by Beth Kephart
A wind rasps at the window. I rake my hair through. I pull the thin smock close, but it does no good, and now I remember Mama, the last year she was sick, the smell in that room, the shadows. The bureau on the back wall. The chest on the floor. The bedpan, shaped like a horseshoe. The coil of the rug, which was the color of the quilt, the mirror, the tin of buttons, the shoe box of feathers. I’d bring her applesauce, still warm in the bowl. I’d make it for her, alone in the kitchen—the naked fruits the color of bone, the fire high beneath the pot, the pulp that I would strain through and through, cut a Bartlett into it, a squeeze of lemon, a shake of cinnamon. “I made you applesauce,” I’d say, and she’d say, could barely say, “Emmy, you are my only.”
Mama died, and Daddy went heartbroke, and heartbreak kills you just as sure as cancer does, and I didn’t have choices, and there was Peter, and there is Baby out there waiting.
“What are we going to do, Autumn?” I ask. “What is there for us?” But before I can hope for an answer, there is a knock on the door, a key in the lock, Bettina with her cups and her pills.
“How are you getting on?” she asks, and Autumn starts humming louder.
Mama made puppets out of Daddy’s socks and painted cot-ton balls. She built Christmas wreathes out of old pinecones. She was a pipe-cleaner artist. Made pipe-cleaner tigers. Made lions and deer and ocelots. Bent the pipe cleaners and fluffed them up, and later I’d find them prowling toward me in the trees or sleeping in the flower beds or clinging to the fence that divided our lawn from Mr. Jenkins’s. Mama could do most anything. Mama would have rescued me.
She’d have known to find me here.
She’d have rescued Autumn, too.
We’d have been sisters.
Part Three
Sophie
“Shhh, now,” Miss Cloris is saying. “You take your time. Miss Helen and I aren’t going anywhere, and Harvey’s about to behave. Like a good pup, Harvey is.”
“I’m sorry,” I try to say. “I’m sorry.” But the tears keep pouring out, and Minxy stays put on the windowsill, and Miss Helen reaches for my hand, smoothes my fingers down with hers, and I can’t stop crying. “I shouldn’t have busted in,” I sob, trying to press my other hand to my face to stop the tears, but the tears have a mind of their own.
“You don’t be silly. our door is open.”
“I just couldn’t …,” I start, and now I really can’t go on, and Miss Cloris pushes up from the front-room couch, where she’s been sitting on the other side of me, and goes halfway to the kitchen, then stops and turns back, undecided.
“You bring us something to read, Sophie?” she asks at last. “Is that it?” She means the page three I yanked from the basement when I started running—up the rattle of planks, beneath the trembling web, past the Maytags, through the kitchen, out the front door, which slammed hard behind me, and kept on slamming, as I ran the slate, past the acorn splat, to the walk, and up the steps to the Rudds’. I knocked but I didn’t wait for any answer. I pulled the knob and stumbled in, and in the very first room, I found them, Miss Helen and Miss Cloris, holding hands. They made room for me between the two of them, and I haven’t moved since, even though Harvey is banging his fat tail hard on the bright wood floor, wanting up and in between us, and Minxy on the sill seems eager to jump, and Miss Cloris still cannot decide if a drink or sweets can fix this.
“A house fire,” she says now, lifting the headlines from my lap, where I had left them. “October 1978,” she reads to Miss Helen. “Two toddler boys the victims.”
“That is indeed a sad story,” Miss Helen says, “I can see why it caused you a commotion.”
“That’s not it.” I can hardly get the words out.
“That’s not it?” Miss Cloris asks. Through my flooding eyes I see the mix-up in Miss Cloris’s face—her wanting to be kind, but her confusion.
“I mean that’s not the only it. The fire is it, but the boys—they’re my brothers.” I burst with the words, like a big exploding hydrant.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Miss Cloris says, tucking in beside me, unfolding the whole page three so she can read beneath the picture of the two-story house in the pretty neighborhood going up in flames and smoke. “ ‘I thought they were outside,’ Mrs. Cheryl Marks, twenty-five, is reported to have said,” Miss Cloris reads to herself but also to Miss Helen. “ ‘I thought they were playing on the swing.’ ” She reads on—about the boys and their ages, the boys and their father, away on business when the fire happened. She reads about Cheryl Marks, a librarian at the local library, who was in her bedroom working her Singer sewing machine when the fire happened. She thought the boys were outside. She threw up the sash and jumped. Sailed from the second-floor window into a low row of hedges, leaving it to a neighbor to carry her off and leaving it to the police to sadly inform her that her boys had been playing inside. They had been trapped and she’d gotten out. The source of the fire remaining under investigation.
Miss Cloris presses her knee into my thigh and cups my chin in the big softness of her hand.
“Sophie,” she says, “you look at me. This was 1978. Those boys were four and five.”
“I know what it said. I can read.”
“Honey, this is 2004, and you’re—you’re how old now?”
“Fourteen.”
“That makes you born in 1990, Sophie. Your brothers would be in their thirties by now.”
“But Cheryl Marks is my mother. And those boys were my brothers, because they were in my mother’s personals.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, love.”
“In the basement.”
“You found this in the basement?”
“With their toys and things, in a box. I was looking for a miracle….”
“In the basement, love?”
I nod. “In a box. And that’s what I found. My brothers’ toys. My mother’s story.”
I feel Miss Helen’s hand press down harder on mine and Miss Cloris’s knee unjab my thigh. I hear Minxy fly from the windowsill and paw her way into my lap. Miss Cloris makes a big, sad sigh, then takes my free hand up in hers, and now I have no hands with which to wipe my tears, and they pour down my cheeks, my chin, my neck. My T-shirt’s soaking.
“Nothing’s impossible,” Miss Cloris says. “Of course it’s not.”
“Because it explains everything,” I say.
“Everything?” Miss Helen asks.
I nod, and then the tears come hard again.
“Why don’t you tell us,” Miss Cloris says, “just what you mean.”
Emmy
Bettina says, “If I see one ounce of trouble, one trembling inch, you will be reported, privileges revoked.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Autumn nods.
“No wild shenanigans.”
“None.”
“No bumper cars with the nurses’ stations.”
“We swear.”
“No giving other patients rides for the cheap thrill of it. Not every patient who needs a wheelchair gets a wheelchair. Make proper use.”
It’s the same every day, after we wait in line with the others for the shower and lavatory, after Bettina helps me in and out of my chair, after breakfast, which is potatoes, runny or mashed. After Talk Therapy, Music Therapy, Crafts Therapy, Autumn’s in charge, and Autumn has stories—one for every inmate, one for every day that she’s been here.
“That’s Wolfie,” she’ll tell me. “Thinks she’s Hollywood. Get a good look at her hair.”
“That’s Jeannie in the Bottle.”
“Why?”
“It’s her face,” she says. “The way it’s smooshed.” Autumn pushes me slow so I can see for myself. She whistles above me, so that we won’t be suspect.
“You meet Virgin Mary yet?”
“How could I?”
“Virgin Mary and her diet of petals. Flower petals. Best friends with Liesel the dancer. Liesel hears music everywhere.”
They unbandaged my arm, took away
the sling. They left me with a scar that runs like a track from the hill of my shoulder to my wrist. Autumn said to be proud of the scar. Called it my survivor tattoo. Runs her finger down its ridge, but all this time, all this talk, how many days, she won’t give up her secret. She wheels me floor to floor, down the halls, past the benches, whistling. She calls out to Julius, the mop man, to shine the floors.
“You’re all the shine this place needs,” Julius will tell her, and she’ll whistle at him, laugh like she’s honking through a horn. “Too bad he’s four hundred years old,” she’ll whisper down into my ear, and I’ll wonder how Autumn will ever break out of here, how she’ll break me free, how we’ll find Baby. It’s like she’s part of them now, like she belongs to this place, like no one can know it the way she does, like she has no choice, except that every single day Autumn is scheming. “Today we’re flying free,” she’ll say. “We’re keeping our minds clear,” she warns me. We spit out our pills soon as Bettina’s back is turned—slide them through the slot in the side of Autumn’s globe; it’s a bank globe. “Bettina’s in love with Dr. Brightman,” she’ll tell me, when the blonde one with the ruler smile is gone. “She was born here,” she’ll tell me. “’Cause her mother’s crazy.”
“That true?” I’ll ask her.
“Ask her if you want,” she’ll say, and then her eyes will go so wide that I can’t tell if she’s lying.
Down the hall she takes us. Past the benches, past Wolfie, wearing her Marilyn Monroe hair, past Jeannie, pressing her face against the window, past Liesel, who wears pink slips and jazz hands and a fake moonstone on her wedding-band finger, past Fanny, who was Autumn’s roommate once, before Fanny got too crazy. “Roomie number five,” Autumn says whenever we pass her by, and I don’t know if Fanny is her real name or just the nickname Autumn calls her, but her smock splits open in the back and she doesn’t mind, she has no shame, and Autumn says Fanny’s in love with Cavity, who only has two teeth in his head.
The hall bends into a high bang of traffic and carts, women with brooms, men with cigarettes, ash eyes and skin. “Hey, Wolfie,” Autumn will say, and Wolfie will puff up her hair, like this is a movie we’re in. At the elevator, we’ll wait for the ping. When the ping pings, we’ll go two floors down, and when the doors open, we’re flying—breeze in my hair, tile loose beneath the wheels, the bad wheel in a dull squeal—and now we’re past the library, past the office, past a long bank of windows, and this, the windows, is where we stop to watch the world going by. Autumn stands beside me in an angel stream of sun, and she is young, her arms so skinny. She’ll kiss the part in my hair with her chapped pair of lips, and little by little, she’ll stop whistling, and always, always, she’ll wink at the guard in his chair, who sits at the desk that stands between the inside and the outside, the door that leads to the courtyard. “I’ve got him under my spell,” she’ll tell me.
“I want to ask you something,” she says now, her breath in my hair, the s’s skipping across my scalp.
“What something?”
“Do you believe in people?”
“People, Autumn?”
“People.”
“I do. Some people.”
“Then tell me a story?” She reaches for my hand and squeezes it tight, as if she won’t breathe again until I start talking.
“First night of Baby’s living, she took my hand,” I say.
“Took your hand? For real? With her baby fingers?”
“Took them, squeezed them,” I say, because it’s true. “Let me know that she was real.”
“Oh,” she says, the smallest word, and she doesn’t whistle; she doesn’t dance, or even move. She stands there beside me, watching the world beyond the glass, the patients with walking privileges walking the spokes of the courtyard, the birds in the one tree, the row of azaleas, their flowers gone, their branches stiffened.
“What’s our plan?” I ask her after time goes by.
“Thinking of flying,” she says, as she always says. “Only way,” she tells me, “of getting free. We have to be free to find Baby. Have to get up some speed and fly.”
“We do,” I say. “I know.”
“Look,” she says, pointing across the courtyard to the tree, where crows are squatting. “Do you see them?”
“I do.”
“Those are some wings,” she says. “Nice and sturdy.”
Sophie
“We cannot always know,” Miss Cloris is saying. “We cannot always understand.”
“Though sometimes we do,” Miss Helen says, barely a whisper. She puts her hand on Minxy, still curled in my lap, and Miss Cloris reaches for it. They stay like that, hand in hand over me, until Minxy turns and knocks a paw to Miss Helen’s smallest finger.
The sun is in a different place. Harvey’s asleep. Miss Cloris has come and gone and come with a plate of cheese and a Bartlett pear, cut into quarters. She’s poured from the pitcher of pink lemonade, until there’s nothing left but ice cubes and seeds. I’ve told my story the best that I can—our running from the No Good, the promises I break, the rules I don’t abide more and more often. I’ve told them that there is one box more of my mother’s personals, and that after this, when I go home, I’m going to break the tape, unlock the secrets.
“Maybe we should come with you,” Miss Cloris said, and I said, “So long as I know you are right here, I’m fine.”
“Sometimes it’s better to take the news slowly,” Miss Helen cautioned.
“There’s truth,” I said, “and I want it.”
“Maybe we should invite your mother for a visit, treat her to some courtesies, let her talk.”
“I need some time,” I said, “without her suspecting.”
Miss Cloris stands and starts pacing. Harvey shakes himself awake and trots to the door. “You stay in the side yard,” Miss Cloris tells him, opening the screen to let him through. Then she walks in little circles around the room, pushing at the hair on her head.
“I don’t like this,” Miss Cloris says. “Not one bit. The two boys and the No Good and the hiding—and you, Sophie, living as you have, one of the brightest girls I’ve ever met, sneaking your way into the sun.”
“Childhood should be an adventure,” Miss Helen says. “All of living should.”
“So much inside air,” Miss Cloris says. “It breaks my heart.”
“Though here you are,” Miss Helen says. “That counts for something.”
“Illegally,” Miss Cloris says, “at least according to her mother.”
She keeps walking and pushing at her hair. Minxy rolls and makes the leap to the bright floor. Miss Helen leans against my shoulder, and in the yard, Harvey whines for someone to play. It must be one o’clock by now, or two, my mother working toward the end of her shift, playing her Lotto, wanting her miracle, and maybe her miracle isn’t money after all, but the undying of two boys in a fire, the unsmashing of knees, the unlying to me, over all these years. My mother’s personals is truth by way of lies. It’s the lockup of her, and the gaps in between, and it’s the No Good and my father, Andrew Marks, in the bottom of a box, in a story: away on business. And when he came home, what? And when I was born—what then?
“Miss Helen,” I ask, “you okay?” She straightens her head and shifts her weight, and Miss Cloris comes to help her—fits one hand to Miss Helen’s face and another to her shoulder until she is sitting up on the couch inside her own balance, her wheeled chair catching the sun spokes in the corner.
“You leaving, child?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And returning?”
“I will.”
“You call. You holler. You don’t knock. You understand?”
“Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“Tell Joey I say hi?”
“Of course.”
“Tell him I’m glad he ended up living here with you.”
“Tragedy and blessing,” Miss Cloris says. “Sometimes they’re the same one thing.”
E
mmy
“You were warned,” Bettina says, and she says it so sadly. “You were trusted.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Autumn says, and I echo, “Yes, ma’am, yes.”
“I asked for calm and not commotion.”
“It was an accident.”
“I asked for civility, respect.”
“We weren’t meaning disrespecting.”
“Weren’t meaning doesn’t matter, Autumn. You start running like you did, and this whole place goes to chaos, and now Cavity’s in the infirmary—sliced deep and clean right here.” Bettina draws a line above her eye to mark the spot where the skin split after Cavity got to running behind our wheelchair brigade and smacked the floor with his face. Cavity tripped. Cavity’s in the infirmary. Autumn kept running; we were flying. “Getting sewn up in the blood zone,” Bettina continues. “Which is your doing.” We sit in a small room with a closed door, Bettina’s legs crossed at the ankles, her fingers pulling at the wooden cross that she wears around her neck. My heart is a frog in my chest.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Autumn says, “what Cavity did. Cavity is Cavity.” Her hands make somersaults across her lap. She swings her feet above the linoleum floor.
“Do you know what inciting is, Autumn?”
“We were just getting up our speed. We didn’t mean harm.”
“This is a hospital, Autumn. There is no speed.” She drops the cross and ties up her arms beneath her chest, sighs heavy. She leans back against the lawn-colored chair. There are vertical seams above her nose, between her eyes. There’s a rash of red up high on one cheek. She smells like coffee, paste, cigarettes, old ammonia. There’s commotion in the hall beyond us, a rectangle of light that comes through the window in the door.
“Do you want to explain?”
Autumn shakes her head no.
“I need to know, Autumn, what the speed was for.”
Autumn’s head swings, side to side. “Can’t tell. That is our secret.”