Up from the Blue

by Susan Henderson

  “Enjoying yourself?” It was Mr. Woodson, picking up a cup and a plate.

  I scanned the room more confidently now that he stood next to me. “How come Shirl isn’t here?” I asked. “Why is she always in trouble?”

  “Tillie, she’s not in trouble,” he said, bending low and speaking quietly. “She’s just nervous. She feels better staying in our classroom.”

  “Oh.”

  “Here,” he said, “I was just going to take this back to her. Would you like to help?”

  I followed him back through our empty pod and to the classroom, where he unlocked a metal closet behind his desk and took out a record player. Shirl helped him plug it in. That day, while our class stayed in the other wing of the school, we listened to Sammy Davis Jr.’ s “The Candy Man” and then military parade tunes. I knew all of the songs by heart and wanted to sing out loud, but was surprised by a lump in my throat that made the notes come out wrong.

  As I stood there listening, hands in my pockets, Shirl ran to her cubby and searched inside. She returned with a record of her own—a 45 of the Hues Corporation with visible scratches in the vinyl. She lifted the arm off of the big record, and when it stopped turning, held it by the edges and handed it to Mr. Woodson. Then she set the smaller record on the turntable. When the music started she was so excited every part of her seemed to move in a different direction at once, like a jellyfish swimming.

  “Bump your hips into mine,” she shouted over the music. “Like this.”

  “Ow!”

  I tried to bump into her and somehow missed. The next try was too hard. By the middle of the song, we had it down. We both sang along with the chorus:

  Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over.

  When the music began to fade out, we kept singing at full volume. Maybe it was the influence of living in a mostly Irish neighborhood, but I thought the words were “Rockin’ on my shamrock.”

  It was the first time I saw Shirl smile, her teeth too bright against her skin. She grabbed my sleeves as if that would keep her from falling to the floor. “No!” she laughed. “It’s ‘Rock on wit yer bad self.’”

  It was then, as we were laughing and holding each other, that our classmates walked back into the room. I did not hear what they said, only the sound of Shirl smashing the record, two-handed, against the table.

  “In your seats!” Mr. Woodson shouted, and we all ran because he almost never raised his voice.

  Shirl sat at her desk, the record still in her hands. It was broken into five sharp pieces, held together only by the record label at its center. When Mr. Woodson turned his back, I whispered to her, “If you’re not going to keep it, can I have it?”

  Leaving school, I heard Shirl behind me. It was not just the sound of her bells but also the whispers of the other students. When she came up beside me, she opened her book bag and handed me the broken record.

  “You said you wanted it.”

  We walked as far as her bus together, where she got in a line and said, “My mom showed me in the newspaper how people drive through your neighborhood to see all the lights.”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised to know she’d talked to her mom about me.

  People often drove up our street just to see how our neighbors had framed their houses and hedges with strings of color. You could look through the living room windows and see their huge decorated trees. And when they opened their double doors, you’d hear holiday music. But that wasn’t the case with our family. There were none of the details that had once come with Christmas—no reindeer hand towels, no marshmallow snowmen with pretzel sticks for arms. I wasn’t even certain we’d celebrate this year.

  “Tillie,” she said, “why don’t you invite me over some time?”

  I stood there, holding my first vinyl record, hoping it wouldn’t break into any more pieces before I could tape it back together. I looked at Shirl, trying to imagine her sitting in our empty living room, and said, “Get permission, I guess.”

  Dad had never specifically told us not to have visitors, but he didn’t encourage the idea because visitors tended to ask questions that were tricky to answer. Still, the next day, with a note from her mom, we set off for my house—Shirl with a hood of spotted fake fur framing her face and bells ringing with each step. I’d never walked home from school with another classmate before. And other than Hope and the Orkin man, who sprayed for bugs, we’d never had a guest in our home. It felt nice, imagining my neighborhood through Shirl’s eyes—the neatly raked yards, the groomed gardens under burlap until spring, the painted mailboxes, and of course, the Christmas lights.

  “I feel like people are staring at me,” she said.

  Once she said it, I noticed, too: housewives and elderly couples pressed against their windows or walking very slowly down the sidewalk. They looked for too long, and one woman smiled so hard her lip stuck above her teeth.

  “I’m nervous,” she said.

  It was such an odd thing to imagine anyone being afraid in my neighborhood where many kept their doors unlocked at night. And while other communities were in the newspaper for fires or shootings, ours was more likely to be featured for charity drives and garden club awards.

  When we got to my street, I noticed Dad’s Volvo in the driveway. Normally, we used Phil’s key to get in, but it wasn’t unusual for Dad to come home early. If his meetings were done, he could do his paperwork at home.

  “Well, this is my house,” I told Shirl, and we stood, admiring the neighborhood lights from my porch.

  “Why didn’t your family decorate?”

  I shrugged. It was more apparent at night when you drove up the street and felt you were inside a tunnel of lights until you got to our house. Our porch was lit by a single bulb and stood out like the broken strand of lights on a Christmas tree. Your eye went straight to it.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “I’m freezing.”

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t ask if you could come inside.”

  “Can you?”

  “Okay,” I said, leaving her on the porch.

  I found Dad in the formal living room, wearing the itchy cardigan sweater he always wore around the house this time of year, struggling to place a Christmas tree in its stand. I was surprised; I’d begun to believe we wouldn’t make time for Christmas.

  “Stay back, Tillie,” he said, when I came close to help. “It’s too heavy for you.”

  “Dad? A girl from my class wants to come over.”

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “But Dad, she’s on the porch.”

  “Tell her to go home. It’s not a good time,” he said, grunting and wrestling with the tree.

  I went outside. “My dad says it’s not a good time. Sorry. You have to go home.” I looked at Shirl shivering and said, “Well, hold on a minute.”

  This time, when I came back outside, Dad came with me, distracted and pulling pine needles out of his pant legs. “Here, my dad will drive you.”

  Shirl saluted him, holding her hand all wrong. It has to be stiff and touch the eyebrow. We got in the backseat, and while Dad waited for us to buckle, Shirl gave him directions, starting from the YMCA across town.

  I’d heard whispers about the neighborhoods the bused kids came from, how it was a place for robbers and drug deals and kids who brought down the scores on our county’s tests. As we drove, I worried that the people out my window carried guns, and if I looked for too long they might shoot.

  “Left here,” Shirl said. “Another left. Now a right. Okay, turn at the next light.”

  The houses on Shirl’s street were larger than I thought, but they didn’t have the columns or bay windows that you’d see in my neighborhood, and there were no trees anywhere. When she got out, Dad locked the doors and waited for her to get safely inside.

  As we drove home, I passed him the snowflake I’d made at school, and considered asking him if he’d deliver my card to Momma, th
en decided against it. Something about his refusal to talk about her was beginning to feel scary.

  When we got home, the tree was up and Phil, in his knit cap, was under the branches tightening the screws of the stand.

  “It’s tilting toward the kitchen,” Dad said, setting the snow-fake in a pile of bills.

  My brother stayed under the tree until he got it straight. And when he stood up, he seemed taller and moodier than the brother who chipped his tooth one winter ago.

  I could still see him trying to close the door in his slippery wool mittens, then heading down the street behind the bigger boys with his Flexible Flyer. Watching him slip and fall behind the others, his breath blowing out like smoke, I remembered how glad I was to be inside. Though Dad was strict about keeping the thermostat low, Momma had turned the oven to the broil setting and kept its door open to heat the house.

  We never heard the crash of his sled. We had the music turned up, and I had just convinced her to put a pat of butter into the hot stove so our house would smell like cookies.

  The first knock at the door startled us. Momma didn’t want to answer it because she was in her bathrobe—though she could have, it was before she’d painted it shut. The knocking continued, and when she finally did open the door, we heard Phil’s wailing at the bottom of the hill. Even before the stranger could tell Momma what had happened, she was running down the snowy street in her robe and slippers. I waited by the window, mad at the interruption and at the cold coming in through the open door.

  Boys were crowded around the parked car he’d run into. He was jammed underneath it, up to his waist, and practically squealing. Momma helped him up by placing her wrists under his armpits, the broken tooth lost in the red snow. When she passed the sled, she told me she kicked it hard for running him into that car.

  Dad handed me a sandwich and I admired the lights he’d hung on the tree. After we ate and washed our hands, he brought out the boxes of ornaments. When he took the lid off that first box, I smelled the old house. Not the smell that used to make us open the windows, but one I hadn’t noticed until just then—something faint, like wallpaper paste. Each ornament was wrapped in tissue, and through the paper you could see the colorful fabric and animated faces Momma had sewn onto angels, Santas, and snowmen. I slowly took an ornament out of its paper and held it, overwhelmed with the sorrow I could not express. I didn’t hang it on the tree. None of us did. We just stood there, holding pieces of Momma.

  Finally, Dad rummaged through the box for the Afro’d angel that always went on the very top of the tree. When he found it, he paused for only a moment and then showed us how to soldier on by marching to the tree and hooking the angel to the tallest branch. Phil and I went next, and after an hour of hanging Santas and angels and Frosties, the tree—so colorful and whimsical in our otherwise spare home—said all we couldn’t say about what we were missing.

  IT WAS A SENSIBLE Christmas. Our stockings were filled with school supplies, and there were very few presents under the tree—a hat from me to Phil, a scarf from him to me. He gave Dad a package of drill bits; Dad gave him thermal underwear and mittens. Phil could have told him that no boys in the sixth grade of our school wore mittens—they only wore gloves—but he kept quiet. Then, wincing, I gave Dad the present I made him. And when he held up the hideous sock, sharp with dried glue, I wondered why I thought he’d want a doll.

  I could not help but imagine the lovely, impractical gifts Momma might have given: mirrored sunglasses, clogs, Pet Rocks, a mood ring. As Phil and I threw the last pieces of wrapping paper into the fire, Dad disappeared for a moment. When he returned, it was with the kinds of unreasonable gifts we’d been hoping for! There was a rock tumbler for Phil, with bags of rough, unpolished rocks and the chemicals that would smooth and shine them. Then, for me, he wheeled in a Schwinn Sting-Ray with curved handlebars, and a banana seat colored red, white, and blue for the bicentennial.

  I put on my coat and pedaled hard and fast into the wind until everything burned. I rode round and round the school, and when I was out of breath, stopped behind it at the edge of the woods. There, I pulled the card I’d made for Momma from my coat pocket and read it out loud as if she might hear me: Dear Momma, Where are you? I look for you every day, and I know you’re looking for me. Every night, I wish for you to hurry home. You know who this is from.

  For a while I stood listening for her, and when it was too cold to wait any longer, I put the card on the highest tree branch I could reach, where she might find it.

  I got back on my bike, riding past the lit-up houses and the sounds of piano playing and children laughing until I was home. We had survived Christmas without all the decorations or the piles of wonderfully unnecessary gifts. Still, I could not shake the feeling that I’d find her. Sometimes she felt so close. And that night, when I closed my eyes, I could swear I heard her singing Christmas carols.

  14

  Careful

  IT’S NOT A GOOD sign that she didn’t send you a card,” Hope said. We sat in the basement clubhouse on the worn furniture—Hope upside down, me scraping my feet back and forth through the dirt floor. “No, that’s not good. That brings up other possibilities.”

  “Like what?”

  She shook her head as if to say, Poor girl. “I don’t know. Can you think of anyone who wanted to murder her?”

  A chill worked its way through my body, knowing that both of us, right then, were thinking of my father.

  Again she shook her head. “I’m only putting together clues. I think the fight they had, the one Phil overheard, could be when it happened.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. When I shrugged, my shoulders stayed up by my ears.

  “You said he has a temper, right? Do you think she could defend herself against him?”

  Her questions made me feel like Alice falling down the long hole, and the world I knew disappearing too fast to grab hold of it.

  “But what did he do with the body?” I heard Hope ask. “That’s the question I have. Where’s the body?”

  Unable to stand even one more of her ideas, I was suddenly on my feet. “What time is it?” I asked in a voice that was both too high and too loud.

  She looked at her watch. “Quarter after.”

  Panting, as if I really had climbed back up out of that hole, I said, “It’s almost my dinnertime. I have to go.”

  She stood up and put her hands in her pockets, her shoulders arched high like someone who knows a lot but isn’t saying it all. “You’ll have to be careful,” she said. “Don’t let him know how much you understand.”

  I nodded as we both jumped out of the door in the wall and closed it again. “Careful,” Hope said, whispering from behind me now. “You’re leaving footprints.” She bent down and wiped them with her sleeve.

  “Sorry. I didn’t notice,” I said, my heart beating faster.

  “I’m just saying you have to be real careful.” She followed me out the basement door, and from there we split up. She snuck from my backyard through the neighbor’s, and I walked up the side steps to the front of my house.

  I peeked inside through the gold mail slot, listening for my father. I knew if he heard me come in, he’d already be mad about something I did or didn’t do. There were so many rules to remember: Never climb the kitchen doorway, never put dirty dishes to the right of the sink rather than the left, never ride bikes through wet grass without drying the spokes with a towel afterward, and never sit in the barely furnished living room reserved for grown-up company, even though we’d never had a grown-up visit our house.

  But now I questioned whether there was a darker side to him. What if he was not just picky and controlling? What if …

  “I see you there, Tillie.” Dad spoke through the mail slot from the other side. “Are you going to come in for dinner?”

  I tried to answer, but my mouth felt frozen.

  Dad opened the door. “What did you get into this time?” he asked, looking at my feet. “Hold on, there. Leave y
our shoes on the porch.”

  “Okay.”

  “Socks, too. I should start buying you brown socks.”

  “Okay.” The cement was so cold I stood on tiptoes, hopping from one foot to the other.

  My dad was not a large man, but he spoke as if he were. “Into the bathtub,” he said, finally letting me through the door. “Dinner will be ready soon, so make it quick.”

  “Okay.”

  As I started up the stairs, he called after me, “Hustle now, Pest.”

  I took my time. I didn’t mean to, but I hardly felt I was even inside of my body. It took effort to move, to remember where I was. I filled the tub with water that was hotter than I was allowed, poured in Prell shampoo to make bubbles. When I got in, my legs turned bright pink and the water turned a muddy brown.

  “Are you out yet, Tillie?”

  Out yet? I hadn’t even gotten my shoulders under the water; it was still too hot. I added some cold water and more shampoo until it foamed.

  “Tillie. We’re waiting for you.”

  There was an insistence in his voice that made me believe Hope’s theory. A feeling in my gut that he could go too far. I sunk into the bath, as the water continued to get colder and higher, and imagined him approaching Momma in the dark bedroom, and—seeing the plate of food he’d cooked tipped upside down on the bedspread—placing a pillow over her face to smother her.

  After dinner, I went straight to my room, closed the door, and huddled on the floor with my covers. I missed her. Wrapping my arms around my shoulders, I felt her there with me. It gave me some relief from the constant and hollow feeling of wanting to tell her something during the day, something completely insignificant—about a cat whisker or a heart-shaped rock I’d carried all day in my pocket or a story I’d overheard as I sat by myself in the lunchroom. The things untold, unshared—they added up.