Up from the Blue

by Susan Henderson

  Up

  FROM THE

  Blue

  A NOVEL

  Susan Henderson

  To David, who knows everything about me, and

  he’s still here

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  MAY 29, 1991, 8:47 AM

  1 The House with the Blue Door

  2 Bear

  3 The Sooner the Day Ends

  4 Teacups and Violins

  5 Things Beginning with the Letter D

  6 Knots

  7 National Airport

  8 Sassafras

  9 Bells

  10 Hope’s Pink Bathroom

  11 School Steps

  12 The Ways You’re Wrong

  13 Christmas Lights

  14 Careful

  MAY 29, 1991, 9:31 AM

  15 Fever

  16 Poem about the Moon

  17 Chair Legs

  18 Great Tap Root

  19 Good Lies to Tell

  20 Spare Key

  21 Silver Dollars

  MAY 29, 1991, 2:30 PM

  22 The Ghost of Momma

  23 A Note on the Fridge

  24 Porcelain

  25 Wading into the Potomac

  26 Hush Now

  27 Apple

  28 Riding Bus 14

  29 The Mall

  30 What’s Lost Is Found

  31 Rubies

  32 Locked Doors

  33 Tumbling

  34 Coin Trick

  35 The Skipping Brick

  MAY 29, 1991, 7:03 PM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR Up from the Blue BY SUSAN HENDERSON

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MAY 29, 1991, 8:47 AM

  IT STARTS LIKE A tingling at the top of my abdomen. And then, as if I’m wearing control top pantyhose—which I’m not, I’ve never been that girlie—it begins to shrink in around me, tighter and tighter, until my belly feels rock hard. Nervous, I pace our new apartment, hoping to simply walk it off. It’s not a contraction. I won’t allow it—not now. The baby isn’t due for six more weeks.

  When my belly relaxes again, the tingle fading, I dig through the moving boxes trying to find my address book and a telephone to plug in. I’m not even sure if we hooked up the service or not. I try to breathe slowly. The boxes are packed randomly, my husband’s idea to keep it simple and take the stress out of moving. “It’s all going to the same place,” he had said. He knows I have issues with too many orders and too many rules. Unfortunately, I also have issues with chaos.

  I peel the tape off one box and find oven mitts, books, and shoes. Another has cups, a tape dispenser, and a notebook of unfinished poems that were better in my head than they are on paper. My hair, far past my waist, drips into the next carton filled with a lampshade and stuffed animals from the baby shower. No phone. No address book. My breath comes faster as I scan the stacks of boxes lining this room I’ve only known for two days, and when I consider the time and the amount of lifting it would require to go through them all, I realize I could be in trouble.

  I can’t reach Simon because he’s still midflight to Paris, where he’s helping to choose art pieces and oversee their shipment for the modern art museum that just hired him. He didn’t want to travel this late in the pregnancy, but he’s lucky to have this job. Majoring in art history is a lot like acquiring an expensive degree in unemployment, and now more than ever he wants to bring stability to our family.

  I slam the cardboard flap closed on another box. And now I’m scared. I shouldn’t have been going up and down the stairs so much. If something hurts this baby, it’s all my fault.

  Next door is a row house that looks like ours, Queen Anne style, brick—though ours is red with a round bay window and the other is white with a square bay window. I see glimpses of my neighbor moving from room to room, tidying up, sipping her coffee or tea. She looks about my age, and is the perfect image of how I planned to spend my day—slowly unpacking and cleaning, and later scoping out local restaurants to find a way to reclaim this town I thought I’d never live in again.

  There’s another tightening in my belly. Out of options, I open the door to the bustle of traffic and fast-walking men and women with briefcases. I hold the rail and walk quickly down our steps and up the neighbor’s, knocking normally at first and then more frantically.

  As I listen to her footsteps approaching, I’m stunned by my reflection in the glass on either side of her door. I was wrong to think I resembled this woman I’d seen through the window in any way.

  “Can I help you?” she asks. She looks as if she dressed from an L.L. Bean catalog, professionally relaxed, makeup and hair done, but lightly. We may both be in our midtwenties, but with my wet, stringy hair, gray maternity jumper, and untied, red high-tops, once again, I look like the kid without a mother.

  “I just moved in next door, and … I think I need a doctor. Can I use your phone?”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  We move quickly through her immaculate house, past knickknacks and tapestries from Africa, Russia, China. This neighborhood is filled with young diplomats. The only reason we could afford something here is because we got a fixer-upper we have no immediate plans to fix up. I follow the woman into the kitchen, where she points to the telephone hanging on the wall.

  “I’ll be in the next room if you need me,” she says. I wonder if she’s told me her name. I simply nod, take the receiver in my hand, and freeze. I don’t have anyone to call. I don’t know the name of the local hospital. I haven’t memorized my former doctor’s number and haven’t yet found a new one. I was going to get to all of that.

  I’m aware that the woman who owns this house is listening for me to do something, and because I’m afraid, I dial the number of my childhood home, wishing I could talk to my mother, but of course she doesn’t answer.

  “Hello? General Harris speaking.”

  I haven’t heard my father’s voice in two or three years, maybe a call a few Christmases ago, and at first I say nothing. Then, because my belly is tightening again and I’m standing in a stranger’s house I say, “I’m scared.”

  “Tillie?”

  I never officially cut him off. There was no big falling out. Life just got busy, and the less we were in touch, the more peaceful I felt. I didn’t even tell him I got married.

  “Tillie, is that you? Talk to me.”

  “I’m in Dupont Circle. And I need a doctor.”

  “You’re in D.C.? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll tell the doctor what’s wrong. I just need to get to a hospital, and I don’t know which one or how to get there.”

  This is what he’s good at, ignoring the emotions of the moment and solving a problem. After four or five minutes of him trying to give me directions I’m too panicked to follow, he decides to call me a cab that will take me to G.W. Hospital.

  “Where are you?” he asks.

  And I don’t remember that either. I haven’t memorized the new address yet, and when I ask the woman of this house where I am, I’m keenly aware that I’m giving her a very bad, though fairly accurate, first impression.

  As I hang up the telephone, the neat, closed box that held my past is smashed open and oozing into the present. I had felt it coming though. This whole year it seemed that the world was conspiring to bring us together: First, it was the television coverage of Desert Storm this winter that flaunted my father’s satellite-guided bombs dropping on targets with the accuracy of a video game. Then it was Simon finding the rare opening for an assistant curator at an art museum here in D.C. Now this.

  Still holding the phone to my ear I stand motionless, hoping to feel t
hat little upside down foot kick my rib cage. I press in different spots to see if the baby will push back. Nothing.

  I don’t want to have a full-on panic attack in a stranger’s house, but I’m definitely on my way. When I spot a pan of brownies on the stove top, I take just a pinch, hoping the sugar will get the baby moving. I turn to the wall, pretending I’m still on the phone, and say, “M-hmm,” eating one bite at first, and then going ahead and eating the entire brownie.

  “Okay. And thank you,” I say to no one, then hang up. I only nod my thanks to my neighbor, afraid there might be brownie on my teeth.

  Waiting on her front steps, I work my fingers through my wet hair, letting the loose strands float away in the breeze. I don’t dare turn around to see if she’s watching me from her doorway. Instead, I think how good the sidewalk will be for hopscotch, what a nice climbing tree we have in the front yard, what a normal childhood we can offer this baby, if he or she will just hold on.

  There’s the pain again—at first a wave of bad cramps, not just in my belly but in my back this time. And now the tightening.

  My neighbor opens the screen door and asks, “Can I help? Want me to wait with you?”

  I shake my head and raise my hand as if to say, I’m fine, everything’s cool, grateful to see the Red Top Cab pulling into view.

  “G.W. emergency room,” I say, just as Dad told me to. As we drive away, I realize I have no wallet, no ID, and no cash. Head in my hands, I spend the rest of the trip with a view of the never-vacuumed floor.

  When the cab pulls up to the hospital, I pat the seat beside me as if I’ve only now realized I’ve forgotten my purse. I figure he’ll be sympathetic to a distressed pregnant woman, but he drives off fast and pissed. I walk through the sliding glass doors and into the chaos of sick people. I have to pee, but I get in the registration line first, as people in front of me cough and complain and one applies pressure to a bloody wound. I’m terrified of another pain, of what waiting too long might mean for the baby, and wander up to the front of the line.

  “Wait your turn,” a patient says.

  “It’s not about me,” I tell him. “Me, I’d stay at the end of the line, but my baby needs to be seen right away.”

  “You’re no more important than anyone else,” another patient says. “Get in back.”

  I feel a hand on my arm. Instinctively I shrug it off, whipping my head around with a kind of growl, and there’s my father. His hair’s been gray since I was born, but now his skin seems to match it. He stands there facing me, the only one in the ER wearing a suit, his shoulders rounded from all the years hunched over his weapons research. I back up, folding my arms over my chest so he can’t do anything weird and uncharacteristic like hugging me.

  He stares first at my belly, then at my wet hair—something familiar—and finally at my wedding ring. I register his look of surprise, possibly because I never sent him an invitation, but my gut says it’s surprise that someone would have me.

  “You didn’t have to come,” I tell him, trying to discover what looks so odd about his face.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks, maneuvering me to the back of the line, his hand stiff against my shoulder.

  “Dad, just leave me alone.”

  “But you called me.”

  “I needed a ride. I didn’t ask you to be here.”

  And now, of course, I realize what looks odd about him is that he shaved his mustache, leaving this pale, swollen patch above his lip and exposing facial expressions I’ve never seen in him: uncertainty, nervousness, grief. When I find myself at the front of the line again, I shoo Dad away while the woman behind the desk takes down my information.

  “Name?”

  “Tillie Harris.” I spell it.

  “ID”

  “I don’t have it with me,” I say, combing my hair with my fingers.

  “Address.”

  “Um. I need to skip that one, sorry.”

  “Insurance card.”

  “That, too.”

  “It’ll be fee for service, then.”

  “I’m good for it. You don’t have to worry about me not paying.”

  No change in her expression, she continues down the sheet of questions. “Date of birth. Social security.”

  Finally, numbers I know.

  “Next of kin.”

  “My husband. Simon Williams. I kept my last name.”

  She could care less. “His work phone?”

  “I should know it.”

  “Medical complaint?”

  “I’m having pains across my abdomen, like something’s gripping me.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “Thirty-four weeks.”

  She looks at me for the first time, and I start to tear up. “Something’s wrong,” I say quietly, my voice cracking. “I’m scared.”

  “Name and number of your regular obstetrician?”

  Another number I don’t know, but I give the name and city.

  I see the triage nurse next, who looks over the paper full of non-answers. I tell her about my pain and when it started and how long it lasted. She takes my vitals, tells me my blood pressure’s elevated.

  “Empty your bladder first,” she says. “And then I’d like you to take this paper cup and fill it up at the water fountain. Try to drink the whole thing while you wait for your name to be called.”

  I’m slow to stand up, afraid to move toward the bathroom, where I may discover I’m bleeding, or find a blue arm slipping out between my legs.

  When my father reaches out to help me up, I hurry to do it on my own. My wet hair has soaked the back of my dress, and I know this bothers him. Worries him. He takes out his handkerchief, and the slightest touch of it against my back makes me stomp my foot. A child having a tantrum. And this, more than anything else, is why I’ve stayed away from my father. Because when I’m around him, I am eight again, trapped in that year that scarred us all.

  I find a seat in the waiting room, where patients cough and argue, and a TV hanging from the ceiling plays a soap opera at too high a volume. Dad takes the only other chair that’s free—too far away to offer his unsolicited advice, but close enough to show his irritation at the way I’ve shredded the rim of my paper cup.

  When I close my eyes, I see our old house on the air force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico—planes constantly overhead, their vibrations strong enough to start cracks in the sidewalk. I can practically taste the red dust that was always in the air, staining our walkway and our shoes. It was the spring of 1975, near the end of the school year. I’d just had a birthday, always the last one in my class, but that year, every single child I invited had an excuse for why they couldn’t come. Peeking from behind the curtain of our old house, I see Momma, just her shadow.

  Our neighbors didn’t know exactly what the trouble was inside our home. I don’t think any of us understood, either. We were still of the belief that it would pass, that my dad could solve everything, that all of us would survive.

  1

  The House with the Blue Door

  I WAS BARRED FROM SCHOOL for the day because I’d been biting again. Whenever I pressed my teeth into one of my classmates, my teacher stopped the lesson and called, “Tillie, Tillie.” There was always a struggle as she tried to wrestle the hand or arm from my mouth, but I held on—fighting until the last string of spit released—because I liked to leave a mark.

  Although I had nowhere to go, I got up early and sat on the front steps in my nightgown, knees together, bare feet arched to keep my legs off the cold concrete. American flags rose up the poles and flapped against the Sandia Mountains, pale gray in the distance, as lights popped on inside the little square houses of our neighborhood, each the same size with their well-mowed lawns and rectangular flower beds under the front windows.

  Soon, the men from each home walked tall and purposefully out their doors, one after another, in their crisp blue uniforms or camouflage jumpsuits, all with the same haircuts, the same pair of glasses. Some, like my
father, had more decorations on their uniforms. But from this distance I noticed the sameness.

  There was a sense of music to the slamming car doors and starting engines, a distinct sense of order as each man backed out of his driveway. Looking from one open garage to the next, I could see that we all had bikes, silver metal trash cans, reel mowers, and rakes. Our home was like all of the others on our street. The only difference was our front door. My mother had painted it turquoise blue.

  The children were the next to leave with their lunch boxes and textbooks—girls in plaid and flowered dresses that fell just above the knee, boys in jeans and short-sleeved, checkered button-ups. When I recognized another second grader, her pigtails tied in yarn, I waited for her to see me there with my face decorated in yellow smiley stickers.

  At first, she seemed to pass without noticing me, but at the last moment she turned her head over her shoulder and shrieked, “You have rabies!”

  I smirked until the stickers pinched my skin. “I get to stay home,” I said.

  And then came Mary Beth, wearing a huge Band-Aid with my teeth marks underneath it. During yesterday’s class, while she cried and held her arm, I had to stand in the corner of our classroom with my nose to the wall. I found the exact smudge where I’d put my nose the other times, and I listened to Mary Beth’s whimpering, the whispers of her friends, and the stern voices of teachers. But there were giggles, too, because even with my nose to the wall, I could still turn my feet inward like pigeons’ toes or shake my behind.

  “My dad says you should keep your teeth to yourself,” she said, suddenly gripping the hand of the girl in pigtails.

  “So what?” I said, standing as they ran together toward the school. “My dad’s the boss of your dad.”

  Finally, my brother rushed out of the garage door, trying to close his Scooby Doo lunch box without dropping his textbooks. He stopped beside me to see why it wouldn’t latch, opening the lid and shifting the jar of green olives and the two hot dog buns inside.

  “You have to slam it,” I said.

  He did, and it bent the lid but closed shut.