by Diane Munier
Leeanne is so fixated on Pearlie, she’s forgotten to be afraid of the rest of the world. She’s shutting this place up, boarding her pets with Barb and taking off for Florida with Pearlie and Donna.
I’m jealous, I’m threatened, I’m happy, I’m filled with admiration. Mostly I’m relieved Pearlie will have someone who loves her enough to put herself second. The way Merle always did.
Then there’s Cyro, proud of himself for having gone in the diner on Sunday. Proud of himself for going to Merle’s funeral on Wednesday. He’s Mr. Man-About-Town now. He went to Big-Mart with me and Spencer on Monday. He wanted to pick out some things for Dusty and get a new shirt for the funeral. I flick my light at the crack in those new drapes, and he flicks his light back the way Merle used to. See that’s why we do it, to remember Merle.
That’s when it hits me and I don’t see it coming. I’m thinking I’ve got it under control, but what do I really control? That’s when I leave off the back half of my walk and run to Spencer’s. I don’t knock, I don’t have to. I pretty well stay here now. He’s in the kitchen finishing the dishes and he’s holding a box of Saran Wrap we just bought on our trip to Big-Mart with Cyro and he throws that down as I throw down my light. He grabs onto me because I’ve slammed into him.
I’m just crying. He’s held me for three nights now, and he’ll hold me for three nights more, three nights at a time all the way into the future I hope. I don’t want to be anywhere else but where I am now in these arms.
“I’ve…got to…tell you something,” I say, crying and breathing and wet and snot coming.
He doesn’t have a thing to say. He grabs the nearest thing, a paper towel and wipes my face and I grab it and scrub and throw it aside. “Spencer…I love you. From my soul.”
I can breathe a little now. I’m just staring at him and I quiet some but I’ve got hic-cups.
His hands on my clammy face, we are looking at one another.
I do and I will.
A soft kiss.
He pulls me in and I lay my cheek on the wet spot I’ve made on his shirt. He has walked me into the bedroom, well we’d been moving, and I’d barely noticed. But he’s undressing me in there, and then he leads me to the bed.
He undresses himself and I am watching him.
It’s all I want, all my eyes want, all my mind wants.
He climbs in beside me and he puts the covers over me and pulls me to himself and his leg over me even, wraps me in him like he’s my mummy-clothes, my burrito shell, my second skin.
He hugs me hard the way I need it. I whisper, “Harder,” because I can’t get enough.
This is how we become one. And after a while, we both know it’s time.
There’s not a lot of preparation, just our whole time together, this third week, our crash-course in one another.
He is careful as he pushes into me, and it hurts for just a minute, not so bad, but when he tries to pull out of me, I won’t let him.
It’s only pain, and I know pain, but this is the kind of hurt that leads to something more, something so good I see the light too, for just a flash.
His face, his head drops. He tells me he loves me, loves me.
I know it’s okay…for Merle…it’s okay. I can let him be…let him go. I have love.
I’m loved.
And I love. I love. I love.
Me and Mom Fall for Spencer
Chapter Thirty-Three
Many things are true at the same time—good-bad, sense and madness, love and contempt, safety-peril. Many things are true at the same time. We have, we are, we lose, we ache, we fight, we freeze. It can all be true and all at once.
We want it narrowed down. We want it in the simplest form. We want one thing. If it’s good, it can’t be bad. If it makes sense, it can’t be crazy. If we love it, we can’t also hate it. But many things are true, all at once. I know this. I am real. I am a ghost. I am here.
There is the one thing you see, the fifty things you don’t, the hundred things you can never see with the human eye—like somebody’s heart.
You can’t see it. Or motives. You can’t see motives. You can’t read minds.
Only Spencer can do that, and then only with me. You can’t know someone’s pain, how deep.
You can’t weigh the damage.
We don’t even have the lights on. We are just so small.
“I was always here,” I whisper to him that night as we lay wrapped together. “This was my home,” I say. My safe place I do not add, for that hasn’t changed.
“She worried I had Autism. She knew there was something…different. But Frieda told her I just needed more time. And love. But it wasn’t something Mom could trust.”
“Like a wives’ tale?” Spencer asked, lazily stroking up and down my arm.
“I’m going to say this…whisper it.” I taste my lips, the comfort of him there, baptismal salt. “She…needed something to be wrong with me.” Oh there it is, one piece, one piece, one jagged piece.
I can’t say more. I can’t tell it. I worked so hard to make us something…normal. But she needed something to be wrong…with me.
His hand is on my back. “It’s alright, Sarah,” he says.
I don’t know. I want it to be. But I have pictures in my head, snapshots of her. I told you I’d opened doors. But not everything has had the courage to come out…because I don’t know.
“She cried a lot. She left me with Frieda during the day. She took classes…for a long time. It was the only way out for her. She loved art…my art. She never understood me, but the art…she liked that. I think it was the one thing she believed came from her. Other than that…I was his alien who’d grown in her body and came out to deliver his guilt…forever.”
“Sarah,” Spencer whispers. He’s holding me and his arms create the right environment…a new environment…for the ghost girl inside me.
“I knew I couldn’t take her place…the damsel…in the tower. I knew I had to grow up another way. I had to take it away….”
“Take what?”
“Being…desirable. To men. I couldn’t…take that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You shouldn’t. No one should understand this,” I say.
Silence. Dog toenails on the wooden floor, the sound of bones caving to lie on the soft honeyed wood.
“My father was there…but the good times…she would dress up and they’d take themselves away and I’d be glad and think it would be better. But it was never better. The next morning when I went home, furniture might be overturned, evidence of bad weather in some of the rooms, and the silence of them sleeping in, but often not in the same bed…same room.
“She didn’t talk, she wailed. She talked in this plea, or this angry shrill sound, and he didn’t talk, he endured and then he blew up. When he went for her, I ran. I always ran. For Frieda. She wouldn’t ask. This is where I came.”
“Not Cyro’s?”
“Not the same thing. Cyro had…a sick wife. Jason.”
“Was he different from your dad?”
“They were both cops…but Cyro had less anger. Sometimes, I went for him. She’d say, ‘get Cyro,’ and I would. I would run to their house, Jason would see me, ‘Dad,’ he’d call, ‘it’s Sarah.’ And sometimes he’d say it so tiredly. He knew I was taking his dad.
“So Cyro was our hero…and his wife was always sick. And one time…it had been brewing…and I was staying at Frieda’s…with Leeanne. Pajama party. Friday night. It had been so bad between them…and Frieda was giving us this…school was out.
“And he came home early, too early for Friday night. But he was here…at Frieda’s…crossed the border cause Frieda’s was mine. He was wild, came right in without knocking…Leeanne in the corner with her dolls and I was playing with mine…on the couch…I knelt there and…she was dancing…my doll…and angry boots on the porch and in he came. His gun was in his hand.
He screamed for Mom and Frieda came from the kitchen…and he shot her. H
e just…he shot her.”
“Why?” Spencer whispered, his arms pulling me so tight against him. “Sarah….”
“I am ten years old. I hear this sound from Leeanne…and he’s blinking and he comes over to me, his fingers on my shoulder, he lifts me like that and I’m walking, wide steps on my toes….”
“Babe,” Spencer says. “Babe,” and he kisses my hair.
“He drags me outside…not that I resisted. I am so light and little, I know I can get picked up by the wind, and I want it to be over…just over…just over. I feel…in his hand…he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t love, but he picks me up with one arm around my back, my chest pressed against his, my hands and feet hanging, he holds me without a care, but I see his lips up close as they speak, the spit flying, and the red in his eyes.
“Cyro is in the street. A gun…and a gun…and the sounds of their voices the desperate pleas…and the love…is in Cyro. My hero. I know this. But I don’t want saved. I have already died.”
Spencer holds me as tight as he does when he holds me as tight as he does.
“The scar?” Spencer says, and I feel his dread.
“Beyond Cyro, there is Mom, standing on Cyro’s porch, the afghan from Cyro’s chair wrapped around her. Her shirt is off. I see this so clearly, her bare shoulder and the strap from her bra. She screams his name. Cyro’s name.”
“Cyro’s name,” Spencer repeats.
“Fred shoots. Cyro goes down but he fires. When Fred falls he takes me down and I am over him. His arm loosens and falls away and I know that we are leaving. I roll off of him and over me is this shape, and I wait for the big angel to take me. I am not afraid…I’m relieved. I can be dead now.”
More silence. Screaming then, and noise and sirens. And the angel bends closer...but it’s Frieda, her face, and she touches me, over my heart….
The one who’s around me then, the one who speaks to me, reaches me…is Cyro. I think…it was Cyro all along, but his leg is shattered. Cyro crawled to me.
“I saw Frieda,” I say.
Spencer doesn’t speak. But I do not disappear in his arms. The ghost is wearing flesh and blood. The ghost has found her words.
Me and Mom Fall for Spencer
Chapter Thirty-Four
There is a ten year old girl who’s lost her wings. She comes home from the hospital but she stays in her room. Her mother cajoles her out with a new Barbie doll. Go down to the coffee table. I bought you something.
She doesn’t want to go down to the living room. She is not living anymore. But her mother prevails and so she goes down the steps and she can see the bright pink package, the coffin with the doll in it, waiting for the girl’s hands and voice to bring her to life.
But the girl turns and runs back up the stairs, trips and keeps going until she’s in her room, until she can close her door and dig her way in to the back of her closet.
Her mother puts the doll on her bed, and later, when the girl comes out of the closet she sees the doll, freed from her package, posed by her mother to stand and look ready for the beach.
The girl stares at the doll and tries to figure out how to get around her, how to shove her under the bed where she’ll never have to see it again.
At first she’s afraid. But then she feels something more, something that wants to break loose and make the loudest noise. So she screams and grabs the doll and runs from her room and throws the doll down the stairs.
Her mother finds it, picks it up. Her mother stands at the bottom of the stairs, the doll in her hand the way the gun was in his. Her mother yells her name and says she has to stop being like this, she has to try to be normal. She has to try.
The girl is not against normal. She just doesn’t know how to find it. She doesn’t know what it is now with the rooms so quiet, so free of his angry voice and his violence. She doesn’t know what it is with her mother home, with Frieda gone and her house stained and silent, with Jason angry and distant, with her hero fighting…in the hospital.
She doesn’t know how to go outside when she carries this scar burned into her, this mark that sets her apart from normal.
That fall she goes to school, but the first day she leaves and walks home. The school calls her mother. Marie comes home, frantic, searching for her daughter. She finally thinks to look in the girl’s closet, and there she is, hugging her knees.
Merle comes every day. He has books and paper, and ideas. He looks at all of her art the way some people notice nature and talk to God. Merle considers the artist.
She can explain the pictures and they start there. They are not necessarily good, they do not necessarily show talent, but they reveal the artist she was…then. And they make her remember herself…before.
So it starts around her art, and it segues to Leonardo Da Vinci. She likes Leonardo and the way he captures spirit along with flesh. Along with soul. Merle explains the difference. Da Vinci paints the layers of human life, the layers which lead to the divine…the Artist. He paints the Artist in the man.
Who can do that? Who can paint the seen and the unseen?
But it’s there. In the Mona Lisa. Most say this is the most famous painting in the whole world. She is no more beautiful, perhaps not as beautiful as others, Merle says. But it’s the light. That’s why people have lined up for centuries to gaze upon her. They are drawn to the light in her face.
This girl may be ten years old but she is captured by this idea. She knows it’s there…the light. She knows what she’s looking at in Da Vinci’s work. She knows because she’s seen its opposite…her father’s lips, her father’s eyes, her father’s deeds. There’s her father…but there’s Mona Lisa.
The dark proves the light, Merle says. And Da Vinci captured the light and Merle says, it’s her job to find it in every created thing…the light. It’s her job to allow it to be free in herself…the light. It’s her job to move as far away from the darkness as she can…to find the light and give that away and to encourage it in others.
“Is this normal?” she asks.
“It is exceptional,” Merle says.
“Is exceptional better?” she asks.
“Yes,” Merle says.
She has no idea how to do this, be this light, but the idea is a rope, and she’s holding it.
By this time Leeanne’s mother has asked…Leeanne won’t go to school.
And that’s how it begins, the three of them, Merle’s lofty ideas, the girl’s hunger for them and Leeanne’s droll humor as she sighs deeply while Merle and the girl go off into the endless possibilities…the stars.
All that fall and some of the winter Cyro is in the hospital. Sue can barely take care of herself. Marie takes food Sue won’t eat.
Jason is a ward of the street, mostly staying with Merle and Pearlie. But more and more the girl takes responsibility for him. It keeps her from thinking of herself. Jason is a lost puppy with no one to love. He moves toward her.
It’s important for Jason to stay in school. From the hospital Cyro insists. He feels Jason has too many uncertainties and needs the familiar routine. Cyro is a man of uniforms and discipline. It’s all he can give Jason…from a distance.
Merle does what he can to catch Jason up, for he’s not been able to start with his class. But by Halloween he is back in the classroom, often raising holy heck, but he’s there.
And Cyro comes home and Sue goes in to the hospital for the last time. By Thanksgiving she’s in the ground and Merle is driving Cyro back and forth to physical therapy.
And Jason belongs to the girl. No more dolls. Just real things now, hurting things. The girl grows strong for him. And Leeanne. She takes care of them, corrects their school work, makes Jason use the right colors on his homework, turns his backwards letter around, lectures him, rebukes him, mothers him, fathers him.
Cyro loses his leg. She takes him treats. He does not give her his light. He has no light now.
It’s Pastor Stanley, it’s Merle. By the next fall Cyro emerges in a chair and he goes up a
nd down in the street, up and down, faster and faster. And her mother stands in the window and watches and smokes and is silent. And slowly the girl takes care of her too.
And Jason wants to run after Cyro all the time, and he does, but sometimes Cyro won’t let him so he sulks, he gets in trouble at school, and he spends as much time at the girl’s house as he does his own.
And one night, the girl stands on the porch with Jason and they are counting the times Cyro goes up and down, up and down, and Sarah feels safe, and Jason is proud.
Cyro flashes his light at them, and they run to him. He sends Jason in to the house to get ready for bed. Jason lets the door slam. He gives the girl the flashlight he takes on his runs. “You’re my deputy now,” he says.
“For what?” she asks.
“For the street. You and me…we’ll keep the bad guys out,” he says.
Then he wheels away and she stares after and figures well, he needs this light, so she runs after and she turns on the light and tries to run fast enough to keep the bright circle before him. But he doesn’t want that. He sends her to the sidewalk, his side of the street. He says he’ll take hers. He tells her to stay even. And they walk.
It’s Cyro who tugs on the rope in her hand, the rope put there by Merle and Leonardo Da Vinci. It’s Cyro who teaches her to climb.
I tell Spencer all of this. In the dark.
“My Sarah, my Sarah,” he says to me. He cries for me. He tells me it’s not pity, it’s compassion…it’s rage…it’s sorrow, it’s a river of sorrow, it’s his heart breaking open. It’s love. He says I have to let him catch up to me.
I’m dry-eyed. I’m observing a proper emotional response through him. I’ve never known the way to view it, so I have not gone up in my personal hot air balloon and looked down on it.
Until now, until the safety of him.
“My Sarah,” he says, his hands against me, his arms holding me.
If there is sleep it’s in patches. I am sleeping with my eyes open. I’m at rest. It’s not a green valley, not that. But I just am. I am still.