Getting Near to Baby (11 page)

“Aunt Patty, I don't know.”

“I've never seen a child do that business with the fingers before,” she said in a worried way.

“She was counting, that's all,” I said. “Little Sister was counting things to keep herself occupied.” I didn't feel like saying more. I had been thinking about how much Aunt Patty did not want people to know that little Sister would not speak. It made me feel tired to think about it, real tired.

“I have never seen the like,” Aunt Patty said. “I wonder if we shouldn't try to snap her out of it.”

Mom and I had tried plenty of times, but no matter how much Little Sister might be distracted, she never forgot not to speak. I shrugged.

“Have you tried anything?” Aunt Patty asked me.

“We've talked to her. She doesn't answer.”

“Well, everybody talks to her. We ought to be able to come up with something better than that.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Like things,” Aunt Patty said. “To make her mad, I guess.”

I turned to look at Aunt Patty.

“Like pinching her,” Aunt Patty said, “or like holding her upside down by the ankles—”

“Aunt Patty!”

“Well, you know, till she says something.”

“Like what?” I said, louder than I meant to.

“Well, like, ‘I give up,' ” Aunt Patty said in a voice suddenly gone high-pitched. “Something like that.”

I looked at Aunt Patty like I was the principal of her whole life and she would have to stay after school forever if she tried such a thing.

“It was an idea,” she said finally.

“It was a terrible idea,” I said. “I don't think you're Mom's sister at all. I think you're Miss Pettibone's sister.”

“Willa Jo,” Aunt Patty said to shush me. But I wouldn't be shushed.

“It is just so like you to think you are the only one to wonder. Don't you think Mom tried to get Little Sister to talk? Don't you think I did?”

“I don't know,” Aunt Patty said. “Your momma and I didn't get around to talking much about that.”

“No, you were too busy making her cry.”

“I never did.” She looked hurt, but it was too late to pull back now.

“You said all the wrong things,” I told her. “You said every wrong thing. Why couldn't you do like Milly?”

“I don't know what Milly said, Willa Jo.”

“She never said anything to make Mom cry.” I was nearly as angry with Aunt Patty as I had been with Miss Pettibone. But it was a confused kind of anger, mixed up with all kinds of other feelings that made my heart ache.

“I never meant to hurt your momma,” Aunt Patty said. “I love her. She is my own sister, like Little Sister is yours.”

Two fat tears ran down Aunt Patty's cheeks. It's just terrible to see people cry. Worse when it is my fault. It wasn't like she would really have held Little Sister up by her ankles. At least, I don't think she would.

“I didn't say the right things, though,” Aunt Patty said as if the words hurt her throat. “You're right about that. I don't know the right things to say to someone who is in such pain, even if she is my sister.”

“No matter what she'd done, you have to say...” My own words choked me. “You have to say, ‘It wouldn't have made a bit of difference.' ”

And I knew right then that it wouldn't. There were no right words for Aunt Patty to say. Words are not enough.

I
t's about midmorning and the roof is beginning to heat up. The sun is high and the air is kind of sticky. I wish I could get Little Sister to go back in. Her nose and cheeks are getting too pink. She pretends she hasn't heard me. I know she is feeling the sun, though. My shoulders feel tingly, and my nose burns if I scratch it.

Aunt Patty has gone back inside the house. She's gone back inside three or four times now, to dress or to do something else that needs doing. She always comes back out. I am enjoying the peace and quiet for as long as it lasts.

You'd think there wouldn't be much to do on a rooftop. But you'd be wrong. To begin with, there's the view. Green rolling hills rimmed with red clay earth, big patches of yellow buttercups and purply-pink stuff in bloom, the flash of light wherever a creek cuts across the fields.

Black-and-white cows over there and the tip-top of a red barn behind that hill.

A white church spire rising out of the valley over there where a bell will toll come twelve o'clock.

A short strip of the highway is visible between two hills and there is a never-ending stream of matchbox-sized cars that when I stare long enough begin to look like the same cars coming back again. Like they aren't really going anywhere, but are glued to a wheel that is going round and round in the distance like a Ferris wheel.

Sometimes we watch and sometimes we play. Little Sister and I devised a game of tic-tac-toe using pieces of broken roof tile somebody left beside the dormer window. The crossed lines are already there in the roof tiles that are laid all over the roof.

Or we count.

I started her on multiplication tables some time ago. I figured the numbers were so big she would get tired of counting on her fingers and speak to me. But Little Sister began to see a game in it.

She worked out new ways to give me an answer to how many of something she could count. A thousand of something is a thumb stuck out like she's hitchhiking; a hundred is a finger pointing down; and when she flashes her hands, she's holding up as many fingers as she means tens. She only ever needed the thousand sign once, when she was trying to count the gumballs in a machine. Little Sister always was sassy.

So if the number of roof tiles is 132 on this nearly square section over here, she points one finger down for the hundred, then flashes three fingers for thirty, then holds up two fingers until I've said the number she's shown me: 132. And when we add up all the sections we've counted and get 1,611, she flashes me a triumphant look. She's going to need that thousand sign again.

She jerks her thumb once for a thousand, points six fingers down for six hundred, flashes one finger and then holds one up until I say she's right. The thing is, Little Sister has the last laugh because she is fast enough that I have to stay on my toes to keep up with her. And she still hasn't had to say a word.

We counted how many green roofs there are in town, how many gray and brown, how many red, and there are two blue rooftops. You'd be surprised how most people pick the same color for a roof. There are mostly green ones, 102 that I can see.

You'd also be surprised at the amount of foot traffic Aunt Patty's dead-end street sees. Mostly bird-watchers, you'd think, since so many of them look up. A few of them have been carrying binoculars. Little Sister and I are quite the attraction.

By now, if Aunt Patty gets caught out here looking up, she acts like there's nothing at all unusual about two people sitting out on the roof all morning. She acts like she's only checking on whether we want peas or carrots with our dinner. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Aunt Patty is inside when Liz comes. Liz sees me the moment she comes out from the shadow of the trees that line her driveway. She does not continue to look at me, though, as she comes across the street. There is something about that that bothers me. But when she comes to stand below and looks up at me, she has to squint into the sun.

“My momma would skin me alive if I did something like that,” Liz says.

I don't know what to say to this. It's a surprise to hear her taking that scolding tone with me.

“Your aunt Patty is worried sick. She called my momma and asked her what to do.”

“My aunt Patty,” I say, although there is no other, “called your momma?”

“My momma told her to call your momma, but she won't do it.”

“What else did your momma say?”

Liz puts on the sternest of faces. “That you are bound to come down if it rains hard enough.”

For some reason, this makes me grin. And after a moment Liz grins back.

“I'm off to buy milk,” she says. “I'm not to offer you any encouragement.”

“You didn't,” I say.

She shakes her head then and says, almost sadly, “I never thought I would feel sorry for your aunt Patty.”

Little Sister and I watch her until she is out of sight. Somehow Liz has made me feel bad for Aunt Patty She tries, I know she tries. Aunt Patty tries harder than anybody. I don't know what I hoped to accomplish by climbing out here. I guess Aunt Patty thinks I did this to drive her crazy. Maybe even Liz thinks so. But I didn't. I can't say exactly why I stayed, either. It just felt like the place I wanted to be.

One reason I'm out here, like I said, was to see the sun come up. In fact, when I went up to the attic and climbed up on a chair to push that dormer window open, I thought that was the only reason I was coming out here. It was awful quiet, not even the birds were making a sound. It was still real dark but with that hint of blue color that says the sun is coming on soon.

Huddled out here by myself, watching the sky turn from darkest blue to deep purple, I started to remember this dream I had during the night. All I could remember was something about Baby and a curtain rising.

And then Little Sister climbed out behind me. She hadn't stopped to put on shorts and a shirt like I did. She was still wearing the frilly white cotton nightgown Aunt Patty bought for her. Little Sister looked like an angel as she rose to stand on the rooftop, the breeze pulling the nightgown and her long hair off to one side the way it did. I forgot to try to remember the dream.

Little Sister crouched down and duck-waddled over to me, either because it made her stomach cramp to be up so high or because the breeze was cool, I don't know which. But she didn't act like she was cold. She sat down next to me and waited to see what would happen next, because that's the way Little Sister is. I didn't say anything, try to explain, nothing. It seemed wrong to disturb the quiet.

The air was cool and silky on my skin, and the sky kept turning more and more purple. Then came just a hint of a pink so hot it might be orange. And then it was. An orange so full of fire it looked like the edge of the world had burst into flame. Little Sister's hand crept into mine.

I let myself look for as long as I could, although Mom always warned us not to. When I looked away, I could see seven burning suns coming up all around me. But I kept needing to look back. It was like my eyes were hungry for the sight of that brilliant light. Finally, when I couldn't look straight on, I saw everything by looking off to the side. It was like watching something in a mirror.

I know it doesn't really happen this way, but it always looks as if the sun creeps up to stand teetering on the edge of the earth. I waited. It stayed there for long moments until I wondered,
Is it stuck there.
Just when I thought it, the sun made a little jump, and then it floated free.

It was in that moment that I knew joy.

I fell back to lie against the roof. Looking up that way I could see where morning overtook the last faltering edge of darkness. To look there made my stomach dip. Even my skin felt like it wanted to creep closer to the roof tiles, clinging. Little Sister leaned over me as if she might look into my eyes and see what I was looking at. Her hair slid across my face. But when she leaned away again, I didn't sit up.

I got to thinking about that dream again, not really trying hard to remember it. I can never get a dream to come back to me that way. I have to kind of tease it out, mulling over the parts I remember and trying not to make up any parts that weren't really there.

Then it did something a dream rarely does, it came back to me in one big picture. Not like a painted picture, but sort of a moving picture. Not of the whole dream, but this one piece of it. And then it was gone. Like there wasn't any more to it.

Then again, maybe that's all there ever was. Because the other thing I knew when it came back to me, I'd had this dream before—the morning Baby died.

W
e used to be a whole family, five of us. Daddy worked at the mine from early in the morning till supper time. Mom painted cards for most of the day, and if we weren't in school, we played either outside or in the room around her. Mom didn't mind if we made some noise or ran around now and then. The only rule was: “Don't shake the table.” That's how it was until sometime after our baby sister was born. Baby, that's what we all ended up calling her. She liked that.

But then the mine petered out. The owners ended up flat broke and owing money besides. Daddy looked for a job, but there wasn't enough work in the neighborhood to go around. Daddy took it real hard, but he didn't sit around the house for very long once the mine was shut down. He went off one day, looking for work—looking far and wide, he said.

I don't know that Little Sister and I missed him the way we might have. We'd been missing Mom more; she'd been so busy with Baby for the first few months. She was doing something for Baby whenever she wasn't painting, and painting if she wasn't busy with Baby.

Then Baby was big enough that Little Sister and I could watch her on a blanket on the floor while Mom painted. That was some help, and Mom could make time at the end of the day to be with us.

Although Daddy had already been gone for weeks by the time Baby could lie on the floor, it seemed like Daddy left just as Mom was coming back to us. Mostly we missed him at supper time and on Sundays. It didn't take long to get used to waiting for him to come home.