Hush by Jacqueline Woodson Page A

crying silently, the realness of how everything you ever loved could be taken away from you just like that settled over me, eerie and dangerous as quicksand.
    Every month, a letter comes from Grandma. It comes in a white business envelope with a Texas post-mark. We read the letters hungrily, over and over again. Sometimes, I come in to find Mama fingering the letter lovingly, a faraway look in her eyes. That’s it. That’s all we have left of the past. Letters with no names on them, just paragraphs and paragraphs of chatty news. No real questions about our lives, no news of what happened after we left, who asks about us, who calls her up to cry. When we write back, we’re not allowed to use our new names. Our letters to her are guarded and shallow. Mama talks about Jehovah’s will, me and Anna talk about the movies we saw, the classes we have. We can’t describe our school, we can’t talk about this new place. Our letters go to Texas and eventually get to her. What do we get—all of us? The knowledge that we’re all alive. That somewhere beneath all the stupid shallow stuff, we’re surviving. That we still love and are loved. That underneath this new Evie skin, there is still Toswiah Green. Somewhere.
    Always.
    I stretch my legs out in front of me and bend slowly toward them the way Leigh showed me. I can feel the backs of my legs burning with the stretch. Leigh said this was a good thing, that in no time I’d be able to touch my forehead to my knees. I’m not the fastest girl on the team, but I’m not the slowest. After practice yesterday, a few girls came over to me and slapped my hand, welcoming me.
    Daddy longlegs, Mira said when she waved good-bye. Spider woman.
    Later, Spider, someone else said.
    I lifted my head, then bent down toward my knees again, breathing out slowly.
    Spider. I liked that.

19
    WHEN I WALK IN ON THURSDAY, MAMA IS grinning and dancing around the room. I pull my knapsack off my shoulder, thinking that she’s joined Daddy in the mind-loss game, but then she dances over to me and in her eyes, I see my old Mama, the one who let Daddy pull her up from her place on a picnic blanket and dance her around the park. When I look over at the table, Anna is sitting there smiling.
    “She hasn’t gone crazy,” Anna says, reading my mind. “She just got a job.”
    Mama dances the letter into my hands. Dear Mrs. Thomas: Let me be the first to congratulate you on your appointment at Public School 13 here in . . . I feel the room getting smaller, around then bigger again, the air coming fast into my throat. Maybe a part of me had thought it would never happen, that Mama would never walk into a classroom again and begin the day with “Good morning, children.”
    “Fifth grade,” Mama says, still grinning. “I thought I’d have to teach high school. Thank you, Jehovah! Thank you for my faith.”
    Daddy stares out the window. Silent.
    “Dance with her, Daddy,” I say, wanting him to be smiling, too, happy for Mama. In Denver, when Mama told stories about her class, he’d throw his head back and laugh, happy. Proud.
    I take Mama’s hand and dance with her for a moment. Her hand is soft. The way I remember it, our feet moving in unison, Mama smiling.
    “Like this, Daddy. That silly Hustle dance that you guys used to do.”
    Mama shakes her head, looks at the letter again and grins. She holds the letter in one hand and spins me with the other, then our feet come back into step together. After dinner some nights, they would put on music and dance like crazy, Daddy’s feet moving faster than the music, Mama doing steps that looked like they were halfway cool once upon a time. And they’d laugh and pull us into them and we’d all just act the fool while somebody sang about love or zodiac signs or about white boys playing funky music.
    But Daddy just keeps staring out the window. And after a moment, the room feels hollow. Mama squeezes my hand once, then lets it go, picks up the Watchtower on her