by Gin Phillips
Sometimes she thought that complete silence sharpened her vision, in the same way that she sometimes thought the steady rhythm of hiking might open her mind to potential ghosts.
Sometimes she wondered if she really ever saw anything at all.
She had just turned thirteen when her mother started taking her to church. It was a few months after the accident. Her father stayed home. Ren and her mother sat in the fifth pew from the front, behind the lady in the green furry hat. The hat covered the lady’s eyebrows completely. At the front of the church, behind the pastor, behind the choir, a stained-glass window showed Jesus on a throne. His hands were extended, palms up. His face was kind but strong, not pale and emaciated like other Jesuses she had seen. She liked this Jesus. She liked the pastor, who would talk about grace and mercy and faith and salvation, all beautiful words that she liked to roll around her mouth. He gave a sermon on the gifts we receive from God. He meant abilities, not actual presents. These gifts were manifestations of the Spirit, and they were different for each person—the gifts of wisdom or faith or healing or prophesying or interpreting or miraculous powers—but they were to be used for the common good. She liked this. She looked up the word “manifestation” when she went home and decided Scott could be one.
She did not look for solace in church the way her mother did. Her mother needed to know that there was something after death; she needed to be reminded of it, promised it, convinced of it. Ren didn’t need convincing. So she looked at the stained glass. Jesus and his throne were in the center of the window, and they were the simplest part of the design. A ring of disks surrounded the throne, framing it in vivid blues, reds, and yellows with the sunlight streaming through. There was a different image inside each perfect circle, and they reminded Ren of foreign coins that someone had melted into glass. There were angels and unrecognizable beasts and horses and doves. There was a bird with the head of a blue-eyed man. There was a blood-colored horse with the golden head of a lion. There was a woman with the wings of an eagle.
She would stare at Jesus and imagine him coming to life, stepping from the window into air, floating over the heads of the church members. She would reach up, and his robe would brush against the tips of her fingers. He would look down at her and put his hand on her head.
This fantasy had many endings, depending on the Sunday. Sometimes Jesus would lift a hand and the window would vanish. A great gleaming round doorway to another place would open where the window had been. The doorway would shine with something soft like candlelight and a strong sweet wind would blow. The doorway did not lead to heaven. It led to another world, and anyone who wanted to walk through it could go, but the catch was that Jesus would not tell you anything about the other world. It was a blind leap. Ren always chose to go—sometimes she was the only one in the whole church to go. She would discover that the world on the other side of the window was full of warriors and sorcery and magic.
On some Sundays no doorway was revealed. Sometimes Jesus set the church aflame, and fireballs rained down from the arched ceiling. Ren would save her mother by dragging her out of the church, dodging the falling fire, and pushing her mother into the safe open air. Then Ren would save others, lowering them out the windows and heading back for more. Sometimes Jesus would take the rainbow light from the stained glass, leach it right from the window itself, and let it pour down on Ren. She would feel the warm light soak into her skin, and everyone would look at her and know that she was chosen.
One Sunday, the stained-glass Jesus moved. Actually moved. It did not happen as Ren had imagined it. It started with only a twitch of his finger. It was no fantasy, not at all like her daydreams—the movement of his finger was as concrete and undeniable as the rustle of the pastor’s papers on the lectern. Ren looked up at her mother to see if she had noticed Jesus, but her mother was staring straight ahead at the pastor. Ren looked back at Jesus’s fingers—they all moved this time, beckoning to her. Come. Come here. Come to me. She looked to his face, to his kind mouth and sharp cheekbones, but he showed no expression. Then one of the brilliant circles—the one with the winged woman—flew out of the window, sailing like a Frisbee into the crowd, then shattering against the back wall of the church. A round hole was left in the stained glass, and behind the hole there was only blackness. A cold wind blew from the empty space. Jesus blinked. He did not meet Ren’s stare. The circles began to break free, one by one, spinning in the air, sunlight still inside them. They smashed and turned to dust over the pews, over the gray marble floors, over the suit coats of men, and over a furry green hat. The glass broke hard against wood and skin, shards flying, blood-red and eye-blue, but no one made a sound. No one screamed. No one ran. No one even looked away from the pastor.
It was the lack of reaction that made Ren realize she was wrong, that nothing she was seeing was really happening. She squeaked, but she held the small sound inside her mouth, the way dogs could sound during thunderstorms. She was breathing heavily, pulse knocking inside her throat, and because of either the squeak or the breathing, her mother looked down at her and frowned. Ren lowered her eyes. She could see amber-colored pieces of glass by her feet, with the red tail of a horse in one of the pieces. The pieces had swirls of color like gasoline in rain puddles, and the swirls were moving. The air was frigid from the wind blowing through the empty circles in the window. Ren shivered and tried to control her breathing. She closed her eyes and squeezed her numb hands together.
She could feel a small thin cut on her thumb, along the lines of her knuckle.
When she looked up, the circles were back in the stained glass where they belonged. Jesus was still. She did not trust anything she saw anymore, though. She did not know what was real and what was only falling glass. She refused to go inside the church again. Her mother did not argue with her.
At one of the larger amphitheaters, she found a flat rock almost perpendicular to another tall rock. Both were slightly warm from the sun. She sat down, hugging her knees to her chest, leaning back against the L shape of the rocks. This close to the rocks, she could see the striations in a single broad boulder, dark pink bands and yellow stripes, swaths of color side by side.
She pulled off her shoes and socks, checking the bandage wrapped around the ball of her right foot. She’d been afraid she needed stitches, but the gash was healing up nicely. She pulled off her hat and sat on the rock, lifting her face to the sun.
She heard the tune to “Just Like a Woman” before she saw Scott. He cast no shadow, so she could only tell he was getting closer by the song growing louder. Then she saw him from the corner of her eye, just his legs and feet at first, until she turned her head and looked up at his face. He smiled and sat beside her, on the edge of her rock chair, making no sound other than his song.
“I wondered where you’d been,” she said. “It’s been days.” She always saw him more often when she was on-site. At home, in her flat-roofed bungalow, she sometimes went weeks without hearing the hum of his voice.
“. . . just like a little girl,” he sang. He added an instrumental “da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da” at the end.
“You could have asked for a better voice if you were going to haunt me.” She shifted on her rock, crossing her legs and facing him.
He never aged. His hair was always the same length—a little too long, flopping over his eyebrows, shaggy over his ears and down his neck. He still had an awkwardness in the slump of his shoulders. His legs seemed to be in his way. His face was perfectly smooth. He always looked just as he had when he left her.
“Do ‘Dark Eyes,’” she said.
It had been her favorite Dylan song to fall asleep to. Before the accident. She once upon a time had a favorite Dylan song for each of a wide range of activities. She liked to lie awake to “Ballad of a Thin Man.” She had selections for brushing her teeth, for jumping on her bed, for drawing on her notepad, for remembering.
Scott obli
ged, leaning in, eyes too sincere, arms thrown out with jazz-hand palms. She giggled, tempted to touch him, knowing better than to try. She covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed, a gesture she did not use anymore. All the girls in sixth grade had covered their mouths demurely at the first sign of giggles—it was a tic that her mother had loathed. Her mother said if you want to laugh, laugh. If you want to be mad, be mad. Don’t cover it all up like you’re ashamed of feeling something. Put your hand down, Ren, put your hand down. Let us see you.
“Sing it for real, Scotty,” she demanded, behind her hand.
He sat straighter, looking toward the ground, not her. “I live in another world, where life and death are memorized/Where the earth is strung with lovers pearls and all I see are dark eyes.”
His hair caught the sun, gold for a moment, as Silas had said hers sometimes did. She’d always coveted Scott’s hair. When he’d run, when he’d chase her—back when she was half as tall as he was—and she was slow to turn away, she would see his hair rise and fall in a single short sheet, thick and straight. She’d loved to touch it, thread her fingers through it, when he hugged her good night.
His eyes shifted to hers again, and she missed him. She missed sharing a look with him when their parents’ backs were turned—she missed him kicking her under the table. She missed how he would pick her up in a fireman’s carry and walk through every room of the house, nearly banging her head against doorways.
A story her mother told her: When Ren was nearly three, she hit a rebellious stage. Prior to that, she’d been consistently adorable, and Scott was fed up with it. He got spanked, got sent to his room for talking back, got lectured on saying “Thank you” and “Please,” and Ren got nothing but cuddled. But when she learned to scream “No” and throw herself on the ground and dig her fingers into the carpet for leverage, she started getting her bottom slapped and her hand popped and her blanket—she called it a bah—taken away. Scott was delighted at first. He would appear when he heard a tantrum and prompt, “You should spank her, Mom. Or take her bah away. You should take her bah away.”
And they would take the blanket away, and she would cry. And he would laugh. Then the laughing would stop. He would start saying, pleading, “I’m gonna give her the blanket back, okay? She’s been punished enough, okay?” And he would pat her head like she was a terrier, kiss her cheeks, hold her in his lap while she yanked at the holes in his jeans.
It’s only a story—Ren doesn’t remember any of it. It is not that they were particularly close. They were not friends—they were brother and sister. It was something not as smooth as love between them. Maybe they didn’t even like each other. She had certainly hated him at times, hated him for always doing everything faster and smarter and better and first. But he knew her when things were still right. He knew her when their parents were right. He knew her when she was right. He was the only one who could see what happened, how things had changed, only he was dead by then. But he still remembered. He was still right, the only right thing left. She loved him for that.
“Some mother’s child has gone astray, she can’t find him anywhere,” he sang. “But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise/Whom nature’s beast fears as they come, and all I see are dark eyes.”
She felt a chill, a tremble along the surface of her arms and shoulders. “I do love your voice. I always did. It has character. And feeling. Dylan doesn’t have a very good voice, either.”
He frowned at her.
“Well, he doesn’t, technically.”
He leaned one shoulder against the wall of rock, draping an arm over his folded knee, looking up at her. Once upon a time, he would have tickled her next. That look of affection had always led to bottom-of-the-feet attacks.
“Silas is getting gas for the trucks, and I told him I wanted to take the afternoon to hike,” she said. “We’re all going home for a little while to catch up on phone calls and e-mails and sleep and stuff. Then we’ll come back.”
He looked puzzled.
“I have real work to do that pays me money. But we’ll come back before the month’s over.” She rubbed a popped blister on her palm. “So do you like him? Silas?”
Scott tilted his head, fondness back on his face. Fondness and something more painful.
“I like him,” she answered. She looked at her brother, smiling as his silky hair brushed against rock. “Is he a good man?”
She couldn’t read his face.
“I think he is,” she said. “I think it’s different this time, Scott.”
He leaned forward, his forehead nearly touching hers. His eyebrows were in disarray.
“Could you maybe find some of his dead family members and pump them for information?” she asked.
Sometimes when he came to her, time seemed to waver. She could almost see it quiver, like heat waves rising off asphalt. It was as if she had a fever that crept up degree by degree, not noticeable at all when he first appeared. But the longer she looked at his face, the less steady the rest of the world seemed. Now her head felt fuzzy. She did not know if he had been beside her for minutes or hours. Her fingers felt thick and swollen, as if the circulation to her hands had been cut off. She rubbed at her temples again, and when she looked up, he was gone. Her cheeks felt like they might have blistered. She reached for her hat, and her fever lifted slowly.
She took a long swallow of warm water and reached for a bag of peanuts in her pack. She heard a noise behind her. She thought Scott had come back, and she half turned.
It wasn’t Scott. There was a rustle of bright feathers, and a movement of legs. The woman stepped onto the rock, her sandaled feet a hand’s length from Ren’s hip. The yucca cords between her toes were dusty and starting to fray.
Ren looked up, recognizing the woman by her skirt but wanting a better look at her face. The woman’s torso was solid and strong, a small wrinkle of fat or muscle pressing against the band of the feathers. Her two bracelets were fixed in place around her forearm. The undersides of her small breasts lay flat against her rib cage. Her chin was sharp, and there was no paint on her face this time.
Then there was heat against Ren’s back, so much heat that she was afraid her skin would scorch. She spun on the rock and saw a fire in the open dirt, between the clumps of rocks. There was too much smoke for her to see it clearly—her eyes burned. But it was roaring, burning fast and hard.
A young woman, slender with long legs, was sitting near the fire, cross-legged. She was sweating from the heat of the fire, beads dripping from her forehead into the dirt. She was hunched over a bowl. Her knuckles were scabbed over in places, freshly bloodied in others. She held a stripped piece of yucca in her hand, and the end of the plant was in her mouth. She chewed contemplatively, large eyes glancing at the older woman, at the sky, at the high walls of the canyon. Ren could see her face. It was the girl she had seen cut off her hair in the river. She was several years older, in her late teens or perhaps early twenties, with her hair thick and long again.
This was unusual, this crowd of ghosts dropping by for social calls.
The girl wore her dark hair in a loose braid, and the apron around her waist was more standard than the older woman’s. A braided brown belt—plant fibers, probably also yucca—held a bundle of cords in place. The cords were tucked between her legs and hung over the belt at the small of her back, arcing and spreading across the dirt like a drab tail. As plumage went, it paled in comparison to the parrot skirt’s brilliant rainbow.
The unfinished bowl in her lap explained the heat of the fire—finished and dried pieces must be in the blaze, baking, layered between broken bits of pottery. The fire was piled with enough fuel to suck up all the oxygen, leaving not the slightest draft of oxygen to tinge the black color of the paint.
The end of the yucca brush had grown pliable enough, apparently, because when the girl pulled it from her mou
th and nudged it with the pad of one finger, she seemed satisfied. Holding it between her thumb and two fingers, she dabbed it in a small clay jar, then pulled the brush across the interior of the bowl in a long movement followed by several shorter dashes.
Her eyes did not leave the bowl once the brush touched the paint. A frown line appeared by each eyebrow, making an upside-down V over her nose as she concentrated. She did not look as if she smiled easily or often. Her face was harder than it had been when Ren had seen her at Crow Creek.
The older woman stood, legs apart, watching the younger girl. Ren scooted toward her, across the rock, trying to read the woman’s expression. Her face was soft, fond, proud. Ren could see the wrinkles around the woman’s eyes, deeply set, plus laugh lines etched around her mouth. It was a mouth that had smiled often. This woman certainly was old enough to be the young woman’s mother.
The older woman looked down at Ren sharply, holding her gaze for a moment, and Ren was sure the woman could see her.
But the parrot woman looked away and called to the girl—Ren couldn’t really make out the sounds, much less the words—stepping nimbly from the rock and pointing toward the bowl being painted. The girl shook her head, and the woman mouthed something more emphatically. The girl gestured for the woman to go away. The girl did not look away from her bowl, and Ren couldn’t tell if she was angry or amused.
The parrot woman did not step away. But she did stop speaking. For a moment, the girl painted silently, and the woman stood by her side, watching. Then the woman raised her fingers to her mouth, squashing her lips together, making them flat and wide. She rolled her eyes and in general made herself ridiculous. She seemed to have a problem with some part of the bowl.