Nest (5 page)

“You know what I need?” Her voice is soft and raspy. She might be crying a little, or maybe it’s just that she’s gotten too much wind and sun and salt spray in her eyes. “I need you to just leave me alone. I’m sorry, but I really need some peace and quiet.”

She wasn’t signaling me over with her stick; she was waving me away! She was shooing me from my own special spot. I’m a kid and she’s a grown-up, so I have to listen to her. I want to smile a big smile to show her I’m just fine, thank you, but my chin is trembly and my lips feel scrunched up, like I’ve just sucked a lime fished out of Dad’s empty gin and tonic glass. My eyes are watery, and it’s not from wind or sun or salt spray.

“Have a good day, lady,” I whisper.

As I walk away I hear her mumbling, “Just a little peace and quiet. Peace and quiet, that’s all I want.” When I know she can’t see me, I start running down the path. I’m Pocahontas, racing through the woods without making a sound. No thuds. No twig snaps. Just peace and quiet. Quiet and peace. I’m the fastest, quietest runner in the world. I run so fast that even the wind can’t keep up with me. I run so quietly that even the ants can’t hear my footsteps.

Take the left fork in the path.
Peace and quiet. Quiet and peace
. Running this fast, I’ll be home in a flash, a milli-flash, which is one thousandth of a flash. No one will be there yet, so I’ll have four more Fig Newtons and then I’ll feel better. I’m at the beech
tree. There must be a speeder on Route 6, because I hear a siren, messing up my peace and quiet. No, it’s not the police on Route 6. It’s an ambulance with flashing lights on Salt Marsh Lane. An ambulance with flashing lights in front of our house. There’s an ambulance with flashing lights in front of our house.

“Mom!” Rachel screams from the front porch as the ambulance drives away. White lights flashing, and the awful red wail of that siren.

“D
O
I
HAVE TO
flip them over?” I ask Rachel.

“What does the box say?”

I’m making fish sticks while she makes a salad. I’ve never made fish sticks. I keep checking on them, because the last thing we need tonight is burnt-black fish sticks thrown into the trash.

“It doesn’t say.”

“Then you shouldn’t flip them,” Rachel says.

“Okay.”

I don’t know how Rachel knows that I shouldn’t flip them when the instructions don’t say that, but I don’t want to fight. She’s working really hard to peel the cuke for the salad just like Mom does, sliding the peeler toward herself instead of away. There are little flecks of green all up and down the cuke.

“I don’t mind a little skin, you know. It’s got extra nutrition,” I say.

Rachel gives me a tired smile and shakes her head. “I can do this,” she says to herself. “I can do this.”

I like the smack of heat when I open the oven door. I’m shivery-bone cold, even though I just took a long, hot shower. Rachel stayed in the bathroom with me the whole time, because we wanted to have a good alibi if Mrs. Morell knocked on the front door and tried to make us come over to her house to eat supper even though we have Dad’s permission to stay here by ourselves until he and Mom come home from the hospital later.

“Oh, really? We didn’t hear you knock,” we’ll say if Mrs. Morell ever questions us, which probably won’t happen, since, based on my observations, she never leaves her house. Anyway, just in case, we won’t be lying, which is something you don’t do to an adult, even one who has three lousy boys and a yelling husband you can hear through the closed windows, and even when you have a good excuse, like you were shooed away from your special spot and your mother got rushed to the hospital when you thought she was at dance rehearsal.

“What happened to Mom?” I asked Rachel after the ambulance was gone and we were in the front hall with the door closed and no more siren.

“You’re shivering and it’s warm out,” she said. “You should go take a hot shower.”

“First you have to tell me what happened to Mom.
You have to tell me that right now.” My body wouldn’t stop shaking with scared shivers.

Rachel stared at me like she was trying to figure out what my words meant. She looked like a troll doll with her bugged-out eyes.

“Rachel!” I yelled. She blinked her eyes and started talking super fast.

“Mom forgot her boom box, so she came back home to get it and was walking down the stairs to go back to rehearsal. I saw her fall. All the way to the bottom step. I was just getting home from school. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. She told me to call an ambulance, and they came and they checked her. ‘I can’t feel my left side,’ she said, and they put her on a stretcher and then into the ambulance. They called Dad, and he said that he’d meet them in the emergency room in Hyannis and that we had his permission to stay here, and then you came home with the shivers.”

“Were they nice to Mom? Was she scared? Was she crying?” I asked.

Rachel looked at me. She took a big breath. First her eyes got wet with tears, and then her tears spilled over. She sobbed and sobbed, so I took her hand and walked her to the couch. I held on to her and rubbed her head and said, “You don’t have to worry” and “You don’t have to talk,” and because of that she hasn’t told me anything else, not while I showered,
not while we’ve been making dinner, so I still don’t know if Mom was scared and crying.

Fish sticks used to be for when we had babysitters, but clearly our babysitter days are over, because we’re doing a very good job taking care of ourselves. The fish sticks look perfect, golden brown. And if you ignore a couple of green spots on the cukes, the salad looks just like Mom’s, with lettuce and slices of tomatoes and capers. Mom believes in salads every night, because she says they’re the closest thing to eating spring.

“Wash up?” my sister says, and we stand together at the kitchen sink and wash our hands with Palmolive and dry them on the dish towel.

“Time—” she says.

“—for dinner,” I say, and my sister and I sit down at the kitchen table that we’ve already set with two plates and two cups and two forks and two knives and two napkins so we can eat our perfect fish sticks and our almost-perfect salad.

I have the privilege of reading in the reading corner, since I proved to Miss Gallagher that I understand how the Pilgrims and Indians helped each other out, by getting all of my multiple choices on the worksheet right.

“Your pick, Naomi,” Miss Gallagher said, smiling,
and now I’m sitting by myself on a puffy red pillow on the floor, trying to decide. I’d like to read
The Burgess Bird Book
, but the rule is only reading-corner books, since Miss Gallagher specifically selected them to improve our reading skills.

“Ten more minutes to finish up your worksheets,” Miss Gallagher says, which means I only have ten more minutes in the reading corner. I’d better get cracking.

I want to read the book about the girl who runs away and hides out with her brother in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sleeps in the fancy beds, but then I can’t read the one about the girl who wants to be a writer. And there are two other books that sound just as good, and that’s not even counting the poetry book about birds and bugs.

I try spreading the books out in front of me on the rug, closing my eyes, and pointing, but the trouble is that I remember which book is where, and so it’s the same as picking one and I just can’t.

“Naomi,” Miss Gallagher says from her desk at the front of the room, “I hope you’re using this privilege well. It doesn’t look like you’re reading.”

My heart’s beating fast.

I make myself pick up the poetry book and open to the first page. I try to read, but the words are blurry, and when I blink, the tears spill down. They’re coming faster and faster. I’ve got to wipe them away quick, before anyone notices. I don’t know why I’m crying,
but I can’t stop. Now my shoulders are shaking, and Miss Gallagher notices.

She’s not at her desk, as usual, where she can keep an eye on all of us and make sure we’re behaving respectfully. She’s standing here above just me and whispering, “Really, Naomi, it’s nothing to cry about,” but it’s a scold whisper, and everyone hears her and turns and looks. I’m not a crybaby. I’m tough as nails. That’s what Mom always says, but Mom and Dad didn’t come home from the hospital last night like I thought they would, and Rachel and I had to get ourselves ready for school with no parents at all, and now I’m not tough as nails; I’m crying like a big fat baby right in front of everyone.

On the bus ride home, Dawn hands me a whole pack of SweeTARTS. We’re not allowed to eat candy on the bus, but I do anyway. Sean sits behind me and says,
“Waah waah waah,”
and Joey smacks him in the arm and says, “Shut up about stuff you don’t understand,” which makes me think that maybe he wouldn’t have dunked us in Heron Pond after all.

When the bus pulls up at our corner, Joey and I get out and I run ahead of him, because I see Mom’s car, so I figure she’s home before I remember that it was the ambulance that drove her to the hospital and her car being parked out front means nothing. I cross my fingers and hold my breath and fly up the stairs
and open the front door. She’s lying on the couch with a quilt up to her chin.

“Snap Pea,” she says, but her voice is soft and creaky, and she doesn’t sound like her.

I’m walking so I can close the terrible space between us when Dad shows up and stands in the way.

“Your mother’s tired,” he says. “Let’s let her rest.”

Mom’s eyes are fluttering closed. Dad puts his arm around me. He twitches like he’s nervous, but he doesn’t let me go.

“Honey, I know that this is hard for you. I’m sure you’re feeling helpless,” Dad says.

I’m not sure how I’m feeling.

“That’s a natural reaction right now.”

I wish Dad would be quiet.

“If you want to talk about your feelings, of course, I’m here.”

What I want is for Dad to stop talking. Just me and Mom. Just Mom and me.

But Dad doesn’t stop. He talks about
trauma
. He talks about
pain
. Then he starts walking, and since his arm is still around me, I have to walk, too. I have no choice but to walk away and leave Mom with something wrong with her alone in the room.

We’re going to watch TV together while we eat our dinner, which isn’t something we ever do, because there
are better ways to occupy ourselves, which makes us people with richer lives. Tonight, I guess, we don’t need richer lives. We just need to get through dinner, which is Dad heating up canned tomato soup and Rachel and me making open-face cheese melts in the toaster oven and then carrying it all on a tray into the living room, where Mom is stretched out on the couch, pretending to be interested in
Get Smart
.

“Pretty funny, kiddos,” she says, but she can’t fool me. She doesn’t think the show is funny, and she doesn’t think the way her left leg drags along the ground when she walks is funny. Nothing funny at all about two days and nights stuck on the couch so that she’s close to the bathroom. And I bet she really doesn’t think it’s funny that the doctors have no idea what’s wrong with her, even though they did a bunch of tests in the hospital and then just told her to take it easy and not to worry and they’ll know more if new symptoms show up and she feels like a ticking time bomb, a damn ticking time bomb, which is what she told Dad yesterday when he brought her a bunch of brownish-pink hydrangeas from the garden to cheer her up and they thought I was loading the dishwasher but I was actually spying on Mom.