Once You Know This

by Emily Blejwas

  • • •

  After school Mom picks me up with her hair brushed as straight as it can go and held with a plain rubber band. She’s wearing jeans, her gray sweater with the hole at the elbow, and no makeup. She looks beautiful and I give her a huge hug. She smiles at me without seeing me. Her eyes are still long-lost. “Want to go to the purple-slide playground?” she asks. “It’s so nice out.”

  “Yeah!” I say and offer to push Tommy’s stroller because Mom’s holding Scrabble and her arm is linked in Granny’s and it’s hard to do all that. Mom sometimes brings Scrabble places but we never play. Our school got a grant earlier this year and every fifth grader got a brand-new board game. Some of us got Trouble and some got Scrabble but we couldn’t choose. Mom played with me once but she didn’t notice when Tommy put a tile in his mouth.

  He choked on it. It was terrifying. Mom kept thumping him on the back and shaking him upside down and finally she reached in and got it out with her finger. I’ve tried to think of a word to describe her eyes but I can’t. It was like Granny’s nervous horse but much, much worse. We haven’t played Scrabble since. I don’t know why she carries the game sometimes. Maybe she’s trying to get her courage up.

  • • •

  Mom is as smiley as she gets at the playground. She pushes Tommy in the swing and makes faces at him and he shrieks like babies do. Granny closes her eyes on the bench and lifts her face up to the breeze and doesn’t try to wander away once. And when I hang from the monkey bars Mom tickles my bare stomach like I’m a little girl. I laugh not because it tickles but because I’m so happy at that moment.

  I used to be happy at lots of moments but then we moved into Jack’s house. He tricked me by saying how much I’d love having my own room because I used to share with Mom and he said I could paint it any color I wanted. Mom said, “You know she’s nine, right? So she might choose pink.” Which was ridiculous because my favorite color has always been yellow. “I’ll paint it rainbow if she wants me to,” Jack said, but that was a lie because my walls are still the color of an old sock and I don’t like having my own room at all. I miss waking up and seeing Mom the very first thing. She used to point at me from her bed and I would point back and our fingers just touched.

  We stay at the playground past when we should and I wonder if Mom is thinking about Life Before too. The sky’s turning lavender and pretty soon the boys will drive their cars slow through the streets. We walk home with our eyes on the sidewalk and I pretend I’m one of those kids on the news playing in the new park on the North Side, and the potato chip bags are red and yellow leaves I’m kicking up with my brand-name sneakers. I kick at one snagged in a crack but it’s really stuck.

  At home Mom makes real macaroni and cheese the way Grandma Jane taught her. Grandma taught her lots of things, like how to sew on a button and clean fabric using dish soap and sun and make iced tea that tastes like a place you want to go. And Mom always says it out loud whenever she does any of those things: My mother taught me that. Then she gets the cinnamon-and-raisin-toast eyes, which are always warm but half happy and half sad.

  • • •

  Most of the time Mr. McInnis ignores it when we pass notes in class but sometimes he grabs one on his way down the aisle to remind us that we’re supposed to care about school. Today he gets one Sofía drew in marker so when he unfolds it we can all see the outlines through the back.

  It’s a picture of two men holding hands and one is labeled Mr. McInnis and the other is Boyfriend. Which is stupid because none of us have ever seen Mr. McInnis with a boyfriend. We don’t see him anywhere but school. We don’t even know where he lives. There are hearts all over the page in all different colors and I wonder how Sofía got so many purples and pinks in her marker box. Did she trade for them?

  I look up to see if Mr. McInnis is wondering too but his face is as red as the reddest heart and I look back down. Maybe he does have a boyfriend. Sofía’s looking down too. We are all looking down. “Okay,” Mr. McInnis says. “Page fifty-seven. Subject-verb agreement for indefinite pronouns. Can anyone do the first one?” Someone raises their hand and gets it wrong. No one passes a note for the rest of the day.

  • • •

  I’m eating Cheerios using the least amount of milk possible so the milk lasts through the weekend. I should eat breakfast at school but for some reason I think it would hurt Mom’s feelings. Granny’s across from me taking tiny sips of her coffee. I wonder if she’s trying to make it last too. She reaches toward me but her eyes are on the plants next door that belong to Odessa Williams.

  I only know her name because we got a letter for her once by mistake and I returned it. Jack was mad I went alone. He said her son is one of the worst on our block. Which is weird because Odessa takes such good care of her plants it seems like she would take good care of her son too. But maybe kids don’t always turn out like their parents. For Tommy, that’s a good thing.

  “Do you need something, Granny?” I ask.

  Granny tucks my hair behind my ear with a shaky hand, then frowns like my face looked better with the hair hanging over it. It probably did. But then she taps my head and mutters. I tuck my hair tighter behind my ears. She taps my head again in the same spot and like a miracle I know what she means. I run to my room and push around all the junk in my top drawer until I find a barrette with a purple flower on it. One of the petals is missing but it doesn’t matter. I stick it exactly where Granny tapped her finger and run back to my chair in the kitchen.

  Granny smiles and chirps at the barrette. She sounds like the big blue and gray bird with the Mohawk that always sits in the same tree on the same branch on the way to school. It seems like he’s trying to tell me something but when I look at him he looks right back with his eyes black beads and his face pointy and hard. Just like some of the boys at school. Granny’s chirps turn a little closer to words and I think I hear “pretty” but I’m not sure.

  • • •

  Jack’s been gone four days and the red mark on Mom’s face has faded to the palest yellow. She’s mopping the kitchen floor with her jeans rolled up, humming a song. I don’t know the song but I hold my breath because the sound is so beautiful that I never want her to stop. Then she stops. “Can you lift your feet up?” she asks.

  “What? Oh. Yeah.” I lift my feet up and she mops under them. Then I tuck them onto my chair so I won’t get her clean floor dirty. It smells like lemons in the kitchen and Tommy’s bouncing in the doorway in the seat Laila gave us, laughing when Mom swipes at his socks with the mop. I want to pretend everything’s fine but I can’t because Jack will come home eventually. Mom sits down at the table to stretch her back. I don’t want to break her happiness but I have to.

  “Mom,” I say and tap one finger as gently as I can on her cheek, the way Granny tapped on my head. “You can’t let him do that anymore.”

  She smiles, keeping her happiness, and I’m relieved. “I know,” she says. “I’m making a plan.”

  • • •

  Mr. McInnis and Ms. Sanogo each chose one volunteer to change the decorations from Day of the Dead to Thanksgiving in the fifth-grade hall and by the best luck in the world, it’s Marisol and me!

  “Hey, girl!” Marisol says and hugs me around the neck. I can hear her earrings jingle and smell her strawberry lip gloss and I feel like a baby even though Marisol is seventeen days younger than me. “Just like we planned it, right?” she says and looks around at all the skeletons. We used to celebrate Halloween until some parents somewhere complained and now all the schools do Day of the Dead instead. Marisol says, “Guess it’s time to take down all these dead guys.”

  We start pulling on the skeletons, trying not to break their bones. “This is nasty,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Marisol agrees. “But for real the Day of the Dead isn’t nasty at all. It’s a time to remember all your loved ones. In Mexico, they get together at the graves and clean them and pray and tell stories. And you leave out the dead people’s favorite foods
. We make a little altar at home and Mamá always buys a big bag of M&M’s and picks out all the green ones and lines them up in a perfect row for her papi.” Marisol jumps up to pull down a high skeleton and his head pops off. “Leave it to this place to put a bunch of bones in a hall and call it Day of the Dead.”

  I wish we celebrated Day of the Dead so I could make an altar for Grandma Jane. Except my memories are just scraps and I wouldn’t even know what kind of candy to line up. And Mom keeps her memories so close they only slip out by accident, like when she’s searching in her purse for something else and drops a pen in the parking lot.

  • • •

  Medicare doesn’t want to pay for the medicine to help Granny think clearer. I picture Granny’s brainwaves as crazy mountain peaks and the medicine washing over them like a river washes rocks. (Mr. McInnis calls this erosion.) But that’s probably not how it works. “I don’t think you understand,” Mom says into her phone. She looks around at all the kids coming out of school and finds me standing right in front of her. “Oh. Hi, sweet pea. Sorry. Just—Yes,” she tells the phone and we start walking.

  I push Tommy’s stroller. He’s asleep under a huge winter hat that’s over his eyes but Mom’s hair is loose and flipping in the wind like trying to get her to have some fun. She keeps swatting it away so she can see where she’s going. It’s weird to see Mom’s hair all wild next to her face, like it’s teasing her, and I want to grab it and tie it in a knot and tell it to knock it off. Because how can she concentrate on a plan without Granny’s medicine and her hair whipping around like that?

  Grandma Jane used to make Mom have fun, but in a nice way. She would turn the car radio up really loud and light her cigarette and dance and laugh and Mom would too. They would roll the windows down because of secondhand smoke but even in winter that car felt warm. I wish I could do that for Mom but we have no car and I can’t dance and those cigarettes killed Grandma Jane. “It’s just that she can’t function without it,” Mom says to the phone. “What else can I say? How can I prove it to you?”

  • • •

  There’s so much construction paper I know Mr. McInnis paid for it himself because our school would never have this many choices. If every kid wanted a full orange sheet, we could have it. My whole self feels gentle but I’m not sure why. It could be all the paper or the warm air from the space heater Mr. McInnis snuck in or the silence except for the sound of all our scissors. On the second day of school, Mr. McInnis brought scissors for every kid who didn’t show up with some on the first day ’cause their mom couldn’t afford school supplies or didn’t care or wasn’t paying attention to the list.

  We’re doing Matisse paper cutouts which are always bright colors from nature so Mr. McInnis tried to take us outside. I’m not sure what bright colors from nature we could see in this neighborhood in November but we were happy because we usually only go outside for recess and nobody really plays except on the tire swing but the rope broke last week. The security guard stopped us because it’s against school policy to go outside except for recess or a field trip. Mr. McInnis tried to talk him into it but he had trapdoor eyes, which are like pretending to listen when you’re actually not. So we all turned around and Kayshaun who was last in line turned into the leader and walked us back.

  But Mr. McInnis didn’t give us extra math problems or say Maybe next time or kick the door. He called it a temporary setback and told us about how when Matisse wanted to do these cutouts he was old and sick and lived in Nice, France, where the Mediterranean Sea was the deepest blue and the heat was too bright for him to sit by the pool. So they took him inside and he said I will make myself my own pool. But I guess he said it in French. Mr. McInnis showed us a picture of Matisse in an old-fashioned wheelchair with all colors of paper scraps at his feet so we knew he was for real.

  Then we all closed our eyes and Mr. McInnis told us to picture the brightest thing in nature we could think of. Lots of kids chose the lake downtown with orange or yellow suns in the sky. But I chose a winter night with a midnight blue sky that I made with blue and black stripes because they don’t make midnight blue construction paper. I put a bright white moon in the corner. Then I worried Mr. McInnis would think I was lazy because I was the first one done, but when he looked over my shoulder he said, “Exactly.”

  I usually sleep through Tommy’s crying but this time it sounds different. He’s catching his breath like he’s been crying a long time. I go into his room and pull him out of his crib but then I don’t know what to do with him so I stick him back in and he really cries then. Granny’s bed is empty and for a second I think she got out even though we have three locks and she’s never tried to undo them. I peek into the living room and she’s in her usual spot on the couch, staring out the front window at the puffs of clouds hiding the moon.

  Mom’s on her side in bed, breathing fast and moaning a little like Patches when we found him on the sidewalk last summer. We gave him some milk and his name and he felt better. He ran off to explore the house and the street and I thought he might keep going but he ran back and climbed into my lap and meowed up at me like telling me everything he saw. I loved that. But then he clawed up the couch and Jack put him out one night when we were asleep. I called for him all the next day, through the August heat waving up off the pavement and blocking my throat. But I never found him.

  “Mom?” I say.

  “Brittany,” Mom says in half her voice. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

  But she’s not fine. Sweat’s soaked all the way through her tank top and it’s running down the side of her face. I want to smooth her hair back the way she does for me when I have a fever but I’m afraid it will fall out in my hand. She told me that happens sometimes when you don’t eat much and not to worry but I’m worried.

  Who can help? My heart hammers in my head and Tommy cries harder and I can’t concentrate. Granny can’t help. No matter what I’ll never call Jack. I find Mom’s cell in her purse and push Laila’s name. “Laila? It’s Brittany Kowalski,” I tell the message. “Maureen’s my mom? She’s sick. I need help.” I hang up and know Laila won’t call me back in time. Sometimes I just know things. I can’t explain why but I do.

  Mom says never go out at night because bad things happen on the street but I have no choice. I unlock all the locks and run next door in my bare feet and nightie that’s too thin and too short. No one’s out. The sky looks big and magical. I let myself through the fence and walk up the steep concrete steps to the first-floor apartment. The porch is crowded with all kinds of plants, some round and flowy and some mean. I knock on the green door. The paint’s chipped but the color’s pretty, like the lake on a sunny day downtown.

  Odessa peeks through the front window. Her face is wide and brown with freckles tossed across her cheeks like confetti. She undoes her locks and swings the door wide. She’s wearing a Bears sweatshirt older than me and flannel pants covered in silvery snowflakes that make winter seem like a dream without shovels and ice. “Gracious, child!” she says. “Are you the little girl from next door?” I nod. “What’s the matter, baby?” she asks.

  “My mom’s sick,” I tell her. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Where your daddy at?”

  “He’s not my daddy and I don’t know where he is.”

  “Okay, wait one minute and here I come.” She finds her keys and slips her coat on but doesn’t bother with the buttons. She pushes her feet into a pair of men’s work boots with no socks and locks the door behind her. When we get inside our house, Granny’s still frozen on the couch and Tommy’s hysterical. “Does he have a paci?” Odessa asks. I nod. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. “Go find it and give it to him, honey. I’ll see about your mama.”

  I find Tommy’s pacifier and he lies down. I stay with him and rub his back till he falls asleep. It doesn’t take long. Then I tiptoe down the hall and peek into Mom’s room. Odessa’s sitting by her side, smoothing her sweaty hair back. She hasn’t seen the nests of Mom�
�s hair in the bathroom trash and I don’t tell her about them. She gets Mom to sit up and hands her two pink pills and a glass of water. Mom drinks them, nods, then lays back down. Odessa tucks her in like a kid. “She be all right, honey,” she says when she comes into the hall. “Just a little flu’s all.”

  “I’ll stay till morning so you can get some sleep. Then I gotta get back home and mind my twin grandsons. They four years old and they so bad!” She laughs a rumbly laugh and walks me to my room and tucks me in too. I lie awake a long time listening for anything strange and when I fall asleep I dream Granny is across the street in the parking lot and the lace of her nightgown is caught on the fence but then the fence turns into Odessa’s ivy plant and Granny pulls free.

  I wake up before the sun. Odessa’s snoring in the plaid chair but her eyes pop open when I walk in the room. “Oh!” she says. “I’m glad you woke me.” She rubs her hands together and shakes them out. “My nephew Tiny be comin’ by to drop somethin’ off and I don’t wanna miss him.”

  I sit on the arm of the couch and worry. Jack has people pick things up and drop them off sometimes and Mom hates it. Why’d she tell Tiny to come here? I shouldn’t have called Odessa. I glare at her. There’s a huge man on our doorstep. “There he be,” Odessa says. She opens the door and he hands her a paper bag. “Thank you, doll,” she tells him.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I follow Odessa to the kitchen. “Did you know Tiny was premature?” she asks. I shake my head. How would I know that? “Oh yes, he was. Puniest thing you ever saw. Fit in the palm of his daddy’s hand. We didn’t think he would make it. No, ma’am.” She smiles at me and sets the paper bag on the kitchen table and I squint at her. “And look at him now! So big and strong!” She laughs that laugh again, then gives me sparrow eyes. “You don’t ever know what a person will grow up to be,” she says. “You just got to wait and see. People do surprise you.”