morning to find out what time they were going to discharge her. They said she’d be ready at noon.”

  “I really wish you would come with me. I’m not sure I want to do this on my own.”

  “You won’t be alone,” Lily said, smiling. “Rich will go with you. Ma likes Rich, though I have no idea why.”

  I watched her to see if she might give in. The hard veneer of her expression did not change. She merely blinked her eyes quickly like she always does when she wants to dismiss something.

  I poked the sharp tines of my fork into the resistant egg, and the yellow center ran thickly over the pink disk of Canadian bacon and perfectly toasted English muffin. But when I raised the forkful to my lips, I couldn’t eat. The egg white made me nauseous and I set the fork back down.

  “I’m really not hungry,” I said.

  “Fine,” Lily said angrily and pulled the plate away from me.

  Rich drove cautiously toward the hospital. With the windows rolled up to keep the hot air outside, I could smell his cologne. Like Lily’s perfume, there was something terribly noxious about this scent. It was more masculine than Lily’s, with a slight musk to it, but it was still pungent. I thought of the scent of pine in Peter’s jacket.

  Rich seemed hesitant to turn on the radio.

  “Go ahead,” I nodded when he motioned tentatively to the stereo. “I’m easy.”

  There are a million stations in Phoenix. At the cabin we get the college station, and if we put the antenna out the window we can sometimes pick up a couple of stations in Portland. Here there were too many choices. Rap music thudded violently under my feet, and then he switched quickly to something else. Country twang, and then a talk show. For five minutes we filled the empty space between us with the white noise of too many decisions. He shrugged finally and turned the stereo off.

  “Lily woke me up last night,” I said.

  “Was she outside wrestling tumbleweeds again?”

  “I don’t think she’s sleeping very well.”

  “She’s not sleeping at all,” he said, turning to me and frowning. “She’s been battling those tumbleweeds for weeks, and every time we get a dust storm they roll back in. And when she’s not up with the tumbleweeds she’s taking showers. Three or four a night. I hear the water come on and I think, She’s already clean. What’s she doing?” He chuckled a little and then his voice grew soft, “She hasn’t slept in our bed for months.”

  I pulled the visor down to shield my eyes.

  “I know she’s worried about Violet and now your mom,” he said. “But she’s not herself anymore. She’s pissed off all the time. Everything I say sets her off. Like it’s my fault or something.”

  “Like what’s your fault?”

  “I don’t know. Violet being sick maybe. Her not being able to sleep.” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I snorted.

  “I really don’t know what to do,” he said. “She won’t let me help. She hardly lets me near Violet. I try to go to the doctor’s appointments with her, but she doesn’t want me to come.”

  I opened my mouth in disbelief, remembering what Lily had said about him not taking her seriously.

  “I know, it’s crazy,” he said apologetically.

  I nodded, but didn’t say anything about my conversation with Lily. Somehow it seemed safer to agree with his confusion than compound it by telling him that Lily was a liar.

  “How’s the restaurant?” he asked, smiling and turning to look at me.

  “Good,” I said, grateful. “I’ve been making muffins.”

  We parked the car and walked through the thick, hot air to the hospital entrance. Inside, I found the elevator and looked at Rich, who seemed similarly uncomfortable here.

  “You can stay down here in the lobby if you want,” I said.

  “You sure?” he asked, though I saw his shoulders relax, releasing the anxiety he must have felt.

  I nodded.

  When the elevator doors opened, I stepped out and held the door open for a doctor who was running down the corridor. He was dressed from head to toe in blue scrubs. His shoes were covered in what looked like shower caps. His face mask was like a bandana around his neck.

  “Thanks,” he smiled.

  I had walked only a short distance down the corridor when I realized that I was on the wrong floor. I stopped in front of a big glass window and looked in at the newborns. I have never wanted to be a mother, but I have always been fascinated by babies. Especially new ones. I love their smell and the way their eyes dart from one color or shape or flash of movement to the next. I crossed my arms and peered at the rows and rows of incubators. And then suddenly my hand flew to my mouth.

  In one incubator, a baby no larger than my own fist lay trembling. In the next incubator there was an infant whose skin was yellow with jaundice, its eyes sealed shut like a kitten’s. These were not the healthy ones, not the rosy-checked ten pounders named Ashley and Joshua. These were the sick babies, the crack babies still shuddering from the impact of their mothers’ violent wombs. These were the babies without names whose eyes were set wide apart from the liquor or heroin in their mother’s blood. The ones who were missing fingers or toes. The ones who had had only enough nourishment to grow to the size of lemons inside their mother’s reluctant bellies.

  I pressed my hands against the glass and allowed my eyes to focus on the shuddering baby in the far corner. There were tubes going in and out of every orifice, a blue knit cap on its head. Compared to these babies, Violet looked like the picture of health. Her stuttering breath would go unnoticed inside these vibrating glass walls.

  As a candy striper passed with a rolling cart filled with food trays, I felt a wave of nausea rush over me like the car sickness I felt as a child. Uncontrollable, completely overwhelming. I backed away from the glass and ran back down the hallway to the elevator. Inside, I stared at the numbers above the door so that I would not have to see the blood-splattered blue pajamas of another doctor, I counted the floors and tried not to remember the other times I’d been in the hospital.

  The psychiatric ward didn’t look much different from the neonatal ward. It was quiet here. Quiet and green. The walls were pale and moss-colored, and there were fake plants perched precariously on every counter. I walked past the solarium, looking for Ma’s room, and a voice followed me. “Indie?”

  I stopped and stepped back, peeking my head into the room, windows and plants filtering the Arizona sunshine. A large-screen TV and two blue couches. My mother set down a magazine and stood up.

  She wasn’t dres
sed yet. She was wearing a soft pink robe, similar to one I saw hanging on the back of Lily’s bathroom door. Her hair was down, past her shoulders, blond with curly silver strands making it appear messier than it actually was. Her skin was pale, transparent, and stretched tightly across the sharp bones of her face and fingers.

  “Ma,” I said as if to confirm that she was, indeed, my mother.

  She smiled, the skin of her lips pulling back tightly against her teeth. She held out her arms then, gesturing for me to come closer.

  “Ma, you look terrible.”

  “Thanks,” she said bitterly.

  “I thought you were being released today,” I said. “I came to bring you back to Lily’s. Rich is downstairs.”

  She looked absently out the window at the polluted Phoenix skyline and shrugged.

  “Ma,” I said, annoyed. “We came to bring you home.”

  “I think I should probably stay until they get the latest blood work back,” she said. “I’m very ill.”

  “I know,” I nodded. “But the doctors told Lily you could be released this afternoon.”

  “Maybe.” She sighed and sat down on the couch. Her bare knee peeked out through the folds in the robe, sharp like a stick instead of a bone.

  “Where’s your doctor?” I asked.

  “It’s something in the house,” she said softly. “Asbestos. I think your father put asbestos in the walls to poison me.”

  I felt my knees grow weak. I sat down across from her. I felt like I was looking at a child. She was thinner than Lily. Her hands were shaking.

  “Where’s your doctor, Ma?” I said again.

  “He doesn’t know a goddamn thing!” she said loudly, startling me. “They’re all fucking quacks here. They tried to tell Lily I did this to myself. They tried to blame it on me.”

  Her eyes were big and wet, turning the same shade of blue as Lily’s as they filled with tears.

  “It’s okay, Ma.You stay here and let me go find your doctor.”

  She looked out the window as an airplane flew overhead.

  “Ma, promise me you won’t go anywhere.”

  She didn’t look at me but nodded slowly.

  I left the solarium and went to the front desk. A nurse was talking softly on the phone. She was twirling a strand of hair that had come loose from the chipped white bobby pin that held her cap on.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She raised her eyes and looked at me, irritated. She covered the phone with her hand. “Can I help you?”

  “I need to find my mother’s doctor. Her name is Judy Brown. She’s in two-eighteen.”

  “That would be Dr. LaVesque in Toxicology,” she said and uncovered the phone. She started whispering into the phone again.

  “Excuse me, I need to know who her doctor is for this ward,” I said.

  “She’s been released,” the nurse said again, slapping her hand against the mouthpiece of the phone again.

  “She has not been released. She is sitting in her robe in the room down the hall.”

  “The paperwork was signed this morning. She is under Dr. LaVesque’s care as an outpatient.”

  I rode the elevator down to the lobby. When the doors opened, I was briefly tempted to walk out the front door and go straight to the airport. To leave Rich and Ma in the hospital. To get on the next plane back to Maine. Instead I walked to the lobby, where I found Rich reading a Reader’s Digest and chewing the edges of a Styrofoam coffee cup.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Can you help me figure out what’s going on?”

  When he took my arm, I felt a lump growing thick in my throat. “They’re giving me the runaround, and Ma’s still got her robe on.”

  He pulled me into him as if to shield me from something and muttered, “We’ll get it all figured out. Don’t worry. It’s probably just a mix-up. These hospitals are so big they can hardly keep track of who’s coming and who’s going.”

  I closed my eyes to fight the sting of tears. But on the back of my eyes all I could see were my mother’s long fingers reaching for me. The pink of her robe and the exposed bones that used to be her legs.

  Ma was just confused. She had even signed the release papers, but she hadn’t gotten dressed. Her doctor explained to Rich while I helped Ma pack her bag that her records were being transferred to the Mountainview hospital, and that she was to check in with the referred psychiatrist when she got there. The toxins were gone from her body now. Dialysis had replaced her poisoned blood with clean blood. They had flushed the poison out of her. The only lingering effects were the weakness of her joints and muscles. Fatigue.

  Ma sat in the front seat of the car with Rich, and I stared at the back of her head all the way back to Lily’s. I could see when she had stopped bleaching her hair; there was a good inch of silver roots at her part. Rich talked softly to Ma about Lily and Violet, about the heat, and about what Lily might be making for dinner. I watched the cars whizz by us on the freeway, wishing that Rich would get us home quicker, that I could get out of this crowded place that smelled vaguely of poison.

  When we pulled onto Rich and Lily’s street, I saw Lily standing on the front porch holding Violet. She was barefoot, and her hair was loose around her shoulders. Tangled. Her shoulders were shaking, her face was absolutely white, and the tracks of her tears were like fresh scars.

  “Jesus,” Rich said, pulling into the driveway and throwing open the car door.

  Ma sat motionless in the front seat, and I stared out the tinted window at the strangely altered colors of this scene. At their blue hands and at Violet’s blue face. At Lily, a strange blue Madonna, barefoot and trembling. Through the closed window, I watched Lily sobbing and Rich holding her shoulders. I watched him take Violet from her arms as Lily crumpled to the floor. Even when the ambulance pulled up in front of the house, I didn’t open the car door. I just sat behind my mother and watched Lily’s small mouth opening and closing, muttering silent explanations. She stopped breathing. God, she stopped breathing.

  From my room, Lily s tap shoes on the piece of plywood Ma laid down on the kitchen floor sounded like rain. From my fever bed, where my head was thick and heavy, the rhythm of metal on wood could have been a special lullaby for me. When I closed my eyes and I could feel my heart beating behind my eyelids, I imagined the storm outside that was making this song. I imagined black clouds, thunder, and the tap-tap-tap of Lily’s rain.

  I came home from school because of the small welts on my stomach. Chicken pox. The childhood illness I had managed to avoid for so long, Ma assumed I must be immune. But by the time Daddy got me out of Mrs. Kinsey’s reading class and into the car, I was itching all over and my skin was hot to the touch. He had to go back to the bar, but before he left he poured me a glass of orange juice and ginger ale and let three maraschino cherries sink to the bottom, leaving red trails behind.

  Daddy took Benny with him to work, because the moment Benny saw Daddy carrying me into my room with a cold washcloth on my head, he started to cry. As Benny’s voice trilled over Ma’s head, piercing and strange, she seethed, “Benny, why don’t you go with Daddy to work? Let Indie get some sleep.” And Benny followed behind Daddy out the door. I watched him through my bedroom window, skipping behind, almost tripping over his own feet. He had forgotten all about my fever by then. And I was alone in my room, and Lily was making rain with her feet.

  I drifted in and out of sleep. Outside it was not raining; it was a perfectly sunny May day, but the metal rain was insistent and I was confused. I covered my throbbing head with the heavy feather pillow and tried not to think about the red bumps all over my skin. About the way it felt like ants were crawling across my back.

  I woke up terrified, and it was dark outside. When I sat up, I felt my blood moving from my head down into my shoulders and arms. The beating of rain was inside my brain. The ants had become bees and my skin was buzzing. I got out of bed and walked slowly to my door. I felt as though I might fall down at any
moment, that the pull of the earth was somehow stronger for me.

  It must be midnight, I thought. It was so quiet here. Everyone must be sleeping. I was thirsty and I hoped that my reluctant legs would carry me to the refrigerator for orange juice or a glass of milk. Slowly, I made my way to the kitchen. I was so cold I almost expected a puff of white steam to escape from me when I opened my mouth. I looked up at the clock over the stove. 5:00 A.M. It was morning and I didn’t know where the night had gone. I was disoriented and my legs were buckling. Benny was sitting at the kitchen table with a large Tupperware bowl and a box of cereal. He looked like a giant leaning over that big bowl. His face was covered with Cocoa Puff dust and there was a triangle of milk on his T-shirt.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “Lily’s got rocks,” he said.

  “What?”

  He was using a ladle to eat the cereal.

  “Ma says she has rocks.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about, Benny,” I said. “Ma!!!”

  “THEY’RE NOT HERE!” Benny hollered back.

  My head was pounding in new rhythms of pain. I sat down next to Benny when the edges of my vision started to turn black and fuzzy, when everything started to hum.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “Lily got rocks and Mrs. Dexter took them to the hospital. Daddy’s at the bar doing invention.”

  “Inventory?”

  “Uh huh.” He smiled and dipped the ladle into his bowl.

  “Did Lily eat something bad?”

  “No.”

  “Did she have a stomachache?” This was like some awful game of charades.

  “Yes! And she hasn’t gone poo for four days. She has rocks.”

  “She’s constipated?”

  “Backed up,” Benny said, smiling from ear to ear.

  Sun was starting to stream through the kitchen window, making a small beam of light on the table next to Benny. I laid my head down in the warm puddle of sun.