by Beth Kephart
“Joey?” I ask, my heart in my throat.
“It’s nothing,” Joey says, his voice straining.
“Some night for no moon,” I tell him, and now I can’t swallow, and I don’t want him to stop, but he has to, because what if he falls, and what if he’s hurt, and what if it’s my fault, because it would be?
“Tree’s a dream,” he grunts, “for climbing,” and all of a sudden the tree’s alive again, as if someone picked it up to shake it. I hear the grab of Joey’s hands among the leaves, the splitting of the bark beneath his shoes, the falling away of cracked twigs. Finally I see his fist punch through the tree shadows, and then his wrist, and then his shoulder, and then his head. I smell chocolate chips and dog kiss, the leather belt that slaps long at his waist. I watch him riding that limb as if he’s riding some horse and pray that my mother’s still sleeping.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” I whisper.
“Trees are meant for climbing.”
“You be careful.”
“Am being.” Across the alley, a light snaps on in the upper hallway, and I can see more of Joey now, see the knobs of his hands, the leaves in his hair, the tear in his T-shirt. His eyes are the light. His face is in shadow. His hair’s a wild mess beneath his cap.
“Help me?” he asks, stretching his hand out, and I bend over the sill and reach with all my height.
“I’m not tall enough,” I say.
“Try harder.”
I stand on my toes, press my knees into the low wall beneath the sill. I tip across the ledge, lower my shoulders, and now when Joey stretches, his hands clasp mine and he pulls himself toward me on the tree.
“Little by little,” he says, his words pressed out of a too-small space, and I’m pulling so hard that I can’t speak. “Slow,” he says now, “and easy,” and my arms are around him, his weight is near, I can hear his thumping heart, and the limb bends and rises like a seesaw game and the leaves shower down to the ground.
“It’s not safe,” I say.
“I’m almost there.”
“The tree’s not strong enough.”
“It better be.”
I hold tight and ease him in, hug him slow off the wobble of the tree—his cheek on my cheek now, his words in the space between my neck and chin. “Not bad for a girl,” he says, and then he’s laughing, and I’m laughing, pulling him up and in, until his head and neck and shoulders are through the open window, and his one knee is on the sill, and then the other is through, and he’s beside me, in my house, in my attic, breaking every single rule, the splinters shivering beneath us.
“What are you doing?” I ask him, breathless.
“Aunt Cloris made cookies,” he says. “Thought you should have some.” And now he digs into his pocket and finds the cookie crumbs and puts the cookie back together on his hand.
“Chocolate chips,” I say.
“That’s right,” he says, and then he’s kissing me, breathless, and the cookie falls to the floor, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted is these kisses.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I manage between everything.
“I should be,” he says, “because I like you.”
“I have brothers I never met,” I tell Joey later, after the moon has decided to come out after all, a bright moon, growing smaller.
“Aunt Cloris told me,” he says. “At least a little.”
We lie each on one joist, the carpet of pink stuff between us, watching the moon disappear, the night grow lighter. “You’ll get in trouble,” I told him, but he said that he wouldn’t, that Miss Cloris and Miss Helen were all in favor of keeping a friend in need safe.
“I’ve been safe all these years on my own,” I told him.
“But now you don’t have to be,” he answered, and after that he held my hand over the fluff of pink stuff and stopped talking. We had a million things to say and nothing needing immediate saying. I had stories in my head—my stories, his. I had his hand in my hand, the taste of Miss Cloris’s cookies on my lips, my mother sleeping down below, the box of personals. There were two little boys. They weren’t outside. The fire got them. The fire still burns my mother’s knees. What do you suppose any of us wish to be remembered for? she asked me. For the things that tried to stop us or the ways we carried on?
“What are you going to do?” Joey asks me now.
“Find out the truth.”
“What happens if you don’t like the truth?”
“It can’t be helped. It will be true.”
“What are you hoping?”
“Hoping to stay here, to stop moving. To go to a real school. To go into town. To get a dog of my own and take an Airstream adventure.” To go fly a kite, I almost say, but I remember not to.
“That old Airstream,” Joey says softly. “It’s not going anywhere.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Aunt Helen’s time is soon. She’s dying, Sophie.”
I turn, search for Joey’s eyes in the dark. “She’s dying for sure?”
“Little by little, but quickly. Aunt Cloris pretends like it’s not going to happen. Aunt Helen lets her. It’s the only way, I guess, for them. Except sometimes I find Aunt Cloris crying.”
“How long,” I ask, “does she have to live?”
“She stopped going to doctors,” Joey says, “a year ago. She said there was nothing they could tell her that she didn’t already know. Make every day count, is what she says now.” I squeeze Joey’s hand and close my eyes, try to picture Miss Cloris and Miss Helen. The big one and the little one. The wheeled chair and the custard. The clanking chains of the porch swing at night. Miss Cloris left behind. My whole body hurts just thinking of it. A tear falls from my eye, and then another tear, and now my whole face is drowning with the sadness of what is to come and what can’t be changed and the pressing down of time.
“You’re lucky,” I say. “Growing up with them.”
“I still miss my sister,” he says. “And my mom and dad.”
“Unlucky and lucky,” I say. “At the same time.”
Emmy
“ ‘The barn was very large,’ ” I read, from the Charlotte’s Web book. “‘It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell—as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.’”
Past the rectangle of the window, snow falls, fat and wet and white. All morning, all afternoon, it has laid its whiteness down, and beyond the window, in the courtyard, the bare trees wear the red bulbs of Christmas. The sound of the weather has worked its way inside—the hush-pause and the down tick, the ache in the clock on the walls.
“Autumn.” I stop. “Sweetheart, look.”
But she has closed her eyes and she won’t look up. “Keep reading,” she says with a sigh.
“‘It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope,’” I read on. “‘And whenever the cat was given a fish-head to eat, the barn would smell of fish. But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead. And there was always hay being pitched down to the cows and the horses and the sheep.’”
I smell Christmas Eve on Autumn’s breath, the chicken potpie that we ate with a slender wedge of cheese and a little puddle each of cranberry juice poured out in Dixie cups. Someone had brought in an old stereo and plugged it in with old-fashioned Christmas blues, and we sat there, together, while Jimmy Butler sang “Trim Your Tree” and Felix Gross sang “Love for Christmas,” and when Sugar Chile Robinson sang “Christmas Boogie,” Wolfie took up Virgin Mary’s hand in hers and a space was cleared on the tabletop and the two of them danced, Virgin Mary’s eyes a million miles away, but something close and near on her lips, something like a blessing. I half expected Autumn to dance, but she has learned her lesson, she says, or so she told Bettina five days ago, when they returned privileges to her
and unlocked the door and told her, “But we are watching.”
“‘The barn was pleasantly warm in winter when the animals spent most of their time indoors,’” I continue, even though we both already know what will happen with the spider and the pig, the words in the web, the radiant, the terrific, the humble, “‘and it was pleasantly cool in summer when the big doors stood wide open to the breeze.’”
“I’d like some of that summer breeze,” Autumn says.
I take my time reading—give Charlotte A. Cavatica and the farm fair and the magnum opus all the space they need, until my eyes start to close and my thoughts drift off to Baby and how I will not be holding her, will not be singing to her, will not be saying, “Happy First Christmas, Baby.” I won’t be saying, “I love you,” and that is why she’ll never know. You are not a mother if your daughter never knows.
I hear a knock at the door, the knob turn. “Bettina?” I say.
“Am I interrupting?” she asks, and when she comes in and stands there, I think of how Bettina is practically an inmate, too—born here or not, here she is, the Christmas hour approaching, and nowhere to go but to Room 433. She has let her hair grow down to her shoulders, and it falls in irregular curls. She has taken the cross from her neck and pulled a sweater over her uniform, and at the hem, some of her yellow slip sticks out. Her hose are white and see-through. Her knees look blue and cold.
I watch her watching me, just standing there, thinking something I can’t see, and then it’s as if she remembers why she’s come, and from her apron pocket she slides a package tied with string. “It appears that you have a correspondent,” she tells me, and I shake my head no. I have no correspondent. I have nothing, except for Autumn, except for Charlotte and Wilbur and the farm.
But she stands there anyway, lit up by the lamp beside her and the Christmas colors from the courtyard below. “Here,” she says. “Addressed to you.” I sit tall, my back against the wall, and the package smells like rainwater and stamp glue, wood shavings and graphite, the accordion fold of old air.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“I have no correspondent.”
“Apparently, Emmy, you do.”
I turn the packet over in my hands. Loosen the strings with my thumb. Look up at Bettina, but she only shrugs.
“Special delivery,” she says, and she stands there waiting for me to open the thing, but I won’t do that until she’s gone.
“Merry Christmas,” I say.
“Merry Christmas, Emmy, Autumn,” she says after a minute goes by, after the snow keeps falling past the window. When the door closes, Autumn turns and sits up beside me, and still I hear Bettina in the hall, feel her near, smell her sadness, and I wish I had a present to give her, a box for her to take down the hall, to the elevator, past the guard, across the spokes, through the arch, into her quarters. If she was born here or not. If she is in love or never will be.
“What do you suppose?” she says.
“Don’t know.”
I set Charlotte aside. I slide the package from one hand to the other, turn it over again, do not recognize the handwriting on the brown envelope, cannot read the ink across the stamps. It is not a book, or I would feel it. It is not a hat; my mother’s gone. It is not a scarf or mittens, because it has no lean into or stretch. It’s something solid inside. Too hard and heavy to be fragile.
“Autumn,” I say. “We are remembered.”
The snow is falling. The year is almost done. I cannot see the clock on the wall or hear its ticking. I split the package seam with my longest finger, run my flesh through the thick packing, reach inside, and take my Christmas. It is cold to the touch; it is sculpted. It is driving wheels and bell and smokestack, cylinders and steam chest, whistle. I know what it is, and it is perfect.
“Who?” Autumn asks.
“Arlen,” I say, and I am like the snow, falling, falling.
Sophie
He leaves the way he came—a shimmy down the long arms of the tree. I hear his front door swish and creak closed, and he is gone, and the light leaking in through the window is pink. From another rooftop or another tree, the crows return. I smell like Joey and attic splinters and chocolate.
Mother will wake soon. She’ll rub her knees and call my name, and if I’m not where I’m supposed to be, there will be questions; there will be trouble. Slowly, I walk the attic boards and the right part of the stairs. I step into my room, change into a T-shirt. I crawl into bed and try to sleep over the wildness and strange hurt of my head.
When I wake, she is standing above me, her long hair falling forward. The sun through the window catches a small square of her face—the blue river of a vein working its way to her eye. The flesh beneath her lashes looks like the scratched-out scribble of a sketch.
“What’s gotten into you?” she’s asking.
“Mother?”
“Nine a.m. and still in bed?”
“It just happened,” I say, rising up on my elbows and rubbing the sleep from one eye. My head still hurts, and now my heart, too, and my throat is like a scene from Cather’s desert. I swallow and hear the click.
She studies me, tucks her hair behind her ears. She fits her hands onto her corduroy-skirt hips and leans in, closer. I take a long, deep breath and pray that she cannot hear my heart. “what’s this?” she asks me now, lifting a spot of pink fluff out of my hair, into her hand.
“I don’t know,” I say, my heart so crazy that I’m sure she’ll hear the wild thrash of it now, the bad inside it, the fear.
“Where did it come from?”
I shrug, lean away from her stare. “From cleaning?” I say, the first lie that comes to mind.
“From cleaning what, Sophie?”
“From behind the curtains, maybe? From when I was dusting your salts and peppers?”
“Those curtains are blue.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t.”
She balances the pink on the palm of her hand and lifts it higher, as if it’s some formula she’s captured, a new Archimedean solid. “odd,” she says now. “Very.” In a cold, shattering voice that decides nothing. I turn and curl my knees toward my chin. I close my eyes as if I’m considering more sleeping. I feel the touch of her finger on my shoulder.
“No more,” she says, “of that. The day has started.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going out, but not for long. we’re short on supplies.”
I stay still, not speaking.
“Sophie?”
“Yes?”
“I want you out of this bed and up and ready.”
“Mother?”
“We’ll have work to do when I get back.”
I nod.
“And take a shower,” she says. “You’re smelling funny.”
I run the loud center of the stairs and down into the front room. I tear through the kitchen, past the sinking icosahedron, into the laundry room, past the machines. My shampooed hair sits heavy on the bones of my shoulders. My sweatshirt falls baggy past my waist. The door to the basement rasps at its hinges and sucks at the air, and the web above my head floats loose.
I take the stairs one plank at a time, turn the square corner, see the dolls and the cars and the toys and the first box, flat as a brown carpet—everything as I left it, a dangerous wreck. There’s no time for fixing. There’s only time for my mother’s second box of personals, which sits on the shelf above the ghost of the first—a Magnavox box with the FRAGILE signs pointing up, and the brown tape more shiny and steadfast. I pull it toward me, tug at the first loose tab of tape that I find. The cardboard tears; a seam pops. I dig my fingers under the second line of tape, and the box gapes, and my head hurts, and I catch my breath, knowing that I can stop this if I want to. I can still not know, can still be half of good, can not break this rule, not know these secrets.
But it’s too late, too far. There was an attic and a window and acorns going splat. There was a boy with a ball and a dog, two aun
ts. There was my inside and their inside and all I never knew and all I ever wanted, and now I’m here, my knees sunk to the cool of the basement floor, my hands pulling at the box flaps, my lungs sucking in all the air they can hold, to power up my heart. I find scrapbooks, baby books, a curl of soft, blond hair. I find photographs and a puzzle board—the wooden shapes of hats and shoes. I find tiny hangers for tiny dresses and an orange tin of buttons and one yellow sock and Candy Land pieces and a photograph of my cat Chap and a felt bag of blocks and books never returned to the library after all, books still in their shiny, crackling covers, and a book of her own, The Book of Thoughts. I find toy tops and toy bananas and toy purses and plastic lipstick and a pair of train tickets and a pair of big shades and an umbrella no bigger than a doll would hold and a second photograph of Chap. My mother’s second box of personals is the history of me—as if I am alive but the past of me isn’t, as if everything I came from is part of shame or hush. I feel a hot, heaving sickness in my gut. I feel my mind too heavy with mystery to understand. To know what it means, to take it all in, to be here by myself. Maybe we should come with you, Miss Cloris said, and I’m wishing that I’d let her, that I wasn’t here alone, that I had other people’s courage with me, and other people’s knowing.
“Sophie,” I hear now. “You down there?”
“Mother?” I call up. My heart stops.
The top light snaps on and the door rasps and I hear Mother take one wobbling step down onto the plank. “what in the world,” she’s asking, “are you doing down here?” and there are stones in her voice, a cold coldness. I take The Book of Thoughts and stuff it up beneath my sweatshirt, spring from my knees. I hurry over cars and dolls, run up the stairs, stand on the square turn, halfway.
“I was looking for the broom,” I say, and even I can hear how thin and breathless I sound, how unreliable. “The one with the dustpan.”