You Are My Only (6 page)

“That's it?” my mother asks. “That's all you've written?”

She holds the single page as if it's a smelly onion peel, shakes it as if it's crumbs, knocks it down between her hamburger and the ketchup. Her name tilts on her uniform pocket. Her hair slips free from her bun. She had a misery day and I've worsened it plenty. “One page,” she says, “and not a single mention of the buckyball.”

I swallow the last of my chips and meet her eyes. I steal a look toward my essay, blooming grease spots.

“The buckyball, Sophie. The roundest round molecule, the most symmetrical large molecule of all.” She closes her eyes and sinks her face into the bones of her hands, and when the next piece of her hair falls loose, she sighs. Suddenly I wish I could tell Mother about Joey and his aunts, about the cat and the dog, about Father Latour and the red hills of New Mexico, the clover fields, the cottonwoods, the acacia.
What,
I asked,
is acacia? Acacia,
Miss Cloris answered.
Some call them whistling thorns. Whistling thorns,
I would say to my mother. why can't we talk about that?

The light of the real day is gone. The lamplight is harsh. My mother's hands are blue blooded and thin and heavy with her chin, and in the silence I remember her years ago, on the floor of a lost house, beside me. She'd bought a long roll of waxed white paper and pots of finger paints and said, “we'll paint what we dream.” There wasn't white in her hair. There wasn't night beneath her eyes. She'd unrolled the paper across the width of the floor, and all afternoon we painted dreams. Hers were blue like sky. Mine were yellow-pink, like sun. Afterward, for the whole next week, her fingers were the color of the purple inside shadows.

“Mother,” I say now, “I'll make it up to you. I promise.”

“How's that?” she moans, her words mashed behind her hands.

“Tomorrow. You'll see. I'll surprise you.”

She lifts her eyes and squints against the lamplight. She straightens the name on her shirt. “I'm awfully tired,” she says. “Awfully so.” She puts her hands down flat and pushes herself up from the table. She wobbles a little, then stands.

“Getting late,” she says.

“I'll clean up,” I tell her.

“Do some reading,” she tells me. “Take an interest.”

It's a half-moon night. The clouds float low, skimming the rooftops, gauzing the street lamps, and down there, low, past the cradle of the tree, Miss Cloris and Miss Helen swing from the wooden porch chair that hangs from silver chains. The swing creak is an evening song, bigger than their talk, bigger than crow rustle, bigger even than the sound of my mother snoring, one floor below.

Perfection.
Mother uses the word, but nothing ever is; it's a false-hope word, an illusion. It's sitting inside Joey's house like I have a right to be there, like I won't be erased from this neighborhood if Mother figures her way to the truth. I didn't write my long essay because I didn't give it proper time. I didn't give it time because I didn't want to. I wanted to stay with Joey and his aunts and the archbishop and the hills. I wanted to stay where the cat Minxy sleeps, where they slip orange slices in with the fresh-squeezed lemonade, where I'm not supposed to be.

“Hey,” I hear, and when I look up, I see the shadows that Joey makes, hanging out into the dark from his second-floor window.

“Joey,” I ask. “what are you doing?”

“Looking out,” he whisper-shouts, putting his hands up to his face. He blows the words across the alley of the yard and up so nobody else can hear them. I can't see more than the blur of him, the flopped, funny wilderness of his uncapped hair.

“Me, too,” I say. “I'm looking out.”

“You see the moon?”

“Sliced right in half.”

“You see the crows?”

“They're black as night.”

We stay quiet for a while, let the night songs sing.

“Joey?”

“Yeah?”

“You like school?”

“It's okay enough.”

“You ever hear of Archimedean solids?”

“Not much.”

“I guess she's right, then.”

“Who's that?”

“My mother.”

“Right on what?”

“Homeschooling,” I say, and nothing more, and the night floats by, and Joey goes nowhere. After a while, he's talking again.

“Bus comes round at seven o'clock,” he says.

“Yeah. I've seen it.”

“School's not so far down the road.”

“That's nice.”

“Funny things happen at school. You should take a ride, see the school from inside.”

“Can't,” I say. That's all. Because saying one thing will lead to another and another.

“You think you'll ever go to school?”

“Maybe someday.”

“College?”

“College!”

“I'm aiming for college.”

“Well, good for you, Joey,” I say. “Good for you.” The skin beneath my eyes gets tight.

“Sorry we didn't get around to the throwing lessons,” Joey says after a while.

“I didn't mind.”

“Miss Helen needed a story.”

“I liked it fine.”

“You coming back?”

“I probably might.”

“You're not mad or anything?”

“Not mad.”

“All right.”

“Moon's going away. Getting higher.”

“I'm guessing it's time.”

“All right. Night, Joey.”

“Night, Sophie.”

“See you tomorrow?”

“I will.”

Save the Cather for me,
I want to say.
Save Harvey. Save Minxy.
And the moon is higher and his window goes hollow and I am left alone and lonesome. In most every house we've ever come to, the people who have lived ahead of us have left something behind. Maybe the kitchen table, for being too small, or the lamps, for being so ugly, or a painting, because it's a reminder of something it might be good to forget. We're takers, Mother and I, moving the left-behinds on—the birdcage nobody wanted, the picture frames that got abandoned, the painted dresser, the collection of knobs. “What will we do with the knobs?” I said. “They'll find their purpose,” Mother told me. Renting is for people like us, Mother says. For collectors, for carrying forward.

The last people to live in this house left in a hurry. Left the stains still on the linoleum floor, the curtains still hanging, the shoe boxes toppled in the hallway closet. In the pantry they left cans of tomatoes, and rice. In the living room they left a torn-cushion rocker. They left drawings by little kids and a bag of blue marbles, a collection of dried ladybug wings, set out like beads. “We'll get to it,” my mother said, but everything is still like it was—our things squeezed between their things, the library books in their tower, the boxes we carry from house to house stacked up in the closets or the basement.

“I'll make it up to you,” I said. I promised, and I mean to, lying here on my borrowed bed, flipping through library pages on the genius of solids. It's Kepler I keep coming back to, Kepler, who makes me remember my mother's sighing smile, and the more I index back to Kepler, the more I'm sure: I will write my ode to him, which has to be better than writing five pages on an icosahedron—has to be. “From Nothing to Big Things” I'll call it, starting with Kepler's poor and sickly birth and heading straight through his laws of planetary motion, his honoring of the pinhole camera, his optics and the words he used to explain the moon and its pull on the tides. I can see, the more I read, why my mother was sighing over Kepler, his work on the Archimedean solids being pretty much the least of his greatness. “From Nothing to Big Things.” I write the title in fancy script across the top of the page and then I sit here and think. It is dark down the hall and down the stairs. Dark straight up to the high half-moon. My mother snores like a train coming through.

Up a cut of curb, Arlen angles. Past the window streak of the old diner, beneath a sign for Kodachrome, down. We reach the west edge of the university, and Arlen pedals through—past the first of the early risers, a dog that doesn't mind us. The station lies east in a haze, beneath a fidget of shadows, and the streets grow wider than they were before, less still and undercover. Cars drive by, and people pass. An old man with a dog. A lady shaped like a stick. A pair of boys with a pack of cards. No Baby. The walk beneath us is broken, snagged. My ankle is a bowl of glass, and with every bump and bang, it shatters.

The smell of fumes is on us. There's a chemical sky. Behind me I hear the soft howl of air escaping Arlen's lungs, the push-through-and-forward of his knees, and now we have come to where we are, and we are still going. The pole of pain that was my leg is my arms now, too. It is my hands and fingers, which have hardened into twist and bone. Up ahead, I spy the local trains in their silver gleams, the white rise of the old station, cut as if from marble, the flower seller making her roses—poking the stems into buckets of water and flapping a blanket to the ground, adjusting a sign. Her roses are yellow; they are red.

One block more. Three quarters. One half. Arlen riding the curb cuts like a master. A taxi speeds to the curb and stops, and when the bright door pops apart and the two men get out, I know they are not the thieves of Baby. I know that the woman in the green dress leaning against the yellow-brick of station wall is, likewise, not hiding Baby, nor the man and the woman, cuddled close as they make their way near. I have Baby's sock in my purse. I have the smell of her in my heart. I have instinct, the mother's kind. I will know when I am near to Baby.

“Slowing her down,” Arlen calls out from behind. “Brace yourself.” And now we are hitching on the broken-up walk and jouncing hard and jittering near upon the crowd that's not so much gathered as converging at one of the station's many glass doors. I hear the squeal of the applied brake behind me and the big slap of Arlen's shoe on the ground. I hear the second shoe slapping down, and in the tumult and pitch of the almost stop, I cannot hold on. I am heaped upon the walk, smashed down, the front wheel of Arlen's bike riding the hill of my spine.

Arlen's on me in a second, his big bat-wingy arms. “Emmy,” he says. “Emmy, I'm sorry.”

Already a trickle of blood has opened high on my elbow and that old man's loose mutt is quick to my heels. “Get,” I tell the dog, and Arlen smacks it on the rear. And then he puts his arms around me, big and tight. When the mutt starts barking, the old man says, “Come,” and despite all of those who have stopped to stare, despite the shatter of my ankle, the rip-through near my elbow, no one reaches in with help, not one.

“I had to brake,” Arlen says.

“Don't start with feeling bad. We made it is all.”

I look beyond him to the station door, to the people coming early, the people from taxis. Everywhere is the smell of train metal and speed. I scan the outside crowd for lumpishness, wrong parcels, babies, but I know what's true: whoever has her is not here in this morning's sun. It's a dark thing this one has done; dark keeps to darkness. To the wooden benches lined up like church pews inside the station. To the cool blue corners near the sweet blued walls. On the other side of the sunbeams that the station lets in through its high panes of glass.

Arlen is careful with all the pieces of me. He lifts me upright off the ground, with my bad leg hanging. He tips the sleeve of his jacket toward the blood on my arm, but I put out my right hand to stop him.

“Don't you spoil that jacket of yours,” I tell him. “You've done enough.”

“Known you since last night,” he says. “And look.” Meaning my ankle. Meaning my arm.

“I won't hear such nonsense talking,” I say. Because what matters now is what happens next. What matters is that we find my Baby before she's put on a train and taken to where I won't know enough to follow. The fender of Arlen's bike is smashed. Its streamers are all crinkled. It looks like a puddle down there on the walk, some other thing needing rescue.

Arlen smoothes his frizzled hair, tugs at his shirt. He pulls a chain and padlock from his trouser pocket and pulls out a key. “Wait for me,” he says, hop-walking me to the stretch of wall where the lady in green stands, unmoving, a patch of warm on her face. I lean against the wall beside her, until I'm certain I won't fall. I watch Arlen scoop up the bike and weave it to a nearby barrel trash can. He strings some part of the chain through the bike's front wheel and loops the rest around the barrel, loops and loops it. He takes more time than I wish he would, but Arlen's very careful. All of a sudden, a white police car with its red blare on is speeding past and my thoughts speed with it—home to Peter and the empty swing, to the sergeant finally finished with his coffee. Gone to our house, maybe. Asking Peter, And your wife? Where is she?