Jaguar (6 page)

“Leave it,” his mom whispered. “They’ll be here in a minute. Go home to the bathroom and get my back medicine out of the cabinet. You know which bottle it is? Ok. If someone’s here, wait outside the window. Can you wait out there without anybody seeing you?

“Yes,” he said, “the bushes. . . .”

“Go now,” she said, her voice louder, harder. “Don’t stop to talk to anybody, don’t tell grandma or grandpa. Hurry.”

“But . . . the rabbit. . . .”

“He won’t go anywhere,” she said. “Catch him when you come back. I need that medicine, Eddie. You have to do this for me. Now, go, they’ll be—.”

Eddie heard the voices in the hall, and before he knew it he had raised the window, slipped outside and closed it. He waited a moment, listening to the therapist make small talk while she fed his mother. He sat under the window, knowing he should hurry, but unable to move because he wanted to see her face.

He looked once again down the alley into the lumber yard. Eddie thought he saw the figure of a boy about his age scale the far fence and disappear.

The metal treads of the fire escape echoed his steps no matter how careful he was. Going down the side of the building was scarier than going up, but he kept hold of the ivy and that helped. The last jump to the ground pitched him forward on his hands and knees. He scraped his palms in the gravel. They bled from the scrapes, but he didn’t cry.

He didn’t short-cut through the feed store this time, but went the long way down the alley and around the lumber yard instead. Something about the boy Eddie had seen made him hope he’d run into him.

In the years after his sixth birthday, Eddie would remember many details of this day. He would not remember the run home, nor how he managed to sneak past his grandparents. He did remember finding the big bottle of blue pills behind the cough medicine in his mother’s cabinet, and he remembered the sting of the steel rung of the fire escape when he grabbed it with his scraped-up hands.

This time, when he listened at the window, he heard hoarse barks of pain from his mother.

“That’s it, Leda, we’re just about done,” the therapist said. “Let’s try it one more time.”

His ear was right next to the window now, and he heard his mother’s sobs and heavy breathing.

“No, please. Let me rest,
please.
”

“We need to keep you moving, Leda. If we don’t keep at it your arms will just lock up like they did at first. Aren’t you doing much better now than when we first started? I think so. You couldn’t move them at all, then. Now look at you. Once more, now.”

Eddie pressed his head against the cool brick of the wall and tried to shut out the dry, empty screams of his mother’s scorched throat.

He watched a trail of tiny red ants make their way from a branch of the ivy onto the brick, then into a crack in the mortar. When he looked closer, he saw that thousands of ants used the crack in the wall as a kind of superhighway, some of them stopping to touch antennae in their two-lane scramble.

Everything was quiet in the room now except for his mother’s heavy breathing. He peeked over the sill and saw that the curtain had been drawn around her bed and he could only see the lumps of her feet near the bottom rail. He raised the window again and stepped inside.

She was lying on her back with a sheet up to her waist. Her head was flung back on her pillow, and she gulped great breaths of air through the angry slash that had once been her mouth. She didn’t really have a face. From the middle of what used to be her nose on down it looked like somebody just pasted on skin, like the figures she’d helped him make out of newspaper and paste. She wasn’t ugly, exactly, even though she didn’t have lips anymore to cover her teeth. But he couldn’t stop staring, and he stood there, stock-still, until her breathing eased and she opened her eye.

“Oh, Eddie,” she said, “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t want you to see. . . .”

He left the window open and stood by her bedside with his hand on her shoulder. Presently, she lifted her arm under the sheet and touched his cheek. He knew he should say something, but he couldn’t think of anything.

“Mom, I love you,” he said, and kissed her forehead.

“Oh, Eddie, I love you too. This is such a mess.”

He was going to let her rest some more, but she tried to sit up.

“Would you help me up?” she asked.

He reached behind to the smooth, warm skin of her back and helped her sit up. She had to catch her breath. Her breath didn’t smell very good when she breathed hard in his face but he tried not to show it.

“I love you, Mom,” he repeated. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She rested her forehead on his shoulder.

“I love you, too, Eddie. You have to remember that. Other people won’t understand. But
you
know it, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And I don’t want you to forget . . . to forget me as I was. Like in our Christmas picture.”

“I won’t, Mom,” he said.

She gathered herself up a little more and took a deep breath.

“Well,” she said, “did you bring it?”

“Yes.”

He took the medicine bottle out of his pocket and set it on the bed.

She held up her stumps and said, “I can’t open it. You’ll have to open it and get me some water. I can’t use a straw yet, either.”

He opened the big bottle of blue pills and set it on her tray beside the bed, and he poured a glass of water from her pitcher. The big, heavy pitcher slopped the water all over the tray. His mother didn’t scold him. She didn’t seem to notice. She took another deep breath.

“Ok, Eddie, I need to take them all. It’s ok, because I’m supposed to take three a day and I haven’t had any since I’ve been here, right? So I have to catch up.”

“But Grandpa says that when you take medicine—”

“Does it look like it can hurt me?” she snapped. She softened her voice.

“It’s my back,” she said, “it hurts so much I can’t think straight. Now we’ve got to get done and get you back home.”

He helped her by giving her the pills a small handful at a time, each of which she swallowed with a big gulp of water. Eddie didn’t realize until then just how useful lips were, because she couldn’t really keep the water in very well. Her mouth on the inside was cracked and dry. What was left of her tongue was thick and smooth; all the little rough spots were burned off.

When she finished the pills, she reclined back on her pillows, her arm linked in his.

“I’ll get some sleep now,” she said. “Thank you. You should run back home, now. Take the bottle with you.”

“My rabbit. . . .”

“Hurry and see if you can find him,” she said.

Eddie found the rabbit behind the other woman’s wastebasket in the corner of the room. It skittered away from him and when he made a grab he got it by one back leg. He backed into the other woman’s tray that came crashing down on top of him, but he kept hold of the rabbit.

Footsteps
pit-pit-pit
ted down the hall, so he ducked behind his mother’s curtain. Her eye watched him, but she didn’t say anything. He stuffed the rabbit under his jacket and clamped his elbow down to hold it. He snatched the empty pill bottle from the tray and stepped out the window just as the door to her room crashed open. He couldn’t reach up to close the window and hold onto the rabbit, too, so he crept down the fire escape and hid in the ivy at the bottom until he was sure no one was looking.

When he jumped to the ground, the rabbit fell out from under his jacket and scrambled off into the weeds. Eddie looked back up at his mother’s open window. The curtain fluttered like before, so he waved. Eddie ran all the way to the trees by the river and didn’t come home until dark. By then, his mother was dead and the whole town knew how it happened.

What great sleep there is for a childhood.

—Gaston Bachelard,
The Poetics of Reverie

Maryellen woke up when her breathing stopped. She fought the smother of wet earth that plugged her nostrils and choked off her breath. She felt like she was buried alive, or thrashing upward from under pondwater toward her mother’s grieving face.

She gasped a breath.

“Come on, honey. Wake up, now.”

She gasped another breath, pushed off the wet washcloth that her mother held to her face. She had not been drowned in a pond after all, and she caught her breath.

“You had a bad dream.”

Her mother’s voice sounded funny, a long way off.

A dream,
she reminded herself.

“I was drowning,” she said. “Something held me underwater.”

“You’re here, now,” her mother said. “Your father had a bad dream, too. Like a zoo in here.” She toweled Maryellen’s face dry and laughed. “The two of you chattering away. The army hospital said they fixed that for him.”

Maryellen’s head hurt, and the light hurt her eyes.

Her head throbbed, and her mother’s voice hurt her ears.

“You’re supposed to let people sleep when they talk or walk,” her mother said, “but that godawful yelling was going too far. . . .”

Maryellen wrapped up in a blanket and sat in a chair because her head hurt too bad when she lay down. Her mother brought her a cup of tea with some toast. She warmed her hands on the hot cup, then pressed her palms to her eyelids. Blue shimmers flared against the dark. Maryellen reminded herself that she was home. She had a headache, the first headache she ever remembered. Her father and the dead rat seemed like dreams themselves, but she knew they were true. The sweat that matted her hair to her forehead was real.

“You just wore yourself out sleeping, poor thing,” her mother said. “You must have been one tired little girl. Your daddy, all the excitement . . . ?”

A questioning tone edged her mother’s voice. This time she wiped Maryellen’s face with a hot, wet washrag.

“No,” Maryellen told her mom. “I was playing.”

“Playing?” she laughed again, that quick laugh. “Well, it sure looked like you were sleeping. Then thrashing. Who did you play with?”

“Afriqua,” she said. “Afriqua Lee. She’s got green eyes and curly, curly hair like that lady in your magazine. Do I
have
to go to church? I don’t feel good.”

Mom’s lips pressed her forehead.

“You’re not hot,” her mother said. “You can go to church. Maybe you can catch a little nap there, if you want. Nobody’ll notice. Say ‘Good morning’ to your dad and finish getting dressed.”

Maryellen mumbled “Good morning” to her father without looking up, and allowed him a hug on her way to the bathroom. She wore her new robe, the pink material all shiny and much brighter in the daylight.

She washed her face in hot water, but the vivid dreams of the pond refused to go away. She was afraid she was going to throw up. She hoped she didn’t, even if it would keep her home from church. Maryellen shut the water off and heard her mother talking to her father.

“I don’t know, Mel. She looked so
pale
, and you didn’t see her eyes, they were so wild. She didn’t even see me.”

“You’re the kid expert,” he said. “This is all new to me. All kids have bad dreams. She’s probably fine, but I’ll stay home and take care of her. . . .”

“No, you don’t. You’ve been gone so long that people here think that I made you up. Today I want to show you off for the whole town.”

Maryellen straightened her robe and left the bathroom. Her mother swept her close for a hug.

“You look better now, babe. Do you feel better?”

Maryellen nodded. She didn’t really feel better, but she didn’t feel bad, exactly, except for the headache. She tingled, and just felt . . .
different.
Her body didn’t feel like she was all the way in it.

“Good,” her mom said. “I want to show us
all
off, starting today.”

They rode the mile to church in her grandfather’s black car with the running boards. Her parents borrowed it for the day, and if the weather stayed good they would all have a picnic at Kapowsin. Her grandparents lived just behind them through the bushes. They always walked to church, and usually they walked with Maryellen and her mother. Church was old people and crying babies and the few men already back from the war.

She loved riding in grandpa’s car but today she barely endured the ride to church because the bouncing aggravated her headache. Fragments of her dreams whirled about her like candy wrappers in a dust devil.

Her new dreams were special dreams, much different from other dreams, more like being awake than dreams. The foreign world of Afriqua Lee began to feel as familiar as this one.

Afriqua Lee and her people lived in large, linkable vans, some of them like railroad cars. Four or five of her grandfather’s cars would fit inside the Romni Bari’s personal van. Buses and vans of the Roam lit up all over, or took on the colors of the landscape, or created a landscape that had never been there. They left no track, and no sound escaped them, and they didn’t stop for gasoline like her grandfather’s car. When they came to the great wall of a city, the sides of the vans advertised their wares. Members of the Roam sold expertise and information, delivered goods and messages. City people couldn’t travel to other cities, she didn’t know why. The Roam could travel to any city it chose, but it couldn’t have a city of its own.

Some of the vans put on shows for children, to entertain them while their parents bought what they needed from the Roam. Maryellen saw one of these shows in her dream: jaguars chased monkeys through an overgrown courtyard of stone. These picture-stories were different from the ones in her books.

The city in her dream, seen from the top of a huge pile of stones, walled itself in against the world. The wonderful vehicles of the Roam moved in a great procession when they entered and when they left the gates.

“Come on, babe,” her mother said, and shook her again. “We’re here.”

Here,
Maryellen thought,
where is “here”?

She glanced over her mother’s shoulder, out the car window, and remembered. Sometimes she sure fell asleep fast. The pipe-tobacco smell of the upholstery brought her back, and the tolling of the church bell across the street battered her headache. The day, too, was too bright for her head. She squinted her way up the aisle and squeezed into the pew between her mom and dad.