Free The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos Page A

screams do I ever hear my son’s real voice, deep-throated and heavy. It’s the voice I used to hear in my dreams, back in that time when I used to dream of a teenage boy without an elongated palate and a too-long face that this fragile x has embedded into him. In my dreams, the teenage boy would stand in our white kitchen and smile with eyes that were never heavy lidded and blank, eyes that saw me, really saw me, not just the form of the mother who takes him for evaluations and keeps him out of group homes. The doctors say it could be my x or it could be Jeff’s, there is no way to know. But I know that the x is mine. I know that I have done it. I know I’m the one who ruined him.
    He cries now, following his own routine, the screaming giving way to this slower, deeper sound, the sound of my real boy stuck inside there, the blue trying to emerge in all this whiteness.
    Rebecca slides herself across the floor in her too-tight jeans and grips him from behind, spooning against his back the way they taught us. Her hands grip his and pull them around his sides. How a girl so slim can be so strong I do not understand. And I don’t understand how he never bruises Rebecca the way he does me. My arms are linedwith bruises from the tantrums set off by dishes dropping or car alarms going off or too-loud toilets that flush down the hall.
    Ethan, Ethan, Ethan , she says into his neck, and as he slows, she says it a fourth time because, somehow, fours speak to him. Ethan .
    Her glassy hair fans out behind her. The two of them lie that way for a minute on the floor, neither of them moving. I think, looking down at them, of her, of the girl out on the lake that day, and then her lying on the sand with Audrey above her. I can almost smell the lake water coming up out of her throat, and I imagine my children are fish on the white floor. At least they are not blue. At least there is that. If we could just stay this way , I think, listening to their breath, the two of them safe and quiet on the floor, maybe I’d never have to dream again .
    Mom , Rebecca says. Help me get him up .
    I move to his left and hold my hands in front of him so he can see them before they startle him. Even my own bare hands are jarring to my son. When he goes to school on his little yellow bus, sometimes I drive out of town to a strip mall where I have my fingernails and toenails painted a stark red. Sometimes, on the way back to pick him up, I drive by the lake, and I park and just sit in my car, letting my hands hang out the window to dryin the sun. Then I get out, sit on a curb, and scrub all of it away with nail polish remover and cotton balls. Once I told Magda what I do, and she said, Why would you do that, go to such trouble, only to have to take it off again? I couldn’t explain that I do it for my mother, wherever she is, to show her that I have not given up trying.
    I manage to get him on the bus to his school in another district just outside of town where there are programs for boys like my son. Some of the others have Down syndrome and wave to me with their thick hands and almond eyes that disappear into their faces when they smile. The matron takes Ethan’s hands in hers and leads him up the steps into the same type of bus he’s been on since pre-school. Rebecca has gone inside to put on her mascara and lip gloss and to look at her reflection—to look at her shiny hair, her long lashes, and maybe, I think, if she could see it, her luck.
    Say good-bye to Mama, Ethan , the matron says. Her name is Shelley, overworked Shelley, who has been hit in the eye and who sometimes has to bribe my son onto the bus with M&M’s. Today, thankfully, there are no struggles. She winks at me once his seatbelt is fastened.
    There you go now, Ethan , she says. Ethan’s O.K .
    He looks out the window, toward me but not at me, and says what has become his mantra of comfort.
    Ethan’s O.K ., he says. He says it four times.