I was supposed to listen for Chick. He was asleep on Mama’s bed and I was supposed to stay inside and wait for his waking squeak. I would change his diaper and give him some apple juice and play with him until Mama was finished with the twins’ piano lesson.
But the sky was blade-blue, the windows were open, and the redheads were spinning tales just outside. I could hear them laughing. They were lying on blankets in the sun, drinking soda and slathering themselves with oil. The whiff of coconut and lanolin came drifting in through the window.
I was supposed to sit inside by myself and read but Peggy’s soft voice began a story, and the other redheads quieted to listen. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I went out through the screen door and around the van to flop on the grass beside the blankets. With the window open I thought I’d hear Chick as soon as he woke. I picked and chewed grass stems as Peggy talked.
It was about a very young boy, fourteen or so, and Peggy claimed it was true. He died for love, she said. His family was poor. He was cut out for heavy work and bad pay, but he was a sweet kid, and he loved a cheerleader in his school. She wouldn’t even look at him, of course. Her life was different. But then she got sick and the doctors said it was her heart. She would die, they said, unless she could get a new one. The word went around the school that she was waiting for a donor. The boy was terribly sad for a while, but then he told his mother that he was going to die and give his heart to the girl. His mother thought this was just his sweetness talking. He was healthy. But a few days later he dropped dead. Instantly. A brain hemorrhage, they said. Surprisingly, the doctors found that his bits actually were compatible to the cheerleader’s, and they transplanted his fresh heart into her. It worked. Now she dances and cheers again with the poor boy’s heart.
The redheads were impressed. Vicki said it would be weird to feel your life pumping through this heart that had loved you. Lisa wondered if the cheerleader would be haunted.
“He was probably worth three of her,” said Mollie. “A heart like that.”
Then from the bedroom of the van just behind me came a single loud slam like a twelve-pound hammer on sheet steel. In the fading echo Chick was screaming.
I was halfway around to the screen door before the redheads even started telling me that my baby brother must have fallen out of bed. Peggy and Mollie were up, following me. By raw luck the screen door latched behind me as I whipped through.
Chick was on the bed, purple-faced and howling. I jumped up beside him and pulled him into my arms. He was shaking and gasping between shrieks. He couldn’t make so much noise if there was anything stuck in his throat. I felt for his diaper pins. Were they sticking him? Then I saw Arty.
He was crumpled face down on the floor in the narrow crack between the bed and the wall. He wasn’t moving.
“Oly, is the baby all right?” Mollie was rattling the screen door. “Oly?”
Chick subsided to unhappy burbles and hiccups, and I slid him back onto the blanket. “Arty?” I whispered. No answer. No movement. At the foot of the bed lay a big rumpled pillow with a grey spot of dampness in its creased middle. The pillow had been tidy at the head of the bed the last time I’d peeked in. Chick could have moved it, but Arty’s talk about Leona the Lizard Girl hit me again. I knew. Arty had tried to smother the Chick.
I hung over the bedside, reaching to touch him. “Arty?” His head was heavy, his fins limp.
Mama and Papa mustn’t find out. I jumped down, grabbed Arty by the rear fins, and pulled him back down the carpeted ravine to the bedroom door, and out into the living section of the van.
“Oly? Are you O.K., honey?” Peggy was at the screen door. “Is the baby O.K.?” Mollie called.
Chick was hiccuping in the bedroom. He sobbed occasionally. Arty was very still. I turned his head to the side so I could see his face. His eyes were closed. A big patch on his forehead was beginning to turn blue. I took a deep breath and ran to the door. The redheads stared in at me. “I think Chick’s O.K.… But Arty …” I lifted the latch and began to cry.
I huddled on Mama’s bed with Chick during the uproar, and heard the grownups decide that Arty had climbed up on the kitchen counter and fallen off onto his head. He was still unconscious when Mama rushed him off to Papa’s infirmary trailer.
Chick sat up beside me, his fuzzy hair frowzled, and patted my cheeks with his tiny hands. He ran his fingers into my nostrils and mouth until I smiled, painfully. Then he smiled too, with his few teeth all showing in his floppy grin.
Above us on the painted metal wall was a shallow dent the size of a dinner plate.
“Oh, Chick,” I said.
The twins marched in and commandeered the baby. “If you’d been inside where you were supposed to be,” said Elly, “this wouldn’t have happened.”
“You could have helped Arty get what he was looking for,” said Iphy.
I hugged my knees and stared numbly at them. The rat was awake in my belly.
They took Chick out to the dining booth to play with him and I lay there on Mama’s big lavender bed and thought about Arty coming in through the screen door and finding nobody and humping his way back to the bedroom and seeing Chick asleep on the bed. I saw him push his way carefully up to the pillows and grapple one onto the baby’s sleeping face, Arty leaning on it with his whole weight. So Chick woke up and threw Arty just as he’d throw a toy or a chunk of banana. Without touching him.
Mama stayed at the infirmary with Arty but Papa came back with the news.
“The poor little apple batted awake and says, ‘Mama, Papa,’ first thing. I whooped and your mama stopped crying. He couldn’t remember a thing about it. He’s got a concussion and a dog hair of a skull fracture, but praise be, he’ll be right in no time.”
Elly shrugged. Iphy clapped her hands. “I’m so glad.”
I laced my fingers over my pointed chest and closed my eyes, breathing in gratitude that I hadn’t got him killed and that he’d been clearheaded enough to “forget” what had happened.
We fed Chick from a bottle until Mama and Arty came home the next afternoon. He was good about it. But when Mama noticed the dent in the wall a few days later I told her that Chick had thrown his bottle at it once while she was gone. She tsked but didn’t scold him. It was too late, she said. “You have to ‘No’ him just when he’s done it. He wouldn’t know why I was fussing at him now.”
Arty lay on his bunk in the middle of everything and we danced to his tune. The twins waited on him and I helped him to the toilet, and Mama spent all her time thinking of delicate things for him to eat. He was happy. He was polite. He smiled and laughed at the jokes we made to amuse him.
He couldn’t read for a while. His eyes wobbled and trying to focus gave him headaches. I read to him in my slow, stumbling way and he corrected and scolded and made me go on for hours. By the time he could read for himself again, I could read almost anything, though my pronunciation was still shaky on words I didn’t know.
Mama did her duty by Chick but fussed over Arty. For days Chick barely appeared outside the bedroom. Then Mama brought him out and tucked him in beside Arty “to watch while Mama makes supper for her beautiful boys,” as she put it. I felt my stomach claw its way into my throat, but Chick snuggled up to Arty happily and played with his fin. Arty blinked for a second and then went along with it.