by Beth Kephart
“Can I get you something?” I ask.
“We’re out of supplies,” she says, as if I hadn’t been telling her the same thing now for days.
“A glass of water?”
“That would be fine. Except I used up all the ice.”
“A glass of plain water,” I say. “Coming right up.”
It’s enough to bring her back into the room, toward the La-Z-Boy. I help settle her in, then head for the kitchen.
“Sophie?” she calls.
“Yes?”
“Run the water until it’s full-force cold.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Make up new ice.”
I blast the water and fill the empty ice-cube tray, slip it into the cave of the freezer. I fill her glass, shirt-dry its bottom, present it to her like it’s something special—a magic potion for the queen in her throne. I think of Joey outside, looking for me in the window. I think of Harvey and how he’s gone suddenly quiet. I would give anything for Rapunzel hair, or even a mother who works the shifts she’d promised.
“Now,” she says, “where were we?” She drinks and swallows loudly. She touches the tower of books with her hand, looks confused. “Archimedes?” she asks. “Icosahedrons?”
“Actually, Kepler.”
“That’s right.”
“I wrote a paper.”
“Now I remember.”
“Would you like for me to read it?”
She swallows the last of her water, sighs. “Another time,” she says, “when I’m a bit stronger.”
We stay silent then—Mother sitting, me standing, the tower of books at her side. Across the alley, they’re waiting on Cather. They’re also waiting on my Kepler.
“Am I inconveniencing you?” she asks after a while.
“I’m sorry?”
“The look on your face, Sophie. Somewhere between boredom and torture. You’d think after all I’ve done for you, you could at least …”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I haven’t finished.”
“Forgive me, Mother.”
She stops, throws up her hand, closes her eyes. “Do what you will,” she says at last, surrendering. Her lips are so thin, so gray-blue. She fits one hand to her worse knee.
“What do you need?” I ask her.
“Some sleep,” she says. “Uninterrupted.”
“All right.”
“We’ve got half the town library sitting on that table,” she says, sleepy. “If you’re bored, it’s your own fault. The whole world’s right there.”
“Right.”
“Right?” But the fight’s gone from her, and the train is soon coming, and I know to wait for it, to throw it nowhere off its tracks. I lift the empty water glass from Mother’s hand, set it down beside the tower. I steal a story for myself, the thinnest book. I climb the stealthy outside of the stairs, but by the time I reach my attic space, the alley beyond is empty.
Emmy
Dr. Brightman says, “Take a seat.” I am on the wheeled chair, already sitting. He says, “EmmyRanesitdownrelax,” without looking up to see me. Bettina stays. Granger goes. I wait for Dr. Brightman to take his eyes off the papers on his desk and release me.
“Relax,” he repeats.
The wall of my stomach against the strap of the wheeled chair. Bettina at the window, staring.
“Twenty-three,” Dr. Brightman says.
“Twenty-three what?”
“Twenty-three days since admission. Four hours out of the infirmary. How are we doing?”
I say nothing. I am not well. He must release me.
“Nervous breakdown and delusions,” he says, reading from the chart. “Mrs. Rane?”
“Yes?”
“How are we doing?”
“Dr. Brightman,” I say.
“Yes?”
“I’m Emmy Rane.”
“That is correct.”
“There’s been a mistake. I should not be here.”
I comb my fingers through my hair to make it neat. I fix the string tie at my neck and sit up proper. If he sees who I am, he will release me. If he understands. Any mother would cry for the want of her baby. Any woman would hate Peter with all her might. Dr. Brightman moves a stack of papers onto another stack of papers. He fiddles around in his shirt pocket, and now here is a pair of horned-rim glasses. Dr. Brightman is an ugly man. His hair is the wrong color. His hair is painted.
“You’re having trouble settling in?” he asks.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve had an episode?” he says. “According to Bettina?”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine.”
“Of course, sir, I am not fine. Someone is out there with my baby.”
“Grave inconsistencies,” he says. And then he writes it down.
He wears a watch, its face like the moon. He scratches his forehead with a sausage finger. Outside, beyond the office door, someone is screaming. On the freedom side of the window, the sun is crinkling. “Perhaps we were premature,” he says, “in releasing you from the infirmary. Do you think you need more time, Mrs. Rane, in the hospital environment?”
“I do not,” I say. “I do not need any more time here at all. What I need is to go find my baby.” I pull at the chair’s leather strap with my one good hand. I kick at the chair with my casted foot. I think about Autumn, crying when they piled me into the chair, when they leather-strapped me to it. “Don’t do it,” she was saying. “Don’t take her. I can save her.” How much time has gone by? Who has been watching? Who is out there, in the woods, on the streets, in the alleys, behind the trees, looking for my baby?
“Bettina?”
“Dr. Brightman?”
“I’m recommending the cleanse.”
“The cleanse, sir?”
“The cleanse,” he repeats. “And we’ll resume the lorazepam. We’ll see if that helps, before we return her to infirmary.”
“Sir.”
“Mrs. Rane,” he says, speaking now to me. “This is a team effort. We are at work on your behalf.”
“Someone has my Baby.” I say it quiet. I say it without kicking. I do not pull at the leather strap. I am well. I have my reason.
“I’ll write a scrip,” he says. “Send it to the pharmacy.”
Sophie
The minute she drags herself across the walk and chuffs down the street, I’m gone—the door slamming behind me, my feet on the slate, my fist against the Rudds’ door, pounding.
“What is it, love?” Miss Cloris asks, stepping back, as if I might keep pounding, door or not, even if Harvey’s home, prowling, protecting.
“I was just wondering,” I say, “if you could use a visit.” Beside Miss Cloris, Harvey goes up on his back feet like a dancer, then flops back down. He looks me straight in the eyes, lets his tongue fall loose.
“We could always use a visit,” Miss Cloris says. She wears a striped shirt, the purple and red stretching longwise, over a pair of nubby stretch pants. There’s a belt around the barrel of her waist—thin and silver-glittered.
“Can I come in, then?”
“You can.”
“Thank you, Miss Cloris.”
The air behind her smells of butter, sugar, chocolate. There’s a finger stroke of white across her face. She lets me into the first room, then leads me to the kitchen, pulls out a chair, raises an eyebrow. “You’re just in time,” she says, turning to the counter behind her and piling cookies on a plate and nodding so that I’ll take one. It’s sweet melt and chocolate chunk. It almost hurts, my hunger.
“It’s the Toll House,” she says. “Just made.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Some milk?” she asks.
I nod.
She pours me a quick glass of milk, which fringes to the top with bubbles. She takes an apple from a basket, some crackers from the pantry, a block of cheese from the refrigerator door. “Might as well turn this into a party,” she says, and now Minxy arrives from around the
corner, snaking her tail and leaping, with no trouble, onto the space above my knees.
“I didn’t mean …,” I start.
“I’ve been wanting to taste that cheese,” she says, “since I brought it home last Tuesday from the market.” She cuts herself a sliver and puts the whole thing in her mouth. She cuts me a wedge and insists.
“We’re one shy of a full morning deck,” she says, slipping out of the kitchen, around the corner, up the stairs. I cut another wedge of cheese, sandwich it between two crackers. I drink through the bubbles of milk. Finally I hear Miss Cloris on the stairs, and by the time I get to the clean front room, she’s halfway down, Miss Helen scooped into her arms like a child. Harvey rushes their ankles faster than I can catch him. When I call him, he listens—lowers his ears and lets the ladies pass.
“I heard we have some company,” Miss Helen says. Her voice is small and tired. They reach the bottom of the stairs and stop, Miss Cloris lowering Miss Helen into her special chair. She straightens, combs her fingers through Miss Helen’s hair. Now Miss Helen sits and Miss Cloris rolls her and Harvey yips and when they get to the kitchen and are arranged at the table, everyone gets a slice of cheese, even Harvey, who they let me feed with my fingers. Miss Helen tests a cookie—breaks off a piece of a piece, closes her eyes. “You outdo yourself,” she tells Miss Cloris, but it’s as if Miss Cloris isn’t even listening. She’s watching Miss Helen, shadows beneath her eyes, and I think, and then I know, that Miss Helen looks smaller since the last of my visits. How many days? She looks smaller and Miss Cloris looks sadder, and suddenly Minxy is back and leaping to my lap, and I feel my stomach start to ache.
“Is she better now?” Miss Helen asks me.
“Ma’am?”
“Your mother. Joey mentioned …”
I nod. It’s the best I can do.
“You must be a very fine nurse.”
“I’m actually no kind of nurse.”
“I am surrounded,” Miss Helen sighs, “by excessive modesty.”
We spend the afternoon on an utmost urgent; that’s what Miss Cloris calls it. She goes away, then comes back and says, “We start with doweling rods.” Now she’s measuring them out—one sixteen inches, the other twenty-four, according to her metal ruler—making a Magic Marker line at both sticks’ cutting spots before she knives in and snaps off. When she’s done, she rules the sticks out again, putting another mark halfway up the short stick and a third up the long, and when that’s done, she holds the two sticks like a cross where the blue dots meet and ties them together with string. Next she notches the sticks’ ends, and Miss Helen sighs, and I watch, and I think how sure Miss Cloris is, how nice and neat each cut, and I remember my icosahedron on the kitchen table, not half as nice, not an utmost urgent, Archimedes leading to Kepler leading to silence and my mother sick, and all these days passing, and by the time I finish that thought, Miss Cloris has gone notch to notch with the string and is tying a double knot back up top, and Miss Helen is tired but eager.
“Now,” Miss Helen says, “for the fun part.”
Miss Cloris goes away and returns with a big cardboard box, which she plonks down to the kitchen floor, scooting Harvey off, but just for a second. “You’re such a pooch,” she tells the dog, pulling his snout out of her way, unlocking the box flaps and digging in. “Ah, it is here,” she says, dragging a big sheet of electric-orange fabric up to the table, which Miss Helen, sliding plates and glasses to one side, has made nearly clear.
Miss Cloris smoothes the fabric and lays the wood frame down upon it. She cuts it to the pattern and hands me a bottle of Elmer’s. “Outside edges,” she says, pointing to the orange diamond, and I squeeze the bottle and smear the glue along the fabric’s borders. I check with Miss Cloris, to see how I’m doing. She says, “Don’t go shy on the Elmer’s.” when I’m done, she leans in and shows me what’s next—how the orange diamond with its edge of glue is to be pressed to the lengths of string that connect the sticks. I do as she says, and Miss Helen encourages me, until finally the glue and the diamond edge and the string are one thing, and meeting Miss Cloris’s satisfaction. She lifts what we’ve made, holds it high.
“Picture this,” she says, “in the sky,” and I remember, a long time ago, in a drive from one house to another, seeing a kite on the end of a string, knocking around in the wind. I didn’t understand how the kite had gotten there or how it kept its distance from the ground, and I must have asked a million questions, because the next week, when we were settled, Mother came home from the library with a stack of kites-in-stories books. The Sea-Breeze Hotel. The Dragon Kite. The Flyaway Kite. “Kites are better in stories,” she said, “than they are in actual life.”
“Now comes the best part,” Miss Helen is saying while Miss Cloris knots what we have so far with more turns and strengths of string. “The very art and heart of the thing.” She clears the table, best she can. Miss Cloris stoops to the box on the floor. When she stands up tall, her arms are full—of collars and shirtsleeves and buttons.
“That’s almost every dress she ever wore,” Miss Helen says, smiling. “Before she decided against dresses. We had a scissors party. It was …” Miss Helen writes into the air with a finger, as if she’s tracing the word she’d like to say but can’t find the voice for it quite yet.
“Exquisite,” Miss Cloris says, finishing the sentence, after a while. She stoops again and straightens again, her arms heavy with more scraps and ribbons and pins and threads. “Now it’s your turn,” she says, looking at me. “You’re in charge.”
“In charge?”
“Of the tail of this kite. Make it anything you please.”
I stare at Miss Cloris and her pile. I look back toward Miss Helen, who has left the trace of her word in the air.
“It’s Joey’s birthday coming up, a few months from now,” Miss Cloris says. “It’s up to you to make the tail right nice.”
“The kite’s a surprise?”
“It’ll be Joey’s surprise. We’ll drive out to Carter, choose a place on the hill. we’ll have him close his eyes until we get the thing flying high. That’ll be our job, see? Yours and mine. Miss Helen will keep him occupied, make sure he stays true to the rules.”
“That’s nice,” I say, but suddenly my eyes are hot and everything’s swimmy, and where my hunger was my heart is hurting.
“Now, now,” Miss Cloris says, leaning toward me, concerned. “What’s this about? It’ll be a happy day. You’ll see.”
“I can’t go kite flying, Miss Cloris,” I say, my breath sucking away.
“We need four for the plan, dear, for Joey’s birthday. We’ll explain to your mother, if that’s your trouble.”
“No,” I say. “Please! Can’t explain it to my mother.” I must have shouted a little, because now Harvey’s barking and Minxy’s on the prowl and Miss Helen and Miss Cloris are looking at me funny, as if they don’t know how to turn my crying off, as if this is the actual utmost urgent.
“It won’t be for a while yet,” Miss Cloris says at last, quieter than I’ve ever heard her. “An open invitation, if you can swing it. No deciding right now. There’s still some time for thinking on it.”
“Thank you, Miss Cloris.”
“Now, what about the kite tail?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You still up to that?”
I sniff and nod.
“Any color you want, any texture, any knotting. That is the beauty and the art of the kite tail, like Miss Helen says. It’s not supposed to be anything, so you can make it all you want.” She works through the fabric pile, turns a button with one hand. She pulls a collar from the mess of things. “Remember this?” she asks Miss Helen, and I can tell she’s asking for my sake, covering up for my tear burst, making room for me to recover.
“Pure puffery,” Miss Helen says, going along with Miss Cloris’s plan. “Made you look like a rooster on the prowl.”
“And you loved me despite it.”
“I loved you a
lways.”
They talk like that, back and forth, about the ugly collar and the girly sleeves and the other things Miss Cloris used to wear that now she doesn’t, and how it was when they took two pairs of scissors to the old dress pile and chopped the whole thing into scrap pieces. They go on as though I’m not here, as though it’s a private place, me at their table, working through a kite tail in my head. I want to say I’m sorry for the shouting. I want to say I’m sorry for not explaining. I want to say, my mother and me, we’re out-running the No Good, but I cannot do a thing. I just sit here trying to breathe, and now Minxy comes back toward my lap and leaps as if my knees are the world’s softest pillow, as if I have been forgiven, as if I can figure it out—how these scraps make a tail.
By the time Joey comes home, I am recovered and the kite’s in hiding, with its long Rapunzel tail. “Now, that’s making quite a statement,” Miss Helen said before Miss Cloris wheeled her away to the back room.
Miss Cloris cleaned the kitchen of its cotton scraps, hid the kite somewhere upstairs, came back down and sat with me, drumming her fingers on the table. Finally she asked if I knew anything about making sand tarts, and when I shook my head no, she said, “Never harmed anyone, making two batches of cookies in a single day.” Five things, she told me, is all that we’d need—the butter, which she’d have to soften; the vanilla extract, which I found in the pantry; the confectioners’ sugar; which is the snow version of sugar, the flour, a softer snow than sugar; and pecans, minced down to nothing. We kept our voices low, and Harvey behaved. we pressed the sweet dough into star shapes, ate the morning’s chocolate chips while we worked. “Forty-five minutes at two-seventy-five,” Miss Cloris told me when the trays were oven-ready. “Miss Helen likes them brown around the edges.”
We set the timer after that, cleaned up the kitchen. We talked about anything but kites, anything excepting Mother, anything at all excluding Miss Helen and her weakness. We each had our hurt spots, I was coming to see, and Miss Cloris was kind, and sometimes she’d say, “Life goes by faster than it ought to,” and I’d say, “But sometimes time moves too slow,” and either way we weren’t judging each other, and when I walked across the kitchen to stare past the alley and around the tree and back on the house where I was living, Miss Cloris didn’t ask me for feelings or explaining, only said, “Those crows ought to pay rent, for all the time they spend up on those branches.”