“Leave him alone, Mama,” Anna says. And for a moment, the old Anna—Cameron—is there, looking at Daddy, her face all bunched up with worry. But then, just as quickly, she frowns, sucks her teeth at him and turns back to her schoolbooks. At night, Anna says If I ignore him, he’ll go away. Like a rotten tooth.
Where will he go? And I’m scared suddenly. Scared that Daddy will disappear as quickly and as permanently as Denver did.
And Anna shrugs, glares at me and says Who cares. He ruined my life!
Now Mama looks over at Anna and frowns. “I’ll leave all of you alone!” She slowly puts on her raincoat, slips her Bible and some plastic-covered Watchtower s and Awake!s into her shoulder bag, and leaves.
I stare past Daddy’s shoulder out the window. Outside, Mama takes the magazines out of her bag and walks slowly, holding them up to people she passes. The people shake their heads or ignore her. Their eyes flickering pity or disdain. Some look straight ahead like Mama’s not even there.
Something’s gone dead on Mama’s face, like some part of her is remembering that this isn’t who she always was. That she was once a teacher. That her students loved her. At the end of the school year, students would put so many apples and “World’s Best Teacher” statues and mugs and T-shirts on her desk, we’d have to come help her carry all the stuff home.
She holds the magazines in front of her now. Maybe she thinks they’ll keep the memories from coming. Hello. May I bring you some good news today? she says to the people she passes.
My father takes my hand and pulls each finger gently. He looks up at me and smiles. “Evie,” he says, shaking his head and sighing. “My sweet copper piggy.”
“Penny!” I say, looking at him sideways, not sure if he knows he’s made a mistake.
But then he smiles slowly and pulls my pinky finger. “And this little penny stayed home,” he says, winking at me.
Then I laugh, relieved. He and I stare out the window, our shoulders touching. He needs a bath. But beneath that smell, there is the smell that has always been Daddy.
“I’m glad Randall and Dennis went to jail,” I whisper.
My father pulls my head to his shoulder and sighs. The rain falls and falls. Mama holds the Watchtowers up a little higher and walks on.
The walls in Mama’s classroom are covered with photographs of her students. Not the regular class pictures, but pictures of them with their families, them on bikes and roller skates, in swimming pools and on swing sets. In the photos the kids are always laughing. Sometimes they’re looking at the camera and sometimes they’re not. I walk slowly along the walls while Mama teaches. Her students watch her, listen intently, ask questions, sneak looks at me. “Mrs. Green—is that really your daughter?” they ask when Mama stops for a moment and says, “I know you have questions about that girl walking around the class, so go ahead and ask them!” She smiles when she says this, gives me a sly look. I feel grown-up—like me and Mama are in on some secret the rest of the kids are too young to understand. In a week I’ll be thirteen and everything—good and bad these days, seems to make me cry. Mama calls it “the tears of thirteen,” tries to get me to laugh at how easily the tears come. This afternoon she’s taking me shopping for a birthday outfit. Outside, the sky is blue and cloudless. Mama’s students look at me in wonder, their mouths slightly open. “Mrs. Green,” a boy with brown hair and glasses says, “she only looks a little bit like you.” I lean against the wall of pictures and fold my arms. Their faces reveal their love for Mama—the way their eyes fill up with pride when she singles them out for something good, the way they look away in shame when she scolds them, the way they rush to be the student standing closest to her when she calls them over to a map spread out on her desk. I look at Mama and feel a rush of pride and love so deep, I have to tilt my head back to keep the tears from coming.
15
TOSWIAH’S DRESS IS GREEN AND TIGHT AND comes down past her ankles. It is sunny out, cold but not freezing. When she starts walking toward me, the dress seems to float out behind her. Lulu had a dress like that, and when Toswiah’s dress lifts up in the wind, tears start stinging. I bite my bottom lip and look away from her, but she keeps coming.
“You said you had a cousin named Toswiah? What was she like?”
Her voice isn’t mean when she asks this, just curious. And for the first time, I think that maybe she believes me.
I shrug. “She was nice,” I say, thinking of Lulu. “I miss her a lot.”
“She doesn’t visit you?”
“Uh-uh.”
Toswiah lets out a loud breath. When I look at her, she’s taking in the whole school yard, like the answers to everything are out there somewhere.
“Well, why the hell not?”
“Her mother and my mother are sisters. But they don’t speak. They had a fight a long time ago about I don’t know what. And that was the end.” I look at her and pull my lips to the side. The lie comes as easily as water.
“My mom has a sister that lives down South. She can’t stand her,” Toswiah says. “Grown-ups can be so stupid. That’s your sister, right?” She points across the school yard to where Anna’s standing with two other girls.
I nod.
“My sister’s retarded,” Toswiah says. She looks at me, one eyebrow raised.
I smile. “I think mine is, too.”
Toswiah shakes her head. The dress blows up a little, and she flattens it down against her legs with both hands. “No. I mean really retarded. Only everybody calls it ‘developmentally disabled.’ Only that’s too long to say. She’s seventeen.”
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. We stare out at the school yard without saying anything.
After a moment, Toswiah says, “Well, I’ll see you later.”
I lift my hand and wave at her even though she’s standing close enough to touch.
“See you later.”
She stands there another minute like she’s waiting for me to say something else.
“Thanks,” I say.
“For what?”
I shrug and sort of smile. “For, you know. Coming over to talk to me.”
Toswiah looks at me for a long time. “Whatever,” she says. Then slowly walks away. When she gets halfway across the school yard, she turns and waves back.
I watch the wind lift her dress up around her ankles. It’s a warm wind, gentle. I feel it in my hair and against my ears. Maybe it’s a warm front. Coming in from Colorado.
16
ON SUNDAY, MY MOTHER GOT UP EARLY AND started fussing about me and Anna not going to Kingdom Hall enough. Anna put the pillow over her head and cursed. I sat up in bed and stared outside. Christmas lights flashed from people’s windows. We would not be celebrating Christmas this year or any holiday in our mother’s house ever again.
On Thanksgiving, Mama made lasagna and thanked her Jehovah for giving us another day. We ate the lasagna quietly, listening to Mama preach about how worldly holidays were wrong. I don’t know how celebrating the fact that Pilgrims and Native Americans stopped fighting long enough to sit down and eat a meal together is a sin in God’s eyes, Anna had said. I had never been a big turkey fan, but I missed Thanksgiving, missed all the people who stopped by to eat dinner or dessert with us and wish us a happy holiday. I missed us putting up lights two days after Thanksgiving and me and Anna fighting over how we’d hang them.
Now I stared out the window, wondering if those houses with lights had trees up already and if there were presents under them. The Christmas before last, I’d gotten so much stuff, I thought I’d never stop unwrapping. Most of it was still in Denver somewhere. Stuffed animals, games, clothes, gone. Even the ring Daddy had given me with TOSWIAH engraved into the gold.
I bit my lip, feeling the tears coming on. Don’t think about the past, Anna said. Just the far, far future. The sky was overcast. We’d been here over a year and I still didn’t know if that meant rain or snow. The windows rattled, which was a sure sign that it was freezing o
utside. I climbed out of bed slowly and stuck my feet into the ugly pink bedroom shoes Mama had gotten us.
“Get up, Anna. You hear Mama fussing. You know this means we gotta go to Kingdom Hall today.”
Anna groaned and rolled over toward the wall. Her side of the room was neater than mine. There were pink frilly things on her dresser and posters of musicians on her side of the wall. I didn’t listen to much music anymore.
“You stay in bed too long, you know she’ll pick out your outfit.”
Anna rolled back over and opened her eyes. “I hate this life!” she said. “Hate it!”
“Far, far future,” I said. Anna glared at me.
Every now and then Mama started making noise about how we’d all be destroyed in Armageddon if we didn’t straighten up and fly right. The first time she said it, Anna said It’d be better than what I have now, and Mama fussed at her for so long, I’m sure Anna was sorry she’d ever opened her mouth to say anything. Ever since then, Mama only once in a while made us go to Kingdom Hall. But when she did, there was no arguing with her about it.
I went over to the closet and pulled out a green wool jumper. Women weren’t allowed to wear pants at Kingdom Hall because the elders said it was being disrespectful to God—which made no sense to me. I mean, Eve was hopping around the Garden of Eden naked and God didn’t seem to be mad about that. I didn’t believe a whole lot that the religion said, but sometimes they hit on something that made me go “Oh.” Like once, this guy was giving a sermon about the Ten Commandments. I’d never really paid attention to them before, but when he was reciting them, they made sense—I mean, basically, they’re just saying be nice to people if you want people to be nice to you. It made me wish I hadn’t pointed to Carla’s lice-filled head all those years ago—giving her a first-class ticket to cootie-land.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe you go back to the dust after you die—that it’s like you never were. They believe a few people go to heaven and some go to the New World that God’s gonna create after He gets tired of how messed up this one is. No hell, though. Heaven, New World, or dust—those are your options.
Toswiah and Cameron? Dust. Evie and Anna? New World. Daddy? Already living in another religion’s hell. Mama? Heaven? Who knows.
Mama says in the New World, there won’t be any more hatred or disease or floods. She says the animals will all be friendly. You’ll be able to pet snakes and hug lions, she says, her eyes getting bright.
I pulled a dark green turtleneck off the hanger, got some underwear out of the drawers that Anna and I shared—she had the two top ones and I had the two bottom—then headed off to the bathroom, mumbling good morning to Mama and Daddy as I went past.
Our bathroom here is tinier than the downstairs half-bathroom we had back in Denver and three times as small as the upstairs bathrooms. I’d never thought of us as rich when we lived there, but now I know we had it good. I closed the door, pressed my head against the cool mirror glass and sighed.
When I came out, Daddy was sitting at the window, eating a bowl of oatmeal. He looked over at me and smiled.
“Your sister up?” Mama asked. She was pouring pancake mix from a box into a white plastic bowl. In Denver, all her mixing bowls had been the good kind, made out of glass. Here, everything except Daddy’s oatmeal bowl seemed plastic and cheap and temporary.
I nodded and took another step before stopping. “Mama,” I said, turning slowly toward her. “It’s all wrong, isn’t it?”
Daddy put his oatmeal bowl down in his lap and stared out the window. I swallowed. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.”
Mama poured water into the batter and stirred. “What’s guaranteed, Evie?”
I shrugged.
“Nothing’s guaranteed, honey. Nothing. If someone tells you something is, don’t believe it.”
“But I thought—”
“Did you thank Jehovah for allowing you to wake up this morning?” Mama asked.
Anna sat down across from me at the kitchen/dining room/den table and made a face. She was wearing a wool skirt that stopped at her ankles and a light blue sweater that looked about two sizes too small. Where I’d gotten taller over the year, Anna had just gotten bigger—not fat, but every part of her body seemed to be “blooming into womanhood,” as Mama liked to say.
Mama sat down next to me and put a plate of bacon in the middle of the table. I looked at her sideways. Every day I hoped that she would say “Psyche your mind. I was just kidding about the God stuff,” but it never happened. If anything, she got holier.
“Well, did you? Either of you?”
“I did,” I lied.
“Yeah,” Anna said. “Me, too. Like I do every day.” Mama raised an eyebrow at her but didn’t say anything.
Anna took a bite of bacon.
“Are you going to say the blessing?” Mama asked.
Anna bowed her head. “ThankyouJehovahforthis foodandallotherblessingsamen.”
I laughed, then covered my mouth with my hand.
Mama took a sip of her coffee. “I don’t think it’s asking a whole lot to be thankful for what we have,” she said quietly, looking from me to Anna. “Sometimes I think if we’d been more thankful—more aware of what we had in Denver—things wouldn’t have ended the way they did.”
Anna and I looked at each other but didn’t say anything. My mother hardly ever mentioned Denver. When she did, we knew we’d taken something too far.
“I think the road back is a narrow one,” she said. “A part of me believes that if we do everything right, we can have it again.”
“But we can’t ever go back there.”
“Not Denver,” Mama said. She looked over at my father sitting by the window and lowered her voice. “The happiness. It’s not always going to be like this.”
It all seemed too vague. I wanted definite. Either we got back to Denver or we didn’t. Either we were happy or we weren’t. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that their religion is the true one and that they’re the chosen people. Well, that’s what I wanted—the truth. Who were we really? And why? Why had this had to happen to us? Why couldn’t someone else’s daddy have witnessed the murder?
“What about babies?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. “With this Armageddon thing, the end of things that you always talk about, will babies get destroyed, too—because they can’t walk, so they can’t go out in field service and pray and stuff?”
Mama frowned at me, checking my face to see if I was messing with her. I wasn’t. We could start at the beginning—the basics. Who was this god of hers, anyway? Why would He want to destroy babies—and families?
“Jehovah can see into people’s hearts,” Mama said. “He knows who’s who and who’s going to be who.”
“How come He didn’t give Hitler a disease or something?” Anna asked. “To keep him from killing all those Jews? Or what about the people who killed Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedys? And Malcolm X? What about those guys? Or like when—”
“Or what about us?” I yelled. “What about us? What did we do to deserve this?!”
Mama shook her head. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. He has His plans and it’s not for us to understand. There’s a reason why we’re here. We just don’t know it yet.”
She bit her bottom lip, her eyes glazing over. After a moment she blinked and looked from me to Anna. In that split second, I saw her again—the lady I used to know in Denver. My mother.
“You’re strong,” she said. “You’re both so strong.” She bit her lip again. “My strong, strong daughters . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I don’t want to be strong!” Anna said. “I just want . . . I just want to be who I am! Who I always was!”
Mama smiled. It was a small smile, but I saw it. I remembered it. From a long time ago.
“No one can take that away,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. A moment passed before she added my sister’s name. “Cameron.”
Anna and I looked at her, ou
r mouths open. How long had it been since I’d heard that name coming from her mouth? I blinked slowly. When I looked at Mama again, her eyes were far off and she was our new mother again. But Anna was smiling.
Mama’s Bible was sitting beside her plate. She picked it up and begin reading. “ ‘Even though I walk in the valley of deep shadow, I fear nothing. . . .’ ”
“I need new running sneakers,” I said.
Mama ignored me and kept reading. “ ‘Surely goodness and loving-kindness will pursue me all the days of my life.’ ”
“I think God will see it loving and kind of you to let me get a good day’s sleep. So I should be able to get right back to bed now instead of—”
“You’re coming today, Anna,” Mama said. “You just got new sneakers, Evie.”
I bit the inside of my lip. It felt like the moment when she said Anna’s old name had never happened.
“They’re too heavy.”
“Too heavy for what?”
“They make my knees hurt,” I said quickly. This wasn’t a total lie. What I had were cross-trainers, and even a nonprofessional like me knew real runners had real running shoes, not cross-trainers. Cross-trainers would definitely mess up your knees if you ran too much in them.
Anna frowned at me. A “Yeah, right” frown. A “What are you up to now?” frown.
“And plus,” I added, “they feel too tight now.”
“We’ll get you new sneakers, then,” my father said from the window.
“I need new sneakers, too,” Anna said.
“You can have mine. I hardly wore them.”
“Yuck!” Anna took a tiny bit of bacon and glared at me. “I don’t want your skanky sneakers.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you two,” Mama said. “Just eat and hush.” But there was a small, proud smile at the edge of her mouth.
I watched our father staring up at the overcast sky as if some big answer was about to drop out of it into the empty bowl on his lap. He was disappearing. Sitting at the living room window, but disappearing. The papers Mama had brought home were piling up beside his chair. She had opened them to the want ads. They lay there, right where she had left them. Untouched.
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