Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  Then again, I was the idiot who didn’t care for myself.

  The self-hate was torrential.

  I called Norris, sobbing, asking her why and how long she’d known. She was very kind, bewildered. She wished he’d made another decision. She, too, was losing a dream. She was sure we would marry and become a family. She knew she was dying. She wanted to know her Buffalo was married and had a wife and children before she departed. Instead, he seemed to be self-destructing. But she knew she couldn’t change his mind. Although he asked her not to talk to me, we stayed on the phone for hours in those two weeks.

  It was torture to be stuck there in his place, but what could I do? I had to pick up the kids in Mississippi in two weeks. No use flying home only to fly all the way back to Mississippi. When I could bring myself to get out, I’d go drink with Stormé at East of Eighth. One morning, Norris showed up and told me to pack an overnight bag. She took me by the hand, and we went out to see Norman, who’d retreated to Ptown for the summer to write.

  When we came in, Norman was sitting at the bar overlooking the beach. I didn’t ask where Buffalo was. Norman looked at me and said, “My dear, you were too damn smart for him anyway.” The kindness of that statement made me well up, and he laughed and said, “Knock off the tears.” We had drinks, then went out to dinner. The next day, Norris took me shopping, loading me up on handbags and dresses and jewelry and all kinds of things I’d never buy for myself.

  Before we headed back, I went up to the top floor to say goodbye to Norman. He had put on a clean white shirt. He sat at the end of his bed. I sat down next to him. We both knew it would be the last time I’d see him.

  “You have safe travels, Alice.”

  “You, too, Norman.” He knew I didn’t mean on the ferry. “Thank you for letting me be a part of your family. It has meant everything to me.”

  “You’re going to make it, you know that? You’re the real thing.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I sure am going to miss you.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “No, you’re beautiful.”

  “Well, I guess you’re right,” he said with a smile.

  I gave him a kiss on the head as I stood to leave. It was the last time I saw him, sitting on the edge of his bed, in pale-blue cotton boxer shorts and a crisp white dress shirt, gazing out to sea.

  EVERY SECOND SATURDAY

  I stopped off in Mississippi just long enough to pick up the kids (I never even left the airport) and hop the next plane to California. I walked from my gate to the walkway to meet them, and the floodgates of the rest of my life opened up. The whole world felt right again with my sweet three at my side.

  Even so, my heart was shattered. I never shed a single tear at losing Liam; I had long since fallen out of love. But I was broken, ripped wide-open raw with pain at Buffalo’s brutal betrayal. I, of course, saw fucking Buffalos at every turn, every song reminded me of him. I cried myself to sleep at night after the kids were fast asleep. I sent him a string of humiliatingly desperate e-mails. Begging, then cussing him out. Norris told me to bill him for everything I’d given away in the divorce, and I did.

  Cruelly, he’d write me back that maybe it wasn’t forever, this split.

  As if I’d ever take him back.

  The only way I knew to ease my wounded heart was to soothe it with the passion of new lovers. The truth was, until Liam, I was never much interested in men. Just like Stormé, I grew up in a household with a father figure who left no room but his way, and his way did not include the homosexual way. So although my first love was the redheaded girl who sat in front of me in math, and my first girlfriend was the trumpet player in the high school band, when it came time to have children and marry, I talked myself into Liam. Liam was nonbinary before we called it that, as close to “girl” as a boy could get. After Liam, Buffalo sort of steamrolled me into a romance with him, and I was so aching for love and so afraid of the Mississippi courts that by then I went willingly. And I did love Buffalo—I loved him with a wild, passionate abandon. But now that I had no court battle, no Southern Baptist Mississippi judge looking over my shoulder, I could finally just be whom I wanted to be with, and who I wanted to be with was women.

  Every second Saturday in Sacramento, there are open art studios in the city’s midtown art district. My friends, who witnessed my total devastation, took it upon themselves to help me secure a date for each Second Saturday.

  I wasn’t looking for love; I was looking for distraction.

  I was reckless. I both wanted to get involved quickly and not get attached. I tended to come up with nicknames for each date. “The Badass Banker” was an Indian teller I met at my local branch who drove a Prius and had a lot of piercings.

  “Crème Brûlée” was a chef I met at an event who liked to feed me during sex.

  “Violence, Esquire” was a defense attorney with a masochistic exhibitionist side who liked to text me very bad things from court.

  “Professor Fuck” was an English professor who gave all her students As on their papers and liked to drink whiskey and write poetry all over my body in Sharpie.

  I would do almost anything to keep me from thinking about Buffalo, so raw was my heart.

  I don’t remember who it was who introduced me to “Quantum Starlight.” All I know is that when someone introduces you to a trans Italian quantum physicist who was the only girl in a family of brothers named after The Brothers Karamazov (her name was Alyosha), you pay attention. She was doing her postdoc at UCLA, and we talked online late into the night and on the phone for months before I finally agreed to go down to meet her.

  My friend Dana agreed I could stay with her in her loft downtown. I drove down and bunked out with Dana, catching up with each other on everything in our lives. I told her about the wild route to Alyosha and how it’d all come about by my heartache about Buffalo.

  When I told her he was Norman Mailer’s son, she said the truest thing that would ever be said about the situation: “Well, honey, of course Norman Mailer’s son broke your heart!”

  Later that night, I left to go meet Quantum Starlight at her flat. She waited for me on the street. I was surprised by her physical presence. She was smaller, more catlike than I’d expected. She had wild, curly dark hair, freckles, and a guttural tick in her throat.

  “Do you mind it?” she asked, a childlike look in her eyes.

  I peeled off my shirt, exposing all my surgery scars and knife wounds. “Do you mind it?”

  We made love into the morning hours, until we fell asleep, spent in each other’s arms.

  The next morning, my phone chimed with a text.

  It was Dana: turn on CNN, it’s Norman.

  I scrolled the news on my phone and saw the headline: LEGENDARY AMERICAN WRITER NORMAN MAILER DIES IN NEW YORK.

  I must have howled because Alyosha shot out of the bed in fear, then seeing my tears, came back and wrapped me up in her arms. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to be in Buffalo’s arms.

  I texted Buffalo: i’m so sorry. i love you.

  Something happened to me then; I just went numb. It was if all the pain I’d endured the last few years overwhelmed me. I couldn’t feel it. My lips went numb. They tensed up and took on an ugly, taut slash. I started to shiver, though I wasn’t cold.

  Alyosha looked at me, pushed my hair from my eyes.

  “You’re in shock, love.”

  I gazed up at her deep green eyes. Maybe it was her accent, but I couldn’t understand a word she said.

  “I’m going to help you now.”

  Alyosha began to pinch me, all over. Her fingers were fine and pale and slender. She pinched me along my thighs, on the underside of my breasts. She took tiny bites of my skin here and there between her teeth. These weren’t love bites or playful pinches; they hurt. They hurt a lot. Between these wounds, she kissed me. Bite, kiss. Pinch, kiss. Bite, kiss. Pinch, kiss. Eventually, my whole body felt on fire.

  I started to cry. I couldn’t
stop crying.

  “That’s the quantum science of sorrow, my love.”

  AND JUST WHEN

  Life went back to normal after that. No more Second Saturdays, no more pining for Buffalo. I went back to simple days with the sweet three. Teaching. Cooking dinners. Enduring the visitation schedule of dropping the kids off with Liam one week every month to his house in Sacramento. Keeping to myself. Writing poems.

  In some ways I gave up on life. I certainly gave up on the idea of love. I felt like I’d come so close to the edge so many times I couldn’t take that risk again. Every time I tried to have a little something extra, things went terribly wrong. So I finally accepted that custody of my children was perhaps the only thing I got.

  And that was enough. The years stretched out, and Liam bounced back and forth between supervised and unsupervised visitation. I knew now that when he was put on supervised visitation, it was only a matter of time before he’d win back unsupervised again. The only thing that still hung over my head unresolved was the house in Ocean Springs. Houses in that part of the world didn’t sell for four, sometimes five years after the storm.

  On the day the house papers came in the mail, offering me a paltry sum for my part of it (roughly 4 percent) and making the ten-day monthly unsupervised visitation permanent forever, I called both Addison and Dr. Colette. Both of them were in agreement: if I’d learned one thing over all these years, it was that the path of least resistance was always the safest for my children.

  I signed the papers.

  A strange feeling came over me.

  Grayson, ironically, was home from school that day. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, “I just can’t go.” He’d wandered out from his room that morning and announced, “I’m not going to school today.” I don’t know why, but I let him stay home. Avery’s friend Leilani’s mom came to pick up Avery and Aidan, pulling into our drive in her minivan, stepping out to wave through the window at me. As soon as I saw her wave, I saw the van begin to move, with Leilani and her two little brothers inside.

  Backward.

  Rolling.

  Down our drive.

  Across the street.

  Headed into the yard of our across-the-street neighbors.

  I screamed, pointed. Mrs. Yokomoto ran desperately, catching up to the van, tucking in by grabbing the wheel, and slamming her flip-flopped foot into the brake right before it hit the neighbor’s house.

  My heart was pounding double.

  Part of me thought, I can’t let this woman drive my children to school. But it was already time to go, and the kids were outside and everyone was laughing like it was all a great escapade, and in my brain I could only hear my own heartbeat, with a rhythmic song.

  My cell phone rang, and I answered it. I told my friend Patrick about the wild van chase and the court papers.

  Then I heard my voice say, “I don’t feel right; I gotta go.”

  That’s the last thing I remember. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the kitchen floor, with Mama yelling at me, “Alice Mary, get up! Did you take something?”

  Grayson sat at my head, with his small hand on my shoulder, his wide blue eyes staring down at me, quiet as a midnight hotel hall.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I mumbled.

  “You most certainly are not fine!” Mama shrieked, grabbing a mirror I’d brought out to my desk to pluck my brows in better light, “Look at yourself!” She thrust the mirror in my face, and then I saw myself—black eyes, what looked like a broken nose, a horrible scrape between my nose and upper lip, busted bottom lip, chin broke open like a too-ripe plum.

  “I’m bloody.”

  “You called 9-1-1, right, Grayson?” Mama asked over my head.

  “Yes, ma’am, I called them first. Then you. Then I put the dog in the crate, then I opened the front door. Then I came back and sat down here with Mama,” Grayson reported.

  His voice sounded so far away.

  “What happened to her?” Mama asked.

  “I was in the other room. I heard her tell someone on the phone she didn’t feel right, then I heard a big bang, then I ran in here and she was jerking around on the floor and her chair she was sitting in was way over there, and there was blood, so that’s when I called 9-1-1.”

  “You did good, honey,” Mama cooed. “Let’s get her up.”

  I could hear the ambulance in the distance, and I remember Mama and Grayson leading me over to the couch, where I was lying when the local firehouse paramedics came in. I knew them from the field trip in Aidan’s class the week before.

  “Alice, can you hear me?” one asked, shining a light back and forth in my eyes.

  “Yes, I have ears.”

  “Do you know what happened to you?”

  “Mama says I’m not okay. I think I broke my face,” I said quietly.

  “Did you take anything, Alice?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I need you to tell me if you did. It’s important.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Even if it’s something the doctor gave you.”

  “I didn’t take anything.”

  But I’d been having seizures for years, hiding them from almost everyone. They started shortly after Liam choked me. I went to a lady doctor in Mobile after the first one and convinced her to not keep a record of it. If Liam found out I had a seizure disorder, the motion to reverse custody would have come at the speed of light.

  “Sometimes I fall down,” I told the medic.

  “Is that what happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I really had no idea what happened.

  “Young man,” the medic asked Grayson, “are you the one who called?”

  “Yes, sir,” he answered.

  “Did you see her fall?”

  “No, sir. I heard a big crash, but by the time I came in, she was just shaking on the floor.”

  “Shaking, like convulsing?” the medic asked.

  “Yes, sir, I guess so,” Grayson answered.

  “Alice. Alice—look at me! I need you to stay awake.”

  “Yes, sir,” I mumbled. I felt as if I was looking up at them all from the bottom of a steamy terrarium.

  “Do you know what year it is?”

  Silence.

  “Alice, can you tell me what year it is?”

  “Nineteen sixty-six.”

  I heard Mama gasp then, a little cry escape, before she said, “That’s when she was born.”

  “Do you know what street you live on?”

  “I live on this lane.”

  “Which lane is that, Alice? Can you tell me the name of it?”

  “This one.”

  “Alice, let me ask you another question. I need you to think about it and answer for me if you can, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said from my resting place on the dirt at the bottom of the misty glass terrarium of my mind.

  “Who is the president?”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Who is the president of the United States?”

  “The flycatcher in chief.” I heard Grayson laugh, and then there was movement, and I felt myself strapped to a board and then slid into an ambulance. And sliding backward down the highway like someone going down a very clear drain.

  It was only later that we all pieced together what happened.

  First I opened the court papers: Recent, Relevant.

  Then Mrs. Yokomoto lost control of her van.

  The kids that were going to school went.

  I answered a call, hung up.

  Then I had a massive grand mal seizure, the worst I’d had since sustaining an acquired seizure disorder due to lack of oxygen to the brain.

  Due to lack of oxygen to the brain, while being strangled. By Liam, all those years before.

  I seized, while sitting in my zebra-striped office chair at my desk in the kitchen, under the window.

  Hit my head on the desk, smashing my keyboard with my face.

  Two black eyes and ruptured eye sockets tha
t would take three years to heal.

  Broken nose.

  Split lip.

  Still seizing, I bucked in the chair, and it tipped and slipped out under me, shooting across the kitchen floor.

  Slammed my head on the floor.

  On the floor. I still seized. Grayson came in. The ambulance came.

  A few days later, I learned my fate: not just a fall, a traumatic brain injury. I’d hit my head so hard I’d injured my brain, permanently.

  The skull is like a bowl, with sharp-edged ridges lining the inside. When shook, the brain hits on these ridges and gets ripped and torn.

  A coup contrecoup with diffuse axonal shearing of the brain.

  In layman’s terms? Shaken baby syndrome.

  Only I’d survived.

  Thanks to Grayson, yet again.

  I could no longer read books. About an hour after the fall, I could not speak in sentences. The neurologist finally stopped me as I said, “But I say, I say, I say, ambulance, I say, words, row words.” I was trying to explain I spoke in sentences at first.

  “When the edges of the brain are torn like that, the damage keeps settling in for hours.”

  The damage keeps settling in.

  Just like abuse: the damage keeps settling in.

  I went home a few days later, dragging my left leg, unable to move my left arm, unable to speak in sentences, no longer able to read a book. My short-term memory had about a ten-minute span. While the kids were at school, I’d lie in bed for hours, then get up finally and drag my leg across the room to my bathroom. Once there, I’d stand perplexed, not sure what the toilet was.

  Then the pee would run down my leg and it’d come to me: toilet.

  I slept about eighteen hours a day the first few months. When I rested my head on the pillow, lying on my side, I could hear my heartbeat in my ear like a conch shell, roaring.

  Recent. Relevant. Recent. Relevant. Recent. Relevant. Recent. Relevant.

  I could no longer drive. A few weeks after the injury, the permanent visitation schedule kicked in. Mama drove me and the kids downtown to Liam’s second residence (by now, he had a place in Midtown not far from where we met originally, as well as in New Orleans). The kids got out of the car, crying silently. They each came to the passenger side of Mama’s Oldsmobile.