You Are My Only (19 page)

“I don't know,” I say, my heart so crazy that I'm sure she'll hear the wild thrash of it now, the bad inside it, the fear.

“Where did it come from?”

I shrug, lean away from her stare. “From cleaning?” I say, the first lie that comes to mind.

“From cleaning what, Sophie?”

“From behind the curtains, maybe? From when I was dusting your salts and peppers?”

“Those curtains are blue.”

“I don't know,” I say. “I really don't.”

She balances the pink on the palm of her hand and lifts it higher, as if it's some formula she's captured, a new Archimedean solid. “odd,” she says now. “Very.” In a cold, shattering voice that decides nothing. I turn and curl my knees toward my chin. I close my eyes as if I'm considering more sleeping. I feel the touch of her finger on my shoulder.

“No more,” she says, “of that. The day has started.”

“Okay.”

“I'm going out, but not for long. we're short on supplies.”

I stay still, not speaking.

“Sophie?”

“Yes?”

“I want you out of this bed and up and ready.”

“Mother?”

“We'll have work to do when I get back.”

I nod.

“And take a shower,” she says. “You're smelling funny.”

I run the loud center of the stairs and down into the front room. I tear through the kitchen, past the sinking icosahedron, into the laundry room, past the machines. My shampooed hair sits heavy on the bones of my shoulders. My sweatshirt falls baggy past my waist. The door to the basement rasps at its hinges and sucks at the air, and the web above my head floats loose.

I take the stairs one plank at a time, turn the square corner, see the dolls and the cars and the toys and the first box, flat as a brown carpet—everything as I left it, a dangerous wreck. There's no time for fixing. There's only time for my mother's second box of personals, which sits on the shelf above the ghost of the first—a Magnavox box with the FRAGILE signs pointing up, and the brown tape more shiny and steadfast. I pull it toward me, tug at the first loose tab of tape that I find. The cardboard tears; a seam pops. I dig my fingers under the second line of tape, and the box gapes, and my head hurts, and I catch my breath, knowing that I can stop this if I want to. I can still not know, can still be half of good, can not break this rule, not know these secrets.

But it's too late, too far. There was an attic and a window and acorns going splat. There was a boy with a ball and a dog, two aunts. There was my inside and their inside and all I never knew and all I ever wanted, and now I'm here, my knees sunk to the cool of the basement floor, my hands pulling at the box flaps, my lungs sucking in all the air they can hold, to power up my heart. I find scrapbooks, baby books, a curl of soft, blond hair. I find photographs and a puzzle board—the wooden shapes of hats and shoes. I find tiny hangers for tiny dresses and an orange tin of buttons and one yellow sock and Candy Land pieces and a photograph of my cat Chap and a felt bag of blocks and books never returned to the library after all, books still in their shiny, crackling covers, and a book of her own,
The Book of Thoughts.
I find toy tops and toy bananas and toy purses and plastic lipstick and a pair of train tickets and a pair of big shades and an umbrella no bigger than a doll would hold and a second photograph of Chap. My mother's second box of personals is the history of me—as if I am alive but the past of me isn't, as if everything I came from is part of shame or hush. I feel a hot, heaving sickness in my gut. I feel my mind too heavy with mystery to understand. To know what it means, to take it all in, to be here by myself.
Maybe we should come with you
, Miss Cloris said, and I'm wishing that I'd let her, that I wasn't here alone, that I had other people's courage with me, and other people's knowing.

“Sophie,” I hear now. “You down there?”

“Mother?” I call up. My heart stops.

The top light snaps on and the door rasps and I hear Mother take one wobbling step down onto the plank. “what in the world,” she's asking, “are you doing down here?” and there are stones in her voice, a cold coldness. I take
The Book of Thoughts
and stuff it up beneath my sweatshirt, spring from my knees. I hurry over cars and dolls, run up the stairs, stand on the square turn, halfway.

“I was looking for the broom,” I say, and even I can hear how thin and breathless I sound, how unreliable. “The one with the dustpan.”

“But the broom's up here,” she says tightly. “In the closet.”

“I guess I forgot,” I say, certain that she can hear my tumbling heart from where she's standing, can see the thickness of things beneath my sweatshirt, can guess at how frightened I am that she will try to move past me—turn the corner, look down, see what I've done.

“what has gotten into you, Sophie Marks?” she demands. She holds herself steady with both of her hands, one fist each around the railing above the planks. The spiderweb trembles with every word she speaks. She glances up, then glances back down, looks into me.

“I wanted to clean,” I tell her, and it's like the truth, all of a sudden, as if she has no right to doubt me, as if the only lies between us are her lies, stuffed into boxes.

“You already cleaned.”

“But not with the broom,” I say. “And I couldn't find it.”

“Now, isn't that odd?” she says, and she stares at me for the longest time, black heat in her dark eyes and hurt in the way she stands, and suddenly I realize that she's tipping back, that she's losing balance, that she might stand on these steps and fall.

“Mother!” I call, and by the time I run the planks, she has tumbled to the landing—fallen back instead of forward, a shuddering sound that breaks the web from the rafters and sends it drifting into my arms, reaching for her.

“Now look what you've done,” she says, pushing me away and steadying herself, looking hurt and small and full of indecision, as if she can't decide what to believe and she cannot keep her balance, and I feel sorry, all of a sudden—sorry for her knees, sorry for her hiding, sorry that she does not choose to trust me. That my past is not my past, but hers. That every single day she's been lying.

“Mother.”

“The groceries,” she says, pulling herself up now, so slowly by the thin rails of the basement, with the white fists of her hands. “would you mind putting them away? I've left them on the counter.” Her words are stiff and far away. She looks unwell and dizzy.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“We don't need that kind of cleaning.”

“Okay.”

“When you're finished, you come and find me.”

When I wake, Autumn's gone. I don't need to open my eyes to know it. It's how the air feels less alive. It's how I am the only one who's breathing. It's what I don't smell, and what I do smell, which is fear.

“Autumn?” I say. “Autumn?” I yank the thin sheets off, pull my sweater from the drawers, see how the globe and the goggles have gone missing, how Autumn's bed is rumpled, empty. Autumn! I reach for the lamp and pull the chain, and in the hard light I see the note she's left me, written across the chest of drawers with a crayon stolen from Crafts.
Emmy, I will find him. He will help us.

I turn, and there's the train on the sill. I tear through the sheets, through the drawers, but the envelope's gone, Arlen's address and handwriting, and Autumn is gone, and it is not yet dawn. “Autumn!” I cry, and I am across the room and through the door and running, my good leg, my bad leg, my feet bare, the sound of my weight on the tiles. It's dark and empty in the long hall, and only Julius is here, running his mop across the floor. “You see her?” I ask him, and he shakes his head no, and still I'm running, calling her name, banging my hand against the red down of the elevator button—one two three four five one two three—until it pings and the doors glide open, glide closed. Four. Three. Two. One. When the door pings open again, I run down the long hall past the pale windows, past the courtyard, which is piled high with snow. “Autumn!” I call, and the guard at the front desk is sound asleep over his
Daily News
, his feet up on the desk, his head thrown back, as though somebody went and put pills in his cup. Somebody could have.
I have him under my spell.
Autumn? I remember the globe of pills. I think of her note upstairs. I think of Autumn wanting to be free every single day. And with every second that passes, the sun is rising, and through the door now, the heavy panels of glass, I see footprints, fresh, in the snow, across the spoking paths. I see the scarf, a slash of red, against the white.

“Autumn!” I cry, and the guard doesn't stir. I reach the door. I yank it hard. And I am running.

“She found you?” Joey's saying. “when you were down there?”

“Never been so scared.”

“And then she fell? Backward?”

“Like she was fainting, but she wasn't. She was all down on the floor and then all come-to, telling me to put the groceries away, and then to go find her, and when I found her, she was on the La-Z-Boy, and she wouldn't look up; she wanted nothing. She'd been to the library, and the old books were gone—all the math and science. She was fast asleep. She's sleeping now.”

“You sure?”

I nod, trace my fingers down the long scratch of Joey's arm, a twig scratch, wrist to elbow. He has leaves in his hair, like he is wearing a costume, instead of the cap he mostly keeps on his head, and he called me Rapunzel when he climbed inside, and then he leaned down and he kissed me, the salt and sweet of peanuts, long and out of breath from all the climbing, the reaching for me and me for him, and then he remembered that he'd brought me a brownie, which was Ziplocked in his pocket and shaped like squish from the climb. “They're sending their love,” he said, and then he said that he couldn't stay long, and besides, he was afraid of my mother waking up and climbing the stairs, and everything he said, he said in a whisper, which is harder than talking and more tiring, too.

“Couldn't ever make it up those attic stairs,” I promise. I whisper, too. I know the risks we are taking.

“But what if she hears us?”

“I'll say it's mice that I was chasing.”

“You have it all planned out?”

“Contingencies,” I tell him, sounding braver than I feel. “The old what-ifs.”

“I guess.”

He stands there, balanced on his attic plank, tall, with pitcher's arms and curly, leaf-stuck hair. I stand here, two feet on my plank, in worn-down jeans, my sweatshirt strings too tight at my neck. when Joey leans, I lean and his lips are mine, his breath is my breath is his breath. “Share it?” I ask, pulling back, meaning the brownie, but he says he's had plenty already, and dinner is soon, besides, and when I pull the squish from the Ziploc and break a piece and put it on my tongue, it's a beautiful melting moistness like none I've ever had.

“I found something,” I say when my tasting and swallowing is done.

“What did you find?”

“
The Book of Thoughts
. In the personals. In the basement.” I rustle my hand up into the folds of my sweatshirt and pull the book into the light that comes in through the window. It's a thin paper thing, hardly any writing to it. I flip through it, then snap it shut, and close my eyes, and keep breathing.

“It's five sentences,” I say. “or six.”

“That all? That's all her thoughts?”

“I'm not really sure,” I say. “exactly. Some of her thoughts. I guess. At least.”

“Looks old,” Joey says, looking from me to the book, which I've placed on the sill. “And rained on.”

“Box has got a date on it,” I say. “November 1995.”

“At least that old, then.”

“At the very least.”