You Are My Only (4 page)

She studies me, can't decide if I am lying.

“We have Sir Johannes Kepler to thank,” she finally continues, “for rediscovering Pappus's notes on the Archimedean solids and sharing his knowledge with others. Pappus lived in the fourth century AD and Kepler thirteen centuries later. Sometimes history is in the hands of one man, or even in the hands of a woman.” She closes the book and her eyes. My mother, I realize, is lonesome for Kepler, for the man with Archimedes's history in his hands.

“I'm sorry,” I tell her. “For not paying better attention.”

“You'll write an essay,” she says, “to make things right. Five pages on the travels and lives of the truncated icosahedron. There's plenty here,” she says, sweeping her hand toward the books, “to get you started.”

“The travels and lives?”

“You heard me.”

“A whole essay?”

“How is that so hard?”

“But, Mother …”

“Nothing more.”

She lifts her knees, and the ice packs fall. She levers the foldout stool back into the La-Z-Boy's mouth and pushes up and groans. She hands me the book of photographs, then hobble-hops toward the stairs. “Seek perfection,” she says, “in all that you do.”

Perfection,
I want to say, because look where we live, look where we are—in a house with a tumbledown roof and cracks in the floors and walls so full of old picture holes you'd think somebody had gone off shooting bullets. “What's the point?” I ask instead.

“The point of what?”

“Of learning Archimedean solids?”

“If you were a smarter girl, you wouldn't have to ask.”

“I thought you said—”

“I'm going to bed.”

“
Mother.”

“The clock is ticking,” she says, scraping her way up the stairs, her ice already puddling the floor.

The next morning, she walks the path, creaks open the door to the old Volvo, turns the motor over. I run. Up the stairs and into the attic, over the crossbeams and the pink fluff, toward the window. Outside, the sun is pale and liquid. The crows are big and black. They knock their way around the sky, then knock back down into the crooked tree. Flying and settling and returning and flying, and now the biggest crow caws down from the wide green crown and looks through the window at me.

I throw the sash up, push my head out, and watch as the sergeant crow stares and blinks, hops branches and twigs, hunches up his rubbery wings. When the door to Joey's house swings open, the sergeant flies and the other crows fly, and now when I look past the tree, I see Miss Cloris standing at the edge of her porch, wearing a rainbow-striped tee and a bow in her hair. She lifts her glasses from the string around her neck and fits them to her nose and stares up at the tree, as if she's wondering if the crows were a dream. She stares for a good long time, then shakes her head. “Now, that was a bona fide crow party,” I hear her say to Harvey, who has scratched in beside her and held himself to the ledge of the rainbow-striped porch, looking like he'll fly, too, any second. She hums a little something, puts her hand on Harvey's head. He wags his tail stupendously. “You bad old pup,” she tells him, and now when she looks up into the crazy branches of the tree, she stops and shades her eyes with her hand.

“Hey,” she calls. “You growing an aviary over there?”

I shrug, don't answer.

“You know what an aviary is?”

“Not really.”

“It's like a garden of birds. Takes a special someone to grow one.”

She pulls the glasses from her nose and fixes the bow right in her hair, crosses her arms across her chest, and waits for me to have something to say, but all of a sudden, I don't. “Pleased to meet you,” she says at last. “My name's Miss Cloris. By the way.”

“Sophie,” I tell her.

“You Joey's friend?”

I nod. “He's teaching me to throw.”

“Is he?”

I nod again. “He home?”

“Lucky for you,” she says. “It's a teacher in-service.”

“That's nice,” I say, no idea just what she means.

“I take it you're waiting on Joey?”

“Maybe I am.”

“Well, he's home, like I said. He's inside, with Miss Helen, reading her Cather. You know willa Cather?”

I shake my head no.

“You an interrupter? When people read, you listen?”

“I like stories,” I say.

“I like girls who like stories.”

“I've been reading,” I boast, “since I was three.”

“And you never heard of Cather?
My Ántonia
?
The Song of the Lark
?
O Pioneers!
?”

“No.”

“You best get yourself a Cather education. A girl can't live without Cather.” She pauses. “You like to come hear Joey read? He does a nice Cather.”

“Right now, ma'am?”

“Right now if you can swing it.”

I stare down at her.

She stares up at me.

Harvey wags his tail, ferocious.

Mother finds out, and she'll kill me. Mother suspects, and we'll be gone, moving again and losing and dying, a little blacker every day, a little less something to fight for—and still, yet: the diner is that way, down the road, and my heart is pounding loud, and pounding louder.

“I'll stir up some lemonade on the off chance,” Miss Cloris calls now. “Slice up some wedges of orange.” She tugs at the bow in her hair and heads back toward the house. Harvey wallops his big tail behind her.

I wait all night for the light of day, which will come laid flat out on the back of a train, Arlen, the big man, says. “You wait,” he tells me. “You see.” I am going nowhere in this soggy dark with this pole of pain for a leg; I'm waiting. I put my hand against the tender swell. It hurts something like a bee sting.

“Someone should take a look at that ankle,” Arlen says.

“I've got bigger worries.”

He has taken off his jacket and given it to me, laid it across my knees like a blanket. He has kept his arm across my shoulder, and I don't mind him, not really. I don't mind how he gives me room to tell my Baby stories, how he lets things be—no questions. I keep her just this close, all night long, with words and stories, the little songs that sometimes I will sing her.
True, true, the sky is blue.
I count down the minutes until dawn, when I can search again, when I will find her.

At last the day's first train crests the bend. “Just like I promised,” Arlen says.

“You wait and watch for it every day?”

“I find it peaceful.”

I watch in silence. I watch the ocher eyes swoosh the dark off the rails ahead, put their gloss of snail shimmer down. I feel the rattle in the hill where we sit, the air sucking crazy. Through the window in the booth above the pair of train eyes, I see the engineer and his straight-ahead face. I see the dangle of a light above his head.

“The first train is the express train,” Arlen declares. “I like its speed.”

The train screams and pitches. It thunders—such an awful trembling that I do not know how the houses on the banks along the tracks don't shatter up and crumble. My ankle swells in the raging roar. The jacket kicks up in a riffle from my knees until I press it flat with my hands.

“Watch it, now,” he says, and he lifts his arm from my shoulder and rises up onto his haunches and balances here beside me in a way I wouldn't have thought he could. He's got something he knows about the miracle of the day's first train, and beside him I bear witness.

“Watch the ridgeline,” he tells me, his voice drowning in the bellows of the train shooting past. When I look up to where he's pointing, I see a streak of tangerine touched down upon the silver-bodied train. Right there, like a horizon line, just as he has promised.

“Daybreak!” he hollers, and now he stands and pumps his fist to the sky, and the long strands of his graying hair get pulled about in the air suck. Finally the wind roars down, and the night has become a veil of shadows. The night isn't night, after all; it is first dawn.

Fast as it came, it leaves. When it's gone, Arlen squats back down beside me. His legs are wide but not long. His trousers are scruffy. He's missing a button on his blue-plaid shirt; there's a toothpaste stain on his collar. With the rising of the sun, he has been revealed. I am surprised by the pleasant way he smiles.

“Thank you,” he says.

And I say, “What for?”

“For the company.”

“That's funny,” I tell him. “Funny sweet.”
Like something Kevin O would say
, I think,
if Kevin O were in love with trains
.

Arlen rubs at his eyes with the fists of his hands. He looks a little cold without his jacket.

“Here,” I say, lifting the jacket from my knees.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “I'm the one who hurt your ankle.”

“Saved my life is more like it.”

“Well,” he says, “you were standing there.”

He isn't a pretty man or a handsome one. The bulb of his nose sits crooked. There's nothing on his outside that's as nice as his inside, but still. “Will you help me find my Baby?” I ask.

“Is there a plan?” he asks.

“I'm thinking.”

“Can you stand on it?” he asks, and I say, “I don't much know if I can, but I know I have to.”

He says, “Put it down slow,” and now he takes the rise of the hill on his own, straightening his trousers all the way to his ankles, which, I see, in this breaking light, are naked. His shoes are the color of dried hay. His trousers are patched. His hands aren't like the rest of him, by which I mean, they are trim and the right size for hands. “Here,” he says, as if he's inviting me to dance, and I put both my hands into his so he can give me the strength to stand, but when I try to ease onto my weight, it's like I've been hot-spiked.

“Oh, Arlen,” I say.

He says, “Steady, now. I've got you.”

“How am I going to find her,” I ask, “if I can't walk?”

“Let's get you off the embankment,” he says, “for starters. Incline can't be good for a gimpy ankle.” I start hopping soon as he comes toward me. He takes my lean against his shoulder. His jacket has fallen to a pile on the ground. He makes sure I am steady before he bends down to retrieve it. I waver. When he again stands tall, I lean back in.

“You still feel a chill?” he asks.

“Sun is doing its job.”

“You still working on your plan?”

“I don't have a plan.”

“Then we need you home now. Soon as can be.”

“Arlen, I told you. I said it already. I'm not going home without my Baby.”

“Police will come knocking, and what will they do when they find that you're gone? What will they think? What about your husband? They'll put you down on the suspects list, maybe. Jigger up some kind of motive. Mother on the lam, they'll say. If you don't have a plan, you risk suspicion.”

“I would not hurt Baby.”

“I know, but the police don't.”

“You know about police, Arlen?”

“Maybe once or twice.”

“What do you mean?”

He doesn't answer for a minute, longer. His hold grows tight on me, and anxious. “Doesn't matter,” he says at last, and I don't come back at him with questions, because he still smells like chicken bones and garlic, still takes my weight like a Roman column. I don't mind, I decide it right now, whatever he's done. Arlen's to be trusted.

“Arlen?”

“What?”

“Where do you think they took my Baby?”

“Can't figure it.”

“Who would have done it?”

“Jealousy,” he says. “Or greed.”

“I said
who
, Arlen.”

He steps and I step and I let the ankle hang between us. He steps and he says, “Press your arm hard down on my shoulder—make it easier.” I try what he says, but it's still not easy.

“I'm going to wear you out,” I say, out of breath. We're up the incline and down now, in a gully. We're in a patch of grass that grows tall as my hips. Beyond the fog is the back portion of a modest garden shop. Piles of mulch and piles of earth. Pot after pot of bush and zinnia. I smell the steam of things growing. “Would like to steal us one of those wheelbarrows.”

“Stealing's no good,” Arlen says. “It's trouble.”

“We'd bring it back,” I say, “when we were done. Then it'd be lawful.”

“It would still be trouble.” When he talks now, he's wheezing. When he walks, he slants. I hop and he pulls and we drag, and now Arlen stops to collect himself. I stand beside him in the scratch of grass, my right arm sore from pressing hard across his back.

The sky is pinking. It is floating down onto the garden shop, peeking in through the greenhouse windows, putting a glance of gold onto the hump of mulch. It showers sun on the street beyond, where a few cars are already out trolling, their headlights streaking. I smell a lit cigarette. It burns through one of the shadows.