Mama looked at me with sad, heavy eyes. “Well,” she said softly, “it’s what you wanted . . . isn’t it?”
16
I WAS STRUCK still. With all the time I’d spent thinking about Mama and Ben breaking up, never once had I stopped to guess what it might actually feel like. And it felt as though I’d stepped off a cliff into a deep, black hole.
Mama pushed herself up from the couch. “I’m goin’ to bed,” she said.
It was all I could do to breathe as she shuffled across the rug to her bedroom and clicked the door shut behind her. It was only seven thirty.
Fresh tears overflowed and ran down my cheeks. I shook my head even though there wasn’t anybody to shake it at. Nothing felt right. Not in all my ten years had Mama gone to bed before me. I always went first. And then she’d come in and pat my head and kiss me and tell me she loved me.
My mind slipped from Mama to Ben to Ginger to Lyn to Daddy in a circle that spun round and round and round again, until I felt as if I might throw up. Finally, I couldn’t stand it a second longer.
I tiptoed to Mama’s bedroom door and opened it a crack. There was enough light for me to see her curled on her side, a lonely hump under her navy blue sheet.
I went and kneeled on the floor next to her, and she opened her eyes. “Mama,” I whispered. “You gotta talk to Ben. You gotta tell him this is all my fault and not his. Then he won’t be mad at you anymore and everything will be okay.”
“It’s not that simple. Not for grownups.”
“Then tell me how to fix things. Tell me what to do.”
Mama sighed. “Mistakes are tricky things, Piper Lee. Sometimes they’re easy to fix. But sometimes there’s nothing you can do.”
I’d thought I was all cried out, but the tears sprang up again. “No,” I said. “There’s gotta be a way to fix things. You just have to help me figure it out.”
Mama closed her eyes. “I don’t wanna talk right now, Piper Lee. Just go on to bed and get some rest. Tomorrow’s another day.”
So I went to bed, but I sure didn’t get any rest. I cuddled beside Mowgli, with the sheet pulled over my head and my mind twirling like a Ferris wheel.
I thought about Daddy. I did feel angry at him for dying. But hearing Mama admit she’d felt the same way was a relief. And I thought about Lyn, about who he really was. It gave me goose bumps, lying there in the dark, and I was real glad I’d agreed to meet him at the library and not given out my home address.
I remembered how excited I’d been when I’d stumbled onto the Real Investigations website. But I hadn’t heard from a single person who knew anything about Daddy. Except, of course, for Lyn, who really didn’t know anything about him either. And I had to admit, deep inside, that what Mama had been telling me all along was probably right. That Daddy really, truly was gone.
And the longer I thought about it, the madder I got, because it really had been Daddy’s decision to go up that day. And I felt myself start to let him slip away. And I cried some more. And when my anger finally cried itself out, and I thought just maybe I’d be able to sleep, I threw back the sheet instead. Because I knew it was up to me to fix things for Mama.
I turned on the light and got out a pencil and paper, sat on the floor, and started to write. And as the night wore on, I scribbled and erased and wrote again. And each time the words came out wrong, I quietly crumpled the paper into a ball and started over, until I’d finally written something that I prayed was good enough.
Dear Ben,
I know you’re all riled up at me. You got plenty of good reasons to be riled at me, and now I’m gonna give you one more. But I hope you’ll still read this letter, because it’s taken a long time to write. (It’s almost two in the morning and I started a long time ago.) It’s my fault Tina has been bugging you. I’m the one who told her about you and Mama getting married. I found her number online. I did it a little bit for Ginger but mostly for me. (Please don’t be mad at Ginger. It was my idea.) I thought if you and Tina got back together, then someday if Daddy came back, he and Mama could get back together, too. But now I know that’s not gonna happen. And I know it was wrong to think that way and to do what I did. I’m real sorry.
I’m also sorry I made you and Mama fight. She wasn’t really mad at you. She was just worried about me. She’s been doing a lot of crying since you left. Me too. (And I don’t usually cry very much.) Please don’t be so mad at me that you’re mad at Mama, too. So I hope you will do two things for me. One: call Mama and tell her everything will be okay. She believes the stuff you tell her. Please do it soon. And two: give me one more chance. I am very, very sorry. I promise to be a better kid from now on.
Love, Piper Lee
P.S. Mama did not make me write this. She don’t know about it.
There was one fat tear mark on the bottom of the page. I tried to rub it away, but it smudged and looked even worse. I folded the letter anyway, stuffed it into an envelope, and licked the seal real quick before I could change my mind.
But as soon as I did that, it dawned on me that the letter might take two days to reach Ben. And I knew I’d never survive two whole days of suspense. I wasn’t sure my nerves could take another five minutes. I started to panic, because the only faster thing was to call him, and there was no way I could do that. I’d never be able to think of what to say.
But then I realized I had the words right in my hand. I tore the envelope open and pulled out the paper. Then I crept through the dark living room to the phone in the kitchen. I switched on the little bulb above the stove so I’d have enough light to read by.
Ben didn’t answer until the sixth ring, and his voice was so thick with sleep that it didn’t even sound like him.
“Ben?”
“Who’s this?” he mumbled.
“It’s me,” I said. “Piper Lee. I’m real sorry to wake you up.”
“Piper Lee? You know what time it is?”
“Yes, sir. It’s two o’clock. But I wrote a letter to you, and it’s real important. Will you listen?”
“Right now?”
“It won’t take long.”
He paused and then moaned. “Okay,” he said.
So I rambled through the letter, and when I got to the end, I just stopped. I couldn’t think of anything more to say.
“That it?” Ben asked.
“That’s it.”
“All right, then. Go on back to bed now.”
I wanted to ask what he thought, if he’d agree to call Mama, if he’d give me one more chance. But I didn’t have the courage to ask anything. “Okay,” I whispered. “Thanks for listening.” And I clicked off the light and tiptoed back to bed and to Mowgli and pulled the sheet up over us both.
I slept clear through till nine the next morning. Then I lay there for another half hour listening to the sounds of Mama moving around the kitchen and the clackity-clack of Miss Claudia’s sewing machine. But when the phone rang, my heart about stopped, and I hightailed it to my doorway in time to watch Mama pick up.
I knew it was Ben by the way her face got hard but her eyes got soft. “I’m fine,” she said, hesitating a little, as if she couldn’t quite decide if she should try to sound mad or happy or neither one. “She did?” she said a minute later. “No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Well . . . I s’pose it couldn’t hurt.”
I couldn’t quite guess the conversation by the little bits of words I heard and the long pauses in between, but my imagination was sure going crazy.
“She’s still in bed,” Mama said. She glanced toward my room and our eyes met. “Oh, she is up . . . Hold on.” She held out the phone and said, “Ben wants to talk to you.”
I swallowed. “He does?” My heart started to pound and my hands turned sticky and cold. “Okay,” I said. I forced myself to take the phone. “Hello.”
Ben cleared his throat. “Mornin’, Piper Lee. I was half-asleep last night, but I wanted you to know I was listening.”
“Oh . . . okay.”
“I
’preciate the effort.”
“Okay,” I repeated.
“I took tomorrow afternoon off for the air show,” he said. “But instead of doin’ that, we’re gonna get together and have a talk. Iron some things out . . . all four of us.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and nearly crumpled with relief that it would be all of us and not just him and me.
“All right, then,” he said. “Bye, now.”
And that was it. I put the phone down. I’d honestly forgotten about the air show, but now I looked at Mama and started to cry. “He said we have to talk tomorrow instead of goin’ to the air show.”
Mama nodded. “So he did.”
I fell into her arms, and she smoothed down my hair. “So you called him, huh? How come you did that?”
“To try to fix things.”
“Brave girl,” she said, and I could almost hear a smile in her voice. “I’m proud of you for trying.”
“Did it work?”
“I’m not sure. We both said some pretty hurtful things to each other.”
“Then you both need to apologize,” I said. “That’s what you always tell me.”
“Just whose side are you on, anyway?”
I sniffled against her shoulder. “I’m scared about tomorrow. About what he’s gonna say to me.”
Mama’s chest rose and fell with her sigh. “It’ll be okay, Piper Lee.” But I thought she sounded a little scared herself. “Ginger’s coming over tomorrow morning,” she added. “I guess her regular sitter has the flu.”
“Oh,” I said.
She held me away from her and smiled. “Look at that hair of yours. How ’bout if you go pull it back outta your face and I make us some breakfast?”
The day was long and slow. I stayed in my pajamas until noon and then took a long bath. The evening wasn’t much better. Mama and I didn’t talk much. We sat on the couch and watched an old Western on TV, but I spent most of the time nibbling my thumbnail and staring off into space. All I could think about was tomorrow, and the big talk, and just how much trouble I was in with Ben, and about whether he and Mama would end up back together or not.
Finally I told Mama my belly didn’t feel too good. She put the back of her hand on my forehead and shook her head. “You’re not sick,” she said. “You’re just worried.” She brought me a glass of ginger ale to sip on, then held out her arms. I scooted over and laid my head on her shoulder until it was time for bed.
I lay in the dark, looking out at the smidgen of sky I could see through my window and thinking about Daddy. And that made me feel better than anything else could.
I slept even longer the next morning, and when I finally shuffled out to the kitchen in my pajamas, I was surprised to find Ginger already there.
“Hey, Piper Lee,” she said. “Didn’t think you were ever gonna get up.”
I rubbed my eyes. “What time you get here?”
“I dunno. Eight thirty or so.”
Mama stirred some sugar into a gallon jug of water and then dropped six tea bags over the rim before screwing on the lid. “You were sawin’ logs pretty good when I checked on you a bit ago,” she said.
Ginger wore a purple T-shirt and a ruffly pink skirt. The necklace from Tina hung down her front. I went back to my room to get dressed and pulled my hair back into a ponytail.
“Aren’t you even gonna brush it?” Ginger asked.
I turned to see her standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips.
“You’re s’posed to knock,” I said.
“Brushing your hair makes it look shiny,” she told me.
“I don’t care. And knock before you waltz in.”
“Hey, Piper, can we go fly your glider plane for a while?”
Her question gave me a little pinging feeling in my heart. Today was the air show and I wouldn’t be there. I didn’t especially want to think about planes right then. “No,” I said. “Not now.”
“Then what do you wanna do?”
“Eat breakfast,” I said. But I only said it to shut her up, as food wasn’t too high on my list of wants right then either.
Mama gave me half a grapefruit and a piece of toast. After that she handed me the gallon jug of tea and told us to go put it outdoors in the sun. I carried it out back and set it among Miss Claudia’s flowers. Then Ginger and I plopped down onto the cement steps.
The sun was good and warm, but not too hot yet. Bees hummed around the bachelor’s buttons, and purple spikes of lavender swayed in the breeze. The whole backyard smelled like a perfume factory.
I clasped my hands around my knees and gave Ginger a sideways glance. She tried to reach one of Miss Claudia’s cherry tomatoes without falling off the step. “So,” I said, “did you know I called your daddy?”
Ginger picked the tomato and popped it into her mouth with a look of triumph. “Yeah, we talked all about it.”
“He told you what I said?”
She shook her head. “Said it was just between the two of you.”
“Oh.” I felt a warm rush of thankfulness.
“You sure I can’t fly your glider? Just for a bit?”
I sighed. What difference did it make? “Okay, I guess. It’s upstairs in my top dresser drawer.”
She hopped up. “All righty. Be right back.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And don’t you dare touch anything else in my room, you hear me?”
I glanced up at all the obstacles that my plane could crash into. Trees and electric poles and rooftops, not to mention the apartment building itself.
“Aim it that way,” I directed when Ginger came back a minute later. “And if you land it in a tree, you gotta climb up and rescue it.”
Giving orders to Ginger gave me something to do, and watching the plane perform its graceful swoops and arcs made me feel a tiny bit better. But I couldn’t quit worrying over what Ben was gonna say or do about all the trouble I’d caused. And as the sun moved higher in the sky and the tea turned a dark amber, I knew it must be getting on to noon. “So, was your daddy put-out with you for callin’ your mama?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well . . . is he really put-out with me for giving you the number?”
“Well, ’course. Wouldn’t you be if you were him?”
And that was all it took to flip my stomach inside out.
17
BEN STILL HADN’T shown up by one o’clock. I sat on the living room rug and tried to coax Mowgli into batting his catnip mouse while Ginger watched Little House on the Prairie. I would’ve given my two front teeth to know what Ben was going to do so I could at least prepare for it.
Would he and Mama get in another fight? Would he yell at me? Would he punish me? He probably figured I deserved a licking. Would Mama let him do it? A trickle of sweat ran down my back.
Mama flitted from room to room without seeming to do anything. She scrubbed the kitchen table with a dishrag and then five minutes later scrubbed it again.
The phone jangled at one twenty-four.
I held my breath as Mama answered it. But after “Hello,” she didn’t say anything more, just stood there with a funny look on her face. Her eyes widened as she listened, and her breathing got faster. “All right . . . thank you,” she said. She set the phone down. “Turn to channel four.”
Ginger glanced over from the TV. “Do what?”
“Channel four,” Mama snapped. “Now.”
I’d never heard Mama use that voice with her. Ginger jumped up and grabbed the remote off the coffee table.
The screen changed to a man wearing a headset microphone. A banner at the bottom of the TV scrolled LIVE—GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS FACILITY, and in the background towered the gray stone walls of the prison where Ben worked.
“First of all, Karen,” the reporter said, “this facility is divided into three general areas, or blocks, referred to as J-block, C-block, and L-block, and only C-block is involved in this disturbance. So far, all we know is that when this incident began, approximately th
ree hundred inmates who reside in C-block were in the yard as part of their regular Saturday activities. About ten thirty, an officer’s body alarm sounded in C-block, indicating that an officer was down. Several others responded to the distress call and were confronted by a group of inmates, who overpowered some of the officers.”
Mama sucked in her breath.
I kept my eyes on the reporter.
“At the same time, in the areas where these officers had previously been, the inmates left their housing units and moved up to the C-block corridor. Although the details are hazy at this time, Karen, we do have reports of at least two injured guards and several injured inmates. The prison has been placed on lockdown and will remain that way throughout the disturbance.”
Ginger let out a yelp. “Daddy!” she cried.
Mama’s face was the color of a mushroom.
I turned back to the TV and heard a woman’s voice ask, “Is there any indication as to what might have triggered this disturbance, Charlie?”
“Well, nothing concrete at this point, Karen. But we do know that the Georgia legislature has recently slashed funding for many popular inmate programs, such as college accreditation courses and many sports programs, and there’s been a lot of dissention and unrest because of it. So that’s a likely possibility.”
“My God,” Mama whispered. “Ben was right.”
I was about to ask, Right about what? But as soon as I opened my mouth, Mama put a finger to her lips and pointed back at the TV.
“So what is the plan at this point?” Karen asked.
“Well,” Charlie said, “correctional professionals know that, unlike movie portrayals where a massive show of force is used to overwhelm the bad guys, disturbances such as this one are most often resolved through patient negotiation and interagency cooperation. Local law- enforcement agencies are providing perimeter security at this time, and a command center has been set up by officials of the Georgia Department of Corrections.”
The reporter paused and looked down at some papers in his hand.
A Smidgen of Sky Page 10