Fig (31 page)

Uncle Billy says, “Every place has something to be famous for.”

My grandmother sighs and puts the car in drive, and we lurch forward. We listen to the radio long enough to hear a repeat of the weather report I heard this morning. Snow is likely, but the Cold War is finally over. Gran takes me home and tries to drop me off without getting out of the car or seeing my father, but he appears just as I'm shutting the car door. He comes from nowhere with an axe over his shoulder. He's been chopping firewood with the red blade. He's smiling because he's been outside doing something physical. He waves for Gran to roll her window down. I hold my breath and cross my fingers.

“And how are my two young
ladies
  ?” he inquires. He exaggerates the word “ladies,” and he winks at me. He will never be able to wink like Uncle Billy does. Gran nods her head the way she does when everything is in perfect order, but she won't look my father in the eye. Her hands remain on the steering wheel, her rosary wrapped around her fingers. I stand there with my white gloves still on and I tug at my jacket sleeves to make them longer. I keep outgrowing all my clothes, even the new outfits Gran bought for me last month.

I wait for Gran to tell Daddy how I have failed her. I can hear her, clear as day:
What a disgrace!
Such a disappointment
and
I am absolutely ashamed
.

I stand there in the cold waiting for the world to end.

“Same time next week?” Daddy asks.

Gran looks him in the eye and smiles her pinched-lip smile. “Yes,” she says. “But, Tobias, please be sure Fiona's ready. She often isn't.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Daddy says, saluting her like a soldier would his sergeant. He uses the hand not holding the axe, and I know he's thinking what I am thinking: I am always on time. In fact, I'm often early. Then he puts his free arm around my shoulders and we stand like this as we watch my grandmother drive away. She drives too fast on the gravel and I don't have to look to know my father is grimacing. Driving fast like this puts extra wear on the driveway and costs Daddy money he doesn't have. Her tires spit out gravel, and in her wake Gran leaves behind a small dust storm.

*  *  *  *

When Gran picks me up the following Thursday, I'm not sure what to expect. Maybe she convinced Miss Pratt and Miss Avery to take me back. Or maybe she intends to take me for a manicure.

I've done my best to leave the sore alone, but last night my fingers betrayed me in my sleep. In the morning, I woke to find the sheets stained with the telltale rust, and the sore itself was an open rose—the reddest a rose can ever bloom. Washing was not enough to make it go away.

“Put your seat belt on,” Gran says, already pulling away from the house, and the Buick slips on a patch of black ice. My grandmother has never been in an automobile accident, and my uncle says, “This is a matter of divine intervention.” Daddy agrees. He says, “It's got to be some miracle that Gran was born in Kansas—a world both flat and straightforward.” And I think,
Some of us are never meant to leave this state.

Gran uses her turn signal although no one is behind us. She does this despite that she's simply turning off one driveway onto another. She slips onto the driveway that is like a road. Daddy plans on naming it someday—getting a green-and-white street sign and everything—but when I asked what he was waiting for Daddy said, “The right name, of course.” Sometimes I feel so stupid.

The sun is already setting even though it's only four fifteen. I look for the dog. I've seen tracks in the snow. I think about following them through the dormant bramble of wild raspberry—toward the river, to hide awhile in the comforts of her den. The days have been short and dark, so I use my eyes to drink the orange-and-pink horizon. This color is only temporary in a landscape otherwise woven from shades of constant gray, filthy white, and relentless black.

When Gran gets to the highway, she turns left when right leads to charm school. She is following the direction of the sore on my wrist. Left. As in
Mama left
. After she drives another ten miles, I figure we are headed toward Lawrence. And this is confirmed when we enter the city limits. I wonder what we are doing. Gran is quiet, and I know better than to ask. Mama isn't the only one who prefers silence.

Again, Gran follows the compass rose of my wrist, steering the long Buick into the left-turn lane and cutting off the car behind us. They slam their brakes and honk three times, but Gran doesn't seem to even notice.

She uses a gloved finger to crank the heat, and the hot air comes blasting out and the turn signal clicks as we wait for red to change to green. As the Buick purrs I look out the window and find myself face to face with the hospital where I was born fifteen years ago. Where Mama lived that summer when I was six. Is this where my grandmother is taking me? I hold my breath and cross my fingers. And the turn signal continues to click, and “clicking” rhymes with “ticking” for a reason. In the tinted glass, my reflection is ephemeral. Double exposed, my expression is not just constructed from soft pink flesh but built from white bricks, square windows, and plastic blinds.

The arrow turns green and the car moves forward, turning left. The clicking stops. Gran drives another two blocks, and everywhere there are signs for hospital parking.

At each intersection, Gran breaks the law by not coming to a complete stop, and finally she eases the long car into a parking spot on the street. And I see where we are: We are parked in front of her doctor's office. But when we go inside, I find I'm the one with the appointment.

*  *  *  *

“Your grandmother tells me you were once hospitalized for cellulitis?” the doctor says. He keeps asking the same questions: “How did you get the sore?” “How long have you had it?” and “Does it ever scab over?”

He wears latex gloves the same powder blue as Sara's hands. After having to wear white gloves for charm school and to hide my wrist, I feel claustrophobic when I look at his gloved hands. I wonder if he wants to crawl out of his skin the way I do.

He is rough with the sore.

He presses down on the flesh all around it, asking if it hurts. He palpates, and then he presses down into the center of my rose. “What about this?” he asks. “Does it hurt when I do this?”

Each time, I shake my head. I shake my head to say no.

I know better than to tell him the truth. I do my best not to talk at all. He sits on a stainless-steel stool that has wheels.

He peels his gloves off and tosses them into a trash can that is also made from stainless steel. The can is overflowing with other discarded powder blue latex gloves. The exam room needs to be cleaned. There is blood splattered on the ceiling.
DR. HENRY BURNS
has been embroidered onto the left breast of his white jacket.

“That's what I thought,” he says. But he doesn't actually say what he thinks. Instead, he pulls a prescription pad from his pocket, and this is what the other doctors are always doing when they talk to my mother. His pen makes a scratching noise as he writes. He has gray-blue eyes and white bushy eyebrows, while the rest of his hair is black and cut short.

He holds the prescription in the air, and when I reach for it he draws back the way a bully would. “That sore,” he says, “is infected.” Then he pauses, looking at me the way people like him do—everyone is always trying to figure me out, even when they don't like me.

Finally, he hands me the prescription.

“This is an antibiotic ointment,” he says. “You can only get this strength from a doctor, so once this sore has healed, the ointment is not to be used again. In fact, you should throw it away.” I have always hated the word “ointment.”

“Wash the wound with soap and water, then apply the ointment and a bandage,” he says. “Once in the morning and again at night before you go to bed.”

He narrows his eyes, trying to stare into my soul, and then he says, “The rest of time, the sore must be left alone.” And everything in my life is an echo.

*  *  *  *

The ointment makes the sore vanish—almost overnight. Like magic, half a year of picking is gone, and there is no scar in its wake. Like it never even was.

I touch the spot where there is no scar. I use the pads of my fingers. When I rub, I think of Gran, who doesn't tell anyone about my expulsion from charm school, the sore, the ointment, or the doctor. I've seen my grandmother rub the ground where my grandfather is buried. When she touched the grave, it reminded me of how I now touch the skin where once I was hurt. First she pats the grass, but soon she forgets herself. Her hand begins to circle like she's going to conjure his spirit from the dirt. She rubs the earth this way because she misses him, and I touch my wrist because I miss the girl who arrives whenever I am picking.

Gran comes for me at 4:15 every Thursday. We don't return to the doctor. I sit in the back of the long Buick and she drives. For three hours, my grandmother drives. Never too close to the farm. Gran follows other desolate back roads, and I memorize the Douglas County countryside—all the houses, and all the different routes. She pulls over whenever a car comes from the other direction. She is trying to keep the Buick clean. More often than not, we still get splattered by the exhaust-stained slush. And I watch the sun dip into the white horizon of winter.

The falling sun turns the snow into a wash of pastels and the initial pink and orange fade into lavender and lavender into gray, and gray into night. As soon as the numbers on the dashboard clock turn to 7:00, Gran makes an abrupt turn and heads back to the farm. We fishtail on black ice, but she never once loses control. Uncle Billy's right. It is a miracle. A matter of divine intervention.

The digital numbers of the car clock glow blue and so does Gran. She looks like a ghost. Like she's barely even there. She hunches so far forward, it is hard to see her head from the backseat, and this is from the osteoporosis. We never talk, and when Gran drops me back at home we don't say good-bye. I just climb out and watch her drive away. I watch the trail of exhaust follow her—alchemized by the winter air, the hot turns to cold.

Gran comes even after 1989 turns into 1990, and winter turns into spring and spring into summer and summer into fall. She comes for me and we drive. The routine is soothing, and I leave my sores alone. I am alchemized by the ointment; I think I'm healed.

Gran continues to pick me up every single Thursday even though charm school officially ended back in April, and then my freshmen year in June. Forever punctual—she is never late. We loop through country roads, driving around and around, and everything loops, including me.

Gran gives me the pearl rosary, which I wear around my neck. And I am another link on a chain of Fionas. When Daddy sees the rosary, Gran explains. “Fiona is a woman now.” Her words echo, and later I have to look at myself in the mirror. I am trying to see what she sees, but all I see is the little girl I've always seen staring back at me.

loop:
n.
1. A length of line, ribbon, or other thin material doubled over and joined at the ends 2. Something having a shape, order, or path of motion that is circular or curved over on itself 3.
(Comp. Sci.)
A sequence of instructions that repeats either a specified number of times or until a particular condition prevails.

loophole:
n.
1. A means of evasion.

loopy:
adj.
1. Off beat; crazy.

October 18, 1991

Gran and I are in the Buick, circling around the lake, when she doubles over and vomits everywhere.

I break free of my safety belt, scramble over the seat, and grab the wheel. Even though I don't know how to drive—even though both Daddy and Uncle Billy are always pressuring me to learn—I manage to steer the long car around the curve of Mirror Lake before I can get my foot on the brake, and I stop the vehicle.

I shift the Buick into park. My grandmother is drooping. She leans against the window—her eyes half-closed and fluttering. Her face twists and I read the language of her body. She's in pain. I switch the ignition off and take the keys.

Wearing the inside of my grandmother, I run and walk a quarter-mile to Wilma's, where Uncle Billy hasn't lived forever, and I use the pay phone bolted to the cinder-block wall to call 911. I tell a woman's voice where the paramedics will find us. And then I rush back to the Buick, where my grandmother is sound asleep in a bad way. I wrap the rosary around her hand and my hand, and I wait for help.

*  *  *  *

The paramedics ask me to climb into the ambulance, and I can't move. I stand in the dust kicked up by the speed of the emergency vehicle. Everything is fast. Too fast. And Gran is already strapped to a gurney, and I am scared. She mumbles, falling in and out of consciousness, and when I hear her say, “I need my granddaughter,” I end up running. I run for the woods, where I hide.

My heart tries to break me open. It is a bomb inside my chest exploding as I watch the paramedics trying to figure out what to do. They keep looking at the woods, at the place where I disappeared and the shadows I let swallow me. I think of Snow White and the woodsman hired to cut out her heart, but no one comes after me. The paramedics practice triage; as always, the matriarch is the priority. They are not the seven dwarves. They are medical professionals, and they do not care about me.

Clutching the crucifix, I watch the red and blue lights circle on the cold surface of the lake until they vanish. The ambulance goes racing away toward the finish line, and the sirens scream,
Emergency! Emergency! Emergency!
and I can't believe I just abandoned my grandmother. There is nothing left to do but run.

I run through the maze of trees until they give way to a field of cut corn. I zigzag through the toppled blond stalks as the sun heads for retreat in the world beyond the western horizon. I jog along the McAlister side of the Silver River and up onto the highway. I run across the steel bridge through a wave of vertigo as the gray sky pulls back and the wide ribbon of water below rushes on, and the world reels and I keep running.