Shine Shine Shine (17 page)

He refused to take a bath when the mother put the question out there, but he allowed her to brush his hair and wrap him in a blanket. She kept leaving the room and coming back, pressing her hands onto her long skirt. Her eyebrows wrinkled down. They had put yard furniture in the living room; Maxon saw that it was rainproof. Before, in the living room, there had been a chair with mice living in it, and a lounge covered in red corduroy. The two children sat on a swinging sofa, curled metal rods holding the sofa to the frame. It would swing back and forth or side to side. Maxon’s feet touched the floor, but Sunny had her feet folded under her.

“He starving!” the brown woman called in from the kitchen, where she was knocking dishes around in the sink. “Look at him! Like a damn toothpick!”

“Where do you live?” said Sunny’s mother.

Maxon pointed out the window.

“Come on,” said Sunny. “Let’s go play.”

Maxon took her hand when she offered it. They went out under the apple tree and began to pick up apples. Only halfway through the summer and already some were starting to fall, crabbed and hopeless little fruit, gnawed by deer, pink only on one scant face. Maxon had the understanding that Sunny would never eat these apples, like Maxon sometimes did.

Sometimes as they were playing with the apples, Sunny’s hand would fall onto Maxon’s hand or arm, as if she was trying to feel if he was hot.

“Where do you live?” Sunny asked. “Will you take me there?”

Maxon shook his head. He chucked an apple through a window in the old barn with perfect aim. The pane broke and shattered inward. He put another apple through the exact same hole. Sunny watched him. When she threw an apple, she threw it short.

At the sound of breaking glass, the mother came out the screen door again and it shut with a crack you could hear hit the mountain on the other side of the valley, under the fog.

“Maxon, I am going to take you home,” she said. “Can you show me where that is?”

Maxon thought about running away, but the tall woman with the braided hair compelled him inside. She had all the books, and all the candles. There was a tight smoothness to her face, and her teeth, so white in rows, made him stare. They got into the station wagon. Sunny stood beside the car door, sadly waving. Maxon looked down at her feet, not bare, not pressing toe prints into the ground, but wearing leather shoes held tightly on her feet with a wide strap. The station wagon pulled down the drive, and the new gravel crunched under the tires.

*   *   *

W
HAT HAPPENED THEN DID
not have any significance. Maxon did not remember it, because it was not in his memory.

*   *   *

T
HEN THE STATION WAGON
came back up the driveway, crunching on the gravel. The mother led him by the hand, back into the kitchen, and gave him a banana. She told him to sit on the bench behind a table, built into the wall. It was red and the mice had chewed it open, showing its foam stuffing. He peeled the banana and began to eat it.

The mother said to the brown woman, “Well, there was no one there. But I can tell you. There were sheep living in rusty cars. I mean living. And pigs.”

“You lie,” said the brown woman.

“Nu, the place is falling down and no one is at home. I called, I yelled, I rang the bell, and do you want to know what this child said to me? That seven-, eight-year-old child?”

“What he say,” said Nu, working on putting dinner away.

“He said, ‘They went to town.’ Can you believe it? He’s barely bigger than Sunny. They left him out in the rain in those—” Here she began to cough. “—shorts. And went to town. Nu, if you had seen the place. I think there was a mule in the parlor.”

An hour later they had all gone to see the fireworks. Maxon wore a blanket, and was running in tight, concentric circles around Sunny and her mother, as they sat in a pasture on an old crocheted afghan, waiting for the explosions. The field they sat in had been newly mowed and the hay harvested. It was prickly, as a father’s beard might be, even through the blanket. Sunny sat on her mother and wrapped her legs around her mother’s waist.

“There’s a bat,” Sunny said. “And there’s Maxon.”

The mother laughed, hugged her child, and Maxon watched them. He could hear their talking. Sunny said she didn’t want to see the fireworks, kept letting her eye be distracted by the boy, and the bats flying around. “That’s Maxon, and that’s a bat,” she repeated.

When the fireworks started, Maxon was startled by the noise. The show was all around them, but he didn’t look up. It was dark, and then there would be a flash, and all the cars illuminated, and the mother’s face showing, and then black again, and a sharp whine. The smell of the hay clung around him, and he could smell that there were cows nearby.

“We have to take him home, after this,” said Emma.

“No, I want to keep him,” said Sunny. And Maxon continued to trot around.

The booms of the fireworks echoed down the valley, amplified by the river, ricocheting off the mountains on both sides.

“No,” said Emma. “He has to go home.”

“But I like him. I want him,” said Sunny.

When the fireworks were over, the two children sat in the backseat while Emma drove, muttering to herself and shaking her head. Maybe she was practicing what she would say. Maxon felt pretty good sitting there in the dark with the girl, the hiss of a sudden rain in the wheel wells, the flashing, weird mosaic of lights on the ceiling in the car, the back of the mother’s head. The girl reached out for his hand and he took it. He was taller. She was fatter. His toes were turned inward from being shoved into shoes that were too small. When they stopped at a stop sign and he knew they were close to home, he slipped out the car door and into the rain. No one gave chase. It was too dark and he was already gone, sliding over wet fallen wood, under the clutch of dripping leaves.

“Come back tomorrow,” she had said, squeezing his hand. “Don’t forget.”

Probably, if he was being ruthlessly straight with himself, that was when he had fallen in love.

That was when it had happened.

14

Down on the Earth that rotated on its own lazy and inscrutable axis, the mother’s brain was still getting oxygen from her blood. She was breathing, she had breathed, drawing air in rattling gasps on and on through the night. When morning came to the world outside the hospital, she was still alive. She had gone from ICU to a private room on a metal gurney, but her long body was not aware of this. Her body was paying attention only on the inside. Its organs were full of tiny motions, dark processes. The body was preserving itself from death, denying its own rotten condition, living. It was doing the same thing all the other bodies on Earth were doing, in their own boxes of rooms and long corridors and dark cellars and flying down the highways in little cars and down railways in closed compartments. The body was staving off death for yet a little while. It was a fetus in a womb, unwilling to come out, though the labor had begun, the contractions had started, and the blood was getting thin.

The dark room, the dripping walls, the bloody entry, the stern contractions of the hallway, were resisted by the mother. There were no robots to help her now. They had all been removed: the breathing one, the circulating one, and mostly the tracking beeping one. She was alone in her bed; only the biological robot in her skull remained to keep her cells alive. She was alone from her family, alone from all of history, and the more the room pushed in on her, the more her brain pushed back. She would not die. She could not die. She could see her daughter in a dream, walking around like a kitten with its feet in boots, shaking its paws, running into walls. She couldn’t die and leave Sunny here on Earth.

*   *   *

I
N THE BIG HOUSE
on Harrington Avenue, Sunny stood at the kitchen counter, bald as an egg, curtains wide, and opened three orange bottles of Bubber’s medications. She set them out in front of her on the smooth granite countertop. Bubber stood next to her, solemnly, his footed pajamas wrinkled around his ankles, snapped together at the waist. He was waiting to take his medicine. Then he would watch two episodes of
Blue’s Clues
. Then he would go to school. Except that today, Sunny had decided that he would neither take the medicine nor go to school. He would stay home and be unmedicated. See what happened. See if the roof flew off the world. See if the doctors came and stood in the yard, waving clipboards and adjusting their glasses. If she had to bar the door and put the sofa in front of it, no one would come in and put a medicine into her child. Whether the walls came down, whether he turned into a werewolf and devoured her, whether he said, distinctly, “Give me the medicine. It’s what I really, secretly want,” she would not give in. She would learn exactly what he was without the medicine to make it easier. She would watch him all day. If a fit came, she would sit on him.

“No medicine today, Bubber,” she said. She poured the pills out on the counter and they mixed together, blue with white tablets with the green capsules. Bubber watched her. He had his blanket around his shoulders, a flannel shirt of Maxon’s, ancient and soft and full of holes. His bright blue eyes regarded her. “It’s okay,” she said to him softly. “No school, no medicine.”

“Where’s Dad?” said Bubber loudly, like a duck. After he was done talking, his mouth hung open and he breathed through it.

“Daddy is on the rocket. He’s taking the robots to the moon. But I know he’s glad you’re thinking about him.”

“I know,” said Bubber. He looked at the clock. “
Blue’s Clues,
” he said.

Sunny swept the pills into the trash can and they fell down around the garbage, down to the bottom of the can where it was wet. She watched Bubber trot into the living room. What would happen? She thought maybe she should put his helmet on. He put the DVD expertly into the machine and pressed the button on the remote, sat down in front of the TV. His face went brighter when the characters came on the screen and she watched him sing, talk, move his shoulders up and down exactly in time with Steve and Blue. He had it all memorized. Elmo, too. And all of Dr. Seuss. He had memorized the inflections, the facial expressions. He could always do it. It was all a flawless replication, as many times as he tried.

Maybe without the medicine, he would have a facial expression he made up by himself. A new one. She feared it would be rage. Or sorrow. Or hate. What would his brain put out, given rein to put out anything it chose? Then the hospital called. They said: “Your mother is still alive. Will you be visiting today?” She said: “We will have to see how it goes. My son is having a medical emergency.” They said: “She will not hang on for long. This might be your last chance to say good-bye.” Sunny had already said good-bye. She didn’t want to say good-bye again. She wanted it to be a week from now, or ten days ago, or ten years ago, when she was still certifiably alive, before everything had happened: the cancer, the pregnancies, the wigs. There were too many things happening at once and one of them had to go.

Sunny smoothed her hand over her scalp. She had taken the mother off life support. She had taken the child off medicine. She had taken herself off wigs, eyebrows, her urban housewife costume disguise. She couldn’t do anything else to speed the end times, but the end times refused to come. Someone should come to the door, pronounce her unfit, the charade over, but no one came. The musical sounds of
Blue’s Clues
tinkled in the living room with Bubber’s peaceful echo, and Sunny wished that Maxon would turn the rocket around and come straight the hell home. She moved through the house over the dark walnut floors, those wide planks, polished weekly, stained perfectly. She stood behind Maxon’s empty chair in Maxon’s empty office, and looked at his desk. Inside the desk somewhere were papers, official papers that would be needed soon. She would need her mother’s will. She would need insurance documents. Her mother’s, and maybe Maxon’s. After all, Maxon might never come home. Astronauts died. They also decided they liked space, living in space suits, orbiting other astral bodies. They stayed away, forgot they had homes, families, bald wives, crazy children, cancerous mothers-in-law.

Sunny decided she would open up the desk drawers, and find the necessary paperwork for herself. Behave in a way that she might have behaved before she became a mother. Make phone calls. Decide what to do with all their real estate. Sort things out. Hold people’s feet to the fire. Page through sheaves of paperwork and light on an important line here, a contradictory line there, shout, AHA! She lowered herself into Maxon’s chair. She opened the one shaped like a file cabinet, and there were files all neatly labeled, everything she could ever need: insurance, mortgage, and one labeled in block letters: MOTHER. She pulled the file out and sat with it on her lap for a while, then set it aside. Then she opened all the other drawers except one. It was locked.

A locked drawer. In the other drawers she had found neatly organized office supplies, ordered papers, logical files. But here was a long flat drawer locked with a key. The key was not there. Why was it locked? Locked against whom? What could Maxon possibly have to hide?

*   *   *

S
HE REMEMBERED A TIME
before she had agreed to marry Maxon, when she had fallen superficially in love with a man who had a lot of hair. This was during college, when she was away from both Maxon and her mother, far away in another state. In college she studied art and math. She was a wigmaker and bald, so she attracted a lot of attention and people knew who she was. She cut an important and contradictory profile on the campus of her college, which was small and liberal, across the Pennsylvania border, in Ohio.

At this college, she had a bicycle. It was one of the ways she was missing Maxon, to ride this bicycle, when her mother had demanded she go at least six hours away to school. He always had one, now she had one, and she rode it around the campus, missing him. Though she knew she should not love him, he was still her best friend.