Nearer Than the Sky (4 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Psychological, #General

BOOK: Nearer Than the Sky
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I tried to picture Ma in some hospital room now, talking to Benny, but I couldn’t imagine what she might have to say to him after all this time. For more than twenty years now she hadn’t even said his name, and
sorry
had certainly never been uttered. She probably knew I would be able to taste her lies. More bitter than lead or arsenic on my tongue.
I
wasn’t born yet when Benny stopped breathing. That was when Benny was a baby and Ma and Daddy were still living in California. She says that Benny got himself tangled up in his blanket. That he was blue. She says that it took her almost twenty minutes to get him breathing again. That if she hadn’t been trained in CPR, he was sure to have died. That she breathed her own life into him, and that it was her breath that brought him back.
I imagine my mother, twenty years old, in a nightgown someone gave her for her bridal shower. The nylon probably hadn’t worn thin yet. The elastic in the cuffs still tight around her small wrists. I imagine her bare feet on the cold linoleum floor of Benny’s room. A mobile with impossibly colored plastic butterflies spinning over his head. I can hear my father snoring softly in the other room, the insistence of mourning doves in the tree outside the bedroom window.
She says she found him blue inside that blue room, the one I vaguely remember sharing with Benny before we left California. The air was probably heavy that day, a thick marine layer like a gauzy blanket over the rented bungalow. It might have been thick enough to choke a child. At first she might have thought he was only being smothered by the haze. That it had filled his lungs like smoke.
If she hadn’t been in nursing school, if she hadn’t studied that chapter in the book (each time she tells the story she pauses here),
he would have died.
But what she always leaves out is that her breath wasn’t enough. That when she closed her lips over his and blew, part of him was already dead. And the part the sea air killed was the part that would have kept his head from lolling to the side when he was tired. The part that would have kept him from sucking on the edges of his T-shirts or falling down whenever he tried to run. That missing part would have made him like any other kid instead of a
retard.
That word rang in my ears long after I left the playground, holding Benny’s hand and making sure he used a tissue to wipe the snot from his nose.
Retard
tasted like the smell of Lily’s diaper pail.
 
The reason we were at the diner was because we had just gotten haircuts. Promises of tuna melts with sweet green pickles and vanilla shakes were the only way she could convince Benny to hold still, not cry, not scream at the sight or the sound of the scissors. For me, she promised chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes in return for my long thick braid. For the curls that had become so tangled that summer she couldn’t comb my hair without eliciting piercing screams and tears. After the hairdresser cut through the thick rope, my head felt wobbly and light, and I put the braid in the glove compartment of the Nova.
At the diner, Ma gave Benny a quarter to ride the motorcycle out front. He climbed on and pretended to rev the engine. He was big for his age, too big for the ride, but he loved this more than the cold thrill of a vanilla shake on the back of his teeth. When the motorcycle stopped rocking back and forth, Benny’s lip started to quiver.
“Let’s go in,” I said. “You can pick the table.”
Ma was in the bathroom with Lily, trying to get her to go. Since Ma had started potty training her, Lily wouldn’t go anymore. She’d hold it until she got stomachaches, until Ma would have to take her to the doctor. Lily said she was afraid she’d fall into the toilet. She was also afraid she’d get sucked down the bathtub drain.
“Which one?” I asked Benny.
“The window one!” he said, pointing at a table where three teenagers were sitting, smoking cigarettes.
“We can’t sit there. Pick an empty one.”
“I want that one,” he said, rocking back and forth.
“How about that one over there? You can see the fire station from there.”
Benny nodded and went to the booth. Ma came out of the bathroom with Lily, whose face was puffy and red.
“Good girl,” Ma said, reaching across the table for a napkin from the dispenser. She blotted Lily’s eyes, even though she hadn’t been crying. “Lily went number two all by herself,” she said proudly.
“Number two, number two!” Benny hooted.
“Shhh,” Ma said and put Lily in the plastic baby seat.
“My head feels wobbly,” I said, moving my head back and forth. I felt light.
“It looks pretty, honey,” Ma said.
“Do
I
look pretty?” Benny asked, shaking his head back and forth. Little pieces of hair that the hairdresser missed fell from his shirt onto the table top.
“Benny,”
she said.
“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Lily said.
“Yes you are,”
Ma cooed and pulled a bib out of the blue baby bag. “A pretty, pretty girl.”
“I want liver and onions,” Benny said to the waitress.
“Benny, why don’t you get a tuna melt?” Ma said, tying the bib around Lily’s neck.
“Daddy gets liver’n onions,” he said.
“I want chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes,” I said. “And a vanilla shake, please.”
“I want liver’n onions and pickles,” Benny said.
“He’ll have a tuna melt,” Ma said.
The waitress looked at Benny and then back at Ma. “I think he wants liver and onions,” she said.
Ma scowled at the waitress.
Please don’t, Ma,
I thought.
Please don’t yell at the waitress. Let him get his stupid liver’n onions.
I stared at the checked pattern on the linoleum until I was almost dizzy.
“Fine,”
Ma said. “And I’ll have a tossed salad with cottage cheese. Italian dressing on the side. And some sliced peaches for the baby.”
“Pretty,” Lily said, pointing one of her chubby fingers at the waitress.
“Thank you, sweetie-pie,” the waitress smiled.
Ma snuffed and turned her head, staring out the window at the fire station.
“She’s adorable,” the waitress said to Ma. Magic words.
Ma turned away from the window and smiled. “Thank you.You know, she’s only two and a half but she’s already got quite a personality.”
After the waitress brought our food, the door opened, jingling, and I looked up from the Arizona map on the place mat. I had been counting all of the places I had been.
Flagstaff. The Grand Canyon. Montezuma Castle.
It was a man and a lady I recognized, but I wasn’t sure why. Then I remembered it was one of the nurses who worked with Ma at the nursing home. Ma called her “Miss Snotty-Pants” behind her back, but “Karen” to her face. She was holding hands with some guy with black, black hair. She looked different in bell-bottoms than she did in the starched white uniform she wore at the nursing home.
“Hi Judy,” she said and came over to the table. “This is my boyfriend, Larry.”
“Nice to meet you,” Ma said, holding out her hand and giving one of her whole-mouth smiles.
“This must be Lily,” Karen said. “Isn’t she an angel? And how are you, Indie? I understand you’ve become quite a little bookworm.”
I felt my face getting hot. Ma was always telling me I should get my nose out of my books and make some real friends. But the way Karen said it made it sound like I was just plain smart.
“And this must be Benny,” she said. “Aren’t you a finelooking young man?”
“I got my hairs cut,” Benny grinned, pushing his onions around his plate. Then he speared a long, wriggly piece of liver and shoved the whole thing in his mouth.
“I see, I see.” Karen smiled and turned to Larry, who was studying the chalkboard menu on the wall. “Where do you want to sit?”
Ma watched Karen and Larry walk away. While she retied Lily’s bib, her eyes never left them. Ma could do that—tie my shoes, make me a jelly sandwich, braid my hair, all without paying any attention to what her hands were doing.
I noticed before anyone else did.
Benny’s eyes were watering and his chest was heaving. It looked like he was crying, but no sound was coming out. He dropped his fork and his hands flew up to his throat.
“Ma!” I said. She was scooping some cottage cheese onto Lily’s peaches.
“Shhh, Indie,” she said.
“Benny’s choking!” I said, standing up because I didn’t know what else to do.
Benny’s face had turned from red to white.
“Ma!” I said again, panic like heat.
Ma was looking over toward the table where Larry and Karen were sitting. When she looked at Benny and saw him wriggling in the booth, her face flushed red. She looked quickly back across the room at Karen and Larry.
“Somebody help!” I cried. “My brother’s choking!”
Then Ma was up and pulling Benny out of the booth. She got behind him and put her arms around him, balling her hands into a fist at his chest.
“I’m a nurse,” Karen said, running back over to our table.
“So am
I.
” Ma glared at her and squeezed Benny.
Benny made a horrible animal sound and then something flew out of his mouth and landed on the linoleum a few feet away. It was the piece of liver, gray and slippery. He coughed and cried. He was clutching at the place where Ma had squeezed.
“You may have cracked his ribs,” Karen said, horrified.
“He’s
breathing,
isn’t he?” Ma said, brushing from her eyes a long blond piece of hair that had come loose from her ponytail.
The waitress was staring at the piece of liver like it was a piece of Benny’s lungs. Ma bent over and picked it up. She stood there with it dangling between her fingers, like she couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
“You okay, Benny?” I whispered.
He nodded, wiping at his tears with the back of his hand. A small, thin string of snot caught on his finger.
“Here, Benny,” I said, pulling a handful of napkins from the dispenser and helping him wipe at his nose. I stole a quarter from the tip left in the next booth and handed it to him. “I’ll be right out. Go ride.”
Benny wiped his runny nose on his sleeve and walked out the door. I looked back to where the teenagers were sitting. One of the boys had his hands curled at his chest, making his face droop and his voice slur.
“You are so immature,” the girl giggled and put her cigarette out in her soda.
“I’m retahded,” he mumbled, drooling.
My eyes stung.
Ma was still standing in the middle of the floor holding the piece of liver. Karen was sitting down with Larry again. She shook her head and said loud enough for Ma to hear, “She’s only a nurse’s aid, I don’t know what she was thinking.”
Ma walked toward the teenagers. I waited for her to say something, to defend Benny. To make the acrid taste of
retarded
go away. But she didn’t say anything. She just went straight to Karen’s table and gently put the piece of liver down on her place mat. “I may not be an RN, but I can find a pulse. Difference between me and you is I’m not fucking everything with one.”
Ma turned her back to them and returned to our table. All of the color had left her face; even her lips were pale.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Outside, she yanked Benny off the motorcycle ride and pushed him into the backseat of the car. Lily had fallen asleep in my arms. She was heavier in sleep, but I didn’t dare to try to hand her to Ma. So I struggled to get her into the car seat all by myself while Ma lit a cigarette in the front seat. I got into the front next to her, and she turned the key. A fire truck turned on its sirens as she peeled out of the parking space. I opened the glove compartment, pulled my braid out, and held it tightly between my fingers.
S
ilence. Peter left while I was sleeping, and in the stillness of early morning it was quiet in the cabin. I could hear Jessica purring at the foot of the bed, the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, a log shifting in the woodstove. The sky outside might have been filling with light, but here in the woods the light of dawn is not strong enough to penetrate the thick foliage. It would be at least eight o’clock before the sun would find me.
The pillow next to me still smelled like Peter, the unidentifiable scent that I might call
home
if I were to smell it outside of our cabin. I rolled over and held the pillow. I buried my face in the smell, and it immediately began to fade. He had left a note on his side of the bed. A yellow piece of legal paper torn carefully in half. I knew the other half was probably on the little desk in the living room. Peter is precise with his placement of things. Nothing is ever lost here.
I turned on the light and tried to decipher his handwriting. The scratches and elongated loops were as familiar to me as my own after all these years. Sometimes I even notice the slant of my own hand beginning to mimic his, becoming his when I am tired. The note asked me to make sure to tell the pilot I was on the plane—an old joke between Peter and me. A ritual to keep me safe. Peter doesn’t fly anymore. He hasn’t for years. We used to travel back to Arizona to visit Lily and my mother. That was when I was still able to make myself believe that there was normalcy in their lives, that I was just like any other college girl bringing her boyfriend home to meet the family. The last time we flew together was back to Maine after a trip to see my father in California.
It was spring, and below us, the Midwest was being ravaged by tornadoes. Entire neighborhoods were being lifted and spun and thrown down again. But we were high above the storm, resting on clouds. Despite the bumps and dips, I liked the idea of this, as if we might be able to look out the window and stare down into the eye of a cyclone. But Peter was terrified. I could see his lips silently counting the seconds between the bumps, as if counting might somehow help him predict the next jolt. It wasn’t until the plane actually dropped, plummeting sharply, and even the flight attendants screamed, that my own heart buckled. In those terrible moments of falling, I recollect only the unfamiliar smell of hotel shampoo in Peter’s hair and a small burn on his wrist when I clutched his hand, thinking,
This is the way it ends.
But after, when the plane had stabilized and the pilot came on to explain and apologize in that lighthearted way they always do, I let go of that feeling. It’s something you have to do, I suppose. Something to keep yourself from paralysis. But Peter refused to get on an airplane again after that. He says that life is easier when you’re afraid of flying. That the world becomes a much smaller and harmless place. Besides,
his
parents still live together on the coast up in Bar Harbor. We can get there in a couple of hours by car whenever we need to.
I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen. I opened up the cupboard and found the kitty treats. Jessica looked at me suspiciously, and I shrugged, tossing her two orange fishshaped snacks. As the coffee brewed, I searched through the pile of junk on the back porch for my suitcase. I hadn’t gone anywhere for so long, I couldn’t even remember the last time I had used it. It was the same one I’d had since I left Arizona for college. Finally, I found it under our big red cooler, cobwebs binding it to a mess of cardboard boxes and unused junk.
I carried it into the kitchen and set it on the kitchen table. Only one of the clasps still worked, the lock was broken, and I vaguely remembered having had to duct-tape it together the last time I used it. Inside, the plaid lining was faded and soft. There was an elastic pocket along the back for toiletries, thin leather straps to hold everything in tight. I picked my favorite things from the laundry pile in the mud room. The suitcase was too small to fit even a week’s worth of clothes inside, but there was something comforting in this lack of space. A pair of pants, a skirt, less than a week’s worth of underwear and shirts. I wasn’t planning on staying long. This suitcase wouldn’t allow it.
As I closed the one functioning clasp, I thought about Peter’s family. Visiting his parents is something we look forward to. Something we plan for. He never gets calls in the middle of the night, threatening calls that force him onto airplanes. The trips to Bar Harbor are something we happily anticipate. The recollection of his father’s hands, fisherman’s hands, reaching for mine at the dinner table to say grace fills me with longing. The way the doorbell rings and the patter of his mother’s slippered feet behind the door, even the way she peeks through the gossamer curtains to see who’s there affects a certain gravity on my heart. My favorite visits, though, are when his sister, Esmé, is home from Brown. When we arrive she is almost always sitting on the love seat by the fireplace, her knees curled under her, peering over the top of a book. But when she sees Peter, she tosses the book aside like a banana peel or crumpledup piece of paper. She loves Peter more than anything in the world. You can see it in the length of her hugs, in the desperate way she clings to him each time we leave. In late August the fields behind their house are filled with blueberries that we bring back with us in his mother’s Tupperware. Sometimes I can smell the salty air in my hair for days after a visit.
At night in Peter’s childhood room, as we lie curled tightly into each other in the narrow bed, I pretend that this is my home too. After Peter has fallen into the deep abyss of untroubled sleep, I listen to the waves crashing against the rocks, and pretend that this family belongs to me. But every time we visit their little red farmhouse where you can see the ocean from the hayloft in the old barn, I feel unbearably sad. Longing that is deeper than
want
. It’s not as simple as desire. It’s more like missing something you’ve never had.
Now I pretended that I was only going to visit Peter’s family. This was the only way to get myself through my cup of coffee and out the door.
Chuck Moony pulled up the driveway when I was checking to make sure I had my ticket and my toothbrush. Jessica begged for another treat, and I gave in. She purred and wound herself around my legs and I thought, ridiculously, that she was trying to keep me from leaving. That maybe she intended to tether me here with her fluffy tail.
“Ready?” Chuck asked through the screen door.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said and joined him on the porch.
Chuck is Peter’s best friend. They grew up together in Bar Harbor and moved here together to go to school. Chuck dropped out after freshman year, though, when his mother died. He went back to Bar Harbor to help his dad on the docks. He knows everything in the world about lobster and crabs. About the color of the horizon at the edge of the sea at any time of day or night. He says he could never have learned as much in college anyway. He only came back to Echo Hollow a few years ago after he and his wife, Leigh, got married. I think Peter likes having him close again. There’s something nice about having a shared childhood with someone.You don’t have to explain a lot of things to each other.
Inside the cab of the truck Chuck handed me a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts and gestured to a bright pink box on the floor. Inside were a dozen chocolate glazed donuts, my favorite kind. I leaned over and kissed his scratchy cheek. As we backed out of the winding driveway, I watched my red and gold world roll by, curl away from us like feathery smoke from a chimney.
“You need to stop at the Swan?” he asked, turning carefully onto the main road.
“No. We can go straight to the airport.”
“Okeedokee,” he said and rolled down his window to let some cold morning air into the truck.
“How’s Leigh?” I asked. Leigh had just found out she was pregnant a couple of months ago.
“Good.” He smiled. “She started making maternity dresses a week ago. There’s not much of a point to it. She’s still only a hundred pounds.”
I laughed.
Chuck usually came by the house at least three nights a week. At the beginning of the summer he started working for a contractor building spec houses, and he would stop by on his way home, still covered with a layer of sawdust. Leigh worked nights, so he’d come alone, carrying grocery bags filled with beer and meat. It was the one thing I looked forward to on those miserable summer days. He and I would sit outside on the porch while Peter marinated the meat and then tended the barbecue. The cold beer cans were relief from the heat, and Peter’s meals were small feasts. They would tell stories about growing up in Bar Harbor and I would laugh until my stomach hurt and my cheeks were tired from smiling. But sometimes when Leigh had a night off, he would bring her along too, presenting her to me as if she were a gift, as if female friendships were as easy as proximity. And inevitably she and I would stumble for things to talk about inside while Peter and Chuck sat happily on the porch. She was too quiet, and she never seemed to trust me. When she got pregnant, I was grateful for finally having something to talk about. She would bring along catalogs filled with baby things and we would sit across from each other at the table discussing cribs and bibs. Cloth versus disposable diapers. She even seemed a little less leery of me when I told her that Peter could probably help her make homemade baby food.
When we got on the interstate, my stomach turned from too much coffee and chocolate. It was a long way to the airport, and I hoped that the sharp pains in my abdomen would subside. I shifted around in my seat trying to make it feel better.
“Bellyache?”
“Yeh,” I grimaced.
“You want me to stop at the rest stop?”
“Nah,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“There’s a Tums in the glove box,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said and found a family-size container behind a bunch of tools.
“Ulcer,” he said, clutching his own stomach.
The Tums was chalky on my tongue. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. The breeze from Chuck’s open window blew across my forehead. When I opened my eyes, Chuck said, “How’s your ma?”
“She’ll be fine,” I said.
“It must be hard for you.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The way things get switched around. I mean, my ma was the one who always made sure everybody else was okay.You take it for granted, you know? That she’ll make cupcakes when it’s your birthday. That when you’ve got a cold she’ll put Vicks on your chest. I remember when she got sick it felt weird to have to take care of
her
for a change.”
I nodded. Ma had never put Vicks on my chest.
“What do they say,
that’s the way the world crumbles?
”
“Something like that,” I laughed.
Chuck’s mother died when he was only twenty. His father killed himself less than a year later. Chuck found him hanging from a noose made of fishing nets.
He insisted on parking at the airport and walking me to my gate. He even spent ten minutes trying to get through the metal detector. Watch removed, wedding ring, big silver belt buckle. Finally the woman with the magic wand figured out it was his steel-toed boots. He brought me two Egg McMuffins, but my stomach still hurt so he ate both of them. He also came back from the newsstand with a thick
Vogue
that smelled like the perfume counter at the JC Penney and a double-size pack of cinnamon gum. “For your ears,” he said.
I opened up the pack and offered him a piece. He smiled and pulled one out. He rolled the silver foil between his thick fingers and chewed.
“How long are you going for?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Not long.”
“Promise?” he asked. “You know we’ll all miss you.”
Until this moment, I hadn’t felt like crying. But I could feel tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. He rubbed his knuckles gently across the top of my head. “You better be back before Leigh needs those maternity dresses.”
We sat quietly then, watching my plane taxi slowly to the gate. Both of us chewing methodically.
“Look,” he said, spitting his gum into his hand suddenly. “I made Jessica.”
In the palm of his hand, his little pink wad of chewing gum had been transformed magically into a miniature sculpture of my cat.
“Party trick.” He grinned. “I call it Oralgummi.”
“I love it,” I said, smiling, and he popped the miniature sculpture back in his mouth.
He waited for me to get on the plane, and even then through the porthole window, I could see him standing in the big glass window waiting to make sure the plane took off okay. I knew, too, that he would stand there until he couldn’t see me anymore through the clouds.
 
There was no one waiting for me at the airport in Phoenix. Lily’s husband, Rich, had to work, and Lily couldn’t go anywhere since Violet got sick. She had suggested I take a taxi, recited directions to her house. I had only been there once, and all of Phoenix looks the same to me. There are no landmarks to help orient yourself. No distinguishing characteristics to differentiate this corner from that corner.
It was early. Because of the time change, it was only 11:00
A.M.
I thought about going to the airport bar but then thought better of it. Better to get this over with, I figured. Instead I called Peter at work from a pay phone.

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