Nearer Than The Sky Page 3

  “You okay?” Peter asked, rubbing his thumb across the back of my hand.

  I nodded.

  Joe tapped on the glass and waved before he started to pedal away. We waved back, and Peter squeezed both of my hands, leaning forward to whisper in my ear.

  “You wanna watch a movie?”

  This was something we usually reserved for special occasions, for anniversaries and birthdays. It was exactly what I needed; Peter always knew.

  “What about Julia?” I asked.

  “She’s downstairs doing the money. It’ll be at least a half hour before she’s done.”

  He took my hand and led me through the doors and up the stairs again to the theater. He still has a small limp, even after all these years, but I love the way it makes him move slowly, with care. I can see in his walk the old man he will become.

  While he readied the projector, I took off my dress and folded it neatly, unrolled my socks and untied my shoes. I sat on the floor in front of the screen with my knees up under my chin. When the lights began to flicker across my body, I closed my eyes and waited until I felt his hands on my shoulders. Until I tasted his words, as familiar and comforting as a wood fire in winter. The soundless film made ghosts across his chest, across the scars that ran along his naked legs. Even hair and muscles could not disguise the old wounds, but the black-and-white pictures could. I think that’s why he loves this place. Our bodies only a screen, a moving canvas.

  After, I lay with my head across his thighs, my bad ear pressed against him.

  “Are you happy?” he asked. He always asks this after. To make sure.

  I nodded, lifting my head to look at the pictures moving across his face.

  After I slipped my dress back on and tied the laces on my tennis shoes, as we were walking up the dark theater aisle, Julia opened the door tentatively and peered into the darkness at us. I felt my face turning pink.

  “Indie, your sister’s on the phone. She says it’s an emergency.”

  Peter squeezed my hand. We followed her down the stairs into the café. I went into Peter’s office and closed the door. The phone was resting on his desk, and I thought, I could leave you there, Lily. I could leave you and Ma on the other end of the line. I could never answer the phone again. What would you do then?

  The phone was cold against my ear. And I wondered for a moment, before Lily knew that I was there, if it might be over.

  “Indie?”

  I nodded my head silently, waiting.

  “I think you should come home now,” she said.

  “Is she . . .”

  “They put her in the psych ward last night. They say she’s become a danger to herself,” she said, her voice shaking.

  I almost laughed. A danger to herself. “What are you talking about? I thought you said it was lead poisoning or something. Can’t they just treat her for it?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You mean the treatment?”

  Lily’s breath was quivering. I imagined her pale and fragile on the other end of the line. A gust of wind could make her whole body tremble.

  “Lily?”

  “They say she’s been doing it to herself.”

  “What?”

  “They said that she’s been poisoning herself.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “The doctors said that it’s nothing environmental, that it’s her. That it’s intentional. They found rat poison in the tests. And other chemicals, things you don’t just eat or breathe by accident.”

  “What does she say?” I asked.

  “She says they’re full of shit. But she’s really out of it.”

  I tried to imagine my mother in a psychiatric ward of a hospital, but when I closed my eyes, I only saw Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. My mother didn’t fit into this picture, except maybe as Nurse Ratchet, in a starched white uniform, her graying blond hair coming loose from the tight braid she usually wore.

  “Last night she started talking to Benny.”

  I felt as though my heart had become detached from all of my veins and muscles and was floating upward, pulsating in my chest, my throat, my head.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, knowing exactly what she meant.

  “They called to ask me who Benny was. They told me she was talking to him. Like he was in the room with her,” Lily said. I could hear the pain of this catch in her throat.

  “How long is she going to be there?”

  “I don’t know. They want to send her back up north once she’s stabilized physically. They want to get her set up with a psychiatrist in Mountainview, to get her on medication, into counseling. But she can’t go up there alone. Somebody has to go with her.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

  “I can’t go with her. I need to be here with Violet.” She sighed heavily, the weight of a thousand worlds on her shoulders. “I can’t do this by myself. I need your help.”

  Anger welled up, and my dislodged heart found its way to my hands, which throbbed as I squeezed the phone. “Lily, it’s not as easy as that. I’m all the way in Maine, for Chrissakes—”

  “—and our mother is talking to our dead brother. Not to mention that she’s been drinking rat poison with her tea and swallowing eyedroppers of Draino for Chrissakes,” Lily hissed.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll bring her home, but I’m not staying.”

  “Soon?”

  “It’s just because of Benny,” I said.“I want to hear what she has to say about Benny.”

  At home, Peter made tea for me and grabbed a beer for himself. We put on mittens and sweaters and sat outside watching the sun melt through the leaves that still clung to the trees. The end of autumn is precarious. A simple storm could rip the colors from the trees, leaving the dull branches exposed.

  We’d made a harvest dummy and carved jack-o-lanterns that shared the porch with us. We didn’t get trick-or-treaters, but Peter had insisted on a punch bowl filled with candy.

  I sat on the step below Peter, holding my mug with both hands, and he wrapped his legs against my sides to keep me warm. The loons that live at the pond up the road had left already. All summer they had called out to each other desperately in prehistoric voices. It was quiet without them.

  “What are you thinking?”

  I shrugged. There’s no way to explain some things to Peter. No way to articulate the twisting feeling my nerves get every time I am suddenly and involuntarily connected again with my past. My childhood is like an amputee’s phantom limb. It’s not something someone intact can understand.

  “Will you come with me?” I asked and immediately wished I hadn’t. I felt his legs stiffen against my sides.

  “Ind,” he said. “I would, but the restaurant . . .”

  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s fine. I know.”

  “If you need me to, I suppose I could have Joe watch the place for a few days.”

  “I said it’s fine.” I turned to look at him.

  He lowered his head and kissed my hair. “I’m sorry.”

  I nodded and suddenly felt guilty. Peter was afraid of flying. It was almost cruel to request this of him. Besides, I didn’t really want him to come, didn’t even know why I’d asked.

  After Peter went to bed, I crawled up the ladder that pulls down from the ceiling in our bedroom and sat at my desk. I picked up the fountain pen that he gave me for my birthday and opened the sketch pad I’d been using to write things down in. The light from the shed shone through the window onto the open pages.

  OCTOBER 31, 1999. LOCAL WOMAN ATTEMPTS SUICIDE BY POISON, SURVIVES. Phoenix, Arizona. Judy Brown is in the hospital tonight after an apparent suicide attempt by ingestion of poison. Detectives found a “virtual arsenal” of poisonous substances in the cabinets of the woman’s Mountainview home. Mrs. Brown survived the nearly lethal dose and rests tonight in the psychiatric ward of St. Joseph’s in Phoenix. Mrs. Brown is the mother of three children: Miranda Brown, Lily
Hughes, and Benjamin Brown, deceased. It is reported that Mrs. Brown was heard speaking to her dead son last night. She was seen, perhaps, staring into the orange glow of the hospital parking lot muttering excuses.

  I tried to picture Ma in some hospital room now, talking to Benny, but I couldn’t imagine what she might have to say to him after all this time. For more than twenty years now she hadn’t even said his name, and sorry had certainly never been uttered. She probably knew I would be able to taste her lies. More bitter than lead or arsenic on my tongue.

  I wasn’t born yet when Benny stopped breathing. That was when Benny was a baby and Ma and Daddy were still living in California. She says that Benny got himself tangled up in his blanket. That he was blue. She says that it took her almost twenty minutes to get him breathing again. That if she hadn’t been trained in CPR, he was sure to have died. That she breathed her own life into him, and that it was her breath that brought him back.

  I imagine my mother, twenty years old, in a nightgown someone gave her for her bridal shower. The nylon probably hadn’t worn thin yet. The elastic in the cuffs still tight around her small wrists. I imagine her bare feet on the cold linoleum floor of Benny’s room. A mobile with impossibly colored plastic butterflies spinning over his head. I can hear my father snoring softly in the other room, the insistence of mourning doves in the tree outside the bedroom window.

  She says she found him blue inside that blue room, the one I vaguely remember sharing with Benny before we left California. The air was probably heavy that day, a thick marine layer like a gauzy blanket over the rented bungalow. It might have been thick enough to choke a child. At first she might have thought he was only being smothered by the haze. That it had filled his lungs like smoke.

  If she hadn’t been in nursing school, if she hadn’t studied that chapter in the book (each time she tells the story she pauses here), he would have died. But what she always leaves out is that her breath wasn’t enough. That when she closed her lips over his and blew, part of him was already dead. And the part the sea air killed was the part that would have kept his head from lolling to the side when he was tired. The part that would have kept him from sucking on the edges of his T-shirts or falling down whenever he tried to run. That missing part would have made him like any other kid instead of a retard. That word rang in my ears long after I left the playground, holding Benny’s hand and making sure he used a tissue to wipe the snot from his nose. Retard tasted like the smell of Lily’s diaper pail.

  The reason we were at the diner was because we had just gotten haircuts. Promises of tuna melts with sweet green pickles and vanilla shakes were the only way she could convince Benny to hold still, not cry, not scream at the sight or the sound of the scissors. For me, she promised chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes in return for my long thick braid. For the curls that had become so tangled that summer she couldn’t comb my hair without eliciting piercing screams and tears. After the hairdresser cut through the thick rope, my head felt wobbly and light, and I put the braid in the glove compartment of the Nova.

  At the diner, Ma gave Benny a quarter to ride the motorcycle out front. He climbed on and pretended to rev the engine. He was big for his age, too big for the ride, but he loved this more than the cold thrill of a vanilla shake on the back of his teeth. When the motorcycle stopped rocking back and forth, Benny’s lip started to quiver.

  “Let’s go in,” I said. “You can pick the table.”

  Ma was in the bathroom with Lily, trying to get her to go. Since Ma had started potty training her, Lily wouldn’t go anymore. She’d hold it until she got stomachaches, until Ma would have to take her to the doctor. Lily said she was afraid she’d fall into the toilet. She was also afraid she’d get sucked down the bathtub drain.

  “Which one?” I asked Benny.

  “The window one!” he said, pointing at a table where three teenagers were sitting, smoking cigarettes.

  “We can’t sit there. Pick an empty one.”

  “I want that one,” he said, rocking back and forth.

  “How about that one over there? You can see the fire station from there.”

  Benny nodded and went to the booth. Ma came out of the bathroom with Lily, whose face was puffy and red.

  “Good girl,” Ma said, reaching across the table for a napkin from the dispenser. She blotted Lily’s eyes, even though she hadn’t been crying. “Lily went number two all by herself,” she said proudly.

  “Number two, number two!” Benny hooted.

  “Shhh,” Ma said and put Lily in the plastic baby seat.

  “My head feels wobbly,” I said, moving my head back and forth. I felt light.

  “It looks pretty, honey,” Ma said.

  “Do I look pretty?” Benny asked, shaking his head back and forth. Little pieces of hair that the hairdresser missed fell from his shirt onto the table top.

  “Benny,” she said.

  “Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Lily said.

  “Yes you are,” Ma cooed and pulled a bib out of the blue baby bag. “A pretty, pretty girl.”

  “I want liver and onions,” Benny said to the waitress.

  “Benny, why don’t you get a tuna melt?” Ma said, tying the bib around Lily’s neck.

  “Daddy gets liver’n onions,” he said.

  “I want chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes,” I said. “And a vanilla shake, please.”

  “I want liver’n onions and pickles,” Benny said.

  “He’ll have a tuna melt,” Ma said.

  The waitress looked at Benny and then back at Ma. “I think he wants liver and onions,” she said.

  Ma scowled at the waitress. Please don’t, Ma, I thought. Please don’t yell at the waitress. Let him get his stupid liver’n onions. I stared at the checked pattern on the linoleum until I was almost dizzy.

  “Fine,” Ma said. “And I’ll have a tossed salad with cottage cheese. Italian dressing on the side. And some sliced peaches for the baby.”

  “Pretty,” Lily said, pointing one of her chubby fingers at the waitress.

  “Thank you, sweetie-pie,” the waitress smiled.

  Ma snuffed and turned her head, staring out the window at the fire station.

  “She’s adorable,” the waitress said to Ma. Magic words.

  Ma turned away from the window and smiled. “Thank you.You know, she’s only two and a half but she’s already got quite a personality.”

  After the waitress brought our food, the door opened, jingling, and I looked up from the Arizona map on the place mat. I had been counting all of the places I had been. Flagstaff. The Grand Canyon. Montezuma Castle. It was a man and a lady I recognized, but I wasn’t sure why. Then I remembered it was one of the nurses who worked with Ma at the nursing home. Ma called her “Miss Snotty-Pants” behind her back, but “Karen” to her face. She was holding hands with some guy with black, black hair. She looked different in bell-bottoms than she did in the starched white uniform she wore at the nursing home.

  “Hi Judy,” she said and came over to the table. “This is my boyfriend, Larry.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Ma said, holding out her hand and giving one of her whole-mouth smiles.

  “This must be Lily,” Karen said. “Isn’t she an angel? And how are you, Indie? I understand you’ve become quite a little bookworm.”

  I felt my face getting hot. Ma was always telling me I should get my nose out of my books and make some real friends. But the way Karen said it made it sound like I was just plain smart.

  “And this must be Benny,” she said. “Aren’t you a finelooking young man?”

  “I got my hairs cut,” Benny grinned, pushing his onions around his plate. Then he speared a long, wriggly piece of liver and shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

  “I see, I see.” Karen smiled and turned to Larry, who was studying the chalkboard menu on the wall. “Where do you want to sit?”

  Ma watched Karen and Larry walk away. While she retied Lily’s bib, her eyes never left them.
Ma could do that—tie my shoes, make me a jelly sandwich, braid my hair, all without paying any attention to what her hands were doing.

  I noticed before anyone else did.

  Benny’s eyes were watering and his chest was heaving. It looked like he was crying, but no sound was coming out. He dropped his fork and his hands flew up to his throat.

  “Ma!” I said. She was scooping some cottage cheese onto Lily’s peaches.

  “Shhh, Indie,” she said.

  “Benny’s choking!” I said, standing up because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Benny’s face had turned from red to white.

  “Ma!” I said again, panic like heat.

  Ma was looking over toward the table where Larry and Karen were sitting. When she looked at Benny and saw him wriggling in the booth, her face flushed red. She looked quickly back across the room at Karen and Larry.

  “Somebody help!” I cried. “My brother’s choking!”

  Then Ma was up and pulling Benny out of the booth. She got behind him and put her arms around him, balling her hands into a fist at his chest.

  “I’m a nurse,” Karen said, running back over to our table.

  “So am I.” Ma glared at her and squeezed Benny.

  Benny made a horrible animal sound and then something flew out of his mouth and landed on the linoleum a few feet away. It was the piece of liver, gray and slippery. He coughed and cried. He was clutching at the place where Ma had squeezed.