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By Root 1140 0

was irritating, that damned haze, especially when it bunched up between her wrists and got tangled and she could barely work her knitting needles because of it. She was determined to knit through it, though. She pushed one needle between the looped thread, wrapped the thread around, and easily slid the finished stitch to the other needle, over and over. She was working up a steady clicking to the needles that sounded like a song; it had been so many days since she’d been able to do this. She completed one row, a second, a third. She used bright purple thread, too bright maybe because her eyes were starting to sting, and now tear, and that haze was dropping, so that all she could do was sit there and hold her needles until it lifted.

It wasn’t lifting. She blinked her eyes, trying to blink the haze from her eyes. Her vision cleared enough for her to drag across the room to get her sewing box, lift out her sharpest shears, and snip away at that navy haze wrapped around her hands, tangling up her yarns. She did. Parts of the navy were especially dense, and she had to grip and bear down hard with the scissors to get through it. Until the haze played a cruel trick, retreated suddenly, and it was the skin around her wrist that she sliced.

She didn’t even feel it. Wouldn’t even have known had it not been for the expression on Shern’s face when she came into her room to kiss her good-bye on her way to school, and she stood there in the archway of her mother’s bedroom door with such a horrified expression as if a scream had frozen itself on her face. And Clarise asked her what was wrong. “Talk to Mommie and tell me what is it,” she said with a tongue so heavy that it seemed to her it took hours to get the words out.

But all Shern could do was point to Clarise’s lap. It was only then that Clarise realized how that deceitful haze had duped her as she looked down and saw her wrists lying loosely in her lap, gaping quietly, spilling their contents like red satin ribbons unfurling gently to the floor.

When Til answered the phone to Shern’s broken, barely recognizable voice and she and Ness and Blue and Show hailed a cab to Chestnut Hill and rushed in on the house already emptied by the emergency crew, and the next-door neighbor told them what hospital, and they barrelled in on the emergency room, pleading: for information, for the girls, they were told they were too late.

Not too late for Clarise. Clarise would live, the hospital told them. She was under a thirty-day court-ordered commitment on her way right now to the Pennsylvania Institute for the Mentally Ill. All attempted suicides were handled this way. But they were too late for the girls. Children’s Services had already claimed them, had someone from Family Court retreive the girls. “Hysterical,” the aunts and uncles were told. “As you can imagine, those girls were hysterical.”

So Til sent Blue and Show back to Clarise’s house, to unspill Clarise’s blood if they could, but at least to remake the house into a place where the girls could return without the images of what had just run very far awry that morning. Too far awry even for Til and Ness to fathom. They shook their heads right now and tried to still their breathing as they sat facing each other huddled in a brown-aired room at 1801 Vine Street waiting to see the case manager assigned to the girls.

“Family Court, case managers, attempted suicides, I feel like I’m stuck in a bad dream that’s not adding up to anything that looks like sense. Just doesn’t add up, Ness,” Til said, seeing and not seeing the American flag standing behind a counter and between a door to an inner office and a wall where Lydon Johnson peered down from a scalloped gold frame. “Just doesn’t fit in with everything I know about Clarise’s constitution; she’s just not the kind to try to take her own life, just not, no way, just not.”

“I agree with you, Sister,” Ness said as she reached across to help Til pull her coat off her shoulders. She let her fingers rest on the fox-foot collar. “Remember how Clarise loved this collar when she was a little