by Beth Kephart
“Emmy, what did they do to you? Where did they take you?”
“Emmy. They do you wrong?”
“Emmy. I’m not leaving you to nothing. You speak to me, you hear me? Unless they cut your tongue?”
“They cut your tongue?”
Someone says it. Someone moans the words.
“There, now,” she says. “At least I got you talking.”
“You?”
“Me?”
“Leave me alone.” My hair is a wet rag. My skin is pickled. My teeth are breaking into chatters. “Please.”
Turning my back to her, facing the door. Pulling the sheet up, up over my head, and the air whizzes from the pillow, no case on this pillow, just stuffing and sack. My broke parts stay crooked, like a busted-up letter K—the toes inside my cast still pointing to the ceiling. Now the chair wheels are roll-ing, the flat one going squat. The sheet yanks down. Autumn stares in.
“Hey,” she says.
“Can’t you let me be?” Can’t you? Can’t you? I want to scream, and if I scream, they’ll do it all again, and I don’t scream, and my teeth chatter.
“Tell me what happened.”
There’s a scar, like a wrinkle, through her lip. There’s a gone slash of flesh above one eye. There’s a hatching near her chin, the skin too white. “What happened to you?” I ask. I shiver.
“Me? You’re the one who got taken.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Can’t you see? Not talking.”
“Was it the cleanse?” She’s shifted again, come closer, is stroking a stray strand of hair away from my face. Staring the blue sky of her eyes through me, and something softens, and I nod, and that’s all, and the tears riot through, but I do not holler. I do not make a ruckus. I will never make a ruckus again.
“I hate that,” she says. “I hate the cleanse.” Stroking my hair, combing it through, the wet knots and tangles stiffening.
“They’ve done it to you?”
“’Course they have.”
“And you’re still here?”
“And bored straight out of my own genius mind.” Her lips turn up and the wrinkle vanish-folds. A tear appears in one corner of her eye.
“What’s the purpose of it?” I whisper, shivering, pulling the sheet around me hard. “The cleanse, I mean.”
“To make us peaceable,” she says, but saying it makes her cry. Big tears from both of her eyes, and now she climbs down out of the chair and lies beside me, her forehead to my forehead, her hand taking my hand. “I remember peaceable,” she says. “Do you? Think peaceable, Emmy.”
“Like the old jigsaw puzzle?”
She almost laughs. “You had one, too?”
“The Peaceable Kingdom,” I say. “One thousand pieces.”
“‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them,’” she says, and I think of Mama, and I think of our afternoons, the floppy card table with the foldaway legs, the hundreds and hundreds of puzzle pieces, and Autumn, younger than me, puzzle piecing, too—sometime, long ago, who knows how long, or where, and what secret. I don’t think Autumn will ever tell me her secret. I wait. I wait. Nothing.
“That’s some quoting.”
“Mrs. Morganton,” she says. “Mrs. Morganton taught me.”
“Who’s that? She work here?”
“Oh, lording Lord, Emmy. No. Mrs. Morganton. Mrs. Morganton made pies. She made puzzles with me. Before I got here. When I was free.” Autumn puts her fists up to her eyes and cries. She burbles like a brook. She lies back still. Past the door is scuffle and howl, the slow and the fast moving. I see it through the window glass, the glass all scratched with black diamonds.
“Tell me,” I say. “Story’ll keep us warm. It’ll be something.” She slips inside the sheets, touches her forehead to mine, as if she can give me her thinking that way, thought to thought, no words.
“You ever have a Mrs. Morganton pie?”
“Not as I remember.”
“My mother,” Autumn says, sniffling now, drying her eyes with the inside arm of her sweater, “she couldn’t bake a pie if her life depended on it. But Mrs. Morganton could. Mrs. Morganton pulled the berries from their patch and baked them sweet.” The tip of Autumn’s nose has gone red, her eyes.
“Tell me about the pies,” I say.
“Peaches.” Autumn sniffs. “Blueberries.”
“Tell me how they tasted.”
“Psshhhahh,” she says. “There’s no describing that.”
She pulls her head away and lifts her arm again to blot her nose, and now I see a thin purplish line above the wrist, dug in, but also risen, and I think three years. Three years Autumn’s been here, with nowhere to fly and no pies.
“I’ll tell you something about my mama,” I say. In exchange, I think. Story for story.
“Okay.” She sniffs.
“Mama was a hat connoisseur. Connoisseur—that’s what she said.”
“I have never met a connoisseur,” Autumn says, and suddenly she’s still, still as the glass apple that sits at home beside my box of jewels. What has Peter done with my jewels, or with my mother’s rugs, or with her hats—my box of hats?
“Mama was one. She made sensations.”
“Sensations,” Autumn repeats. In the hall, past the door and the diamond-glass window, people go up and back—toothbrush hair and odd meanders and the guy with the bucket mop, mopping. I feel my heart start thumping again, my shame from the cleanse. “My mother’s best hat was white,” I say. “A white hat with a brim so wide it fit three of us beneath it—Mama, Father, Emmy. The band on the hat was a mint-green silk. On the knot of the band perched a bird.”
“A real bird?” Autumn’s eyes gush blue.
“A bird she made with the feathers we found in the path along the river,” I say, bringing it back, for her sake, for mine. Bringing Mama back, and her birds. “Gold birds, blue birds, red birds, black,” I say. “They’d shiver off their feathers, and we’d find them. All summer long we went hunting for feathers, until Mama had her bird.”
“Mmmm,” Autumn says, like she’s almost sleeping. “A many-feathered bird. A sensation.” Autumn lifts her arm and the scar is there. She lowers it, and it disappears.
“Mrs. Morganton lost her husband to the war,” she says now. “Said I was the daughter she’d have had if Mr. Morganton was living.”
“You should have traded in.”
“What?”
“Mothers.”
“Ha.” She almost laughs. “Should have; you’re right. My mother didn’t want me,” she says. “I knew from early on. I wanted her to pay.”
“Did you?”
“What?”
“Make her pay?”
“She made me pay instead,” she says. “She told them I was crazy.”
“What happened is your secret, isn’t it?” I say.
“Can’t speak it,” she whispers.
“I’ll tell no one,” I say.
“It’s me,” she says, “who can’t stand to hear my own story told.”
There’s noise in the hall, a commotion. There’s someone yelling and the elevator ping and Granger on her way and now Autumn turns on her back and moans, throws her bony hand over her eyes. Outside, the wind sneaks up under the loose skirt of the roof tiles, and I pray that somewhere out there Baby is latched in tight. That whoever it is who stole her stole her for love of Baby and not for the harming to Baby, this being my only choice for hoping while I am locked up here—that the thief of Baby thieved for the chance of raising Baby right. That she holds my child close, holds her safe, covers her ears from the wind, until I find her, until I take her home.
“We have to get out of here,” Autumn says.
“I know,” she says. “We do.”
Sophie
In the morning she takes a long time fixing to go. Sits on the edge of her bed, waiting for her Pond’s cold
cream to settle. Brushes her hair, one hundred strokes around the sagging curves of each ear. Lies back down after the two hundredth stroke, and the air squishes from the pillow and the bed quilt rumples and I stand in the doorway, watch-ing. The soles of her white work shoes are like two faces. Her knees are like hills. Her face is far away; her voice is farther.
“You see what working does,” she says after a while.
I nod.
“Can’t hear you.”
“Ma’am.”
“You think I wouldn’t have done this life different?”
“’Course you would have.”
“I’m playing the lottery, Sophie. Our turn for miracles.”
When she’s gone, I walk the house considering. Up and down the stairs, through the front room, around the lean of books and the La-Z-Boy, toward the sill, where the salt and pepper shakers from each and every one of Mother’s diners are on parade display. Near the shakers, a small pot of plastic geraniums has paled with sun. The only picture on the wall is the old cross-stitch—two bluebirds and words in a scroll: A Loving Heart Is the Beginning of Kindness. A thousand x’s on a cloth. Four thousand needle pricks. end of the sun like a spilled cup of tea across one corner.
“Our turn for miracles,” Mother said, and now I head through the kitchen, past the laundry machines, to the basement door, which is crooked on its hinges. I flip the lights and creak down the planked stairs. There’s a tremble of spiderwebs hanging near my head. Pipes crank toward the ceiling, pink rags twisting at the turns. Along the one wall is a long shelf of old paint cans and hard-gleam brushes. Down another is a sawhorse table and little piles of saw-dust, left behind the way most everything else down here was left behind by whatever family lived here last. The basement walls are a thick rain color. There’s a dirty break of window along one edge, a rag doll twisted on the sill, a hopscotch scotched to the floor.
But it’s our boxes that I’m looking for—the ones I carried here on move-in day, marked FRAGILE. The boxes are taped up tight; that’s how they travel. They’re Mother’s personals; that’s what she’s always said. “Mind your own,” she tells me, and I have, moving those boxes house to house and never breaking their seal, never asking. But there are no miracles upstairs, and there are no miracles at the diner, and the only miracle I know for sure starts with setting the No Good free. “Be good,” she says, but good is rules I don’t understand, and Joey lives next door, and there’s a kite waiting to show off its long Rapunzel tail; there’s me wanting the kite and wanting Joey.
Mother’s personals sit on the shelf above the rusted paint cans. I step-laddered them up. I will step-ladder them down. Tilt the old brown TV box toward me first, because it’s the lightest one and the most banged up, the tape loosest at its seams. I’ll glue it back maybe—fix it somehow. Mother won’t know until we move again. Her knees too bad for basement stairs. Her life too plain exhausting.
You want to know the truth?
I have been asking you for the truth.
It is our turn for miracles.
But it’s not miracles I find here, on the basement floor. I find Chief Tankua, Big Jim’s Indian friend, instead, still in his Chief Tankua box, his eyebrows bushing out over his eyes. Big Jim is in his own box, too, wearing nothing but crinkly peach-red gym shorts. He can smash a karate board and throw a baseball; that’s what the box pictures tell me. He can burst a muscle band by making a fist. He can lie here the way he’s been lying here, beside a shoe box of Chevy Camaros and Johnny Lightnings and Plymouth Superbirds and a Cadillac limo, and there’s a house, in Mother’s personals, made of dark-blue Legos, and a magazine that’s called The Silver Surfer. September 18, it says. Fifteen cents. red crayon and orange crayon scribbling the Silver Surfer.
I find a plastic bat and a wiffle ball. I find a deck of cards and some cups and spoons. I find a pair of blue-striped sneakers, and a pair of shoelaces, bright orange, in their package. There’s a toy telescope and a map of stars and some tiddledywinks and pick-up sticks, and I’m taking each thing out and laying it across the floor—next to and next to and next to—and the spiderwebs float and the sun pushes in, and all I can hear is the pounding of my heart high in my ears, as if my heart is monster size and taking over. It’s a store for boys on the basement floor. My mother’s personals is boys, her secret. My mother’s personals is not a miracle.
The smell is termites, rust, and hopscotch chalk, rain that never dried through. It’s crayon wax and the pimples of mold on the back of Silver Surfer. one of the Matchbox cars has gotten loose and its front wheel is spinning, and when I park it down, alongside the rest of the miniatures, I hear slide inside the TV box, collapse along the seam lines, and I know that there’ll never be any fixing this, any returning the TV box to strictly personal. I have broken a rule, and the proof is here, and I will never be forgiven, and still I am breaking rules and reaching in to the crumble of the old box, laying out what more I find: the yellow sand bucket, the trowel, the stuffed purple turtle, the cake pan shaped like a dinosaur, the plastic bank full of pennies.
Box 1, mother’s personals, takes up half the basement floor, gets knocked with window sun. The webs above my head blow like shirts on a line. Still I do not stop—take out and put down, take out and put down—until it’s the very last thing in the box: a folded-up newspaper pressed hard across the box’s bottom. October 12, 1978, it says. Thursday. A man named Sid Vicious on the front page and a black-and-white fire on page three. TWO TODDLERS KILLED IN THREE-ALARM, the headline says.
Two toddlers killed, both of them boys.
Emmy
A storm is coming. The moon is lying low, out of the way, and the sky is a dirty green-gray bowl. Autumn has pushed me around to the window, which is thick as some old encyclopedia, nailed shut. She lies on her bed with her goggles on, humming some strange little tune.
It’s a fortress we’re in. It’s walls turning on walls, stone into brick, castle tops and concrete roofs, stairs on the outside spiraling toward inside, a flat pan of lawn. The courtyard is spoked with concrete pathways, and at the far corner, through the open arch, lies the long skinny road—Carter Road, Autumn called it. On the one side of the road, she says, lie the nurses’ quarters. On the other lies a long, wide field—used to be corn there, Autumn says, and cows, back when State grew its own food. You can’t see the road or the fields or the houses from here, but Autumn’s been through it all, three times and again—my orientation, she says, to State. “Dietary,” Autumn has said to me, standing near, pointing to the parts of State we can see. “Laundry. Mending. Warehouse. Print Shop. Photo Lab. X-ray. Commissary. Office.” A madness of doorways and panes, arches and bridges, all of it connected, Autumn has promised, by bridges and walkways, secret tunnels.
“Where’s the infirmary?” I asked her.
“There,” she said, pointing across the lawn, where the light through the windows was yellow-green and the windows were cut high, into ribbons.
“A month,” I said.
“A month you been there?”
“A month,” I said, and I started to cry. Autumn bent near and threw her toothpick arms around me, but already my teeth had started to chatter, and the skinniness of her couldn’t get me warm, and when I couldn’t stop, she whispered, “You better tell me. You better, Emmy,” until finally I said, “They took my Baby,” and she pulled back, and she stood tall, her eyes so wide.
“I will kill them,” she said, like she already knew all the wrong the world can do and like she had powers against it, like she had guessed me to be a mother all along.
“I just want her back,” I said, “is all.”
“So we will get her.”
“Can’t get her stuck in here.”
“Of course we can’t.”
“She’s out there,” I sobbed—pointed past the courtyard, the mean spokes, through the archway, down the road, past the fields, toward the highway. “Out there, and I can’t reach her.”
“Bastards,” she said. “One and
all.”
She leaped, furious, like a dancer, to her bed. She began to hop, the mattress rasping and squeaking beneath her and the room shaking. “I do my best thinking up here,” she explained, not even a little out of breath, touching her toes when she jumped now, kicking her feet, grabbing at the back of her heels, jumping at a terrible speed, her brow wrinkled, her eyes glazed, her hair slapping her shoulders.
“You some kind of gymnast?” I said at last, my sobbing gone over to surprise. She was wearing a green dress and purple stockings, big hole in one toe.
“A genius,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“You coming up with a plan?”
“I’m getting my mind ready,” she said, “for the planning.”
She made one final huge pounce, down and up, her head practically scraping the ceiling tiles. She folded midair and collapsed, her back slapping against the rumpled sheets of her bed, the mattress still rasping beneath her. She closed her eyes, then leaped up suddenly again, stole her goggles from the globe, pulled them on, over her head, and returned to the bed, her face squished, her eyes at a great distance. “Almost forgot,” she said, and started humming her strange little tune.
I stayed in my chair at the window, watching her mind wheels spin, until it was as if she had gone into some magician’s trance, into a place that was hers and was private, and so I turned to watch the window again, to watch the lights going on, the doctors straggling through, the nurses, the patients, leading away and out, toward my baby. I remembered the plume of the plane, and the ants, and the green. I remembered the sock, so yellow and lacy. I remembered Peter when he came to me in the room the police took me to: “Your hair is a mess,” he said. “You’re filthy dirty.” There was the white strip of skin where his wedding band had been. His hair was toughed-up bristles. His gray T-shirt was tucked into his stiff blue jeans, and his shirt was undone at the neck.
“Tell them I’m not crazy,” I begged him. “Tell them that.”
“I’m not lying,” he spit, “for your sake.”