The Red We Share

It’s 7:59 a.m. when I go into Momma’s room. I’d woken up from a bad dream, but my sisters aren’t awake yet, Riley still snoring through the darkness and Anna talking in her sleep, so I crept out of my twin bed and I’m going to crawl in bed with Momma like I used to when I was little. I haven’t done it in a long time, not since I turned ten and my sisters told me that I’m too big to be sleeping in Momma’s bed after nightmares. Momma gets so mad at me when I wake her up, but I know to tell her I had a nightmare, so she’d wipe the tears from my puffy cheeks and then let me lie next to her while she stroked my skin until I fell back asleep.

The alarm clock on Momma’s nightstand glows a neon green and casts a sickly color onto her waves of freshly washed hair, the exact same shade of red as mine. Unlike Momma’s perfectly managed hair that was never without products, mine is wild, as it always is in the mornings until Momma brushes it. Momma is the most beautiful person in the world to me, especially since I’m getting older and always hearing that I look just like her. I love her because I’m the youngest and she treats me like a princess, and because she always reminds me how much she loves my curly red hair.

She lay face down on the fluffy pillow; her long wavy hair splayed around her like the sun I drew for an art project at school last week. I’d colored it in the same shade of coppery ginger as our hair and brought it home for Momma to see, and she’d pinned it on the fridge next to Anna’s self-portrait. I reach out to touch Momma’s hair, feeling the soft strands between my fingers and finding comfort in the fragrance of her shea butter shampoo that wafts into my nose. It is only after her alarm goes off at 8:00 a.m. and she does not stir that I begin to feel a heaviness in my stomach.

My sisters and I share the room right next to Momma’s, and every morning we hear the alarm clock screech at the same time, after which we know we have five minutes for Momma to wash her face, brush her teeth, and put her clothes on before she comes to our room to rouse us. My brothers have ten minutes after the alarm, because Momma always spends five minutes with us, picking out outfits, telling us what chores we each had to do that day, and most importantly, brushing my hair. That routine is one of many in our family that never changes, and probably never will.

The alarm clock clicks to 8:03 a.m. and Momma still has not moved. The rock in my stomach sinks lower and lower until it settles at the bottom of my belly, where Momma had told me that my baby parts were. I came home from school a few weeks ago and asked Momma about what my teacher had said in class that day, about how I was at the age that my body would be changing and one day I would start bleeding from around the same place I pee from and that meant I could have babies. Momma laughed one of her loud booming laughs that always made my chest warm and said that she supposed it was time I had “the talk” since Anna, being two years older than me, had gotten it when she was ten too. I didn’t really understand a lot of what Momma said in the hour after that, but she’d made me promise I’d never let a man like Daddy try to give me a baby, no matter what he said he’d do for me. I had told Momma that I loved Daddy and I would love to have a baby with someone like him, and she’d slapped me. She didn’t do that often, but when she did it always made me cry, and it made her cry too, and she would find me later and apologize and say she’d never do it again, but we both always knew she was lying.

I rest my hand on one of Momma’s arms and she doesn’t return the touch in her usual way, how she places her hand over mine when I put it on her arm, waiting for her attention so I don’t interrupt or distract her. I stand there, beside her bed, with my hand on her arm until Asa comes in Momma’s room a few minutes later, rubbing his stubbled chin, his eyes sleepy. He had just recently started growing hair on his chin and was always touching it, like it was precious to him.

I turn to him, and I guess my face must say something that my mouth doesn’t, because my brother immediately pulls me away from Momma and wraps his large, muscled arms around me. When he calls out for Jack his voice cracks, but not the way it had been doing a lot lately, instead in the way it does when he cries in the bathroom late at night and thinks no one can hear him. I hear Jack’s heavy footsteps run from down the hall, but I can’t see when he comes into Momma’s room because Asa holds my head into his stomach and my face is buried in his sweatshirt, but Asa says something and Jack lets out a loud, gut-wrenching wail. I don’t know why Asa’s holding me like he’s shielding me from something, or why Jack is crying so hard.

I can’t see anything at all and what I can hear is muffled, Asa is holding me so close, and the smell of his cologne lingering on his sweatshirt hurts my nose. I try to pull away, to get away from the strong stink of it, but Asa holds me tighter and shouts at Jack, gesturing wildly with one of his arms and clutching my small body with the other. Then Riley’s voice, usually sweet and soft, cracks with a bawl as she says something to Asa. I can hear Jack wailing and shouting through sobs at both of them, at me, maybe, but his voice was different too; frantic, panicked. I’d only heard his voice that way once before, when Momma told us Daddy wasn’t coming back and we had to be on our best behavior from there on out, “for my sanity,” she said. Jack had cried harder than I did, because he was Daddy’s favorite the way I was Momma’s.

By the time the yelling among my older siblings stops, my body is pulsing with the blood rushing to and from my heart, and my head has started to hurt. Asa crouches down, our faces level, and holds me by the shoulders. I don’t know where Jack or Riley have gone, if they’re still behind me or if they’ve disappeared back to their bedrooms; all I can see is Asa staring into my eyes and Momma lying in bed behind him. “Lilah, go pack a bag, okay? We’re going over to Mrs. Helen’s for a while.”

I ask him why, why I needed a bag and why it was 8:15 and Momma hadn’t gotten out of bed yet and why we were going to Mrs. Helen’s house across the street this early in the morning. His face is bright red like it always was after he came back from baseball practice, and his eyes were beginning to look bloodshot.

“I – I just need you to listen to me, Lilah,” he says. “Please.” Asa never says please. He always just demands, expecting everyone to do what he says because he’s the oldest. I open my mouth to ask more questions, but then I hear Jack, who is still standing behind me in the doorway, once again cry out, sorrow filling his voice.

I nod, just once, and Asa picks me up and puts me on his hip the way he used to when I was littler and he was too, but he’s always been bigger than me, so it didn’t matter. I wrap my arms around his neck and he walks us out of Momma’s room. I look over his shoulder at Momma on the bed, the white comforter pulled up to the base of her neck, her arms draped by her sides, and her red hair stretching in every direction, such a glaring contrast against the fabric.

Asa carries me to the next room over, where my sisters are opening and closing their respective drawers in the one dresser we all share, pulling clumps of clothing out and shoving them into their school backpacks. The original contents of the bags, spiral-bound notebooks, mechanical pencils, the oddly folded paper or two, a textbook, and so many rocks and shells and things, are strung out all over the carpeted floor, strangely accompanied by Anna’s favorite stuffie and Riley’s drool-stained pillow. Asa sets me down just inside the threshold of the doorway and tells me again to pack a bag, that Riley would help me and he would be back to get us in a minute, and then shuts the door. It’s quiet for the first time since he’d come into Momma’s room, except for my double bell clock, the one that my sisters and I keep on the dresser, which ticks softly among the rustle of Riley and Anna shoving clothes into bags and moving around the room.

I stand there unmoving, my back to the tall door, until Riley grabs my backpack off the rack above my head and drags me to the dresser by a firm but kind grip around my wrist. She thrusts my orange L.L. Bean bag at me and instructs me to pack enough clothes for a week and make sure to grab extra underwear. Again, I ask why, why I needed to pack and why it was 8:25 a.m. and Momma hasn’t come to brush my hair and why Jack was crying and why everyone was mad at me.

“Nobody’s mad at you, Lilah, we just have to go to Mrs. Helen’s house, and we have to leave soon,” Riley says as she opens the bottom drawer of the scarred wooden dresser and begins to rifle through my clothes. Everything feels wrong.

“Then why isn’t anyone telling me anything? What’s going on?” I ask, but the rock in my stomach feels like it’s gotten bigger and much heavier, like it knows something I don’t.

Riley looks me in the eyes, and I see something in hers that I don’t recognize. She doesn’t answer my questions and instead says, “Come here,” reaching out a hand. “I’ll help you. Let’s get your clothes packed and then I can brush your hair, okay?”

I reluctantly let her pull out shirts and shorts and told her yes and no to which ones I wanted to wear for who knows how long we would be spending at Mrs. Helen’s house, and then I grab two handfuls of socks and underwear from the basket in the closet with my name on it and shove those in my bag too.

I sit on the end of my bed and Riley brushes my hair. It makes me miss the way Momma brushes it with tenderness and love; Riley’s hand is so harsh and rough in comparison. Through Riley’s arms, I watch Anna as she keeps unpacking and repacking her backpack, which is pink with a bedazzled unicorn on it. She just turned twelve a few weeks ago and Jack told her that now she was too old for unicorns, but Momma bought it for Anna before school started this year and Anna loved it so much, she carried it everywhere for a week. My backpack has a gecko stitched on it and my initials, L.A.H., which are the same as Momma’s. The bag used to be hers when she was my age, she said, when I was finally big enough to wear it to school last year.

By the time Asa comes back to our room, Riley has tamed my hair, Anna has finally found her stuffed elephant but still hasn’t said a word, and I am still sitting on my bed with my legs dangling off the end. Asa has a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and Jack’s backpack on the other and is keeping Jack’s skinny, slightly limp body upright by an arm around his back. Jack’s face is splotchy and red, and it makes my stomach twist. Riley takes my hand in one of hers, and she feels so much bigger than me, something I haven’t noticed until now. Then I notice Anna, who takes Riley’s other hand, is silently crying and clutching her elephant to her chest.

“Come on,” Asa says.

We walk together, the five of us, down the hallway, and I listen to the rain pound against the roof and the windows and the walls and notice that the house feels so much smaller than it had when I’d woken up mere minutes ago. My backpack is heavy on my shoulders and Riley’s hand feels sweaty and warm in mine, and we all trudge through the house slower than I’ve ever walked, like we’re wading through thick mud. Everything is just how we left it last night, pillows and blankets scattered from family movie night and makeshift popcorn buckets and corn kernels littering the coffee table and couch. We’d stayed up late and watched Megamind and Anna and I had laughed so loud that Asa and Jack threw popcorn at our faces, and Riley and Momma just chuckled and shook their heads at all of us. I don’t remember how I’d ended up in bed; Momma or Asa probably carried me up and tucked me in after I fell asleep on the couch, which happens often.

I hold the front door open for everyone like Momma always makes me when we leave the house as a group. Asa steps out first, leading the way down the stone path since he’s the oldest, supporting Jack, then Riley, who is Jack’s not-so-identical twin, and then Anna. The cold air gusts through the threshold and tousles my hair, making it wild all over again. When it was my turn to leave the warmth of the house and step into the rain, I hesitate.

It’s bitterly cold outside, the kind of cold that makes your bones ache from the inside out and turns your skin a blistery shade of red. It’s raining a pelting, angry rain, which only makes me colder through my t-shirt. Standing in the doorway, looking back over my shoulder to the stairwell, up to where Momma still lay in her bed, with the red hair we share spread around her like the sun, I know for a fact I will never forget the way the rain sounds as it pounds against the windows like Daddy always did when Momma locked him out of the house.

I step through the doorway; my small hand wrapped around the round doorknob. I pull it closed it behind me and listen to the squeak of the old hinges and click of the rusty latch, but this time, Momma isn’t here to be the caboose and lock the door behind us.

The rain pierces my skin as I follow my siblings down the walkway leading from our little house to the sidewalk, and then Asa leads us across the road and up the path to Mrs. Helen’s house. We all crowd on the front steps, trying to find shelter from the rain under her awning. A weary, sagging Jack gets passed off to Riley so Asa can knock on the door. The sound of his knuckles against the wood echoes through my head as I turn to watch the rain splatter on the pavement of the road. In the distance a siren sounds, but I remind myself that’s not unusual for our town.

Mrs. Helen, in her deep purple bathrobe, slippers, and thick gray hair wrapped up in fabric, opens the door and says, “Hi, angels.” She pauses, takes us in with our bags on our backs and Jack and Anna’s tear-stained faces and Asa’s clenching jaw. “What’s going on?”

Then Asa says, “Can we stay here for a little while?”

The siren gets closer, louder, making my bones rattle under my skin.

“Of course, but,” a considerate pause. “Why?”

The sounds of splashing water and tires approaches behind us, and the siren is now loud enough that I can’t even hear my own thoughts. Anna now starts to cry again, and Riley pulls her in a hug alongside a mute Jack.

Mrs. Helen clutches the neck of her robe tightly and looks past us, toward our quaint yellow house. She takes in a deep breath and lets it out shakily and then meets my eyes for a moment before looking back to Asa, whose clenched knuckles are white on the strap of his duffel.

“Oh, dear. Come here, children, in, in, in,” and she ushers us into her home, which smells faintly of honeysuckle and fresh coffee. One by one we step over the threshold, each of my siblings dropping their bags just inside the doorway alongside their discarded shoes, like we always do when we visit Mrs. Helen.

When it’s my turn to enter, I look up to meet Mrs. Helen’s eyes, and she places a soft, wrinkled hand on my cheek. “It’s alright, sweetheart. It’ll all be okay.”

Just before she closes the door, I see two people in uniforms wheeling a stretcher into my house, now quiet ambulance sirens illuminating the still-sleeping street.