Promise Page 8

  Jo waited. The drill in her head drilled deeper. Everything was still dark. It was as though someone had thrown a brown paper sack over her head. Was she going to be blind now? Upstairs her mother kept on slamming doors, storming around. Then her mother ran down the steps, screaming. “The baby! We need to look outside, he must have gone right through the window. All the windows up there are broken. There’s a hole in the ceiling.”

  Another long silence. Then her mother screamed once. Then dead silence again. Jo’s ears popped once, then twice.

  Now the heavy breathing stopped. “He’s gone.” Her father. He began to sob, great wrenching sobs. She had never heard her father cry.

  Jo spit more ashes. “Who? Who’s gone?”

  Then there was a scramble and she felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder. “Oh my God! Mort! What’s that in her head?”

  Her father’s hand felt her forehead, touching the thing. His fingers brushed her eyes. “You see to her and I’ll go look for the baby. Keep her still. Don’t try to pull it out.”

  Jo could feel her mother’s hands flutter gnat-like around her face, lighting here and there, pushing her hair out of her eyes. A cloth touched first one cheek and then the other, wiping, wiping. Everything was mud. She was drowning in mud. “May-May,” she whimpered. “What’s in my eyes?”

  Her mother gathered Jo up in her arms, exhaling short shallow little breaths that tickled against Jo’s face. Alice mumbled something but Jo couldn’t catch the words.

  “Mother, did you lose Tommy?”

  Alice began to rock her. “He’s not lost. Your father is finding him. He’s probably taking him to the doctor to make sure he’s all right. He’s probably taking him to Dr. Campbell.”

  THEY SAT together on the floor, Alice crying quietly and rocking her, stroking the side of her head. Every now and then something in the house crashed, then settled. Something solid but wet had started to blow in and splatter the floor. Jo began to shake with the cold, her wet nightgown sticking to her. Her fingers were icy, her teeth had begun to chatter. Her mother kept on rocking; she’d begun to hum “Lead On, O King Eternal,” the song they sang at Aunt Fan’s and Aunt Sister’s funerals.

  It had begun to pour in earnest; a freezing wind blew along the floor. Jo shook harder. “Mother, I’m cold. Shut the door.”

  “The door’s gone, honey.” Alice let go of her. “I’ll see if I can find you a coat.”

  Jo heard her mother’s footsteps going across the floor, then there was a long silence, then the sound of fumbling, gathering. “Son! Oh my sweet little boy! My baby boy!”

  Jo wiped her eyes, but everything was still black. Something nagged at her. “What? What happened to Son?”

  Her mother didn’t answer, just kept on, her voice growing weaker, as if she were gradually being buried alive.

  Jo stood up and began to stumble toward the sound of her mother’s voice. Then she heard her mother’s footsteps, moving away from her. “May-May. Mother. Where are you?” Jo was shaking so hard now she could hardly put one foot in front of the other; her forehead throbbed, a hammering, interior pain. The cast had grown mushy and heavy, dragging down her arm. Rain poured into her mouth as she called out, and she strangled on the words. Her own voice could have been mistaken for that of a little child. To her ears, it sounded distant, as though it were coming from the schoolyard playground down the street.

  She reached up and felt her hair plastered against her head. Was the roof gone too? Where would they go? What would they do? The cast had turned to putty now; she could feel it slide about on her arm like a heavy coat of wet paste. Rain, sheets of melting ice, rolled down her face. She blinked and tried to focus. Tilted her head up and blinked again. Now the mud in her eyes had turned pink. Now she could see shapes, now her mother, down on her knees, beside—who? And what was that? A spear? A wire? Sticking straight up, out of his chest, impaling whoever it was like a specimen on paper, except that this was no butterfly, this was her brother Son.

  She blinked once, then again. Now that she could see a little through the darkness, she remembered. The coat hanger in her hand, a spear. His eyes when he looked at her, hurt and lost and deeply sad, as if she’d betrayed him in some profound way, as if the tornado that lifted her off her feet (yes, she was actually flying through the air when they collided) had been her own doing. As if she’d planned the whole thing the way an assassin would plan, had honed the coat hanger, held it just so, inserted it precisely in the left lower chest, puncturing his red, beating heart (he had one after all!) so that it exploded into his chest cavity, then, she imagined, melted like snow in the sun. And now, it was done: he was dead and dead is forever, and she had been the instrument of that death. She had killed her own brother. Moreover, nobody but she herself knew this, nobody knew she was a murderer.

  It seemed impossible that she could have done such a thing, but now her vision cleared and she drew near and touched him. Under her fingertips the evidence: the curved hook of the coat hanger, all around it the dark sticky substance that smelled like pennies, and around that the motionless, fleshy hull of a man’s chest.

  Was she sorry? Of course she was.

  She picked up his hand; it was cold and wet and limp. Utterly powerless now. It felt like it had been blown there from far away, just a piece of debris, somebody else’s trash. Would her parents still love her when they found out? Because of course she’d tell; she would have to tell them. What else could she do?

  “Thou shalt not kill.” It was the first commandment she’d learned, because it was so simple, so easy to remember. Among the shortest and certainly the most easily kept. She’d never in a million years dreamed she’d ever kill somebody, especially her own brother. Not even in self-defense. She was an ordinary girl living an ordinary life in an ordinary town. And of course it was an accident, the way the storm blew her down the hall that way. The fact that she just happened to be clutching that blasted coat hanger. Of course they wouldn’t blame her. Of course they would see and understand.

  Kneeling there, holding her dead brother’s hand, the shard of glass emerging like a unicorn’s horn from the place above and between her eyes, she felt like a house with new tenants. Something had been emptied out, something filled again. How remarkable that she had done something so irrevocable, so shocking! She, Jo McNabb, was no longer ordinary, nor would she ever be. Something quite shockingly out of the ordinary had happened. In that moment, too, she suspected something even more surprising: that she’d never been an ordinary girl in the first place, that she’d only pretended to be. The pretending had been like the cotton bales she’d seen being taken off the rail cars down by the mill: huge and heavy and untidy. In that moment, too, two figures popped into her head: that washwoman and her husband, looking up at her father, his napkin still tucked under his chin, on the back step. Something old in that look, something ancient and buried. She dropped her brother’s hand; it hit the floor with a sickening slap. She got up. “Mother,” she shouted, over the downpour. “I can see now. Now I can see.”

  She looked around the room. Nothing was where it should be. Even in the dark she could see that the living room and dining room looked like her dollhouse had looked when Son, then eight, had picked it up one day and shaken all the pretty furniture she’d made onto the floor. Every piece broken. The dining room chairs were upended against the living room wall where the sofa used to be. The sofa was completely gone and the windows it sat under broken. Her father’s brown velvet easy chair sat on the dining room table, which itself sat in the foyer, in front of the opening where the front door had been. The ice and hail and sleet had begun to clatter louder now. The living room floor was turning white.

  She went around the table and stood in the open space where the front door had been. Up and down the street, nothing but black. They needed candles, flashlights, all of which were in the basement. They needed to find a dry spot. Her teeth chattered, her fingertips were now completely numb. Her mother hadn’t answered. Where
had she gone to?

  And her father. Why hadn’t he returned?

  “Mother!” she called out. “May-May, where are you?”

  Over the sound of the rain, she heard doors slamming upstairs.

  “Up here! Oh my poor little baby! Tommy! Where is he?”

  She shouted up at her mother: “May-May, can you bring me a coat? It’s in my closet.”

  “There’s no coat.”

  “It’s in the closet.”

  “There’s no closet. It blew away.”

  How could a whole closet blow away?

  The blood was still dripping into Jo’s eyes. In the doorway she turned her face to the sky, and let the ice hit it, turn the sticky blood to liquid, and wash it away again. Then she turned around to the wrecked sodden living room. In the dark she spotted splotches of white around the room. She went toward one of them and touched it, a piece of something, soaked, a man’s shirt. Her father’s or Son’s. It must have come from the laundry basket piled high with dirty clothes now that Essie came infrequently. Before little Tommy, when Essie came every day, she never let them pile up. Each day she took the dirty from the laundry baskets that Jo and her parents used; Son’s she gathered from the floor of his room, where he’d thrown them. All of these Essie put into the sheet she kept on the back porch for that purpose and tied it up for the washwoman. “In case I take sick,” she’d said, when Jo’s mother suggested she leave the task to one day a week. Could the tornado have untied one of Essie’s square knots?

  By now the blood had rolled back down. Not seeing was like drowning; she began to pant for air. Her cast had completely dissolved and her broken arm hung loose. She took the shirt and carefully wrapped it around her head in the space between the shard in her forehead, which she was now afraid of touching, and her eyes. Then, using both hands, wincing at a bolt of pain in her left arm, she tied the arms of the shirt at the back of her head. Now, at least for a while until the blood soaked through, she could see what there was to see, which was very little except for the shapes of upended furniture and her brother’s body, which oddly seemed to be growing larger each time she looked at it.

  She headed for the stairs, guided by the sounds of her mother slamming around upstairs. In the dark she ascended, first feeling for the banister on the left and finding it gone, then moving over toward the wall on the right to guide her. One stair step broke completely through when she put a tentative foot down and she stepped over the opening to the next step, marveling at the fact that her mother and father had avoided falling through to the dark beneath. Will any of us be alive at day’s end? she wondered. Son dead and little Tommy missing. Her father still gone. What had happened to him?

  She reached the first landing and turned to take the next flight up. On the second-floor hall landing she caught sight of a moving shape. “Mother?”

  “That’s it, he’s just gone. I’ve looked everywhere. I felt all around for him. I felt every inch of the floor and in the closets. He must have blown right out the window. He’s out there somewhere, in the cold. Why didn’t I hold him tighter?”

  “Daddy will find him.”

  “I’m going out there to look for him.”

  Jo climbed toward her mother’s voice. As she ascended, she heard the hail stop and the rain start; then the rain was rolling down her face. She looked above her. There was a broken window over the upper landing; the downpour and a freezing wind almost knocked her off her feet. She could feel shards of glass under her saddle oxfords. She’d always hated those shoes, but now she was grateful for them. Over the downpour other sounds now: screams, sirens, shouting.

  “Mother, don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me in this house by myself. I can barely see a thing. There’s a piece of glass in my head.”

  Her mother was coming down the steps toward her now, breathing hard. “I’ve got to find my baby boy. One boy dead, the other gone. My fault. Nothing but my fault. Why did I let him slip through my fingers? What kind of mother am I?”

  Jo reached up through the darkness and touched her mother’s breast, then her hand. Jo clutched at the hand; it slid through her wet freezing fingers. “May-May, come on downstairs with me. I need you to look after me.”

  “You stay with Son. Maybe he’s just in a coma. Maybe he’ll come to, people come out of comas every day. Maybe Daddy will be back with the baby. Get a blanket ready.”

  “Something’s stuck in my head, May-May. I’m bleeding. What if I die too?”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Jo. You’re not going to die. You’re just going to have an awful scar once the doctor gets the glass out and stitches you up. You’ll just have to wear bangs the rest of your life.” Her mother let out a weird chuckle, as if this were all a joke and Son downstairs was going to rise like Lazarus from the dead and little Tommy wasn’t in the next county.

  Her mother passed her by and headed on down the stairs.

  Jo had just opened her mouth to tell her mother about the missing step when she heard a crash. Her mother screamed once; then there was nothing except the sound of the rain. Jo listened, then descended, slowly, slowly, barely touching her foot onto the stair step ahead of her until she came to the missing one.

  She leaned down and felt around. There it was: her mother’s leg, caught in the opening where the step had been. Jo touched a shard of the wet, jagged bone. Her mother’s leg had gone through the broken step, while her body had fallen forward, downward. The leg had snapped at the midpoint of the tibia, between the knee and ankle.

  Jo went down a couple of steps to where she thought her mother’s head should be. She bent down and felt around for Alice’s face, and when she found it, she put her fingers on her mother’s nostrils. Alice was still breathing. Jo felt her way back up to her mother’s foot. She couldn’t see it. A flashlight, a candle. She needed a light.

  She got up and went on down the steps. Then she walked around into the hall to the alcove under the steps where the telephone was. The phone rested on the wooden student desk Alice had picked up from Tupelo High School surplus and refinished. It fit the space under the stairs perfectly. Panting now, Jo sat down at the desk and picked up the phone. Of course it was dead. Why had she bothered? What an idiot she was.

  Behind the phone and hall closet was the door to the basement, the steep steps leading down, the ones she was always afraid of slipping on, plummeting headlong into the silent gloom of the basement, with its spider webs and old magazines and now-quiet monster of a furnace and the cluster, on a tower of stacked boxes, of candles and matches and flashlights. The pack of batteries.

  Again she touched each descending step before trusting it. If she fell, there’d be nobody left, nobody to see about her mother.

  It seemed to her that she was descending into an underworld. Once her feet hit the dirt floor of the basement, she walked straight ahead, her good arm outstretched, to the stack of boxes, under the ground-floor window, matted, she knew without seeing, with messy, dense webs, webs with no discernible pattern, the kind black widows make. Her toe touched something and she reached down. There they all were. She gathered the flashlight and batteries first, then a candle, which she put under her arm, and some matchboxes, which she placed carefully in her mouth, between her teeth. She turned on the flashlight. How dry the basement was! How dusty! And so warm. She felt the warmth gather her in. How she wanted to sink down into it, just for a little rest, just a moment’s rest. She felt suddenly dizzy, a bit nauseous. She sat down on one of the steps.

  It occurred to her that the basement might be leaking so she pointed the flashlight upward. Then she saw it: her mother’s foot, hose rolled down to the ankle, sticking through where the upper stair step had been. It was moving, wiggling, very slightly. Something out of place, something alive where nothing should have been. It was as if a snake had appeared over her head.

  She rose shakily and grabbed hold of the banister and started back up, watching each step, but moving fast.

  When she got to the top she headed aro
und the corner again, and set down the candle and matches on the desk. Then she turned back to the stairs leading up and pointed the flashlight. As she’d first thought, her mother had fallen headfirst, both arms flung out to catch herself as she fell. The leg had snapped like a twig, the way Jo’s arm had, except the leg looked like a jagged saw had cut into it after the initial break. She wondered if the leg could be saved. Facedown, Alice was moving a little now, making feeble snuffling noises into the step. She reminded Jo of Snowball’s kittens.

  Jo climbed to the point in the stairs where her mother’s head lay, then farther up to the broken step, where she turned her attention to her foot. “May-May,” she said, “I’m going to get your foot loose. It may hurt but be still. Just lie there. Lay your head down.” Her mother the grammarian was a stickler for the proper usage of lie and lay. Jo used them correctly without a moment’s thought.

  Blood poured from the wound, obscuring the protruding bone. Jo put both hands around her mother’s ankle and tugged, once, then twice. Alice screamed once and passed out. The foot didn’t budge. Jo grabbed the flashlight with her left hand and took a good look. A splinter of wood had punctured the foot, holding it in place. With her right hand, she pulled on it. The foot gave a little, then a little more. Now she could wiggle it back and forth in the sickening flesh. Jo wondered if she should be further wounding the foot, but what choice did she have? She continued to push at the splinter.

  The leg quivered. Jo had gotten her Campfire Girls first-aid badge. She knew Alice was in shock and needed to be dragged off the stairs and covered. The leg needed to be splinted; her mother was in danger of bleeding to death or dying from the shock.

  Jo’s left arm, taking the weight of the flashlight, had begun to flare. Jolts of pain, coming in waves. She put the flashlight down and kept on wiggling the splinter; finally, when she felt it give and break off, she took the flashlight up again and peered down into the hole. The foot was loose; she lifted it with her good right hand. Her mother’s weight shifted and began to slide. Alice was at the midpoint of the first and longest rise of stairs. With the foot now free, she was in danger of sliding down the steps headfirst, landing on her head, the broken leg bumping along behind her.