Chapter 1: "Stay seated, Mandy," the flight attendant says. "When the other passengers have gotten off, I'll come get you." Right. She should try staying seated herself, when everybody else is standing up and the guy by the window wants out and stuff's tumbling from the overhead bins and you get bumped half into the aisle.
A man says, "Watch it," and some other man says, "Hey." Suddenly there's a pocket of hot silence. Everyone around has just realized I can't see.
"Those must be your folks. They've got a sign with MANDY on it."
Then a woman is hugging me, Aunt Emma, I guess. Her front is soft and she's shorter than me. She laughs, flustered. "I knew you were fifteen, but somehow I hadn't pictured...I mean, I thought of you younger..."
A man hugs me, and another, hugs of wool jackets and aftershave, clumsy big hugs, and their voices rumble.
One tells me he's my uncle Gabriel. Great-uncle Gabriel. They're all greats, for that matter, Great-uncles Abe and Gabriel and Great-aunt Emma, who is Gabriel's wife.
"So, Mandy," he says. "I hope you're going to liven up our gloomy old house."
"Gabriel, hush," Aunt Emma whispers. "It's too soon."
"Don't worry about me," I say. "It's OK."
And even if it's not, I can take care of myself.
That's my gift. Other girls get blond hair and nice families and brains that tell them the right things to say. I've got knowing how to take care of myself, and how to face what I have to face.
Like that night I woke up in the hospital and heard the nurses talking about whether they should take me to my mom. One said, "I hate for her to see," as if there was any way I could through bandages over eyes that had stopped working.
Besides, did that nurse think I couldn't imagine how my mom was? That I couldn't guess what happened to people when they got thrown from cars and smashed against utility poles?
I fussed until she put me into a wheelchair, took me to another floor, to intensive care, and I was too dumb to wonder why I was getting to go there now when they hadn't let me for days and days.
"Here's your mother," the nurse told me, and I had to take her word for it. The only sounds in the room were machine sounds.
I found my mother's arm, reached for her face, but the nurse moved my hand away. "You'll dislodge the tubing."
I listened for Mom to make some noise, even to just breathe out loud, but all the room became one steady, tiny monitor blip.
"Hey, Mom," I said, "you sure we can afford the rent here?"
I could feel the nurse get uptight, knew she was thinking: Hard case; people like these don't have feelings like they should.
"Don't worry, Mom," I said. "I'll get along."
My mom died the next morning, without me ever knowing if she'd heard.
This is my first time to Texas. The cold air surprises me. Somehow I thought Texas, even in the north, would be warm and dusty-smelling, not damp and cold and made empty by a wind without scent. There is no sun; I would feel it through my eyelids. I would see it. I can see sunlight, bright light. There is none this day.
We drive a long while after leaving the Dallas airport, first over highway and then back roads, and then I'm inside a house and still chilly. Aunt Emma puts a bundlely sweater on my shoulders and I hear a furnace coming roaring on. "Cold November," says Uncle Abe. "We'll have heat in just a few minutes."
I can't stop a shiver.
"Em," says Abe, "guess we've got another cold-blooded one," and I think he's saying that I'm mean, but he's not.
Gabriel says, "You Uncle Abe means thin-blooded. Emma always wants the heat up."
The house smells of cooking, onion and broccoli and meats layered one meal into the next, nice smells, but smells.
And of flowers, but not sweet ones like my roommate's at the hospital. I ask Aunt Emma what kind and she says marigolds. "About the last, I guess. We could get frost any night now."
"Most people plant marigolds to keep deer away," says Gabriel, "that's how bad they smell. But Em likes them."
"An honest smell," says Aunt Emma, "and they're easy to grow." Her answer starts another question. It seems to hang in the air: This Mandy, does she grow easy?
No, I want to shout. I don't grow easy. I'm trying the best I can and messing up terribly and I don't see how the three of you are going to make anything any better.
No, I want to shout. Don't you read? It's never easy to raise a child, not even for the people whose job it's supposed to be. Mothers grow children. Not great-aunts and old uncles.
No, I want to shout. Stare at me, in this bundlely sweater. I don't even know quite where to look, now that you're silent and your voices don't tell me where you are. Do I look easy to grow?
"May I see my room, please?" I ask.
Again that silence. I'd said, May I see. You'd think I'd know better, would have learned these last weeks what see and look do to people who can, when they hear the words said in front of someone who can't. When someone who can't says them herself.
"Certainly," answers Aunt Emma. She laughs, an embarrassed little laugh. "Actually, we have a choice for you. About what room you want, I mean. There's one here on this floor..."
(Copyright c 1996 by Jeanette Ingold. Published by Harcourt, Inc. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.)
