Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Psychological, #General

Nearer Than the Sky (7 page)

Lily wasn’t in the living room, and Violet was silent in the crib. I peeked at her and watched her for several moments, looking for some indication that she was still breathing, for the faint rise and fall of her chest.

There was a light on outside, illuminating the back patio. Beyond the reflections the light in the living room made on the sliding glass door, I could see the faint outline of Lily’s patio furniture. White wicker chairs and a glass-topped table.

I glanced at Violet and then slid the door open slowly. A rush of warm air hit my face. It had to have been thirty degrees warmer outside than it was in the house. It felt like going inside the cabin after sledding or skiing on a winter afternoon in Maine. At first I didn’t see Lily, and thought that maybe she had just left the light on to ward off burglars. Maybe she was in the kitchen fixing a bottle or some warm milk for herself. Then I heard that scraping, brushing sound again and saw a flash of Lily’s hair. What I hadn’t noticed until now were the tumbleweeds, a virtual forest of mangled branches. The entire backyard was littered with them, some as tall as Lily. I could hear her grunting as she pulled them apart, cutting them with a pair of hedge clippers. From the patio I watched her fighting the tumbleweeds as if she were in the jungle instead of her own backyard. My heart started to beat loudly when I heard her cussing.

“Goddamnit,” she whispered. “Fucking weeds. Shit.”

I thought about turning around and going back inside the house, but she was so close now she would have been able to hear me sliding the door open again.

I coughed softly.

“Jesus,” she said, startled, as she appeared from behind one particularly large tumbleweed. She held her hand to her chest as if to keep her heart from escaping.

“Sorry,” I said. “What are you doing?”

She shoved the tumbleweed aside and came to the patio. Despite the heat, she was dressed from head to toe in black. Black turtleneck, black jeans, and thick black gloves.

“Trying to get rid of these damn things,” she said pulling off the gloves.

I raised my eyebrows at her and motioned to her clothes. “Why are dressed like that? You look like a criminal.”

“You wouldn’t believe how prickly they are. The first time, I came inside all scratched up. My legs and hands were a mess for a whole week.”

“It’s one-thirty in the morning,” I said.

“Did I wake you up?”

“No. But can’t this wait until morning? Have you slept at all?”

“I have to wait until nighttime because it’s too hot to dress like this during the day.” She sat down in one of the wicker chairs and cocked her head to the side, to get a crick out of her neck.

“Lily,” I said. “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m serious.You’re all wound up.”

“I am not wound up.”

“What about dinner?” I persisted. “Rich and I were just kidding around.”

“You and Rich are cruel,” she said.

“It was all in fun.”

“You think this is fun? You think any of this is fun?” Lily waved her arms toward the house, toward the tumbleweeds, toward me.

“I’m just saying that sometimes you need to let go for a second.You need to be able to step back. Rich is only—”

“Rich . . .” she started. “Rich isn’t dealing with this very well.”

“The stuff with Ma? Come on. He’s been down this road before. This is classic Ma. Making fun
is
his way of dealing,” I said.

“Not with
Ma,”
Lily said, her voice cracking. “With Violet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” she said and pulled off her gloves. Her hands were small and white on the glass tabletop. She looked at me intently. “He thinks I’m overreacting. He thinks it’s not as bad as it is.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “He seems very concerned.”

“He doesn’t come with me to her appointments, he won’t help with her medicine at home. . . .”

“I’m sure he’s just scared,” I said. I remembered Rich holding Violet right after she was born. At the beach in Maine, he shielded her from the cold wind with his whole body. I remembered the way her small fingers curled desperately around his thumb.

“And then that crap at dinner. It’s like he thinks everything is a joke.”

“That was about Ma, Lily. That had nothing to do with Violet.”

Lily stared into the dark backyard.

“Besides, they’ll figure out what’s wrong soon enough and then she’ll be fine,” I tried.

“She really
is
sick,” Lily said then, loudly. She turned to look at me and something like fear flashed across her eyes. Her hand flew to her lips and fluttered there, a strange, longwinged butterfly hovering in front of her face.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t, Lily. Jesus.”

I left her in the backyard and returned to the cold room, cold sheets, cold air spinning over my head. Leaning over and picking up the phone, I knew that Peter would have already left for the cafe. I imagined he was probably deciding which films to show for the day. He might have had Joe mull some cider to ward off the autumn chill. As the phone rang, I closed my eyes and thought about cinnamon and cloves and sharp blue autumn skies. I imagined Jessica, woken from sleep, covering her ears with her paws. But when the machine picked up, I couldn’t think of a thing to say and hung up the phone. I lay back down on the unforgiving sheets. Outside the tumbleweeds crackled and I perched at the edge of sleep all night, peering down at the dreams that would not come.

1972. I don’t know now if this is true or only a vaguely recollected nightmare that has lingered too long. But I do know this: cold linoleum on my bare feet, the glare of the bathroom bulb in the middle of the night, and the way my mother’s hair spilled like lemonade over her shoulder as she knelt next to Lily on the bathroom floor.

The maze of the Mountainview house is more complicated in my dreams. The hallways are wider and the doors lead to rooms that were never there. Shades drawn reveal landscapes inconsistent with the aspen, pine, oak of my childhood. Sometimes I see night through the glass, sometimes I see California ocean, desert red and long stretches of impossible green (and I don’t know if it is grass or water or the velvet expanse of an old green dress of Ma’s I found in the closet one day). I could get lost in this dream house, while in reality there were few places to hide. Awake, getting lost was a futile task. I knew what could be found behind each door. I knew which ones to open and which must be left closed.

Tonight, I am barefoot and wandering through this jigsaw house. This puzzle of orange daisy wallpaper, blue shag carpeting, and the fake marble countertops that peel back like stickers when I pick at the edges. I am barefoot and I will not wet the bed tonight. I will not make that dream trip down the dizzying, eagle-after-eagle-after-eagle wallpaper hallway to the bathroom only to wake up drenched in my own sour pee. It was the sound of the plastic mattress pad that woke me, reminded me that I must not do that ever again.

The sound of my feet across the kitchen floor makes me think of rain against glass. I concentrate on the way my heels, toes, heels, toes make rain in the midnight kitchen.

The door to Ma and Daddy’s room is wide open, not locked shut, not locked tight with yelling voices behind. It is open like the inviting lid of a toy box, like the lid on my crayon box, and it is impossible not to look inside. Daddy looks like a big bear on the bed. He is spread out across the mattress and his back is so wide I could spread my whole body across it if I wanted to. The white bedspread with the pills I can’t help but pluck off when I get sent here to nap or to cry is crumpled up at the foot of the bed. Daddy doesn’t like any covers on his feet. Not even in wintertime.

I can feel the need to pee like a heart thudding softly in my stomach. I put my hands between my legs and push the nightie up tight, concentrating on the soft flannel on my naked skin. Eagle after eagle after eagle, and there is yellow light coming out from under the bathroom door.

“Ma,” I whisper. “I gotta go. . . .” I hadn’t worried that I might need to wait.

She doesn’t answer me and I put my hands on the door, lean into the door and whisper, “Ma. I don’t wanna pee my bed again. I got up so I wouldn’t pee my bed.”

Again, I can’t hear anything inside. I push gently, knowing that if she’s sitting on the toilet like last time, I’ll get spanked. I’m certain that if I find her sitting at the edge of the toilet, leaning toward the roll of toilet paper that’s teetering on the edge of the sink instead of on the roll where it is supposed to be, then there is bound to be trouble. But not more than if I wet my bed. Not more than if I wake up with my nightie soggy around my hips.

The door opens real slow, orange daisies orange daisies orange daisies and the yellow yellow glow of a bare bulb hanging still and bright in the center of the room. I think at first that Lily is only sleeping, sprawled across the floor like Daddy sprawled across the bed. Her nightie is yanked up under her arms, her face buried in the fuzzy orange bath mat. But I can hear her crying and Ma has got something in her hands, a tube that is connected to Lily’s bottom, a bag of water at the end like the kinds you see on
All My Children
when someone’s in the hospital. And Ma is kneeling next to her, her hair spilling like lemonade across one shoulder. She is pushing the tube into Lily, holding her butt to keep her still. But Lily doesn’t scream, she only grabs handfuls of orange carpeting from the bath mat. I can see it between her fingers.
Hold still, baby. Hold still.

I stand in the orange-daisy yellow, bare-bulb light of the midnight bathroom and stare at Ma’s hands working quickly, making that tube disappear. And I know that whatever Ma is doing to Lily is worse than anything she might do to me if I wet the bed.

I must have made a sound, because Ma turns her head and sees me there, stands up so quick she bangs her head on the light bulb. “Shit,” and it is swinging and the light is flashing off and on like when Daddy plays Monster in the living room at night (until Ma reminds him about the lightning). Then it goes completely dark and Ma is cussing softly. And then all I smell is the dark, awful smell of excrement. The terrible, earthy smell of when the dog next door gets loose and messes in the yard, the stink of the bathroom after Daddy on Sunday mornings. I feel my stomach turning and then I can’t hold it anymore. The pee is hot on my leg. It runs all the way down one side and then pools underneath my foot.

I feel Ma’s hands on my back pushing me out the door.
I’m giving Lily her medicine, Indie. Go back to bed.
And she is pushing me so hard that she must not even notice that I wet myself.

When I am back out in the hallway, the light goes on again under the crack in the door, and Ma is whispering to Lily.
It’s okay, honey. You’ll be better soon. Everything will be okay.

In this particular dream, I cannot find the puzzle piece that explains what Ma was doing to Lily inside the orange daisy room in the middle of the night. So, instead I grab a dark jagged piece from the puzzle box and make it fit into that crack under the door so I don’t have to see the bright light or hear my mother’s apologies.

I
got up early, just past six o’clock, but Rich had already left for work. Lily had squeezed fresh orange juice with oranges from the tree in the front yard. There were eggs Benedict with hollandaise sauce and fresh paprika sprinkled on top of perfectly round poached eggs. Freshly ground coffee with real cream.

“What time do you want to go to the hospital?” I asked.

“Rich said he’ll take you when he comes home for lunch,” Lily said, refilling my juice glass.

“You’re not coming with me?”

“I really can’t leave,” she said. “I should stay here with Violet.”

“Why doesn’t Rich watch her?” I asked. I held my fork tightly and stared at Lily, who would not look at me.

She shook her head. “Besides, you’ll just pick her up and bring her back here. The hospital’s close. It’ll only take a couple of minutes. Ma knows I’m not coming.”

“Did you talk to her?” I asked, wondering how I could have missed this conversation unless Lily was on the phone with Ma in the middle of the night.

“I called the hospital this morning to find out what time they were going to discharge her. They said she’d be ready at noon.”

“I really wish you would come with me. I’m not sure I want to do this on my own.”

“You won’t be alone,” Lily said, smiling. “Rich will go with you. Ma likes Rich, though I have no idea why.”

I watched her to see if she might give in. The hard veneer of her expression did not change. She merely blinked her eyes quickly like she always does when she wants to dismiss something.

I poked the sharp tines of my fork into the resistant egg, and the yellow center ran thickly over the pink disk of Canadian bacon and perfectly toasted English muffin. But when I raised the forkful to my lips, I couldn’t eat. The egg white made me nauseous and I set the fork back down.

“I’m really not hungry,” I said.

“Fine,” Lily said angrily and pulled the plate away from me.

Rich drove cautiously toward the hospital. With the windows rolled up to keep the hot air outside, I could smell his cologne. Like Lily’s perfume, there was something terribly noxious about this scent. It was more masculine than Lily’s, with a slight musk to it, but it was still pungent. I thought of the scent of pine in Peter’s jacket.

Rich seemed hesitant to turn on the radio.

“Go ahead,” I nodded when he motioned tentatively to the stereo. “I’m easy.”

There are a million stations in Phoenix. At the cabin we get the college station, and if we put the antenna out the window we can sometimes pick up a couple of stations in Portland. Here there were too many choices. Rap music thudded violently under my feet, and then he switched quickly to something else. Country twang, and then a talk show. For five minutes we filled the empty space between us with the white noise of too many decisions. He shrugged finally and turned the stereo off.

“Lily woke me up last night,” I said.

“Was she outside wrestling tumbleweeds again?”

“I don’t think she’s sleeping very well.”

“She’s not sleeping at all,” he said, turning to me and frowning. “She’s been battling those tumbleweeds for weeks, and every time we get a dust storm they roll back in. And when she’s not up with the tumbleweeds she’s taking showers. Three or four a night. I hear the water come on and I think,
She’s already clean. What’s she doing?”
He chuckled a little and then his voice grew soft, “She hasn’t slept in our bed for months.”

I pulled the visor down to shield my eyes.

“I know she’s worried about Violet and now your mom,” he said. “But she’s not herself anymore. She’s pissed off all the time. Everything I say sets her off. Like it’s my fault or something.”

“Like what’s your fault?”

“I don’t know. Violet being sick maybe. Her not being able to sleep.” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“That’s ridiculous,” I snorted.

“I really don’t know what to do,” he said. “She won’t let me help. She hardly lets me near Violet. I try to go to the doctor’s appointments with her, but she doesn’t want me to come.”

I opened my mouth in disbelief, remembering what Lily had said about him not taking her seriously.

“I know, it’s crazy,” he said apologetically.

I nodded, but didn’t say anything about my conversation with Lily. Somehow it seemed safer to agree with his confusion than compound it by telling him that Lily was a liar.

“How’s the restaurant?” he asked, smiling and turning to look at me.

“Good,” I said, grateful. “I’ve been making muffins.”

We parked the car and walked through the thick, hot air to the hospital entrance. Inside, I found the elevator and looked at Rich, who seemed similarly uncomfortable here.

“You can stay down here in the lobby if you want,” I said.

“You sure?” he asked, though I saw his shoulders relax, releasing the anxiety he must have felt.

I nodded.

When the elevator doors opened, I stepped out and held the door open for a doctor who was running down the corridor. He was dressed from head to toe in blue scrubs. His shoes were covered in what looked like shower caps. His face mask was like a bandana around his neck.

“Thanks,” he smiled.

I had walked only a short distance down the corridor when I realized that I was on the wrong floor. I stopped in front of a big glass window and looked in at the newborns. I have never wanted to be a mother, but I have always been fascinated by babies. Especially new ones. I love their smell and the way their eyes dart from one color or shape or flash of movement to the next. I crossed my arms and peered at the rows and rows of incubators. And then suddenly my hand flew to my mouth.

In one incubator, a baby no larger than my own fist lay trembling. In the next incubator there was an infant whose skin was yellow with jaundice, its eyes sealed shut like a kitten’s. These were not the healthy ones, not the rosy-checked ten pounders named Ashley and Joshua. These were the sick babies, the crack babies still shuddering from the impact of their mothers’ violent wombs. These were the babies without names whose eyes were set wide apart from the liquor or heroin in their mother’s blood. The ones who were missing fingers or toes. The ones who had had only enough nourishment to grow to the size of lemons inside their mother’s reluctant bellies.

I pressed my hands against the glass and allowed my eyes to focus on the shuddering baby in the far corner. There were tubes going in and out of every orifice, a blue knit cap on its head. Compared to these babies, Violet looked like the picture of health. Her stuttering breath would go unnoticed inside these vibrating glass walls.

As a candy striper passed with a rolling cart filled with food trays, I felt a wave of nausea rush over me like the car sickness I felt as a child. Uncontrollable, completely overwhelming. I backed away from the glass and ran back down the hallway to the elevator. Inside, I stared at the numbers above the door so that I would not have to see the blood-splattered blue pajamas of another doctor, I counted the floors and tried not to remember the other times I’d been in the hospital.

The psychiatric ward didn’t look much different from the neonatal ward. It was quiet here. Quiet and green. The walls were pale and moss-colored, and there were fake plants perched precariously on every counter. I walked past the solarium, looking for Ma’s room, and a voice followed me. “Indie?”

I stopped and stepped back, peeking my head into the room, windows and plants filtering the Arizona sunshine. A large-screen TV and two blue couches. My mother set down a magazine and stood up.

She wasn’t dressed yet. She was wearing a soft pink robe, similar to one I saw hanging on the back of Lily’s bathroom door. Her hair was down, past her shoulders, blond with curly silver strands making it appear messier than it actually was. Her skin was pale, transparent, and stretched tightly across the sharp bones of her face and fingers.

“Ma,” I said as if to confirm that she was, indeed, my mother.

She smiled, the skin of her lips pulling back tightly against her teeth. She held out her arms then, gesturing for me to come closer.

“Ma, you look terrible.”

“Thanks,” she said bitterly.

“I thought you were being released today,” I said. “I came to bring you back to Lily’s. Rich is downstairs.”

She looked absently out the window at the polluted Phoenix skyline and shrugged.

“Ma,” I said, annoyed. “We came to bring you home.”

“I think I should probably stay until they get the latest blood work back,” she said. “I’m very ill.”

“I know,” I nodded. “But the doctors told Lily you could be released this afternoon.”

“Maybe.” She sighed and sat down on the couch. Her bare knee peeked out through the folds in the robe, sharp like a stick instead of a bone.

“Where’s your doctor?” I asked.

“It’s something in the house,” she said softly. “Asbestos. I think your father put asbestos in the walls to poison me.”

I felt my knees grow weak. I sat down across from her. I felt like I was looking at a child. She was thinner than Lily. Her hands were shaking.

“Where’s your doctor, Ma?” I said again.

“He doesn’t know a goddamn thing!” she said loudly, startling me. “They’re all fucking quacks here. They tried to tell Lily I did this to myself. They tried to blame it on me.”

Her eyes were big and wet, turning the same shade of blue as Lily’s as they filled with tears.

“It’s okay, Ma.You stay here and let me go find your doctor.”

She looked out the window as an airplane flew overhead.

“Ma, promise me you won’t go anywhere.”

She didn’t look at me but nodded slowly.

I left the solarium and went to the front desk. A nurse was talking softly on the phone. She was twirling a strand of hair that had come loose from the chipped white bobby pin that held her cap on.

“Excuse me,” I said.

She raised her eyes and looked at me, irritated. She covered the phone with her hand. “Can I help you?”

“I need to find my mother’s doctor. Her name is Judy Brown. She’s in two-eighteen.”

“That would be Dr. LaVesque in Toxicology,” she said and uncovered the phone. She started whispering into the phone again.

“Excuse me, I need to know who her doctor is for
this
ward,” I said.

“She’s been released,” the nurse said again, slapping her hand against the mouthpiece of the phone again.

“She has not been released. She is sitting in her robe in the room down the hall.”

“The paperwork was signed this morning. She is under Dr. LaVesque’s care as an outpatient.”

I rode the elevator down to the lobby. When the doors opened, I was briefly tempted to walk out the front door and go straight to the airport. To leave Rich and Ma in the hospital. To get on the next plane back to Maine. Instead I walked to the lobby, where I found Rich reading a
Reader’s Digest
and chewing the edges of a Styrofoam coffee cup.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Can you help me figure out what’s going on?”

When he took my arm, I felt a lump growing thick in my throat. “They’re giving me the runaround, and Ma’s still got her robe on.”

He pulled me into him as if to shield me from something and muttered, “We’ll get it all figured out. Don’t worry. It’s probably just a mix-up. These hospitals are so big they can hardly keep track of who’s coming and who’s going.”

I closed my eyes to fight the sting of tears. But on the back of my eyes all I could see were my mother’s long fingers reaching for me. The pink of her robe and the exposed bones that used to be her legs.

Ma was just confused. She had even signed the release papers, but she hadn’t gotten dressed. Her doctor explained to Rich while I helped Ma pack her bag that her records were being transferred to the Mountainview hospital, and that she was to check in with the referred psychiatrist when she got there. The toxins were gone from her body now. Dialysis had replaced her poisoned blood with clean blood. They had flushed the poison out of her. The only lingering effects were the weakness of her joints and muscles. Fatigue.

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