JEWEL

by LOTT, BRET

  Her eyes hung on mine a moment more, then she closed them, and as if in proof to me she’d learned everything there in that moment, she slowly brought her arms up and placed them on this Nancy Tindle’s shoulders, and she held her, patted Nancy’s back once, twice, three times.

  I closed my eyes.

  There is still nothing out my window, still nothing, though the sun is fast on its way down out there, just beneath it and beyond the tops of houses the thick bank of gray fog just off the coast, ready to roll in and swallow us all.

  And so it is settled, whenever I want, Brenda Kay has a home in Saugus.

  I don’t need any more visits to any more homes for retarded girls, though I’m certain there’s folly in this, in having no other place in mind for her. But what I took from that place is worth everything to me, the picture, just after Brenda Kay’d left the kitchen for outside, of twelve girls standing round a swimming pool in the hot dry desert afternoon, Brenda Kay settled in between Martha and Sammy, every girl with a cane pole in her hand, each waiting for a fish to bite, and the picture of Brenda Kay’s eyes on me, waiting. That is everything.

  But none of that matters, because she’s not here now, and I picture again for the thousandth time a yellow van rolled on Sepulveda or some such street where cars drive too fast, and where it is easy to get killed any day of the week, any hour of a day, here in California.

  I let the curtain fall from my fingers again, resolved now to call the school, though each time she’s late they say the same thing, You know traffic and Don’t wowy, she’ll be home soon.

  But I call anyway, because there is no reason why I can’t have an answer, however lame, as to why my daughter isn’t yet here. I stand at the wall phone in the kitchen, the receiver in my hand, and lean as far as I can into the front room, my eyes trying to dig through those awful white curtains even a deeper orange now, almost scarlet for that sun, and I try to see, but see nothing.

  Someone answers on the sixth ring, and my words spill out of me, a tangled chain of them that betray how old I am, how afraid I can be at the simple fact of a late van from the school, and once those words have left me, the woman at the other end says, Towanceredondo Beach run? and I nod and nod, finally say, Yes, yes.

  New driver, she says. You’re not the only one to call. It’s his first day, she says, then pauses, says, And you know traffic. Okay? Her last word is tacked on as if I am to take this reason and wrap myself in the comfort of it, feel somehow safer, both for me and for my child, and suddenly, as I watch my hand place the receiver back in its cradle, my hand even smaller, even more wrinkled than twenty minutes ago, I see myself standing at the edge of a swimming pool in Saugus. I see my own end there, Brenda Kay dead and gone, nowhere for me to go but there.

  It’s a funny image, but one I cannot laugh at, too many times I’ve thought on her dying before me, and wondered if I would still wake up early of a morning after having laid out her clothes the night before, and make her breakfast, then lunch. I wonder, too, if I would tape over her lunchbox so it won’t pop open, only to turn from that task, call out her name to the empty house, and hear nothing. Standing at the pool seems a logical end now, where I ought to end up, and I envy my child, envy her seeing Leston in Marlboro ads, envy the feel of Mrs. Tindle’s arms around her, envy her having a friend who raises a hand to strangers, says How! with all the authority one can need in this world.

  It’s almost five now, and already I can feel the slow tremble of the house, the train on its way. It’ll be here in a minute or so, and I wonder if anyone will be in that caboose to see that Brenda Kay is not here, is not waving to him.

  I stand at the kitchen window, waiting for the train to come, for the tremendous heave and rumble that used to wake my grandchildren when they spent nights, and that used to wake me, too, my first months here, Leston warm in bed next to me, Brenda Kay settled in her own room and asleep. Those first nights I would sit up in bed and listen to the huge and shambling sound the train made passing by, a black animal high on the dirt platform above the bushes at the back of the yard. How big that sound seemed then, how important and lonely and dangerous there in the middle of the night, those first days when all my children were grown and gone, married, making children of their own.

  I wonder at all these things, me standing at the window, and hear, finally, after what I only then realize is perhaps the second or third time, a horn honking in front of my house, the sound of it nearly lost to me wallowing here in my kitchen.

  I make it to the door and down the steps. There are things I want to say to this driver, words I don’t yet know, but words I want to utter nonetheless. Brenda Kay is already stepping off the van and moving fast up the driveway. She just brushes past me, her mouth closed tight, her eyes to the ground as she moves quickly, her arms swinging away, in one hand the lunchbox, the other her pink knapsack.

  For a moment I turn to her, watch her moving away from me, and I can see there, above the garage, the train moving fast past us all and I see how dark that eastern sky really is, and how late in my life all of this is coming, all of it. Brenda Kay is headed to the back yard, where she will stand with her face pressed to the small space of chain link fence Burton still keeps cleared for her. She’ll stand there, do as she has for more than twenty years now, peer up at the train passing by, and wave.

  I turn to the van, still a few yards off, and for a moment I hesitate, not certain there is any call for my anger toward a new driver. I think on when I was driving the station wagon myself, the children hollering and crying and throwing up and the mothers coming out to you when you are late only to damn you for having been stuck in that traffic.

  So the only words I have forming in my throat, in my head and heart, are the words Thank you. Brenda Kay is home safe, standing at the back fence and waving while round us the air is filled with the rhythm and scrape of the train.

  I make it to the van, place a hand on the rail up, and lean in, only to see the driver, a man who looks Chinese to me. He has on gold wire-frame glasses, and he is smiling, already nodding, though he doesn’t know what I am about to say.

  Sowy, he says. Sorry for late. New route. He leans over in his seat toward me, puts out a hand, and says a word, what I take must be his name, Nuyen perhaps, and it occurs to me he is one of these Vietnamese people I have read of in the paper, and who I’ve seen at the market and at the pier and everywhere now, and suddenly I miss Lupe and her gold tooth, and then I miss Laqwanda, the colored girl who was the bus driver before Lupe, and I miss Mr. White, who disappeared back to upstate New York soon as the children were taken up by the school district, his mission here completed, and then I miss, finally, Cathe ral, a name as strong and steady and clear as any I have ever known.

  And, as with every day since he has died, maybe even every day since he’d helped me fold sheets on a night in Mississippi, I miss my husband, my Leston.

  Okay? this Nuyen says, and I have to swallow, blink, nod my head. I glance back into the van, see Dennis there, him the only child left.

  He smiles at me soon as he sees I am looking at him, and pushes his glasses up higher on his nose. He’s forty-eight or so now, an old man himself, his hair gone gray, his face gone to thick flesh. Yet still he smiles at me, remembers who I am.

  I wave to him, say, Hey, Dennis.

  He waves, then stands, points to the seat across the aisle from him.

  He says, Brenda Kay sit over there, and nods at me, sits back down.

  I look at him a moment longer, smile at him. I say, Dennis, you’re a fine boy.

  He smiles, nods, pushes his glasses back up.

  I turn back to this Nuyen, nod at him, step off the van onto the street.

  I say, You better get a move on, and I point down the street ahead of him. Head out to Crenshaw and turn right, I say, then left at the third street, four houses down. That’s the quickest way to Dennis’. I hear my voice in the street, hear how loud it is, the train long gone.

  His face is all co
ncentration, his eyebrows together, mouth pursed.

  I swallow, slowly say, Crenshaw right, third street left, four houses down. I say, Be careful. I say, Thank you.

  He nods again, this time a hard quick move, his face still working on my words, trying to record them as best he can. He pulls closed the van door, gives it the gas, and he is gone.

  Brenda Kay is already at the kitchen table, back from waving at the train, she’s turned on the kitchen lights, and is pulling out today’s papers from her knapsack, the lunchbox already left in the sink.

  Though I need to start dinner, need to get us ready for the night ahead of us, need to start thinking about running water for the bath, about laying out her clothes for tomorrow, and about what she’ll bring for lunch tomorrow, too, though there is all of this to think about, the only thing I can see myself doing right then is sitting down at the table with her, and looking at her, taking her in. Not long from this moment she will be up from the table and in the living room, the television popped on to reruns of shows she’s seen a hundred times already but which she’ll laugh at all the same. She’ll sit there in the recliner and slather her hands with hand lotion, then wipe them on the towels I’ve draped on the armrests for just that purpose. Not long from this moment I will be cooking up the box of macaroni and cheese, slicing up bits of ham to toss in with it, boiling up snap beans. Not long from this moment we will none of us be here.

  She pulls from the knapsack a purple sheet of paper, a flyer from school. She holds it up, says, Dance, Momma! and hands it to me, her face in its smile, her eyes alive with the prospect of going to one of these events.

  I take the paper, read it. Snoopy is on it, there in his ranger hat and grinning. He holds a placard, on it typed DANCE!

  For those with Developmental Disabilities, Their Friends, and Family.

  When, Friday April 14 Where, GARDENA COMMUNITY CENTER 1600 W. 160th St. TIME, 7, 00-9, 30 P. M. COST $1.00

  I look at her, expecting her to be watching me, but she is only digging in her knapsack for something else, her mind on the next thing she has to show me. She pulls it out, smiling again, shouts, Bingo! and hands me the next sheet. This one is yellow, the words on it set off in a square border decorated with butterflies and flowers, FAMILY BINGO FOR PERSONS WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES, THEIR FRIENDS, AND FAMILY MEMBERS.

  I quick read through it, see that this event, like all the others, is at the Center, the Friday two weeks from now, and that I have to call Jennie or Dawn to reserve a space. At the bottom of the sheet, in big balloony letters and with a smiling sun coming up behind it, are the words Have a Happy Day.

  And again I turn to Brenda Kay, expecting to see her watching my face for whatever might come across it, evidence of whether or not we’ll go to either of these events. They’re at night, I am ready to say, l and I don’t like driving all the way out there. I can offer that reason up to her, something I know she can understand, and I ready myself for what she might say, whether she’ll cry or pout or push her knapsack off the table, and I start to smile, look up at her.

  But she is still digging in her knapsack, and I say, How much more, Brenda Kay? and tilt my head to one side, ready and waiting to be annoyed at how the girls down to the Center organize too much for these children, too many events in lives already jammed and overflowing with the simple and giant tasks of making it through a day.

  Then she pulls out the next sheet. Look, Momma! she shouts, and it seems her voice is louder than it has ever been, louder than me shouting into the school van, louder than my wailing in the delivery room, louder than the cries of my children at their father’s funeral, or the sounds of treefrogs on a night in Mississippi. Louder than anything I have ever heard, her small words filling the world, Look, Momma!

  She holds up only a sheet of paper, a thin sheet of lined newsprint paper torn from a tablet not much different than I’d had when I was a girl, when the world was ready and willing to be filled with all I could teach it, she holds up a sheet of paper torn from a tablet like those she’s had all her own life, too, tablets she’s been filling for more than thirty years now, she holds up a single sheet torn from a tablet like the one I’d taught Cathe ral to write on, a woman who’d portended all this, who’d told me the truth all the way back then on an evening in Mississippi, the first day I’d known Brenda Kay was in me, this baby I’ve carried my entire life is my hardship in this world, my test. And the way God has smiled down on me, too.

  She holds the sheet up for me to read, holds it in front of my face, a hand on either edge, those short fingers of hers gripping tight the paper, what is written on it everything that could ever matter to her here in this world, N 2 13 AB S Only letters, rows of them, the first letter of her name. She’s written thousands of these before, filled tablet and tablet and tablet, but on this night, they are enough. More than enough, the sky now black outside the kitchen window, the train tracks gone quiet until sometime late tonight, when the house will shudder once again, and God might wake me from my sleep, bring me to the bedroom window to see the train moving outside, that black shadow moving forward on into the night and leading me away from here, from Brenda Kay alone and asleep in the next room, from the rest of my children, from the ghosts of the lives I’ve been blessed enough and cursed enough to have led.

  Only letters, labored, indifferent, yet full as she can make them of herself. Letters, I finally hear, singing with all they have, scores of them swirling round me in voices I’ll never understand, but beautiful.

  the end. all the same, God smiling and smiling and smiling.