Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [113]
So Clarise was ready. She had Til’s fox-foot–collared coat in her closet to cover her blue cotton gown. She’d just finished the purple shawl the night before for draping around her head. She’d complained about cold feet and legs and been given an extra pair of over-the-knee nylons. All she needed now were shoes, and they were on the way, once the day shift nurse finally made it in and left her shoes in the utility room to dry up from their coat of White-All shoe polish.
The silver-blue-haired, prone-to-throw-a-fit Emma was at the next table over and whispered to Clarise that the sky was going to fall. “Look at how gray,” she said, pointing wildly at the window. “Gray is the heaviest color too; it sags so.”
“Calm down, just calm down,” Clarise said as she looked out of the window that took up a whole wall. “They’re pink streams in the gray, see, look and you’ll see them. The pink will act as a harness and hold the sky up to the heaven until it’s strong enough to stand on its own.”
“Really?” Emma asked, her voice sudsing up to cry.
“On my honor,” Clarise said, and raised her fingers as if she were doing a Girl Scout pledge. “And with this Mickey Mouse hairdo”—she touched her puffs of hair wound tightly in the rubber bands—“my honor is all I have left.”
Emma tilted her head to study Clarise’s hair, and then Clarise heard the smudging walk of the day nurse. She looked quickly at the nurse’s feet, saw her in her street shoes, put a blank look to her face as if she’d already had two doses of her medication, and then hated herself for what she did next.
“I was wrong,” Clarise said as she pushed her chair back slowly and walked over to Emma as if she had lead in her slippers. She leaned down and whispered in Emma’s ear, “That’s not pink, it’s lavender in the gray, and lavender will make the sky fall quicker than even yellow.”
“It will?” Now Emma was crying. “What can we do? My God, we’re going to be crushed. What can we do?”
“We can count to ten and scream our asses off,” Clarise continued to whisper, and then backed up slowly as she listened to Emma count. Clarise was at the utility-room door by the time the screaming started, and the exhausted staff came from every direction and rushed past Clarise to restrain Emma.
Clarise could still hear the screaming in her head as she jammed her arms into her aunt’s fox-foot–collared coat and stuffed her feet into the day nurse’s shoes. She could still hear it as the exit door into the stairwell closed behind her and sounded like a yawn. She could even hear it as she smiled and said good morning to Four-eyed Jim. “God, am I glad my replacement got in here, so I can finally go home,” she said to Jim as she leaned in and scribbled on the pad. “Caught without boots, so I have to wear my work shoes out in this snow,” she said to draw his thick-lensed glasses from her face to her feet. She could hear the scream even as she walked right on out of the front door, across the courtyard under the window to the room that had been her home. And then, as she got to the corner of Market Street, which was absent cars or people or opened stores, grateful for the thick rubber soles on these nurse’s shoes, and she could still hear the scream, she realized it was her own screaming going on in her own head. It was a silent scream that she didn’t allow to leave her head. Help me, Jesus! she screamed. Help me to get home, get my bearings, call the aunts and uncles, and then please, Lord, you brought me this far, now please help me find my girls.
26
Perry stood on Hettie’s porch and called to his son as he saw him running up the block.
“Later, Pops. I got to get to Ramona,” Tyrone yelled back.
“Only take a second, Ty.” Now Perry was waving his keys. “You gonna need some transpo to take your lady out to hunt for those girls.”
Tyrone’s feet almost dented the pavement, he stopped so short. No way could his father be offering him his car. Not his brand-new deuce and a quarter that he never ever let Tyrone borrow because Perry maintained that if Tyrone were handed