by Beth Kephart
I didn’t hear Joey until he came through the door, dropped his backpack to the floor, took Harvey’s front paws onto his shoulders. “You big old beast,” he was saying when I turned around. He smiled his bright white crooked teeth at me. His eyes are on the black side of blue. His hair is like a thousand Slinkys, springing, and his shoulders are built out wide, his body lean. His shorts hung low. He wore no laces in his high-tops. He had a bruise below one knee, fading off to green.
“You’re home early,” Miss Cloris told him.
“Mr. Shoe took sick.”
“Is that right?”
“It is.”
“You wash up, now. Miss Helen’s waiting.”
Harvey whined when Joey set him down, looked like he might jump again. “You never learn, do you, dog?” Joey said, but Harvey yipped like he was sure that Joey would return from around the corner and up the stairs, which, eventually, he did. I followed him to the back room and Miss Cloris followed in time with her plate of browned sand tarts, and we all settled in for the reading—Miss Helen’s nothing weight against Joey’s shoulder, Minxy on my lap, Miss Cloris beside me. Father Latour was in his adobe room on Christmas Day, humming a song called Ave Maria Stella. The sand tarts were disappearing. Joey was stopping every now and then to fix Helen’s head on his shoulder. “I’m through at five o’clock,” my mother had told me—it felt like a year ago—when she left for work that morning. The clock over the kitchen sink was ticking.
Emmy
Up and up, and then stop, and she’s not speaking. We are through again, and down a hall. There is a porch beyond; there is sky—I can almost see sky. “Damn it,” she says every time the key sticks, every single time. “Damn it.” The brace-let of keys has smudged the knob of Bettina’s wrist green. There’s the smell of tobacco leaking.
“Where,” I ask her for the fourth time now, “are you taking me?”
“To the cleanse,” she says for the fourth time. She sounds tired, and still I keep asking. “It’s protocol, okay? That’s all I can tell you.”
She walks and she pushes. She pulls at the hoop in her ear. She won’t smile because she can’t, and the floor goes bump. She unlocks a door and pushes me through, and now at last we have come to where she has been going. From the white floor, basins rise. The nurses wear white. There is a glassed-in cage of an office, where an owl woman sits, peering through the glasses on her nose.
“Ninth one today,” the owl says. “That time of the month.” She walks toward me, her hands out in front, her right hand twitching—I see it twitching. I flatten back against my chair.
“Let me do it,” Bettina says.
“If that’s what you want,” the owl answers.
“Do what?” I demand.
“Strip you down,” Bettina says—almost a whisper, almost an apology for Dr. Brightman’s cure, but she said nothing, absolutely nothing when she could have—“for the cleanse.” She puts her hands on me, her fingers on the strings of the dress. It takes nothing and I fight her and she says, “The easier you let it be, the easier it is,” and I say, “Why? Why? Why?” and she says, “Doctor’s orders,” and I am naked now, scorching cold flesh, my arm and my leg in their plaster.
“One more into the pot,” the owl says over what I say, over what Bettina says back, over the sound of her carrying me now, lifting me and sinking me into a steaming tub, and I am not alone, and I will not look upon the others. “Let the bad leg hang. Wrap the arm.”
“Ma’am.”
“Cushion for the head. We’ll let her steep. Put your hands down, Mrs. Rane,” the owl says. “Put your hands down, I warn you.” And now Bettina whispers, “Let it be, Emmy. Get it done.”
“I am a mother,” I say, sobbing.
“Dr. Brightman’s orders,” she says.
Sophie
We take the long way on the short walk home, stopping at the alley to watch the crows ganging up on the tree, then walking around, to the tree’s other side, where no one can see us but us. If you drew a line across the top of my head and kept the line going, you’d come to the shelf of Joey’s shoulders. If you looked up, you’d see the one dimple in his one cheek and the thin white scar that goes crosswise across his brow, where the back of the cap usually sits. If you were listening, you’d be listening to the story about the girl at school who left a nest inside her locker and opened it the next day to find birds. “You should have heard those birds,” Joey’s saying. “You should have seen old Mr. Shoe.”
I’m only half listening. I’m watching Joey talk—the lock and unlock of his jaw, the black in the blue of his eyes, the way he looks past me and up into the tree and then looks down again and finds me still here, half listening. “They always talked about it,” he’s saying now, and I’ve missed the end of one story and the beginning of the next, and he’s caught me and I blush.
“Talked about what?”
“New Mexico. ‘Fitting out the Airstream for the Southwest,’ they’d say.”
“Miss Cloris and Miss Helen?”
He looks at me funny.
“of course them.”
“So why didn’t they go?”
“Because of me, I guess.”
I wait for more of whatever I’ve missed, whatever he hasn’t said yet, but he’s stopped. His eyes are drifting away again; his dimple’s gone.
“You going to tell me?” I ask him, but his eyes go blacker than blue and his jaw works itself hard and bony silent, and he looks past me for such a long, long time that I wish I could take back my asking.
“Joey?” I ask, and he says, “There were four of us. My parents, my sister, and me. we went out driving to an apple farm. A truck pulled alongside of us and tried to pass but couldn’t. I was in the seat behind my mother, in a car seat; I was three. They found me on the roadside, crying.”
“Your aunts found you?” I’m so confused. Found him where? what roadside? How did he get there?
“The police. And the police found Miss Cloris, who was my father’s stepsister, the only family who could help, or wanted to. Miss Cloris brought me here, and here is home, and I’ve never known much different. I was three, like I said. My life is here, and most of the time it feels like it always was.”
“, Oh Joey,” I say.
“It’s okay.”
“No, Joey, it’s not.”
“They’re good to me—Aunt Cloris, Aunt Helen. They’ve always done their best.”
“What was your sister’s name?”
“Jenna.”
“How old was she?”
“Six.”
“What else do you remember?”
“My mother’s hair, which was blowing through the open car window. My father singing some radio song. My sister sleeping. The car was white, with a thin blue stripe, and there were cows in the field where they found me. That’s it. That’s all I remember.”
He stands here, close, and I step closer. I reach for the line across his brow. He lets me touch it, lets me keep my hand near, tells me how Miss Cloris and Miss Helen had been planning an Airstream adventure when the accident happened and he moved in. Cross-country, state by state, their everywhere year—they’d been planning that, and then Joey came. “They put it off,” he says, “and kept putting it off, and then my aunt Helen got sick.”
“So that’s why you read to them, then?”
“I guess that’s it.”
“To take them to places they haven’t been?”
“We pretend.”
“You do a nice reading,” I say.
I don’t ask him what Miss Helen’s sick with. I don’t ask him for any more talk. I just stand here, on this side of the tree, looking for the blue in his eyes and the dimple in his cheek, tracing the white line across his head. He lifts his hand and tucks my hair behind one ear. He moves closer, and it happens. His lips taste like sugar snow and the fine mince of pecans. I close my eyes and cannot breathe.
“I had to,” he whispers when it’s over. “Did you mind much?”
He leans in again, and this time I kiss him back and the crows above us stir. “It’s not fair,” I say between kisses, “what happened to you,” and he just keeps saying it’s all right, until suddenly, from down the road I hear the cough-spit of the Volvo. “Joey,” I say, “she’s back,” and everything changes—Joey and the crows and especially me, pulling away, past the branches toward the street. I run the slate to the door and bang it open. I slam it behind me, tight and sure. “Sophie!” Joey calls, but still I’m running—up the stairs, toward the attic, over the crossbeams, across the pink. I throw the window open and call down to him from there.
“Tomorrow,” I tell him. “I promise.”
Emmy
Going away, going away, going back, and I am almost home. It was a stream—remember the stream? Emmy, if you can, remember the stream.
“A fighter she is, this Mrs. Rane.”
“Soaked me through.”
“Me, too.”
Mama is pulling an inner tube, pulling me—my bottom wet and my arms spread out, as if my arms are wings. Mama is walking with the water to her knees, the snake of the rope between us making the water striders dance.
Don’t move, my love. This is float.
Look at the frogs, eager for sun.
My bathing suit is pink. My bathing suit has a little white belt that I have learned to snap, in and out, like crickets talking.
Emmy, Mama says. You’re growing up.
Emmy, you are my only.
Emmy, it’s just the two of us and the stream.
The sky is leaves. The sky is a lifted sheet of green that won’t fall down. The green of peas, the green of grapes, the dark tip green of the beans that Mama snaps between her finger and her thumb. There is a bird making a tree branch heavy, her gray belly bottom like the high back of the sun.
“She’s settling now. She won’t do harm.”
“Jesus. Still morning. When will this day be done?”
To the sea, Mama says. She has her flip-flops on. They are yellow but deep in the muck of the stream. They stir up chimneys of fog wherever they go—piles of white water rising. The soft, pale hairs on Mama’s legs glisten where they are wet with steam. In the spaces between my fingers and toes, the dark water runs cool in a backward pull. My bottom’s sunk in deep.
I could walk forever, Mama says.
Forever is the sea.
On the banks, the stream runs across the low trunks of the trees. There are shadows beneath the trees and past the trees, and somewhere in the shadows is the chalky path down which Mama and I have come—she carrying the inner tube in the wedge of strength between her arms and ribs, and me in the polka dots of my own flip-flops, the snap and the slap of our feet. Waiting all winter, all spring for this, Mama said, and it is still not summer, and sometimes, when the stream bends or the breeze blows, a chill comes in, but in the rubber nest of my inner tube, I snap my belt. The stream is getting bigger now. Stream like a river. It turns over rocks and deeper in my Mama sinks. She hitches her skirt high past her knees and keeps walking.
Close your eyes, says Mama, and feel the float. Feel the power of the water rising, running.
There are lilac trumpets on Mama’s yellow skirt, and her hem is dark with stream. There are curls at her neck where the hair falls down from the scarf she ties it up with. She hardly bothers with her hair, and even though I am the age I am, I know what it is, who she is: My mama’s beauty. Daddy says so, and I think it.
Oh, Lord, Emmy, she says, and she stops.
Mama, what?
Oh, Lord, Emmy. Look there. Must be lost, the poor thing. In the wrong kingdom.
I look to where she points, to the edge of the stream, where, in the rooty banks, a tall bird stands, soft-feathered, its legs like hollow sticks. Mama stops walking, and the tall bird blinks. She says nothing and it shakes its head, cuts the thick air above the creek with the knife of its beak. I float on and on, on the back of the rising, widening stream. I float, and the snake of the rope between Mama and me curves into itself and tangles, and the creek, still getting bigger, carries me forward, on, but still Mama is plunked down like a tree.
Mama! I call, but it’s too late, and now I am up against the hard back of her pale thighs with the river of a stream pushing us both to the sea. Mama’s knees give. I hear the pop and slide of her yellow flip-flops. Oh, she says, a startled sound. Oh, Emmy, and her body sways, back and forth, her arms like the limbs of a blown-about tree, until finally she shivers down to her knees. Oh, she says, and the big bird digs its head into its neck and rolls back the droop of its wings and lifts high. It lifts and its wings are the sky, and Mama spills into the hurry of the stream—the lilac trumpets on her yellow skirt billowing down.
Oh, Mama says, and she’s below me now, tumbled now, the little desperate curls still dry, and I hear another kind of a snap. It’s the snake of rope between Mama and me set free. It’s me, set free, in the river rising, and the river tightens and deepens; it bends. It’s not a stream.
Oh, Emmy. Love.
I turn and see her rising from the muck. I turn and see her reach.
Emmylove.
And the river bends and widens and right at that moment hurries me forward over a table of rocks, and I am sideways to the sea, facing the rooty banks. Behind me, Mama stands and she reaches, but her dress is heavy with the sheen of river and her flip-flop feet are slipping.
You be brave, she calls out after me, and the river writes itself into a new, twisty shape, and when I turn again, there Mama is, swim-running her way to the riverbanks and pulling herself up in the rooty mud with her bare hands, her bare feet; she’s lost her flip-flops. Mama is running. She is barefoot through the shadows of the trees, and I am floating and float-ing with the sizzle of my heart, and the sky overhead is a thin green sheet.
She will run ahead. She will catch me.
Be brave, Emmylove, I am coming.
Mama!
Rescuemerescuemerescueme.
“Oh, good God. Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, no rest for the weary. Calm yourself, Mrs. Rane.”
Mama!
Sophie
“Corned beef,” Mother tells me, “and sauerkraut. I got us extra.” She’s set the two takeouts down and sits while I deal out knives and forks, tear two sheets of paper towels, fold them like napkins. when she pops the lid on her box, the air around us goes sour.
“Still warm,” she says. “we’re lucky.”
She chews and chews. I cut my meat into a thousand pieces. I run my tongue across my lips, tasting the sugar snow of Joey.
“What’s the matter?” she asks me, looking up at last, then looking down at my hands—slicing the corned beef into pink stew, into thick soup, into paste.
“Maybe I’m not that hungry.”
“And how exactly could that be? You not being hungry?” She lowers her fork and looks at me, suspicious. “It’s five fifteen,” she says. “Dinnertime. Aren’t you always complaining that you’re hungry?”
“Bellyache,” I lie, quick. “Maybe from the old rice. Shouldn’t have made it. You were right.”
“You wait this long to tell me?”
“Just started feeling it, a few minutes after five.”
“You wait that long to get sick?”
“It just happened.”
“Don’t disrespect me.” She pushes the long parts of her hair over her shoulders. She smoothes the wild eyebrow hairs above one eye. She looks into me like she can see chocolate-chip cookies and sand-tart cookies, Miss Cloris and Miss Helen, Joey and me, the crows in the tree. A twitch starts up in her other eye. “Corned beef not good enough?” she says. “Too big for kraut?”
“That’s not it.”
“A bellyache?”
“Coming to think of it,” I say, “I’m already better.” I lift a forkful of kraut to my lips and force it through. I swallow over it and smile. I take a forkful of beef and chew it down, worse than an old eraser
. She watches me, takes up her fork, and swallows, suddenly cautious.
“What did you do all day?” she asks now.
“I was reading.”
“Reading what?”
“One of those books.”
“Which book, Sophie Marks? Be specific or stop lying.” Her voice is low and angry, the way it gets before some-thing terrible happens, and if something terrible happens, there will be no stopping it.
“You want to know the truth?” I ask.
“I have been asking you for the truth.”
“I was working on my Kepler, making it perfect.”
“You were, now?”
“I was.”
“I thought you’d finished. Haven’t you been saying so—that you finished your Kepler? Haven’t you been wanting to read it?”
“Can I be excused, Mother?”
“Excused?”
“To get my Kepler?” My heart is pounding so loud I’m sure she can hear the lie inside it. I’m sure she can see the lie I am. we have to stay here. we can’t move—not this time.
“Which is done now?”
“It is. Done and so much better.” I fake my hopefulness so hard that maybe suddenly even I believe that I was home all day, refining Kepler.
“You finish your kraut.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You respect your mother.”
Emmy