Feathers (6 page)

That was the first and last time anybody said anything about
me
being gifted.

I waved my hand at Sean to get his attention. He liked that more than somebody coming up and touching him.

The ocean,
I signed.

Sean shrugged.

Water,
he signed,
water and air. It sounds the way air feels on your face on a windy day.

He took some ketchup out of the refrigerator and one slice of cheese.

Here,
he signed, putting the cheese down on one of the plates.
That’s where you sit.

Yellow,
he signed.

That’s a hard one, Sean! Yellow doesn’t have a SOUND.

Nothing has a sound to me! That’s how this game got started. Yellow!

We’d been playing this game since we were real little. One person gave the word and the other person had to describe it, to make the person feel it someplace inside of themselves. To make the person
hear
it. Sean was better at the game than me, but I still loved playing.

Like something soft,
I signed.
A pillow. Or
yellow
sounds like bubbles feel—lots of them in a bathtub.

Sean nodded. Then he turned the fire off beneath the burgers and put each of them on the plate with the paper bag. I watched the bag get dark from the oil.

He stirred the onions again, added some spices, a little bit of butter and the broccoli, then stirred it once more, added some water, turned the heat down beneath it and covered the pan.

Music,
I said.

What kind?
He looked at my rice, then raised his eyebrows.

I turned it off but didn’t lift the top.
Perfect,
I said.
A guitar.

Sean thought for a minute.
Like rain,
he said.
Coming down real soft when it’s warm out and you only get a little wet but not cold. That kind of rain.

I smiled. That’s exactly what it made me feel like when I heard a guitar playing softly.

Daddy came out of the bedroom. We watched his face. His eyebrow twitched. You had to look hard to see it.

Let her rest a bit,
he said finally.
Dinner ready? Smells good in here.

For a while, we ate without doing much talking. I watched the cheese melt on my burger, then poured ketchup over everything, stirred my rice until it turned pink. We listened for Mama to come out of her room but she didn’t.

“Anything interesting happen at school this week?” Daddy asked. He took a bite of his vegetables and smiled at Sean. Me and Sean both shook our heads.

“Nothing interesting happened with work either,” Daddy said softly. “The road from here to Indiana is flat as my feet. Every now and then a bright green road sign pops up to keep you awake.”

“Is Indiana pretty?” I asked.

Daddy thought for a minute. “Pretty light when the sun’s coming up. But what place ain’t pretty at the beginning and the end of the day?”

Where’s the prettiest place you ever been, Daddy?

Daddy grinned. “I guess California. Took me a long time to drive there, but when I got there, I went straight to the ocean. It was almost night when I pulled the truck up to where I could see the water.” He closed his eyes a moment. “All those different colors spilling over everything.” Then he opened his eyes and looked at me and Sean. “And here,” he said.

Sean watched his lips. When Daddy finished speaking, Sean kept on watching them. After a while, Daddy got up from the table, scraped the food off his plate and put the plate in the sink.

I watched Sean watch Daddy. Sometimes he just stared—and it was like his eyes were trying to do everything—speak and hear and smell and touch. Maybe that’s why they were so beautiful. They had all the senses right there in them, showing through.

There’s another one coming,
Daddy signed.
Another baby.
He smiled—a kind of laugh smile like he was just as surprised as we were by what he was hearing.

What?!

Another baby,
Daddy said again.

That’s crazy! Mama’s too old. We’re all too old. What’s anybody in this house gonna do with a baby?

Sean smiled, like it was all slowly sinking in and he liked what was becoming clear or something.
A baby,
he signed.
Wow.
He leaned back in his chair and stared out the kitchen window. Snow was still coming down hard.
A baby,
he signed again.

I ran my fork through my rice, feeling all kinds of stupid feelings.
I
was the baby who
had
made it. It was sad, but each time one of those other babies didn’t make it, it seemed clear to me that I was the one who was
supposed
to be the baby in the family.

“I don’t know why she has to be so tired about it all,” I said. “Doesn’t make any sense.” I didn’t say what I really wanted to say. What if you and Mama come home crying again, I wanted to ask. What if we think a baby’s coming but it doesn’t come all the way?

Daddy looked at me. “Because you’re right, Frannie. She
is
old. And that makes it harder to be pregnant. And . . .” But he shook his head and didn’t finish what he was going to say. After a minute passed, he signed,
So let her get some rest and try to grow you all a brother or sister.

I shrugged. “Even if it’s a girl, I’m not sharing my room, that’s for sure.”

Daddy ignored me.
Sean, you wash tonight,
he signed.
Frannie, you dry and wipe everything down.

I don’t want to wash!
Sean glared at Daddy.
I always have to wash.

Because you always get them clean,
Daddy said.
Frannie, you wash the dishes then!

I shrugged. I didn’t mind washing—the warm water felt good in the wintertime. And the bubbles were fun to squeeze through my hands.

Forget it,
Sean signed.
She doesn’t know how to do it. We’ll be eating hamburgers and rice off our plates for a week. I’ll wash.

Daddy put his hands up. “Ain’t that where we started?” he said.
Come say good night to your mama before you go to bed, you hear.

Me and Sean nodded. Then Sean got up and started in on the dishes. Somewhere, in another apartment, somebody was playing music—the same song over and over again. It never felt right, to be hearing the song and not have Sean hearing it too. I knew he had his own music going inside his head, music I’d never be able to hear, and maybe that made
him
sad. But still, sometimes when I heard music, even if Sean was right next to me, I missed him. I got up and took my plate over to the sink. Me and Sean didn’t even look at each other but I bumped him with my shoulder on purpose and he bumped me right back. For some strange reason, it was enough for both of us, just to be standing side by side.

9

Mama stayed in bed on Saturday, only getting up to go to the bathroom and to stop me from yelling at Sean for changing the television channel in the middle of my favorite cartoons. It was almost noon when she came into the living room. There were bags under her eyes and when she signed to Sean, her hands moved slower than usual. Sean was in a stupid mood and needed to be fighting with somebody.

She’s been watching it all morning,
he said.

“I just watched—”

Mama put her hand up.
You two need to figure it out . . .

“Forget it. Let him watch whatever he wants. I don’t care. I gotta clean the stupid bathroom anyway.” I was talking with my back to Sean so that he couldn’t see my lips. He hated when I did that but I didn’t care. I stomped down the hall and started pulling the cleaning supplies out of the hallway closet. I hated seeing Mama looking all tired and messy. It wasn’t fair. Let Sean watch whatever he wanted, it didn’t matter to me. I just wanted her to go back to bed and come out of her room looking better. Sean was so stupid sometimes. He acted like he didn’t even care.

After a little while, I heard him flick the television off, head to his room and slam the door.

The apartment got quiet and the quiet felt like something hot and sticky all over me. Something scary and all blurred up. I leaned over the edge of the tub to scrub it. Snow had piled up outside the bathroom window and the sky was silvery-gray—like something heavy was pushing down on the clouds. For some reason the Jesus Boy came into my mind. I wondered where he lived, what he was doing. I wondered if he had a window to stare out of and watch snow coming down. When I tried to picture his face, all I saw was the broken-up look he’d had that afternoon. I tried to think about the real Jesus, the one Samantha knew so well. All I kept seeing was hands, though—hands and feet with scars on them.

While I was scrubbing, the sun came out—watery and cold-looking. I sat on the edge of the tub with my sponge in one hand and the can of Comet in the other. Just sat there like that, watching the sky until the sun faded back behind the clouds again.

After I finished cleaning the bathroom, me and Daddy went grocery shopping. We got onto the elevator and Daddy took my hand. I knew I was too big for that but I let him take it anyway. When the elevator started moving again, I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“What’s going on, star?” he asked. His voice sounded strange in the closed elevator. Sometimes I forgot how quiet it was inside our house with all that signing going on and all.

I shrugged.

“You worrying, aren’t you?”

“Aren’t
you
?” I looked up at him. His eyes were red and puffy and he hadn’t shaved. “Those other babies . . . ,” I said slowly. “They . . . they
died.
Mama grew them for a while and then they were all gone again.”

Daddy pulled me closer to him. “Here’s the deal,” he said. The elevator door opened and we walked out into the lobby past the weekend doorman. The lobby had mirrors and pretty tile floors and a fake fireplace with an electric log in it.

“You don’t need to worry about what happened before. All you need to look at is what’s happening now.” He nudged my chin up so I would look at him. “And be happy about it. And if it means you only get to be happy for a month or two months or three months, so what. A month or two months or three months is a good long time.”

I kept looking up at him. My head felt like it was all swirly inside. Felt like if somebody lifted the ground out from beneath me, I’d just float off somewhere. I shivered, took my hand out of Daddy’s and shoved it in my pocket.

When I was a little girl, Sean would stand over me and sign songs. When my brother danced, it was like nothing else mattered anywhere. He danced and signed like there was music all around him all the time. Some days, I wished I could hear that music. And some days I wished I could climb inside all the quiet and stillness inside Sean’s head, curl up there and just rest awhile.

Daddy opened the car door and I climbed into the back. He always promised me I would be able to sit up front next year. Every year was next year.

He got in on the driver’s side and started the car. It was an old car and needed a few minutes to warm up.

“This tiredness could just be,” Daddy said, “that your mama’s been working too hard and you kids—”

“Been wearing her out,” I finished for him, rolling my eyes. With all the wearing out of my mama she and Daddy said we did, you’d think she’d be completely see-through by now. Like the old pieces of cotton sheets we used to dust with. I stared out the window.

My grandmother always says that good things come in ones and twos and threes and bad things come however they can get here. I tried to close my eyes and picture the place where all the tiredness was coming from, the place where the baby was growing and wearing Mama out. I wanted to lift the tiredness up out of Mama with my thinking. I wanted powers like that. If I could walk through the world and just touch people and lift their pains right out of their bodies, I’d never stop walking. I looked down at the pocks on my palms. They were starting to itch.

“What you thinking about, sweet pea,” Daddy asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

I kept staring out the window, silently scratching my palms.

10

I asked Daddy to drop me off at the rec center after we finished grocery shopping. I wanted to watch Sean playing ball.

“You going there to play some games or you going there to bother your brother?” Daddy asked, pulling up in front of the gray building kids went to after school sometimes and on weekends. The building always smelled sweaty and the sound of kids running around the gym and game room echoed all over the place, then got all muffled—like the noises were drowning in their own sound.

“He won’t care,” I said. Once he got used to the idea that he’d have to walk home with me, I figured, he’d just have to accept it. It’s not like I followed him around
that
much.

Daddy rolled his window down and I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

“You two be careful,” he said, rolling up the window real fast so the snow wouldn’t blow in.

I shivered, pulled my hat down over my ears, and ran inside.

The minute Sean saw me, he frowned. Two of the guys he was playing with were deaf and one of them signed,
Babysitting time.

Sean signed a curse back. One that a lot of hearing people knew.

He chucked the ball to another guy and took a time-out, coming over to me. He was wearing a pair of old blue shorts and a T-shirt that had this cartoon guy walking down the street in a long robe. Underneath the guy, it said KEEP ON TRUCKING. The shirt used to belong to Daddy but somehow Sean had inherited it. There was a big dark patch of sweat under his collar.

What are you doing here?
he asked.

I shrugged.
There wasn’t anything to do at home.

Sean looked at me. One of the guys was waving for him to come on and Sean signed for him to wait.