Up From the Blue (22 page)
As always, I turned the knife in the keyhole, but this time I paused. The doubt had crept in: Phil calling me crazy the night I found Momma, Hope calling me a liar as we stood outside the secret room, Mr. Woodson telling me I had a tremendous imagination.
I’d been in trouble so often for talking to myself, for simply disappearing. An entire class could go by in school and I wouldn’t remember any of it. A knot formed in my gut as I wondered,
Could I have imagined everything?
And then a tougher question:
Could I possibly survive going back to my room, just lying there with my eyes on the ceiling tiles, letting tomorrow be the same as today?
More certain than ever, I turned the knife just a little more until I felt the lock release. I pushed on the door, entered the blue glow, and there she was. My muscles relaxed, and I let out my breath.
“Momma,” I whispered, closing the door only partway. “I have good news.”
She leaned against her usual side of the couch, but tonight she had a jewelry box and other trinkets spread across the cushions.
“Try something on,” she said, holding out a satin-lined box filled with costume jewelry.
When I reached for bracelets and clip-on earrings, she dabbed perfume behind my ears.
“Take another,” she said, pointing to a bracelet. “When you dress up, your jewelry should make a little jingle.”
I grabbed the first thing I touched, anxious to get going. “I have a plan,” I said, trying to sit beside her, but my pants were so tight I couldn’t bend in the middle. I stood up again. “It’s something that’s going to make you very happy.”
“What’s this plan you’re talking about?” she asked, rummaging in a pile beside her, tossing colorful scarves, shawls, and hats my way.
The way she said “plan” showed that she didn’t understand. I wasn’t talking about a simple to-do list or homework strategies. This was about escape, about changing our lives. I pulled a silk shawl over my shoulders, feeling the coins shift to the other side of my pocket.
“Let’s just say it’s the best night of all for us to dress up.” In fact, it was perfect—making our escape a real celebration.
She smiled and put a beret on her head and a handful of bracelets over her wrist so they lined her entire forearm. She put on every scarf and necklace I passed her.
Once we were dressed, I paraded in my shawl, taking long, dramatic steps like a model. She laughed again, but it was the empty kind of laughter that meant she was tired. “I think it’s time for bed,” she said.
“No! My plan. Remember?” I pushed both hands in my pocket, searching for the key.
“Tillie, it’s late. We’ll do this another time.”
“But you don’t understand.” I fumbled more furiously, not
feeling the key. “Wait,” I said, getting on my hands and knees, patting the floor for it. “This will just take a second.”
With poor lighting and impatient fingers, I felt along the ground, moving scarves and hats out of my way, when I heard more coins fall. I growled in frustration, and the silence that followed made me realize how very loud I’d been—and foolish. We’d have to hurry.
I recovered what coins I could, then patted the floor more frantically until I finally found the key, which I held up to show Momma. Her eyes were wet as if she suddenly understood I’d come to save her. It was the kind of beautiful moment to stop and enjoy if we had the time, but there wasn’t a minute to spare.
“Come on,” I said, reaching for her wrists, not letting the key go this time. I didn’t mean to shout, and didn’t mean to grab her so hard, but once I did, I wouldn’t let go.
“You’re hurting me,” she said as I walked backward, pulling her off the couch and toward the door, the key digging into my hand and her arm.
“We have to hurry.” I didn’t have time to explain and could hardly speak my teeth were chattering so much. We could talk in the car.
“Don’t be scared,” I said. It was an expression I knew people used when you have every reason to be scared—an attempt to trick your mind into bravery, though you hear footsteps upstairs.
We didn’t have far to go, but we had to be quick, and I needed her to walk with me instead of pulling back. I turned to give her a reassuring smile, one that said,
Please don’t be nervous. I’ve thought this through.
But beneath the beret and scarf and dangling jewels, the troubled expression on her face quickly grew to one of alarm.
I could feel the danger in the room, and turned to face the dark shape filling the doorway.
My father.
He stood there in his briefs and his thin undershirt, blocking the door. And a strange sensation worked its way from my stomach to my throat.
My ears thumped with the sound of my pulse as he stepped into the room and flipped on the overhead switch. The harsh light revealed a mess of open drawers, clothes, and soda cans thrown everywhere, and my mother in the middle of it all, white and startled. My father seemed to mouth, “Quiet!” And when the sound returned, I heard my own voice—high-pitched, desperate—and realized I’d been screaming the whole time.
When I stopped screaming, in the awful silence that seemed to go on and on, I reached for Momma, not sure when I had let her go. And standing just too far away, I swiped at the air, my bracelets clinking together. I tried again, finally grabbing hold of her sleeve.
“I found her!” I shouted. “I found her, and we’re leaving right now!”
More footsteps overhead, and soon Phil rushed down the stairs and stopped short on the landing, where he stood with his arms limp. There was no way to know what he was thinking or feeling except for it was a lot of something, and he was not letting it out.
“Tillie, you’re confused,” Dad said.
I shook my head back and forth until I felt lightheaded, hoping to shut out his words.
“Tillie, get a hold of yourself,” he said.
And I didn’t want him to tell me that my mother wasn’t here. He couldn’t take her from me again. He tried to grab my
hand but I pulled it away, hysterical and thrashing. “Stop him, Phil! He’s going to kill us!”
Phil, on the landing, did not move. There was only the sound of us panting, until he spoke—only a whisper. “Someone tell me what Mom’s doing here.”
M
Y UNDERWEAR, SOAKED WITH
amniotic fluid, drips in a trail until the nurse who’s been kind to me lowers me into a wheelchair. She spreads a blanket across my wet lap and we’re wheeling fast down a hallway, past the numbered rooms and lines of cranky, coughing patients.
A powerful contraction grabs my lower back and squeezes forward, but this time it stings so deep at the base of my spine I start to hyperventilate.
“Take a slow breath if you can,” the nurse says.
And I choke trying, my eyes watering with the pain.
“Slow breath out,” she says.
“I can’t have this baby!” I say, gasping. “I’m not due yet. You have to stop the labor!”
“I’ll take her from here.” This new nurse is all business, and I feel the panic of losing my only sympathetic ear.
Before she’s gone, the one I like whispers, “I’ll check on you after my shift,” and I’m wheeled away, down another corridor.
“Please! I’m not ready. Someone listen to me.”
We stop at the closed elevator. “Honey,
you
may not be ready, but the baby is,” the nurse says, and drops a rubber band into my lap. “I suggest you tie your hair up while there’s time.”
The doors open, and we roll inside, my belly tightening again, and I start to pant.
“One slow breath,” she says. “Remember your Lamaze class. You practiced the breathing techniques, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I practiced them. When it didn’t
hurt!”
What we’d prepared for sounded so peaceful. Almost romantic. Simon had planned to rub my back, and feed me ice chips. We were going to play classical music. We were going to pick out a boy’s name and a girl’s name. He was going to hold my hand throughout.
The nurse puts her hand firmly on my wrist, and I jerk my arm away from her, shouting, “I can’t have this baby! I’m not ready!”
Someone’s finger presses the number three, as if I’m just some crazy person talking to myself in the corner. When the doors shut, I hear the nurse whisper to another, “We may need the social worker on this one,” which is all wrong. She’s not understanding. Simon would never put up with people talking to me like this.
“Tillie.” My father’s voice comes from the back of the elevator.
“Oh, God, what are you doing here?” I crumble into tears.
“Tillie, don’t get yourself worked up,” he says.
The nurse nods her head in agreement. “You need to focus on the baby, Ms. Harris. You’re going to have to get yourself ready.”
And how does this happen? Even when he’s not wearing his uniform, and though there’s no way for the nurse to know that this slender man is largely responsible for nearly ninety thousand tons of bombs dropped this winter in the Persian Gulf War, my dad is giving orders and people just carry them out.
The elevator doors open again, and I’m wheeled into a dim room, muddy pink with teddy bear wallpaper only along the ceiling.
“Here, ma’am. I need you to stand up.” A technician holds one of my arms at the elbow, hoisting me out of the chair.
I feel air on my backside, and move my hand to close the gown, when the nurse says, “Hold it right there.” I feel the cold wet of an alcohol swab just above my butt. “Okay, you’re going to feel a little stick.”
“What is that?”
“This is a corticosteroid to help speed up the development of the baby’s lungs.”
“Please,” I squeak, my nose stuffy from crying. “Please, stop the labor.”
“Okay, let’s get her on the bed. One, two, three, lift your hips now.”
I don’t lift at all, but somehow I find myself on top of a bed with wheels.
She lifts my sleeve and swabs a cotton ball on the inside of my arm. “Some extra fluids for you,” she says, inserting an IV tube, then hanging a clear bag on a metal pole beside the bed.
“Would you like—is this your father? Would you like him with you?”
“No!” I shake my head so hard I’m dizzy. “Dad, get out of here! Oh, God, here comes another one.” I take a deep breath as if I’m about to get dragged underwater.
“Here, let me tie up her hair,” the nurse says, finding the rubber band on the floor.
She’s rough, snagging strands that cause me to reach for my head, but the pain returns to my back and my belly, and I don’t have enough hands to hold everything that aches. I simply moan, looking up to the tiles and the sprinkler system, hoping for any distraction from the pain. Nothing helps. I can only live through it and try to recover my strength during the few minutes in-between.
Clear liquid flows down tubes into my arm. And now they’ve attached a belt to my abdomen with wires that dangle between my legs, connecting me to a fetal heart monitor. I hear continuous clicks—like my brother opening and shutting the ashtray in our old car—as a strip
of paper rolls on and on with the jagged mountains and valleys of the baby’s heartbeat on it. There are so many wires, so many different machines I’m attached to, I can hardly move in any direction without feeling a tug. I’ve lost track of who is in the room with me, and it seems like everyone here has looked between my legs and stuck a hand inside. Any sense of modesty I had is long gone.
Another contraction grabs hold and I’m too exhausted to cry. I just cover my face and feel the utter despair that the pain is inevitable, that my protests make no difference. I wonder if this was how my mother felt in her blue-lit prison, face-to-face with what she couldn’t control.
I grip the damp sheets through the next round of contractions, which come so fast, one on top of the other, that all I can do is blubber miserably. I can feel the baby moving down, pressing on my lower back, like it’s going to come out of the wrong hole. When Dr. Young enters the room, wearing a mask and blue scrub cap, I tell him this, though it comes out as cursing. He only nods, then turns on a huge round light, like an eye that swoops down from the ceiling, and I feel someone place my feet in stirrups again, and someone else breaks down the table so, without me having to move, my legs are open wide at the very end of it.
“Ms. Harris,” he says, “the baby’s ready. I want you to push as hard as you can while I count to ten.”
“No,” I sob. “I’m too tired.”
“I know. It’s tough. It’s tough,” the nurse says.
“Push!” he commands.
“No!”
“Push!”
“Stop yelling at me!”
I
N THE CENTER OF
the school playground, there was a tetherball pole. Just the pole. The ball and the rope it hung from were never replaced after a weekend of vandalism, and so the pole was mostly used for base during games of tag, and occasionally for boys who wanted to show how fast they could shimmy up to the top. Today it was free.
With one hand holding the pole, I walked in circles, leaning out toward the ground, watching my shadow. The pole burned, but I held on, listening to the squeak of my hand against the metal and telling myself,
I got my wish. I got my wish
.
It had been one week since I was caught trying to escape with Momma. One week since we all stood in the basement with the lights on and Dad shouting, “Go to your rooms!” I ran as fast as I could in three layers of pants and Momma’s long shawl, tripping all the way to my room, where I shoved myself under the bed. It hurt, and I wanted it to. I felt hot and cramped, unable to lift
my head. The perfume Momma had dabbed behind my ears was too strong, and I wanted air.
