In Transit

Kristen-Paige Madonia 

     The nosebleeds started in June, three weeks after Emily came to live with Noah and me.  Emily was sitting at the kitchen counter, slumped over the brown chipped tile, watching me as I stood at the stove and sliced mushrooms, flinging them into the pot of spaghetti sauce steaming on the burner.  I was still getting used to the concept of having to feed someone every night, the responsibility of providing nutrition and eating schedules for a child.  Goat cheese or brie, a box of crackers and a bottle of merlot were usually what Noah and I called “dinner”.  We ate a lot of pasta those first weeks that Emily was with us. 

The warm drops of blood began clustering inside my nose and releasing themselves down my upper lip.  I caught Emily watching me, horrified as I practically bled into her dinner.  Her blue eyes narrowed sharply when she saw the red, so I turned away from the stove to face the sink and pulled a paper towel from the roll mounted on the wall.  I tilted my head upward and began counting to five: one number for each deep breath I used to calm my nerves.

            “Mom never did that,” Emily said, as I inhaled the first breath slowly and closed my eyes.

            “Really?  Miriam never bled in your dinner?”   I exhaled.

            “No.  The mushrooms.”  She drummed her fingers on the counter top. 

I inhaled number two.

            “Mom never put mushrooms in the sauce.” Her voice was rising, as if the nosebleed impeded my hearing.

I exhaled again.  I reminded myself that she was my sister’s child.  A nine year old wading through trauma.  I searched for my patience.

            “Meatballs, she always added meatballs.”

I imagined my sister Miriam in her Chicago apartment rolling raw red meat between her hands.  Miriam flavoring chunks of beef with spices from a plastic bottle and shaping them into perfect spheres for her daughter and her husband.  She probably had a special kitchen gadget that scooped the meat into flawless circles.  In addition to the nosebleed, I became violently nauseous. 

I inhaled again.

            “I’ve told you, Emily.  Noah and I don’t eat red meat,” I said from beneath the paper towel.  I exhaled.  “So that means no meatballs.” 

Inhale.  Deep.  Number four.

“Mushrooms are better for you.  I promise.”  I exhaled again and thought of the stress releasing powers of breathing that I had learned about in my yoga classes.   

I lowered my head and pulled the paper towel away from my face.  Behind me, Emily slapped her hand on the counter with a loud groan, and then I listened as her feet hit the hard wood floor.  I inhaled my fifth breath and turned to watch her stomp out of the kitchen, her long blonde braids swinging down her back.  Miriam’s pale hair on my niece.

            On a good day I didn’t mind her company; it was something to keep me busy between hours at the computer.  I was in between assignments and was working on a freelance piece about an artist in Los Angeles, so Emily was entertainment when I didn’t feel like writing.  But on a bad day, seeing Emily, seeing Miriam’s personality and attitude embedded in a nine year old child that I didn’t know, made me sick.  It gave me nosebleeds. 

            Emily’s parents were in Chicago.  Miriam and Conway had been driving home from the theater on a Saturday night and got sideswiped by a senior citizen, an old woman with long silver hair and deficient eye sight.  Conway jerked the wheel too hard, and their Audi did a one-eighty before hitting the railguard head-on, sending them both to intensive care.  I hadn’t seen my sister in almost three years, not since I had moved to California when Noah took the teaching job at UCLA.  Almost three years and the first time I see her is in the ICU at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.  And she didn’t even know I was there.  I stayed in Chicago for over a week, but eventually the Child Service therapist suggested that I take Emily home with me while her parents began the healing process.  Take her away.  Give her a vacation.

            Emily was in bed by the time Noah got home.  A bowl of cold spaghetti on the table and brown crusted pots in the sink.  The nosebleed had stopped, and I was lying in the bathtub soaking under a blanket of white bubbles and editing a piece I planned to pitch to a small art magazine in Long Beach.  I had twisted my long brown hair into a sloppy knot on top of my head.  A glass of wine, my pack of cigarettes and an ashtray were lined up on the edge of the tub; Charlie Parker played in the stereo.

            “You in there, Sapph?” Noah’s voice leaked through the closed door.

            “It’s open.”  

I watched Noah come in and prop his body against the wooden door frame.  His tie was balled up in his fist, and he smiled at me lopsidedly.  The cuffs of his shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and I could see the black ink of his tattoo nudging out on the bottom of his bicep.  Thick shaggy black hair and bronzed skin.  I always imagined that it was probably difficult for his female freshman students to concentrate while he lectured on art history--pictures they had never seen, artists they had never heard of.  We had been together for over four years, and things had always been simple with Noah.  Uncomplicated and quiet.  Uninterrupted. 

“How’s life in the world where nine year olds live?” He moved into the room and sat on the edge of the bathtub.  He nudged my skirt, thrown on the bathroom tile, with the tip of his navy flip flop.

“Glass number three,” I told him, holding up my wine and closing my eyes.

“It’s not forever, Sapphire,” he offered, dipping his hand into the steaming water and running his fingers over the top of my foot, squeezing my baby toe.

“I don’t even know her.  I hardly know Miriam.” I reached for the pack and lit a Camel Light.  “Not since Conway, really.” He moved his hand up my shin and over the top of my knee.

“She’s your niece.  Maybe it’ll be good.  You can get involved again.”

“It’s a shitty reason to get involved.  Don’t you think?”  I blew crooked streams of smoke into the air and watched them sail in the steam from the tub water.  I wrinkled my nose at him as he waved the smoke away from his face. 

Noah was rubbing my knee now and smiling, as I shook the tip of my cigarette into an ashtray made from a seashell with the words “Key West” painted in yellow across the top. I raised my wet foot out from under the foamy bubbles, placed my big toe on the tip of his nose.  Drops of water ran down his chin and he winked at me before he slid his hand up the inside of my thigh. 

The next day I printed up medical articles off the internet about my sister’s condition.  Swollen liver.  Punctured pancreas.  I studied side effects of medicines that the doctors in Chicago were dripping into her body.  Statistics of patients in comas. 

Until Emily came to live with us, she had never been to the beach.  Miriam and Conway used vacation time for ski resorts and trips back to New York City, so living in Manhattan Beach, living near water, was a novelty.  Every afternoon Emily and I walked from our condo to the pier and laid out our towels under waves of summer heat.  It gave me somewhere to take her, something to do when we were alone.  I would buy her a hot dog or fries at Alfredo’s Snack Hut, sit in my beach chair, and jot notes or edit stories while she ate and colored in books about super heroes and Barbie Dolls. 

 “Sapphire, did you and Mom take swim lessons when you were kids?” 

Emily watched the kids in the water, the surfers in the waves, and the teenagers in bikinis racing across the beach to the spot where the ocean licked the sand.  Next to us a family of four opened sodas and ate sandwiches, a naked baby dug in the ground with a green plastic shovel.   

“Sure.  Maybe.  I don’t really remember.”  The pancreas produces the hormone insulin and glucagon to control metabolism.

“You don’t remember?”  She rolled her eyes.

The liver is the largest internal organ in the human body; in a healthy adult, the liver weighs about 3 pounds and is about 6 inches thick. 

“Wait.  Yeah.  At the country club back in New York.  I think.”  I imagined my sister’s liver shutting down and her body swelling up with toxins.  Her organs ballooning up inside her tiny body. 

I looked at Emily.  Her blue eyes scanned the beach and then moved to the papers in my lap.  She was sweating, the sun’s heat sending big drops of moisture tumbling down her forehead and onto her neck.  Her blonde hair stuck to the sides of her cheek, wet.  I thought of the tennis lessons our parents made Miriam and me take in the summer when we were kids.  The way I hated the short pleated skirts and tight sports bras, the wasted summer hours I could have spent at the pool reading.  The way Miriam loved wearing white sun visors and short socks with pink balls on the back that poked over the edge of her white tennis shoes.  Miriam’s sunburned skin and our mom in the lounge chair sipping Tequila Sunrises and watching us, mingling with other country club mothers.  The things I left behind after high school.  The differences that drew my sister and I apart.

“Didn’t Miriam ever teach you to swim, Em?”  I wondered how much the doctors told her about her mom and dad, how much nine year olds were allowed to know.

“Nope.” She ran her fingers over a picture of Donald Duck to flatten out the wrinkles and carefully picked up an orange crayon lying in a pile next to her on her striped blue beach towel. 

“You’re bleeding again, Sapphire,” she said, pointing her finger at my face. 

I lifted my sunglasses up onto the top of my head and tilted my nose into the air, feeling the nosebleed opening inside my nostrils.

“Shit.  Do you think you could.”  I pinched the tip of my nose with one hand and reached for my straw beach bag with the other.  “Here.  Look in here for a napkin or something.”  I handed her the bag.  “This isn’t normal.  I never get nosebleeds.”

Emily pulled a tissue out and stuffed it in my hand before she bent back over her coloring book.

“Mom used to get them sometimes.”  She squinted at me from her towel.  “She called them stress-bleeds.”

“Gross.”

“How come people call you Sapphire?”  Emily said as she brushed sand off the black and white image she was filling in with color.

“It’s my name.  What do you mean?”  I closed my eyes, breathing through my mouth in long slow sighs.

“Mom says it’s not.  She says your real name is Ester and you just pretend that it’s Sapphire.  That really it’s not.”  She wiped her fingers over her eyebrow, clearing off the sweat.

“I never liked the way Ester sounded, you know?  Ugly and boring.”  I put the medical print outs down on the towel next to her.  “I changed it back when we were kids.”

“How come you and Noah don’t have kids?”  She began shading in the beak with her orange crayon, as I pushed the end of the tissue up my nostril.

“I dunno.  We’re young.  And Noah and I aren’t married.” I began counting and breathing to five.

            “How come?”  She swapped the orange for a yellow crayon. 

            Two.  Three. Four.

            “I don’t know if Noah and I believe in marriage.” I stabbed my toes into the sand and wiggled them downward until the ground was cool.  I pulled the tissue out and pushed my sunglasses back down over my eyes.  The bleeding had stopped. 

“It’s not something that we need really,” I said, hearing how the excuse sounded out loud. 

Emily lined up her crayons in order from brightest to darkest color beginning with yellow.  I thought of Miriam and Conway’s wedding in New York and the bright yellow and orange flowers that my sister and I wore.  Before Conway took her to Chicago.  Before Emily, and before Miriam’s catering career.  Their lives littered with busyness.

            “How old are you?” Emily asked.  “Younger than Mom, I know.”  She wiped her hand across the back of her pink neck, flicking sweat off her skin. 

            “Older than you and younger than her.  Twenty-seven.”  I balled the red stained tissue up in my fist.

            “Oh,” she said, as she wrote the number in the right-hand corner of her picture.

“We should get going.  You’re beginning to burn.”  I tugged at the edges of my black and white striped bikini and tried to smile at her.  I struggled to remember what Miriam looked like at nine, but all I could see were pictures from albums we used to look through in high school.  When she was nine I was three, too young to remember real images.

We walked down the strand, dodging tanned boys on skateboards, couples riding bikes with tall silver handle bars, women in sunglasses on roller blades, and shirtless men in bathing suits jogging with dogs.

“You guys don’t have a dog, right?” I stuffed my hand into my beach bag and felt my tee shirt, our towels, the medical papers.

Emily rolled the sleeves of her tee shirt up over her shoulders.  “Mom won’t let me have one.  She says dog hair is too messy.”

“Jesus Christ.”  I felt my pack of cigarettes lying in the bottom of my bag. 

“You shouldn’t say that, that word like that.”  Emily said as she stopped to readjust her flip-flop, wiggling her toes, and wiping the sand off her ankles.

“Right.  Sorry,” I said, realizing the Camel Light pack was empty.  “Listen, I need cigarettes.  We’re going to have to stop at the liquor store.” 

“How come you haven’t taken me to church?” Emily moved closer to me, out of the way of a teenaged boy with yellow spiked hair and silver studs in his ears, his nose, his bottom lip.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“We’ve missed three Sundays since I’ve been here,” Emily said, digging her hands into the pockets of the pink shorts she wore over her bathing suit.

“I didn’t know my sister still did the church thing.  Sorry.”  I thought of Miriam in her white confirmation dress, announcing her faith in front of a parish full of people my parents played bridge with, split timeshares with, and made trips to Vegas with.  “Here.  We can stop here,” I pulled on Emily’s tee shirt and nudged her off the walking path.  It was hot, and I needed nicotine.

“You can’t go in there like that, Sapphire.”  She scanned my body starting with my bare feet and ending with my sunglasses resting on top of my head.

Emily and I stood in front of a small market next to a sign out front announcing two for one gallons of ice cream.

“Like what?” I put the bag down in front of her feet and pulled out my wallet.

“Like that.  You can’t go in a store in a bikini like that.” Her voice was screeching a little, as she wrinkled her nose and squeezed her eyes into tight slits staring up at me. 

“Watch me.  Here.” I pushed the bag on top of her toes and turned towards the store, “Don’t move.  I’ll be two seconds.”  I pushed my bikini top around a little, tucking in extra skin, and left Emily on the sidewalk.

            Back at the condo there was a message from the doctor in Chicago.  I tossed my keys on the table in the hallway while a man’s voice announced on the answering machine that Conway had been moved out of ICU.  Recovering.  Miriam had also been discharged from ICU, but was still being intensely monitored.  Unconscious and internally bleeding.  I heard Emily moving around in the guest room as I walked to the kitchen.

            I mentally ran through the list of things I thought children were supposed to do after a day at the beach, and from the kitchen I yelled to Emily to get out of her bathing suit, comb her hair, take a shower and wash off all that sand.  I opened a bottle of merlot and listened to the message for a second time.  The water began running in the bathroom. 

            When Emily came to the kitchen counter in her pink night gown, I poured her a glass of milk and set it in front of her. 

            “Is that expired?” She dug crumbs out of the cracks in the tile grout as I returned the milk carton to the refrigerator.

            “Why would it be expired?” I said, noticing a headache creeping into my temples.  “Would I serve you expired milk?”

            “I’m not thirsty.” She lowered her hands from the counter and sat on them.

            My muscles felt tight and sore.  I opened the refrigerator door again and stood in front of it, pulling at a hangnail on my right thumb with my teeth.  Leftover spaghetti.  Carrots and brie.  Eggs.

            “How about we do breakfast for dinner tonight,” I said, turning towards her with feigned enthusiasm.

            “Whatever.”  She rolled her eyes and watched me pull out the eggs and set them on the counter top.  “At home Thursdays are pizza night.”  She pushed the milk towards me.

            “Pizza, huh?” I pulled out a glass bowl and began cracking eggs, tossing the shells into the sink behind me.              “With pepperoni and sometimes sausage.”

            “Do you know what ‘ungrateful’ means, Emily?” I cracked another brown egg into the bowl and watched her blue eyes swell up with frustration.

            “Mom never used brown eggs.” She rose from the bar stool and slammed her fist on the counter top.  “And she never drank wine during the week.” She began walking backwards, facing me but moving towards the doorway.  “And she let me eat meatballs.”

I tossed the last shell into the sink, wiped my hands on the green dishtowel on the counter, and began following her.  Her voice rising. 

“And Mom was nicer to me.” She backed away from me, her wet pale hair hanging over her shoulder and dripping down her night gown.

            “Was.  Was nicer?” 

She stopped, lifted her thin pointed nose up at me and squeezed her eyes into narrow slits. 

“Is there a reason you’re using the past tense, Emily?”  My head filled up with flashes of Miriam at her wedding, Conway at her side, ripping her away from New York to Chicago.  “She’s not gone.”  Miriam giving birth, stuffing up her life with a child.  This little doll she could dress up and play with.  “There’s no was about your mother.”  Miriam in the hospital bed, her nose packed with tubes and her veins jammed with needles and chemicals.  Medicine to fix the accident that Conway made.

            “How do you know?”  Emily was crying now, fat drops tripping down her cheeks.  “You don’t know anything.  She could be dying.”  And with those last words she ran her tongue over her lips and spit on the floor at my feet.  One thick clear burst with white bubbles.  Spit.

            I slapped my sister’s daughter.  Flat and hard across her pink sunburned face.  I slapped her for her selfishness and her spoiledness and all the traits that her mother gave her, that my mother gave Miriam.  She turned from me, stunned, and ran down the hall, her bare feet hitting the wood floor as she made her way to her room and slammed the door.

            I drank a glass of wine and waited out my second nosebleed of the day, clogging the redness with tissues while I sucked the liquid through a straw and kept my head tilted upward.  The sound of my hand hitting her face echoed in my ears, and I thought of the way I lost control, the way I let emotions of years gone by exit me and storm across the face of a nine year old. A child that had nothing to do with the time lost between Miriam and me. Eighteen minutes passed before I knocked on her door.  I counted to ten and let myself in. 

She was sprawled across the bed, her face buried in the pillow.  Her shoulder-blades trembled, as she sobbed into the blue and green flowered pillowcase.  I sat next to her and began rubbing her back.  She flinched sharply, her shoulders jutted backwards and her back arched inwards before her muscles relaxed. I looked at the pictures lined on the book shelf.  Shots of Noah and I traveling through Europe after college, close-ups of Miriam and I in high school in New York, a wedding picture of my parents, my mother painted with makeup and diamonds the Christmas we spent in Italy.

“That.  Shouldn’t have happened.” I ran my fingers through her wet hair, gently pulling out the knots.  “I’ve never really had a kid around like this.  This is new.” 

She kept crying, but eventually she turned her head to the side, wiped her nose on the pillow.  I saw her blood-shot eyes, her tear-streaked cheeks, the redness on her skin from where I struck her.  Her eyes looked lost and mute, and I realized how out of place she must have felt.  Being with Noah and me, being in our condo, being at the beach half way across the country from her family.

            “I miss Delby Almond.”  She sucked in air through her nose, the crackle of phlegm and sadness blocking her breathing.

            “Delby who?”  I moved her hair from her face, off her wet cheek.

            “Delby Almond.  He’s a boy in my class and we play together in the summer time.” 

I tried to imagine what it was like to be nine in the summer time.  Chicago and Miriam and Conway.  To be nine.

“Delby’s really good at making forts and I miss playing with him.  There’s no room here to make forts.”  She closed her eyes as I rubbed my fingers across her thin pale eyebrows.

            Noah got home after Emily and I ordered pizza and she went to bed.  I was in the bath, my self-pity exaggerated by half a bottle of merlot.  He opened the door and made his way to the tub, sitting on the edge with my ashtray, the bottle of wine, and my Camel Lights.

            “A destructive vice,” he said, as he took my glass of wine from my hand and wiped my cheek, ran his thumb over my eyes hot and red from crying.

            “Don’t feel sorry for me,” I told him.  “I’m doing a pretty good job of it myself.”  I watched him top off the glass.

            “I feel sorry for her,” he said, handing back the glass to me and bringing the bottle to his lips for a long swig.  “And maybe for you, I guess.”  He put the bottle back on the edge of the tub and smiled at me.

            “She’ll be fine.”  I pulled a cigarette out of the pack.  “She’ll be a country club kid.  Just like Miriam and me.”  I lit the Camel.  Inhaled deeply.  “She wins.  She gets Miriam.  And I’ll stay here.”

            Later that night in bed, I imagined Emily in Chicago after all of this was over.  I imagined her as a teenager: smart and healthy and beautiful.  I imagined her long blonde hair strewn across a pillow, lying in bed with a boy.  Some boy that she thought she loved.  Her thinking back to the time she moved to California, to her parents’ accident and these moments she spent in transit.  I thought of her naked and safe inside the complexities of youth, becoming her own person and thinking of these days as memories.  Just images that never seemed quite real. 

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