The Blue Girl (9 page)

And his head?
I said.

Jeff said nothing. Jeff did not look.

Possible encephalitis
, he said.
We'll watch him. There will be a few tests
. And,
It could be nothing
.

The doctor reached out to shake Jeff's hand, and I remember that Jeff did not take it.

Now here we are in this town with a girl who almost drowned and then came to life again, living in a permanent state of blue. We didn't know what was wrong with her—we still don't—and yet I can't help but feel relief, knowing there is someone stranger than my son living out there in the world. Finally, there is something worse than a son with a mutated gene—fragile x syndrome, they call it—who bangs himself against the door at night, and speaks in a cartoon-like voice he has made up for himself. There is something worse than knowing you have killed off your own son's chances of normality without even knowing you could. And you can't undo it, you and your mutated gene on your x chromosome. Your daughter has been spared, but your broken son in this small town, he is a spectacle. Yet now, now there is someone else to wonder
about at night across the black water, through the trees. Even the people who still think she's a dream, a game, a rumor to keep us all from being too bored, even they now wonder about her, instead of my son.

When I wake up this morning after our visit last night, the house still smells of the pies. I'm late getting the kids ready, and Jeff is already gone, as he always is, the only trace of him a splash of water on the counter and the stubble on his razor. And as usual, his side of the bed is made up, the covers tucked in. For years he has been trying not to leave even a trace of himself behind. In the early years he traveled as a salesman for a computer company, but the technology changed faster than he could, and now he sells electronics for a chain store in a town not far from here. It is my fault we stay in this town, even though we both grew up here, the fault has always been mine. He slips out of the house in the morning and into the bed at night without a coffee ground in the sink or a crease in the bedspread. Sometimes at night when he's lying there in his silent sleep, I lean over and whisper,
I know you're in there. I know you're really there
.

But now he's gone and Rebecca has made Ethan a bowl of cereal and turned on the little television in the breakfast nook so that he can watch cartoons and imitate the voices. Sometimes I look at them sitting there, my daughter with
her perfect skin and hair like glass and my son with his finger motions—stimming, they call it—and strange sounds coming out of his throat, and I want to cry, right then and there, to put my head down on the counter and not raise it again until someone pulls me up and out of the chair, bodily picks me up, forcefully even, and shoves me back into my life. But then I smell the vanilla and the sweetness, and I know that she's out there waiting for me, for us, and that again we'll go and feed her, feed her our pain and our secrets along with the moon pies, and she'll take it all in and take it all away.

I lean over the table and kiss Rebecca on the top of the head—even her scalp shines—and I say,
Thank God for you, Rebecca, thank God
.

She looks over at her brother with his face pressed up against the tiny television and wipes a crumb away from her mouth.

Thank God for what, Mom?
she says, and then, under her breath, she mutters,
Jesus
.

Just thank God, is all
, I say.
That's it. Just thank God. Can't anyone thank God anymore?

Ethan throws his head back and laughs a teeth-chattering laugh, and Rebecca says,
Not in this house
.

She smiles at Ethan, but when she gets up to rinse her plate, she says,
Speaking of God, the goddamned house stinks of vanilla
.

I say,
You're spending too much time with Greg
.

She doesn't deny it. She likes him. I've seen the looks, the sideways glances, the brushing up against her. I remember how it was. I was young and pretty—but not as pretty as Rebecca. All summer I watched my daughter become prettier until one day, it seemed, she moved from pretty to beautiful. I was pretty as a girl, but not beautiful, not like my own mother. Never beautiful. Sometimes I find myself wishing Rebecca were less beautiful. I think how happy my mother would be to see Rebecca now, how my mother always hoped I'd be beautiful.
There is always something to strive for
, my mother would say as she applied mascara and lipstick.
Anyone can be better
. It might be easier for Rebecca, though, if she were simply pretty. She'd have less to lose, fewer dreams to hold on to. Maybe she'll be lucky enough to remain beautiful, unlike pretty people like me, faded, without dreams.

I move to take Ethan's cereal bowl from him—always from the right side, never the left—and I am trying to take all three at once—bowl, napkin, and spoon—because the disruption of order is more than he can bear. Rebecca sees what I'm about to do and slides the spoon under my hand. She understands her brother in ways even I can't, in ways that Jeff has never tried to, and although I'm grateful for her—which is why I kiss her and thank God—there are
times I can't stop myself from falling into the deep pit of “what if” . . .
what if
she has been damaged too,
what if
her understanding of her brother stems from having a recessive gene of her own—a permutation, they call it.
What if
she has early ovarian failure or her menopause comes on too soon.
What if
something were to happen to me or to Jeff, and Rebecca were left to take care of her brother? I take a deep breath and try to push these thoughts away while tipping the spoon into the bowl, waiting for the gap after the commercial to slide the bowl, spoon, and cereal away all at once.

This is when my mistake happens, when I drop the bowl. Because of all the dreaming I haven't been doing, I've fallen into a daydream of generations of chromosomal damage, of a daughter who may never bear children. And that's when the white ceramic bowl falls to the white ceramic tile floor, splashing white milk that clings to the silver spoon. It is like slow motion—milk, bowl, spoon, tile, crack—and I am staring at all the whiteness, at my son with his mouth open, screaming.

The chair falls back—also white like everything in my kitchen—as Ethan stumbles into me and begins banging with his fists and then with his head against the tile floor. Crack, crack, thud, crack.

The sound kills me, as it always does.

He yells again in his real voice now, the cartoon voice receding for the moment. Only when he screams and bangs and bangs and screams do I ever hear my son's real voice, deep-throated and heavy. It's the voice I used to hear in my dreams, back in that time when I used to dream of a teenage boy without an elongated palate and a too-long face that this fragile x has embedded into him. In my dreams, the teenage boy would stand in our white kitchen and smile with eyes that were never heavy lidded and blank, eyes that saw me, really saw me, not just the form of the mother who takes him for evaluations and keeps him out of group homes. The doctors say it could be my x or it could be Jeff's, there is no way to know. But I know that the x is mine. I know that I have done it. I know I'm the one who ruined him.

He cries now, following his own routine, the screaming giving way to this slower, deeper sound, the sound of my real boy stuck inside there, the blue trying to emerge in all this whiteness.

Rebecca slides herself across the floor in her too-tight jeans and grips him from behind, spooning against his back the way they taught us. Her hands grip his and pull them around his sides. How a girl so slim can be so strong I do not understand. And I don't understand how he never bruises Rebecca the way he does me. My arms are lined
with bruises from the tantrums set off by dishes dropping or car alarms going off or too-loud toilets that flush down the hall.

Ethan, Ethan, Ethan
, she says into his neck, and as he slows, she says it a fourth time because, somehow, fours speak to him.
Ethan
.

Her glassy hair fans out behind her. The two of them lie that way for a minute on the floor, neither of them moving. I think, looking down at them, of her, of the girl out on the lake that day, and then her lying on the sand with Audrey above her. I can almost smell the lake water coming up out of her throat, and I imagine my children are fish on the white floor. At least they are not blue. At least there is that.
If we could just stay this way
, I think, listening to their breath, the two of them safe and quiet on the floor,
maybe I'd never have to dream again
.

Mom
, Rebecca says.
Help me get him up
.

I move to his left and hold my hands in front of him so he can see them before they startle him. Even my own bare hands are jarring to my son. When he goes to school on his little yellow bus, sometimes I drive out of town to a strip mall where I have my fingernails and toenails painted a stark red. Sometimes, on the way back to pick him up, I drive by the lake, and I park and just sit in my car, letting my hands hang out the window to dry
in the sun. Then I get out, sit on a curb, and scrub all of it away with nail polish remover and cotton balls. Once I told Magda what I do, and she said,
Why would you do that, go to such trouble, only to have to take it off again?
I couldn't explain that I do it for my mother, wherever she is, to show her that I have not given up trying.

I manage to get him on the bus to his school in another district just outside of town where there are programs for boys like my son. Some of the others have Down syndrome and wave to me with their thick hands and almond eyes that disappear into their faces when they smile. The matron takes Ethan's hands in hers and leads him up the steps into the same type of bus he's been on since pre-school. Rebecca has gone inside to put on her mascara and lip gloss and to look at her reflection—to look at her shiny hair, her long lashes, and maybe, I think, if she could see it, her luck.

Say good-bye to Mama, Ethan
, the matron says. Her name is Shelley, overworked Shelley, who has been hit in the eye and who sometimes has to bribe my son onto the bus with M&M's. Today, thankfully, there are no struggles. She winks at me once his seatbelt is fastened.

There you go now, Ethan
, she says.
Ethan's
O.K
.

He looks out the window, toward me but not at me, and says what has become his mantra of comfort.

Ethan's
O.K
., he says. He says it four times.
Ethan's
O.K
. now
.

When the bus pulls away, I stand in the driveway watching it become smaller and smaller and think about how I wish that was true, that Ethan was
O.K
.

Now it's night, and following my own routine, I lock Ethan into his room, wishing it could be otherwise. I started locking him in as a last resort after the alarms we installed failed, and I awoke too many times to find him up and wandering. I lie on the white bed with no discernable trace of Jeff. Sometimes he doesn't come home until well after midnight when the store has warehouse inventory. Or so he claims. I hardly ask anymore what his reasons are. If he's going to do it—erase himself—then why doesn't he just get it over with?

I hear Rebecca sliding open the glass door to the deck so slowly, so carefully, it makes me wonder how many times she's done it. I hear her feet on the driveway, and I know she's headed for the lake, for Greg. I think of getting up, of following her. I think of telling her not to do it. But I don't. I lie on the bed and think of my son sleeping in the next room with his mouth open, quiet, not banging. I know that soon we will drive to the lake in our separate cars, Irene and Magda and I, and we'll wonder whether we can ever step inside her blueness. I think of my daughter sneaking out to the woods with a boy, and I do not move. I do not stop her, and I do not dream.

Rebecca