Six-year-old Tammy folded her hands in front of her, bowed her head, and took a deep breath. "Thank you, Lord, for this food upon our table. Amen."
"Amen."
Hands, small-medium-large, reached for corn-on-the-cob and broth of chicken and fresh green salad made of lettuce and tomato, bell pepper and carrot, celery and onion. There was hot homemade bread and cold unpasteurized milk. Everything and everyone that was important in Derrick's life was all right here. Except for...
"Where's Sarah?" he asked as he buttered a slice of bread that warmed the palm of his hand. When no one answered, he asked again, "Where's Sarah?" this time looking directly at his mother. Her eyes seemed tired, as if she were off somewhere faraway in a daydream. A swirl of black hair, singed with the first early signs of gray, fell across her forehead. She brushed it back, absently, apparently still lost in her daydream. "Mom?"
"Hmm?" she said, only half-there.
"I asked where Sarah was?"
"Who?"
"Sarah."
For a moment, there was an eerie pause in the meal. Forks stalled in mid-air. Mouths were closed. Ears were opened. A dozen questioning eyes turned to stare at him. Who's Sarah?
Then Tammy grinned. With her mouth full of a thick, cheesy casserole, she said, "Betcha Derr's got a girlfriend."
Derrick felt himself blush, though he had nothing at all to blush about. He was just curious about Sarah, that was all. No big deal. He was sure she was all right; someone would have told him if she weren't. So he smiled uncomfortably and turned back to his plate of vegetables, doing his best to let everyone’s attention turn away from him.
The secret behind Sarah would just have to wait.
Derrick didn't breathe another word of her until he was in bed that night. Brian was already asleep in the corner, one of his arms hanging off the edge of the bed, his hand brushing against the floor. Georgie was tossing in the bottom bunk, rocking himself back and forth like he did every night until he would eventually fall asleep. From the upper bunk, Derrick whispered, "Georgie?"
"What?" The light sway of the bunk beds stopped.
"Where's Sarah?"
The rocking started up again.
"Georgie?"
"I don't know."
Derrick leaned over the edge of his bed. "If you don't stop that blessed rocking, I'm gonna slug you."
"I don't even know who she is," his brother whispered.
For a moment, Derrick wasn’t sure he could believe his ears. "She's your sister, for crissakes. Your sister! The one who tried to eat the tail right off your kite yesterday."
"That was Tammy," Georgie said quietly. He rolled away from the edge of the bed, his face toward the wall, his back to Derrick, where Derrick could see a luminescent iron-on patch of the Incredible Hulk glowing green in the dark. "Ain't one pesky sister bad enough for you?"
Derrick supposed he could have argued. He could have pointed out a handful of recent incidents when little Sarah had pestered the both of them. Little sisters did things like that. Eventually he knew he could have made Georgie admit that Sarah was missing. But …
But somewhere deep inside, gnawing at his gut, Derrick knew there had never really been a Sarah. Her four years of giggling and gurgling and crying – sometimes all night long – had been an odd dream of sorts, an imaginative hiccup, a wistful step outside the boundaries of reality. That's why they had all stared at him with eyes that asked, Who's Sarah? Because there was no Sarah. His imagination had played a game inside his head, like it did with everyone, like it did when Tammy played tea party with playmates that weren't really there. A momentary, imaginative hiccup.
That's all it had been.
A momentary, imaginative hiccup.
The summer's first one hundred degree temperature arrived less than a week later, pushing the mercury above the red zone on the rusting Orange Crush thermometer that had been tacked to the big oak standing outside the kitchen window.
Pa had allowed them the day down at Miner's Pond. Clad in cut-offs made from an old pair of jeans he'd worn out during the winter, Derrick was busy cleaning the spring weeds out of the little patch of sand that covered the ground between the water and the cliff of rock they used as a diving platform. The others were already in the water, squirming and churning enough to make the pond look like a pot of boiling watercress soup.
Tammy let out a squeal just before Brian dunked her.
Sometimes, like now, when her hair was damp and it closely embraced her thin, almost-hollow cheeks, he would see Sarah looking out from Tammy's laughing eyes. Even though he realized that there had never been a Sarah. And when he remembered those special things she would do, those special things his imagination had made so real for him – like the time she tried to cut her own hair and Ma nearly had to shave her head to make it all even again – after times like those, he wished she had been more than just a daydream.
But she hadn't. He knew that now. She was gone, her dolls were gone, her clothes were gone. There had never been a Sarah.
Derrick collapsed into the soft sand and sifted his strange emptiness from hand to hand in the form of a thousand gritty particles.
"Come on, Derr," one of the others called.
He smiled and shook his head, all of a sudden feeling too old to be splashing carelessly in Miner's Pond. He felt a little sad instead, as if at age twelve he had suddenly realized the time was nearing when he would have to give up some of those cherished things that stood between being a boy and being a man. Perhaps the joy of Miner's Pond. Perhaps some other never-to-be-forgotten place or time or person.
That's what his parents had done. Over the years, they had somehow given up their happiness for something else, something he wasn't sure he understood. And maybe that was what growing up was all about. Giving away those things you liked most about yourself.
If so, it didn't seem fair.
"Derr, come on!"
It didn't seem fair at all.
Derrick wiped the sand from the butt of his cut-offs, and with a laughter he wasn't ready to surrender yet, he did a painful belly flop into the circle of his brothers and sister.
It felt great.
They played away the afternoon, exploring creek rocks for crawdads, building a miniature dam to house minnows, diving off the cliff, playing tag up and down the creek's banks until their feet were sore and their bodies were bright pink from too much sun.
Now it was getting time to head back home again.
Derrick gathered up the towels they had brought along, and the lunch bags which Ma would want to use again. The others were down the creek a ways. He could hear their laughter whistling through the paw-like leaves of the oak trees.
"Gotta go!" he yelled as he shook the sand out of the towels. He liked being big brother, the one they looked up to and depended upon. Sometimes, he felt more like their father than their brother.
"Let's go!" he called again.
The boys came busting through the bushes. Brian collapsed in the sand. "Beat ya," he said, lying flat on his back.
"Did not," Georgie cried. His arms were braced on his legs as he collected a breath. His eyes kept looking to Brian, as if he knew he had been beaten and wondered if his younger brother might make too big a deal out of it.
"Where's Tammy?" Derrick asked. "Pa's gonna be real upset if we don't get ourselves back by supper time."
Brian dragged himself to his feet. "I beat ya," he said again, pushing Georgie up the side of the short bank. When they had made it to the top, they stopped and turned back to their older brother. "Thought you were in a hurry," Brian said.
"What about Tammy?"
There was a short pause that seemed to last forever. His brothers exchanged a curious glance. A chill wound up Derrick's spine as he recognized their familiar bewilderment. He didn't inquire a third time. The story was still fresh in his mind. Who's Tammy? Just another hiccup, that's all. No need to ask further, just fill in the blanks. There is no Tammy. There never has been. She was just a
product of the same game, the same hiccup of imagination that birthed Sarah. And now they were both gone. An imaginative quirk, that's all it was.
"Derr, it's getting late."
He glanced up at the voice and wondered, almost casually, if the two boys who had been his brothers for almost every minute of his life, if they too, were mere hiccups. The thought scared him.
"Derr ..."
"Yeah," he said, flipping the towels over his shoulder. "Coming."
Tammy never returned. He knew she wouldn't. The same as his parents and his brothers, he never asked about her.
That night, Brian went off to sleep in his own room, the room that Derrick's imagination had leant to Sarah and Tammy. It seemed lonelier without Brian sleeping in the corner, without his arm hung over the edge of the bed, brushing a hand against the floor. He leaned over the edge of the bed and stared down at Georgie. At least Georgie was here. At least he still had the comfort of Georgie's rocking, the comfort of the bunk bed swaying back and forth like it had always swayed at night, as long as he could remember. At least that hadn't been taken from him.
Summer lost its magic after that. The days became too hot, Miner's Pond too cold. The beautiful yellows and greens around the farm shriveled, becoming deadly browns. The laughter that had so often swept around the dinner table became a whisper, a cough of its past joy. Everything changed, and somewhere along the line, memories of yesterdays gradually became more and more difficult to call up again, as if pieces of his life were somehow being consumed. The magic of summertime had been lost and everything was suddenly different.
Even his parents seemed somehow different, somehow changed. Although he wasn't sure exactly what the difference was, and he caught himself wondering if perhaps it was merely his imagination at play again.
"Remember before?" Derrick heard his mother ask his father one night. They were outside on the front porch, casually gliding back and forth on the porch swing, allowing themselves to be overheard by the evening stars and by Derrick himself. He was upstairs in the attic, poking through old boxes of toys, searching for a game of Coodie which he hadn't seen in years. Just a bored-night impulse, that was the only reason he was there.
"Before what?" Pa said.
The arthritic squeaking of metal to rusting metal filled the moment of silence and drew Derrick curiously closer to the window.
"Before we got married," she said. "Remember how we used to walk along Dogwood Creek at night and the breeze would rustle through the trees, sounding like God himself was trying to talk to us? And how we always knew we'd get married and live out the rest of our lives together. How it was never gonna change?"
Pa chuckled. "I remember."
"I miss those times," she told him.
"Guess I do, as well."
"They were good times."
"The best," his Pa agreed.
"I want to go back." The rhythmic squeaking paused for a breath, then started up again. "I want it to be like it was then, without the worries and the fears, without the kids and the farm to look after."
Pa didn't say so much as "Hmm."
"Mind ya, I'm not unhappy," she said. "But it's all slipping by so quickly. I want to do it all again. I want to court and marry and make babies all over again, like it was the first time."
"Been feeling this way all summer, have you?"
Derrick couldn't see them on the porch, they were sitting almost right underneath him, but he imagined her nodding her head. He stepped back from the window, suddenly feeling a strange sense of shame from his eavesdropping, realizing his ears had crossed the path of something they were never meant to hear. But they had heard, and Ma had been different all summer. Perhaps that was the only trick of his imagination that hadn't really been a trick. She had been different. The whole summer had been different.
He left the attic without ever finding the game of Coodie.
Brian blinked out of his life two days later. Derrick woke up to find the bottom bunk empty and when he went searching for Georgie, he found the ten year old in Brian's room where Brian should have been, rocking Brian's bed the way he used to rock the bunk beds.
"What are you doing in here?" he asked. "Where's Brian?"
Through sleepy eyes, Georgie expressed his puzzlement, that same puzzlement that had surfaced after each of Derrick's summer-long inquiries, after each loss that had seemingly slipped away unnoticed. And Derrick knew, he knew and he understood and he felt the emptiness devour another portion of his life. Georgie was all he had left, and what would happen after his last brother slipped away?
What would happen then?
It was early August all too soon. The fields were dry and dusty. Miner's Pond had dipped so low that a soul couldn't dive off the cliffs without meeting the bottom head first. His mom was looking different by the day. His father was too. As if the summer hadn't withered them like everything else it had touched. As if they had somehow thrived on the heat and the dirt and the peace that had shadowed the farm. That's what it was – peace. Too much for Derrick's liking. The meals were too quiet, the days too empty.
He stayed close to Georgie whenever he could, whenever he wasn't off tending to chores or running errands or sleeping in his own bed, a wall away from his little brother.
But it happened just the same.
He woke up one morning and he was the last, all his brothers and all his sisters were finally gone. He was all that remained. He imagined his parents breathing a heavy sigh, relieved that at last the inevitable moment was near, that moment when their oldest child would finally slip away like the others.
There were days now, unlike past summers, when he wished he had never been the oldest, the last to go. How much easier it would have been to have simply slipped away like Sarah, right at the beginning, never having to watch as the others were taken one-by-one, never having to feel each loss. How much easier.
Each day painfully dwindled away, seconds feeling like minutes, minutes like hours.
Then one night, the sky black without the moon as its companion, as he lay in bed, his mother came to visit. The window was open, inviting the slight breeze inside to chase away the godawful heat. It was like a thousand other summer nights, yet unlike any that had come his way before. From the top bunk, with his arms folded behind his neck, he gazed out the window to the darkness of the universe and wondered where it ended, wondered if he would float out there after...
"Derr?" A shaft of hall light sectioned his darkness, and his mother's silhouette filled the doorway. "How you doing?"
"Okay." He didn't want to look at her, kept his watch on the universe instead. It would be easier that way. But she crept into the darkness anyway, right up next to his bed. She stood over him, a shaft of light falling across her face. It was the first time, as he finally forced himself to look at her, that he had fully realized just how much she had changed over the summer.
"Is it too hot for you?"
The singe of gray that had danced like a wind-blown scarf through her hair was no longer there.
"I'm comfortable."
And her eyes had come alive again, they had a sparkle in them that he hadn't noticed in years.
"You sure?" She brushed the hair away from his forehead, then held his hand in hers. "You know I love you."
Derrick glanced out the bedroom window at the watching universe. He wanted to tell her he still loved her, but knew he wouldn't be able to find a way to say the words.
“Remember that," she said. "Remember I love you." Then all too quickly, she turned and started out of the room.
"Ma," he said, still looking away. "Are you sorry I'm your son? Are you and Pa sorry you ever had me?"
She paused, a wisp of shadow in the doorway. "Of course not. You're our son, our flesh and blood. You're part of us. We'll always love you."
"Even if I have to go away?"
Her eyes were hidden in a checkerboard pattern of black and white, but the long silence answered his question for her. He knew then that she didn't
understand what she had done, that it had all been done innocently, out of ignorance of the consequences of her wishing. I want to court and marry and make babies all over again, like it was the first time.
"I still love you, Ma," he told her. "Even if I have to go away."
"There's nowhere to go," she said. "Nowhere at all. This is where you belong."
The bedroom door closed.
Darkness rushed in through the open window.
Derrick rolled over, away from his doorway to the windowed universe, until he was nestled safely in the wings of his blankets. Then a single tear tumbled down his cheek, a tear not for himself, but for his mother.
Ice Sculptures
I thought I'd forgotten.
Spring, summer, and autumn have each since come and gone, and I guess it was easy to fool myself into believing the past was finally something left to cold impossible yesterdays. Out of season, out of mind. Unfortunately, things unfinished have a way of hovering around the edges of your life until you can't ignore them any longer. I guess that's why I had to get the film developed. I guess that's why I'm not surprised by the photograph I always knew would be there.
Yesterdays never really let go of your soul. They just pretend they've gone away until they're ready to return again...
Eagle Peak in the summertime was a soft white cloud hanging mid-universe somewhere between heaven and earth. Swallow up the air, it would chill your soul. Cup your hands and sip the water from its lake, it would remind you how alive you really were. Each breath was the incense of fresh cut pine, each glance a bright and bountiful rainbow of alpine flowers.
It's that summer aliveness I've tried to remember about Eagle Peak. But it's the winter I can't seem to forget.
Through Shattered Glass Page 3