by Beth Kephart
The smell of fumes is on us. There’s a chemical sky. Behind me I hear the soft howl of air escaping Arlen’s lungs, the push-through-and-forward of his knees, and now we have come to where we are, and we are still going. The pole of pain that was my leg is my arms now, too. It is my hands and fingers, which have hardened into twist and bone. Up ahead, I spy the local trains in their silver gleams, the white rise of the old station, cut as if from marble, the flower seller making her roses—poking the stems into buckets of water and flapping a blanket to the ground, adjusting a sign. Her roses are yellow; they are red.
One block more. Three quarters. One half. Arlen riding the curb cuts like a master. A taxi speeds to the curb and stops, and when the bright door pops apart and the two men get out, I know they are not the thieves of Baby. I know that the woman in the green dress leaning against the yellow-brick of station wall is, likewise, not hiding Baby, nor the man and the woman, cuddled close as they make their way near. I have Baby’s sock in my purse. I have the smell of her in my heart. I have instinct, the mother’s kind. I will know when I am near to Baby.
“Slowing her down,” Arlen calls out from behind. “Brace yourself.” And now we are hitching on the broken-up walk and jouncing hard and jittering near upon the crowd that’s not so much gathered as converging at one of the station’s many glass doors. I hear the squeal of the applied brake behind me and the big slap of Arlen’s shoe on the ground. I hear the second shoe slapping down, and in the tumult and pitch of the almost stop, I cannot hold on. I am heaped upon the walk, smashed down, the front wheel of Arlen’s bike riding the hill of my spine.
Arlen’s on me in a second, his big bat-wingy arms. “Emmy,” he says. “Emmy, I’m sorry.”
Already a trickle of blood has opened high on my elbow and that old man’s loose mutt is quick to my heels. “Get,” I tell the dog, and Arlen smacks it on the rear. And then he puts his arms around me, big and tight. When the mutt starts barking, the old man says, “Come,” and despite all of those who have stopped to stare, despite the shatter of my ankle, the rip-through near my elbow, no one reaches in with help, not one.
“I had to brake,” Arlen says.
“Don’t start with feeling bad. We made it is all.”
I look beyond him to the station door, to the people coming early, the people from taxis. Everywhere is the smell of train metal and speed. I scan the outside crowd for lumpishness, wrong parcels, babies, but I know what’s true: whoever has her is not here in this morning’s sun. It’s a dark thing this one has done; dark keeps to darkness. To the wooden benches lined up like church pews inside the station. To the cool blue corners near the sweet blued walls. On the other side of the sunbeams that the station lets in through its high panes of glass.
Arlen is careful with all the pieces of me. He lifts me upright off the ground, with my bad leg hanging. He tips the sleeve of his jacket toward the blood on my arm, but I put out my right hand to stop him.
“Don’t you spoil that jacket of yours,” I tell him. “You’ve done enough.”
“Known you since last night,” he says. “And look.” Meaning my ankle. Meaning my arm.
“I won’t hear such nonsense talking,” I say. Because what matters now is what happens next. What matters is that we find my Baby before she’s put on a train and taken to where I won’t know enough to follow. The fender of Arlen’s bike is smashed. Its streamers are all crinkled. It looks like a puddle down there on the walk, some other thing needing rescue.
Arlen smoothes his frizzled hair, tugs at his shirt. He pulls a chain and padlock from his trouser pocket and pulls out a key. “Wait for me,” he says, hop-walking me to the stretch of wall where the lady in green stands, unmoving, a patch of warm on her face. I lean against the wall beside her, until I’m certain I won’t fall. I watch Arlen scoop up the bike and weave it to a nearby barrel trash can. He strings some part of the chain through the bike’s front wheel and loops the rest around the barrel, loops and loops it. He takes more time than I wish he would, but Arlen’s very careful. All of a sudden, a white police car with its red blare on is speeding past and my thoughts speed with it—home to Peter and the empty swing, to the sergeant finally finished with his coffee. Gone to our house, maybe. Asking Peter, And your wife? Where is she?
“Where are you going?” the woman beside me asks, in a dreamy voice, as if I’m headed out on some vacation. As if I had not just been thrown from the handlebars of a bike and smashed to the walk far below. As if my left arm and right leg aren’t practically broken—maybe broken. Her cheeks are rouged.
“Something’s been stolen,” I say. “Someone.”
“Hmmm,” she says, and never opens her eyes, and I think that maybe she’s lost something, too, and I look to Arlen, across the way, wrapping the final loop of locking chain around his girl-style bike and patting the back of the trash can.
“Arlen,” I call, “will you hurry up, please?”
“I am going away,” the woman beside me murmurs. “My honeymoon. I’m just standing here, waiting for my honey.”
Honeymoon, I think. Honeymoon. Honey.
I think of Peter at home, in his fury. I think of Sergeant Pierce asking, “And your wife?”
Sophie
The bus roars around the corner, chokes up, shudders, then roars again, and Joey’s gone. I heard his front door slam and his shoes skip the walk, heard Harvey going wild and Miss Cloris calling, “Go out and conquer, Joey Rudd.” Now the day feels wrapped in plastic, and I am trapped on this side of here.
“I’m leaving,” my mother had called up the stairs at the early-shift hour. “Be good.”
“Planning on making it all up to you,” I called back, but if she heard me, she didn’t answer.
“From Nothing to Big Things”—that’s all I’ve got: the title. All this night long, and that’s it, my ode for Mother. “I’ve poured my whole life into you,” she is given to reminding, and it’s been a hard life, too, getting out from under the No Good, our reason for running. “Your mother knows best,” she says when we are on the move again, on the chase or ahead of it, just in front of it. When I was small, I thought the No Good lived in the outsides of things—that night came on because of it, that badness was coming my way. But I have been safe, all thanks to Mother, who aches in the knees on account of all the running we’ve done, in the middle of the night, straight into nothing.
“You know what nothing is?” she’ll ask me. “Nothing is dark light. It’s black noise. It’s the only way I knew to save you.”
I want to give my mother Kepler—the best of him from me. I want to make her misery end, help her toward believing that there’s no use running anymore. The No Good is gone. we lost it. we’re free. Give your knees a rest, I want to tell Mother. Unlock the doors and breathe.
Johannes Kepler was born with the skies in his eyes, I write at last, the first words of the essay. He was born looking up so he could see. I smudge the facts, to make the opening sing, but now I settle into the truths as I find them in the tepee of books on my bed. Kepler was a sick baby, and a poor one, I write on. He was almost a Lutheran and never a Catholic, which wasn’t good where he came from. Still, Kepler was a genius and everyone who met him knew it, and it didn’t take him long at all to become the Imperial Mathematician.
Imperial. My mother will like that.
Outside, Harvey’s going crazy in the alley. I finish my thought and set my pen aside, then run the stairs to the attic. I slide in across the crossbeams and take my place at the window. It’s the crows that have Harvey in a stir, the bunch of them back in the tree, and now I hear Miss Cloris calling, “Harvey, you let those birds be.” She stands on her porch wearing red shorts and a khaki-colored tee, a loose kerchief on her head. She wears a pale-yellow apron and holds a wooden spoon high in one hand, and when she talks to Harvey, she waves the spoon like she’s conducting his circus.
“You get in here, Harvey Rudd,” she says, but the dog pays her no mind, and the crows don’t show muc
h interest one way or the other: they are busy with their tree play. Now when Miss Cloris looks up, toward the tree of crows, her eyes get stuck on me.
“Why, Sophie Marks,” she says. “Good morning to you.”
“Good morning, Miss Cloris.”
“You busy over there?”
“Working on Kepler.”
She swishes her spoon for a second or two, then “Aren’t you an interesting one?” she says.
“Homework,” I tell her. “An essay for Mother.”
“You learning celestial mechanics?”
“Learning Kepler,” I say.
“I like that,” Miss Cloris says. She makes a funny little down strike with her spoon, then smiles wide. “You need a break, you come on over,” she says. “I’m making custard for Miss Helen, and with custard, there’s always extra.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Harvey means to apologize for the noise.”
“That’s all right.”
“I’m afraid that there will be no taming Harvey.”
“Maybe he just likes birds,” I say.
“Maybe that’s so.”
“Maybe he just likes the big outside.”
“Now, that’s the truth. You need a break, you know what to do.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Otherwise, you carry on with Kepler. Perhaps you’ll share your findings when you’re done?”
“You’d like that?”
“Now, don’t get silly with me, Sophie Marks. we like our learning at the Joey Rudd house.”
From Nothing to Big Things, I think. From No One to Someone. It’s a whole wide world out there.
Emmy
I fit my right arm along the long shelf of Arlen’s shoulder and lean in, trust Arlen, let him take us on through the station door. There is jitter in my bones, jitter and weight upon my heart. Up ahead, the station doors open and close, and we are three steps away; we are two.
“You okay?” Arlen asks.
I feel like a fever.
“We should rest a bit,” Arlen says. “I recommend it.”
Through the high-up windows of the station, cones of sun fight their way in.
“Baby has jewels for eyes,” I remind Arlen, so he knows what he is looking for. “Baby smells like Baby.” I see her going back and coming near in the backyard swing beneath the sky above the green ant jungle. I feel the feather touch of her almost hair, sense her head bob on my shoulder. She is near. She must be near. And she is mine, nobody else’s.
“We’ll rest a bit,” Arlen says. “And then we’ll search.”
The clutch of his hand at my waist. The leaned-into ache of his shoulders. I scan the room for Baby. Scan the pews. Scan the sunbeams. Scan the shadows. Where?
From the sour smell of a cardboard box, a kitten pokes its furred head. From the polished wood of the waiting-room pews spill crates and luggage, shoes and hands, a jacket slung and a woman curved, her profile sliced by the sun. There are three girls playing jacks. There is that man with that dog.
“Sit awhile, Emmy. Get your bearings.”
I can’t move without Arlen. I can’t go up and down between the pews, can’t find my way into the blue of shadows nor get near to the farthest corner by the ladies’ washroom, where the secrets of the station spool. On the signboards, the trains are laid out in their order—the name of the train, the departing time, the destination city. Up against one wall runs the slender ticket counter, with the agents lined up behind bars. Beyond the back doors the red caps stand, behind the smoke veil of cigarettes and fuel. Overhead, the speakers blare Washington, D.C.; New York City; Boston; Harrisburg; and here comes the lady in green, oozing up toward the ticket counter. She moves as if the air were made of honey. She carries the blade of a rose in one hand, a yellow rose, and touches the head of a boy in summer plaid; she is alone. When the clock above the signboard clicks 7:47, the station becomes chaos and time.
“No harm,” Arlen says, “in sitting still for just one moment.”
Where Arlen goes I can go. Where he won’t I cannot. Across the farthest distance, near the ladies’ washroom, on the far other side of things, a woman in white paces a short distance. Her skirt swishes. It nicks and swirls. She walks into a sunbeam and out of a sunbeam, over and over again. “Harrisburg,” the blare says. “Last call.” And now again the woman turns, and this time when she does, I see how her arms are shaped into a hollow and how inside that hollow is bounce and tremble. She walks and her skirt swishes. She walks and she bobbles her parcel. She walks and she is nervous, back and forth, and all of a sudden, in the crackle of waiting and watching, I smell Baby. Absolutely.
“Arlen!” I say. “Arlen! It’s her! Her and my Baby!”
I point, and he stares. I point, and he won’t move, and the lady’s skirt swishes in the pearl light of the beamed sun; her arms hold Baby. “Arlen!” I call out. “What’s the matter with you? Look!”
But Arlen won’t move. He shakes his head and says, “That’s just a woman, Emmy, not a thief,” and I say, “Arlen, that’s a woman stealing Baby!” His hand is claw and his arm is pressure. He nooses me into himself.
“You’re seeing things.”
“Don’t do this, Arlen,” I say. “Don’t ruin me and my Baby.” I hop and he holds me, and now with the hand with which I have been pointing, I make a fist and I pound at whatever part of him I can. “Look,” I say, and he squints and I squint, and now the sun is all of a sudden all wrong, leveling a haze down in that far corner.
Arlen says, and I hear the words, and the words are wrong: “Emmy. Love. Listen to me. It’s just your imagination.”
“I saw something, Arlen. I smelled it. Smelled Baby.” Pounding my hand on his chest, pointing in Baby’s direction.
“Emmy, it’s all right. We’ll find her.” He wrestles with me, won’t let me go.
“We already have!”
“There’s no one there. There’s nothing but sun.”
And suddenly I don’t hear the overhead blare. Suddenly the sunspots burn, and the faraway corner is fuzz and blur. A crowd has gathered, and over the sound of Arlen talking, there’s the sound of another kind of hurry. There’s blare in the streets and blare coming through, someone saying my name, Mrs. Rane. “We have a situation, Mrs. Rane.”
“Leave me!” I scream. “It’s her! It’s the thief who has my Baby!” But now it isn’t Arlen’s hands but another pair of hands upon me, and I hear Sergeant Pierce on his walkie-talkie: “Suspect’s been found. We’re taking her in.” I feel my arms pulled back behind me, the slap of two cuffs on my wrists.
“Back off, now. Back away,” the sergeant says, and I can’t see and I can’t feel whomever he is talking to, and I can only hear Arlen, loud, Arlen defensive: “Sir! She means no harm. She is a mother.”
There’s another sergeant and he gathers up my feet. There’s a crowd and it breaks. I am carried from the station like a sling.
Sophie
“It’s the nutmeg,” Miss Cloris is saying, “that makes it special. You ever have nutmeg?”
“Not that I know of, ma’am.”
“Born of a tree,” she says. “The Myristica fragrans. Now, isn’t that some name for a tree?”
“Nice as acacia.”
“Sure is. Here. Have another.”
The custard’s the color of eggs and milk browned over by spice. Miss Cloris baked it and set it to cool inside a dozen dishes, each one no bigger than my palm. I could eat custard all day. I could take a bath in it. Miss Cloris blows a soft whistle up through the puffy parts of her hair and asks me to tell her about Kepler. I pause and think, recite the essay’s first sentence. She whistles again, closes her eyes.
“‘Johannes Kepler was born with the skies in his eyes,’ ” she repeats. “You wrote that yourself?”
I nod.
“Didn’t find it in a book somewhere?”
I shake my head no.
“You know what we call that, don’t you?”
“What?�
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“We call that talent. Here,” she says. “Have another custard.”
I feel my face go red and dig my spoon in deep and let the sweet smooth taste cover my tongue. “Miss Helen’s recipe,” Miss Cloris says.
“Where is Miss Helen?”
“Coming to us when she’s ready, as she does.”
“She isn’t ready?”
“Miss Helen needs her rest, God be blessing Miss Helen.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
On the floor, at my feet, Harvey yips. He knocks his tail against the linoleum tile and lets his tongue fall free. Miss Cloris says Harvey is not a fan of custard. She’s got him busy with a bone. “So what’s next?” she asks. “After your first sentence?”
“ ‘He was born looking up so he could see.’ ”
“Is that a fact?”
“It could have been.”
“My word,” Miss Cloris says, licking her own custard spoon. “Your mother has some Kepler coming. When does she get home?”
“Around five o’clock.”
“How much more essay writing are you planning on?”
“Some.”
“We’re not here to interfere with your learning, Sophie.”
“You’re not, Miss Cloris—I promise.”
I look away from her and around the room, take notice of the pictures on the high parts of the walls—painted cardboard cutouts inside boxes. It’s Alice big and small. The Queen of Hearts. The White Rabbit. The Walrus and the falling Humpty Dumpty. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
“My Wonderland dioramas,” Miss Cloris explains without me asking. “It’s a bit of a fetish.”