Flannery Page 14

  There should be a special red phone with a flickering red button that you can use only once in a lifetime, when all is lost.

  Not when all is almost lost.

  Not when a few things are lost.

  This would be a phone that you’d use on that very singular occasion when all is lost.

  Say you are on the highway in your beat-up old Toyota truck with your very pregnant mom on the way home from a picnic in Northern Bay Sands and a rain has started. A rain so dense and hard that no matter how fast the windshield wipers flick back and forth, ridges of water pile up on top of each other and you can’t see. The trees are the same gray as the sky.

  It is getting dark and Miranda says she has to pull over because we might hydroplane and on the radio they are saying there are accidents and to stay off the highways and so Miranda pulls over because she can’t go any farther and she’s having pretty intense contractions.

  You are nine years old, almost ten, but you know what contractions are because ever since you can remember you’ve had to know things most kids don’t.

  You’ve had to know that the heat bill might not get paid and that some people are slightly uncomfortable with children who don’t know who their father is, don’t even know his last name for God’s sake.

  You’ve had to know not everybody can afford the school trip to Quebec at the end of junior high, and that sometimes perfectly respectable people have to get welfare and go to food banks and that there are welfare police who sit outside your house in their cars and spy on your mother to see if she has a boyfriend sleeping over on a regular basis, so they can take away her welfare check.

  You’ve had to know and pretend you don’t notice that there’s a guy in greasy glasses and a black-leather bomber jacket who is an undercover welfare cop and who sits outside your house in his car every day with his daily slice of takeout pizza and a can of pop, watching your front door hoping to see a boyfriend of your mother’s come out.

  Because welfare moms are not allowed to have boyfriends because that might mean they are being supported (an idea that causes Miranda to snort like a horse).

  And you’ve always had to know that it costs the government more to have him sitting there, with strings of melted mozzarella cheese sagging between his glossy lips and his pizza slice and the car gradually filling up with his pop cans and after-pizza cigarette smoke, than the amount of welfare your mother receives, and all the while she’s trying to make art which the world needs in order to make life worth living.

  You have had to know that someday you might find yourself trying to wave down a transport truck in the middle of a rainstorm at the edge of the highway because your brand-new baby brother is coming.

  The hard wind and gritty mist of a passing transport truck will nearly knock you down and you will watch the taillights zoom away while your mother is having contractions.

  A red phone should appear on the hood of your new/old Toyota, with a red blinking button that puts you in touch with somebody higher up.

  You would pick up this magic phone and somebody would say, This is big stuff, kid. Life and death. This is a job for adults. Step aside.

  Okay, forget the phone. The clouds should part and a ray of light, the hand of God. Somebody should take over.

  There was a phone, of course. Miranda had an ordinary (though second-hand) cell phone in her purse and she dialed 911 and she told them where we were and that the baby was coming and that it was a month premature and that she only had her daughter with her, her nine-year-old daughter.

  She was looking at me while she said all this, except when she squeezed her eyes shut. She was in the middle of speaking and she shut her eyes and she didn’t look like Miranda at all. She didn’t look like my mother.

  Our next-door neighbor had had a home birth a little while before this, which I thought was gross, and they’d invited all the neighbors to stop by for a visit during the labor like a big party, and they kept the placenta in the freezer because in some cultures everybody fries up the placenta later on and eats some of it as part of a ritual to welcome the new baby.

  I was so scared Miranda would make me go over and watch the birth I forgot to ask some important questions that might have come in handy there on the side of the road in the rainstorm.

  Miranda hung up the cell phone.

  They’re coming, she said. Then she said it over and over. They’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming.

  Which is what I mean about the special phone, because anybody could see that they weren’t coming.

  They would never come, whoever they were, but I was there. I was there already, and that’s the part that was profoundly unfair. I was going to have to deal with it.

  Miranda grabbed my hand and she squeezed it hard and she said, Flannery, this baby is going to be born very soon.

  And I thought, All is lost.

  Perhaps it would be helpful to list some of the many things that were lost.

  We had been hiking in the woods in our rubber boots and mine had wild horses on them and there was a waterfall with mist coming up all around it and the squelch of the mud and lots of pitcher plants and the long grass was golden and there were rust bushes with glittering frost and a few trees that were so orange they looked like a fire.

  Miranda was huge and she had a big felt hat with a striped feather and an overstretched unraveling sweater that used to belong to Hank and a red poncho and our picnic basket had olives and peanut butter and honey sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies. It was supposed to be our trip, a mother-daughter thing. A day in the woods together before the baby came. We’d even had a little bonfire.

  I had seen Miranda’s belly wobble. I had felt Felix move under my hand. I’d been at the baby shower.

  All the diapers and powders and blankets and sleepers.

  But did I believe there was going to be a baby?

  I did not.

  Not until that transport truck whipped past me on the highway in the rain and I heard Miranda’s door open and she was pacing back and forth behind me and moaning and panting and yelling and leaning against the side of the Toyota and at one point she got down on her hands and knees which was the scariest part, but she got back up and she sat down on the truck seat with the door open and her head hanging down.

  The rain was lashing the divided highway. It looked like steel ropes swinging down from the heavens when cars driving past on the other side of the highway lit it up in their headlights. The headlights lit up the tops of the trees and the big empty sky and, for a brief moment, the wrenching pain on my mother’s wet face, and then she was plunged back into darkness and there was a floating spot hanging before my eyes, and there was nothing but forest and my jacket was soaked to my skin and I was shivering.

  Miranda stood up again and was resting her back against the tailgate of the truck and she threw back her head and screamed into the sky as loud as she could, The baby is coming.

  And then I believed, without a shred of doubt. The baby was coming.

  Also, there was going to be no red phone. What was lost was the life we had before, Miranda and me. What was lost was just the two of us.

  I had loved just the two of us.

  But later, on Saturday mornings, when Felix and I would wake up early and get two big bowls of vanilla ice cream with bananas and chocolate sauce and maraschino cherries and watch cartoons, I had to admit. All had not been lost.

  All had almost been lost. Sure. And maybe something had been lost. Miranda screamed her head off and then we heard the siren. We heard the siren before we saw the flickering red lights.

  An ambulance was coming out of the dark.

  20

  After Kyle Keating and I watch the last unbroken egg trundle as fast as it can toward the curb, totter with indecision at the edge and finally topple into the gutter, its yellow yolk slithering free of its broken shell, there is an awkward moment.

  We’re just sort of standing there, facing each other but looking down at the sidew
alk.

  So, yeah, says Kyle.

  Yeah, I say. I know.

  Kyle’s hands are dug down deep in the pockets of his jeans. I can see his knuckles pressing against the tight denim. He’s rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. I’m still holding the torn and empty paper bag.

  Even though I’ve talked my head off the whole way home about Mercy Hanrahan and the love potion and the glassblower I’ve got an appointment with about bottles for the potion, and Amber and Gary, I suddenly can’t think of a single thing to say.

  Neither can Kyle.

  But then he gets a text and says he has to head off to work. He’s a lifeguard. I tell him I’ll talk to Mr. Follett about maybe getting a new set of eggs and starting the project over (anything to avoid writing the essay about teen pregnancy).

  Thanks for walking me home, Kyle, I say.

  You’re welcome, Flannery, he says. And then Kyle is jogging up Long’s Hill, and I burst into the house slinging my knapsack off my shoulder onto the pile of boots, yelling for Miranda.

  I’ve got to go to this glassblower’s studio. So can we drive?

  There isn’t much gas.

  We don’t have to go very far.

  Can’t someone else take you?

  Miranda, you’ll enjoy this.

  It sounds like shopping.

  It’s not shopping, and I need the truck so I can bring back the bottles. Plus, do you want me to fail Entrepreneurship?

  How are you paying for this?

  The guy said I can pay after the fair, out of my profits.

  Awfully optimistic, this guy.

  Believes in the love potion, it seems.

  He said that?

  He implied it.

  When Miranda and I finally pull up in the truck there’s a squat cinderblock building with a blinking red sign in the window that says Glass Studio. The door has a wrought-iron ring for knocking.

  We knock, but there’s no answer, so I pull the door open.

  The heat hits us in the face. We can hear the furnace breathing fire like Tyrone’s dragon.

  Inside, a man is lifting something from the huge furnace with what looks like a giant pair of tweezers. He’s wearing denim overalls and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a trucker’s cap that says Kingsbridge Auto. He has wireless octagonal glasses that sink into his apple-red cheeks, and he appears to have no teeth but lots of fine white nose hair. He’s got to be at least eighty-five.

  Look! says Miranda.

  The man is holding up a tiny, delicate glass bottle. It’s shaped like a bottle but it appears to be liquid fire. It is pulsing like it is a heart, and the heart is flushing with blood that is not blood but white boiling light with a yellow halo.

  The man dips the little vessel into a vat and there’s a hiss and a cloud of smoke and he lifts the glass heart out of the vat and it’s a perfect bottle for a love potion.

  He sees us watching and comes to meet us with one hand out for shaking and the other still holding his treasure in the tweezers.

  I broke one of the hundred packing them up and had to make a new one, the man says. I’m Fred MacLachlan, pleased to meet you. Now, which one of you is the mother?

  Oh, stop, says Miranda.

  Two ravishing beauties, he says. What a pleasure.

  I introduce myself and Miranda and within seconds they’re deep in conversation — about the new parking garage on Water Street, and the graffiti, and how the construction is blocking traffic. And Fred tells Miranda about his upcoming move to Europe.

  You should come along, he says.

  Oh, I have my kids, she says.

  Well, I guess they’ll grow up sometime, he says. This comment annoys me, naturally.

  We don’t want to hold you up, I say to him. After all, you have to get ready for your trip. You’re leaving soon, right? Leaving the province? Going to some place where they understand glass?

  Huh? he says. He’s having a hard time taking his eyes off Miranda.

  Oh yes, he says. But wait. Let me see what I have for this beautiful lady. A memento.

  He’s gone to the back of the warehouse and we hear something that sounds like a shelf of glass tipping over and smashing.

  He’s laying it on a little thick, isn’t he? I whisper.

  Oh, I don’t know, says Miranda.

  He comes back holding a little glass figurine out before him. He puts it in Miranda’s open palm.

  It’s a polar bear, Miranda says. Oh, my! Flannery, look! She is clearly moved by his gesture.

  A little glass polar bear, Flannery! Like my ice sculptures.

  Global warming, the guy says. I read about your project in Canadian Art.

  You read that? Miranda says.

  Of course I did. Two-page spread, how could I miss it. Very nice picture of you, too, on the beach with the bonfire.

  You’re too kind, Miranda says. So. But. You’re leaving, though?

  We actually have to get going too, Miranda, I say. Got to pick up my brother, I tell the guy. That’s Miranda’s other child? She has two, actually. And he’s very young. He’s not going to be grown up any time soon. I look at the guy to make sure this is sinking in.

  Well, what a pleasure, Miranda says.

  Me too, the guy says. It’s an honor. An artist of your caliber. It really is an honor. You’re doing such good work. Keep it up. And good luck with your love potion, Florence.

  Flannery, I say.

  Indeed, he says. Good luck.

  21

  There’s a Halloween party at Brittany Bishop’s tonight but I don’t want to go. I don’t want to run into Tyrone after he’s stood me up again. He probably thinks he’s too cool to go to a party at Brittany Bishop’s anyway. Everybody says her parents are going to be home.

  Amber has the big swim meet to decide if she gets to go to the Nationals this weekend, so she won’t be going to the party. Besides, she’s hardly talking to me.

  But everyone else has been planning their costumes for weeks. Brittany Bishop’s parents always rent a chocolate fountain for her parties. And halfway through the night a pizza guy delivers a gazillion pizzas.

  Elaine Power is going as a monarch butterfly, of course. Andrew Sullivan is going as a soap bubble. His costume is apparently made of chicken wire and twenty-seven boxes’ worth of Saran Wrap. Ella Sloan is going as a block of Swiss cheese.

  Even Felix has a party. A little girl in his karate class is having everybody over. Felix is a devil. His face is covered in red makeup and he has a plastic pitchfork and a red satin costume with a tail, and horns on the top of his head. He also has a glue-on goatee of black synthetic fur and fake nails, long and curling.

  I’ll be staying home all alone, dressed as myself. Leggings, Morrissey T-shirt. Same old, same old.

  But right now I have to finish the prototype of our unit because it has to be submitted to Mr. Payne on Monday or Tyrone and I lose fifteen percent. I’m in my bedroom with all my notes and one hundred beautiful glass bottles.

  Tyrone hasn’t done one single thing for this project. I hate him.

  Love, definitely not.

  Then there’s a knock on my bedroom door.

  What are you putting in this potion? says Miranda. She sits down in the middle of all the clothes on my bedroom floor and the stuff I’ve gathered for the project. I’ve been online and I’m determined to make the potions totally eco-friendly.

  I already know that people will reuse the perfume bottles because they’re so beautiful. But I want the potions to be non-toxic too. Artificial food-coloring is actually pretty nasty. It can cause disease.

  You need to boil some fruits and vegetables, Miranda says when I tell her all this. Beets for red, carrots for orange, spinach for green and blueberries for blue, she says, because I’ve also told her my idea for four different kinds of love.

  I happen to have some blueberries left over from last summer in the freezer.

  Soon we’re down in the kitchen chopping carrots and beets, bo
iling spinach, squashing blueberries and straining everything through four separate pieces of an old cheesecloth blouse of Miranda’s. She says it had a hole under the arm. When we’re done, we pour the four different kinds of colored water into four different bottles. We seal them with the frosted stoppers that came with each bottle. The potions have some sediment floating around in there, but that just makes them look more authentic.

  They don’t taste very good, I say, when Miranda holds out a teaspoon of green potion for me to try.

  But a customer only needs one sip for it to work, Miranda says.

  Tyrone is supposed to be here, I tell Miranda. I slump down into a kitchen chair. It’s already late and I still have to label the prototypes. Miranda can see I’m upset, even though I’m trying really hard to sound unfazed and blasé and generally like I couldn’t care less about Tyrone.

  I believe people are the best people they can be, Flannery. I believe everybody is trying to be good. But it’s harder for some people. Tyrone has had a hard time. They’re going through some heavy stuff over there.

  So are we, I say. I don’t even have a biology book. And we’re going to have to go to the food bank again. Do you know what that feels like? I mean, they’re asking everybody in school to donate to the food drive. And I can’t donate anything. I’m the one they’re donating to, for gosh sakes. It’s humiliating.

  Miranda closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them, she says quietly, Flan, oh boy. Okay. Look …

  But then she doesn’t say anything for a minute. I wait quietly, looking into her eyes, until she takes a big breath and starts again.

  Tyrone’s stepdad, Marty? she says. Is physically abusive, Flannery. He’s hit Tyrone’s mom. He’s blackened her eyes. Once he broke one of her ribs. Marty is a terrible drunk. I’m trying to talk to her, get her out of there. But it’s not easy. There are shelters, but she’s not ready to leave yet. She’s afraid he’ll come after them.

  She lets out another big breath. This is confidential, okay, Flannery? But you have to understand. Things aren’t very easy for Tyrone. He’s not even at home half the time. Maybe his grades aren’t the most important thing in his life right now.