I spot three German shepherds on my way to meet the school bus; they look nothing like the dog I used to feed. They stand in the pasture—dark compared with the snow. The cottonwoods are bare, the branches a tangle of black against the gray expanse of morning sky. From the nests secured to the treetops, hundreds of meadowlarks lift only to settle back into the branches seconds later, but the dogs don’t look up. They stare at me, and I stare back—and I almost miss the bus.
Later, when I tell Daddy, he says the wild dogs around here are full of German shepherd, and starts walking with me in the morning. He does not need to walk with me in the afternoon.
“Those dogs are nocturnal,” he explains. And he doesn’t have to tell me what this word means. I already know. Mama is nocturnal too.
There are rumors about the feral dogs. Mostly people say they’re part coyote, but on the bus Trent Wallace tells Candace Sherman and Sissy Baxter they’re part wolf.
He says, “That’s what my pops told me,” but when I tell Daddy, he laughs. He doesn’t like Trent’s father, who owns and operates Wallace Dairy and lives in the biggest house in Douglas County—the one Mama always likens to the plantation from the movie Gone with the Wind.
“I saw the Wallace calf that got killed,” Daddy says. “That carcass was riddled with bite marks and scratches—wolves don’t do that. Wolves know how to kill. They don’t play with their food. They go straight for the throat.”
Mama spends her days standing in the day porch, where three walls are all windows. She uses Daddy’s binoculars to search the world on the other side of the cold glass. But then the first blizzard of the year comes and buries the threat with the deepest white snow I have ever seen.
“Any wild dog left alive,” Daddy says, “is denned up for now.”
Still Mama smokes a lot. She thinks that no one knows. She hides behind the catalpa tree, where she can’t be seen from the house. I find her cigarette butts stuck into the snow, and when she comes inside she always smells like breath mints and the oil she wears made from amber and myrrh. But she can’t hide that the artist callus on her middle finger is now stained an ugly yellow.
* * * *
The blizzard knocks the power out, and Mama has to get the emergency candles. Daddy lights a fire, and after we eat dinner in the kitchen Mama and I curl up on the sofa and she reads The Snow Queen out loud as the wind shakes the house, turning the outside world into a whirl of white.
Daddy makes hot cocoa with miniature marshmallows for all of us, and after he has passed us our mugs he sits on the floor to listen to the story. He rests his head on Mama’s lap, and she strokes his thick black hair with her fingers between turning pages.
Later, in my bedroom when everyone is asleep, I sit in my window seat and watch the snow. I watch the farm as it circles around in a snow globe of its own making. In the howl of the wind, I can hear the howling of the wild dogs, and I wonder if everyone got it wrong. Maybe Mama was right after all. Maybe she really isn’t a schizophrenic. I think about the dog I kept feeding. She didn’t look like a German shepherd, but with her different-colored eyes and mangy blue-black fur she also didn’t look like someone’s pet.
But then I start thinking about what it’d feel like to have everyone think you’re crazy when you’re not. It might even be enough to drive you crazy for real. Then again, the crazy you might become might be the kind of crazy that can go away if you find out you actually weren’t crazy to begin with. And maybe it’s the kind of crazy that really does get better from resting all the time and taking a lot of long, hot baths. Outside, the world howls, and I hold my breath and cross my fingers.
* * * *
March 30, 1984
Just as the weather turns from cold to warm I get the chicken pox and Gran becomes overly concerned about me scarring. “She already has that nasty habit,” she says, only she’s whispering as if this is enough to keep me from hearing her.
Mama and Daddy have to shear the sheep, so Gran comes to stay with us and care for me. She coats my body with calamine lotion, and I turn to clay. When I move my arm, the pink crust cracks as if my elbows were made from plaster and I could break into a million pieces.
Gran puts mittens on my hands and socks on my feet even though the days now are quite warm. She wraps Ace bandages around my wrists and my ankles to keep me from taking them off. This is worse than when she made me wear the splint. The only time I see my hands or feet is when she soaks me in an oatmeal bath. I feel like Gretel from the fairy tale. The bathtub is the cauldron and Gran is the hungry witch. Sitting on the toilet, she leans over to squeeze the sock filled with oatmeal and to stir the milky water. She is cooking me.
My fever remains high, and the mercury climbs to a hundred every time. I am burning up. I can’t read because of my mittened hands and my foggy brain. I try to watch TV, but all I want to do is scratch myself. I am trapped inside my skin.
I lie on the couch, and Gran works her crossword puzzles. Her pencil scratches the paper every time she writes an answer. When she goes to use the bathroom, I rub my face against the red velvet sofa, or scratch myself through my clothes using my teeth. Gran always returns, and this is when she helps me drink water through the bendable straws she bought for me.
When Mama comes to check on me, she is always red and sweaty with bits of raw wool stuck in her hair and on her clothes. I can smell the greasy smell of lanolin, and some of the fibers remain after she leaves. They float around like dandelion seeds. And I try to blow them away, but I always run out of breath and they land on me and make me itch even more.
* * * *
My fever breaks, and the chicken pox have all scabbed over. I feel much better and I only itch for Gran to leave. Finally, she drives away in her long blue Buick followed by a cloud of dust. From the porch, I wave good-bye—no more mittens, no more socks, and no more yards of bandaging.
No longer bound, I stand amid piles of wet fleece that Mama’s been washing since dawn. “You’re free,” she says, and she’s smiling but exhausted. I can tell she wants to be alone.
I walk to where the sheep are being pastured.
They are different animals than before I got sick. Now they are naked, pink albinos. Freshly sheared, the ewes stand under the late-morning sun, exposed. I’m barefoot, and the tall Johnsongrass tickles one of the pox scabs on my ankle. I reach down, and my body responds to my fingernail. The blood comes easily. This time, I pick the scab for a different reason than when I picked the scabs on my knees. I am not doing it to get attention. I am doing it because there is no one here to tell me not to do it.
The scab was a miniature volcano, and now it’s erupted.
This time, I am more aware of the warmth that comes from bleeding than I am aware of the pain. I use my finger to wipe the blood away, and then I watch more blood bursting to the surface—bright and red. This blood was blue only seconds ago, and from red I watch the blood turn brown as it dries on my finger. The brown highlights the wavy pattern of my fingerprint, and like a snowflake I am the only person in this world who comes with this particular design.
* * * *
Only two and a half weeks before the school year is over and summer becomes official. Mama buys green grapes from the grocery store, and the three of us sit on the porch and watch the sun set. The apple blossoms have fallen, and in their place new fruit grows—tiny, green, and hard.
Daddy tries to peel a grape for Mama.
My fingers feel anxious as I watch my father try. His fingers are large and clumsy and I wonder how he ever managed to carve the intricacies of my grandmother’s wooden Christ. I realize his nails are too short as he scrapes away more fruit than skin. When he’s done, he hands Mama a tiny moon—it is green and pocked deep with craters.
Mama takes it anyway, popping it in her mouth, and as she chews never once does she stop smiling. The sunset paints her skin pink and orange—and even now that she is puffier, she is still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
And this is why I
must give her something perfect.
I use my fingernail to peel off the thin grape skin, strip by careful strip. Skinned, the fruit is smooth and wet; it glistens. Mama smiles as I hand it over. She studies the perfection and is gentle with my gift. She nods her head in gratitude, and then she eats it. After she has swallowed it, Mama stretches her arms into the air. She folds her hands behind her head, and then she says, “This is the life for me!” And later, by the light of the moon, she will pull all the weeds from the flower garden for the first time in almost forever.
* * * *
Every time the sore on my ankle scabs over, I have to peel it off again. I am chasing after the warmth—the kind of warmth that connects back to my heart and relaxes me. Only it doesn’t happen every time, so I’m forced to keep trying.
The sore has gotten red and hot, circled by rings of swollen white. I repeat everything Mama did the night of my seventh birthday—the night we both came home again.
I clean the wound with Q-tips and hydrogen peroxide. I begin to like the sting of the cleansing white foam, so I add more. Then I care for the wound the way Daddy would. I smear it with Neosporin the way he always does when he nicks himself while working wood. I do this once a day, but nothing changes. Then I do it twice a day. And finally three times. Next, I sneak droppers full of Mama’s tinctures—Echinacea and goldenseal, everything I’ve ever heard her use to fight infection. And I shudder from the bitterness and the alcohol.
I cut my fingernails as short as I can even though I don’t want to pick anymore because picking hurts too much. The pain is not worth the warmth, which is now too hot. The redness and the hotness do not go away; they outdo any temporary pleasure as the infection spreads. My ankle swells, and a purple streak begins to climb my leg like the mercury in the glass thermometer which indicates the return of my fever.
It takes Mama forever to even notice, but when she does she gives me Tylenol and puts me in a hot bath with Epsom salts, and then she squeezes the sore until it shoots green-yellow pus. When she squeezes, I swallow the need to scream. The screams turn into heavy rocks inside my stomach.
The infection gets better for a day, and then it gets worse than ever. The wound grows bigger and rounder; pregnant with pus, the pus threatens to explode as the purple streak inches past my knee. Headed for my heart. Mama drives me to the emergency room in Lawrence.
* * * *
I miss the last two days of school because I have to stay in the hospital instead. The doctor explains how it began as staph but turned into cellulitis. His teeth are too small for his face, and his lips are very chapped. I’m tempted to peel away all of his dead skin and the patch of dried shaving cream by his ear.
“Fiona,” he says, “you almost lost your foot.”
My foot is suspended in the air, hanging from the ceiling in a sling. “It’s important to keep it elevated,” the nurses like to say. “To keep it above your heart.”
There is an IV in my wrist. The needle is taped into place and attached to a long, clear tube attached to plastic bags of saline, antibiotics, and pain medicine. This all hangs from something that reminds me of a coatrack, only there’s an electrical-looking box attached and used to monitor my vitals. The screen has green lines and a picture of a heart. The heart is not the anatomical kind but the shape of a Valentine—an outline of red light.
At night, Mama sleeps on the plastic armchair by the window, folded into her body. And the moonlight makes her glow. Daddy has to get back to the farm before the sun goes down, to water and feed the animals. When Uncle Billy comes to visit, he gives me his lucky rabbit foot. I wrap my fingers around the softness.
Uncle Billy looks very worried.
“Fig,” he says, and I look up at him. “Will you promise to always take care of yourself ?” he asks, and I think I manage to nod.
I am squeezing the furry charm. I squeeze as hard as I can, and I think I can feel the bone inside, even though I know the rabbit foot is a fake. Uncle Billy kisses me on both cheeks, and despite the lingering scent of peppermint soap I can still smell the fish. He spends this time of year wading through the Silver River, casting lures.
After he leaves, I dangle the rabbit foot in the air from the chain of tiny steel beads. The fur is dyed the most unlikely shade of blue—the Crayola color called Indigo. The color of the summer sky right before night falls. When I go home, I will keep this charm between my mattress and my box spring because it is beloved.
* * * *
In the morning, the nurse comes to drain my ankle because the superantibiotics are not enough.
First, she numbs the area with a shot. With gloved fingers, she opens a plastic package containing the largest syringe I have ever seen except for the oral ones Daddy uses to deworm the sheep. But this one has a needle, which she sticks into my ankle before slowly pulling back on the plunger. This is the opposite of getting a shot, and all I can feel is the pressure of my ankle releasing as the clean tube fills with pus. The tube is marked with black lines and red numbers and reminds me of Gran’s favorite measuring glass.
Mama holds my hand, but Daddy cannot bear to look. He stands by the window, and because we’re on the third floor his head is surrounded by rain clouds. I fill two large syringes, and when no pus comes out anymore, they tell me I’m ready to be released. “Sometime this evening,” the nurse says before she shows Mama how to properly clean and bandage my wound.
The doctor writes a prescription for oral antibiotics. I hate swallowing pills, but he doesn’t care. “You will take three a day for the next two weeks before I reevaluate the situation.”
He repeats himself. The doctor says “This was a very serious infection” again and again while we all nod our heads and stare at him dumbly. Then he asks if he can talk to me alone, and Mama and Daddy go stand in the hallway, where I can’t see them anymore. Dr. Serious stands at the end of my bed, and because my foot is hanging in the air my leg cuts my vision of him in half.
“I’m just trying to understand,” he says. “It’s been months since you had the chicken pox.”
Dr. Serious squints at me like I am hard to see.
“If properly left alone,” he says, “all the pox should have healed just fine.”
The phrase “left alone” echoes in my head. Mama and Daddy come back in when the doctor leaves with my chart. Mama asks, “Won’t it be nice to go home?” and Daddy answers for me. “Yes,” he says, but all I hear is “left alone.”
* * * *
I have to be taken out in a wheelchair.
“Hospital policy,” the nurse explains, but won’t let Daddy push me. Daddy and Mama walk on either side of the wheelchair until Mama suddenly stops. We are passing by a long window, only it doesn’t offer a view of the outside world. It looks into another room. From the wheelchair, all I can see are balloons drifting on the other side of the glass. They are the kind of balloons that look like inflated tinfoil. This must be the nursery. Once upon a time, I was kept in there.
The nurse stops pushing only after Daddy stops too. I turn to look at Mama. And she is looking through the window with her forehead pressed against the glass.
“Annie?” Daddy says. And he turns her name into a question, which is never good.
I hold my breath and cross my fingers. With her head still against the thick soundproof glass, Mama turns to look at Daddy. My fingers are cramping, and I’m about to turn blue when she finally steps back, pulling my prescription from her purse.
“I need to get this filled,” she says, and I can tell Daddy doesn’t know what to think.
“Makes sense to me,” the nurse says, her voice disembodied.
Daddy nods and starts walking, but I see the way he continues to look back at Mama, who I can’t see anymore because the nurse is pushing me again, trying to keep up with my father’s long strides. Both Daddy and Uncle Billy are very tall, Paul Bunyan–size.
The lights in the elevator flicker as we ride down. Daddy smiles at the nurse the way he does when he’s
uncomfortable.
“Them babies sure do tug the heartstrings,” the nurse says. She says this as if she understands everything there is to understand about my family.
I want to tell her the truth.
My mother is crazy, I would say. A real nut job. Which is what Phillip Booth likes to say, but I don’t. I don’t say anything at all.
Daddy goes to get the car, and I wait in the wheelchair. I can feel the nurse’s breath on my neck despite the already thick humidity of this after-rain world. The cinnamon gum is not strong enough to mask her sour breath. When Daddy pulls around, she helps me get into the back of Mama’s Volvo. Through the window, I watch her push the empty chair back into the hospital, where she leaves it in the crescent-shaped vestibule.
I fall asleep waiting for Mama. When I wake again, the sky is dark and the streetlights are now burning—the air still thick with humidity, there are now thousands of moths dancing around the yellow globes. Mama is getting into the car. She puts the medicine on the dashboard. It’s in a white paper bag, stapled shut with the instructions attached.
When she tries to put on her safety belt, it gets stuck and won’t come out.
She turns around and pulls, but it still won’t budge. She yanks and yanks, and then she screams, “I hate this place!” Her face is red, and I can tell she was crying long before she got into the car. And Daddy is climbing out of his seat and rushing around to help her.
“Annie,” he says, “let me try.”
Mama is taking deep breaths, and Daddy says, “I can fix it.” He says this again and again, and finally the strap slides out from where it was stuck inside the wall. He clips the buckle shut, and now Mama is rummaging through her purse. I hear the rattle of her pills, and she is checking each bottle—searching for the right fix. And in the side mirror, I watch as she swallows a blue circle with a heart carved out of the inside. At least that’s what it looks like to me.
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