Nearer Than The Sky Page 8

  “You’ve got chickens?” he asked and laid his head down next to mine. His eyebrows were raised, concerned.

  “Um hmm,” I nodded.

  “Don’t worry. I told Ma I would take care of you,” he said and stroked my arm with one of his thick fingers.

  I fell asleep at the table. When I lifted my head, my neck was stiff and Benny was putting his bowl in the sink. The clock over the stove said 8:00. I went to the living room, turned on the TV and lay down on the couch under an old army blanket Ma had put over the back to hide a grape juice stain that Benny made. In and out of sleep again, I kept confusing the sitcom plots with the design of my dreams. Artificial laughter with the other sounds of the house. One game show turned into the next, all the colors of the prizes and the passionate kisses of the soap-opera actresses turned over and over like the spinning wheel on The Price Is Right. I remembered at noon that I should have been at school, and wondered briefly if Ma might be mad that I’d missed my bus.

  By 1:00 Ma and Lily still weren’t home. Benny was on the floor next to the couch with ajar of peanut butter, a knife, and a box of graham crackers. He took turns making one for me and then one for himself until my throat was thick.

  It was Daddy who finally came home and carried me back to my bed. Indie, honey, where’s your Ma? he asked, pulling the blanket up around me when I shivered. How long has she been gone, sweetie?

  A long time, I said, my head pounding behind my eyes.

  It was Daddy who poured the cold pink calamine lotion into the palm of his hand and then cooled every stinging welt with a careful drop. Does it still itch, honey? Is it better now? He waited until my eyes were so heavy I couldn’t keep them open anymore. Until my skin stopped prickling.

  And it was Daddy who took Benny into the bathroom and cleaned the peanut butter from his hair and face. You’re a good kid, Benny. You took good care of your sister.

  In my bed, the sheets were cool on my hot skin. In my room, the whole world was quiet.

  The next time I woke up I heard the front door opening and Lily’s feet pattering down the hall. Then I heard Ma’s sighs and Daddy’s fist coming down hard on the kitchen table.

  “What were you thinking?” he said. “You left Benny here to take care of Indie? She’s got a fever. Jesus, Judy.”

  “I was at the hospital with your other daughter, Ben. I couldn’t exactly leave her on the kitchen floor holding onto her stomach, could I? Do you realize she hasn’t gone to the bathroom in four days? I thought at first she was just holding it again, but then I thought it might be her kidneys, the way she was grabbing at her back. So I took her to the emergency room. Forgive me.”

  “I don’t care if she hasn’t gone to the bathroom in a month. You don’t leave a goddamn sick kid at home alone.” Daddy’s voice was so deep it felt like it was inside me.

  “Benny was here,” Ma said.

  “I was here,” Benny said. “I took care of Indie’s chickens.”

  “Benny, why don’t you go play outside?” Daddy said. His voice lowered, the low steady beat of a drum. “Couldn’t you have called me at the bar?”

  “I didn’t think you’d appreciate being disturbed,” she said.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what that’s supposed to mean.”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at, but I do know one thing. There better have been something seriously wrong with Lily to justify you leaving Indie alone here with Benny all day.”

  “Well, if you’d listen, I’d tell you. I told Dr. Murray to do a urinalysis. She wouldn’t go to the bathroom because she said it hurt to pee. I was afraid it might be kidney stones.”

  Stones, I thought. Benny said she had rocks. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but games will never hurt me. Was that how it went? I saw giant playing cards behind my eyes. A brand new dishwasher. A grand piano.

  “Well, did he give her some antibiotics?” Daddy asked, sounding tired.

  “He said the urinalysis turned up fine. But I’m pretty sure she’s got a bladder infection. I talked him into writing up a prescription. And the reason why I was so late is because I had to go to the grocery store for some cranberry juice. It’ll help her flush out her system.”

  “The doctor said there was nothing wrong?” Daddy said.

  “The doctor doesn’t know everything. The doctor isn’t with her every day, is he?”

  Their voices were starting to spin like the game show wheel inside my head.

  “She was screaming,” Ma yells. “It could have been her appendix, for Chrissakes.”

  I recollected the sounds of Lily’s rain. Her tap shoes on the plywood stage. I didn’t remember screaming; I only remembered the sound her feet made. She’s lying, I thought. Daddy, don’t listen because she’s making it all up.

  I covered my head with the pillow. Daddy’s soft voice was like chocolate milk beneath the lemon-juice sour of Ma’s insistence. I put the pillow over my good ear until their voices disappeared, until all I could hear was the thick calamine coolness of the cotton pillowcase and heavy feathers.

  Lily rode with Violet in the ambulance, but she shook her head when we offered to go with her. Violet was breathing again. They just wanted to do some tests. She would call from the hospital. To Ma, she whispered, You just got home from the hospital. Why don’t you get some rest? To Rich, she said, Can you put something together for dinner? Do you think you can manage that?

  Rich and I went inside, lit up cigarettes in Lily’s pristine kitchen, and poured ourselves gin and tonics in big glass mugs. Ma stood on the porch long after the sirens had faded, holding the door open, letting the hot air in and the cold air out. She was wearing clothes I didn’t recognize; it had been so long since I’d seen her. Pale yellow cotton sweater, so thin I could see the bones of her shoulders almost poking through.

  “Ma,” I said. “Come inside. Let’s help Rich make dinner.”

  “I don’t know about dinner, but I can make some mean scrambled eggs,” Rich smiled.

  Ma didn’t move from the doorway.

  “Breakfast sounds great,” I said.

  “When Benny was a baby,” she said, turning to face me. Her long fingers were pressed against the door frame. “When I found him in his crib and he wasn’t breathing, there was a second when I hesitated. A second when I panicked. But then my instincts kicked in. It didn’t have anything to do with the mechanical things in the text books. When you have a child . . .”

  The sound of Benny’s name coming from Ma’s mouth made me tremble. I stood closer to the open door so the warm air might rush over me and take away the chill.

  “Come inside, Ma. Let me make you some tea,” Rich said.

  Ma reluctantly closed the door and came into the smokefilled kitchen. She coughed softly, and Rich snubbed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray we had found at the bottom of a drawer. She sat down at the kitchen table next to me.

  “It’s something you don’t understand until you have a child of your own,” she said, squeezing my hand. I pulled away.

  “Something a mother knows,” she said, frowning at Rich.

  Rich took a big swallow of his cocktail. I pulled another cigarette from the stale pack we’d found in the same drawer as the ashtray.

  “Do you have any Sleepy Time?” Ma asked. “I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours since I’ve been in the hospital.”

  “I think so,” Rich said, opening a cupboard filled with the accoutrements of Violet’s illness. Bottles and syringes. Rubber suction devices to keep her nasal passages clear. On the second shelf he pulled out the familiar green box with the bear in the rocking chair on the front. “Here we go.”

  The teakettle’s whistle startled me. I’d forgotten that we’d put it on to boil as Rich and I prepared dinner. I jumped back from the toaster where I was making toast. I bumped into the stove, and the frying pan filled with scrambled eggs fell to the floor. The hot copper pot rested on my bare leg for a mome
nt before I registered the pain.

  “Oh God,” I said and kicked my leg. Immediately a long thin line of blisters appeared on my calf.

  “Oh shit, are you okay?” Rich asked, pulling the lever on the fridge. There was a cascade of ice and then he was holding an ice cube to the burn.

  The ice melted against the heat of my skin, and then made it nicely numb.

  Ma sat still at the table, dipping her tea bag in and out of the empty mug. The teakettle was whistling, insistent.

  “It sounds like the train,” she said.

  A lump grew thick in my throat. I remembered the sound of the train near our house in Mountainview.

  We were only able to salvage some of the eggs, and the bread ripped when I spread the cold butter on the toast, but it reminded me of the times when Daddy made breakfast for dinner for Benny and me. The times when Ma and Lily were away and it was just Benny, Daddy, and me. It reminded me.

  Ma said she was tired and went to bed while we were loading the dishwasher. “Let me know when you hear from Lily,” she said.

  Rich and I drank several more cocktails.

  The phone rang as I was rinsing out the sink. Rich looked at me and a fear so real it made my heart buzz flashed across his face. He wiped his hands on a soft pink dish towel and picked up the phone.

  “Oh, Peter, hi. Yeah, hold on one second,” he said and handed the phone to me. There were a few stray soap suds on the receiver.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” His voice was deceptively close. It made me homesick to hear him talking about the ordinary things. A new employee. The produce delivery girl’s broken arm and a forgotten box of Roma tomatoes in the walk-in cooler. It made me lonesome to hear about the small breaks in his daily ritual. Of hard cider with Joe and Chuck at Finnegan’s instead of going home. Of the new record he bought to fill the house with music, to drown out the sound of my absence.

  “Things are a mess here,” I said finally.

  “Your mom?”

  “No, she’s fine. Violet’s sick though. She’s at the hospital. We’re waiting for Lily to call.”

  “I should let you go then,” Peter said.

  “No,” I said. “Just a couple more minutes. Tell me about the trees.”

  And while Rich finished up the dishes, I curled the phone cord into the other room and imagined red and gold and orange, fading now into early winter, to the sound of Peter’s voice.

  “Sleep tight,” he said softly.

  “You too.”

  The phone rang again as soon as I hung up the receiver. Rich’s hand shot out and grabbed the phone from the wall. He stood motionless and quiet, listening to Lily on the other end of the line.

  “Oh thank God. Good. Good.” He nodded and turned to me, his face relaxing, his shoulders descending in relief. “Overnight? Okay. Do you need me to bring anything? You sure? Okay. Kiss her for me,” he said and then quietly, “Love you.” He hung up the phone.

  “Is she okay?” I asked and wrung out the sponge.

  “They’re doing some tests. EKG, MRI. I don’t know. It may not have been her asthma. It may have been a small seizure or something. One of the doctors suggested it might be epilepsy, but Lily seems okay. Calm at least.”

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Good,” he smiled. “Relieved. Hungover, though, I think. That’ll teach me to start drinking at noon.”

  I hugged him quickly, noting how soft he was compared to Ma and Lily.

  “I’ll go let Ma know,” I said.

  I walked up the stairs to the unused nursery where Ma was sleeping on a small daybed next to the window. The wooden crib that Peter and I had given Lily for her shower was in the corner. There were stuffed animals propped up inside, fresh out of their packages. Plastic eyes staring resolutely at the wooden bars of this cage. A mobile hovered motionless above. It smelled like baby powder and fresh plastic diapers. There was no indication that a child had been inside this room. The diaper pail was empty. The plastic infant bathtub had never been used. It reminded me of the time we went to look at the model version of this home before Lily and Rich were married. There were three models to choose from, each one decorated to look as though someone lived there. And the illusion was precise, convincing, until you tried to lift a plate from the place mat on the dining room table or remove a book from the bookshelf and found that everything was glued down. That the cereal boxes were empty and the television was made of cardboard.

  I stood over her for a few moments before I reached for her shoulder, which was bare in her sleeveless nightgown.

  “Ma,” I said softly.

  She rolled over and opened her eyes wide.

  “It’s okay, Ma. Lily and Violet are spending the night at the hospital, but everything’s fine. They’re doing some tests.”

  She sat up and smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand. “It was a seizure, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “What makes you think that?”

  Ma put her fingers between the slats of the venetian blinds and peered out at the dark night. “Lily had seizures when she was little, too. Don’t you remember?”

  “It may just be her asthma,” I said. “They just want to rule some things out. Get some sleep. Our bus leaves tomorrow at noon.”

  I left the room before she could argue. I couldn’t stay in this house another night. I felt a new urgency to get this over with. I was afraid that if I spent one more night with Ma and Lily that I might be woken by voices I didn’t want to hear. Lily cussing at tumbleweeds. Ma talking in her sleep. My own startled breath when I woke again and again from the same dream.

  When I came down the stairs the next morning, Lily was pouring coffee, Rich had already left for work, and Ma was holding Violet at the kitchen table, a cloth diaper thrown over her shoulder, Violet’s head resting against her chest.

  “Good morning,” Lily smiled brightly. Her cheeks were flushed pink, and the window over the sink was wide open. A cool gust of air blew in and rustled the pale curtains.

  “You’re home already?” I said, wiping the sleep from my eyes, wondering if the kitchen would be empty when I opened them again. But I wasn’t seeing things. Ma was rubbing Violet’s back in circular motions. The thick blue veins moving under her transparent skin like small rivers.

  “It’s fall,” Lily said, motioning vaguely to the open window. “The heat finally broke. It’s seventy degrees outside.”

  “How is Violet?” I asked.

  “She’s doing just fine. She had some of Gramma’s homemade oatmeal this morning and some apple juice,” Ma said, cooing at Violet whose eyes were fluttering against sleep. “Now she’s taking a little nap after her breakfast.”

  “Did they figure out what happened?” I asked, staring at Violet in disbelief. Her cheeks, like Lily’s, were flushed pink. It was as if someone had colored her in, brushed pink watercolors on her papery skin, dotted the centers of her eyes with pale blue drops of light.

  “Not sure yet, but she’s doing just wonderful today. And now Gramma’s here to make sure it doesn’t happen again, right Miss Violet?” Ma said, holding Violet away from her and looking into Violet’s watercolor eyes.

  “Have you got the shuttle schedule, Lily?” I asked.

  “We need to talk about that,” Ma said, lowering Violet back against her chest. “I’m not going back up to Mountainview quite yet.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Now don’t freak out,” Lily came in. “It’s just that I could really use the help with Violet until they figure out what’s going on, and Ma’s afraid she’ll get sick again if she goes back to the house.”

  “What?” I said again.

  “I’m pretty certain it’s something in the walls.Your cheap father could have used lead-based paint on all those walls. Put asbestos in. There could be radon in the basement. It’s a deathtrap,” Ma said, rocking Violet against her.

  “What we were thinking is that you could go up there and get everything checked out
,” Lily said. “Make sure everything is fine before Ma goes back.”

  I stood staring at them both as they looked at me with identical expressions and identical eyes.

  “I can’t believe this,” I muttered.

  “Now Indie, it’s the least you can do. Really. Do you want me to wind back up in the hospital?” Ma spoke softly so as not to wake Violet, but her voice was stern.

  “Ma, they didn’t find anything like that in your system. They said it was rat poison, arsenic, for Chrissakes. Are you guys nuts?” I was shaking, holding my coffee mug, trying not to spill the hot coffee on my hands.

  “It’s something in the house, Indie. You didn’t believe them, did you? That I’d do this to myself?” Ma scowled at me, and then starting talking to me as if I were a child. “Jesus. Can’t you see that’s just their way of making more money? If they say I’m crazy, then they can hook me up with some billiondollar-an-hour psychiatrist friend of theirs up in Mountainview and convince my entire family and maybe even me that I’m losing my marbles, and for the rest of my life I spend all of my money and most of my time hoping they’ll cure me. It makes a hell of a lot more sense if I spend my money getting the mess your father made of the house cleaned up. That’s the only cure I need.”

  I looked at Lily. She was leaning against the sink, one arm crossed across her waist, the other hand holding a coffee cup.

  “What do you think of this?” I asked Lily, furious.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” she said, shrugging, revealing absolutely nothing. “Ma can stay here with me until you’ve made sure the house is okay. Then she can go home, and you can go home, too.”

  “Wonderful,” I seethed. “Of course, we won’t worry about what this so-called deathtrap will do to me.”

  “Indie, don’t be ridiculous. Environmental toxicity is cumulative. Spending a week in the house is not going to have the same effect as thirty years, now is it?” Ma smiled.

  “Fine,” I said, setting my coffee cup on the counter and raising my arms in defeat.