A Flicker in the Clarity

by Amy McNamara

  It’s all I can manage; it’s going to take time and practice to start saying what’s really in my head.

  “It’s a childhood nickname. It’s a . . . it was a way for me to . . .”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I choke out, but I want her to tell me everything. I want to ask her how anyone knows what they’re supposed to do next, but my inner and outer selves will not connect.

  “This night is super intense,” Mamie sighs. “I changed my name because I wanted to feel like myself, if that makes any sense. I wanted to be done being the person everyone expected me to be.”

  “That’s how I feel. Split, particulate, unable to assemble.”

  This is exactly the kind of remark that would earn me a blast of exasperation from Emma. A laugh. Or both.

  Mamie just squeezes my shoulder again.

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking for college, but art school’s in there, right? God, I remember how competitive and awful Bly is junior year, everyone scheming, working their connections, walking around making themselves sound golden.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Don’t let them get in your head.”

  Too late.

  I sigh.

  “Come up to Providence. You can stay with me, do the official campus visit. You’ll love it. I’ll show you around.”

  I start to do what I always do when people suggest someplace I know we can’t afford. Close up shop. Lights on, no one home. But then she adds, “And there’s financial aid. Not just loans. Bring your portfolio. I can look at it, help you pull it together if you want. Deal?”

  “Um, yeah.” I came to mess up her life and she’s planning to help me.

  Mamie gives me another quick squeeze, then stands and offers her hand.

  “I’ve gotta get back in, but really, I’m glad you came tonight. It’s like the Blake engraving Dr. Holmes loves. That one line always stuck with me: ‘Cruelty has a Human Heart.’ We need to be tender with each other. With ourselves.” She pulls me up and hugs me. Whispers in my ear. “None of this is easy. Uncharted territory. But Evie, you make the map. You save you. Okay?”

  Unbridgeable Distance

  MAMIE’S WORDS FOLLOW ME around the apartment.

  You save you.

  I’m alone for the weekend too, my first time, a unique circumstance. My mom’s never had anywhere to go. She’s at some Brucker Candy Company retreat upstate. And I’m not exactly alone. Shame and regret are constant company.

  While I can’t really picture my mom backward trust-falling into the arms of Vera from production or confronting her fear of heights on a ropes course, her absence means I can be miserable and no one will mind. She was weirdly excited when she called to check in, so I put an extra-bright smile in my voice, but now the apartment’s darker and lonelier than ever. I’m pacing, practicing what I’m going to say to Em, trying to figure out how to tell her we were wrong, but there are no scenarios where it comes out well.

  I throw myself into cleaning, like I can buy inner peace through external order. I used to do it a lot, rearrange the furniture, pretend I was hired to stage it, make the place look appealing, happy, boho chic meets free-spirited intellectual.

  I dig coins from the couch, almost four dollars, vacuum everything, dust the tops of shelves and the legs of all the chairs. I sift through piles of mail, even the random pieces of junk that come addressed to my dad, the ones my mom has a hard time recycling. I take down slippery stacks of magazines, catalogs, legal journals. I sort the letters from the building people by date and prop them next to the tray of perfumes on my mom’s dresser. I scrape the toothpaste from the bathroom mirror and scrub the tub. I empty the linen closet, start a donation bag with my Powerpuff Girls sheets and beach towel. I toss the tiny wrist splint I wore when I was eight after my cast came off. My mom saves everything.

  I tackle the fridge, scrubbing shelves and dumping the stuff in the far back that looks like a new and sinister life-form. I empty my closet, adding all the clothes and coats I’ve outgrown to the donation bag.

  Shame’s headlamp hits every dark corner, and Regret is a cutthroat antisentimentalist. Between the three of us, every aspect is inspected, hideouts dismantled, the smudge of inertia erased. I purge my laptop, read a “READ ME, PLEASE” from Jack and three emails from Ms. Vax reminding me of the time and date for my TeenART interview. That one stops me for a second. I imagine myself showing up, giving it a shot, but then my stomach starts to flop around like a fish on a hook so I reorganize my Investigation and finish what I was writing about engineering and imagination. Roebling faced his skeptics and resisted the idea of an “unbridgeable distance” to make a seemingly impossible connection. He took us all someplace new.

  I pull apart my room, gather every sketchbook and journal I can find and sort through them, making a pile of every map I’ve still got. I have enough for a small atlas, a weird compendium. I’ll call it World Atlas of Being Lost and sell copies to no one. This is me saving me.

  I bathe Marcel, suds him up until he looks like a snowball and smells like coconut oatmeal, then we curl up together on Mom’s bed while I sift through old photos. I linger on one of my handsome dad. We’re at the Union Square Greenmarket on a fall morning. I’m on his shoulders, eating a candied apple. My mom’s holding his hand. She looks a thousand years younger. All around us are buckets of mums and baskets of apples.

  The thought of talking to Emma makes my stomach go cold. I don’t know what I’ll say to her, but everything’s changing.

  Even me.

  Astral

  SOMEONE KEEPS CALLING MY NAME. The weird thing is that it sounds like my voice. I blink at the clock. It’s ten to six. So much for sleeping in. I lie still a minute, until I’m sure it was a dream and I’m alone, no one’s actually in here with me. My mind’s full of bridges. No, more shivery than that, the edges of images and words popping the way they do when a map starts to come. I close my eyes, and maybe it’s afterburn from the sun angling through the blinds, but I see cables and spans, the faith it takes to build into space, to trust your math, the need to connect one thing to another.

  I slide in thick socks down the hall to my mom’s room and hoist my grandmother’s sewing kit from of the back of her closet. Destruction’s no part of love. Em’s forgetting that. I was too. It was everywhere in that gallery, between all those people, between Mamie and her guy. Love just is. Our lives are made of it, even if we’re too lost to see it.

  My mom keeps the sewing kit for me in case I decide to learn. My grandmother made my clothes when I was little, dresses with smocking and delicate collars. She’d approve, one maker to another, of an alternative use of her things. I carry the heavy box to the dining room table.

  I open it and stare into an altar of making: wooden spools wound with bright thread, silvery needles with delicate eyes, snaps, pins, and small metal scissors. I sit with the kit and try to make sense of the images in my head. Narrow paper rings slip easily off vivid fingers of embroidery floss. I pull some of it straight, stretching strands from a center point out. I start to wonder if anyone’s ever made a star-shaped bridge, multiple decks reaching for different destinations. Then I know what I’m missing, what I need to get started.

  I run back to my mom’s room and sift through the pictures again. I’m looking for one in particular, a black-and-white my dad took of me two months before he died. I’m in the V of a tree, my hair long and wild from an afternoon in the park. The sun’s cutting through leaves near my face. I remember the day because I was wearing my favorite overalls, the ones with big pockets. I had them stuffed with pinecones and acorns. In the photo I’m still wholly myself, not knocked flat by the loss of my dad, my fading mom. I’m staring at something outside the picture, my small hands clasping each other tight like I already know to shore myself up. My mom told me he loved this picture so much she kept it tacked on the wall near his bed. The little holes in the corners from the pins are what made me think of it now. I bring it back out with me
and sit down to work.

  This one has to be big. I look through my paper until I find the right piece, then lay the picture near the center. Near the bottom right corner I pencil-sketch a compass rose. True north’s an anatomical heart. Arrows mark the cardinal directions.

  I inspect the thread, tangled and rainbow generous, select candy-apple red, and start to stitch right through the photograph, a line from the center of me radiating like sound, a rhythmic undulation. I pencil connections, me to Emma, and Jack, and Marcel, and my mom, even Mamie. Future routes to stitch. Colors reaching like cables from me into the unknown, off the edge of the image, onto the bordering paper, and out to that edge as well.

  It’ll look like a star-shaped bridge, an aster, a multipoint constellation, bright thread lines linking everything together. I grab the photo of my family at the Greenmarket and add it too. I stitch a small silver spiral, like a nautilus shell, near my dad’s head, then another for Patrick, and beyond them both I use a brush pen to make ink-blue waves roll into undefined space.

  Maybe I’ll try for TeenART. Maybe this is something I could bring. Map where Evie starts trusting herself. I’ll call it Starbridge/Constellation. It will be astral, an explosion of stitches.

  Love, Theo

  AFTER A FEW HOURS OF PLANNING, sketching, inking, and stitching, Marcel and I are beyond ready for fresh air. The dining room table is littered with snips of thread and pencils and paint, but what’s starting to take shape makes me happy. If Robert Rauschenberg can paint on a quilt, hang it on the wall in a frame, and call it Bed, I can make a self-portrait star-bridge celestial thread explosion and call it a map.

  My mom said she’d be back late afternoon, but I leave her a note just in case, saying it’s noon and I’m heading out for a few hours to breathe some real air and play with Marcel at the dog park.

  We swing by Mrs. Cohen’s to see if Dominic wants to join us. Mrs. Cohen’s always happy to see me, opening her door after I do the light knock she taught me, a private rhythm, hers and Mr. Cohen’s from back when he was alive. Mrs. Cohen is the definition of birdlike, the knobs of her spine visible through her thin cranberry sweater. I decide to visit her more. I want her to last forever.

  I suck on a lemon candy from the dish she keeps near her armchair and wait with Marcel while she stoops to slip Dominic’s dainty feet into his tiny sidewalk boots. Marcel eyes him with pity. Dominic looks at the ground. He cocks his ear to the side, though, and listens while she has a little chat with him, reminding him to behave himself. Love is complicated. Dominic always behaves himself.

  The minute her door is closed he adjusts to us, boinging up and down in his little boots near Marcel like a Super Ball, trying to get a rise out of his fat compatriot. Marcel pretends he’s above all that, but by the time the elevator opens to the lobby, they’re both dragging me toward the door. I spot something taped to our mailbox. A postcard of the Fort Lauderdale airport and its crowded runway, planes lifting off and landing. A sticky note on the picture reads “Came to us by mistake.”

  I flip it over. Dark boyish scrawl crowds the small white square.

  Evie—I’m waiting for my connection to Haiti, but I can’t leave without telling you I’m sorry. I fucked it up between us & then I didn’t even say good-bye. I’m going because I have to, it’s as simple as that. My family is always so sure they know what’s right for me, but my choices are mine to make. Your choices are too. I hope you figure out what that means for you & you do it.

  Evie, you’re the light. I wish I’d told you that one last time, but I didn’t because I knew if I saw you again I’d want to stay.

  Love,

  Theo

  Love Theo!

  For a second I fixate on the word, then I let the dogs rush me out into the day. I follow them wherever they lead while I read and reread Theo’s postcard. They sniff and mark and show off for each other, pretending to eat random crap on the ground while eyeing me nervously. After a block or so they figure out I’m not paying attention.

  Theo’s sorry.

  For what? For saying I needed a hero? For dumping me? For starting something when he knew he’d be gone? For going? I can’t tell what this postcard means. It’s like he slipped out but left the door open behind him. After reading it so many times I have it practically memorized, I shove it in my coat pocket. Maybe I’ll add it to my map.

  Marcel’s a creature of habit, so I should have expected him to lead me to Emma’s block. What I don’t expect is to see Alice on her stoop with a book. It’s nice out, almost summery, so I don’t know why it’s surprising, other than the fact that I’ve pretty much managed to erase Alice from my mind altogether when not confronted with her continuing existence. I stop a second while reality and the world inside my head stitch themselves back together. It occurs to me that people call this kind of split denial, and that it’s exactly what my mom does when she ignores the legal letters in the mail.

  I follow the dogs.

  “Hey.” Alice lifts her eyes from her reading when I walk by.

  “Um, hi,” I say back. So much for slinking past unnoticed.

  She’s wearing a pale-pink sundress, milky and pastel, like her skin. I wonder if she put it on for Jack. She looks beautiful sitting there, the sun moving through the new leaves above her, painting a pattern of light on her face.

  Before I can chicken out, I say, “Alice, I’m sorry.”

  I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to say it.

  She raises a brow and lays her book in her lap.

  “For?”

  Dominic snuffles in the dirt at the base of her boulevard tree. I loop his leash tight around my wrist.

  “For . . . everything? Pretty much. For being threatened by you all the time, for treating you badly, for wishing you’d disappear. You were right about it all.”

  Including Jack. But that part I still can’t make myself say out loud, not yet. I don’t know what’s going to happen with Jack. I slip two dog treats from my pocket, crouch, and let the dogs slobber them from my palm.

  She eyes me skeptically. I don’t blame her. I thought saying I was sorry would kill me, but it’s having the opposite effect. I feel lighter, more alive. Maybe gravity’s a question of regret. Do the right thing and feel yourself lift up a bit.

  “You’re burning,” I say, straightening up and pointing to her shoulder.

  “Global warming,” she sighs, pressing her skin with a narrow fingertip. A bright circle appears like an inverse shadow.

  The dogs start to tug, impatient.

  “Well . . . okay then . . . enjoy your book.” I turn to leave. My stomach’s growling and I forgot to bring money for lunch. I’ll have to go home to eat, take Marcel to the dog park later.

  “Wait. Did you do something to wreck that show?”

  Her question stops me in my tracks.

  “What?” I whirl around.

  “Mamie’s show. Emma called. She said you were planning something.”

  At the mention of Emma’s name, I’m heavy again. I’ve been hiding in my map, ignoring her texts. I don’t know how to tell her I didn’t go through with it.

  “No. I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  The dogs work circles around my legs until I’m tied up in leashes.

  “That’s good.” She nods, her features softening. “Well done.”

  Over us both, two lazy clouds turtle by, make time visible, white against the blue.

  “I went, though.” I hesitate, not sure what I’m going to say. “It was . . .” I go for the truth. “Her show blew me away.” I realize as I say it that I have to try for TeenART—really go for it—no chickening out.

  Alice sits up a little straighter, surprised. She smiles.

  “I can’t explain it. The paintings were huge, strange, beautiful. They were like telescopes that looked back through memory, and time, and pain. . . .”

  I stop talking. My words sound stupid and don’t come close to describing what I saw in that room, how I felt when I heard Mamie ta
lk, what it was like to see her in love with someone new.

  I shrug. Untangle myself and turn to leave.

  “I broke up with Jack,” Alice says to my back. It’s a statement. No emotion.

  I face her again. She looks resolute.

  “Alice, we weren’t doing anything at that party, I promise.”

  Marcel must sense my distress, because he leans against my leg so hard he almost knocks me over.

  “I know.” Alice picks up her book again.

  I look at the cover. How to Build a Girl, by Caitlin Moran.

  She follows my gaze, flutters the edge of the pages. “I mean, I didn’t know at the time, at Ben’s, but I believe you. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That’s not why.”

  “Then why?”

  “He’s not a good boyfriend. He needs to grow up. You should know that, in case you guys . . .” Her turn to shrug. “I deserve better.”

  She smiles, wry, one side of her mouth up. She looks how I wish I felt, what I’m trying to figure out. Like someone pulled together, proud of herself. I file it away for later.

  A squirrel skitters past Dominic and he goes nuts, barking, lunging, tugging hard on his leash. Marcel starts to get worked up too, yanking my arm from the socket. I give in, let them drag me away, tossing a quick good-bye over my shoulder. But then I stop. I call back over to her.

  “Hey, Alice!” I’m not even sure about this.

  “Yeah?” Her face shifts, defenses back up.

  “Do you want to, um, would you maybe want to get coffee sometime?”

  Her face shows no emotion and she lets me stand there, waiting.

  Finally she looks down at her book, then back at me again.

  “I don’t know,” she says slowly, but she’s nodding. “Maybe . . . I guess. Maybe?”

  It’s good enough for now.

  I twist Marcel’s leash around my wrist again and try to smile at her even if she’s not ready to smile back.

  More in Common with Air