JEWEL (59 page)

He nodded, his eyes back to the girls.

Nancy did each girl this way, and we watched it all. Three girls didn’t say anything to her Wendy, Martha and Adelaide but it didn’t seem to matter to Nancy, who still gave each girl a hug and said, “You’re welcome, ” no matter what. In a way it was funny to watch all this going on in the kitchen, eleven retarded girls all about the same age as Brenda Kay, give or take five years or so, parading through, most of them short and round, some, like Olivia, a little taller, thinner. But each of them looked happy in her own way, even if they weren’t all loves and kisses when Nancy hugged them. They were just girls, each of them different, each of them dressed in clean clothes, whether sweatshirts and sweatpants or in shorts and blouses and tennis shoes. They were all happy, it seemed, and I knew one couldn’t ask for anything more than that. Nothing more.

Then came the last girl from the dining room, my Brenda Kay, who stood behind a girl that could have been her sister, a girl it turned out was Sammy, the girl who’d started up the whole idea of fishing. She had hair near the same auburn as my daughter’s, but longer, and had thicker eyebrows. She smiled and smiled at Nancy, her teeth ragged and brown in her mouth, but it didn’t matter. She I l held Nancy the longest of any girl so far, held her and patted her back until Nancy said, “Now Sammy, I think Larry’s out there baiting up the lines, ” and let her go. Sammy stood back from Nancy, then reached to her hands, took them.

She said, “I love you, Nancy, ” and still smiled. “I love you, too, Sammy, ” she said. She gave her hands a squeeze.

Sammy finally let go her hands, and came round Nancy, who turned back to the water. Then Sammy stopped in front of us. She smiled, held up a hand as though she were a traffic cop stopping us.

“How! ” she said, and Nancy turned quick to us.

“Oh, Sammy, ” Nancy said, smiling.

But I’d already put up my hand the same way, held it out in front of me just as Sammy did. “How! ” I said.

Sammy dropped her hand, and laughed, her shoulders suddenly going up and down with it, eyes all squinted shut with the laughter. She turned, headed out the door.

Now Nancy held the rag out to Brenda Kay, who stood with her hands at her sides. She was looking at Nancy’s eyes, her mouth open the way she does when she’s not certain what to do.

I cleared my throat, said, “She’s doesn’t know ” But Nancy put up a hand to me, held it out the same way Sammy’d done.

Like a traffic cop, ordering me to stop.

“Thank for lunch, ” Brenda Kay whispered, her eyes still on Nancy’s.

Her hands were still at her sides.

Nancy nodded, said, “You’re welcome, Brenda Kay.” She reached to one of Brenda Kay’s hands, took it in hers, gently wiped it with the warm washrag.

I stood there, and felt myself growing smaller, shrinking away from the world and everything I’d ever tried to do in it. She held my daughter’s hand, and wiped it, turned it in her own and wiped it again.

Then she let go that hand, took Brenda Kay’s other hand in hers, and I felt myself disappearing into the air around me, a feeling I’d known would someday come, but which, now it was here, wasn’t welcome at all.

Yet here we were, and I watched as Nancy put the rag in the sink, and bent down, put her arms round my daughter, my Brenda Kay, the child born out of twenty-two hours of labor and countless hours of pain. And suddenly the pain I’d known in giving her to this earth was a simple pinprick, a splinter in my finger compared to this feeling now, and how my daughter seemed to be swallowed up in the arms of this woman.

Nancy’s arms were around my daughter, and I felt I’d already lost her, felt I might as well have been dead and gone already for those loving arms round my Brenda Kay.

But then I saw Brenda Kay’s eyes look to me, those deepwater green eyes of Leston’s. Her eyes were on mine, asking, I could see in them, still looking for me and what she ought to do.

And with those eyes on me, I finally knew the truth of why we were here in a house in Saugus, it wasn’t the end of my life we were preparing for, but the beginning of the next life for Brenda Kay. My lives, the long string of them that started with the death of my daddy and went on from there, right up to and including this moment, that long string of lives wasn’t over. My life would never be over, but would be carried on, I saw, in Wilman here at my side, and in James in Texas, in Burton in his big house in Palos Verdes and in Billie Jean in her mobile home in Buena Park, and in Annie in her house in Torrance, and in all the hordes of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to follow after me.

My life would never end, I saw, not even in my own Brenda Kay, because of those eyes turned to me and asking what to do, the only true victory any mother could ever hope for, the looking of a child, whether retarded or not, to you for what wisdom you could give away before you left for whatever reckoning you had with the God who’d given you that wisdom in the first place.

And so because it seemed the only valuable thing I could give her, the sum total of my life wrapped up into this moment, I gave to her all I knew, my eyes on her own, meeting for what felt the last time, I nodded for her to go right ahead, for her to hold on to Mrs. Tindle. I nodded.

Her eyes hung on mine a moment more, then she closed them, and as if in proof to me she’d learned everything there in that moment, she slowly brought her arms up and placed them on this Nancy Tindle’s shoulders, and she held her, patted Nancy’s back once, twice, three times.

I closed my eyes.

There is still nothing out my window, still nothing, though the sun is fast on its way down out there, just beneath it and beyond the tops of houses the thick bank of gray fog just off the coast, ready to roll in and swallow us all.

And so it is settled, whenever I want, Brenda Kay has a home in Saugus.

I don’t need any more visits to any more homes for retarded girls, though I’m certain there’s folly in this, in having no other place in mind for her. But what I took from that place is worth everything to me, the picture, just after Brenda Kay’d left the kitchen for outside, of twelve girls standing round a swimming pool in the hot dry desert afternoon, Brenda Kay settled in between Martha and Sammy, every girl with a cane pole in her hand, each waiting for a fish to bite, and the picture of Brenda Kay’s eyes on me, waiting. That is everything.

But none of that matters, because she’s not here now, and I picture again for the thousandth time a yellow van rolled on Sepulveda or some such street where cars drive too fast, and where it is easy to get killed any day of the week, any hour of a day, here in California.

I let the curtain fall from my fingers again, resolved now to call the school, though each time she’s late they say the same thing, You know traffic and Don’t wowy, she’ll be home soon.

But I call anyway, because there is no reason why I can’t have an answer, however lame, as to why my daughter isn’t yet here. I stand at the wall phone in the kitchen, the receiver in my hand, and lean as far as I can into the front room, my eyes trying to dig through those awful white curtains even a deeper orange now, almost scarlet for that sun, and I try to see, but see nothing.

Someone answers on the sixth ring, and my words spill out of me, a tangled chain of them that betray how old I am, how afraid I can be at the simple fact of a late van from the school, and once those words have left me, the woman at the other end says, Towanceredondo Beach run? and I nod and nod, finally say, Yes, yes.

New driver, she says. You’re not the only one to call. It’s his first day, she says, then pauses, says, And you know traffic. Okay? Her last word is tacked on as if I am to take this reason and wrap myself in the comfort of it, feel somehow safer, both for me and for my child, and suddenly, as I watch my hand place the receiver back in its cradle, my hand even smaller, even more wrinkled than twenty minutes ago, I see myself standing at the edge of a swimming pool in Saugus. I see my own end there, Brenda Kay dead and gone, nowhere for me to go but there.

It’s a funny image, but one I cannot laugh at, too many times I’ve thought on her dying before me, and wondered if I would still wake up early of a morning after having laid out her clothes the night before, and make her breakfast, then lunch. I wonder, too, if I would tape over her lunchbox so it won’t pop open, only to turn from that task, call out her name to the empty house, and hear nothing. Standing at the pool seems a logical end now, where I ought to end up, and I envy my child, envy her seeing Leston in Marlboro ads, envy the feel of Mrs. Tindle’s arms around her, envy her having a friend who raises a hand to strangers, says How! with all the authority one can need in this world.

It’s almost five now, and already I can feel the slow tremble of the house, the train on its way. It’ll be here in a minute or so, and I wonder if anyone will be in that caboose to see that Brenda Kay is not here, is not waving to him.

I stand at the kitchen window, waiting for the train to come, for the tremendous heave and rumble that used to wake my grandchildren when they spent nights, and that used to wake me, too, my first months here, Leston warm in bed next to me, Brenda Kay settled in her own room and asleep. Those first nights I would sit up in bed and listen to the huge and shambling sound the train made passing by, a black animal high on the dirt platform above the bushes at the back of the yard. How big that sound seemed then, how important and lonely and dangerous there in the middle of the night, those first days when all my children were grown and gone, married, making children of their own.

I wonder at all these things, me standing at the window, and hear, finally, after what I only then realize is perhaps the second or third time, a horn honking in front of my house, the sound of it nearly lost to me wallowing here in my kitchen.

I make it to the door and down the steps. There are things I want to say to this driver, words I don’t yet know, but words I want to utter nonetheless. Brenda Kay is already stepping off the van and moving fast up the driveway. She just brushes past me, her mouth closed tight, her eyes to the ground as she moves quickly, her arms swinging away, in one hand the lunchbox, the other her pink knapsack.

For a moment I turn to her, watch her moving away from me, and I can see there, above the garage, the train moving fast past us all and I see how dark that eastern sky really is, and how late in my life all of this is coming, all of it. Brenda Kay is headed to the back yard, where she will stand with her face pressed to the small space of chain link fence Burton still keeps cleared for her. She’ll stand there, do as she has for more than twenty years now, peer up at the train passing by, and wave.

I turn to the van, still a few yards off, and for a moment I hesitate, not certain there is any call for my anger toward a new driver. I think on when I was driving the station wagon myself, the children hollering and crying and throwing up and the mothers coming out to you when you are late only to damn you for having been stuck in that traffic.

So the only words I have forming in my throat, in my head and heart, are the words Thank you. Brenda Kay is home safe, standing at the back fence and waving while round us the air is filled with the rhythm and scrape of the train.

I make it to the van, place a hand on the rail up, and lean in, only to see the driver, a man who looks Chinese to me. He has on gold wire-frame glasses, and he is smiling, already nodding, though he doesn’t know what I am about to say.

Sowy, he says. Sorry for late. New route. He leans over in his seat toward me, puts out a hand, and says a word, what I take must be his name, Nuyen perhaps, and it occurs to me he is one of these Vietnamese people I have read of in the paper, and who I’ve seen at the market and at the pier and everywhere now, and suddenly I miss Lupe and her gold tooth, and then I miss Laqwanda, the colored girl who was the bus driver before Lupe, and I miss Mr. White, who disappeared back to upstate New York soon as the children were taken up by the school district, his mission here completed, and then I miss, finally, Cathe ral, a name as strong and steady and clear as any I have ever known.

And, as with every day since he has died, maybe even every day since he’d helped me fold sheets on a night in Mississippi, I miss my husband, my Leston.

Okay? this Nuyen says, and I have to swallow, blink, nod my head. I glance back into the van, see Dennis there, him the only child left.

He smiles at me soon as he sees I am looking at him, and pushes his glasses up higher on his nose. He’s forty-eight or so now, an old man himself, his hair gone gray, his face gone to thick flesh. Yet still he smiles at me, remembers who I am.

I wave to him, say, Hey, Dennis.

He waves, then stands, points to the seat across the aisle from him.

He says, Brenda Kay sit over there, and nods at me, sits back down.

I look at him a moment longer, smile at him. I say, Dennis, you’re a fine boy.

He smiles, nods, pushes his glasses back up.

I turn back to this Nuyen, nod at him, step off the van onto the street.

I say, You better get a move on, and I point down the street ahead of him. Head out to Crenshaw and turn right, I say, then left at the third street, four houses down. That’s the quickest way to Dennis’. I hear my voice in the street, hear how loud it is, the train long gone.

His face is all concentration, his eyebrows together, mouth pursed.

I swallow, slowly say, Crenshaw right, third street left, four houses down. I say, Be careful. I say, Thank you.

He nods again, this time a hard quick move, his face still working on my words, trying to record them as best he can. He pulls closed the van door, gives it the gas, and he is gone.

Brenda Kay is already at the kitchen table, back from waving at the train, she’s turned on the kitchen lights, and is pulling out today’s papers from her knapsack, the lunchbox already left in the sink.

Though I need to start dinner, need to get us ready for the night ahead of us, need to start thinking about running water for the bath, about laying out her clothes for tomorrow, and about what she’ll bring for lunch tomorrow, too, though there is all of this to think about, the only thing I can see myself doing right then is sitting down at the table with her, and looking at her, taking her in. Not long from this moment she will be up from the table and in the living room, the television popped on to reruns of shows she’s seen a hundred times already but which she’ll laugh at all the same. She’ll sit there in the recliner and slather her hands with hand lotion, then wipe them on the towels I’ve draped on the armrests for just that purpose. Not long from this moment I will be cooking up the box of macaroni and cheese, slicing up bits of ham to toss in with it, boiling up snap beans. Not long from this moment we will none of us be here.