Simone
Lion wanted to go on an airplane. Every time I told him no, it felt like swallowing a pebble and realizing once it went down that it wouldn’t dissolve, that there was no amount of stomach acid that could handle something so solid. The pebbles piled one on top of the other until my stomach felt hard to the touch and I was throwing up twice a day even though I wasn’t pregnant, just guilt-ridden and terrified.
It was Tuesday, four weeks after the hospital, and today was the day Luck’s cast would come off. I was my mother’s child even when I didn’t want to be, and I caught myself with the same cutting voice every time the twins strayed from me. I made Luck cry yesterday after she climbed a tree one-handed and stayed up there for an hour, thought we was playing hide-and-seek and wouldn’t clamber back down even after I started screaming out for her.
When I finally tilted my head up to the canopy of live oak branches my babies once found as fascinating as the concept of time and saw my little Luck crouched in the tree, I was already half-disintegrated. Once I got her close enough to reach and then finally on the ground, I grabbed her wrist like a ranger grabs his gun. Without thinking. She sobbed and only came to me for a hug after she realized mine were the only arms around.
I wanted to do better. I wanted this memory to be a blip on the highway of the childhood I’d created for them and, eventually, they wouldn’t even be able to see it. But I couldn’t promise nothing. I couldn’t promise plane rides or birthday cakes or Halloween costumes. So instead, I raged before I reckoned. I slung words like a jump rope and tripped over my own skin. I held Luck and Lion till they begged me to let them go and, when I did, I fretted over scar tissue from cuts I hadn’t caused, ’cause what if I was the source of all the ruin in our lives?
We all cope somehow and I didn’t think my vices were any worse than the next mother’s. I stopped sleeping. I drank till I went dizzy while the kids slept and I laughed more than I cried and hated myself for it. Most of all, I had conversations with Tooth in my head even when I didn’t say a word to him in person.
I’d tell him I knew the only reason he argued with the social worker to not separate the twins from me was ’cause he didn’t wanna admit he could only be their father in theory.
I’ve always been their favorite, he’d say.
When you’re too young to know the moon is a constant loop, you’re always wishing it was whole. Tell me a time they been as happy to see you as they was to think you might be happy to see them. Tell me a time you knew them well enough to know Luck’s right eyelid will fold so it looks half-shut when she’s really happy, that Lion will tell you a story with The End signaling he’s done if he cannot contain his joy in his usual silence. Tell me a time you wanted more than our outlines.
You jealous. You always wanted me more than I wanted you and you jealous they do too. You wish you could have me like that.
Before I knew better, I wanted you. But I think I really wanted you to want me but not do nothing about it, ’cause you looked at me and you saw my mother’s first child, saw the summer you fucked a girl for the first time and I didn’t know you yet, was still in the third grade.
But instead you touched me like I was a woman and I was scared. I was scared till I told myself I wanted you, that it was a miracle you wanted me back, and I never did finish reading All About Love, ’cause I knew if I read it, I’d understand that wasn’t what we had. And I couldn’t face that. I was my mother’s first child. I was still close enough to my first day of kindergarten, I remembered the color of my name tag.
You got more excuses than anyone I ever met. How you gonna say you didn’t love me? How you gonna look at our children and say I ain’t loved you back? You selfish, Simone. You always got a problem with somebody.
I’m selfish. I always got a problem with somebody. Somebody always got a problem with me. I wanted a truck for my kids and me to sleep in. I wanted a family who wanted me back. I wanted to love somebody who didn’t grow disinterested when I aged, the cushion of my cheeks thinning, my body outgrowing my favorite Juicy skinny jeans.
Call it selfish. But I showed up at my momma’s door to raise a white flag the color of honey milk and ended up worse for it. Took in another pregnant girl, who turned around and treated my family like it was a prize to be stolen from my grip. I’ve been selfless and that’s not no way to survive out here.
You stupid for letting me go. You stubborn. Not fit for mothering. You seen Adela hold a child? You seen her tuck them into bed? She’s better than you ever was.
In my head, Tooth was cruel. It was easier that way. I knew if I told him any of this, he would be soft, tell me he was hurting too, that if anyone was naive about us, it was him. He’d say whatever he had to say to get me to lean into him. But that is why I would never tell him. I knew better than to walk back into the fold of him.
I had to make my children’s dreams come true. I felt myself decomposing in the aftermath of the hospital, no light left to synthesize into another day worth trying. But if I didn’t clip the dead leaves from my shell, I was only gonna spread my diseased parts to my children. And there wasn’t no version of this life where I wasn’t willing to turn myself inside out to give them everything.
Last night, while I watched them sleep, I came up with a plan. We’d go to the doctor in the morning and get Luck’s cast off, the stitches on her scalp checked one last time, and then I was gonna take them to a plane. Maybe not one that would soar them to a landscape of snowcapped hills and peaking skyscrapers, but they at least deserved to see the airplanes that had journeyed far beyond them. I hoped that just watching those planes ascend into the sky till they disappeared from sight would begin to make up for all this. It had to.
I woke everyone up early. April and Crystal spent the past few nights with us ’cause April’s Lola was visiting and didn’t know she had a baby and her parents told her to go stay at her friends’ place till Lola was gone, and Crystal and her sister kept going at it about who was responsible for unclogging the drain in their shared bathroom. As the sun rose and revealed the paleness of the sky, my future crystallized in the dim glimpse of light.
“Get up!” I shouted.
Crystal jolted, panicked, but April continued to sleep. “What? What’s wrong?” Crystal’d already grabbed Cece and was pulling a shirt on over her bra.
“Y’all need to go,” I said.
“Us too, Momma?” Lion asked, clutching Luck’s free arm, awake and already cowering.
“Not you, baby.” I poked April till she stirred. “Get up. I need y’all to go so I can take the twins somewhere, just us.”
April was groggy but blinking open. “Oh. Okay,” she croaked.
Slowly, they each packed their bags, gathered their children’s loose pacifiers and lovies, and hopped down from the truck bed, kids held close.
Crystal yawned. “It still cool if I come back tonight? After my night class?”
I took a breath. “Actually, I was thinking the twins and I just need some time. Y’all can figure it out, right? Just for a few days? Maybe a week?”
“Oh. Yeah, of course, we’ll figure it out.” Crystal and April looked at each other and I knew they was thinking, What’s Simone doing? Why’s she being all rude? But I wasn’t being rude. I was doing what needed to be done. I was choosing my children.
Once Crystal and April were gone, I told Luck and Lion we was gonna go to the doctor and then we was going on a trip. Lion burst into tears and asked if he had to go with Daddy and Adela again.
“No, baby, Momma’s coming with you. Don’t you worry, I’ll be there the whole time.”
Luck pet the top of his head till he stopped crying. I made us all breakfast, gave them their glasses of milk, and then we piled into the truck cab.
The whole way to the hospital, Luck didn’t say a word. I tried to get her to talk, asking her all kinds of questions ’bout what she wanted to do with her free arm and what her favorite drawing on her cast was, but she didn’t say more than a word or two back. This is how she was every time we got in the car to go to the doctor’s: silent, passive, gone from herself.
When we arrived at the hospital, I made sure the parking spot wasn’t lined in red and held both of the twins’ hands as we walked in, waited for the nurse to call us, finally got brought back into the little room where the last physical reminder of what happened would be removed.
The doctor knocked on the door and then entered. He smiled at Luck like she was an infant and not the astonishing child she was and she didn’t smile back. Lion hid behind me.
“Today’s the day!” he said. “How are we feeling?” he asked me.
“I’m fine, but I’m not the one with the broken arm and the brain bleed, so you should really be asking my daughter,” I said.
His smile retreated, but he took my advice and turned to Luck. “How does it feel? Fractured ulnas are no joke, missy, but you were lucky enough to heal so quick we could take this thing off you, huh?”
She shrugged. “I just wanna climb again. Momma says I can climb again when my cast off.”
“That’s right. Your head’s healed so nice, you can run and climb all you want,” the doctor said. He looked to me and added, “With appropriate adult supervision.”
I sighed. “Can you please just take off her cast? We have places to be, don’t we?”
Both twins nodded and I felt like we were one little pack again, charging through the line of trees together, on the hunt.
“Alrighty.”
The doctor pulled out a corded handheld machine that looked like a tattoo gun from a drawer. He screwed a blade to the top and sat down on his spinning stool again, gliding right on back to Luck and me. He plugged the machine in and held it out so we could see.
“I’m going to use this to cut off your cast.”
I put my hand up to stop him from bringing that thing any closer to my baby. “Wait, you’re not gonna put her to sleep or numb her or nothing?”
He laughed. “It won’t hurt. The blade stops the moment it cuts through the cast.”
“What if it don’t? What if your blade thinks my daughter’s skin’s the same as the cast?”
He laughed harder. “I assure you the technology knows the difference, ma’am. If I used a regular knife I’d be far more likely to hurt her. It’ll take about two minutes, alrighty?”
I looked at Luck. She was afraid, so I couldn’t be. This was the mistake I’d made in the MRI room, letting her glimpse my fear split wide open and gushing from my chest. I couldn’t make it again.
I smiled at her. “Trust the doctor, baby. He’s gonna fix you up and then we’ll go on our adventure, okay?”
Luck nodded but I could tell she wasn’t sure. I wasn’t neither.
The doctor switched on the machine and the blade whirred. Lion shook behind me, Luck gripped her other hand on my knee hard enough to break skin. The blade floated down, closer and closer to her cast till it was touching it and the doctor was pulling this cutting machine down my daughter’s arm, her eyes squeezed shut, my hands struggling not to reach out and snatch the machine from the doctor’s fingers. And then it was done. The doctor switched the machine off, put it on a tray, and gently peeled the rest of the cast from Luck’s arm till it was bare.
Where the cast had been, Luck’s arm looked withered and flaky. It was lighter than the rest of her skin and scaly, but it also looked soft and wet. Like a newborn, after ten months soaking in fluid. Delicate and alien to the air, sort of bruised and misshapen.
Luck opened her eyes. Lion paused his shaking. The doctor touched her arm, asked a question or two, and rose with the same unnecessary enthusiasm he’d had when he entered the room, before whizzing right out again, leaving us alone.
“How’s it feel, Lucky?” I asked.
“Broken.” She burst into tears.
It took ten minutes of convincing before she’d move a finger, then her wrist, finally her whole hand and arm at once. It was brittle and tender and she winced, but once she saw it could move, her tears stopped and she started asking about the adventure, forgetting not to move her arm until her fingers were wiggling everywhere. I smiled.
“You’ll see.”
We drove for an hour and Luck and Lion played I spy, ’cept they didn’t understand that you had to pick something that’d stay in sight long enough for the other person to guess, so Luck kept picking highway signs and Lion kept guessing the sky till Luck declared she’d won and Lion started crying and whining, “Momma, Luck cheatin’. She cheatin’, Momma!”
I knew we was close when I started seeing planes. Just one at first, way high up, but pretty soon the planes were low to the ground and Lion spotted one and screamed so loud, my eardrum felt like it was about to burst. Luck started listing all the places she knew planes went to.
“Hawaii and Utah and Disney. Sometimes they even land in the water, you know that? Like a boat!”
“In the water?” I asked.
“Mmm-hmm, and all the people get to swim to shore.”
“That’s only if the plane crashes, baby. Most of the time, the plane lands on the ground.”
“No, that’s not true, ’cause I seen it on the TV at the hospital and the nurse says it was real. For real.” She nodded and pursed her lips like she hated to tell me I was wrong, and I choked back a smile. She was so sure. I worried I’d scared that out of her, when they was back with me and all she did was ask questions the whole first day, unsure of any answer. Unsure of the borders of her world.
I drove past the guard stationed at the entrance, smiling as he waved me by. I was worried everyone knew about me, that someone was circulating a flyer with my face on it saying “bad mother” and the caseworker’d come back to take my babies. I was haunted by the sight of his pen scratching on his clipboard. I still shivered at the absence of the twins’ skin touching mine when they rolled away in the truck at night. But I couldn’t let my haunting reverberate through them, so I ignored my fears and drove on.
I parked the truck beside a green Jeep and helped the twins down till all their little feet was on the ground.
“Where we at, Momma? This an airport?” Lion asked.
“Not exactly, baby. It’s a museum.”
The National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola was a place of legend.
I wasn’t all that much of a fan of the military or the navy or any of ’em and I’d never in my life thought about venturing onto the naval base, but one thing I knew was that the navy had planes and my children wanted, more than anything, to see a plane.
“A museum? Like for art? I can draw them a picture and they can put it up so people can come look at it and go, ‘Wow, that’s so pretty and I wonder who made it,’ and I’ll say, ‘Luck! Luck made it!’ ”
I laughed. “I like that idea. You can draw a picture when we get back in the truck, but right now we’ve got a museum to see. It’s a special museum, not an art one, not even a history one.”
They bolted ahead of me, Luck dragging Lion with her strong arm, and Luck tried tugging on the door with her freshly mobile hand but it wouldn’t budge, so Lion tried helping and still they couldn’t open it. They both looked over their shoulders, up at me, and that sight’s gotta be more profound than any museum painting ever could be, them looking at me like I got the key to the door, like I could do anything. I pressed the button that unlocked it and pulled.
Luck rushed forward into the room, but Lion stayed still. I gently touched his back and ushered him inside, toward the check-in desk, but still he walked slow, his eyes spread wide like a cat in the middle of the night, sure he’d miss something if he blinked too slow. Luck ran back to us and started talking about everything she saw.
“Look, Momma, you see the orange plane? You see over there they got statues of people but they not for real, they just statues, and you see the little plane? That one looks like it made for me, huh?”
I turned from the check-in desk and leaned down to Luck and Lion. “Stay close enough I can see you, okay? You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Luck said. Lion nodded.
I smiled. “Go on, then.”
I knew I’d done something right watching them fly into the room like that, the soles of their shoes still caked with mud, Luck’s hair bobbles clacking together, even with the one patch of hair they’d shaved that was now slowly growing back. They was so small beside the big planes, their little selves not even tall enough to reach the wings, and watching the wrinkles in the back of Lion’s head as he looked up at the propeller eased everything that had happened. They was still here. They could still look up at a plane and be mesmerized to silence.
I wiped a tear as Lion ran over and grabbed my hand with his clammy one. “Momma, you gotta see this one, over here. Luck says it’s called a Tiger and I’m a Lion!”
I followed my son through the maze of planes to where my newly freed daughter was climbing up into a Blue Angels plane and, even if I had looked away at the one time that mattered, even if I had failed and failed again for that one day that broke us all, I knew I could put us back together.
I’d made something for them today that was gonna trickle through their veins for a lifetime, and when I looked down at my daughter’s healing stitches on her pointy head as she talked, my son’s dimpled cheeks as he gazed, I knew I’d done something right.