You Are My Only (10 page)

“You don't like broken things, you shouldn't be here.”

“That's right,” I say. “I shouldn't.” I feel the first tear fall and then the next one. I swat them away. They keep coming. Autumn stares at me, and then she watches the sun, the milk of it pouring through the thick-as-walls window.

“You're in for a ride now,” she says at last, “rooming with me.” She spins—one, two, three—then stops. Dead, cold, perfect stop. Something with her hands she does, something with her feet, to make the wheeled chair start and stop. “You know why I'm so good at this?” she asks.

“Don't know.” My voice sounds funny, like it's full of sidewalk cracks.

“It's my pilot training,” she says. “Also my skydiving.”

“Is that a fact?” My tongue sticks and unclicks from the roof of my mouth.

“Most certainly is.”

“You wear pouf skirts when you're flying?”

“I wear whatever I want.”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“They let you wear that, and I'm wearing this?” I look down at the thin bit of nothing they put me in. A dress tied with strings at the back, no collar. Degradations, is what it is. Wronged up and uglied. Stolen from.

“Infirmary tricked you out,” she says. Starts laughing. Stops.

“Where are my real clothes?”

“Heck if I know.”

“I need my real clothes,” I tell her. “So I can get out.”

Her eyes go sky wide. “You leaving? So soon?”

“Best as I can.”

She stares at me, screws up her nose, too little a nose for all its freckles. “Me, too,” she says finally. “Leaving right with you. Up. And. Out.” She whirls herself, makes a circle. She slumps down, makes like exhaustion. “I have a degree in the color blue,” she says. “And once”—and now she leans in toward me, plants her elbows to the right edge of my bed—“I fell through nine completely separate clouds in a single afternoon, a world record. Don't believe me, look it up. You will find it to be true.” She points at the globe behind her with the goggle crown, like that's proof enough of her story.

“What are you doing here, then?” I ask her, the way I would have asked the snobby girl in school, back when there was school, back when I had choices and made the wrong one.

“Big mistake,” she says. “Right same as you.” And there's nothing I can say to that, and nothing I say, period.

“So. You going to tell me now?”

“Tell you what?”

“How you banged yourself so pretty? You fall from the sky? You forget your chute?”

“I can't,” I say. “I can't tell you.”

Her eyes go wide, so blue. “Is it a secret, what you can't tell?”

“Worse than a secret,” I say, and I don't know why I say it, why I confess, to Autumn, the crazy and the skinny, but when I say it, when I know it to be true, the tears start coming and they will not stop and suddenly I am howling animal howls and suddenly I am screaming and I am yelling at Peter, and I am yelling for Baby, and I am yelling at Arlen to find her, Arlen, who thought he could save me, who wouldn't believe me, who stood there afterward, yelling, “I'm so sorry.” I see everything that was and everything that's wrong and all the people in the world who could have Baby and what are they doing to Baby? Where is my Baby? How many houses in the whole wide world will I have to search through to find Baby? And now Autumn goes to blur and she's gone, and now she's beside me—down the narrow rim of the bed, lying near. I know that it's her. I smell her hair. She holds me strong as a thin girl has no right to.

“You can tell me,” she says into my ear, but I can't, can't even breathe, and now she takes the fingers of my ruined arm and counts them, one two three four five one two three four five one two three four five, until I can breathe and I am not so close to drowning.

“I have worse than secrets, too,” she whispers, and that's all she says, and then we lie there like that, together on the bed, her frizzy hair my pillow, her count the way I breathe, until from outside, in the long hall, I hear Bettina calling.

“What is going on in here?” she demands, bursting through.

“She needs me,” Autumn says.

“Julius reported a ruckus.”

“There was no ruckus.”

“Don't lie to me, Autumn. Do you hear me?”

“It wasn't her,” Autumn says. “I swear it wasn't. She's been sleeping.” And she's holding me tight, and I'm counting to myself, one two three four five one two three four …

She stays home and stays home, lives in that chair. Drinks the milk warm, eats the rice cold, gets up only and slowly to pee or to run her finger down the crack in the curtains, then throw the curtains tight again, as if she's being hunted by weather, as if being hunted makes her so tired out that all she can do is sit back down in that chair. Sometimes, after three, the Rudd door slams and Harvey slides across the porch with his long scraping paw nails, and then the door will slam again and it will be the sound of Joey thumping down the alley. “For the love of God,” Mother will moan, “will they be quiet?” It'll take her a long time to settle, but she does, and when that happens, I tiptoe up the stairs, rush across the pink, throw my head out the window toward Joey, whispering, “Hey,” until he looks up and says, “Hey,” in a soft shout right back, and after that, today, he says, “How is she?”

“Sick,” I say. “Real sick.”

“Sleeping sick or awake sick?”

“Little of sleeping and awake.”

Joey bounces the ball and Harvey steals it. Harvey skiddles across the alley and then returns, dropping the ball at Joey's feet. Joey retrieves it, turns, and pitches hard, and Harvey barrels down the alley so fast that his legs get in the way.

“We're holding the Cather on you,” Joey tells me.

“You're doing that?”

“Aunt Helen insisted. Says she'll dream on it until you return. She doesn't want you missing out on the story.”

“You'll give her my thanks?”

“You come over here and give it. She's missing you.”

“But I'm just right here.”

“Three stories up. Like Rapunzel.” Joey shadows his eyes and squints. “You should grow your hair, at least, so I could climb it.”

“That was a fairy tale,” I say. “You can't climb hair.” I laugh, and then Joey's laughing, and then, remembering my mother downstairs, I say, “Shhh,” with a finger to my lips.

“It's an idea, anyway,” Joey says in a whisper-shout. Harvey has returned the ball and dropped it at Joey's feet. He squeaks like a wheel and waits for the pitch, until Joey delivers a nice long one and the dog's off. “You should call a doctor,” Joey says now, “if your mother's so sick.”

“She wouldn't have it.”

“Why not?”

“She's a private person.”

“So what?”

“It's complicated.”

“You should have Aunt Cloris take a look. She's half a nurse or something.”

Harvey returns the ball, and now Joey starts tossing it high—up above his head toward the clouds. Harvey runs in circles. Higher and higher, Joey tosses the ball. If my arms were forty feet long, I'd reach and swipe the soaring thing clean out of the sky.

“Sophie?” I hear now from down below. “Sophie Marks?”

“Joey,” I whisper-shout. “That's my mother.” I wave my hands, but he's too busy with the ball, too coiled up in Harvey's barking, and even when I lean out far as I can go over the window ledge, he doesn't see or hear me. He tosses the ball and tosses the ball, and Harvey grows wilder at his feet, and my mother keeps calling me, louder. I close the window: snap. I hurry across the beams, tiptoe the outside of the attic stairs, then walk-run the rest of the way down the stairwell's center, making as much noise as I can so it'll sound like I'm coming from the bedroom. Outside, I hear Harvey going wild. Inside, I hear my mother, and when I reach the first floor and glance toward the La-Z turtle, it's empty. She stands by the front door at the window wearing her white nightgown, her hair streaming down her shoulders, her one hip jutting. She's split the curtain by just a crack. In the angle of sun, dust hangs.

“Were you sleeping?” she asks without turning.

“No, ma'am.” My heart's up in my throat; it's pounding. I think of all the what-ifs, the consequences. What if she'd parted the curtain on the alley side and not the street side, seen Joey looking up, talking to someone? what if she'd come up the stairs dragging her knee, and I didn't hear her? what if she turns around right now and sees the lying in my eyes and says, “we're moving”?

“You sure took a long time coming,” she tells me now.

“Maybe, come to think of it, I was sleeping. Maybe I was.”

“Were you or were you not?”

“At the very least, I was daydreaming.”

“Your mother's sick,” she says, turning and rolling her eyes at my mixed-up confessions. “Have some heart.” She faces back toward the window and sighs as if it's my fault all these days are wasting.

I cut toward her, across the room, and stop. I feel the dust bits on my skin, close my mouth tight. I wait for Mother to say something more. She doesn't. She stares instead.

“I wouldn't have moved in here,” she says at last, “if I had known about that dog.”

“He just gets excited,” I say, and then add, at once, to correct myself, “I mean I guess.”

She turns, looks over her shoulder, stares me down. “There are no excuses,” she says in a low voice, “for an animal like that.” She makes sure that I understand, then turns back toward the window, wobbles, catches herself against the sill with a pinch of both hands. The sun pushes past her. The dust bits dance.

“Can I get you something?” I ask.

“We're out of supplies,” she says, as if I hadn't been telling her the same thing now for days.

“A glass of water?”

“That would be fine. Except I used up all the ice.”

“A glass of plain water,” I say. “Coming right up.”

It's enough to bring her back into the room, toward the La-Z-Boy. I help settle her in, then head for the kitchen.

“Sophie?” she calls.

“Yes?”

“Run the water until it's full-force cold.”

“I'll do my best.”

“Make up new ice.”

I blast the water and fill the empty ice-cube tray, slip it into the cave of the freezer. I fill her glass, shirt-dry its bottom, present it to her like it's something special—a magic potion for the queen in her throne. I think of Joey outside, looking for me in the window. I think of Harvey and how he's gone suddenly quiet. I would give anything for Rapunzel hair, or even a mother who works the shifts she'd promised.

“Now,” she says, “where were we?” She drinks and swallows loudly. She touches the tower of books with her hand, looks confused. “Archimedes?” she asks. “Icosahedrons?”

“Actually, Kepler.”

“That's right.”

“I wrote a paper.”

“Now I remember.”

“Would you like for me to read it?”

She swallows the last of her water, sighs. “Another time,” she says, “when I'm a bit stronger.”

We stay silent then—Mother sitting, me standing, the tower of books at her side. Across the alley, they're waiting on Cather. They're also waiting on my Kepler.

“Am I inconveniencing you?” she asks after a while.

“I'm sorry?”

“The look on your face, Sophie. Somewhere between boredom and torture. You'd think after all I've done for you, you could at least …”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I haven't finished.”

“Forgive me, Mother.”

She stops, throws up her hand, closes her eyes. “Do what you will,” she says at last, surrendering. Her lips are so thin, so gray-blue. She fits one hand to her worse knee.

“What do you need?” I ask her.

“Some sleep,” she says. “Uninterrupted.”

“All right.”

“We've got half the town library sitting on that table,” she says, sleepy. “If you're bored, it's your own fault. The whole world's right there.”

“Right.”

“Right?” But the fight's gone from her, and the train is soon coming, and I know to wait for it, to throw it nowhere off its tracks. I lift the empty water glass from Mother's hand, set it down beside the tower. I steal a story for myself, the thinnest book. I climb the stealthy outside of the stairs, but by the time I reach my attic space, the alley beyond is empty.