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Like Wings, Your Hands. Elizabeth Earley
Читать онлайн.Название Like Wings, Your Hands
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781597098069
Автор произведения Elizabeth Earley
Жанр Зарубежная классика
Издательство Ingram
“I’m sorry,” she said, which was the soundtrack to the familiar facial expression. If it had meaning, it would have been mildly offensive to Marko because it would mean she was sorry about who he was—sorry about his heaviness in her mental notebook, the burden his existence was to the imaginations of able-bodied people—but thankfully, it was as hollow as the look of pity it accompanied. Unfortunately, the words didn’t seem to have lost their meaning to his mom, because she looked even more nervous.
To calm himself and distract himself from his mom’s nervousness, from the tube threaded into his penis, from the potential crashing of the plane, and to counter the swirling math, Marko decided to concentrate on something else. He looked for all of the printed numbers he could see around him and added them all up, dividing the total by three. If it were a clean divide, one that resulted in a whole number, then he was safe and the plane wouldn’t crash. If there were a fraction left over, he would simply add those numbers to the whole number and divide by three again. He would repeat this until he got a whole number as a result.
In the midst of this mental arithmetic, Marko’s mom pulled his arm down a little roughly. He wasn’t even aware that he’d had his hands up in front of his face again until she yanked on him. He tried to keep them down but they sprung back up involuntarily. He put them down again and kept them at his side, but when he did, he wasn’t able to do the adding and dividing in his head. His thinking was stuck. He started to panic. His hands went back up.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, can you hold still for just a moment until I’m done here?” His mom’s voice was soothing. He dropped his hands again and tried to relax. But then turbulence happened and he still hadn’t gotten to a whole number!
He quickly decided on another way to keep the plane safe. He listened for anything he could overhear from people on the plane, any words he could make out from their conversations. If he whispered those same words aloud to himself three times and then did it again with the next words he heard, the plane would stay safe. Marko listened. It was hard to hear voices over the roar of jet engines. He thought he heard “that was funny” after someone nearby finished laughing. Marko lowered his head and whispered, “that was funny” as quietly as possible three times.
“You okay?” His mom asked. He looked up at her. She smiled. He nodded, listening for the next words. But now she was done catheterizing him and she got up to go throw out the waste. Marko looked at the woman in their row. She was 92 percent uneasy being left alone with him. To make her feel better, he tried to make conversation.
“I’m going to meet my grandfather for the first time in Bulgaria,” he said. She gave him a nod and a tight, fake smile. Her uneasiness wasn’t reduced. In fact, it went up a few percentage points. He decided to take it up a notch and over-share.
“It all started six months ago when I found this book and my mom’s journal. And this box that I could lay down in and sort of time travel and have weird dreams.” He pulled out the book and held it up to her. The same strained smile stared back and her uneasiness had now topped out at 100 percent. She got up and walked off down the aisle. He was free to use his hands again, so he went back to the more comfortable task of addition and division.
2. May 13, 2015: 20,000 feet
On the plane to Bulgaria, Kali saw the high view of the past nineteen years of her life since she’d left there to come to America. The years contained so much—falling in love, having another abortion, having a baby, falling out of love, getting divorced, watching him leave their child, accepting her mother, Lydia, as the surrogate other parent to her son when she hadn’t even filled that role for Kalina as a child. Only Lydia called her Kalina anymore. In Bulgaria, before 1999, she had always been Kalina. In the States, after 1999, she was Kali.
When Kali left Sofia, she went to the South Shore of Boston to be a nanny for wealthy children there. Lydia followed her six months later. Kali’s host family let her mother stay there with Kali for a few months until Lydia herself found work as a nanny. Lydia’s wealthy children belonged to a family with a townhouse in Cambridge and a mansion in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Kali recalled all of this while she catheterized Marko. She was embarrassed to have to do it right there in his seat, but there was no other option. His wheelchair was gate checked and she couldn’t carry him to the tiny airplane lavatory. She put a blanket over his lap for privacy, even though he seemed oblivious. He was busy with his screen time. He was watching reruns of Red Sox games. Kali knew he’d rather be watching porn, or “kissing videos” as he called them. He had a cache of videos of people kissing, both people and cartoon characters, actually—a vanilla collection that he allowed his mom to know about. But Kali was aware of the harder core stuff he had hidden behind a password-protected folder. She’d thought about making him get rid of it, but decided to let him be. There was the inevitability of it on the one hand, him being a teenage boy much like any teenage boy, but then, on the other, was the heartbreaking part. The part Kali couldn’t bear to think about. What kind of romantic life would he be able to have with no sensation in his pelvis—no sensation anywhere below his waist?
Kali knew that sex is 95 percent mental—that the pituitary gland is the hub that produces all the chemicals that make the body feel so on fire about it. And Marko’s pituitary gland was alive and functioning, so why couldn’t he have a full and active sexual life, even without the use of his penis? Even without a partner? Thus, the videos. Kali couldn’t deprive him that.
The woman in the seat next to her in their row was staring unabashedly at Kali prepping the catheter. She looked away when Kali inserted it into Marko’s penis, and then looked back when she re-covered his lap. Kali made eye contact with her and she looked away.
“He has spina bifida. Paralyzed from the belly button down,” Kali said. The woman gave her that look she knew so well. It was a look of admiration and pity that Kali couldn’t stand. It made her nervous to have it this close to her. She fought the urge to slap the woman, to knock the look right off her face.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. Kali didn’t respond. She went about taking the cath back out, as the bag was nearly full. Marko was moving his hands rapidly and rhythmically, so Kali couldn’t get a steady hand on the tube. She grabbed his arms and pinned them down, which startled Marko. Immediately, she regretted having been so rough with him.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, can you hold still for just a moment until I’m done here?” she said, apologetic in tone. It worried Kali slightly that Marko held so still and was so quiet while she removed the tube and cleaned him up.
“You okay?” she asked. He nodded and she smiled. With the used catheter and bag gathered up, she needed to get up and dispose of everything and wash her hands. She gave a look to the woman next to her and started to rise, aware even as she did that it was a simple luxury—this bearing of weight on her legs—that her son would never experience. As the woman stood up and moved aside to let Kali out, that thought made her aware, more intensely than usual, of how completely this basic guilt was woven throughout her life and everything she’d done since Marko had been born fourteen years prior. This brought her thoughts, again, to Lydia and when she first came to the States.
Kali moved carefully down the plane’s aisle, absorbed in the memory. Lydia had come initially, or so she said, to merely visit Kalina. But after a month and a half lapsed and her mother was still there with no plans of leaving and dwindling money, Kali began helping her look for work. Kali understood that Lydia didn’t want to return to Bulgaria and be alone with her father, Todor, who was chronically depressed and who routinely threatened suicide, to the extent that it no longer had any shock value left. Kali herself had just stopped talking to him shortly after moving away, not wanting to bear the emotional burden of his pain.
The kind of work that could sponsor a visa and keep Lydia in the United States for longer than six months was abundantly available in New England, given all the rich, white people having kids. After Lydia found a family to nanny for, Kalina