by Beth Kephart
“There is no such thing,” my mother spits. “No such one.” And the men hold her back, and the blare lights tangle, and I am going to be sick. I’m going to throw up on the floor, and suddenly I hear a long terrible howling, worse than animal, worse than jungle, or Mother, and it is my own stolen self, and I am ashamed, found out, and I can’t stop howling.
“Will someone let me through!” Miss Cloris is saying, “For God’s sake, she is a child.” And now I hear her wide feet on the stairs and her, breathless, coming for me, and I feel her arms around me, her hands in my hair. “Sophie. Love.” And it’s all I can do to lift my arms up to her, to let her hold me, to take every ounce of goodness from her, which is every square and cell.
“Miss Cloris,” I sob, and she says, “I know, my love.”
And I say, “But I was stolen from.”
And she says, “It isn’t right. But we’re here now. we’re here to help you.”
Emmy
The snow has piled high; the earth is wet. The sun has come in on the horizon. On the walk below, a robin shrugs the white fluff from her wings, and a squirrel sits twitching its tail. Behind me, on Cot A, my bags are packed—the Levis I arrived with, the yellow sock, Autumn’s goggles and Autumn’s globe, because now Autumn’s things are mine. “It’s your time,” Bettina said. But I don’t understand time anymore.
Out there, beyond, the mail truck pulls into Administration, and a car winds down Carter Road. Out there the sun paints a stripe of gold down the sheer icicles. Out there, somewhere, is Baby. Psshhhahh, I think, wiping a tear from my face, and now, overhead, a gang of fat geese fly—heavy, lifted, hollering geese—and I follow their trail with my eye. “Your chunk of sky,” I say to Autumn, and I feel a breeze blow by.
“Emmy?” It’s Bettina at the door. “You coming?”
“I’m coming,” I say. “I will.”
“You forget something, you can come back for it later.”
“I’m not forgetting,” I tell her. “I swear.”
Sophie
There was talk for a long time. There were police rooms and courtrooms and a lady testing my head and a lady testing my heart, which was a million shattered pieces. I don’t know how you live with so many shattered pieces. There was a dentist who said my teeth were the whitest he’d ever seen for someone who’d gone untended. There was a doctor measuring me to the seventy-fifth, checking every part that makes me whole, and you are whole, they kept saying. It is amazing, they said, above my head. There were social workers and therapists and so many people asking questions, and Miss Cloris never left me, or her lawyer, either, a nice old man in a charcoal suit who claimed to be Miss Cloris’s brother-in-law. “You have a sister with a husband?” I asked, trying to follow. “I have an ex-husband with a brother,” she answered, and she was unlocking the Airstream just then, walking me in, saying it was mine for as long as I would need it, that the system agreed, that we had won, at least, that battle, and I didn’t ask questions because there were already too many questions, too many things I couldn’t make sense of. My mother is in lockup; her trial’s coming. The house where I lived is evidence. The boxes of personals have been packed by the experts and shipped to a lab far from here—the little cars, the plastic men, the photographs, the yellow sock, the hangers that are the size I was then, and around whatever is left is the sticky caution tape, which flaps in the wind and doesn’t break in the storms and tells everybody who drives by slow where the problem was, what the news is. “She is not talking to anyone,” Miss Cloris said for me. No one in trucks and no one with cameras and no one with microphones, until finally they let us alone, because you can’t get past Miss Cloris. You can’t be built like she is, her size and her shape, and think she’s going to give in to something you’re asking. “She’s just a child,” she’ll say into the phone. And then she’ll hang it up loud, bang it to its cradle, and invite me to her table for tea, and we will sit there, the two of us, in the middle of the morning, and try to make sense of right now and also try to get ready for the future.
Miss Helen’s sick, but she will not see a doctor—“Let it be,” she says. “Let it be.” Joey reads when he’s home and Minxy watches and sometimes in the afternoons I learn to throw better than a girl; I learn to lean harder on Joey, and he lets me. He lets me talk when I have to and stop when I can’t, and sometimes he tells me the story, again, of how he survived, when his whole world crashed in, was robbed and stolen. And in the mornings, when Joey’s gone, I leash Harvey like Miss Cloris has taught me and take him on a walk and no one stops me; no one says, “Sophie, be good.” The door slams and it is no secret. The door opens, and I’m home. The world is complicated, and I am, too, and Miss Cloris says that the only way to see the sky is to keep looking up, looking forward.
It’s silver inside the Airstream, silver and old, with a pullout bed that’s rounded at the edge and a string of clattery beads separating the bed from the toilet. Miss Helen’s white rabbit lives here—in the sheets, in the curtains, in the little welcome mat where I leave my shoes—and on the wall there’s a photograph in a rounded silver frame: Miss Cloris and Miss Helen, walking hand in hand.
“That was before,” Miss Cloris said when she saw me staring at it, “when Helen was strong.”
“You’re wearing a dress,” I said.
“I am.”
“You look better in pants.”
She hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe.
They’ve searched for my parents, for the Mr. and the Mrs. Rane. They found my father dead. “It was an embolism,” Miss Cloris told me. “Died at work, just twenty-seven.” She sat beside me, on the silver bed, and gave me the news real slow, and I cried for a long time, for never having known my father, for never having had one, for being stolen away from the chance. Miss Cloris didn’t pretend it was all right. She didn’t say there, there. She let me cry until I was out of tears, and then she said you rest right here, and left the Airstream, and then she came back with a warmed-up slice of pie. “Blueberry,” she told me, and then she went out to get me seconds, and after I was done, she took my hand and said, “They’re still doing the detective on your mama.”
But every day that goes by, my mama’s missing, and every day, too, my mother sits in a prison where they say I should not see her, the fire in her knees, the dark in her eyes, the thieving, the Kepler she wouldn’t believe in.
The sky was blue, and it was easy.
The archbishop has died, but the bell tolls for him, high above the streets of Santa Fe, and his church, Miss Helen says, stands tall and actual. Miss Cloris cried at the end—cried hard and we didn’t try to stop her—and Joey closed his eyes, and it wasn’t but for a few days later when Miss Helen suggested that we move on to poems. Short pack-ages, she called them. Tied up with meaning. And every now and then I’ll read, and when I look up, Miss Cloris is crying.
Monday through Friday, Joey’s at school. Monday through Friday, one o’clock, my tutor comes, Miss Mandy Stanley, her blond hair straight and smooth to her shoulders, her eyes like gem rocks widely broken. She brings me lessons about notebooks and homework. Lessons about keeping organized. we fit tabbed paper between lined paper and snap the notebooks shut, and we fill index cards with the notes we take from the textbooks we are reading. “You’ll be ready come January,” she tells me every day, and I say that if that happens, then I’ll miss her, and if that happens, also, I will not know what to do. I will not know how to walk the corridors of a school and pack up when the bell rings and fiddle the numbers on my locker and put my money out for the cafeteria food—and Miss Mandy and me, we talk it through. “Don’t you ever underestimate your own intelligence,” she says when I start worrying down my list of worries, and I want with my whole heart to believe like Miss Mandy does, to see the world like she does, through those eyes.
“Sophie?” Miss Cloris calls me now. “You in there?” She taps at the Airstream door the way she does, with the side of her ring-finger knuckle.
“I am.
”
“You be ready in an hour?”
“I will.” Because today is Joey’s birthday, and he’s hookying off of school, and the wind is kicking high and the clouds beyond the Airstream windows are sailing loose and woolly. It’s like a day rinsing clean, and I have tied my hair up in a high ponytail and put on my best dress and slipped Miss Helen’s beaded purse across my shoulder, a little square hung from a string. It smells like mint and tea leaves and the nub of old lipstick. And when I step outside, I stand straight as I can. Stand like Miss Cloris says to stand, which is tall enough and straight enough that I can see the sky.
An hour later, we’re in Miss Cloris’s old Civic—Miss Helen with Miss Cloris up front and me and Joey in the back, holding hands, and Harvey left at home, barking at us through the window. “You’re in charge now,” Miss Cloris told him as she locked the door, and then we drove off, down the street, around the bend, to the bigger road against which the big buildings sit—the library, the post office, Hanover’s Foods, my mother’s diner. Miss Cloris drives slow—“we’re special cargo,” she says—and even if some people honk or wave their hands or make their funny faces, we don’t mind, because it is Joey’s day and not one of us has told him the surprise.
When we get to a gravel wedge by the side of a smaller road, Miss Cloris parks and I make Joey close his eyes and Miss Helen promises to sit right with him, on guard, while Miss Cloris and I unpack the Civic’s trunk and carry the all of it—the baskets and blanket and kite in a sack, the pitcher of raspberry lemonade—to a smooth face of rock that Miss Cloris remembers. By the third trip back to the Civic, through the tall grass and the weeds, we are ready. Miss Cloris scoops Miss Helen into her arms. I lead Joey, who hasn’t opened his eyes, who keeps a promise tight, who holds my hand like he will for all of time. we’re alone out here. we’re alone, and the wind is blowing.
In Miss Cloris’s arms, Miss Helen and her green dress float like a leaf gotten loose on a stream. Beside me, Joey’s cap is stuck backward; his long leather belt is softly slapping. Miss Cloris’s shirttail hangs over a pair of pinstriped trousers, and now we’re near to the rock and she turns and she says, “Aren’t we a sight?” as if that’s the best thing any whole person could say about another. I glance down at me—at the peach dress Miss Cloris and I bought at the store, at the ruby-beaded purse cutting crosswise from my shoulder. “we’re a sight,” I say, and then we’re laughing, as if nothing was ever wrong or ever could be, as if we engineered goodness. As if we have that power.
There’s the scurrying of animals we can’t see, but we can hear them. There are deer way over, at the broad field’s edge, and from the limbs of the trees at the edge of the field, old bottles are hung, like a crooked set of chimes. Above us, the sky is sketch and wings, and clouds roll back in, while far away, in the distance, an old building crumbles. Many buildings—tunnels and bridges, a wall of stone, and walls of brick, and roofs that are cracked, and big twiggy bushes that have been pulled up and piled to one side. “The old hospital,” Miss Cloris says when I ask her. “Developers bought the land, but the buildings sit there, rotting.”
“Why rotting?”
“Because sometimes it takes time,” she says, “to scoop out the old and make new.”
The whole thing is broken into. The outside stairs are springing off, like bad curls, and the brick is boned over by old ivy. There are sprays of paint across it all—red lions, a pair of blue horns, a silver graffiti chandelier. It’s crumbled, tossed, and left behind, but there’s a strange kind of beauty to it.
“Seems like a sad place,” I say, and we just stand there looking until finally we remember that Joey has kept his eyes closed, that we’re here for a performance, that we have practiced. It’s Joey’s birthday. It’s Joey’s day.
“Don’t open them yet,” I say, and behind Joey’s back, Miss Cloris and I slip the kite from where it’s been hiding in its Hefty. Together, while he waits, we untangle the string. Together, while Miss Helen smiles, we get ourselves ready. when there’s nothing more to do, we look at each other, square in the eyes.
“It’s your show,” Miss Cloris says. “Do you hear me?”
She puts the kite in one of my hands and the ball of string in the other. She tells me to strike a bargain with the wind, to do as she has told me to do, when we were practicing this day for Joey. “Joey,” she says now, “you can open your eyes,” and all of a sudden, I’m running—across the sink and rise, through the weeds and grass, toward the crumble of the hospital, beneath sky. I’m running, and the kite is jostling behind. It tugs, and it kicks. It doesn’t take flight.
“Keep going!” Miss Cloris yells, and I’m running.
“Faster!” Miss Cloris calls out. “Faster!” And now Joey is yelling with her, and Miss Helen is calling to give the kite more string, and when I glance back, I see Miss Cloris standing tall as a woman like Miss Cloris can stand and Joey taller beside her, Miss Helen on the blanket at their feet. “You’re doing it,” they’re telling me. “You’re putting on some show.” And right at that moment, right when I lose all hope of magic, the electric orange of the kite goes zing and the string whips, slips, tightens, and when I look up, behind me, I see the kite going high, a red-tailed hawk swooping by.
Higher and higher goes the bright zinging kite, the collars and buttons and seams of its tail, the zippers and puff parts and dainty see-throughs. From far away, I hear Miss Cloris telling me to do as we planned to do, which is to say, let the kite go free. “Let it go,” she calls. “Let it all be.” And when I do, when the last final inch of the string burns through, when I am holding on to nothing but drawn-down bits of sky, I look up and see the kite float higher than the birds, toward the clouds that are rolling in, woolly. I hear the jangle of collars against zippers against seams, and now I hear a long whooping and hollering and I turn to see Joey running—through the tall grass down the hill, toward me. “Sophie!” he’s calling. “Sophie!” And when he reaches me, I’m off the ground, Joey’s arms lifting me skyward. “You fly a kite better than any girl ever,” he’s saying, breathless, and his lips are on mine. Far away, in the rock face of the old building, I hear echoes in pipes and old rainwater sponging through tiles. I hear the bark of a dog and the buzzing of insects, and I remember Miss Cloris’s words about tragedy and happiness, and how sometimes the two are the same one thing, and I think of Cheryl Marks, her own No Good: Seek perfection in all that you do.
“Better than any girl ever?” I ask when the kiss is over, and Joey nods yes, and he takes my hand, and we start back up the long grass hill, and above us the sky is still brewing its storm, and by the time we reach the smooth rock, a gust has started to blow.
“We’ll be drenched,” Miss Cloris says, “if we wait any longer. We’ll be drenched, and bless you, Sophie. You did fine.” She lifts Miss Helen and her float of dress high. Joey and I gather every other last thing.
“Must the party be over?” Miss Helen asks, her voice a whisper.
“Can’t afford to catch a cold, dear,” Miss Cloris says, hugging her tight, and we set off for the narrow strip of gravel.
They are there when we pull to the curb—the big man and the brother-in-law, and a couple beside them. They stand on the porch, taking shelter from the purple slash of rain that has come in hard in the last few minutes. Miss Cloris steers the car to a stop and lets the engine idle. She sits and she watches and waits. She turns around and studies me hard, then asks us, very quietly, very oddly demure, if we would all mind staying put for the moment. She opens her car door. She slams it shut. She hurries up the walk, a hand above her heart.
“Who are they?” I ask Joey, but he doesn’t know and pulls me close, and the rain is falling too hard for me to hear what is said—the brother-in-law to Miss Cloris first, and then the big man to Miss Cloris, and then the woman and Miss Cloris talk while the last man paces, his hair like knitting yarn rubbed out in spots and his shoulders too small inside his sweater. But it’s the woman I watch most closely
, her blond hair against the slick white of her trench coat, the belt of her coat tied, not buckled. She wears plain tan boots that lace up past her ankles. The hem of a red skirt falls past her coat, and she moves from one foot to the other, her hands on the ends of her belt, her hands like birds, fluttering, worried.
“Who is she?” I ask, the words a jumble in my throat, and Miss Helen turns, her eyes full on me, her mouth making little marks against time but saying nothing, and now Joey pulls me even closer, holds me harder in the back of the car, and I can’t breathe, but I have to breathe, and the woman turns, and she keeps turning, toward the steps and down and out, and now she runs. She is a ruin in the rain, she is a break against the purple slash, she is breaking and crying and running, her eyes a bright smash, her hands like small birds flying. “Baby,” I hear her. “Baby. Baby.” And the sky is not blue; it is not easy.
Acknowledgments
This book began with an obsession concerning certain abandoned buildings and the lives of urban explorers. It took me to a place once known as Byberry, in the northeast corner of Philadelphia, and to the stories Jim Cuorato, Paul Lonie, and Dominic Ragucci told about a building that once was, about the patients who passed through.
Lauren Wein of Black Cat gave me cause to keep on writing; she believed in this story and my ability to make it whole; she sent e-mails that were full of graces, poetry. Marjorie Braman read twice with care, offered wisdom, and kept me company with stories of chocolates and flowers. And then, one summer day, Laura Geringer read and asked a question: What if? I am so deeply grateful.