Run (6 page)

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directly involved might not have been able to see them distinctly, but for Kenya time slowed down and gave her the chance to think of each one as its own act of a play. In the fi rst, her mother left her on the sidewalk and ran to the older boy, Tip. She blind-sided him with the full force of her body, the momentum of the blow knocking him very nearly clear of the car. The second one was the car hitting her mother, and this hit was made up of many smaller hits: her hip against the high front fender—BANG—her chest against the hood—BANG—and then she rolled up until her head struck the windshield with a single clear crack, just at the moment when the car slid to a stop. The third act was the worst to see because it was the whole scene played back in reverse. Her mother’s head leaves the windshield, her body rolls backwards across the hood, and then she falls to the ground with a wet, heavy thump and lies there, facedown in the snow in front of the tires of a light-colored SUV. One of her mother’s arms was still in its coat sleeve a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 42

but the rest of the coat was turned inside out and fanned the ground next to her, the slick green lining facing up. Kenya, who was capable of moving like lightning, of leaping, of vaulting, of being her mother’s little gazelle, was there beside her before the coat had settled out across the snow. Not only was Kenya fast, she had trained her young reflexes to snap like springs. Crack the starting gun and she was off the blocks. She ran. She was down on her hands and knees, calling,

“Mama, Mama,” but it didn’t come out anything like the word. It was just a long, high sound that started with the letter M. She put her hand beneath her mother’s cheek to turn her head. She needed to see her face. When did her mother’s head get to be so heavy?

“Don’t move her,” a voice above her said. It was an adult voice but she did not regard it. One of the first rules of safety in scout-ing was not to move a person after an accident, but that knowledge came second to the fact that no one can breathe facedown in the snow. When she had turned her mother just enough, she brushed the snow out of her nose and eyes. There was blood beneath her head, a bright and shocking soak of red against the white, but the sight of her mother’s face, the weight of her head in her hands, calmed her and she was able to stop making that noise. She could hear a car door open and then there was a man’s voice that everyone quieted to hear. Over and over again he said, “I didn’t see her.

I didn’t see her.” Doyle and Teddy ran to Tip, who was still on the ground. The other white man, the one who Did Not See Her, just stood there repeating the only sentence he knew. And then Teddy, whom she had always especially liked, left his brother and came and crouched down right beside her. He put his arm around her like she was someone he knew and for a second he held her tight so that her shoulder pushed against his ribs. Then he let go and took off his own coat in the snow and put it over her mother. He put his own hand beneath her mother’s head to keep it from being too cold.

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“Will you get somebody to help?” Kenya said.

“Somebody will be here in just a minute.” Again he spread his arm like a wide wing over Kenya’s back and they crouched together, their knees touching very close. He was a big man, tall and big-shouldered, and though she was tall for her age she felt like a little girl beside him. Both of the boys were handsome and tall and even though she liked Tip and knew he was very smart, Teddy had always been her favorite of the two brothers. He had a softer face. Several times in her life he had smiled at her when their eyes met in a crowd, not because he knew her but because he was the sort of person who didn’t mind smiling at people he didn’t know. He was only wearing a blue pullover sweater now and he did not shiver even though it was freezing. Sitting like this beside him, touching him, would have been the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to her except that now she could not think of him at all. Her mother hadn’t opened her eyes and Kenya had to keep brushing the snow off her face. Teddy took off one of his mittens and pressed it tightly to the long cut across her forehead. Cars had stopped all around them and people stood in the snow and waited for something to happen. It seemed that there were almost as many people clustered on the sidewalk as had been to hear Jesse Jackson.

“I didn’t see her,” the man from the car told someone. “What was she doing in the middle of the street?”

“She’s your mother,” Teddy said.

The way he said it, not as a question but as a statement of fact, made Kenya wonder for a second if he knew this was her mother, but then she realized that wasn’t the way he had meant it. She told him yes, and even though she couldn’t put any volume behind the word, she saw her mother’s chest very clearly rise and fall at the sound of her voice.

“What’s her name?”

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“Tennessee,” Kenya said, and she added, “like the state.” Because that was the way her mother always said it. If she didn’t introduce herself as “Tennessee-like-the-state” then someone was always bound to ask.

“That’s not one you hear every day,” Teddy said.

“No, sir,” Kenya said.

Doyle came over to them then, crouching down in the snow.

He wasn’t wearing a coat either. He had spread it over the other brother, who for some crazy reason was only wearing a jacket. “Tip’s okay,” he said to Teddy. “I think he’s broken his ankle but he’s okay.

The damn car went over his ankle.”

“She pushed him out of the way.” Kenya’s voice was soft. The headlights from the SUV cut her into a silhouette. “He was going to be hit by the car.”

Doyle nodded solemnly and Kenya could tell that he was thinking, yes, I saw it too. He looked down at her mother and very gently touched her forehead next to the place where Teddy was pressing down the mitten, and at that moment Tennessee blinked open her eyes. She looked at Kenya for a minute and the sides of her mouth bent up the smallest bit.

Kenya took hold of her mother’s hand. It was cold and bare. Her glove had fallen off. “Sleep,” Kenya said. “They’re going to be here to get you in one minute.”

And the mother, who had no energy to do anything but listen to an eleven-year-old, closed her eyes again. If she had seen just who it was that Kenya was huddled up against, she gave no sign of it.

Teddy sat and watched the whole thing. He had no idea if the woman whose head he now held in his hands would live or how badly she was hurt and he was sorry to think this little girl had to sit there and watch it all. Even if it had to happen, she shouldn’t have to see it. “Your loved ones were daring and brave,” Teddy said r u n

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quietly, “and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says,

‘Give me a challenge and I’ll meet it with joy.’” Kenya looked up at him. She had no idea what he was talking about but the words were beautiful.

“‘They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths,’” Teddy said. “‘They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.’”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Teddy,” Doyle said, pushing himself up from the ground. “Not Reagan. Not now.”

When the ambulance came it seemed like only a minute had passed and it seemed like a day. One man came straight to the mother and one man went to Tip. Tip sat up and pulled his father’s coat around him. He shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said, and pointed to the woman lying a few feet away. He didn’t look entirely fine but the man didn’t ask him again. He also went to see about the woman.

Now there were three policemen on the scene and they scattered the crowd and spoke to the man who had struck Kenya’s mother with his car. He was back sitting in the driver’s seat in order to stay out of the weather. Teddy rested the woman’s head into the snow and pulled the girl back so that there was room enough for the two men from the ambulance to work. The first thing they did was slide her onto a board, a flat sled that kept her off the ground. The lights on their truck stayed on, cutting wide red circles around them.

“Are you her family?” the ambulance driver said to Teddy.

“His family,” he said and pointed to Tip.

“And she’s yours?” The driver now pointed to Kenya.

Teddy looked down at the girl who was tucked under his arm like a permanent resident and she looked back at him. He had forgotten to ask her name. “She belongs to her,” Teddy said, and mo-a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 46

tioned his head slightly to the black woman on the ground. This was how their connections were established. No one asked Doyle if he belonged anywhere in this group. In fact there was a moment when a policeman tried to shoo him away.

“My son stepped in front of the car,” Doyle told the policeman.

“It was snowing so hard, I don’t think he even saw the curb. None of us saw the car. This woman saw the car and she pushed him away.”

“The car hit her when she pushed him?” the policeman said.

Doyle said yes, that was the way that it happened. None of the things that had seemed so important ten minutes ago, Jesse Jackson and Lawrence Simons and the fish in their jars, none of those had any bearing on the story now.

Kenya watched the workers like the foreman of a construction site. She kept an eye on every move they made. The ambulance driver was a black man with some island accent. Of the two men who worked on her mother, one was white and one was black. All three of the policemen were white men. The white ambulance attendant snapped a white plastic collar around her mother’s neck while the black ambulance attendant belted her legs. They worked like ants, their movements small and precise. One took his hands away and the other one’s hands were there. One put a bandage on her head, the other sliced open the sleeve of her coat and wrapped a cuff around her arm. Kenya gasped to see him cut the coat when it would have been so easy to simply slip it off of her. Her mother would go straight to the little wicker basket on the top shelf of the closet where needles and thread were kept. Kenya herself did not know how to sew but surely it could be mended. One man opened up her mother’s eyelid with a thumb and shone in a light. The other taped her head to the board with wide paper tape. They called out numbers and nodded to themselves. Every minute Kenya’s mother r u n

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became stiffer and straighter, locked into the equipment until every piece of her was bundled tight.

“What’s her name?” the black attendant said to Teddy. He had forgotten already that Teddy did not know the woman and that he had no reason to know the answer to the question.

“Tennessee,” he said.

“Like the state,” Kenya said.

“Huh,” the white attendant said, and the black one said, “Tennessee? Tennessee, can you hear me?” His voice was so loud that even the policemen turned around.

When Tennessee opened her eyes again Kenya rushed to put her face just above her mother’s face. Her mother tried to smile but the men told Kenya to step back and Teddy took her arm lightly and pulled her away. They were very busy. It was as if they had rehearsed this accident before, as if they had practiced and practiced in antici-pation of exactly this night. “Tennessee,” the black man said. “Can you tell me where you’re hurting?”

But she couldn’t tell them anything, and then her eyes were closed again. They reached beneath the board she was strapped to, counted to three, and picked her up like she was nothing more than snow. Then they slid her into the back of the truck.

When Kenya put one foot onto the step to climb inside the men all shook their heads. “Not tonight,” the white ambulance attendant said, as if perhaps tomorrow it would be fine for her to ride along.

“I want to go!” Kenya could hear the panic in her own voice.

“You stay with your family, they’ll drive you over,” the ambulance driver said. “We can’t have little girls in the back of the truck.” Snap, snap, they locked the metal board down into place and each man leaned out and grabbed a door and pulled it shut. It was all so fast, as fast as the accident itself. There was no way to see her a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 48

mother now. Once the doors were shut Kenya started to cry, though not in the keening way she had done before. She cried like a girl who was standing in a snowstorm without her mother. Her mother didn’t let her ride the T alone and so she wasn’t certain she would be able to get back home by herself. She didn’t have any money for a token. For some reason she didn’t have her keys tonight. She usually wore them on a cord around her neck. She had forgotten to ask which hospital they were taking her mother to and even if they had told her she wouldn’t have known how to get there. The men in the truck hadn’t gotten the story straight, even though Teddy had told them. They had left the black girl with the two young black men who didn’t know her. After all, they looked like they belonged together. She wasn’t hurt, she wasn’t alone. They didn’t think another thing about her.

“I’ll call an ambulance for the boy,” a policeman said. “They should have sent two.”

“I don’t need an ambulance,” Tip said from the ground. He had pushed a wall of snow against either side of his ankle in an attempt to freeze the swelling and the pain. He did not untie his sneaker or roll up the leg of his jeans. He didn’t want to know.

Teddy had left her to go and see about his brother. It was much worse for Kenya now that her mother was gone. Not only did she have no idea how she was going to find her again, she could now see the size of the red mark left behind in the snow even as it was quickly being covered up. It was impossible not to try and calculate the extent of the damage. Without Kenya there to watch over things, to keep her mother safe, anything was possible. How could her mother keep herself safe when she couldn’t even stay awake?

The crowd had all gone away. Now that the ambulance had left, the remaining group of them were of no interest to anyone.

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The few people who stayed behind had turned their attention to Tip. Kenya was sitting in the snow alone next to the spot where her mother had been. That’s when she happened to notice something small and dark beneath the SUV. The shape of it made her wonder because it clearly was not a leaf or a piece of paper, and because she very much wanted to be thinking of anything other than her present circumstances, she crawled under the car to see what it was.