Authors: BRET LOTT
” Barbara let go my shoulder, and I heard her clap behind me, say, “That’s right, Brenda Kay.”
Wilman slipped back on the sunglasses, put both hands to the wheel, drove us on.
We got there near eleven, the sun up high now as we drove along a thin strip of pavement, Mrs. Tindle’s road. The town of Saugus itself had been pretty enough, something of a German village, or at least what someone thought a German village might look like settled out here on the edge of California desert, little houses with lots of gingerbread and shutters, picket fences, a Safeway and Von’s market built to look more like chalets than grocery stores. Then we were out of town, Barbara calling out directions from a sheet of paper she held, Wilman nodding each time he found the right street.
To the left of us lay a row of brown hills, here and there a lone cottonwood, nothing more, at the base of the hill was a railroad line, empty and straight and heading off into the distance, to the right lay huge fields, flat and not yet plowed up for whatever it was they grew here.
My hands’d gone all sweaty, started to shaking a bit, too, with how close we were coming to this end, my end. My hands shook, and then I could feel the sweat on my back, even though I was sitting in this plush beige velour seat, seats almost the same color as those hills out there, seats more soft, more comfortable than any piece of furniture I’d ever had in my house.
And I smiled at that thought, at Wilman and his cars, at him driving us on into Los Angeles that filet time, his hollering out to City Hall, Annie burying herself in the back seat, amazed and embarrassed and disgusted with her white trash brother.
“What, Momma? ” Wilman said, and I turned to him, saw he was looking at me. “What’s so funny? ” he said.
“Nothing, ” I said, still smiling. I rubbed my hands together.
“Everything, ” I said. I looked at him, touched a hand to my forehead, felt how cold my skin was, clammy and wet.
“Momma? ” he whispered.
“There it is! ” Barbara said from the back seat, her arm shooting out between the two of us like she was some little girl herself, finally got to some place she’d ridden weeks to get to.
It was only a house, two storys with pale blue clapboard, no shutters, a chimney running up the near side. The house was on our right, a hundred yards or so set off from the road and out in the fields. The front of the house had two windows downstairs, the second floor in the front had three windows across it, and I wondered right off which of those windows might end up being the window of my Brenda Kay’s room, wondered if she might be in a room that looked out on lonesome empty highway, past it that railroad track so that freight cars would rumble through of a night, shake the house. She would be used to that, I knew, maybe that shaking even comfort to her once I was gone, something to help her through. Or maybe she’d end up on the back end of the house, have a window that looked out onto all these fields.
Then we eased onto that drive, and suddenly the house seemed huge, and I couldn’t move.
Wilman popped open his door, as did Barbara. But before either got out they stopped, and I could tell they were watching me watch this house.
I turned in my seat, made my eyes go straight to Brenda Kay. I wanted to see her reaction to this place, this house that could end up her home. I wanted to see on her face whatever it was this place registered in her, some face that might betray she knew what was going on here. I was looking for some fear in her, maybe some kind of dread in how her eyes took it in, in how she held her mouth.
But she was only looking at the magazine in her hand, her eyes going back and forth across it as though she might be able to read the small amount of words beneath the pictures there.
I felt tears well up in me, the hard knot at my throat like a cold fist, because this was the truth of me, I wanted to find in my child fear of the future, when all along, I saw, it was me who was afraid, Brenda Kay more equipped than any of us for my ending, because she could not know what loss was. “Miss Daddy, ” she’d sometimes call out to me in the kitchen of an evening, and I’d go in to the living room, a dishtowel in my hands as I dried them off, and I’d search her face for some sign of tears, of genuine grief, only to see her smile, point at a tall man in a Marlboro ad in a magazine.
“Let’s go on in, ” Wilman whispered, and I felt his hand on my shoulder, felt him give a gentle squeeze there. Still I searched for something in Brenda Kay, some evidence, I knew and did not want to know, of me, of me.
I found nothing. Finally she only looked up, smiled at me, her heavy, wide face near as wrinkled, near as old and sagging and aged as my baby son’s next to me. She was forty-one years old now, a baby the doctors said would never live past two, would never walk. Here, smiling at me.
And there were her eyes, her almond-shaped eyes beneath auburn eyebrows, her auburn hair cut short as always, bangs across her forehead like she was ten. But it was her eyes I saw, and that green.
Leston’s eyes.
She pointed a finger at the page, said, “John Stamos, John Stamos!
Hospital! “
“Yes, ” I said. “Yes, ” and I tried to smile, her image trembling for the tears I held in my eyes, tears I didn’t want to let fall, not now.
Those were Leston’s eyes she had, and I could not cry at that.
She turned to her window, looked at the house then, lost the smile.
She squinted one eye at the sun coming in on her, and looked.
I said, “What do you see, Brenda Kay? ” She paused a moment, lifted the hand from the magazine, held it up to block the sun as she looked.
“Schoo? ” she said. She looked at me, on her face the same look of puzzlement, eyebrows up, mouth open.
I said, “No, ” and swallowed. I reached over the seat to her, and she put her other hand in mine. I swallowed hard again, squeezed her hand, said, “Let’s go see.”
Mrs. Tindle opened the front door even before I could knock. She was a woman of Barbara’s age, but thinner, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail at the base of her neck, wrinkles beside her eyes, smaller ones beside her mouth. Her skin was dark and tan and clean. “Welcome, welcome, ” she said, and put out her hand to me, said, “Mrs. Hilburn, I’m Nancy Tindle.”
I took her hand. She shook mine hard and strong and firm, and already I liked her just for that, and for the reason she seemed happy, smiled without putting too much in it. She seemed real, and when she let go my hand, she went right to Brenda Kay, held out a hand for her to take.
“You have to be Brenda Kay Hilburn, ” she said.
Brenda Kay took her hand, though she hadn’t yet committed to smiling, only shot her eyes from me to this woman and back again.
“We’ve got lunch coming up soon as we can round up the girls, ” she said to my daughter, and she turned, still with Brenda Kay’s hand in hers and headed into the house. I saw then what she had on, a pair of jeans and a pink cotton blouse, an apron tied round the waist. She said, “You guys just follow me. Pardon whatever mess you find in here, too.”
And we followed her.
The girls, Jenny, Adelaide, Margaret, Jo, Rachel, Patty, Karen, Sammy, Wendy, Olivia, Martha. Eleven of them, with room. for twelve.
Janine, number twelve, had died a month ago, Mrs. Tindle’d told me over the phone when I’d called her the first time to set all this up.
She’d lingered a moment over the girl’s name, letting the word Janine hang there on the line for a moment or two before she’d hooked to it the words died last month, and I wasn’t certain if she was putting the words together that slowly for herself and what grief she had in her, or if it were for me, some sort of revealing of the obvious, our children die, every one of them, whether we are here or not.
So there were eleven of them, all with about the same degree of mental retardation, Brenda Kay right in the middle of them. “We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew, ” Nancy Tindle told us while we ate lunch in the kitchen, her husband, Larry, a small man with quiet eyes and big hands, in the dining room supervising the girls. We leaned against the countertops in the kitchen, a room filled with light from the row of big windows that looked onto the back of the place. There was the barn, and a swimming pool out there, too, something I couldn’t see when we’d driven in. “We want to give them the best care we can, and spread that care as even as we can. One girl needs more care than another, there’s bound to be rifts open up, jealousies, that sort of stuff. We want each of them to be loved.” She smiled, lifted onto a plate a grilled cheese sandwich. “Mrs. Hilburn, this is for you, ” she said, and handed it to me.
“Jewel, ” I said, and met her eyes with mine. “Thank you.”
Visitors made some of the girls nervous sometimes, Nancy’d told us, and so we’d eat in here, have our sandwiches in the peace and quiet of this room, so we could talk. And we talked and I felt myself laugh a couple times, a feeling in my chest I hadn’t expected, a surprise, but a sorrowful one, too, because each time I came down from that laughter I came back to the purpose at hand, finding out about this place, this person, these girls.
Why I laughed, Larry’d built the swimming pool for the girls, Nancy’d explained, in order to help them get a different kind of exercise. So he’d built a cement, in-ground pool all the way out here in the desert, only to find that, though the girls’d said originally they’d like to go swimming, not a one of them would dare step foot in it once it was done.
“One of them, Sammy, I think it was, hollers out Fishing! ” Nancy said, holding out to me and Wilman and Barbara a plate of Oreo cookies, each of us taking one. “There they all are, twelve girls this was back when Janine was still with us all of them lined up in their swimsuits and standing at the edge, scared stiff of that water. They all look at Sammy, who gets this big smile on her face, then they all turn to Larry, and every one of them yells, Fishing! at the top of their lungs ” She laughed then, one hand covering her mouth, and I couldn’t help but laugh myself. Wilman took it up, too, and Barbara, who laughed the hardest of us all.
“And here’s Larry, ” she said, still smiling. She shook her head, closed her eyes, and looked suddenly much younger for that smile, for the joy in how she could find the humor in all these girls. I smiled.
“Here’s Larry, ” she said again, “here with a revolt on his hands, twelve girls ready to throw him into the water. So what does he do?
He goes on out to the fishery in Ontario, the closest thing around, and by nightfall he’s back here with a couple of books on the subject, and then the next day he starts prepping the pool, and by the next week he’s got the pool stocked with these little rainbow trout, and then there’s the girls, all of them, standing in a circle around the pool twice a day ever since, mornings and evenings. We never eat any of them the girls threw a fit, especially Jo and Rachel and Margaret, crying and ranting and raving the one time Larry tried to clean one of them. He didn’t even have the thing half-scaled before he had to quit.
So it’s been just recreational fishing ever since then. And hell trying to get them to eat fish sticks, too.”
Barbara burst out at that, and Wilman shook his head, snickered in his quiet way. And I laughed, too, said, “Her daddy, Leston, took her fishing, when we moved back to Mississippi for a while. All I can recall is the mosquitoes.” I crossed my arms, pushed myself off the counter.
For a moment I thought maybe the laughter, the lightness in me, would die with that memory, the two of them on the edge of the bayou, Leston swatting away at mosquitoes and cursing, Brenda Kay swatting all the same, but turning to me and just staring at me there in the kitchen window. But once I gave myself to that picture, twenty-two years old in my head, of Leston behind Brenda Kay, his hand letting out line, his mouth moving in words I’d never want Brenda Kay to hear, her just there and looking at me, I still found I was smiling.
“Oh, no need to worry about mosquitoes. This is the desert. Not many of them at all, ” she said.
“Fishing! ” one of the girls in the dining room called out, and in came Larry, in his hands a stack of paper plates piled with breadcrusts, napkins and orange peels. He crossed the kitchen to the trash can at the end of the counter, smiled at us.
“They heard you, ” he said, and dropped the plates into the trash, dusted his hands. “Now you’ve done it, ” he said.
“Line up, ” Nancy called over her shoulder. She held a washrag under running water there in the sink, and suddenly here came the girls. We three stepped back as they came in, stood against one wall while the girls did exactly as Nancy Tindle asked, they lined up, the first one at the sink, the line going out the kitchen door and disappearing into the dining room. Nancy rung out the rag, handed it to the first girl, a girl a little shorter than Brenda Kay and with black hair that fell to her shoulders. She took the rag, wiped her hands with it, handed it back to Nancy. “Thank you for lunch, Nancy, ” she said, her voice different than Brenda Kay’s, darker, deeper, but just as loud. Her eyes were right on Nancy’s, and Nancy leaned over, gave her a hug, the first girl’s arms reaching round Nancy’s shoulders. Her hands patted Nancy’s back a couple times, and then the two let go. Nancy said, “You’re welcome, Rachel.”
She turned, rinsed out the washrag under the hot water again, and the next girl stepped up, wiped herself down. She was about as tall as Nancy, thin with red hair, but with the same face and thick arms and hands as all the girls, each of them Down’s Syndrome girls. She handed the rag back to Nancy, her face down, her eyes unable, it seemed, to meet Nancy’s. “Thank you for lunch, ” she nearly whispered. She put up her arms, hugged Nancy in just the quickest way, her hands patting Nancy’s back only once before she let go. But while she’d been hugging Nancy, I’d seen her eyes cut over to us, take us in in just a moment’s time, then look back at the floor. Nancy smiled at her. “You’re welcome, Olivia, ” she said, and Olivia turned, walked past her and out the back door.
I looked at Wilman, saw him standing with his arms crossed, his bottom lip between his teeth. He was watching it all, too. Then he saw me watching him, and he smiled, brought up a hand and touched his chin.