Rise (21 page)

She'd come for him any second now. They'd walk together out the door and drive into the desert. They'd take the highways where the prospectors went a hundred years before. Where the Indians fought their battles and left behind their tears. She'd talked about how the dunes looked just as the sun goes down.
The sand is soft as powder
, she said.
It changes with the wind
. Her eyes were gold and she reached for him, and sometimes she held his wrist so tight her fingertips left bruises.

There wasn't any lock on Jesse's door. He set a chair beneath the knob how they did it in the movies. He tilted it until the fit was tight, and then he turned off all his lights. He went inside his fort where it was darker still. He sat in there and waited, and he could hear the beating of his heart. He waited some more, and a golden light was shining through the blanket walls. He poked his head out and looked. It came from the doorway and the window. It came from the stone
that was sitting on his desk. It moved like firelight against the walls. It flickered and cast strange shadows.

There were footsteps in the hallway and the sound of something heavy being pulled across the floor. The screen door opened with a bang. It opened and closed, and more footsteps came and they stopped right outside his room. The light was getting brighter. Jesse stood up and went to the door. He wanted to cover his eyes. The knob began to turn. Russell was standing on the other side. Jesse could see the shadows from his boots in the crack beneath the door.

Jesse reached for the knob. He felt it turn inside his hand. He squeezed it harder, with all the strength he had, and Russell was breathing on the other side of the door. The planks creaked under his boots. They stood like that, the two of them, and Jesse didn't let go. He held the knob even after it had stopped turning. After the shadows were gone from under the door and Russell had started up his truck. The room went dark and the stone did, too. The dishwasher finished its cycle.

Jesse was still holding the doorknob when the policemen came. It was warm outside, but they covered his shoulders with a blanket. Two cruisers with their lights flashing and they took him to the station. They let him take the stone along, and it was cold inside his hand. A lady doctor came and asked him questions. She wanted to know about school and his mom and his favorite TV shows. She bent down beside his chair. “I hear you know about crystals,” she said. “They tell me you're an expert,” but he didn't open his hand for her. He didn't let her see it.

B
abies weren't frightened of her face. They didn't yet know sickness. They saw only her eyes, how big they were. There was a baby girl before her in the aisle. A little round-faced girl, no older than two. Her ponytail went straight up like a paint brush, and her mother had tied a pink ribbon around it. The girl stood up on the seat while her mother read magazines. Angela smiled at her. She set aside her book and covered her eyes with her fingers and uncovered them again. The little girl giggled at that. She grabbed the fabric of the headrest and squealed. She reached for Angela and for the stewardess who was pushing the drinks cart up the aisle. Her mother patted her on the bottom.
Felicia Marie
, she said.
You better hush. People are trying to sleep
. The girl squealed again, and her cheeks were dimpled and shiny like apples. The mother looked between the seats then. Her face went dark when she saw Angela.
Get down here, young lady
, the mother said.
Get down here right now
, and she moved quickly. She pulled her little girl away from the headrest. She held her baby against her chest. She held her there and didn't let her squirm.

The roundness in Angela's cheeks went first. Her skin went from olive to yellow. She'd spent all those mornings on her deck, but the sun didn't warm her, not even in September when LA was hottest. She'd shivered and watched the neighbor kids splash around in the pool.
They worked their squirt guns and wrestled in the water, and they were happy even when their parents fought. How little children need to be happy. How little it takes, and still things go wrong. She watched them all summer and into fall, and the roundness was gone and from one day to the next the veins popped out on her forearms. Her hands were spotted like her grandma's had been. Liver spots, grandma called them, and Angela had wondered why.

Her belly grew round like a pregnant lady's. Like Mr. Hogan from the old neighborhood who drank beer every morning and tossed the cans onto his wife's compost heap. In the last few weeks the bones in her throat had started to show. There was a hollow between them, and her mother would notice this right away. She'd see it and know. Thirty years married to a U.S. soldier, and her mother still thought like a German farm girl. She'd been right about Angela's father. She knew he was sick from the smell of his breath.
He's got the mark
, she'd said. She knew it months before the doctors did, and she'd see the mark on Angela now, too. Her girl who'd been pretty once. She should be a model, that's what all the people said. And what did it matter. Every day brought another loss, and her prettiness was the least of them. It fell away like the burden it was.

Her mother was waiting at the luggage carousel. She carried the same winter coat, the extra one she kept for guests because it was cold even in November. Angela didn't remember that old plaid coat until she saw her mother standing there in her winter boots. She'd brought it along every Christmas when Angela came home from college.
Look how you're dressed
, she'd say back then.
You're always in short sleeves. You need to cover up
. Angela would pretend she didn't feel the wind when they went through the sliding glass doors. She'd say she was warm in her sandals or the loafers she wore without socks. Anything was better than letting her mother be right.

The coat smelled like mothballs. It was years between visits now. Years when it used to be months. Her mother walked too quickly at first. Angela couldn't keep up, and the air outside was sharp in her throat. It squeezed her chest. She'd forgotten how thin the air could be up here. This was probably how fish felt when they were pulled
from the water. She slowed and stopped and set her hand against the retaining wall where the juniper bushes grew. Her mother stopped, too. She came close and fixed the collar on the old plaid coat. She took her scarf off and wrapped it around Angela's neck, and her eyes were black when she spoke. “You need to cover your mouth,” she said. “The wind's picking up. All those years in California and you've forgotten how it blows.” They walked slowly to the car. Her mother always parked in one of the farthest spots, out by the long-term lot. There were patches of ice in places. Angela slipped and caught herself, and the mountains were dark already against the sky.

Her bed was the same and the feather quilt, but her books were gone and most of her posters and ribbons. Her mother had packed these things in plastic boxes and set them in the closet. The bookshelves were full with her mother's art books now and porcelain figurines, and up at the top there was the yellow book of fairy tales her mother had brought from Germany. She'd read it to Angela when she was little. She read to her in German, and Angela understood. Struwwelpeter with his wild hair and Hans im Glück who was happiest when all his gold was lost. She knew the stories and her mother's voice, and that was the last thing she heard that night and the first thing in the morning.

Her body was healthy in every way but one. She wasn't even forty and her heart was healthy and her lungs were clear and everything was perfect except for the thing that wasn't.

She held a cup of tea in her lap. Whitethorn and lemon balm because they were good for the circulation, that's what her mother told her. Her mother had set the redwood chaise in the middle of the yard. She'd brought out blankets, too, and wrapped them around Angela's knees. It was almost forty degrees out, and it felt even warmer. The sun was shining on her head. It was bright as California outside, mountain bright, and she should have worn her sunglasses. Two little girls played in the front yard at the old Meyer house. They tunneled into
the melting snow. One of them was wearing a skirt without any tights, and even from across the street Angela could see the pink of her legs.

The Meyers had moved years before and who knew what happened to Patty, fat Patty who was round as a bowling ball but completely flat-chested. They called her Fatricia at school. Angela did, too. Only once but it was wrong and she knew it even then. She did things when she was young as if she had no choice. A couple of the girls painted Patty's face one day in gym class.
Close your eyes
, they'd told her.
Stand real still
, and Patty waited for them to make her pretty. Calm as a Buddha while she stood there by the mirror. She waited for them to melt the eyeliner. They used Bic lighters back then to get the flow just right, and Angela didn't want to look. She put her jeans back on, those extra-slim Jordache jeans that cut high across her waist. She combed her hair and waited by the lockers for the bell to ring. They were working on Patty's eyes. They nudged each other and laughed at the enormous arches they drew and the red circles they put across her cheeks, and Angela saw it all and she didn't stop them and she didn't say a thing, not even to Patty who stood there with a crooked dreamy smile. She left before Patty opened her eyes. She went out of the locker room and into the courtyard where the smokers waited between classes.

The little girls were running circles now. They shouted and poked their fingers through the links of the fence. Their mother was looking out the living room window. She held a baby against her shoulder. Angela waved to be neighborly. She raised her hand and the woman waved back without knowing who Angela was and then she called her girls inside. It was dinnertime.
It's getting colder
, she told them.
Quit your running and come
. She hustled them in and shut the door.

Angela leaned back against the chair. The lights went on in all the houses and she should be getting inside, but she stayed because the evening air smelled like winter. Like pine needles and chimney smoke. Somewhere a dog barked and another answered, and she held her cup and looked at the old Meyer house which hadn't been painted in years. The screens hung away from the windows in places. The house looked tired and the street, too, and the sky was pink above them with fading traces of the sun.

•

Her mother talked about transplants in the evenings. This was their routine. They sat together in the kitchen, and her mother said Angela needed to get on the list.
It's time
, she said, and she touched Angela's wrist where it was swollen.
We've waited long enough
. Angela leaned back in her chair. Look how small her hands were, her mother's hands with their bent fingers. She talked about alternative therapies, about a tree in Costa Rica with medicinal qualities in its bark, about Chinese herbs that stimulated the liver. There were mysteries in the world the doctors didn't know, and Angela said
yes, yes, you're probably right
, and her mother held her wrist. Her fingers left marks, indentations like dimples that took hours to fade.

They'd taken peginterferon together three times a week. Peginterferon via subcutaneous injection and ribivarin pills because the combination worked in fifty percent of people. They soaked the sheets with their sweat. They shivered and nothing warmed them and they were burning from inside. Forty-eight weeks of treatment and they lay together in bed unable to wash themselves or change the TV channel. Forty-eight weeks sicker than they'd ever been and none of it helped and none of it mattered and it felt so good to stop.

Thanksgiving weekend they went together to see her father. It was time to change his flowers. The sun had no mercy, her mother always said. Even in winter it faded their colors. Angela wore her coat in the car. They drove out past the old high school and the Citadel Mall where she'd spent every Friday with her friends, and she'd stolen a radio there once. She'd walked right through the doors. Past the city park and those red rocks in the distance where the Indians saw spirits. Clouds were blowing in from the mountains. She shielded her eyes from the blue of the sky. Things were beautiful, and she hadn't known. She'd thought only of leaving when she was young. She'd marked off the days until graduation because the coast was waiting. She'd follow the sun west and watch it set over the water, and all she'd done was trade one sort of beauty for another.

Her mother patted the headstone the way she used to brush his jacket. She was smoothing down his shoulders and whispering in his ear. She was someplace else, and Angela watched her from the car. She didn't want to walk that cemetery path. She never got out, not even in high school when her father was freshly buried. The markers made her uneasy, and his section used to be so empty and now it was almost full. There were soldiers buried there who'd died in Vietnam and in the Gulf, and they looked so young in their pictures. Earnest and sweet-cheeked as high school boys. Her mother set silk poinsettias in the pots on either side of the stone. She arranged them, and her scarf blew around in the wind. It wasn't like the graveyards in Europe. She'd said this many times. People didn't tend to their dead. The city didn't let the families grow roses or plant tulips for the spring, and the silk flowers were pretty but they weren't the same. Graveyards need something living and not just plastic and silk.

The car was getting cold. Angela rubbed her hands together and looked along the rows. Other cars were driving through. People were bringing pinwheels and fresh flags, and one lady had a plastic Santa Claus sitting in a sleigh. They decorated the graves and swept the snow off the stones, and she should have visited Gary more often. She should be more like her mother and set flowers on his grave.