by Sarah Willis
He lowers himself onto the faded stuffed chair in the living room, and the three of us sit on the couch. At least he doesn’t pull the easel over. I couldn’t stand the easel right now.
Robert is crying quietly. Megan sits on the edge of the couch, hands gripped in her lap. My fists and throat are so tight they hurt. “Where is she?” Megan asks.
“All right,” he says. “Now listen closely. Your mother has tuberculosis. TB. You’ve heard of it, I know.”
We have. My grandfather died of it, before we were born. My mother’s father. It’s one of the few things I know about him, except that I have his big cheekbones.
“It’s very contagious, which means she can pass it on to us, to you kids. It’s in her lungs. It may have spread. They don’t know how she got it, or why. Maybe from her father. Maybe she caught it as a child but didn’t know it, or it lay dormant and now it’s come back, it’s active. They just don’t know.”
“When will she come back?” Megan asks. I let her do the asking, since she’s doing pretty well at it.
“They don’t know. She’s in a special wing in the hospital, but it’s a small hospital. They want to transfer her to a sanitarium, a place just for tuberculosis patients. There’s one a little over an hour away. There aren’t many sanitariums left, so we’re lucky it’s close. The doctor says they may not take her. They’re not taking new people anymore, but he says someone owes him a favor, and he’s going to try. He liked your mother. Likes. Likes your mother. They could keep her in the hospital, but it would be better for her at the sanitarium.”
“I want her to come home now,” Megan says. “Now!” She says this so firmly, like an adult commanding a small child to sit, that for a moment I think it might work. I’d listen to her.
My father shakes his head. “I want her home too, Megan. But we will have to wait.”
My brother’s crying grows loud. He sniffles and sobs and whimpers all at once. My teeth tighten at the sight of him. “I want to go see her,” Robert says through gasps for air.
“We can’t.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Can’t they just give her a shot?”
“Not really. They have medicine. There is a cure. It’s not like in your grandfather’s age. There is a cure.” He says this obviously trying to convince himself. He’s not convincing me at all.
“You let them take her?” I say.
He shakes his head back and forth before speaking. “No. I wouldn’t let them. I told them they couldn’t keep her. I said it was against the law to … It didn’t matter, what I said, because she wouldn’t … She wouldn’t come back with me. She said it was for us … for our protection. She wouldn’t come home.” He rubs at his eyes with the back of his hands. “She said to give you all a kiss.”
I don’t want his kiss. He could have made her come back. How could she not come back, just long enough to say good-bye? How could she let them keep her there? I am never going to see her again, and she thinks sending us a kiss will help? I hate them both so much I’m shaking.
“It’s all your fault!” I say, thinking it’s all my fault. Because I got her upset by going to church, or maybe God really didn’t want me to show Rusty my breasts. “If you had eyes, you’d have seen she was sick long ago and she’d be better by now. It’s all your fault. All you care about is painting!” I get up and stomp up to my room. But I want to hear what’s happening downstairs, so I turn around and sit on the top step.
“I want to see her,” my sister says.
“Me too,” Robert whimpers.
“Oh Jesus,” my father says. “I wish you could.”
Not me. She can go rot. She didn’t even try to come home first.
She will never come back. She’s gone. We never come back to places we leave.
“The cow,” my father says. “What will I do about the cow? Who will milk the cow?”
“Fuck the cow,” I say, just loud enough for me to hear the word come out of my mouth. It makes me feel better. “Fuck the damn cow,” I say a bit louder.
“I’ll try,” my sister says.
“Thanks,” my father says.
I laugh into my hands. I laugh so hard my stomach hurts. I laugh so hard I can no longer hear my brother crying.
Just after a dinner of boiled potatoes and grilled cheese sandwiches, which I had to make because my mother isn’t here, I walk to the crossroads and up to the top of Valley View Hill. I don’t tell anyone where I’m going. It’s a stunning day. High-rising clouds with impossibly flat bottoms drift across the sky. Red-winged blackbirds skirt from bush to bush, warning each other that I am here. The air is crisp and thin and easy to breathe, a relief from the air inside our house, which is heavy and damp from the puddles of my brother’s tears. He is such a sissy.
I don’t go over into the grassy field; I stay on the road. Where is my mother now? How is she going to protect us? Whose job is that now? Who’s going to stop my brother from crying? My father only knows how to paint. He’s not even a very successful painter. He’s going to make a terrible mother. I’m next in line, but I don’t want the job.
I take a gulp of air and spread out my arms. I run down the hill, right in the middle of the road. As my feet begin to stumble, I launch myself into flight.
With bloody bits of gravel embedded in my skin, I wobble home, numb, and then not numb, to the pain. I have scraped the skin off my chin, my arms, my palms, and from my knees to my ankles. I don’t think I have broken anything, but my skin is on fire.
“Oh my God, what have you done?” my father says as I walk into the kitchen, where they have just finished doing the dishes. His face goes pale.
“I tried to fly,” I say. “I didn’t make it.”
He tells Megan to run across the road for Helen, and for a minute I think, Yes. I need Helen now, but when she comes she’s not carrying a Bible, but iodine and clean cloths. She is followed by Rusty and Brenda. Brenda shrieks when she sees me, and Rusty pales, just like my father. Rusty asks me if I’m okay and I say sure.
Helen tells everyone to leave us alone, go outside. They all file out, looking backwards at me, nearly tripping over themselves. I can hear Brenda asking my father what happened. Then Helen turns on the kitchen faucet.
She fills a metal bowl with warm water. “Just stand there,” she says. “Don’t sit. Can you do that?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“This will hurt,” she says.
I think it can’t hurt more than I already do, but I’m wrong. Helen washes my exposed skin, first just squeezing the water over me, then getting the rag wet again and gently wiping me down. I don’t yell out, but I keep gasping for air that doesn’t seem to ever reach my lungs. When I’m mostly clean, she lightly pats me dry, then anoints me with the iodine, which stings like fire ants, then fades to a dull throb. When Helen is done with me, I look like a bad joke, half orange, half white. Maybe mostly orange. I see my father’s face peering at me through the mesh of screen.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
Helen says yes. He is followed by Megan, Robert, Rusty, and Brenda. He didn’t know they were going to follow him in, and he looks at them with a frown. I figure he imagined a nice little father-daughter talk, with Helen as a wise and patient buffer. But he doesn’t know how to send everyone back out, so they stand around in the kitchen. There’s not much room, but everyone gives me plenty of space, as if my wounds might be contagious.
“You look goofy,” Robert says, and he grins and almost giggles, even though his eyes are still red. I step forward and punch him in the stomach.
Robert yells as if he’s been shot. Helen gasps. Brenda snickers.
“Go right up to your room, young lady,” my father says.
“I’ll go with her,” Helen says.
My father looks like he wants to say no, that he is mad enough at me for my foolishness and my slugging Robert to not allow me even the slight comfort of Helen, but he lost control of everything this morning when my mother decided to
stay somewhere else, and he hasn’t found a way back. Besides, there is no denying Helen. He nods.
Rusty looks at me, a sad, scared look, and I know he feels terrible for me. It helps a little and I try to smile at him. Then I head upstairs.
In my room, Helen tells me to kneel by the side of my bed. This is a mistake, because when my knees hit the floor I holler and straighten back up. Even for God, I can’t do this.
“Just sit on your bed then, Tamara. I’ll kneel for both of us.” She does, then bends her head. “We will pray for your mother first, that God will heal her, both physically and spiritually. Then we will pray for you, to heal you inside and out, just like your mother. You must also ask forgiveness for hitting your brother, and for purposely hurting yourself and your family.”
“I thought I could fly,” I say.
“You know better than that, Tamara. God did not give us wings. Now pray, and open your heart to Our Lord. Maybe you will find Jesus today.”
But I don’t pray. I bend my head and think that maybe I can fly. Maybe I just did it wrong. Maybe I have to start higher up, to catch the breeze. I am also thinking I didn’t hit my brother hard enough by half.
The next day my father gives us the rest of the news.
“Let’s get in the car,” he says, right after the breakfast of cornflakes.
“Why?” my sister asks. She’s getting good at asking questions. Before, she was a dormouse, and now she’s like the squirrels—chatter, chatter, chatter. It’s putting my father off balance; when Megan speaks I can see his body tense up as he braces himself against the kitchen chair.
“We have to go to the hospital.”
“To get her back?” Megan asks. “Good.” She walks to the front door.
“No, no,” he says. “You all have to get tests.”
Megan frowns. “For what?”
“For tuberculosis, stupid,” I say.
Robert starts to sniffle. “I don’t want to have a test.”
“What happens if we have tuberculosis?” my sister says.
My father blinks, opens his mouth, and then closes it. He looks around the small kitchen, then toward the ceiling. “Well … Ahh … You would have to stay at the hospital too.”
He’s expecting a large protest, a slew of complaints, but instead my sister bounces up and down. “Oh, good!” Megan says. “I’ll go pack.” She skips out through the dining room arch and up the stairs.
My father wearily shakes his head. “Oh no.” He looks to me for help. I shrug.
Now he slaps a hand against his forehead. “Oh Jesus, what are they going to think when they see you?”
I am a palette of bright colors: splotches of Windsor orange, permanent mauve, Prussian blue, magenta pink, and Indian red, covering all but a few spots of lightly tanned white, topped with a loose mop of dull brown hair which still retains tarred pebbles from the road. And I’m not quite ripe yet. I have a feeling there are a few more colors to arrive: purples and greens and dark black. I am a mess. Robert is blubbering by the sink.
“So, I won’t go,” I say. “I’ll just stay here so I won’t embarrass you.”
“Just go pack some things for your mother,” he says. “And be quick.”
I kick Robert in the shin as I walk by.
As I pack my mother’s things I think about the fact that my father has begun to say Jesus. He never said that when she was here. I wonder if we are already a bit less atheistic without her to make us “us.”
In the car ride to the hospital I imagine I can’t breathe. My lungs fill with thick, wet air. Sweat drips down from my armpits. I can feel my face flush. I tell myself I’m fine, but it reminds me exactly of how my father insisted there is a cure.
Robert has lost his voice from crying and has finally stopped whining that he doesn’t want to go. Megan sits next to my brother in the back seat, her worn alligator suitcase at her feet.
No one speaks. We learned long ago that if my father does drive, it’s best not to distract him.
I decide to pray.
As we drive into the hospital’s parking lot, my father tells us that we will not be able to see our mother, even though she is right here. My sister doesn’t say a word. She clutches her suitcase in a tight little fist as we get out of the car. My father doesn’t have the energy to tell her to leave it behind.
I have my mother’s things in a paper grocery bag. Her nightgown, slippers, a terry-cloth bathrobe, some underwear, socks, her cold cream, and a cross. I ran across the road to ask Helen for it right before we left. Helen beamed when I asked her and took the one right off her neck to give me. I bet she has a dozen more. I’m hoping my mother might take the hint.
Praying in the car helped me. I don’t feel sick anymore. It was only panic. I’m strong as an ox. I could lift my brother and throw him into a tree.
My father knows where to go and we follow him down a long hall to a small waiting room, where he tells the receptionist our names. We sit in beige plastic chairs, all in a row like people waiting for a bus.
My father looks around the room with a sigh, and I know it is not because we are going to be tested by some doctor who might decide to take us away, but because the waiting room is so aesthetically displeasing to his eyes. The chairs are beige, the walls a faded dirty mint green, the woodwork dull off-white, and the carpet gray. The ceiling lights cast flat puddles of shadows on the floor, taking away any hope of dimensions. He leans his head back and closes his eyes.
Another family is waiting in this small room, all thin, blond, and sad-looking; a mother and a father, each holding a daughter, the girls so alike I think they are twins. No one says a word. I can hear the clock tick on the wall, a thuck, thuck, thuck sound, as if each second is an effort.
There are only two doors, the one we came through and the one next to the receptionist’s frosted window. The window is closed. Blurry beige forms move behind the opaque window, seemingly unconcerned that everyone out here in this room is scared to death.
There are posters on the wall. An enormous set of lungs, with red and blue veins like a road map. Brought to us by the American Lung Association. Several posters are “a service of the U.S. Public Health Service,” which recommends tuberculosis testing. I guess I’ll follow that advice. There is a poster by the National Tuberculosis Association that says it is “fighting for the complete eradication of this disease from the face of the earth.” They are taking the “zero tolerance approach.” I picture well-groomed blue-eyed men in white coats herding everyone with TB together and dropping the H-bomb on them.
A nurse calls in the other family. They all look at each other when their names are called, as if they aren’t sure she means them, then slowly they stand, lowering the twin girls to the floor, who grab their parents’ hands and follow them through the door. Robert has brought his copy of Haunt of Fear. It’s open on his lap to a picture of a man with his skull split in two by an ax, his eyeballs popping out of his head, but Robert seems to have forgotten how to read. He doesn’t turn a single page for the next ten minutes. Finally the same nurse, a very short, heavy woman who is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, calls our names.
“Tamara, Robert, and Megan Anderson?” she says. Of course she pronounces my name wrong. I correct her.
“Yes, yes, here,” my father says.
She opens the door a little wider and waves us in. The other family hasn’t come back out. I wonder where they’ve gone.
We are led into a lab with a wooden chair that has a flat wooden platform where your right arm goes. There are test tubes and syringes and big wide rubber bands on a cabinet nearby.
“You’re the Andersons? For a tuberculosis test?”
“Yes, we are,” my father says. The nurse writes our names down on the test tubes.
“Me first,” Megan says, going straight to the chair and sitting down. She lays out her thin arm, wrist turned up.
The nurse gives a questioning look to my father. He spreads out his hands in a gesture of surrende
r. “Why not?” he says.
“You’re a brave girl,” the nurse says, dabbing at the inside of her elbow with a cotton ball.
“I have tuberculosis,” Megan says.
“Oh my. I hope not,” the nurse says.
“But I do,” Megan says.
The nurse once again looks to my father, who merely shrugs. “Well, let’s just see. We’re going to do a few tests. First a blood test. Have you ever had your blood drawn?”
“Uh-huh,” Megan says. “When I almost died.”
“Oh.” She doesn’t look to my father, obviously knowing there is no help there. She wraps a rubber band around Megan’s upper arm. “Well, you must have survived. So you know what I’m going to do. Do you want to watch or turn your head away?”
“I’ll watch.”
The nurse picks up a syringe. My brother cries out and turns away. I watch, even though I want to turn away. The nurse sticks the needle into Megan’s skin. Blood rises into the syringe. The room wobbles and I wish I were sitting down. This is completely different from sticking myself with a pin. It’s slow, and the needle goes deep inside. When she pulls it back out, a tiny drop of blood forms on Megan’s pale skin, and the nurse presses a cotton ball to it and covers it with a Band-Aid.
“Now just a TB skin test. This won’t hurt much at all.” Once again she wipes Megan’s arm with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol, but this time lower down, between her wrist and elbow, where Megan’s skin is soft and white. She puts a little gunlike thing on Megan’s arm and then pushes a button. Megan doesn’t even blink. “All done,” the nurse says. “Who’s next?”