Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  The knock made her jump and screech because that was it, he was here, and the door that separated them was as flimsy as tissue paper. But the knock was also soft and familiar so it couldn’t be him and he couldn’t have her address he couldn’t. Could he. Could he.

  “Oh.” Nis said. “Oh.” Then she seemed to think carefully until she asked, “Do you have time for a visit?”

  “No. Thank you.” Lynn said mechanically. Her phone lit up in her hand. She dropped it.

  Nissa picked it up. Then she was in the house, closing the door behind her, while Lynn thought of what her voice must have sounded like through the door, the whine of fear emanating from her heart, just leave me alone leave me alone.

  Lynn thought she said, go home, but Nis followed her through to the nearly-cool bedroom with the dribbling AC unit. And Nissa was thirsty again, so they sat together on the floor, drinking water from wet glasses.

  She should send Nissa home. It wasn’t safe. She should double check that the doors were locked. She should send—

  “—Is that your garden?” From the bedroom window the grass was rank and luxuriant, so densely matted that they could see only the tops of the plastic deck chairs some tenant had left behind. “It looks like a place no one lives,” Nis said, “like everyone is gone.”

  “It’s wild. I like it because you feel like something could hide there. A deer. Or. I don’t know. A fairy ring. Something.” The chairs might be from Wal-Mart, but they looked like ruins abandoned to the denizens of the back-alley world: squirrels and cats and starlings.

  “We should go outside in the shade.”

  Together they returned to the kitchen where the broken vinyl flooring gave under their feet, and out the screen door where the air seemed like a physical barrier, a thick amber jelly surrounding them, suspending them in gold. Nissa led her to the black walnut and they sat under the dripline, where the grass was shorter and dappled with gold and dark.

  “This is a good place to hide,” she said, “no one in the world can see us in here.” She began braiding the blades of grass where they stood in the ground, leaving their roots undisturbed.

  “You aren’t making a crown?”

  Nis shook her head, picking another three blades to braid together, then trying a four and six strand, then French braiding the grasses all around them. There was something hypnotic about the little fingers at work.

  “When I was little, my Mom left.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She just left. Who would leave a little kid like that?”

  “That’s sad.”

  “When you have your baby I could come and help you look after her. I could change diapers, my Mom showed me how.”

  “I thought your Mom was gone?”

  “Yes. She showed me before she left.”

  “You’ll be in school when the baby’s here.”

  “Sometimes I stay home from school. I didn’t go for a whole month last year. My Dad said, you stay home if you want to.”

  *

  Then it was dark and Lynn started, as though she had not realized time passed in their green darkness. “Oh, Nis, your Dad will be wondering where you are.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You better go. He wouldn’t like you being out at a stranger’s house.”

  When Lynn went out the next morning, the dewless night now passed, the world not refreshed, the braids disconcerted her until she remembered Nis and her quick, dirty fingers weaving the blades together while they talked of nothing Lynn could remember.

  *

  Maybe he was here every night after she left for work. Maybe that was his cigarette on the step. Maybe he kicked over the pot of basil by her front door.

  She got the call from the group home saying they didn’t need her though she’d planned another three days. She was still recalculating her budget when Nissa came over. It was already too hot to stay outside. Lynn had made popsicles from orange juice and mint tea from the tangled plants she’d found in the backyard. They sat in under the old AC. Nis burped, then giggled and licked orange juice off her wrist, missing the rivulet dripping onto her jean shorts.

  Step. Step. Step.

  Nis stood up, as though to go to the door, but Lynn held onto her arm and pulled her down, holding her still as the steps went up and down and up and down. Lynn’s knuckles were white and her nails bit her palms.

  “What are you doing that for?” Nissa asked.

  “Don’t talk for a bit.”

  “Why?” The girl asked full voice, then repeated softly, “why?”

  “Because I don’t want him to know I’m here.”

  The knob on the kitchen door rattled. Then again. Then a shove against the door frame.

  “Once when I was a little kid,” Nis whispered, “I was all alone in the house because my mother had left. I was scared, but I didn’t even cry, Dad said. I never cried.”

  Step. Step. Step. Lynn thought of her mint and her dill and the richness of nasturtiums that had sprung up before her arrival.

  “Where did your mother go?”

  Nis shrugged. “She moved back home, Dad said. Out west. On an island. He said it was Salt Spring. Why do you think she left?”

  “I don’t know why anyone does anything,” Lynn said, still listening for the retreating footsteps. I don’t know why people leave kids behind. Or why they take them away.”

  “You’re a grownup,” the girl whispered with childish disapproval. “Why don’t you know?”

  For five minutes they heard nothing, and the dull knife-point in her breast withdrew. It never left. It never would, because what had once seemed like a place of safety, an eggshell world, had been shattered by his voice, and his step. No safety, she thought, not for her or the weird little girl who visited, and not for the new one, either, not even with a back garden and a front porch.

  “Are you okay?” Nissa asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Are you okay? Are you okay?” As though the answer could change from Lynn’s feeble lie to something true.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “but I think you’d better head home.”

  “Is the guy gone?”

  “I hope so. If you see him here just keep walking. Don’t come back. Don’t talk to him. It’s not safe to come into stranger’s houses. You don’t know what will happen.”

  She kept her back to the child, whose steps receded slowly as though she might be called back, and Lynn only knew she’d gone because of warm, damp air that gusted through the room.

  That afternoon she found the plastic bag Nis had left behind. At first Lynn thought it was garbage, but when she picked it up she realized it contained a small bottle, something you’d find in the craft section at a dollar store, stopped with a cork and full of some viscous golden liquid. Maybe the slime Nissa loved to make? In it floated flakes of iridescent plastic. She set it on a shelf where it would be safe until she could return it, and for a moment admired the way the sunlight snuck between the slates of the blinds and struck the glitter. It made her think of collecting stickers with holographic silver unicorns on them. It made her think of being a little girl and loving, beyond all things, iridescence and sunset tints. Glitter and silver paper and purple ribbon.

  She tried the cap, but it didn’t give and it wasn’t hers to try anyway. With the faint tug on the cork, a thin film of viscous golden liquid touched her finger, and because she was tired, she touched her left eye, and a drop of that substance entered her sight.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  She froze. The air still, her skin slashed black and gold by the light through the broken blinds. She thought, if I don’t believe I’m here, he won’t know, and he will go away. And maybe that worked, for a moment, but then she heard his heavy steady step leaving the door. Through the broken blind she saw him pause and look out across the tangled lawn, as though watching for someone, then turn again toward her windows. He stepped close to the wi
ndow and shaded his eyes to look in. It would be okay, though, because she was deep in the old house’s gloom, and she pretended she was nothing, just a ghost or a dust mote.

  But think of Cortisol cascading through her system triggering unspecified worry in her daughter’s developing brain. Even in the warmth and red of the womb, the child might still feel dread, so she breathed more and more deeply and found she could not tear her eyes away from the window. When his face aligned with hers, she started. He’s in the light, she kept telling herself, and I am in the dark, we are so still, we are nothing.

  Because it was not a face, but a muddy grey shadow, opaque at its core, trailing dark clouds, the way a cuttlefish trails black, mucousy ink. No eye, no mouth, just that knot of shadow inclined toward the window. At least, that’s what she saw with her left eye. With her right eye she saw a familiar cheekbone and nose, a light blue eye and the collar of a green polo shirt against a tanned throat.

  The smeary cloud that was also him put on his sunglasses and stepped back. Pressure rose in her belly. He dropped his cigarette. The pain grew. He was gone as she realized what was happening and her first thought was no no I’m not ready I don’t have enough money—

  —the trickle of fluid. But the breast pump and just-in-case formula—the list in her head rattled on as she breathed against the pain. As it eased, her left eye saw a new, faint glow wriggling over the world. In at the windows, around her geranium, seething and gleaming with a brightness that spilled over the leaves and leapt into the air.

  When the contraction eased, she picked up her bag and crept out the back of the house, across the tangled yard, past Nissa’s braids which now glowed with a growth she had never seen.

  The back gate nearly fell apart in her hands as she stepped through and made her way along the alley, overhung with branches of black walnut and spotted with broken bricks and mud and plugged drains and plastic containers. She crept around the fallen branch of a tree and glanced into the backyard of another old rental house, through the vine-grown chain link, to see a young boy systematically breaking the windows. The boy glanced over. She kept walking and hoped that someone, somewhere, was waiting for him.

  At the end of the alley she called a cab as another contraction hit, her left eye closed against the bright, boiling life of the boarded-up street, the tangled threads in the grasses, the flitting gleams in the worn back gardens of August. The world, she thought, as another contraction shoved her to a crouch, is swarming and wild and full of lost children.

  Like the house and the garden, the hospital teemed with light and smears of muddy darkness. So much pressure, she thought, that pretty soon her brain itself would spill out, destroy her ocular nerve in the—

  —another contraction and the woman now beside her said, breathe.

  The nurse’s face was a tangle of gold and silver, bright and undulating. She saw a little boy watching from the corner of the room. He wore a Calgary Flames t-shirt with Kool-Aid stains down the front, and jeans a size too big.

  “What’s he doing here?” Lynn asked the nurse who attached electrodes to her belly.

  “Who?”

  “The boy,” she said. The last vowel stretched into a cry.

  “There isn’t a boy here.”

  “Your face,” she said. “Your face.” She reached her hand up into the tangle of green and gold threads that obscured the nurse’s features.

  “Lynn, tell me what you’re seeing, okay?

  “It’s all light,” she said. “It’s all light.”

  *

  They moved her to a recovery room the next evening. That night she slept in snatches and woke often to look at Annie in her clear plastic bassinette, to marvel at her tiny hands and her dark grey eyes, her powerful hunger and her unerring instinct for Lynn, who was home to her. Sometime after the night nurse visited she fell into a deep sleep before struggling up in bed to remember where she was, and what the crying meant.

  Nissa was standing over Annie’s bed.

  “Hello,” she said, looking through her right eye because her left eye still sparked and glittered. “Did you come to see the baby?”

  “Um,” Nissa said. “Yes.”

  For the first time Lynn wondered why an eight-year-old would be in a hospital in the middle of the night. Through her right eye the girl was familiar—dust-coloured hair, torn jean shorts, bare feet.

  But then through her nearly-closed left eye she saw something else. Nissa—girl-shaped, familiar, awkward—and around her a far-ranging creature that existed in the same space, whose translucent wings filled the room in iridescent drifts and flows, so she could not tell what was Nissa and what was flat hospital light refracted through the substance of her body.

  “Nissa, where’s your Dad?”

  “I want to see the baby. That’s all. I said I would help take care of her.”

  “She’s asleep,” Lynn said, “and it’s not safe for you to be in the hospital by yourself. Where’s your Dad?”

  “I just wanted to see the baby.”

  Nissa now stood over the clear plastic bassinette, the girl-body a knot, a cluster at the heart of something much larger, comprised in diaphanous layers and smokes, long tenuous wings and streamers that shrouded the light and the doorway, that wrapped—Lynn now saw—around the baby.

  “She’s very little so you have to be careful. You look so different.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said, and the tendrils coalesced in Lynn’s left eye, tighter around the child. “Do you know that when I was a little girl I was all alone, all alone and I was only a little baby and my Mom left?” Nissa’s voice was fretful. Again her drifting wings obscured Annie from Lynn’s sight.

  “You’ve missed her forever,” Lynn said, “and she shouldn’t have left you like that. Now don’t lift her up, she’s too small.”

  “I know. I’m very careful with babies.”

  Nis had wrapped Annie in her human-shaped arms and in the other ones, the translucent ones, so Lynn swung her tipsy legs over the side of the bed. “You need to be careful with her head, Nis. Let me help you, okay?”

  “I know. I’ve held lots of babies. But how can you see me?”

  “I can always see you.”

  “Yes. Before. When I wanted you too.”

  With one limping step, Lynn was beside the bassinette. She picked the baby up and felt her warm, silky little head under her chin, and turned her to face Nis, who reached out with a warm, feathery current that ruffled Annie’s hair. They stood together for a moment, then the girl’s large, pale eyes swiveled and looked up into Lynn’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “you shouldn’t be able to see.” Nis reached toward Lynn’s left eye with a finger extended, growing long and sharp, the nail like a claw, like the proboscis of a mosquito, like the long, unfurling tongue of the butterfly.

  The last thing Lynn saw with her left eye hung permanently in her mind was Nis and Annie together, wrapped in the diaphanous substance that glowed with a life so vigorous it defied gravity and sense. That terminal brightness overcame her eyes and her mind and she said, “Annie! Annie!” But darkness registered before pain, and then she screamed, burying her face in her baby’s arms.

  Though her functional right eye could no longer see Nissa, she heard the girl’s voice close beside her ear. “I didn’t like that man, the grey man. I didn’t like him at all. Did you like him?”

  Lynn could not speak.

  When the night nurse arrived the scream was a whimper, and after that she didn’t remember much. There was a fever, and pain shattered the left side of her head, so her skull seemed to bubble under the cold cloth they draped across her eyes as they took her somewhere down the flickering white corridors. They said the headache was a spinal leak from the epidural. They said something about blood pressure and her optical nerve. When she could understand them she knew it was neither of those things, it was, rather, that sharp proboscis, that unfurling tooth that hung in her mind where her eye should be.

&nb
sp; When she could open both her eyes again, her left side remained empty. Not darkness, but absence.

  Her first night without pain she leaned over Annie’s bassinette and realized for the first time she was not afraid of his sudden arrival, he had blurred in her mind, like a dream instead of a man. She said to Annie, we’ll be okay, won’t we? You’ll be a girl without a father, but we can manage that, can’t we?

  Annie woke without crying and opened her eyes, a blue so pale that they might be silver. Lynn thought, I’m sure her eyes were dark. Dark navy, steely and stormy. Not like his eyes at all. I’m sure of it.

  But no. Pale and silver-blue, and staring old-wise from such a small and pointed face.

  Sleepwalking with Angels

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  • • ∞ • •

  This is the way you leave the world.

  “Dad, I’ve filled your refrigerator. I got that soft cheese you like. They were all out of fresh peaches, but the produce guy said he’ll have more next week. I’ve sorted out your pills. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay and read to you? Is there anything else I can do? We all love you very much—don’t we kids? Say goodbye to Grandpa. Say goodbye.”

  A memory stands somewhere in the room waiting for your acknowledgement. For the longest time you’ve resisted looking, but this effort costs you more than you can say. Closing your eyes doesn’t help. That’s when the recollection burns the brightest.

  You value your solitude. It’s impossible to be yourself around other people; you always find some role to play. You crave those moments when you’re missing, when no one is watching, where nothing you do is a mistake.

  But you clench your teeth every time you go to bed alone. Falling asleep is like a dive into the abyss. Your adult children say they are worried about you. You could take care of things yourself if they would only give you time. For now, you sleep with your back to that side of the bed.