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  The vacuum came into view, abandoned at the base of Barbara Ann’s bed. It was an upright with a long belly of a bag, and its pig nose, still vibrating near the floor, rattled little bits of paper and dirt. On the bed was the body of my mother, flung backward. Her face was turned to the wall. Both of her hands were clasped over her chest, heaving up and down with her breath.

  Barbara Ann spoke softly, “Mama? Are you okay?”

  Our mother didn’t move. The up and down of her ribs was the only sign she was alive. I sensed she didn’t hear us or want to know we were there.

  After a moment, Barbara Ann took a step further into the room, reaching her hand toward the vacuum and flipping it off. Its gears groaned and, with a long keening sigh, it fell silent. She waved me backward and we shuffled out into the hallway, pulling the door closed with a soft click.

  Seeing my mother splayed that way was like seeing her fall again—as she had so long ago, folding to the ground at my father’s feet. Something had broken in her then, and now, I saw she was still broken. A glimmer of something that would take me more years to fully understand glinted in my mind. It wasn’t so much me or Barbara Ann she was railing at; instead, she was lashing out at her life. The unfairness of being trapped inside a place she hadn’t foreseen and that now yawned before her like a vast stretch to the horizon. Between here and the end of her days lay the relentless needs of a disabled child, and the fear that maybe she didn’t know how to be a mother or how she would ever help her son.

  I couldn’t do more than simply sense this about her, and I didn’t want to know more. The deeper I saw into my mother, the more hopeless I became. By January, I no longer wanted to go to school (thanks to Mrs. Larson, who continued to ignore my raised hand, call on Lynette, and tell me sharply to wait my turn) nor did I want to be at home. I gave up on all of the days of the week, except for Sunday. Though the Sabbath carried a trying set of givens for me—scratchy petticoats, severe ponytails, hours of hard, cold sitting—it was the one place where life wasn’t muddy with confusion. I didn’t have to figure out how to make my mother happy or how to follow Mrs. Larson’s rules. There was only one rule and it was clear: I simply had to believe.

  In March of that year, with snow deep on the ground, I sat fiddling with the tissue pages of my Bible. It was 10:30 in the morning at Lakeridge Baptist Church, and I sat in the third pew, listening to my mother sing. She stood at the pulpit in her lavender print suit, taking deep breaths and sending out song. She had a beautiful voice, a euphonic, sweet soprano that fluttered over the congregation. As always, I was vaguely startled to hear her sing, aware I was seeing and hearing a part of her that wasn’t really mine. Though we had a piano in our living room at home, my mother rarely played, nor did she teach us children’s songs or ever burst into happy lyrics herself while moving through the rooms of our house. It was only in church that she turned into a songbird. My father, who was tone deaf and couldn’t for the life of him hold a tune, was the one much more likely to burst into song while strolling through our house, belting out Mel Tormé songs or his favorite. Oh, Danny boy …

  “Blessed are we to have beautiful voices in our flock,” Pastor Bill said, as my mother stepped down from the pulpit and slipped into the pew beside me and Barbara Ann.

  I shifted and sighed. The hard oak pew pushed against the knobs of my spine, and my bottom felt bloodless and numb. Barbara Ann nudged me, sliding her New Testament into my hands, the fancy one she’d gotten for her thirteenth birthday. It had illustrations of Jesus in Gethsemane, feet smothered in lambs. But not even this seemed enough to hold my attention.

  Glancing around, I spotted Ruthie Belcher, a girl my age, further down to my left, leaning forward in the pew. She gave me a moist smile, her pale lips parted and pulled slightly downward, as if each corner of her mouth were tacked to her chin. Her cheeks were spongy and her skin was a faint, whispery gray.

  I smiled wanly and looked away. Ruthie frightened me. When she was a baby, she’d caught a bad case of measles and the high fever had burned part of her brain. Now she had epilepsy—not the quiet sort, but big, rocking fits that knocked chairs and crashed plates and sent her head and spine slamming to the floor. Only last week, during Wednesday evening fellowship, I’d heard a commotion back near the potluck table, and a plate of brownies had skidded off the table cloth and bounced into shards and crumbs. Jumping up, I saw grownups huddled around Ruthie’s chair. All I could see of her were her shoes trembling near the floor.

  Now, I scooted to the edge of the pew and stared down at my feet. Lately, my own body had started to do strange things. Yesterday, I’d learned that I was having night terrors, scrambling up in the middle of the night, talking and yanking at Barbara Ann, entreating her to go with me somewhere, and then fleeing into the darkened hallway clear down through the living room. I had no memory of doing such a thing, and still wouldn’t have known if Daddy hadn’t teased me as I had headed off to bed.

  “’Night, S’marge,” he’d said, his pet name for me coming over the top of his newspaper. “No more of that running around, right?”

  Confused, I’d stood blinking in my PJs, heat crawling around my ears.

  “You don’t remember?” Mama said, her tone light and doubtful, taking my shoulders and turning me toward the bedroom.

  “You had a nightmare,” Barbara Ann whispered as we trundled down the hall.

  My stomach shifted as I shuffled beside her.

  “How do you know?” I whispered back, looking at the floor.

  “You were screaming. A lot.”

  Mortified, I slipped into bed, and Mama shut the light, retreating back down the hall. Barbara Ann said into the black silence, “You’ve been doing that all week.”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I packed my stuffed animals three-deep on either side, pulled the covers up to my chin, and turned to the wall. I didn’t want to know something or someone could be inside of me, someone hidden, whom I didn’t know, and who got me up in the middle of the night.

  Now, a folded note slapped my elbow and bounced onto the pew seat. I darted my eyes to Ruthie, knitted my brow, and shook my head, fiercely, long enough to see her eyes dim and her face drift back out of my sight, behind her mother’s shoulder. I knew what the note said. It was inviting me over to her house after church. I didn’t want to go. Not now, not ever. Her house was too much like mine: somber, silent, a carpet of sadness throughout the rooms.

  Pastor Bill’s voice wound down, and I knew without looking that he was raising both hands, lifting us to our feet.

  “All ye who are weary, Jesus softly calls …”

  I stood up, the congregation rattling around me, my limbs tingling as blood crackled through my veins and woke the wooden parts of me. Suddenly, I was aware of everything beneath my skin, my bones and blood vessels, and thick tangles of nerves. I didn’t know I was clutching the hymnal with both hands and staring at the cover until Barbara Ann pulled it from my grip and hastily started flipping to the right page.

  “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me …”

  Barbara Ann held half of the hymnal toward me, and I took hold of it as Mama’s voice lifted again into song. I felt myself lean toward the longing of the words, the tender lilt of the notes rising off the page. Everything was held within: love and tenderness, safety, a blanket of soft dreams.

  “Come take your savior’s hand, He’s holding it out for you …”

  A rustling beside me and a change of bodies bumped my arm. I felt Ruthie materialize beside me. She’d switched seats with her mother and now she pecked at my arm with her finger. I twitched my elbow away from her but tore my eyes off the hymnal, following her finger now poking downward to the floor. There, her foot was pressed up next to mine, our ankles all but touching, and our shoes, polished white, polka dotted and bowed, were exactly alike, as if our feet belonged to the same person.

  “Whatever your troubles are today, whatever darkens your soul, hand it to Jesus …” croo
ned Pastor Bill, extending the traditional call to sinners to come forward and be saved.

  I wanted to be as far from Ruthie Belcher as my feet could take me. For a blinding moment I sensed that, beneath my skin, she and I were exactly alike. We were bundles of nerves and bone, with a spongy orb of brain stuff that might burn with fever, or as Roddy’s had, grow wrong in the womb.

  I pushed the hymnal into Barbara Ann’s hands and shoved past her and my mother, stepping out into the center aisle. It looked like a smooth runway, a wide slide toward a place without holes or questions. My feet flew past the pews and headed toward the altar.

  Pastor Bill’s eyebrows lifted as he saw me coming. Leaning down, he took my hand, enveloping my fingers between his palms, like two soft pillows.

  “What brings you here today?” he murmured into my ear.

  I lifted my lips and whispered, “I want to go to heaven.”

  To another life—to safety—was what I meant to say.

  “And what must you do before you can enter the Kingdom of Heaven?”

  I told him the answer, the one that would get me into heaven.

  “I accept Jesus as my Savior.”

  He nodded, pressing my hand and guiding me over to his side. I stood, pushing back tears, swallowing hard at the knot bouncing in my throat. At last, here was what I needed—protection from the fits and forces that sent me stumbling through the night.

  Chapter 6

  Monkey Bird

  Early on, I learned how to move through our house without making a sound. I didn’t know what to do for my mother, covered as she was beneath the bedspread, her face blanketed with an icy cloth. If I knew anything about her headaches, it was that the smallest sliver of noise plunged like a knife blade into her temples and for hours she needed the black silence of a tomb.

  One Sunday afternoon in June, I slipped through our screen door with the softness of a thief. Better to be outside where I couldn’t disturb Mama. I was about to turn eleven and my early birthday gift, The Adventures of Lassie, was tucked under my arm. It was my very first hardcover book, a gift from my parents, and I wanted not only to escape the dark entombment of the house but also to find a special place to settle in and open to the first page.

  Heading in my usual path, around the garage, I was drawn by the buzz of cicadas and darting flashes of dragonflies crisscrossing the half-acre field beside our house. We lived on a two-acre lot far out in the country, just past a bend in the road. Ours was a small ranch house painted soft lavender, the color my mother loved. The house itself wasn’t much to see, but for me it was a glorious place. A wild, weedy field circled around the back, and in front, shielding us from the occasional ambling car, were four towering cottonwood trees. Their cool promise of shade and secrets harbored in the ditch at their feet drew me down the driveway. In no hurry, I zigzagged, watching the dirt puff up around my feet, unaware that within minutes I’d discover a way to fly.

  My favorite cottonwood wore a raggedy lightning scar down one side. Reaching its trunk, I pressed the open face of my palm against its gray furrowed chest. Its years of growth pushed back against my hand, and for several moments I didn’t move. I sensed something, my first inkling there were things in the outside world I might go to for comfort. Leaning in, I lifted my eyes and saw the lowest branch flexed like an arm, dipping just deep enough for me to leap and grab onto its elbow.

  Swiftly, I glanced over my shoulder at the house, darting my eyes from window to shuttered window, and confirmed no one was watching. I didn’t know if I was allowed to climb; the rules of what girls could and could not do and how they must behave, especially Baptist girls, baffled me. Already, I had learned what I needed to do to have adventure: namely, act fast and stay out of sight. Tucking my book into my waistband, I planted my feet at the edge of the ditch, hinged my knees, took a deep breath, and sprang up, flailing my spindly arms for the sky.

  The rough bark of the branch burned my palms as I squeezed and dangled there for a moment, high above the earth. Then, clenching my belly, I swung a scabby leg high enough to plant one heel in the V of the trunk and hooked the other leg up over the limb. In another moment, I was up and scrambling higher, three branches more, until I reached an upper leafy platform. The flat bench of the branch fit my haunches like a saddle, and once I settled into place, my spine pressed back against the trunk, I sank into the scents of moss and bark, the tingle of leaves dancing along my ears.

  Up here, the world was mine. Swooping my gaze back and forth, I scanned all there was to see beyond the borders of my yard. To my left was the rumpled rise and dip of the pond basin across the road, unseeable from the ground; straight ahead of me, the shallow slope of valley spilled down toward Bear Creek; and on my right, farthest away, was the Devil’s Backbone, a bony spine of rock rising from the prairie, and behind it, the hulks of mountains.

  Giddily, I closed my eyes and inhaled the smell of leaves. I felt like a tree dweller, capable of knowing everything that birds, monkeys, and flying squirrels already knew: that human troubles were small, little more than faint scratchings in the dirt. Hordes of grownups could shuffle beneath me and never know I was there. The limbs of the next cottonwood were so close that if I were to leap gently, barely lofting off my perch, I could float and land comfortably in its arms, leaves holding me like water, washing me in green light, catching my fall. The rough and ugly edges of the roots and ground below would be a million miles away, no threat to my airy bones.

  “Margie Ray?” I heard the screen door crank open.

  I held my breath. My mother’s darkly coiffed head popped out from behind the screen door and swiveled as she scanned the yard. Her eyes were hooded and her lips colorless. Seconds passed. I knew she couldn’t see me, and for a moment I considered staying quiet, foreshadowing what would grow into a deep pattern.

  “Yes, Ma’am?” I said, giving in.

  Her head flipped to the left where the gas tank hulked behind a bundle of shrubs, and then she looked back down the driveway, brow furrowed at the road, before she finally stepped through the door onto the porch and looked up.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well I swear, how did you get up there?”

  “I climbed.” A twinge of attitude edged my words.

  She came out into the yard and headed down the driveway, a laundry basket full of wet sheets on her hip. I sighed and pulled my feet up into a squat, already anticipating her command for me to climb down.

  Below me, she halted, put down the basket, and straightened up again, blocking the sunlight with one hand on her brow. The light glittered off the leaves and tossed shadows across her face. I still couldn’t make out if she was in her dark mood. I blinked and pushed my bangs out of my eyes.

  “Well,” she said, peering up at me, shaking her head.

  The light shifted, and suddenly I saw her mouth was soft. Surprised, I smiled, and then, just as quickly, touched my fingers to my lips. Her eyes held a yearning. In a moment, she dropped her gaze and stood in the heat, hands propped on her hips, looking out across the field. She chewed on her bottom lip, as she often did when she was somewhere else, and I thought, even if I swung from my knees, she might not notice.

  A scamper of air lifted and twisted her hem, then dropped it, and twirled away up over the rise to the pond. Finally, she sighed and glanced up at me again.

  “Well, be careful up there,” she said, hoisting the basket onto her hip.

  I watched her disappear around the house and then bob up again, farther away, at the clothesline. I sensed some kind of moment had passed between us. A kind of generosity I couldn’t define. Something about my perching in a tree had lightened her spirit. I didn’t know that she had been a tomboy before she fell ill with rheumatic fever. She wasn’t allowed to climb trees or run with her brothers after she recovered. But before, as a seven-year-old, she had once slid between the legs of her older brother to make a backyard touchdown.

  Settling
into my treetop perch, I opened my book and began to read, beginning the first of many afternoons I would spend above ground. In the weeks to come, I simply left gravity behind, crawling up the same trunk three more times, until I’d mastered it, and then, I took on the other trees. Each one demanded a new cleverness, a renewed courage for finding my way up the fat barrel of trunk to the first branch; and then a careful patience for the next footing, the next grip and tug on a branch before trusting it with my weight. Slowly, I learned climbing trees was a kind of talking—a back and forth between me and the tree. If I paused enough and listened, I could venture out on raw branches as far as I dared, halting and gasping as they bowed and sprang under my weight. Every branch was like a dipping and swooping bird taking me out to another part of the sky, showing me yet a new view, a different angle of seeing.

  As I gained confidence, I packed more than a book to take up into the branches: Ritz crackers and Kraft cheese slices, half an apple and a box of raisins; boldly, though disastrously, I once pushed my luck and taped a Coke bottle to my ribs with an ace bandage. It plummeted from my squirming ribs and shattered on the rocks below, startling me enough to lose one hand’s grip for a few seconds as I wildly clutched at the air. My heart fluttered and sank when the screen door opened. Should Mama see me now she would change her mind and take my tree away. Instead, it was Barbara Ann who scurried toward me, rustling open a paper bag. Without looking up she squatted, plucking the angry shards from around the rock and dropping them into the bag, then sweeping the tinier slivers away with a floppy shredded branch she pulled out from the ditch. Quickly, rolling the bag, she stuck it under her shirt and glanced at me long enough to make sure I had my grip.