You Are My Only (12 page)

“And you loved me despite it.”

“I loved you always.”

They talk like that, back and forth, about the ugly collar and the girly sleeves and the other things Miss Cloris used to wear that now she doesn't, and how it was when they took two pairs of scissors to the old dress pile and chopped the whole thing into scrap pieces. They go on as though I'm not here, as though it's a private place, me at their table, working through a kite tail in my head. I want to say I'm sorry for the shouting. I want to say I'm sorry for not explaining. I want to say, my mother and me, we're out-running the No Good, but I cannot do a thing. I just sit here trying to breathe, and now Minxy comes back toward my lap and leaps as if my knees are the world's softest pillow, as if I have been forgiven, as if I can figure it out—how these scraps make a tail.

By the time Joey comes home, I am recovered and the kite's in hiding, with its long Rapunzel tail. “Now, that's making quite a statement,” Miss Helen said before Miss Cloris wheeled her away to the back room.

Miss Cloris cleaned the kitchen of its cotton scraps, hid the kite somewhere upstairs, came back down and sat with me, drumming her fingers on the table. Finally she asked if I knew anything about making sand tarts, and when I shook my head no, she said, “Never harmed anyone, making two batches of cookies in a single day.” Five things, she told me, is all that we'd need—the butter, which she'd have to soften; the vanilla extract, which I found in the pantry; the confectioners' sugar; which is the snow version of sugar, the flour, a softer snow than sugar; and pecans, minced down to nothing. We kept our voices low, and Harvey behaved. we pressed the sweet dough into star shapes, ate the morning's chocolate chips while we worked. “Forty-five minutes at two-seventy-five,” Miss Cloris told me when the trays were oven-ready. “Miss Helen likes them brown around the edges.”

We set the timer after that, cleaned up the kitchen. We talked about anything but kites, anything excepting Mother, anything at all excluding Miss Helen and her weakness. We each had our hurt spots, I was coming to see, and Miss Cloris was kind, and sometimes she'd say, “Life goes by faster than it ought to,” and I'd say, “But sometimes time moves too slow,” and either way we weren't judging each other, and when I walked across the kitchen to stare past the alley and around the tree and back on the house where I was living, Miss Cloris didn't ask me for feelings or explaining, only said, “Those crows ought to pay rent, for all the time they spend up on those branches.”

I didn't hear Joey until he came through the door, dropped his backpack to the floor, took Harvey's front paws onto his shoulders. “You big old beast,” he was saying when I turned around. He smiled his bright white crooked teeth at me. His eyes are on the black side of blue. His hair is like a thousand Slinkys, springing, and his shoulders are built out wide, his body lean. His shorts hung low. He wore no laces in his high-tops. He had a bruise below one knee, fading off to green.

“You're home early,” Miss Cloris told him.

“Mr. Shoe took sick.”

“Is that right?”

“It is.”

“You wash up, now. Miss Helen's waiting.”

Harvey whined when Joey set him down, looked like he might jump again. “You never learn, do you, dog?” Joey said, but Harvey yipped like he was sure that Joey would return from around the corner and up the stairs, which, eventually, he did. I followed him to the back room and Miss Cloris followed in time with her plate of browned sand tarts, and we all settled in for the reading—Miss Helen's nothing weight against Joey's shoulder, Minxy on my lap, Miss Cloris beside me. Father Latour was in his adobe room on Christmas Day, humming a song called
Ave Maria Stella.
The sand tarts were disappearing. Joey was stopping every now and then to fix Helen's head on his shoulder. “I'm through at five o'clock,” my mother had told me—it felt like a year ago—when she left for work that morning. The clock over the kitchen sink was ticking.

Up and up, and then stop, and she's not speaking. We are through again, and down a hall. There is a porch beyond; there is sky—I can almost see sky. “Damn it,” she says every time the key sticks, every single time. “Damn it.” The brace-let of keys has smudged the knob of Bettina's wrist green. There's the smell of tobacco leaking.

“Where,” I ask her for the fourth time now, “are you taking me?”

“To the cleanse,” she says for the fourth time. She sounds tired, and still I keep asking. “It's protocol, okay? That's all I can tell you.”

She walks and she pushes. She pulls at the hoop in her ear. She won't smile because she can't, and the floor goes bump. She unlocks a door and pushes me through, and now at last we have come to where she has been going. From the white floor, basins rise. The nurses wear white. There is a glassed-in cage of an office, where an owl woman sits, peering through the glasses on her nose.

“Ninth one today,” the owl says. “That time of the month.” She walks toward me, her hands out in front, her right hand twitching—I see it twitching. I flatten back against my chair.

“Let me do it,” Bettina says.

“If that's what you want,” the owl answers.

“Do what?” I demand.

“Strip you down,” Bettina says—almost a whisper, almost an apology for Dr. Brightman's cure, but she said nothing, absolutely
nothing
when she could have—“for the cleanse.” She puts her hands on me, her fingers on the strings of the dress. It takes nothing and I fight her and she says, “The easier you let it be, the easier it is,” and I say, “Why? Why? Why?” and she says, “Doctor's orders,” and I am naked now, scorching cold flesh, my arm and my leg in their plaster.

“One more into the pot,” the owl says over what I say, over what Bettina says back, over the sound of her carrying me now, lifting me and sinking me into a steaming tub, and I am not alone, and I will not look upon the others. “Let the bad leg hang. Wrap the arm.”

“Ma'am.”

“Cushion for the head. We'll let her steep. Put your hands down, Mrs. Rane,” the owl says. “Put your hands down, I warn you.” And now Bettina whispers, “Let it be, Emmy. Get it done.”

“I am a mother,” I say, sobbing.

“Dr. Brightman's orders,” she says.

We take the long way on the short walk home, stopping at the alley to watch the crows ganging up on the tree, then walking around, to the tree's other side, where no one can see us but us. If you drew a line across the top of my head and kept the line going, you'd come to the shelf of Joey's shoulders. If you looked up, you'd see the one dimple in his one cheek and the thin white scar that goes crosswise across his brow, where the back of the cap usually sits. If you were listening, you'd be listening to the story about the girl at school who left a nest inside her locker and opened it the next day to find birds. “You should have heard those birds,” Joey's saying. “You should have seen old Mr. Shoe.”

I'm only half listening. I'm watching Joey talk—the lock and unlock of his jaw, the black in the blue of his eyes, the way he looks past me and up into the tree and then looks down again and finds me still here, half listening. “They always talked about it,” he's saying now, and I've missed the end of one story and the beginning of the next, and he's caught me and I blush.

“Talked about what?”

“New Mexico. ‘Fitting out the Airstream for the Southwest,' they'd say.”

“Miss Cloris and Miss Helen?”

He looks at me funny.

“of course them.”

“So why didn't they go?”

“Because of me, I guess.”

I wait for more of whatever I've missed, whatever he hasn't said yet, but he's stopped. His eyes are drifting away again; his dimple's gone.

“You going to tell me?” I ask him, but his eyes go blacker than blue and his jaw works itself hard and bony silent, and he looks past me for such a long, long time that I wish I could take back my asking.

“Joey?” I ask, and he says, “There were four of us. My parents, my sister, and me. we went out driving to an apple farm. A truck pulled alongside of us and tried to pass but couldn't. I was in the seat behind my mother, in a car seat; I was three. They found me on the roadside, crying.”

“Your aunts found you?” I'm so confused. Found him where? what roadside? How did he get there?

“The police. And the police found Miss Cloris, who was my father's stepsister, the only family who could help, or wanted to. Miss Cloris brought me here, and here is home, and I've never known much different. I was three, like I said. My life is here, and most of the time it feels like it always was.”

“, Oh Joey,” I say.

“It's okay.”

“No, Joey, it's not.”

“They're good to me—Aunt Cloris, Aunt Helen. They've always done their best.”

“What was your sister's name?”

“Jenna.”

“How old was she?”

“Six.”

“What else do you remember?”

“My mother's hair, which was blowing through the open car window. My father singing some radio song. My sister sleeping. The car was white, with a thin blue stripe, and there were cows in the field where they found me. That's it. That's all I remember.”

He stands here, close, and I step closer. I reach for the line across his brow. He lets me touch it, lets me keep my hand near, tells me how Miss Cloris and Miss Helen had been planning an Airstream adventure when the accident happened and he moved in. Cross-country, state by state, their everywhere year—they'd been planning that, and then Joey came. “They put it off,” he says, “and kept putting it off, and then my aunt Helen got sick.”

“So that's why you read to them, then?”

“I guess that's it.”

“To take them to places they haven't been?”

“We pretend.”

“You do a nice reading,” I say.

I don't ask him what Miss Helen's sick with. I don't ask him for any more talk. I just stand here, on this side of the tree, looking for the blue in his eyes and the dimple in his cheek, tracing the white line across his head. He lifts his hand and tucks my hair behind one ear. He moves closer, and it happens. His lips taste like sugar snow and the fine mince of pecans. I close my eyes and cannot breathe.

“I had to,” he whispers when it's over. “Did you mind much?”

“No”—I shake my head—“I didn't.”

He leans in again, and this time I kiss him back and the crows above us stir. “It's not fair,” I say between kisses, “what happened to you,” and he just keeps saying it's all right, until suddenly, from down the road I hear the cough-spit of the Volvo. “Joey,” I say, “she's back,” and everything changes—Joey and the crows and especially me, pulling away, past the branches toward the street. I run the slate to the door and bang it open. I slam it behind me, tight and sure. “Sophie!” Joey calls, but still I'm running—up the stairs, toward the attic, over the crossbeams, across the pink. I throw the window open and call down to him from there.

“Tomorrow,” I tell him. “I promise.”