Emerald City by Jennifer Egan Page B

Yet here it is.

ONE PIECE
    My brother builds models for a hobby. From plastic pieces he makes ships and airplanes, racing cars, those see-through human bodies where you put in the heart and stomach and things. I arrange the pieces for him. For years we’ve had the same quiet days: lawn mower sounds, children laughing on our neighbors’ lawns, faint noises of TV from where Dad sits alone in his study watching a game. Every year the models get more complicated.
    Six years ago, when Bradley was ten years old and I was seven, our mother started the car to take us shopping. After backing out of the garage, she remembered her grocery coupons. We stayed in the car, engine running, while she went inside to get them. It was a hot day, one of those afternoons when bits of white fluff fill up the airand under everything you hear beating locusts. That’s how I think of it now, anyway.
    Bradley sat in front. While our mother was gone, he slid over and started fooling around at the wheel, making believe he was driving. The electric door to the garage was shut. When our mother came back with her coupon book, she walked through the space between the garage door and the front of the car to get to her side. She was in a hurry. She had on a straw hat, and her hair flopped out the front. Maybe because of that hat she couldn’t see Bradley. Maybe she saw him and thought it was safe to walk there.
    The car jerked forward and hit the door. You wouldn’t think a person could be so hurt from a thing like that, but they said she had bleeding inside her. Sometimes I stare at those plastic human models in Bradley’s room with all their different parts and wonder which parts of her bled.
    I remember my mother like you remember a good, long dream you had. I see a beautiful shadow leaning down, maybe over the edge of my crib. I remember her singing a lot, silly songs when she dried me after a bath about friendly vegetables and farm animals speaking in rhyme. She was in the church choir, and we would walk there together through the snow on mornings when the sun was so bright I had to keep my eyes closed. I held her hand, and she guided me over the ice.
    There’s one time I remember most, like that part of a dream that keeps coming back. She was leaving for the airport, dressed up in nice shoes and panty hose, and I was riding my trike. I must have been four years old. As she walked toward the car, I rode behind her, pedaling faster and faster until I hit her ankle and tore the stocking and made her bleed. It wasn’t an accident. I knew what would happen, but I couldn’t believe it. I kept pedaling.
    I remember the look on her face when she turned and saw me behind her. Her mouth opened, and she stood touching her hair for a minute. Then she leaned down and put her hand on the bloody cut. I cried like I’d been hit myself. When I think of that now, I still want to.
    With Bradley in the car, maybe it was like that. I think about it.
    Bradley likes doing things that are dangerous. Stunts, I mean. He’s raced motorcycles and jumped from a plane in a parachute. He’s run along the top of a train, hang-glided, sailed alone on Lake Michigan when a storm was due. I watched all of it. There’s a secret we don’t need to say out loud: having me there keeps him safe. I keep my eyes on Brad no matter how far away he goes, and I hold him in place. It’s a talent of mine, I guess. A kind of magic. When our mother walked through that space, maybe I looked the wrong way.
    The Belsons are coming to our house for a barbecue, and I’m making a pie with Peggy, our stepmother since last year. Outside the kitchen window Bradley pushes my stepsisters, Sheila and Meg, on the tire swing. Peggy keeps looking out there like she’s nervous. Dad’s beside her, chopping onions for burgers.
    “He’s pushing them awfully hard,” Peggy says.
    Dad looks out and so do I. Sheila and Meg are six and seven years old, Peggy’s daughters from her first marriage. Dad smiles.