Once You Know This

by Emily Blejwas

  I shove the notebook back under the mattress and pull my coat on. Then I put Granny’s coat on her too and lead her to the front door and undo all the locks. “I’m walking to the end of the block with Granny,” I yell to Mom and shut the door behind us fast before she can say no. The air is cold but it feels good so maybe I just need to cool my brain off to think of a plan. We stand on the steps for a minute but I still don’t think of a plan. “C’mon, Granny,” I say and walk her to the sidewalk.

  “Hey, you!” Odessa calls as we walk by. She’s on her porch lifting the sheets off her plants, peeking at them like they’re sleeping babies, whispering and smiling before covering them back up.

  “Hey,” I say back.

  Odessa comes down her steps sideways, rocking back and forth a little. “This cold came on so quick!” she says. “I got the arthritis, so I feel it in my hips.” She reaches the fence. “Oooh, girl!” she says really loud and I jump. “Don’t ever get the arthritis!”

  “I won’t.”

  Odessa looks at Granny. “Not your granny, though. Look at her posture. Just perfect.” I nod. Granny does stand up straight. Then Odessa lowers her voice to regular. “She thin, though, Lily,” she says. “Thinner than I seen her before.”

  I look down at the ground. Somehow I feel like this is my fault. Probably ’cause I was off chasing a pretend Polish grandma when I should have been taking care of my real granny. “I know,” I say. Granny starts to walk away. “See you later,” I tell Odessa. We get to the end of the block and turn around before I realize Odessa called me Lily. I can’t remember Granny ever calling me that in front of her and I want to ask her about it when we pass back by but she’s already inside. The plants are all tucked in their pink and yellow beds and the porch light is off.

  • • •

  Mr. McInnis never said what happened at the principal’s office but I guess not much because now he has a plan called Home Visits. “If your parents can’t come to me,” he says, “then I’ll come to them. I’m going A to Z, so Ahmed Asan, I’ll see you first!” Ahmed’s the smallest kid in our class and he shrinks behind his desk and looks even smaller. Thinking about Home Visits gives everyone different faces so we look like a book Tommy has about feelings. My face is a mix of embarrassed and terrified. I have to think of a plan before Mr. McInnis gets to K.

  “Kenya and Brittany,” Mr. McInnis says. “Congratulations!” I hold my breath in case this announcement’s even worse. “Our school has a new program that lets students with high reading scores go to the library once a week for free reading.” Some of the kids laugh because this sounds like a punishment. I look at Kenya but her face is calm as always. We get our stuff and walk down the hall and into the library and sit down at desks next to each other before I realize I only brought my Plan B notebook.

  I open it and try to flip to a new page without her noticing but she says, “What’s that?” She’s reading a book with a 9.2 on the spine which means she reads as good as a ninth grader.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is it a journal?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Cool.”

  Then I just tell her everything, about Jack and Mom and stealing the notebook from Dollar Tree and riding the bus to find my Polish grandma. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because she’s so quiet I know she won’t tell anyone or maybe it’s ’cause she said something about me is cool which no one has ever said in the history of the universe. “But I can’t think of a plan,” I tell Kenya. “I can’t think of anything.”

  “My dad always says that to get to your future you have to look to your past.”

  “Oh. Is that like, an African proverb?”

  “I don’t think so. My dad’s from Detroit.” She pauses and I freeze because why did I have to say something so dumb right after she said I was cool? But then Kenya laughs. And once she starts she can’t stop and I laugh too. We laugh and laugh. She’s holding on to my arm and tears are in her eyes and I have to put my face on the desk I’m laughing so hard I can’t sit up. I see the librarian lean over and I wait for her to shush us but she just grins.

  • • •

  After school I make a list in my Plan B notebook called To Get to Your Future You Have to Look to Your Past, and write all the memories I can think of. They start out nice like how the sun shined through a yellow tree and turned the glass gold at our old bus stop. But then I start thinking bad stuff like Mom getting mugged and our landlord eating cottage cheese and saying weird things. I write everything down because Kenya’s dad didn’t say Happy Past or Sad Past and my life is exactly like Mom said about the bag of trash and the bag of sea glass.

  • • •

  I’m sitting on the front stoop staring at the perfect blue sky and thinking about how strange November is, to be so cold and so pretty at the same time. The mail lady walks up and hands me the stack and it looks the same as always except for a huge pink envelope in the middle. I drop the rest of the mail pulling it out. “Your birthday card?” she asks. I shake my head. The card is to Daisy Hill but there’s no return address.

  “No,” I say. “My great-grandma’s.”

  “Is that right! How old is she now?”

  “I don’t know.” I run up the steps and leave the rest of the mail scattered behind and bang through the door. Granny’s sitting on the couch. She looks so pale and small. I haven’t heard her mutter in days. Maybe she gave up trying to make us understand. I wonder what’s inside her head, if she has words and pictures dancing around that can’t get out or if it’s a gray buzz like no radio station or just a silent snowy day.

  “Granny,” I say and sit down next to her. She doesn’t turn or blink. She’s so still I have to watch her chest for a second to make sure she’s breathing. She is. “Someone sent you a birthday card, I think.” Nothing. “Can I open it?” Still nothing. I open it. A smiling pastel bumblebee covered in glitter is on the front, holding a magic wand with a star on top. It’s a card for a little girl. Is that what’s in Granny’s head? Is she a little girl again?

  The inside says, Here’s hoping all your wishes come true! Happy Birthday! and someone wrote in shaky letters underneath, Thinking of you. On your birthday and every day. Love, Fuzzy. I read it out loud to Granny. “Who’s Fuzzy?” I ask but she doesn’t move. Mom and Jack are home. I can hear them picking up the mail. I shove the card and envelope between the couch cushions right before they walk in.

  “Hey,” Mom says. “How come the door’s open and the mail’s all over the front steps?”

  “Sorry. I thought I heard Granny calling and I dropped it.”

  Jack looks at Granny who is a statue on the couch. I wait for him to shake the pizza ads at me and say something ridiculous about identity theft (like anyone would want to be him) but he doesn’t. He comes toward me and I freeze like Granny and he puts his hand on my head and tries to mess up my hair, but it doesn’t work because I have a ponytail and also because I hate him. Mom is grinning like after I blow out the candles on my birthday cake and we all pretend whatever I wished for will come true.

  “Just be more careful,” Jack says. I nod and glance at Granny. She has flower-shop eyes and the corners of her mouth twitch, just a little, and I know she is thinking of Fuzzy.

  • • •

  The cops don’t come to our school like they go to the high school but when they do it’s usually to the lunchroom. Today two kids got in a fistfight and some other kids turned it into a food fight and now five of them are in handcuffs, sitting on the floor with all the smashed hamburgers and ketchup. One of them actually has a French fry stuck to his shoulder.

  Mr. McInnis is standing at the end of the row with his glasses off, rubbing his eyebrows, because two of the five are in my class. One is Ladarius Prince, who’s always in trouble and is right now shaking his head at the cops and smiling. But the other is Jerome Hawkins, huge and smart and silent and wouldn’t hurt a fly. His head is down. That’s the one Mr. McInnis is rubbing his eyebrows about.

 
; Marisol is holding Granny’s card open in front of her so the bumblebee is smiling and glittering at me, waving its magic wand over my cold hamburger. “Maybe he’s a secret admirer,” she says.

  “Are you serious? She never goes out. And she’s old. It has to be someone from a long time ago.”

  Marisol shrugs. “A secret admirer from a long time ago, then. ‘On your birthday and every day!’ That’s not just a friend. It’s either a secret admirer or family. That’s what I say.” She sets the card down and chews on a fry. “These are disgusting.” Over her shoulder, the five boys struggle to their feet without using their hands, except Jerome. He stands up straight as an arrow. Mr. McInnis leans toward him to say something.

  “How am I ever gonna find him? I don’t know his real name. I don’t know his last name. I don’t even know where he lives. What am I gonna do? Walk around the rest of my life calling for Fuzzy?”

  Marisol lays the next fry in a pool of ketchup and rolls it back and forth. “Why do you need to find him anyways? First your dad and now Fuzzy. What are you looking for? Hate to break it to you, girl, but this”—she spreads her hands out like the dim cafeteria and the cold food and the hard shouts are the showcase in an old game show—“is your life.”

  The boys are gone but the blue lights still flash through the windows. Mr. McInnis is standing at the side door with his hands in his pockets, looking out. I can’t decide if Marisol is right or wrong but I think both. “I know,” I tell her. The bell rings and Mr. McInnis startles like Mom does sometimes. He turns and walks toward the steps, back to the hallway and the classroom and the other thirty of us. “I just think maybe he can…help.”

  Marisol gives me a smile like you give a little kid who can’t hit a baseball. “But you do know where he lives,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  Marisol taps her finger on an ink circle on the pink envelope. She hasn’t stopped biting her nails. Her mom paints that nasty stuff on them but Marisol just chews through it. “Ever heard of a postmark?”

  • • •

  Every night since Fuzzy’s card came I can’t sleep. I close my eyes but all I see is the pink envelope the way you can still see the sun through your eyelids at the beach. Mom always sent me to the lake in a sun hat but Grandma Jane didn’t make me wear it because she said it was a special thing to feel your hair in the wind and see it afterward in the mirror all full of sand and water and tangles and sunshine.

  I try to see Montgomery, Alabama, the city spelled out where Marisol tapped her finger, but I don’t know what to picture besides cotton so I just make up stories about the ceiling stains above my bed or see how fast I can run my eyes along the window bars or stare at all the art we’ve made this year that already covers half my wall. It’s more art than we did in all of fourth grade. Maybe all of third and fourth put together.

  Then I pull out my Plan B notebook and turn to a blank page so Mom won’t see the cover. Tommy and Granny are asleep and Jack’s out and Mom’s washing dishes at the kitchen sink under weak light. I sit down at the table and she jumps. “Oh. Hey, Brit. What’s the matter? Can’t sleep?”

  “No, I just forgot about this assignment I was supposed to start,” I lie. “It’s a profile of Granny.”

  “Mmm. Okay.” She turns back to the sink and I watch her for a minute. She’s not in a hurry to finish the dishes. She lets her hands rest in the soapy water with each dish before lifting and rinsing and setting it careful to dry.

  “So Granny’s husband was Frank Hill?”

  “Yes. Well, no. Frank’s last name was something else. Granny kept her maiden name. I don’t know why. Grandma always said it was very unusual during those days. Women never kept their names, or used dashes or anything.” Mom shrugs. “I guess she just wanted to stay Daisy Hill.”

  I write this down. “Now I need her brothers and sisters,” I tell Mom.

  “Whose?”

  “Granny’s.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Mom! It’s for school!”

  “I know, I know. It’s fine, Brit. It’s just so…detailed.”

  “Well, that’s how Mr. McInnis is.” Mom turns from her soapy sink to smile at me and I remember in that instant how much I love her. I look down at my notebook. “So what were their names?”

  Mom sucks in air through her teeth and for a second I think she cut her hand on a knife but then I realize she just really wants to have the answers. “She had three sisters, I think. No, four. No, three. There were four girls. I don’t remember their names, baby, I’m sorry. Granny was somewhere in the middle. And there was one brother but I don’t know his real name. It started with an H. Harold or Harvey? I’m sorry, Brit, this isn’t very helpful.”

  “It’s okay. What do you mean you don’t know his real name?”

  “Well, we just called him Uncle Fuzzy.”

  I hop up from the table. “Okay, well, that’s a good start. Thanks, Mom.”

  Mom sets down the dish she’s holding and stares at me. “Is that all you need?” she asks.

  “Yeah, we can finish tomorrow. I’m pretty tired, so.” I actually fake a yawn.

  “Brittany?” Mom asks as I turn to go.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything about your dad’s side.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She nods and smiles with half her mouth like the other half couldn’t decide what to do.

  Jerome hasn’t been back since the lunchroom fight. Some kids say he’s locked up and some say he’s living at the shelter on Roosevelt and some say his grandma put him on a bus to Baltimore to live with his dad. Some kids say his mom’s a crackhead and that’s why Jerome is slow. But I’ve sat behind him all year and I’ve seen his papers. He gets straight As. Which is not easy in Mr. McInnis’s class. He’s not like other teachers who pass us along like that game we used to play in first grade. Hot potato.

  Mr. McInnis is distracted. On Tuesday he kept saying Van Gogh when he meant Gauguin. On Wednesday he forgot how to multiply fractions. And yesterday he just gave up at 2:35, turned off all the lights, and told us to think about what we’re thankful for in preparation for Thanksgiving, which is six days away. I don’t want to bother him but if I don’t I’ll have to spend the whole weekend with no way to work on Plan B. Fuzzy’s the best lead I have. Fuzzy is the only lead.

  When everyone goes to recess, I wait behind. “Need something, Brittany?” Mr. McInnis asks. His voice sounds like someone recorded it and played it back from far away.

  “Um, yeah. Only if you have time. I just need help with something. But it’s not for school. It’s…for something else.” Mr. McInnis nods. “I need to find a Fuzzy Hill in Alabama. In Montgomery, actually.” Mr. McInnis stares at me with ragged-quilt eyes.

  “Sorry! That sounded weird. Fuzzy Hill’s a person. I just need help looking up his phone number.”

  Mr. McInnis crosses his arms. “Who is he?” he asks.

  “He’s my great-grandma’s brother. He sent her a birthday card and she wants to call him to thank him I guess. But my mom doesn’t have his number and we don’t have a computer and I thought maybe you could help me look it up here. But it’s no big deal, really.” I start to back away. I’ve never lied to Mr. McInnis and it feels worse than stealing the Plan B notebook. If Mr. McInnis knew, would he wink at me like the girl with wedding cake hair? Somehow I don’t think so. I just want to go to recess.

  “No, no. It’s fine,” Mr. McInnis says, standing up. “I’ll help you. Let’s go down to the lab.” We walk down the hall and my stomach is dancing around in my throat but I don’t know if it’s because it’s just Mr. McInnis and me in the hall or because I just lied to him. “Do you know his real first name?” he asks.

  “No. But I know it starts with an H.”

  “Okay, well. We can try that.” He pushes the computer lab door and holds it open so I go first. There are a few kids inside and none of them look up. We sit down and Mr. McInnis pulls up a map of the
United States on the screen and zooms in on the South. “Do you know where Montgomery is?” he asks. I shake my head. He points to Alabama, the green state. To the star in the middle.

  “So, Alabama’s next to Mississippi,” I say, pointing to the pink state to the left. “Where you’re from.”

  He smiles. “Yes, ma’am,” he says and somehow sounds just like Odessa even though they are exact opposites.

  “Are you from their capital?” I squint so I can read it. “From Jackson?”

  Mr. McInnis laughs. “No, I’m from the opposite. The closest thing on the map to where I’m from are the Palestinian Gardens. It’s a scaled model of Palestine as it was when Jesus walked the earth, built from concrete blocks and car headlights all covered in white plaster. One Mississippi yard equals one Palestinian mile.”

  “Oh.”

  Then Mr. McInnis pulls up a list of every H. Hill in Montgomery. There are fifty-two. “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” he says. He clicks print and types in his code and I watch his balance drop from $1.10 to $0.30.

  “I’ll bring you eighty cents on Monday,” I promise when he hands me the papers.

  He shakes his head. “No need. Just glad I could help.” I pull the door open to go to recess and through the swooshing shut I hear him add, “For once.”

  • • •

  Laila heard about a church giving away food for Thanksgiving so we’re all on the Madison bus. I’m in the very front seat next to Miles and our moms are behind us. Mom’s jiggling Tommy, who’s crying, and Laila’s making faces at him, which is making him cry louder. You can see downtown all the way from here, filling up the windshield, and we’re making our way toward it, block by block, stopping and waiting and starting.

  I keep my eyes on the Willis Tower. Grandma Jane took me to the top of it when it was still the Sears and we could see the whole city with the people like bugs and the boats like turtles in the lake and Grandma said, “See how big the world is?” I was small but I wasn’t afraid. My hands were sweaty and my bangs were in my eyes. A man stepped in front of me and Grandma lifted me up so I could still see. “Don’t ever forget that,” she said. Mom says I never went to the Willis Tower when it was still the Sears but I remember Grandma’s face, sunny from the bright glass.