By Catherine Uroff

Featured Art: Polar Chroma Squall by John Sabraw

We’re waiting for a hot air balloon ride up by the old Warren County airport, in the middle of an open field, nothing around us but the long airport shed and a guy with a bushy beard sitting on the flatbed of a truck. Kent’s talking to the pilot about the weather, asking about refunds because it’s a little windy out. The pilot laughs. White teeth flashing in the middle of all that dark hair on his face.

“It’s a breeze,” he says. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Sherri calls me then. She’s lived across the street from us for years. She’s a gossip, telling me things that she shouldn’t, like who in the neighborhood is fighting over money, whose child is questioning, whose husband needs a lawyer. Last year, she asked my daughter, Aimee, to babysit for her while she played tennis. Apparently, Aimee turned on the television almost instantly and forgot to feed the kids their lunch and by the time Sherri came home, the house was wrecked and the children were stunned from all the shows they’d watched, and a boy was coming down the stairs, tucking in his shirt.

Now she’s talking quickly and her voice is so low I have to plug my free ear with my finger to hear her.

“Aimee’s done something. Aw, Lynne, what can I say? I’m sorry.”

The pilot’s looking up, as if there’s something in the clear sky to see. Kent’s gesturing for me to hang up, jabbing his index finger repeatedly into the palm of his opposite hand. He doesn’t like me to be distracted. That’s one of his complaints about me. I’m never really present, that’s what he says.

“There’s an ambulance parked in the driveway. Seems like she took something. Her friends are there. That boyfriend too. But she’s OK. I want you to know that. They’re tending to her now. I made sure of it.”

“Took something?” I ask or maybe I don’t say anything at all. My mouth is hanging open. 

“She’s OK,” Sherri repeats.

I need to get going. The car’s parked behind the airport shed and I’m looking across the field where some of the grass is too tall and probably hiding ticks and other bugs that will latch onto my skin, suck me dry, and if Aimee was here with me and if she was younger, I’d hold her hand and we’d march out of the field together.

“Lynne, what are you doing?” Kent asks. I look down. I haven’t moved. I’m holding my phone tightly against my chest. I can’t hear Sherri’s voice anymore. Maybe she’s still talking, telling me more, telling me something important that I should listen to. 

“It’s Aimee.”

“What now?”

“She’s done something,” I say, echoing Sherri. 

I’ve got the pilot’s attention. He’s jumping off his truck, slapping his hands together. Kent scowls at me. The pilot reaches me first. He puts his hand on my shoulder and that’s when I realize that I’m crying, shuddering, shaking.

“Hey,” he says softly and his voice is very kind. “What can I do to help?”

***

We’re about twenty minutes away from home, maybe a little less. Kent gets stuck behind an eighteen wheeler. I stare at the truck’s soot-striped underride guard and press my feet down as if I can control the pedals, the speed, that way.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Kent says.

“We shouldn’t have left her.”

“This isn’t our fault.”

He tucks his chin down, wrinkling his neck. Right before we left for the balloons, he got into a big fight with Aimee. She wanted to go with us but Kent wouldn’t even consider getting her a ticket. He told her that the balloon ride was something special, for adults only, and plus she hadn’t earned anything nice like this. She got in trouble for a party she’d gone to the weekend before in which the police were called after she was caught peeing in someone’s front yard. Aimee’s not his daughter so he doesn’t really have to worry about how he talks to her.

“If you could go faster,” I say. My throat is dry. I can barely choke the words out.

“I’m keeping us safe.”

That’s what we fight about most these days. His driving. He’s either too cautious, refusing to switch lanes to avoid traffic, or too reckless, speeding up when cars are braking up ahead. Aimee rolls her eyes whenever he says something, and how can I blame her? He gets on her for little things, like not putting her clothes in the laundry hamper, leaving dirty dishes on the counter instead of putting them in the dishwasher, keeping her shoes out in the middle of the floor where he can trip over them.

“I don’t want to be safe,” I say to him now. “I want to get to Aimee.”

He swerves into the other lane so quickly that I have to grab onto the door handle to keep steady.

“I’m doing the best I can,” he says. 

***

The ambulance sits in our driveway, like it’s just any other car, a guest coming for an afternoon visit. Sherri’s outside, standing on the sidewalk in front of her house. One of her kids hugs her knees and she’s got her hand on top of the child’s head. I used to stand that way back when Aimee was younger, I’m sure of it, although what I remember most is holding her in my arms, Aimee resting her head on my shoulder. She’d reach up with her short, fat fingers to stroke my hair. I’d close my eyes and do nothing but feel her fingers in my hair. She was always gentle when she was a baby. She never pulled.

Some of Aimee’s friends are sitting on our lawn, cross-legged in a circle. I recognize Fiona and Zoe and Miranda but there are more. They look so much alike to me, these skinny, sad-faced, beautiful teenage girls. Her boyfriend, Austin, is walking around them, like he’s a kid playing duck-duck-goose. I don’t stop to say anything to them even though the girls get up when they see me. I trip into the house, stopping short in the foyer where a young man is at the bottom of the stairwell, checking something off a paper on a clipboard. He’s wearing a red shirt with a white plastic name tag pinned on it. Nick. That’s his name.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Are you the mother?”

Nick looks to be as young as Aimee. His eyebrows are so light that I can barely see them.

“Tell me. Just tell me.”

He looks pained for a second, as if he wants to assert his authority, tell me who’s in charge here, but then he swallows hard and tells me about the pills. At this point, no one knows how many she’s taken. And that’s the key to everything. Knowing the quantity. But she won’t tell them. She refuses, which is just making everything more difficult.

There’s a rumbling upstairs, footsteps too, and then two other men in red shirts are making their way down to us, slowly, pausing at each step, carefully lowering a stretcher down, down. Aimee’s on top of it and she sits up when they get to the foyer. For a second, she looks like a princess on her throne.

“I feel dizzy, Mom,” Aimee says in a sing-song voice, sounding very young, not sixteen at all, but like a little girl again and I can’t help but think of the times when I’d take her to Story Time at the public library when she was a toddler. I’d sit on the floor and she’d sit in my lap, leaning into me, thumb in her mouth, and an old lady would sit on a stool in front of us and sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider song. Aimee would pop her thumb out of her mouth long enough to sing along. There were hand motions too and I’d pick up Aimee’s hands, those damp fingers of hers, and we’d do them together. The spider crawling up. The spider falling down. It seemed as if all the other mothers there knew the song already and I felt foolish for having to learn it along with my child. I didn’t have the kind of childhood where songs were sung to me. But I learned that song with Aimee and all the others too.

And now she’s on top of a stretcher and she’s wearing a tight t-shirt and short shorts and she doesn’t have any shoes on and her toenails are ragged and her legs have some bruises on them that I haven’t seen before and her cheeks are pale and there’s some sweat on her forehead, up near her hairline, and she has too much eye makeup on and sometimes I can just see her and feel something break inside of me and this is one of those times.

“Why’d you do this, Aimee?” Nick asks, leaning close to her. He’s got a pen out, hovering just above the clipboard, ready to record whatever she has to say. “Why did you take those pills?”

“Because I’m unhappy,” she says, using that same little girl voice, and I wonder if he feels stupid, for not understanding such a simple thing.

***

They take her to the hospital in Glens Falls. Kent and I follow the ambulance. It doesn’t use lights or a siren either, and I pound on the car dashboard. Wake up! Wake up! I want to scream to those paramedics. Make her an emergency. Kent misunderstands and speeds up so that we’re too close to the backside of the ambulance, where Aimee is just inside, strapped down, maybe about to tell Nick more stories about her unhappiness, and I have to point out to him that he needs to slow down, to make sure there’s space between us, and usually this would make him complain, sigh, mutter under his breath, but he doesn’t say a word. He just slows down and takes his time to get us there.

At the hospital, the woman behind the front desk points us to a special waiting room. It’s quiet and empty and has lots of folding chairs lined up in a row, like a classroom. Kent sits first. He bows his head, making it easy to see his bald spots, his scabby, gray scalp.

Austin slumps into the room, his parents behind him. They wave to us and then sit in the row in front of us, facing forward. We could be at a station, waiting for a bus. When Kent taps Austin on the shoulder, they all turn around.

“I hold you personally responsible for this,” Kent says to him. His voice is shaky. Aimee would make fun of him if she heard him.

“What the hell?” Austin’s father says. He has a baseball hat on, the brim pulled so low that I can’t see his eyes.

Kent stiffens.

“I happen to know, for a fact, that your son takes Aimee to parties where alcohol is involved. Alcohol is known to be a depressive. Not good for someone like Aimee. With her moods and all.”

Austin’s mother points at us. She has very long fingernails, filed to a point, painted bright red. Valentine’s Day red. Last year, for Valentine’s Day, Austin painted something for Aimee in art class. At first, I thought it was a cross, nestled in a bed of flames, but each time I looked at its rough strokes of thick paint, I saw something else. Aimee was so proud of that work of art, made especially for her. She taped it up on her bedroom wall where it stayed for a few months until she got into a fight with Austin and ripped it in two. Kent yelled at her over that, all because some wall paint came off when she tore it down.

“We’re here to help,” Austin’s mother says. “But we’re not here to be accused.”

I get up then and walk out of the room, past the check-in counter that has a line five people deep, through the sliding glass doors that open automatically for me. I stand by the curb of the hospital’s horseshoe driveway. The traffic from I-87 is loud with its own music: low rumblings, higher whines. I stare at the row of parked cars before me, noticing how neatly they line up in between their white lines. The sky’s cloudy now, all gray above me.

“There you are,” Kent says.

He’s next to me, fooling with the zipper on his navy blue windbreaker, pulling it up and then down.

“The doctor just came by.”

I start for the door, but Kent puts his hand on my arm to stop me.

“He’s gone now. No point in looking for him. They dash in and out, that’s what they do. Aimee’s OK. She didn’t take that many pills. Maybe just a few. They were from my back surgery, the Percocet I got. Remember how I didn’t take all of them? Well, Aimee got into them. But she’s fine. I want to tell you that. She’s going to be just fine. They don’t have enough room to keep her but overnight. The doctor said she should see someone once she’s released.”

Something deep in my chest lurches.

“When can I see her?”

“He didn’t say. I should’ve asked. I wasn’t thinking. Look, I’m in shock too, you know. It’s not just you.”

“I’m going to see her.”

“I’ll come with.”

“No, please. Don’t.”

“I can’t?”

“It’d be better—”

“Ah, how have we come to this?”

He’s crying. Quick tears, one right after the other. I don’t answer him. I think that if I do, it’d be like I’m acknowledging some shared experience between us, which isn’t true at all. I’ve been alone a lot but I’ve never felt it as strongly as right now, standing outside the hospital with him.    

***

Back inside, I wave to the woman behind the check-in counter, as if I know her, and she doesn’t stop me. I breeze through touchless sliding doors, following a yellow line painted on the floor to get to the triage area. There are wall-mounted hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere and posters about how important it is to keep your hands clean. A nurse’s station is in the middle of the room but no one notices me as I walk around, peeping around half-closed privacy curtains to look inside the exam rooms. Aimee’s the one who finds me.

“Mommy?”

I step into her room, pulling the curtain tight behind me. She’s hooked up to a monitor. Her face is still pale and her lips have something chalky rimmed around them.

“Aimee Jane,” I say, using her middle name, like I used to when she was a little girl and had done something silly or a little naughty. “How are you feeling?”

“My head hurts.”

“I’ll get a nurse.”

“I want to get out of here, Mom.”

A short man wearing a white lab coat comes in. Aimee scoots up in bed a little.

“I met your husband in the waiting room,” he says to me.

He moves around me to get to Aimee’s bedside. He holds her arm up, fingers and thumb on her wrist, to take her pulse. I notice, then, that she’s hooked up to an IV.

“She wants to leave,” I say.

“She needs to be monitored overnight. I’d keep her longer if I could.”

“Her head hurts.”

“To be expected. We can see if there’s something we could give her for the pain.”

“Is Austin here?” Aimee asks. “I wanted him to come over while you guys were at the balloons but he had to finish mowing the lawn first and what kind of person says that to someone else unless they don’t care? Don’t care at all.”

The doctor drops her arm. I’m worried that she’s turned him off, made him not want to treat her anymore. He backs away from her bed and then motions for me to join him outside the curtain. This is always the way it is with Aimee. All those private discussions I’ve had about her over the years! Her teacher stepping out of the classroom to hold a one-on-one with me because Aimee wouldn’t sit still during circle time. Her Girl Scout leader pulling me aside after troop meetings to inform me that Aimee kept interrupting everyone. Her soccer coach cautioning me about Aimee’s language on the field whenever she missed a goal. While all the other parents were folding up their chairs, high-fiving their kids for their great plays, there I was, listening to the coach. 

“Has your daughter ever seen someone?”

“No.”

“Has she ever done something like this before?”

“No. But she’s always been…you should know…she’s always been,” I pause. The doctor is distracted, looking around, frowning. Then he takes out a pen from his lab coat pocket and sidesteps me to grab a notepad from the nurse’s station. He scribbles something down and rips the paper off the pad.

“It’s all over. I see it all the time now. Young girls especially. They feel so low. They think there’s nothing left to do. We’ll have a specialist see your daughter while she’s here. But I want to give you a name of someone good with teens, someone she can talk to.”

I want to tell him about Aimee, what she was like as a wild, little kid, the courage she used to show. On weekend mornings, she’d bike all around town for hours. One time I was out, running errands, and I saw her on the opposite side of the road, pedaling so fast, wobbling over the white line, her long, thin hair streaming behind her. She took her feet off the pedals when she saw me, coasted for a while. She grinned and took her hands off the handles too, and there was a very short amount of time—right before she crashed, smack down, onto the pebbled shoulder of the road—when she was able to keep her balance.

“I was up by the Warren County airport,” I say instead. “Waiting for a balloon ride. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

The doctor frowns. He could be Kent, not understanding a word I say.

“Aimee would’ve loved it. She wanted to go with us but we said no. Or, really, my husband said no and I didn’t stop him. He’s not her father. You should know that. So he doesn’t really understand either. But she would’ve liked being up that high. She’s fearless like that.”

The doctor hands me the note paper and then looks away. He’s preparing himself for the next patient, I can just tell.

“Look, she just needs help, Mom,” he says. “Please get her the help she needs.”

***

At home, while Kent cleans up the mud that the paramedics tracked in, I go into Aimee’s bedroom. Her closet door is open and I see a heap of clothes on the floor along with notebooks and textbooks and empty paper shopping bags and skimpy sundresses that still have security tags on them. I try to remember the last time I went into her room. She likes her privacy, used to glare at me every time I came in, so after a while I just stopped.

Sherri wants to come over. She says she’s made some food for us and it reminds me of all the people who brought food over when Aimee’s father, Jack, died. He went out to a bar with friends one night without me and I scolded him for leaving us because Aimee was just a baby and she had a cold. I wanted to stay at home, be there if she needed me, but Jack was restless and looking for fun so I practically chased him out of our apartment. Go! Go! Forget about us! Later that night, he was on the side of the road with friends, they were singing a drinking song and laughing, and a car came around the bend too fast and drove right into Jack, flipped him up so high that it looked like he was flying. That was what one of Jack’s friends told me later. After his funeral, everyone brought over food, fussed over me. I got used to their sympathy. I even liked it. I’d never received so much attention. And then it just stopped. I ate all the casseroles and then one day I opened up the refrigerator and realized there was nothing left, nothing new to eat at all.

I sit down on the floor of Aimee’s closet. There’s her smell, the strong, musty perfume she wears. In one of the notebooks, there’s a page that has nothing but a large spiral on it, a black, thick-stroked mass of interconnected circles, tiny slits in the paper where she pressed down too hard. Other pages have Austin’s name on them, up and down and sideways, in cursive and block letters.

Kent calls for me but I don’t answer. When he finally finds me, he crouches down and puts his hand on my knee. I think he’s going to cry again, tell me how sorry he is, ask what he can do to help.

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” he says instead.

***

The next afternoon, I go by myself to get Aimee from the hospital. She’s out of triage and on the fourth floor in a semi-private room. Aimee’s bed is by the door, nowhere near the window. Her face is scrubbed clean. Her hair is slicked back into a ponytail. She looks more like herself—there are the freckles on her nose, the pinprick-sized mole on her right cheek, her perfectly shaped, thick, dark eyebrows, her full bottom lip, her ski slope nose—and I want to fall on the floor, onto my knees, when I see her like that.

“Where’s Kent?” She asks.

She’s not sounding like a little girl anymore. Her voice is flat.

“At home.”

“He’s mad.”

“No one is mad.”

“Then why isn’t he here?”

Kent and I were up for most of the night, talking, drinking coffee to keep awake. Neither one of us wanted to fall asleep, to wake up to something new even though we should’ve been happy to see the day end. Right before it was time to pick Aimee up, he slipped into the guest bedroom and fell asleep on top of the bed. It was OK though. I’d made it clear that I wanted to do this by myself.

“I don’t need him,” I say to Aimee.

“Whatever.”

I’m gripping the bed rails too tightly, trying to keep the strain out of my voice.

“I’m going to get you the help you need, Aimee. I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner.”

I have the note paper that the doctor gave me in my pocket. I touch it then, just to feel its sharp fold.

“Look, I made a mistake. I get it. But don’t start acting like I’m crazy or something.”

“Just someone you can talk to.”

“Jesus, Mom, is Kent putting you up to this? Is that it?”

“No. He’s not…he’s not the problem.”

“He’s telling you to do this. God, I hate him.”

The first time Kent met Aimee, she was five years old. Jack had been gone for three years by that time; sometimes she still called for him even though she never really knew him. Kent brought over a Barbie doll. He opened up the plastic box and untied Barbie’s wrists and ankles so that she could play with the doll right away. She stroked Barbie’s hair with the tip of her finger. She was so cautious with his gift

“I’ll do the right thing by you, Aimee, I swear I will.”

“Oh my God, what are you even talking about?”

She’s glaring at me, just like she does whenever I ask her to tidy up her room, show me what’s in her backpack, explain why she’s in detention again. This is the time for me to say something profound and meaningful, something that will touch her, that will make sense to her, that will zing her heart and nestle its way into her soul and be a beacon, some shiny thing that she can hold onto, rub when she gets upset, a ghost that wraps around her shoulders like a shawl. Maybe I can tell her about her father, her real one, the man that I always loved, the man that I chased away, out of the house, on the very last night of his life. Maybe I can tell her how Kent held my hand last night and wept some more and told me he was sorry for his part in it, how he didn’t make things better, he only made things worse, but there was always something in the way, blocking him from really reaching me or reaching Aimee and he didn’t know if it was just Jack or something else, but It was always just the two of you and then me, looking on, standing outside the circle. I don’t want to be outside anymore, Lynne. You have to let me in. And I would reassure my daughter, tell her what she wants to hear, which is, I hope, that no one will ever come between the two of us.     

“See, Mom, you don’t even know,” Aimee says.

She puts her hand on her chest, and for a moment there’s nothing but the simple movement of her chest rising and falling as she breathes in and out.

“I’ll figure this out.”

“No, you won’t,” she says and then her roommate behind the curtain barks out a deep, guttural cough, and I back up, towards the door.

***

She’s steady on her feet as we leave the hospital but I cup her elbow with my hand anyway. She tries to shake me off but I hold on tight. She wants to stop for coffee at the hospital cafeteria and then gets into a furious text war with Austin as we stand in line at the cashiers. Her face gets very red and she’s muttering swears and people stare at her as she viciously taps on her phone. In my car, she puts her feet up on the dashboard and then she swings her arm around and punches the side window. We’re not even out of the parking lot yet.

“Take me to Austin’s,” she says. “I need to talk to him.”

“You need to rest.”

“See, you’re not listening to me.”

“I can’t—”

“You say all these things like you’re going to help me but you don’t know what that even means. If you really wanted to help, you’d take me to Austin’s.”

I imagine driving her home. Kent will be waiting by the front door. She’ll push past him to get inside, elbow him out of the way because he won’t have the sense to step aside. Then I think of driving to Austin’s, how she’ll pound on the front door of his house, how his mother with the fancy nails will be the one to finally open it, tell my daughter that her son is out, not taking visitors, unavailable for the time being. And I’m desperate—I’ve never felt that kind of yearning before—to do something, anything, but what’s ahead of us.

“I’ve got another idea.”

“What?”

“Why don’t we swing by the balloons, on our way home. I bet they’re still there.”

“Balloons?”

“We don’t have to go up in one. We’ll save that for another day. But I want you to see them. I think you’ll like that.”

“I need to see Austin.”

Her voice is getting higher. She lifts her chin and I can see her neck, strained and skinny.

“This won’t take long.”

“Why won’t you listen to me?”

“I am…I mean, I will…it’s just I think…please Aimee, let me take you there.”

My voice cracks and maybe she feels sorry for me but for whatever reason she stops making a fuss. She slumps in her seat, stares at her phone again, and I swerve onto the highway, merge quickly into the left lane so that I can go faster.

This time, at the old landing field, a bunch of people are standing around, gazing up at the sky. I park my car in the parking lot, in the exact space that Kent used the day before. At first, Aimee refuses to get out. She says that I can do whatever I want as long as I don’t drag her along. I spend a few minutes arguing with her. Then I plead. I even put my hands together like I’m praying and she tells me to stop acting stupid but after a while she opens up her car door and says, “Fine, let’s just get this over with.” We walk onto the field together. Some of the people in the crowd welcome us. One man is wearing tails and a top hat, like he’s in a Fred Astaire movie. There’s another group of people who are toasting each other with champagne glasses.

“Here they come!” Someone shouts and I nudge Aimee and then we both look up to see a balloon coming in. One second everything is clear and then the next, the balloon’s there, slowly coasting in the sky, casting a wide shadow over the field. It has a checkerboard pattern—black, white, and red. There are people in its basket, waving, and I think of all they can see: the roads and fields and trees spread out below them. 

It doesn’t take long before other balloons fill the sky. It’s as if the first balloon has somehow been able to multiply, spawn new ones. A dozen of them, floating in various positions, slowly descending, even brighter than the first one. Yellow, green, purple, and red. All different designs. Striped. Checked. One’s made to resemble a strawberry with green leaves on top. The hiss of their gas burners are very loud and I can’t hear anything else. But I feel this sudden lightness, a buoyancy I haven’t had before, like if I jump I’ll go higher than usual. I glance over at Aimee and see that she’s smiling and I think that means she feels it too. I tell her, then, that everything will be OK. I point to the balloons, still hovering above us. I promise her that that’s where we’ll be someday. She doesn’t argue with me. She lets me talk to her about balloons. And we stay until the very end, waving them all in, making sure they touch down, all that brilliant material collapsing on the ground.

---

Catherine Uroff’s short stories have appeared in a variety of journals, including The Louisville Review, Prairie Schooner, The Bellevue Literary Review, Moon City Review, Sou’wester, and the Beloit Fiction Journal.