You Are My Only (20 page)

“What else was in there?”

“Photographs. Baby toys. Little plastic hangers. Juggling puzzle pieces.”

“That all?”

“Didn't have time but to grab one thing.”

“The Book of Thoughts,”
he says.

“Would you read it?”

“Me?”

“The way you read to Miss Helen?”

“Right here? Like this?”

I reach to pull a leaf from his hair. I reach again to kiss him. “I'd feel better,” I say, “hearing it from you.”

“All right,” he says, leaning closer.

I trade my plank for his and crush beside him.

“‘
The Book of Thoughts
,' ” he reads. “Page one. ‘we love in our own ways.' ”

“That's all of page one?”

“That's all she put there.”

He reads the way he reads.

I close my eyes to listen.

We love in our own ways.

The sky was blue, and it was easy.

I wanted to die. They wouldn't let me. I wanted home. There was no home. And after that, when it was done, after it all, then I had nothing. We love, and it's gone up in smoke.

There was no one who could understand. I went from town to town, then stopped. I worked the Clock and Watch. I took my hour off ahead of noon and walked the back streets, empty, and the sun was a flame, and it was the fault of the streets being empty. It was the fault of whoever had left you. It was the fault of them not knowing that children left untended die. I worked the Clock and Watch. I was walking the neighborhood streets, which were sun-blazed and empty. Your hands in the grass were pale and pudgy. You had been left to the weather.

I wore white, a mother's color. The sky was blue, and it was easy.

We love in our own ways.

I ran where she had run. I fit my footprints into hers—down the stairs, across the courtyard path, between the benches piled with snow and the half-wall of azaleas, like animals with crystal fur, past the red jag of the scarf in the snow. The end of the night was the beginning of day. The sky was fuzzy. Now the footpath was Carter Road, and the road turned, and to one side was the brick face of a long, low building, the black spirals of escape stairs, the smoking chimneys, and to the other was the wild slope of iced grass and white stones. Beyond the field was the dark hem of far trees, and hanging from the limbs of the trees were bottles and cans catching glints from the sun that was still rising.

“Autumn!” I kept calling. “Autumn!” Her name freezing in the air before me, then snapping back. My bad leg was a thin pole. My feet were blue in the snow. “Autumn!” Her note in my pocket, her words in my head, her practicing—our practicing—to be free. And now the narrow road turned, and the plowed snow was banked to either side, and the highway was up ahead. In the dawn before me was the globe. Africa, North America, Asia, the constellation of spilled pills—how many, I wondered, had she slipped into the guard's cup, and how,
how
had she done it?—and still the footsteps were running between the treads of tires in the snow. I could hear a bus chuffing up ahead, the honk and blare of cars in a hurry to get anywhere but State. I could smell the burn of tires against the slick of snow, the fumes burning through, and I knew before I got there, before I saw the long, angry knot of traffic, the rounding red and blue of the police cars, the hard heart of the ambulance, with its doors slamming closed. “Autumn!” I was screaming. “Autumn!” And she was locked inside, and the siren lit up, and she was gone. There was a man and a woman, a car pulled to one side, its headlight shattered. There were the goggles, where she'd dropped them, to the ground.

Emmy, I will find him. He will help us.

“No! No! No!” I screamed. But the ambulance drove off, and Autumn was gone.

“There's something else,” Joey says, and he's holding me now, both his arms around me, his back against the wall, my back into him, and in his hands a page of yellowed newsprint that had fallen from
The Book of Thoughts
to the fluffed-pink floor.

“I don't understand,” I say over the hard knuckle of my throat, and he hugs me for a long time and says nothing, and now he turns the newsprint in the square of window sun and reads: “ ‘Infant Stolen in Broad Daylight.' ” There's a picture of a baby. There's the baby's mother, her eyes round and big like the baby's. “Manhunt Continues,” the smaller headline reads. “Mrs. Rane could not be reached for comment.”

She stands too straight in the spine, as though she is stacked inside with secrets. She folds and crouches close.

“There is news,” Bettina says.

I turn in my bed and say nothing. I stare at her through the glass of my eyes. She has come every night, so many nights, since Autumn died, her goggles the only important something she left behind. She has come again tonight, claiming news. She reaches for my hand. I let her take it. She wears her cross again, touches it with her free fingers, stares into the night, into the wild and ruined world.

The night is shiver cold. The air is crystals. Bettina pulls the blanket to my chin.

Autumn never told me her secret, I want to say. I must confess. I cannot bear it. Because it was my secret that stole her, that took her from me; her cot is empty.

“We have had our conference, Emmy,” Bettina says now, after so much silence has passed between us. “We are agreed.”

“You are agreed,” I repeat, the words dull in my mouth.

“Dr. Brightman will meet with you tomorrow. He'll explain.” She exhales, and the air goes white.

“Explain what?” I ask.

“Impeccable behavior. Consistent self-care. Responsible. Trustworthy. No episodes. I wrote a report. Miss Banks wrote a report. Even Granger wrote a report. Dr. Brightman has been watching, and he listened.”

I shake my head, don't understand.

“Your freedom, Emmy.”

“My freedom?”

“There'll be rehabilitation, of course,” she says. “Steps to take. A process. But you'll be free. They will release you. You will have your old life back.”

“I will never have my old life back.”

“You have earned your wings.”

“Listen to me,” I say. “Listen. I have got no place to go. What good is releasing?”

“You will make your own home, Emmy. You'll be taught how. You'll get a job. Vocational will help you.”

“But,” I say.

“This is an opportunity,” she says.

And she holds my hand, holds it like Mama would have.

“My heart is broke,” I say.

The knock comes in the middle of the night and keeps on coming—a smash against the door, a pounding like an animal running. “Cheryl Marks,” the voice calls. “open up.” And I can hear Mother in her room, creaking off her bed, creaking on the floorboards, her bad leg dragging. “Jesus,” I hear her saying. “oh, sweet Jesus.” And now she's calling to me in an edge of broken whisper, “You keep to yourself, Sophie. You let me handle this.” And still she's walking in circles, dragging her leg, and the smashing comes faster, harder, and they'll break the door to nothing; they will bang through it, blow the house down, and Mother's on the stairs calling, “I'm coming,” in her best official voice. “I'm coming.” She walks the loud middle of the steps, turns the corner on the landing, and when she descends again, takes the last flight of stairs down, I crawl from my bed and head to my door and go as far as I can without her seeing, my head hanging over the rail now as she drags across the living-room floor. The banging stops, and the mix-up of voices, and now there's the flame of flashlights against the back wall, a spiking flicker that slowly settles until the downstairs is aglow, and my mother's shadow and their shadows bulge and shrivel on the illuminating wall, and Miss Cloris is among them. It's her square shadow. It's her puffs of hair, her shape behind the others. There are three of the others, and there is my mother, and there is Miss Cloris, and my mother is screaming, “Don't touch me!” and the voices, the men, are saying, “Calm yourself, Mrs. Marks. we have some questions.”

“
You
have some questions?” she shouts back. “Barging in here in the middle of the night?”

“It has come to our attention.”

“What has?”

“We are speaking of a serious crime.”

“Sleeping in one's own house is a crime?”

“If you'd just come with us, down to the station.”

“I have work. The first shift. In the morning.”

“Mrs. Marks.”

And now there's the shuffling of paper, and one of the men walking toward her, and now she's growling, “where did you get that? wherever did you.…?” Her voice like a knife scraping a plate, and I think of Joey, scrambling down the tree,
The Book of Thoughts
tucked into his shirt, the stolen infant, the promises he was making—“They'll know what to do; they always do.” And I think of my mother, at dinner tonight, the long sorrow in her eyes and the thieving in her and her not knowing that I was knowing, that Joey'd read her words:
The sky was blue, and it was easy. We love in our own ways.
“what's the matter with you?” my mother demanded, impatient. “You aren't eating, and it's store-bought, too.” And I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't swallow, and I held my hand against my chest, so that all the broken pieces of my heart wouldn't bleed the space between us.
The No Good is you,
I wanted to say.
You running from you, you taking me with you.
And it was right here all along, and if white is a mother's color, what is my mother wearing? where is she—my real, true mother? Be good.

“Calm yourself, Mrs. Marks,” they're saying. “we'd like to take you downtown, ask you some questions.” But she's growling at them now. She's kicking and I see it all in the spike lights on the wall, see the biggest man of the three taking her elbow into his hand, and the other coming up to her other side, and Mother insisting, “You ask me right here,” and someone saying, “You have the right …” And all this time, Miss Cloris is a tilted shadow on the wall, and finally it's Miss Cloris who says, “Let's not forget what is most important here.” My mother is being wrestled down. There's the sound of chains and key, and she's growling, my mother, demanding to know who Miss Cloris is and what she's speaking of and is she the owner of the infernal dog and if there's any trouble on this street, it starts with that wolf barker, and over this and through it, Miss Cloris is saying, “Let's not forget why we are here. The child's name is Sophie.”

“There is no such thing,” my mother spits. “No such one.” And the men hold her back, and the blare lights tangle, and I am going to be sick. I'm going to throw up on the floor, and suddenly I hear a long terrible howling, worse than animal, worse than jungle, or Mother, and it is my own stolen self, and I am ashamed, found out, and I can't stop howling.

“Will someone let me through!” Miss Cloris is saying, “For God's sake, she is a child.” And now I hear her wide feet on the stairs and her, breathless, coming for me, and I feel her arms around me, her hands in my hair. “Sophie. Love.” And it's all I can do to lift my arms up to her, to let her hold me, to take every ounce of goodness from her, which is every square and cell.

“Miss Cloris,” I sob, and she says, “I know, my love.”

And I say, “But I was stolen from.”

And she says, “It isn't right. But we're here now. we're here to help you.”