The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,52

She wipes more sweat off her face, and her hand looks too pink against her white face, like her hand and her face belong to two different bodies. “I just can’t…I just can’t carry you anymore…”

She is swaying a little now, back and forth. I know I should move forward, maybe take her hand. But I am also worried she could fall down right on top of me. I step back.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says. Her sunglasses have fallen off one of her ears. They sit crooked across her face, the pink strap hanging around her neck. She does not try to fix them. Instead, she sits down, right there on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of her black high-heeled shoes comes off, and the way she is sitting, I can see her underwear.

“Mom, get up. Let’s go find somewhere to sit. A bench. Let’s get a place in the shade.”

Instead she lies all the way down, curling her knees up to her chest. “I don’t know what to do.”

There are cars now, slowing down, people looking out their windows. I try poking her, hard enough to hurt. “You have to get up. Get up now.”

A man rolls down his window and leans out. “Honey, is your mom okay? Did she fall?”

“Mom, get up!” I want to kick her.

She is still on the ground when a police car slows and pulls over to the side of the road, lights on, no sirens. The other cars move around it, people watching us.

“Hi there,” the policeman says, getting out of his car. “Is this your mother?”

I nod. He doesn’t look old enough to be a police officer, even in the uniform, so many things swinging off his belt as he jogs toward us—a stick, a gun, a radio. He is wearing a hat, but I can see he has acne, swollen red marks and open scabs on his throat and cheeks, so much that it looks like it hurts. He gives me a bottle of water and tells me to go sit in the shade and drink it.

“Ma’am?” he says, kneeling beside my mother, his hand on her arm. “Ma’am? Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

She props herself up on her elbows. “No,” she says. “No, no. I just need to lie here for a minute. I’m okay.”

“Okay, well, we have to get you someplace where it’s cool. We have to get you out of this sun, get you some water. Do you have any family I can call?”

She sits up quickly. “Where’s my daughter? Oh my God, where is she?”

“I’m here,” I say.

She sees me and lays her hand on top of her heart. If you were just driving by now, seeing her lying on the grass with her hand like this, the policeman kneeling next to her, you might think she’d been shot.

“She’s fine, ma’am,” the policeman says. “But she needs to get inside, and you do too. You need to stand up and walk with me so we can get your daughter inside where it’s cool.”

This is what does it. She stands up, leaning on him for just a moment before she waves me over, and we walk to his car together.

Finally she is embarrassed.

We are in the police car, both of us sitting in the back. My mother is drinking her second bottle of water. I am on my third. The police officer tells us we have to keep drinking it, that heat-stroke is nothing we want to fool with. His car is magnificently air-conditioned, and I ask him to please turn it all the way up, to make sure it’s on maximum. He laughs and says, “Of course!” and then I can feel it all around me, the coolness filling the air like smoke.

“It must have been the heat,” my mother says. “I really don’t know what came over me. Thank you so much for the ride.”

He says that the heat has been making people act crazy all week. People have been fainting in their own homes—sunstroke, heatstroke—dropping like flies, he says. But he keeps asking her questions, looking at her in his mirror: Does she really want him to take us back to our house? Does she want him to take us to Social Services down at the station? Or the hospital, maybe?

No, she says. No. She’ll be fine if he just takes us home. He asks her if she thinks she can take care of me,