“Git on back here, girl!”
I tumble over a tree root.
“You better watch out,” he yells. “I’m gonna git you when you come back here!”
I’m not even out of breath, jumping over rocks and the fallen tree in my way. Funny how the pain goes away when you got the chance to be free.
“Emma?” I call ahead so she doesn’t run from the sound of footsteps, thinking it’s Richard, like I would if’n I heard someone running at me.
At the edge of the creek I bend over ’cause now I am out of breath and bending over seems like the best way to catch it without causing too much trouble to my insides.
“Here I am,” a little voice carries over to my ears.
My head jerks up at the sound. But I don’t see her at first.
“Where?”
“Over here.”
And there, on a smooth rock that’s half in the water, half out, is my baby sister, hugging her knees and rocking to and fro. At first the bruisin’ doesn’t look so bad, but when I come closer I see there’s dried blood caught up in it and my stomach does a nosedive.
So before I reach her I squat down and hold the end of my shirt into the water so I can clean her up.
“I couldn’t find you,” she says, not even wincing when I dab at her forehead.
“I’s over at Wilson’s,” I say. “Hold still. Where’s this comin’ from?” I’d started from the bottom of the dried trickle and traced it up into her hair where there’s a round patch of darker blood. It’s up above where the worst of the bruisin’ is. That’s when she does flinch when I dab at that.
“Hold on, lemme git some more water,” I say, jumping off the rock and picking a fresh part of my shirt to get wet.
“You okay?” I ask her when I get back close.
She’s as still as the rock she’s sitting on. Her shoes have come untied so I tie ’em back up, double knotted the way she likes it.
“Say something.”
But she won’t.
I cain’t run my fingers through her hair to make her feel better ’cause her hair’s all knotted up so instead I stroke her arm.
“He lost his job,” she says quiet-like.
“What’d you say?” I lean closer to her mouth so I can hear better. She’s being that quiet.
“I said, he lost his job.”
“Richard?”
“Who else?”
“Why?”
“How’m I s’posed to know?”
“Does Momma know?”
Emma shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t even know where Momma is.”
“Me neither. How’d you know he lost his job?”
She doesn’t say anything so I guess it isn’t important how she come to hear.
“Guess we’ll be stayin’ up here at the Diamond River a whole lot more” is all I can think of to say.
And then it comes to me. “What if we write to Gammy?”
“What?” Emma raises her head a bit.
“We could write Gammy and ask her to come out here for a while,” I say. As I talk it sounds like a better idea than when it first popped into my head a second or two ago. “She might like it better’n where she is now and then she could live here with us.”
“But what about Auntie Lillibit? Gammy’s already takin’ care of her,” Emma says.
Auntie Lillibit is Momma’s little sister, whose real name is Elizabeth but everyone just calls her Lillibit after what Momma nicknamed her when they were kids our age. Gammy lives in a room in her house near Asheville and does all her laundry and cleaning for her, like she’s sick or something, which she always seems to be. When they were little Auntie Lillibit started wheezing when she ran out to play and the doctor told her momma, Gammy, she wouldn’t live long if she overdid it, so from that day on she underdid it. And she’s lived ever since. Momma and her never did get along on account of the fact Momma says Gammy spoils her rotten and she doesn’t like to be around rotten things. So Momma’s steered clear of the both of them for as long as I can remember. Gammy came to visit us a few times when we were little, but when I close my eyes I cain’t even remember what Gammy looks like, it’s been that long.
Still, I cain’t think of a better idea so I’m clinging to it.
“Gammy could help Momma the way she helps Auntie and then Momma’d be a whole lot happier, I bet,” I say. Emma’s head’s stopped bleeding, but if you look hard you can see a big bump right past where her hair hits her forehead.
“I’m gonna do it,” I say. “I’m gonna write her.”
“Where’re you gonna get a stamp?”
“I’ll ask Mr. Wilson where the post office is and I’ll go in and buy one, stupid,” I sass her. “That’s what you do when you want to mail something. You go to the post office.”
“What about her address? You don’t know where she lives.”
“I know for a fact she lives on Sycamore Street,” I tell her, “’cause she used to say she was sick-a-more streets popping up around town and I remembered it that way. I don’t know the number but Avery Creek is a small town—the mailman’ll know her for sure.”
“She’ll never come,” Emma sighs, and goes back to hugging her knees. “Not in a million years.”
“She will, too.”
“We’ll see.”
We stay by the stream until it’s hard to see to the other side and then we know it’s time to go on back home. Standing up and stretching feels good—my bottom is sore from the rock I was on.
The floor of the forest is spongy and I wonder why it never occurs to us to sit on it instead of hard rocks.
“Okay, so this is what we’re gonna do,” I say to Emma from over my shoulder since she’s walking slower behind me. “I’ll go in first to see where he is and find out if the coast is clear and then I’ll whistle for you to come in. If you don’t hear a whistle, don’t come in, I’ll take myself out the back door and meet you there and we can come on back to the stream. Got it?”
“Yeah, okay,” she says in a whisper. “I don’t feel so good standing up and walking.”
“Just get to the house and then you can lie down.”
“My head’s swimming.”
“I know,” I say. And I do. My head swims like that when it gets hit, but after I sleep for a spell it’s all better.
“I can’t go any farther,” she says.
“Stop your whining and hurry up,” I say. “We’re almost there.”
I don’t whine half as much as Emma is after this whipping. Most times she’s good and keeps it to herself, but I guess tonight’s not one of those times.
There’s a light coming from the back of the house, the kitchen, so it’s anyone’s guess who’s in there. Momma, okay. Richard, not okay.
“Remember to listen for the whistle,” I hiss back to her. I hope she hears me, she’s pretty far behind me.
I slow way down when I get to about a hundred Barbie lengths from the back door. I listen for a clue to who’s in there but I don’t hear a thing. A few steps more and I can make a dash for the bottom of the window where I can peek in. One. Two. Three…and I’m there, below the kitchen window that’s right above the sink.
I didn’t think about the fact that the window’s set up higher than my head, so I have to push…this…rock… aah…to a spot right here so I can stand up on it. There. Perfect. The edge of the windowsill is so dusty and dirty my fingers slip off at first but then I grip on and slowly…slowly raise my head up to the co
rner of the window.
I can see the table with the smooth metal edges in the middle of the room, Momma’s ashtray’s in the middle, and, right in front of me, the flies licking up the leftover crumbs on the plates stacked up for cleaning. I think Momma’s waiting for more soap slivers to go in the can ’cause the dishes’ve been piled in there for a few days now. The flies dart from one to another, stuffing themselves. The bigger ones are the ones that bite real hard and leave red marks on my skin.
Strange that the light’s on but no one’s in the kitchen. Momma’s always after us to turn them off—wait! Here she is. She’s coming straight at me and I duck, in case she sees the top of my head. I hear clinking that’s probably her shifting things around in the sink and after it goes quiet for a spell I inch back up to see what’s what.
Scrape. The chair’s being pulled back at the table and there’s Momma, lighting up another cigarette. She takes in a deep breath and blows the smoke up to the ceiling. I’m about to turn to give Emma the whistle that the coast is clear but I stop when I hear the floorboards rattle with the weight of Richard coming into view. He’s standing in the doorway, taking a swig of his bottle, like he did with me earlier.
“Just go on,” Momma says. I can hear her clear as day.
Richard looks over the top of Momma’s head and for a second I think he’s caught me in the act of spying, but then I see he’s looking to the sink.
“When you gonna start acting like a real woman an’ git to cleanin’?” he says. When he does his top lip curls up toward the bottom of his nose.
Momma says something I cain’t quite make out since she says it ’fore she takes another breath of her cigarette.
“Whut?” Richard looks back over to her with the top of her head resting on the palms of her hands, her cigarette in the fork of her two first fingers on her right hand.
“About the time you fix the hole in the roof over our heads,” she says to him, raising her head up to his.
“You’re lucky I’m goin’ out or I’d put a hole in your head the size of my fist,” he says. He tilts his bottle up, drains it and throws it through the air right toward the sink…toward me. It shatters onto the top of the heap, bits of glass clink against the windowpane. I duck down just in case it breaks through, and while I’m squeezing my eyes shut the picture of Momma, sitting at the kitchen table smoking, is burned against my eyeballs. She didn’t even flinch when his arm hurled the bottle across the room. Or when it hit the sink.
The front door slams shut and I feel the wall I’m leaning up against rattle. Now, at least, the coast is clear. His truck rumbles up and coughs away from the house.
I turn away from the house and whistle into the air, but I cain’t make out any bushes moving where Emma’d be pushing through, so I whistle again. Nothing.
She probably fell asleep waitin’ on me like she was.
“Hey, Em!” I whisper-yell to her. It’s quiet all around so I follow the cut of light on the ground outside the window to the edge of the woody trail. “You can come up now!”
“Hmm?” I hear a tired little voice from practically under my feet.
“Where are you?”
“Here,” she says. My eyes adjust to the dark and there, curled up like a dog, is Emma, about three Barbies from my foot.
“C’mon.” I crouch down to help her up. I know her head’s throbbing so it’s making her more tired than she is in the first beginning. Last time my head was hit, anytime I stood up too fast it throbbed like my brain was going to beat its way out of my skull. So I know what she’s feeling like right about now. “C’mon and put your arm over my shoulders and I’ll help you in.”
She does as I tell her and we wobble back up to the house, breaking sticks under our feet along the way.
I don’t get worried until her head rolls back onto my arm that’s holding her across her shoulders. Now I’m scared.
“Momma!” I call out to her while I try moving Emma sideways through the front door, propping it open with my foot at the same time.
“Momma, help!” And then we both collapse inside the door, our arms tangled up like they were when we were standing. After a few minutes that seem like hours, I try to get my arm out from under Emma, but her deadweight makes it near to impossible so I just leave it be.
“What in the hell?” I hear Momma saying over us. “What’ve you gone and gotten yourself into?”
I keep my eyes closed because opening them will mean having to heave myself and Emma up off the ground and I just don’t feel I have the strength for it.
“Get up,” she says. And I can hear her sucking the life out of her cigarette again. “Go on, get up. I know you ain’t asleep,” she says to us. And she’s half right—I am not asleep but Emma sure is out cold.
The floorboards squeak and squawk with the weight of her walking away and I figure that’s for the best, anyhow. She ain’t strong enough to pick both of us up, anyway, so I was just putting off the inevitable, I s’pose.
“Emma.” I rattle her back with the arm that’s still stuck underneath it. “Come on, Em. Move up just a little. Emma.”
I turn my head completely sideways and see that her eyes are blinking open.
“Just move a little so I can stand up and then I’ll get you up,” I say. “That’s good. Okay. That’s real good.” She arches her back up so I can slide my arm out and hop up.
“Okay, now give me your hands and I’ll pull you up and we’ll get you up to bed good and quick. There. Now give me the other arm. That’s real good. On the count of three I’ll pull you up. One. Two. Three!”
And just like that game where you swing a baby over a puddle, I swing Emma up off the floor.
“Let’s go over to the stairs,” I say, holding her left arm across my shoulders again. “Good. Little baby steps. That’s real good, Em.” I find that when I talk to her like she’s a baby I get a whole lot further than when I get mad at her.
“Good girl, that’s real good. One more step. There. We’re at the top of the stairs now. A few more steps and we’re on the bed. One step. Two steps. Good! Three steps. Four. There!”
I let her fall facedown onto the top of the bed so I can pull her shoes off before I set her in there proper. Pine needles are stuck to the back of her shirt so I pull that over the top of her head by kneeling on the bed right over her. It’s messy but I get it off. She’s gonna have to sleep nekked on top ’cause I cain’t get her sleep shirt onto her, but that’s fine since it’s real hot tonight, anyway.
I walk on my knees to the top of the bed where our pillows go and I pull her up so her head’s on one of them and then I shimmy the sheet out from under her so I can let it fall on top in case it gets drafty overnight.
Phee-you.
Now I can go down to see about some food in my belly ’cause I know I won’t be able to sleep with it empty.
Momma’s at the kitchen table, smoking, and I know better than to ask her about supper so I go to the icebox to see what’s what.
“There’s chicken from Sunday in there,” Momma says. “Don’t eat standing up—how many times I have to tell you that? You sit and eat proper.”
I spoon out some of the chicken stew onto a plate I take right from the top of the pile in the sink…no use dirtying up another when I know it’s me that’s gonna clean ’em all, anyway.
Momma sets back in her chair and crosses her arms in front of her like she’s inspecting my eating habits.
“What happened to the stage s
tar I saw all passed out on the floor in front, begging to be carried in?” she asks me, fixing her lips tight around the cigarette. “You want me to spoon-feed you, too?”
“Wasn’t me that needed carrying in,” I say, “it was Emma.”
Momma pushes her chair back from the table and crosses over to the cabinet to the right of the sink, where the glasses are.
“Caroline Parker, I am so sick of Emma this and Emma that,” she says, helping herself to a bottle she keeps under the sink. It’s so quiet I can hear her Adam’s apple move up and down, pushing the drink faster into her belly. “That’s all you whine about—Emma needs this, Emma needs that. Every single goddamned day. When’m I gonna get a break, huh? When?”
She’s sitting in front of me again, the glass in between us like a silent relative that’s gonna ruin the night whether you like it or not.
“I’m sorry, Momma,” I say, trying to keep the glass as filled up as possible.
“Ah, but you didn’t answer me,” she says, reaching for it. Her Adam’s apple goes up and down again but when the glass is set back down the level isn’t too much lower so I’ve still got time. “When’m I gonna get some peace around here?”
I push the last of the stew onto my fork with my left finger and hope she doesn’t notice. I don’t know how anyone can expect to get the last bite of stew onto a fork without their free hand helping.
And while I chew I think about how I can answer my momma.
Thank goodness she starts talking again so I don’t have to think too hard. “Things are gonna change round here,” she says. “I’m gonna be taking in some cleaning and whatnot and you’re gonna be helping me with it after school. I don’t want to hear a peep from you in the way of whining, you hear me? Not a peep.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“None of this Emma needs this or that, you hear?”
“I cain’t help it if Emma gets in trouble,” I say, trying to keep the whining out of my voice, but I swear it’s hard to do ’cause it’s not fair I’m getting blamed for what Emma does.