The Center of Everything

by Laura Moriarty

  “But that’s what you do,” I say.

  “Well,” she says, reaching for the floss, “we’ll give somebody else a crack at it for a while.” She is all talk, though. When it gets closer to the first day, she gets nervous. They have already gone through a dry run in the summer: the bus for special education students, the short bus, came out and picked up my mother and Samuel so they could run through a simulated school morning, seeing his classroom, meeting his teacher. But now the real thing is coming up, and the school has sent out a letter, polite but firm, making it clear that no parents should be on the bus on the first day of school. They will send the same bus out again, and there will be two paras on board to assist the students on their way to school.

  “They used to not have any of that,” Verranna Hinckle told us, grinning as she scanned the letter. “It’s because Kenny Astor’s parents sued the district.”

  But my mother is not feeling very appreciative. She calls the school secretary several times a day, attempting to weasel her way not only onto the bus but into sitting right next to Samuel for the entire morning of school. I think they are getting tired of her calling.

  “Yes I know,” she says. She is sitting on the couch with Samuel on her lap, the telephone receiver in the crook of her neck. “But you don’t understand. He’s never been away from me. As in never.” She pauses, and I can hear someone talking on the other end. Samuel reaches up to the phone cord, wrapping it around his wrist. “I know there’s a first time for everything,” she says. “I know that, okay?”

  The night before the first day of school, my mother knocks on my door and tells me that Samuel probably won’t get to start school tomorrow. She can tell he is already upset. He knows something is up, she says, and she expects he will put up a fight. She doesn’t see how she’ll be able to get him up and dressed and waiting for the bus by eight.

  “It just won’t work,” she says, shrugging. “They don’t understand.” She is standing in my doorway, wearing the jean skirt and a shirt that is on backwards. I watch her for a moment, pushing my glasses up so I can really see her. She bites her lip, looks back at me.

  “I’ll stay home and help you,” I say. “I can miss the first day.”

  The next morning, we get up at six, and even though she insists on being the one to lift him and help him brush his teeth, it really is a good thing I am there. He thrashes and swings when she lifts him from his bed to his wheelchair, from his wheelchair to the tub, and then up and over the rim of the tub into his wheelchair again. She leans him up against her so she can shimmy his pants up and over his hips, pushing his arms into his shirtsleeves, and he screams. I stand behind him, holding his arms down with mine, careful not to squeeze or pinch his thin skin. But still he grabs hold of her hair when we are coming out of the bathroom, and his grip is so strong that he is able to bring her to her knees before I can get him to let go. We wait until after breakfast to put on his shoes, because he is kicking wildly, swinging his legs with more strength than I thought he had.

  He has never been like this before. He knows today is different after all.

  When the bus comes, things go badly. My mother wheels him outside, and there is no doubt in my mind at all that he sees the bus, the lowered wheelchair ramp, and the smiling paras waiting on each side. He screams as if he is dying, holding on to my mother’s shirt with his crooked hand until his fingers turn the color of bruised peaches. I am so busy trying to pry his fingers away that for a while I don’t see that she is holding on to him too, her arm locked around his waist.

  I touch her hand. “Mom.”

  One of the paras, a large woman wearing running shoes and a fanny pack, pats my mother on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she says. “We’re going to take care of him. We’re going to teach him things. I promise.”

  But he manages to pop the other para in the nose before they get him on the bus. She stands up for a moment, wrinkling her nose like a rabbit. “I’m okay,” she says. “I’m fine.” They strap his wheelchair onto the lift, and he starts to move upward.

  “It’s only for a few hours, baby,” my mother says. She’s crying now, not even embarrassed that the paras can see. “You’ll be home by two.”

  They put him next to a window, both of them kneeling to buckle him in. I can see two other people on the bus, a little girl who looks normal, and a boy with a very large head. Samuel bangs his fist against the glass, and we can hear him screaming. My mother has to turn around and put her hand over her eyes until the bus pulls onto the highway.

  “Are they gone?” she asks.

  “They’re gone.” I put my arm around her. “You did a good job. He’ll be home by two.”

  She is still crying, her shoulders heaving beneath my arm, but after a while she looks up at me, and even with the tears on her face, she looks like she could also be laughing. “Look, you’re a nice lady and everything,” she says. “But what have you done with my real daughter?”

  I take my arm away, embarrassed. “Are you going to be okay?”

  She wipes her face on the sleeve of her robe. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

  It’s true. By the next day, she has already gone across the highway and gotten a job at McDonald’s, the lunch shift, ten-thirty to one. If she can get AFDC to approve her working without them taking everything else away, she says, she’ll be able to make some extra money while Samuel is at school, and still have a full hour and a half to herself to shower and eat lunch before he gets home. She says this part, a full hour and a half, as if she has won a week at a health spa in Sweden.

  Libby says all I missed on the first day was roll call and an announcement that the school will no longer be using the thirteen absences rule or the special computer. If you miss more than three classes in one quarter, the teachers themselves will call your house, and they will know exactly who they are talking to.

  Also, Mr. Goldman is gone this year. He went back to New York with his wife. I saw the obituary for her father in the newspaper, so I guess that’s why. They announced he was leaving at an assembly last year, and a lot of people were crying, and everyone was clapping for him, even the teachers who talked about his balking in the teachers’ lounge. He smiled and said thank you, but sat down quickly. I think he was sick of us, and ready to go back home.

  Libby and I are the only seniors on the bus. Brad Browning has a car this year, but Libby is not allowed to ride in it, and I have not been asked. We sit together, up front, because there are eighth-grade boys in the back who still throw spitballs, burp loudly, and laugh. We buy magazines at the store across the street from school and trade them back and forth: Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Glamour. The models on the covers are flawless, shimmering, more beautiful than even the most beautiful girls in our class, and the words beneath them say things like YOUR BEST YEAR YET!, CELEBRATE LOVE!, and TWENTY-ONE DAYS TO A NEWER, SLEEKER YOU! We rub the perfume samples on our wrists, give each other the quizzes: WHAT’S YOUR SEXUAL I.Q.? WHAT’S YOUR FASHION PERSONALITY? ARE YOU A BITCH OR A DOORMAT??? These quizzes are hard to answer without lying, because it’s easy to guess which answer is the right one, the one that will give you the most points in the good column: not a bitch, not a doormat, but just right. Somewhere in between.

  1. A coworker embarrasses you in front of a client. How do you respond?

  A. Fire back! Say something even more embarrassing or hurtful to her.

  See how she likes it!

  B. Don’t say anything. Maybe she didn’t mean it. C. Take her aside and let her know that she embarrassed you, and that you don’t appreciate her disrespect. Listen to what she has to say in response, but don’t back down.

  Libby and I agree that the right answer is never this obvious in real life.

  Homecoming is in October, but neither of us has a date. Libby says she couldn’t go, even if somebody asked her. “I’ve got my partner right here,” she says, tapping her cane on the floor of the bus. “He’d get jealous if I tried to dance with someone else.”

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nbsp; She says things like this sometimes, but still, I go to great lengths not to mention the cane. I am also careful not to mention Traci’s or Adele’s name, even though I know that, really, this is stupid. It’s not as if my not saying their names will keep her from thinking about them, about the accident. Traci was her best friend. It must be there, in her mind, all the time. But I don’t want to say the wrong thing. Libby says if one more person tells her everything happens for a reason, she is going to beat them to the ground with her cane.

  “It says here,” she says, her finger pressed against a page of Mademoiselle, “that if you’re feeling blue about being single, you should try doing something loving for someone who needs it. Not necessarily something romantic. And it has to be something you do, not something you buy.”

  We decide we will each do something like this. We shake on it. I will offer to baby-sit, once for my mother, once for Travis and Deena. Libby says she’ll make a scrapbook for the Carmichaels. She will make copies of photographs she has of Traci and write down what she remembers about her.

  “Edited, of course,” she adds. “They don’t need to know it all.”

  This is all she will say. She does not tell me what she is going to leave out, what things she knows about Traci that Mr. and Mrs. Carmichael would not want to know about their own daughter, even in their deepest grief. I am comforted all the same. Lately, painfully, I have been envisioning Traci Carmichael as an angel, her blue-gray eyes watching me sadly from underneath a halo, her body vague and not clearly defined. The teachers had already planted two trees on the front lawn, one for Traci, one for Adele. There is a plaque on the ground between the trees that says For Traci and Adele, angels in our hearts forever. When I pass it, I think about that day in gym when she had her hands on my ankles, and I feel guilty about everything bad I have ever done.

  But really, it’s difficult to imagine Traci Carmichael as a fluttering angel. It doesn’t make sense. There is no way that Traci Carmichael could be floating around in the sky with a harp and wings and still be Traci Carmichael. She might be okay like that for a little while, but then I think she would get bored. She would start rolling her eyes. She would want to pass around a petition.

  The only way I can really imagine Traci undead for all of eternity is to picture her just riding along in Adele Peterson’s Honda, not being necessarily good, but not being bad either. She isn’t thinking about me or even anything, just listening to the music on the radio, her pink-braceleted arm hanging out the window, her fingers spread wide in the breeze.

  At McDonald’s, my mother is a hit, a natural. She is fast at the cash register, and she does not forget to set timers. Her ice cream cones stand up perfectly, and she learns how to change the syrup in the cola machine the first week. In November, she is employee of the month, which doesn’t seem fair. She only started in September, and I’ve been working there for over a year. DuPaul moves her up to drive-thru right away, because she makes the customers laugh, and then they don’t get so mad when they have to wait.

  We never work together, because she only works when I am in school, and I work after it. Still, the comparisons are made.

  “Your mother is such a fast learner,” Trish says, smiling. “She never makes any mistakes.”

  I lower a basket of fries into the oil and don’t say anything. I know where this is going.

  “Are you adopted?” she asks brightly, her eyebrows high up on her forehead, arched.

  My mother says she will let me baby-sit for her when spring comes. If I am going to baby-sit Samuel for a full day, she wants it to be in May, when the weather is nice and she can go for a walk. I would think that she would be happy to let me baby-sit right away, no matter what the weather is like. She must be exhausted, I tell her, now that she is working at McDonald’s and also taking care of Samuel. But she says she is less exhausted now that she is not with Samuel all the time. It’s nice to get out a little, she says, and talk to other people.

  “Some people, maybe,” I say. “Not Trish.”

  “People in general,” she says.

  But when I ask Deena if she would like me to baby-sit, she says yes right away. She wants to know when. She says she has not been to a movie, not one, since Jack was born. She says something else, but I can’t hear her because Jack is crying.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Poor guy. His teeth are coming in. I said that would be really nice.” She pauses, lowers her voice. “We could probably use a night out. Things haven’t been going so well.”

  I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t.

  She picks me up in Travis’s Datsun, wearing mascara, hoop earrings, and a red velvet shirt with a neck so low you can see the top of her bra. There is something, maybe baby food, dried on a strand of her hair. She hugs me when I get in. “This is so nice of you,” she says. “It’s a big deal for me to get to go out. You have no idea. And we’re paying you. I don’t care what you say.”

  “No. You can’t pay me. It’s my favor,” I tell her. “You look nice.”

  She glances up in the rearview mirror and smiles. “This is the one shirt I own that no one has thrown up on.”

  The apartment complex where they live looks amazingly similar to Treeline Colonies. It is only two miles up the highway, and also brown with black trim. They live in the basement, and Deena points out the four half windows that are theirs from the parking lot. I follow her down the concrete steps, her high heels stepping carefully over patches of ice. “Down to the dungeon,” she says. “Watch your step.”

  Travis opens the door for us, Jack red-faced and crying in his arms. He is also dressed up, wearing a belt even, and clean shaven, his skin still pink from the razor.

  “Hey Daddy-O,” I say. Jack turns away, his face buried in Travis’s shoulder. He’s a year old now, but still all chubby cheeks and knees, his ears sticking out like handles on a cup. Travis leans forward to hug me, but it is difficult with him holding Jack, so he ends up just patting me on the back. Even this makes Jack cry harder, louder. Travis smiles and walks away with him, singing in his ear.

  “We shortened his nap today so he would sleep for you,” Deena says. “That’s why he’s such a grouch. Okay, here’s the rundown.” She points at a paper by the phone. “This is the number for the ambulance. I’m sure you won’t need it, but just in case. This is our pediatrician. He’s really nice, but don’t call him unless it’s something major. Call us first if you can. This is the number of the restaurant, and this is the number of the movie theater. The movie starts at nine-ten.” She frowns. “This is Travis’s mom’s number, but call only if it’s an emergency.” She lowers her voice and smiles. “Let sleeping bitches lie.”

  Travis looks up, the expression on his face difficult to read. Jack isn’t crying anymore, but gurgling softly, his small hand wrapped tightly around one of Travis’s fingers.

  “Also he’s teething,” she continues. “So if he looks like he’s having a hard time, just sort of rub his gums with one of your fingers. It helps.” She models this technique on her own mouth, her pointer finger moving quickly around the inside of her mouth, smudging her red lipstick. “He usually goes to sleep around eight-thirty. I would check his diaper around eight. If he seems like he wants another bottle, he can have one. There’s a backup in the fridge.”

  I am silent, growing concerned. When I said I would do this, I pictured Jack sleeping, me reading a book. “How do I know if he seems like he wants another bottle? What does that mean?”

  Deena frowns. “This kind of cry means he’s hungry,” she says. She makes a series of short, high-pitched sounds, opening her mouth wide.

  “No,” Travis says. “It’s more like this.” He makes, as far as I can tell, the same sound Deena just made. “And this kind of cry means he needs to be changed.” He makes another crying sound.

  “You guys don’t sound like a baby,” I say. “You sound like dolphins.”

  Neither of them laughs. They look at me the way Trish does when I forget to set the
timer on the fries. “You can’t hear the difference?” Travis asks.

  “No.” I’m more nervous now than before.

  Deena looks at her watch. “We should probably get going.”

  “I just want to wait until he settles down to sleep,” Travis whispers. “I’ll put him in his swing.”

  Deena nods. “Okay, but the movie starts at nine-ten. We won’t have time to eat.”

  They look at each other. “Evelyn can put him in the swing,” Deena says.

  As soon as Travis puts Jack in my arms, he starts to cry again. “Try the bottle,” Deena says, handing it to me. The bottle is warm, decorated with tiny blue elephants. I hold the tip up to his mouth, aware that they are both watching. I feel stupid, like a bad imposter, and even a baby can tell the difference. “See the elephants, honey?” I try. I sound stupid.

  Travis and Deena put on their hats and coats and stand in the doorway. “Um, that isn’t the way to hold the bottle,” Deena says. “It’ll give him gas if you do it like that.”

  Travis says I need to rock him a little when I hold him, rearranging Jack in my arms. “Didn’t you take care of your brother when he was little?”

  “Not really. Is it the teething thing? Should I put my finger in his mouth?”

  Deena smiles and sighs, taking off her coat. “It was nice of you to offer,” she says. “Really. Just the idea of getting to go out was good.” She takes Jack from my arms, and right away he stops crying, the redness leaving his face. He gazes up at her with adoring eyes, sucking on the bottle that she holds at the correct angle, his tiny hands resting on her arms.

  When Deena came to pick me up, she had been playing a regular rock station from Wichita, but when Travis starts the engine, he switches the radio over to country.