by Mia Mckenzie
“Hey!”
Oh, no. Oh God, no. I’m still doubled over, so all I can see is her feet—in those same perfect leather boots—when she catches up with me. I can’t possibly run anymore, so I just hold up my hand and, to my surprise, she stops a few feet away. When I catch my breath, I look up at her and my first thought is how goddamn much I like her face. Her eyes are super dark and intense and she has, like, a presence that fills the room even though we’re not actually in a room. Also, somehow, she looks perfectly put together, even though she just chased a child-abduction suspect three whole city blocks.
I try to speak and a wheeze escapes me. She frowns, like she’s starting to realize I’m either really bad at kidnapping children or possibly not a kidnapper of children at all. I hold up one finger in an attempt to communicate that there’s an explanation coming any minute now. “I’m the…[wheeze]…I’m the egg…[wheeze]…”
Vicky runs up behind her aunt. “Skye, are you okay?”
Her aunt looks at her like, Why do you know this slow-running kidnapper’s name?
“I’m the egg donor,” I wheeze.
She looks at me. “What?”
That’s right! Who looks like the crazy person now? is something I consider saying but I’m worried that, objectively speaking, I’m still the one who looks like the crazy person. So instead I just kind of shrug and nod and continue to clutch my burning chest.
She stares at the kid, who stares back at her with that angry look again. Aunt Faye opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, only no words come out. We all stand there for a few seconds, frozen and silent except for my wheezing. Then Aunt Faye grabs the kid’s hand, turns, and walks away with her. I watch them until they’re out of sight.
My phone buzzes again. I forget to ignore it. It’s Slade again. This time the text banner reads: Mom in hospital. Stroke.
Shit.
6
My mother is sitting up in her hospital bed, watching the local news, when I arrive. She’s wearing a hospital gown and a once-fuzzy pink bathrobe she’s had for at least ten years. Her eyeglasses are perched on the end of her nose and she’s peering over them at the TV. She looks totally fine, like she might as well be at home watching soaps in her bedroom. I know people can have little strokes and seem normal the next day. Nevertheless, I’m suspicious. My brother is slumped in the chair beside the bed, dozing, his snores louder than the weatherman.
“Skye Beam?” my mother asks when she sees me in the doorway.
“Hey, Mom,” I say, coming into the room, which is small and cramped and smells like my brother’s cologne.
“I didn’t know you were in town,” she says. “When’d you get back?”
“Yesterday,” I lie.
The sound of our voices wakes Slade. When he sees me, he laughs a little and shakes his head. “You got here fast from Miami.”
I throw him my meanest sneer. He shakes his head again but shuts up.
“How are you feeling?” I ask my mother.
“I’m doing alright,” she says, “as far as I know.”
“Well, you look great,” I tell her. “Especially considering the stroke and all.”
She looks confused for a second. “Did I have a stroke?”
Slade shakes his head. “No, Mom. Skye’s just playing around.”
Ugh, I knew it!
My mother pushes her glasses up on her nose and eyes me. “You look skinny. You working?”
You working? is a question my mother asks every time I see her. The answer has never been no but she still asks. I’m pretty sure this is a question all Black moms ask of children they don’t see or talk to every day. You working? is basically the Black mom version of How have you been?
“Yes,” I tell her. “I’m working.”
“Where?”
“I work for myself, Mom. Group travel, remember?”
“Oh,” says my mother. “You still doing that?”
To be clear: The “that” my mother is referring to is owning and running a successful company that allows me to travel the world.
“Yes. I’m still doing that.”
“Must not pay much,” she says, looking me over again. “You don’t look like you’re eating enough.”
“I’m eating great,” I tell her, which isn’t objectively true.
“Well, you always had a fast metabolism,” my mother says. “When you were a teenager, you used to sometimes eat half a box of Apple Smacks in one sitting.”
“That was Slade.”
“Oh, that’s right!” she says, laughing. She looks at Slade. “You almost ate me out of house and home.”
Slade shrugs. “Skye ate all the yogurt, though. Remember?”
My mother looks at me, and I can tell she’s trying to recall it. “I do,” she says finally, nodding. “You got that from your father. He always loved yogurt.”
I feel a twitch at the corners of my mouth. I hate it when my mother starts talking about my father without warning. I’ve made it a habit to never think about that dude and I don’t like it when other people break my habits for me.
“You always ate up all the ice cream, though,” my mother says to Slade. “Especially cookies and cream. You could scarf down a whole gallon of that in a couple of days.”
Slade laughs and my mother laughs, too. I’m thrilled as fuck they’re having such a good time.
The sound of the local news in the background is suddenly distracting to me, like a mosquito buzzing near my ear, and I want to swat it away.
“I have to get going,” I say, fake-checking the time on my phone.
“You literally just walked in the door,” my brother says.
I frown at him. “Slade, lemme talk to you out here for a second.” I walk out into the hallway and he follows.
“What is your problem?” I ask him. “You told me she had a stroke just to get me here?”
“I wasn’t trying to get you here. I thought you left town last night. I was just trying to make you feel guilty enough to call.”
“I hate you. Do you know that?”
He nods. “It’s pretty obvious. One day you should tell me why you hate me so much, since I’ve never done shit to you.”
“Whatever. Just tell me what actually happened.”
“She said she felt dizzy, so I brought her here. They did a C-scan but it looked fine. They kept her overnight for observation, though,” he says, then he starts to move past me down the hall.
“Where are you going?”
“Coffee,” he says.
“You can’t leave. I’m leaving.”
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and keeps walking, disappearing around a corner.
For a second, I consider leaving anyway. I’m annoyed that Slade got me here by lying through his teeth. This never could have happened if I was on my way to São Paulo right now like I’m supposed to be. I wish I was there now. I wish I was anywhere other than this goddamn hospital.
“Skye Beam?” my mother calls.
Somehow, I resist the urge to scream until my throat is bloody and instead poke my head back into the room. “Yes?”
“I thought that was you,” she says, as if I just got here. “I didn’t know you were in town. When did you get back?”
I take a long, deep breath and go back inside. I sit down in the chair Slade vacated. “I got back yesterday.”
“Oh,” she says. “You working?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Where?”
“JetBlue. I’m flying planes now. Slade didn’t tell you?”
She looks confused and for a second I feel bad for messing with her. Then she frowns and says, “Well, they must not be paying you much, ’cause you don’t look like you’re eating.”
Ba dum tss.
A nurse enters. She�
�s youngish and blondish and bubblyish. “How are we doing, Miss Mary?” she asks.
“Fine,” my mother says, frowning a little.
“Let’s get those vitals, okay?” She fiddles with her blood pressure machine and smiles at me. “Are you a relative?”
“I’m her daughter.”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” she says to my mother. Then to me, “I’m Elizabeth. I’ve been taking care of Miss Mary today.”
“Miss Mary?”
“Oh, that’s what I call her,” she says. “I can’t pronounce…what is it? Amara-liss?”
“It’s Amaryllis,” I tell her.
“That’s a mouthful,” she says, giggling, waving her hand. “I just call her Miss Mary.”
I look at my mother. “Did you tell her she could call you Mary?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Her name’s not Mary,” I say to the nurse. “No one calls her that. Her name is Amaryllis. You should call her Amaryllis.”
The nurse acts like she didn’t hear me.
“One thirty over ninety,” she says of my mother’s blood pressure. “A little high but not too bad. And your oxygen looks just fine.”
“Excuse me, Emily?” I say.
“Elizabeth,” she corrects me.
“Yeah, I hear you. But, honestly, I’m not in love with that name, so I’ma just call you Emily. Cool?”
She stares at me like she’s trying to decide how serious I am.
“Is there a good bar around here, Emily?”
“I…um…I’m not sure,” she says. “I don’t really drink.”
“Ah,” I say, nodding.
She turns back to my mother. “Your vitals look great, Miss Ama…”
“Amaryllis,” my mother and I say in unison.
“Am-a-ryl-lis,” says Emily/Elizabeth suuuuuuuper slowly. “The doctor already put in your discharge order, so you should be out of here within the hour. Call me if you need anything in the meantime.” She walks out without looking at me again.
“You believe that shit?” I ask my mother when she’s gone.
My mother shakes her head. Then, after a few seconds, she says, “Where’s Slade?”
Right. Of course. Slade. “He went to get coffee.”
“Oh,” she says, sounding disappointed.
Familiar theme music plays as the news comes back from commercial. A memory flashes in my mind, of me at twelve, watching the backs of my parents’ heads through a closet keyhole as they watched the local news. My father had locked me in the closet because I’d talked back to him. My mother hadn’t stopped him, hadn’t defended me at all. She’d just sat there watching the news, like she is now. The memory fills me with a sudden sense of anger and panic. My heart pounds. I take a deep breath to calm myself.
“Listen, Mom,” I say, “I have to go. Slade will be back soon, though.”
“Alright,” she says. “It was good seeing you.”
I head for the elevators, walking fast. I see Slade coming toward me down the hall.
“You’re already leaving?”
“Eat a dick, Slade,” I say, not stopping.
When I get inside the elevator and the doors slide shut, I feel suddenly overcome. With what exactly, I’m not sure. But the elevator feels too small, like the walls are closing in on me. When the doors open into the lobby, I hurry out, almost running to the exit.
7
When I get back to the bed-and-breakfast, it’s only around six o’clock. Nevertheless, I go straight to my room, strip, pull on a raggedy T-shirt, and collapse on the bed. I feel exhausted, the way I always do after seeing my mother, and also probably from being chased down the street like a robber in a cartoon. I fall asleep for what seems like hours and am awakened by the sound of knocking on my door. I turn over and try to go back to sleep, but the knocking persists. “Go away!”
“Skye, it’s Viva. Tienes visita.”
I get up and open the door. “¿Visita? It’s the middle of the night.”
“It’s seven-thirty,” says Viva.
“Who is it?”
“Dice que se llama Faye.”
“Vicky’s aunt?”
“All I know is she called for you earlier. I put her through but you didn’t pick up.”
I sort of remember ignoring the faraway sound of a phone ringing.
“She’s waiting for you in the parlor,” Viva says. “You might want to put on pants. Or at least underwear.”
When I get downstairs, Vicky’s aunt is kneeling in front of the wood-burning stove, staring through the glass door at the flames. Her brow is tightly drawn, as if she’s trying to solve a problem that exists deep in the flicker of the dying fire. I watch her for a few seconds, until it starts to feel weird and lurky, then clear my throat. She looks up at me but doesn’t say anything. Her brow is still furrowed. Finally, she sighs and says, “Your fire’s going out. The back log isn’t catching.”
I shrug. “It’s not really my fire, per se.”
Ignoring my indifference, she removes an iron poker from the rack of fireplace tools and opens the glass door. “Sorry for showing up on your doorstep unannounced,” she says, not looking at me. “I tried calling.”
“I was working,” I tell her. “On some super important stuff.”
She nods and reaches the poker into the fire. “Once I talked to Vicky and sorted out what happened, I felt bad. I wanted to apologize.”
“Okay,” I say. I take a seat on the arm of a nearby chair and watch as she uses the little hook on the poker to try to drag one of the logs in the back to the front, where there’s still flame for it to catch.
“My sister didn’t want anyone to know about the eggs,” she says, still looking at the fire, not at me. “She kept it a secret from everybody but her husband. She probably would’ve kept it from him if she could have. I didn’t know about it until after she died.”
“Wait. You’re Cynthia’s sister?”
“Yes.”
I don’t know why I assumed she was Vicky’s paternal aunt. I do recall Cynthia having a sister a couple of years older, though I don’t remember ever seeing her during my three summers with Cynthia at camp. She doesn’t look much like her sister, who had a round face and wide, curious, friendly eyes. Faye is all cheekbones, heavy lashes, and intensity.
The poker’s not accomplishing the task of moving the log where she wants it, so she puts it down and picks up some large iron tongs. She uses both hands to work the tongs, grabbing the log between them and lifting it up, as embers pop and spark.
“Why didn’t she want anyone to know?” I ask.
“Cynthia always wanted children. Even when we were just little girls ourselves. Maybe having to use someone else’s eggs made her feel she’d failed in some way.”
The fire suddenly gets bigger, the rogue log finally catching the flames, and we both watch it for a few moments in silence. I steal glances at her profile, see the reflection of firelight in her silver hoop earrings.
“That’s my best guess. I could be all wrong. It’s not something she would’ve talked to me about.”
“You weren’t close?”
She shakes her head, no. A thick twist of hair falls in front of her eyes. She grasps it between her thumb and forefinger and tucks it behind her ear, super tenderly, like she’s trying to be extra gentle with herself. It’s the most graceful of movements.
“Was she close to other people?” I ask.
She looks right at me now, surprised by the question. “Other people?”
“I mean, did she have close friends? Other close family? I didn’t spend much time with her as an adult. I’m curious who she grew up to be.”
She sighs and puts down the fireplace tongs. “She worked a lot. Other than Vicky, I don’t think people were of much interest to her.�
��
“Did you like her?” It’s maybe an intrusive question but considering she showed up at my place of sleep with no warning, I feel pretty okay about being intrusive.
For a few seconds, she stares at me with the same look she had at the record store when I told her about poor Pee Paw: half disbelief, half caught. Then she says matter-of-factly, “I liked her when we were kids. As adults…I liked her sometimes. Which is probably more often than she liked me.”
“Why?”
Now she looks uncomfortable. “Our grandmother used to say sisters are natural enemies. She had seven and despised every one.”
Granny sounds nice.
