Up from the Blue

by Susan Henderson

  The drink had cooled enough to finish it in one last swallow. “There you go,” Momma said, taking the cup and resting her hand on me.

  “This is my favorite part of the day,” I said, not sure if I had spoken aloud or not.

  I could feel the numbness I knew as sleep moving through my limbs. Momma cradled my head in her hand and lowered me to the pillow. I closed my eyes and felt her tears again. I pretended we were at the playground together, lying on our backs on the merry-go-round, turning and turning in the rain.

  I woke to the sound of stomping and banging. My head felt heavy on my pillow, but I pulled myself up and stumbled to the bedroom door. Phil was listening from the hallway.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. My tongue felt swollen and my words were slurred.

  “I’m not sure. The doorbell rang while we were eating breakfast, and Dad jumped up and started rushing around the house.”

  “It’s morning?” I felt woozy and held on to the wall.

  Before he could answer, Dad barreled down the hallway, carrying a suitcase, which bumped against the wall every few steps. I moved out of the way as he turned into my room.

  Another wave of dizziness caused me to bend over and place my hands on my knees, but he didn’t stop to check on me. Instead, he began taking clothes out of my dresser drawers.

  “Dad?”

  He handed me my sneakers. “Here, put your shoes on.”

  I was too tired to grip them and they fell to the floor. “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Anne is here to pick you up. She’s going to take you back to her place for a bit.”

  I rubbed my face, trying to wake up. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ll stay with her for a few days while we pack up the U-Haul and drive it to the new house.”

  “You’re moving without me?”

  “It’s a very long drive, Tillie. You’ll join us as soon as we have the new house set up.”

  I held to the side of my costume box, overstuffed with tutus and cowboy vests and dress-up shoes. I leaned over it like I might get sick. “Dad, I don’t want to go with her.”

  “Don’t argue with me.” He rolled the clothes the way he rolled socks so he could pack tight without anything wrinkling. “Hurry up, now. Anne is waiting out front.”

  “But Dad.”

  “Put your shoes on.”

  I reached for the closest pair from inside the costume box, slammed them to the floor, and stomped my feet inside. “I won’t go!” I shouted, then turned to Phil and said, “Tell him we won’t go!”

  Phil, who never raised his voice or questioned what he was told, looked stunned and said, “Dad? I’d rather stay here, too.”

  “She’s only taking Tillie,” Dad told him. “I can use your help.”

  I felt the same sort of shock as if waking from a bad dream where nothing made sense. All I knew was I needed Momma and bolted out of the room, tripping most of the way until I’d pushed open her bedroom door, letting the light shine in from the hallway.

  There were serving trays, pill bottles, half-empty glasses on the end table. On the far side of the bed, the covers rose and fell. I stepped into the room and slowly closed the door so Dad wouldn’t hear it latch.

  I tiptoed closer and leaned against the bedspread. “Momma? Tell him I won’t go. I want to stay with you.” I crawled under the warm, sour-smelling covers and pressed my back against her belly. “I want to stay with you, Momma,” I said, tucking my hands under my chin.

  She did not move. Outside, I heard Anne’s car start up, as Dad stomped through the house. I pressed closer and slid my legs under the covers, wincing when I heard the blast of a horn. “That’s her honking. Please don’t let her take me. I don’t want to go, Momma. Momma?”

  All of the muscles from my throat down to my stomach tightened as I waited there, staring at the serving tray with the fold-down legs. My eyes followed the tray’s gold edge back and forth until it became two blurry lines. Then, very slowly, Momma’s arm, blue white and freckled, rose from the covers and she closed her fingers around my hands and warmed them. “I don’t deserve you, Bear,” she said.

  As she wrapped her arm around me tight, I started to cry. It came in waves and it came with no sound. Nothing, not my father or even my long-gone mother who used to twirl in circles and smell of gardenia lotion, could have comforted me more. I wanted to fall asleep there. Her arm was heavy, but until it hurt, I wasn’t going to move.

  There was a moment of peace, a slippery sense of calm in which I believed that Dad’s secretary would leave and our family would load the U-Haul and drive away together. I wanted to believe in this, though I heard Dad calling for me. I could hear him in the hallway, and I braced myself for the sound of his hand on the doorknob. There it was.

  The door opened and he entered the room. His shadow approached the bed, and I quickly closed my eyes, believing he would not want to wake me. I tried my best not to move, sure he could hear every swallow. And when I felt his hand on my shoulder, I flinched.

  “Come on, Tillie. It’s time.”

  I kept my eyes closed, my heart wild and thumping.

  “Please don’t be difficult now,” Dad said and started to pull me away from her.

  “Bear,” Momma whispered into my ear with dark and powerful breath. “My little Bear.” Her arm stayed limp around me.

  I grabbed hold of the mattress, kicking my legs and arching backward when he tried to lift me, but his grip was strong. He carried me, thrashing, down the hallway past my silent brother and out the front door. Anne’s white hatchback, stained by the red dust, was waiting at the end of our walkway with the engine running and the passenger door open. Dad wrestled me in beside his secretary.

  “I won’t go!” I screamed.

  He tried to buckle me in, but I flailed around so much he couldn’t get close. I didn’t realize he’d shut the door until I tried to launch myself back out of the car and hit my head against the window. But it was when he held his hand up to say good-bye that the panic started. My teeth chattered and my legs began to tremble as if I was only then awake enough to understand what was happening.

  “Tillie, you have to settle down,” Anne said, as if I could.

  “I want my mother!” I yelled, but my voice sounded far away, drowned out by the sound of blood pumping in my ears. I felt the thud of my suitcase landing in the trunk, and lunged for the handle. She slapped my hand away, and we began to drive.

  Sobbing and dazed, I turned around in my seat and stared out the back window at the house I’d never see again. It got smaller and smaller, and then Momma rushed across the lawn in yesterday’s clothes, waving her arms desperately over her head.

  “Let me out!” I shrieked. I couldn’t catch my breath.

  Anne kept her eyes on the road, accelerating as Momma called my name again and again before she fell to her knees in the grass.

  4

  Teacups and Violins

  I OPENED MY EYES TO see flat, beige land speeding by, and sat up suddenly, feeling the seatbelt across my lap.

  “Awake already?” Anne asked.

  Seeing her behind the steering wheel, I remembered that I was in her car, remembered how she slapped my hand when I tried to run back to Momma.

  “You were out so quickly. I thought you might sleep the whole way.”

  Everything ached—my back and neck from leaning away from her, my head and throat from screaming. My feet, which didn’t touch the floor, felt tingly from hanging still for so long.

  “I’m only about thirty minutes off base,” she said. “But it feels like we’re way out in the country, doesn’t it?”

  I kept my face against the glass, watching the heat rise and blur the red earth and purple mountains. Closing my eyes again, I thought of Momma—how she’d held me till the very moment Dad yanked me from her arms and shoved me into the car. I thought of her running after me with her hands in the air, and wondered if Dad had brought her back inside or if she was still th
ere on the lawn. I cried again, but softly this time, so my head wouldn’t pound.

  Finally we pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store. “Hungry?” she asked, tapping my leg. I wasn’t in the mood to be touched.

  I hadn’t had breakfast and just the mention of food made my stomach rumble. Still, I didn’t speak as she pulled the key from the ignition. I simply got out of the car and stood beside it. Anne slammed the door with surprising force, and I followed her inside, keeping several paces behind her.

  “Who’ve you got there, Anne?” a woman wearing a store apron asked.

  “Long story,” she answered. “I’ve got her for the week while her father relocates.”

  “Her dad’s that big shot you work for?”

  She nodded, then turning toward me, noticed for the first time that I was still in my nightgown. I fixed the strap on one of the high-heeled sandals I’d taken from my costume box. The shoes were a good deal larger than my feet, making my steps unsteady.

  “Oh, dear,” Anne said. “We’ll have to make this quick. This is not exactly proper dress for grocery shopping.”

  I stood still, hands hanging loose at my sides.

  “Look at those red eyes,” she said. “They must sting.” She sighed and tried to put her hand on the side of my face but I ducked.

  “Okay. I get it,” she said. “We’ll just get on with the shopping.” She began to push the cart down the aisle. “I suppose you should know I don’t believe in junk food.”

  This was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. How could she not believe in junk food? It was right there on both sides of us, real as could be: cheese that sprayed out of aerosol cans, cereals that turned the milk pink, and chocolate donuts like Momma bought us.

  Thinking of her right then gave me a sharp pain in the chest.

  “Will you eat fruit leather?” Anne asked.

  “No.”

  Her shoulders hunched and she took a deep breath. “Well, you can try it, at least,” she said and dropped a package into the cart.

  A man with a handlebar mustache wheeled beside us, and said, “I heard about your new addition.”

  “Very funny, Walter.”

  “Can’t wait to hear how this happened,” he said.

  “Well, Tillie’s father is very busy working on a space-based navigation system for the Department of Defense, and she’s going to stay with me while he unpacks and gets settled in at the Pentagon.”

  “Oh, so this is the colonel’s kid,” he said. “But why isn’t she with her mother?”

  “Her mother is …” and suddenly whispering, she said, “troubled.”

  He made a not-too-subtle cuckoo sign by his temple, and Anne nodded, putting her finger to her lips.

  “You don’t even know her,” I said in the same quiet voice they’d been using, and then I swept my arm across a shelf, causing two cans of tuna to hit the floor.

  “Careful now,” the man said, staring at me with one eyebrow raised. I stared back at him and did not, would not, make a move to pick up the cans.

  Anne was bent over a bin of cheap sneakers, oblivious to our staring match. “What size shoes do you wear?” she asked.

  “I won’t wear those,” I said.

  “She’s spitting mad,” Walter said.

  “Like a cat,” Anne said.

  “A bear,” I said.

  “What?”

  “My mother calls me Bear.”

  “Yes, but you’re not one,” Anne said. “You are not a bear. You are a young lady.”

  “Not yet, she’s not,” Walter laughed. He rolled his cart ahead of ours, and still laughing, said, “Good luck to you, Anne.”

  “We’ll manage just fine,” she called over her shoulder.

  When we got back in the car, the windows were so coated in red dust it felt dark and cramped inside. Anne promised the ride to her house would be short, so I sat ready to get out, not even touching my back to the seat as we passed cactus, sage brush, more of the mountain I knew, and the colorful houses of her neighborhood. The driveway led to a yellow cottage, and when she got out of the car, she once again slammed the door with surprising force, locking the seatbelt on the outside of it. We walked into what looked like a hotel room—carpet striped by the vacuum cleaner, artwork that matched both the sofa fabric and the wallpaper. Then there were the violins, barely noticeable at first, like music in a waiting room, but soon it was what you noticed above all else.

  I walked over to the couch. “Just a minute,” she said abruptly.

  A moment later she returned with a towel and laid it down, indicating where I was now allowed to sit. I decided to stand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, finally, as if only just noticing what a weird idea it was. “It’s expensive fabric. My house isn’t very well equipped for children.” She walked to the kitchen, her floral dress blending with the wallpaper as she reached to a shelf of fruit-themed teacups and saucers. “I want you to be happy here, Tillie. Juice?”

  Though I hadn’t answered, she poured something brown into a teacup painted with tiny strawberries and set it at the kitchen table. I stayed where I was.

  “Would you like to play backgammon?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m afraid there aren’t any girls your age nearby,” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  I opened the sliding glass doors to the backyard.

  “Maybe get dressed first?” she suggested, but I was already outside.

  There was nothing in the backyard but a wilted garden and some chairs stacked in a corner of the patio. Most of the yard was grass—dry as straw—that poked my ankles. There was no reason to stay outside except for it was not inside, where Anne sprayed Windex on the glass to wipe away my fingerprints.

  My brother would have thought up a good way to spend the time. Before he got so serious, before everyone became so fond of calling him the young soldier, he was a kid with a lucky rabbit’s foot attached to his belt and was the best at inventing games just when you thought there was nothing to play. We made our own ink by pounding flowers with rocks, adding water, and stirring with our fingers. We danced to the cardboard records we cut off the backs of cereal boxes. And sometimes we pretended to steal Dad’s briefcase full of top secret work. We’d blow things up, then run back to invent bigger weapons as we needed them.

  Without my brother, I only thought of things like how hot I was and how much I didn’t like to be tickled, even by grass. I stood on that blazing patio for as long as I could stand it until, defeated, I went back through the sliding glass doors and sat on the towel.

  I stared forward at the TV set, though it was not on. We didn’t have a TV at home—not one that worked anyway. Dad once bought a kit, and successfully built the heavy wooden frame, but the electronics proved more difficult. The picture was snowy, and stripes moved up the screen, then started again from the bottom. After several attempts at taking the tubes and coils out and putting them back in again, he declared the kit “defective” and the frame became just another place to set things on in the living room. Some of the fathers in our neighborhood liked to tease him for this, saying, “How are you supposed to shoot a missile into space if you can’t put a television kit together?”

  Anne, for the longest time, tidied the already-clean room, humming along to the violins and arranging a collection of painted thimbles into a circle. When the last thimble was in place, she said, “I’m trying to do your father a favor. I wish you wouldn’t take it out on me.”

  I don’t think she expected me to answer. It seemed that she just needed to say it out loud. She turned on the TV, and even before an image appeared on the screen, I heard a couple having a painfully slow conversation with an organ playing in the background. The picture of the fancy living room that emerged was neither black-and-white nor color, but a mix of various grays with occasional pink and green bands running through it. Even so, I was glad to pretend I was in that living room instead of Anne’s. But what I enjoyed th
e most were the commercials that showed familiar scenes from the air force base—the hangars, the uniforms, and close-ups of the American flag.

  Later that night, she remembered my suitcase in the trunk of her car and brought my things to the bedroom where I’d stay for the week. Though I was already dressed for bed, she insisted I change into clean pajamas.

  When she left me alone in the room, I opened my suitcase to find Dad had packed two butterscotch candies and the World Book Encyclopedia for the letter D with photos of every breed of dog. Beneath the book were clothes that smelled like home. I simply tipped my face into them, holding my stomach tight as I bent over, though it did nothing for the ache.

  By the time Anne came back to check on me, I was under the covers with an armful of clothes, and when she leaned down to say good night, I pretended to be asleep.

  My mind was full of images that had piled up through the day: miles of cactus; painted thimbles, perfectly spaced; the man making a cuckoo sign in the grocery store; the gray American fag with green and pink horizontal stripes. One week. One long week, but then I would be back with my family.

  I tried to imagine Momma beside me, opening Alice in Wonderland to the last chapter while I touched the remaining rubies and the spots of glue where the jewels had once been attached to the cup. I tried to feel the warm, bitter drink moving down into my limbs, tried to feel her right there, staying at the edge of the bed until I fell asleep. But when I shut my eyes, I saw us screaming each other’s names, and getting farther and farther apart.

  IT WAS THE SUDDENNESS of leaving Momma that had upset me the most—the shock of being warm and sleepy one moment and then confused and hurried the next. When I woke up in the strange bed, I had that same feeling of disorientation, of being wrenched from all that was familiar and known.

  My neck was sore and there were creases on my arms and legs from the clothes I’d tucked under the covers. I opened the door and headed into the violins.

  “You’re not an easy sleeper,” she said over her teacup, taking a different vitamin with every sip.