Some things you just can’t stop. Like the leaves from turning red in November. Like their loosening from the tree limbs. Like their flutter down to the ground where they turn brown and dry. Or their crunch under your bare feet when you walk through the old garden.
It’s Mama’s forty-first birthday. Aunt Dot is making her favorite dish, beef stew, and her favorite dessert, coconut cake. The cake had to set for two days in the refrigerator, and it’s been all I can do to keep Charlie away from it.
Charlie is restless and so am I. We’ve been at Aunt Dot’s for six weeks now, and we miss roaming the woods at Edisto and dipping our lines in the creek. Aunt Dot doesn’t move as fast as she used to because of her hips and the walker she has to lean on, and we don’t get to go to the park or for walks or bike rides as often as we’d like.
We do, however, go out in the old garden behind her house where there is one good climbing-size magnolia tree whose trunk stretches beyond her rooftop and several azalea and camellia bushes that are good for hiding behind or napping beneath.
Heath is allowed to take us for short walks as long as Charlie holds her hand and we watch for cars pulling out of driveways and we don’t talk to strangers, which I have no intention of doing. We are also allowed to go to Colonial Lake and to Moultrie Playground before dusk, and we can go to Mr. Burbage’s to buy a piece of candy or a Gatorade.
We can even walk to the coast guard station in the afternoon and watch the junior sailing class, dozens of little one-man boats near the seawall tacking this way and that, their bright sails flapping in the wind like a rabble of butterflies. The kids in the boats don’t look much older than me or Heath, but they do seem to have a lot more freedom than us, driving their vessels wherever the wind blows.
“I’m going to sail a boat one day.” Charlie points to a redheaded boy who is grasping the tiller with one hand and some sort of rope connected to the sail with the other.
Heath tousles his hair, and I reach for his chunky hand. If we didn’t have Charlie to look after, we would be bored and lonely and, worst of all, purposeless.
Julia visited for a few hours last week, and she left the same day. She came to talk to Mama, who is sick and quiet and resting in Aunt Dot’s guest room with several quilts across her long, bony legs. I saw Julia run down the stairs and out the back door, wiping her nose and her green eyes with the backs of her hands. Whatever Mama said or did must have upset her. Maybe that is why she never wanted to see her when she visited us last summer. Whatever Mama said or did is a secret that even I don’t know.
NOW AS I SIT IN THE TOP OF THE MAGNOLIA TREE IN Aunt Dot’s garden, sketching the rooftops and St. Michael’s steeple, I ignore Charlie’s begging me to get down and play hide and go seek.
“Ask Heath,” I finally whisper. He scoffs and walks back to the house where I hear the old screen door to the kitchen screech, then slap behind him.
I look over to one of the upstairs windows where I can see Mama resting in an old lounge chair. Her eyes are closed and she looks still. So still you would never know there is an invasion going on in her brain. A tumor growing larger by the moment, destroying the gray matter that helps her think and remember and be herself.
I hear the screech of the back door again. “Etta?” Heath has her hands on her hips and is staring up the tree. I joggle the limb a little so she knows I’m here.
“You need to set the table. I’m going to help get Mama down the stairs.”
I turn and grab hold of the knobby trunk of the great tree and climb down it limb by inner limb like a leafy ladder.
MAMA CAN’T MAKE IT DOWN THE STAIRS SO HEATH carries up a card table, and I set it up in the upstairs hallway. Charlie pulls a few chairs and stools from the bedrooms until everyone has a place.
Aunt Dot slowly carries up steaming bowls of beef stew as Mama leans on Heath and makes her way out of the bedroom door before settling herself in the ladder-back chair from Aunt Dot’s vanity.
Charlie burns his mouth on the stew right away and then he drops his spoon on the hardwood floor. I take it to the bathroom sink, wash it out, and give it back to him, and Aunt Dot tells him to drink his milk and blow on the stew before he takes another bite.
Mama tries hard to keep her head up, but it looks like it weighs one hundred pounds, and she drops it to the side from time to time. Aunt Dot brings the stew to Mama’s lips and she slurps a little and smiles. “Mmm,” she says. Then she looks to me and winks, and I know she is still in there somewhere, ducking up out of the trenches as if to say, It’s not over yet.
After supper Heath carries up the cake and we sing “Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday, dear Mama.” Then we are all quiet as Aunt Dot cuts into the cake and serves it up. She gives Charlie an extra-large piece and she cuts Mama’s up into little bites and lifts it on a fork to her mouth. Mama chokes a little on the coconut bits and Aunt Dot lifts the water with the straw up to her mouth and she slurps and nods.
The cake is good. Sweet and fluffy and whip-creamy. I remember, back when I was five, when Daddy and I tried to make the same cake for Mama on her birthday. It turned out lopsided and gooey because we didn’t know it needed to set a few days in the refrigerator. But Mama acted like it was the greatest thing she had ever tasted. She ate two large slimey slices just to convince us as the top layer slid slowly off of the bottom layer onto the table on the screened porch at the creek house.
“We did good, Etta baby.” Daddy squeezed my shoulder and I rested back into his thick, soft chest.
“Yes, you did.” Mama smiled, then she reached over and put the top layer back on the bottom as we all chuckled.
AFTER A FEW MORE BITES OF CAKE, MAMA SAYS SHE needs to lie down and Heath helps her back to the bed while Aunt Dot and I clear the table and Charlie eats a second slice before putting on his pajamas. Once the Crock-Pot is soaking in sudsy water and the dishwasher is turned on, churn-churn-churning all of the food off of the china plates, I sneak back out to the darkened garden and climb the tree so I can see the steeple at night, its soft light glowing from the upper balcony above the bells and the clock tower.
Aunt Dot says she’s been to the top of the tall, tall steeple a few times, and the view of the city and the harbor is like no other. And once, when the enormous brass bells rang out while she was up there, she could feel the steeple swaying ever so slightly from side to side.
What are the odds of a child losing two parents before they turn ten? What is the probability? What is the explanation? Even in the novels I read, a child doesn’t lose two parents, except in The Secret Garden and The Boxcar Children, of course. But Mary Lennox’s parents were never good to her when they were alive so the loss doesn’t seem so bad, and it doesn’t take long for the boxcar children to find their grandfather, who is loving and kind and willing to take care of them forever and ever.
Now I can see Aunt Dot take her place by Charlie’s bed in the twin bedroom next to Mama’s. Aunt Dot’s got the little devotional book out with the yellow, smudged pages. It’s called More Little Visits with God and she used to read it to her son many years ago. There are stories about trusting God and looking forward to heaven, and when she reads them my heart slows down and I imagine the basin of light filling a dark, cold room with warmth.
I’m scared. I’ll admit it. I don’t know what will happen to us. It’s a secret I am not allowed to know.
Now I zip my fleece up and lean back against the trunk of the tree and stare at the steeple against the indigo sky. I rub my arms across the large knobby limbs as a cold breeze rustles the waxy green leaves. What other choice do I have but to wait?