by Donnna Salli
I heard a thumping, thumping, thumping, like something unsettling on the other side of a wall. With the final thump, my eyes opened. It was confusing. I was backstage, in the dark, but my eyes had opened to white—a white ceiling.
The poltergeists popped in. “Claire, you’re on.” No, it was Lydia. She was standing beside my bed, and Phil was at her shoulder. It was dark—the hospital—it must be night. I thought, Did I know them then?
Phil shook my arm. “Claire. Your entrance. It’s coming up.”
I remembered, then, where I was. I said, “Okay—okay.”
When I came to, beside Gen’s tub, there were people around me, an ambulance crew. One of them said, “You’re a very lucky young lady.”
I was lucky, all right. I’d lost a bucket of blood, become a labyrinth of splinters—in my body, my mind—and my picture was about to make the front page. Next to Gen’s and Tim’s, Alison’s and . . . hers. Marlena’s mother had driven down the road to the lumberyard and turned the gun on herself. I was the only survivor.
I often wonder what became of Marlena. I don’t know if she had a father, one around, I mean. The week I left Paul, I had a dream. It was the sort so momentous you wake up struggling for breath. I was crossing a narrow, wooden bridge suspended between two precipices. Below me, rocks pointed dark fingers, a river frothed white. When I got halfway across, the slats of the walkway broke, and I fell through to my chest. My feet were swinging out of control. My arms were the only thing keeping me from falling, and they were weakening. “Help me,” I called, the little scream of dreams. “Someone, please help me.” But no one came. Just when my arms were giving way, a voice said right inside my ear, You’ll have to help yourself. It was a voice you wouldn’t say no to. It startled me. I stopped flailing and pulled myself up. I did it an inch at a time, but I did it. When my entire body was on the walkway, I lay there and breathed.
When I finally heard my cue, it was as if the voice spoke again. I pulled myself out of the pit, dusted the stage dust off, and it was enough. I hit the boards, and the moves and the lines came, from wherever they come. I opened my head, let the weight flow out, and was Ariana. The little plane flew itself. It was a newly hatched dragonfly, a rainbow on wings—more colorful, perhaps, for all the strain.
As openings go, it was fine. But by the end, I was limp. My arms ached and my legs throbbed. My head hummed. I waded to the dressing room through a heavy calm. When we gathered for notes, Phil told each of us as we came in that Marcus was dead—his heart. When we were all there, he said, “Lucy sent her apologies and hoped you were having a good show. Isn’t that like her? Tomorrow’s show will be for Marcus. No notes tonight, people—we’ll post them tomorrow. I hope you’ll give Lucy a call.” We left in silence, not bouncing off the light fixtures like we usually do.
As if I hadn’t endured enough. More than my share . . .
The news about Marcus was the end, the unraveled rope. It was the cornerstone pried from the wall. The opposites of my life paraded before me. Gen had been taken from me—I’d had to turn away from Paul. The one thing I wanted was to be a mother—I’m not good at even mothering myself. People, lovely, dreadful people, expect the impossible from me—I expect it in return. We call it love, all of us, broken past love. Except maybe Richard. Of the people I know, he’s not quite so far past it.
He was with Lucy, of course. I thought of her, how tough and overdone she is, how fragile underneath. It had to be a blow for her. I love God, I do. Inside the shell that is me, something has always waited for God. But the thought of Lucy even close to clawing at the ceiling as Marcus went through made me sad. It made me desolate. I knew, for the first time, I was sad enough. I could stop waiting, could turn away and not look back.
By the time I got to the car, I had. I’d walked through bone-chilling wind, but I was burning up. “No more,” I said. I lay my hot forehead on the cold steering wheel and cried. I didn’t need a God who’d stand silently by the bed, deny you children, abandon your marriage, dangle the impossible, fail your friends . . . who would beguile you, bait you, thwart you. What was saddest was, I’d finally reached the ultimate in wild—wild with grief.
It felt good, to cry, to feel again in that way. I stopped at the all-night grocery and drifted down the aisles. When I got to the cards, I read every one in the rack. The one I chose made no mention of eternity. On its front were poppies and linden leaves, with IN SYMPATHY in tall letters. I couldn’t face my empty bed, so I drove to campus. I was hurrying down the lighted path along the pond to the coffee shop when I heard wings flutter overhead and behind me. I jumped, turned, and saw, a ways off, a duck drop to the water. That calmed the unearthly tingle that had gone down my spine. The campus flock seems to stay later every year.
The coffee shop was packed. Couples on dates and scholars on break. People like me, with nowhere to go. I had to wait for a table. When I got one, I ordered hot tea with milk. I started to say, “And with honey,” then I noticed the bottle on the table. As I waited, I thought hard. How, I wondered, can a person ever say exactly what she’s feeling? I sat there, running different openings through my head, then dug a little notebook out of my purse. I tried, Lucy—dear friend. You and Marcus have been so—
Suddenly, I felt something. I felt someone, that light, that mix of heat and energy. I looked up. A woman was standing beside the table, a girl, really. She smiled and said, “Hi, I’m Molly. I’m with Campus Crusade?”
I noticed, the way her voice went up. Half of my brain thought, Oh great—a Bible thumper. The other half started to laugh.
Molly must have heard it. She said, “You’re going to think this is crazy, maybe, but I come here a lot to talk to people, and every time I do, I pray first and ask God to tell me who. Tonight, I had a feeling He was sending me to you.”
I sat there, reeling. It was the ceiling, burst open—the patient, folded hands. The laugh I was hearing in my head burbled and built. When I’d recovered my senses enough to fashion a thought, I sent out silently, All right, I get it, I see You. I looked into Molly’s earnest eyes and said, “I don’t think it’s crazy at all. I’ve been expecting you.”
She gave me a very puzzled look.
I motioned toward a chair. “It’s been a long night, Molly, very long. Why don’t you have a seat? Order yourself something warm. I’ll tell you about it.”
All This
The town was quiet now.
At the VFW, the workers fried the evening’s last basket of fish, then turned down the lights except those in the bar. At the cinema, the 7:45 and 8:00 screenings let out. The moviegoers streamed from every door. It was colder—they rushed to their cars. At Larkspur Theatre, the vehicles lined up again, only now at the exit to the street. Brake lights blinked on and off as drivers moved ahead. They punctuated the night.
The face of the storm was less than an hour away. Those who had come a distance for the play knew they should get right home. The train, nearing from the west, was right on time. It passed a farm, and the dog circling in the yard barked its arrival. At a neighboring house a dog answered, and then farther across the landscape, another. From the northwest, the pack announced the storm. Word of train and of storm converged on the town, it reached the lake and went beyond. But the lake already knew of the change of weather. The bay had rolled white-tipped all day. Now the waves had deepened. The sound of their rush to shore built and built.
The man stepping from his car at the church on the bluff knew what the lake was doing, though he could not see it in the dark, or hear it at this distance. He climbed the parsonage steps, opened the door. His wife, wearing a robe belted at the waist, was pouring hot water into a cup. She turned, and he pulled out a chair at the table and sat. He leaned back in the chair and began to speak. She pulled out the opposite chair and sat. There was a book on the table, open in the middle, spine up. The man leaned forward, dropped his elbows to the table, and raked his fingers through his hair. He spoke again. She shook her head. She could be sayin
g “no”—she could be saying “oh, dear.”
All this, and more, the white bird saw, flying a wider, wider circle.
Antonia Sprague-Heller
My God. What a day.
There’s really been only one other like it in my life. A person will struggle—she’ll fight. She’ll do just about anything to avoid making a decision she knows she has to make. We have got to be the most perverse creatures on the planet. Something in the human enjoys misery. It keeps us locked away, some in a mansion, some in a hovel. But then, one day—a day you don’t plan, an hour you don’t expect—the door opens. You have what you need, or you receive your answer. It’s so obvious, and so right, and you even have the wherewithal to carry out what you need to carry out. A big angel with flaming eyes and burnished hair might as well have walked through the wall and commanded you.
I’ve been struggling to make a hard decision. Or, as I said, I’ve been struggling not to make it. When it comes to ducking and prevaricating, I’ve got a stack of blue ribbons. The problem is my husband. We’ve been separated about six months, since I caught him in an affair and threw him out. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I caught him and I left. I’ve got my own career, a damned good one. I’ve got my own income. There was no sense arguing over who’d stay and who’d leave. Of course, he immediately had to do the manly thing and moved out, too. So there sat our house, empty as a tomb. I wasn’t going to get into a contest to prove who could be more juvenile. I moved back in.
This past spring, two of my nieces graduated high school. They’re women. I’m a woman. I figured they should know about us, so I gave them a book of quotations by women. I read one of the copies, of course, before I wrapped it. There was a real gem from Mae West: “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution, yet.” Amen, I thought. I hand-lettered it on black paper in gold ink and posted it in my office above my computer.
I didn’t used to have my sense of humor in a sling. But then Sam and I separated, and I had so much anger and betrayal to process, I thought I’d implode. The first month was the worst. I washed boatloads of hankies and went through a jug of foaming bath oil. I ran up astronomical numbers on my phone bill calling my sister, who’s juggling her own husband, triplets, and an administrative job. She also does committee work and volunteers for hospice, in between trips to the dentist and trilling at hockey games—oh, and scheduling grooming appointments for the Brittanies. She makes me feel like a slouch. But I carry on. A colleague in the English department told me I needed to read some books that mirror my life. He said, “The way you’re feeling, you’ll love Jude the Obscure—and Sister Carrie will knock you out.” She did. The books were just what I needed. I had to walk on the bottom before I could find my way up.
Now most of those feelings have passed, and lately, Sam’s been asking me to take him back. He’s had such hope on his face every time I’ve seen him. I’ve come mere centimeters from saying, “Yes, come home.” But a decision like this isn’t easy, especially when there are complicating factors, like in our situation. I’ve been so tied to our past, so afraid of the future, I haven’t been able to get on with living. Where Sam has been concerned, the only words I’ve seemed to know lately have been “maybe” and “maybe not.” It hasn’t been good for either of us. But I was too cluttered inside to make a decision.
Until tonight.
I was sitting at the desk in the kitchen, reviewing what had turned out to be an unpredictable day, when the wreckage cleared. I saw the answer. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought. I was so struck by the certainty that arose, I grabbed a highlighter and marked the day on the desk blotter. It’s one of those giant appointment calendars. I drew a big yellow-bordered cloud with the sun breaking away behind it, right over the 13.
The other day that changed my life wasn’t my wedding day, as some might expect. It, too, was a night, a night eleven years ago, and the angel who walked in wasn’t very dramatic at all. He had burnished hair, yes, and a song on his tongue—but he’d come in search of trash.
When the door opened, I jumped.
I’d been deeply, solidly asleep—the kind it takes time to come out of, the kind where surfacing too fast causes physical pain. Air bubbles in the brain, or something. My office was hot and dark, lit only by the gooseneck lamp above the desk. My heart was pounding, my back and arms were numb. I shot up through levels of disorientation, eyes blurred, neck stiff and sore. The entire right side of my face felt as if it had been resting against a rock. In a sense, it had. I’d been asleep on the keyboard to my computer.
“Oh. Sorry, professor. Thought you’d gone.”
It was Hank, the custodian on our floor. Everyone in the sociology department, faculty and staff, was on a first-name basis, but not Hank. He was a formal gent who insisted on using titles. His coming in surprised me. It wasn’t his usual working time. I was humiliated I’d been caught sleeping, and through the fog in my brain, I could see that Hank was flustered and embarrassed. You’d have thought he’d caught me in fishnets and a teddy, whipping up a smoking flask of margaritas. He startled back from the door and said, “Had my grandson’s birthday party. I’m in late. I’ll come back. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, no, Hank. It’s all right. I’ll step out of your way. You’ve got to get in here sometime, don’t you?” I bolted up out of my cramped position and glanced at my watch. It had stopped. I used to throw the desk clock into a drawer when I worked late, so as not to get discouraged and not to be distracted. I said, “Do you have the time?”
“Not a question of time—I make it. It’s my job.”
“Of course you do. What I meant was, what time is it?”
“Gotcha.” He pulled a shiny watch out of the front pocket of his vest. I’d noticed he always wore vests—it was a dapper touch I admired. He said, “My dad gave me this. It dropped out of my pocket in the movie theater once, but I found it when the lights come up. Near gave me a heart attack, ’til I had it back in my hand. It’s . . . 11:43.”
“Thanks.”
Could it really be quarter to twelve? I thought about home, pictured my king-size bed with the sheepskin mattress pad and goose-down comforter. I pictured Sam, his arms and legs sprawled as if he owned the whole bed, which of course he did when I was cuddling with a keyboard.
Hank was a talker. He’d chitchat freely as he worked, and I usually welcomed his visits. They got me out of myself. “Little Hank, that’s my grandson,” he said, “turned eight today.” He reached behind the desk for the recycling and the trash.
“How wonderful, Hank. Your namesake. I imagine you’re close?”
“Oh, yes. He and I are train buffs. Have I told you about my trains? No? The basement’s wall-to-wall tracks, with buildings and trees, people in the yards, postmen walking sidewalks, cars lined up at the crossings. There’s a farm with a dog herding sheep, Canadian honkers by the pond. It’s a small entire world. The Missus spends an afternoon a week down there, dusting. She never cared a whit for a train, least not the model-sized version, ’til she met me. Now she’s got her own conductor cap. You don’t have much recycling today. Least, not like usual.”
“No, not much.”
It hadn’t been going well. My recycling was usually full, the office littered with the perforated edges of computer paper. But not tonight. As Hank moved, whistling, toward his cart to empty the cans, I caught sight of my computer screen. My head hitting the keyboard had sent what I’d been working on somewhere into outer space. I’d been lucky to get in at an East Coast school and was gunning for tenure. I was also terrified I wouldn’t get it—I needed all the publications I could muster. A mix of despair and fatigue bubbled up through some thinly plastered cracks. I grabbed the aspirin bottle from the top desk drawer, spun out of the room and into the hall. “Excuse me, Hank,” I said as I slipped past.
“Certainly.” He emptied the cans two at once and turned back into my office.
At the fountain, I palmed two aspirin, then two more
, and washed them down. In the smoky, ceiling-to-floor windows lining the corridor, I caught a look at myself. I didn’t like what I saw. I was only thirty—but I looked tired and stooped and harried as hell. “What are you doing?” I said to the stranger in the window. “What in piss-ant-loving purgatory are you doing, waking up in the middle of the night cuffed to a computer?”
I stared out the window at the line of light poles stretching pink-orange into the distance, and tears started to flow. Hank was now coming out of my neighbor’s office, and I called out, “See you tomorrow. Gotta powder my nose.”
“Sure thing, professor. Tomorrow, for sure.”
I ducked into the lavatory and did my weeping in private. I didn’t come out until I could tell by Hank’s whistling that he’d moved into the next hall. When I got home and shook Sam awake, he took one look at my face and said, “Who died?” It took him the rest of the night to calm me down.
I enjoyed freshman year of college so much, I did it twice. Well, that’s maybe not how it went. In first grade I got put ahead a year. My family is large and on the quiet side, in that way a circus can be quiet. We’re half-German, from which I get my diligence, and half-Irish, from which I got my fire. I’m the baby—if you ask the others, the pampered one. Well, excuse me for enjoying being everyone’s doll and turning it to my advantage. A kid would have to be pretty unskilled, in a family of eight, not to find someone to get her what she wants.