I’d have never thought of Yellow 5 again without Ben reminding me. I wanted to tell him to make a list of things to recall, memories I couldn’t pluck out of my brain on my own.
“What happened? He bit you?”
“Nah, nothing that dramatic, he pushed me into the fence right when I thought I’d gotten ahold of him, just haunched me to one side, and I fell full on, jammed the back of my hand right onto a nail. It was on a rail Mom had already asked me to fix, a good five times. So, you know, my fault.”
I was trying to think of what to say—something clever, commiserative, I still had no grip on what reactions Ben wanted—and Ben interrupted. “No, screw that, it was goddam Yellow 5’s fault.” He broke into a quick smile, then let his shoulders slump down again. “I remember Debby, she dressed it all up, my cut, put a Band-Aid on it and then put one of her stickers, those shiny stickers with like hearts or whatever, on top of it.”
“She loved stickers,” I said.
“She put ’em everywhere, that’s for sure.”
I took a breath, debated flitting over to some other harmless subject, the weather or something, then didn’t.
“Hey, Ben, can I ask you a question?”
He went shark-eyed, tight, and I saw the convict again, a guy used to being on the receiving end, taking question after question and getting attitude when he asked his own. I realized what a decadence it was, to refuse to answer a question. No thanks, don’t want to talk about that and the worst you get is someone thinks you’re rude.
“You know that night?”
He widened his eyes. Of course he knew the night.
“I remember, I may have been confused, about exactly what happened …”
He was leaning forward now, his arms stiff, huddled over the phone like it was a late-night emergency call.
“But, one thing I do remember, like stake-my-life-on-it remember … your light was on. In your bedroom. I saw it under the crack in the door. And there was talking. In the room.”
I trailed off, hoping he’d save me. He let me float, that freefall few seconds when your feet go loose on ice and you have just enough time to think, Oh. I am going to fall.
“That’s a new one,” he finally said.
“What’s that?”
“A new question. I didn’t think there’d be new questions anymore. Congratulations.” I caught us both sitting in the same posture, one palm on the edge of the table like we were about to push back from a meal of leftovers. Runner’s posture, I remember it from the last time I saw him, me twenty-five or twenty-six, and him wanting money, asking all flirty and sweet at first—do you think maybe you can help your old man out, Libbydear?—and me telling him no, straight off, a bat cracking a line drive, shocking, humbling. Well, why not? he’d snapped, and his shoulders shot back, his arms flipped up, hands on my table, me thinking: why’d I let him sit down, already calculating the time I’d waste getting him back up.
“I snuck out that night,” Ben said. “I came home, me and mom got in another fight.”
“About Krissi Cates?”
He started at that, then let it slide over him.
“About Krissi Cates. But she believed me, she was completely on my side, that was the great thing about Mom, even when she was pissed as hell at you, she was on your side, you knew that. In your bones. She believed me. But she was angry, and just, scared. I’d kept her waiting for, I don’t know, sixteen hours with no word—I didn’t even know what was going on, you know, no cell phones back then, you’d go a whole day and not talk, not like today. I hear.”
“So, but—”
“Right, we just got in a fight, I don’t even remember if it was exactly Krissi Cates or that’s where it started and went from there, I wish to God I could remember, but anyway, she kinda grounds me, sends me to my room, and I go there and after an hour I’m pissed off again, and I leave the house, leave the radio on and the lights on so if she peeks out she thinks I’m still there. I mean, you know the way she slept, wasn’t like she was going to walk all the way to my room to look in on me. Once she was asleep, she was pretty much asleep.”
Ben made it sound like an unbelievable journey, those thirty-some steps, but it was true, my mom was useless once she was asleep. She barely even moved. I remember holding tense vigils over her body, convincing myself she was dead, staring til my eyes watered, trying to make out breathing, trying to get even a moan. Nudge her, and she’d flop back into the same position. We all had stories of encountering her on coincidental overlapping visits to the bathroom in the night—turn the corner to find her peeing on the toilet, robe between her legs, looking through us like we were made of glass. I just don’t know about the sorghum she’d say, or That seed come in yet? And then she’d shuffle past us back to her room.