the blue room

Mama took me to visit Great-Grandma, and the whole way in the car I kept asking Mama to slow down. She kept saying it would be illegal to go any slower. She turned up the radio, and I asked her if she would turn it down, and she blew a raspberry but then turned it down. I knew it made her sad how I was always so worried about either me throwing up or her dying. But throwing up was the second-worst thing in the world. And she was my mama and you only get one.

All I really had was a mama and a great-grandma. My great-grandpa couldn’t talk anymore on account of a stroke. I would’ve had a grandma too, but she died in a car wreck fifteen years ago, before I was even thought of, back when Mama was little.

Mama told me I still had a grandma. She said everyone had a grandma, even if their grandmas were dead like mine. But whenever I wanted to ask Mama about her, it felt weird to call her grandma, so I called her Mama’s mama.

When we got to Great-Grandma’s, I ran up and hugged her, and she took off my helmet and put her hand on my head. “Bless you,” she said. She was always blessing me.

I crawled up beside mama on the couch like a baby, even though I was seven. When I got good and situated, I laid my head on her and let my mind drift, thinking about the smell in Great-Grandma’s house, something like breath mints and fried food. I thought about my stomach, trying to figure out if it felt queasy or if I was just imagining it, like Mrs. Street said. And I thought about Mama’s mama.

In my mind, I saw Mama’s mama every day. Sometimes I would dream that she and Mama and Great-Grandma and I were all together, like she had never died. Other nights I would dream that Mama’s mama was hovering outside my window like a vampire. Mostly, though, the things I thought about Mama’s mama were sad. I started missing her before I ever knew her. With my head on Mama’s lap, looking up at her while she unwrapped a piece of candy and slipped it in her mouth, I realized that if I missed her as bad as I did, then Mama and Great-Grandma must miss her even more because they actually got to meet her.

I leaned up and looked at Great-Grandma where she sat, hunched over in the recliner. “Do you miss Mama’s mama?”

Great-Grandma had to turn her whole body to look at me. “Why, yes. I do. I miss my daughter very much.”

“Why don’t you cry then?”

“I cried out all my tears when she died,” Great-Grandma said. “And besides, she’s not really gone.”

“She’s in heaven,” I said, sounding bored.

“Well,” Great-Grandma shifted a little and winced at the pain. “I think she’s here too. Matter of fact, I know she is. I saw her.”

“You saw her?”

“Last night. Saw her clear as day.”

I crawled off the couch beside Mama and sat with my legs crossed in front of Great-Grandma’s recliner. Great-Grandma wanted to be like Sylvia Brown, the psychic she watched on TV, so when she started up with the story, she looked at a spot on the wall like the visions were coming to her from somewhere far off.

She said Mama’s mama walked up to the doorway of her bedroom and made a motion with her hand like “follow me.” Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa slept in separate beds on account of their back problems, so Great-Grandma walked over to his bed and put her hand on his chest.

“I didn’t know if she was telling me Amos had died or what.” I didn’t know ghosts could warn you about people dying. Another thing to worry about.

But Great-Grandpa’s chest pushed out against her hand, she said, so she followed Mama’s mama into the Blue Room. Back in the seventies Great-Grandpa painted it Deep Ocean Blue, but when my mama was still a little girl, her and her cousins called it the Blue Room because that was easier.

I asked Great-Grandma if Mama’s mama looked see-through.

Great-Grandma leaned back in the recliner as much as she could with her hunchback. I stared at her hand as it dangled from the edge of the recliner. Her fingers were shiny, like they had lotion on them that needed to be rubbed in better.

“See-through,” she said, thinking about it. “She kindly glowed a little. But I couldn’t see through her, no.”

I looked over at Mama to see what she thought of all this. Her sleepy gaze was on the TV, fixed on the way Victor’s mustache moved up and down as he talked. She loved Victor on Young and the Restless, even though he was old enough to be her daddy. I thought of what Mama would look like if she were to start glowing.

Victor must have caught Great-Grandma’s eye too because she stopped talking and stared at the TV. If Mama’s mama hadn’t died before I was born, she would probably be on the couch beside Mama, looking at Victor with her eyes bright and her mouth open in a half-smile exactly like Mama’s.

“What did Mama’s mama say?”

“That’s the thing. She didn’t say nothing, but she was trying to. Over and over. Looked like she was getting frustrated because I couldn’t hear her. It’s like when I press mute on the remote here.” She pressed the Mute button to demonstrate. Victor, with his bowtie and slicked-back hair, went silent. Mama looked over. Great-Grandma fumbled with the remote.

“I’m pressing the button,” she said. “Oh, dammit to hell.”

Mama said, “Let me see.” She pressed it once and it worked. Victor’s gravelly voice filled the room once again.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

Great-Grandma tried to snap her fingers. It made a sound like Mama’s lighter trying to strike. 

“She was gone. Just went—” She made a wiping motion with her shiny old hand.

Great-Grandma dipped snuff, and she picked up an old Coke bottle to spit some out. Even though I knew it was coming, I couldn’t look away. Instantly, my stomach went to bubbling.

I tugged Mama’s pants. “When are we leaving?” I whined.

Seeing that thick syrup Great-Grandma spat out, I worried I would throw up. Throwing up was the nastiest thing in the world, and I felt like if I ever threw up again, I would die. I had thrown up before, when I was three and again when I was five, but when I turned six, I started looking at it differently. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Here’s what I mean: Mama once made me a ham and cheese sandwich, and when I took a bite of it and looked where I had just bitten, the yellow cheese mushed into the pinkness of the ham looked like throw up. After that, every time I looked at a regular sandwich, even one I hadn’t bitten into, it reminded me of throw-up. Same with hotdogs and popcorn.

In school, a kid named Brett threw up during story time and sometimes, when I lay down at night, I could smell it. I could see the janitor, his greasy long hair and bumpy skin, waiting in the corner of my room with a leather pouch full of that sawdust stuff he sprinkled on Brett’s yellow vomit.

I crawled onto the couch beside Mama like a slug.

“I don’t feel good,” I told her. If I whined, she might get frustrated and we could leave.

“You’re okay,” she said. “If it’s coming, it’s coming. Best thing is to not think about it. Remember how Mrs. Street said that?”

Great-Grandma had gotten up out of her recliner and hobbled into the kitchen. She brought back a can of Sprite and said, “This’ll help if your stomach’s upset.” She handed me the can and said, more to Mama than to me, “Hope I didn’t scare you.”

“I’m not scared,” I said.

Great-Grandma said, “Don’t want to scare my baby.”

I crawled back onto Mama’s lap like I was crawling back in time to when I was small enough to be cradled. She kept wincing and adjusting. Though she never said, I knew she wished I wouldn’t lay on her like that, heavy as I was, but any time I got to thinking about Mama’s mama, I wanted to be closer to my mama.

Last year, for example, I had a King Kong action figure that was my favorite at the time, and I decided that Kong would kill one of my ninja action figures. I held King Kong up in the air, made him zoom down from the sky and surprise the clueless ninja. King Kong’s big, clawed hand covered the ninja’s face. I pushed Kong’s teeth into the ninja’s chest. Their plastic bodies clinked out across the yard. As I smashed them together, I made King Kong growl. I imagined the way his teeth tore through the skin.

Afterward, I tore up a couple blades of grass and weaved them together while I thought about the poor ninja and how he had died and then I thought about Mama’s mama who had also died. It occurred to me that the saddest thing in the world was for a mama to die. After that day, every time I thought about dying mamas, it was like a brand-new idea, like I had invented it. Just like that, on a beautiful summer day with all the grass waving at me, I started crying.

Mama came outside to check the mail. Because I was crying so hard, I didn’t hear her walk up.

“You get hurt? Let me see.”

I dodged her hand when it came to rest on my shoulder. When she finally got her arm around me, I broke down. I pressed my head against her stomach and shivered like it wasn’t eighty degrees outside and summer.

Mama asked a couple more times what was wrong then gave it up. I cried for every person whose mama had died, and I cried because it could happen to me. I wanted Mama to wear my bicycle helmet every time we got in the car, but I knew she wouldn’t. As I hugged Mama and shook and cried, it occurred to me that I had gotten so upset that I might throw up.

Young and the Restless had gone on a commercial break, and Great-Grandma decided to flip the channel. As though it had been put there to torture me, an image of a car wreck flashed onto the screen.

“Joel Forsythe with a live traffic update.”

The screen switched to images of EMS workers’ and road crews’ dirty boots as they stepped through debris. The camera was set on the ground, like it was trying not to look. I knew, though, that just outside the frame was a scene too bloody to show on the news. “Reports say a tractor-trailer lost control and collided with a car in the neighboring lane. One fatality has already been reported. Highway patrol says they are investigating the accident. More at six.”

“Everyone always in a hurry,” Great-Grandma said.

Mama said, “It’s those transfer trucks, acting like they own the road.”

“A fatality,” Great-Grandma said. “Mm, mm, mm.”

I was afraid to ask but couldn’t help myself. “What’s a fatality?”

Mama shot a glance to Great-Grandma. Great-Grandma looked down at her hands. “It means someone went to be with the Lord.”

“Someone died,” I said.

The alarm in my voice caught Mama’s attention. “Okay,” she said, shooing me off her lap. “Get your helmet. Let’s go.”

I took a sip of the Sprite Great-Grandma had brought me and groaned.

“I gotta pee,” I said.

“Now he’s gotta pee,” Mama said.

I trotted down the hall toward the bathroom. A little shiver went through me as I passed the Blue Room, and I picked up speed. Now that Mama and Great-Grandma weren’t looking at me, I had a moment to think about the car accident, the fatality. The death. They said the transfer truck lost control. Like something else took over. I hated to hear those words because I knew they would bother me forever. I would always worry about all the ways I might lose control.

From the living room, Mama yelled, “I better hear that toilet flushing.”

I turned on the bathroom light and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My eyes looked Deep Ocean Blue. My freckles, Great-Grandma would say, looked like Mama’s mama’s freckles.

If my skin had freckles and Mama’s mama had freckles, then maybe I would die just like Mama’s mama. My bones would break like her bones broke—in a devastating car wreck. Fatality. And the pavement. And the syrupy spit. The ghost come back to warn of death. The snap of a neck. The saddest thing in the world. It wouldn’t make a sound. Like a television on mute.

Without any warning, I felt a lump in my throat. The world turned in a slow spiral, and I barely had time to move to the toilet before vomit sprayed from my mouth like a can of soda that had been shaken up. When another surge came, I tightened my stomach to help push it out. As each mouthful spilled from my lips, my body began to feel warm. I held the handles that had been installed when Great-Grandma started having trouble getting around. I hovered there above the toilet, coughing and spitting. As more worked its way up my throat, a deep calmness washed over me.

From the living room, I heard Mama call for me.

“I’m coming, baby!” she yelled.

Her voice was the sweetest sound I ever heard.

Wes Byers is a writer based in New Orleans, Louisiana. His work appears in Southern Review of Books, Pembroke Magazine, Reckon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Fictive Dream, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Mississippi and has previously served on the fiction board at the New Orleans Review.