The Reading Promise

by Alice Ozma

  I was nine years old. I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, which I never do, and heard sirens in the distance, moaning to each other in a language I sort of thought I understood. There was another moaning, closer, inside the house. I ran downstairs and found my mother on the kitchen floor, sprawled out like a doll someone had suddenly dropped to go do something else. There were little dots all around her, some sort of white bug all over the counters and crawling down onto the floor. Some of the bugs were on her, on her shirt and in her hands. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the light and realized that they were pills, little white circles and ovals, sprinkled all over. I’d seen the pills before, she took them for everything from depression to a blister, but never in this quantity. The phone was on the floor, I could hear my godmother’s voice on the other end.

  “Hello?” I said cautiously into the mouthpiece.

  My mother looked up, thinking I was talking to her. Her eyes were red and tired looking, but also distant and, in an odd way, very relaxed. She looked like she was about to smile and say something to me, but then her face clouded over and she started crying, mumbling something as she sobbed.

  “Sweetheart!” my godmother said with surprise. “Okay, this is good. Listen, your mom is going to be okay. There’s an ambulance on the way. You should see flashing lights any minute. Be ready at the door and let them in when they come. Are you all right? Do you understand what’s going on?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t sure which part I was responding to. I couldn’t tell if I was all right. I was barely awake. And I wasn’t sure what was going on. My mother had taken some pills, and spilled some, and now she was taking a nap on the kitchen floor, only she was very upset about it. I went upstairs to wake up my sister, because she would know what to do. I explained what was going on, as much as I could. After a few words she heard the sirens and jumped out of bed.

  “Dad!” she screamed into the dark. “Dad, wake up!”

  We got in our car to follow the ambulance. It made everything on the road red and white, like Christmas lights but more desperate. The moaning of the sirens continued. Sometimes I thought it was my mother, but it couldn’t have been, because she was inside the truck and the doors were closed. People were moving around in there with her; I could see them whenever we got close enough, picking up things and gesturing to each other. I was the one who let them in when they came to the door and they had been kind, soft, patient. Now they looked angry, their faces taut and tense, arms swinging wildly in the air and then landing firmly on some object, which they carried to my mother’s side. I couldn’t actually see my mother, but I knew she was there, on some sort of mat just below the window, tucked away out of sight. They probably didn’t want anyone to see her crying. She made awful faces when she cried, scrunching up her cheeks and getting her face all red. My crying face would have looked even worse if I’d been crying, but the swirling, flashing lights brought a strange sense of calm over me. No one would sleep through this; my mother would not just close her eyes and go away. How could she? The sound was deafening, the moaning became screeching, and I wanted it to get louder and louder, to keep us all awake. Especially my mother, who was trying to go to sleep on that cot in that truck, but they wouldn’t let her. They kept the lights on and kept the sirens screaming and we all got to the hospital awake.

  I opened my eyes wide for a second. I was in my car. People were running toward me, all around me there was shouting. The rain was coming down harder. I let my eyelids drop.

  I stayed awake forever in the waiting room, or so it felt. It was much harder once we got there. Inside the hospital it was quiet. People were whispering because the patients were trying to sleep. Some of the lights were out, and there was a TV in the waiting room softly playing infomercials, barely daring to raise its voice even when it made its most emphatic points. I couldn’t keep my head up. I let it fall on my father’s shoulder for a while, but then they called us in to see her. I had to wake up.

  She was behind a bright white shower curtain, lying on a bed that had lots of tubes coming out of it. There was a pitcher of ice and some cups beside her, but I didn’t see any water. She was asleep, but they seemed to think it was all right. They mentioned to my father, in even softer whispers, that they’d had to use charcoal. I wondered if they had started a fire to keep her warm. But no, it was already awfully warm in the room. Maybe they had used the charcoal to draw her picture, like in art class. They might need to remember what she looked like, so they’d know if anything changed. I wondered if my father had a picture of her in his wallet the way people sometimes do, one that he could give to them. I knew he didn’t, though.

  When we came back later she was awake, or pretending to be. Her eyes were open and she was saying things, but none of them made sense. She was telling my sister that all of this fuss had been because of her, saying that a fight they’d gotten in had left my mother crying and crying and crying like I’d found her. But that wasn’t it at all. As I’d gone up to bed that night, I’d seen her frantically writing an e-mail to the man she’d been talking to the most. I recognized his picture in the corner of the screen. Fifteen minutes later she was sobbing and writing frantically back to him. Something he said arrived a moment later and left her wailing even harder. I’d heard all of it in the distance as I tried to fall asleep. What this had to do with my sister I wasn’t sure. As far as I could tell, nothing at all. I felt bad that Kath was getting blamed for something she didn’t do. I wished my mother would just tell the truth, or the truth as I saw it. But maybe she didn’t understand what she was saying, anyway. Her eyes were barely focusing on us.

  They told us she’d be better soon. I wondered what that meant. She wasn’t sick, as far as I could tell. Not sick like most of the mothers in the books we’d read, or even the ones we would later read, had been. Not sick like Mama in Esperanza Rising, or hurt like Amanda Cardinal in Wish You Well. She was in a hospital, but she’d done something to go there, and she’d done it quickly—she wasn’t even coughing or sneezing the day before. This wasn’t like Ramona Quimby getting queasy as she looked at her fruit fly experiment in school, either. It was like nothing we’d read about, and nothing I’d seen. My mother was perfectly well, as far as I could tell, but people were telling me that she would get better.

  We left just as the first squeaky streaks of sunlight came out to inspect us. I was sweaty, and the goose bumps on my arms wouldn’t go away. I felt strangely secretive about our departure, as though we’d just done something I should try to hide. I wanted to sneak into the car, slink back home, and forget this ever happened. Instead, upon our exit we were greeted instantaneously by another truck pulling up, its lights spinning madly, and that same screaming, screeching moaning tearing through the dawn. I could still hear it. It was getting louder as I remembered it. And there was another noise too, something even closer, but not quite as loud.

  I opened my eyes. Someone was tapping on my car window. A man in a raincoat.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “I live in the house right there. I saw everything, you poor thing.”

  I could barely hear him over the sirens as the fire trucks and ambulances circled us.

  I must not have said anything because he kept looking at me and finally asked, “Can you understand me? Are you all right?”

  I nodded and got out of the car slowly. The man offered me his coat, but I pushed it away. He offered me his cell phone, which I very much wanted to use, but I was having trouble using my tongue. It felt heavy in my mouth, and my brain seemed to have no control over what it was doing. I managed to run it against the back of my teeth and expected to taste blood. Surprisingly, everything felt fine. No teeth were missing, nothing felt broken or even bruised. Other than a headache and a dizzy, confused feeling, I couldn’t notice much of a difference from the way I’d left the house. I reached for the man’s cell phone, finally managing to get out the words “Thank you” and smile as warmly as I could without making my headache
any worse.

  I dialed my house and waited for my father to pick up. As it rang, I saw the woman I’d hit walking into an ambulance. She wasn’t hurt, but they wanted to check us both out. And as a precaution, I suppose, they threw on the lights and sounds as they pulled away. That noise. I found myself sobbing without even noticing it at first. My cheeks were wet and hot, I felt tears against the phone and pulled away to try to keep it from getting wet. When my father answered, I was once again struck dumbfounded. I heard his voice, so calm and warm and soothing, and I couldn’t speak.

  “Hello,” he said, always a statement when he answered the phone, never a question.

  I sobbed wordlessly, something between a moan and a scream that sounded oddly familiar.

  “Hello,” he repeated, sounding annoyed but still stating the word, not asking it.

  “Daddy,” I said, gasping a little to hear the word come out of my mouth. I had never used it much even as a very small child, and probably not at all in ten years. “I crashed the car,” I yelled, trying to drown out the sirens and my own crying.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said, without asking where I was.

  And he was.

  We walked home but the noise kept playing. Over and over again, the whirring, sad, sound. I waited for it to die down. When the neighborhood was silent and everyone was asleep, I knew it was coming from me. The sounds of ambulances, and the sounds of my mother, came together in my heartbeat as I tried to fall asleep. But for me, it was the sound of survival. I pulled through, and we’d all pull through, because we were a family of survivors. I was so alive, I couldn’t sleep. In the most unexpected ways, I was starting to understand my mother.

  To forgive her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Day 3,170

  A bud is a flower-to-be. A flower in waiting. Waiting for just the right warmth and care to open up. It’s a little fist of love waiting to unfold and be seen by the world. And that’s you.

  —Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy

  Does it have to be a ‘gown’? Can’t you just wear something you already own?”

  “There’s a dress code. Plus I’ll feel really weird if I’m underdressed. I’ll stick out, in a bad way.”

  “What about a nice skirt and a button-up shirt? Would that fall under the dress code, maybe?”

  Single fathers of girls have a lot of tricky issues to face. They deal with puberty, boys, and dating as best they can. I give them, and especially my father, enormous credit for this. My grandmother passed away when I was thirteen. My sister moved out while I was in middle school. My father was too proud to ask his sister for advice. So with relatively little female input, he found his way through the maze of teenage girlhood right beside me, learning to trust me and, eventually, the boys I chose to date. I am proud to say that most of the time, he fully understood what he was doing and made reasonable, logical decisions. I chalk some of this up to all the books we read about young girls. They were almost entirely fiction, but they were usually quite realistic and gave us both great insight into what “normal” girls and “normal” families did. Even with all of our reading, though, some things still absolutely baffled my father. As my senior year of high school came to a close, I realized that prom was one of those things.

  My father just didn’t understand the hype.

  “It’s one night!” he kept repeating, whenever he saw the list of things I needed to buy and do.

  My list was actually quite modest, compared to most girls I knew: I wanted my hair done, only because I didn’t know how to do it myself. I wanted a dress. So far, that was it. I didn’t feel the need to bother with shopping for a purse, or jewelry, or even shoes. I was fine with hunting around my closet for something that would come close enough. But things kept popping up.

  “Stephanie says I should get my nails done,” I mentioned over breakfast one morning shortly before the big night, “but it seems like a waste of money. What do you think?”

  “ ‘Done’? What do you mean by ‘done’? Painted?”

  “Well, that’s one option.”

  “They’re too stubbly. You chew on them like you’ve got the secret to eternal youth in your—what’s the white part called? The tip?”

  “I could get fake nails, I guess.”

  “Oh my goodness, no. They look like cat claws, and when the teachers at school get them they make this awful clicking sound whenever they type. It’s enough to drive a person batty.”

  “I wasn’t planning on typing very much at prom.”

  He let air out of the corners of his mouth dramatically.

  “Still,” he said, “Who would even notice if you had them? In your prom photos, is anyone really going to look at your fingernails?”

  I remembered, with a laugh, how my mother’s first reaction to my winter formal photos had been: “Why didn’t you take the time to get your nails done!”

  Though my mother had lots of seemingly logical suggestions on how prom should be done, she was having a rough year at work and hadn’t offered to contribute financially (my father refused to let me work while I was in school) or drive me around (I hadn’t been behind the wheel since my accident), so my father and I were left to puzzle through her advice and complete the adventure on our own. And so far, we were failing in one of the most important categories of all: the dress.

  We still hadn’t found anything in my price range. I started visiting prom stores with my father and, along with getting a severe case of sticker shock, I noticed that it was something mothers and daughters tended to do together. I felt a pang of jealousy when a friend, whose family was not wealthy by any means, tried on a five-hundred-dollar dress, took one peek out of the dressing room, and was greeted by her mother warmly shouting, “That’s it! That’s the one. Put the rest away. Call the salesgirl over. We’ve got our winner.”

  I picked up another dress from her pile and pointed out the price tag—over two hundred dollars less.

  “Well,” the mother said, “this is not about money. Sometimes you find it, and you just know. Besides, this is the second most important dress she’ll ever wear. And she looks beautiful. So that’s good enough for me. This is something a mother does for her daughter.”

  My mother was interested and supportive, but with my father as my official prom sponsor, things were a little different for me than they were for most of my friends.

  “What about this dress you wore when you were in The Crucible?” he asked one day, as we sorted through my closet to see if anything I had could possibly be reused. “Everyone said how nice you looked in that, and Kath took all the time to sew it.”

  “That was a time-period costume. The Crucible took place in the late seventeenth century.”

  “You’re the one who always says how much you love vintage.”

  “I feel like it’s not quite the same.”

  “Now you’re just being difficult.”

  The real problem was that I wanted an actual prom dress. Not a sundress that I could dress up with the right shoes, or a casual dress that might look formal with enough borrowed jewelry. This was my last chance in life to wear a prom dress, and deep down that was what I wanted. I felt guilty. I tried to convince myself that I’d be happy in whatever I wore, that I didn’t need to be the belle of the ball. But like the bicycle my father had wanted so many years ago, I started having dreams about it: a poofy, pink, princess dress with enough crinoline to make it stand up straight even when I wasn’t wearing it. The bicycle. I finally understood. The dress was something I didn’t need. And if I got one, it could have been any old thing. It was silly and unnecessary. But once I’d imagined and dreamed about the dress, anything else felt like running behind while my friends pedaled away in front of me.

  My father soon wearied of my quest for the perfect dress and brought magazines to the store while I shopped. I’d come out of the dressing room, saleswoman in tow, tiptoeing toward him proudly as I wondered if this might finally be the one.

  “Ma
kes you look like all you do all day is think about bass fishing,” he’d say, peering for only a moment at me before returning his eyes to his Newsweek.

  The saleswoman looked awkwardly from my father, to the elegant cream-colored dress with the empire waistline, and finally back to me. She shrugged as though she completely understood where my father was coming from and led me back to the rack.

  “I can’t take much more of this,” my father blurted out during the car ride home. “There are only so many magazines and baseball books in the world. Don’t you have friends who are prom shopping? I’ll give you whatever money I can. Surprise me. Please, please, surprise me.”

  The money he gave me was barely enough to buy a nice pair of jeans, let alone a prom dress. We’d gone back and forth about the price dozens of times. My father was willing to give me what he could, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him a fair price for a dress. After years of living near poverty, it seemed wrong to ask for almost anything, let alone the figures some of my friends’ parents were happily forking over. I kept my estimates low, but because my father had never been a teenage girl, they still seemed high to him. Every time I left the house on my hunt, I expected to come home empty-handed. There was nothing, not even the simplest gown, in my price range at most prom stores. But still, in the back of my mind, the dream dress floated around, taunting me and whirling its fluffy layers. It wasn’t real. It would never be real, for me.

  I knew it the moment I saw it. My friend and I pulled up in front of a thrift store and there, smiling down at me from a third-floor window, was a ballerina-pink, poofy, unquestionably made-for-prom dress. I didn’t say anything. I was afraid if I called out, someone else on the street might run in ahead of me, dash up the stairs, and take the dress before I could get to it. So I kept my mouth closed and my head down as I made my way toward it in a trance-like state, like a bug magnetized to a streetlight. I picked it up and held it in my hands. It felt heavy, and still soft, and just right. I looked at the size. It was mine exactly. I looked at the price. It was fifteen dollars more than I had. Even used, I didn’t have enough for my dream dress. I tried it on anyway, to convince myself it wouldn’t have really looked good. I was right—it didn’t look good. It looked breathtaking. Just as I was about to take it off, a saleswoman approached me. She was pointing at something and reaching for one of the layers of crinoline.