by Beth Kephart
“You need to be straight with me, Autumn.”
“Secrets are secrets.”
“You had my trust, Autumn. You had privileges.”
Had, she is saying. Had. Had.
“It was the crows’ fault,” Autumn says at last.
“I don’t see how crows could have anything to do with this, Autumn.”
“Because they were flying.”
“You need to tell the truth.”
“That is the truth. They were flying, and we wanted to fly, too.”
Bettina looks from Autumn to me and back again. The ruler of her mouth won’t bend.
“We didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Autumn says, pleading. “We’re sorry for Cavity.”
“The facts are the facts, Autumn. Always.”
“We were just practicing.”
“Practicing?”
“Stretching our wings.”
“Ma’am,” I say, but Bettina barely glances my way, and Autumn won’t look at me either, as if to look at me is to make a suspect of me, as if it were not my fault that we were flying in the first place, practicing our speed, for Baby’s sake, for going free.
“We meant no harm,” Autumn says, her lips thin as a fly’s wing, bitten into and raw.
“Meaning and doing harm are two separate things, Autumn.”
“Please,” Autumn says. “It won’t happen again.” Something in her blue eyes cracks. Something splits and spills, and in this moment I understand that Autumn is the only thing I have. The only sure and actual. I want to reach for the fumbling hands on her lap. I want to hold them, each one, and keep them safe from whatever is going to happen next.
“It’s my fault,” I say. “I made her do it.”
“You made Autumn race you down the hall in your wheelchair?” Bettina asks, very quietly, very slow.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You made her swerve and tilt? You made her holler?”
“I didn’t hear her holler.”
“You put Cavity in the infirmary?”
“It was me,” I say, “and I apologize.” I won’t look at Autumn, because I know she will beseech me. I won’t look into her blue eyes leaking. I look hard and steadfast toward Bettina. I say the words as if it’s trial and jury, defendant and witness. As if it’s seven weeks ago, or eight, or however long since Peter sat there saying I was crazy.
Bettina looks from Autumn to me and back again. She pushes her heels into the floor, stands up, pulls at the cross on her neck, sighs, and now her mouth bends, but it bends downward. She rubs at the rash near her eye. “I need to talk to Nurse Granger,” she says finally. “You two wait here.”
She walks to the door and locks it behind her. She stares in at us through the glass in the door and then she walks away.
“Psshhhahh,” Autumn says, scrubbing at her eyes with the balls of her fists. Her arms are so skinny, it’s like they’re only made of bone, like skin is the sleeves that Autumn puts on.
“What will she do?” I ask. “What happens next?”
She shrugs and a tear breaks from her eye. “This is State,” she says, shuddering, and I want to reach for her, climb out of these wheels, escape with her to somewhere safe, but the door is shut and Bettina’s key has turned the lock. Whatever it is has been done, and Cavity’s lying in the infirmary, a line of blood above one eye.
Sophie
The Volvo coughs to a stop and I’m ready—the kitchen clean and the La-Z-Boy polished, a long glass of ice water sitting still among the towered books, which I have rearranged according to their sizes.
“Have a seat,” I say when Mother drags in. “Put your feet up.” I ease the take-homes from her hands, trade them for Ziplocs of ice for her smashed-in knees. I do not look into her eyes, because if I look into her eyes, she will see that I am lying. That in the basement beneath us her personals are scattered. That in the house next door, they know her story. I have broken her first rule: Be good.
“You play the Lotto?” I ask her, taking the leftovers into the kitchen, slipping them into the cool of the refrigerator, coming back.
“No miracles,” she says.
“Maybe tomorrow?”
“Taking tomorrow off.”
“You are?” I ask, stopping cold in my tracks.
“Marge wants a double shift. Told her she could have mine. Need my rest, Sophie. That’s the truth. Need time at home with you.”
I nod. Say nothing. Don’t look anywhere near her so she can’t see into my heart.
“Now, what’s all this for?”
“What do you mean?”
“The niceness of things. The ice water.”
“Just want you comfortable,” I say. “After your long day.”
“You sure that’s all?” She looks at me up and down and my stomach goes wormy.
“I’m sure.”
“You don’t sound so sure.” She studies me harder, then settles into her chair. Slips out of her white shoes and pulls at the strands of her hair. One of the hairs gets loose and curls free and floats slow to the floor, and now she closes her eyes and lifts the long glass of water to her lips.
“Well?” she says.
“Well?”
“Come and join me.”
I sit opposite her in the cranky old rocker. I creak back and forth, watching the sun heating her Ziploc knees, the ice melt to nothing. “You ready to hear my Kepler?” I ask before she can ask me about my day.
“I suppose I am.”
“ ‘From Nothing to Big Things,’ ” I say, my voice suddenly shaking. I cough, pretend it’s a tickle. I lift the paper from the floor, where I’d slipped it an hour ago, for this purpose. I start at my beginning: “ ‘Johannes Kepler was born with the skies in his eyes. He was born looking up so he could see.’ ” I glance up to find that Mother’s eyes are closed. The line between her brows is deep.
“I’m listening.”
“All right.”
“ ‘The skies in his eyes,’ ” she repeats.
“I thought …”
“Keep reading.”
I steady my voice over every word and phrase.
We eat dinner in the same chairs, the take-homes in plates on our knees. For a long time, she doesn’t talk, just chews.
“So you’ve befriended Mr. Kepler,” she says at last.
“I liked his story.” I smothered my hot dog with the yellow mustard we keep inside the refrigerator door. It still tastes like water that has boiled many things. When I chew, it slides around in my mouth.
“ ‘Skies in his eyes,’ ” she repeats. “ ‘Born looking up.’ ‘A heart shattered but still beating.’ You know he had a broken heart, Sophie? For a fact? It said so in the books?”
“I just assumed.”
“But why assume?”
“Because look at him, Mother. Look at his life. His father going away and not returning. His children dying, and then his wife. His mother put on trial for witchcraft. His own country locking him out.”
“Johannes Kepler was the father of celestial mechanics,” Mother says. “His mathematics explained the shapes of honeycombs. He created the science of optics. He revolutionized the study of solids. And here you come, with your Kepler essay, talking about sadness and heartbreak.”
“I wanted to tell his story. His real story.”
“That’s not what you’ve done. You’ve written fiction. Your ideas about how a man feels. A man you’ve only met in books.”
“How else would I meet him?”
“You know what I mean.”
“How else would I meet anyone?”
She stares at me or through me, her eyes dark coals, her eyes full of all she’s never told me. Bobby and James. Four and five. A fire. She left them. She jumped. Her smashed-in knees are not her work-ruined knees. Her smashed-in knees are burning. Why does she keep their things in a box, and why can I not ask her, and why has she hidden the truth all these years, and where is my father, and why are we still running? What proof does she have
that the No Good wants us? That we aren’t our own strange version of already free?
“What do you suppose Kepler wished to be remembered for?” she asks me now. “What do you suppose any of us, Sophie, wish to be remembered for? For the things that tried to stop us or the ways we carried on? Think about that, Sophie, next time you choose to write an almost version of a man.”
“Yes, Mother,” I say, my voice all smoke and anger.
“Don’t speak to me that way.”
“What way?”
She lets her head fall back against the La-Z-Boy. Another loose hair floats to the floor. She stares beyond me, toward the sill of salt and pepper shakers, the thousand silky x’s: A loving heart …
“Does that dog ever stop barking?” she asks after a while.
“Harvey’s a good dog,” I say.
“Is that a fact?”
“It is.” I stand, leave my mustard-smeary hot dog plate right on the chair, where I know I shouldn’t. I cut straight past her, walk the loud heart of the stairs, slam the door to my room.
“Don’t you slam that door, Sophie Marks,” I hear her calling from below.
I open the door. I slam it harder.
Emmy
Autumn isn’t to leave. She is to stay right here, Room 433, Cot B, watching the world through the window, except when Bettina comes and takes her down the hall to the shower and stalls, then brings her back, walks her inside, locks the door.
“I will die,” she said when Bettina told her, and all that night I held her in my arms, and nothing that I said could stop her from shaking. “I’ll never get out,” she kept saying. “Never get free.” A wind blew in, lifting the ever-loosening tiles on the roof above our heads. Clouds heavied in, then slipped away, like a curtain drawn back over the moon.
“Bright out,” I said. But Autumn wouldn’t look up to see.
They bring her breakfast, lunch, and dinner on cardboard cafeteria trays—runny potatoes with bacon on the side, a slab of Spam, a bowl of peaches, celery sticks smoothed over with peanut butter. They turn the lock. Sometimes somebody from Services will come, pull the curtain down the center of the room, and talk quiet and firm, and Autumn will lie there with her goggles on, humming some tune, hardly listening.
“You have to behave,” I’ll tell her afterward.
“I have to get out,” she’ll say. She wears three sweaters, a yellow tube top, a pair of leggings, bare feet. She wears her red circus skirt and a gray sweatshirt. She wraps her neck with a bright red scarf and calls herself the Red Baron. She studies the globe, rattles the pills that we’ve fed it. She points to countries, cities, mountains, seas. “Baby’s out there,” she says. “We have to find her.”
“Seven months,” I say.
“Seven months what?”
“Baby’s seven-month birthday, or thereabouts.”
“You think she’s talking by now?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You think she’s still in this country?”
“Better be.”
“You think the guy with the bike is still out there looking?”
“Arlen?” I ask. “Arlen, you mean?”
“Funny name for a guy,” she says.
“Funny person.” Though when I think of Arlen now, I think of what he did for me. Of how he said to hold on, hold on. I think of Mama lying in her bed at the end, my hand in hers, her hand slipping. “I raised a good daughter,” she said, and that was the last thing she said, the very last of Mama’s words.
They cut the cast from my leg; my leg’s white and skinny. They gave me lessons in walking again. “Go at your own pace,” they tell me, and I have taken it slow, leaving Autumn only when they make me, when they force me to go up and down the long tunnels of the halls, over the bridges, past the bay of windows, past the guard, to Music, to Crafts, to Dining, to Talk. It is crowded at State. I’m on my own.
The library is hush, a room with a view. It is Miss Cilla Banks, three hundred years old, who has plopped herself down in a big chair to read, and who doesn’t mind me, so long as I don’t disturb her reading.
“You understand the Dewey decimals?” she asked me the first day I opened the door and pushed through, and I told her yes, I know Mr. Dewey. Mama was the one who made our acquaintance, who took me to the library Saturday mornings and said, “Pick out a book for yourself.” I asked Mama once what the spine numbers mean. “Branches of knowledge,” she said, explaining how every book has a second name that gets chalked down low on the spine. We went up and down the stacks, Mama and me. We found big words. We wrote them down. We made up songs to sing. When we got home, we worked the kitchen together—Mama rubbing my father’s steak and me snapping the tips off of beans.
Miss Banks wears a navy housedress like the kind no one but the cat is supposed to see. The dress has big white buttons down the front and a single brown one, except sometimes a white circle button goes missing and sometimes it’s replaced with a fat red square as if rearranging buttons is Miss Banks’s method of accessorizing.
“Coming to read?” Miss Banks will ask when I walk in, never looking up to see whether I nod yes or shake my head no, and not minding where I go, which stacks I walk to, which book I take down to the floor and read. It can go for an hour like that, just the two of us—Miss Banks the librarian in her stuffy chair and me on the floor, and sometimes Julius will come in, leave his mop and bucket at the door, and spend ten minutes or more with the Daily News. Or sometimes a doctor will come by, or a nurse, and when that happens, Miss Banks will lift the glasses from the chain around her neck and pinch them up to her nose and ask, “Subject matter? Title? Author?” in that order, and whoever has come has to answer so that Miss Banks can point them to where they should go. They sign their name on a clipboard pad when they take a book from the room. They toss it back into a bin when they are done.
I find the books that Mama read to me. I take them back to Autumn, to read to her at night. I crawl in beside her on her cot and she watches the moon, and I read, and when I’m done, she’ll ask me if I have ever had a garden of my own, or if I ever met a thief kind as Ali Baba. She’ll smile, but it’s not like the smile of before, and she doesn’t wear her goggles anymore, and for three days straight she hasn’t changed her leggings. “Psshhhahh,” she says, when I tell her good night. She touches her finger to her heart and turns.
“I can’t take it,” she says. “I can’t take it anymore.” And every time a black crow caws, she sobs into her pillow.
Sophie
Clouds have come in; the sky is dark. Miss Cloris and Miss Helen go back and forth on the porch swing, the loose bits of chain snapping against the long links whenever the chair rocks back to its center. I can hear their voices rising—the sound of their words, but not the words themselves. I watch the windows in their house for Joey passing. At last the screen door slams and Harvey’s down there barking, and when the door slams a second time, it’s Joey in the alley, play-wrestling that dog to the ground. The only light there is is the leak of light that falls from the porch toward the alley.
“You’ll get the police called,” Joey’s warning Harvey, “if you don’t stop your yipping.” But Harvey keeps on sing-ing to the hidden moon, and Joey wrestles him harder, tries to shush him. on the front porch, the swing chains come to silence and Miss Cloris stands to scoop Miss Helen into her arms. I see their half-shadows on the porch boards. I hear their whispers rising. Now the door slams and there’s nothing, then there’s Cloris flipping on the kitchen lights. I watch her lower Miss Helen into a kitchen chair and then walk toward the sink, where I can’t see her.
“Joey,” I whisper-call through the tree limbs. Against the kitchen light, he’s a silhouette, and Harvey’s all for action, jumping his paws to Joey’s shoulders. Joey takes the dog’s weight, then presses down on his cap and fits his hand over his eyes. “Hey,” he says at last, when he finds me staring through the night. “You okay up there?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “You okay?”
He shakes his head. “Wish I could see you. For real, I mean.”
“Wish it, too.”
Harvey whines and noses up to Joey’s chin. Joey laughs, takes Harvey’s front paws, and holds him still, like the start of a dance.
“You sure you can’t come out?” Joey asks me.
“I am.”
“Your mother awake?”
“She’s left the door to her bedroom open. She’d hear me on the stairs.”
“It’s a good night,” he says. “Even moonless.”
“I know.”
“Got all my homework done.”
“That’s nice.”
“Have an idea,” he says finally, lowering Harvey to the ground.
“What’s that?”
“Just don’t go anywhere. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Joey Rudd.”
He reaches into Harvey’s collar, drags him around to the front porch and up through the door; I watch it all in silhouette. Then the door slams again, and Joey’s back outside, a dark shadow with a backwards cap making its way to the base of the oak. I hear leaves rubbing leaves and the snap of a twig. I hear the croak of a limb yanking downward.
“What are you doing?” I whisper through the knots of the tree.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” he says, “let down your golden hair.”
I see the tree shiver in the dark. I hear sneakers slip against the bark, then hold. Farther up, nearer to me, the leaves turn into wings and the wings are the night crows flying free, and the wings are in me, too—the way my heart turns over on itself, the way my stomach flutters.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” I warn him.
“Am not.”
“Watch out, will you?” My words are breath.
“I’m watching.”
“Can’t see you.”
“There’s a distance,” he says, “and I’m climbing.”
It’s shadows and gray, the crooked lid of his cap. It’s the arms of the tree, its elbows twisted, its leaves shaking loose to the ground. High up, near me, the tree starts shuddering harder, and Joey cries out, and now there’s silence and the tree goes much too still.