Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  And Daze says, “Oh, leave her be. It’s too much for any of us to take in.”

  For the summer, I have an off-and-on part-time job helping Mrs. James clean out her attic, and, with Phoebe and Daze tied up at the hospital, she enlists me again to take my mind off the situation. Mrs. James has her own part-time job in the county clerk’s office every morning. Sometimes, like this week, she says she’s too pooped by the time afternoon rolls around to go through boxes dredging up the past. So she makes iced tea, and we sit on the couch in the air-conditioning and watch back-to-back reruns of I Love Lucy and Batman. My father says that television hijacks the mind, filling it with something other than God. We’ve never even had a set. But as long as the TV’s running at the James’s house, I don’t feel bad about anything. Right up until Lucy does the dance with Ricky and all the eggs break in her shirt, and I start laughing so hard I can’t stop, and then there’s a bad moment, and a bad sound, a croak, and it’s coming from me. It’s the sound of laughing switching to crying so fast that my face and neck are wet with tears before Mrs. James realizes what’s happening.

  She sits with me and pats my back. She calls me “sweet patootie.” She tells me when they made my father they threw away the mold, which is just how some folks are, and that he’s going to be fine. She tells me chemical burns are better than fire burns because your insides don’t heat up. She gets out her notary-public stamp and lets me notarize a bunch of junk mail envelopes, squeezing hard until the paper takes the impression. It actually does make me feel a tiny bit better for some reason.

  Each night, Phoebe brings home brief reports before falling into bed. Tuesday she says he’s alert but disoriented. They’re making sure nothing gets infected while his skin’s scabbing over. Wednesday he’s out of the woods enough, infection-wise, to tolerate a brain scan and to meet with a different kind of doctor, a psychiatrist.

  Thursday afternoon, Mrs. James feels a migraine coming on and needs absolute quiet. So I sit at my own kitchen table at home, Titus sprawled out beside me, trying to read a book the bookmobile lady thought I might like. It’s about a girl whose father is mysteriously away from home. Townspeople are speculating that he ran off with another woman, but her mother is trying to keep a stiff upper lip.

  “I hope you’ve done your Bible reading first,” Phoebe says when she comes back from the hospital. I’m supposed to read the Bible every day before anything else. Right now I’m making my slow way through Jeremiah, for the second time, and I tell her so. She pulls out the chair opposite me and nudges Titus off the table. She’s still smiling as politely as she has probably done all day, which makes her look strained, like something she’s wearing underneath her clothes—the same outfit she wore to the airport not even a week ago—is too tight.

  I wait for the rest of what she has to say, but then I see that she is waiting for me. When Phoebe is very upset, she switches from confiding in me, which forces me to listen, to keeping information to herself in a way that forces me to ask questions. Only she gives me the shortest answers possible, so I learn only as much as everything I can think of to ask.

  “Well?” She dips her chin in my direction.

  I open my mouth to speak, but I am afraid suddenly of sounding afraid out loud. I am afraid I will start crying again.

  “Your father won’t be home for a while,” Phoebe says, and waits again. “Why not?” she asks finally, for me. “What’s going to happen, Mother? Well, Charmaine, right now it’s anybody’s guess. He’s been moved to a smaller hospital, a facility, really, where your grandmother’s second cousin has found him a room. For long-term recovery. In the meantime, things are going to be a little different for you and me.”

  I know I should be asking why he can’t recover at home, which is what I don’t understand. But Phoebe is watching me from across the table, eyebrows raised, mouth tight with expectation. She sighs and places both hands flat on the placemat. She lifts an index finger and we both watch the tendon move around under her skin, rippling the delicate veins.

  “How?” I say.

  You can see how the question from me makes her feel better, the relieved look that comes over her face just after she is asked and before she answers, even if the answer she’s about to give is going to be incomplete or upsetting. “For starters, we’re out of money,” she says. “Let me rephrase that. We were out of money and now we are not only out of money, we owe money. Lots of money.”

  “To who?”

  “To whom. Whom do you think? To the hospital. The first one, not the one he’s in now, praise the Lord, which is more of a rest home than a hospital. Daze worked that out, but let me tell you, money’s not the only kind of debt.”

  She waits for another question, and I cast around for it but my head feels hollow.

  “How are we going to get by, you wonder?” says Phoebe. “Well, your mother has put in her name as a substitute teacher. Which will be a drop in the bucket. What else, you’d like to know? Well, your mother has secured a renter for this house. For the next few months. You and I will be staying down at the river.”

  “The next few months?” I say. “He’ll be gone that long?”

  “It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen,” she says, “but one thing’s for sure. We either rent out the house or lose it. And the Cattersons have three months furlough and they can’t shift around according to your father’s condition.”

  My throat is starting to get tight. I bite down hard, and I keep my eyes on the cover of my book. It’s blue, with three tiny white silhouettes of the main characters, each in their own series of circles, like you’re peering at them through a Slinky or the fat end of a tornado, a vortex, like a black hole, which is maybe what you’re supposed to think, since the book is about traveling through space and time. Space and time act differently near a black hole, stretching out, slowing down the closer you come, right up until you get sucked in and pulverized. This is what feels like is happening to the information Phoebe’s giving me. My ears suck it in, but my brain pulverizes it. I imagine peering all the way through a vortex, with my father on the other end, tiny, and then I realize that I haven’t prayed without ceasing since I saw him in the hospital bed. “What’s wrong with him?” I say finally, keeping my eyes on the book cover. Inhabit me, O Lord God.

  Phoebe is moving her finger again, watching the back of her hand. “They’re talking about something gone wrong in his brain. A chemical imbalance.”

  I have only ever thought of chemicals as household products like bug spray or ammonia or windshield-wiper fluid or paint. Or like the bleach that burned my father’s skin. Substances with sharp odors and warnings and childproof caps. I never knew the brain had chemicals with hazards all their own that could poison you, maybe, from the inside out. A crazy-feeling giggle bubbles up in my throat.

  “In the meantime,” Phoebe says, “I told the Cattersons they can move in right away. There’s no reason to draw out this whole ordeal.” She stands, then squats before the cupboard under the sink and hands me two brown grocery bags. “Pack your things.”

  Upstairs, in the middle of the braided rug, I unfold the two bags that have to hold everything I’m taking, everything I will need for school. For one stunned moment I don’t remember where I keep any of my clothes, even though I’m staring right at my dresser. Even though junior high starts on Monday. Then I am on my feet and packing in a frenzy, stuffing the first bag with my two pairs of jeans, the hand-me-down Jordache ones from the charity box and the new ones Phoebe sewed to look like Levi’s, with the fake orange felt tag that makes them impossible in a way she will never understand. After the jeans go my cut-off shorts, my T-shirts and button-up shirts, then my brown church dress from Daze. Into the other bag go my shoes and socks, my underwear, and a nightie. I find the belt and safety pins for the sanitary pads and stuff those into the bottom of the second bag so I’ll know where to find them next month.

  I am praying again under my breath, and it gets faster, like my racing heart. The pray
er keeps out the image of my burned, sleeping father. It keeps out the worry over what will happen if the Cattersons are still living here when he’s ready to come home. It keeps out the idea of Seth, sleeping in my bed, looking out my window, touching all my books. But it’s as if all this is just waiting at the corner of my mind, so that when I forget the prayer again it can come rushing back in.

  Titus slinks into the room and pads his way over to me. We will be taking him with us because Seth is allergic to cats. And dust. And carpet. And even air, probably. The Cattersons, Phoebe says, will be rolling up my rug and storing it in the basement. At the river, Titus will get to try being an outdoor cat, which Phoebe says will be a treat for him, but which is another worry for me, and now I’m praying so fast that I’m spitting a little bit as my lips form the words: Inhabitmeolordgod, inhabitmeolordgod, inhabitmeolordgod. I sink to the rug again and pull Titus onto my lap. I bury my head in the back of his neck, which he lets me do for a long time, purring, nosing his face into the crook of my elbow as I pray. We stay this way until Phoebe calls from downstairs that it’s time to go.

  Halfway to the river, I remember my box under the bed. “I need to go back,” I say, caught between wanting the box and not wanting to see the Cattersons as they arrive.

  But Phoebe is squinting into the setting sun. If she hears me at all, she is concentrating too hard on driving the river road to answer.

  That it is not the best idea for me to see my father for a while is a rare point of agreement between Phoebe and Daze. Phoebe says that the medicine he’s taking makes him very subdued. Not great for visitors. But the next day, our first full day of living down at the cabin, she returns from the hospital with a short letter from him.

  “I didn’t read it,” she says, holding it out to me.

  I take the folded sheet of paper. I have been tracking Titus around the perimeter of the cabin, warning him when he seems about to explore farther. Cats roam, my father has told me. Cats establish a territory and know, always, where they are in it and how to get back home.

  “He’ll just want out again,” Phoebe says when I scoop him up and return him to the cabin. But I am already letting the flimsy screen door, original to the RV, slap shut behind me, heading down to the dock to read the letter in private.

  A few things I did not expect, it begins without greeting. As if maybe he wrote it first and then decided it might as well be a letter. They asked if I fell. The first time in the tube, the screen was off. This time, pictures and words, which I remember they told me about, only I’d forgotten. The words said “a rubber hand will touch you in five seconds.” Then the noise from the camera, mapping the ocean floor. But the noise can be the prayer.

  A letter of groggy half thoughts. My father has always printed in capital letters—sharp marks that slant forward and dent the paper. His handwriting here is looser, large and nearly cursive but not quite. I lie on my back, on our dock, and use the letter to block the sun, which is about to dip behind the western palisades.

  Everything inside me is outside the machine. I was in the tube. Then I swallowed the pill, and the tube I was in was in me. That’s the whole letter.

  It’s a warm day. The big leaves of the sycamores look limp and tired after the long summer. A red-tailed hawk shuttles between the steep rock walls. I try to imagine myself inside myself, with my own breathing and heartbeat like weather around me. The river lifts and settles, pressing the warped planks of the dock against my shoulder blades. The water smells oily. My father has told me that at one time Kentucky was under a large inland sea. That’s why it’s full of limestone, which is made up of millions of tiny skeletons of tiny fish. Now all that’s left of the sea is the river, which flows eventually into the Mississippi. For centuries the river has pushed its way over and through and along the rock, carving the gorge.

  I hear Phoebe before I see her, grunting softly as she makes her way down the grass bank, dusty yellow summer squash in each hand. “I forgot all about these,” she says. “We can eat off the fruits of our labor.”

  “Technically, it’s not our labor,” I say, since my father is the one who kept up with the garden before leaving for the Holy Land.

  “Technically, I found them and picked them. That’s pretty laborious.” She steps out onto the dock, holding the squash out to her sides to keep her balance.

  “You’re wearing my jeans,” I say.

  “Not your new pair. Not the ones I made you.” She is wearing the charity box Jordache pair, which fit her better than they fit me. Under stress, Phoebe gets smaller and smaller. She has new finger-sized shadows between her ribs. My ribs don’t even show anymore, and above them my breasts just get bigger and more painful. Sometimes I think they’re going to keep on swelling forever, the way my father’s tomatoes do on the vine, splitting wide open if you don’t pick them in time.

  “Did he say anything about me?” Phoebe says, lowering herself to a crouch. Then she loses her balance and sits down hard. A corner of the dock dips into the river, picking up a film of water.

  I hold out the letter. “Read it yourself,” I say. Which is rude. Phoebe’s mouth turns down and her chin points. She will hold the face until she gets an apology.

  “He misses being home,” I say quickly.

  “Really?”

  “He says he loves you.”

  “Maybe I should take a look at that after all.” Phoebe sets down the squash and holds out her hand.

  As she reads, I watch the surface of the water. Sometimes it’s a black-green sheet of glass, but today you can see the current, flexing and unflexing like a long muscle. Soon Phoebe’s mouth is doing the pre-crying thing, like she’s sucking on a piece of hard candy. I know I should feel bad about lying, but what I feel instead is angry.

  “I want you to close your eyes with me, Charmaine,” Phoebe says, tucking in her chin. “Lord, first of all we thank you for teaching us not to take our mental health for granted.”

  I try to pray what she prays, but I can’t. Then I try to start up my own prayer, but I am fully in the grip of my fallen nature, and the only words that surface are ugly: Lord, make my mother shut up.

  “We also give you the glory for this fine day,” she goes on.

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, I pray. I can’t help it.

  “Help Charmaine and I to support each other with honesty and respect. Amen.” Phoebe raises her head. “I just thought he might have said ‘Look after your mother,’ or something. You don’t have to make things up.”

  A breeze stirs the leaves around us and they flip over, changing entire trees to a paler, grayer shade of green, then back to normal. “What happened with the rubber hand?” I finally say, cross because she’s the only person I have to ask.

  “He’s a little confused,” she says. “It’s what they’ve got him on. He’s had an MRI, so I guess that’s the tube part.” As she speaks, Phoebe contemplates the squash, then the river. Tiny puddles of loose skin form at either side of her mouth, which makes her look young and old at the same time. It draws the anger right out of me. Now I wish the words I made up had been in my father’s letter. I pray, in my head, Forgive me. I pray, Help my father and Help my mother. Inhabit me, O Lord God. Out loud I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a tough time,” Phoebe says. She leans over the side of the dock and wiggles the squash around just under the surface of the water. Then she brings them out and wipes the dust off, in long dirty streaks, down the legs of the jeans I’ll be wearing to school.

  On Sunday, for the first time ever, we miss morning church. It’s been exactly a week since the bleach incident, and Phoebe says she feels tired of explaining things to people. “And besides,” she says, “I feel worshipful right here, with the river. It’s another adventure, really, like living on faith alone.”

  “You hated living on faith alone,” I remind her.

  “The point,” she says, “is that we lived to tell.”

  Late summer in Kentucky is usually dry, but today it’s driz
zling again, which makes the built-in tweed sofa I’m sprawled on—also my bed—smell like an old coat. We keep the windows open to catch the slightest wet breeze. At the miniature sink, Phoebe scrubs potatoes. She tries to use as little water as possible, because even though there’s been plenty of rain, our cistern only holds so much at a time, one tank barely enough for two showers. The cabin feels suffocating. If I reached out my arm, I could touch the back of Phoebe’s leg—that’s how cramped we are.

  “It’s hot,” I say, then wish I hadn’t. Saying so only makes it hotter.

  “It’s like a sauna,” says Phoebe. “People pay money for sauna treatments. And I’m telling you, Charmaine, plenty of people would love a front-row seat to the changing of the seasons down here. Just wait. Someday after I’m gone, you’ll tell your children, ‘One time my mother and I lived all by ourselves in a real log cabin down on the Kentucky River.’ Then you’ll show them the spot and get all choked up.”

  I send my skepticism, telepathically, toward Titus, who’s watching us from the passenger seat. He hates rain. I can’t imagine a time after Phoebe’s gone. Then all at once I can, and an unwelcome bolt of grief runs clean through me.

  “You won’t have to give them all the details,” Phoebe says, misinterpreting my face. She wipes the sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm, then stabs each potato with the paring knife. “We can look at this situation in terms of the challenges or the opportunities. If you never have to persevere, Charmaine, you’ll never know you can. And I, for one, am feeling positively buoyant after winnowing down my earthly store.”

  “You sound like Daddy,” I say. “Divesting yourself of things.”

  “This is different. Less prophet, more pioneer.”

  The two paper bags that hold my own winnowed store are wedged between the RV’s passenger seat and driver’s seat. I picture Seth sitting at my desk, opening the box under the bed and discovering the Holy Land relics, the secret glimpse of Niagara Falls, the notebook with my prayer written inside, which I have forgotten all about. Again. I breathe and run through it twice.