Hush (9 page)

When I came out, Daddy was sitting at the window, eating a bowl of oatmeal. He looked over at me and smiled.

“Your sister up?” Mama asked. She was pouring pancake mix from a box into a white plastic bowl. In Denver, all her mixing bowls had been the good kind, made out of glass. Here, everything except Daddy’s oatmeal bowl seemed plastic and cheap and temporary.

I nodded and took another step before stopping. “Mama,” I said, turning slowly toward her. “It’s all wrong, isn’t it?”

Daddy put his oatmeal bowl down in his lap and stared out the window. I swallowed. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.”

Mama poured water into the batter and stirred. “What’s guaranteed, Evie?”

I shrugged.

“Nothing’s guaranteed, honey. Nothing. If someone tells you something is, don’t believe it.”

“But I thought—”

“Did you thank Jehovah for allowing you to wake up this morning?” Mama asked.

Anna sat down across from me at the kitchen/dining room/den table and made a face. She was wearing a wool skirt that stopped at her ankles and a light blue sweater that looked about two sizes too small. Where I’d gotten taller over the year, Anna had just gotten bigger—not fat, but every part of her body seemed to be “blooming into womanhood,” as Mama liked to say.

Mama sat down next to me and put a plate of bacon in the middle of the table. I looked at her sideways. Every day I hoped that she would say “Psyche your mind. I was just kidding about the God stuff,” but it never happened. If anything, she got
holier.

“Well, did you? Either of you?”

“I did,” I lied.

“Yeah,” Anna said. “Me, too. Like I do every day.” Mama raised an eyebrow at her but didn’t say anything.

Anna took a bite of bacon.

“Are you going to say the blessing?” Mama asked.

Anna bowed her head. “ThankyouJehovahforthis foodandallotherblessingsamen.”

I laughed, then covered my mouth with my hand.

Mama took a sip of her coffee. “I don’t think it’s asking a whole lot to be thankful for what we have,” she said quietly, looking from me to Anna. “Sometimes I think if we’d been more thankful—more
aware
of what we had in Denver—things wouldn’t have ended the way they did.”

Anna and I looked at each other but didn’t say anything. My mother hardly ever mentioned Denver. When she did, we knew we’d taken something too far.

“I think the road back is a narrow one,” she said. “A part of me believes that if we do everything right, we can have it again.”

“But we can’t ever go back there.”

“Not Denver,” Mama said. She looked over at my father sitting by the window and lowered her voice. “The happiness. It’s not always going to be like this.”

It all seemed too vague. I wanted definite. Either we got back to Denver or we didn’t. Either we were happy or we weren’t. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that their religion is the true one and that they’re the chosen people. Well, that’s what I wanted—the truth. Who were we really? And why? Why had this had to happen to us? Why couldn’t someone else’s daddy have witnessed the murder?

“What about babies?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. “With this Armageddon thing, the end of things that you always talk about, will babies get destroyed, too—because they can’t walk, so they can’t go out in field service and pray and stuff?”

Mama frowned at me, checking my face to see if I was messing with her. I wasn’t. We could start at the beginning—the basics. Who was this god of hers, anyway? Why would He want to destroy babies—and families?

“Jehovah can see into people’s hearts,” Mama said. “He knows who’s who and who’s going to be who.”

“How come He didn’t give Hitler a disease or something?” Anna asked. “To keep him from killing all those Jews? Or what about the people who killed Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedys? And Malcolm X? What about those guys? Or like when—”

“Or what about us?” I yelled. “What about
us?
What did we do to deserve this?!”

Mama shook her head. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. He has His plans and it’s not for us to understand. There’s a reason why we’re here. We just don’t know it yet.”

She bit her bottom lip, her eyes glazing over. After a moment she blinked and looked from me to Anna. In that split second, I saw her again—the lady I used to know in Denver. My mother.

“You’re strong,” she said. “You’re both so strong.” She bit her lip again. “My strong, strong daughters . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“I don’t want to be strong!” Anna said. “I just want . . . I just want to be who I am! Who I always was!”

Mama smiled. It was a small smile, but I saw it. I remembered it. From a long time ago.

“No one can take that away,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. A moment passed before she added my sister’s name. “Cameron.”

Anna and I looked at her, our mouths open. How long had it been since I’d heard that name coming from her mouth? I blinked slowly. When I looked at Mama again, her eyes were far off and she was our new mother again. But Anna was smiling.

Mama’s Bible was sitting beside her plate. She picked it up and begin reading. “ ‘Even though I walk in the valley of deep shadow, I fear nothing. . . .’ ”

“I need new running sneakers,” I said.

Mama ignored me and kept reading. “ ‘Surely goodness and loving-kindness will pursue me all the days of my life.’ ”

“I think God will see it loving and kind of you to let me get a good day’s sleep. So I should be able to get right back to bed now instead of—”

“You’re coming today, Anna,” Mama said. “You just got new sneakers, Evie.”

I bit the inside of my lip. It felt like the moment when she said Anna’s old name had never happened.

“They’re too heavy.”

“Too heavy for what?”

“They make my knees hurt,” I said quickly. This wasn’t a total lie. What I had were cross-trainers, and even a nonprofessional like me knew real runners had real running shoes, not cross-trainers. Cross-trainers would definitely mess up your knees if you ran too much in them.

Anna frowned at me. A “Yeah, right” frown. A “What are you up to now?” frown.

“And plus,” I added, “they feel too tight now.”

“We’ll get you new sneakers, then,” my father said from the window.

“I need new sneakers, too,” Anna said.

“You can have mine. I hardly wore them.”

“Yuck!” Anna took a tiny bit of bacon and glared at me. “I don’t want your skanky sneakers.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you two,” Mama said. “Just eat and hush.” But there was a small, proud smile at the edge of her mouth.

I watched our father staring up at the overcast sky as if some big answer was about to drop out of it into the empty bowl on his lap. He was disappearing. Sitting at the living room window, but disappearing. The papers Mama had brought home were piling up beside his chair. She had opened them to the want ads. They lay there, right where she had left them. Untouched.

Mama looked at her watch and told us to finish eating and get our coats. She got up from the table and went over to the bookshelf for our Bibles. Anna chewed her bacon slowly. She put her finger to her lips.

“Hush,” Anna said. “Just hush.”

I half-smiled, not sure what she was trying to say. But her eyes were serious.

Anna leaned across the table. “Make believe none of it ever happened,” she said. “Hush. Make believe we never were. You and me, li’l sis, back to the dust.”

Daddy looked over at us, lifting his bowl toward us like an offering. Anna sucked her teeth, got up and took Daddy’s bowl to the kitchen.

Outside, I looked up at Daddy’s window and waved. His hand lifted into the air absently.

I bent my head down against the cold and walked a little bit behind Mama and Anna. Our Bibles are green with HOLY SCRIPTURES written on them in gold lettering. When I held it away from me and squinted, it became a mountain in Denver.

Anna turned and saw me. “God, you’re such a freak!”

I stared at her but didn’t say anything.
Does it matter what I am,
I wanted to scream,
if I’m not anyone?!

As Mama led us through the neighborhood, I watched people watching us and wondered who they saw.

Curl your toes into the soft pine of your floor-boards. And do remember me.

PART THREE

17

THE COACH IS TALL AND SKINNY. HE TELLS US we can call him Leigh. When he looks at my permission slip, he nods and asks if I’m related to Anna.

“She’s my sister,” I say, looking away from him. It is Tuesday. Late afternoon. The school hallway is quieter than anything. My mother thinks I am getting tutored in science, because she wouldn’t approve of track. Not now. Not as a Witness. Her new motto is Acade mics and the Bible. So what if your body went to hell? Your soul and brain would be fine. When I asked her about getting tutored, she said
Why can’t Anna help you?
and Anna rolled her eyes and said
Because I’ve already forgotten the stuff she’s just learning.

This is the first big lie I’ve ever told her. It came easily.

“I teach geometry, also,” Leigh says now. “Anna’s one of my best students. Is she not a runner?” He smiles at me. One of his front teeth overlaps the other in a nice way. His running shoes look old but like a long time ago they were decent.

I am wearing my new ones and dark blue running pants with bright green stripes down the side. The white T-shirt I’m wearing used to say DENVER MIDDLE SCHOOL, but the letters are so bleached and faded, Mama had okayed me bringing it to this place. The shirt is soft and still smells faintly of our old house.

“Nah. She’s not really into sports.”

“Well, let’s see if
you
are.”

I follow him into the gym, where four girls are running in a line, one behind the other, passing a silver baton back and forth. When the one behind calls “Stick!” the one right in front of her throws her hand back. They do this a bunch of times, their motions smooth as water.

Above us, a line of girls are running around a track. The track rail circles the whole gym. I can hear them breathing. Their feet pounding together sound like two huge feet instead of many. My own heart speeds up. Everyone seems to be connected to one another, in unison. I feel myself wanting this so hard, I have to bite my lip to keep from screaming out.

“You ever run track before?” Leigh asks.

I shake my head.

“Well, you’ll need a pair of running shorts, spikes and flats—those are shoes for the track, you can get them at any good sports store. You’ll also need—”

“We . . . I don’t know if my parents can afford to—” Leigh nods and blows the whistle hanging around his neck. The other girls stop running and begin to jog over toward us. He leans into me and says, “I’ll need your clothing and shoe sizes.”

I don’t realize how tense my stomach is until it starts relaxing.

After everyone introduces themselves, Leigh asks the girls from last year to talk about the team. We sit down on the gym floor in a circle. I recognize two girls from my homeroom and a few others from seeing them around school.

“It’s a good team,” one of the girls, who introduced herself as Mira, says. She is about my height, dark like my mother and soft-spoken. She speaks with a little bit of an accent. Like someone from England.

“We win a lot,” a girl named Denise says. The others slap each other five and hoot.

I hug myself. The gym is big and chilly. My new running shoes feel stiff and wrong. All the others are wearing shoes like Leigh’s—Adidas with thick soles and fluorescent stripes. The ones Mama has gotten me are a dark blue, no name brand that I have ever seen on anybody’s feet before. I sit cross-legged and try to cover my feet with my hands.

“Okay, let’s get to running,” Leigh says. Everyone jumps up as though they’ve been stuck with pins.

When I am the last one to rise, Leigh says, “Fast, Evie. We do everything fast around here.”

“So you’re a runner,” Mira asks me as we jog around the track. The track is an eighth mile around and banked at the curves. Leigh said we had to run a half mile at our own pace, but everyone takes off like it’s a race, and by the second time around, I am struggling to keep breathing.

“I don’t think so,” I say, my voice coming hoarser than I’ve ever heard it.

“Your legs are long,” Mira says. She smiles and pulls up to the front of the group. I take a deep breath, feeling warm. My legs are long, I keep thinking. Yes. Yes. My legs are long. It is the friendliest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.

 

 

 

“WHY ARE YOU SO SMELLY?” ANNA ASKS WHEN I get home. She is sitting at the kitchen table, studying, and I race by her to get a glass of water. I gulp it down without saying anything to her, then go over to the window and kiss my father. Mama is at Kingdom Hall. Tuesday night is her Bible study.

The last time Mama asked me and Anna if we wanted to go, Anna said
Are we gonna be tested on it?

Mama lifted both hands and said
I give up. I’ll miss you all in the New World.

When you get there, pet a friendly lion for me,
Anna mumbled. But not loud enough for Mama to hear.

I touch my face now. It feels warm and flushed. I’d run all the way home. In the cold air, it felt like I was breaking every speed limit. Like I could run all the way back to Denver.

“Why are you standing there
touching
yourself?” Anna asks, her voice rising with disgust.

I take my hand off my face and glare at her.

“Man,” she says. “Take
me
to that study group!” Then she turns the page in her textbook and puts her head down on her arm to read.

“Was it helpful?” my father asks, his voice so soft, I can barely hear him.