The Center of Everything (16 page)

I close my eyes, and pray to God to make my mother disappear, for her to be zapped by a bolt of lightning, smited by a laser from above. She doesn’t belong here. All of the other women are wearing dresses, but she’s wearing cords and a blue sweater that is too tight. And now this, telling Sharon, lovely, pink Sharon, who is so much cleaner than she is in so many ways, that she has to wash her hands.

Harry Hopewell is a tall, black-haired man with sideburns that make him look a little like Abraham Lincoln, and I think maybe he has done this on purpose. He wears a black suit and a red tie, a gold cross stuck in the middle of it. His voice is deeper than Pastor Dave’s. Words come out of his mouth like he is pounding on a drum.

“Are you all ready?” he asks, standing behind the DJ table, his arms stretched out wide. “Are you all ready to witness the healing power of the Lord?”

Pastor Dave starts to play something on the accordion, and my mother leans over and taps me on the arm. “Evelyn,” she whispers. “What’s that man’s name?”

I frown at her. She is like Ray Watley at school, talking in class. “Hopewell.”

My mother looks back up at him, squinting. “You’re not going to believe this,” she whispers, “but I swear, I mean I
swear,
that guy was on a soap I used to watch.”

I scoot my chair away from her, closer to Eileen.

“I’m afraid I’m having trouble hearing you,” Harry Hopewell says, cupping a hand around one of his ears. His voice is so loud you can hear it over the accordion, and he hasn’t even turned on the microphone. “What I need to know is, are you all with me today in the spirit of the Lord? Are we going to do some healing? Are your hearts bound in faith? You all have to be in the spirit for this to work.”

There is a growing hum in the room now. People are stamping their feet, clapping hands, calling out “Amen.” It’s exciting. But I’m worried my mother will ruin everything. You can tell just by looking at her face she’s not in the spirit. She’s looking up at Harry Hopewell, at the disco ball, and at me, and her face looks like she is going to laugh and also like she is still trying to remember the name of the soap opera.

Harry Hopewell steps down from behind the table and asks who wants to go first. A lady in the back row raises her hand, and Pastor Dave plays “When the Saints Come Marching In” on his accordion as she walks between the folding chairs to the front of the room. Harry Hopewell looks at her carefully, and then closes his eyes. “What ails you, child?”

“Headaches,” she says, her voice more like she is asking a question than giving an answer. “I’ve been getting headaches right here.” She points to one of her temples. “I get them almost every day, for about a year now. They’re very painful.”

Harry Hopewell puts his hands on each side of her head like it is something he can squish together, and for a moment, I think this is what he is going to do. “In the words of Luke,” he says. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me. He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”

Even my mother is quiet now, jiggling Samuel on her knee. Harry Hopewell asks us to bow our heads, to let the spirit of the Lord enter the room, for each of us to pray for this woman to be set at liberty from her headaches. I pray as hard as I can, holding on to Eileen’s hand. You are supposed to close your eyes, but I open mine long enough to see that my mother’s are still open. If this doesn’t work, if the lady still gets headaches, it will be her fault.

“Do you feel this?” he asks, still squishing the lady’s head. “Do you feel this coming from my hands, this heat?”

She waits, her eyes closed, face tensed, as if she is listening for a sound from far away. Then she opens her eyes. “I do,” she says. “I feel it!”

Eileen jumps a little in her chair, both hands cupped over her mouth.

“I feel better!” the lady says, to us now. “I feel better! I really do.”

Pastor Dave starts playing the accordion again, and the lady dances down the aisle, her arms raised high in the air.

The next man who goes up won’t say exactly what his problem is; he will only say he is suffering from wicked thoughts in his mind and heart, but Harry Hopewell nods quickly, as if he knew what the man would say before he even opened his mouth.

“You know,” Harry Hopewell says, taking off his glasses, rubbing the lenses with his red tie, “Jesus, while on Earth, stilled a storm. He had the power to calm both the land and sea. Does he not have the power to purge this man of the thoughts that torment him, to bring him back into the light?” When we don’t answer, he looks up at us. “Well, does he?”

“Yes!” we say, all of us together, except for my mother, who says nothing.

He places his hands on the man’s head and tells him he won’t suffer from wicked thoughts anymore if he is in fact a true believer. The man says, “Okay,” and goes back to his chair. A woman with arthritis goes up next, and then even Sharon and Pastor Dave take a turn. Sharon starts crying, up there in front of everyone, and it’s so strange to see her like this, mascara tears running down her pink cheeks. She’s crying so hard that you can’t really understand her as she explains what the problem is, but then Pastor Dave says that they haven’t been able to have a baby, and that they want one, more than anything else in the world. They’ll give up anything to have a baby, he says. Harry Hopewell says if this is true, then they’ll be able to have one.

My mother leans over me to poke Eileen on the knee. “This is stupid,” she whispers. “That’s mean, for him to tell them that.”

I look at her, unbelieving. It’s pretty bad, what she said, even for her. You can’t call a reverend stupid, especially when you’re in church. The walls could fall down, tumbling down just on her head, leaving everyone else alone. And then, maybe because we’re in church, she gets what she deserves.

“In the back there?” Harry Hopewell asks. “Ma’am? With the baby?”

The accordion stops playing. My mother shakes her head quickly, sitting up straight. “No. Nothing. I’m okay.”

But Eileen waves at Pastor Dave, motioning him over. “Go on up,” she says, pushing on my mother’s arm. “Go, Tina. It’s free, anyway.”

My mother brings Samuel closer to her chest, his empty eyes staring off past her shoulder. She shakes her head. “No, Mom. No. Stop it.”

“Come on. What would it hurt to try?”

Pastor Dave is moving toward us, smiling and squeezing the accordion in and out as he walks. He stops when he gets to where we are and puts his hand on my mother’s shoulder.

“I’m okay,” my mother says. She keeps her head still, but she moves her eyes so she’s looking at his hand on her shoulder. “Really.”

“Tina,” he says, still holding the accordion in his other hand, his fingers pressing lightly on the keys. “You said your baby was sick. Don’t you want to help him? We’re coming to you with love. Just love, Tina. Nobody’s judging you for what you may have done wrong in the past. We only want to help you and your baby come to Christ.”

“Come on, Tina,” Eileen says, her hand on my mother’s knee. “Just give it a try.”

My mother is still looking at Pastor Dave’s hand on her shoulder, her eyes wide. “No thanks.” She pulls the edges of Sam’s blanket over his face. “Go away, okay?”

The people in front of us have turned all the way around in their folding chairs to see. My mother starts to stand up, but there’s nowhere for her to go. She tries to scoot her chair back, but she can’t.

“God wants you to be happy, Tina,” Pastor Dave says. He kneels beside her, his hand still on her shoulder. “Christ died to wash your sins away, but you have to let it happen. You have to say yes.” He takes his hand off her shoulder and reaches toward Samuel.

“Okay,” my mother says, raising one of her arms like she is getting ready to ask a question, or to volunteer. “Okay,” she says again, looking at Pastor Dave’s hand. “If you touch my child…” She pauses, like she is trying to decide what will really happen, like she isn’t sure yet and has to think about it. “If you touch my child, I’ll hurt you. I really will.”

Pastor Dave stands up and moves back. It is hard to believe. All of us watching take in one deep breath at the same time, like a choir getting ready to sing. You can’t say you’re going to hurt a pastor right in the middle of church.

And then, again, it’s like Wichita, her hand suddenly tight around my wrist, pulling me up beside her. But I don’t want to go with her this time. “I’m staying,” I say, trying to twist free.

She leans down and looks at me, her slightly crossed eyes inches away from mine. “No, Evelyn. I’m your mother, and you’re coming with me.”

No one comes to save me. She pulls me outside, out into the parking lot, into the cold late-morning drizzle. She does not even try to dodge the puddles, but kicks right through them, dragging me behind.

“I hate you,” I tell her. “You ruin everything.”

“I know, Evelyn. I know.”

Eileen jogs out behind us, holding our coats. “Tina!”

My mother tries the door handle of the car, but it’s locked. When Eileen gets to the car, she hands us our coats so we can put them over our heads, but then we all just stand there.

“Mom, take us home,” my mother says, her hand over Samuel’s face. Even with the raindrops falling right onto him, he hardly blinks.

“You could at least try.”

“Take us home.”

Eileen puts one hand on my shoulder, and we face her, the two of us. “Tina, I know you don’t want to hear this. But I think Samuel has a…specialness to him, and—”

“He’s retarded, Mom.”

“Tina—”

“He’s retarded. He’s retarded, he’s retarded, he’s retarded.” She puts her own hand against her ear and nods. “He’s not special. He’s retarded. That’s how it is. That man in there can’t do anything about it.”

They both stand there for a while in the rain, looking at each other. Then Eileen unlocks the car. We get in, and she drives us home.

ten

I
AM NO LONGER ALLOWED
to go to the Church of the Second Ark. If I want to go to a normal church, my mother says, fine. But no more Second Ark. She tells me this while she is trying to get Samuel into a clean T-shirt, and he is crying, loud and angry, flailing his legs and good arm.

“I’m a Second Arker, Mom,” I tell her. “I don’t want to go to some so-called church where the Scripture has been as good as thrown out the window just so I can look at a bunch of stained glass.”

“How original,” she says.

I go to my room and slam the door. But I am too mad to stay there. I come back out again, running down the hallway toward her. I could hit her. I’m that mad. I stand over her, my fists clenched, ready to burst. “Pastor Dave and Sharon are going to come out here and get me. I’m going with them.”

She picks Samuel up, her free hand resting on the small of her back as she stands. “I don’t care if they send a goddamn limo out here. You’re not going.”

“Freedom of religion!” I yell, going back to my room. “Where’s my freedom of religion?” I slam my door, and then open it and slam it again.

It does not seem fair that she can do this, here in America.

I stay in my room for the rest of the day. I don’t even come out to eat. I can stay in here forever if I need to. I am like Moses in Egypt, and I have righteousness and God on my side. My mother is the Pharaoh, Samuel only one of the plagues to visit her, all of which, it seems to me, she deserves.

I’m happy when school starts again, because at least it’s an escape from her. I am taking French this year, and so is Travis. We use it as a code to talk about our mothers, right in front of them.

“Bonjour, Travis, ma mère est très bête.”

“Bonjour, Evelyn, ma mère est un chien méchant.”

But my favorite class is science. Mr. Torvik has a model of the solar system hung up around the room, and when he turns a switch, the planets revolve around the sun, the baseball-sized Earth spinning on its axis. The planets glow in the dark, and if we are good, if we do our homework and do not pass notes while he is talking, Mr. Torvik shuts out the lights for the last five minutes of class and turns on the switch, so we can just look up and watch the planets move.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” he asks, the light of the planets reflecting off his glasses.

In the spring, he takes us outside and has us bring in leaves to put under the microscope. He shows us how to tell how old a tree is by counting the rings of the stump, the wider rings being moist years, when the tree grew the most. He tells us the names for the different kinds of clouds—cumulus, cirrus—and we learn about warm fronts and cold fronts and wall clouds, how tornados are formed.

We watch films about dogs and wolves, how they are different, how they are the same. They belong to the same
genus,
he says, but are not the same
species
. Snow rabbits are white because that makes them blend in with the snow and harder to see. Mr. Torvik says the reason there are white rabbits where there is snow is because all the rabbits who were different colors couldn’t hide in the snow and got killed before they could have babies.

I raise my hand. “This is before Noah’s ark, or after?”

Traci Carmichael turns around, and again there are the thin lips, the blue-gray eyes. “You’ve
got
to be joking,” she says. She looks at Brad Browning, who is already laughing, shaking his head. I feel my neck flush, my throat go dry. Half of me thinks,
We’ll see, Traci Carmichael, we’ll see who’s laughing when the bombs go off, and only my name is in the book,
but the other half of me knows I have said something stupid.

Mr. Torvik opens his mouth and closes it several times, like he is trying to yawn instead of speak. “It’s separate,” he says finally, his hands making quick, chopping motions in the air. “Two different things.”

He shows us a film of lions hunting, circling a herd of antelope. The antelope are too fast for the lions to catch, except for one with a hurt foot, and the lions all move quickly after this one, surrounding it, as if they already had a meeting and knew exactly what they were going to do. Traci puts her hands over her eyes during this part, and so of course Libby Masterson, who does not have her own brain, does too. But I watch, something in me wanting to see the look in the limping antelope’s eyes as the lion’s paw grabs it by its throat, the rest of the herd running past, only scared for themselves, no time to stop.

“It’s so sad,” Libby says, even though, really, she didn’t see it. “It’s terrible.”

But Mr. Torvik says it isn’t sad. It’s just nature. This way, he tells us, the lions get to eat and the antelope rid themselves of an imperfect specimen. Nature has to get rid of imperfections in the womb, or soon after, to make certain that imperfection isn’t allowed to mate and reproduce itself. Otherwise, there would be a bunch of antelope with bad legs limping around.

He squints at the VCR, trying to find the rewind button. “You wouldn’t want that, class, now would you?”

Mario Cuomo is on television at the Democratic National Convention, and my mother won’t let me change the channel. He looks really mad when he talks, and I like Ronald Reagan better because he’s usually smiling and making jokes. But Mario Cuomo says we cannot let Ronald Reagan be president again, because he’s already talking about spending billions of dollars putting a shield around the shining city on the hill. Mario Cuomo says this shield won’t work, and anyway, there really are two cities in America these days, and half the people live in the other one, which isn’t shining, and isn’t on a hill. He says go ask the people who sleep in the streets if they live in a shining city; go ask the woman who can’t get the help she needs because we just spent it on a tax cut for a millionaire or another missile.

“That’s right,” my mother says, trying to clap. She can’t really, because she’s holding Samuel with one hand and the fingernail clippers in the other.

He is still retarded. All this year I have been learning so much, he has learned nothing. My mother spoon-feeds him oatmeal, carries him around the house as if he were a part of her body, his legs dangling below her arms.

“Can we watch something else?” I ask, my hand already on the dial. I’m sick of Mario Cuomo. The Democratic Convention has been on all week, canceling my shows. “No.”

I glare at her, yawning, loud and on purpose. I scratch my head with the hand that is holding a Rubik’s Cube, and Samuel makes a screeching sound
.

My mother stops looking at Mario Cuomo and looks at Samuel. She leans forward, turns the television off with her foot. “Do it again,” she says.

I put the Rubik’s Cube back on my head, and again, he makes the sound, like a pterodactyl, his good arm reaching toward me.

She takes the Rubik’s Cube from me, without asking, and offers it to him. But he doesn’t want it. He goes back to the way he always is, zombie-eyed, just staring. I put the Rubik’s Cube back on my head, and again, he makes the sound. My mother takes it from me and puts it on her head. He cries out.

She confiscates the Rubik’s Cube permanently, carrying it in the pocket of her bathrobe at all times so she can put it on her head whenever she wants him to look at her. She starts making the pterodactyl sound as well, imitating him, like she is trying to show him they are both the same species. She does this when she thinks I’m not looking, but sometimes I am.

“Oh shut up, Evelyn,” she says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

She loses the cube. She spends the whole day looking under cushions and behind furniture, saying, “Find it! Evelyn, we have to find it!,” Samuel riding on her hip, staring off over her shoulder. Out of desperation, she tries one of her slippers, puts it on her head. He groans, and does something with his mouth that is maybe a smile. She tries different objects—a fork, a cup, a pack of gum, one of my notebooks. The shinier the object, the louder he groans, but it has to be on your head. She takes a hat that Eileen knitted for her last Christmas and sews a red patch on the front, covering the patch with glue and then glitter, so it sparkles in the light.

Now when she holds him, he stares up at the hat, and she can at least pretend he is looking back at her.

I haven’t seen Travis since February, when he got in trouble with Ed Schwebbe, his friend with the blue-and-white van who sometimes gives him a ride to school. He had to go back to the group home, this time for seven weeks, and they didn’t even let him come home on weekends.

By the time he comes home, it’s almost May, warm enough to sit up on the roof again, even at night. He tells me the whole story, how one morning Ed was driving him to school, and they started talking about whether or not Ed could jump over a picnic table in just one jump if he got a running start. Ed said he thought he could. Travis said he didn’t think so.

“I knew he could probably do it,” Travis tells me, throwing pebbles again, but not at his mother’s window. They land on the hedges below us, making no sound. “He’s pretty tall. I just didn’t want to go to school.”

But Ed found a picnic table in a park and jumped over it by eight-fifteen, which left plenty of time to get to school before the first bell. So Travis said he wasn’t sure whether or not Ed’s feet had touched the picnic table as he jumped over it, and the only way to be sure would be for Ed to jump over a table again, but this time it would have to be on fire. He told Ed that he had seen someone do this on television, which was not true. So this was why Travis and Ed had put the picnic table in Ed’s van and driven out of town, stopping only to get some kerosene, to the middle of a plowed soy field. They got a good blaze going, but Ed never got to jump because a state trooper saw the smoke rising from the highway. And so Travis and Ed ended up appearing before a judge, who wanted them each to have seven weeks at the group home to think about what they had done.

“And did you?” I ask, hitting him on the shoulder with one of my flip-flops. “Did you think about it?” I’m trying to act disappointed, but really, I’m just glad he’s back.

He nods, watching the highway. His face has grown more lean in the last year, so his eyes seem larger now, catlike. He is wearing only shorts, no shirt, and just lately, maybe while he was in the group home, he has gotten dark hair on his chest and underneath his arms.

“I thought about it.” He smiles, rubbing his chin.

“What did your mom say?”

“She called my dad. Told him.” He laughs again. “I guess I won’t be going to live in West Virginia this year either.” He throws another pebble. “Poor me.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re staying,” I say.
So we can get married
. “But you should really go to school.” I’m worried about this, how much Travis gets into trouble. In my mind, Travis has to start going to class regularly, so he can pull his grades up, so we can be boyfriend and girlfriend in college. Then he will start coming to church with me, then we can get married. When we are old and married, we will tell people that we have been friends since we were little, and that we went to Homecoming and Prom together in high school. Travis will smile at me, and say,
She turned my life around. I was always in so much trouble before Evelyn.

Travis leans back, looking up at the sky. “Which one is that?”

“Venus,” I say. “It’s so bright because it’s close. Especially right now.”

I’m learning more and more about the stars. I got Mr. Torvik for science again this year, still balding and hushed-voiced, still with the miniature solar system hanging from his ceiling. He gave me a book to read about planets and stars. “You seem so interested,” he had said. And I was. I sat open-mouthed the day he explained light-years to us, shutting off the light and then turning it back on.

“See how fast light travels?” Mr. Torvik whispered. “It takes no time for the light of the lightbulb, from the moment I turn it on, to reach your eyes. It actually takes time, but not very much.” He paused, flipping the light switch again, on and off. “The closest star to Earth, the very closest, is just over four light-years away, which means when we look up and see it, we’re really seeing the light that was made in 1981.

“Can you imagine that kind of distance?” he asked us, taking off his glasses. “Can you
imagine
?”

I couldn’t. Not really. It was like when someone said “forever” and you tried to imagine it both ways, forever in the future and forever in the past. Mr. Torvik said there are stars in our own galaxy that are ninety thousand light-years away. I think if you really sat down and tried to imagine that much space, or that much time, you would go crazy.

Mr. Torvik told us they used to think that the Earth was in the middle of everything and that everything else moved around it. But now they know that it’s actually the Earth moving around the sun, and that the Earth isn’t really in the middle. It just looked that way from here. Galileo was the one to figure out that there are moons around Jupiter. He got in trouble for it, because the moons around Jupiter didn’t have anything to do with Earth, and so that meant there were other things out there that didn’t have anything to do with us at all.

But if you think about the size of the universe, or even just one galaxy, Mr. Torvik said, it’s pretty obvious that there’s quite a bit that doesn’t have anything to do with us. The universe is so big that there may not even be a middle. If something goes on forever, there can’t be a middle, a top, or a bottom.

“Venus,” Travis says, looking up. “Huh. There’s the Big Dipper. I know that one.”

I watch his neck move when he talks, the soft outline of his Adam’s apple shifting underneath his skin. They made him cut his hair short again in the group home, and he’s mad about this, but I think it looks nice. You can see his face again, the angles of the bones in his cheeks. He is beautiful.
Please God,
I think, looking up.
I will love him forever. Please.
I close my eyes, and when I open them, I see a streak of light shooting across the sky. It’s already gone.