Maybe if I had told someone about the mean boy, Cookie wouldn’t have gone away.
I have to get away from my mother, no matter how bad her brain tumor gets. I am afraid all of the time because my mother has ESP.
Chapter XIII: The Spirit
My mother has been visited by a spirit who tells her what to write. The experts call it automatic writing. She puts a pen on a piece of paper and her hand is overtaken by a spirit. She does it at night. The spirit warns her of terrible things that will come in the future. Things so terrible that she cannot describe them. They will talk to her only if she never repeats what they say.
She said, “This is what brain surgery will do for you, make you an open channel to important messages from the beyond.”
Then one spirit became more spirits. Keep our message to yourself, the spirits told her. She has a particular place in the universe, a place no one else can occupy. The future is filled with terrible things but none of them will befall you. You are one of the select few. Only a select few are chosen and the rest are ruined in the fire and flood.
She says she is a telepath who can move items without touching them. She wills things, like spoons, to move and she doesn’t touch them to make them do that. Anyone who does not believe her is a non-believer, a small-minded person who nothing special will ever happen to.
With her automatic writing, the spirits told her over and over that she is right. Right to move away from my father. Right to stand up for herself. Good because she stands up for others. They have a message for me. My mother relays it. “Stand up to others, like The Office and your father. Never stop standing up to them. This is the best advice I can ever give you.”
“More particulars,” she says. “Unbeknownst until now, there’s a tie-in to other events, including, once again, brain surgery.” The lead spirit’s name is Esther after that saint in the Bible who saved her people from her selfish husband’s plan to massacre people all over the place. It must have been Esther who she had met during the brain operation. The light, the voice, all of that white. Heaven, that’s where she was, about to be let in. But she was needed on earth. She could predict the end of the world and all of the lightening and thunder that goes along with it.
The Church is against telepathy but anyone who has the gift can’t ignore it. “You don’t notice Jean Dixon going out of style.”
“You just can’t listen to the Church about everything,” she whispered. “They’re just a bunch of men who hold conferences and figure out what else women are doing wrong. It always involves lipstick.”
I get afraid. I wonder where my mother disappeared to. I’ve never heard of the things she’s talking about.
There were pads of paper with writing all over the living room and teaspoons all over the coffee table. Dorothy thinks that Esther should pick up after herself a little more.
“I have the gift,” my mother said. “But it doesn’t have to stop here. Who wants to go in on a Ouija board with me?”
One night I had been in the courtyard but came inside. The lights were off. A little light came in from the unit behind ours. My mother was standing by the heater and smoking a cigarette. The dark and smoke made the air dark blue. She was standing up by herself just like she used to.
She said in this singing voice, “Looks like Mother was able to make her way to the stereo and turn on her favorite song. She loves a good torch song. Always has. Judy Garland. Of course. Who else at a time like this? ‘And never a new love will be the same. Good riddance, goodbye. Every trick of his you’re on to…’ Truer words were never spoken. But Mother will go on. She always has before. I’ve always been a fighter. From Day One. And she always will be. Help Mother with her robe and then get her on to the couch.”
“What they will take from you,” she said, “you can never predict. You can be doing what you were born to do, and he will walk in and take what you love. You can have done everything right and some bully comes along, and you are left standing in your apron empty-handed. And your suffering is nothing to them. They will tell you that they were just doing a job. A paid job. And you will never get over it. It will come back time and time again.
“What happens to you, something you never dreamed of, this life, and what it will do to you later. Something happens that is so severe and unlike what happens to others that it runs for eternity in your blood. You will be somewhere, standing, looking at a clock, sewing on a button, and something will remind you of it and you are back there, jarred back decades earlier. That is why there is no such thing as innocence. At some point, you run face first into the life horrors.”
When she talks like this, I get paralyzed. I don’t want her to know that sometimes I don’t believe what she says. I decided to drop a hint. “What if you never have any life horrors?”
“Oh, you will. No one gets out of it that easily. That is what we are here for. Now, hand Mother her robe.”
And then my mother had a seizure, small but you couldn’t deny it. She pulled the sheet off of her foot and leg and they shook. She and I watched. “The tumor has grown back,” my mother whispered. I called my aunt who said to call the doctor who called me back. Where’s your father? he asked. He’s at the lake. The doctor said, “Your mother is getting better. I saw her last week. The tumor is not growing back. She’s getting stronger. We just need to get her through this phase. It’s only been a few months since her surgery and this is how I’d expect her to feel. Give her an extra phelantin a day. It will keep her quieter and that’s what she needs. Do you know which pill that is?”
“Orange and white,” I said.
I gave my mother more medication just like he said and then she fell asleep again.
On the nights when the spirits did not want to talk with my mother, she would go to sleep. I picked her book up from the floor. I checked her breathing with a mirror. I turned out the lights, then sat in the dark watching her.
She always takes off her cap before she goes to sleep and there is the purple cut across her head. She still looks like a ghost, small and wispy. I know that she will not move all night long.
Even though I don’t believe in them, I am afraid that the spirits will come to visit me. That they will rise up out of the sheets like dust while she sleeps. They will tell me about the terrible things to come, things I can never have imagined in real life. Why don’t you want to know this? They will say. Why are you always afraid, little girl? Afraid of getting off the porch. Afraid of jumping over the irrigation ditch. You didn’t even get Cookie’s necklace fixed. You have such a brave, strong mother, a real fighter, who lived through brain surgery.
I am so afraid that I sit in the living room all night, wide awake, waiting for them. I’d get so scared that it felt like my whole body was sour.
I watch my mother and the scar on her head. When she actually moves, I know that she is still alive.
I have this lonely feeling, the kind you can’t get rid of unless you do something about it. I know this trick that will make me feel better. I put ice in a glass, then my mother’s bubbly pop, and hold the glass up to the moonlight. It’s not exactly a prism, but I like the shine and the way the lights sparkle. Some nights instead of worrying about the spirits, I fill up a glass and watch the bubbles and light, just to think of something else.
My mother woke me up, calling out my name and moaning. She has something important to tell me. She had woken up during her brain operation. It never happens, horribly rare, she said. This is something you need to know about your mother. That’s how extremely rare it is. She lay on a table, her head opened up. They were removing the tumor. Lights everywhere, white lights blazing, and white gowns, silver showing through their hands. Yes, listen, she had woken up during surgery, when her head was open. God had arrived. She couldn’t move, but she was awake. No one noticed because their backs were to her when she opened her eyes. She had been saved for a special purpose. That’s what that meant. Mental telepathy, automatic writing.
When she went back to sleep, I diagrammed some sentences.
Then I started noticing that Davey wasn’t on the monkey bars as much, and he wasn’t in his room. Where was he going?
Chapter XIV: Davey’s House
Davey must go out exploring like he always did at the lake. Or he goes to the park after I walk him home from school. He finds me at the lookout.
“I’ve found a house for us,” he said. He sat on the boulder. “It has a sycamore tree, just like at home. Come on. It’s right over there.”
He was bashful when he showed me how to slide in through a side window. Like this, and then he was in the house looking at me through the window. He slipped back out, then held back the laurel bush, holding it back until I cleared the window. I stood looking around a large, empty living room. He said he did this every day. When? Instead of school.
“I’m not lighting the fireplace, though.” Someone was. Older boys, we decided. The window moldings had been ripped down and broken in half, crashed down over a knee probably, then shoved into the fireplace and lit on fire. A half-molding lay across the mantle.
We walked through the house. Upstairs, Davey pulled a crate from one bedroom to another, stood on it, and pulled a box from a closet shelf. There were broken toys. And a stuffed bear with its ear torn off. A can opener and two cans of food.
“Sometimes I’m here all day,” Davey said, shrugging when I held up the cans. I listened for noise from outside.
“You don’t go to school? But I walk you there every day.” I had never felt this helpless about my little brother before. This empty house he said was his. How I feel is what the word “aghast” means.
“I’d rather be at home.” He meant this house, where no one lived.
“You’ll get caught.” I put the cans back in the box.
“Nobody knows what I do anymore,” he said.
“I’m supposed to know,” I said. “Why doesn’t anybody live here? Whose toys are these? You have to start going to school again. Someone will notice and you’ll get in trouble.”
“No one will know.”
“Tomorrow, I’ll meet you here when my school lets out. Just stay here and I’ll pick you up. Don’t walk through the Project without me.” I felt like my insides were vacant.
The next day, I slid in through the window, almost horizontally so that I could hold back the laurel with my legs, and I found Davey walking through the house wearing a broken army helmet. It was camouflaged and plastic. The chin strap hung from one side.
The next afternoon, I found him asleep on the floor with a blanket pulled over him, his arms tense, one used as a pillow, the ripped and dirty stuffed animal two feet away. We walked home and I put him to bed after giving him cough medicine. Davey went to sleep and my mother was asleep.
I thought about how I didn’t tell anyone about Cookie. How she held her ruby necklace up to the window.
I made a list of people who could help me about Davey and there was no one. So I called my father on the telephone. He said he had never been so glad to hear from someone in his life.
“Davey doesn’t go to school anymore. He plays in an empty house. He says he’s not going to school again. He wants to go somewhere where he’s happy.”
“Does anybody think of telling him he has to go to school?”
“The Project, it’s not like where we used to live when we had a regular house with a big front yard where you could play. It’s all different here. No one even has a bike or a record player.”
“I don’t know what I can do about this. Your mother moved you far away. What does she say about Davey missing school?”
“Mom is sick. She doesn’t wake up and make dinner anymore. You wouldn’t come home and now we’re here and this is where we live. People look down on you when you live in the Project. It’s not like Ambrose. The boys at school make fun of me because I live in the Project, which is the worst place in the world.”
“Don’t be down on it too much, honey. It’s where you live. Just do what your mother says and you’ll be okay. That worked for me when I was your age.”
“You didn’t live in a housing project when you were a kid. Nobody called you ‘Project.’ Nobody looked down their nose at you. ‘Project, just Project. You don’t count.’ That’s what they told me at school.”
“You can’t listen too much to what other people say.” Then, “I don’t know how to help you. What does your mother say to all that?”
“Mom can’t help me. She sleeps all day.”
“What about your Aunt Linda? Can she tell you what to do?”
“No. She’s already busy. She has a swimming pool.”
“Twelve years old and you’ve got these kinds of complications. Your mother always had to make a point. And it’s always worse than the last one.” A moment later, he was happy with a memory. “Remember how you’d always come back from the other side of the lake with a story about monsters? You’d say, ‘And this time I really saw them.’ We always wound up laughing and running up the dock stairs, past the fish cleaner, turning around at the same time to look at the lake. That was us at the lake. We’ll be together again.”
I told him that the lake was a million miles away. But talking to him on the phone I remembered taking the ferry out on the lake, him steering and me standing next to him, breathless in the wind, how I’d help tie up somebody’s boat. Across the water we would go.
“Do you still have leg pain, kiddo?” When the aching got bad I cried, and he rubbed my legs with Mentholatum, then covered me up with a blanket and I would sleep.
“Leg pain?” I asked. “I don’t know.”
In the next phone call my father said, “Help your old Dad out and be good to your mother. Don’t worry about yourself. Your mother loves you. Do what she says.”
My mother slept on the sofa, her mouth crooked like she had been talking when she fell asleep. I didn’t want to see my mother’s mouth looking that way, babyish. We liked the way she looked on New Year’s Eve a long time ago. She had on a beautiful dress, black and sparkly, and she had on high heels. My father told her to stand in front of the fireplace. He took her picture a minute before he was supposed to and she isn’t smiling or frowning. She’s just standing there, looking beautiful and like herself and looking at him.
I sat across from my mother, counting her breaths per minute. I woke up my mother to give her her pills and made the mark on the chart. She said, “He’ll think about us and come to his senses and we’ll all be together again. This has been a rude awakening for him. He knows now how bad it can get without him.”
But I know what that means. It means I will have more problems.
Then my father called to say that Davey was going back to Ambrose. He was sending a ticket.
“That’s a good idea,” my mother said. I wanted it to be a good idea for me, too.
Then my aunt called to see how my mother was doing and told me that I had to get very good at this.
I had to figure out how to make sure that Davey goes home to Ambrose at the same time he stays here with me. The Project kids gave me the right answer.
Chapter XV: Davey Leaves
I sat on the monkey bars.
Davey and I can hardly look at each other. He said maybe he should stay at Blackberry Bluff. “You have to go, because Mom and Dad say so. It’s o.k. You should go look at where the deer lie down and write me a letter about it.”
I have that sadness, like waves rolling inside of me.
“Be sure to write me a letter,” I said again. That’s all I can think of to say.
The big news that Davey was leaving the Project traveled around fast. The Project kids walked to our courtyard through the dark with flashlights in their hands. Davey and I saw them coming. We heard all of this noise, kids talking and yelling, and we moved to our porch. Then it happened, first one, then another, sitting down on the monkey bars. The smaller kids twirled like human knots on a wire pulled tight.
The bigger children held flashlights. Davey jumped off the porch and stood in line to hit the bars.
The older kids tucked the flashlights into the waistbands of their pants and lined up behind him. The flashlights made them look like fireflies. Since the kids were twirling, you could see movements of light in circles. And light in jagged lines. I stood on the porch and watched these lights darting around across the courtyard. Nobody talked. Lights were jumping all over the place.
And then they sat on the monkey bars with Davey in the middle, their faces lit up by the flashlights. They were breathing slowly with their breath returning to normal, just in time to leave. They took off like bugs, quickly, like there was a whistle that went off that no one but them could hear.
I walked out to the monkey bars and did a wheel like we always do. Feet on the ground, I went over backwards, my hands above my head. My fingertips, which landed on the wet pavement like they were supposed to, pointed toward Davey. I saw the world upside down. Davey looked at me upside down. We were breathing exactly the same.
Then I brought up my shins up so that my feet met a bar, came up, and pulled myself out of the monkey bars.
I stood in the courtyard thinking about the Project kids. Davey took a baseball bat over to the Stimp’s porch and just left it there and walked away. They must wonder why he’s leaving and where he’s going. What sort of place was this, this place where he was going, the lake, that we had described to the Project kids? I hardly remembered it myself, that’s how long ago it was. I looked all around our courtyard and for a minute, everything didn’t look like everything else. Even the orange color of every unit looked different from the one beside it.
I sat down on the monkey bars and Davey sat down beside me. That’s when I knew that this would be the last time that he would ever sit beside me here in the Project.
That’s when I knew that I would play with the kids on the monkey bars no matter how old I am. I had that feeling of bravery again like I had when I was Cookie’s friend. I told Davey not to worry about anything more.
Two weeks later, my father’s letter to my mother came. My mother said to me, “If your father wants a wife, he knows where to find one. I won’t be signing any divorce papers. And I won’t be moving from here anytime soon. Mother has a point to make and she will make it. I’ll see you in court, buster.” My parents were enemies.