Homesick

by Jennifer Croft

  Then she gets in trouble for disappearing, but it is worth it.

  At home Amy takes her pictures out of her fossil drawer and goes over them one by one, looking for clues about the tumor

  She begins at the beginning. The first picture she has is from Christmas Day of the five-foot polyester teepee set up in the living room next to the tree. Every Christmas Eve the girls get to spend the night inside the teepee while Santa and his reindeer go around the world. Their aim is always to stay up all night, and officially it is the one night of the year when even their mom says they have no bedtime.

  And at first, in the gentle glow of the thousand tiny lights strung around and around the tree, diffuse through the teepee’s tan fabric, Amy sees her sister’s enormous brown eyes gleam. As long as Amy permits it Zoe recites her Christmas list: a puppy, a dollhouse, a tree house, a trampoline, a puppy, new crayons, some new movies, a leash with sparkles and colors on it, puppy stickers, a water gun, a princess crown, a book about puppies.

  You can’t read Zoe’s handwriting yet, and Zoe can’t spell, so Amy is the one to make the lists. Zoe insists on putting puppy twice so Santa knows it’s important.

  And in fact at the moment this first picture is taken Zoe is in the study, still by the fireplace squeezing her little Scottish terrier to her face.

  By the time the reindeer land on top of their house and Santa comes down and eats the cookies and drinks the milk they set out for him on the mantel, the girls have always fallen asleep. Zoe falls first after a prolonged struggle. Amy pretends to fall asleep first, but secretly she watches over her sister’s hot little body curled up against her, breath quick, feet shuffling, a tight, pulsing ball of pure desire. Then slowly Zoe succumbs, and Amy lets herself follow.

  As if by magic the teepee always fits them, even though they grow.

  Amy holds the picture out by the tip of the hard white strip at the bottom and brings it back up to her face, scrutinizing and recalling. She weighs in her mind her sister’s heartbeat versus the jerks and twitches of her body during seizures, looks to see if she can see.

  It seems impossible that Zoe got a tumor while Amy did not. The girls almost always get sick at the same time: chicken pox, strep throat, colds. Then it’s fun because their dad reads them stories like the one about the duck that turns into a swan and their mom brings them glasses of Tang. Unless Amy does have a brain tumor but no one knows yet. In that case her personality might already be changing. In that case she might already be becoming a completely different person, but nobody has noticed, and Amy can’t notice because it’s her brain that’s getting switched.

  Amy slips the teepee picture back into the envelope. She examines all the pictures of their house, searching for the culprit: the pantry with the light switched on, the kitchen, the dining room looking towards the living room so you don’t see those plates with the shipwrecks and the boys that drown, the long oak church pew in the living room where no one ever sits, the smooth cool concrete of the front porch, the giant tree in the backyard with the sun behind it, their dad’s study that takes up almost a third of the whole house, the very long driveway and clear down at the end of it the garage like a little separate house with the basketball goal affixed to its peeling white siding, the coats in the entryway, their room with its invisible line drawn down the middle separating order from chaos, their mom’s desk in the hallway between their parents’ room and their room, their parents’ room, the bathroom with the bathtub bubbly before their mom gets in.

  She looks and looks like the doctors do at CAT scans, but she keeps on not seeing it, even though she knows it must be there.

  Because for me they bleed over sometimes, like when I think of your first ambulance and see my own body instead, thudding down an endless sidewalk on a stretcher clutching what’s left of my stuffed octopus as frat boys spill out of their houses and line up to watch.

  Amy and Zoe are taking time off school

  This is because Zoe can’t go to school anymore because she has to have surgery, and surgery is expensive, so Amy can’t go either, because they can’t afford to pay. Their mom says the public schools won’t let Amy do her Kumon, and they’ll make her do everything at grade level like addition and subtraction. This makes Amy laugh because she finished addition and subtraction a long time ago, but then she sees their mom seems serious and tries to correct her face.

  The girls watch a lot of TV now, not only the cartoons on Saturday mornings. Sometimes Amy reads out loud to Zoe. Zoe likes Dr. Seuss books, and Amy does different voices for different characters. She practices at night in the bathroom so she doesn’t get tripped up on the rhymes. Zoe’s favorite is The Cat in the Hat. Amy’s favorite is Horton Hears a Who!, but Zoe says she doesn’t like that one because it’s boring. Amy says she doesn’t like The Cat in the Hat because it’s stupid, although she reads it to Zoe anyway.

  Eventually they compromise on Green Eggs and Ham. Gradually Amy teaches Zoe to read it herself.

  Amy and Zoe both know that the surgery is coming up soon. But they watch TV and read their Dr. Seuss books and ride their bikes with their dad. Amy makes Zoe keep practicing their address. Zoe laughs when she remembers and cries when she can’t. Zoe never knows the zip code.

  Their parents tell Zoe that she can have any present she wants after her surgery in exchange for being brave. For several days the girls make lists. Zoe paces up and down their bedroom like she might explode. Finally she decides on a pair of cowgirl boots. Amy says she should ask for something better than cowgirl boots, like moccasins, but there is no reasoning with Zoe, she wants the boots.

  A fight breaks out between their parents. Their mom stays at home with Zoe while Amy and their dad go to Drysdales North South East and Western Wear. They look around at the bandannas and silver buckles, and then they choose a pair of little square-toed ropers with yellow tops with stitching in different-colored threads that looks like a cross between a happy cat and a fireplace. Their dad puts his hand on Amy’s shoulder and says for the second time that money is no object. She doesn’t look at him.

  They take the boots to the salesgirl and realize they don’t know Zoe’s size. Amy hears her dad make a noise. She is trying to calculate what size her sister wears based on her size and how long it usually takes for Zoe to fit into her shoes. Then she realizes that their dad is crying, sitting down on one of the benches for trying things on. She says a size. The salesgirl disappears into the back to find it.

  On the day before the surgery they all go to their grandparents’ house and have root beer floats and watch TV and Sleeping Beauty

  Amy and Zoe huddle very close together as though the air conditioning is making them cold. After the movie’s over Zoe and their parents get up and start to walk out to the car. Their grandparents stay where they are, sitting on either side of the entertainment center. Amy sits with them until she hears the car doors. She runs to the shut front door and stands on her tiptoes and watches them through the bottom blue square in the stained-glass window while they pull out of the driveway and into the street, the glass fogging up except where her nose is pressed against it. Slowly her fingertips slide down the slick groove of the wood.

  When the phone rings the ground drops out and Zoe is gone

  It rings like a drill, insistent. Amy hears their grandma take a drag off her cigarette, and then she picks it up. Amy is lying on the sofa, back to the TV like she is taking a nap, although she isn’t sleeping.

  A gash opens up in her head, and she brings her hands up to her skull as though to keep it all from falling out.

  Their grandpa says not to mess up her pretty hair. Their grandma shushes him. Then she hangs up and comes over and puts her hand on Amy’s shoulder. Amy curls up. Their grandma says very quietly in almost a whisper that her sister has just been wheeled into surgery. She does not say that everything will be all right. For one second, Amy reaches around and grasps her grandma’s hand. Then she jumps up and runs into the bathroom and vomits. You can’t eat anythi
ng before surgery, so all she throws up is fluids from her own body, which taste like poison.

  To worry used to mean to strangle.

  While her sister’s in the hospital, Amy is in charge of the dog

  She tries to teach it different tricks like fetch to surprise Zoe when she gets out, but the dog won’t learn.

  After a few days, Amy is allowed to visit. She is so scared her sister might have changed personality from the surgery that her hands won’t stop shaking on the way. When she walks into the room she sees an alien lying in a little bed with all kinds of different tubes and wires coming out of its body. It takes her a second to understand what is happening. Her sister’s long streaked hair is all gone, and all across her bare little skull is a jagged dark red wound. Without wanting to Amy bursts into tears. Her hands fly to her face to cover it up, but it is too late because their mother is already angry. Before she is dragged back out of the room she gets a look at her sister’s eyes. They are dull, and hollow.

  Amy lies on her grandparents’ couch all day with her face in the cushion, curled up like a seashell.

  One day at the hospital Amy tries to play Chutes and Ladders with some dying kids, but after just a little while they say she’s cheating, and she has to go back to just waiting

  She knows it’s not her fault she’s lucky, but it makes her stomach hurt. Her head gets so bad she can’t see straight. She tries to lie down on the floor with her eyes closed, but she gets caught.

  The journeys a word makes are not fully fathomable (a fathom was once an embrace, or the measure of an armspan), part of what sets it apart from its semantic kin, giving rise to words that look the same and come from the same home but that mean completely different things now, like casualty and casualidad (which is just coincidence in Spanish).

  Zoe is released from the hospital on Amy’s tenth birthday

  It is September 24, 1991. Amy’s party, held at their grandparents’ house, is attended by all the relatives and extended relatives from all over Oklahoma. Even their cousins who live in Oklahoma City come. At first Amy and Zoe hold hands because Zoe is very weak and not used to walking, but then people come and crowd around Zoe, and Amy is jostled away. Gradually Amy drifts over to the doorway and keeps an eye on Zoe, silent.

  Now when they go anywhere everyone stares at Zoe. They try putting different types of hats on her, but she hates them all. She insists on wearing her cowgirl boots regardless of whether or not they are appropriate. They are slightly too big for her, but if she wears two or three pairs of socks, they are fine.

  Sometimes now the girls go and hide in the hall closet not because there might be a tornado but just because. Their parents say that they will homeschool them from now on because their dad is a college teacher anyway, and their mom knows a lot about a lot of things because she was the salutatorian of her high school class and would have been the valedictorian except for one of her teachers who was a jerk, so it will actually be better than school. This is fine with them. The only people they want to see are each other anyway.

  Amy starts taking pictures again, but only occasionally, and almost always of Zoe.

  When they go in for Zoe’s checkups they get to go to LaFortune Park afterwards and look at the ducks. One time they see one of the ducklings get snapped up by a snapping turtle, leaving only bubbles on the surface of the pond. They stand there looking for a little while, finding it hard to believe. Their mom says that’s the way the world works, but they don’t care: they don’t want to go anymore. So then their mom says fine, pretend, and they go straight to their grandparents’ house after checkups instead. Amy sits very quiet beside her sister almost like she is her sister and her own body’s just an empty ghost.

  A lot of times their grandparents play Scrabble while they watch TV. Their grandparents always get into arguments over whether words are words or not, but their grandma is always the scorekeeper, so she always wins. They argue fondly, and the girls enjoy it, although their grandpa claims that sometimes their grandma stabs him with her pencil, and he does have big blue marks on the backs of his hands, but they have never seen her do it in all their time there, so they’re not sure. Their grandpa also told them one time when they went to Camp Waluhili that he would fax them some cookies, but then they found out you couldn’t fax cookies, and they began to view him as a jokester, an unreliable source.

  Amy takes a picture of Zoe on the couch with the dog and the octopus with big huge eyes

  The octopus is a gift from their grandparents for Amy’s birthday. They each got one. It’s the size of a baby but with eight purple arms. For the picture Zoe sets it on top of the dog’s head like a funny hat. She is blurred because she is laughing, but you can still make out the dimples in her cheeks, and in back of them the hollows.

  Words owe their very existence to distance, although their deepest purpose is to overcome it; this is the truest in instances like homesick, a word I’ve always loved—but never thought I’d feel, until today.

  For Christmas they get matching pairs of tennis shoes from their grandparents

  The shoes are the same dark orange as their mom’s car only with black zigzag stripes. They have Velcro instead of laces because Zoe hasn’t learned to tie her shoes yet. The best thing about them is they have tiger paws on the soles, which means the girls get to leave paw prints wherever they go. They intentionally track mud into the kitchen even though they know they’ll get in trouble. Zoe forgets about her cowgirl boots, except when they dress up to go to church.

  In the backyard they play with the roly-polies that live at the trunk of the tree. The roly-polies bustle around like quicker caterpillars, but when you pick them up and hold them gently between your fingers they turn into hard little gray balls. The girls collect them in a bucket and then let them loose.

  They no longer take their baths together because Amy doesn’t want to. Zoe’s tantrums only result in a reduction in bath times for everyone because their mom says it’s just not worth it.

  Their dad loses his job and at first the girls are thrilled. Their mom goes and works in an office, and the girls spend days on end poring over their dad’s atlas sitting on either side of him, asking questions over every picture on every page. They learn all the animals on Madagascar and make mazes they refer to as Black Forests, with coded maps that Amy hides around the house for Zoe. Their dad lets them use his big old T-shirts as saris. They check out cassette tapes from the library with Japanese flute music and salsa from a forbidden island kingdom the girls assume has treasure in the coves. Zoe points out that no one’s proven there aren’t fairies living there. They would likely fit inside your pocket and you’d just have to be careful not to squish them when you’re sitting down, but otherwise they’d take you to the treasure probably. Amy informs Zoe that fairies don’t exist. But she says what there could be is species considered erroneously by the scientists to be extinct.

  Then their dad starts interfering in things and covering Zoe’s eyes when kissing comes on TV or when one person shoots another person and there’s blood. It used to be they could do whatever they wanted because their mom was always reading mystery novels in the other room. Now Amy runs out of time for Kumon, and Zoe runs out of time for her plastic animals. The girls confer and adopt a strategy that consists in pretending they want to take a nap in the middle of the school day, which allows them at least a couple of hours of freedom in their room. Amy’s pretty tired of sharing, but she’s been told repeatedly there is no way for each of them to have a room. Amy explains to Zoe how when she grows up her room will have the make-believe grass they use on football fields and walls the color of the sky, with clouds, but Zoe says she doesn’t want her own room and gets a look on her face like she’s about to cry.

  After naptime he takes them on bike rides or drags them to the racetrack to teach them about luck, which he calls probability. They start going to the mall to ask the salesgirls if they can have a free sample of perfume. Whatever they get Zoe uses up her share of in a day, s
praying herself in the face every few minutes until she stinks. Amy holds the tiny vials up to the ceiling light and peers inside. Then she tucks them away inside the shoebox in her fossil drawer like relics.

  Sometimes they go to the MedEx around the corner from the Tulsa Teachers Credit Union to look around. Zoe wants everything, and sometimes their dad says she can have anything she wants that costs less than a dollar. One day she gets a bone for the dog. One day she gets a barrette. Her hair is starting to grow back now, although it isn’t long enough yet for a barrette. As it grows it gets darker and darker, and one day their grandma says they don’t even look like sisters anymore, what with Amy being so fair-haired, like before. So Amy tries wearing her sister’s hats, but she finds they give her headaches.

  The next Christmas the girls discover they no longer fit into the teepee. They ask for a new teepee knowing they are asking for something impossible. They build themselves a fort in the living room out of chairs from the dining room and out-of-season sheets, and afterwards they stand together in the entryway surveying their creation. That night they stay up all night talking in their fort, and the next day after stockings they nap all morning in the soft light of the Christmas tree filtered through the lake-colored cotton.