by Amy Sorrells
Things weren’t always like they are now. When I was little, this place was my kingdom, the meadows my ballroom, the trees and the creatures my subjects. We didn’t have much, since my daddy died before I was born. But we got by, at least until Mama hurt her back working at the nursing home when I was in the eighth grade. Found her sitting in the car when I came home from school—she’d been sitting there all day; she was hurting too bad to get out. Took me and more than a few neighbors to get her inside. Shawnie and Tim—they live next door—each of them took one of Mama’s arms. Grover Sherman, who’s since passed—he lent us the walker he’d used after his hip replacement.
Doctors tried to help, but the only thing that worked were the pain pills. She took them like they were Pez candy, one right after the other. She tried to keep her job, but eventually they let her go and she got on disability. After that, the doctors quit writing her prescriptions. That’s when she found heroin. She didn’t have to look far in Riverton to find it, either.
I close my eyes and pretend things are the way they were before all that, when I used to fall asleep to those katydids and frogs and Mama singing me to sleep.
Mama sang a lot in those days. “You are my sunshine,” she sang as she got ready for work. “My only sunshine.” I’d watch her put on her makeup. “You make me happy.” First the foundation, then the powder that made her face look soft as velvet, then the way she held the black pencil so steady as she lined her eyes.
“Baby girl, do you know how much I love you?” she’d say as I stood on a step stool beside her. Same thing when I got big enough to sit and watch. She’d put her arms around me tight and look at our reflections in the mirror, studying the two of us as if we were a fancy picture, framed and hanging with a light shining on it in a museum.
I’d shake my head no, just to hear her say she loved me again. Her lips would brush against my ear, then my temple, as she whispered, and I’d carry that with me the rest of the day. When I got home from school, she’d watch me do homework or take me to the library, where we’d get big, thick books she’d read to me at night, and sometimes skinny ones full of poetry, and sometimes we tried to write our own.
Mama liked poetry then. She liked books. She liked life. Even our impossible life. But as I said, that was before she started liking heroin. Smack. Whatever you want to call it. I call it pure evil.
Now, if we do anything together, it’s showing up at social services in town for food stamps and WIC money. The rest of the time she’s chain-smoking or pacing the floor of our trailer, pausing every once in a while to peer out the window for junkies bringing her smack or money or both.
Most of them come and go without incident, sweatshirt hoods pulled over their heads, more like shadows than humans. They think I can’t see them, but I know who they are. They tell Mama their stories. One man buys it for his wife, who got hooked after taking pain pills for a C-section. Another’s a mother whose name I see in the paper for her work with the PTO. Says she takes it for her headaches. Another is a manager at the factory, who hurt his back like Mama.
The ones who really make me mad are the kids not that much older than me, from the college, driving their parents’ cars, wearing Greek letters on their sweatshirts when they come to the door. Or kids like Jack Lawson, who was on the front page of the Riverton Journal-Times for his full-ride football scholarship to the state university one week, and on the front page the next week for his funeral after overdosing behind the stadium one Saturday night. Kids who have everything ’cept the sense to say no to smack.
The junkies who came here tonight are different, though. Two men and a woman. They didn’t bother hiding their faces. Their eyes stare, shiny and black like the kestrel in the cage at Sudie’s, as if I’m a finch or a vole. Runners, probably. They’re bolder than plain old users. And they definitely don’t care that there’s a baby in the house. Mama doesn’t either, these days.
I take a deep breath, turn the handle of the storm door, and step inside.
“Hey, Jaycee . . . ,” Mama says, words slow and drawn out. Ragged.
The room smells faintly like vinegar, the smell of heroin cooking. A box of tinfoil, pieces of straws, and a couple of burned-out spoons litter the coffee table in front of the threadbare couch where the people are slumped, except for Mama, somehow still half-awake in her recliner. But none of that bothers me as much as the syringes lying there. I never get used to seeing those.
The three strangers are passed out, beady eyes hidden by sleep, tourniquets still tight around their arms, needles still in them. If they weren’t snoring, I’d think they were dead. Their mouths hang open, slack, an improvement from the snide smirks when they first arrived.
“Hey, Mama.” I try not to let my eyes fall to her chest, her T-shirt cut so low and tight it reveals every lump and bump and crease of her. She is thin, too thin, and the skeletal features of her face match those of the woman slumped on the couch, making them appear related in some macabre way.
Mama reaches for a cigarette smoldering on the table, and I head to the bedroom to avoid her exhale.
“Jayden,” I whisper when I see him sleeping, legs tucked under him, his round bottom in the air like a roly-poly beetle. His crib is the nicest thing in the house, nearly brand-new thanks to Veda Spradlin from church, who knew of a family giving one away. Jayden’s cheeks glow bright red, and when I put my hand on his back I can feel he’s fevering again. A round stain of moisture spreads on the sheets around him.
“Let’s get you changed, baby boy.”
Sweat has dampened his blond hair, curling it around the back of his neck and around his ears. He blinks once, twice, then sleepily reaches for an empty bottle on the bed—not one that I made him.
“At least they fed you, hmm?”
He’s too thin, too. That’s what the doctor said when I took him last week. I make sure to keep those well-child appointments whether Mama comes with us or not, because I know there’s already a risk they’ll take him from us . . . considering.
Mama promised me she was staying away from smack while she was pregnant. I wanted to believe her. I watched her take the methadone every morning, medicine they gave her at the clinic to help her stay off the drugs. She never used anything but that around me that I could tell, so I tried to push my doubts away even though the junkies never stopped coming around. “Helps us eat, don’t it?” she’d say to me if I asked.
When she had him at the hospital, he wasn’t early or anything. But it didn’t take long for him to start jittering and fussing after he was born. I thought for sure the hospital tests would say he had heroin in him and they’d take him from us right then, but it turned out Mama was telling the truth. It’s just that the methadone’s near as hard on a baby as heroin. He spent almost a week withdrawing in the hospital, and weeks after that at home, too. Cried all the time, high-pitched and wailing like the coyotes at night.
He’s better now. Almost nine months old. Still fusses more than other babies I see around, but he’s calming down more every week. Doctor says all that fussing makes him burn more calories, which is why his weight isn’t all that great. Not to mention the Mountain Dew Mama puts in his bottle when I’m away. I buy the food they tell me to with the WIC card, and I make the formula the way they show me, with an extra scoop. But I have no way of making sure Mama carries through with it while I’m at school.
I fasten his clean diaper, then lean down and kiss his cheeks, his hot forehead, and inhale the sweetness of his neck I bathed earlier. “I sure do hate leavin’ you alone.”
I hate a lot of things right now . . . Mama and those junkies and the pure evil they bring into our house, the stench of it hanging in the air even after they’ve gone home, along with the constant fear of getting shot if a deal goes bad. I hate having to work all the hours I can at the diner for measly paychecks to make up for the food stamps Mama trades for money to get cigarettes. I hate worrying all day long about Jayden when I’m at school, wondering if Mama will hear him cry or r
emember to feed him or make sure he’s breathing or if a stranger will hurt him—or if I’ll come home to find her dead.
Jayden coughs before settling into sleep again, a thick, junky cough that rattles deep in his chest. I hold him against me until I’m too tired to hold him anymore, his little heartbeat thumping twice as fast as mine, then set him back in his crib. He curls himself into a roly-poly again, and I rest my hand on his back to feel him breathe. If he’s still hot in the morning, if that cough isn’t better, I’ll take him to the clinic first thing.
The night sounds press through the thin walls of the trailer, like static at first, then I can pick out the low hum of katydids and frogs. I want to go back out to the meadow where fireflies dance around my feet, my waist, and the fragrance of blue phlox replaces the sour sting of drugs in my nose.
When Jayden’s old enough, I’ll take him with me. We’ll camp out on a blanket and I’ll show him the Big Dipper and Venus. I’ll show him how to spot bats chasing night bugs, and we’ll fall asleep safe until the morning birds wake us up. I’ll teach him how to tell a cottonwood from a sycamore, a maple from a hawthorn. I’ll save and press leaves from an ash tree so that he can know what those are after the emerald ash borer has killed them all.
3
* * *
Something’s very wrong with Jayden.
Daylight, yellow-tinged as it filters filmy through our smoke-stained trailer windows, illuminates Jayden’s flushed cheeks. If his forehead was hot last night, it’s on fire now. Heat rises off him like it does off asphalt in the middle of blistering summer days. Usually by this time he’s fussing for his bottle, but he hardly stirs when I pick him up.
“Mama.” I stick my head out the bedroom door, but she doesn’t move in her recliner.
When I carry Jayden to the kitchen, the three strangers are still there and they don’t move either. They’re not snoring anymore and needles aren’t hanging out of their arms, so that’s an improvement.
“Mama,” I say again, louder this time from the kitchen. “Jayden’s sick. Please come help me.”
His head lolls to the side and his eyes stay closed as I lay him on the counter and fumble with the fever medicine, then sift through the pile of dirty dishes to find a medicine dropper. A prescription bottle of Mama’s methadone falls off the counter, the pills scattering all over the floor. There’s no time to worry about that. I run the water till it’s good and cold and wet a rag for his head, and I’m grateful he at least winces at that. But he won’t wake up to take the medicine. I think about the baby bunnies, how they fussed and fought last night when Sudie fed them. If I force the medicine in Jayden when he’s limp like this, he’ll choke for sure. But he needs it. He needs something.
“Mama!” Angry tears prick my eyes. “Don’t you worry, baby boy. Sissy’s gonna help you.” I lift Jayden’s limp body from the counter and feel the fever blaze through my shirt. His breathing isn’t right either. It’s too fast. And his belly caves in under his ribs with every breath, the skin around his collar bones, too, like it’s taking everything he has to suck in air.
He moans, but barely, as I hold him in one arm and rush to grab his bag and a couple of clean outfits. I can’t think what else he might need—diapers? A bottle? Worry jumbles everything in my head. One last look around our room and the turquoise corner of his favorite blanket catches my eye. I grab it and start for the door.
“Mama!” I scream.
The woman stranger startles, her bony arms flying up in the air. She curses and settles back into the cushions.
“Mama! I’m taking Jayden to the hospital.”
I know my words are in vain, but at least I said them. I yank the door open, not caring that the whole trailer shakes as the back of it hits the wall.
Jayden crumples into the curve of the car seat when I lay him in it. He opens his eyes halfway as I fasten the buckles, but they close just as fast.
“Dear Jesus, please help him. Help me.”
The engine takes three tries before it starts. The nearest hospital is a half hour of rolling hills and curved, two-lane highway north of town.
Should I have called an ambulance?
I reach back and put my hand on Jayden’s leg. Hot as ever.
Mama.
Curse her. Curse the drugs. Curse our life.
Condensation builds on my windshield. The humidity didn’t fall at all overnight. The rising sun flashes like a strobe light through the trees as I drive on the road that winds out of Riverton, past the curve where I used to help Mama put the white cross in the ground on the side of the road where my father died in the wreck that killed him before I was born. In the distant tree line, a hawk floats high and circles without any effort at all above the trees. And farther back, gulls from the river.
Gulls filled the shores in the pages of a book I found left in a booth at the diner, a typical romance set in a small town on the coast of North Carolina. The reader before me must’ve liked it as much as I did, judging from the worn pages, the softened spine. For a time, I imagined myself as the main character, a beautiful woman pursued by a handsome man. I imagined what it would be like to live among white picket fences instead of barbed wire, in a whitewashed cottage instead of a rust-stained trailer. Mostly I wondered what it would be like to live in a place where the sun rises new over the endless stretch of the sea.
How does God decide where someone is born? He could have put me and Jayden anywhere—the Horn of Africa, the edge of a rain forest in Brazil, a flat in London or France, that beach in North Carolina, five miles away in the same town to a wealthy professor at Riverton College and his wife. How did he decide to put us here?
Jayden whimpers, coughs, and I am relieved that at least he moves.
“It’s okay, baby. We’re getting closer. Hang on.”
He was sick yesterday, cough and fever, but nothing he hasn’t had before. Nothing like this. I don’t understand how he got this bad so fast. Yesterday evening he was sitting in the bathtub splashing, laughing when we played peekaboo and I put the soapy wet washrag on my own face to hide. He helped turn the pages when we read Goodnight Moon and even found the little mouse on one. He fell asleep with his head on my chest while I sang him a hymn.
“He’s such a good boy, Lord. Please. I’m sorry for whatever I did or didn’t do to take care of him. Please help him.”
I know the Lord can do miracles. I’ve seen the sickest animals get better when Sudie prays. Birds who fall out of their nests or break their wings flying into telephone wires, raccoons and opossums hit by cars, turtles with cracked shells, bunnies tinier than the ones I took to Sudie last night. I’m just not sure God will do a miracle for me.
A semitrailer rocks the car as it passes in the other direction, and I realize I’ve been worrying so much I have no idea how far I’ve gone, no recollection of the last ten minutes of driving.
The last thing I remember is passing the cemetery Sudie takes care of, same one my father is buried in, right next to the brick chapel on the way out of town. “A labor of love,” she calls it, and it must be. She has one man, Shorty Smith, who digs the graves. If he has a proper first name no one in Riverton knows it since he’s barely four foot nine and that’s all folks would ever call him anyway. According to Sudie, Shorty can dig a grave in under two hours without help. Sometimes he brings a friend, or Sudie helps him, but most of the time he does it on his own. Sudie says the graves aren’t really six feet deep like folks like to say. They’re five feet deep and four feet wide. Still, that’s a lot of digging for a small man and an old woman with a bum knee. And a lot of filling in, too. Takes her up to fifty hours a week to take care of it all, nearly fifteen hundred graves and eight and a half acres, some of the headstones dating back to the early 1800s when the first people settled Riverton.
I’ve been out there with her a couple of times to help her plant flowers and such, but I don’t like it much. I especially don’t like the row of little white crosses with lambs and the names of children etch
ed on them along the back fence line. Babies and children who died in the 1870s from the cholera epidemic.
I flip through the radio stations for something to help me focus on driving. Something to keep me from shaking. Nothing besides bad songs and static. I turn it off.
“You are my sunshine . . .”
I sing a few lines before my voice cracks.
“Please don’t take my sunshine away.”
In the rearview mirror I see Jayden, listless. I am glad when the road straightens some and the forest canopy opens up into stretches of corn and bean fields. Farmhouses with acreage start to appear, including one with a woman wearing an oversize straw hat on a riding mower, the stripes of green grass neat and straight. Eventually farms turn to an occasional trailer park like Shady Acres, or a single solitary trailer sitting all alone on a big, wide patch of land. Closer to town are rickety homes with stone front porches that must have been something a few decades ago. A man sits on the front stoop of one and tosses a cigarette toward a rusty metal rocking horse caught up in the weeds. Homes turn to strip malls, half of the stores boarded up, the other half dollar stores, liquor stores, and junk shops posing as antique dealers. Fast-food restaurants, a middle school, a high school. A car dealer. A funeral home.
A white sign with big red letters. E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y.
If there’s a place I’m supposed to park I don’t see it, and I don’t care to look for it either. I pull into the ambulance bay and don’t bother to turn the car off, just put it in park and pull Jayden from his seat. His cheeks look too rosy. He collapses like a rag doll on my shoulder. The automatic doors fly open and a blast of cold air shocks my skin.