I told my cousins how in the Project there were kids our age everywhere you look instead of how everyone is dead-alone on Grace Point. “But it’s real dangerous. You can’t go out at night in the Project because the people are bad. What the kids eat there is real bad. Nobody gets out of there alive,” I said nonchalantly. They believed everything I said because how could they know anything else. Davey talked about rats and how to count them before they get away. We cracked each other up in a quiet way.
But mainly, I just want to go back to the Project. I want to talk with Cookie who doesn’t have a phone and who I only see for a second in the hallways at school now. Who walks her through the park? What about her necklace?
Two more days and I was going back to the Project.
Chapter IX: Light and Glass
My aunt whispers when she talks about my mother. “Your mother doesn’t look the same. You’ll hardly recognize her.” She whispers even more quietly, “She’s lost all of her hair and so much weight. She’s a skeleton. If the hospital can’t help her, I don’t know how they expect the rest of us to. Although maybe you can since you’re the daughter.”
“O.k.” I whisper back.
I am afraid to see her. I have never thought of my mother as a skeleton who has to be whispered about. And worse yet since I am her daughter I have special powers that will make her well and I don’t have any good ideas.
“We’ll get her better,” I told Davey. He is very quiet and worried, I can tell.
On the last night before we went back to the Project, when I wanted to get away from everyone, my aunt caught me in the living room, sitting on the rug behind the chair. That was my favorite view out the tall windows, which looked out onto the lake a mile away. You had to ignore the craggy branches if you were going to like the view. I heard her walking toward me across the carpeting. She would be mad at me for sitting on the carpet, which is not what floors are for and for being there when I was not supervised.
She said, “You and I, we both love light and glass.” She said that the full moon would show through the paperweight with a brilliance that no one can describe. “You love beautiful things. I can tell.” She sat down on the floor next to me. She held the round paperweight between her thumb and forefinger and turned it. The paperweight was a prism that took in the almost-full moonlight and shot it back out. It brought the moonlight into the room. She told me that I was different, not of this time, and that I belonged somewhere else in time, some earlier time, hundreds of years ago.
“It is up to you, her daughter, to keep your mother alive. You have to get very good at this. Do you promise that you will be good at this?”
Maybe I will know what to do when she comes home tomorrow. I promised to be good at that.
What she said about me not being of this time gives me the creeps. After she left, I look out the window being sure not to stare at the craggy black branches. I am exactly of this time. I like rock and roll. I’m letting my hair grow long and I’m going to part it in the middle. Susan says someday I’m getting my ears pierced. I don’t talk about glass and light and old-fashioned things to other teenagers.
But I told my aunt that I would be good at keeping my mother alive because when my aunt is talking to me all I can think of is how I am going to do what she says.
I looked at the craggy branches which scared me but which I like. I was going to have to keep my mother alive.
When my mother came back to the Project in an ambulance, the ambulance men said she wants to be moved onto the couch. She just laid there and didn’t move, not even a muscle. I pulled white blankets up to her throat and figured out how to fix a fake hospital table. My aunt came over. Davey and I ate the dinner my aunt made and then she had to rush off. We watched TV for awhile then Davey went back to his room. My mother didn’t eat dinner. That night I watched her, figuring I will sleep in a chair in the living room. She moaned in her sleep. She looks like one of those tissue paper ghosts we made as little kids. You wrap a rubber band around Kleenex and pull some through to make a head. Below the rubber band there’s more tissue paper that does not have a form. That is my mother now.
In our unit, to see the sky and what the moon is doing, you look up. The lights are out in all of the units behind us. My mother’s cap has come off, and I can see the scar across her skull. It reminds me of the road to the lake, a line cutting across the hills that grow more purple as they back far away in the distance. I don’t know if I should pull her cap back on or not. What if she wakes up and catches me and thinks I’m a coward because I can’t stand the sight of her cut-up head? She will ask, How will you take care of me if you are such a baby that you can’t look at my head? Remember what a coward you were about leaving the porch or jumping over the irrigation ditch, what a fit you threw?
All night I sat up, watching my mother, while all of the fears I ever had came marching back.
In the morning she moaned while we were getting ready for school and said things I didn’t understand and called herself “she.” Like, “Mom doesn’t feel well. She feels sick.” Dorothy came over when we were at school. My aunt called on the phone that night to tell me that I would figure out exactly what to do, but I am not sure. She says I better do this right because I promised to figure it out.
I drew pictures of pills and colored them in with the same colors on the actual living capsule. Mysoline, white, phelantin, white and orange, something blue that would be stopped in ten days. I will give her every pill twice a day. Check marks meant she has taken the pill. I showed the chart to Dorothy and then I described it to my aunt over the phone and she said, “As long as you understand it, that’s all that matters. If you make a mistake, your mother could die. It’s all on your shoulders, because you’re the daughter, and I have my own children to take care of.”
My mother said, in a slow voice, “Yes, as long as you understand what Mom should be taking. She can’t keep track of the details right now.” Then she fell asleep.
I was worried. How could I ever keep her alive? I sat real quiet and watched my mother another night.
Susan tried to bring over the jeans she was giving me that she had pegged so that they would be tight and cool. But I can’t answer the door because I’m scared to turn my back on my mother. I want to cry. I almost opened the window and yelled at her to come back with my jeans.
I had to figure out how to turn into a teenager and wear jeans, be a good daughter, and get my mother back to normal all at the same time.
Chapter X: Caring for My Mother
The most important thing is to watch my mother and keep track of her and get her well. Every morning I hold a powder compact mirror from my mother’s purse in front of her mouth to make sure that she’s still breathing. Dorothy comes to our unit and we go to school. We knock 1-2-3 on Cookie’s and Georgie’s door and if they answer, Cookie and Davey and me all walk to our schools. I think about my mother all of the time. I am afraid that I will get home and she won’t be there.
I come home right after school. I run through the park, running in front of Cookie who always asks me about getting her necklace fixed. I told her the other day that I am busy helping my mother get well and I can’t get her necklace fixed right now.
My mother looks small, and I am not sure that I am glad to come home fast from school or not. My real mother has gone away and left a ghost in her place. I put a finger to my lips when Davey comes in from playing. My mother talks slowly, looking hard for words, looking hard for a way to explain regular things. She says one thing and then she is too tired to talk. She doesn’t have any moxie left.
I bring her everything she needs. Coffee, water, soup. She cried once. She couldn’t remember what she had been thinking. She couldn’t reach her blanket to pull it up.
Davey goes out to play and Dorothy goes home unless she comes back in for dinner with us, which we all like because she’s funny. When she’s not there, the chart says, “Rebecca is on duty” so I finish fi
xing dinner. The chart says “Rebecca is on duty” from Friday night to Monday morning.
My aunt keeps calling on the phone every night for the report of the day and always says the same thing. Has anything out of the ordinary happened and if so what did you do about it? “You’re going to have to get very good at this, Rebecca, because it is up to you as the daughter. I have my own family to take care of and a big house and I can’t always be there taking care of your mother.” One time I said to my aunt, “That is the millionth time you’ve said that.” She said that I was huffy but I know that no matter how huffy I am, I’m the daughter and the one who everybody counts on.
I wanted my mother back to how she had been. She used to drive a car. She made waffles. She sent the nuns flowers on their feast day which made me get in good with them.
At night I cry sometimes. All of the problems seem too big. I am sick of telling my aunt that I’m helping. I don’t want to answer the same question over and over. I wish she wouldn’t call anymore. I started feeling mad about everything. I wanted to say to my aunt when she told me to help my mother all the time, “You do it.”
She keeps driving up to bring groceries and give us orders like we are the servants. “Get this” and “go get that.” She doesn’t see how anyone can get well breathing the air that comes off that courtyard. She brings in her wiggling little yellow dog, plops him down on the floor like he is a bag of groceries and the floor is the table. He runs around in circles in the middle of the room. My mother hates the dog and calls it Little Miss Flibbertygibit or Mr. Stinker. My mother said, “Is that thing turning itself into butter? Because butter we can use.” Davey and I crack up when she says that. My mother is funny again.
My mother calls my Aunt Linda “Mrs. Better Homes and Gardens,” but not to her face. After Aunt Linda left, my mother says from the couch, “Let’s see what Mrs. Better Homes and Gardens has left as a deposit,” and Davey and I look through the groceries. My mother is getting better.
I want her to get better fast and everything can go back to normal. I can go to the lookout or watch the door at Cookie’s unit and get her necklace fixed. Mainly, I want my jeans back that Susan has.
Just when things were as bad as they could get, the worst thing happened and it was my fault.
Chapter XI: Cookie Disappears
I have this terrible feeling that Cookie is going away. Even though I am supposed to go straight back to our unit after school, one day I went to Cookie’s. I knocked on the door with the secret code. She let me in. There were old crumbs on the table, globs of old food stuck to the chair. Cookie talked about what she would like to get Georgie for his birthday. She is my best friend ever.
“Cookie, we’ll make ourselves blood sisters. It’s what the Indians do. I’ll cut my finger, then you cut yours, then we rub our fingers together, and the blood gets mixed together, and we’re blood sisters. All of our lives. It’s the strongest friends we can ever be.”
Cookie said no.
“When someone asks you to be her blood sister, you have to. It’s Indian code. You can’t turn me down.” What a lie.
“I’m not cutting up my finger. It will hurt, so I’m not doing it.”
“It won’t hurt. I’ve done it before.” What a lie again.
“If you’re bleeding, it hurts. Bleeding is how you know it hurts.”
Then she said, out of the blue, “I’m always going to remember you.”
We went upstairs at her unit and went through her jewelry and she told me what she got each piece for, birthday or Christmas. “Ruby,” she said in that soft way she had, like a wish had come true. She held each piece up to the light coming in through the window.. The glass against glass twinkled and for a moment I thought she might have a father who would find her, carrying spices and silk up the staircase like in the book. “Let’s hold up all of the necklaces against the window light again.”
I asked Cookie once, “That mean boy, does he still try to come in?” “Yes,” she said. “Does he ever get in?” “No,” she said. “Not yet.” She said, “On my birthday, I’m getting a Sarah Coventry charm bracelet and I’m wearing it all day every day. There’s no rule about special occasions for bracelets.”
What if I tell my mother or we tell The Office about the mean boy? “No,” Cookie said, “I’m not supposed to open the door.”
I promised Cookie that I wouldn’t tell anyone and that’s the promise I decided to keep.
On one of those days when your insides feel like they’re caving in, my ears began ringing around noon, and I can hardly hear anyone talking although I know they are. I hear buzzing and ringing like it is the only sound on earth. After lunch, I sat outside of the school on the steps, hoping no one would find me and tell me to go inside with the others, go to class, what are you doing out here anyway. No one interrupted me and then the ringing stopped.
As usual, Cookie is not at school.
I walked through the park alone, but when I left the park, I saw two police cars parked in front of Cookie’s unit. I ran over there as fast as I could and yelled, “What happened?”
“Nothing,” they said when I asked why they are here and what is wrong. But I saw blood on the grass.
The shoes on the wire were turned toward Cookie’s. I yelled, “What happened? Did something happen to Cookie or Georgie?” The police said, “What are you talking about, kid?” There was blood on the grass outside of their unit, and police with their cars, but they wouldn’t tell me what happened. I went back to our unit and waited. Dorothy doesn’t know anything and neither does Susan. The next morning, when Davey and I went to pick up Cookie, we couldn’t get to the door because there was yellow danger tape across the front.
A neighbor walked by the unit and watched us for awhile from the other side of the street. Then she came over and stood on the sidewalk. She said that something horrible had happened in there, in Cookie’s unit. I know what it is – the mean boy got in.
After school, I ran home and sat on the monkey bars. I watched the yellow danger tape peel itself away in the breeze. When I got up in the morning and looked out our kitchen window, the tape had gotten wrapped around the monkey bars and flapped in the wind. After school, the Project kids tied each other up in it.
Then one of my biggest fears came true - I got lost in the Project.
Chapter XII: A Future for Cookie
I sat on the bed in my room and tried to make up a future for Cookie. One made up of two white sweaters and grilled cheese sandwiches on Saturday and a bike at Christmas, like I had in Ambrose. A father who goes to parties with her mother. A father who gets her necklace fixed. Her father would help her figure out if the necklace was a ruby or not. Or she had gone to her Aunt Bootsie’s so Georgie was taken care of everyday even if her mother was sick.
Cookie had disappeared and that made me feel sick all of the time. “What’s wrong?” my teacher asked. She said that she had never seen a pupil change so fast. Glum, gloomy. I usually pay attention in class. The painters painted the inside of Cookie’s unit; from the monkey bars, I watched them leave. Susan yelled at me that she didn’t know where Cookie was so I had to quit bugging her about it.
I walk through the Project like Cookie and I always do. Maybe Cookie moved to another unit but was still nearby in the Project. I walked down to the Wigwam Store for a candy bar.
On my way back up the hill, three boys came toward me and one said, “You got that crybaby face. I’m gonna to tear your bra off you and see your little titties.” A boy spit a mouth of food at me.
I was mad. “You do that and I’ll tell because I know where you live,” I said. I finally did it. I said something back.
And then they ran off.
Walking back to our unit right after that, I forgot where I was. I was scared of those boys and I was thinking so hard, trying to figure it out, what I should have done about Cookie or what else I should have said to the three boys, and suddenly I looked up from the sidewalk. The units al
l looked the same. Orange buildings, garbage cans to the side, gray porches, courtyards, monkey bars. Everything looking exactly the same with no way to tell anything apart. I turned in circles looking for something that was different and would tell me where I was. Where did I live? Which unit was mine? I didn’t know. I felt dizzy and everything shifted down. I turned in circles, fast circles. The world went by my eyes. Who would help me find my way home? My mother was at home, a sick doll-person asleep all the time. My father was hundreds of miles away, forgetting me the way people forget what they did on a holiday. No one would come for me. I stopped turning. The world shifted up. Then I saw the shoes on the wire. Then I saw our Rambler. And the corner of crumbling courtyard cement. My back was to Cookie’s unit. I faced our courtyard.
“Help me all the way up, Rebecca,” one of the little Stimp kids yelled from the first bar of the monkey bars. “Not now,” I yelled back. “In a minute.”
I turned back around and looked at Cookie’s unit, especially the window upstairs where she didn’t want me to show off her ruby necklace that first time. This is the memory that kills me: Cookie told me once that if they had money, they would move to their own house. She would have a father and she would walk at a lake with him and find arrowheads. Their father would teach Georgie how to fish. Cookie said, “Rubies are for everyone,” and she would throw her arms up in the air.
I forgot to help the Stimp kid on the monkey bars.
I told my mother, who was swishing around in her sheets like she was an egg beater, “Some boys were mean to me when they caught me walking down the street.”
“Then don’t walk down that street alone again.”
I went back to my bedroom and thought about Cookie all over again. I didn’t want to leave the Project anymore because she might come back and I had to be there. Was she gone or not? I couldn’t figure it out. I wanted to go outside and then I didn’t want to go outside.
When the person who made you brave leaves, do they take your bravery with you? Now that Cookie was gone, would I go back to being stuck on the porch?