Chapter Two
My mother stands in the ER waiting room at St. Pete General, shivering under a fleece blanket, her fever having spiked on the way over. It’s late January, but the reception area and waiting room are still decorated for Christmas. Green paper wreaths hang from the ceiling, dangling by invisible threads. They sway ever so slightly from the current of the air-conditioning. They dance to music only they can hear.
A child’s coloring book page is taped to the glass of the receptionist’s window. It’s a full-length image of Santa Claus, smiling gently in his red suit. He has a sack slung over his shoulder with cliché toys peeking out of the top: a baby doll, a stuffed lion, a jack-in-the-box. I can see the spots on the picture where the artist applied more pressure, all the gradient of shading, dark red and light.
The receptionist slides her little window to the side and asks how she can help my mother. As Shea explains, the receptionist’s fingernails tap the information into her keyboard. My mother tries not to talk above a whisper, her throat on fire from suspected strep, her second bout with the infection this month. My mother is more prone to strep than others, and being a preschool teacher doesn’t help since the close quarters and exposure to children blend to create the ideal conditions for the contagious disease to spread.
I like the way everything echoes in here, all the hard surfaces receiving our sounds and then sending them back to us. Shea’s voice is familiar, but slightly strange, amplified by the echoes.
My mother signs her name when instructed on the electronic pad. She presses gently at first and then harder and harder until her digital signature appears, an extra curl in the M in Mira for good measure.
Just last week, my mother finished the course of antibiotics from the first infection, but this morning, the pain returned, and by the time we’d finished dinner, her sentences were punctuated with sobs, as if she were swallowing glass with each breath, and then we all went into the bathroom and I watched in the mirror as Shea inspected my mother’s throat. My mother stretched her mouth wide while Shea pointed a mini Maglite flashlight inside to illuminate the situation. My mother said ahhhhh, holding the note clear and steady until Shea was done, a musician waiting for the conductor to signal the song is over.
“Yep. They’re back,” Shea had said, referring to the little white spots on my mother’s swollen tonsils.
“No, they can’t be!” My mother looked at her own reflection in the mirror for a long time, wiping tears from her cheeks with her palms. “I’ll be fine until tomorrow. I’ll go to the walk-in clinic before school, or I’ll just call out…” Her voice got softer and softer as Shea grabbed her hand.
“No, Mira. Let’s go to the ER tonight and just get you checked. If it’s strep, let’s get the meds started. Get you fixed up.” I saw the sadness in my mother’s eyes as she faced the inevitability of another throat culture, another round of antibiotics, another round of fear that overusing antibiotics will create superbugs, strains of bacteria that are resistant to treatment. While my mother doesn’t allow hand sanitizer in her classroom, most people who work with children stock up on extra-large tubs of the stuff, walking up and down the aisles, doling it out like communion, the children’s hands cupped and waiting for the clear gel to anoint them and make them holy and clean. I can’t help but feel bad for the bacteria. They are only trying to survive, after all, only changing themselves into something strong enough to resist what surely feels like the threat of mass extinction.
After checking in with the receptionist, we sit on hard chairs and watch cable news on a small, bubble-screen TV mounted behind Plexiglas so you can’t change the channel. Hospital waiting rooms can knock you over with their sadness, and this one is certainly no exception. An elderly woman naps in her wheelchair as her possible grandson looks down at his phone. He glides one thumb on the surface of the glass in an upward motion again and again, sweeping through information that glows from the bright white screen. A twenty-something father paces in a small circle, holding his possible daughter. She sucks on a green pacifier, pressing her blond head against his shoulder.
I like to invent backstories for strangers, but then it makes me imagine the backstories strangers might invent for me and my mother and Shea. I consider the clues they might notice about us, ponder the relationships they may conceive for us. I’m comforted by the fact that they would likely never guess my actual backstory in a million years. I’m comforted by the fact that, although it feels so burning and obvious to me on the inside, there are no signs or signals on the outside of me detailing my origins, no keys to decode where I come from.
A metal rack of brochures and pamphlets lives on one wall of the waiting room, a rotating display with tiny compartments for each stack. After we’ve waited for a while, my mother starts to feel restless, her nerves kicking in. She walks over to the display, the fleece blanket wrapped around her shoulders now. My mother reaches for the rack and sets it spinning like a wheel of fortune. When it stops, she pauses and then picks up a brochure and folds it into her pocket.
Eventually, a voice calls my mother’s name, and we are ushered into triage—a sea of mostly empty beds draped in disinfected cotton, everything washed in shades of blue and green. After her vital signs are measured and submitted for the record—blood pressure, temperature, heart rate—my mother breathes deeply, inhaling and exhaling while the nurse listens to her lungs. After the throat culture is procured—my mother’s tongue tamed with the wooden tongue depressor, the long swab rubbed on the back of her throat and around her tonsils, the sample of possible bacteria collected—my mother reclines in the mechanical bed, and the nurse opens and then closes the pale green privacy curtain. The small metal bearings along their small metal track make a bright pinging sound as the nurse leaves us alone to wait for the doctor, who will eventually swish the curtain open again, removing the thin barrier between us and the rest of the room. But for now, we have the illusion of being alone, just the three of us.
“It’s probably me,” Shea says, her palm on the top of my mother’s head, smoothing her hair gently. “I’m probably a strep carrier. I’ve read about it. Some people are carriers. Why else haven’t I caught it yet?” The room feels subfreezing and smells antiseptic, an aggressively sanitized igloo.
“Evelyn hasn’t caught it yet either,” my mother says, motioning toward me with one hand and then closing her eyes. “You’re probably both carriers. I would be so lucky.” My mother forces a blind smile and then settles herself into the flat pillow. “Kids have been dropping like flies for weeks now. It’s making the rounds.”
Her cheeks are bright pink, her eyes damp at the corners, tears catching the light. I want to take her picture because this is when my mother looks the most beautiful to me—these moments when she’s not thinking about herself, when she’s not even aware of her looks. We had left the house abruptly, not enough time for my mother to assess her appearance. She slipped sandals on over white gym socks, her feet freezing from the fever chills. She wrapped herself in an oversized cable knit cardigan that’s missing two buttons. I can still see the remnants of this morning’s mascara, faint black smudges along the bottom rims of her eyes.
A young doctor appears with the results of the throat culture. Her footsteps echo on the hard floor as she approaches my mother’s bed. It is strep, yes, of course it’s strep; it’s just as we suspected. The young doctor tells my mother not to worry because strep is just very contagious, and they are seeing lots of cases right now. It’s the season, she says, and it’s not uncommon to have back-to-back infections, especially with such high rates of exposure. The young doctor says she’ll send a prescription to the Walgreens down the street, and we can be on our way.
When we return home, Shea puts my mother to bed, covering her with an extra blanket. I stand in the threshold of their bedroom and watch as my mother burrows herself into the pillows and closes her eyes. She disappears into a sea of softness, only the top of her head visible. Shea leans over my mother and kiss
es her earlobe. Maybe I should feel uncomfortable around these displays of affection, but it’s never bothered me. I’ve always been aware of their feelings for each other. They’ve never kept that from me.
After tucking my mother into bed, Shea puts her arms around me. “She’s going to be just fine,” she tells me. She squeezes me tight and then lets me go, pulls her phone from her back pocket, and types an e-mail with her thumbs while she talks. “I’m going to cancel my morning class tomorrow and help take care of her,” she says. “My students will be thrilled to get the notification, even though they love discussing modernist poetry at eight a.m. I’m e-mailing them right now.” When Shea’s finished, she slips the phone back into her pocket and looks up at me. “What’s on your schedule for tomorrow?”
“In English, a virtual class on The Great Gatsby. I still need to finish the prereading questions. Must be ready to dazzle them with my thoughts on the decline of the American dream in the 1920s. Then a trig quiz, then a voice chat with my history teacher to review the unit exam we took last week.”
“Too much focus on testing,” Shea says. She furrows her brow a bit to display her disapproval. Shea teaches literature at a liberal arts college in St. Petersburg. She eschews tests of any kind, preferring to evaluate her students on their contributions to discussions and their reactions to the text, in spite of department guidelines. The beauty of having tenure, Shea often says.
“No worries, the trig unit is cake. And I got an A on the history exam,” I tell her. “So we’ll just be reviewing my brilliance.” I flash my best good-girl smile and then bat my eyes to make Shea laugh, but also to illustrate just how easy it has become for me to handle all of my online assignments. I’m halfway through my third year in cyberschool, and I’ve settled into a rhythm—wake up, log on, complete reading assignments, prepare for quizzes, schedule teacher chats, sign on to the message boards, post two paragraphs of meaningful interactions with peers (teachers are obsessed with all things meaningful these days), complete activity log, sign off. Most weeks, I’ve completed all the necessary work by Thursday morning, but I don’t advertise that to my mother and Shea.
“Well, I hope we don’t get in your way,” Shea says. She slides her jeans off, throws them on top of the hamper, and then climbs into her side of the bed, under the covers with my mother, who is already asleep now, breathing with her mouth open, each inhale and exhale flickering like the beat of a moth’s wings inside the house, when they become trapped, attracted to the light that eventually leads to their demise.
“Nah, never,” I assure her. “Good night, Shea,” I say, and she blows a small kiss my way as I turn off the lights and close the door and head down the darkened hall.
It’s late now, after midnight, so I go to my own room and close the door behind me. I flip the light switch, and everything is illuminated—my gold velour chair we found at the antique mall in Tarpon Springs, my purple plaid blanket thrown over the back, my map of the world pinned to the wall. I’d originally planned to use the map to document my travels, like I’ve seen in the movies, marking each city I’ve visited with silver thumbtacks, but I haven’t left Florida yet.
I used to dream about moving to a place where nobody knows me, where I can reinvent myself, untether myself from death and blood and true crime specials on television. The idea stirs and stirs in me until it feels electric, a euphoric zap to the brain that reminds me that if all else fails, there’s always the escape hatch, the rip cord, the possibility of floating down, down, down, to a new land that’s a clean slate, far from the knowledge of who you are and what’s come before you. Close your eyes and spin yourself around, lose your sense of direction for a moment. Then walk up to the map, your fingers outstretched, waiting for the feel of the paper on your hands, the signal that you’ve made it. Reach out and point to a place. Then open your eyes and see where you’ve landed, and remember that there are places on this blue and green earth where nobody knows your father’s name, where nobody knows that you look like him, that you have his eyes, his hair color, his nose.
I grab my laptop from under the bed, wrap myself in the purple plaid blanket, and sit down on the velour chair. With one touch, the screen comes alive, and I enter my password. I open a web browser and click on the little blue star, the symbol that opens my list of saved bookmarks. I scroll down the list, the title of each one turning blue as the mouse hovers over it. I won’t open any of the pages; I never do. I just want to make sure they are all still here—the television news clips, the articles, the reenactments, and the crime scene as diorama, actors standing in for my father, actors standing in for the dead.
Before I had this system, this way of organizing what my father did, every web search felt like pulling the silver arm of a slot machine. I’d look up something benign—the migratory patterns of birds or the number one song from the day I was born—and I’d hold my breath as I navigated the search results, paralyzed by the possibility of stumbling across something about him or what he did. Now I know that if I find him, I can just file him away with one click, putting him in this archive for safekeeping. Now I can let myself fall down the rabbit hole, getting lost in the vortex of the Web. I can click, click, click, sift through link after link, read until I’m high on information, until I lose track of time. When it’s over, I won’t remember it all, won’t be able to find the trail of electronic breadcrumbs back to the beginning of the search, the opening through which I so quickly descended. I’ll remember point A and point B, but not the in-between. Middles are just so ordinary, so forgettable. Give me a spectacular entrance, some dramatic music to stoke anticipation. Give me a tragic twist at the end of it all.
I click away from my bookmarks, and the list disappears, the links tucked back into their digital bed for now. Then I type the URL of Andy’s blog, Letters from the Death House, into the address bar. I watch as the small picture of him loads at the top of the page. He is always smiling in his prison jumpsuit top, the collar of a bright white T-shirt peeking out from the orange. His name is Andrew Randolph Vail, but he signs his letters Love, Andy. He is on death row at Raiford, like my father. Letters from the Death House is maintained by his sister, Sherry. Each blog entry is a letter Andy sends Sherry from death row, scanned and uploaded, written on lined notebook paper in his own hand.
Andy is thirty-two years old, his face thin and clean shaven. He shares everything, his heart cracked open on the page, just waiting for me to enter. He writes about his daily life at Raiford, his interactions with other inmates, what he’s reading, his exercise routine. He writes about the future, how he’s making peace with his impending death. He tells his sister that he thinks of her on those nights when all he can hear are the cries of his fellow inmates bouncing off the cold walls.
There is no new entry to read tonight so I click on the Photos tab and scroll through the pictures I’ve already seen dozens of times—Andy as a kid at a birthday party, smiling without his two front teeth; Andy at the shoreline, building a sandcastle with a bright green pail; Andy as a teenager, posing with his prom date in front of a sparkly silver background.
I close my laptop and slide it under my bed. I turn off the lights and crawl under the covers, feeling the cool cotton on my bare legs. My eyes adjust, and within the darkness, I see Andy. I stare into his blue eyes as my fingers graze the skin of my inner thigh, search until they find the warm center. My fingers are cold at first, but they warm quickly from my own body heat. It always feels so good, this tingling that starts just below the surface, like tiny bubbles that form as water begins to boil. Eventually, the water spits and roils, and the bubbles swim to the top, and my back arcs as if I’m plugged into some invisible power source. My body rises, higher and higher, and I close my eyes. I feel like I’m climbing the steepest cliff, desperate to get to the top. When I reach the edge, I jump, and my body becomes a sail as I fly, every nerve inside me pulsing and raw. I press my face into the pillow to dampen my cries. When I open my eyes, Andy is gone.
When I
wake in the morning, the apartment feels strange, too silent for a Wednesday. I’m used to the scurry of my mother as she gets ready for work, music streaming from the portable speaker that my mother takes with her from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom as she gets dressed, eats breakfast, and puts on the small amount of makeup that she wears to school—just powder, mascara, and lip gloss. I can track her location at any moment through the volume and clarity of the music, a kind of sonar I’ve been developing for as long as I can remember.
I walk out to the kitchen, and the coffeepot comes to life on its own, the timer still set as if it’s just another work day, the machine simply doing what it’s been programmed to do. I open a cupboard and assemble the ingredients for one of my favorite breakfasts, instant oatmeal topped with fruit cocktail in heavy syrup. I tear open the brown paper packet, mix the dehydrated oats with some water, and then pop them in the microwave and set it for one minute.
As the machine hums and the bowl spins inside on the glass turntable, I open the junk drawer and retrieve the can opener. I’m already thinking about how the instant oatmeal will absorb the sweetness of the thick syrup when I mix it all together, already anticipating delight when the microwave dings and I open it, reaching inside for the steamy bowl.
I crank the can open with the manual can opener, dump the fruit cocktail on top of the oatmeal, and then cross back to close the drawer. That’s when I notice her—there inside the junk drawer—a girl’s face smiling at the ceiling. It’s one of the glossy brochures from the emergency room, the one my mother shoved into her pocket last night. It’s rendered in all primary colors, the surefire way to signify that something is intended for children, as though kids aren’t able to distinguish any other shades.
Girl at the Edge Page 2