It was summer now and we did not rush off to school together as we’d done all year. I went to Ingrid’s room, pushed aside the white, filmy curtains surrounding her bed and jumped in. She rolled the other way.
“Wake up!”
“It’s summer. Go back to bed,” she groaned, half asleep.
“Come on, Ingie, get up!” I suddenly felt as if I hadn’t seen her in ages, my original playmate, my scholastic cheerleader. I wanted her to wake up so we could gossip and giggle like we had before I had become so embedded in my other world. She groaned and stirred.
“Oh, you’re back,” she said, finding consciousness. “Ma is in the hospital.”
“I know. We should go today.” Ingrid had her driver’s license and Daddy’s old car.
“Yeah, okay. But we have Katrine until Mother gets home. That is, actually, you have Katrine. I had to play with her yesterday. Three hours of Barbies.”
“I know.”
She sat up, swollen around the eyes, and stared out the window. She had probably been up until midnight, watching reruns of Clint Eastwood movies.
“What did you do last night?”
“Nothing. Watched TV after I put Katrine to bed.” Yep.
“I’ll make you some tea,” I offered.
“That would be good.”
When Mother came home, Ingrid and I were sipping tea while Katrine colored in her Barbie coloring book at the kitchen table. Mother’s eyes were tired.
“You two can go ahead to the hospital,” she said to Ingrid and me.
“Can’t I come?” said Katrine.
Ingrid and I exchanged glances, preferring to have some time together to talk without fear of Katrine announcing everything we said to the world, namely our parents.
“Take her with you,” Mother said.
“What have the doctors been saying?” Ingrid asked.
“They’re still unsure. It will take a week or so to get tests back and then we’ll see. They’ll release her tonight. Daddy and I will pick her up and take her home to Pop.”
* * *
Ingrid’s spike-heeled shoes clicked down the hospital halls as we left Ma’s room. We were quiet. Nothing scary had been told to us but somehow, we expected it might come. Ma’s cheery mood had been a little unnerving. Like a secret.
“Can I sit in the front?” Katrine asked when we got back to the car.
“No,” we both said.
Ingrid put on the radio. And turned it off again. She let out a heavy breath.
“What do you think?” she asked me.
“What does she think about what?” said Katrine from the back seat.
“Nothing,” said Ingrid.
We got off the freeway near Doheny Beach and drove by the railroad tracks. The ocean lay flat and clear blue where it met the sand. A hundred white shorebirds stood still. The train rushed by, blocking our view with its noisy flicker.
I remembered trying to fall asleep one night in Ma’s big double bed. I had heard the train whistle all night. I listened as long as I could to the rumbling deep down the tracks. And in the morning, the church bells from the San Juan Capistrano Mission would wake the finches in their bamboo house. They would flutter, beep-beeping about the perches, scratching and ringing the little bell above their swing. And soon after, I would hear Ma’s voice admonishing Pop in a harsh whisper for something he had or hadn’t done. Then bacon would fry. Biscuits would bake. I would wake up in the happiest place I knew.
At the hospital in San Clemente, Ma had seemed happy. I wondered if it had been only a show she put on for the sake of the children. Ingrid drove down the highway staring forward as if she didn’t see the road. I felt the future coming in a way I had never experienced it before. Until I saw Ma in the hospital, tomorrows had always been exciting and promising. Now I had to wait a week to know if I could go back to visiting a small apartment in San Juan Capistrano with black and white finches and church bells and trains. And I was afraid of that week. I didn’t want it to come.
A banner hung on the fence near the harbor announcing Crosby, Stills and Nash at a Doheny Anti-Nuclear rally on the weekend.
“Look at that, Ingrid,” I said as we sailed past, “CSN at a nuclear rally.”
“CSN here?” she said, sounding far away.
“Are you guys going to go to a concert?” asked Katrine.
“Maybe,” I told her.
“Can I come?”
“Katrine, you’re too young to go to a concert,” Ingrid told her.
“You guys always treat me like a little kid,” said Katrine. She folded her arms over her chest and pouted. We drove down Pacific Coast Highway, passed the harbor and the road that led to our high school, toward home.
“Maybe it’s not that bad,” Ingrid said, finally.
“Maybe,” I said. “She didn’t seem too sick. It’s just weird. She’s always been so healthy.”
“Let’s try not to worry before we have to.”
“Is Ma going to die?” asked Katrine. Ingrid and I exchanged glances.
“Everyone dies sooner or later, Katrine,” I told her. She was quiet. Ingrid gave me a sarcastic nice-going look. I shrugged back at her.
“Ma didn’t look like she was going to die to me,” Ingrid told her.
Back home, I disappeared into my room and closed the door. I found an old school notebook with some blank paper left inside. I couldn’t think any more about Ma. I was beginning to confuse every pure emotion I had felt in the last two days with every new fear. Words that passed between Rebecca and me haunted my thoughts even in the hospital hallways.
I had to think about Rebecca. It wouldn’t wait any longer. And I had to talk about Rebecca. But there was no one to tell. So, I wrote about her. I wrote for her. At an old dark wooden desk that squeaked from the pressure of my pen.
Words leaked from me like tears and sweat. I did not think or hesitate but poured onto paper as fast as they screamed in my head. Each letter on the page satisfied me. I formed them and scribed them. I loved the ink and the flow. Here was white that was silently bleeding black from under my pen. It was almost, I thought, like making love must be. The release was like that, or so I had heard.
There was a knock on my door. The interruption was intolerable. My dad poked his head in.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing,” I said. I did not mask my annoyance.
“Excuse me!” he said, “Your mother needs you and Ingrid to make dinner and take care of Katrine while we pick up Ma. I think Ingrid’s done her fair share these weeks, don’t you?”
“Alright. Just a minute.” I was definitely not done.
“Now,” he said.
I knew better than to cross that tone. That night, Katrine crept into my room.
“Anneliese,” she whispered. I wasn’t sleeping either. “Does everyone really die sooner or later?” I was amazed that she had arrived at ten years of age without ever digesting this fact.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s just natural. You know, like birth.”
“Can I sleep in here?” I scooted over in my single bed and she climbed in.
“Why do they die?”
“The body stops working I guess. Like an old clock or a car.”
“Daddy always says if you take care of a car, it will run forever.”
“Well, if you take care of your body it will run for a longer time. But I don’t think he truly meant forever anyway. And then there’s illness,” I said, “Sickness. And then... some things just happen.”
I thought of Ma sitting up in the hospital bed. I thought of her scurrying across the bridge and the railroad tracks and of everyone who knew her at the stores she visited. Katrine read my thoughts.
“Ma takes care of her body. She walks to the store every day.”
“I know.”
“Can it even happen to kids?” she asked.
I wished for the liberty to lie to her. But I decided she was too old for fairy tales.
“Even to kids,” I said quietly. I could feel fear building in her.
“But not usually,” I added, “it’s very rare that serious sickness happens to kids.”
In the darkness, her breath gasped now and then. I knew she was crying. I didn’t have words for her. I waited until her breathing relaxed and she slept.
Later in Katrine’s life, she would know a boy and she would love him. She would trail him at school and hope he would notice her. And one day she would have to visit him in the hospital, sick with leukemia. He would tell her that he did not believe in God and that she would have to let him go. Then he would go away from her, forever, but she would hold onto him for the rest of her life.
I crept out of bed to see if Mother and Daddy had come home. I found Mother at the kitchen table with a glass of scotch on ice. I heard my dad snoring from down the hall. Mother’s eyes were red.
“Don’t worry yet,” I told her, sitting next to her and hoping Ingrid’s advice would distract her.
“I know,” she said, “I just don’t know what I’d do without her.” She put her head down on her arm and began to cry.
“I don’t either,” I told her. My own tears fell then, onto the table, dripping steadily. I covered her hands with mine.
“It might be fine,” I said after a while. “A stomach ulcer maybe.”
“I know. I have never given much thought to losing her. I’ve never lost anyone I loved.” I hadn’t either.
“Thank you for your help with Katrine,” she said, muffled. “Has she been a pain?”
I suddenly felt very guilty.
“She’s been pretty good, but it was mostly Ingrid. I’ve been away a lot.”
“You have, actually. I’ve missed you. Ingrid’s missed you, too.”
I was torn. I couldn’t wait until class, still two nights away. But I promised myself I would be there for Mother until then. That I would try not to think of the studio. That I would ride bikes with Katrine and stay up late with Ingrid. And I would go to see Ma in the morning.
“Why don’t you go to bed now, Anneliese?”
“Are you going to go to bed?”
She reached across the table, picked up my father’s corncob pipe, and looked at it for a while.
“Not quite yet,” she said.
“You really should,” I told her.
She put the end of the pipe in her teeth. She looked silly. I smiled.
“Have you ever smoked?” she asked me.
“Once or twice.” It didn’t seem at all necessary to lie. There were much bigger things at hand.
“Have you ever smoked?” I asked her.
“I tried it once when I was 19. I just coughed,” she admitted.
“I didn’t much like it either,” I told her.
“You tried it at the studio, I imagine?”
It was the truth. But I knew it would further color her opinion of the studio and the company I was keeping.
“No,” I lied then to protect my other life, “Hannah and I tried it once.” My mother loved my childhood friend. I figured she was a safe alibi.
“Where did you get the cigarettes?”
“From a machine.”
“Figures she would try something like that,” said my mother, smiling and instantly forgiving both of us. “I’m glad you didn’t like it.”
“I’m glad you didn’t like it either,” I told her. I got up and hugged her and went to bed.
From my bedroom, I heard the door of the liquor cabinet open again. Liquid gurgled into her glass. That was a lot of scotch, I thought, having felt its effects once. But she needed it, I supposed.
* * *
Katrine was full of energy in the morning.
“Will you do something with me?” she asked.
I glanced to my desk. What I wanted to do was write. I thought of Mother last night, the pipe in her teeth.
“Okay, what?”
“Ride bikes?”
“Okay.”
I hadn’t meant to go all the way to San Juan, but once we were on Emerald Bay Parkway, we kept on going. The same railroad tracks that ran behind Ma’s house reached into our town as well. We heaved our bikes over a chain link fence and skidded with them down a dirt embankment to the tracks. Alongside of them ran a cement wash where we peddled, unthinking, toward San Juan Capistrano. It was as if something pulled us along and we did not question it. I thought for a moment of what I had told Mother as I went out the front door. “I’m going to ride with Katrine,” I had yelled, giving no time or destination. Sometimes, Katrine and I would be out for hours. I would call her from Ma’s house.
The ride south to San Juan took us two hours. The day was warm and dusty. Katrine began to fade behind me.
“Come on, keep up!” I yelled to her.
“I’m trying but you’re going too fast!” I slowed a bit until she rode beside me.
“We’re almost to Ma’s house, aren’t we?” she said.
“We might as well go all the way there,” I told her.
She smiled. Seeing Ma was just what Katrine needed. It was just what I needed.
Where the wash met the old part of San Juan, we crossed the rocks at its base and struggled up the other side. Another chain-link fence. We heaved our bikes again, climbed over and stood across the street looking at her front steps. Katrine hesitated. She was frowning.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her.
“I’m afraid to go in.”
“What do you think will happen?”
“Can someone catch what’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t think so, Katrine.”
“I want you to be sure.”
“Okay then, I’m sure. Come on.”
We crossed the street and went up the steps leaving our bikes on the sidewalk below. We knocked lightly on the screen. The door was open to let in whatever summer breeze might blow through. The bees hummed over our heads in the red bottlebrushes. We peered through the screen.
Ma came from her bedroom a little more slowly, I thought, than usual.
“Oh!” She was startled and clearly angry with us. “I just spoke with your mother. She thinks you’re out riding your bikes!”
“We were, Ma,” I said, “they’re down there!” I looked to the sidewalk. She opened the screen and ushered us inside.
“You get on the phone and call your mother, right now!” Katrine and I were disappointed with the reception.
“Who’s there, Flos?” said Poppa, from the hall.
“It’s the kids!” she yelled.
“I was going to call her as soon as we got here, Ma, we just got on our bikes and kept going and figured we’d come all the way.”
“All by yourselves?” She was frenzied and I was feeling a little miffed at her.
“Ma, I’m sixteen years old. It’s not that big a deal.”
“Oh, I suppose. But I worry so about you all. Don’t go doing that anymore. And call your mom.”
I sighed audibly and picked up the phone. Even Ma wanted to keep me in childhood. I explained our ride to Mother who wasn’t concerned.
“Katrine rode all that way?”
“She’s fine.”
“Thanks for entertaining her today. I didn’t really have the energy. Sometimes she takes a lot out of you.”
“I know,” I laughed. “What’s Ingrid doing?”
“Sleeping in.”
“Okay. We’ll be home before dark.”
“Leave by 2:00, no later.”
“We will.”
“You see,” I said to Ma, “not a big deal.”
“I forget you’re grown-up,” she said. “I’m sorry.”