Fig (14 page)

“If properly left alone,” he says, “all the pox should have healed just fine.”

The phrase “left alone” echoes in my head. Mama and Daddy come back in when the doctor leaves with my chart. Mama asks, “Won't it be nice to go home?” and Daddy answers for me. “Yes,” he says, but all I hear is “left alone.”

*  *  *  *

I have to be taken out in a wheelchair.

“Hospital policy,” the nurse explains, but won't let Daddy push me. Daddy and Mama walk on either side of the wheelchair until Mama suddenly stops. We are passing by a long window, only it doesn't offer a view of the outside world. It looks into another room. From the wheelchair, all I can see are balloons drifting on the other side of the glass. They are the kind of balloons that look like inflated tinfoil. This must be the nursery. Once upon a time, I was kept in there.

The nurse stops pushing only after Daddy stops too. I turn to look at Mama. And she is looking through the window with her forehead pressed against the glass.

“Annie?” Daddy says. And he turns her name into a question, which is never good.

I hold my breath and cross my fingers. With her head still against the thick soundproof glass, Mama turns to look at Daddy. My fingers are cramping, and I'm about to turn blue when she finally steps back, pulling my prescription from her purse.

“I need to get this filled,” she says, and I can tell Daddy doesn't know what to think.

“Makes sense to me,” the nurse says, her voice disembodied.

Daddy nods and starts walking, but I see the way he continues to look back at Mama, who I can't see anymore because the nurse is pushing me again, trying to keep up with my father's long strides. Both Daddy and Uncle Billy are very tall, Paul Bunyan–size.

The lights in the elevator flicker as we ride down. Daddy smiles at the nurse the way he does when he's uncomfortable.

“Them babies sure do tug the heartstrings,” the nurse says. She says this as if she understands everything there is to understand about my family.

I want to tell her the truth.

My mother is crazy,
I would say.
A real nut job.
Which is what Phillip Booth likes to say, but I don't. I don't say anything at all.

Daddy goes to get the car, and I wait in the wheelchair. I can feel the nurse's breath on my neck despite the already thick humidity of this after-rain world. The cinnamon gum is not strong enough to mask her sour breath. When Daddy pulls around, she helps me get into the back of Mama's Volvo. Through the window, I watch her push the empty chair back into the hospital, where she leaves it in the crescent-shaped vestibule.

I fall asleep waiting for Mama. When I wake again, the sky is dark and the streetlights are now burning—the air still thick with humidity, there are now thousands of moths dancing around the yellow globes. Mama is getting into the car. She puts the medicine on the dashboard. It's in a white paper bag, stapled shut with the instructions attached.

When she tries to put on her safety belt, it gets stuck and won't come out.

She turns around and pulls, but it still won't budge. She yanks and yanks, and then she screams, “I hate this place!” Her face is red, and I can tell she was crying long before she got into the car. And Daddy is climbing out of his seat and rushing around to help her.

“Annie,” he says, “let me try.”

Mama is taking deep breaths, and Daddy says, “I can fix it.” He says this again and again, and finally the strap slides out from where it was stuck inside the wall. He clips the buckle shut, and now Mama is rummaging through her purse. I hear the rattle of her pills, and she is checking each bottle—searching for the right fix. And in the side mirror, I watch as she swallows a blue circle with a heart carved out of the inside. At least that's what it looks like to me.

Daddy is in the driver's seat again, and when he turns the key Mama catches my eye in the passenger-side mirror, but she doesn't smile or look away. She stares at me instead. Daddy pulls away from the curb and the tires make a noise like rain as they roll over the wet street, and Mama still doesn't look away.

Lawrence falls behind and she continues to stare. And even though I often can't see her in the long gaps of country darkness, I know she is still there—in the mirror, watching me. And when we pass a lonely streetlight or a house lit up, she is illuminated by the temporary brightness, and she is there. She is there when a car comes from the other directions, and as the headlights turn to taillights, she is glowing red and she is still staring.

Her stare is empty but sometimes angry. Mama stares at me like she doesn't know who I am or why I'm in her mirror. Like a caption to explain an image in a book, there is a warning below her stare. It reads,
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

wormhole: a “shortcut” through space-time.

September 1984

When I enter the fourth grade, Mama starts seeing a new therapist and she seems to get better every day, and it matters less that I will be nineteen in ten years.

On Saturdays, she takes me to the Dairy Queen and we order strawberry milkshakes, which we suck through straws as she drives back home. I wonder if these milkshakes are the reason she is getting fat, but as long as Mama is happy I couldn't care less about her weight.

Now I just have more of her.

*  *  *  *

The whine of the tornado alarm loops and the television screen goes red.

And the warning repeats itself:
TAKE IMMEDIATE SHELTER
.

Mama fills a plastic jug with water, and Daddy grabs a box of crackers and salami from the pantry. They usher me out the back door and toward the cellar. The wind slaps against my face and stings my cheeks. I pull on the double doors because both Mama and Daddy's arms are full. The doors fly open. Once we're all under the house, Daddy pulls the doors shut again and he secures them with a two-by-four, and I expect silence to follow but there isn't any. The sounds aren't even muffled. The siren nags and the wind is just as angry as it was before.

Mama pulls on the string to turn on the light, and all I see are amoebas swimming in the dank air—blue-black, they are like the rainbows motor oil makes on water. Daddy sits on the bench across from us. The lightbulb swings back and forth, and his face goes from dark to light, again and again.

Outside, the world is blowing away.

And I think about what it'd be like to lose everything. Would we start over somewhere else? Somewhere far away from here. Is the fourth grade different in a different place?

The barn is picked up in one piece and hurled to Missouri the way they throw discs in the Olympics. The trees are next—the ring of cottonwoods that protect the house. The massive trees make a popping noise as they are ripped from the ground. And it sounds like rain when God shakes the earth from their tangled roots. Next, the tornado plays with the house the way a cat plays with a mouse—it paws at all the windows before it smashes all the glass.

It takes the house apart, board by board. The nails scream as they come undone after a century worth of holding.

Mama reaches into her jeans and pulls out her medicine. She shakes a pill from the bottle and swallows it without any water. Another blue circle with a heart carved out. Then she sits with her elbows on her thighs and her head in her hands. I see her knuckles poking out of her hair. Daddy leans back, watching the ground. Neither of my parents looks up. There is a dead centipede on the dirt floor.

Gran once told me about a tornado that came through here when my father was a little boy. It took the Fergesons' original two-story farmhouse. Tossed it to the sky and heaven kept it.

Bits and pieces of their farm were found scattered across the county for weeks after. We still have their white enamel kitchen sink out by the train tracks, half-buried. In the summer, the chicory grows a blue fairy ring around it.

When the Fergesons crawled out of their root cellar, the only thing left was their front door. It stood there in its frame, the three steps leading up still intact. And sticking out of the keyhole was the key where they'd always kept it to keep it from getting lost. When Gran sent Daddy across the road with a casserole, Mr. Fergeson opened this door for him like their house was still there.

When Daddy tells the story, he always says, “That was the day I stopped believing in God.”

Before Daddy's grandfather bought the farm, there used to be a cider house, but it, too, blew away. Ever since we Johnsons moved in, nothing on the farm's been touched by the tornados that sweep through Douglas County as routine as a housekeeper and her broom.

I lay my head in Mama's lap. Through the crack between the cellar doors, the world is a filthy color green. As Mama strokes my head I pray. I pray for my family to begin anew. I hold my breath and cross my fingers. And the repetition of my praying puts me to sleep—but when I wake up, I find myself in my bed, and it's a new day just like every other one that came before, and our house is where it's always been. We will not be moving away to start over somewhere better; somewhere over the rainbow is not a place we get to go, or have. The only difference is I don't have to go to school today.

The storm broke the kitchen window and the yard's littered with mangled tree branches and the gardens are all a mess. The hens did not survive, and I help Daddy clean the coop. The straw floor is plastered with egg yolk and broken shell. The black and white feathers are everywhere—woven into the chicken wire, caught in the splintered wood. The bodies of the flightless birds themselves lay where they were dropped, and when I pick them up they are limp and cold.

*  *  *  *

Uncle Billy has work in Colorado and is leaving town for a spell. In the winter, he often goes to work at the ski resorts in Aspen or Steamboat Springs.

“It's the only way I can afford to have any fun,” he says. And then he winks at me and says, “Someday you will come along and I will teach you how to fly.”

He wants to give me my birthday present even though my birthday isn't for another twenty-one days. He insists I open it in front of him. The box is wrapped in silver paper with a long ribbon tied all the way around. The ribbon ends in a fancy black velvet bow at the top.

The box is gigantic, almost as tall as my chest when I am standing.

Uncle Billy grins. “Go on,” he says. “Open your present.”

I fill the living room with the sound of tearing paper. What I peel off, Uncle Billy gathers and tosses to the side. He lets me use his pocketknife to cut where the cardboard flaps have been taped shut. Inside the box is another box wrapped in red with yellow ribbon. And because of how big it is, Uncle Billy lifts it out for me, and I use his knife again to cut the ribbon.

In this box I find another box.

I unwrap paper, undo ribbons, and cut open boxes. The living room fills with wadded-up wrapping paper, ribbon, bows, and empty cardboard boxes. Marmalade busies herself by chasing after all the paper and attacking it. Uncle Billy acts as if everything is normal.

“Open your present,” he keeps saying every time I find another box.

I'm left with a small box that fits in my lap. It looks like the first present, only smaller. The same silver paper, but instead of ribbon Uncle Billy has written,
I love you.

Inside I find a wooden doll.

She is not shaped like any doll I have ever seen. Her hair, face, and clothes have all been painted on. She smiles at me with her rosebud lips, and she wears a head scarf, a cloak, a long skirt, and an apron. Every garment is decorated with flowers—bright reds and pinks and oranges contrasted sharply by the application of black.

“Open your present,” Uncle Billy says again.

And he shows me how her body unscrews. How she comes apart at the middle. I pull one doll from another.

“They are nesting dolls,” he says. “Matryoshka.” And this is a doll I can actually love.

“They come from Russia,” Uncle Billy says. And there are five altogether, but I like the smallest one the best. She looks exactly like all the other ones, only smaller—and she is solid.

She cannot be opened.

*  *  *  *

Today is the first day of 1985.

Uncle Billy comes back for Christmas and stays long enough to celebrate New Year's Eve.

And it is bitter cold outside, but Uncle Billy doesn't care. He wants to take a walk before he drives back to Colorado in his little pickup truck. He wants to walk with me.

We walk out to the old railroad spur where the busted-up tracks are buried by the perfect snow. From here, I can see the cut of the Silver River, and the dome of Kansas sky is blue today like a robin's egg. There are roses in my uncle's cheeks from the cold, and as we walk we are surrounded by the clouds we make just by breathing. I feel like I am floating. And this is why I can't be sure of what I see. I see the silhouette of a dog in the distance across the water. As she trots she continues to stop and turn around, and when she looks so do I. There are three of them, impossibly small. They chase their mother, and the pups are nothing more than black dots on the white snow.

*  *  *  *

March 3, 1985

Mama begins her annual spring cleaning.

And her first focus is my bedroom.

I sit in the window seat and watch her make decisions about what I get to keep. She rounds up all my stuffed animals, both ratty and not ratty, and tosses them into the cardboard box while I pretend not to care. I pretend I'm not a little girl anymore.

The box is the same big box from Uncle Billy, only now it takes instead of gives. It swallows my entire childhood, which will all be donated to the Goodwill in Lawrence. Mama doesn't look underneath my mattress, and she leaves my nesting dolls alone. They stand on the top of my dresser, where I lined them up in a row. Large to small, they watch Mama sort through my belongings, and they can't help but smile because that is how they were painted.