The Blue Girl

by Laurie Foos

  I cannot let him wander, I say aloud outside his room. I cannot let this happen.

  It already happened, Rebecca says.

  I want to ask her who she is talking about, herself or Ethan, but Ethan is banging, and we are both so tired.

  Just go to bed, Mom, she says. He’s not going anywhere tonight, and neither am I.

  I move to hug her but stop myself, because I can see in her eyes she has had enough touching for one night.

  In the dream I was playing with Irene’s husband, Colin, the two of us throwing a Nerf ball from one to another, back and forth, back and forth. The ball was soft and dry, not soaked as I’ve imagined, but still I was afraid to drop it.

  It’s your turn to shoot, Colin said.

  He pointed a finger at me and then at the hoop he kept hung over a doorframe.

  I tossed the ball back to him. He spun it on one finger and threw it back at me, hard.

  I don’t want to, I said. I tried to get up from the couch but found my pants soaked through with marshmallow filling.

  Please, I said, I don’t want to be the one to shoot.

  You shoot first, Colin said. He placed the ball in the middle of the floor. Or else there is no more game.

  So I shoot first.

  I take the dream as a sign, because how else can anyone take a dream after years of wanting? And what is it that I want from my own husband and Ethan and Rebecca? It used to be that I was a different sort of woman, a woman who could say, I want this but not that, and this more than anything. I used to be filled with wanting. I wonder if Rebecca is that way now, the pretty girl in town filled with wanting, the pretty girl who inspires all the wanting. I wonder if that’s what my mother wanted for me. I wish she were here to ask, even if the answer disappointed us both. If I’m going to lock my son in his room, I think, standing in the dark, with moon pies sealed inside the Ziploc bag that I carry in my tote, then I am going to be first.

  We’re in the dark, under the trees, when I tell them I must be first this time. It’s something I have to do, I tell Irene and Magda when we get there and stand outside in the dark, with the pies warm and our breath in clouds in front of us. Irene lights a cigarette and offers it to Magda and then to me, but smoke in my mouth and lungs is not one of the things I want. At least I seem to know what I don’t want, even if I don’t know what it is I do want.

  Oh, Libby, Irene says, we should have known. Always, always, of course. From now on, you should go first.

  Magda touches my hand and tells me how hard it must be for me. So hard, she says, having a son like him. Never mind the foolishness happening with Greg and Rebecca.

  Like him? I ask. As if he has no name. And what does that mean, like him? All these years in this town, and still, is this how they think of my son—a boy like him—all of them probably saying their prayers at night in gratitude that they have not been—what is it one of the women from the PTA once said?—burdened. No . . . not burdened . . . saddled, maybe, like a horse. I think of all of the looks I got when I used to take him to the store, before he grew so tall and became harder and harder to hold. Or when the kids were small, out at the lake when they first started to notice he couldn’t follow their games, the lake that shimmers now as we stand here, three women with moon pies. How sad it must be, I’ve heard people say, to have a son “like that.”

  Even my mother said it once, that she knew it must be hard on me to have a boy “like that.” I forgave her—what else could I do? She was my mother—though I never did forget.

  Magda is sorry. It’s not that I blame her, or any of them. Not my mother, surely, who cared more for girls, truly, and understood so little. Of course it is sad. It would be a lie to say otherwise. But I will not give in to the sadness.

  Brittle is what I am, Magda tells me, the words catching in her voice. My mama was right about me. I have no softness.

  Look at us, I think. Now we are women like that. We are women with baskets and napkins and tote bags, all for a girl who cannot get out of bed. A girl who seems to drown but still lives. As if we can do something, anything, for such a girl.

  But then as we approach the house I think to myself, Who’s to say we can’t?

  It’s so dark I nearly trip on the steps. I feel Irene’s hand fold around my elbow to catch me, and as I reach out to knock, I think of Ethan in the white room alone—asleep, I hope—dreaming whatever it is he dreams.

  When he was younger I used to imagine myself tunneling into his head, digging under his skin and cracking through the skull, all without pain. I’d slide inside the blood and pulp of his brain, into the broken synapses. I would tie them together with twine to refasten them. When I could tell I was finished by the synapses lighting up all around me, I’d burrow through the walls of his brain, opening the damaged part so it could get into the spaces where it was clear—because I knew there were spaces that were clear.

  As I think about the way I used to imagine myself fixing his brain from the inside, standing there at the door, a feeling moves through me. I realize that all my life I’ve tried so hard to be clear.

  When the old woman finally opens the door and stands there with her hands in her pockets, glaring at us, twisting her pockets into knots, I suddenly know that what I really want is something I can never have.

  We’re so late, I say to her. Tonight I feel bold, speaking to the old woman for the first time. From the beginning I’ve let the others speak while I waited. I’ve spent so many nights that way, waiting for my turn with her.

  We are sorry, I say, but the woman does not move away from the door. We didn’t mean to be so late. We know she’s hungry. We don’t mean to keep her waiting. She must be so hungry by now, I say. Please know how sorry we are.

  Finally she steps aside to allow us in. The door to the girl’s room is open only a crack so that the light throws one thin slat into the small room where the old woman waits. At first I’m so fixated on the light from the room and the old woman staring at me with her hands in her pockets that I don’t hear the sounds. Then suddenly they are upon us, the rumblings of a cough—worse than a cough, the racking sounds of fluid, of a struggle so deep and thick that I nearly drop the moon pies on the floor, tote bag and all.

  You send your children, the woman says, and pulls her hand from her pocket. The hand is filled with gravel from the road. I flinch, thinking she may throw it at me, but she shakes it in her hand and begins pacing. You send your children out to feed her, and now she breathes this way. She chokes on what your children gave her.

  What children? Irene says, but the old woman moves away from us and toward the door, where she paces back and forth, back and forth, the way I have so many nights when Ethan is locked inside his room and bangs against the door.

  What shame you should feel, she says, what shame. I thought you understood how hungry she is, how long she waits. But then the children come, and I see you understand nothing. Now she will not eat. Now she will not eat again.

  The coughing comes again, thick, filled with phlegm. I have a flash of memory of Ethan as a boy with the barking cough of croup. I screamed to Jeff to call the doctor as I sat in the steamy bathroom with him on my lap. He was three or four, maybe, and had yet to speak. Rebecca was still in her crib—that much I can remember. Like a seal, the doctor said when he finally arrived. Unmistakable, he said. I rocked Ethan back and forth in the steam and then rushed him, like the doctor advised, into the cold night air. The contrast from heat to cold would open up the lungs, the doctor said. Jeff yelled instructions to me from the downstairs telephone. Don’t wake the baby! I screamed back at him, in those years when we still yelled and screamed, when Jeff still cared enough to be anything but silent. I stood in the backyard in my nightgown and socks, squatting down on the ground and holding Ethan’s mouth open with my hands, as if I could force him to suck in the air. My whole body was covered with goose pimples as I stood there, my arms and legs shaking so hard I fell over onto the grass tipped with ice.

  Your child
ren come, the old woman goes on, as the coughing gets louder and louder, from a low rumble to a dark wheeze with a scratched intake, and I can feel in my own throat burning. She is hungry, so she eats what they bring. She eats when I am not here to look out for her. You take so long to come, too long this time, too long.

  Magda and Irene and I look at each other in the dark room and step back from the old woman. She is small but very angry. Furious, even. I hear her knuckles crack inside her pockets.

  I don’t understand, I say, because I don’t. I no longer understand. And this is why I do not dream.

  The old woman moves forward and tries to grab one of the moon pies from Magda’s linen napkin, but Magda is too quick and raises her arm in the air.

  The children, Magda says, holding the napkin high in the air above the woman’s head. Tell me, old woman, what children are you talking about?

  A boy and two girls, says the old woman, pacing now over the rug that looks as if it has been swept far too many times. The longer we stand there, the more clear my sight becomes, until I can make out the swirls of what once must have been color in the rug. Reds, oranges, a dull yellow. Nothing blue.

  That boy, Magda says. She lets her arm fall down at her side and nearly falls into one of the chairs. The coughing goes on and on. That boy of mine.

  At least I know it is not Ethan. I glance at Magda slumped in the wooden chair, defeated, and for once I am glad to have a son “like that.” A son who will never touch a girl the way Magda’s son touches mine.

  Little boy does not go in. He stands at the door. The little boy I do not blame.

  Buck? Irene says. Oh my God, oh, no.

  Little boy does not go in, but the girls, yes, says the old woman in a flurry of hands and breath. She picks something from her teeth and chews on it, then moves toward the door where the light still throws shadows into the room.

  Let us try, I say. The cough grows louder and more intense. Let us try to feed her. She’s never refused us before.

  The old woman circles the rug and stares at me, hands moving, always, in the pockets.

  Let me try, I say, just me. I have a boy who is also in a room. I have a boy like her.

  The old woman spits something from her teeth.

  No one, she says, moving close enough to me that she is eye level with my breast, is like her.

  She pulls the door open and waves me in.

  Go, she says.

  The girl is sitting up against the pillows and stops coughing as soon as I approach. The curtains from the window beside the bed move slowly back and forth, but when I move to pull the window closed, I see it has already been locked and latched. The girl looks bluer, if that’s possible. Bluer than the deepest dream. Her skin looks cracked, like it’s been splattered with more color than even she can take, and it’s clear to me standing there that this is not a condition she has developed but a lifetime of bluish hints that have bit by bit overtaken her. I lift the tote bag onto her bed and pull it open so she can see inside.

  There is more to give, I say. We have not given enough. Surely you must understand how much we want to give.

  She wheezes softly. Her lips part.

  Yes, I say. Good. You understand.

  She closes her mouth at this remark and sniffs the air. I take this as my cue and reach inside the tote bag. Slowly I unwrap it. I slide it out of the Ziploc and pass the pie across to her, allowing the sweet smell to rise in the air between us. I break off a piece, and in my carelessness bits of chocolate float down onto the comforter.

  Sorry, I say, as I hold the piece of the moon pie in my fingers and out to her. Sorry.

  And then the terrible thing happens. Her jaw opens down to her chest, her pink tongue clacks against the roof of her mouth and then drops, and just as I think she can open no wider, her mouth becomes enormous, spewing forth a torrent of white foam. I jump up from the bed as she heaves a stream of filling all over the comforter and the pillows, a bubbling ferment of white that comes and comes until it stops.

  Rebecca

  ETHAN IS GONE.

  I knew it before anyone else. I could feel it. As soon as I woke up, I remembered the weight of Greg on top of me on the couch on his porch and the smell of vanilla and chocolate, and inside my head I knew—Ethan got out. I knew before my mother screamed and started running through the house, before all the phone calls to my father at work, who never picked up the phone. I was still dialing his number over and over when Audrey and Caroline and Magda and Greg and Buck showed up and scoured the yard, calling his name to the trees beyond the white fence. I was sitting with the telephone, on the kitchen floor, with my knees up to my chest, scraping chocolate off the floor.

  Hang up, Mom said. That sonofabitch.

  Greg came in and didn’t say fuck once, realizing, I guess, that this was not the time to say it. He put his arm around me and started stroking my hair and saying things about not worrying and taking care of me, and even something about love. I didn’t want to hear any of it, not then, but still I let him say it, because I thought my own father didn’t care whether we were here or not, me or Ethan, and for a minute I felt like smashing the phone on the floor so he’d have to pick up the pieces to keep the house white, perfect, without color. They were all out there looking while I sat on the floor, just letting Greg stroke my hair while low sounds started coming out of me—not like crying, exactly, maybe crying without tears. My face stayed dry, but the sounds still came.

  Now the cop they called is here and wants to talk to me. Mom comes into the kitchen and opens the cabinets under the sink, calling, Ethan? Where is Ethan? like the games of hide-and-seek we used to play when he was little, which he never understood because he’d always jump out and yell, Ethan is here!

  I push Greg away, get up, and walk over to my mom. I bend down to try to help her up, but she feels thick, weighted down, stuck to the floor. When I try to pull her up, her pants make a squishing sound.

  I don’t blame you, she says. I want you to know I don’t blame you, and then I feel that sound coming out of me again, and I say, Blame me for what?

  For any of it, she says. It’s not your fault that you went.

  The cop starts up with the questions while I lean against the counter.

  All the questions. There have always been so many questions about Ethan. Why does he talk that way? Why are his ears flat? He’s retarded, right? What does it feel like, having a brother who bangs his head and can’t do much of anything for himself? But the questions I have are about the girl. The girl out trying to drown herself in the lake. Why doesn’t he ask about her? I wonder. Then I realize that he doesn’t know.

  I tell the cop I did not let my brother out. That is the truth. Other nights, yes, I say, there are times when I’ve let him out of the room because the banging gets to be too much and because I have to sleep, I have school. Didn’t this guy ever go to school? But when I’ve let him out of his room, I’ve kept him in my room with me, where he buries his head in my beanbag chair and falls asleep face down. The cop says he never had a brother like mine, but he imagines it would be hard. He’s seen my brother in the car with my mother or sometimes at the store with us. He imagines there’s a lot of strain, he says.

  Ethan has problems, I say. A disability. He has something called fragile X. Do you know what fragile X is, officer? I say, because I feel that burning in my stomach that I get when people talk about my brother like this.

  There are lots of kids like Ethan, I say. They live everywhere, not just in this stupid lake town. He’s not the only one.

  And then I almost say, And how would you feel if someday you and your bitch wife—and I don’t know why I even think this guy’s wife is a bitch when I’ve never seen the guy before, and why would I care about his wife, and maybe his wife is soulful and kind, the way my mother used to be, but still I want to call her a bitch for some reason—had a kid like Ethan? How would you feel then having a kid who couldn’t understand you or write his own name or be left alone at all at
eighteen?

  Or worse, I want to say, as he stands there with his pad and pencil while Magda and Irene and Audrey and Caroline are all out there calling for him. How would you feel if you had a kid that was blue? A kid like her?

  I’m about to say this when all of a sudden I hear Audrey yell from the back door, Mom, Jesus, Mom, where’s Buck?

  Now Buck is gone, too. Buck is not in the yard or in the car or hiding under the cabinets where my mother is still pulling pots. Buck is not there, Buck is somewhere else, and though I can’t think about it now, I know I’m going to be wondering for a long time just what happened last night after I let Greg push himself into me on the couch, and just what our mothers were doing last night with their moon pies. They were gone for a very long time, longer than they’d ever been gone before, and I’m going to be wondering how two of those mothers let their sons go missing without even noticing they were gone.

  But I can’t think about that now. There’s no time now. Now I have to get Audrey alone.

  Before the cop can get to Irene and the screaming Audrey, who’s shaking her mother by the arms at the back door while Magda tries to pull her off, he asks me where I was last night, if I can prove where I was, because they have to think that maybe, just as a possibility, Ethan was taken.

  I turn to him, and I want to say, I was with my boyfriend. His mother caught us. She opened the door and saw. I know she did. Go ahead and ask them all, but I don’t. I stand there looking at the cop and at Greg, who says nothing, not even fuck.

  I move away from the cop, whose attention is on Irene now anyway, and I push Greg away as he tries to grab me around the waist and hold me. It’s not that the holding isn’t nice, I want to say, but not now, Jesus, not now, but what comes out is me telling him, Get the fuck off me, Greg, and tell the officer the fucking truth.