Fig (32 page)

I run until the railing ends and I'm on the other side. I stop long enough to vomit. I turn inside out like my grandmother just did, and then I run again. I run along the Silver River once more, but this time I run after the running water. The bank is littered with wet pebbles, and they reflect the fire of the setting sun. The air stuck inside my body slices into my lungs and organs; it tries to dissect me, and when the river begins to crash over rocks and into the falls, I cut away and run north again.

My shadow chases me as I cross the ditch; she stalks me as I tunnel through the twisted corridor of trees in the orchard. And I am running the same path now I ran with Mama all those years ago, but this time I don't trip once or fall. The miasma of the putrid apples in the grass is intoxicating, and I am drunk by the time I pass through the ring of cottonwoods, and the house is there to welcome me. Daddy's truck is nowhere to be seen, which means he's not here. I cross the threshold called home, and my shadow is close behind.

*  *  *  *

I find the X-acto knife in Mama's art supplies, and the razor blades are in the bathroom cabinet where they've been waiting—waiting behind the looking glass just for me, always and forever. And all I had to do was open this small door above the sink.

I'm all alone with my shadow. Everyone else is in one hospital or another, and when I climb into the claw-foot, I am trying to be seven years old again.

I'm wearing one of Mama's old nightgowns and there is no water. Just the cold white enamel and the same plug and chain that can't be lost—and yet everything has changed. Nearly sixteen, I fill the tub, and around my neck a virgin now hangs. Three more years to go until nineteen, and the daddy longlegs who lived in the drain died years ago and left behind a legless corpse long since turned to dust. And there is no mother at the end of the hall, resting in her room—there is nothing but an empty chamber full of echoes.

I pull up my sleeves and tuck the long white nightgown around my privates like a diaper. And I take all the scars from the boy at Saint Joseph's and transfer them to myself.
Pay attention
, he says. And I do. I pay attention. I pay one toll after another. I rub my fingers across my skin and I can feel the tiny ridges—the texture of his flesh on me—and the texture provides a grip, something to hold on to, something to keep me from slipping all the way away.

I have my own scars, but they are different. My open sores bloom into rotting roses and leave scars like shooting stars: dreams that never do come true. These scars are not the perfect lines that made the body of the boy at the hospital. Mine are messy, and I want what he has: I want self-control. I take the safety cap off the X-acto blade and compare this sharp edge with the razor blade. One is a triangle and the other is rectangular. Basic geometry: perfect shapes, straight lines, angles, and precise points—this is something even Miss Pratt and Miss Avery could appreciate.

Clean and sharp, these blades will be tidy when they open me. Clean and sharp, they will work as God did when he carved Eve from Adam. I, too, will give birth to a girl who will fall for me, and she will handle everything I cannot. The shine of the blade is dangerous. And I think, maybe this is what it feels like when people try drugs for the first time—a certain dread, and a lovely anticipation.

I try each blade to compare the danger. I turn their potential into a race. This is biology, basic anatomy—science. And in science, the setting must be controlled, and my hand doesn't once waver. The X-acto knife is exact. Easy to control, the handle is also crosshatched to provide the grip I am seeking. I draw a long red line across the white canvas of my thigh. In the gallery of the tub, my shadow does the same. She draws a shadow line across her shadow thigh.

While the X-acto knife is exact, the razor blade is more than just an instrument for cutting; it is a tiny mirror, another reflection in which to find myself. I see everything I'm about to do, and then I see what I just did, and I am learning. It doesn't take long to turn right now into gone.

Both blades help me breathe again. They open so much faster than fingernails ever did or could; like magic, they part my skin, and in the blood the red sea divides and I am warm and tingling—from pain. I am overwhelmed by the pleasure of another girl. Just as the doctors once cut me from Mama, I cut this girl from myself and she steps out of me to run her blade along the inside of my arms just as Sissy and Tanya did to Candace with their fingertips.

She waits for me to shiver, and smiles to see me smiling.

She switches back and forth—from one blade to the other, from one limb to another. She opens me. She builds a bridge between our bodies, and we are symbiotic; the blade serves as a prosthetic in which to bind and connect. I belong to her just as much as she belongs to me. The blood is hot and leaves me cold as I turn blue into red.

The blades part the skin, and the red sea rises. I chase the purple in the split second between blue and red, and in this borderland my chest can expand; my lungs open and close like the wings of a butterfly, and I am ventilated—I am cutting away the cocoon, and I am opening. I am changing.

But blood mimics skin. It reacts to air, turning colors. The chemistry continues: The blood begins to die, and the thin ribbons of liquid all turn hard. Each cut seals itself. It turns into a crust of rust: a call and response, my blood answering my body by not being blood anymore. It changes just like that. No attachments to what it was. It turns into a scab, and this scab saves my life—a life I am not trying to take, but to prove. I think of Alexis Romanov, whose blood refused to coagulate.

Heir to the Russian throne, he inherited an X chromosome from his mother, and this X carried a copy of the mutant gene for hemophilia. If Alexis did as I do now, or even as I have done before, his crimson tide would have washed away the world.

I'm not afraid of growing old, but I am afraid of growing up. I think of the song forever looping on the radio. The song the popular girls listen to as they sprawl across the lawn during lunch or after school. Serenaded by their ghetto blasters, the lyrics to this song also loop as the singer sings:
“You will remain forever young.”
But I don't want to be forever young. I just don't want to turn nineteen. Like Alexis, I, too, have a copy of my mother in my genes. Three more years to go. And the blue turns red and the blood is hot and it leaves me cold.

*  *  *  *

Uncle Billy's eyes are full of tears, and when I look at him he blinks, and the tears spill down his face. Salt and water, they are the substance of the sea, and they are meant for me.

The bathroom window frames a night sky, and this perfect square of sky frames a full moon surrounded by an aura of silver rainbows. I want to go outside—to lie in the cold grass covered only by the vast dome of stars above—of universe; I want to feel small like that instead of the kind of small I feel right now. I don't believe in God, but I do believe in heaven.

And I am also crying. My tears are hot, but they don't leave me cold—they leave me warm—and Uncle Billy is surrounding me with mother arms, and mother arms are always warm and they are always strong. He helps me stand, and then he guides me to the toilet, where I sit. I watch everything he does. Every cut he cleans. My uncle washes me. He washes away the hurt and the smallness I am feeling. He baptizes me with hydrogen peroxide, and when he's done I glisten: Made from love and a generous application of Neosporin, I've been dressed with a new skin.

My uncle turns away so I can undress. And I will not be bleaching red and brown back to white this time, because Uncle Billy doesn't hesitate to throw away my mother's nightgown; he stuffs it into an empty carton of Epsom salts that he tosses back into the trash, and I come to understand that he won't be telling anyone about tonight, not even Daddy. Billy is still turned the other way as I step into a pair of clean pajama bottoms and button up the flannel top.

“You can't pick on yourself like this,” he says. “Not anymore.” And this is how I come to know what he knows. What he sees. And what he understands. Someone has been paying attention. “And you certainly can't do this,” he says, turning now to look at me. With my finger, I draw an X across my heart. I promise him.

Bandaged, I go to bed, and Billy stays the entire night in my window seat. He doesn't want to talk about Gran. “Tonight is about you,” he says, although he does assure me that she will be okay. He sits in the window with a quilt wrapped around his shoulders, and with the lights turned off the moon turns his silhouette into a soft grandmother wearing a shawl.

Billy stays like this all night, and in the morning, when I awake, he is still there.

*  *  *  *

Billy and I drive to the hospital in Lawrence, and Daddy explains what happened to Gran.

“She's all hollowed out inside,” he says, and then he lists off all the operations she's undergone, and every organ removed from her body: minus one uterus, one gall bladder, and one spleen, my grandmother is a lesson in subtraction. With all that extra room inside, her intestines tied themselves into a knot. In my head, I see them trying to form the loop for infinity.

“She's under observation for now,” Daddy says—which is exactly what Uncle Billy said to me this morning before we left the house. Only I'm the one under
his
observation.

While the doctors decide what to do with Gran, my uncle is also working on a treatment plan just for me. I look at Gran asleep in her hospital bed full of needles, tubes, and morphine, and I hold my breath and cross my fingers: I want her to feel as safe as I do now.

All I ever needed was for someone—anyone—not just to notice but to see, and to ask me to stop, and Billy is the one who stepped up. It's a relief to be held accountable. Knowing that my uncle knows—knowing that he will be keeping tabs on me—feels like picking felt, only better; because he knows, and because he will not stand for it, everything has opened and it is easier to breathe again.

*  *  *  *

Gran has to have another operation. They cut out the section of knotted intestine. This time the surgery is laparoscopic and she only has to stay in the hospital for a few days. Daddy and I come to take her home while Billy stays at the farm, where there is always work to be done.

As the oldest son, my father has the power of attorney. He doesn't just control Mama and me. Daddy signs paperwork and then he goes to get the Buick, to bring it around to the front.

“The pain medication is making your grandma act strange,” the nurse says, and I nod like I understand. We are waiting for a wheelchair, and when it comes I'm allowed to push Gran by myself. “Just leave the chair in the vestibule,” the nurse tells me, and then she leans over to say good-bye to my matriarch. “Fiona,” she says, “I hope we never see you again,” and then the nurse winks at me.

I push the wheelchair through the hospital, down the elevator, through the large white lobby, and into the vestibule, where we wait for my father. Every thirty seconds, we are blasted by hot air, but it's too cold to wait outside. “Dearie,” Gran says, and I can't help but think of the grandmother in
Little Red Riding Hood
—the one who is really the wolf. “Come around so I can see you.”

I do as she says. My grandmother never calls me “Dearie” or “Honey” or “Darling”—only Fiona, and usually my name is no more than an angry whisper. This grandmother sounds like a soft grandmother. “Oh, Alma,” Gran says when she looks at me. “It's so good to see you,” and this grandmother reaches for me—something else she's never done. But I am not the subject of her endearment. She is reaching for her little sister: When I was six, I died from scarlet fever.

Gran takes my hands, kissing each one—she won't let go. “Not this time,” she says, and this is when Daddy pulls up, forever the doting son. A better son than he is a husband or a father. He is always promising to take care of Gran no matter what. He makes this vow again and again. “I will never put you in a nursing home,” he will say, and when he does, my grandmother smiles at him and says she's proud to be the mother of such a good boy.

Daddy pulls up to the yellow curb, and I have to let go of Gran to push her wheelchair through the sliding automatic glass doors, and it is colder outside than I expected.

I think about Mama's nurse and what she explained to Daddy and me last month. She said Mama would be deinstitutionalized soon, but she didn't know when. “It's the new policy,” she said. “This is why the streets are suddenly full of homeless people talking to themselves, eating out of the trash, and freezing to death come winter.”

She also said we could always put Mama into a nursing home. “They aren't just for the elderly or the dying,” she explained. “They're for anyone who can't take care of themselves.” And even though she was talking to both of us, I don't think Daddy was listening, because he didn't once interrupt to say, “I will never put my wife in a home.” He just nodded his head, thanked her for the information, and shook her hand to say good-bye.

He is always shaking hands with the staff at Saint Joseph's, and thanking them. “Thank you,” he says.
Thank you for taking my daughter's mother away from her.

Daddy gets out of the car and tries to get Gran to stand—but she's confused. She doesn't know who he is. “Stop calling me that,” she says. “I am nobody's mother.” But he doesn't listen. He just continues to call her “Ma.” He says “Ma” like he thinks saying it again and again is enough to prove his point, and in the end Alma is the only one who can get Gran into the car.

Daddy stands on the sidewalk, glaring at the sky. Yesterday, he said he understood why I ran away like I did, but I know he's a liar. He will never forgive me for leaving his mother all alone like that. I know this because I will never forgive him for letting Mama commit herself. I'd like to ask my father,
How many times have you abandoned
my
mother?
but I don't.