Nearer Than The Sky

by T. Greenwood

  Before the lightning threw me into the sky and flung me down again, there was tenderness. In the hems of Ma’s dresses and in the way she brushed Benny’s hair out of his eyes. But afterward, gentle fingers curled into fists again. Fists that hung at her sides, threatening when my fingers reached to touch that part of her that reminded me of wind.

  When we came home from the Foodmart, Ma called Daddy at the bar. I was leaning inside the car, looking for Indie’s Crissy doll. She was fussing in the shopping cart. I knew she wouldn’t stop until I found the doll. Lily was in the back. I only leaned in for a second. Less than a second. That’s when it happened.

  After she hung up the phone, she turned around and held on to my shoulders.

  “Where’s your Crissy doll?” she asked, her voice shaking.

  I shrugged. I had stopped playing with her after the button that controlled her long red hair broke. She was useless with her ponytail stuck inside her. I closed my eyes and tried to think of where I had put her.

  “We have to find her,” Ma said and ran down the hallway to my room. I heard the creaky lid of my toy chest and the thump, thump, thump of my other toys on the wooden floor. “Damn it. Where is that stupid doll?”

  On the back of my eyes I saw her red hair before she broke. I saw her outside in the field behind the house. I saw Benny twirling her pink arms around and around.

  “Her button broke,” I said walking down the hallway to my room.

  “This is very important. Do you know where she is?”

  I shook my head. “She only has one arm. Benny twirled the other one off.”

  “Where did Benny put her?”

  I shrugged my shoulders again, sat down cross-legged on the floor next to the open toy box and picked up an alphabet block. The red paint was worn to a soft pink. When Ma started to walk away, I looked up at her polka-dot dress, at the sharp hem dotted black and white, and I reached for her. I wanted to feel the crisp cotton between my fingers. I wanted to hold on to her.

  The sting of a slap. It was sharper and more painful than the lightning rushing through my body. I pulled my hand away from her and enclosed it inside the one that wasn’t wounded.

  When I looked up, I saw Ma standing over me, her face colorless and blank.

  “She’s in the flowers,” I said, my throat constricting and my hand stinging still.

  “Outside?” she asked, her face brightening. She knelt down next to me, her skirt swirling around her like a fortress of polka dots. “In the backyard?”

  I nodded and sucked my bottom lip in to keep from crying.

  When she leaned over to kiss my cheek, I recoiled. I’d cut my fingers on the sharp edges of her. I wasn’t about to let that happen again. But her lips were warm and soft and her skin smelled like Lily’s: powder and sweet lemons.

  I followed her back into the kitchen and watched her through the open back door as she walked to the field to find my Crissy doll. She bent over, searching through the tangled grass. She could have been picking flowers. She could have been making a bouquet of purple asters to put in a coffee-can vase on the kitchen table.

  When she found the doll, she turned to face me. Standing in the middle of the field of wildflowers, holding my broken doll by her remaining arm, she hollered, “Indie, look! I found it!”

  I didn’t care about the doll; I only cared that Ma’s expression had changed. That her face was smooth and smiling again. When she came into the kitchen she handed me the doll and picked me up. My legs dangled at her sides and she held me close. I felt warm and happy. I even felt tenderness toward the doll I had neglected and left outside in the rain. Nothing in the world mattered in Ma’s arms with Crissy in my hands and my legs embracing the polka-dot breezes of Ma’s dress.

  That night, Daddy helped me put on my blueberry nightgown and piled blankets from my bed on the couch. I would go to the doctor in the morning to make sure everything was okay, but for now he wanted me close so he could keep an eye on me. In the kitchen, I could hear the clink, clink of Daddy’s fork on the plate, the glug, glug of milk being poured from the gallon jug. He had brought the TV tray into the living room and set it up for me. But my mouth was full of too many new strange tastes. The lightning had made my tongue confused.

  “I just don’t understand why you left her in the cart while it was raining,” Daddy said softly.

  “I was in the car looking for her damn doll,” Ma hissed. “I can’t have my eye on her every second. When I turned around, it had already happened. If I hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t be here now, would she?” Ma’s voice mixed in my mouth with Daddy’s like orange juice and toothpaste.

  I tried to separate the tastes. Meat loaf, cheesy scalloped potatoes, wax beans from a can. Ma’s lies and Daddy’s acquiescence. It only stopped when the room fell silent. And even then, there was the faint bitter of Daddy’s sigh on my lips. Of Ma’s insistence and the hint of sugar in Lily’s cooing. Benny was the only quiet one. The only one who didn’t leave a terrible taste in my mouth.

  I held the Crissy doll tightly to my chest. I pushed the button hard and tried to pull her hair out of her head. But the button was broken and her ponytail was stuck somewhere deep inside her plastic body.

  The results from the environmental toxicity tests arrived in Ma’s mail the day after the funeral. I had called the radon guy already and told him not to bother coming back, but I’d forgotten about these. I threw all the other mail addressed to Ma (sweepstakes entry forms, magazine subscription renewals, Sears sale catalog) on the kitchen table and held the envelope from the lab.

  I could hear the shower running. Peter had been in there for almost a half hour already. He did this in Maine sometimes to get warm on colder days, as if the heat of the water might penetrate his skin and stay inside of him after he turned the faucet off. I imagined him using Ma’s shampoo, not bothering to read the label that said it was for colored hair. Using her lavender soap, her mint dental floss, and her clean white towels. Peter didn’t notice these things the way I did. Everything I saw, now, seemed to reveal a little something more about Ma. The disposable things of her life seemed to say more about her than anything else did.

  I’d brought the kittens to the Humane Society reluctantly. The mother was healthier and more affectionate now. I’d grown more attached to them than I had ever intended. When the girl with braces and a lazy eye took the cardboard box from me, I felt sad and guilty.

  There was still some Coke left in the two-liter bottle that Rosey had brought over. I took it out of the fridge and unscrewed the plastic top. It made a weak hiss, and when I poured it into a cup and sipped, it was too sweet and almost completely flat. I sat down and looked at the smudged postmark on the manila envelope from the lab. It was dated the day that Ma died.

  In the bathroom, the shower had stopped running. I could hear Peter brushing his teeth. He would be wearing just his jeans, a towel around his neck like a bib. He brushed the top teeth first and then the bottom, in the circular motions they teach you in those first early visits to the dentist. He would floss and then brush again. Quickly, just using water instead of toothpaste.

  The girl had braces and a lazy eye. She was probably no more than sixteen. One of those girls who decides to become a veterinarian after her first pet dies. I see her with a cat, longhaired and gray. She might have stood barefoot in the bloodspeckled snow after the car passed, staring at the scene of the accident.

  Funny. Mail keeps coming long after a person dies. It takes a while for your name to disappear from all of the computers that have, at some time in your life, stored your name and address. After Chuck Moony’s mother died, he had to forward more than thirty magazines to his address, and for years afterwards, they kept trying to get her to renew.

  Peter’s habits are as familiar to me as my own. Clothes are put on left to right. Sleeves, pant legs, shoes. He’s done this since he was a child, and he doesn’t remember anymore why he started, but he insists he can’t stop now. It is his ritual to ward off dan
ger.

  Left then right. Gloves. Socks. Shoes. The one day he did it wrong, there was a horrible accident on the road. The motorcyclist in front of him ran into the back of a semi and was decapitated. Just like that. Left to right. It’s just easier that way.

  I thought about the kitten that died. The one I’d buried in the backyard. The ground had been too hard, and I wasn’t able to make a proper grave. I hoped that it would be okay out there after I was gone again. I tried not to think about coyotes or hawks or vultures. They all descended when you weren’t looking. I could turn my head for a second, and its body might have been ripped from the earth. I didn’t tell the girl at the animal shelter about the one that died. How do you explain something like that to a teenage girl with braces and a lazy eye?

  I wanted the results to be positive, for the tests to reveal that there was poison all through the house. I wanted there to be lead in the water and walls. I wanted there to be asbestos, radon, and arsenic. I wanted the poison to have been here all along, lurking in everything she drank and breathed and touched. I wanted all of what she’d said to be true. For once, I wanted to believe. But instead of tearing at the sealed flap, I folded the envelope and stuffed it into the trash can.

  Peter flushed the toilet and ran water in the sink. He would run it until there were no little hairs in the basin. He would even wipe a clean towel across the top of the faucet so there would be no spots. Everything in Peter’s world was clean and bright. Precise. The stars in Peter’s sky were perfectly aligned.

  Rich said he would take care of everything. He was putting Ma’s house up for sale. He had a friend who was a real estate agent in Mountainview. He would sell all of her things. He said, Take what you want, Indie. I’ll take care of the rest.

  I whispered, “What do we do?”

  He took a drag of his cigarette and when he exhaled, it looked like ghosts escaping from his mouth. “I don’t know.”

  I nodded and took the cigarette he offered me. I inhaled and then made my own, smaller ghosts.

  Later I went through the drawers and cupboards and filled a small box with the things I wanted to keep. A corkscrew, some Tupperware, a giant black mohair scarf. The things I really wanted I couldn’t take home with me: the smell of snow through Benny’s window, the sound of wind chimes Ma had hung out back years ago, the glow and chaos of the constellations on Benny’s ceiling at night.

  After everyone was gone, Peter and I went for a walk in the woods behind the house. I wrapped Ma’s scarf around my neck and breathed the chemical smell of mothballs. We held hands, but we didn’t say anything. I pretended that we were walking though the woods behind our house. That we were already home instead of here. The sky was bright blue, like the inside of a robin’s egg, a color you couldn’t possibly know about unless you’d seen a robin hatch from its shell. Peter walked slowly so that I could keep up. His legs were longer than mine, and despite his limp, he usually walked much faster than I did.

  “You cold?” he asked, squeezing my hand. I’d forgotten to bring mittens.

  “Nah,” I said, stepping over a branch.

  “You sure? We could go back to the house and get some mittens.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Peter raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I scowled at him, suddenly angry. He stared straight ahead. The only sounds were our feet slapping against the layers and layers of wet leaves and the sounds of our breaths.

  “Why are you pissed off?” I pushed.

  “I’m not pissed off. I was just thinking we could go back to the house and get you some mittens. Jesus. Forgive me.”

  “I guess I just don’t understand why you always have to save the day. You know? Indie, do you need this? Indie, do you need that? I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry. Blah blah blah. I can take care of myself you know.” I didn’t know where this was coming from, but it had already been said.

  “What are you talking about?” Peter said. He stopped walking and reached for my hand.

  “I mean,” I said, yanking my hand away, “that I’m tired of being taken care of. I’m tired of you always having to pick up the pieces. I’m tired of being the one who’s always a mess.”

  Peter sat down on a fallen tree and stared at his hands.

  “I lose my job and you hand me a spoon and some muffin batter. I lose my mother and you’re on the next plane. I lose my mind and there you are. Have a new one, Indie. Don’t worry, it’s on me.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” he said.

  “I’m making perfect sense.You don’t need me. You need me to be a mess.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought that’s what people do for the people they care about. I must have been crazy,” he said and hit his forehead with the heel of his hand.

  I sat down cross-legged on the damp leaves, waiting for him to tell me that my pants would get wet, that I’d get a cold, that I was making another mistake. “You never need me to pick up the pieces for you.You never even have pieces,” I said.

  “Of course I do,” he said and reached again for my hands. But he and I both knew he was lying. That’s what people really do when they care for each other. They say what they’re supposed to say. They’ll say anything to keep the balance even, even when it’s not.

  We walked back to the house quietly.

  Inside, I closed the curtains in the living room so there was only a sliver of light. Peter sat down next to me on the couch and took my hand, hesitantly, almost afraid. His caution made me feel terrible. I squeezed his hand, felt the bones in my fingers. The rhythm of blood in his veins and the tensing ropes of his tendons. I squeezed until my own hand pulsed with pain. Peter’s expression did not change. He only looked at me, his face a question mark, asking when I would be back to normal again.

  Peter’s eyes were wide and scared when I pushed his back against the couch and pulled his jeans down around his ankles, but he closed them when I put my legs on either side of him and pressed my own bare chest against his. I pushed my whole body into his, until there were no spaces between us. I put him inside me and wished that I could swallow him, fill my entire body with him, until the only part of me that was left was a thin layer of skin, like the skin of a snake ready to shed, or the transparent husk of a cicada. For one terrifying moment, I touched his thigh and through the blur of tears thought it was my own.

  I was mistaken about being far enough away. I thought that geography alone could separate me from my childhood. I didn’t understand then about time. I was naive. I believed that a suitcase alone was evidence of certain departure.

  Here I am at nineteen, wearing a pair of Levis from the Salvation Army worn soft and blue by someone else. This was the other uniform I wore at the Birches. I liked the way the soft denim felt on my pelvic bones, which pushed against the front pockets when I leaned against the step railing on the porch outside the rec room. I wore boys’ V-neck T-shirts that I bought in plasticwrapped packs of three at Wal-Mart before I came here. This one, today, was fresh out of the package with creases in the shoulders and waist. I wore a choker I’d made out of jade beads strung on a black leather lanyard. Low-top navy blue Converse sneakers, tied loosely so I could slip them on and off with ease. My ankles were sockless and brown. I smoked cigarettes and had an antique silver lighter engraved with someone else’s initials.

  Both of my roommates were working the breakfast shift. I’d woken to the starch and hair spray of their voices. I had the whole day off, so I didn’t mind being woken. It would make the day seem longer. Sun streamed through the mist of hair spray. I looked out the window at the impossible blue of the lake and incredible green of the golf course and manicured miles of lawn. I was hungry and swore I could smell maple syrup and pancakes and bacon.

  I got dressed and walked out of the girls’ dorm and across the parking lot to the building where we ate and did our laundry and watched TV. This early in the morning most people wer
e either working or still sleeping.

  I’d been at The Birches for two weeks. Two weeks was long enough to learn the nature of mornings. Sunlight and the clank, clank of the dishes and glasses and silver utensils in the hotel dining room. Children in booster seats spilling syrup on the floor. Grumpy hotel guests in pastel clothes wiping sleep from their eyes and complaining about the color of their toast and the texture of their juice. I preferred mornings like these, outside the dining room. In my jeans and sneakers. A cup of coffee on the porch steps and a cigarette. I didn’t read the newspaper here. Here, the rest of the world could have been the figment of someone else’s imagination.

  I had only talked to Ma once. When she realized that the number I’d given her was only a pay phone in the hallway of my dorm, she stopped calling. I never got her messages. She couldn’t find me here. She was angry that I hadn’t come home for the summer. I could hear it in the words she didn’t say.

  I told my roommates that I was born on the reservation near Flagstaff. That my father was white and my mother Navajo. That she died when I was four. That the only thing I remembered about her were her hands, laden with turquoise. Silveredged skies or lakes circling her fingers. I told them my name was Indian. I told them about the lightning, but in my version of the story, it happened in the desert of my imaginary childhood instead of in the Foodmart parking lot. I made Lily and Ma in her polka dot dress dissolve in the rain, like pink baby aspirin spilled on the pavement.