The Center of Everything (13 page)

“My feet! Mom! My feet!” I twist my arm out of her grip. She stops so quickly that her head goes forward even after her body has stopped moving.

“Wh—Oh! Oh God, I’m sorry. I forgot. I forgot you had no shoes. How could I forget that?”

She looks weird, even for her. Her eyebrows are pushed down behind her sunglasses, and she looks as if she is concentrating very hard on something, her forehead wrinkled, her mouth open. I can hear her breathing.

She bends down and puts her hands under my arms. “Hmmph,” she says. But this time, she can’t get me past her knees. She sets me back on the grass, stumbling backwards. “I’m sorry, Evelyn,” she says. She wipes more sweat off her face, and her hand looks too pink against her white face, like her hand and her face belong to two different bodies. “I just can’t…I just can’t carry you anymore…”

She is swaying a little now, back and forth. I know I should move forward, maybe take her hand. But I am also worried she could fall down right on top of me. I step back.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says. Her sunglasses have fallen off one of her ears. They sit crooked across her face, the pink strap hanging around her neck. She does not try to fix them. Instead, she sits down, right there on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of her black high-heeled shoes comes off, and the way she is sitting, I can see her underwear.

“Mom, get up. Let’s go find somewhere to sit. A bench. Let’s get a place in the shade.”

Instead she lies all the way down, curling her knees up to her chest. “I don’t know what to do.”

There are cars now, slowing down, people looking out their windows. I try poking her, hard enough to hurt. “You have to get up. Get up now.”

A man rolls down his window and leans out. “Honey, is your mom okay? Did she fall?”

“Mom,
get up!
” I want to kick her.

She is still on the ground when a police car slows and pulls over to the side of the road, lights on, no sirens. The other cars move around it, people watching us.

“Hi there,” the policeman says, getting out of his car. “Is this your mother?”

I nod. He doesn’t look old enough to be a police officer, even in the uniform, so many things swinging off his belt as he jogs toward us—a stick, a gun, a radio. He is wearing a hat, but I can see he has acne, swollen red marks and open scabs on his throat and cheeks, so much that it looks like it hurts. He gives me a bottle of water and tells me to go sit in the shade and drink it.

“Ma’am?” he says, kneeling beside my mother, his hand on her arm. “Ma’am? Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

She props herself up on her elbows. “No,” she says. “No, no. I just need to lie here for a minute. I’m okay.”

“Okay, well, we have to get you someplace where it’s cool. We have to get you out of this sun, get you some water. Do you have any family I can call?”

She sits up quickly. “Where’s my daughter? Oh my God, where is she?”

“I’m here,” I say.

She sees me and lays her hand on top of her heart. If you were just driving by now, seeing her lying on the grass with her hand like this, the policeman kneeling next to her, you might think she’d been shot.

“She’s fine, ma’am,” the policeman says. “But she needs to get inside, and you do too. You need to stand up and walk with me so we can get your daughter inside where it’s cool.”

This is what does it. She stands up, leaning on him for just a moment before she waves me over, and we walk to his car together.

Finally she is embarrassed.

We are in the police car, both of us sitting in the back. My mother is drinking her second bottle of water. I am on my third. The police officer tells us we have to keep drinking it, that heat-stroke is nothing we want to fool with. His car is magnificently air-conditioned, and I ask him to please turn it all the way up, to make sure it’s on maximum. He laughs and says, “Of course!” and then I can feel it all around me, the coolness filling the air like smoke.

“It must have been the heat,” my mother says. “I really don’t know what came over me. Thank you so much for the ride.”

He says that the heat has been making people act crazy all week. People have been fainting in their own homes—sunstroke, heatstroke—dropping like flies, he says. But he keeps asking her questions, looking at her in his mirror: Does she really want him to take us back to our house? Does she want him to take us to Social Services down at the station? Or the hospital, maybe?

No, she says. No. She’ll be fine if he just takes us home. He asks her if she thinks she can take care of me, and she says yes. She tells him about the shoes, and how we had to take them off because they were too tight. She had tried to carry me, and the heat had just gotten to her. That was all.

When he pulls up to our house, he gives her his card and tells her she can have him paged if she starts to feel bad again, or if there is anything she needs. We get out of the car, and he rolls down his window, asking her again if she thinks she will be able to look after me.

“Yes,” she says, her arm cool around my shoulders. “Yes, I’m sure.”

The next morning, there is a pair of Keds in front of our door, left there in the middle of the night. They are a size too big, but this is better than too small. I stuff toilet paper in the toes so they will fit and show them to my mother, but she doesn’t smile. She stays in bed all day, her eyes open, looking up at the ceiling, still wearing the yellow dress. She doesn’t even get up to eat. I don’t want to go into her room, dark and humid, starting to smell. She sleeps on just her mattress now, her broken bed pushed to one corner.

I eat cereal with the watered-down milk for two days, and leave her alone. I stay up late, watching television until they play the national anthem and the stations go blank.

On the third day, there is no more cereal, no more milk. I go back into her room and jump on her mattress. I yell at her and tell her she has to get up. When I pull off the sheets, she rolls over and turns away from me, the yellow dress pale and wrinkled. Her hair is awful, the back tangled in red-brown knots.

Finally, she stands up, her hands in her hair, looking not at me but at her reflection in the mirror. She closes her eyes and opens them again. “Okay, Tina,” she says. “Come on.”

She goes into the kitchen and finds some powdered milk. She fries an egg for me. She tells me not to worry. She will try to fill out the yellow-and-blue booklet again. She should not have talked to the lady at the desk like that. She says she is just having a bad time right now, but she still loves me. I am her little light in the world, she says, and she will always take care of me. Everything will be okay.

I eat my egg and watch her move around the room, listening to her talk. Everything will not be okay, I know. She has lost her job. She is going to have a baby, Mr. Mitchell’s, and he has moved away with his wife somewhere, probably to get away from her. She sat down on the sidewalk downtown and cried like a little girl with her underwear showing until the police had to come.

I don’t say anything, but in my head, things have changed. I’ve drawn a line between us, the difference between her and me. It’s like one of the black lines between states on maps, lines between different countries on the globe. They don’t really exist. You don’t really see a long black line when you cross from the United States into Mexico, from Kansas to Missouri. But everyone knows where they are, and they are important, keeping one state separate from the other, so you can always tell which one you’re in.

eight

I
T’S
J
ANUARY, AND LONG, SHARP
icicles hang down from the roof. Eileen says she had a friend who was killed by an icicle; it fell off the building just as he was coming out the door, and it went through his head like a knife, split it right open.

My mother and the new baby are still gone. He was born too early and too small, with a weak heart and lungs that don’t work by themselves. He has to stay in the hospital, a respirator breathing for him, in an incubator to keep out germs. My mother has to stay because her blood is too thin, and she needs rest. She’ll be fine though, Eileen says. She’ll be home soon.

Eileen has come up from Wichita to stay with me. She says the baby, Samuel, is most likely an angel who will only visit Earth for a little while before he flies back up to heaven. But it will be okay since he is a baby, she says, pure and innocent. He will go straight up, no problem. It will only be sad for the rest of us.

But she turns away from me when she hangs up the phone after calling the hospital, and acts like there’s something in her eye. She cooks for me, makes me anything I want, but she doesn’t eat. She wraps her entire plate up as a leftover, and says she will eat it in the morning, but never does.

“He’ll go straight up,” she says, getting out the aluminum foil. “Straight on up to a better place.”

I go outside to the common yard and lie down in the snow, my arms spread wide, watching snow fall from the sky onto my face. I tell Eileen I am making snow angels, but really I am just lying there, thinking of the baby, wondering whether he has flown back up yet or not, if he can look down and see me lying here, looking up, trying to see him.

But the new baby doesn’t fly up. After just a few days, they take him off the respirator, and he starts breathing all by himself.

Eileen takes me to the hospital in Kansas City, but we are not allowed to touch him, or even go in the room. There is a little window to look through, though, and when Eileen holds me up I can see him, squirming and gray, much smaller than you would think a baby could be. He looks more like one of the baby hamsters in a cage at school than a person. I put my hand up in front of the glass, and just my hand, stretched pinkie to thumb, is as long as he is. One of his legs is like two of my fingers put together.

He has hair already, thick and dark red like my mother’s, but it is shaved on the sides, and a tube goes right into his head, burrowing right under the skin of his scalp. Another tube goes into his arm, another into his belly. There are wires attached to his chest, and he has a glass box over his head, with a hole at the bottom for his neck. On top of the box is a bright yellow teddy bear, a rainbow on its chest. He doesn’t look at the bear.

I try waving, tapping on the window. I can see he’s awake, his tiny hands squeezed into fists, one leg thrashing, his chest heaving up and down. His cheeks pucker like he is trying to suck in air through a straw, but there isn’t enough. He kicks his good arm and his legs, like a beetle that has flipped over on its back and can’t get up. I saw a grasshopper like this once, half of it run over by a car, its yellow-green insides squished out, the other half still alive, still moving. I stepped on it, killed it so it would quit hurting.

“Maybe there’s not enough air in the box?” I ask.

“No,” the nurse says, standing behind Eileen. She is the nice nurse, the one who asked us if she could get us something from the pop machine in the nurses’ lounge. “There’s more oxygen in the box than outside of it. It’s just that his lungs can’t get enough of it in.”

I hold my breath for as long as I can, until I feel dizzy, until it hurts.

“Poor baby,” Eileen says, her fingers on the glass. She has been crying so much that the crying seems like a part of her face now, like her nose or her mouth. When old tears dry or fall off, new ones grow in her eyes, spill over. But she talks like she is not crying, though anyone can see that she is.

The other nurse comes out of the room where Samuel is, pulling a mask down off her face so she can talk to us. They have to wear the masks because if the baby gets any germs on him, even just one, he will die. They are monitoring his blood, she tells us, making sure there isn’t too much sugar or salt. They are watching for jaundice. They are checking the veins in his eyes. She doesn’t want to get our hopes up, she says, looking right at Eileen. It’s still hard to say which way things will go.

Eileen nods and smiles at the nurse, says thank you. But after the nurse leaves, she tells me that the nurses actually don’t know what they’re doing. They can’t help him at all with all their needles and machines. Only God can help the baby now, Eileen says. The only thing we can do is pray.

So we do, every night at the kitchen table when we come home from the hospital, Eileen’s small hands pressed over mine. She prays to Jesus to help the baby and my mother, not God. Jesus is God’s son, but they are also both the same person. I don’t understand this, how two people can be different people but still just one person. Eileen says that’s because they’re not people.

In my head, God has dark red hair and a beard. He doesn’t wear clothes, but it’s okay, because you can’t see below his shoulders anyway. Everything else is always covered by clouds. Jesus looks exactly the same only he has blond hair and wears a white robe and sandals. This is how you can tell them apart.

And Jesus, I understand, is nicer than God, a little less likely to kill you if you do something wrong.

A week goes by, and the baby doesn’t die. Eileen takes me to visit my mother in the room she shares with a blond woman who is pregnant with twins. This woman’s belly, covered only by her thin gown, rises up so large out of her small body that at first I think she has put pillows underneath the sheets. But no, the woman says, pulling back the covers, showing me, she’s really that big. She can’t even walk anymore, won’t be able to until they come out.

Her husband, a large man with a beard, comes to visit. He brings her flowers, yellow roses, and says hello to us when he comes in, shaking snow off his jacket.

“The least he can do,” the blond woman tells us, smiling, holding up her cheek for him to kiss.

My mother is on the other side of the curtain from this woman, and she keeps it pulled shut. Sometimes she is asleep when we come in, but sometimes she is sitting up, awake, staring at the wall in front of her, not even looking up at us when Eileen says, “Knock knock? Tina?” There is a television on her side of the room, but she does not turn it on.

“Tina honey? I brought Evelyn in to see you. Are you awake?”

My mother looks at me and Eileen as if we are a light that is too bright. She tries to smile. Polaroid pictures of Samuel in his incubator are tacked above a bag that runs clear liquid through a tube into her arm, like she is a blender or a radio, something that needs to be plugged in to work. The liquid in the bag looks like water, but it could be anything.

“Are you okay, Evelyn?” she asks. I am standing far away from her, behind Eileen even, feeling bad for her, but still. The black line between us has stayed there, grown thicker and darker the whole time she was pregnant, sick all the time, crying in her bedroom at night. We had to go back to the welfare office, had to see Barbara Bell again. And now it is this, sick in the hospital with a sick baby, two strings tied together into a tight knot. Whatever was frightening or ugly about her before is doubled now, with her zombie eyes and the IV in her arm. Her hair smells like medicine, like sickness. So does her breath.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Eileen’s taking care of me.”

This seems to make her more worried, not less. She opens her mouth to say something, but then looks as if she is suddenly too tired, or does not even know what it was she wanted to say.

The nurses say that the next few days will decide everything for Samuel—he’ll either get better or a lot worse. No matter what, they tell us, they won’t put him back on the respirator. And if his kidneys go, that’s it. Eileen nods like she understands, but she starts crying again, her hand tight over her mouth.

But his kidneys don’t go. He gains half a pound in less than a week, and the nurses try to explain his other improvements in words we can understand. A red light that did not blink the day before is blinking steadily now, and this is a good thing.

“Well, his heartbeat is stabilizing, and his lungs are getting stronger,” the doctor tells us. “Things are looking up. The surgeries were successful, and we’ve had some luck.”

Eileen almost starts laughing, or maybe she is just trying to catch her breath. She looks up, smiling, and claps her hands twice.

The doctor has wrinkles on his forehead, two small
L
’s facing outward, and I can see how he got them, his forehead pushed down with concentration as he looks at the notes on his clipboard, reading the numbers on the machine with the blinking red light. “But he’s a very sick baby, even for a preemie. I’m still worried about a hemorrhage in the brain. And his kidneys. And his eyes. He’ll need more surgery, and even then…”

But Eileen is already crying again, her hands folded, head bowed. “Thank you,” she says. “Oh thank you.” She looks up again, and I can see her crooked smile surprises the doctor, who was not smiling, and is not, still.

The following Sunday, my mother still in the hospital, Eileen takes me to church. I understand that she is taking advantage of my mother’s absence, doing something that my mother, if she were at home, would not allow.

“There’s no need to say anything to her about it,” Eileen says. “She’s got enough on her mind. But we’re helping her, really. More than she knows.”

Eileen’s pastor in Wichita has recommended a church for us in Kerrville, the Church of the Second Ark, which, it turns out, isn’t really in a church at all, but in a roller-skating rink rented out Sunday mornings, the disco ball still hanging from the ceiling, folding chairs lined up along the glossy white floor. Eileen says she would rather come here, and be with real Christians, than have to go someplace where the Scripture has been watered down and as good as thrown out the window, just so she can look at a steeple and a bunch of stained glass.

“If you’re going to follow the Bible, you have to follow the Bible,” she says. “There’s no point in going halfway. Especially when you’ve got a sick baby.”

When we walk in, a man in a light blue suit—jacket, pants, vest, tie, everything light blue—is standing in the middle of the rink playing an accordion. I can’t tell what song he’s playing. Sometimes he stretches the accordion out and it sounds like the legs of a table being pushed across a floor.

“That’s Pastor Dave,” Eileen whispers. “He’s the one I talked to. I like him a lot.” She squeezes my hand. “He knows his stuff.”

He nods at Eileen when he sees her, but does not put the accordion down.

“Morning, Pastor,” she says, walking toward him, her shoes slipping a little on the smooth floor. “I’m Eileen Bucknow. We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes, Eileen.” He lets go of the accordion with one hand, holding it out to her. There is a strap around his neck that holds it up. “I’m so glad you could come!”

“This is my granddaughter, Evelyn, the one I was telling you about.”

“Evelyn!” He smiles at me, taking my hand. He is younger than my mother, with straight blond hair and blue eyes and pinkish skin, not sunburned, but just naturally pink, the way other people look when they’re embarrassed. His face is smooth, unwrinkled, but he has a mustache, thick and darker than his hair. It looks like it may not even be his, but something you could buy in a store and paste on, a mustache another man grew for him. “So glad you’re here with us today,” he says. “And the baby?”

“Doing better, praise Jesus.” Eileen closes her eyes while she says this. “He’s out of the woods.”

Pastor Dave tilts his head back and pushes the accordion in and out. I am mesmerized by the accordion, all the buttons, the different sounds it can make, the way it moves in and out, folding up and out again like a chest, someone breathing. “I have to say, I’m not surprised,” he says. “Not surprised at all. You-all be sure to sit in the front row,” he says, pointing to the folding chairs. “You’re our VIPs.”

There is already a large man in a flannel shirt sitting in the front row, and Eileen makes it so I have to sit right by him. He turns and holds out his hand. “You-all new?”

Eileen explains she is from Wichita, and that I am her granddaughter, and that she is just in town visiting because my mother is in the hospital with a new baby.

The man frowns, looking at me quickly. “Everything all right?”

“He’s getting better. We think they both might come home soon.”

“Well I hope so,” the man says. “You’ll be in my prayers.” He reaches into the pocket of his shirt and hands Eileen a small yellow card.

ED’S TV AND SMALL APPLIANCE REPAIR
“Cheaper than buying a new one”

“Wait a minute,” he says, taking a red pen out of his pocket. He draws a cross on the card before handing it back. “Just bring that into my shop if you ever need anything fixed,” he says. “I give a thirty percent discount to Second Arkers.”

“Oh, how nice,” Eileen says, taking the card. She pats me gently on the leg. “Evelyn, these are the nicest people in the world,” she whispers. “You’ll never see so many kind people together in one room as you will in a good church like this.”

I watch the other people file in, men in ties that do not match their jackets, women holding hands with children who are picking their noses. There are three rows of ten chairs, and so some people have to sit on the floor. Only the men sit on the floor. The women and children get the chairs.

Pastor Dave moves behind what I think is the DJ’s table when the roller-skating rink is in session, the record players and switchboards covered with a white cloth with
JESUS IS LORD
stitched in gold letters. “Good morning!” he says, thumping his hands on the table and then clapping them together. He sounds so happy that he looks like he is maybe going to start singing instead of talking, his arms raised above his head like Maria in
The Sound of Music
. “Sorry you-all have to put up with me on the accordion again. I’m still working on bringing in a piano or at least a keyboard Sunday mornings.”