I walked out of the house and flopped down in the front

yard. The sky was a pale, pale blue. I decided I would lie in the grass all day. I concentrated on trying to make my heart stop beating, then James and Maisey would be sorry they said those things. They'd cry in the dark church at my funeral,

think of the day they were mean to me. My absence would be like a loose tooth to them for the rest of their lives—they'd keep going back to it over and over, nudging it to go away, but it wouldn't. I'd haunt them and their stupid children.

My heart didn't slow down; in fact, it speeded up when I 1 1 7

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thought of lying in a coffin, creepy organ music playing while my classmates filed by sneering at my body. Look at her. She drove her mother crazy. I wondered if Rae and Mrs. Miller would come to my funeral. Would Rae look at my lips and think, Ooh, gross. Would her mother begin a prayer over my body, then end by speaking in tongues and flopping around on the floor next to my coffin? The thought of Mrs. Miller's gibberish made me sit up. If I were going to have a funeral, I'd like to decide who could come and who couldn't.

Late that afternoon, we'd all wandered out to the

front yard when Daddy drove up to the house with no Mama visible in the car. I thought maybe she was lying down in the backseat. But she wasn't. Daddy walked into the house and we followed him. Specks of burnt toast still dotted the edge of the sink in the kitchen. "Your mama's going to be away for a while," he said, hugging Maisey close to him, combing her brown, curly hair with his fingers. "It's like her head's a radio," he said, "except all her signals have gotten messed up. She's the same person she always was, though; we'll just have to be extra-careful with her when she comes home. She's like that old radio of James's—hit the knobs wrong and you foul the whole thing up."

"Is she going to the hospital here?" I asked. I didn't breathe

for fear Daddy would say yes. I could just see Mama showing up at Unit 17 in a nightgown instead of her white uniform. And how horrible it would be if the seventh-graders went

to sing to the patients while Mama sat there drooling and crossing her eyes, her nightgown twisted around her like a 1 1 8

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shroud. I knew I'd die for sure then. The whole town would know she was crazy.

"No, of course not," Daddy said. "The doctor is sending her to a small hospital in Tallahassee. She's not crazy; she's just tired."

I knew Daddy was just saying that. Mama was crazy and

we all knew it. Everybody is tired, but not everybody would stand next to a lake and watch as a child nearly drowned. Still, I was relieved that she was going to a hospital in Tallahassee. This we could keep secret.

At first Daddy thought it best if we kids didn't go see

her; "She needs a break from y'all," he said, and I wanted to say, She's our mother and we made her crazy, so we can do anything we want with her. But I didn't. I wondered what

she would do all day. If she'd make tile ashtrays and little wood birdhouses like our patients did. Or would she sit in a dayroom in her nightgown and stare out the window? Or rock back and forth, slobbering, rubbing her hands? I wondered what the doctors were going to do to her. Were they going to give her a lobotomy so she'd be happy again? I wondered if she'd end up like Innertube, the patient who hung out at the gas station. He'd had a lobotomy. Maybe she'd get one too. Or maybe they'd zap her like they did Mrs. Miller.

A couple of weeks after she'd been gone, Daddy decided to

take us over to see her. That old feeling of panic that had sent me running home from school to bang on the glass door washed over me as we headed down Highway 90 toward Tallahassee. Black shadows fell in stripes across the road, making me dizzy

as we whipped past a stand of tall pines. Then we caught every red light in Quincy. All that starting and stopping made me carsick. I didn't want to see Mama; I wanted to go back home. 1 1 9

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