The Blue Girl (15 page)

I
PROMISED
. THAT
'
S THE FIRST THING I THINK WHEN I
get upstairs and on the computer. Mama asked me to promise, and I did. But I don't know if it's a promise I can keep.

Mama did not swear she would stop going. Why should I promise if she won't? Why should Mama be the only one to see her?

I start clicking. I move the mouse and click and breathe, in and out, in and out, trying to feel if there's a wheeze in my chest, too, if there's a pulmonary obstruction, because I suddenly feel like coughing for a long time until I can't cough anymore, until there's no air left inside me.

Until I turn blue. Like her. Because who's to say, really, that I couldn't? Maybe there was a time when she wasn't blue. Maybe she was once like us, like me, just a girl with too many thoughts and too many words who one day coughed and coughed and coughed herself blue.

It could happen, I think, as I click and cough, cough and click. It could happen to me. It could happen to any of us. Except Audrey. Audrey, I think, is now above becoming blue. Impervious to it. Audrey has had her mouth on the girl's mouth twice now. Twice she's saved her, and you'd think, you'd really think that kind of contact would turn anyone blue, if anything could. But not Audrey. There is something different about Audrey since the girl came and Audrey started saving her. Maybe I have it wrong altogether. Maybe Audrey's the one most likely to turn blue.

I click. I click and click and click.

            
See bluish coloration

            
Rapid onset of wheezing

            
Pulmonary obstruction

            
Chronic coughing

I click and think, click and cough, click and think and cough some more. There has to be a better word for blue skin. There just has to. But how to describe her? I close my eyes and try to see the flash of her moving past the car and into the lake, but I didn't get a good look. After all that, after Greg kept on with all the fucks and even Rebecca told him to stop, all I remember is the splash.

Inky
, I think. I type it in and hold my breath.

            
Inky skin

It comes back:

            
No results for inky skin. Consider narrowing your search.

I type in new searches and click and click and click on them, each one, until the lists gets longer and longer.

Then I try:

            
Signs of death

I cough some more. Then I try:

            
Signs of impending death

It's a word I like.
Impending
. That's how everything feels now, like the whole world is impending.

            
There are two phases of death: the pre-active and the active phase. In the pre-active phase, the patient may appear confused or detached. Conversation may become impossible. Patient may begin to refuse visitors, even loved ones, during this phase, and may also refuse food and drink.

But she still eats moon pies. This I know.

I click on active phase.

            
When a patient moves into the active phase of dying, the skin of the extremities or torso area often turns bluish (see
mottled skin
). The nail beds may also appear blue, as will the lips and area surrounding the mouth. Oxygen pools to the major organs
(heart, lungs, liver) and may cause the skin to appear blue or even purple.

The smell of the burnt chocolate keeps coming from downstairs as I sit at the screen and read it over and over. I wish I could have seen her up close, the way Audrey has, but it was so dark that night in the woods with the headlights off and the lake all around us, everything black, not blue. I try to picture what she looked like when she came out of the water, but all I saw was Audrey with her arm around the girl, Audrey's hair wet and stuck to her face. It was so dark in the car, so dark I could hardly breathe, so dark my throat felt thick the way it does when I'm nervous, when Mama goes out to the girl, or when Greg and Rebecca are out on the porch making sounds they think no one can hear. It makes my throat tight just looking at the word—dying—and I click away from the site and shut the computer down. I lie on my bed and try to calm it all down: my breathing, the need to cough, knowing someone in my own town is blue and may be dying, and knowing that Mama has joined up with the mothers of my best friends, and they're all making moon pies to keep the girl from dying.

Is that what Mama is doing?
I wonder. Is that why she makes the pies? Is she trying to keep her alive? Or it is something else?

I promised I wouldn't go. I did promise.

I wonder how it feels to die. To be dying. To be dying and not even have anyone know you're dying.

At least I don't worry as much about my brain anymore. Now it's respiration, rates of breath, the oxygen level in my blood. Now I hardly think of my convolutions or synaptic firings or which parts of my brain control the involuntary response, because now I see that it's all so involuntary. Now I know I can't hold my breath long enough to die.

I think about Mr. Davis's lecture on complex thought and cognitive skills, the impairments that are a result of oxygen deprivation or the failure of chromosomes to meet. Maybe the blue girl has something chromosomal, like Ethan. Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong. How can I know if I'm right if I haven't really seen her?

I should tell someone
, I think, as I get up from my bed.
I should tell someone that we could all be wrong, all of us, our mothers and their secret visits, and even Audrey, who dives into the water
.

But who?

At dinner I eat only salad, even though Mama has made lamb chops and scalloped potatoes, green beans sautéed with almonds, and artichoke hearts dipped in olive oil. The kitchen is filled with her cooking, which I know is a
sign of Mama's nervousness because this is the kind of meal she makes when she goes off with her friends and the moon pies.

I am not fooled. I chew the tri-color salad slowly. I swish the tomato seeds around my teeth, then the cucumbers crunch into nothing but water, and for a minute I hope I don't suffer from diverticulitis with all these seeds. My grandmother had it, the one from Russia. After meals she'd lie on the couch and say,
Oh, sweet girl with the beautiful teeth, in Russia we didn't have so many seeds to stick in the gut. Bring me a piece of bread
. She'd lie on the couch and chew the bread I brought. Crumbs would fall from her mouth.
This bread is so good I could die for it. People die for less, you know, much less
.

I'd nod and she'd chew some more.

For bread I would die
, she'd say,
but not for seeds. Why in America are there so many seeds?

I reach for a piece of bread and eat it without butter, letting my mouth go dry as I think of my grandmother with the seeds lining the pockets in her intestines.

My father eats and eats. Each jab of his fork brings a smile to his face, he and Greg always laughing, laughing at the food, even as Greg says,
Ma, this is a fucking feast
, and my father loses some of the scalloped potatoes as they spray out of his mouth and he says,
Watch it with all the fucks, boy, your
mother doesn't like it
, and Mama says from her place at the sink, where she scrubs that pot with the burnt chocolate,
You've got that fucking right
. Then they all laugh. All except me.

After dinner Mama is still scrubbing her pot at the sink. I go over to help her.

Mama
, I say,
maybe you should give up on that pot
.

She smiles and drops the Brillo pad in the sink.

Caroline, my girl, there are things you can't understand. This was a gift from my mother. How can I just throw it away? You can't throw away things given to you from the dead. They're all you have left
.

I know there's something more about that pot, because Mama is not really so sentimental. She misses my grandmother, I know that, but if my grandmother were here and she saw that blackened pot, she'd tell my mother to stop holding on. Mama's proud of me, I know that too, but once, when I couldn't remember what grade I'd gotten on a paper and started crying because I couldn't find it, she had to admit she'd thrown the paper away. Not just that one, but all of them.

I throw them out
, she told me,
so that boy, that brother of yours, doesn't cheat
, she said.

But I knew better.

And that's how I feel as I decide to break the promise while standing in the kitchen with the scalloped potatoes and the burnt pot, with my father and Greg watching
television in the next room, with my mother scrubbing and scrubbing and waiting to be alone. I feel that I know better.

While she's still scrubbing, I feel this hunger deep inside, and it's not because I only ate the salad and need to diet because my waist is getting so
thick
—as Mama says—or because I'm afraid to die right there in the kitchen—who's to say I won't?—but because I want something. I want something I cannot name, something that will pull me out of the books and words and my own head, something that will take me out to where they've been.

To her.

I wait and wait until Mama stops scrubbing and has to go into the living room because my father is calling. I hear them talking about Greg and Rebecca, Mama asking my father if he knows what's going on, and my father saying,
They're just kids, like we were once
. Mama says,
Don't you remember what happened to us? Do you want him to be trapped?
My father tells her that's not going to happen, and is that how she feels? Trapped? While they talk I reach in and I take them, the moon pies, still warm in my hands.

I get up before the alarm, before the bus, before Mama is awake and ready to check my hair for the butterfly clips she doesn't like. Last night I waited and took some more of
the pies from the very top of the pile, only a few, so Mama wouldn't notice, and zipped them into my backpack. She's too distracted, thinking all the time about Greg and Rebecca. She made me promise not to go see her again, and I did promise. She knew I'd promise. She'd never suspect me to break the promise, but I know I have to.

On a piece of paper I wrote the signs or causes of blue skin.
Impending death
. That, I've underlined. If anyone knows the truth, it will be Audrey, Audrey who's saved the girl twice. Audrey who's always awake.

It takes a long time to walk. When we were younger, I made the walk to Audrey's at least once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes on my bicycle. Then as we got older it was all rides and laziness, one of the reasons my middle is so thick, I guess. When I get to Audrey's, Buck is standing outside by the back of the station wagon. The sun is behind him. He looks bigger, standing there in his sweatshirt with the hood up, not like an eight-year-old anymore.

That's because I'm almost nine
, he says when I tell him how big he looks. When I laugh he comes closer and gives me this little smile.

You have some of those pies, don't you?
he asks, and then he says, his voice low,
For her?

I pat him on the hood of his sweatshirt. The station wagon is unlocked. I pull the door open and look inside.
I tell Buck to get us a blanket, the biggest he can find, and then I search for the automatic light for the door and slide it over to off.

Go get Audrey
, I say,
and tell her to hurry
.

He stares at me and leans close, putting one hand on my backpack where the pies are.

Only if I can come, too
, he says.

Just then Audrey appears behind him and puts her hands on Buck's shoulders. It may just be the light, but she looks wide awake, not tired at all.

He can come
, she says.
But she could run again, just like last time. She could head for the lake, and then what?

I open the backpack and take the moon pies out, hidden in the white napkins I wrapped them in, almost glowing. As I stand there with Buck and Audrey, I realize I'm not worried about dying, not today. We're going to miss the biology test, the one that Greg is probably going to fail, and now so will I.

She won't run
, I say.
Not if we feed her
.

But that's not all she eats
, Audrey says.

I don't know what Audrey means, but I just nod. Buck and I scrunch down in the backseat and pull the blanket he brought in his backpack over our heads. Audrey goes to get their father. He comes out with his shoulders slumped and slides into the driver's seat. I can see him through
the thick blanket, but he doesn't seem to notice us at all. I think about his brain, about its lack of neurotransmitters, about everything it hasn't been doing since he went into the hospital. He looks so sad that his brain has turned against him.

Just out to the lake, Dad
, she says to him when he gets behind the wheel. She has the Nerf ball in her hands.
Just you and me at the lake, you and me and the ball. You can play when we get home
.