The Blue Girl (13 page)

The only thing that keeps me from screaming is Buck. I would never want to scare Buck, Buck with his crazy dreams and the bag of sugar on his head. He's too little for dreams like those. He's too little to have a sister who would wake him up with her screaming if she didn't deliberately keep herself from going crazy. He's too little to have a mother making moon pies and pretending she's not going out to a lake to feed a girl who's blue. And he's too little for a father who does nothing but play basketball by himself with a Nerf ball and a little hoop.

The night we went out to the lake, Buck came into my room and stood by my bed.

Audrey
, he said,
Audrey, are you up?

I just looked at him and said,
Don't you know by now I'm always up?

He gave me a sad look, sadder, even, than his too-tight pajamas with the sailboats on them. I felt my throat go tight when he looked at me that way.

Next time
, he said,
next time, promise you'll take me with you
.

With me where?
I said, and then,
Buck, don't get any ideas about where I've been
.

I pulled myself up and leaned on my elbows.

There won't be any next time
, I said.
You have to go back to bed
.

He nodded and opened the door. Through the opening I could see the Nerf ball whizzing by, our father bending down to pick up the ball after he missed.

Take me next time
, he said, and then closed the door before I had a chance to answer him.

I am so tired. The tiredness makes my arms and hands itch. It makes my stomach squeeze. Every minute of every day I am one giant blur of tired.

But when I found her and breathed into her last night, for the first time since that day at the lake, I didn't feel tired. I felt huge again. Enormous. Like she had blown something into me that made me expand. Even my jeans felt tight.

The whole way home, while Rebecca was rubbing my wet back, I wanted to tell her about the feeling, the way I would have when we were younger, before she started messing around with Greg, before she got almost too pretty to talk to. I wanted to tell her that I opened my mouth and breathed something in, something huge and whole and mine.

If I could, I would share it, but somehow, whatever this is, this huge thing inside me that I carry around, this thing that makes me dream even when I can't sleep, it seems to be mine alone. Sometimes at night when the television's on, I think of sharing the feeling with Buck, of putting my mouth on his and breathing into him while he's asleep, but the thought is so disgusting that I lie awake all night in a sweat. Sometimes I think of trying to give whatever it is to my father, because if anyone needs to wake up, it's him. Sometimes I think of giving it to Ethan, but then, what would he do with it? Probably the only peace you get inside a head like Ethan's, a head full of weird voices and cartoons, is during sleep.

Every time I've seen her, she's been awake. Her eyes are always open. Even when I found her facedown in the water, just the way I did in the half-dream I've had too many nights to count, her eyes were open.
Fixed is actually the right word
, I think. When I turned her over and pushed the air out of my lungs and breathed into her mouth, she smiled like she'd been expecting me all along.

It's not that I minded being awake, not at first. After I pulled her out of the lake in front of my mother and her friends, the days were long, and there seemed to be so much to do. I'd sit in the living room after Buck and my mother went to bed, and I'd watch my father play
basketball by himself in the living room. He seemed to like it when I watched, the way I'd watched the
TV
set with him when he thought it was going to blow up. For those first three weeks we just sat together, me and my father, me on the couch with my feet up and under a blanket, even though it was still so hot out, and my father on the floor in front of the
TV
with his hands over his head.

It's all right, Dad
, I said to him one night when he kept getting up and pacing around the room and then crouching down again.
Nothing's going to happen
.

He said,
Yes, something will happen, Audrey
, and he sat back down on the floor and rocked.

That was the last time he really looked at me, the night before Mom made the call, before they took him away.

The next day Buck and I stood at the window and watched him go. One of the men in the ambulance put his hand on my father's shoulder. He went with his head down, kicking at the gravel in the driveway like a little kid. Buck asked where Dad was going, and I said,
Someplace good, someplace safe. A place where he won't have to worry so much
. My mother got in the ambulance with him but didn't cry. None of us cried, though I think we should have.

Buck said, after he was gone,
Does this mean we can watch
TV
again?
and I said yes, and then he asked if this meant that things would go back to the way they were, when Dad
was
O.K
., and I said they would, but I knew it wouldn't be
O.K
. again, even then, even before that first time I saved her life, even before I lay here night after night, unable to sleep.

Last night I hid my balled-up wet clothes in the back of my closet after my mother peeked in, then turned around and left, closing the door behind her. I knew she wouldn't look. I knew she wouldn't ask about the wet clothes or why I was shivering or why I took so many towels from the linen closet. She knew we took the car, but she wouldn't ask who drove or where we went. As I put on my nightgown, I started thinking we should be a lot more careful, that letting Greg drive was a bad idea, that maybe Caroline was right and we should just stay away and let our mothers do whatever they were going to do. But we can't stay away. Greg is definitely going to go again. I can feel it in every fuck he says, every
fucking blue girl
this and
fucking blue girl
that.
What did she ever do to you?
I'd asked in the car on the way out to the lake, and he'd said,
Why the fuck do you care so much about a fucking blue girl anyway?

After I'd saved her, again, Greg didn't say a word. When he parked Dad's car in the driveway and turned out the lights, I asked,
Why do
you
care about her so much, Greg?

Yeah, just shut the fuck up now, Greg
, Rebecca said as she opened the door, and then everyone went quiet. I got out
of the car and walked away with Dad's keys in my hands and the blue girl's breath inside me.

When I know my mom has gone out to the porch to smoke her cigarettes, I sit down on the living room rug to watch my father play. He looks very tired but doesn't stop playing. I think maybe that if I can watch him long enough, my father catching and throwing and catching, maybe I'll be able to doze off for at least a little while. The longer I watch him, though, the less tired I become. My throat feels sore from helping her breathe, my chest going up and down, up and down. I keep seeing her face in the back of my eyelids every time I close them.

He stops dribbling for a minute and stares at the hoop.

Are you winning, Dad?
I ask him.

He seems surprised to hear me talk to him, as if my voice itself is a surprise. We look at each other, me and my father, as if we've never seen each other before. I wonder how I look to him now, now that I don't sleep, with her blueness inside me.

He doesn't answer. I lie on the rug all night watching him not winning.

Magda

L
IKE I TOLD IRENE, WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. THESE
kids with their ideas. It was only a matter of time before they went looking for her.
It's not like the moon pies don't leave a smell
, I said when Irene called me after finding Audrey's wet clothes.
It's not like we've been so good about hiding it. We make pies and go out in the night. They were bound to figure us out. Look at my boy, Greg
, I said,
always watching me stir the chocolate. You can't hide much from kids, Irene
. I wanted to add that everyone knows that her husband is not right in the head and that she should stop being ashamed. Caroline has told me about the strange games he plays with a basketball, and that he thinks the
TV
will blow up one day and kill them all.

Look at Ethan
, I said, and that is enough. Any time we feel our problems clogging our heads like water in the ears, that's all we have to say.

Look at Ethan
.

Before the girl came, we all looked at Ethan. We pitied. We wrapped our arms around Libby's shoulders when she talked about the school filled with kids who wear helmets, kids who can't go to the bathroom on their own. We saw the small yellow bus. We saw him getting bigger and still talking in that voice of his. We knew.

It's not that we'd forgotten Ethan once the girl came, but our pity has changed. Shifted. Now, we don't look at him so much. Me, I've always been a little bit afraid of him, which is something, as a mother, I hate to admit, but now that the blue girl has come, now, after all the feedings, we haven't been thinking as much about Ethan with his strange voice and flat ears. Libby doesn't say as much, but I suspect she feels more at ease now, too, without all of us looking all the time at her son.

Which of course
, Mama would say,
must be a feeling so terrible. You should feel more, Magdalena
, she'd say.
You are not feeling as much for others as you did when you were a girl. Feeling is something you should do
.

After I hung up with Irene, I started on the pies. It wasn't really a decision or a plan—I just started taking out the cookie sheet and the mixing bowl, the marshmallow cream and the chocolate, without even thinking.
I feel things, Mama
, I wanted to say. I feel the need to feed her, deep in my middle, and I hear Mama's laughter in my head.

You who always hated cooking
, she'd say.
Now look at you in a sea of mixing bowls
.

They come home while I start to make the pies, and I'm filling the kitchen with my smells, as if Mama and I are alone in the kitchen, melting the chocolate for the cookie tops and bottoms, though Mama would never have eaten moon pies.
Too sweet
, she'd have said,
and the filling sticks in the gut
.

Caroline comes in first, always, and flops herself down at the table. I notice she's late today, but I don't let on. There are still things I keep to myself. All mothers do.

Caroline begins to talk as I put the cookies for the tops and the bottoms of the moon pies in the oven.
The things that house the secrets
, I think. She is a talker, my girl, always full of words. I imagine her head like the ticker on the news shows with a stream of neon words running across, never stopping, eventually repeating. She was young when she started talking, fourteen months, and she has not stopped since. When she was little, I sometimes used to pray she'd stop talking so much, always jabbering, always
Mama this
and
Mama that
. My own Mama warned me how I would come to miss the sound of my own name, my name disappearing into a sea of
Mamas
. How right she was.

I love Audrey
, Caroline says, picking at a page in one of the many books she is always carrying,
but Audrey's family is kind of strange
.