Blues for Zoey (3 page)

10

Big Daddy

In the back
of the ambulance, the paramedics had Mom strapped to a gurne
y. There was a bandage on her head and orange
padding stuffed around her face. It pinched her
cheeks and pushed her lips into a pair of prunes.
But it couldn't stop her from grinning. That
was because she was dreaming of Dad. “Daniel … ”
she murmured, breathing deeply. “Daniel …
Daniel … ” She whispered his name over
and over. Eventually, the words faded away, but the smile stayed.

The paramedic looked fr
om Nomi to me, arching his eyebrows. “She often talk in her sleep?”

“Sometimes.”

I picked up Mom's hand and stroked it. The paleness of her skin looked even whiter under my brown fingers. She squeezed my hand and the grin on her face went even goofier. I think she thought my hand was actually Dad's.

Nomi watched Mom's face, wincing as if in pain. “I shouldn't have pulled her.”

“She
'll be fine,” I told her. “It's not your fault.” Of course, my sister didn't believ
e me.

At the hospital, they made us sit in an empty hallway while the doctor did his examination. The blue chairs were a gazillion percent plastic and about as comfortable as the crappy bleachers they have around the track at school.

Nomi sat beside me and
kicked her legs, staring at one foot and then the other swinging up, then thumping against the chair legs.

My
sister is eight years younger than me. I was
thirteen when Dad died, but Nomi was only five. She says she remembers him, but she
doesn't really. (I can match all of
her memories to photographs we have around the house, all the ones with Dad in them.)

I worry about
her. When you grow up with no
father and a mom who's liable to conk out
for days at a time, it takes a toll on a kid. Sometimes, I think Nomi
's forehead ought to be stamped with the word
FRAGILE
. Everything about her—her arms, her legs,
even her hair—seems too thin. The most fragile part
of her, though, is her eyes. They're
so big and glossy, it's like she's always on the verge of tears.

I put one arm ar
ound her shoulders and felt the
thump-thump-thump
as her feet hit the chair. “Don't worry,” I said. “Just a matter of time before she wakes up again.”

Nomi kept on thumping. “It's because of me.”

“You just wanted to wake her up.”

“But there was B-L-O-O-D.”

“You don't have to spell it.”

“But I don't want it to happen to you too.”

I hugged her close. “I'm not gonna pass out just from hearing the word. I promise.”

“What if it's not an attack? What if it's because she hit her head?”

“It's just an attack,” I told her.

There were televisions bolted
into the corners of the room. I thought maybe I could distract Nomi from blaming herself with a TV
show. Unfortunately, both sets wer
e tuned in to the latest episode of
Big Daddy
, the
worst reality TV show ever conceived. They take
a bunch of twenty-somethings who have never known their parents, and make them humiliate themselv
es in competitions to find their biological father.

In the first episode, all of them were exiled on a tropical island (like we'd ne
ver seen that one before). They were separated into two groups: orphans who had been abandoned as childr
en and fathers who hadn't known they'd had a kid. The trick is that none of
them knew which father had fathered which orphan.

At the end of each episode, all the fathers voted on which orphan
they thought was their kid. The orphan with the fe
west votes was booted off the show. At the end of each season, the last remaining orphan won $250,000. This
was followed by the big revelation scene of which father had fathered the winner. That lucky dad also won $250,000.

I
hated
that show.

“That girl has big boobs,” Nomi commented, stating the obvious. On the screen, an orphan in a tank top swung upside down fr
om a tree branch.

“Let's read a magazine,” I suggested. I
started searching the tables for some kid-friendly reading material, but there wasn't much. Luckily
, the doctor came out of the emergency ward. He had a face like a bloodhound, saggy and dull but reliable.

“You'll be happy to hear your mother's head injury isn't serious. Nothing that would keep her unconscious.”

“You see?” I told to Nomi. “It's
not
because of you.”

The doctor started asking questions about Mom:
How
long
had she suffered from somnitis? What p
recisely were the symptoms? Were there
any warning signs prior to an attack?
At first,
I thought he needed this information to treat her properly, but then I realized he was just excited to be treating someone with such a rare condition.
To him, Mom was a novelty.

Nomi must have sensed the same thing because she suddenly asked, “Can we go in and see her now?”

11

Some Family History

My mother's name is Aiko, which means “l
ove child.” (In Japanese, it isn't quite so hippie sounding. It's just a normal name, like Jane or Sarah.
Even still, my mom definitely has some hippie tendencies, and it's possible that was where they came from.) Her great-grandparents came over fr
om Kyoto in the sixties, which makes her a
yonsei
, a
term that means “fourth generation.” Nowadays, in my family,
yonsei
might be the only word of Japanese any of us know.

The generations that came before my mom were pretty strict about keeping the Japanese bloodline as pure as possible.
From the way she explains it, everyone
before Mom was under tons of pressure
to find a nice Japanese person over here,
marry as quick as possible, and start popping out little purebred Japanese babies.

That ended with Mom because her parents—my grandparents—both died in a car crash while Mom was studying music at col
lege. As a result, she never had the chance to cave in to parental pressure and hook up with a Japanese gu
y. Instead, she married my dad. A black guy
from Barbados, which is how Nomi and I ended up several shades darker than Mom.

When I was young, the neighborhood where w
e lived in Rosemount was mostly white, so being the color of a strong latte made you special. Up there, I stood out. In Evandale, on the other
hand, just about everybody is some shade of
specialty coffee.

When I meet new people, especially adults, I can
almost see the wheels turning as they pore over my face, trying to make sense of my puffy lips, my slanted eyes, the freckled blotches that pepper my nose and the tops of my cheeks. Eventually, when they ca
n't figure it out, they always ask the same thing.

“Sorry, I'm just curious, but … where are you from?”

Ambiguous ethnicity also means you get mistaken for everything you're not. People come up to me in the street, speaking some language I can't understand. Sometimes it's Spanish, sometimes Persian, sometimes something from Southeast Asia. Every time, I apologize politely and explain I have
absolutely no idea
what they just asked me.

Here's something that will never happen:

Stranger on the Street
:
Excuse me, but I was just wondering, would you happen to be some sort of J
apanese-Caribbean half-breed mongrel-type-person?

Me
:
Good guess.

Stranger on the St
reet
:
Huzzah! I knew it! (High-fives nearby friend.)

Yep, never gonna happen.

12

One Way to Become Famous

Nomi and I stood by Mom's bed. Asleep, she looked different. She had
been heavier before Dad died. You saw it
in the photographs we had around the apartment. Mom had always been small, almost as frail as Nomi, but in those old pictures, she at least had a bit of healthy roundness to her cheeks.

That was gone now. The oval of her face had sunk into something closer to a figure eight, her cheekbones caved in and hollow. The bones of her arms—her elbows, her wrists, her knuckles—they all protruded in a way they never had when I was Nomi's age. Now, as I looked at her, lying on a shallow mattress in a cold metallic bed, the only puffiness was around her eyes, swollen with sleep.

Nomi went up and stood beside the bed, but she was still looking at me. “Can I tell her I'm sorry?”

“It's
not
your fault,” I told her.

She wouldn't listen. “I
'm sorry,” she whispered to Mom.

Mom just lay there.

“She can hear us,” Nomi said.

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

She leaned close to Mom's
face. “It's okay to wake up now.
”

“If only that worked.”

Nomi looked at me like I was evil. I was saved from her glare by the buzz of my phone. It was Calen.

“J
ust calling to check,” he said. “You're coming tomorrow, right?”

I was so wrapped
up in Mom's attack, I didn't
know what “tomorrow” meant.

“It's Topher's
party! I'm gonna drive, but I might
have a bunch of the team's shit in my car, so I'm trying to figure out how
many people I can take. Probably just you. Yo
u're coming, right?”

I looked at Mom. If she was
still asleep tomorrow, it would be difficult to leave Nomi home alone.

“I might not be able to.
”

“Dude, no way!” Unlike me, Calen wasn't
good on his own. In everything he did,
he always needed at least one accomplice. “This is
Toph'
s
we're talking about.”

Every year since high
school had started, Topher Briggs had thrown the biggest par
ty of the summer.

“I can't,” I said. “I'm at the hospital right now.”

“Oh. Your mom?”

“S
he had an attack today. If it's like last time, she'll be out for at least a couple of days.”

“Dude. S
hit.” Calen had a knack for loading a lot of meaning into those two words.

Calen and I had been friends since we were kids, since the time when we wer
e neighbors up in Rosemount. When Dad died and we moved to Ev
andale, Calen was the only one who remembered I existed. It's funny how fast people forget you when you're not right in fr
ont of them.

“Anyway,” I said, “I can't leave my sister alone.”

“What if you bring her?”

“Ar
e you insane? I can't show up
at Toph's with an eight-year-old.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“
And
,” I pointed out, “isn't this whole conversation about how you won't
have enough room in your car for anybody
else? 'Specially if you gotta drive Alana too.”

“Yeah, but dude, your sister is, like,
tiny
.”

“Which is exactly why she's not coming.”

“Babysitter?”

“I'll have to let you know tomorrow
, but I kind of doubt it'll happen.”

Calen said nothing for a second, which at
first I took to be silent acceptance, but in fact it
was merely a dramatic pause prior to hitting me with a secret weapon.

“You do know that Christina Muñoz is gonna be there, right?”

Christina Muñoz. I had been quietly crushing on that girl—or at least the back of her head—since she sat in front of me in the seventh
grade. But ever since we moved to
Evandale, I only saw her periodically. At Topher's parties, for instance.

Sadly for
me, she was the sort of bright-faced, olive-skinned beauty who emerges f
rom the womb with a boyfriend grafted to the other end of her umbilical cord. Even when we were twelve,
she went out with Trevor Greaves
for the whole year. Of course, all they e
ver did was hold hands on the way home f
rom school, but I would've happily taken that much.

“So what?” I said, trying to sound like I didn't care either way. “I think we both kno
w she's gonna be there with some guy.”

“Raheem from Central Prep, you mean?”

I had
never met Raheem, but I recognized his
name. Dating Christina Muñoz made you famous. “Yeah, him.”

“Then this is your lucky day. I hear
d they broke up, like,
this week
. Which means you have
about a three-day window—which means
you have to come
.”

All this
time, Nomi had been listening anxiously to my half of
the conversation. I pulled the phone away and held
it against my chest, looking down at her.

“Any chance you could sleep over at a friend's house tomorrow night?”