The Edge Of The Sky

by Drusilla Campbell

  Beth was all she had of Jack. She must remember that.

  She got out of the car and opened the way-back. The angle of the driveway had made the oranges, two avocados, and a ten-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes roll to the door. An orange rolled out and down the driveway like a tiny sun. She left it and carried the groceries in and put them away.

  The house felt empty and crowded at the same time.

  “Here’s the truth,” she told Gala. “If I could, I’d leave tomorrow.” The girls were old enough to take care of themselves. They’d only miss her when it came time to pay off their charge cards.

  Had she really closed the girls out? No. Then why had she put the urn with Jack’s ashes on the passenger seat of the Toyota, nested in a pillow off their bed so it would not roll? And why had she buried the memory of doing this so deep that she had not remembered until Beth’s anger brought it back?

  She had put the urn in the car and driven to the Laguna Mountains early on a clear, cold November day less than two months after Jack’s death. Before then his ashes had been in her closet, on a shelf. That day she walked the Garnet Peak Trail, where she and Jack had been a dozen times, her back to the mountain, her face to the Anza Borrego. The long side of the mountain, boulders and talus as steep as if God had set his shovel in the ground to separate the mountains and the desert, and far below and beyond the expanse of blue-gray and pale gold desert fading at the horizon into a dusty mauve mist; she remembered it clearly now. To the right of her there were hang gliders, their blue and red sails like flowers drifting on the updrafts a thousand feet above the desert floor. The wind blew her hair backwards until it hurt. Her wind-parched eyes watched the empty air, the gliders, the occasional hawk with its wings glinting red-gold in the sunlight. After some time had passed she walked back to the 4Runner and got the little ceramic urn. She discovered later she had left the car door open and buzzing like a wasp. She had returned to her aerie and stood with her toes at the cliff’s edge, too close for safety. Now that Lana remembered, she did not blame Beth for being angry. Maybe it was wrong to dispose of Jack’s ashes without the girls beside her. A shame as wide as the desert filled Lana, desiccated her heart.

  She had gone to Garnet Peak and without a thought of Beth and Micki, she had opened the urn and lifted out handfuls of Jack—coarse and gray-white, like eroded sea shells at the edge of the surf. It was a strange, sad thing that a man, tall and strong, should amount in the end to so little: two cups or three of something rougher than sand, finer than rock. By chalky handfuls she had tossed Jack’s remains into the wind, the wind that blew constantly where the mountains met the desert. And the wind carried him up and out like dust. A grain lodged in her eye and she had to finger it out as if it were just a bit of grit. She remembered so clearly how that bit of bone felt at the corner of her eye, like a boulder. But on her fingertip it was a speck she could barely see. A dot of white. She put her finger in her mouth and sucked it off and thought, her eyes too wind-dried for tears: this is the last time I will take him inside me.

  When the urn was empty she swung her arm out wide and tossed it out over the escarpment as far and hard as she could. She did not hear it break hundreds of feet below.

  She remembered driving back along the Sunrise Highway and down I8, reaching home and climbing into bed. Where she stayed until Wendy told her to get up.

  Lana grabbed her gardening basket off the shelf on the back porch and went outside to cut snapdragons and stock for the dinner table. Around the corner of the house where she had trained pink Cecil Bruner rosebushes over the wall that separated their house from the Tillmans’, she sank down and leaned her back against the cold bricks.

  She pressed her forehead against her knees, wrapped her arms around her knees and pulled them tightly against her body; a little tighter and she might be able to shut off her own breath.

  I must make it up to them, she thought.

  Can’t be done.

  I must.

  Too terrible what you did.

  I must try.

  Back in the kitchen, she carried the basket of cut flowers to the sink and ran tepid water over their stems, leaving them to drink it up while she went upstairs to Beth. She found her daughter in the playroom, in the beanbag chair, reading a book.

  From the doorway Lana said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, Beth.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Lana could not see Beth’s face and was just as glad. “I can’t make it up to you, I know that. But I wanted you to understand that what you said, it got through to me. I heard you, Beth.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  An hour later as Lana put the final touches on the lasagna, Billy Joel playing loud on the CD player, loud enough to muffle her thoughts, Micki slammed through the back door and flung her backpack down the hall toward the foot of the stairs.

  She dropped into a chair at the table and reached for a toothpick, a bunch of them standing up in a tiny cup like bits of kindling. Her expression was stormy.

  “Hello to you, too,” Lana said, trying to sound pleasant. “How’d it go at Tiff’s?”

  Micki lifted her shoulders and let them drop.

  “Want some chicken noodle soup?”

  “Do we have any saltines?”

  “In the pantry.”

  Lana ladled out a bowl of soup made from leftovers several weeks earlier and defrosted that morning. Micki sat down again, opened the saltine box and crumbled several squares in her hand, dropped them into the soup and began to eat.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  Micki made a disgusted face. “Some of The Fives came over.” She slathered butter on a saltine. “They are such honest-to-god phonies, Ma. They wanted to know about Eddie and how rich he was and who he dated. Like I know that stuff. Like it even matters.”

  “Did they all spend the night?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What a crowd.”

  “I felt like a bug under a microscope. Like they don’t see me every day at school. What did they think, I’d grown pointy ears? Like Spock?”

  “So you don’t care that you’re not in the . . . club?”

  Micki gawked at her. “Of course I care. Being a Five means something, Ma. It’s not about friends. You never can get that.”

  Lana turned away and poured the rest of the sauce over the lasagna. It seemed she did not get a lot of things, at least not until too late.

  “Ma? You okay?”

  No, but she wasn’t going to say so.

  Lana heard Micki get out of her chair and walk up behind her. She felt her daughter’s chin rest on her shoulder and she swallowed down a sob.

  “Can we eat in the dining room tonight?”

  “Of course. I’ve already cut the flowers.”

  Lana waited, hoping she would say more. A simple “thanks” would thrill her.

  Micki set the table because she wanted to make sure she did not have to sit next to Eddie French. She put Beth on one side and him and Auntie Mars on the other and herself across from them. Her mother sat at the end nearest the kitchen as usual. She brought out the heavy cherrywood box in which the family silver rested, sixteen place settings with old-fashioned curlicued handles. As she laid each place in careful symmetry she remembered how heavy the knives and forks had felt when she was little and how she had worried about dropping one. She put salad forks to the left of the dinner forks and dessert spoons to the right of the knives as she had been taught. The table napkins were heavy cotton with faint lines of green and gold to match the cloth she had taken from the cupboard upstairs. For the centerpiece she arranged snapdragons and stock in a cut glass bowl—Waterford, like the water glasses she set to the left of the forks. If Micki had once been afraid of dropping her knife and fork, she had been even more terrified of breaking one of the Waterford glasses that Grandma Stella told her were worth more than she was. She thought about these childish fears, and the time when they had worried her seemed far away not just in time but geography
as well, as if that little girl had not only lived in another century but in another country.

  Her mother came in to set the table and was surprised to see it done already.

  “Thank you, Mick. That’s a help.”

  She had tears in her eyes. Weird.

  Micki supposed that her mother was nervous about Eddie French. She could have told her that she understood and felt the same, but she was still mad at her for keeping him a secret. Micki had taken it for granted that the woman who told her to tell the truth would hold herself to the same standards.

  She went upstairs and into her bedroom, where she found her sister standing in front of her closet.

  “Can I wear your turquoise sweater tonight?” Beth asked.

  “I got chocolate on it.”

  “Shit.”

  Micki lay back on her bed and hugged one of the pink-and-white-checkered pillows.

  Beth looked at her. “You excited?”

  “I guess. Kinda.” She rolled over onto her side, pulling the pillow closer. “Actually, I feel really strange. I sort of wish he wasn’t coming.” She hadn’t planned to say that but it was true.

  Beth sat on the edge of the bed. “Remember when we were little and you just got this bed and we bounced so hard it broke? Before you even slept in it one time?”

  Micki laughed. “Ma was so mad. She wouldn’t fix it. She said I’d have to sleep on the floor until I graduated from high school.”

  Micki thought about her father coming up the stairs with his tool belt on and she imagined the same kind of images filled Beth’s mind. She said, “I’m never gonna stop missing him. Do you think she does?”

  “What?”

  “Miss Daddy.”

  Beth nodded slowly. “Yeah, she does.”

  “You’d never know it.”

  “Yeah. Then sometimes I think she’s really sad,” Beth said. “You can’t tell with her.”

  “Do you? Miss him?” Micki felt happy they were talking again.

  “What d’you think? Of course I do.”

  “You don’t act like it, either.” Micki was thinking how Beth was never home anymore, how she had become secretive. “You’re at Kimmie’s all the time.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t miss him.”

  “How come you like Kimmie so much?”

  Beth got up and browsed through Micki’s closet some more. “Sometimes I don’t so much.”

  “I liked your other friends better.”

  “Look who’s talking. I already told you what I think of The Fives.”

  Micki closed her eyes and the movie in her mind fast-forwarded to last night at Tiff’s. She had been excited to be invited for a sleepover. It had been the answer to all her yearnings. Then she walked into Tiff’s bedroom and saw three old Fives from the class ahead and two girls Micki had known since sixth grade. She felt awkward and shy, as out-of-whack as she had been in the fifth grade. Sissy Lindstrom had a photo of Eddie French she had cut from some style mag. He’d gone to a premiere with a sitcom airhead who wore glued-on white satin cutoffs and a sequined halter top and her hair—like Micki’s mother would say—a rat’s nest. It was embarrassing to think of her birth father actually asking a skank like that for a date. Did they go back to his place and do it? The thought had made her want to get up and walk home even though it was dark outside. The Fives could not stop talking about how Micki was going to have famous friends and go to premieres, stuff she had never thought of and did not care about. She tried to explain that she only wanted to meet him and find out what he was like, that Jack was her true father, but they didn’t listen so she shut up.

  “You have more clothes than I do.” Beth held up a red tee shirt with navy blue and white tabs on the sleeves and stars around the scooped neckline. “Can I wear this?”

  “What’s wrong with your own clothes?”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry I asked.”

  “Wear black—that’s what Kimmie’d wear.”

  Beth pulled the red tee off its hanger and dragged her sweatshirt over her head. She was skinnier than Micki remembered. Her pelvic bones were the only things holding up her baggy pants.

  Micki said, “I heard you got a bad grade on your geometry test.”

  “Big fucking deal,” Beth snarled as she pulled the tee shirt on.

  “It will be when Ma finds out.”

  “I don’t care what she says. I hate her. She’s such a liar. Look what she did to you. If you hadn’t picked up the phone—”

  “What about you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was going to, only she made me promise I wouldn’t. She said she wouldn’t let me get my license next year.”

  Micki did not blame her sister. At the same time she felt alone in the world, abandoned by everyone.

  “I was going to tell you.” Beth admired herself in the mirror.

  “This is hot.”

  After a few minutes Micki got off the bed and took a shower and dressed carefully, taking time to become absorbed in drying her hair. She wore a pair of Levi’s and a fuzzy blue sweater that was almost as dark as her eyes. And the earrings her father had given her for her twelfth birthday, tiny, white opal studs with electric blue veins running through them. She could have worn makeup but she didn’t. She could not say why but she wished she were ten years old again.

  She walked through the bathroom into the bedroom, where her sister was holding a magnifying mirror up to her face as she applied mascara.

  “You’re like Elvira, Queen of the Night,” Micki said. “You’re not a Goth, you know.”

  Beth put down the mirror and glared at her. “You don’t know what I am.” She jabbed the mascara wand at Micki.

  Micki turned and walked away but at the bathroom door she stopped with her hand on the knob. It felt big and solid in her palm and she was glad to have it to hold onto.

  “You’re gonna get in big trouble, Beth. And I don’t mean just Ma.”

  “So? It’s my life.”

  The doorbell rang and Beth made a face.

  “Go say hello to your daddy, why don’t you?”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It was strange having him there, first in the kitchen and then in the dining room. There did not seem to be enough oxygen in the air and Micki wanted to open a window but her mother said they’d freeze.

  The evening did not start well. Her mother had bought wine and Eddie reminded her that he did not drink so there was nothing for him except some half-flat quinine and a two-litre bottle of Coke which he didn’t care for. Aunty Mars poured him a glass of bottled water and squeezed half a lemon into it. Eddie French seemed happy but her mom went on and on about being sorry she forgot and having a lot on her mind until it got embarrassing and Aunty Mars hugged her and told her to calm down and shut up.

  Things were not so tense by the time they sat down to dinner, thanks mostly to Aunty Mars, who looked fabulous in a long, slinky green dress and heels that made her six feet tall. She was totally on, telling stories, asking questions and, of course, she had opinions about everything. Some of them were so off the wall they made everyone at the table laugh, which was what she wanted. Halfway through the lasagna, Micki finally relaxed and sometimes found courage to get a clear, cool look at her father. Birth father. Whenever she forgot to apply the adjective she felt guilty.

  Eddie French dressed like a GQ model and he was good looking—not spectacular like a movie star, but handsome enough so if Micki were to walk with him down the street, she wouldn’t mind if people saw them. She could not tell if they looked alike except for the eyes, the navy blue eyes were the same. One time she looked up from her lasagna and he was looking right at her and when their eyes met, he did not look away and neither did she. The strangest sensation came over Micki. He’s mine, she thought. I am his.

  Beth was a jerk through the whole meal. She hardly said more than “Pass the salt.”

  Then, just when Micki had begun to enjoy herself, her mother had to bring up alcoholism and drugs. Mi
cki wanted to sink through the floor. Would the woman never give up?

  “When did you stop? Drinking?” She spun the stem of her wineglass as she spoke so it was obvious to everyone she was uncomfortable. “We should talk about this, I think. I want Micki to know.”

  Micki and Beth looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

  “I don’t mean to embarrass you. . . .”

  Not much, Micki thought.

  “Doesn’t embarrass me at all,” Eddie said.

  “How come you wear braces?” Beth asked.

  Her mother glared and said, “We’re talking about something else now.”

  Eddie said, “When I was drinking and using, I couldn’t track the plot of a first-grade reader, but these days I can handle two questions at a time.”

  Aunty Mars laughed. Lana patted her lips with her napkin. Micki had never seen her look so awkward and embarrassed.

  “I wasn’t implying—”

  “—and I wasn’t inferring.”

  He told Beth, “I got the braces because I’ve always been ashamed of my lower teeth. Tops are okay, but on the bottom they were crazy, going in all directions.”

  “Don’t you feel sort of weird,” Beth asked, “when you go out with stars and all?”

  He leaned on his elbow. “Tell you the truth, Beth, most of those girls have a lot worse things than braces.” Before anyone could ask what he meant, he said, “And I just don’t get embarrassed unless I feel I’ve done something wrong.” His eyes crinkled at the corners and Micki could barely see the pupils, just a flash of light in them.

  “Like I told you on the phone, Mrs. Porter, I made a lot of money fast and you know what they say about cocaine, it being God’s way of telling us we have too much money?”

  Beth said, “You used cocaine?”

  He smiled at Beth. Micki wanted to grab his arm and remind him that she was his daughter. “I did a lot of drugs and drank. Got two DUIs before I wised up.”

  “What do you mean, wised up?” Beth could not take her eyes off him.