Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  Somewhere far behind me, the Pinto sputters to life. Soon Phoebe pulls up and leans out the driver’s side window. “What’s the idea?” she says.

  I keep walking and she inches the car forward. It was dark before, but now the Pinto’s headlights make the sky darker. It feels as though there’s nothing in between me and the huge empty spaces over the horse farms, all that air, the atmosphere, and then everything beyond that. I see myself walking on the surface of the globe, on the underside of it, maybe, and I remember that gravity depends on how dense matter is. It’s not nearly as strong on the moon as it is on our planet, and not nearly as strong on our planet as, say, on the sun or in a black hole. If I knew how to rearrange matter, all I would have to do is lift my feet in the right way and fall into all that space.

  “You want to walk a little?” Phoebe says. She breathes out in exasperation over the struggling engine. “Okay. Walk. Walk your heart out. For a little bit.” She slows the Pinto down to a shuddering idle and drops back, so that I’m walking just outside the light of the low beams. I keep walking as if I’m trying to get away from the light, as if God himself has told me not to turn around for any reason, or I might turn to stone. Or salt. Poor Lot’s wife, her home burning behind her. Maybe she looked back because she thought a frozen eternity, facing what used to be home, would be better than a future without it. Maybe God didn’t even turn her to salt as a punishment. Maybe it was her tears that did the job, and God was just warning her that he was about to burn up everything in the world that meant more to her than him, and that watching would be too much for anyone to bear.

  When I stop walking, when I do look back, the residential recovery mansion no longer shows up behind me. I cross the road in front of the Pinto and get in. Once on the interstate we ride in silence for several long minutes. Phoebe breathes hard, like she is trying not to start crying again, and her breath makes a little circle of steam on the windshield. When she speaks, though, she sounds matter-of-fact. “Your mother is a fool.”

  I let the words sit there and wait for more.

  “Not for the reasons folks might think. Not because I believed my husband was a prophet or because I followed him as the head of my household, against my own better judgment. And that’s plenty to make me a fool, you better believe it.”

  “You’re not a fool,” I say, because her voice is so flat I can’t stand it.

  “I’m a fool because I thought I was already completely worn out,” she says. “I thought I was beyond feeling hurt.” She turns to me, and even though her voice has been flat, her eyes are wretched. For the second time this evening I wish one of my parents wanted something from me. “Don’t forget this,” she says. “Be smarter.” Then she laughs, a single chop of sound. “And if I knew how to tell you to do that, I would.”

  The rest of the drive home I’m looking out into the darkness beyond the twin cones of our headlights, thinking of all the fields and horses, then all the tobacco barns, everything that I know is there but can’t see. And high above all that, in space, black holes are pulling everything, all kinds of matter, all kinds of light and energy, into themselves. They can’t ever be filled up. You could stand at the edge of one and try as hard as you wanted to; you could throw in every single piece of matter you have, hoping just to hear something land. You could stand there until you wore yourself out, or until you got mad about all the stuff you’d let go of, missing it, or you could stand there listening so hard to the silence that you’d begin to imagine you were hearing things after all.

  Chapter 14

  I GET CALLED TO THE office again Wednesday, during activity, in the middle of Kelly-Lynn telling me that her mother has checked herself out of rehab, broken up with Rob, and is relocating them to Omaha. “She’s big into starting over,” Kelly-Lynn says. “Maybe in my next school I’ll call myself Theresa, or Charmaine.”

  I’m picturing Kelly-Lynn making her way down the hall of a strange new school, pretty enough to turn heads, no one knowing one single thing about her. Except the school officials with their thick file. I don’t even pay attention to what Coach Doran’s saying at the mike until Kelly-Lynn says, “That’s you.”

  I’m wondering if Principal Conrad changed his mind since yesterday and I’m in trouble after all, but the secretary just calls me “hon” and tells me I should go straight home after school instead of to the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center. Because my grandmother’s had another stroke. As the secretary speaks, the room loses focus for a second, then comes back with raw color. She’s saying that her father had two strokes and didn’t die until years later, and her brother just had his first stroke and is already back at work.

  “I’ll say a prayer,” says the secretary, and what I think back at her is Good luck, and I don’t even care anymore that it’s a fool’s game to be angry at God. It’s clear now that nothing is going to be the way it was. Not for my father. Not for Phoebe and my father. Not for me. Now maybe not for Daze. None of which you’re even supposed to pray for anyway, not really. Only for the holy state of reception. To God’s voice, God’s call, God’s comfort. Which is where prayer without ceasing comes in, only too bad it’s impossible. Unless there happens to be something wrong with your brain.

  The rest of the school day goes on around me, and then it’s over. “You in trouble?” says Tracy on the bus. “I heard them calling your name.”

  I think about not telling her, but I can’t really imagine anything anyone says making me feel worse than I already do. “My grandmother had a stroke.”

  “She old?”

  “Kind of,” I say. “Not that old.”

  “She bad off?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She had one before.”

  Ravenna’s behind the wheel this afternoon, and the bus is orderly. Even Cecil Goode only smirks at us on the way to his seat. “There’s always next time,” he calls softly in my direction as we file out of the parking lot with the other buses. We ride quietly through the county, through all the spiky fields of harvested tobacco. Then through town, where we pass everything I’ve always known. The United Methodist Church, the Church of God. First Community, my old elementary school. We pass the tree streets that lead up to the scrubby field where the water tower stands high on its hill, the unlit cross a faint mark against the cloudy gray sky.

  The leaves are starting to change color, but only if you look hard. My father once explained to me that the reason some maple trees turn red is that the sugar they use as food gets trapped in the leaves when the days get shorter. Other colors, the yellow and orange, have been in the leaves all along, only the chlorophyll from sunlight covers them up all summer and makes them look green. So in the fall some things get trapped, like in the red sugar leaves, and other things, things that were there all along, get revealed.

  Beside me, Tracy is digging into the sole of her tennis shoe with a ballpoint pen.

  “Are your parents divorced?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t look up. All the weight in her face pulls her cheeks down toward her lips into a troubled pout.

  “Did you hear?” I say.

  “I’m writing it,” she says, nodding at her shoe. She’s making some block letters, and I see an N and a T, and when she pulls back her hand and shows me, the sole of her shoe says I DON’T KNOW.

  We stop at the gas station, but Tracy stays put. When we reach the bottom of the gorge and approach the cabin, she stands up like she’s getting ready to let me by, but then, instead, she heads down the aisle in front of me. “Going home with Charmaine,” she says to Ravenna.

  “Behave, then,” Ravenna says.

  We wait there in the ditch while the bus pulls away.

  “I always wanted to see the inside of this trailer-cabin,” Tracy says.

  I look at the cabin as if for the first time. From the outside it doesn’t look big enough for two people. The log walls look rough and splintery.

  “You gonna invite me or what?”

  “Would you like to come in?
” I say politely.

  “Okay,” she says, after a little pause, like she’s responding to a real invitation she has to consider first.

  I open the door and poke my head in first, hoping to find Titus curled up on the passenger seat, but he’s not there. “I have a cat,” I tell her, “but he hasn’t been home in a while.”

  On the stoop, she cups her hands around her mouth and hollers, “KITTY, KITTY, KITTY,” so loud that the palisades boom with it. “I’ll keep my eye out,” she offers. “You know how cats are.”

  From the doorway, the RV interior is narrow and dim. Our box of shoes sits under the dinette, and even with the window open over the sink, I can smell the stale combination of leather, rubber, and feet.

  “It’s just like I thought,” Tracy says. “Everything you need right here. Your little-bitty sink and stove and fridge. Can I see the bathroom?” I point to the accordion door on the other side of the dinette, and she edges around the table, opens the bathroom door, and stretches it closed behind her. “Can I use this little-bitty commode?” she says, her voice muffled by the door.

  “Sure.” I flip the dinette up against the wall so she can see how it makes the middle space bigger. I push the box of shoes up against the wall, too.

  “Look at that,” she says about the dinette when she’s finished in the bathroom. “I never saw that before. It’s just like a regular trailer in here, only more solid. I bet you can even stay during a tornado. A flood’ll be your problem,” she says.

  “We lost our dock the other night.”

  “Happens,” Tracy says, peering into the cab. “What would get me is no TV.” She sits down on the sofa and makes a face. “This where you sleep? Hard. What about your mom?” I point to the flat cubby above the driver and passenger seats, and she lets out a low whistle. “If I had to go to the bathroom in the night I would forget and raise up and hit my head. What’s your mom’s job again?”

  “Substitute teacher.”

  “And your dad’s the preacher.”

  “He writes stuff, mainly. What God tells him to. He did, I mean.”

  “Did your mom leave him to bring you down here? Or did he leave her?”

  I weigh both possibilities and am horrified to feel my eyes beginning to burn. But Tracy doesn’t seem to notice. It is a relief to have her here, filling up all the usual thinking places in my head with her voice.

  “Them other people still in your house?”

  I swallow and nod, and she goes on.

  “I thought my parents were divorced because Momma said they were and Daddy was living over in Clay’s Corner. But last year he came home, and she decided they were still married, and now he goes back and forth. He had a baby with his girlfriend. When he’s here we all pretend we don’t know, but he took me to see her once. My baby sister. Her name’s Tabitha, like on that old show Bewitched?”

  “It’s in the Bible too. Tabitha.”

  “You read the whole Bible?”

  “Almost.”

  “Well, without TV what else are you going to do?” Tracy looks around with approval. “I can see living like this someday. But with TV. And a phone. Everything kept neat. All your shoes in a box like that. ‘House Rules,’” she begins reading from the list on the refrigerator.

  “That’s nothing,” I say, tearing it off and crumpling it.

  “You got rules and everything,” she says, nodding. “Keeps everybody in line. You got anything to eat?”

  In the refrigerator is a Tupperware container of powdered milk that needs to be shaken up again and a carton of eggs that Phoebe’s already hard-boiled so they won’t go bad. Half a loaf of wheat bread. Two damp boxes of spinach on the freezer shelf.

  “No, you don’t,” Tracy says, looking over my shoulder. “No chips or pop or nothing. Good thing I’ve got some smokes.”

  We climb down out of the trailer-cabin and cross the lawn to the slippery bank. It’s only a little damp, still, and we make our feet flat, then lower ourselves to sit halfway down, leaning our backs into the slope. The river is still brown from all the rain, and there’s a whiff of skunk in the air. Tracy reaches into her tight jeans pocket and pulls out a narrow plastic case shaped to hold two tampons.

  “Your dad didn’t have a baby with someone else, did he?” she says, tapping out a cigarette instead of a tampon.

  “No,” I say, watching the water. It’s moving, but unless there’s a branch or leaf on top, it’s so smooth today you can’t tell.

  “Then maybe he’ll come back. You never know. ‘Nothing’s over till it’s over’ is what Momma has to say about it. ‘Till the fat lady sings.’” Tracy parks the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, reaches into her jeans again, and extracts a pocketknife. She turns her head toward me, cheek resting on the ground. “You got cousins?”

  “No.”

  “None? And no sisters or brothers either. That you know of. All right then.” She flips open the tiny blade, gets to her feet, and stagger-steps down to the river, where she leans over and dips the knife in the current. Then she hikes back up the bank and sits cross-legged beside me. I sit up, too.

  “You know what blood sisters are, right? You just give yourself a little cut on your finger.” Tracy holds up her finger. “Then the other person does it. Then you take your fingers”—she parks the cigarette again and uses both hands to show me—“and mash ’em together. You bleed into each other, see? So then my blood is in your blood, and yours is in mine. And once blood’s inside you, it keeps making more blood, so then we’re blood kin.” She holds the knife out to me, and I test the blade against the tip of my index finger. “If we’re blood kin, we’ll be sisters forever and have to help each other out, and you don’t have any real sisters. You need more people, that’s all. What if your parents get divorced? What if your granny dies on you?”

  I think about Daze maybe dying and press harder, then I bear down on the knife’s tip right into the soft part of my finger until a pearl of blood appears. “Here,” Tracy says. She takes the knife back and presses the tip into her finger, too. “Squeeze it,” she says, and we both do, blood blooming into the whorl of our fingerprints. It’s thinner than I expected. “Now here.” She holds up her finger, I hold up mine, and we press them together. “That’ll do it,” she says, as we separate them again. There’s a warmth in me now, spreading out from my hand, like our blood really could be mingling.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Tracy sucks her finger. “If we’re going to be kin,” she says, “you got to keep that fool grin off your face.”

  We’re still sitting there watching the river when the Pinto pulls in, and Phoebe honks for me. I tell Tracy I have to go, and she tells me to suit myself and taps out another cigarette.

  “Who’s that?” says Phoebe, as we back out of the driveway.

  “A girl who stopped by,” I say. “From the bus.”

  “I don’t like you having people over when I’m not home,” Phoebe says. “But at least you stayed outside.”

  “Her name’s Tracy,” I say. I slip my blood-kin finger into my mouth, and there’s the metal taste mixed in with salt.

  Phoebe swats my hand away from my face. “They brought your grandmother back from the hospital and moved her into special care again. I snuck away during planning period this afternoon to check on her. She’s alert at least. She knew me.”

  “Which brain half was it in?” I ask, thinking of my father’s printout. “Hemisphere, I mean.”

  “What? I don’t know.” Phoebe shakes her head. She has not trimmed her hair in weeks, and the long bob swings under her chin. “Left, I think. It’s her right side that’s wonky. And her speech.”

  At the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center, Phoebe stops by Daze’s apartment and sends me on up to special care on the third floor. I find Daze in a hospital bed, her soft white hair around her shoulders. I’ve never seen her hair down before, even when I’ve spent the night with her. Even during the first stroke. She’s rubbing one pale hand with gar
denia lotion, a flower that smells sweet and sad at the same time.

  “Daze,” I say, and throw myself on her chest to give her a hug. She pats me on the back.

  “Phoebe,” she says, then I draw back and look at her.

  “Charmaine,” I say, laying a hand flat on my chest. She tilts her head to the right, like it’s heavy. The right side of her mouth droops.

  “Phoebe,” she says again, narrowing her eyes with concentration. “No.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

  “Figh.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “No.”

  “Can you write?”

  She looks at her right hand as if she could ask it. Then she reaches out with her left hand and grasps mine, making a bundle of my fingers with a strength that takes my breath. A noise comes from her throat that sounds like “Sorry.” She is clutching my hand so hard that the tips of my fingers turn purple. There are tears in her open eyes, and I feel them in the back of my own throat. I have never seen Daze cry before. She looks trapped inside her body, and I think of the woman in the picture, the body split open, like the person inside has escaped her sinful, limited flesh. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe she’s been torn from her body, separated forever from touching other bodies with it, which maybe was her only real comfort. Maybe the body, like Mrs. Teaderman said about the unconscious, is both prism and prison at the same time. I squeeze Daze’s fingers back as hard as I can.

  Paulette, a nurse Daze likes, pulls back the curtain and sticks her head in. “How’s my favorite patient?”

  Daze moves the side of her mouth, but this time nothing comes out.

  “She’s been asking after you,” Paulette says to me. “I can understand her just fine.” She grabs Daze’s foot. “Can’t I, hon? We start on physical therapy first thing in the morning. Don’t we, hon?”