Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

“Oh, jeez. Poor kid.” Ronnie hands her a daiquiri. “Then we’ll just have to celebrate on our own.”

“You signed a new contract?” Ronnie was right about Phoenix being the place for his company. The city is growing like wildfire.

“A big contract. A new shopping mall going up in the north of town.”

“Oh, Ronnie. That’s wonderful.”

He raises his glass to her and takes a drink. “I was talking to one of the partners in the mall, an older fellow. He said he grew up here in Phoenix, and when he was a boy he lived in an adobe house, just like the Indians. In the summer, they’d soak the walls and curtains with a hose, then set a fan on them. That was their air-conditioning.”

“I guess it was cheap, anyhow.” She sips from her drink. It tastes too sweet to her, strangely chemical. She sets it down.

Ronnie looks carefully at her. “Are you okay? You look a little pale, too.”

She shrugs. “Maybe I’m fighting the flu also.”

In the morning, Sissy’s temperature reads 101 degrees. She gives her two orange St. Joseph aspirin and makes her drink a cup of weak tea. After Sissy’s temperature drops, she bundles her up in a blanket and brings her out to the sofa.

“I’m going to make you some chicken soup now.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“I’ll bring you some ginger ale. But not at the same time as the soup, because if you drink cold with hot your teeth may shatter.”

Sissy sleeps most of the afternoon. She ladles herself a bowl of soup also and sits down to eat it, watching her youngest child’s carrot-colored eyelashes flutter with dreams, her chest lift the blanket draped over it up and down. With the older kids, she never had the time for a moment like this. She hardly had the time to sit down to eat. They were happy kids, though. They were a happy family. Even after Michael was lost, although not as happy. How could they have been?

She feels her own forehead. Not hot, as far as she can tell. She’s almost never been sick. When would she have had time for it?

And yet she still feels off.

She swallows the last of her soup. She’s promised to help out with making costumes for Sissy’s school play — she’ll get started on that.

When Sissy wakes, her temperature is high again, but not as high. Ronnie comes home, and she sets about cooking liver and onions for dinner.

“I’m not going to eat that,” Sissy says from her makeshift bed in the living room.

She laughs. “Glad to see you are feeling more yourself.”

She makes Sissy a poached egg and toast and pours her a glass of ginger ale. After Sissy’s done eating, she gives her one more aspirin. She takes one herself.

“Do you want to watch TV?”

“Will you watch with me?”

“Go ahead,” Ronnie says. Sissy rarely asks for company. “I’ll clean up.”

She turns the TV on and nestles on the sofa, slipping Sissy’s head onto her lap. The Winter Olympics are on; they are taking place in Japan. There’s a crime show and a noisy variety hour. She turns the TV back off.

“You wanna help me with your costume for the play?”

Sissy nods, propping herself up into a sitting position. “Okay.”

Ronnie joins them once he’s done washing the dishes. He picks up the latest issue of Life . “Looks like this guy faked his whole story about Howard Hughes.”

“Who’s Howard Hughes?” Sissy asks.

“Rich fellow from Texas,” Ronnie says. “Made out like a bandit during the Depression.”

When Ronnie doesn’t say anything more, Sissy looks to her. Ronnie never wants to talk about what he might have gone through during the Depression. Like Michael, he settled in California after his service and never went back to his home state. Not even one time, from what she can tell. Not close or none he’s said the handful of times she’s tried to ask whether he has any family still in Iowa.

“A few people did all right,” she says. “But most people didn’t.”

Sissy lays down a piece of cloth, forgotten. “Did Daddy’s family?”

“His people were fancier, but like everyone else during the bad years they had no money. When your father was little, his dad still made his doctor rounds in a horse-drawn buggy. By the Depression, they had a car — but not much money for gasoline.

“Of course I just heard all this from your father. I only met his parents one time, right after your father and me got married.”

“Why only once?”

“That’s just how it was. We didn’t have much money at first for traveling, especially with your father finishing his medical studies, then we started having all of you, and there was a continent between us.” She won’t say it, but maybe, just as she didn’t ever want to return to San Francisco, Michael wasn’t interested in being reminded of his old life. This must be why Ronnie never goes home, either, although neither she nor Michael was quite so drastic. People created new lives after the Depression, then the war. It wasn’t running away. It was running forward. All of America did it. “And then your grandmother got the polio. Your grandfather went right after. That was way before you were born.”

“Before Daddy died?”

She thought she’d told this to Sissy before. With a tribe for a family, it’s easy to forget what one child has been told and another hasn’t. “Before your father died, yes. Come on, let’s get you back into your own bed. We’ll keep you home tomorrow.”

In the morning, Sissy’s fever is down to one hundred, but her stomach is still unsettled. She doesn’t give Sissy any more aspirin, although she pops one herself.

“I’ll run to the UtoteM to pick up another bottle of ginger ale,” she says. “I’ll get some saltines, too.”

It’s a warm February day. Although still morning, the sun drops its curious desert glare over the city, glinting off the roofs of cars and mailboxes. She buys two bottles of soda and rolls her window down on the way back. The pungent, camphorlike odor of the creosote plant fills the car. It must have rained during the night.

She turns onto East Avalon Drive. Sissy is standing out front their house, talking to two strange men. That girl! In her nightie, too.

The men are wearing uniforms.

She just keeps on driving, right past the house, right past Sissy’s astonished expression, past the two men, their heads swiveling to look at her. She drives to the end of the block and rounds the corner, toward Camelback Mountain.

She’ll keep on driving. She’ll drive and drive until she’s disappeared into the desert. Until everything has disappeared.

Her hands fall loose on the steering wheel. Sissy is there alone, on the doorstep.

She turns right at the next corner and then turns right again.

Maybe this time she’ll turn onto East Avalon, and it will all have been a dream.

There will be no Sissy on the doorstep.

No anyone on the doorstep.

It will all have been a bad dream.

She turns the corner onto East Avalon very slowly, so slowly, as though somehow she can stretch time, make it long, elastic. Sissy is still there. The men are still there. She pulls up the driveway and opens the car door.

“Get into the house,” she tells Sissy.

The younger of the two men steps forward. He has a wide face and brown eyes with almost no eyelashes. The left side of his chest bears a name tag. The right side shines in the late morning sun with badges and insignia.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

She hefts the two bottles of ginger ale into her arms and walks toward them, the heels of her shoes clicking on the stone walk.

“Ma’am,” the young man begins again. “I’m Sergeant Major John Goode of the Eleventh Signal Group at Fort Huachuca. This is Chaplain Trenton.”