Once You Know This

by Emily Blejwas

  “Did she die?”

  “Yes.”

  “From Alzheimer’s?”

  “No.” Mr. McInnis shakes his head like the memory of it sat on him like a fly. “I can’t tell you anything that won’t make it sad, but I can tell you that your memories of her will make you stronger. Even if you can’t feel it happening. They’re there, in your blood.”

  This makes no sense but just listening to Mr. McInnis’s voice is nice. I look at the clock and there are twelve minutes left of lunch. “Do you mind if I just rest until math?” I ask and Mr. McInnis nods. He pats my shoulder again and goes back to his desk. I fall asleep like a dive into a deep, deep pool and dream of tiny Grannys floating on their backs in my veins, single file, in old-fashioned swimsuits and caps.

  • • •

  Mom’s sitting next to an empty white hospital bed and I’m relieved there’s no blood on it even though I don’t think you get bloody when you die from Alzheimer’s. I’m also relieved Granny’s body isn’t in it because I know I would puke if I saw a dead body. Even if it was Granny’s. Especially if it was Granny’s. A few flurries are floating outside the window and the room is gray from the snow light. But the lamp next to the bed is on and it makes an orange circle on the white sheet. Mom is staring at it.

  “I’m so sorry,” Laila says. She rushes into the room like wind around a corner and hugs Mom’s neck and Tommy whines and reaches for Mom and she takes him. He says “doo ba doo” to her and smacks his palm on her face and Mom smiles. “Sorry I had to bring them here,” Laila says. “I just can’t be late to work again or that maniac will fire me and I really need this job. I’m so sorry, Reen. I love you.”

  Mom stands up and hugs Laila again and tells her not to worry and thanks her for all her help during the blurry days. Then Laila leaves and takes all the air with her. All of a sudden it’s so hot. “We just have to wait for the papers,” Mom says. “Then we can go.” She hugs me and it feels really good even though she’s so skinny. “I missed you so much,” she says. “I’m sorry I haven’t been home. I just didn’t know when Granny would…go…and I didn’t want her to be alone.”

  I don’t know what to say so I just say, “I’m sorry, Mom,” like Laila did.

  “I’m sorry for you, Brit. I know you loved Granny and she really loved you. You were so sweet to her. It made me so proud.” I can hear the crying in her voice and I wish it would stop. If she cries, the whole world might melt into one big blue and green puddle, and Tommy and I will have to swim for our lives and how will I carry him and swim at the same time? I only ever had one swimming lesson. I shake my head because I’m thinking craziness again. Maybe it’s the heat.

  • • •

  We leave the hospital at dinnertime and the bus is crowded with people going home from work. I hold Tommy in my lap and let him chew on my hair. Mom stands next to us swaying and catching herself, holding on to a strap. The snow’s coming down hard and the bus moves slow. Some cars already crashed into each other and going around them makes the ride even slower. Police lights flash through the bus and all the faces turn red and blue, the way Mr. McInnis told us the blood goes to and from our hearts.

  When we finally get home the house is black and I rush to turn on the lamp for Granny and at the very same second the light clicks on, I realize she is dead. The couch is empty and I can see the scratch marks from Patches that Granny’s legs usually covered up. I run to my room and fall onto my bed and cry and cry, about a whole lot of things. Granny and Patches and never getting away from Jack and Mom not eating. And Granny again.

  The microwave’s humming in the kitchen and Mom’s pouring out dry rice. Tommy is banging his hands on his tray, waiting. But Granny isn’t sitting at the table. How will I ever do homework without Granny next to me? I cry more than I’ve ever cried. I wonder if my body will run out of tears and I’ll have to drink water to make more. I remember the time Granny told me to put a barrette in my hair and (maybe) called me pretty. No one will ever notice my tangled hair again.

  Mom sits down next to me and puts her hand on my back. She’s not crying and I’m thankful for that. “Do you think you could eat something?” she asks. “I made red beans and rice.” I shake my head into my pillow and think of how Granny pulled all the sausage out of her red beans and rice and fed it to Patches. Will everything always remind me of Granny forever? “Okay,” Mom says. “Just tell me if you change your mind.” She kisses the back of my head and I feel the whisper of her leaving. The way Granny left.

  Much, much later I stop crying. I pull the Plan B notebook out from under the mattress and go into the kitchen. Mom’s at the table, just sitting. “Hungry?” she asks but I shake my head. I lay the notebook down in front of her. It looks very small.

  “I tried to make a Plan B but I couldn’t,” I say. I want to tell her that it’s not my job because I’m only eleven and she’s supposed to make the plan. But I’m too sad and too tired and so is she. I can tell because the dirty dishes are stacked up like a junk pile in the sink. “You should call Uncle Fuzzy and tell him about Granny,” I tell her. “He’ll want to know. His number is on page thirteen.” Then I go to bed and sleep so deep I have no dreams at all.

  • • •

  I thought it would feel good to be back at school like after Thanksgiving but my body’s so heavy and my head can’t wake up. Mr. McInnis tells me not to worry about my homework until I feel better and talks to me the way we talked to Patches when we found him. Marisol hugs me in the hall and tells me something about Leon but I can’t focus on her words. It’s so loud and everything’s buzzing. After lunch, Mr. McInnis sends me to the nurse.

  • • •

  I’m sitting on the couch in Granny’s spot with my eyes closed thinking about what she looked like so I won’t forget. But her face is already soft in my mind like a picture out of focus. It feels like someone switched my brain with a cotton ball. Mom calls me to dinner and I don’t want to go because I don’t want to leave Granny’s spot and I don’t want to feel her empty chair next to me. But I get up because it’s important to Mom that we eat as a family. That word sounds different now. Like when you can’t remember how to spell a word you’ve known since kindergarten.

  Dinner’s a blur like everything until Jack gets a text that the electric bill is five days late.

  “I just forgot to pay it,” Mom says. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  I wait for Jack to say, If we have any lights tomorrow. You have to pay the bills, Maureen. What do you do all day, anyway?

  But he doesn’t say any of it because Mom’s looking straight at him and her eyes are arrow tips. Then everything gets buzzy again.

  Marisol and me are the only ones who wanted a spot on the monkey bars because the wind’s blowing little bits of ice. The rest of the girls are huddled against the brick wall complaining about being outside and the boys are kicking a half-pumped soccer ball through a tan patch of grass. I can hear Marisol talking again. She’s telling me about the notes she trades with Leon in the hall and we’re thinking about what they mean.

  “I think he likes you,” I say.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oooh, girl. I hope you’re right. Whenever I see him my whole body tingles all over like shivering but not cold.”

  I smile. We sit quiet for a minute.

  “I’m really sorry about your granny,” Marisol says.

  “Thanks. I miss her.”

  “I know you do.” Marisol puts her arm around my shoulders and we don’t talk about Leon or Granny or anything. We just sit with the ice smacking our faces and it feels like we’re the only two people in the world. With Marisol as my friend, I could probably be an Eskimo.

  • • •

  I’m lying on my bed searching my social studies packet for one more fact about Saul Alinsky when Mom shows up in my doorway holding my Plan B notebook. “I read your plan,” she says. “It’s really good.”

  I roll my eyes even though she hates th
at. “Except that it’s not a plan. It’s just a bunch of nothing.” I look back down. I can’t remember the motto of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council.

  “Don’t say that. There’s so much good stuff in here. Can I keep it for a while? I promise to take good care of it.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I don’t need it.” Then I find it: We the people will work out our own destiny.

  “I got you something,” Mom says and hands me a new roll of blue tape to hang up the rest of my art that’s been piling up in a corner of my room since Thanksgiving.

  “Thanks.”

  I wait for her to go make dinner or fold laundry but instead she sits down on my bed and just watches me roll each piece of tape into a circle and push all the projects onto the wall, even the happy hot dog. Jerome’s family crest was the best. He sketched a huge hawk for Hawkins with its wings out wide flying through a dark gray sky. He did it with a regular number two pencil. Mr. McInnis called it purposeful. I hope Jerome still has that hawk. Maybe it’s on a wall somewhere in Baltimore. But probably boys don’t do that.

  When I finish, my whole wall’s covered with art even though we haven’t even gotten to winter break. “It looks amazing,” Mom says.

  “Yeah.” Then Tommy wakes up from his nap and Mom goes to get him and I lie back on my bed and think about how good it feels to sit in Mr. McInnis’s class and paint or draw the things from our lives even if some of them turn out weird.

  Mom pokes her head back in. “Brittany.” I look up and back at her so she’s upside down. “Don’t give up on me.”

  • • •

  Even though we never got the hang of multiplying fractions, Mr. McInnis moved us on to decimals. I guess if we’re gonna get through the whole math book by June we just have to keep going. We told him no teacher ever gets through the whole math book by June but Mr. McInnis just looked at us like he can’t believe we’re still comparing him to any other teacher.

  I can’t get my decimal point in the right place. My whole sheet’s filled with little red arrows pointing left or right. If you put them all together, my point would probably end up right back where it started. Like when they pose us for our class picture and we move a little to the left then a little to the right until the teacher taking the picture says Perfect! but we’re all standing exactly where we stood in the first place. Just like our whole lives.

  • • •

  I’m trying not to smile too much so Tonio doesn’t think I’m weird but it’s hard because I’m riding next to my best friend in a car that doesn’t belong to a grown-up and for the first time in my whole life I feel a little free. Marisol’s scrolling through her iPad with her earbuds in because she’s used to being free but I’m trying to memorize everything. Like the way Tonio turns through the crackly radio to find the Spanish station and how he sings quiet so Marisol can sing loud. I can’t believe Mom let me go but I guess since she read my Plan B notebook and knows I took the 82 and 56 buses by myself this is nothing.

  Out the window everyone’s shoveling sidewalks or waiting for the bus or carrying grocery bags or walking dogs or talking to themselves or smoking cigarettes so Chicago looks like it always does, but today all the colors look brighter even though it’s winter. I want to hug everyone. Even Cart Man, who would definitely push me away.

  “We’re here!” Marisol snaps her seat belt off and pushes the car door open.

  “Whoa, let me park first.” Tonio’s laughing and looking at us in the rearview mirror.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I tell him.

  “Anytime.”

  Marisol and I climb up the snowbank and down the other side to the ice. It’s the first time they ever had ice in this park because when it got really cold an old man who lives across the street decided to turn on his hose and flood it. I saw him on the news. “These kids need something to do,” he said and went back into his house and the reporter said, “Well. There you have it.”

  The ice is packed and most people have on boots but Marisol has brand-new skates and I have her old ones. We sit down on a bench to put them on. “Lace ’em tight,” she tells me.

  “How come you know about skating?”

  “My papi used to take me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Since he died Mamá tries to keep life the same.” She’s pulling on each row of laces, working her way to the top. “So every year I try on my skates and if I need new ones she buys them. But she never takes me skating. So it’s not really the same.” She double-knots the bow and says, “Race ya!” and stomps through the snow until she gets to the ice and rolls smooth like a marble into the center of the crowd.

  I finish lacing my skates and walk to the edge. I haven’t skated since Mom took me in second grade. She had a good tip day and usually that meant she stuffed the extra money into a mason jar under her bed but instead we took the L downtown and skated late into the night until there were hardly any people left and then we found a coffee shop and ordered the biggest hot chocolates they had. I made a beard with the whipped cream and pretended I was Santa Claus and Mom laughed so hard.

  “C’mon!” Marisol says. Her face is huge and bright in front of mine, like the moon looks over the parking lot sometimes.

  I dig the toe of one skate into the snow. “I’m not a good skater.”

  “We’ll go slow.” Marisol takes my hand and I step out and I’m wobbly but we keep going until I get smoother and she lets go.

  • • •

  “Ho, ho, ho!” Laila calls from behind a huge Christmas tree in our doorway.

  “Are you crazy?” Mom says through the branches.

  “Prob’ly! Help me get it inside!” So they pull the tree in and needles go everywhere but Mom doesn’t care, which is not like her. But nobody’s like themselves around Laila. “Is it not the most beautiful tree you’ve ever seen?” Laila asks but we all know the answer. It’s like the tree got lost and came to the wrong house. It takes up half the room.

  “Where’d you get it?” Mom asks. She’s looking at the top branch brushing the ceiling.

  “I stole it.”

  Mom gives Laila drop-dead eyes and she laughs. “I’m kidding! You think I’d actually steal a Christmas tree? Don’t answer that. I won it. We had a drawing at work and I snuck my name in five times.” She holds one finger up to her mouth like shhhh and I laugh.

  “Don’t you want to keep it?” Mom asks.

  “I already got one.”

  “You? Got a tree?”

  “No, Dominic got it for me. Decorated it and everything.”

  “Who’s Dominic?”

  “Girl! I will tell you later, if you know what I mean.” Mom shakes her head and I wonder if Marisol will ever say to me, Girl! I will tell you later! I hope so. “You got a tree stand?” Laila asks and Mom shrugs with her hands like What do you think? “No worries. I’ll get you one.” She leans the tree in the corner. “You got a beer?”

  “That I have,” Mom says and they go into the kitchen.

  I sit in Granny’s spot and stare at the tree and suck the pine smell as deep as I can into my lungs. Tommy’s hitting the lowest branch and laughing when it bounces and I wish Granny was here because that’s the kind of thing she liked before her mind got muddy. Babies doing simple things.

  I’m not trying to listen to Laila and Mom but Laila’s voice is so loud. She says something about Jack with a girl besides Mom and my heart cracks like a frozen puddle, with one piece furious and one embarrassed and one confused and on and on. But the biggest piece is relief because maybe now we’ll get out of here.

  I go into the kitchen pretending to get some water to see Mom’s reaction but her heart cracked into one giant piece: terrified.

  Ms. Sanogo’s class is watching movies because she says getting kids to work the day before winter break is like asking butterflies to line up in row. But our class is celebrating Yule. Yesterday Mr. McInnis brought in pine branches to make Yule wreaths but the assistant principal said they’d look too much like Christm
as wreaths so we’re making bird feeders instead. Mr. McInnis says seeds and feeding creatures are an important part of Yule. The boys liked it for a while because of the hammers but now they’re mostly pelting each other with birdseed when Mr. McInnis isn’t looking and sometimes when he is.

  I don’t flutter in my chair like a butterfly or throw birdseed or pass notes or anything because I’m not celebrating. I’m thinking about two whole weeks at home and Mom’s terrified eyes and our empty cabinet and how cold it was on Thanksgiving.

  Laila never got us a tree stand so Mom put the trunk in a bucket she got me a million years ago when I was a regular kid who went to the beach and dug in the sand with a purple plastic shovel. We couldn’t find our box of Christmas lights and I tried to get Mom to at least get the twenty-four Christmas balls at Walgreens for $5.99 but she couldn’t and I knew it but I was hungry and frustrated and said in a spitting voice, “Who has a naked Christmas tree leaning in the corner in a beach bucket? That’s so ghetto.” I waited for Mom to be mad but she just told me not to use that word.

  “Brittany.” I jump and knock over my birdfeeder and the seeds go everywhere. Kenya starts picking them up and seeing her clean, ironed khaki knees on the floor makes me sick to my stomach. I drop down next to her. “You don’t have to pick them up,” I say, trying to get them faster than her. “I spilled them.”

  “Yeah, but I startled you.” We put all the seeds back in the feeder and Kenya sets it gently on my desk. “I just wanted to tell you there’s a nail sticking out,” she says, pointing to one corner. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Thanks,” I whisper because tears are stinging my eyes and Kenya sees them but she just smiles politely and slides back into her desk.

  • • •

  Mom’s not waiting for me after school so I just start walking. Everyone’s running more than usual because their backpacks are light as feathers but mine’s full of books. You can only check out two at a time but the librarian let me take twelve. I guess she felt sorry for me because I couldn’t stop crying after Kenya helped me and Mr. McInnis sent me to the library instead of the office because we only have a social worker on Tuesdays.