“Furthermore”—Bliss directed her words at Ramona again—“my aunt Til, and aunt Ness, and uncle Blue, and uncle Show are coming for us anyhow.” Bliss curled her coat around her arm as she spoke. “So we’re not even going to be here long enough for anything to drop on your old closet floor. And my aunt Til doesn’t play, especially when it comes to my sisters and me.” Bliss continued to pout.
“I don’t play either.” Ramona tried to hold her meanness in her balled fist, but it seeped out between her fingers. Now she just opened her hand and let it take her over. “And you can tell your aunt Til I said so—that is, if you can find whatever jail they threw her in when she tried to jump bad down at the courthouse. Furthermore, the judge fixed it so none of your strange-assed people can try to contact you. And if you try to contact them, you’ll be the cause of never seeing them again. Now what your little fresh mouth got to say about that?” Ramona stopped. Wished she had held her meanness and not said the part about jail. She could tell by the way Bliss was twirling her coat around her arms that the child was more afraid than she was fresh.
Bliss’s coat was almost a ball now, and she mashed it against her stomach. “You’re lying,” she shouted up at Ramona. “My aunt Til isn’t in jail. She’s on her way here to get us, isn’t she, Shern? Isn’t that what you just told me when we were waiting in the car?”
Shern didn’t answer Bliss. She gently pulled the balled-up coat from Bliss’s arms without looking in her face.
“Shern, isn’t that what you said? You said it! You promised me that Aunt Til was on her way here to get us.”
Shern could feel the kerchief in her stomach starting to loosen, threatening to come undone. She had promised Bliss that the aunts would be coming for them shortly. Even though the fat social worker had told them they’d be living here for the next six weeks or so, Shern had whispered otherwise to her sisters. She’d had to. She’d needed to tell them, and herself, something so they’d stop crying. And now she wanted to cry all over again, hearing this dark news about her aunt Til. She swallowed hard, but the kerchief in her stomach wasn’t going to stay tied. She felt it open completely now, one end, then the next, and the creamed corn and whatever else she hadn’t eaten that day spilled out of the kerchief. She didn’t even have time to gag. Now she was standing there feeling it seep down the front of her white cotton blouse. She put her hands under her mouth, trying to catch it; now she was gagging, and in between trying to ask where the bathroom was.
“Oh, shit, damn,” Ramona said when she saw it. “Run, go to the kitchen sink, hurry up, and try to stay on the plastic runner. My mother just had this overpriced carpet installed. Shit!”
Shern ran back to the kitchen with Bliss and Victoria at her heels. She spit and gagged into the sink, and her sisters patted her back, and Victoria was crying, “I want Mommie.” Then they all three were crying and moaning, “Mommie, Mommie,” and hugging one another in a circle.
Ramona stood in the kitchen doorway, just watching them. For the thousandth time that day she wished Mae were here, and she never wished for Mae to be here. Most of her wishing had to do with Mae not being here, sometimes even wishing Mae dead. But at least Mae would know how to respond to this kind of outpouring. Ramona didn’t. She only knew what to do or say with the fosters when they misstepped, when she had to threaten to kick ass. She couldn’t even playact a response to girls crying because they missed their mother.
“Wash your hands good, and rinse your mouth out with warm water,” she called into their circle. “I’ll look through your many bags and find you a top to change into. Your room is the one in the back, the three of you sharing the one room, of course.”
They quieted down and now were just whimpering.
“After you clean yourself up,” Ramona went on, “you and your sisters might want to put your coats and hats back on and go outside, there a few kids your ages live on the block, or you might want to just go for a walk, see what the neighborhood’s like. Fresh air might do you all some good.”
That was it, the best Ramona could do in the here and now. She went to the shed kitchen to get the mop and bucket so she could clean up Shern’s grief trailing from the living room into the kitchen. She pulled on her rubber gloves and walked back through the kitchen, where the girls were sniffing and making the air in the kitchen heavy with their sighs. She hurried through the kitchen back into the living room. She sighed now too and knelt to start cleaning the plastic runner. At least this part she understood.
3
They didn’t hold Til long. She begged the pardon of the sheriff. Told him what she’d been through that morning seeing her niece’s bedroom bloodied like that. The threats to the case manager were idle, she said. Just a temporary fit of madness caused by her trauma. She’d just wanted to watch over her niece’s babies, is all.
So the sheriff let her go, told her a sitting judge would have to hear her plea to overturn the case manager’s decision. She should get a lawyer, he said, and she should make sure she adhered to the restraining order and not try to make contact with the children because that order had been signed by a judge and a judge would never reverse a case manager’s call in favor of someone who violated one of his rulings. Not that Til could try to see them. She had no idea where they’d been placed. Right now she thanked God that she at least knew where Clarise was; at least she and Ness and Blue and Show had the powerful motivator of rushing to the bedside of the niece they had raised to force them to pull themselves together.
Clarise knew it was the aunts and uncles even before they turned the corner into her room. She could smell the honey and coconut soap that Til and Ness made by hand and sold mail order four times a year. She wanted to be able to smile, to blow them a kiss, wanted especially to let them know that it wasn’t her wrists she’d tried to slash that morning, just that navy blue haze that had gotten in the way of her yarns. But the clear fluid dripping down the plastic tubing into the largest vein in her arm had a clamp on all her body parts. She couldn’t even stick her tongue out to lick around the corners of her mouth that were so dry they were cracking.
Her uncle Blue noticed. As soon as he stood over her, looking formless around the edges because her eyesight was blurred, and she smelled the cedar that meant he was wearing his chesterfield coat because he kept it hanging in his cedar chifforobe, she heard him say, “My goodness, is there any ice around here? Look at her poor mouth. Aren’t they watching her?”
Show was at his side. “Hey, darling,” he said. “They told us we can only stay five minutes. Yeah, that mouth does look a little parched.”
“Move, Blue, let me see.” Ness pushed her way in between Blue and Show. “Awl, look at our baby, you gonna be okay, Clarise, you gonna pull through this, yes, you are.”
“Here’s the ice.” Til’s voice was behind the other three. Clarise guessed that she was trying to be the strong one, and if she looked at Clarise right now, arms bandaged almost up to her elbows, flat in this bed with the sides raised like she was an infant in a crib, her attempts at being strong would fade into hushed sobs like the ones starting to rise up from her uncle Show.
Blue scooped a fingerful of ice chips from a Styrofoam cup handed to him by Til and rubbed them around Clarise’s mouth. How good the ice felt, how cool as it melted into the hot, cracked skin around the corners of her mouth. She wanted to say thank you, not just for the ice but for the tough and tender love they’d always wrapped around her. Blue’s eyes were filled up now and getting ready to run a river; she could tell because she could see glimmering light where his eyes should be. Til could too because she nudged him out of the way.
“Need some pretroleum jelly on those lips,” Til said as she looked in Clarise’s face and gently smeared Vaseline around her mouth, especially where her skin was cracking. “Now that doctor out there said you probably can’t talk because of the medicine they’ve got you on; he said you may not even be able to hear us—that is, make sense of what we’re saying—but I personally think h
e’s the one not making sense, and I do believe you can understand me. So I want you to listen good and do what I tell you; you’ve always minded in the past, so don’t you dare start disobeying now. Now I want you to reach way down deep inside of yourself, as deep as you can go; I want you to grab a hold of the rafter you find there. Oh, yes, you got one, everybody does. You just don’t realize it until your life goes liquid on you and rises above your head and you forced to search for something to get you to dry land. Grab that rafter, Clarise. Hold on. You got strong arms, Clarise, hold on. You got to let your grieving take its course, got to let Finch go. He’s already gone, you got to let him go. I know you and he were so close you breathed in sync, and now your breaths are heavy and sad, pushing into the air single file. But you still got a whole lot of life left in you, a whole lot of living to be done, a whole lot of years of helping those daughters grow into women, so you hold on. Hold on tight, and hold on sure. We’re gonna reel you into the riverbank, get you onto solid ground, but baby, you got to hold on.”
They were all standing over her now. Ness was humming softly and rhythmically to the rise and fall of Til’s words. The uncles punctuated what Til said with loud, soupy sniffles. And Clarise tried with everything in her to unclamp her mouth, to tell them she would hold on, for the girls, for them, for the memory of her beloved Finch. But her mouth wouldn’t move, no words would form, and now they were putting on their coats to leave.
They took turns leaning into the prison of a bed to kiss her good-bye. First Blue, then Show, then Ness, then Til. Til’s fox-foot coat collar stroked her face, and she was flooded with memories of her childhood, and how that collar was her pet because the aunts didn’t believe in live animals roaming freely through the house and wouldn’t let her have a cat or dog. And when everyone was asleep, Til would tiptoe into her bedroom and put the coat around her just so with the collar right against her cheek. Clarise was trying to say “pet,” was hollering it in her head, trying to force the word through her mouth. This time Show noticed.
“What’s she trying to say, Til? Look how wild her eyes are getting. She’s trying to talk, Til.”
“She’s not hurting, is she?” Blue asked, leaning in to look on her face. “Dear God, please don’t let her be in pain.”
“She’s not hurting,” Ness said with confidence. “And, Sister, I do believe you know what she wants.”
Til did. She unbuttoned her coat and eased it from her arms. She arranged it over Clarise so that the collar was against her cheek. “Hold on, Clarise,” she said again as Blue put his chesterfield around Til’s shoulders, and Clarise thought she was seeing something she’d never seen before. A single tear pressed from the corner of Til’s eye and glinted in perfect form against her cheek.
4
The aunts and uncles did hire a lawyer, who strongly reiterated the sheriff’s caution about trying to intercede in the placement of the girls. He looked right at Til when he said it, repeated himself three or four times when Til wouldn’t meet his gaze. Then his words went straight to Til’s heart when he said she could jeopardize the possibility of ever having a relationship with those girls, God forbid. If Clarise were not to recover fully, he said, the restraining order could stay in effect, and those girls could remain in foster care until they were adopted permanently or turned eighteen, whichever happened first. Ness grabbed Til’s hand when he said it; the uncles sucked their breaths sharply and swallowed their screams. And Til dismissed her plan of maybe hiring a detective to find those girls so that she could meet them after school, or at the movies, or the library, spend an hour or two a week with them, make sure they were being treated well, adjusting emotionally; nobody would have to know, she’d reasoned; the girls would certainly never tell. But this lawyer’s cautionary words made a small hole in her heart, and she let her plan sift through the hole for now and busied herself instead helping Clarise to come back.
They all did over the next month. Kept themselves from violating the judge’s ruling and tracking down the girls by immersing themselves in Clarise’s recovery. They did everything but lift Clarise up and rock her as if she were a newborn. They met the start of visiting hours at her bedside, combed her hair, massaged her scalp. Told her how strong she was. They hummed her favorite songs, rubbed olive oil between her fingers that always seemed dry. Told her how strong she was. They brought her yarns and knitting needles and put them in the top of her closet as an incentive, repeated stories that made her laugh when she was a child. Told her how strong she was. They squeezed each second out of those visiting hours until they were practically thrown out and Til would say, “Wait, wait, one last thing I got to do.” Then she’d cover Clarise with her fox-foot–collared coat.
And Clarise was responding. The tube that had dripped that immobilizing fluid into her arms had been removed, so she was sitting up for longer periods during the day, talking in short phrases, but at least she was talking. And asking, all the time asking, about her girls. Smiled weakly when the aunts and uncles lied to her, told her the girls were doing fine, that they sent their love, underage, though, so they couldn’t visit. “Ah, but, Clarise, they truly send their love.”
And the girls had sent their love over that month, through their constant thinking about their mother, longing for her, praying for her recovery and that they would soon be returned to her and their real home. And even if not that, at least that they could go and live with their aunts and uncles. Because the month in that Addison Street row house with Ramona and the girls was like a cheap leather coat, stiff, letting in the cold when it should be giving off warmth, cracking from the least bit of moisture, patched together with so many seams too easy to come undone.
And the girls were coming undone. Ramona listened to them cry themselves to sleep just about every night. When they weren’t crying, they were quiet, withdrawn, at least in Ramona’s presence, seeming not to want to have anything to do with Ramona. Just as well, Ramona thought, she was herself too occupied. There was breakfast to cook, and their bangs, which needed hot curling before they went to school and she went to her own day job at Lit Brothers bargain basement. There was dinner and dishes, making their lunch for the next day. There was laundry, that cart she despised, which she lugged to the Laundromat overflowing now with three girls bathing and going through towels as if the towels were Kleenex. There was Tyrone, her sweet country-boy boyfriend, who came by most evenings, trying to beg his way into her bedroom, who’d taken a liking to the girls, though, and sometimes occupied them playing crazy eights or hangman or tic-tac-toe. There was just too much to do, Ramona told herself, to spend time trying to think of ways to draw those girls out. So she listened to them cry and in between did what little she could to distract them from themselves. “Go outside and get some fresh air,” she’d tell them, or, “Go do your homework,” or “Turn the TV on low,” or “Get down on your knees and say your prayers before you go to sleep for the night.” But she didn’t try to draw them out, didn’t really want to carry on real conversation, even as she watched their personalities sneak out during lapses in their outward shows of grief.
She could see that the youngest, Bliss, was combative, smart-mouthed, spunky, though; Ramona was sure she’d heard Bliss laugh at least once since they’d been there. Victoria hadn’t laughed, but she had the mildest manner of the three, always trying to keep peace between those other two. Shern was the most complicated for Ramona to figure, the moodiest, with pitch-black eyes that gave her an intense look. Ramona had to acknowledge the child had beautiful eyes, not that she would ever say such a thing to Shern, too much against her grain to compliment a foster child.
Plus Ramona hadn’t been able to get beyond the apparent opulence the girls had been accustomed to. Most of the foster children came with a modest amount, a brown shopping bag full; some came with the price tag still affixed to what they carried where the social workers had to stop at John Bargain’s just so they could come with something. But Shern, Victoria, and Bliss had come with a loaded trunk
and the mind-sets that didn’t understand a thing about stretching the havings, making do until payday. So Ramona was sure an air of superiority was hiding behind Shern’s steely dark eyes. It caused her to speak to all three of the girls in short snippets and usually in a voice that was the texture of burlap.
She spoke to them in that voice right now as the girls stood in the dining room, high-quality wool plaid coats on, and Shern declared that she and her sisters were going to the library.
“Are you asking me or telling me?” Ramona snapped.
“She means, Can we go?” Peacemaking Victoria rushed her words like a tide coming in. “Didn’t you, Shern? Tell Ramona that’s what you meant. Can we, I mean, is it okay if we go to the library?”
“I want her to ask me.” Ramona made herself peer into Shern’s eyes.
Shern was just standing there looking at Ramona, though, as if she were forcing Ramona to take in her eyes.
“I want her to ask me,” Ramona said again, anger seeping into her words. “Ask me, don’t tell me.” She had her hand on her hip now and was leaning into Shern’s face.
Shern’s eyes went beyond Ramona’s stormy face over to the buffet cart and a brass-tone fruit bowl filled with plastic pears and bananas. She clamped her lips and stared at the plastic fruit and thought about how much she despised the taste of bananas.
The dining room was bright with the morning sun and swathed in an unsettled quiet. The quiet held, like a plane that’s circling because it can’t get clearance to land. Victoria couldn’t tolerate the quiet. To her the quiet was a prelude to disaster, like Ramona hitting Shern, hurting her; she was getting near hysterical over the thought. “Shern!” Victoria dragged her sister’s name along on a breath that was getting ready to cry. “Why is Shern doing this?” she whined, making waves in the dining-room air, her voice was shaking so.
Tempest Rising Page 6