You Are My Only by Beth Kephart Page A

she?
    â€œWhere are you going?” the woman beside me asks, in a dreamy voice, as if I’m headed out on some vacation. As if I had not just been thrown from the handlebars of a bike and smashed to the walk far below. As if my left arm and right leg aren’t practically broken—maybe broken. Her cheeks are rouged.
    â€œSomething’s been stolen,” I say. “Someone.”
    â€œHmmm,” she says, and never opens her eyes, and I think that maybe she’s lost something, too, and I look to Arlen, across the way, wrapping the final loop of locking chain around his girl-style bike and patting the back of the trash can.
    â€œArlen,” I call, “will you hurry up, please?”
    â€œI am going away,” the woman beside me murmurs. “My honeymoon. I’m just standing here, waiting for my honey.”
    Honeymoon, I think. Honeymoon. Honey.
    I think of Peter at home, in his fury. I think of Sergeant Pierce asking, “And your wife?”
Sophie

    The bus roars around the corner, chokes up, shudders, then roars again, and Joey’s gone. I heard his front door slam and his shoes skip the walk, heard Harvey going wild and Miss Cloris calling, “Go out and conquer, Joey Rudd.” Now the day feels wrapped in plastic, and I am trapped on this side of here.
    â€œI’m leaving,” my mother had called up the stairs at the early-shift hour. “Be good.”
    â€œPlanning on making it all up to you,” I called back, but if she heard me, she didn’t answer.
    â€œFrom Nothing to Big Things”—that’s all I’ve got: the title. All this night long, and that’s it, my ode for Mother. “I’ve poured my whole life into you,” she is given to reminding, and it’s been a hard life, too, getting out from under the No Good, our reason for running. “Your mother knows best,” she says when we are on the move again, on the chase or ahead of it, just in front of it. When I was small, I thought the No Good lived in the outsides of things—that night came on because of it, that badness was coming my way. But I have been safe, all thanks to Mother, who aches in the knees on account of all the running we’ve done, in the middle of the night, straight into nothing.
    â€œYou know what nothing is?” she’ll ask me. “Nothing is dark light. It’s black noise. It’s the only way I knew to save you.”
    I want to give my mother Kepler—the best of him from me. I want to make her misery end, help her toward believing that there’s no use running anymore. The No Good is gone. we lost it. we’re free. Give your knees a rest, I want to tell Mother. Unlock the doors and breathe.
    Johannes Kepler was born with the skies in his eyes, I write at last, the first words of the essay. He was born looking up so he could see. I smudge the facts, to make the opening sing, but now I settle into the truths as I find them in the tepee of books on my bed. Kepler was a sick baby, and a poor one, I write on. He was almost a Lutheran and never a Catholic, which wasn’t good where he came from. Still, Kepler was a genius and everyone who met him knew it, and it didn’t take him long at all to become the Imperial Mathematician.
    Imperial. My mother will like that.
    Outside, Harvey’s going crazy in the alley. I finish my thought and set my pen aside, then run the stairs to the attic. I slide in across the crossbeams and take my place at the window. It’s the crows that have Harvey in a stir, the bunch of them back in the tree, and now I hear Miss Cloris calling, “Harvey, you let those birds be.” She stands on her porch wearing red shorts and a khaki-colored tee, a loose kerchief on her head. She wears a pale-yellow apron and holds a wooden spoon high in one hand, and when she talks to Harvey, she waves the spoon like she’s conducting his circus.
    â€œYou get in here, Harvey