A Life of Bright Ideas Read online

  “That plane’s never going to get off the ground with her in it,” a woman’s voice behind me said, and Winnalee turned around and screamed, “Shut the fuck up, Fanny!”

  Aunt Verdella drew her arms in tightly. “Oh dear, am I too heavy? I’m a hundred and seventy-six pounds. Is that too much?”

  “You’re fine,” Tommy told her as Craig took Boohoo from Uncle Rudy and placed him on Aunt Verdella’s lap. Boohoo was limp and confused, blotched with hives, his lips so swollen they didn’t even look like lips anymore. The stings—so many of them—pocked his skin like miniature sinkholes.

  “You’re going for a ride in the Piper, Boohoo,” I called. “Just like you wanted to.” I meant for my voice to sound excited in a good way, but it sounded more like a siren. I glanced at Tommy, hoping to see confidence and calm on his face, like the heroes in TV shows always wore, but he didn’t look like that at all. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip and dappling his temple. He seemed almost confused about what controls he needed to mess with. He gulped a deep breath, held it for a moment, then blew it out with force.

  Uncle Rudy said something to Aunt Verdella, I couldn’t make out what, then Craig shut the door and gave the plane one quick pat.

  “Back up, everybody. Back up!” Craig shouted. Craig and Melvin—even Brody helped—spread their arms and herded the stunned spectators away from the plane.

  “What’s going on?” I turned when I heard Dad’s voice. He was standing with Mr. Bishop, who looked every bit as confused as he.

  We moved like one body, walking backward, and I could hear someone telling Dad what had happened. “Jesus Christ,” Dad spat.

  The Piper started moving, crawling at first, and the crowd hushed, their fingers near their lips.

  “He’s got to get it up to sixty miles an hour before it can lift,” someone said as the plane grazed the field. People rocked to their toes, as if doing so would somehow help the plane lift all the faster. Together we sighed, when the Piper’s wheels finally left the grass.

  Someone was shouting orders to call the airport and the hospital, and a couple of women were flurrying toward the house. But most stood in huddles, talking among themselves, shaking their heads and rubbing their arms as if they were cold.

  Craig came over to where Winnalee and Freeda and I were standing with Uncle Rudy. Dad made his way over to hear what he had to say. “Tommy will get him there in fifteen, sixteen minutes tops, and an ambulance will be waiting,” he told us. “Tommy’s an excellent pilot. He’ll get the job done.”

  “But it’s so foggy. He won’t be able to see,” I said. Ada appeared at my side, to ask Craig if it was too hazy for Tommy to fly—as if Craig was an experienced flyer who’d logged a million miles in the air, when in fact, he’d only had a couple of lessons so far, and not many more passenger trips.

  “He’ll ride right above the road and keep it low. Tommy knows every high spot around here, so don’t you worry.”

  “Let’s get to the hospital,” Uncle Rudy said. His voice was gentle, as always, but there was an intensity in him that stretched his strides as he led us to the road.

  “Evalee? Where’s Evalee?” Winnalee asked as we hurried, her head cranking.

  “Sally Thompson has her. She’s gonna keep her until we get back.” Winnalee’s steps slowed, and Freeda pushed her to go faster. “It’s okay. She’s got formula and diapers. She’ll be fine.”

  “Call me, call me!” Ada shouted after us.

  Dad paused when we reached his truck, like maybe he was considering driving himself to town, but Winnalee tugged his arm as if it was a branch from our magic tree, that could keep her from falling into a scary world where little boys die of bee stings.

  Dad lit a cigarette the second he got in Aunt Verdella’s car, and Winnalee, who sat in the back with him—I was tucked in the front between Uncle Rudy and Freeda—reached over and opened his window so the wind would suck the smoke out.

  “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it,” Freeda kept saying, as she pressed her head to the window to watch the Piper moving above the road out ahead of us. I was too scared to look. “One minute everything was fine, and now this. For crissakes, if that ain’t life.”

  “Why was he trying to tie up a hornets’ nest anyway? He had to know it was a hive, didn’t he?” Winnalee asked.

  I felt sick to my stomach. Freeda squeezed my hand and told us everything would be okay. Then she spotted the road sign, and muttered a tense, “Goddamn detour. Goddamn it.”

  The tension in the car hung just as heavy and low as the haze above us, as Uncle Rudy turned on Pike’s Peak Road and was forced to slow down to account for the thick spread of new gravel. I cranked my head, trying to spot the Piper, but distance and fog had swallowed it.

  “Shouldn’t we be praying or something?” Winnalee asked. “Isn’t that what people do at times like this?”

  “Our Boohoo’s gonna be fine. Just fine,” Uncle Rudy said. Freeda turned to look into the backseat, and mimicked his words.

  And then Dad spoke, his words punching me in the back so hard they knocked the wind out of me. “Why in the hell weren’t you watching him, Evy?”

  Silence, the kind born out of shock, fell over the car for a second or two.

  Uncle Rudy growled Dad’s name, then squinted a warning glare in the rearview mirror.

  Winnalee snapped, “Uncle Reece! I don’t believe you just said that!”

  Freeda cranked sideways so hard, her right boob butted up against my shoulder. “You miserable son of a bitch, you!” she screamed. “If I could reach back there, I’d pound the living shit right out of you for saying that! How dare you, after all this kid’s been through … after how hard she works to pick up the fucking slack you leave. For crissakes, what’s the matter with you, Reece Peters?”

  “Okay, let’s calm down now,” Uncle Rudy said, his voice scraping like a razor over Freeda and Dad’s rough-edged rage. “This won’t help anybody right now.”

  Freeda turned back around, and drew me into her. I propped my hand between my face and her shoulder so I wouldn’t soak her shirt. Her heart and breath were working hard, and her heel was tapping the floorboards, jiggling her leg and me.

  Winnalee started praying awkwardly under her breath. “God is good, God is great. Let us thank Him if He gets Boohoo to the hospital in time. Amen.”

  I prayed after Winnalee did, but silently. And not to God, but to Ma. Asking her to please, please, if Boohoo came to her, selflessly send him back to us.

  I was grateful when we finally reached the end of Circle Avenue and got back on the highway. I was holding Boohoo, Aunt Verdella, and Tommy so close in my mind and heart since we’d lost sight of them, that it was easy to believe that once we left the rocky terrain, they, too, were now sailing along more smoothly and swiftly.

  When we reached town, Uncle Rudy put his emergency flashers on and honked at every car in front of us until they pulled aside and let us pass. Winnalee scooted forward until I could feel her arm crossways on my back, and her breath on my hair. “Go, Uncle Rudy! Go!”

  We had to park in the visitors’ lot and use the main doors that opened onto the second floor, even though two ambulances sitting alongside the hospital confirmed what Uncle Rudy remembered—that the emergency room was on the first level.

  “Do you think Boohoo is here yet?” Winnalee asked, and Uncle Rudy told her he was sure he was.

  Polished floors that echoed our hurried steps greeted us inside the hospital, as well as an elevator that moved so slowly that Freeda had time to fill it to the ceiling with cusswords before it let us out.

  Maybe it was the whooshing of the elevator. Or maybe it was my rising panic, mixed with the hospital smells. Whatever it was, I suddenly felt like I was going to vomit. There was a short little couch with powder blue cushions and wooden arms tucked in an alcove near the elevator, and Freeda led me to it and told me to breathe through my nose. Dad and Uncle Rudy hurried down the hall, their work boots
thumping.

  “You okay?” Winnalee asked. But I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t do anything but shake.

  “Breathe,” Freeda said, as she bent over me. She stood with us for a moment longer, then told Winnalee to stay with me, and hurried to follow the men.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I said, as I struggled to find a shred of bravery.

  “Don’t be,” Winnalee said. “Boohoo means everything to you. Of course you’re scared. I’m scared, too.” She sat down beside me, our sides touching, and we held hands.

  I don’t know how long we sat there. Minutes? Forever?

  At one point, Freeda appeared at the end of the hall to say the doctor was with him and they were waiting. Winnalee shouted to her like we weren’t in a hospital, telling her to let us know when the doctor came out.

  “I’m so scared,” I told Winnalee, and she squeezed my hand harder. “I know. Boohoo means the world to you. To all of us.”

  We heard footsteps and I was almost afraid to look up, for fear I’d see a man dressed in green, a stethoscope dangling from his neck, coming to tell me that Boohoo was dead. I clamped my eyes shut and braced myself for the tragic, emotional storm I was sure was coming.

  “Evy?”

  It was Tommy. He squatted down next to the couch and I flinched. “Please … no,” I said.

  Tommy took my hands, prying them apart so he could hold one. “He’s okay,” he said gently.

  I looked up, my throat so tight it hurt to swallow. “He’s okay? You sure? You sure, Tommy?”

  Tommy nodded, his closed lips curving into a reassuring smile.

  “Even the doctors aren’t sure how, because I guess with a reaction that severe, you usually only get ten, fifteen minutes tops, and it took us exactly fifteen-point-five minutes to get here, then maybe another minute before the paramedics shot him up with something to counter the allergic reaction.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. My whole body sunk into relief and I started crying all the harder.

  Winnalee was crying, too, and she wrapped her arms around me and Tommy, drawing us into a circle of relief.

  “I couldn’t tell if he was breathing when they gave him that shot,” Tommy said when Winnalee let go. “It didn’t look like it, but shit, I was hardly breathing by that point. Anyway, those paramedics were on the ball, waiting right near the runway. Boohoo was better before they even got him here.”

  Tommy put his hand on my arm, and the relief that radiated from his hand filled me. I exhaled a jagged breath and my tears kept spilling. “It’s all okay now, Evy,” he said, and I nodded, because my mind was powerless to find any words more momentous than “thank you.”

  The rule, I guess, was that only immediate family could go into the emergency room. When the nurse asked if we were all family, we said we were.

  Boohoo was sitting up in bed when we got in his room, a purple Popsicle tucked between his swollen lips. “I gotta hold this here because my lips are fat,” he mumbled around the icy, purple sphere. He had medicine pasted over the sting marks peppering his face, his arms, and his scrawny neck. Winnalee and I hurried to him, one on each side of the examining room table, and Boohoo tucked his head, the tip of his Popsicle tapping cold against my cheek as he giggled, “Oh no, here comes a love sandwich!

  “Feel me,” he said, touching his chest over his heart. “I’m still pounding kinda hard, right, nurse? Not like before, but still kinda hard.”

  “It’s the epinephrine,” she said. “It races the heart.”

  I think all of our hearts were pounding equally as hard.

  “I flied the Piper, Evy. That’s what Tommy said. Did you see me fly in the Piper?”

  “Yes,” I told him, looking up to laugh with relief along with the others.

  “I flied the Piper, too,” Aunt Verdella said. She was sitting in a chair designed like the couch I’d just left. Her eyes were almost as swollen as Boohoo’s from all the crying she’d done, but she had a smile slow-dancing in them now. “The doctor had to give me something to calm me down,” she said. She reached for Uncle Rudy and tugged on him to brace herself to rise, but a nurse stopped her. “Why don’t you just sit for a bit, Mrs. Peters. You’ve had quite an ordeal.”

  “I sure did.” She looked up at Uncle Rudy, and her eyes said all the things she couldn’t say in front of Boohoo. “Course, I hardly realized I was in the plane, as worried as I was. But boy, when that plane landed and the paramedics took over, I just went down. Plop! Look at this,” she said, pointing to her bandaged knees. “That poor skinny guy—I don’t know his name—tried to catch me, but … well, Freeda, let’s just say that you’d better be slapping my hands a little more often than you already do, because I almost flattened the poor fellow.”

  We laughed, maybe louder than we would have otherwise, but relief does that to a person. Aunt Verdella laughed, too, then said, “Oooo, I feel fuzzy. I don’t know what that doctor gave me, but whatever it was, I kinda like it.”

  I stepped back when Dad approached Boohoo’s bed, though I wouldn’t have needed to, because he didn’t get that close. He just reached over and patted Boohoo’s foot under the sheet. “You okay there, little buddy?” Boohoo told him he was, and Freeda watched to see if Dad would back away. He did, but—hopefully—only because the woman from the front desk asked him to come to the desk to fill out some forms.

  “You’re not going to go try lassoing any more hornets’ nests, now are you, cowboy?” Tommy asked.

  “I wasn’t trying to lasso it, Tommy. Rupert is scared of ’em, so I was gonna put my web around it so the bees couldn’t get out. It didn’t work, though.”

  We had to hang around for a while so they could monitor Boohoo, and we stepped into the hall when a nurse came in to check “her patients.”

  Uncle Rudy clamped his hand on Tommy’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. He didn’t say anything, but then I guess he didn’t need to.

  “You call your ma, Tommy?” Freeda asked.

  “No, I suppose I should, though.”

  “Yes, you should,” Freeda said. “You’re her little boy, grown or not, and she needs to know you’re safe, too.”

  Uncle Rudy was digging in his pocket to find change for Tommy to use the pay phone when Dad walked past us and out the door. Freeda pursed her lips, then followed Dad out.

  I could see them from the hallway window. Dad was smoking, his head down, one hand in his pants pocket, and Freeda was bent forward, her face enflamed with rage. A couple of nurses were soft-stepping around them to get to their cars.

  There was a door up ahead, another outlet to the parking lot, and I knew if I slipped through it I could hear what Freeda was saying, without being noticed. But I didn’t need to. I already knew. So I hurried along toward the restroom, recounting the whole awful event in my mind, exactly as I would have written it to Jesse.

  CHAPTER

  39

  BRIGHT IDEA #29: Not all surprises make you happy like a new set of jacks, or a baton with pink rubber tips. Some surprises make you sad, and some surprises scare the crap out of you.

  Boohoo was in the front yard, making little hay bales out of fresh grass clippings from the narrow trails Uncle Rudy’s lawn mower was leaving, and tying them with gold yarn. He had them stacked on the front steps, his toy baler nearby. “They look like real ones, don’t they, Evy?” I told him they did, and he added, “ ’Cept mine are green.” I put my hand on the top of his sun-warmed head, just to feel him here.

  Boohoo paused to scratch his stings, itchy in spite of the calamine lotion. His fingers still had a yellow tinge to them and were a bit puffy, but the doctor said that would go away in another day or two. “Is Cupcake awake?” He shouted to be heard over the mower, since Uncle Rudy’s pattern had led him up close to the house again.

  “Yep. Winnalee’s giving her her bath.”

  “Okay. When I’m done haying, I’m gonna go see her. She’s happy in the morning. Not like Freeda.”

  I waved to Uncle Rudy, and Bo
ohoo got still. “That a bee, Evy?” he asked, his index finger all that moved as he pointed toward his hay bales.

  “No, just a horsefly,” I told him.

  “Good. Because I don’t like bees no more. If I get stung again, then Aunt Verdella has to give me a shot. She practiced a needle on an orange at the hospital, and she wasn’t very good at it, either.”

  I wanted to smile, but couldn’t. Boohoo would carry his fear of bees now, the same way I carried my fear of storms. “Bees won’t sting unless you’re by their hive,” I told him, hoping Uncle Rudy was right about that.

  It was Winnalee’s idea to put on our fashion show for Freeda and Aunt Verdella that night, since I’d just finished altering the last dress. “It’ll be fun. Like playing dress-up again.” Not all the dresses fit us right, but most of them fit one of us well enough. So while Winnalee gave Evalee her bath, I was to hike over and ask Aunt Verdella and Freeda what time they could come over.

  I could hear them shuffling in the kitchen as I neared the porch, and the sound of a spoon clinking against the rim of a coffee cup. The smell of dill and garlic wafted through the porch screens. I paused to give Knucklehead a pat. Even Uncle Rudy couldn’t believe that he was still with us, and although I knew it wouldn’t be long now, for today anyway, I was just grateful that he was.

  “Oh, Freeda. I can hardly stand the thought of you leaving,” Aunt Verdella was saying, as my foot reached for the step. I brought it back down.

  “I know, but let’s face it, I can’t impose on you guys forever.”

  “ ‘Impose’? Freeda, how can you even say that? You’ve been nothing but a blessing since you’ve been here. Taking over the garden so Rudy could hay, helping me with the house and Boohoo … helping me with my diet … giving me a friend to talk to. Helping Button …”

  I stepped to the side so they wouldn’t see me through the screen if either of them happened to look over from the table.

  “But I’ve got a salon to run, Verdella. Terri’s been great about holding down the fort since Winnalee took off—she needed the extra money—but she’s got three little ones at home. I’ve got to get back, Verdella.”