“She is,” Sunshine said. Her voice was full of a pained wonder. “She’s crying.”
Brown turned to Sunshine and talked low and fast, as if I had just been hurtled into an emergency room on a stretcher and he were an emergency room nurse gathering information from the EMTs surrounding me. As if he were trying to assess the severity of the situation. Triage.
“Have you ever seen her cry? I’ve never seen her cry.”
“Once,” Sunshine whispered back. “Only once. The time she told me about her boyfriend.”
“The Asa boyfriend who broke up with her and then died in Afghanistan?”
“Brown. There’s been only one boyfriend. So, yes.”
Then Sunshine was up and kneeling on the other side of me, holding both my hands. She smelled the way she always did, lemon soap with a side of rosemary and wool. All those baby hats.
“What’s going on, honey?”
Her voice was calm, but she betrayed herself with the word “honey.” Sunshine never used that word unless she was worried. She was not a sweetie honey sugar kind of person. “Tell us what’s going on.”
“I can’t. I promised her I wouldn’t. It’s the least I can do.”
But “Clara,” Brown said, and “Clara,” Sunshine said, and I could hear in their voices that they were going to sit there as long as it took, as long as was necessary, until “Spit it out,” and finally I opened my mouth and out it came: How I had come north for her birthday, how I had found Mr. Orange Juice in the dishes cabinet, how my mother had stood there frowning at me, those withered geranium blossoms in her hands, how after I returned to Florida the state trooper stopped her on Starr Hill for erratic driving, after which William T. called me and said “Clara, you might want to come up for another visit,” how I had flown back up and visited the doctor with my mother, and then how only a week after that I pulled into our driveway in Sterns with the Subaru loaded to the gills to find the Amish family there, Amish kids running around, an outhouse standing in the backyard where the chokecherries used to be, how recently my mother had turned to me, down in the place where she lived now, looked at me and said How do I know you again? And eFAD. The gene mutation, the fifty-fifty chance, the fear and terror and torment that it might be inside me too, the what-iffing that went along with that: Should I get the test? What if I carried the gene, what then? What then, what then, what then.
All of it.
I talked, they listened. It took a long time and it wasn’t coherent and it all came out in no understandable order but neither of them said anything. No asking for clarification, no interruptions, no wait-a-minutes. A misshapen door on misaligned hinges to a tiny, ugly room, a lost room inside me being pried open. All the old, dead air inside leaked out right there at the fire pit, where we sat with our plates. Sunshine and Brown were human green plants breathing it in so that out it came as regular air, air that we all could breathe.
“Jesus,” Brown said, when I was done, when I’d filled them in on everything. How early-onset sometimes moved faster than the standard variety, how she was now at Stage 6b and probably on her way to 6c, and did they know that there were only seven stages total. How when I found the orange juice carton in the dishes cabinet, a lukewarm interloper among the bowls and plates, I had known what William T. Jones and Annabelle Lee must already have guessed at. How my stomach knew, my body knew, how something tiny and awful began crawling its way through me then and there. How it had not stopped crawling since.
* * *
“So that’s the deal,” I said. “And now I’ve broken the promise I made to her. The one promise she asked of me. All that world-traveler stuff I told you? Lies. Every bit of it.”
“First off,” Sunshine said, “before we go into anything else, there is something that needs to be said. Which is that if you do carry that gene, the mutation thing, Brown and I will take care of you.”
Right to the chase. No recriminations for not telling them before now, no chastising, no side-eye. That was Sunshine.
“Duh,” Brown said. “That’s a given.”
“And if I kick the bucket, then Brown will carry on and take care of you solo,” Sunshine added. That was also Sunshine. Cut and dried about the c-word and its ramifications. She poked Brown with her elbow and he nodded, which meant, Yes, I will carry on.
“So,” Sunshine said, “is there anything that can be done in the here and now for The Fearsome?”
“No. Nothing. She’s not eligible for any trials—too young, which is a totally screwed-up policy—and the drug she’s on helps some but can’t stop what’s happening and all I can do is sit with her. Everything that got messed up between us is still messed up and I don’t know how to fix it. She’s going someplace where I can’t. She’s never coming back. All I can do is sit and listen and try to follow wheresoever she goeth.”
Neither of them batted an eye at wheresoever or goeth. They had known me since we were eighteen; no eyes would be batted at anything I said or any way I said it.
“Am I doing everything I can do?” I said. “I don’t know.”
Brown’s hands were keeping my one cold hand not-cold, and I pushed my other hand into his cupped palms too. Brown was always warm.
“Tell us what you’re doing,” Brown said. “Start with that.”
“Spending time with her is what I’m doing. I go down there a few days a week and we walk around the halls. I bring her a book. We watch Jeopardy! together.”
“Can she”—and then he stopped, but I knew what he was going to ask and so did Sunshine, because she finished the question for him—“follow along? Does she know what’s going on?”
“It depends. Sometimes it’s like she’s not really there and other times she’s weirdly good at it.”
“I don’t remember her being good at Jeopardy! back in the day,” Sunshine said. “I don’t remember her ever calling out any answers.”
“Me either,” Brown said.
“Maybe she was, though. Maybe she knew all the answers all that time and she never said anything because we were always yelling them out. See, that’s part of what makes me nuts. Like, did I even know my mother?”
“What kid does?” Sunshine said. “Show me a kid who recognizes their parents as people and not just parents, and I’ll show you a weirdo.”
“I was a weirdo, though. Kind of.”
“And you still are!” Brown said, in his exclamation-mark voice. “Kind of!”
“Did they tell you to do anything?” Sunshine said. “Anything more than visit, be there?”
“They told me to follow her.”
“Like, literally? Down the hall or whatever?”
“Like metaphorically. Wherever she goes in her mind, it’s my job to follow her there. Which could be any number of places. The other night she was on her way to choir practice.”