Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  “He’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “He’s moved on.”

  Had I done something? I couldn’t think of any good reason for Wheaton to run out on me. I tormented his mother. She had to know his whereabouts. Finally, a few days after New Year’s Day, 1992, she said, “I can tell you that he’s fine, Prudence.” She took a deep breath. “He’s written you a letter.” She took another deep breath. The door was open only enough for me to see her face. She looked tired. Wheaton’s father, Rick, came up close beside her and extended a note for me. Lily looked like she might cry.

  “Where is he?”

  In unison, they shook their heads.

  Had they somehow put him into a Magnolia Gardens for grown-ups? For a split second, I wondered if Lily was still sleeping with the contractor. Was Rick still struggling with his novel? But Wheaton’s parents, for my purposes, were more like appendages than people. They were a link to Wheaton, little more. They closed the door and I crossed the street with my note. Sitting on the front stoop where I’d first sat, knee to knee, seven years old with Wheaton Jones at my side, I opened his letter. It was printed in pencil on notebook paper. The Ws looked swirly and capped like waves. Those were Wheaton’s Ws.

  Dear Prudence,

  I have to go away now. It’s bittersweet to end on a grand number like ten, thumb to pinky two times. You were the most important person in my life. I wish that I had told you once that I love you. Why didn’t I say it? I do. I love you.

  This isn’t about you. You’ll be all right.

  Remember: I can see things no one else can see, so I know that you’re going to be just fine. Good luck with the birds.

  Love,

  Wheaton

  What upset me most in his letter was the use of the past tense. I was the most important person in his life. I had been replaced. Ours was a platonic relationship, and although I’d had a few dates in high school, as far as I knew Wheaton had not. He was a virgin. At first, I assumed that Skye Bouvier had stolen him away from me. I knew nothing about her, but when I visited Saint Mark’s shortly after receiving Wheaton’s letter, I tracked her down. She seemed harmless. They’d been friends. She thought he was interesting. My accusations of a tryst bothered her. She had a boyfriend. She and Wheaton were never more than friends. She’d tried to help him.

  Apparently, at fall break, Wheaton had left school and never returned. Shortly thereafter, he’d written a letter to the chair of the arts department, explaining that he did not belong at Saint Mark’s. By the time I started investigating, Wheaton was no longer enrolled at Saint Mark’s.

  Skye said that she could show me his old place—if I wanted. She was sorry that I’d lost my friend, but she didn’t know where he was. Maybe his parents knew? I didn’t tell her that he’d left me, that there’d been a note.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  Skye took me to his warehouse studio. It hadn’t been rented yet, and she still had a key.

  I nearly got sick on the concrete floor. In addition to finding the usual things, like clothes and toiletries, pen-and-ink, charcoal still-life drawings—what looked like early class assignments—there was a separate pile of drawings done on kraft paper. These were drawings of wings, but they were rendered architecturally, with an eye for utility, including formulas and measurements, things I didn’t understand. In the warehouse’s center was an eyesore, the culmination of Wheaton’s designs: a winged monstrosity. In the winter of 1992, I still felt my wings, and I felt them at the sight of this thing Wheaton had wrought. I felt them sharp and bulging against my back. Wheaton had made hulking wings, heavy and robotic, like someone’s penance for a crime. They were composed of metal, riveted, each one the length and width of an average-size dining room table, the edges ragged and rusted, serrated like steak knives. Upon closer examination, it appeared that the edges had been intentionally sharpened with some kind of tool. My wings were ghostly, naked to the average eye, felt from the inside out. Wheaton’s wings—if you can imagine something so ugly being called a pair of wings—were connected by three butt hinges, leaving the faintest smell of WD-40 on my hands. Beneath the hinges, there were two industrial-size red-and-white-striped canvas straps that Wheaton presumably wore over his shoulders. Skye and I could not lift the contraption, but she assured me that he had in fact spent a good deal of time donning the metal wings. She showed me where a pulley had at one time been attached to the wings—causing them to open and shut. There was no way to tell Skye that I’d been born with wings. It wasn’t her business.

  I asked to be alone.

  Skye obliged, calling Wheaton “a sweet kid.” After Skye had gone, I rifled through his things, searching for clues, coming up empty-handed. His vanishing was like a scene from a bad science-fiction movie, where someone disappears from their bed and winds up on an alien spaceship. I started to think that maybe his letter was forged.

  His mattress was on the floor. I sat down to catch my breath, to gaze at the mechanical wings. What was Wheaton doing? Men don’t fly, not without meeting their doom. Bird girls hardly fly, only for a few seconds, only a few feet off the ground. I fell back onto the mattress, wrapping myself in his blue pinstriped sheets. He was gone. I was alone.

  Freddie and Veronica sat in our old den. It was theirs now. They were in love or something. Freddie tried to reason with me. “Wheaton must’ve had his reasons.”

  “Like what?”

  That was the question no one could answer.

  Veronica suggested I call the Old Man. “If there’s anything the Old Man can understand, it’s the business of getting on with life.” At this, Freddie laughed. “I’m serious,” Veronica said.

  I have always taken my studies seriously, and so I returned to the University of Florida and completed my spring semester. After my last exam, I flew to New York to see the Old Man. I rehearsed a hundred ways of explaining my feelings of helplessness. When he opened the door, I fell into his arms. I felt guilty because I was upset by the loss of one friend when the Old Man had lost nearly everyone he loved. Loss, I soon learned from him, is not measured in numbers. It’s not comparative. It’s in here. I’m touching my chest now.

  I showered and my Oma fed me. In the den, the Old Man acted the part of maestro playing his favorite records. He smoked his pipe and drank his Black Label beer. “You are chasing a ghost,” he told me. “When it is the right time, you will find Wheaton again. You are not in charge of the universe.”

  “I never said I was.”

  “You are arrogant because of you being young. You can’t help it. You think you are the bandleader. You are not.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m not like that.”

  “Quiet,” he told me. “I want to hear the music.”

  My Oma smiled at us. “I’ll get a snack for you.”

  The Old Man puffed on his cigar. “How many years did you know Wheaton?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Were they good years?”

  Of course they were good years.

  The Old Man said what I was thinking: “Of course they were good years. You love him, and he loves you. So what is wrong with you? Are you greedy? Is twelve good years not enough for you? What number of years will make you happy?”

  There was no magic number. There was nothing to do. Like humans, birds mourn the loss of fledglings and mates. There are a thousand variant weeping songs to sing. I had to sing mine and get on with it. That is what I did. Now I am supposed to do it again, this time for the Old Man.

  21

  November 1989

  Four hundred ninety-two miles west of Moscow, in Vilnius, Lithuania, Lukas Blasczkiewicz unrolled a sheet of canvas. Squinting at the speckled material, he looked for the outline of an angel. In everything, he looked for the winged girl who’d probably met an icy grave in Siberia. Because of her, he was not only a photographer, he was a painter and collector of
wings—real wings, paper wings, wings formed from clay and glass, discarded cardboard, wrapping paper, particleboard, and packing material. Lukas Blasczkiewicz believed in miracles. After taking her photograph, he’d kept his own roll of film, developed it in secret, and printed the black-and-white photographs. With the negatives, he used milk and paint to add color. He experimented with techniques, curious about the bright light surrounding the girl. Each time he manipulated the negatives, he discovered something new.

  Drawing inspiration from the photographs, he painted the girl singularly white, singularly red, singularly wrapped in her angel wings, cocooned as she might’ve been in that holding cell. He loved her, always and forever, for giving him the gift of sight. Every time a bird flew past, Lukas caught his breath. God lives here now. Twenty years ago, his mother died. At the funeral, Lukas had dropped a small locket with a picture of her, the winged girl, into the grave. His sisters were at the burial. His father was not; he was bedridden, dying the next year. His family was a shambled lot: one of his sisters was taking medication for something called manic-­depressive illness; another had lost three children to influenza. The third was so emaciated, self-starved, she looked like a corpse. Lukas might’ve been sad if he didn’t see a little light in each of them, a glimmer of possibility. Because of her, he saw this light in everyone and everything.

  Lukas’s shop dated back to the seventeenth century and was located near the former Church of Saint Casimir. Under Soviet rule, the church was now the Museum of Atheism. Lukas couldn’t pass the former church without snickering at the irony. He remembered that the winged girl had paid reverence to Saint Casimir. The fact that the Soviets would convert a church into a museum of atheism amplified the absurdity of the communist state. A former Polish and Lithuanian prince, Saint Casimir was a pious man who reportedly waited predawn for the chapel gates to be unlocked so that he could pray to the Virgin Mary. At age twenty-five, Saint Casimir died from tuberculosis. In 1522, after miracles were reported and attributed to him, he was canonized. It was rumored that his coffin, removed by the Russians, could cure illness. Lukas believed in such things. In fact, he was the kind of man to buy magic beans. He never considered himself foolish. Just faithful.

  In the early morning, while the town slept, Lukas collected scrap metal in the form of tin cans and wire. He melted the metal down, cutting out and soldering wings. With a circa 1955 camera, he took moving pictures of the wings fluttering in the light of Vilnius square, outside the Museum of Atheism. He hung them, each pair, from the ceiling of his shop. Some of them he left metallic, while others he painted every color of the morning and night sky. Inside, he’d built a bubble machine that vented onto the street and filled the narrow passageway running perpendicular to his storefront with iridescent bubbles of all shapes and sizes. Children and adults passing by pointed at his three-story home. “An inventor lives there.”

  “No, he’s a magician.”

  “He makes movies.”

  “He paints.”

  “He takes photographs.”

  “I think he is mad.”

  Lukas Blasczkiewicz spent his life making and creating. Ceaseless and devoted, he thought always of the girl with the wings who’d saved him from selfishness, depression, and self-loathing. Because of her, he saw the miracle of life everywhere. In butterflies and beetles, in the sky and underfoot. The antithesis of his Bolshevist enthusiast father, Lukas believed in more than men and their egoistic ventures. Solitary, he never felt alone.

  In November 1989, on the same night that the Vilkas family prepared to fly west, first to Saint Petersburg, and then to Vilnius, Lukas Blasczkiewicz pulled open the heavy drapes that hid the interior of his shop from the curious passersby. He walked out onto the sidewalk, snowflakes the size of fists falling fast. The world was white like a photograph before it develops. Full of possibility. He stood back, looking through the plate-glass window to admire what he had wrought from the outside in. Cupping his face to the glass, he smiled to see his handmade paper lampshades, lit by candles, conical and square, suspended at different heights, hanging from his tin-plated ceiling. The shop emanated warmth. It was a refuge, a montage of who he’d become. The walls were covered with bright paintings and black-and-white photographs, each work, each wing rendered in as many forms and hues as he could imagine. The wind whipped his hair, and the black cat, her whiskers streaked white, meowed to return indoors. Lukas scratched his chin, thinking, It is good and right to look from the outside in. Too many people don’t stop to see themselves inside the snow globe, the big hand shaking the sphere. Lukas grinned at the staircase he’d built from wrought iron. It spiraled to a second floor where he kept his books, everything from Beethoven to Byzantinism, but his favorite books were about flight, about the Wright Brothers—Orville and Wilbur—about Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. He prized picture books with fairies, Angels in Art, Birds of Eastern Europe. He’d made this. The cat wound round his ankles and the wind gusted from the east. Lukas held up his finger. Something other than snow was blowing, heading their way. His thighs shivered. He bent down for Cat. She nuzzled and burrowed in his sleeve.

  22

  Old Man, 1989

  No one warns you that when you grow old, your heart that’s been cooperating and keeping quiet, like it should do, is suddenly going to speak up and make you a driveling wreck.

  I was a curmudgeon. I often wish that I had remained that way, to keep these blasted tears at bay. I feel my heart broken how it was nearly five decades ago, when the death of my family was raw, before I survived Germany and met Ingeburg.

  When we were in Moscow, I knew that we had to get the hell out before Ingeburg succumbed to her fears. I knew that once we were in Lithuania, she would feel the land that I had been telling her about for so many decades. Because she was my bride, I thought of Lithuania as her home too. After all our years together, it seemed like she had to have known my sisters and my mother and father—even though she dismissed these notions, calling me crazy, insisting she was German and not Lithuanian. She could not be with this old man and not have some of my Lithuania rub off on her.

  First we flew from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, and from there we boarded a plane for Vilnius, Lithuania. We sat on that damn plane for seven hours. It was like being held hostage because we were ready to leave the official Soviet Union for the so-called Western Province. We were ready to be in Vilnius, a grand city for six hundred years. I could not believe that finally I would see my homeland again. Finally, my son Freddie would see where I was born, where his family came from. And dear Prudence would see the steeples and the stained-glass windows filled with angels’ wings.

  It was worth the wait. I can tell you that it was worth Moscow. Part of me had feared that the Soviet Union had razed the churches and the university, my university, the largest university in Europe, but they had not. They had spared my city. The Gothic and Baroque churches, dating from the fifteenth century, were the same as I remembered, only the crucifixes were gone. Many of the stained-glass windows were covered with plastic tarps. It was an odd thing to see. One of the churches was a garage and another was a warehouse. There was even one turned into a radio factory. But my university where I had attended for one semester had been spared. It is the oldest university in Eastern Europe. I told Freddie and I told Prudence and even Veronica, who is not Lithuanian or German but from some fishing village or something. There were gardens and thirteen courtyards. Even in November, flowers bloomed. When I was seventeen, I had climbed to the top of the bell tower with a girl I fancied, and I remember it was May or June and the sun was setting and we could smell jasmine from the garden below, and that girl kissed me. I wish that I remembered her name.

  On the streets in Vilnius, I took hold of Ingeburg’s hand. I was never afraid that she would die in Moscow, because she is the strongest woman I have ever met, but I was worried about her. In Lithuania, she was regaining her strength as I knew she would. Prudence
was skipping in the sunlight and I mistook her for my sister Daina. She wore black tights and short boots, a wool skirt like a Scottish kilt and a matching hat. It was an outfit like my sister would’ve worn. It is not easy to feel things, not pain or joy, because pain sits with you, and joy is fleeting, easily swatted like a bee. I know all too well these things, and even in the city I cherished, I contained my joy because seeing, touching, and smelling my birthplace, walking streets I remembered vividly as a child was untenable and unimaginable. Sometimes I feared it was a dream. The life I knew would be gone and once again I would be screaming, waking cold between the sheets. It is hard to feel deeply. It is easier to erect walls. When I listen to the great composers, I can settle in their world and hide. I am safe. Music is a refuge. I think the boy understands this. I used to think that he understood very little, but there is more of me in him than I thought. If there had been no war and no purging, would I be more like Freddie? It was stupid to imagine such things. If there had been no madness, there would be no Ingeburg. There would be no Freddie. There would be no Prudence. I might’ve married the girl whose name I can’t remember, the one I kissed on the bell tower. These were the mad thoughts of an emotional man seeing his homeland after forty-eight years.

  On our first day in Vilnius, I took my family toward the Upper Castle. I wanted them to see the splendor that surpassed anything in Moscow. On the way there, I grabbed hold of Natasha Sluska’s gloved hand, startling the woman. “Do you like your job?” I wanted to know. She pushed her spectacles up her nose and declared that she liked it very much. At this nonsense, I told her that she was not a smart woman. Ingeburg gasped and told Natasha Sluska, “He does not mean it. Do not listen to him. He says that to me all the time.” Natasha Sluska smiled her polite Russian smile. Her thin lips were chapped white, blending in with her face. I told the Russian woman that I was tired of her company. She sneezed and Ingeburg said, “Gesundheit.”