An on episode of The Electric Company an avuncular classical cellist plays a minor scale against a plain backdrop the color of a rain cloud. This sound haunts me as I watch my mother walk to her car to visit the oncologist. It floats in my head as I nuzzle her chest at night, my cold nose touching the panel of her sternum as her thinning arms encircle me. My mother smells of sour dirt. I am in kindergarten.

At school the next day the boy sitting across from me draws robots with smiling lines over their box faces. He vocalizes their robot songs, pitch-descending grunts, half-time guitar riffs I recognize from his dad’s truck’s stereo when he got dropped off before school. He wears jeans and a jean jacket and little kid heavy metal brown hair damp and to his shoulders. “My dad likes all the good bands,” he says during morning snack. Browning apple slices crumble in our mouths. 

I slide him a red Laffy Taffy I took from the desk at the hair salon where my grandmother works. I have a handful of them in the pocket of my knitted sweater, one my mother passed down to me, one she had as a kid. “Cool,” he says, teeth stuck on the sweet goo. He takes another sheet of paper from the basket and continues to draw the robots and sing to himself.

At recess, he slumps down off the swing. I wrestle him to the ground, marshalling the weight of my big shoulders and strong legs to pin him against the sodden woodchips and their orange pencil-shaving smell. I put my lips on his. He is scared, and shaky. He smells like milk. He yells, “Help!” and pushes me off. I feel the wrongness of it and something else—prickly bright green dread across my skin—the impending loss of my mother. She is alive, but I become sure she will die soon. She is very sick. 

I cry. Snot and tears smear into playground grit on my palms and my cheeks. Through gasps, I try to explain myself to old Mrs. Skimpley, the playground attendant. She takes me by the elbow and says she will call my mother who is not home, but in the hospital. I am living with my grandmother. There is a stir in the office when no one knows my grandmother’s phone number. 

A week later, my mother dies. The world becomes the indigo in puddles in fall when things start to get dark.

I get put into a special class. Me and two other girls play with sand in a table in low lighting with flute music playing from a stereo. When the kind, young, thin woman in long hair and a cardigan asks how I feel, I say, “Good.” I want out. The room is meant for calm, but I feel like I am underwater, begging for breath and swallowing doom. 

Elementary school continues. I barely speak.

In middle school I fight everyone I can, hoping I will disappear to wherever my mother has gone. In my grandmother’s rearview mirror, on a drive home after a suspension, I see my face: thick brows and lashes, her neck and silhouette in mine, that tall curve of the side and spine—my mother. 

In eighth grade a teacher sees me alone on the front steps of the school and says, “It’s normal when things don’t seem normal,” then gives me a green Jolly Rancher. This is Ms. Rindquist, a teacher I never had. I solidify for a moment, the world coming together a little, like how the sky turns the ground and the trees pink and purple when the sun rises.

By my sophomore year of high school, my grandmother calls my teachers at the end of each quarter with a feeble polite voice, her voice a light cream color like a streak of half-and-half in black coffee. She forces me to write essays on obscure topics I pretend to hate, like narwhals. I get on the honor roll. I have friends.

My friend Tanya sings in the choir and the stern choir teacher offers her a solo. The round clarity of Tanya’s voice is pink, but of twilight and not the sunrise. Then I see the boy I want with Tanya as they sneak around the corner to skip class. They laugh together, chuckling at nonsense like an old married couple, their happiness the color of a yellow beam of light from a window in a room full of books and love and a big green velvet-tufted chaise lounge, a room with the door shut, and that good yellow beam also turns gray then because the sound of their laughter is my gray empty color of heartbreak, the pull of a minor scale that descends again in my life. 

Then I get offered a solo in the choir. When I sing, the line ascends in delicate triplets, a bird rising on a wind gust, and I see Tanya’s eyes on me and though I don’t pay much attention to the timbre of my voice, I notice her face flushed with jealousy, and then I see the boy’s eyes on me too.

My grandmother passes in sleepy old age. I make it into college. I marry.

Decades later my husband and I move to a condo overlooking the bay in San Diego. His voice in the morning is a haze coming off the skyline, an orange cutting through like the noisy sea gulls outside. 

One morning our daughter calls. The c-section has succeeded. The baby is healthy. I have been to a lot of doctors by then for what is happening to me. Hospital sounds are the faux-Caucasian pink skin-tone of Band-aids. I hear my granddaughter’s cries, the color of dark eyelashes, what all women have in our family, especially my own mother. Lyrical dips and dashes of light falling, Tanya’s voice in the choir years ago, and my new granddaughter’s name, Melody.

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Joshua Wetjen is a high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not grading or chasing his two children, he likes to play jazz guitar and try new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in Opossum, Newfound and Yalobusha Review.

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