So B. It (3 page)

“Not from the beginning,” I said. “Only from when Mama and I met you.”

“What happened before that doesn’t matter, baby. It’s just something to be grateful for, because if it hadn’t happened, you and I wouldn’t be standing here right now having this conversation.”

“A person has a right to know from the beginning,” I insisted.

“I suppose a person has a right to
want
to know,” she said.

It wasn’t too long after that that I decided to make a new list. Instead of things I knew about Mama, it would be a list of all the things I
didn’t
know about her. There were so many, I had a feeling as I opened my notebook this would turn out to be the longest list I’d ever made. I pictured it being so long that it would stretch to the moon and back again.

I began in the usual way, by writing the heading on top—

Things I
Don’t Know About
Mama

Then I wrote the first thing that came to mind—

What is soof?

And here’s the funny thing: Once I wrote that, I couldn’t go any further. I stared at the page for a long time, but all the other questions I’d thought of seemed small and unimportant compared to that one.
What is soof?
The words grew louder in my head, and as I watched, the letters expanded and blurred together, spreading across the page and spilling over the edges like sweet milky tea, until the question became so vast that I could imagine it stretching to the moon and back again all by itself.

When I was very little, before I could go outside, we had to have everything delivered—groceries, clothes, everything. Mama couldn’t shop by herself because she couldn’t read or handle money, and I was way too young to go out alone with her. I think Bernadette liked it better that way—all of us staying inside together. Bernie was great on the phone—she could talk people into bending the rules and helping us out in all kinds of ways. Every now and then somebody wasn’t willing to bring us whatever it was we needed, and when that happened, whatever it was, we just did without.

But Mama and I were the opposite of Bernadette. We wanted to go out. I used to sit on Mama’s lap at the window, and we’d both laugh when the sparrows landed on the sill or
when cars honked their horns below in the street. Once I was old enough, I began to beg Bernie to let Mama and me go out to do the shopping together. Eventually she gave in. At first we were only allowed to go places on our block, because of the street crossing thing. Luckily there was a Double D grocery store on the corner. Bernie would stand by the door wringing her hands the whole time we were gone, but Mama and I loved the Double D. We liked to push the cart down the aisles, and to taste the tiny sample cubes of yellow cheese or muffin they sometimes put out on the counters. On the way home Mama and I held hands and laughed out loud at the pigeons scurrying away from us as we walked. I loved being out with Mama. But all that changed the day the vacuum cleaner broke.

Our vacuum cleaner was an ancient metal tank with fins that looked like a rocket ship about to blast off. After it broke, Bernie called around and found out that nobody made that kind anymore and only one store in Reno had the part we needed to fix it. They wouldn’t send the piece and it was too far away to walk, so I
begged Bernie to let Mama and me take the bus.

“Pretty please with sugar on top?” I pleaded.

I had never taken a bus before, but I had seen them pass by under the window a million times and I was dying to ride on one. Bernie was reluctant, but I badgered her until finally she showed me out the window where the bus stop was and gave Mama and me enough change for two round trips.

“It’s in a different neighborhood, Heidi. All strangers. Fly under the radar. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t even look at them, and you hold your mama’s hand the whole time. It’s not safe, do you understand me?” she told me nervously. “It’s not safe.”

Mama and I walked down to the corner to wait for the bus. Despite all that Bernie had said, I wasn’t afraid—I was excited. The Number Five commuter came around the corner and passed so close to us that it blew Mama’s hair back away from her face and lifted her dress up above her knees. The brakes made a high-pitched screeching noise, or at least I thought that’s what it was until I realized the sound was coming out of Mama’s mouth.

She was screaming, and when she began to sob and clutch at her chest, I grabbed her arm and tried to pull her down the sidewalk toward home. Bernadette had seen and was hanging out the window yelling when we got there—

“Get inside, Heidi. Hurry up! Hurry up! Get inside.”

People stopped to stare, and a woman in a big hat tried to grab my shoulder.

“Do you need help, little girl?” she asked. “Do you want me to call the police?”

Bernadette was waiting at the door with the Jujyfruits when we got upstairs, but Mama didn’t even seem to see her. She rushed into the room and started walking in a circle, patting her chest rapidly with one hand.

“Done. Done. Done, Heidi, shh,” she kept saying over and over.

Bernadette tried to give her Jujyfruits, but Mama wouldn’t take them.

“Done. Done. Done, Heidi, shh,” Mama said again.

“Why is she doing that?” I asked.

Bernadette watched her for a minute and then a sad, knowing look came over her face.
She went to Mama and said very softly:

“Why don’t you give me the baby, Precious? She’ll be safe with me. Give her to me now, okay?”

“What baby?” I asked. “What are you talking about, Bernie?”

“Give me the baby,” she said again to Mama. “Give Heidi to me, Precious.”

Mama stopped pacing. Breathing heavily, she slowly extended her arms to Bernadette, who reached out and took the invisible baby from her. As soon as she had done that, Mama went out to the kitchen and lay down in the middle of the floor. She curled up and shut her eyes.

“What’s happening?” I asked Bernadette.

“I think maybe your mama’s having a memory,” she said.

“You said, ‘Give me Heidi.’ Is Mama remembering me?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, honeylamb.”

Then Mama said something that neither of us could quite hear. I got down on the floor next to her and leaned over her, stroking her hair.

“What is it, Mama?” I whispered. “What do you remember?”

“
Soof,
” she whimpered softly, “
soof.
”

How can you tell if someone has memories if they can’t talk about the things they remember? Mama remembered lots of things from one day to the next—how to make tea, where her toothbrush was, how to open cans—but did she remember her past? Her mother? The day I was born? My father? Maybe she had pictures of all those memories in her head, but she didn’t have the words to describe them. Or maybe her broken machine had a little hole in the side and all those memories had slipped through it like small round candies, rolling across the floor, into dark corners, or under the bed among the dust bunnies. All except one, that is. One memory was so important, Mama held on to it and gave it a word all its own to help her to remember…
soof
.

I spent hours picturing that word with all the answers to my unanswered questions tied to it, one after the other like the knotted rag tail of a kite. I’d imagine myself standing there on
the ground holding on to the ball of string while that word sailed and skidded and danced across the cloudless blue sky above me.

But only Mama knew what it meant. And she wasn’t telling.

“What is
soof
, Mama?” I’d whisper as I sat on the edge of her bed at night gently scratching her back. I hoped it might slip out of her mouth and onto her pillowcase as she closed her eyes and relaxed into the rhythm of my scratching.

Sometimes I’d sit down next to her on the couch, open up a magazine, and flip through the pictures, pointing at things—a baby, a dog, a car.

“Show me
soof
, Mama. Is this
soof
? Is this?”

Mama would smile her sweet, wide smile and pat my knee the way she always did when I sat close to her.

“Tea, Heidi?” she’d say. “Tea?”

With anybody else I might’ve thought offering to get me tea right then like that was a way of changing the subject in order to avoid having to answer the question. Like the time Zander offered to let me see the wart on his foot when
what I’d asked him to show me was one of the medals he claimed his father had won in Vietnam. But I knew Mama didn’t understand what I was asking. She could tell that I wanted something, and she didn’t want to disappoint me, so she offered me one of the only things she was sure she could give me. Tea. So I said, “Sure, Mama. I’d like some tea.” And she said, “Good, Heidi. Tea,” and went off to the kitchen to make us two cups of Lipton—hers in the white cup with the gold rim and mine in the one with pink roses, both with three spoons of sugar and a splash of milk, just the way Bernadette had taught her. But a million cups of Mama’s sweet tea couldn’t have washed away my longing for the meaning of that word.

Before Bernadette had come down with her A.P., she’d been a big fan of the library. She went there practically every day. I knew Bernie missed the library, so I was glad when I was finally allowed to walk the three and a half blocks to go there for her. Mama would come too. She liked to look at the picture books. Before we stopped going out together, Mama and I went to the library at least once a week.
Bernie made lists of the books she wanted me to take out for her to read, and she was also always having me look up things about hermit crabs or George Washington Carver or whatever else we happened to be studying at “school.” Whenever I brought a new stack of books home, Bernie would press them to her nose, close her eyes, and breathe in deep, just like I’d seen her do with her father’s old overcoat, which still hung in the hall closet in her apartment.

After I started wondering about
soof
, I asked Mrs. Coppleman, the librarian, if she’d ever heard of Mama’s word, and she said it sounded like maybe it was foreign. She showed me where the international dictionaries were, and I looked in all of them. Nothing. I’d already looked it up at home in M.B.F., of course, hoping to run my finger down the page and find it there among the other
s-o-o
words.
Soon, soot, sooth, soothe
…It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere, except in Mama’s head.

I kept one ear cocked, listening for her to say it. On the rare occasions when she did, I’d pounce on it, looking for clues. Once she said it while she was watching Bernie brush the
tangles out of my hair after a bath. Another time when she cut her finger on the lid of a can she was trying to open. But it wasn’t consistent. I stood in front of her and brushed my hair a million times after that, trying to trigger it, but it didn’t work. When it came, it came without rhyme or reason.

I began hearing it in strange places. Awake in the night during a rainstorm, cars passing by under the window, their wet tires whispering—
soof
. Bernie’s slippers sometimes said it too as she shuffled across the speckled linoleum between the sink and the old round-shouldered refrigerator.

I spent hours looking into Mama’s eyes, imagining that somewhere behind them was a little package all wrapped up for me with a tag attached saying,
This is soof
.

I started having trouble sleeping. Bernadette learned to steer clear of me when I was “under-slept”—she’d been around enough cranky old cats to know how to avoid being scratched and hissed at. But when my upset started rubbing off on Mama and making her rimply, Bernadette lost patience and lit into me.

“Heidi, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There are some things in life you just cannot know, and the meaning of that word of your mama’s is one of them. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better it will be for all of us.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe it was time to give up. Why did I think that word was so important, anyway? For all I knew, it was nonsense, some misremembered thing she’d overheard somebody say on the street. I told myself these things over and over, hoping to talk myself into believing them. Maybe I would have, too, if I hadn’t found the camera way in the back of the sticky bottom drawer in the kitchen where we kept odds and ends like birthday candles and rubber bands. I was looking for the Scotch tape and yanked the drawer open so hard, the whole thing came crashing out onto the floor, and there it was. A black plastic Kodak Instamatic camera, and inside it a roll of film. Used.

My search for the truth began in earnest after I had that film developed. The day I came home with the pictures, Bernadette was sitting
at the dining-room table looking at a library book about marsupials.

“Wish I had a pouch,” she said. “Perfect for stashing reading glasses.”

I set the envelope of photos down in front of her. She closed her book without even bothering to save the place.

“Tell the truth, Heidi,” she said, picking up the yellow envelope and turning it over in her hands. “Did you peek at them on the way home? It’s okay if you did.”

“No. I was afraid to,” I said.

“What’s the worst it could be?” she asked.

“Nothing. The worst would be if there was nothing,” I said.

“Well, let’s see what there is then, baby,” she said softly as she slid a finger under the flap and broke the seal. “Let’s just see.”

There were twenty-three photos in all. The same number as Mama had words. Some of the pictures were so blurry you couldn’t tell what they were, but plenty of them were clear. They were all taken at a Christmas party. There was a dressed-up Santa Claus with a white cotton beard and a crooked tree covered with paper chains and glitter pinecones that looked homemade. Some of the people in the pictures were walking around with trays of punch and cookies and some were sitting in wheelchairs or slumped in orange and turquoise molded plastic chairs with thin metal legs.

“Who are all these people?” I asked, slowly examining each photo before slipping it to the back of the stack.

Bernie was sitting next to me on the couch,
her head bent toward mine.

“Looks like it could be some kind of a club, and this was their Christmas party,” Bernie said.

“Why are so many of them twisted up?” I asked.

“Handicapped, you mean?” said Bernie. “Maybe it’s a hospital or a special home.”

“Who took the pictures?” I asked. “Do you think Mama did?”

“I doubt if she could use a camera, baby.”

“Then who took them, and how did Mama end up with the camera?” I asked.

Bernie shook her head.

“I don’t know, sweetie.”

There were several pictures of a group of three plump teenaged girls with drooping eyelids and ill-fitting party dresses, then two of a shaggy-haired boy about eighteen or nineteen. His eyes were beautiful—dark blue, almost black—but his head seemed balanced at an odd angle on top of his thin neck, his mouth contorted in a grimace, which could have been either pain or pleasure, it was hard to tell. In one of the shots the man in the Santa suit stood
beside the boy, his arm around his shoulder, neither one smiling. The Santa was extremely tall and thin, and he hadn’t bothered to pad the suit, so it billowed out loosely around the middle. His street clothes—shirt collar, necktie, and pant cuffs—poked out from under the red-and-white costume, the sleeves so short that his bony wrists stuck out a good three inches from the white cuffs, revealing the gold watch he had on.

“Pretty scrawny-looking Santa,” I said.

“It’s not the missing belly of jelly that bothers me, it’s what his eyes are saying,” Bernie said.

“How can you tell under those big cotton eyebrows?” I asked.

“I can tell,” she said.

After that, more snapshots of people posing in front of the tree and eating cookies, and then came a slightly blurry picture of a middle-aged blond woman in a red sweater with reindeer on it standing in front of a massive stone fireplace, with her arm around a smiling girl with wide-set pale-blue eyes. I knew right away the girl was Mama.

“She was kind of fat,” I said.

“Or maybe she was pregnant,” Bernie said.

“With me, you mean?” I asked, looking hard at the photo.

“Seems like a safe bet,” she said, taking the picture from me and looking at it closely. “And my guess is that the woman in the red sweater is your grammy.”

I grabbed the photo back from Bernadette and stared at the blond woman.

“Really? How do you know?”

“Look at the eyes. What do you think, Heidi?” asked Bernadette.

“They look like Mama’s only not so wide apart.”

“They look like
yours
, baby,” Bernadette said gently.

We went through the whole stack of photos several times. Most of them were taken inside in the room where the party was, but there was one taken outdoors, on a wooden porch under a big sign with green letters that said
Hilltop Home, Liberty, New York
.

“We have to show the pictures to Mama as soon as she wakes up,” I said excitedly. “She
knew these people, Bernie! She was
there
.”

“Yes, she was, baby. But you know how your mama is—she might not be able to recognize herself from a photograph. Especially an old one.”

“Maybe looking at these will zap Mama’s brain like a bolt of lightning and jump-start her memory, Bernie.” Then it hit me. “Maybe
soof
is in the pictures!”

“Maybe,” she said, but I could tell she had her doubts.

While Mama finished napping, I let myself float suspended like a lily pad in my private little pool of hope. I passed the time by looking up Liberty, New York, in the atlas and pressing my finger down again and again on the town where Hilltop Home had been—the place where my mama and maybe
my grammy
had stood in front of a big fireplace smiling at the camera. I wondered about who had taken the photographs, and how Mama and I had ended up so far from New York. I wondered where my grammy was now and whether Hilltop Home was still there, in Liberty. I was just about to go over to Bernie’s and ask if we could call
information to check for a listing when I heard Mama stir and call out.

Bernadette had gone back to her apartment to feed her cats, Clara Barton and Cookie Dough—named after one of her heroes and one of my favorite flavors of ice cream. The cats never came through the door into Mama’s and my house. When they got hungry or lonely, they stood on the threshold and cried for Bernie. I used to worry that they did that because they had caught Bernie’s A.P., but she assured me that it wasn’t a catching thing—for animals or people.

When I heard Mama calling, I ran to the kitchen and shouted through the doorway, “Come quick, Bernie! She’s up!”

Bernadette came right over and we went into Mama’s room together. She was lying under her covers rubbing her eyes. When she saw us, she smiled.

“Hello, Heidi. Hello, Dette.”

I remember the first time Mama called Bernadette “Dette.” I thought Bernie was going to cry from sheer joy. Mama didn’t add new words to her vocabulary very often, so each
one was a big event in our house. That was a very special addition. It was number fifteen on the list.

“Hello, Precious,” Bernadette cooed as she sat down on the bed next to Mama and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “How did you sleep? How is your head?”

Mama used to get a lot of headaches. She’d hold her head and rock and moan. Usually a nap would make it better, but sometimes she needed Tylenol. She had trouble taking any kind of pills—she couldn’t swallow them—so Bernadette would grind up the tablets and put the powder in Jell-O. Mama loved Jell-O almost as much as Jujyfruits.

“Can we show her now?” I whispered.

“Shh, Heidi. Slow down. She’s only just waking up, and her head was hurting pretty bad before she went to sleep. Give her a second.”

I could barely contain myself as Bernadette sat by Mama, talking softly to her until she was awake enough to get up and go comb her hair and wash her face.

Finally Mama emerged from the bathroom and came to sit by me on the couch.

“Hello, Heidi,” she said, patting my knee.

“Hello, Mama,” I replied, trying to keep my voice calm and even.

I looked at Bernadette and she shrugged.

“Mama, do you want to see some pretty pictures?” I asked.

Mama nodded.

“They were taken a long time ago at Hilltop Home, Mama. Do you remember Hilltop Home?”

Mama smiled and patted my knee.

“Hello, Heidi,” she said.

“Hello, Mama.”

I picked up the stack of photographs and chose one, holding it carefully by the edges so I wouldn’t smudge it.

“Look, Mama. See the Santa Claus?”

Mama looked at the photograph and smiled. I showed her another one.

“See all the people?”

Mama looked at the photograph and smiled. Bernadette came over and looked over my shoulder at the picture I was showing Mama.

“Don’t they look pretty, Precious?” she asked.

Mama said, “Pretty, Dette.”

“Look at this one, Mama. Who do you see?”

I showed her the photograph of the girl and the woman in the red sweater in front of the fireplace.

Mama looked at the photograph and smiled.

“Soof,”
she said.

My heart nearly stopped.

“Where, Mama? Show me. Show me
soof
.”

I was barely able to contain my excitement.

“Tea, Heidi?” Mama said suddenly, smoothing her skirt nervously with both hands.

“Wait, Mama. Not yet. First show me
soof
.”

Mama began to smooth her skirt faster.

“Tea, Heidi?” she said, her voice rising up a notch.

“I don’t want any tea, Mama. I want you to show me
soof
. Point to
soof
,” I said.

I was talking louder than I meant to be, louder than I should have been, and I felt Bernadette reach out and squeeze my shoulder.

“Leave your mama be now, Heidi. She’ll show us when she’s ready to.”

“No she won’t,” I said, shrugging out from
under Bernadette’s hand and pulling Mama’s hands roughly away from her skirt. I took her right hand tightly in my own, forced her index finger out straight and pressed it against the photo.

“Show me, Mama. Where is
soof
?”

“That’s enough, Heidi,” said Bernadette.

“Show me, Mama,” I demanded.

“Uh-oh. Uh-oh,” Mama repeated anxiously, wriggling as she tried to escape my grip. “Tea, Heidi? Tea?”

“I don’t want any tea!” I shouted. “I want you to tell me, Mama! I want to
know
.”

Mama whimpered.

“Done, done, done, Heidi, shh,” she said.

“Leave your mama be, Heidi,” Bernadette said sternly.

“You’re not ever going to tell me, are you, Mama?” I shouted, ignoring Bernadette. “Are you, Mama? Are you?”

I let go of her hand and angrily ripped the photo in half, throwing the pieces in Mama’s lap. Then I ran to my room, slammed the door, and with a jagged sob flung myself facedown on the bed.

I cried for a long time. I cried so hard, it felt like my ribs might crack open. I imagined my heart flying out like a small, red bird escaping its cage, going off in search of a more promising person to live in. A person with a history. A person who
knew
.

After a while I heard my door open and Bernadette and Mama come in.

“Your mama’s made some tea for you, Heidi. Just the way you like it. Sit up, baby, and take it from her, will you please? She needs you to,” Bernadette said quietly.

I dried my eyes and sat up. Mama looked so worried and sad standing there with my white cup with the pink roses in her hand. I took it from her and tried to smile.

“Thank you, Mama. Thank you for the tea.”

“Good, Heidi, tea,” she said, brightening immediately. Then she turned and walked out of the room.

“Where are you going, Precious?” Bernadette called after her.

Mama reappeared a second later holding the two halves of the photograph I’d torn.

“Uh-oh,” she said, handing me the pieces.
“Soof.”

Slowly I got up off the bed and went and stood beside her.

“Which one, Mama? Which one is
soof
? This one?” With my right hand I held out the piece of the photograph that showed Mama as a young girl. “Or this one?” I asked, holding out the other piece of the photo.

Mama looked at me and smiled. Then she reached over and clumsily pushed the two pieces together.

“Tea, Heidi?” she said.