When You Go Away (2 page)

     What Carly worried about since yesterday was the ventilator her mother had been talking about a couple of days ago.  After her last hospitalization, Brooke was fitted with a tracheotomy plug and a collar during her last stay in the hospital, so when she needed the ventilator later, they could start it up right away.  Carly hated the sound, the wheezy air, the metal hush that meant Brooke couldn’t live on her own.

     Carly had searched all the boxes in the living room, and she couldn't find anything that resembled the ventilator that had come home the last time.  But if she did finally find it, she couldn't just attach it and turn the switch.  There had to be some doctor's visit or at least a therapist to come over and show Carly how to adjust it.

       At night, Brooke breathed so quietly at times, Carly was sure she'd died.  Now that Carly was sleeping in her mother's bed, she'd creep out and stand over Brooke, listening, finally poking her sister gently on the arm, grateful for a snort and the fling of an arm.  She'd pull Brooke up on the hospital bed, using the switch to adjust the head, thinking that if Brooke slept sitting up straight, she'd breathe more easily.  Only then could Carly go back to sleep.

     Carly picked up the thermometer.  This was a great thermometer, the important part as smooth as the inside of an eggshell.  When she was little, she'd had to hold the pointy stick under her tongue for what had seemed like forever, and Ryan told her stories about the old-fashioned glass kind in his butt.  Carly didn't believe him because he'd always been like that, kind of gross, talking about boogers and saying "Shit" and "Fuck" even when there were adults around.  Now, he didn't even talk much at all, leaving the house early to catch his ride and coming home long after Carly had fed Brooke, asking her only, "Did you talk to Mom?"  But she didn't want to think about Ryan now.  He hadn't even asked her if she wanted to go to school.  He just ate three pieces of toast and slammed out the door.

     After holding the thermometer on her own skin to warm it up, Carly pressed the thermometer against Brooke's ear, causing Brooke to say, "Ma!"  But before her sister could fling a tiny arm at her, she had the reading.  99.0. That was a fever.  She tried it again in the other ear.  98.9. Carly bit her lip.  Not normal, but not an official fever.  Only four tenths.  Or three tenths, depending on which side was real.  She put the thermometer down, deciding she would take it again later.  Just to be sure.

     "Ma!"  Brooke said.  "Dare i Ma?"

     Carly closed her eyes.  How should she answer that question?  How could she tell Brooke she had no idea where their mother was?  "Should I sing?" she said finally.

     "Da."

      Picking up the syringe, Carly began to sing "Good Morning Sunshine," knowing that their mother was Brooke's only sunshine.  Brooke never made the sounds for Carly that she did for her mother. 
How long
, Carly wondered as she sang,
could this go on? 

      Before she'd come into the bedroom, she'd mixed up the formula in the kitchen in a Pyrex measuring cup, the one her mother always used, and she carefully dropped the medicine in.  She didn't know what it was for, but her mother had always squeezed out two drops from the brown bottle and two drops from the plastic bottle.  As she put the can of formula away, she noticed that there wasn't much formula left, maybe two days worth.  But by then. . . . well, things would be better.

     Carly sucked formula into the syringe and attached it to the tube connected to the peg for feeding.  The tube looked dirty, and she wondered if she had to clean it.  Her mother sometimes talked about "flushing" the tube, so Carly decided she'd try later.  "Okay.  Time for breakfast."

     "No!"  Brooke began to squirm.

     "Does it hurt?"  Brooke moved from side to side.  "Stop it, Brookey.  Let me sing.  I'll sing again." 

     Carly began to sing the song, and Brooke stopped moving, turning her head to look at Carly.  It seemed to take forever for the food to go in, and from what her mother had told her, it should never go in too fast.  "Keep a steady strain," her mother had said, leaning over Carly's shoulder as she fed Brooke.  "That's the way.  That's a girl."

     Carly stopped singing the words, humming instead, and Brooke turned her face to the wall, reaching out a tiny hand to touch it. 
She was so small
, Carly thought, pressing and pressing on the syringe with her thumb.  Brooke had always been small.  Back when she had been a tiny baby, before her body had curled and they knew all the ways her body would go wrong, Carly would bring her friends into the nursery to show off her new sister.  Carly had been seven, almost old enough to babysit she thought, and Brooke was like her living doll.  "She's sooo cute," her friends would say, Brooke's eyes wide and blue, her hair like a fire next to the cotton sheets.  Her mother would let them take turns holding her in the oak rocker Grandma Mackenzie--their dad's mom--had given her mother when Ryan was born. 

     But after a few months, Brooke wasn't so cute any more.  She never really learned to crawl or walk, sort of pulling and pushing herself on the floor, never rolling over or sitting up for more than a second or two at a time.  Her mom and dad went to the doctors all the time and then they came home with awful words that sounded like metal on Carly’s tongue:  intraventrical bleed, ataxic, spastic.  From then on, there were always nurses at the house teaching her mother how to care for Brooke, and the room was full of medicine and supplies, her mother taking down the crib mobile that had been Carly's and pulling out the crib toys because they needed room for the monitors.  Carly didn't bring her friends to the nursery after that.

     She refilled the syringe and slid it slowly into the peg, knowing that it was almost over for now, until later this afternoon.  Her mother fed Brooke three times a day, but before they moved, the doctors told her to feed her four times in smaller amounts because she
was getting sick from her feedings.  "Like diarrhea?"  Carly had asked, even though what came out of Brooke was already like water.

     Carly pulled the syringe out and rested it in the empty measuring cup.  She lifted and slipped a clean T-shirt over her head, drawing her thin arms through the holes.  Usually, her sister smelled like Christmas, sweet and sugary and soft, but lately the smell had changed, grown stale and older.  Like how Carly smelled after playing volleyball during PE.  Brooke wasn't a baby anymore, but a person who might want more than lying on the bed and watching TV.

       Tugging at the shirt and smoothing it over Brooke's flat belly, Carly realized it was the last clean shirt.  She'd have to go down to the laundry room and do a wash, and she hoped there were still quarters in the jar by the front door.

     "Okay!"

     "Tay!"

     "Want to watch cartoons?" 

     "Tay!  Na!  Na!"

     "Have some patience.  Keep a steady strain," Carly said, repeating the phrase her mother used when things were terrible but had to be done anyway, like math tests and Brooke’s diapers and dentist appointments.  It never really helped, but Carly always imagined her mother knew how bad it was.  She saw what was important.

      Carly searched for the remote on the bedside table.  Brooke loved to watch
Rugrats
and
Hey Arnold!
  on Nickelodeon.  Carly flipped through the channels.

     "Da!"

     The bright colored kids flashed on the screen.  "There you go, Brookey."  Carly yanked up the rail on the hospital bed, making sure it was truly closed.  Once last week before her mom left, Carly hadn't checked, and she'd come back to find Brooke on the floor, writhing in an effort to pull herself back up, her mother asleep in the bed just five feet away.  So now she checked once, twice, sometimes three times, worried that Brooke could break all her bones.  Worried that she’d have to call someone for help.

     Carly sighed, picked up the measuring cup, the wash bowl, and the wash cloth, and walked out of the room, the sounds of the cartoons behind her.



     Back when they were still at their house, Brooke would have had visitors every day.  Some days, it was the physical therapist Leon Magnoli, who put her on the floor, rolled her around on these big rubber balls he brought, Brooke on top squealing. 

     For a while, Carly imagined that all kids like Brooke had a
Leon
, but once when she’d gone with her mother and Brooke to the clinic for Brooke’s appointment, the nurse had sighed, running her hands through her hair.

     “God, you are so lucky to have a private therapist.  We are in a major therapist shortage.  I can’t even begin to tell you about the backlog.  It’s a nightmare.  I’m dealing with about 500 kids right now.”

     “He’s the best,” her mother said.  “I won’t trust Brooke with anyone else.”

    
Leon
looked like so much fun, Carly had once wished she could play with him.  He would rub Brooke’s feet, stretch her legs and arms, spin her on the mat.  He called her "My little Kumquat."  Carly's mother gave him a check when he left, and he always said, "I should pay
you
."  Carly noticed that he took it anyway, but she was glad.  He always made Brooke laugh.

     Then there was Mrs. Morgan who came to teach Brooke to talk, Brooke sounding out vowels, "AAAA.EEEEEEE.  IIIIIII. OOOOO.  UUUUU," even though she seemed to make only one long strange sound, "AHHHEIOU."  Later, the teacher Susie Glickman came to the house because Brooke was too sick to go to kindergarten even for three hours a day; after all, as their mother said, Brooke was an “Individual with Exceptional Needs.” 

Susie seemed to think Brooke was exceptional, bragging about how fast Brooke was learning to sound out words.  “In months, this girl will be reading!” she had said.

     There were also the nurses her mother hired to baby-sit, so she could walk for an hour on the treadmill at Oakmont Athletic club or go shopping at Nordstrom with her friends or get a haircut at Anthony's.  While Carly often answered the door, leading whoever it was up to Brooke’s room, Ryan never talked to anyone because he was so busy.  Once
Leon
asked her mother, "Are you sure you have a son?  He looks more like a shadow to
me."  Back then, Ryan was gone for normal reasons then, like baseball or soccer, not like now when he was just gone. 

     It wasn't until fifth and sixth grade, when her parents were fighting every night and then her dad left, that things changed.  There were things that happened behind her parents' door--yells and harsh whispers and sometimes heavy things falling to the ground.  Sometimes, Carly wanted to leave, walking down the street with her backpack and her friend's phone numbers. 

     She knew that the divorce had made her mother so sad she'd stopped getting up in the morning unless it was to feed Brooke, and now since the move to the apartment, Carly could feel her own anger at her father flutter like the gas fireplace at Sam’s house, able to rage at a moment's notice. 

     In the days and weeks after he left, Carly would pick up the scribbled notes on the kitchen counter, reading her mother’s pretty cursive:  “Call Social Security office” and “Check out bills re decreased energy rates.”  There were lists of phone numbers and names of places, Department of Rehabilitation, Parent Training and
Info
Center
, Children’s Special Heath Services. 

     At first, it seemed that life would go on as it had, but then the answering machine would blink with seven, ten, fourteen messages, calls her mother didn’t return.  Then her mother couldn’t pay for
Leon
anymore, a therapist at the clinic taking over Brooke’s care.  But when her mother decided Brooke shouldn’t go back to the clinic because it was crowded and dirty and far away, no one called to check on Brooke, as if she never existed at all.

     Why did a divorce mean all this?  Why did everything else have to change just because her parents weren't married anymore?  Dad still loved them, didn't he?  Or maybe he didn't because he didn't call that often at first, and then even less, and not once did he ask her or Ryan to visit him.  Sometimes, she wanted to ask her mother these questions, but her mom cried about how Brooke’s teacher, Suzie Glickman, moved to another school district, how nothing was easy any more, the letters from the school district piling up on the counter.  She cried because she had to carry Brooke out to the car because they didn't have a wheelchair yet.  But that must have gotten too hard because after a while, Mom didn’t take Brooke anywhere, her sister’s body softer and weaker every day.

     But by the end of seventh grade, Mom decided that they had to sell the house and move.  “We need to get out of here.  A fresh start.  A place where I can think.”   Her mother packed and cried, Brooke in her room almost all day long, no visits from anyone, Ryan stayed out later and later with his friends, and Carly watched it all.  A For Sale sign went up, the real estate agents constantly walked through the house, even during dinner, and her mother ran around with Windex to clean the front door windows every time someone called.  "Curb appeal,” the agent had said, her mother nodding and biting her lips.

     Carly thought if she could just tell her dad what was going on with Brooke, he'd let them stay in their old house.  If she could tell him about how she secretly opened letters from the school, the ones that asked why Brooke was not signed up for the new school year.  If she could show him the way Brooke’s head flopped to the side now.  But when she asked her mom if she could call him, her mother leaned her head on her arms and
cried for an hour.  And once when Carly found his phone number and wrote it on a gum wrapper, she looked up to see her mother weeping on the couch, where she'd been sitting all day.  If she called her father, something bad would happen to her mom, something worse than what had already happened, so she folded up the wrapper carefully and put it in her jeans pocket.  She forgot about it, and later, she found it twisted and ripped from the washer, her father's number only thin pencil scratchings.