Hazard Read online

  “Mama?” I called.

  The image of her crumbling body slid down inside me like a snake, slithering around in my belly. Cautiously, my feet moved. Padding down the hallway, I paused at the nursery, peeking into where Roddy was snoozing beneath a hill of baby blankets. Onward to my parents’ bedroom, I let go a puff of air and peered around the door. Inside, the bed was neatly made, its spread white and smooth as icing. The pillows were just as they should have been, crisply plumped and unflustered. Still, standing there in the quiet, I felt my heart slip backward. How long after my father had carried my mother to this bedroom had she lain on the mattress, unable to rise? What had buckled her so? I couldn’t remember supper that evening or whether I’d fallen asleep without my father’s story.

  My eyes slid from the pillows to the bedside table where my grandparents from both sides of the family gazed from metal frames. Their portraits soothed me. None of their faces wore smiles—they were mountain-raised and empty of nonsense—but I knew their kindness, which drew me now into the room and up the near side of the bed. I reached for the faces of my mother’s parents, Marguerite and Benjamin Franklin Lutes—“Annie” and “Grandpa” to me. Their frame was hinged at the center and I closed it like a book, pressing it to my chest as I circled the bed and gathered all the other family portraits. Shinnying up and under the blankets, my head sinking into my mother’s pillow, I spread my family around me: Annie and Grandpa Lutes, Grandma and Grandpa Combs, Mama, looking pretty in high school, Daddy, handsome in his Air Force cap, and, lastly, a trio of soft-lit images framed in a row. This last was my favorite, with Barbara Ann wearing dark curls and a pretty six-year-old smile, Roddy giggling at the camera, dimpled and toothless, as if someone was tickling his belly, and me, in the center, crowned with sunny pin curls and a shy smile, trying my best to hold still. The creamy-white mat ovaled my face the same way my mother might cup and lift my chin with her hand.

  I don’t know how long I lingered there—it wouldn’t be the only or the last time—lifting the frames like delicate plates, sliding my fingers around the silky curves of the wood. I must have startled when I heard the quick, distant sound of the back door and my mother coming into the house, her voice calling that she was back with that cup of sugar for the batter. Slipping out from under the covers, I set the portraits soundlessly back on the dresser and tables. Once more, I felt rooted and safe.

  I’m not sure how many more snows fell that winter before my worry fluttered again, this time flapping with a force that knocked me off my legs. It wasn’t long. On a chilled day in early March, I stood with Barbara Ann on the curb of the school parking lot, waiting for my mother to fetch us in the car. She was taking forever, and, out of sheer boredom, I was counting patches of black, wet soil blossoming through thick pads of snow. My mood was dark. I had been invited by my friend Darlene to her house for the afternoon, but when I asked Mama for permission that morning, she said no. Instead, we were going on a long blurry car ride to a place I’d never been.

  When Mama pulled up in the Chevy at last, I crawled into the back seat, my fingers aching from snowballs and my toes throbbing in the damp, dark hollows of my shoes. My petticoat was ripped from playing Keep Away at recess, and Mrs. Jean, my kindergarten teacher, had made me stand in the corner for heaven knows what.

  “Are we going home?” I asked, fidgeting myself into place.

  “No, we are not.” Mama clipped her words, her eyes darting to the rearview mirror, her mouth flattening into a red-lipped line. Her neatly combed curls were so dark they shimmered, blue-black in the afternoon sunlight, softly brushing against the deep pink of her collared coat.

  I blew out my cheeks and flopped against the seat. Barbara Ann twisted her neck around from the front seat, scrunching her brows at me.

  I’m thirsty, I mouthed.

  She jammed a finger against her lips, beetling her eyes, then snapped away again, her ponytail whishing against her collar.

  Mama squeezed the wheel in her slender fingers and pulled out into traffic. Beside me, Roddy stared out the window and hummed, his corduroyed legs straddling a wad of toys. For what seemed a thousand miles, we rode in silence, with me slumped against the door and my head propped against the window. I didn’t ask where we were going, or why. I sensed something shadowy driving the car, something that had to do with Roddy, but I wasn’t sure. There was a raggedy feeling about my mother, a skittery fear. Her eyes darted around like sparks, touching us, one-two-three, then zizzing away.

  When we pulled into an enormous parking lot in front of a big yellow building, we inched past a sign I couldn’t read. Circling, tires sloshing the snow, Mama turned into a space and then suddenly jammed on the brakes, bucking us around in our seats and nearly mowing down a motorcycle tucked out of view.

  “Dear Lord,” she whispered, her eyes skipping around the car, checking each of us. Her words stunned me—I had never heard her take the Lord’s name in vain.

  Shakily, shifting the lever on the steering wheel, she reversed and backed out, inching slowly down the next row and into another spot. At last, she shut off the engine.

  For several moments, we just sat there. Mama opened her pocketbook, pulled out a Kleenex, and blew her nose, then looked out the driver’s side window. Her lips moved, but I knew she wasn’t talking to me, or Barbara Ann, or Roddy. After a minute, she dabbed at her eyes and reached into her pocketbook for a compact, slipping open the latch and peering into the little round mirror. With her free hand, she plucked at her curls and bit each lip to bring back some color. Then, she clipped everything back into her pocketbook, dropped her eyelids, and bowed her head.

  I wondered if I should pray, too, but I didn’t know what to ask for. Instead, I dropped my chin and half-closed my eyes, listening to the rushing sound of melted snow running under the car; we must have parked over a drain since the noise roared beneath me like a river of rapids. Barbara Ann swiveled her head around just far enough to peep over the seat at me, glance at Roddy, and face forward again. After a long while, Mama raised her chin, pushed a deep breath through her lips, and reached her fingers for the door handle.

  My mother must have sensed the hardest moments of her life were not yet behind her. She knew how bad fortune could roam in and out, having herself survived a childhood laced with hunger and fever. In time, I would learn that she was born in the darkest hours of the Great Depression on Christmas Eve, 1930. The town where she drew her first breaths, Chavies, Kentucky, was deeply buckled and lurching from the times. The coal industry had collapsed, severing the lifeblood of the mountains and triggering a desperation and vulnerability that would define the first years of her life. When my mother was nine, she nearly died, flattened for the better part of a year with rheumatic fever, a killer in those days. Penicillin was far from finding its way into the hands of doctors in remote parts of the country.

  When I imagine my mother, a slip of a child, ill and swallowed in her bed, I see her legs, spindly and rustling like saplings beneath the covers. Her feverish cheeks, flushed bright red, are heightened by the odd pallor ringing her mouth. In the weeks ahead she would skirt even closer to death, plummeting into “side pleurisy” and double pneumonia. The story of her survival would come to me in small episodes throughout my life, revealing that, like all children who fall ill for long stretches of time, she learned to be alone in that room. By the time she emerged from her bed, she had let go of her childhood.

  Sitting in the frigid car with the engine ticking and my mother praying, I understood none of this at five years old. Only that my mother was troubled and, in some way, deeply frightened. I sensed she feared something close by, something that lurked in these buildings.

  The car door scraped open in her hand, shrieking against grit and winter rust. She stepped out into the parking lot of Denver University’s neurology clinic, hoisting Roddy onto her hip, stepping awkwardly around snow piles and stumbling once when she came to the curb. In my mother’s wake, Barbara Ann and I shuffled up the sloppy
steps to the building, slipping inside the heavy front door. We trundled down a wide hallway with too many rooms; suddenly, Mama and Roddy vanished behind a doorway, leaving me and Barbara Ann standing out in the cavernous space.

  Uncertain, I took in the long corridor and dark benches running up and down the center. Barbara Ann tugged on my jacket sleeve and we backed into the only empty bench spot left. I squished myself between her and a large billowy lady on my right, who was cradling a little girl too big to be held like a baby. The girl’s bony arms and legs spilled out from her mother’s lap and her head rolled around like a cantaloupe. I looked away, shifting my eyes and spotting a boy a few spaces down, pretzeled into a wheelchair, chin wobbling and sparkling with drool.

  “Stop staring,” whispered Barbara Ann. “It’s rude.”

  Packed so close against her, I couldn’t turn to see whether she was angry.

  “Where can I look?” I asked.

  “Down.”

  A sharp bark bounced off the ceiling and ricocheted around the room, causing me to flinch and cover my ears. Craning, I peered around to the right, casting my eyes down the row of benches. There, crouched at his mother’s feet, was a little boy, a smidgen older than Roddy, his teeth clamped down on the webbed skin between his forefinger and thumb. Blood was smeared on his lips and slathered all over his chin. His mother pulled his hand out of his mouth and glanced around, her eyes landing on me.

  Startled, I tucked myself back against the wall. Beside me, Barbara Ann’s nose was deep into Highlights magazine, her pencil scratching about the page. I dropped my eyes, folding my fingers together in my lap. My chest felt hollow and dank. There was something about the boy’s cry; it had a flattened tone, like a bicycle horn, a familiar sound. Roddy wasn’t like this boy, he didn’t chew on his hands, and yet, a deep unease entered me. An oily and ominous thought. Could this be him?

  For the first time, I felt afraid for Roddy. Pulling my knees up close to my face, I stared at one kneecap, strips of pink skin running angrily across the top where I’d pulled off a scab. Touching my lips to the raw skin, I closed my eyes and stayed there, jostled by the little girl’s melon head bump-bumping my arm. I didn’t know if a few minutes passed or an hour.

  When Mama finally came back out the door, Roddy still on her hip, her eyes weren’t right. Her mouth was white. I scrambled off the bench after Barbara Ann, scuttling past the cantaloupe girl and bloody boy. The sharp, cold air hit my face when we stepped outside and I clattered my way down the steps, keeping my eyes fixed on the tick-tock of my shoes all the way to the car. I couldn’t know that what had whitened my mother’s face, the thing she’d heard in that room, was not only shocking but wrong: that my brother had been born with cerebral palsy. She wouldn’t hear the right word—autism—for another two years.

  On the way home that afternoon, Mama drove with her head propped against the left window, as if it were too swollen for her neck to manage. Beside her in the front seat, Barbara Ann watched the road, glancing sideways every so often, her dark ponytail a worried swish back and forth along her collar. Beside me, in the back seat, Roddy made his funny whispery noises.

  “Shh, huh, shh, huh.” The seat wiggled with his rocking back and forth. His hands flapped, as if he were saying bye-bye to the back of Mama’s head.

  Reaching across the seat, I pressed both of his hands into his lap until they stilled under my palms. If I could get his body to stop flitting around, maybe everything would be okay. But when I let go of his hands, off they went again, beating against the air like two fat-bellied birds. Their fluttering, which had always made me giggle, now made me tired, and I turned my eyes out the window.

  My family was in trouble in so many ways. We were in the wrong place and the wrong time, driving home in an era that could not and would not help us. Nineteen-fifty-seven was far too early for help or understanding. We didn’t know how to intervene on my brother’s behalf, nor would we until it was too late. My mother, barely twenty-six, was far away from her own mother, who might have helped her weather the worst of this shock. And my father, by nature, was tightly wrapped, not a source of comfort for my mother or any of us.

  Faith deepened our plight. My parents fiercely believed in the will of God. They were born-again Baptists and we all lived by the language and literal teachings of the Bible. If a bad thing happened, like a brain-damaged child, it was God’s plan and we weren’t really meant to question or understand. This alone would deter my parents from pushing past their own bewilderment and seeking the help of a family counselor or a gathering of like-stricken parents, anyone who could help them see this wasn’t tied to God or sin or immoral behavior.

  And finally, my parents were mountain people, meaning they were both proud and especially prone to shame. Where they had been raised, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, the only reason for a “retarded” child was inbreeding, a condemnable thing relegated to whispers and averted eyes.

  That evening, the rooms of our duplex took on a dusky gloom. Mama’s voice murmured behind the bedroom door, talking with my father on the phone, across the yawn of miles where he was away on business. She emerged with swollen eyes, and at the supper table she strained forward in her chair, tearing up when Roddy wouldn’t pick up his spoon. He wailed and slapped at his bowl until it splattered to the floor. Ashen, my mother lifted her spoon and fed him from her plate.

  Later on, I washed the dishes in silence beside Barbara Ann. Instead of slipping outside for another hour of play, I followed her down the hallway, tiptoeing to the door of the nursery. Hovering behind her, I used my sister as I would the rest of my life: as a scrim to soften the scene before me.

  Inside the nursery, my mother cradled Roddy, rocking and rocking. Her back was toward us and her face turned away. All I saw was my brother’s fuzzy hair, sticking up beyond the blanket, whiff-whiffing in the back-and-forth breeze. My mother didn’t lift her eyes or to tell me why she was humming in a mournful voice, and I didn’t ask. Every time she rocked backward, a tiny silver-framed photo on the edge of the lamp table blinked into view. I knew its every detail. Centered in the oval was my mother, dressed in her satin bridal gown, holding onto my father’s arm, radiant, her eyes bright and face flushed in high spirits. She was eighteen, and my father, twenty-four. A wry smile touched his face, barely visible, as all of his emotions and fatherly affection would turn out to be. Side by side, they swept down the aisle toward this life.

  I couldn’t have known what I do now: that along with her delicate straight nose, her high intelligence, and her faith in heaven, my mother carried on her wedding day a desperate dream for a fresh and wholesome family—one in which everyone was healthy and well-behaved and, above all, the opposite of what she’d known. When she had lifted her high cheekbones and flashed the photographer that dazzling smile, it was as if the camera were a doorway, opening to the place she’d imagined all those childhood fevered months: her place of dreams.

  Now, standing in the doorway, watching my mother rock my baby brother and cry, as she would many times in the coming months, I knew something happy had left our family: a kind of hope—a life we were supposed to live.

  Chapter 3

  Back Seat

  Mostly in the dark hours of night, when Barbara Ann, Roddy, and I were asleep, my parents fought behind closed doors. Their muffled voices, pitched and rumbling, occasionally rattled the wall next to my bed. The only daytime signs they were cracking under the weight of their lives and the thickening horror that nothing was going to fix my brother were their features, deadened for several hours, sometimes for days: my mother’s mouth, altered and frozen into a pursed, colorless beak, my father’s jaw set, his lips grim. The clink of dishes and silverware and the whah of a door opening and shutting were the only sounds in our silent home. If voices arose, it was to instruct us to do chores or to call us to supper. Barbara Ann and I whispered and tiptoed during these times. If we wanted to talk, we wrote it down and passed notes to one another. The silence was like a dens
e body in the room, a corpse at the table.

  After one wordless supper, during which Mama did not touch her food, my parents herded us into the car. Winding down the long driveway of our duplex, we turned left, toward the city. No one said anything. No one cried. We simply drove.

  I did not know what was felling my parents. Roddy didn’t look ill; he looked the same as ever, porky and giggly. I didn’t know what babies were supposed to do, so nothing about him looked strange to me. This would hold sway for many more months until finally his lack of words would prove to me that something was gravely wrong.

  On that first evening drive, I knew to stay quiet. Neon lights squiggled from signs and placards, endless strips of stores, car dealerships, Chevron stations. We slid past them slowly, making our way through traffic as if we were on some kind of sluggish barge and my father was steering us downriver to some distant shore where people were happier. From the middle of the back seat, I could see only partially out of either window and lost track of our direction. I didn’t know we were driving in an enormous circle, lapping the city, east to Sheridan, north to Colfax, west to Kipling, and south again, to West Jewell.

  At some point, a look must have passed between my parents since, without warning, my father eased the Plymouth over to the right lane and turned out of traffic. Alarmed, I sat up straighter and peered out the front window, afraid we had arrived at some sort of hospital where we’d have to wait for hours while a doctor examined Roddy. But it was only a Rexall drugstore. My father put the car in park and my mother got out without a word, went in, and came back with a bottle of Bayer aspirin. Then, we went on.

  I understood aspirin was not the reason for our drive. It was the way my parents did not have to explain why we were spending an evening on the road. I didn’t mind that we were in the car, in the dimming light, driving aimlessly. It was a relief to be sandwiched between Roddy and Barbara Ann, where I couldn’t move or make noise. Better than tiptoeing around the house, where I invariably shut a drawer with a bang, or dropped a tube of glue, or accidentally tripped over Roddy, whose wail sometimes brought me a wordless swat from Mama’s hand.