by Byrne, Leigh
The sugar gave me an instant burst of energy. I sat up and took my favorite pink troll doll down from the shelf above my bed and stroked its hair, searching the room around me for something to entertain my eye, and to keep me from falling asleep.
Our bedroom was the largest of the three in the house, but it seemed small because it was too crowded with oversized furniture—Audrey’s full canopy bed, an executive-style writing desk, a console television, and a triple dresser. Crammed in a cubbyhole were my twin bed and the chest of drawers that housed my clothes. My toys—Barbie dolls, Little Kiddles, and troll collection—were all displayed on two shelves above my bed.
The rest of the space in the room was filled with Audrey’s stuff. She had gotten everything she’d ever asked for, most of which she didn’t need or couldn’t use. Like the electric organ she wasn’t even able to play. It was covered with dusty board games that had never been opened. Posters of the Beatles papered the walls, and all around the floor were tall stacks of their albums, and teen magazines that threatened to topple over whenever someone brushed by them.
She had a ridiculously large collection of stuffed animals. A parrot was perched in a swing on top of the television set, a monkey with a banana in his hand dangled from one of the posts of her bed, and stuffed in every inch of remaining space were a dozen or more teddy bears. Some nights I became frightened, as I lay awake surrounded by these creatures that often appeared wicked and threatening in the shadows of the half-dark.
My bed was situated directly across from Audrey’s. From there I watched her sleep. A small lamp on her nightstand, draped with a sheer, pink scarf, served as her night light, and so Mama could find her way in the dark when she came in to check on her. The soft light from the lamp washed over Audrey’s face, giving her skin a rosy glow, and a deceptive illusion of health.
A little before nine o’clock, she woke up and looked over at me, in my bed. “What are you chewing on?” she asked.
“Just some bubble gum; someone at school gave it to me.”
“Got anymore?”
“Nope, only this one piece,” I said, blowing a big bubble.
“Can I have part of yours?”
“It’s all chewed up, and most of the flavor is gone.”
“I don’t care. My mouth is dry. Bite me off a piece.”
“If you’re thirsty, I can hold your water while you sip it.”
“I don’t want water, I want something sweet. Please, Tuesday.”I bit my gum into two pieces, and put one between her lips.
She chewed it for a minute. “The flavor is all gone now,” she said. “Get a tissue so I can spit it out.”
Daddy came in, as he did every night before he went to sleep, and gave Audrey a kiss. Then he walked over to my bed and kissed me. “Night, sweetheart,” he said. “Your mama will be in soon so you can get some rest.”
Audrey fell back to sleep, and her breathing became even. Weary from fatigue, for another hour I watched her chest rise and descend, rise and descend, and dreamt about what my life might be like if her lungs deflated, and collapsed, and her chest never rose again. I could go outside and play with Nick and Jimmy D., like a normal kid. I could finally be a normal kid.
I was sure Audrey would be better off dead too. I thought of the pathetic way she flopped her arms around, and her scrawny legs that may as well have been two tree limbs propped in front of her, for all the good they were. I remembered her “down days,” as Mama called them, when she sat staring out the window for hours, tears streaming from her eyes. Whenever I asked her what was wrong, she never said, but I knew she must have been crying because she was trapped in a body that couldn’t do what she wanted it to, crying for all she would never experience. She was in pain from her sadness, in pain from her illness. She had to be tired of pain.
5
The following morning I woke up with a scratchy throat and a headache, and my arms and legs were weak and sore. I told Mama, and right away she moved me and my bed into my brothers’ room.
Daddy got sick the same day, and Mama no longer allowed him to go anywhere near Audrey. Like she had done with my brothers, she gave both him and me masks to wear whenever we had to get out of our beds to go to the bathroom.
Two days later, despite the quarantine, the masks, the endless scrubbing of our skin with Lava soap, and all the bottles of Lysol, Audrey started coughing, and running a slight fever.
Daddy called the family doctor, who made a special trip out to the house to examine her. After a thorough check, he confirmed that she did, in fact, have the Hong Kong flu. Luckily, she was only in the early stages, and the doctor didn’t think it was necessary for her to go into the hospital. He felt confident that with the proper medication, and provided we kept a close watch over her, she would be more comfortable at home, at least for the time being.
Mama put a vaporizer beside Audrey’s bed, and lined bottles of medicine up on her nightstand. Since the damage had already been done, I was moved back to our room so I could help with watching her again.
After a few days of taking the medications the doctor had prescribed, her condition improved, and she began sleeping through the night. We thought she was getting better. Then I heard her making a peculiar sound in her sleep. She purred when she drew air into her lungs, and then wheezed as she released it again. Right away I reported this new development to Mama, who rushed to Audrey’s side.
Daddy came in to feel Audrey’s brow, checking for a rise in her temperature. He couldn’t hide the worry on his face.
“I don’t know how she could have gotten the flu, Nick,” Mama said. “I was so careful.”
“Rose, there’s no sense in worrying about that now.”
“I know it’s not helping matters.”
“You of all people should know how tough Audrey is. Think of all she’s been through. She’s not going to let this flu get her down. She’s a fighter, always has been, always will be.”
“But she’s been so tired lately.” Mama’s voice cracked from fatigue, and from being on the verge of crying. “What if she’s too tired, Nick? What if she’s tired of fighting? I don’t know what I would do if I lost her.”
Daddy put his arm around Mama’s shoulders and held her close. “You’re not going to lose her, Rosie.”
Mama turned to me and said in a slight voice, “Go to sleep now, Tuesday. You must be exhausted.” Then she crawled in bed with Audrey, and Daddy pulled the covers up around both of them.
I closed my eyes, but as tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. Something dreadful had found its way into my head and was gnawing at my brain—the thought that I might have been the one who gave Audrey the flu. That maybe the reason I had felt achy that night when I was watching her was because I was already sick before Mama moved me into the boys’ room.
Then I remembered the bubblegum I’d shared with Audrey, and my eyes popped wide open. The bubblegum! It had to be the bubblegum! I knew if Mama, with her phobia of germs, ever found out I had given Audrey my already chewed bubblegum, she would kill me. I could never tell her, and I wouldn’t have to, because Audrey would soon be well again, and no harm would have been done.
6
The next day, Audrey slept most of the time. That night, her breathing was heavy and husky, and a deep, rattling cough often interrupted her sleep. She had a cup on the nightstand beside her bed to spit out the profuse amounts of phlegm her lungs were producing. The mucus, which at the beginning of her sickness had been pale yellow, and then gradually turned green, now had a rusty tint to it.
Four days after she got the flu, she woke up with a high fever. Mama wrapped her in towels drenched in ice water, but her temperature wouldn’t drop a degree. That’s when Daddy declared it was time to take her to the emergency room. He went next door and asked a neighbor to come over and sit with my brothers and me, while Mama got a few of Audrey’s things together.
Audrey was admitted to the hospital that day, a Tuesday, and by the following Saturday, on March 3, 1970,
she had died.
During the funeral, and then long after the service was over, Mama clung to Audrey’s casket and sobbed. It took hours for Daddy to pry her away, and when he finally did, she refused to leave. When it began to get dark out, he had to pick her up and force into the car to take her home.
All through the night, she moaned in agony and screamed out Audrey’s name. By the next morning, she had cried so much, her face was swollen to twice its normal size, and her eyes were nothing but narrow slits surrounded by puffy tissue. Daddy had to call the doctor to come out to the house and give her a sedative shot to calm her down just so she could sleep.
Relatives, some I had never met before, came to show their sympathy to my parents for the loss of their child. Some of them said things like “poor Rose has been through so much.” Others talked about Audrey, and how she had never had a life at all. “She’s in a better place now,” one of them said. “Now her pain is over.”
The neighbors brought casseroles and cakes and plates of sandwiches, so many we ran out of surfaces to sit them on. When the counters in the kitchen were full, we had to start putting dishes of food in the living room on Mama’s treasured Duncan Fife coffee table. Normally, she would have thrown a fit, but she was so out of it, she didn’t even care.
In the days to follow, she lost her appetite completely. She wouldn’t talk to anyone. She even stopped bathing. Heavily sedated, she spent most of her time sitting on Audrey’s bed, gazing out into the open space, as if she were looking at something none of the rest of us could see.
Daddy took Audrey’s death rough too. He had been her father since she was an infant, and he loved her as if she were his own blood. I never saw him cry, although I suspected he did when no one was watching. He moved about the house like a massive zombie, his eyelids rimmed in red and circled in gray from lack of sleep. He busied himself with handling all the funeral arrangements, looking after the family, the cooking, and cleaning, trying to keep some semblance of order amidst all the madness.
As for me, I struggled with my own secret hell from the guilt of having given my sister the flu that killed her. I had thought her death would be best for everyone, but now, seeing how sad it made Mama and Daddy, I realized I’d been wrong. And I could not move past the absoluteness of it all, of Audrey being gone for good. I would never see her again, or hear her laugh like she had when I danced for her. I kept thinking about that day, and how much fun we had.
I asked Daddy if Audrey had suffered when she died, and he assured me she hadn’t. “She suffered enough in her lifetime. So I’m sure God, in his mercy, took her without pain.”
Knowing this made me feel better.
Days crept by after the funeral with Mama showing no indication of improvement. She seemed like she was no longer concerned with caring for herself or the family. She continued to require sedative medication for her nerves, which made her sleep most of the time. When she wasn’t sleeping, she was groggy, wandering through the house, aimlessly, with glassy eyes and a vacant stare.
She formed an odd attachment to a stuffed angel she had taken off one of the floral arrangements at the funeral. She cuddled it in her arms like a baby, and sang it lullabies. “You’re my angel and I love you,” she whispered to the doll as if it were Audrey. “You’re an angel, and you don’t even know it, my angel unaware.”
Mama had Daddy move my bed back in with my brothers so she could spend her days in Audrey’s room alone. None of us were allowed to go in there because she was afraid we would move something, and she wanted everything to remain exactly as Audrey had left it. My brothers and I hovered outside the closed bedroom door, lost. Without Mama our lives had no rhythm, no direction.
After weeks of gently coaxing, Daddy was able to convince her to fix her hair and put on lipstick. He somehow managed to wean her from the angel doll too. After a few weeks more, she began expressing an interest in my brothers and me again, and to resemble her former self.
With Mama close to being back to normal, it was time for us to get on with our lives as a family. To afford us more space in the house, Daddy finished out the basement so we could use it as a den. Nothing fancy, just some indoor/outdoor carpet on the concrete floor and a coat of white paint on the cinder block walls. He bought a small television set to put down in the den, as well as a couple of beanbag chairs. An old mattress was propped up against the wall in case anyone wanted to lie on the floor, and it was the perfect place for Daddy’s well-worn recliner that Mama had banished to the basement years earlier.
We called our new room a den, but it was more of a playroom for us kids, and a retreat for Daddy. Mama didn’t like the den. She claimed the floor was too cold, and hard to her feet, and she had no comfortable furniture to sit in down there.
Mama did her part to make more living space for the family too. She agreed to clear out Audrey’s old bedroom so the boys could move in, and that meant I could take over their room and have it all to myself. At last everything was working out as I had envisioned it would.
7
By the time my eighth birthday came around on July11, Mama was feeling much better. That morning she woke me early and told me she had a special day planned for me. I followed her to her room and sat on the edge of her bed, waiting for her to get dressed.
She let her housecoat slide from her shoulders and tossed it onto a chair. Wearing nothing but her bra and panties, she dug through her drawers until she found her favorite red shell. She pulled it on over her head, tossed her curls back into shape, and then squeezed into a pair of dark denim Bermuda shorts. She walked over to her vanity and sat on the padded bench in front of it. I jumped down from the bed and sat beside her, like I always did when she put on her makeup.
She picked up her brush with the mother-of-pearl handle, pulled it through her hair a couple of times, and arranged a few wayward curls around her face. She slid open her red box of cake mascara and applied some to her lashes with the tiny black brush inside. Then she selected, from the drawer of her vanity, the perfect shade of lipstick to match her shell, and traced it along the lines of her full lips as she pursed them in an O shape. After a quick quality check in the mirror, she plucked a tissue from the dispenser and kissed it, leaving a bright red imprint of her mouth.
“There,” she said springing to her feet. “Now, let’s tend to the Birthday Girl.” She went over to her closet, and pulled out a box wrapped in purple paper and tied with a yellow ribbon. My heart pounded with excitement when I realized it was a present for me. “I’m going to let you open this now. It’s something special I picked out for you.”
I took it from her, tore through the paper, ripped apart the box, and pulled out what was inside, all in one motion. It was a sun-suit that tied at the shoulders, red with black polka dots.
“I love it, Mama!” I stripped out of my pajamas right there so I could put it on and wear it for the rest of the day. “Thank you!”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”
For lunch Mama made corndogs and macaroni and cheese, my two favorite foods, and for dessert, she baked a German chocolate cake, also my favorite. She adorned the cake with eight pink candles, lit them, and then turned out the lights. Everyone in the family sang “Happy Birthday” as she brought my cake over to the kitchen table.
After we ate, I opened my other gift—a new troll doll with hair striped the colors of the rainbow—to add to my already large collection. Then Daddy, Nick, Jimmy D., and I all went outside. Daddy was finally going to make good on his promise to build us a tree house in a sprawling mimosa out in the backyard. Mama stayed behind and picked up the kitchen. It had been over four months since Audrey’s death, and she still hadn’t left the house.
Out in the yard, I found a patch of soft grass and sat to make a dandelion necklace. Before too long I heard the familiar sound of the back screen door first creak open and then snap shut. In the far corner of the yard, Daddy and the boys stopped what they were doing and looked toward the house.
Out
walked Mama, pressing the palm of her hand against the sun’s glare. “My lands,” she said. “At first I thought you were a big ol’ ladybug out there in the grass! You look just like one in your new dotted sun-suit!”
I giggled at the thought. “Oh, Mama, you’re silly!”
She picked up her lounger that had been leaning against the outside of the house since last summer, unfolded it, and situated it facing the sun. She lay down and stretched out, with one leg hanging off the side, and her bare foot resting on the concrete patio beneath her, as if at any minute she might get up and go back inside.
“Ladybug,” she said as she rolled up her shorts so she could get some sun on her legs. “Hmm, now that’s a good nickname for you. I think I’ll call you that from now on.” She tucked her shell up under her bra in front to expose her stomach, leaned her head back on the lounger, and shut her eyes.
A grin crept onto my face. Mama’s back.
I was about halfway done with my dandelion necklace when Daddy and the boys started making some loud noise hammering on the tree house. Mama raised her head and looked in their direction. Then she looked at me. “You sure have been out there in that grass for a long time, Ladybug. What are you doing, anyway?”
“Making a necklace,” I said. “It’s a present for somebody.”
“Who could you be making a present for, it’s your birthday.”
“It’s a surprise.”
She smiled, and the specks of copper in her eyes sparkled. She put her head back and rested it against the lounger again, her smooth face soaking in the sunlight.
