Lay It on My Heart (25 page)

“I'm writing it,” she says, nodding at her shoe. She's making some block letters, and I see an
N
and a
T
, and when she pulls back her hand and shows me, the sole of her shoe says
I DON'T KNOW
.

We stop at the gas station, but Tracy stays put. When we reach the bottom of the gorge and approach the cabin, she stands up like she's getting ready to let me by, but then, instead, she heads down the aisle in front of me. “Going home with Charmaine,” she says to Ravenna.

“Behave, then,” Ravenna says.

We wait there in the ditch while the bus pulls away.

“I always wanted to see the inside of this trailer-cabin,” Tracy says.

I look at the cabin as if for the first time. From the outside it doesn't look big enough for two people. The log walls look rough and splintery.

“You gonna invite me or what?”

“Would you like to come in?” I say politely.

“Okay,” she says, after a little pause, like she's responding to a real invitation she has to consider first.

I open the door and poke my head in first, hoping to find Titus curled up on the passenger seat, but he's not there. “I have a cat,” I tell her, “but he hasn't been home in a while.”

On the stoop, she cups her hands around her mouth and hollers, “KITTY, KITTY, KITTY,” so loud that the palisades boom with it. “I'll keep my eye out,” she offers. “You know how cats are.”

From the doorway, the RV interior is narrow and dim. Our box of shoes sits under the dinette, and even with the window open over the sink, I can smell the stale combination of leather, rubber, and feet.

“It's just like I thought,” Tracy says. “Everything you need right here. Your little-bitty sink and stove and fridge. Can I see the bathroom?” I point to the accordion door on the other side of the dinette, and she edges around the table, opens the bathroom door, and stretches it closed behind her. “Can I use this little-bitty commode?” she says, her voice muffled by the door.

“Sure.” I flip the dinette up against the wall so she can see how it makes the middle space bigger. I push the box of shoes up against the wall, too.

“Look at that,” she says about the dinette when she's finished in the bathroom. “I never saw that before. It's just like a regular trailer in here, only more solid. I bet you can even stay during a tornado. A flood'll be your problem,” she says.

“We lost our dock the other night.”

“Happens,” Tracy says, peering into the cab. “What would get me is no TV.” She sits down on the sofa and makes a face. “This where you sleep? Hard. What about your mom?” I point to the flat cubby above the driver and passenger seats, and she lets out a low whistle. “If I had to go to the bathroom in the night I would forget and raise up and hit my head. What's your mom's job again?”

“Substitute teacher.”

“And your dad's the preacher.”

“He writes stuff, mainly. What God tells him to. He did, I mean.”

“Did your mom leave him to bring you down here? Or did he leave her?”

I weigh both possibilities and am horrified to feel my eyes beginning to burn. But Tracy doesn't seem to notice. It is a relief to have her here, filling up all the usual thinking places in my head with her voice.

“Them other people still in your house?”

I swallow and nod, and she goes on.

“I thought my parents were divorced because Momma said they were and Daddy was living over in Clay's Corner. But last year he came home, and she decided they were still married, and now he goes back and forth. He had a baby with his girlfriend. When he's here we all pretend we don't know, but he took me to see her once. My baby sister. Her name's Tabitha, like on that old show
Bewitched
?”

“It's in the Bible too. Tabitha.”

“You read the whole Bible?”

“Almost.”

“Well, without TV what else are you going to do?” Tracy looks around with approval. “I can see living like this someday. But with TV. And a phone. Everything kept neat. All your shoes in a box like that. ‘House Rules,'” she begins reading from the list on the refrigerator.

“That's nothing,” I say, tearing it off and crumpling it.

“You got rules and everything,” she says, nodding. “Keeps everybody in line. You got anything to eat?”

In the refrigerator is a Tupperware container of powdered milk that needs to be shaken up again and a carton of eggs that Phoebe's already hard-boiled so they won't go bad. Half a loaf of wheat bread. Two damp boxes of spinach on the freezer shelf.

“No, you don't,” Tracy says, looking over my shoulder. “No chips or pop or nothing. Good thing I've got some smokes.”

We climb down out of the trailer-cabin and cross the lawn to the slippery bank. It's only a little damp, still, and we make our feet flat, then lower ourselves to sit halfway down, leaning our backs into the slope. The river is still brown from all the rain, and there's a whiff of skunk in the air. Tracy reaches into her tight jeans pocket and pulls out a narrow plastic case shaped to hold two tampons.

“Your dad didn't have a baby with someone else, did he?” she says, tapping out a cigarette instead of a tampon.

“No,” I say, watching the water. It's moving, but unless there's a branch or leaf on top, it's so smooth today you can't tell.

“Then maybe he'll come back. You never know. ‘Nothing's over till it's over' is what Momma has to say about it. ‘Till the fat lady sings.'” Tracy parks the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, reaches into her jeans again, and extracts a pocketknife. She turns her head toward me, cheek resting on the ground. “You got cousins?”

“No.”

“None? And no sisters or brothers either. That you know of. All right then.” She flips open the tiny blade, gets to her feet, and stagger-steps down to the river, where she leans over and dips the knife in the current. Then she hikes back up the bank and sits cross-legged beside me. I sit up, too.

“You know what blood sisters are, right? You just give yourself a little cut on your finger.” Tracy holds up her finger. “Then the other person does it. Then you take your fingers”—she parks the cigarette again and uses both hands to show me—“and mash 'em together. You bleed into each other, see? So then my blood is in your blood, and yours is in mine. And once blood's inside you, it keeps making more blood, so then we're blood kin.” She holds the knife out to me, and I test the blade against the tip of my index finger. “If we're blood kin, we'll be sisters forever and have to help each other out, and you don't have any real sisters. You need more people, that's all. What if your parents get divorced? What if your granny dies on you?”

I think about Daze maybe dying and press harder, then I bear down on the knife's tip right into the soft part of my finger until a pearl of blood appears. “Here,” Tracy says. She takes the knife back and presses the tip into her finger, too. “Squeeze it,” she says, and we both do, blood blooming into the whorl of our fingerprints. It's thinner than I expected. “Now here.” She holds up her finger, I hold up mine, and we press them together. “That'll do it,” she says, as we separate them again. There's a warmth in me now, spreading out from my hand, like our blood really could be mingling.

“Thanks,” I say.

Tracy sucks her finger. “If we're going to be kin,” she says, “you got to keep that fool grin off your face.”

 

We're still sitting there watching the river when the Pinto pulls in, and Phoebe honks for me. I tell Tracy I have to go, and she tells me to suit myself and taps out another cigarette.

“Who's that?” says Phoebe, as we back out of the driveway.

“A girl who stopped by,” I say. “From the bus.”

“I don't like you having people over when I'm not home,” Phoebe says. “But at least you stayed outside.”

“Her name's Tracy,” I say. I slip my blood-kin finger into my mouth, and there's the metal taste mixed in with salt.

Phoebe swats my hand away from my face. “They brought your grandmother back from the hospital and moved her into special care again. I snuck away during planning period this afternoon to check on her. She's alert at least. She knew me.”

“Which brain half was it in?” I ask, thinking of my father's printout. “Hemisphere, I mean.”

“What? I don't know.” Phoebe shakes her head. She has not trimmed her hair in weeks, and the long bob swings under her chin. “Left, I think. It's her right side that's wonky. And her speech.”

At the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center, Phoebe stops by Daze's apartment and sends me on up to special care on the third floor. I find Daze in a hospital bed, her soft white hair around her shoulders. I've never seen her hair down before, even when I've spent the night with her. Even during the first stroke. She's rubbing one pale hand with gardenia lotion, a flower that smells sweet and sad at the same time.

“Daze,” I say, and throw myself on her chest to give her a hug. She pats me on the back.

“Phoebe,” she says, then I draw back and look at her.

“Charmaine,” I say, laying a hand flat on my chest. She tilts her head to the right, like it's heavy. The right side of her mouth droops.

“Phoebe,” she says again, narrowing her eyes with concentration. “No.”

“It's okay,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

“Figh.”

“Can you walk?”

“No.”

“Can you write?”

She looks at her right hand as if she could ask it. Then she reaches out with her left hand and grasps mine, making a bundle of my fingers with a strength that takes my breath. A noise comes from her throat that sounds like “Sorry.” She is clutching my hand so hard that the tips of my fingers turn purple. There are tears in her open eyes, and I feel them in the back of my own throat. I have never seen Daze cry before. She looks trapped inside her body, and I think of the woman in the picture, the body split open, like the person inside has escaped her sinful, limited flesh. Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe she's been torn from her body, separated forever from touching other bodies with it, which maybe was her only real comfort. Maybe the body, like Mrs. Teaderman said about the unconscious, is both prism and prison at the same time. I squeeze Daze's fingers back as hard as I can.

Paulette, a nurse Daze likes, pulls back the curtain and sticks her head in. “How's my favorite patient?”

Daze moves the side of her mouth, but this time nothing comes out.

“She's been asking after you,” Paulette says to me. “I can understand her just fine.” She grabs Daze's foot. “Can't I, hon? We start on physical therapy first thing in the morning. Don't we, hon?”

Daze does something with her left eye, a fluttering.

“That's your grandmother trying to make a face,” Paulette says. “Physical therapy's not her favorite. Now kiss her good-bye so you don't tire her out.” I do and I feel it all. Her damp, soft skin and the hard bone of skull just beneath it. Underneath the skull, her tired brain.

Phoebe's waiting in a chair in the hallway. “How's she looking?” she asks me. “She didn't look so hot earlier.”

I think about the sunken side of Daze's face, but also about the way her silky hair fell around her neck and shoulders, white as the halo of a planet. “Her hair was down,” I say. “It looked soft.”

“Then she's still out of commission. Ever seen your grandmother's hair any way but skinned back from her face?”

We find Daze's Buick in the parking lot out front. In the car, Phoebe flips on the wipers, pushing a mess of wet leaves to the left and right.

“Does Daze know you're driving her car?”

“It's only until we figure out what's wrong with the Pinto,” says Phoebe. “Once and for all.”

We pull out onto the county road, only in the direction of Clay's Corner instead of the river. “I was thinking McDonald's tonight,” Phoebe says. “We eat in that same little space all the time. It's getting to me.” She reaches under her legs and adjusts the seat forward to her shorter legs. “I've spoken to your father. He feels responsible. It's all been kind of a blow to Daze. His mental health. Your grandmother believed God was speaking to him, you know. For years.”

“Everyone believed it.”

“Not everyone,” Phoebe says.

“You believed it,” I say.

Phoebe sighs and puts the car in reverse. “Maybe you should think about being a lawyer someday. You like making a point. I did believe it, obviously. But now I feel kind of relieved. It was a big pill to swallow and a lot to keep up with.” As she speaks, she is trying to pull the Buick out onto the highway. “Am I good?” she says, and even though I don't want to, I check for her.

“You're good,” I say. I feel myself speaking, breathing, through a tight throat. “Do you even love him anymore?” I ask, and the words sound as squeezed as they feel. I can't shake the impression that Phoebe is weighing her options.

“Your father and I committed to each other before God,” she says, “which is not to be taken lightly. Modern times or no. ‘Cleave,' it says in the Bible. Do you understand the meaning of that word?”

“What about Doctor Osborne?”

Phoebe sighs. “Once and for all, Charmaine, I am not entertaining suitors. Doctor Osborne is a nice person who takes an interest in people. The way he's helping out with Seth, too, with Mister Catterson on the road. Boys need their fathers.”

“Girls need their fathers, too.”

“Girls need their mothers more,” Phoebe says. “One of these days you're going to figure that out.”

The words hit me like a warning, and I turn my face toward the window. Outside, the colors of the sky are crashing into themselves, bright pink and orange layers of cloud lit from underneath by the low sun. I have never set foot outside Kentucky, and I don't understand yet that this is a unique trick of latitude and landscape, that our evening skies hold their place among the world's most breathtaking. If you'd asked me, I would have said the sky was probably like that everywhere. I would have told you that's just the way the sky was.