by Amy Sorrells
“Let me know what happens with the hawk?”
“I will.”
He shuts his door and the car engine turns, and my heart along with it. The taillights of his car blink as he drives away.
Lord have mercy, I think I like this boy.
Things are quiet again at the Johnsons’ trailer, which I pass on the way to the community mailboxes after realizing I haven’t checked mine since Friday. Like many in Shady Acres, they save everything, overflowing bags of aluminum cans, ancient televisions stacked on top of each other, and that horrific love seat, the floral pattern faded, gold foam stuffing sticking out of torn edges, and the constant smell of must hanging in the air. No wonder not even the junkies will steal their stuff. For some reason the Johnsons and others like them can’t part with it, as if clinging to it will somehow keep the memories alive of when it was nice and new.
Sunlight reflects off the community stack of mailboxes clumped together and fixed to a couple of fence posts. I’m just about there when I see a familiar flash of orange and white where I’m about to step.
Another dirty syringe.
The cap is off, the needle bent and pointing up at the sky, where my foot would have landed.
Lord, have mercy.
Kids run around barefoot here all the time, doesn’t matter the weather. I pick the filthy syringe up by the plunger and toss it into the nearby trash barrel like I’ve done with so many of the others I find.
At first I don’t see anything but the usual Saturday mail in my mailbox: the phone bill, the electric bill, the water bill, a glossy mailer from the local ACE Hardware. I almost miss the letter from Mama stuck in the middle of the Dollar Tree mailer. Underneath the sheet of notebook paper is a form, along with a return envelope. INDIANA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION: Application for Visiting Privileges.
This is the tenth one she’s sent me so far, and so far, I haven’t filled a one of them out.
Dear Jaycee,
I’ve been going to hear the preacher every Sunday now, and I think I am starting to believe what he is saying is for someone like me. I wouldn’t blame you for arguing against that. Not at all. But I had to write and tell you what he said.
He was talking about the woman at the well, the one who was there in the middle of the day, and how Jesus asks her for a drink. He talked about how that woman probably knew she wasn’t worthy. She doesn’t believe Jesus at first. But she’s so thirsty and he promises she won’t be thirsty anymore. When she’s finally convinced and asks for the living water, he calls her out on all the men she’s been with, all the terrible things she’s done. He already knew all those things about her before he met her at the well.
I’ve heard Reverend Payne talk about that story many times. I remember learning it when I was a girl. But today it sounded different.
All of a sudden, in that room full of people and that preacher, I felt like I was the only one there, and I realized, the Lord knows all about me, too, and that if he saved that woman, I might have a chance at being saved, too.
I’m so thirsty, Jaycee. I figure taking a chance on the Lord won’t do me no more harm than I’ve already done to myself.
It don’t erase the things I’ve done. I think maybe it just means I don’t have to hide.
I love you.
Mama
I want to believe her.
I’m so tired of running all the time, even when I’m sitting still. Running from Mama. Running from Jayden’s death and the hole it left inside me. Running from Bryan. Even running from Gabe, when he’s just trying to be a friend.
Against my better judgment, I fill out the visitor form.
I think I might be thirsty too.
15
* * *
I put the visitor form in the return envelope and put it in the mailbox before I can change my mind. The Mama who got sent to prison isn’t the Mama who’s writing these letters of late, and more and more, with this baby coming, I sure do need a mama. Maybe she hasn’t changed at all, but maybe . . . if the Lord did all those big miracles, maybe he can help her get back to the old Mama. The one who took me for ice cream on summer Friday nights when I was little even though she couldn’t afford it; the one who taught me constellations and the difference between an ash tree and a walnut tree; the one who took me to the library every Saturday morning; the one who sang “You Are My Sunshine” and rubbed my back at night until I fell asleep; the one I was proud to have help my grade-school class make valentines . . .
Despite everything, I was always good at school.
Things were looking up for me too, right about the time Mama got her addiction. I was making the highest grades in Mr. Shockley’s impossible middle school science class, which got me a seat at the lunch table with the other book-smart girls in my grade. I’d been sitting with them going on three weeks and had just sat down with my tray of square pizza, runny applesauce, and tater tots when I saw Mama’s familiar frame lurching down the main hall toward where we sat in the cafeteria.
“You gonna eat your tater tots, Jaycee?” my friend Lynlie asked.
I got up quick. There was no time to answer her. I headed toward the lunch line and made an excuse to buy an extra carton of milk so I could hide.
Please, Lord. Not now, I remember praying.
“Jay-CEE-eee!” Mama called. At first, no one seemed to notice, but then she hollered again. “Jaycee, you forgot your lunch. I brought it for you.”
A hush fell over the cafeteria.
Mama stood in the middle of the lunchroom wearing a bathrobe over a tube top and a pair of pajama pants with the top rolled down so her belly showed. The bones on her face stuck out, highlighted by dark circles under her eyes, which were flitting back and forth in their sockets. Her face was pocked with scars, which fit in among all the kids with acne, but I knew hers were from where she tried to scratch at invisible bugs on her skin. The muscles in her bony arm twitched as she held up the plastic superstore bag.
I didn’t have a choice about what to do. Every single eye in that cafeteria followed me as I walked toward her.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the bag.
“Ms. Givens, you’re so sweet to bring Jaycee her lunch.” Someone had alerted Mr. Earl, the principal, and he directed a sorrowful look my way as he approached us.
I’d never been so glad to see the principal in my life.
“Next time, if you just bring it to the front office, we’ll make sure she gets it,” he said with an overly kind tone.
The suggestion was lost on Mama, who swayed slightly in front of the silent audience.
I leaned in as if to hug her, but really just to tell her what to do next. “Go on home now, Mama.”
The look in her eyes was something between sorry and shame, but that only lingered a moment before she turned and stared blankly at Mr. Earl. He took Mama gently by the arm and spoke softly into her ear as he escorted her away.
I took the bag and my uneaten lunch tray straight to the conveyor belt and hightailed it out of the cafeteria. I ran down the nearest hallway, where shop classes were held, the sound of the saws and other woodworking machines covering the sound of my weeping, and I found one of the janitor closets unlocked.
That was the first time I met Hersch. He was a janitor at the middle school back then, along with Miss Helen, a wiry old woman we called Candy on account of her flaming copper-dyed hair, which was white at the roots, making it look like candy corn to us kids. That day, he found me in his little closet at the end of the shop hall, my arms and legs crisscrossed so I could fit in the space between the stacks of toilet paper and Dustbane Sweeping Compound—that nasty stuff sprinkled on vomit to soak it up. With Candy peering around the corner, Hersch reached up and pulled a clean rag off a shelf. He knelt down so his eyes were at my level, handed me the rag, and motioned for me to use it to dry my face.
“You can stay here anytime you’re needing to feel better,” he said, his voice gravelly, his eyes droopy with compassion.
I did use
the space again. More than once. The smells of Pine-Sol and bleach-clean rags were a comfort when the schoolwork wasn’t enough to keep my mind off the things happening at my home.
Good grades or not, after that I never did get asked to sit at Lynlie’s table again. And after that, I took the high road with Mama, keeping my mind in another place, a safe place, so that even if we were in the same room together I was a world apart. She wasn’t Mama anymore. I knew from health class and all the teaching the school’d been doing to try to educate us on the dangers of heroin that her mind had been chemically changed by the drug, so that the longer she took it, the more she’d need it, and the more she needed it, the less chance I had of the Mama who once cared about me ever coming back.
“What is the Lord asking you to give up today?” Reverend Payne’s question rolls through my head again as I wait outside on my trailer stoop for Sudie to get home and check out the hawk. Clouds push across the sky above the bare and swaying arms of the ash tree, and I wonder if this is the summer I’ll have to cut it down.
“Sudie!” I take off running toward her place when she finally drives by.
“Land sakes, what is it, child?” She heaves herself up out of her car.
“A redtail. Ran right into it out on the state road. Put him out back. He’s pretty bad.”
“Let’s go have a look,” she says, dirt on her face and under her nails from working at the cemetery.
The brown feathers are barely visible over the towel, and he is so still I am sure he has not survived. I tell her how it happened, that me and Gabe were on our way to the Pancake House when it swooped out of nowhere and flew right into the grille of Gabe’s car. “I did like you taught, throwing a blanket over him and holding his talons. Made sure to put his head up on that towel there.”
“Good. That’s good,” she says, unlatching the side of the cage.
A wing stretches out, wide and flat and filling the cage it’s so enormous.
“I’d say that’s a good sign,” Sudie laughs. “Looks like a young one, too. Talons are still pretty smooth.”
The bird rises and stands then, raising then stretching both wings before folding them back in against itself. He hangs his head as if he’s sorry to have startled us.
“Concussed, for sure. Seems to be favoring that left wing, too.”
“Is it broken?”
“Hard to say. Let’s give him a day. Let the shock wear off. We’ll try to feed him tomorrow. See if he’s moving it any better.” She closes and latches the door.
“How was the cemetery?”
“Not as bad as I thought. Things are greening up so much, I’m gonna have to mow next time, though. Your brother’s spot looks real nice. All filled in. Daffodils you planted last fall are already blooming.”
I’d almost forgotten I planted those, pressing the brown, hard, papery bulbs deep into the soil, believing somehow they’d turn into long, soft green stems and leaves and bright-yellow blooms.
“Sudie . . . I’m scared.”
“I know, child.”
Everything I’ve been holding in about this baby comes pouring out, how I thought me and Bryan were being careful, how I kept making excuses for my cycle being late until it was too late to have an abortion, how I don’t want to get an abortion anyway, how I thought Bryan and I could get married and work things out, how I thought he’d change once he found out I was carrying his child.
I tell her about Mary in the bathroom at the Red Pepper and the bruises Bryan was starting to leave on me, too, and how Hersch just happened to be finishing up at the diner last night. I tell her all this and she listens, just listens, neither angry nor sad, neither blaming nor disappointed.
Then I tell her I’m afraid—afraid of loving this child and afraid I won’t. A child whose face I’ve never seen except in dreams, whose tiny limbs I’ve just begun to feel pressing against me, like butterflies stretching their wings in cocoons. A child whose certain birth reminds me of Jayden, who didn’t ask to be born addicted or to have a mama who cared more about heroin than him but who hadn’t had a choice.
“My baby doesn’t have a choice either. I have nothing to give him. No way out of this place, this life.”
She nods and turns her face toward the sun. “The Lord is gracious to us when we ask him for wisdom.”
“How do you think he decides what kind of parents people will have? I mean, why didn’t he give me a mama who’s clean and a chance to know more about my father than just pictures and a grave?”
“How does he decide who’s born at all, child? And after that, who survives? Why am I still around and over sixty and there are children . . .” Her voice trails off and for a moment it looks like she might be near tears. But then she turns from the sun and looks at me, as serious as I’ve ever seen her. She motions toward the side of her trailer where last summer’s milkweed stands tall and gray and stiff. “I ever tell you about the monarchs?”
“You said this is where they lay their eggs.” She always taught me to stay away from the milkweed in the early summer. Their tiny white egg sacs cling to the underside of the milkweed leaves until they hatch and grow into adults in time to migrate before the cold sets in.
She nods. “They’re on their way back now. From Mexico. Lord only knows how they get all the way down there and all the way back here. Takes four generations of them, traveling on a hunch and the Lord’s great mercy. Trusting whatever he’s put inside them that makes them know which turn of the wind to follow, which ray of sun to aim for, from here to the mountain coast of Mexico and back again. Four generations. Can you imagine that?”
I shake my head.
“I’m not sure we’re much different. Oh, we like to act like we are, planning for tomorrow when not a one of us knows what tomorrow will bring. But we know nothing, really. Only thing we can do is the best we can with what we’ve got. And trust him for the rest.”
“But what have I got?”
She takes my hand. “You got a chance, child. You may not have had a choice in this, but you can give your baby a chance. It’s up to you to decide what the best chance for him will be.”
16
* * *
A chance hasn’t crossed my mind. Maybe because I’ve never really had one.
Reverend Payne said Moses’ mother gave him up not because she didn’t love him. She gave him up because she did. She chose to set him in the river. She chose to give him a chance at life.
I feel the flutter of the baby against my belly and I imagine him stretching inside as if he knows what I am thinking, as if he already knows about this chance he could have to live without the burdens I carry, as if he can sense what it would be like to have a mama and a daddy, and to be wanted and loved by both. As if he knows, like those butterflies, which way I’m supposed to let him go.
The morning sun angles into the diner, catching on glasses of ice water so that they gleam like crystal. I smile at the customers and top off the coffee in the mugs of those sitting at the counter. Hersch fills plates with eggs and pancakes, and I catch myself resting the serving tray on the bump of my belly as I put the plates on it.
I can’t hide this from everyone else much longer.
I push that thought from my mind and focus on the sound of conversation, full and buzzing at the start of the day. The scrape-slice-flip, scrape-slice-flip of Hersch’s steel spatula on the grill top gives it rhythm. Old man Chester Flynn, who owns the hardware, complains to Joe, one of the veterans who is partially deaf, about the town council’s decision to give a national big-box hardware chain a permit to build out by the interstate. Shorty Smith shuffles in and orders his usual English muffin, hold the butter, and three eggs over easy.
A middle-aged woman, complexion smooth as china, fine-gauge sweater over her shoulders, sits at a booth with a girl who appears to be her daughter. I’d put money on the chance they’re here for a college visit, judging from the red and blue folder on their table with Riverton College in bold letters along with several photo
graphs of smiling students.
The mother watches with scrutiny the girl’s every bite, and when I stop by to ask if they’d like anything else, the mother declines for her. The girl looks at me and shrugs as I scribble down their final tab and set it facedown on the edge of the table. Somehow, her eyes remind me of my own.
It’s almost eleven when I look at my watch. Gabe will be in soon, and my chest burns when I think about the way he pushed my hair back. The thick curve of his shoulders. The deep dimple on his left cheek.
“So, how were pancakes yesterday?” Carla asks, setting a tray of steaming-hot silverware, fresh from the dishwasher, on the counter. She sets a tall stack of white linen napkins next to it and tosses me a drying towel.
“Pancakes?” I always have liked rolling silver in the midmorning lull, something about the folding, arranging, and wrapping up that helps pass the time.
“Yeah—you and Gabe were off to get pancakes yesterday . . . ?” she says, one eyebrow raised.
“Oh, pancakes. Right.” I finish rolling another set of silverware and set it alongside the half-dozen Carla’s already made. “By the way, thanks a lot for that subtle setup. Talk about awkward.”
“Go ahead and roll your eyes now. You’ll be glad I did that someday. So . . . how’d it go?”
“About as well as you could expect, considering he nearly killed a redtail.”
“What?”
I tell her the whole story. “So we never actually had pancakes.”
“Never a dull moment with you.” She laughs. I don’t.
“Carla, I don’t want a boyfriend. Took all I had to break up with Bryan Saturday night.”
“You did? About time!” She sobers. “I get that. I do.”
“No, you don’t,” I snap, and am surprised by tears that well up in my eyes.
“Jaycee, are those tears? What on earth? I’m sorry, honey. I was just tryin’ . . . Gabe’s a nice young man. And normal. You know as well as I do we don’t get normal around here very often.”