Flying in Place (2 page)

She shivered all over now. “I know lots you don’t know.”

I know something you don’t know. Perfect Ginny, reduced to that game. “Prove it,” I told her. “Tell me something important, something I couldn’t know any other way. Tell me how to get into your room.”

She put a lock of hair in her mouth, chewed on it thoughtfully, blinked, and shivered again. “Aunt Donna and I have the same pajamas.”

“Huh? That’s not what I asked you! Anyway, you can’t even remember names, stupid. You mean Aunt Diane, Dad’s sister in Ohio—”

“Aunt Donna,” she repeated.

“I don’t
have
an Aunt Donna!”

“We bought them at Macy’s,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand again. She looked relieved. “So I’d have something from the store even though I couldn’t go to the parade. I think that’s why I’m here. To tell you that.” And then she turned and walked through the wall again, back into the place I’d never been allowed to go, and I was alone with the lilacs and the venetian blinds. The breathing had stopped, finally. When I craned my head up at the bed I could see my ugly fat body lying there like a rag doll someone had tossed aside. It was time for me to go back, so I could get up and eat breakfast and go to school.

Getting back in was harder
than it had been the other times, as if my body were a piece of clothing that had shrunk in the wash. When I finally made it I felt a searing pain between my legs and the warm stickiness of blood, and I knew why the breathing had been so loud.

He’d never done that before. He’d done plenty of other things, but never anything that would leave any kind of mark, and I’d never thought he’d treat me more carelessly than he’d treat one of his patients.

He was a meticulous surgeon. Everyone he worked with said so, and the most important people in town looked up to him. The local judge always sent us a crate of oranges for New Year’s, because my father had done his prostate surgery. The mayor had invited us over for dinner after my father removed his five-year-old grandson’s appendix.

Even people who disliked him respected him. My father loved to tell the story of how the chief pathologist at the hospital had postponed his gall bladder operation until my father could do it, although they’d hated each other for years. “You’ve earned your arrogance, Stewart. At least I won’t be conscious to listen to you bragging about how elegantly you’re cutting me open.”

My father had answered. “No, but when you come to you’ll have to listen to me bragging about how elegantly I sewed you back up.”

By now, the anecdote was a family joke. Whenever he sliced a ham or turkey, my mother said, “At least it isn’t conscious to listen to you bragging about how beautifully you’re carving it.” But here I was, bleeding. He never would have left a patient bleeding in bed.

“You mustn’t ever tell anyone,” he’d said the first few times he came into my bedroom at dawn, back when I was a very little girl, “because it would kill your mother if she found out that you do more for me than she does.” He’d said it in that sincere, kind voice of his, and then he’d reached under my pajamas and pinched my nipples, hard, one after another.

But even at their hardest, the pinches only hurt for a moment, and doctors always did that, didn’t they? The careful, compassionate hands saying, “This won’t hurt a bit,” and then the sudden pain of the shot, until finally you learn that “This won’t hurt a bit” really means, “This will only hurt a little bit, for a moment, so that you won’t hurt more later on.”

I’d always thought of those pinches as inoculations, guarding against worse pain; and whatever pain he caused me, I certainly didn’t want to find out what would happen if I told Mom or anyone else, any more than I wanted to find out what it felt like to have measles or polio or the pneumonia that had killed Ginny. If my mother knew, it would kill her; he’d said so clearly enough. Ginny’s death had already killed the parts of Mom that would have kept him out of my room at dawn. If she found out and died completely—

No, I wasn’t going to think about that. I had to think about good things instead, so I wouldn’t get scared. I thought about all the people he’d saved, how he’d taught me to swim, how he always managed to carve out the faces I drew on Halloween pumpkins, no matter how complicated I made them.

It had become a ritual; each October 30 I drew the fanciest face I could, and each October 31 my father came home from the hospital wearing scrubs, gloves, and mask, and carrying a case of scalpels. For an hour or so, the kitchen would become an operating room. He wouldn’t let me handle the scalpels because they were too sharp, but I helped him with everything else. “Light!” he’d tell me, and I’d shine the flashlight where he wanted it; “Swab!” and I’d wipe his forehead. The final two commands were always “Candle!” and “Matches!” and the operations were always successful. We won the town Jack O’Lantern contest every year.

Thinking about the pumpkins usually cheered me up, but today the scalpels only reminded me of the blood, so I thought about the balloons instead. When I was seven I’d been stuck in bed with the mumps, and my father had blown up rubber gloves and drawn faces on them with magic marker, so that they looked like grinning animals with stubby legs and tails. One of them broke when I touched it, and I started crying, but my father laughed and said, “Don’t be upset, Emma. I can make another one, see?”

And he did. Because I’d been so little and sick, watching a rubber glove become a happy animal had seemed magical. But today, thinking about my father blowing up balloons only reminded me of the breathing.

Eyes closed, I drank in lilac blossom and clutched handfuls of the pink and yellow woolen afghan Mom had started crocheting when she first found out she was pregnant with me. She’d stopped work on it three months later, when Ginny died, and hadn’t finished it until the brutally cold winter when I was nine. I was careful only to touch the top third of it, which was softer and neater than the rest.

When I opened my eyes the clock said 6:02, almost time for breakfast; but when I sat up the pain nearly made me whimper, despite all the practice I’d had at silence. It was hard to walk without wincing, and the soft cotton of my bathrobe hurt my skin. I limped across the hall to the bathroom and ran a good hot shower. The pain would fade and the blood would wash off, but I was terrified that I might be going crazy. Only crazy people or people in books saw ghosts, and if I’d just dreamed up Ginny to keep me company, why had she said all those things that didn’t make any sense?

I didn’t have an Aunt Donna, and the Macy’s parade was in New York and Mom wasn’t about to let any child of hers set foot in that cesspoool. The only time I’d ever been out of Wisconsin was at Christmas, when we always went to Ohio to see Aunt Diane, who owned a bunch of horses. I liked the horses a lot better than I liked Diane, who looked like a horse and seemed to believe that this put her on a par with British royalty. I had no idea what Diane wore in bed, but I was certain it wasn’t Snoopy pajamas.

Thinking about all this in the shower reassured me, because it meant that maybe I wasn’t crazy, even if I’d started seeing ghosts who said crazy things. By the time I got out of the shower I was ready to pretend that everything was fine. I’d just go to school, the way I always did.

But when I went back into my room the bloodstained sheets were in a heap on the floor, and my mother was putting clean ones on the bed. My father kept telling her she should hire a cleaning lady so she wouldn’t have so much to do, but she said housework relaxed her. My private suspicion was that no one else’s cleaning efforts could have met her standards. Certainly mine didn’t.

I stood and watched her, admiring her grace and efficiency, wishing I could run out of the house before she turned around and saw me. What was I going to say when she asked me where the blood had come from? I’d taken his medicine like a good girl, and I’d never told anyone. I hadn’t told even now, had I? He’d told. The blood he’d left had told; but I was frightened anyway.

If I could think of a way to make it sound poetic, maybe it wouldn’t kill her. She’d told me that poetry had kept her alive after Ginny died, and at school she was infamous for alternating her grammar drills and vocabulary quizzes with lessons about Shakespeare and Tennyson. But she’d never yet given me an A in one of the poetry units. I was too good at grammar and vocabulary, and if I got anything higher than a B in English people would think she was playing favorites. She wouldn’t let me switch teachers because she didn’t think any of the others knew as much as she did, so she just marked me down as far as she could on anything that was open to interpretation.

No, poetry wouldn’t have worked even if I’d had the time to come up with something clever. Maybe I could pretend I’d cut myself. I’d sneak back into the bathroom, where there were razors—

But I didn’t have time for that either, because Mom finished folding the clean sheet over the blanket and tucked both of them under the mattress, and then she turned and saw me standing there. To my bewilderment, she smiled: one of those shy smiles people in movies give their first true love. She was really looking at me, for once, and she didn’t even look disgusted.

“Well,” she said, and took a step towards me, beaming. “Well, you’ve gotten your period. Congratulations.”

I opened my mouth and closed it. “It’s wonderful,” she said, and she looked genuinely happy, and it made her as beautiful as any of the pictures I’d seen of Ginny. “It’s a good thing, Emma, really it is. It means you’re a woman, that you can have children when you want to and add to the sum of the world, your life bound up in tender lives; it means your body is strong and healthy and doing what it was designed to do. Don’t ever be ashamed of that.”

I swallowed. I didn’t have to invent a poetic lie. She’d done it for me. What had I expected from someone who couldn’t even hear the breathing? No wonder I’d started seeing ghosts, in a house where nothing was real anyway, “Oh,” I said, “Well, I’m sorry about the sheets,”

She shook her head. “Don’t be. It’s even a fitting season for it. All the secrets of the spring moved in the chambers of the blood….” She laughed and said, “I guess it’s too early in the morning to be quoting old Alfred, but don’t worry about the sheets. It’s happened to all of us.”

I shuddered. Most of the time she yelled if I got butter on the tablecloth. “Yeah, I guess,”

Normally she would have corrected me: “
Yes
, Emma, I
suppose
so.” But this time she went on as if I hadn’t said anything sloppy at all. “And you’re younger than I was. I was thirteen when I got mine. You’re only twelve. I’ve heard that girls—women—” she laughed again “—are getting it earlier now, because they’re healthier. It’s because of better nutrition.”

Mom had always prided herself on feeding me well, even though it meant I was fatter than my blessed sister. “Ginny was such a picky eater,” Mom would say with a sigh as I polished off a heaping plate. “Light as a bird.” It was some kind of test, as if even though she gave me gobs of food I was supposed to prove my purity and innocence by not eating it all. But I always did, like greedy Laura devouring the faerie fruit in “Goblin Market,” that charming tale Mom had read me at bedtime when I was a little girl and demanded story books instead of anecdotes about Ginny, “Goblin Market” and
Peter Pan
, forbidden fruit and forbidden flight, evil little men and crocodiles lurking to claim the unwary—delightful stuff to dream of until dawn, when the breathing started.

“My mother didn’t get it until she was fifteen,” Mom said, still with that bashful smile, “so there must be something to the nutrition theory. Do you have cramps? How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” I said. My hands were shaking now, despite my efforts to control them. “How old was Ginny when she got her period, Mom?”

The smile disappeared in an instant, replaced by the familiar look of anguish and hatred. Ginny had died before she’d gotten her period, and I knew it, and Mom knew I knew it. If I’d stayed quiet maybe she would have kept smiling; maybe, since I’d finally done something Ginny hadn’t, she would have started noticing me for myself. Maybe she would have said she loved me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, even though it didn’t matter because the entire mess was one big lie. I hadn’t gotten my period at all. “Mom, that was mean. I’m sorry.”

“Never mind,” she said, and bent to pick up the bloody sheets. She shuddered as she touched them, and for a moment I saw the room as she did, filled with garbage: heaps of wrinkled clothing, my motley collection of comics and Nancy Drew books, a stained, lumpy stuffed horse Aunt Diane had given me years ago. There was nothing beautiful in this room, nothing tragic or aesthetic or remotely old-fashioned. I’d rebelled against Mom’s beloved William Morris wallpaper by painting the walls shocking pink, and the only significant decorations were Superwoman posters.

I did have one pretty thing, a Sierra Club calendar my friend Jane had given me, but I kept it on the inside of the closet door so Mom wouldn’t know how much I liked it. It struck me that of all the rooms in the house, this was the one least suited to ghosts. Why wouldn’t Mom let anyone into Ginny’s room? Because it was haunted? But surely she’d have welcomed Ginny’s ghost.