The Center of Everything (26 page)

I look back at Samuel. His eyes are staring over our heads, at nothing. I’m not sure about this, and I don’t know what to say. But again his hand moves, his finger this time pointing in the direction of the brown love seat in the corner of the room. My mother nods quickly at him and gets behind it. “Give me a hand with this,” she says.

I hesitate, putting the phone back in its cradle. “This is kind of making a mess.”

She snaps her fingers, the way a rude person would call a waiter at a restaurant. “Just do it, okay?”

I get on the other side of the love seat, and we push it toward him, the wheels snagging on the carpet, two cats still asleep on the cushions, going along for the ride. When we get it within arm’s reach of Samuel, my mother gets back down on her knees. “This is a couch, Samuel. You pointed at a couch.” She presses his fingers against the upholstery. “Couch.”

His eyes remain blank, still as a doll’s. But then his hand rises again, his finger pointing maybe at the television set, or maybe just pointing.

“I can’t believe it,” my mother says. Her eyes are wide, her hands pushed up under the glitter hat. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

I stay silent, watching his doll eyes. My mother is never this happy anymore, and I don’t want to ruin it for her. She thinks she’s found a key, a way in, and proof that something is going on behind the blank blue sky of Samuel’s eyes. I don’t want to steal this from her. But I think she’s tricking herself, seeing something because she wants to see it, not because it’s there.

But Verranna Hinckle is impressed with the pointing, even more excited about it than my mother. She comes over and takes pictures with a Polaroid camera, watching Samuel’s arm move this way and that, writing down notes on her clipboard. This pointing is a very good sign, she says, an important step. She likes what my mother is doing with the radio.

“You just don’t know,” she says, pushing up the sleeves of her turtleneck. “There was a girl in Pennsylvania who never talked and never looked back. Severe autism. But then, finally, somebody thought to give her a pen, and the first thing she wrote was a sonnet.” She nods at my mother proudly, as if she herself had something to do with this miracle. “It rhymed and everything. Fourteen lines.”

I am standing in the doorway eating an apple, watching Verranna Hinckle carefully. I am suspicious of her now, with her little snub nose and her clipboard and her notes for her dissertation. I don’t like her getting my mother’s hopes up. I take a pen and slide it into Samuel’s hand.

Nothing. He doesn’t even look at it. He bangs his fist though, and we have to take the pen away from him so he won’t stab himself. I look at Verranna Hinckle, and she looks back at me. She wears glasses too.

“Well, it’s not always that drastic, of course,” she says. “Sometimes it’s just a blinking of the eyes, but at least then you’re communicating. At least then you know he’s in there.” She keeps talking, looking only at my mother. “Right now we should concentrate on the basics, meaning self-care. I want you to keep his hand under yours when you feed him. Let him get the feel of it. We won’t know what he can do unless we give him a chance.” She squints down at Samuel, tapping her fingers on the counter. She tells my mother there are people just as disabled as Samuel who have learned to feed themselves, to use sign language, to use the telephone in an emergency. My mother nods, holding Samuel’s twisted hand. She is believing this. She believes that Samuel might be able to use the telephone.

If I weren’t so mad I would laugh. As if, when someone answered, there would be something for him to say.

I think Travis actually wants to be Mr. Goldman now. I am only waiting for him to show up on the bus one day with his hair long in the front but short in the back, wearing an ironed shirt and a tie, a
U.S. News & World Report
tucked under one of his arms. All of a sudden, Travis wants to travel. He says Mr. Goldman has been to Italy and Japan. He’s gone looking for kangaroos in Australia.

“You’re not going to believe this story,” Travis says, leaning over the back of his seat on the bus. “This is great.”

The story is that when Mr. Goldman was just out of college, he and two of his friends went to Australia together, and they drove into the outback to try to find kangaroos. They spent a whole day, looking and looking, but the only kangaroo they saw was the one they hit with the jeep they were driving home.
Thunk,
and that was it. They felt bad, but then finally decided they should at least take a picture of the dead kangaroo, since that’s what they had come out there to see.

“Gross,” I say.

“Just wait,” Travis says, pinching my shoulder. “Listen.”

Mr. Goldman and his friends thought it might make a funny picture if they picked the kangaroo up and held it in between them with his sunglasses on its face, so it would look like the kangaroo was having a good time instead of being dead. They ended up putting his sunglasses and his friend’s jacket on the kangaroo. But when the flash of the camera went off, the kangaroo came alive and punched Mr. Goldman right in the eye. It took off jumping, and all three of them ran after it, but they couldn’t catch it. They’d left the keys to the jeep in the pocket of the jacket they put on the kangaroo, so they had to walk forever, and when they finally got to a police station, the Australian police just sat around and laughed.

“No way,” I say, trying to imagine this, Mr. Goldman, his tie flipped over his shoulder, running after a kangaroo wearing sunglasses and a jacket. “He made that up.”

“He showed me the picture! You can see the kangaroo, right before it woke up!” We’re both laughing now. If there’s a picture, then maybe it really happened. It’s a great story, if it’s true.

“You know what Deena said when I told her that story?” Travis asks. “She said, ‘What country is Australia in?’”

We laugh harder, Travis slapping his forehead with his fingers. But even while I am laughing, I think of Deena, what her face would look like if she could hear us, if she were on the bus instead of sick at home watching MTV, her large brown eyes widening with hurt.

But I deserve to be able to laugh a little, after all she has gotten, and all I have not.

Verranna Hinckle wants my mother to get Samuel a wheelchair as soon as possible, preferably a lightweight one. She says one of his legs is very strong, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to pull himself around.

My mother has found a wheelchair just like this in a catalog. She tore out the page and stuck it to the freezer with a magnet shaped like a banana. It’s been up there for a month, just a picture, too expensive to buy. Eileen says if my mother really wants the wheelchair, all she has to do is write a letter to any church and tell them she needs a wheelchair for Samuel, and they’ll come through for her, lickety-split. That’s what churches do.

But my mother says no way. She’s not about to write out some sob story and make us sound pathetic.

“We are pathetic,” I remind her. It’s just a joke, but the look on her face makes me wish I hadn’t said anything.

The next week, Eileen brings the same wheelchair from the catalog over to our house, a red bow tied to one of the wheels, a card taped to the seat:

To Tina, Evelyn, and little Sam,

You are in our hearts.

Love,
The First Christian Church, Wichita, Kansas

My mother eyes the wheelchair with suspicion, reaching forward to touch its shiny aluminum wheels. “No strings?” she asks.

“No strings, honey,” Eileen says. “They’re just being nice.”

My mother smiles, trying to hide it. She gives Eileen a peck on the cheek.

After a few days of tantrums and tipovers, Samuel learns to get around in the wheelchair. He uses his good leg to scoot himself forward and then plants his heel in the carpet to pull the rest of his body along, like a slow-moving hermit crab dragging its shell. He likes to sit by windows, we notice. We didn’t know that, before he had the chair.

The new wheelchair makes life both easier and more difficult for my mother. She does not have to carry him everywhere now, which is good. But he can move around quickly, get himself into trouble. He pushes himself into walls, and, not understanding how to back up, just keeps pushing, screaming to himself, his face pressed against the plaster. He inches into the kitchen when my mother is cooking, reaching up behind her at the handles of pots on the stove.

So she has tied a little bell to the side of his wheelchair, to better track his comings and goings. It works well, but it also encourages the cats to stalk him. They crouch like lions under the sofa, waiting for him to wheel by, their eyes wide, their tails twitching.

“Bad kitties!” my mother yells, swinging a dish towel at them. “Leave him alone!” They hiss and scatter, looking for new hiding places so they can do it again.

Verranna Hinckle says that my mother is doing an excellent job, and that Samuel is making, relatively speaking, substantial improvements. She tells my mother to keep her hand over Samuel’s whenever she is doing something for him—feeding him, brushing his teeth, washing his hair, pulling on his diaper, changing his clothes—so he participates in his self-care.
Agency,
Verranna Hinckle calls it.
Give him agency
. Verranna Hinckle has a lot of words like this.

“And by all means,” she adds, “keep up the talking. He understands more than you think.”

I say nothing. Verranna Hinckle is pretending to know something that she does not. For four years now, I have listened to my mother talk to Sam, telling him every day how much she loves him, what a good boy he is, that this is the way you brush your teeth, this is how you lift a spoon. Still, we get nothing. He cries when he wants something, and he stops when he gets it. That’s it.

But I suppose if my mother wants to think that he understands her words, fine. She isn’t hurting anyone, and I think that, maybe, she is the one who needs to hear them.

Three days before the student council election, Mr. Leubbe puts us in pairs so we can do sit-ups for the Presidential Fitness Exam. “You and you,” he says, pointing at Traci and then at me. We hesitate for a moment, and he slaps us on our backs—me with his left hand, Traci with his right—so hard we almost bump into each other, and tells us to get a move on.

“I’ll go first,” I say. I am the one in charge.

“That’s fine,” Traci says, her voice too friendly, too nice. She places her hands lightly on my feet and starts counting off my sit-ups in fives. Each time I come up, she smiles. I look only at her metal teeth, not at her eyes.

Travis will have a good time with this story when I tell him. He will say I had Satan binding my feet, and will examine my ankles for welts and bruises. But she’s really bothering me, still smiling at me, not looking away. I do the sit-ups more quickly, pretending that I care very much about the Presidential Fitness Exam.

She clears her throat, forces a laugh. “Remember we got in that stupid fight in fourth grade?”

I pause mid–sit-up and look right into her blue-gray eyes, her contact lenses swimming in front of them. “Yeah, Traci. I remember.”

She looks a little shaken. I am proud of this, the lowness of my voice, my ability to make her nervous. But she keeps talking, her thin lips pushed into a smile. “It was so stupid. I can’t even remember what it was about.”

I do another sit-up, and when I come up again, I stop and look at her carefully, wondering if she really believes what she is saying, if she could really be that dumb. “You made fun of my mother, the day I won the science fair.” I go back down to the mat, starting to count where she left off. “I won, and you were mad about it. You said they let me win because they felt sorry for me for being poor and not having a father.”

She looks down, at her hands on my shoes. She wears a small silver ring on one of her fingers, some kind of red jewel embedded in it. Nothing has changed. I think of her stolen clothes, still folded neatly in my bottom drawer. I’m glad they’re there.

“I’m really sorry,” she says.

I keep doing sit-ups. I don’t want her to say this to me.

“I’m really, really sorry,” she says. “I guess I was being a dumb little kid. I just didn’t know any better. I didn’t even know I was being mean.”

I give her a doubtful look. She is not counting anymore, and that’s her job.
35 Satan 36 Satan 37 Satan.

“I mean, I know I shouldn’t have said that. I wouldn’t say that to you now.” Her fingers are light on my shoes, barely touching them. “I don’t even know your mother. And I know about your brother—”

I sit up quickly enough to make her lean back, lifting her hands from my ankles.

“You still don’t know anything about anything, Traci. Don’t even talk about my brother. Don’t even bring him up.”

Mr. Leubbe blows his whistle, pointing at us from across the gym. “Troops,” he says, “settle down.”

“You don’t talk about Samuel,” I whisper. “You don’t understand anything about that. And don’t try to be nice to me. I know what you are.”

She winces, and now I can see the beginning of tears. But I don’t care. I have never done sit-ups so quickly in my life. I feel amazingly energized, unsprung. I could do sit-ups all day.

“Why do you hate me so much?” she sniffs. “I haven’t done anything to you since then. And I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”

I am open-mouthed, almost laughing at her nerve, her evil, Traci Carmichael nerve. “I’m not going to vote for you, Traci.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not what this is about.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

Her small, even features freeze, and I think for a moment she is going to start really crying, right there in the gym. But she doesn’t. Maybe she can’t pull it off. When it’s her turn, she does her sit-ups without complaint, me holding her feet and counting. Mr. Leubbe blows the whistle, and we go back to the locker room to shower and change.

I come home from school to see my mother still in her bathrobe, sitting with Samuel at the kitchen table, in the exact same position they were in when I left in the morning. The only difference is that now there is oatmeal everywhere. There are clumps of oatmeal in her hair, in his hair, drying on the wall, on the table. A carton of vanilla ice cream, half melted, sits on the floor, held steady between my mother’s bare feet. Samuel is writhing and screaming, his face red with anger, pointing at a bowl of ice cream just out of his reach.