You Are My Only (9 page)

Turn around,
I think,
and see me
, and now I hear the near muffle of somebody crying, and I turn back to the dark and the pink of the floor and the splintering of the beams, and nobody's up here but me.

“I told you,” I say when it is done, when all I want is a fresh Saltine to clear the slosh taste from my mouth.

“Thank God for Julius,” Granger says.

“That's three times this week that someone lost it on my watch,” Bettina says. “I'm in line for better times.”

“You and me both,” Granger tells her, and I try to picture her above me now, but all I can picture are her two eye hyphens. Elevator doors slide open, and Bettina pushes me inside, turns me around, hits 4. There's an old stool below the buttons, and Granger sits, pulls out her file, checks her nail. There's a dark stain on the elevator floor and a quilted mattress above, its ends drooping down like an old cloud, and when the elevator climbs, I feel the sink of the emptiness inside. In the steel face of the doors, I watch Bettina pulling a hoop through the hole in her ear. When the elevator pings and the doors slide apart, it's Bettina who puts her weight against my chair and rolls me through.

“Four thirty-three A,” Granger says now, pulling a piece of paper from the pocket in her skirt.

“This should be interesting,” Bettina says, and we roll, and now the floor is concrete and it's the cracks that hurt and the only thing I see, miles on end, is steel doors with thick windows, steel knobs. At 433, we stop. Bettina slips a bracelet of keys from her wrists, finds the right one, turns the lock. “Welcome home,” she says.

“This isn't home,” I say.

“This is privileges,” Granger says. “Better get accustomed.”

But all I see is the thin nothing of a cot and the long draw of a dark blue curtain that slices the room in two. At the end of the room is a chest of drawers—four fat drawers, one skinny—and on the top of the chest sits a plastic globe wearing a crown of pink goggles.

“Autumn?” Bettina calls, talking to the side of the curtain I can't see.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Autumn. You come say hello.”

“Hello,” I hear, and then whoever she is giggles, her voice squeaking like a horn in tune-up. She doesn't pull the curtains back. I can see nothing but shadows.

“Use your manners, Autumn.”

“I said ‘ma'am,' didn't I?”

“You know what I mean.”

I hear the creak of a bed. I hear another blow of giggles. Finally Granger walks to the curtain and snaps it back, and there Autumn is, standing on her own thin cot in a gray T-shirt and a red puff skirt, throwing a ridiculous curtsy. Through the small round of the window behind her, the sun comes in, and where it hits her hair, there's a burst of yellow orange.

“What happened to you?” she asks me.

“Be nice,” Bettina tells her.

“It's a question,” Autumn says, “is all.” And now she curtsies again, pinches the red puff up into her skinny fingers, cracks her legs at her knees, and says, her voice gone solemn, “Welcome to State.”

I nod, but when I nod, my teeth start to chatter, and now Bettina and Granger, no warning, scoop me up from the chair and lay me down on the cot. The sheets smell like some other person.

“Roomie number seven,” Autumn declares, queen-like, and I close my eyes so that I can't listen, so that everything around me goes to mumbles. All I see is Baby, and how much Baby needs me. Baby and her yellow sock, the little knobs of bone that are her ankles.

“You rest up, now,” Bettina says, stepping away now, seeing Granger out before she closes the door behind her. “And Autumn, you know the rules. Let her be.”

The door shuts. The lock turns. The elevator pings down the hallway. The cot beneath the curtsy creaks. It's Autumn's feet sweeping the floor.

“Lucky you,” she says.

Lucky
me
?

“They got you your own special chair and everything.” She slides into the plastic seat and I peel my left eye open. She's nearly bent in two as she studies the gadgets, her poufy skirt spilling everywhere. She has a Band-Aid on one elbow, a bruise on her knee. “You need a chauffeur?” she asks. “For getting places?”

“I'm not staying here,” I tell her. “Not staying long.”

“Between now and then, then,” she says. As if it's decided.

“Mother,” I say. “Mother, what's wrong?”

“Exhaustion,” she says, like the word is a mile long. She must have iced her knees in the middle of the night, because parts of the La-Z-Boy swim and parts of it leak and the two plastic bags are knocked to the floor like balloons whizzed empty. Her name runs ninety degrees wrong on her cashier outfit. Her collar is crushed and stained. Her hair has gone whiter overnight, the white hair yawning away from her head.

“Have you eaten, Mother?” I ask her.

“Not since yesterday, noon.”

“You have to keep your strength up,” I tell her. “Remember?” I head for the kitchen and the Styrofoam boxes, open the cold oven door. The turkey meatloaf has turned to cardboard in the oven; the potatoes are stones. “Milk?” I ask her, coming back, standing above her, because we have that, we have milk at least, which I can serve her hot or cold. But she says no. “Rice?” I ask. “Tomatoes?” From the people who lived here before.

“Not today, Sophie.”

“I'll go out,” I say, “and get something.”

“You will not.”

“You aren't well, Mother. Let me do something.”

“Just sit here, Sophie. Tell me a story.”

“A story?”

“Didn't you say you were working on Kepler? Read it to me, what you have.”

“Now, Mother?”

“When else? I am your audience.”

She smiles, and her smile is thin blue. She looks at me, and her dark eyes mist. Outside, the crows are busy in the tree and the bees swarm and the acorns are back at their battle, splatting the hard gray slate walk. Mother's next shift is the eight o'clock shift, and here she is, feet up, name crooked, La-Z-Boy growing beneath her like a lake. “We need to get you ready,” I say.

“I'm calling it in.”

“Calling it in?”

“I need a break, Sophie. I can't stand there, with my knees like this, splitting their dollars with change.”

“It's a new job, Mother. It's your work. Don't you say, ‘New job, best effort'? Isn't that your motto?”

“I've done my best, and they'll understand, and if they don't, then it's a big too bad.”

“Too bad for who, Mother?”

“Too bad for
whom
ever. Exhaustion like this, you can't fight it.” She closes her eyes and goes back and forth with her head in the leatherette neck rest, as if she's shaking off a dream or bad weather. She lifts one hand and reaches for me. I pretend that I don't see.

“You'll feel better after you eat,” I say, heading for the pantry, for a box of rice, for the can of soupy tomatoes, a little round rust across the top.

“I need to sleep, Sophie. Sleep. Don't bother in the kitchen.”

“But, Mother.” I grab the rice box and read the instructions. I find the measuring cup, the stick of butter. I pull the pot from the lazy Susan drawer, and Mother calls out to me, “What did I say, now, about bothering?”

“Strength,” I say.

“It'll be like old times,” she says. “You and me, Sophie. A day off. A spontaneous together.”

But it's not old times; it's now. It's the Rudds next door and my heart tugging on lemonade and custard, acacia and Cather, Joey owing me the pitch and the wild sweet of his curls. Mother can't lie here all day, saying she wants Kepler and not wanting Kepler and not planning to keep to her business, which is leaving for work so that I can leave this place, too. She cannot. I spigot the water into the measuring cup, put the pot on the stove, dial around to medium high.

“I'm not eating any rice,” she warns me. “Not at seven in the morning, I'm not.”

“What else, then?” I ask. “Tell me what else.”

“Warm me some milk,” she says. “But not yet. I need to wake to it.”

“You're not awake?”

“I'm resting, Sophie, if you don't mind. As if I haven't earned it. As if …”

“We're halfway to rice here, Mother. According to the instructions.”

“I'd prefer milk,” she says. “Warm. In an hour. Milk, when I'm ready, would be better. Bring me the phone, will you? The cord's long enough for the stretch.”

“You're calling it in?”

“Have you been listening, Sophie? To what I'm saying?”

“You're going to sit here all day?”

“Until I can stand up, I will.”

“But, Mother. What will happen then?”

“Have I not taken care of you, Sophie? From the start, have I not? Have I not earned your trust?”

“But, Mother.”

“Warm milk,” she says. “In an hour.”

The priest in the hills,
I think. The custard like ice cream. Joey to school and Joey home, and my mother sitting here.

When I wake, she's still there, at the end of my cot, haunched up on the wheeled chair, rubbing my casted foot with tiny fingers.

“They were turning blue,” she tells me, meaning the toes, I guess, stuck out over the boot of the cast. I feel little sizzles wherever her fingers go. I feel cold when her touch works away, my teeth still chattering.

“Who are you, anyway?” I ask her, shivering. She's thrown a sweater over her shoulders, a silver sequined thing with all but a lonely button missing.

“Autumn,” she says. “You already forget?”

“I wasn't meaning your name,” I say. I look up, and the ceiling is those ceiling tiles, like school. I look to the walls, which are gray. I look over the sheets, which are brown. I look to the crown of goggles on the globe. I keep the tears where they are, not falling.

“What were you meaning, then?”

“Just, you know: Who?”

She says nothing for a long time, staring—the side of her hair catching the window sun all lit up and the other side curling past her shoulders. She's got freckles in the valleys beneath her eyes and fringe lashes. She's got ears too big for her head. She's the thinnest girl I've ever seen, the part stuck above her elbows thin as the part that swings below.

“I am the luckiest thing that ever happened to you, that's who,” she says, then blows through the horn of her giggle. “Psshhhahh,” she says, shaking her head. “Didn't no one tell you? I'm the only genius at State.”

“The only one?”

She smiles and her smile is a big upside-right U. “I never lie,” she says, raising her arms quick as a surprise, then dropping them quicker so that she can spin herself a whole circle in the chair, like she's been practicing her spin work while I've been sleeping. “Cool wheels,” she says when she's done.

“Wheel's broken.”