Once You Know This

by Emily Blejwas

  She pulls two huge bottles of Gatorade out of the bag. They’re so cold water spills down the sides and I want to cry, just like the Gatorade. But I don’t. “Have your mama drink these, honey,” Odessa tells me. “She need to hydrate. One today and one tomorrow.”

  • • •

  This time Mom wakes up when Tommy cries and calls for me. She’s still weak but has her whole voice back. She tells me how to make a bottle and I make it and feed Tommy. I change his diaper and put his clothes on and sit with him in the living room while he plays with his toys. Laila comes over and feeds him breakfast and puts him down for his morning nap. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here last night, Britty-Bug,” she tells me. “No one would cover for me, and my boss is a…Anyway…” I smile. She kisses both my cheeks before she leaves and I breathe in deep because she smells like Grandma Jane, eyeshadow and smoke. I lock the door behind her.

  I’m missing school but I can’t leave Mom. I start the book Mr. McInnis assigned even though he gave us till Thanksgiving to finish it. Mr. McInnis got a grant and bought us all our own hardcover copies. It’s about a gorilla named Ivan who lives in a shopping mall. Then Tommy wakes up and I turn on cartoons. We usually only watch TV while Mom makes dinner and if my homework’s done but today it goes on and on. Tommy’s bored because he has a short attention span and shouldn’t watch TV. One of the WIC ladies told Mom that (the mean one with too much blush and rocks in the parking lot eyes).

  By the afternoon Mom’s stronger. She drinks the Gatorade in small sips but makes it through half the bottle before she goes back to bed. I wonder if she’s using time wisely like Mr. McInnis says and thinking of a plan. But maybe she’s too sick for that.

  I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and think about how Grandma Jane used to buy jars of extra-crunchy peanut butter just for me. She was a teacher in Alabama and came to Chicago every summer to take care of me while Mom was at work. After she died, Mom got quiet and only bought smooth peanut butter and that’s another way Jack tricked me because he got Mom to start talking again. And laughing and going out. Jack took her everywhere, even to the Gold Coast clubs, which Laila says are the best. But then Mom got pregnant with Tommy and everything changed but not in a good way like on the diaper commercials.

  Tommy falls asleep on the couch and I finish the book about Ivan who at the end gets out of the shopping mall and makes it to the zoo. I cry when he gets there, not because I’m happy for him. I am. But I cry because I want to get somewhere else too, but I don’t know where or how or what to do.

  • • •

  I wake up smelling pancakes and hearing Jack’s voice in the kitchen which gives me the weird feeling of being sick and starving at the same time. Mom’s at the kitchen table breaking a pancake into tiny bits and setting them on Tommy’s tray and he’s eating them faster than she can break them. She gives me a shy smile but I don’t smile back because this does not seem like a plan to me. “Hungry?” she asks. I’m leaning in the doorway, thinking about going back to my room.

  “Not really,” I tell her.

  “C’mon, Brit!” Jack’s voice sounds like someone turned the volume up too high. “You can’t pass up my famous pancakes!”

  Here are the things I want to say:

  1. Nothing about you is famous.

  2. Where were you when Mom needed you?

  3. You are making pancakes from a box.

  But I don’t say anything. I’m really hungry and he knows it so I sit down. Mom puts her arm around my shoulders and squeezes. “Thanks for taking such good care of me,” she says.

  “Odessa took care of you,” I tell her, loud enough for Jack to hear. I see his back muscles clench but he says nothing. “Where’s Granny?” I ask.

  Mom shrugs. “Still asleep, I guess.”

  “Well, did anyone check on her?” I stand up so quick my chair bangs backward and falls down. Jack turns from the stove and looks at me like I’m a bear in the zoo and he wonders what I might do next. I give him grizzly eyes because he’s being nice and won’t do anything about it. He turns back to his pancakes and I make a big show of stomping down the hall to Granny and Tommy’s room but I should have brought my plate because I’m still starving.

  Granny’s sitting on a perfectly smooth bed with the pillow in a mound under the covers and I know the sheets are triangle tucked the way Mom does it and says My mother taught me that. Granny’s in her nightgown, holding her church purse on her lap.

  “It’s only Saturday, Granny,” I tell her. “Church is tomorrow.” I know we won’t go because we never do but it seems like the easiest thing to say. She lifts her purse a little then sets it back down and stares at it like she’s waiting for it to do something. I picture it growing wings and flying out the window like a big black glossy butterfly, thin enough to slip through the bars. I sit down next to her and she shakes the purse a little. “Do you want me to open it?” I ask. She doesn’t answer so I slide my hand carefully toward the gold clasp and pop it as gentle as I can but she still startles.

  Inside there’s a baby hanger from the closet, a toothbrush, my blue-and-white flowered sock that’s been missing for a month, three spoons, and a banana. Jack laughs in the kitchen and Granny flinches. I hold her hand and it’s cool and smooth and thin like tissue paper. We stare into the purse. I wonder if she’s trying to run away. She used to ask us all the time to go home. She would stand at the front door with her coat on but all Mom could say was, “Oh, Granny. This is your home now. You are home.”

  • • •

  The district slashed the transportation budget and I don’t know exactly what that means except that we’re not going to the aquarium. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Mr. McInnis frustrated. “I’ve been preparing them all fall!” he tells Ms. Sanogo, and it’s true. We know more about leafy sea dragons than any other fifth graders on the planet.

  “You’ll learn,” she says. “It’s always the same.” Ms. Sanogo’s from Africa but she’s a mix of Africa and America now. She wears African shirts puffed at the shoulders like summer clouds, with black pants and dark red lipstick. I’m jealous that Marisol’s in her class because I could listen to Ms. Sanogo talk all day. I’d like to curl up in her voice with Patches, wherever he is, and take a nap.

  “Why don’t you take a breath?” Ms. Sanogo says. “I’m free this hour. I’ll finish up for you.” Mr. McInnis hesitates. He looks at us, at our science books open to Phases of the Moon, at the whiteboard, at his shoes, then back at Ms. Sanogo.

  “All right,” he says. “Thanks.”

  Ms. Sanogo walks to the middle of the rows of desks, picks up my open book, and sets it back down. “The moon, eh?” she says. “Let me tell you about the moon.” The boys sink in their chairs and the girls scribble notes to pass, but I’m listening because of her voice. “In my country, in Cameroon, our moon is not like your moon. It is the same moon but it faces a different direction because we are so close to the equator. Do you know the equator?”

  “Yes,” I say. I’m the only one who hears the question.

  “Good. So that means our Cameroonian moon waxes and wanes from top to bottom instead of from side to side.” I actually drop my pencil. “And people tell stories about the rabbit in the moon instead of the man.”

  • • •

  Marisol walked five blocks by herself to get here and she’ll be in trouble when she gets home but she doesn’t care. Her mom’s fighting with her big brother, Tonio, because he ditched school three times last week and spends all his time with a girl named Estella who smokes weed and wears no underwear. I ask Marisol how she knows this about the underwear. She says she just knows and I understand because I just know things too.

  Marisol says they’re really fighting because Tonio drinks sometimes and her mom is scared he’ll end up like Marisol’s dad. He got so sad when he drank that he would cry even though he was a grown man and one night he got so sad that he died. Marisol never says exactly what happened. Just that he Ended It All.<
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  We’re sitting on my front stoop shoulder to shoulder, shivering in our thin coats. “Did your family used to be happy?” I ask her. “Like, before?”

  Marisol pauses. “Yeah,” she says. “I think so. Sometimes. Because even though Papi could get so sad he could get so happy too. You know? Like extremes.”

  “Yeah.” I think of Jack, but he’s only one extreme. I try not to think about what he’ll say when he and Mom get back and find us outside. Granny’s watching out the window, but what would she do if something happened? Could she dig down deep and find her scream?

  “Papi loved music,” Marisol says. “And he was a good dancer. He liked to turn up the Spanish station and dance with Mamá while she tried to cook dinner. But she’s the opposite. She feels one way always like a straight line. Sometimes I think it’s better to go up and down.”

  “But the down is so bad.”

  “Truth.”

  The moon is huge and almost full over the parking lot. “Ms. Sanogo said that in Cameroon the moon faces a different direction so there’s a rabbit in the moon instead of a man,” I tell Marisol.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  Marisol tips her head to the left, then to the right. “Ai!” she says and points. “I see it!”

  I tip my head like hers. “Me too!”

  We laugh and hug each other tight but I’m not sure why. It could be because we found something magic on this tangled-up street or because we’re together and not alone or because we like the rabbit so much more than the man or because no matter what happens during the day, the night sky is always good to us.

  Mr. McInnis forgets to make us sing “This Land Is Your Land,” so I know he still feels bad about the aquarium. I stop at his desk before lunch. “I’m sorry about the aquarium,” I tell him.

  He smiles and shrugs. “Thanks.”

  “But at least we learned a lot. I think it’s really cool that male sea horses have babies,” I say and he laughs and my body shivers from head to toe because I’m not used to making anyone laugh, especially someone like Mr. McInnis.

  “Well, I haven’t given up,” he says. “Just need to come up with a Plan B.”

  “What’s a Plan B?”

  “It’s a plan you make when your first plan doesn’t work out.”

  “Oh.” I don’t know what to say after that, so I say, “I’m also sorry we can’t imagine our future.”

  Mr. McInnis looks surprised. “You can,” he says. “You just have to believe you can.”

  “Well, I imagine things turning into other things sometimes,” I say, thinking of the red and yellow potato chip bag leaves and Granny’s butterfly purse flitting out the window. “As practice, I guess.”

  Mr. McInnis folds his arms and tilts his head and looks at me with his mouth dropped a little, the way we might look at leafy sea dragons if we ever got to the aquarium. “And how does that go?” he asks.

  “It works a little.”

  “Well, keep trying. And you know something, Brittany?”

  I shake my head.

  “I took the liberty of imagining your future for you.” I blush but I don’t know why. I guess because no one’s ever done that for me before, that I know about. “And you know something else?” Mr. McInnis asks. I can’t even shake my head. I’m frozen. He leans forward a little. “It’s crazy bright.”

  • • •

  “Lily,” Granny says. I’m sitting on the couch next to her doing homework and Tommy’s watching SpongeBob and banging his hands on the TV while Mom makes grilled cheese and laughs with Laila on the phone. It’s been so long since I heard her laugh and it sounds so good. I wish I was as funny as Laila but nobody is. Granny has universe eyes, staring into the air beyond her. I know she’s talking to me because she always calls me Lily. I don’t think she knows my name anymore.

  “What, Granny?” I ask.

  “Don’t swing so high.” It’s been a long time since her voice made a whole sentence.

  “Okay, Granny,” I say quietly. “I won’t.” She starts to lean back but catches her breath quick and reaches out. “It’s okay, Granny,” I whisper. “I’m safe.” She looks at me. The universe eyes are gone, replaced with marble in a maze. “It’s okay,” I tell her again and she mutters something I can’t understand, shaking her head. She keeps muttering. I want to call Mom but I don’t want her to stop laughing so I just sit there and wait for the muttering to stop. It’s a terrible sound, like a car that can’t catch on a cold morning.

  • • •

  Jack’s holding the cell phone bill in front of Mom’s face and punching one finger into it because there’s some number on there he doesn’t recognize. He keeps asking her who she called but she can’t remember or see the number anyway because there are a million numbers on the page and they’re all so tiny and the page is shaking and Mom’s voice is shaking and I am shaking too but I sit on my hands so no one can tell.

  “I didn’t call anyone,” Mom says again.

  “Right you didn’t. Tell me who.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stop telling me you don’t know!” Jack yells and I can see his spit in the air in slow motion like in a movie. Then he shoves Mom into the stove and time catches up. Water splashes from the pot onto Mom’s arm and she holds her breath so she won’t cry. I know because I’m doing the same thing. Her arm’s turning red and puffing up in places. “Great,” Jack says. He goes out the front door and slams it.

  “Mom,” I say in the voice of a small, plain mouse. She doesn’t answer. She’s at the sink, holding a dish towel under running water. “Mom,” I say again. She wraps the towel around her arm, still facing the sink.

  “Just leave it, Brittany,” she says. “Let it go.” I can’t see her eyes but I don’t need to. Her voice is like nails snapping out of the gun Jack borrowed one time to fix the cracked wood around the window.

  “How are you mad at me!” I yell, but she still doesn’t turn around so I run to my room and slam my door too. I crash down on my bed and cry but not because Jack pushed Mom into the stove and not because she burned her arm. I cry because Mom lied to me. She is not making a plan. She will never make a plan. Granny has a better plan than Mom and she doesn’t even live in real life. I need my own plan like Ivan the gorilla. I need a Plan B.

  • • •

  I get to school early because I walked myself. Mom didn’t want me to but I didn’t care. Mr. McInnis is at his desk, sifting through our Frida Kahlo paintings. He smiles when I walk in. “Hey, Brittany. So early today. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Mr. McInnis? Can I ask you a question?”

  He sets down the paintings and turns to face me. He’s so clean all the time. His shirts are never wrinkled and his pants always end just above the floor. Is he the perfect size for the pants companies or does he get them hemmed that way? I think of Mom handing over my hemmed sundress last summer and saying My mother taught me that. Then I shove her out of my head.

  “Of course,” Mr. McInnis says. “What’s up?”

  “How do you make a plan?” I ask. “A good plan. Like a Plan B.”

  He gives me mother-hen eyes, which is weird because he’s a man. “Well, let me think.” He sits back and folds his hands in his lap. “I guess any good plan begins with collecting as much information as you can.”

  “It does?”

  “Yes, because the more you know, the better decisions you can make. What kind of plan are you thinking of?”

  “Just a…plan in general.” I tuck my thumbs into the straps of my backpack. “I gotta go get some breakfast,” I tell him and he nods.

  “Brittany?” he calls when I reach the door and I turn back to see him still facing me with his hands still folded. “Good luck.”

  • • •

  There are dark circles under Mom’s eyes when she picks me up at school, carrying Scrabble. I’ve heard her up at night, watching TV low or cutting coupons in the kitchen. But once I got up for water and she was si
tting at the kitchen table with no coupons or scissors or anything. Not even a glass of milk. She had spiderweb eyes and was staring out the window at the black dark. Odessa’s ivy plant was waving at her in the breeze and spinning its pot like a ballerina but I don’t think she even noticed.

  “Do you want to play Scrabble at the park?” I ask, trying to boost her confidence. “We can leave Tommy in the stroller. He won’t get the tiles.”

  “What? Oh.” She looks down at the box like she didn’t remember she was carrying it. “Not today. We need some stuff. From Dollar Tree.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s okay if you want to go to Walmart. I know it’s cheaper and I don’t mind the ride. Tommy likes to look out the window anyway.”

  Mom looks down at me and I see tears in her eyes but she blinks and shivers them away like they’re from the wind. “Thanks. But Dollar Tree’s okay. We don’t need much.”

  At Dollar Tree I have a bad idea. I’m supposed to be getting laundry detergent but I’m standing in front of the notebooks instead. I need one for my Plan B, to write down all the information I collect. I can’t ask Mom because she’ll ask questions. I look left and right and left again like crossing the street but no one’s around. I choose yellow like wheat fields waving and zip it under my coat before I can change my mind.

  I’ve never stolen anything and at the checkout I hop between my feet and give everyone jackrabbit eyes. “Do you have to pee?” Mom asks.

  “No.” My teeth start chattering and Mom rubs my arms to warm me up.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No.”

  “I hope you’re not getting sick.”

  “I’m not.”

  Finally it’s our turn and the checkout girl looks straight at me. “Find everything you need?” she asks. She has a million of the tiniest braids I’ve ever seen that are twisted around each other and piled on her head like a wedding cake. Her fingernails are painted purple and dotted with diamonds. My cheeks are on fire but I have to see her eyes to know what she’ll do to me. I look up and she winks.