Nearer Than The Sky Read online

  “How is she?” I whispered, afraid to startle her out of this temporary peace.

  Lily shrugged. “The doctors are still doing tests.”

  “She’s pretty,” I lied. She looked like the ghost of a child. Like the abandoned cicada skins in the backyard of our Mountainview house.

  “We got her pictures done at Penney’s a couple of weeks ago. Remind me to give you one before you leave,” Lily said, gesturing to a photo on the end table. In the picture, Violet was propped up against a white velvet backdrop. The navy blue dress, all ribbons and lace, contrasted sharply with her colorless face. Inside the bassinet her breath was almost as still as it was in this photo. Frozen.

  I sat down on the couch, sank into the cold white leather like the soft palm of a hand. Lily sat across from me in a hardback chair. She looked strange in this room. Strange inside the thin, pale pink sweater and long skirt. No matter how much time goes by, when I think of Lily, I think of her wearing the homemade sequined costumes Ma made, rusty baton in her hand and white vinyl boots. Here, in this white place, she looked like she was playing grown-up.

  “How’s Peter?” Lily asked.

  “Fine,” I said. I glanced around the room. The forced air blew the thin curtains. “Lily, how serious is this stuff with Ma?”

  Lily looked down at her hands in her lap. “I don’t know.”

  “What exactly is the matter with her?” I sat at the edge of the couch and willed Lily to look at me. “It sounds like one of her games, Lily. It sounds like she’s doing this for attention.”

  Lily looked at me then, her face strained. “It’s real. Her doctor says it’s attempted suicide.”

  “Jesus,” I said, snorting.

  Lily’s eyes opened wide. “How would you know? You don’t live here anymore.You don’t even know what’s going on in her life anymore. You probably didn’t know she’s lost like thirty pounds. That she’s been calling Daddy and hanging up. Maybe if you weren’t so stubborn . . .”

  “It’s not my fucking fault,” I said. “This is all about Ma. This has nothing to do with me.”

  “I’m just saying that she’s depressed. Think about it, Indie. Everybody leaves her. Daddy left her, you left her. I’m the only one who stayed. I’m the only one who . . .” Lily sighed and shrugged her shoulders, a gesture that could have been Ma’s. “She’s lost everything. She lost Benny and then she lost everybody else.”

  Heat rose up the back of my neck. In the chill of this room, my skin was on fire.

  “I’m just saying that it makes sense. She has nothing. She has nobody except for me. And now, with Violet sick, and me not able to go up there so much, she’s alone.”

  “I’m not sure what you expect me to do,” I said.

  “I expect you to help her get back home. I expect you to keep an eye on her until she gets a doctor up there. I expect you to be a goddamn human being, to have feelings. She’s our mother. It’s Ma.”

  It sounded like a small explosion, like a firecracker or the sharp crack of thunder.

  Lily stood up and walked quickly to Violet’s crib. The sound came again, guttural and deep. Thunder, or the rumble of a train. Violet’s lungs not strong enough to expel whatever poison was inside. Lily checked the gauge on the oxygen tank and put her hands inside the plastic cocoon to rub Violet’s chest.

  “Is she okay?” I asked.

  “She’s fine,” Lily said, turning around and glaring at me. Standing in the middle of the white living room, she could have been some sort of suburban angel hovering above this sick baby. Her bare feet on the thick, pale carpet the only evidence of the child I once knew.

  Here is Lily: grass-stained knees and purple shorts Ma got at the Methodist church rummage sale. Her halter top is stretched across her small chest and she is twirling her baton and walking on her hands. The portable record player is sitting on the front steps to the house, connected to the outlet in the kitchen by Daddy’s thick orange extension cord. The record is spinning around and around; the 45 of “Grand Ol’Flag” is scratchy. I know exactly where it will skip. I know exactly how flustered Ma will look when she lifts the arm and sets the needle back down.

  Ma had dragged Lily’s stairs from the garage. On the side of the wooden prop, she had used a whole bottle of Elmer’s and a whole plastic container of silver glitter to write “Lily Brown” in her pretty handwriting. The steps themselves were covered in bright blue vinyl held down with shiny silver studs.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying not to get my legs tangled up in the extension cord, pretending to do math. Benny was under the table, peeling the wrappers off of Lily’s crayons.

  Ma came in the room with a handful of mail. Through the window, I could see the mailman pulling back down our long driveway, waving to Lily, who was standing on top of the stairs waving.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “He’s not doing nothin’, Ma,” I said.

  “Benny, come out from under there right now. I am losing my patience.”

  Ma was always losing her patience. I imagined it like a tennis shoe or an earring made of colored glass. Maybe she’d find it someday between the cushions of the couch or in the back of Benny’s closet. I don’t know why she needed him to come out. She was the reason he was there in the first place.

  “Where’s your father?” Ma asked, sorting through the pile of bills.

  “He’s out back,” I said, glad she’d decided to leave Benny alone.

  It was Saturday, the only day that Daddy didn’t work. He owned a bar in town, called Rusty’s, and he was at the bar every day except for Saturdays, and sometimes even on Saturday afternoons he’d go in just to check on things. Sometimes he’d bring me with him to play pool. Today, he promised both Benny and me that we could go with him to work. Benny liked the onion rings and the jukebox. I liked the way the sunlight fell across the green felt on the table. I loved the sweet red liquid of a Shirley Temple and the sound of the balls falling after you put a quarter in the slot.

  But now, Daddy was in the backyard trying to tame the weeds. The couch that his best friend, Eddie Grand, had brought to us instead of to the Goodwill was still sitting in the backyard. We couldn’t get it through the doorway, so Daddy put it out back. Sunflowers had first started to grow up around the couch in August, and by September had started to poke their way up through the cushions. It sat out there all winter and now it was completely tangled up in dead weeds.

  Ma put all the mail down except for a manila envelope. She smiled and started to tear it open. She pulled out the contents and sat down at the table. She laid each sheet of paper out neatly across the table, making a shooing motion with her hand toward my math book. I slammed it shut and pushed it aside.

  “What came?” I asked, trying to read upside down.

  “Shhhh . . .” she said, scanning the first page and then the next.

  “Ma . . .”

  “It’s the entry form for that pageant in Phoenix,” she said. “Let me read.”

  I could feel Benny under the table, hear each wrapper being torn and then discarded. I hoped he wasn’t eating the crayons again. Last time he ate Lily’s crayons he threw up Burnt Umber and Sea Foam Green all over my bedspread.

  “What’s a pageant?”

  “The Miss Desert Flower contest?” Ma said as if I were terribly dense or something. “For Lily?”

  “Oh.” I shrugged.

  Daddy came into the kitchen then with an armload of tangled weeds. He wrestled them into the garbage and sighed.

  “Did we get the electric bill yet?” he asked, noticing Ma and the mail.

  “No,” Ma said, distracted.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s the entry form for that pageant in Phoenix I told you about,” Ma said, smiling.

  Daddy’s chin jutted out sharply and he sat down next to me. He put his arm around the back of my chair and peered over my shoulder at the forms.

  “When is it?”

  “June,”
she said.

  “You’re going to take her out of school for this?”

  “No. It’s after school’s out.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Daddy said and ruffled my hair as he stood up.

  “They offer scholarships to the winners,” Ma said loudly, shaking the letter at him. Her face was getting red. I felt Benny get still beneath my feet.

  “And how much does it cost to enter this damn thing?”

  Ma looked down at her hands, and said softly, “It’s only three-fifty. That’s for everything including the room.”

  “Forget it,” Daddy said. “We haven’t got it.”

  “Ben, if we cut back a little. I can work some overtime at the home,” Ma tried.

  “I said no.”

  I could feel Ma shaking; the table was trembling ever so slightly with her anger. She put her palms flat on the table next to either side of the entry form and stood up.

  “You said no,” she said incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “You said no. And that’s the final word?” Ma’s voice was starting to grow. Like weeds growing around me, holding me in my chair. The sharp blossom of her words startling. “Asshole.”

  Daddy looked hard at Ma and then turned his back. Benny held on to my ankle. I could feel his fingers digging into the skin right above my tennis shoe. I reached for my math book, but Ma beat me to it. She picked up the book and waved it over her head and then hurled it at Daddy. It whizzed over his head and hit the wall where her collection of spoons from around the world was hanging. The wooden case rattled and then fell. There were spoons from Japan and Spain and Canada all over the floor.

  “I’m going to work,” Daddy said softly and kissed the top of my head. My eyes stung with tears. He’d promised he’d take me later so that I could practice my bank shots.

  “You leave and I won’t be here when you get home,” Ma said, following him to the door. “I’ll take the money, and I’ll take Lily, and I’ll go to Phoenix.”

  Benny’s hand released my ankle and I felt my blood rushing hot out of my face, down my arms and legs. I imagined it spilling in a pool of Brick Red wax at my feet.

  When Ma ran out of the house after Daddy, Benny scurried out from under the table. There were toast crumbs from breakfast still at the corners of his mouth.

  “Ma’s going to take Lily away?”

  “Shhh,” I said and took his hand. We scurried quickly out the back door and around to the side of the house.

  Daddy got in the car and slammed the door shut. I heard the engine rev and then he was backing slowly down the driveway. Lily was standing at the edge of the yard holding her rusty baton with one hand, sucking her thumb with the other.

  “I’ll leave you!” Ma said. “I’ll leave this shit hole. I’ll go back to California!”

  She stood in the doorway as Daddy and the Nova became just a small orange spot moving through the trees. And then she started to slam the screen door. Over and over. Each time it crashed against the door frame, Benny put his hands over his ears. Again and again she slammed the door until one of the hinges came loose and rattled down the front steps. She bent over and picked up the hinge. She looked at it for a second and then threw it into the driveway.

  Ma sat down on the steps and Lily came over to her, still sucking her thumb, and curled up in her lap. She was too big for this. Her legs were long now; they dangled down to the very last step.

  Benny had disappeared. Hiding, probably. I sat down with my back against the house, plucking at the thick blades of grass, listening to Ma croon, We’ll go away, Lily. We’ll go away someday.

  Lily has always been prettier than I am. I knew this from the time that I could differentiate her reflection from my own in the cracked mirror in the bathroom. Before I had the words, I knew that she was beautiful and that I was plain. But this was before I understood the implications of my plainness. Before I understood that despite attempts at fairness, parents are bound to love their beautiful children more. That homely children are not touched in the same way that their more attractive siblings are. That tenderness has less to do with love than with the softness of skin or with large blue eyes and cupid’s-bow lips.

  Even now as I watched Lily making dinner, I found myself making the usual comparisons, categorizing the differences between us. Hair, eyes, the gentle curve of her shoulder or wrist. Lily’s thick blond hair was pulled up and tethered by a velvet scrunchy. Her neck long and her skin pale. Even at twenty-nine and only eight months after Violet was born, her body was still long and straight like a boy’s. Her bones were small, like a bird’s. Her eyes were so large and deep-set, they might be startling to someone who wasn’t so familiar with the intricacies of her face.

  “Do you still eat meat?” Lily asked without turning away from the counter.

  “Gawd yes,” I said. The Swan was mostly vegetarian (that was the latest trend in town) but Peter and I were absolutely rabid when it came to a good steak.

  Lily, like my mother, has always been a good cook. I remember my mother’s futile attempts to teach me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to; it was just that I was so easily distracted. She gave up when I first swore I’d remember and then promptly forgot to check on a tuna casserole we were making. She found me lying on my stomach watching TV nearly two hours after I was supposed to take it out. I remember her standing there with oven mitts on and the room smelling of burnt tuna. She dumped the whole thing into the garbage and never let me help her in the kitchen again.

  But Lily loved to be in the kitchen with Ma. She even had a miniature apron that Ma had made with purple and white checks, purple rickrack trim, and a pocket shaped like a heart on the front. Lily made little loaves of bread and little pies. Daddy almost always ate at the bar, but on Saturdays Lily would present him with some sort of casserole or meat on a TV tray so that he could watch basketball and eat at the same time. I’d curl up next to him on the couch and we’d eat while Lily watched to make sure that he was enjoying it.

  Tonight, the ingredients were more expensive. The pots and pans not the kind we had growing up: copper instead of the burnt-bottom stainless steel ones in Ma’s kitchen. Lily’s appliances were cleaner and shinier. Black espresso maker, pasta maker, Cuisinart. None of them looked like they had ever been used.

  “Do you want a hand?” I asked Lily. She had finished making the marinade for three thick red steaks and was peeling potatoes.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  “I’ve gotten better,” I said. “Peter’s been teaching me how to bake.” I thought about the plastic containers in the bakery clearly marked Wet and Dry. I didn’t have to do too much besides mix them together and then add berries or bananas to the mix. I don’t know why they never seemed to come out right. “He still does all of the cooking, though.”

  “Why don’t you open a bottle of wine or something?”

  “Sure,” I said. I needed something to do with my hands. I also needed a drink. “Red or white?”

  “We’re having steaks, so how about a Merlot?”

  I glanced quickly at a row of wine bottles in a beautiful wrought-iron wine rack on the counter until I found the word Merlot on one of them. I removed it carefully from the rack and Lily handed me a corkscrew. We never had wine in our house growing up. Daddy drank beer, and when Ma drank, it was always bourbon.

  “I’ve never been very good at this,” I said. “But let me give it a shot.”

  I twisted the corkscrew and then started to press down on the silver arms like wings. The cork promptly dropped into the bottle. Pungent wine splashed into my face and on my T-shirt. “Shit,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Lily turned away from the potatoes. “It’s okay,” she said, grabbing a sponge from the sink and wiping furiously at the counter top. Long after all of the wine had been soaked up, Lily kept running the sponge across the smooth granite surface. She made one last swipe and tossed the sponge into the garbage bin under the sink.

  “I’m really
sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay. I’ll open another one. Are you hot?” She went to the wall and adjusted the air conditioner. I felt a cold gust of artificial air blow across the back of my neck. Then she gracefully and silently pulled the cork from another bottle of Merlot and poured me a glass. I took a long swallow and felt the wine warming me against the chill in the air.

  Rich came home just as I was about to sneak upstairs and find a sweater in one of Lily’s closets. Lily met him at the door and ushered him past Violet, who had finally fallen asleep, into the kitchen.

  “Indiana Jones,” Rich said and hugged me. I have always liked Rich. He reminds me a lot of Daddy. His family is from Boston, hard workers. He went straight to work after high school for his dad’s construction company. He worked his way up until he was foreman and then when his dad died, he and his brother took over. He opened up the Phoenix branch of the company to be near Lily. He and Lily met on a cruise that he took his mother on after his father’s funeral. The story of how they met is one of those stories that makes me think of a photo spread in one of the magazines Lily read when she was in junior high and I was in high school. It is dimensionless. Colorful and smiling, but flat and glossy. Forgettable. He simply saw her sipping on a piña colada at the end of an outdoor bar and thought she looked like an angel. He told her so, and one year later he had relocated to Phoenix and they were on the same ship on their honeymoon. It makes me laugh to remember how Peter and I met when I hear stories like these. The story of how we fell in love is more like the crackly black-and-white films that Peter shows at the theater than the pink, lavender, blue of Lily and Rich’s romance.

  “When did you get in?” Rich asked and pulled a beer out of the refrigerator.

  “This morning.”

  He popped the top off and just as he was about to set it on the counter, Lily glared at him, and he scooted past her to put the cap in the trash. Lily was amazing. When Peter and I moved from our apartment into the cabin, I found about a hundred bottle caps underneath cushions and behind books on shelves.