What Happened to My Sister: A Novel (4 page)

We pass barns with huge pancakes or waffles or hamburgers or fried chicken painted on their roofs. So many of them I stopped counting an hour ago. It’s got to where if I see a barn my mouth starts watering even before the roof picture comes to view. Not all of them have painted food. Some are blank and I start to feel sorry for those ones—they look buck naked. Downright embarrassed
they don’t have pictures. We pass cows. More cows. Cotton fields. Tobacco fields. Pine trees. More cows. Stores selling quilts. Gas stops with
Fireworks Galore!
and
Cigarettes Real Cheap—No Tax!
The more we drive the more it feels like the Flintstones when Fred runs but keeps passing the same things again and again.

I flap my arm up and down out the window and pretend it’s a bird wing. My hand karate-chops the wind. I discover that, if you let it, the wind’ll flap your arm just like a bird flaps its wings without you having to do a dang thing. Hey wait a second! Maybe the birds know it. Maybe they fly for hours and don’t get tired, the wind being what’s moving their wings so they don’t have to lift a feather. I bet that’s what they talk about. Old birds chirping to young ones
Psst! It only
looks
like we’re doing the flying! It’s the wind, kids! It’s the wind! Pass it on
. I put this on the list of things I need to check when I finally get the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
set I been dreaming about forever and a day—ever since Orla Mae Bickett showed me her daddy’s. Each letter gets its own book, gold lettering on the front. You really don’t need anything but the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
’cause it has ever-thing in the universe all right there in one place. If you ask me, you don’t even need schooling if you have the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. I copied down how to spell it so I’d know what to wish for when I blow out birthday candles from now on.

Things to Check On in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica When I Get It

    
1. Why do streams and rivers go to the ocean instead of the other way around?

    
2. Is Frankenstein good or bad? (He gave the girl a flower = good; he’s a scary monster = bad.)

    
3. Do snakes have bones? If they do then how come they can bend ever which way without breaking?

    
4. What happens to girls whose second toes are taller than their big toes? Do they die when they get to thirty? (Orla Mae Bickett said so in homeroom.)

    
5. Do birds really fly or do they just stretch out their wings nice and flat so the wind can do the flying for them?

My arm goes up and down like an ocean wave and it’s cool for a minute. I’m staring out the window, thinking nothing in particular, and right when we pass a Waffle House with a missing
o
on the sign, right that very second, this flash picture pops into my brain. I get them sometimes.
Visions
. For as long as I can remember, every once in a while if I’m setting real still and nothing’s taking up space in my head, a picture of something that doesn’t make any sense at the time will pop in front of my eyes. Like how, when you stare at a lightbulb for a long time then look away and close your eyes a picture of the lightbulb is burned on the inside of your eyelids. This one summer me and Emma were taking turns balancing on the log fence when into my head came a picture of a little moss-colored glass ball rolling up to another one the same size but the color of the sky just before a storm. I could have sworn I even heard the click of the two balls hitting each other. I didn’t say anything about it and pretty soon I forgot the balls altogether. A few months later Mr. White from the drugstore gave me and Emma a set of glass marbles for Christmas but I’d already forgotten about the picture flash. Then, after we moved away, Richard caught me and Em playing with the marbles when we were supposed to be helping Momma in the kitchen and his boot came down on the pouch that held them and the crunch of the breaking glass made me cry something awful. With Richard hollering
boo fucking hoo
after us, Emma and me ran to the creek and settled on a rock at the edge. She said she wanted to show me something she had in her pocket and when she opened her fist I
finally
remembered the picture flash because there in the palm of her little
hand were two glass marbles: one moss green, the other stormy-sky gray.

So anyway, I look out at the Waffle House missing an
o
and
pow!
I have myself a vision of a milk white pudgy baby arm reaching out, wriggling its teensy fingers. It’s gone as fast as it got here. I’m trying to decide whether to tell Momma about it when a loud clanking gives the both of us a start. The hood’s huffing and puffing like an old mule carrying a load of coal. Momma hears it too and slows down, saying
please dear Lord don’t take her now
, and for a second I think she means me but when the car starts choking and coughing I see she’s praying for
it
not me. The wind’s gone on account of us going real slow now. It’s spooky quiet and I hear Momma say to herself
if the car dies we’re done for
and now I’m officially scared because Momma never says things like
we’re done for
so I’m gonna pray. Even though her first husband, my real daddy, got shot dead right in front of her back at our old house in Toast, even though her second husband had the same thing done to him but by her own flesh and blood, and even though we’re
broker than spit at a swap meet
, Momma’s never said
we’re done for
. So I’ll pray harder than ever even though God don’t pay attention to little kids’ prayers. Emma and me, we done experiments over it and it’s true. But just in case things have changed since the prayer experiments, I promise God that if He lets the car live I’ll pray ever-day and I’ll never get on Momma’s last nerve again. I think those exact words over and over—ten times. Probably more—and I really and truly mean every one of them.
I swear, God, if You let the car live I’ll pray ever-day and I’ll never get on Momma’s last nerve again, I swear
. I say it in my head but I move my lips so He’ll know I’m for real.

A car honks at us and Momma says
Jesus H. Christmas can’t you see I’m trying to get out of the way
, and like a magic trick, smoke starts slithering out from under the hood and Momma starts pumping at the gas pedal hard, even though it makes no difference.
And now I know it’s a fact: God don’t pay mind to little kids’ prayers. He’s busy on more important things than dying cars carrying families driving on burning hot two-lane interstates. Momma’s hunched over hugging the steering wheel with her head to the side listening real careful like the motor’s whispering its last dying words. She pumps the gas pedal—
“come on, come on, come on”
—and the way it keeps crawling, the station wagon looks like it’s sorry it’s letting us down. We inch to the gravelly side of the road and the motor hisses itself out for good. It’s so quiet now I cain’t hardly believe it’s the same day as it was just a little while ago with the wind and the radio and the painted barn rooftops. The metal siding creaks and I’m betting it’s the old car saying goodbye. It really did the best it could because it happened to cough to death right under a shade tree. Like a final act of kindness. Like it knew
we
weren’t the ones kicking it and hitting things with it all those years, it was Richard. I believe maybe this car had a soul and maybe that soul went up to Heaven and maybe up in Heaven it’s shiny new and Daddy’s behind the wheel, tooting
hey
to us from Up Above.

I don’t think I’ll bring that up with Momma now though. Out of the side of my eye, without even moving an inch, I watch Momma because it occurs to me that what happens next depends on whether she hangs her head down like it’s the end or tilts it back to the headrest like the car dying is just a stumbling block and she’s not worried. Like she’s just figuring out our next move and we’ll be under way
in the shake of a lamb’s tail
, as Miss Mary at the old drugstore used to say. I breathe in and out four times before Momma drops her forehead to the steering wheel that has little dips for where your fingers go. Uh-oh. Momma doesn’t have a next move.

After a short while, she sits up and stares out ahead like the car’s still moving.

“Maybe it just needs a rest, Momma,” I say. Why this has not occurred to me till now I don’t right know but don’t that sound like a possibility? “Maybe it wants to cool down or something. It wasn’t this hot up back in the hills—it’s probably not used to the heat.”

I sounded too schoolteachery. Too know-it-all. Momma hates know-it-alls. I guess I’m wrong because Momma doesn’t say anything back. I look over to find she’s in one of her trances again. If you saw her like this you’d swear on a stack of preachers’ Bibles a magician swung a pocket watch in front of her, saying
you’re getting veeery sleepy … veeery sleepy …

This time I’m not so worried because Momma cain’t stay in a tired old car forever like she near done in her bedroom after Daddy died. Back then, Momma took to her bed and that trance took infinity and a day to wear off enough for her to come back out. A minister came by once or twice to check on her and so did Mr. White and Miss Mary but I didn’t know them real good yet. On his way out Mr. White patted me on the head and said, “She’ll come around. She’s a survivor, that one.” Once I heard Mr. White say a part of Momma died when Daddy did. He told Miss Mary that Momma
went into her room one person and came out an altogether different one
.

So I know the best thing I can do right now is stay still. Wait for Momma to come around again. I doodle little hearts in my notebook. New ones coming up out of the dips in the tops of old ones so you cain’t tell where they start from. Mrs. Ferson once said me drawing hearts means I got a whole lotta love packed inside me just dying to get out, making it sound like I might barf love if I got sick. So I think of Mrs. Ferson every time I doodle. I been working on covering a whole page in hearts and I’m almost to the bottom when Momma lifts her head and says:

“Well all right. Let’s get out to where someone can see us.”

Then she tells me to
hop to
and get the stuff out of the back. I kinda hoped we’d sleep curled up on them Hefty sacks like little kittens if we had to camp out in the car tonight. I guess not.

Momma only has to bang her door twice this time to get it open and if you ask me, that’s almost a miracle right there. It usually takes five or six shoulder hits before the door’ll let you out. I climb over the seat and open the way-back door like normal since now we don’t need to mind the silver duct tape that’d been keeping it attached to the rest of the car.

Jiminy Cricket! The road’s hotter than I thought it’d be, that’s for sure. I jump out and in two seconds I’m hopping up and down from bare foot to bare foot.

“My flip-flops, my flip-flops! Momma Momma ow!”

“Get your own damn flip-flops,” Momma says from under the hood she’s jimmied up like a car mechanic. “I got bigger bears to skin.”

We’re in bad moods. Even me and I’m not ever in a bad mood. Not even when I stepped on a yellow jacket wasp with a bare foot when I was in first grade. My arm’s all the way almost to the bottom of the clothes sack feeling around for flip-flops. Emma used to call them
flippy-floppys
. Mine have rainbows on the bottoms so the person walking behind can have something cheery to look at.

“They’re here somewhere.” I say this to myself, honest. I sure didn’t mean for Momma to hear when I made the groan sound she calls the
woe-is-me
. If I got the
woe-is-me
in my voice she’ll ask if she should call the
whaaa-mbulance
, making it sound like the crying a baby makes.

“Oh hush up,” she says from right behind me. I jump at her being close all the sudden. “Momma this, Momma that. Like I don’t have anything to do but wait on you hand and foot. Move aside and hold your water.”

This makes my bad mood a little better because
hold your water
is what Miss Juni Moon used to say ever-time someone tried to hurry her up. Miss Juni Moon used to come watch us back in Toast if Momma and Daddy stayed out for too long. Miss Juni had this angry-looking scar on her forehead the shape of a sliver of the moon and she was born in June 1960, the only baby born during the month of the worst flood the town ever had so, thanks to two strokes of bad luck, she was Juni Moon and that was that. Pretty soon no one could remember her real name.

After fishing out my flip-flops Momma stands under the tree that’s so spindly she’s got to stand sideways for shade. She lights her cigarette with one thumb flick of the lighter wheel. Momma can light a cigarette on a windy day with one hand tied behind her back. I bet she could light one in a snowstorm. Also, she can smoke with no hands if she needs to—she rarely does because she says
it’s not ladylike
. But here on the side of the empty road to nowhere she lets the cigarette dangle from the side of her mouth like a gunslinger in a shoot-’em-up even though she ain’t doing anything with her hands.

Since we got nothing better to do, I pull out my notebook.
Today is Tuesday
, I write—even though I don’t know what difference that makes, marking days of the week like that. But I figure the small stuff might could come in handy one day, who knows. So I write:

The car just died. I’m wearing my green shorts the ones with a peace sign on the right. My now-dirty unicorn T-shirt I got from the Goodwill dollar bin a long time ago …

“What in the Sam Hill you think you’re doing?”

I jump in my skin for the second time in the day. I hadn’t heard her coming—she’s real good at surprising me that way. Momma’s cigarette bounces up and down between her lips like it’s dancing to the words. The ash at the end clings on and I worry it’ll fall right
into Momma’s clothes and light her afire. Then I realize she’s got that look that tells me, even though her voice is quiet, she’s madder than a wet hen.