by Jac Jemc
I moved numbly to the library. There was nothing. Even the heat of the sunlight through the skylights was absent. I could hear her downstairs now, but I hadn’t seen her pass me. How she must have moved.
I descended the service stairs, emerged in the kitchen, now the plain white interior of a box. No countertop, no pipes emerged where the sink had once run. There was only the rectangular absence of the doorway to the dining room. It felt hard to breathe, like the oxygen was fleeing the air.
The dining room loomed pitch black, and as soon as I walked through the doorway I could not even see the way back into the kitchen. No light stretched in. I could still hear the intruder ahead of me. I felt for the next doorway, but all I encountered was space. I tried to find a wall, but no matter how far I wandered, the only solid objects the room held were the floor and my feet. I heard the hard click of the heavy front door and moved towards it, but several minutes later, I had still not arrived. “Grandfather?” I called. The silence answered me firmly.
I was lost, exhausted, full, satisfied, alone.
When all you have is everything, the only thing left to desire is for every bit of it to be taken away.
The Dark Spot
By the fourth day I snuck into the smoky basement and pulled open the pressboard panel door of the furnace room. Cobwebs caught my forehead as I reached for the light chain. I pawed my face clean and cleared a path to the old weight bench that hadn’t been moved in thirty years. Balanced on each end of the bar were old rubber Halloween masks: Death and the Wolfman, hidden from us as children because of how frighteningly realistic they were. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I whispered to them before reminding myself that I’d come downstairs to be alone. I sat down and laid out a week’s worth of yawns.
I’d spent the holiday clapping for every song my nieces performed, filling myself with apple desserts, and rehashing the plot points of past Thanksgivings with my sisters and parents.
I held my head in my hands and wondered if a hundred years in this filthy closet could be enough to undo the past few days. My inner eye zeroed in on an escape, but there were rides to be given to the airport in the morning, babies to be cuddled, dishes to be washed. The polite thing to do was stay.
I remembered that final holiday before anyone went away to college, or moved out of state, or spent Thanksgiving with a boyfriend’s family. A distinguished year if only for the fact of our obliviousness of how easy everything would never be again. We dedicated the abundance of food and quarrels to the notion of family, and we did it with gusto. We daughters clinked our etched wineglasses filled with sparkling grape juice and made sure we looked everyone in the eye with our mischievous smirks. This was the last holiday I could remember without the nausea. After that, I started to feel ill from the pressure. From the feeling that everyone was supposed to live more on holidays, pack a year’s worth of a relationship into several days, feel all that love and hate in such quick succession. It was all I could do to find the darkest spot in the house, the room where one of my sisters had grown penicillin on oranges back in junior high and where Halloween masks too scary for little girls were hidden out of sight, where I could sit and let my mind loosen.
I had tried to turn the weekend into a science, to make it into a game I could learn the rules for, to escape the cliché of it being difficult to be home for the holidays. If you asked me who I loved most in the world, the people I would list were under that roof, but spending four days with their adult selves, with the spouses they’d chosen and the children they’d wrought and the opinions they’d formed where curiosity had once lived, was more than I could manage.
Alone in the furnace room, I thought of a person trying to remember a phone number while someone else shouted random numbers in their ear. I thought of trying to sync three clocks perfectly with only two hands. I thought of impossible pulses.
There are times when I know I’m a part of something, even when I’m not actively adding to that thing. Like the dim spot on a fluorescent sign, I can feel the other sections buzzing around me, and I know people can make sense of the words, because the light of the working parts is enough. They can fill in that dark gap because they know what should be there. And sometimes the hardest thing is to be recognized as a part of something that I know I had nothing to do with, no matter how much I wish I did.
Women in Wells
The certainty clings to his smile from the minute she opens the door. They stare at each other recognizing bits that have faded and others that have taken shape over the years. She makes some indecipherable gesture with her eyes, breaking the connection, and laughs. “You’re too good to be true. They’ll be home soon, I think. I’ll wait with you.”
He comes in, thankfully unable to think up an excuse not to. She puts on a record and asks if he wants something to drink. He nods, and when she leaves the room he sits. Everything around him is older now and the same. He remembers playing here as a child, with these brothers who are due back any minute. These brothers and this sister of theirs haven’t changed the house at all since their grandparents died. He breathes in the smell of mothballs. The scent comes from all sides.
When she returns, the glass looks dusty, and he sets it on a coaster. The soul music on the turntable hustles a circus into her muscles and he sits watching her dance, watching the glimmer of her watch face can-can around the room.
It’s taken him a moment to figure it out, but this girl reminds him of someone. She reminds him of that woman in the well when he was a child, just up the road. That woman he told no one about, who’d spoken to him calmly, who’d seemed not happy but certain of her place all the way down there; that woman who’d just stopped speaking to him one day. No flashlight could shine far enough to see if she had gotten free or if she was just being quiet, and he couldn’t tell anyone she’d stopped talking to him because they’d wonder why he never tried to help her out. This girl who answered the door? Who said just a few words as she let him in? This girl who he’s known forever, but not for a while? The voice this girl grew into is the voice of that woman in the well.
All the while she dances, trying not to color so exactly between the lines, slapping the walls. She wonders, beneath the beat, if this man won’t get up and join her; what could he possibly be thinking about her while she willows and swipes around the room?
The music slows and she calms herself and sits in the rocking chair. This man, here. Her brothers, nowhere. This girl can’t be still and because she can’t be still? She begins to whip her tongue around her mouth, counting her teeth: twenty-eight. Wasn’t she supposed to have thirty-two? The number thirty-two sticks out in her mind.
He watches her, the lump moving under her jaw skin, and thinks about how he still sees her as a girl. But she’s beyond that. Surely puberty has wrenched its way through her system and, by now, established well-worn patterns. She is still lithe, pale-looking. Girl-like. They both have evidence in their minds of the other being younger.
He wants to hear that voice again. For years his pride has named itself plainly around pretty girls, but with this one, each thing he thinks to say seems a high-handed sermon delivered from beneath a cartoon mask. He distracts himself with the newspaper from last Sunday lying on the coffee table. He leafs through to the crossword and fills in a few squares. He looks up at her and finds her eyes. He never saw the woman in the well, but he knows this is how she looked up at the silhouette of him against the daylight. Disconcerted, he reads her the next crossword clue: “River in which the heroine of The Scamps of London drowns?” This girl? She hums her elegiac response, lowly, “The Thames.”
He escapes behind the crossword again, eager to hide his excitement at hearing her voice. Yes, that was it. He is sure now. It is full and vacant in the same ways as the voice of the woman in the well. How funnily life was able to fold on itself.
She tucks her feet up into the chair, happy to have company but wasting the opportunity to make legendary decisions. She peels her nails and thinks of where her brot
hers might be. Until this guest had arrived, she’d repeated a mantra from nowhere, again and again, out loud at first, until it wouldn’t stop itself even in the silence: “To become abandoned, you’ve only to extinct the others.” These aphorisms had been showing up for months now. She watches the window, sure her brothers will pucker into focus at any moment.
The man will shift on the couch, squeaking against the plastic cover, and pretend to look at the newspaper while he threads her voice through his head. The girl will rip off the tips of her nails one by one and the same sentence will travel quietly into and out of her mouth. She will salivate and swallow it whole.
These two will be in this room together for hours, and what originally felt like a solitary stubbornness, slowly, will show itself to be spineless. The brothers will arrive back, with apologies. The girl will retreat, and the visitor will never admit what he’s heard.
Marbles Loosed
The question I asked myself was simple: How is it that someone can be lost in a system that exists for keeping track?
When I was a child, people told me I had pearl eyes. I’d rub my sandy fingers in them, sure that was the only way to keep them smooth and beautiful.
I don’t remember my momma, but I remember being kept warm on dark, windy beaches, and I know that must have been her. If you’re asking if I remember her face though? No.
I remember the face of my first home after her. I remember because I had to decipher it, so I could predict when it was time to run and when it was time to hold still. I remember that face thinking I should know more than I did, and punishing me for it.
I remember the pink, pulpy flower face of my grandma. She didn’t try too long to keep me. It took them a while to find her, and when they did, she required convincing to think with her own mind that I was hers. On the first day, she called me Little Bird, but by the second she’d started seeing her daughter in me, and the darkness dipped in.
I remember the expiring Phoebe family who took me in, all of them withering like they’d gone without for too long. How they convinced the state they could stand another child was beyond me, but then my roots were shallow, and they were getting more cash than the raising of me required.
I imagined myself a velvet bag of marbles loosed on a hardwood floor. I’d been scattered so quickly that there was no time to think about what direction to go. Now, I try to look back at my childhood to remember, but it’s hard to pick out moments. Every time I was placed with a new family was just a layer of the time before.
I remember the kingdom of heaven and finger touches on my forehead, like belief could seep through my skin, deep into my brain coils, and me asking questions and being told the Lord would provide any answers I needed, and scowling at being denied the opportunity to learn.
I remember listening to phone calls the blond one made to my case worker, lie-telling about some capsules she planted in my bag, and me, too young and too shy to know how to pin it back on her, but then if I won that case, if I proved I wasn’t lying, the outcome would be no different—either way they were putting me in another home, and that’s what everyone wanted.
I remember what it was to be read stories before bed, and hearing about how Goldilocks found a house where she didn’t belong, but before the bear family kicked her out, she at least got some warm food and a good nap in. I remember believing that story more than the other fairy tales, because there was no happily ever after, just Goldie running off into the woods and the bears left to deal with the feelings of their privacy having been breached.
There were houses with locks on the insides of rooms and houses with locks on the outside, and I was used to feeling trapped either way.
I remember outgrowing clothes and repairing split seams myself, my shirt getting a little smaller each time I sewed it shut. I tried to swipe dresses from my sisters, from my foster mom, but they’d swipe them back and so I’d eat little of what was put in front of me for dinner, in the hopes of better fitting the clothes the next day.
I remember the man who would play the drums in the night. I’d go downstairs to tell him I couldn’t sleep, and he’d beckon for me to come closer. He’d breathe his warm beer breath on my head while he hugged me and said he was sorry. After I’d tucked myself back in, the rhythms would start again.
An instant’s rallying glow is numbed when you dwell too low. I remember, after a hard rain that broke through the roof, being forced out onto the earth, and the wind wearing away half of my complexion. I began with an old-fashioned heart, but it was demolished every time I dropped it out of myself in purple syllables. I grew hard.
I remember the family that put the video tapes back in the wrong cases. When I thought I was going to watch a cartoon, panting men and shrieking women filled the screen with all of their skin-colored shapes.
I remember my teeth falling out my head and no one telling me they would grow back bigger and stronger. I remember trying to match my mind to each home and thinking it wasn’t normal to adjust my opinions so much. I remember learning the continents for school and thinking that if you define something big enough, it’s harder to recognize the changes.
It’s tough to remember the individuals that housed me, but I can rattle ’em off in order easy. I listened to a radio story about men who memorize the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards. They can memorize and recite each card in under two minutes, but ask ’em to tell you where the queen of diamonds is and they’d stare blankly back at you. That felt familiar.
I remember the moment I learned that one day they’d believe I was capable of caring for myself, and I remember the counting. I remember running away, trying to prove I knew better. I remember being brought back, and knowing it would only be days before they’d find a new home where they could lose me again.
Bent Back
At fourteen they diagnosed me with scoliosis, which basically meant my spine kept trying to sneak west. My parents had drained their bank account in a series of bad investments. My uncle, who’d cajoled my mother and father into the first round of some doofus’s pyramid scheme, had recently thrown himself off the Golden Gate Bridge. That doesn’t seem like an especially original way to die until you consider that we all live in Chicago and he had to buy a plane ticket to get himself that far.
The doctors thought the curve in my back was minor enough that it could be effectively treated with a brace. No surgery would be needed if we acted quickly. My parents paid for the brace with money they didn’t have and trusted me to use it while they carried on with their strange, self-obsessed performance of financial grief. Every night my mother rebalanced the budget, artfully arranging her ledger, bills, and adding machine on the dining room table, while my father wasted cash at the bar on the corner. It seemed like part of being married was promising to be blind sometimes.
I wore the brace around the house, out the front door, and back in, but by the time I got to school each day, I’d crumpled the brace into a duffle bag I carried in addition to my backpack. I could tell the sway was worsening, but no one else was watching. In gym class doing side bends, I could slap my left palm flat on the floor, but when I pulled myself over to the right, I could barely knock my head parallel to the ground.
My sister, five years older than me, had just been admitted to the Art Institute and couldn’t get enough of painting pictures of my screwy spine. I took my shirt off for her almost every day, forgetting about awkward adolescence, but she exaggerated the bow from the start and when it started looking more and more like her pictures, she never even noticed. When I absented myself from her studio in the garage, she worked on paintings of wigs and the legs of little girls younger than me. I don’t think I’d even gotten my first period. I still powdered my armpits with talcum, just to have some responsibility, not because I needed to.
I suppose, looking back, I was making some sort of attention grab by not wearing the brace, but spines don’t warp that quickly. My attempt performed more of a sleight of hand than a leap through a flaming hoop. I h
oped someone would notice and care for me or about me. I searched for truths.
My sister played her sad music loudly as she painted me and I knew that biology was preparing to rip its way through my system and change everything.
I’d always been an entrepreneur of sorts: lemonade stands, dog walking, friendship bracelets. I’d also started sliding cigarettes from my father’s packs one at a time. I’d carry them in a special case in my backpack and sell them to the kids at school for a dollar. I never smoked one myself. I feared stunting my growth—ironic to say the least. I’d been saving up the dollars for a puppy. I’d done my research and began visiting the pound on my way home from school almost every other day on the lookout for a dog worthy of my care. I found a mangy mutt of a thing, young but not so cute that anyone else liked him. I knew my parents wouldn’t pay for the supplies or the dog’s shots, what with their monetary anguish, so I was waiting until I had a critical mass of singles in a roll. Then I would unveil my hard-earned dollars and show them that I had saved up enough to care for a dog for a whole year. I hadn’t figured out yet how to explain how I’d earned the money. I worried they’d accuse me of stealing right from their wallets and demand I give the cash back. The thought of the added step of stealing and selling the cigarettes being totally worthless drove me wild with injustice. My parents would grab back the fistful of dollars and I’d have to live knowing I’d aided my fellow students in the accrual of a deadly habit.
On Sundays my mother dragged my sister and me to church. I mostly ignored everything that went on and daydreamed about boys and dogs and what would happen when my parents finally found me out in public without that brace on.