Angel
late August 1996
TWENTY-FOUR
EVERY NIGHT WE ATE dinner together at a plastic outdoor table that was not outdoors but inside John’s apartment, and every night he apologized for not having a proper dining table, and every night I said I didn’t mind and thought I’d rather eat on that white plastic than on marble. We sat beside each other in a row, John, his daughter and me, so we could look out the big window together as we ate. John’s apartment was on the fifteenth floor and we could see the ocean far away.
Felicia, John’s daughter from his first marriage that he never talked about, was only four years younger than me and she had a way of looking at me sideways with her eyes to let me know she wasn’t sure about me yet. She was quieter than I was but had purple hair, and I kept thinking that maybe her hair was like something to say; her hair was her trying to start a conversation.
One night as John was sliding the fish sticks straight off of the pan onto our plates with a wooden spoon, he said, “Angie, we’re big fans of having you here, aren’t we, kiddo.”
Felicia gave me her sideways eyes and then turned back to the window.
“We’ve talked about this already, but I wanted to make it official. Felicia and I would really like it if you’d stay on. Here with us.”
“I’ll be back with Mom as soon as school starts,” Felicia pointed out.
“Yes, honey. But you’ll be here on weekends.”
“You want me to stay here?” I said.
“Yes, here. With me.” He put the pan on the table then and took my hand in his, which was sticky with something from cooking, but the pan wasn’t set right on the table and it crashed down on the floor between us. “That’s okay,” he said, “that’s okay,” and he scooped the fish sticks off the floor in his bare hands and blew on them. Then he put them on his plate and grinned at me, but his ears had gone red and I saw that. “We washed that floor last week. It’s good and clean,” he said.
“Dad, are you asking her to marry you?” Felicia asked. She stuck her fish stick on the end of her fork and looked at it with one eye closed, like it was the fish she was asking.
“No,” he said.
I smiled, and he said, “I don’t think anybody’s looking to get married. Not right now.” Then he made a worried face and asked me, “Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said, and it was true. I didn’t care if I ever got married. “That’s right.”
“Well, is she saying yes?”
“Honey, don’t call her she. Angie needs time to think about it.”
But I didn’t. “But I don’t,” I said. I took his sticky hand in mine and the smile that was on his face then was like a sunrise.
Of course, hours later, after dinner and dishes and TV on the couch with my feet in his lap and Felicia on the floor in front of the screen like she was looking for something inside it, after sex, fast and sweet with his hand clamped on my mouth to help me be quiet so she wouldn’t hear, after he’d fallen asleep beside me with both his hands around mine, I lay awake and wondered. I could hear the TV still on in the other room. The window was open at the foot of the bed and the air coming through was cold, but I liked the air on my face and then the rest of my body hot with the weight and warmth of him against me.
I’d not known before that moment, lying there, that there was a way to be so happy that it hurt you and made you afraid. I knew there was no other answer I could have given him. I loved him truly. I loved him with all the heart I had to love. I loved even Felicia, whose face softened sometimes when I touched her hair to ask her to turn the lights off when she went to bed or when I stood beside her at the sink, washing dishes while she dried. We hadn’t yet even told her of the sister I was growing for her, but I knew when we did, she’d be glad, as we were glad. And then there was the smell of the sea and I thought even the city might be something you could get to love. I liked how it was never quiet, not really, outside. With the windows open, even from way up there in that apartment building, we could always hear the sounds of the city, steady as a heart far below us beating.
But even though John promised I would make new friends when I began my classes at the college after the baby was born, and would be so busy with being a mother and then, later, a nurse, that I would hardly have time to think of Dawson, I knew my thoughts would always be full of the only place I’d known till I came here. I would miss my mother and my sister and even my brothers, though they hardly ever came home anymore. I would miss Minnie and the other girls I’d grown up with. Jason. I’d never thought to leave them. I’d gotten used to people leaving town and I had always been the one that stayed behind.
I would always be wanting to know the ways their lives would change in the years I was away. What happened to them there. I would visit whenever I could, but I knew how that would change, too, because I’d seen it happen first to Charlie and then Jude, and then so many others that I’d gone to school with. The visits were like so many beads spread out on a string, and the longer you were away, the longer the string got but there were never any more beads.
Every night, I’d know they were there. I’d be able to see them in my mind as if they were on the other side of my bedroom door. Drinking and laughing at The Pit as the days got shorter and people got tucked up inside themselves with their secrets for the winter. I’d miss them like it was my own teeth or hands I was missing.
Some people couldn’t ever leave Dawson. Some came back twenty years later, thinking they were old and changed, but we’d recognize them right off, and they’d feel like they’d come home. It might be like that for Jason. He’d been trying to leave for years and maybe Aileen was that last thing he needed to get out the door.
But I knew, with all my heart, that no matter how long he was gone, one day he’d come back. He was the type that wouldn’t ever leave Dawson really. It might be ten years or forty till he came back, but I knew he would. I don’t know what that thing was that would pull him to it so he wouldn’t ever be gone, truly gone, but when he did, I’d bring his daughter to meet him there.
Mara
TWENTY-FIVE
YEARS AGO, WHEN EVERYONE was younger, my son had a kind of reputation around the high school. People would want to move away from him when he was nearby. When he’d be walking down the hall, everyone made themselves a little narrower, so there’d be room for him. I could tell he liked that, but I could tell, too, he didn’t know that it wasn’t just that he frightened them. There were ways that people talked about him, like he was not all there. Like he was this idea of himself, just walking around. Like they didn’t believe in that idea.
And I never told him that, because he thought he was better than they were and he liked to think that. He thought how much better than being a person to be an event. To be a storm or a fight or a mood. He made himself as angry as he could be, so people wouldn’t know anything about him except that. He thought they didn’t know anything else, but they did. And I did.
He thought no one knew how vain he was. He loved mirrors. He wished there were a mirror where you could see yourself like you looked when you weren’t looking at yourself. He wanted to see the side of his face. His eyes, fixed in the distance. When he walked by windows, he’d turn sharply, suddenly, to look in the glass and try and catch a glimpse of himself before he’d turned. Once, he left gym class to go to the bathroom, and on his way out, he stopped to watch himself in the mirror. He leaned right over the sink, till he could have pressed his two faces against each other, and his eyes looked at each other for a while. He was still looking at himself like that when a kid from his gym class came in the door. He stopped and stared at Jason, and Jason was ashamed of himself and of how he liked to look at himself in mirrors. So he got the kid by the hair and hit his head against the wall a few times, then he went back to class.
He did that so the kid wouldn’t tell anyone he saw him staring at himself in the mirror, but when people asked what happened to him, he said, “I saw Jason staring at
himself in the mirror, and then he hit my head against the wall.”
Once, he and Minnie’s sister had to go and pick Minnie up down south, when she’d had her money stolen by someone on her way home. On the way back, Violet let Jason drive, even though he was only thirteen. After only a few minutes behind the wheel, he suddenly swerved the car and they landed in a ditch. They had to get towed to Whitehorse and wait a day while a mechanic fixed the left axle. When they got back, Minnie said an animal had run out onto the road, but I knew Jason had been driving with the window down, his arm out resting on the side of the car, and leaning his head to the side to look at himself in the mirror there. “The Lord knows the thoughts of man,” I whispered to him, “that they are vanity.”
Though I was blind, I saw what he was. I saw his weakness and his desires and his longings and his fury. I saw what he was and I did all I did to stop it. I was for want of words to tell him certain things. To show him what fastened us together, that he was mine and bound to me. That I feared for him. That I feared to be the thing that bound him and for him to be unbound.
And then, as he grew older, I felt him drawn from me. I felt that what pulled at him was stronger than I would ever be, though I fought to keep him. And one day he told me he was leaving, heading across the border for some job he’d heard about. And I knew that this was what I’d feared, that the steps he took out the door that day would be the ones that took him away from me forever. And I knew I had to stop him. It was the only thought I could hold in my head.
I stood before the door and had almost forgotten I held the axe still in my hands. And then I remembered and thought perhaps I could frighten him, make him afraid as I was afraid. I raised it only to stop him for a moment, to make him listen to me. But it was too heavy. It fell from my hands, and I knew from his silence he’d thought it was only an accident that I had not hurt him. And he took my wrist in his hand so that I knew he was offering himself to me, and it was a challenge, it was his way of showing me that not even my hands could stop him from leaving me. I was for want of words, and my fists made themselves into the shape of mouths. And with my fist, I tried to tell him what my mouth had failed to speak.
It happened once. And it was all I needed to know the truth of all I’d feared.
Aileen
late August 1996
TWENTY-SIX
I WOULD NEVER HAVE GOT in the boat with him except for the way he asked. The way he asked made me wonder if Minnie had said something to him.
We never went north after all. On my way to meet him at the house, I ran into Annie. She hugged me like we were old friends and asked what had happened to me since she saw me last, and I couldn’t answer. She told me she had just got back from hauling a load to Florida. “I thought it would be a nice holiday to stay over there. Play the slots. Go see some dolphins. But it was hot as hell. Good to be home.” She said, “We should get together sometime. Get a beer. You know, Jim still asks about you.” I shook my head and didn’t know what to tell her. “You been all right?” she asked, concern in her eyes. Like I belonged here. Like there would be time for her to get to know what things worried me. I said, “I have to go.”
When he came home, I had my suitcase packed to leave, but he said instead, “Let’s take the boat out.” And his face made me say yes.
Or maybe it wasn’t either of those things but what I knew I was going to tell him that made me think that getting into that boat with him was one small thing I could do. It didn’t really make any sense. Like he would forgive me or not because of a boat. But I wasn’t thinking right. I was thinking of Stephan.
The last time I called, he had asked me one more time.
“Have you bought your ticket yet?” he said.
“Not yet,” I answered. I was afraid he’d get impatient, or cold as he sometimes did, that he would end the phone call with me wondering if he had changed his mind.
But after a moment, he laughed, and it was like everything else faded away into that sound, his voice, forgiving, ready. “I guess,” he said, “I wouldn’t be in any hurry to book a four-day bus ride either.”
I hesitated. “You know,” I said. “I think I might fly.”
“Really?” And I heard the pleasure in his voice. It had always frustrated him that I was afraid of flying.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.” I could imagine it already, looking out at the tarmac below as it started rushing past faster and faster and the plane built up the speed to take off into the sky, as everything heaved and shook.
“Leen, I want you to buy that ticket today. I want you to come home.”
“I’m going to. I will. I just need, I just need a little more time. Just a day or two more.”
The quality of his silence before he spoke let me know I’d annoyed him. “I don’t see what you’re doing up there,” he said at last. “What’s so goddamned interesting about that town?”
When Stephan had asked me to come home, it occurred to me for the first time that probably love was always imaginary. That it was something two people agreed to put together out of thin air and stare at for the rest of their lives, so as not to ever really see each other. So love wasn’t something you found or fell into, like all the clichés described, like “oh look, there’s some love, over there,” but something you kept inventing out of nothing for each other every day.
But I knew I could explain none of that to Jason. It would seem as if I were deceiving myself. It would seem as if I were going back because I was afraid. And so I found myself wishing I could leave Jason without a word, without a trace. He was beyond my help or understanding, and I hadn’t known that until Minnie revealed the depth of his lies. I did not know whom to blame for the sickness of what had happened to his mother, who had once been my sister. But though I knew it was wrong, I hated him for it. For what had become of her while I wasn’t looking for her.
I would write to him, if he let me. Maybe I could send him money, even let him visit someday. Or maybe it would be better for me to come to see him here, alone. I didn’t know how I could explain him to Stephan. I’d never told Stephan about my sister. I’d never told him anything of where I’d come from. And there was no reason to confuse things now. The way he knew me was pure, free of my family or my past. It was a better way to be known. The rest was … misleading. A tenuous thread that led somewhere uncertain and dark. A place I no longer wanted to go. And I could cut that thread now, if I could just choose the right words to tell Jason that in a few days, I’d be gone.
As I climbed into the passenger seat of Jason’s truck, I thought of what I’d tell Stephan about my time away. I didn’t know how I’d ever explain what had led me to that strange town, far up past where anyone would go if they weren’t looking for something or lost.
Mara
TWENTY-SEVEN
AFTER IT HAD HAPPENED, the thing I was afraid of, I stayed away as far as I could from my son. His father thought things were better between us, because I did not scold Jason or make him sit for Bible study anymore. But Jason knew I hid from him and why.
And it was that summer I had met Lewis Eames. He was new in town and not staying long enough to trouble himself with fitting in. And he had no gift for attracting the notice or interest of strangers, so he was left alone, mostly, even by his congregation, who were mourning the minister they’d lost in a snowstorm that winter. He came to my Bible study class and I felt him watch me as I read. He was so interested in my Bible and made me show him how the ends of my fingers read the dots and made them into words. He reached out to the page and his hand touched mine.
None of it would have happened, but I needed help and feared to ask for it from Jason. And Lewis was lonely, so he came to call for me most days, to see if there was anything I needed, or anywhere I wanted to go. And the sin that we committed, after only a few weeks of knowing each other, was not so great as it might appear to one who did not understand. Even what I did with Lewis, there in the little room he’d rented across from the church, was to
keep Jason safe. Because I knew what I had done to Jason once, I would do again. And so I hid from him, I hid what I had done and might do to my son in the sin I committed in Lewis’s bed.
And then one morning, I went to Jason and I said, “Take me out in your boat,” and he agreed, as he always agreed to whatever I asked of him. I wanted to walk, and so we went together, his hand at my back, all the way to where he’d docked the boat his father gave him. I climbed into his boat, and though the rocking of it in the water made me clutch at the sides with both my hands, it was not that that I was afraid of. And what I did then, I did to save him. And what I thought of was how for three seasons, I’d carried him inside me. Like a secret. Like something deeply precious, and safe.
And I remembered how, when he was a baby, he’d suck on my finger. The nurse said he had jaundice and that I had to stop breastfeeding him. So I’d heat up formula and give it to him in a bottle, but he’d refuse it so often, I thought he might starve, my little skeleton boy. He was so thin and so small. But he’d always want to suck on my finger, and sometimes I’d cry because he wanted my finger and not the bottle and I was not a good mother.
Then, and even later, when he was a teenager, some nights when I knew he was fast asleep, I would creep up the stairs and lie with my back to his door.
All these years later, I still could feel his mouth, open and wanting. I knew how he was like an appetite. How he went into the world unfed.
When I had once sat outside his door, when he was a sleeping child, I whispered to him, “I will never leave you.” I said to him, “If I fail you it is because I love you.” I told him, “Pay no attention to what I do or say. What I tell you now is what I truly feel. You are loved.”
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 25