Chapter Two

On that April morning when Mama died, she had to give a singing lesson at nine at Loretta Holliday’s house. She was the soprano at Saint Sebastian’s, the Catholic Church.

“How late is it, Daddy?” I put the neon green away and tipped back my head to stroke my mascara on. It was a way I had of stalling for time, because Daddy never wore a watch. He didn’t believe in them. He and Mama both grew up on farms, and he wanted to be able to look at the sun and know the time. Not that he could; it was just his idea of himself, because his father had been able to.

I could hear his footsteps down the hall and then back. “Eight o’clock already,” he answered.

His footsteps rapped down the hall. He’d just had taps put on his shoes, and they made a ringing noise on the hardwood floor. Funny, how you remember things like that, every sound and motion on a morning when your life changes. Daddy was wearing elevator lifts in his heels, he always did, even in his house slippers. They brought him up almost to Mama’s height, and it made him feel powerful. Even if he’d been six feet tall, Mama would still have dominated. But elevator shoes were the only way he’d have even an appearance of power over a woman like Mama. She always had her own way. At least until that morning in April.

Daddy was coming down the hall again, but this time there was a different, urgent sound, his footsteps coming faster and harder, like a capgun popping.

The door to the bathroom flew open. Daddy hung there, holding on to the doorknob, his face looking like a rubber mask that had melted.

“Daddy?” I froze, lipstick at my mouth. “What is it?”

“Bernice. Bernice is in the pick-up.” Both his hands were clasped on the doorknob, one on top of the other, and he pushed himself away as if it took all his strength to move. “Call the hospital, Jubilee. Now! It’s your Mama.” And he ran back down the hall.

I don’t remember following him, I just remember the garage, then the driveway and the truck. And the smell. It was blood and perfume, a strange mix of the heavy musky scent of Ambush, and the rich, foreign smell of blood. Mama always carried a little bottle of perfume in her purse, and someone had sprinkled the whole contents over her clothes and hair.

To this day, I can’t stand certain musky perfumes. The smell of the truck will come back to me, even years later, without any reason. And then I think of Mama, of what I saw in the front seat.

She could barely lift her head off the steering wheel, but she looked at Daddy with eyes that were begging him, for help or forgiveness, I don’t know, but she couldn’t talk. “Don’t try, honey,” Daddy told her. “Don’t say a word.”

Then she let her head drop. One of her arms was hanging out of the open truck door. He jumped on the running board and tugged on her shoulder, calling her name. It was a horrible cry. Ber-ne-ece. He said her name like it was three words, drawing the “e” out till it sounded like a freight train’s wail. Mama didn’t answer. Her shoulders were slumped over the wheel of the truck, her head drooped down so low then I could barely see her face. Daddy shook her so hard she started sliding away from the steering wheel.

I can still see every movement: the shoulders collapsing even more, the head folding away like a puppet. She wasn’t my mother any more. I know I couldn’t have touched her. Daddy grabbed her, but she slid away from him, down until she lay jagged on the seat, her arms in one direction, her legs buckling on the floor. Daddy’s fingers trembled as he searched for a pulse, pressing her neck, her wrist, and then he put his ear against her bloody chest.

That’s when I saw the knife in her chest, driven in so that only the handle protruded from the great pool of red that her white blouse had become. By then her eyes had closed, and a tiny moan was coming from her mouth. I thought of a kitten when its eyes are still shut, that distant, weak sound it makes when it’s looking for its mother to nurse.

And then Daddy was practically on top of her, putting his mouth to hers, breathing into her, the soles of his elevator shoes sticking out of the open truck door. It must’ve been five seconds, but it seemed like an hour. Every detail is there, even the number on the bottom of one of Daddy’s shoes, “fifty-seven” inked in like a tattoo by the shoe repairman when he’d put new taps on the heels. The hula girl’s green skirt shook to the rhythm of Daddy shaking Mama’s shoulders.

“She’s the patron saint of red Chevys,” Mama always told Charlene and me proudly, but that morning the expressionless rubber face looked like a monster, nodding like an idiot.

I ran back into the kitchen and grabbed the telephone receiver from the wall. All I could think of was to dial zero for the operator.

“My Mama’s had an accident,” I whispered into the phone. “We need a doctor. Quick.”

“The address?” she asked. Her voice was calm, controlled.

I remembered it. 1730 Mossy Point Road.

I’m going to be late for school, I thought, still holding on to the phone. And then another thought came colliding with that one. Mama in the truck dissolved everything. School didn’t matter. Adulthood and authority didn’t matter. Everything had collapsed into quicksand. And I was drowning in it.

I stood there in the kitchen, leaning against the phone, my arms folded across my stomach like I was going to throw up. I would be late to school. Mama was going to die. Maybe she was dead already. Daddy’s life would never be the same. Neither would mine and Charlene’s.

The kitchen door slammed shut and Mrs. Guest, our next door neighbor, was holding Daddy up, guiding him to the kitchen table. She raised her chin up at me.

“Come help me, hon. Your Daddy’s gone and fainted at my door. Looks like he scraped his face.” She eased Daddy into a chair and knelt beside him, rubbing her hands up and down the inside of his arms. “Get me a cold wash rag, hon.” I dashed to the bathroom and heard the wail of a siren as I held a cloth beneath the faucet. The wail grew until the ambulance was flashing in the driveway. I ran outside, twisting the dripping washcloth. Two men jumped out of the ambulance, their feet crunching the gravel.

“Where’s the accident?” one of them asked me. Mrs. Guest wasn’t far behind. She was always eager to help people, even when they didn’t need it. “Butting in,” Mama called it, but she was quick to add that Mrs. Guest was a good woman, even though her husband had left her for a waitress in Gulfport.

“Oh, we didn’t need an ambulance,” said Mrs. Guest, looking at me. “Did you call for this, honey? Your Daddy just fainted, that’s all.” One of the men rolled his eyes, and they started to climb back inside the ambulance.

“No,” I said, half thinking if I didn’t say it, it wouldn’t be there, that body in the truck that was Mama. I pointed ahead toward the pick-up, gleaming at the dark cavernous opening of the garage. “My mother.” My voice was sticking in my throat, and I had to push the words out.

The men went forward in their white suits. Later, the moon explorers would remind me of those two men, of the way they moved toward that truck with their stretcher, all bulky and awkward. It was their trepidation, like they didn’t know exactly what they would find. Maybe it was the stench. You could smell the blood and perfume even down by the ambulance. Something as strange as moon dust in the air.

The kitchen door opened then and Daddy came wobbling out, holding on to the stair rail. Mrs. Guest ran up to him. “Harry, what’s happened to Bernice?”

Daddy braced himself against the rail. “Bernice had an accident in the truck.” They were words he would say many times that day, as if to convince himself no one had meant to drive a knife into Mama’s chest. Then he climbed into the ambulance and crouched while the medics lifted the stretcher into the back. A smear of red was drying across the side of his face, from where he’d tried to hear her heart.

Above the white sheet, Mama’s head turned from side to side, her eyes closed. I ran to her and touched her forehead before one of the medics pulled me back. Her face felt cool and smooth and for a moment her eyes flickered, as if in recognition of my fingers against her skin. A red stain was beginning to swell into the whiteness of the cloth.

“Oh my lands.” Mrs. Guest clapped her hands to her face when she saw Mama. I backed into the gardenia bush so that the branches surrounded me like a hug. In the center of the leaves nestled green gardenia buds, hidden there as if they held a mystery. Next month, I thought. Then the flowers would unfold, perfuming the yard, taking away that smell. Mama could pick a fresh one every morning to wear in her hair, the way she did when they bloomed each year.

“Get dressed, hon. Hurry now. I’ll take you to the hospital.” Mrs. Guest was talking to me.

I looked down. I still had on my pink robe and slippers, muddied from the gardenia bed.

The ambulance pulled off, spurting gravel, and the siren wailed again, like Daddy’s voice screaming “Berne-eece.”

“C’mon, sugar.” It was Mrs. Guest. She put her arm around me; her powdery perfume floated with her, light as her touch. I didn’t need her to guide me inside. I wasn’t going to faint. Instead, everything was clear and stark. Through a crack in the sidewalk, a cluster of dandelions had broken through. Those things’ll grow anywhere, Mama complained every spring. I stepped over them, careful not to brush them with my muddy slipper, and went into the house.

At the hospital, Daddy collapsed again and they put him on a cot. I called the high school to get Charlene, but the secretary wouldn’t believe me until I handed the receiver to Mrs. Guest. The assistant principal told her he’d drive Charlene to the hospital, personally.

Mrs. Guest and I waited in a nook at the end of the hall where they’d put some chairs and magazines like Field and Stream and National Geographic. I remember counting: the linoleum tiles in the floor, the flowers in the wallpaper. Mrs. Guest sat with her feet planted slightly apart so the dark brown tops of her stockings were visible.

Lying in the seat of the chair beside me was Highlights, a kid’s magazine. I flipped through it, stopping on a page with a puzzle: “What Is Wrong With This Picture?” Beneath was a drawing of a school playground. A janitor held his mop upside down, a little girl rode her bicycle backwards, and a boy slid up a steep sliding board, defying gravity, his hair waving behind him. In the sky above were both a crescent moon and the sun, but a group of children held umbrellas to fend off an invisible rain.

But the weirdest thing was what some kid had done to the picture. With an orange crayon, the kid had drawn circles around the normal stuff: the teacher reading a book to children gathered at her feet, the flowers blooming in a garden, the baby bird perched in a nest, its beak opened wide to its hovering mother.

Strange kid, I thought. She would’ve belonged in the picture, herself. Or she belonged in the chair where I sat, feeling like all the rules in my own life had been reversed. A doctor appeared at the door, and stared at Mrs. Guest. “You’re the relatives of Bernice Starling?”

She nodded at me. “This here’s her daughter.” The newspaper slithered to the floor as she got up, pushing her hands hard on the chair arms. “The husband, Harry, he’s in a room down there.” The husband, I thought, like Daddy was a character in a play. Her finger shook when she pointed down the hall.

Don’t you dare nod at me like that, I wanted to shout at Mrs. Guest. I’m not part of this.

Charlene was coming down the hall, her yellow dress standing out like a Yield sign at an intersection. Her face was pale white, her eyes round. Beside her, the assistant principal wore a stern look, like he’d caught Charlene in the girls’ restroom lighting up one of the Marlboros she smoked and he was suspending her. Yeah, I thought, we must have done something wrong, both of us. At that moment at Biloxi Baptist Hospital, Charlene and I were both suspended, but from everything, even gravity, it seemed. My head felt detached from my neck, a balloon on a string.

The doctor sucked on the temple of his glasses. Richard Powell, M.D., it said on the tag clipped to his pocket. “Come back and see your mother. She’s asking for you.”

Asking for us! Maybe she wouldn’t die. We followed him down the corridor through double doors that said Intensive Care. Daddy stood before one of the curtained stalls. I was glad he was back on his feet. He whispered, “She asked for you girls,” and pulled back the curtain for us.

But when we looked at her, lying on a high narrow bed, I couldn’t imagine how any words had escaped her body. Tubes ran everywhere, into her nose, her elbow, like a maze in Highlights. Can you find your way out?

Charlene took her hand, lying limp outside the sheet. “Mama, Mama,” she cried.

“Shh,” said Daddy.

Mama turned her eyes toward us, as if only then she realized we were there. Her lips puckered a bit, and for a second I was afraid she would cry, but she lifted her fingers and I knew she was trying to blow us a kiss. Charlene started to reach over to kiss her, but Daddy took her arm. “There’s too much equipment there, honey,” he whispered. “You could knock something loose.”

We blew kisses. “You’ll be fine,” Charlene squeezed Mama’s hand. “We’ll be waiting here till you’re well.”

But in the air there moved something almost imperceptible, so powerful and mysterious and peaceful I could feel the air swelling to accommodate it, like a tide rolling in from a foreign sea. Mama lifted her hand to point at something beyond Daddy’s head, and we all turned to look. There were only the green walls, but her eyes looked focused on something far away, as if the walls had faded into translucent curtains, the kind magicians might use to disguise a levitating body.

“What have you done for the human race, Harry?” Her lips barely moved to release the whisper.

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” said Daddy. “You can talk when you’re stronger.”

“What’s that around your head?” she asked him. Charlene and I looked, but there was nothing. Daddy put a hand to his head. “White,” said Mama.

“Aw, I haven’t gone gray yet,” said Daddy. He tried to laugh. It was a joke between them, but the words lay on the air, flat. A smile flickered over her face, and she closed her eyes, but it seemed as if she were still looking at us, only from somewhere else, beyond the bustling nurses and the dripping drugs and loudspeaker announcements. I was with her, then, behind her eyes for a moment, enough to feel the hurrying nurses and doctors’ directions as inconsequential intrusions into a quieter place, into the peace around Mama. She was going to die, I knew then, but she would be all right. Her breath came in shallow inhalations, a fragile thread connecting her to her own body. A nurse hurried over and studied one of the instruments hooked up to her.

“What is it?” asked Daddy, taking his eyes off Mama for the first time.

“Blood pressure’s falling,” she said, and jerked her head toward the doors, signaling Charlene and me to leave.

At the door, I looked back. That peaceful tide was still rolling in, a blue, enveloping wave impervious to gravity, to any of the rules we impose on the world. It was bigger than anything in the room, as if it could swallow us all, but I knew only Mama was inside its embrace.

“She’s dying,” I told Charlene, checking her face for any sign that she knew, too.

But she was watching her feet, placing her new Easter sandals carefully inside the green squares of linoleum. “She’ll be fine,” she said, but her voice was dull. “We should buy her a card in the gift shop.” We walked in silence back to our chairs and waited while Mrs. Guest made nervous talk, asking about our school, about Mama’s singing. But I could hardly listen, still feeling that strange movement, as if Mama and I were both in a bubble rising slowly above language and noise.

After a long while, Dr. Powell came in, and turned to Charlene and me with a pad of paper and pen. The bubble broke when he entered, and my heart beat faster. He sat beside us, asking our names. Charlene kept staring at the floor, as if she couldn’t hear, so I told him. “Do you have any relatives in town, Jubilee?” The bags under his eyes sagged like they carried the weight of the world. In that second, I felt sorry for him. “We’ll call them for you,” he added.

“Where’s my daddy?” I asked.

“Resting. He’ll be all right in a little while.”

Daddy had probably passed out again, so I took over. “This is my sister, Charlene,” I said, and her head jerked up, as if she’d been awakened from a prayer. “And we have Aunt Sylvia. Sylvia Tattershall. She’s an artist in New York City. She just had a gallery show.”

“Bernice and Sylvia,” Doctor Powell said softly. “Of course. The Tattershall girls.” A smile flitted across his face for a second, taking about fifteen years with it, and then his mouth fixed in a grim line. He rubbed my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes down.

“Sorry for what?” Charlene’s voice was angry.

I didn’t want to hear the answer. “There’s Uncle Clayton,” I went on, since he seemed to know the family. “Daddy’s a salesman at his furniture store.”

“The Starling Furniture Company?” He started to scribble on the note pad.

No, I wanted to say. Uncle Clayton’s the one who burns the steaks at the Fourth of July cook-out, the one who gives my mother a hug when she gets mad at us kids, and teases her out of it. Get it right, if you’re writing it down, I wanted to say. But those were dangerous facts to think about, facts that pushed me back into the fire or the flood that raged that morning. So I started thinking about something else, about those sofabeds from Taiwan that Uncle Clayton had all the complaints about last winter.

“Did you ever buy a sofabed from my dad?” I asked.

He shook his head, and the sadness in his eyes deepened, as if he were sorry about that, too.

“That’s good,” I said. “The hinges stuck.”

“They did not!” said Charlene.

He smiled again, a crescent on his lips, and he beckoned to Mrs. Guest. “Could I speak with you privately?”

She planted her feet and heaved herself up. She wasn’t a heavy woman. It just seemed as if she’d picked up some of that weight in Doctor Powell’s eyes. The two of them disappeared down the hall, but I could still hear the low drone of the doctor’s voice. The word “expired” rose above the others, and I remembered how Mama said her driver’s license needed to be renewed. Then it was Mrs. Guest: “Oh law!” she cried. “Oh my Jesus!”

When she came in a minute later, Mrs. Guest’s smile wavered at me and her eyes were watery. She smoothed my hair, then Charlene’s, pulling us both over beneath her arms. “He’s calling your uncle, sweetie-pies.”

“Mama’s dead.” I pulled back away from her and looked up into her face. It was bland and kind, like a cow’s.

“She is not!” Charlene corrected me, but her voice was scared, not bossy.

“What do we know, sugars?” said Mrs. Guest. “What do we ever know down here, anyway?” It made me think angels were watching while we floundered along, unaware of how blind we were. Maybe Mama was watching us now, I thought. The peaceful wave had rolled out, taking Mama with it.

Mrs. Guest kept stroking our heads, wordlessly.