The Center of Everything (30 page)

When the accident first happened, people kept saying how lucky Libby was, the sole survivor of the wrecked car. I don’t know if she feels lucky or not. She told me that over the summer, Mr. Carmichael mowed the lawn every day, sometimes for hours, going over the same strips of grass two or three times, even when it was scorching out, the air humid with no breeze to blow it away. Every day she woke up to the sound of the mower, the blades racing over the grass that was already too short. She went outside once and saw him lying in the grass, right next to the mower, his hands over his face in the bright sunlight.

The Carmichaels are moving, she says. They’re staying in Kerrville, but moving to a different neighborhood, maybe because of her. They don’t want to have to see her all the time. Adele’s family has already moved.

“I’m sure they’re glad I didn’t die too,” she says, turning her cane in slow circles. A pink, sickle-shaped scar runs from the outer corner of her left eye to the top of her lip, and she runs her finger over it in class when she thinks no one is looking.

We have American government together third period, Libby and I. Mr. Chemsky is the teacher, young and with a red-brown beard, and he likes to use “so-called” as an adjective and “allegedly” as an adverb. “The so-called House of Representatives,” he says, rolling his eyes, “are allegedly elected to represent the people’s wishes in the legislative branch.” He also makes quote marks with his fingers when he talks, sometimes twice in one sentence, and it is hard to tell if he is really quoting someone or if this is just something he likes to do.

He is doing this one sunny day in November when an office attendant walks in with a note. Mr. Chemsky takes the note from her, but waits until she leaves before he opens it, his hand cupped around it like it is from the FBI. When he is finished reading, he pauses dramatically, looking around the room. “Evelyn Bucknow, you’re to go to the office.”

I am scared when he tells me this, and then even more scared as I leave the room, walking down the long yellow hallway to the office. Too many bad things have happened this year. There can’t be anything else. But of course, I know, really there could be. It’s not like there are rules.

When I get to the office, the secretary says that a Dr. Love has called to relay the message that my mother had another episode and is now in the hospital, resting comfortably. My Uncle Bubba will be coming to pick me up in front of the school right away.

I am confused for only a moment, standing there and looking at the attendance secretary, who is wearing green eyeshadow, looking grimly back at me. And then, even from inside the school, I can hear the engine of Travis’s blue Datsun.

He waves when he sees me come through the double doors, leaning over to open the passenger door. “Say hi to Daddy,” he says. He is holding an unlit cigar.

“She had the baby?”

“Last night. Eight pounds, seven ounces.” He thumps a gloved hand on the steering wheel. “Cutest little fucker you’ve ever seen.”

“I get to come in? I get to see them?”

“You’re the first person she asked for. Her grandmother went home last night and hasn’t even come back yet, that bitch.” A box of Dunkin’ Donuts sits next to him on the seat. He sets the cigar on the dashboard, pulls out an apple fritter, and shoves it into his mouth while making a left turn. “Take one,” he mumbles. There’s a shadow of stubble from his ears to his throat, and he has the wild, frenzied look of someone who has been awake for too long.

“Have you named him?”

He inhales and exhales through his nostrils, grinning. “Jack.” He turns on the radio. It’s Prince, singing “I Would Die 4 U,” and Travis sings along. I smile without thinking about it, for the first time in a while. This is not what I would have wanted, not what I imagined when I was younger. When I sat up on the roof with him, waiting for falling stars, I did not think that someday we would be riding in a car together, going to visit his wife and baby. But it really is good to see him this happy, after so many days of watching him go to work in the khaki jumpsuit.

When we get to the hospital, he leads me to the maternity ward, going the long way, pointing out where the pop and candy machines are, the elevator to the morgue, where he saw an old naked man being led back to his room by the nurses. He’s been in every hallway, he says; Deena went into labor at eleven o’clock the night before, and he’d had so much nervous energy that the doctors hadn’t wanted him around until the very end.

“What this place needs is a fucking arcade or something,” he says, pushing the button for the elevator. “All the magazines are dumb. They keep the television on the goddamn
Nova
channel.”

Samuel was in the neonatal unit in Kansas City, and I remember the walls and the floors being very, very white, but the maternity ward of Kerrville Memorial has light pink walls, with flowers painted close to the floor so maybe, if you were on a lot of medication, you might think they were real and really growing there. There are even oversized bumblebees, smiling, their eyes pleasantly dazed.

I follow him to Deena’s room, right around the corner. It’s still sunny out, but you would never know it in here, with dark, heavy curtains covering the window. She is lying in the bed by the door, her head propped up by large pillows, looking up at the television high in the corner of the opposite wall. The sheets and blankets come up to her shoulders, but I can see she’s wearing her own pink robe.

“I think she’s still pretty doped up,” Travis whispers. “You should have heard her scream.”

She turns toward us. “Evelyn? What are you doing here? Travis? What were you-all doing?” She squints, propping herself up on her elbows. “Where have you been?”

“You told me to go get her, remember?” Travis laughs, tousling her hair. “I called and pretended I was a doctor, remember?”

“Yeah. That’s right. Hi, Evelyn.” She smiles. “Wait. Where’s the baby?”

Travis says he’ll go find the nurse. The volume of the television is turned up loud, the opening credits to
General Hospital
blaring. I find the remote, push the mute button. “How you feeling, Deener?”

She crosses her eyes, makes her lips go crooked. “Like crapola. I feel like crapola.”

“Travis said it looked painful. You want some light? You want me to open the curtains?”

She nods. “Yeah. I just feel out of it now. I told them to dope me up with everything they had. I told that nurse, I said, ‘Look, I’m not into that natural childbirth shit. Just give me the juice. I don’t want to feel this.’ But I think she was holding out on me. It hurt like hell. Let me tell you.”

“It seems like it would hurt.” Stupid thing to say.

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad. You’ll want to have one too when you see him. You will. I’ll let you hold him and then you’ll want one for yourself.” She lowers her voice. “Want to see something gross?”

I step away. “No.”

But she is already lifting up her nightgown and pointing to her breasts, her nipples swollen and red against her white skin. “The nurses say I should keep breast-feeding, but I’m not going to do it anymore if he’s going to try to chew off my tit like that.”

A nurse walks in, holding the baby, Travis making faces at it over her shoulder. She puts the baby in Deena’s arms like she is stacking teacups on top of each other, telling us that he has just fallen asleep. I smile at her, but she does not smile back.

Travis presses a button that makes a humming sound, and the back of Deena’s bed starts moving up slowly, until she is sitting upright. “Pretty cool, huh?” he says, talking about the bed, not the baby. He pushes another button, and the bed starts to move down again. Deena tells him to knock it off, and he does.

“Evelyn, come look at him,” she whispers. “He’s like a doll.”

The baby’s face is pinker and flatter than I thought it would be, his eyes bulging and blue-green. I am amazed by how much he looks like Travis, the same shape of mouth, the same cheekbones.

“Isn’t he cool?” Travis asks. Now he’s talking about the baby. He rests his chin on Deena’s shoulder, gazing down.

“You want to be gentle with him,” the nurse says. She is an older woman, deep creases around her mouth and eyes. The nurses on
General Hospital
are wearing white hats that fold on the sides, but this real nurse doesn’t have one. She wears a yellow cardigan and a name tag that says
JULIA SHERIDAN, R.N
.

“I know that,” Deena says. “We don’t need anything else, okay? I’ll ring you when I get sleepy.”

But Julia Sheridan, R.N., doesn’t seem to want to go. She looks at Travis, and then Deena, me, and then at the baby. “Are your mothers coming back?” she asks.

“My grandmother isn’t coming back, probably, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” Deena says. “But since
I’m
the mother now, I guess we’ll be fine. Thanks. Bye.”

Travis says his mother will be back at three.

“Who are you?” Julia Sheridan asks, looking at me.

“She’s my sister,” Deena says.

Julia Sheridan looks at me and then back at Deena. She knows this is a lie. “Look, I don’t mean to hassle you,” she says. “But you have to understand, a baby’s a delicate thing. You-all are just so young. I just wish you had somebody here to—”

“We’re fine, okay? I said I’d ring you when I was tired.”

The combination of Deena getting mad and still being kind of drugged up is no good. Her voice is shrill, her lips rubbery, not making the right shapes for the words. The baby starts to cry, high-pitched, urgent. Julia Sheridan frowns at me and leaves.

Deena blows on the baby’s forehead, and Travis leans over her shoulder, telling him to try to be happy. For Daddy, he adds. But the baby keeps crying, poking a tiny pink fist out from the blankets, clutching at Deena’s pink robe.

“Ugh. He’s hungry. Here we go again.” She moves aside her nightgown, putting his mouth up to one of her already red nipples, wincing in pain. “That’s right, buddy, you go ahead,” she whispers. “You like that, don’t you? Is the evil nurse right?”

I don’t want to be rude, but it’s neat, watching this. I hadn’t seen my mother nurse Sam; they were both too sick when he was born, and he had his nutrients pumped in through an IV and then a feeding tube, and then a bottle with enriched formula. But this baby is just fine, slurping steadily, his little fingers twitching against her skin. It seems strange to me that Deena’s body can somehow suddenly produce food for him. It’s like a magic trick, a secret talent she has always had that I didn’t know about, like juggling or playing the violin.

I sit down on the foot of the bed. The room is nice and bright, little ducks and rabbits on the curtains, a fold-out shelf for changing diapers. Just outside, hanging in the hallway, is a large black-and-white poster of a baby’s wide-eyed face.
FRAGILE! HANDLE WITH CARE
! is printed in large red letters beneath it.

“I got doughnuts while I was out, Dee,” Travis says. “You want some doughnuts?”

She sticks her tongue out. “Doughnuts? Why’d you get doughnuts?”

“You like doughnuts.”

“I need health food. I’m nursing a baby.”

The soap opera is still on with the sound muted, the camera focused on a woman with long blond hair in a glittery black dress. She is very mad about something, pointing a gun at a man in a tuxedo, his hands raised in surrender.

“You watch this one?” Travis asks, turning the volume back on.

Deena shakes her head no. “I tell you all the time. I watch
Days
and
One Life to Live
.”

Travis asks me if I watch this one, if I know what’s going on. I shake my head, still looking up at the screen. “I’m in school when they’re on.”

They look at each other quickly, only for a moment, just long enough for me to see them do it. I didn’t mean anything, but I know they think I did. I keep my eyes up on the screen, trying to think if I should say something else or just keep quiet.

A commercial comes on the television for Irish Spring soap, and we all pretend to watch it. No one says anything, but I can feel that they want me to leave.

“I guess I better get going,” I say, standing up. “The buses leave in an hour.” I don’t know if even this is okay, to talk about the buses, to make any reference to school at all.

“Oh, okay,” Travis says. He reaches for the car keys on the table, moving slowly enough so I have time to stop him.

“I can walk back,” I say. “It’s not far.”

“You sure?” he asks, yawning. “Okay. I guess I am pretty tired.” He smiles, pointing at the doughnuts. “My sugar rush is leaving me.”

Deena says she’s sleepy too, and asks me to turn the light back off on my way out. We hug each other, but lightly, with just one arm each, the baby still nestled in her arms. I wanted to hold him before I left, but now I don’t think I should ask.

“Congratulations,” I say. I feel suddenly large and awkward, like an adult ducking into a playhouse, too big to sit in the play chairs without breaking them.

“Thanks,” she says, and the way she smiles makes me feel more this way.

When I am out in the hallway, I turn back to look at them through the glass window of the door. The room is dark, but I can see the back of the baby’s head, his tiny head still nestled against her. I wave good-bye, but they are looking at the baby, tired-eyed and open-mouthed, and neither of them sees me.

nineteen

I
DON’T HEAR TOO MUCH
from them after they have the baby. I call sometimes, but usually Jack is crying in the background, and Deena just talks about how tired she is, how she’s been up with him all night. He’s a colicky baby, she says, and a light sleeper. When Travis answers the phone, his hello comes out as a yawn.

It’s okay, I tell them. I’m busy too. I am still working at McDonald’s. I told DuPaul I could keep working during the school year if they moved me down to part-time.

“Oh goody,” Trish said, standing behind him. “Goody gum-drops.”

I go in for two hours after school and eight hours on Sundays. It’s a little better now. I have convinced DuPaul I would do better in drive-thru, simply taking money from people, and giving them what they want, no real grease involved, nothing to burn.

“At least you’re not a leaner,” he said, rubbing his beard, looking at JoAnne Steely at the front counter, who was right at that moment leaning on one of the counters and looking at her fingernails. “A lot of these people come in here, saying they want to work, and they just lean around. Like it’s their lawn furniture or something. Like I’m paying them to lean.”

DuPaul has three children, two of them in college. JoAnne Steely the leaner told me he’s here because his wife died three years ago, and he moved here from St. Louis because they offered him more money. There are plaques by the time clock stating that he’s won
BEST STORE MANAGER
in the Midwest District, two years in a row.

“I’ve got no time for leaners,” he says, carrying in crates of orange juice from the walk-in. “No time at all.”

Travis and Deena come through the drive-thru in the Datsun sometimes, Jack strapped into his car seat in the back. He has hair now, thin wisps of dark curls that make him look even more like Travis. They are starting to look alike, I notice, all three of them. They all have the same hair. When it’s cold out, Deena and Travis wear matching blue-and-yellow jackets.

“Hey!” Deena says, looking up at me from Travis’s window. “Can you get us some free food?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. Trish is already behind me, her hand flat against my back, steering me back toward the fry vat. “This isn’t a social hour,” she says. “You’re on the clock.”

Working this much does nothing good for my skin, and my mother has started leaving little packets of Noxzema in the bathroom. This is how it is now. This is my life. I do my homework on the bus.

I’m not sure yet what I will do with the money I am making, though I have been carefully saving it from the very start. I have bought only one tape this year, Tracy Chapman’s, because I like the song “Fast Car,” even though my mother says it’s so depressing she can’t stand it and would I please stop playing it over and over.

Ms. Jenkins is my science teacher again this year, and she says she thinks I can get a scholarship to KU, but still it seems as if this extra money from McDonald’s will be good to have. If I do get a scholarship, I will still need a car to drive away in. I tell myself this when I am at work and Trish is yelling at me, her face too close to mine, and this way I don’t hear her at all.

It’s like swimming underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes, hold my breath, and keep kicking.

Spring comes, finally. In April, the magnolia trees in front of the school bloom pink and white, their honey scent carried by the breeze. On the first warm day, Mrs. Evans opens the windows so we can smell them in sixth-period English. “Breathe deeply, class,” she says. “Beauty is good for you.” But before her class is even over, a storm rolls in, big and loud, the kind of storm I love. The sky turns a deep, dark gray very quickly, and streaks of lightning hit so close that Mrs. Evans jumps and says, “Oh my!” She shuts the windows and goes back to trying to teach us about iambic pentameter, but after a while, she gives up, and we all just sit there and look out the windows.

“Just a different kind of poetry,” she says, more to herself than to us.

At the end of the day, when we are walking to the buses, it’s already sunny again. If you looked at the sky, you wouldn’t even know it had rained at all. But on the ground, entire branches of redbuds and lilacs lie broken on the damp sidewalks. I pick up as many as I can, twisting them in two so they are small enough to carry. Libby stands in the line for the bus, watching me, leaning on her cane. I pick up more lilacs, and give some to her.

When I get home, I give a branch to my mother.

“Thanks,” she says, looking at me strangely. “Do you know?”

“Know what?”

Samuel is in his wheelchair, and she has to hold the branch of flowers up, out of his reach. He tries for them anyway, banging his head against her leg. “Eileen called. My father died this morning.” She is dry-eyed and even-voiced, a newscaster reporting a fire. “Heart attack,” she adds. “You know he’d already had one.”

Samuel reaches for the flowers again, groaning slightly. “No,” she says, pointing at the ends of the twigs. “No, honey, they’re sharp. Evelyn, help me get him into his beanbag.” She puts the branch on the table and slides her hands under his arms, nodding at me to get his feet. I watch her carefully, trying to read her face, but she is looking down at Samuel, concentrating on the task at hand.

“Eileen sounded okay,” she says. “But she might be covering.”

“Are
you
okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.” She tears a flower off the branch for Samuel and helps him get his fingers around it, holding it underneath his nose until he smiles.

Eileen comes up from Wichita three days later, after the funeral, not wearing black, but green, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She says she needed to get away from all the people in the house. Daniel is twenty-two now, in the army and living with his wife and new baby, but they came to Wichita for the funeral, and they haven’t left yet. My grandfather’s two sisters came up from Oklahoma, and Eileen says they are not very pleasant people to be around for very long. There were too many guests, she says, and not enough bath towels. The people from her church have been good, giving her more food than she knows what to do with. She has brought some of it up with her—strawberry-rhubarb pie, banana bread, chicken dumplings, all of it in plastic bowls with plastic wrap stretched across the tops.

She hasn’t even had time to miss him, she says. She says the same storm passed through Wichita that day, and she is sure it was my grandfather, his way of saying good-bye. The hospital called her just as the first drops of rain were starting to fall.

“I was still in my dressing gown, but I just tossed on my slippers and got in the car,” she says, the smoke from her cigarette drifting to the ceiling. My mother is letting her smoke in the house. “All that wind, all that thunder. They hadn’t told me on the phone, but he was already gone. I come out of the hospital maybe ten minutes later, standing there crying, and I look up at the sky, and there was the sun shining down through the clouds, everything green and shiny. There was a rainbow,” she says, her voice lifting. “You think I’m making it up, but I’m not.”

My mother says nothing to this. She does not roll her eyes. “Maybe you and the girls could think about moving up to Kerrville,” she says, pouring Eileen some coffee. “Evelyn’s going to KU, and she won’t be far away.”

“You should,” I add. “I’d like that.”

Eileen smiles and brings her cup up to her mouth. “Maybe,” she says.

I give Samuel a bath, so my mother can stay in the front room with Eileen. I am still not as good with him as she is, and I don’t do the bath right. I get soap in his eyes, and I leave the water on for too long. When it rises to his shoulders, he starts screaming, swatting at me, his head dipping underwater. I have to hold him close so he won’t hurt himself, and this is what finally calms him, his soapy head under my chin. His hands clutch my arms, and we stay still like this, pressed together, his heart pounding so I can feel it, until the water drains back down.

“Everything okay in there?” my mother calls out.

“We’re fine,” I say. He gazes up in the direction of my face. His blue eyes stay focused, unblinking and brilliant. I don’t know if they see me or not.

When I wheel him back out to the front room, a towel wrapped around his hair, Eileen is crying, and my mother isn’t. “Thanks, Evelyn,” my mother says. Samuel pulls himself toward her, his arms reaching vaguely forward. “Look at my boy!” she says. “Look at my beautiful clean boy!”

Eileen watches them, saying nothing, until her cigarette is all gone, turned to ash in the saucer my mother has set on the table. “You’re really not too upset, are you?” she asks finally, really just asking, not mad about it. “You said you weren’t going to be upset, and you’re not.”

My mother frowns, her hands pulling gently through Samuel’s damp hair. “No. I’m really not.”

“Seems like you should be,” Eileen says, looking out the window. “Maybe it hasn’t hit you yet.”

“Maybe,” my mother agrees.

“He had his problems, but he was still your father. He had his good points too.”

“That’s true,” my mother says.

“Probably later I’ll get really upset,” Eileen says. “When I realize he’s gone for good, not coming back. I’m sure it will hit me in a few days. That’s what they say. I’m probably just numb right now.”

“Probably,” my mother says, catching my eye, looking away before Eileen can see her do it.

Samuel is going to start first grade through the special education program in the fall. I think back to my own first grade, and I remember putting together jigsaw puzzles of the fifty states in the union, letter books, and long pages of single-digit addition. It is difficult to imagine Samuel sitting in a classroom like this. I’m not sure what or how they’re going to teach him. If someone gave him a jigsaw puzzle of the fifty states, he would just sit there, and maybe put some of the pieces in his mouth.

“They’ll work on his independent-living skills,” my mother says. She is sitting on the rim of the bathtub, leaning forward to help him brush his teeth, her hand tight around his. He doesn’t like brushing his teeth, and she has to keep her feet wrapped around his ankles so he can’t scoot away.

“But that’s what you do,” I say.

“Well,” she says, reaching for the floss, “we’ll give somebody else a crack at it for a while.” She is all talk, though. When it gets closer to the first day, she gets nervous. They have already gone through a dry run in the summer: the bus for special education students, the short bus, came out and picked up my mother and Samuel so they could run through a simulated school morning, seeing his classroom, meeting his teacher. But now the real thing is coming up, and the school has sent out a letter, polite but firm, making it clear that no parents should be on the bus on the first day of school. They will send the same bus out again, and there will be two paras on board to assist the students on their way to school.

“They used to not have any of that,” Verranna Hinckle told us, grinning as she scanned the letter. “It’s because Kenny Astor’s parents sued the district.”

But my mother is not feeling very appreciative. She calls the school secretary several times a day, attempting to weasel her way not only onto the bus but into sitting right next to Samuel for the entire morning of school. I think they are getting tired of her calling.

“Yes I know,” she says. She is sitting on the couch with Samuel on her lap, the telephone receiver in the crook of her neck. “But you don’t understand. He’s never been away from me. As in
never
.” She pauses, and I can hear someone talking on the other end. Samuel reaches up to the phone cord, wrapping it around his wrist. “I know there’s a first time for everything,” she says. “I know that, okay?”

The night before the first day of school, my mother knocks on my door and tells me that Samuel probably won’t get to start school tomorrow. She can tell he is already upset. He knows something is up, she says, and she expects he will put up a fight. She doesn’t see how she’ll be able to get him up and dressed and waiting for the bus by eight.

“It just won’t work,” she says, shrugging. “They don’t understand.” She is standing in my doorway, wearing the jean skirt and a shirt that is on backwards. I watch her for a moment, pushing my glasses up so I can really see her. She bites her lip, looks back at me.

“I’ll stay home and help you,” I say. “I can miss the first day.”

The next morning, we get up at six, and even though she insists on being the one to lift him and help him brush his teeth, it really is a good thing I am there. He thrashes and swings when she lifts him from his bed to his wheelchair, from his wheelchair to the tub, and then up and over the rim of the tub into his wheelchair again. She leans him up against her so she can shimmy his pants up and over his hips, pushing his arms into his shirtsleeves, and he screams. I stand behind him, holding his arms down with mine, careful not to squeeze or pinch his thin skin. But still he grabs hold of her hair when we are coming out of the bathroom, and his grip is so strong that he is able to bring her to her knees before I can get him to let go. We wait until after breakfast to put on his shoes, because he is kicking wildly, swinging his legs with more strength than I thought he had.

He has never been like this before. He knows today is different after all.

When the bus comes, things go badly. My mother wheels him outside, and there is no doubt in my mind at all that he sees the bus, the lowered wheelchair ramp, and the smiling paras waiting on each side. He screams as if he is dying, holding on to my mother’s shirt with his crooked hand until his fingers turn the color of bruised peaches. I am so busy trying to pry his fingers away that for a while I don’t see that she is holding on to him too, her arm locked around his waist.

I touch her hand. “Mom.”

One of the paras, a large woman wearing running shoes and a fanny pack, pats my mother on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she says. “We’re going to take care of him. We’re going to teach him things. I promise.”

But he manages to pop the other para in the nose before they get him on the bus. She stands up for a moment, wrinkling her nose like a rabbit. “I’m okay,” she says. “I’m fine.” They strap his wheelchair onto the lift, and he starts to move upward.