You Are My Only (13 page)

Going away, going away, going back, and I am almost home. It was a stream—remember the stream? Emmy, if you can, remember the stream.

“A fighter she is, this Mrs. Rane.”

“Soaked me through.”

“Me, too.”

Mama is pulling an inner tube, pulling me—my bottom wet and my arms spread out, as if my arms are wings. Mama is walking with the water to her knees, the snake of the rope between us making the water striders dance.

Don't move, my love. This is float.

Look at the frogs, eager for sun.

My bathing suit is pink. My bathing suit has a little white belt that I have learned to snap, in and out, like crickets talking.

Emmy,
Mama says.
You're growing up.

Emmy, you are my only.

Emmy, it's just the two of us and the stream.

The sky is leaves. The sky is a lifted sheet of green that won't fall down. The green of peas, the green of grapes, the dark tip green of the beans that Mama snaps between her finger and her thumb. There is a bird making a tree branch heavy, her gray belly bottom like the high back of the sun.

“She's settling now. She won't do harm.”

“Jesus. Still morning. When will this day be done?”

To the sea,
Mama says. She has her flip-flops on. They are yellow but deep in the muck of the stream. They stir up chimneys of fog wherever they go—piles of white water rising. The soft, pale hairs on Mama's legs glisten where they are wet with steam. In the spaces between my fingers and toes, the dark water runs cool in a backward pull. My bottom's sunk in deep.

I could walk forever,
Mama says.

Forever is the sea.

On the banks, the stream runs across the low trunks of the trees. There are shadows beneath the trees and past the trees, and somewhere in the shadows is the chalky path down which Mama and I have come—she carrying the inner tube in the wedge of strength between her arms and ribs, and me in the polka dots of my own flip-flops, the snap and the slap of our feet.
Waiting all winter, all spring for this,
Mama said, and it is still not summer, and sometimes, when the stream bends or the breeze blows, a chill comes in, but in the rubber nest of my inner tube, I snap my belt. The stream is getting bigger now. Stream like a river. It turns over rocks and deeper in my Mama sinks. She hitches her skirt high past her knees and keeps walking.

Close your eyes,
says Mama,
and feel the float. Feel the power of the water rising, running.

There are lilac trumpets on Mama's yellow skirt, and her hem is dark with stream. There are curls at her neck where the hair falls down from the scarf she ties it up with. She hardly bothers with her hair, and even though I am the age I am, I know what it is, who she is: My mama's beauty. Daddy says so, and I think it.

Oh, Lord, Emmy,
she says, and she stops.

Mama, what?

Oh, Lord, Emmy. Look there. Must be lost, the poor thing. In the wrong kingdom.

I look to where she points, to the edge of the stream, where, in the rooty banks, a tall bird stands, soft-feathered, its legs like hollow sticks. Mama stops walking, and the tall bird blinks. She says nothing and it shakes its head, cuts the thick air above the creek with the knife of its beak. I float on and on, on the back of the rising, widening stream. I float, and the snake of the rope between Mama and me curves into itself and tangles, and the creek, still getting bigger, carries me forward, on, but still Mama is plunked down like a tree.

Mama!
I call, but it's too late, and now I am up against the hard back of her pale thighs with the river of a stream pushing us both to the sea. Mama's knees give. I hear the pop and slide of her yellow flip-flops.
Oh,
she says, a startled sound.
Oh, Emmy
, and her body sways, back and forth, her arms like the limbs of a blown-about tree, until finally she shivers down to her knees.
Oh,
she says, and the big bird digs its head into its neck and rolls back the droop of its wings and lifts high. It lifts and its wings are the sky, and Mama spills into the hurry of the stream—the lilac trumpets on her yellow skirt billowing down.

Oh,
Mama says, and she's below me now, tumbled now, the little desperate curls still dry, and I hear another kind of a snap. It's the snake of rope between Mama and me set free. It's me, set free, in the river rising, and the river tightens and deepens; it bends. It's not a stream.

Oh, Emmy. Love.

I turn and see her rising from the muck. I turn and see her reach.

Emmylove.

And the river bends and widens and right at that moment hurries me forward over a table of rocks, and I am sideways to the sea, facing the rooty banks. Behind me, Mama stands and she reaches, but her dress is heavy with the sheen of river and her flip-flop feet are slipping.

You be brave,
she calls out after me, and the river writes itself into a new, twisty shape, and when I turn again, there Mama is, swim-running her way to the riverbanks and pulling herself up in the rooty mud with her bare hands, her bare feet; she's lost her flip-flops. Mama is running. She is barefoot through the shadows of the trees, and I am floating and float-ing with the sizzle of my heart, and the sky overhead is a thin green sheet.

She will run ahead. She will catch me.

Be brave, Emmylove, I am coming.

Mama!

Rescuemerescuemerescueme.

“Oh, good God. Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, no rest for the weary. Calm yourself, Mrs. Rane.”

Mama!

“Corned beef,” Mother tells me, “and sauerkraut. I got us extra.” She's set the two takeouts down and sits while I deal out knives and forks, tear two sheets of paper towels, fold them like napkins. when she pops the lid on her box, the air around us goes sour.

“Still warm,” she says. “we're lucky.”

She chews and chews. I cut my meat into a thousand pieces. I run my tongue across my lips, tasting the sugar snow of Joey.

“What's the matter?” she asks me, looking up at last, then looking down at my hands—slicing the corned beef into pink stew, into thick soup, into paste.

“Maybe I'm not that hungry.”

“And how exactly could that be? You not being hungry?” She lowers her fork and looks at me, suspicious. “It's five fifteen,” she says. “Dinnertime. Aren't you always complaining that you're hungry?”

“Bellyache,” I lie, quick. “Maybe from the old rice. Shouldn't have made it. You were right.”

“You wait this long to tell me?”

“Just started feeling it, a few minutes after five.”

“You wait that long to get sick?”

“It just happened.”

“Don't disrespect me.” She pushes the long parts of her hair over her shoulders. She smoothes the wild eyebrow hairs above one eye. She looks into me like she can see chocolate-chip cookies and sand-tart cookies, Miss Cloris and Miss Helen, Joey and me, the crows in the tree. A twitch starts up in her other eye. “Corned beef not good enough?” she says. “Too big for kraut?”

“That's not it.”

“A bellyache?”

“Coming to think of it,” I say, “I'm already better.” I lift a forkful of kraut to my lips and force it through. I swallow over it and smile. I take a forkful of beef and chew it down, worse than an old eraser. She watches me, takes up her fork, and swallows, suddenly cautious.

“What did you do all day?” she asks now.

“I was reading.”

“Reading what?”

“One of those books.”

“Which book, Sophie Marks? Be specific or stop lying.” Her voice is low and angry, the way it gets before some-thing terrible happens, and if something terrible happens, there will be no stopping it.

“You want to know the truth?” I ask.

“I have been asking you for the truth.”

“I was working on my Kepler, making it perfect.”

“You were, now?”

“I was.”

“I thought you'd finished. Haven't you been saying so—that you finished your Kepler? Haven't you been wanting to read it?”

“Can I be excused, Mother?”

“Excused?”

“To get my Kepler?” My heart is pounding so loud I'm sure she can hear the lie inside it. I'm sure she can see the lie I am. we have to stay here. we can't move—not this time.

“Which is done now?”

“It is. Done and so much better.” I fake my hopefulness so hard that maybe suddenly even I believe that I was home all day, refining Kepler.

“You finish your kraut.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You respect your mother.”

“Emmy, what did they do to you? Where did they take you?”

“Emmy. They do you wrong?”

“Emmy. I'm not leaving you to nothing. You speak to me, you hear me? Unless they cut your tongue?”

“They cut your tongue?”

Someone says it. Someone moans the words.

“There, now,” she says. “At least I got you talking.”

“You?”

“Me?”

“Leave me alone.” My hair is a wet rag. My skin is pickled. My teeth are breaking into chatters. “Please.”

Turning my back to her, facing the door. Pulling the sheet up, up over my head, and the air whizzes from the pillow, no case on this pillow, just stuffing and sack. My broke parts stay crooked, like a busted-up letter
K
—the toes inside my cast still pointing to the ceiling. Now the chair wheels are roll-ing, the flat one going squat. The sheet yanks down. Autumn stares in.

“Hey,” she says.

“Can't you let me be?” Can't you?
Can't you?
I want to scream, and if I scream, they'll do it all again, and I don't scream, and my teeth chatter.

“Tell me what happened.”

There's a scar, like a wrinkle, through her lip. There's a gone slash of flesh above one eye. There's a hatching near her chin, the skin too white. “What happened to you?” I ask. I shiver.

“Me? You're the one who got taken.”

“I don't want to talk about it. Can't you see? Not talking.”

“Was it the cleanse?” She's shifted again, come closer, is stroking a stray strand of hair away from my face. Staring the blue sky of her eyes through me, and something softens, and I nod, and that's all, and the tears riot through, but I do not holler. I do not make a ruckus. I will never make a ruckus again.

“I hate that,” she says. “I
hate
the cleanse.” Stroking my hair, combing it through, the wet knots and tangles stiffening.

“They've done it to you?”

“'Course they have.”

“And you're still here?”

“And bored straight out of my own genius mind.” Her lips turn up and the wrinkle vanish-folds. A tear appears in one corner of her eye.

“What's the purpose of it?” I whisper, shivering, pulling the sheet around me hard. “The cleanse, I mean.”

“To make us peaceable,” she says, but saying it makes her cry. Big tears from both of her eyes, and now she climbs down out of the chair and lies beside me, her forehead to my forehead, her hand taking my hand. “I remember peaceable,” she says. “Do you? Think peaceable, Emmy.”

“Like the old jigsaw puzzle?”

She almost laughs. “You had one, too?”

“The Peaceable Kingdom,” I say. “One thousand pieces.”

“‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them,'” she says, and I think of Mama, and I think of our afternoons, the floppy card table with the foldaway legs, the hundreds and hundreds of puzzle pieces, and Autumn, younger than me, puzzle piecing, too—sometime, long ago, who knows how long, or where, and what secret. I don't think Autumn will ever tell me her secret. I wait. I wait. Nothing.