Flying in Place

by Susan Palwick

  “I’ll start cooking right away,” Mom said. I closed my eyes to keep the room from tilting, and opened them again to find a cool hand on my forehead and Donna standing over me, frowning. I kept getting the eerie feeling that Ginny was hiding somewhere just out of sight, and that if I moved my head quickly enough I’d be able to catch a glimpse of her. But I was too weak to move.

  “Would you hand me the Bible, please?” I asked Donna.

  “The Bible?” said my father. I could hear his voice, but I didn’t have the energy to turn to look at him. “Isn’t that a little melodramatic? You’ve caught a rotten virus, Emma, but you don’t need last rites.”

  “That’s not what I’m looking for,” I said, and felt Ginny’s unseen presence come closer as Donna handed me the old, thick book with its tattered leather cover.

  “What are you looking for, Emma?”

  “Psalms,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her which one.

  “Yes, the psalms are lovely.”

  Lovely, I thought. You really are Mom’s sister, aren’t you?

  Here it was. Psalm 139, and Ginny had only quoted half of it. The next four verses were about me.

  For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.

  I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

  My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

  Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect, and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

  Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. Ginny had brought Mom the poem the night before she went into the hospital; by then, Mom was already pregnant with me. The Bible slid off my lap, hitting the carpet with a soft thump, and Donna bent to retrieve it. “Sleep until dinner,” she told me. “We’ll wake you up when it’s time to eat.”

  I closed my eyes and slipped out of my body. Ginny was curled up in one corner of the ceiling, looking down at me, beautiful again but sad, so sad. I flew up to join her, misery weighting me like lead.

  “I read it,” I told her. “I read more of it. You brought Mom that poem just before you died, and told her it was about him.”

  She nodded, her thin hands trembling.

  “Only Mom didn’t understand. You’d found the most beautiful way you could to say it; you must have searched for weeks to find just the right poem, so that maybe she’d listen. And it didn’t do any good.”

  “For lo,” Ginny said, her voice quavering, “there is not a word in my tongue…”

  Last rites, my father had said. Had he seen Ginny searching through the psalms too? Had she been lying on the couch the way I was now, too weak to move? “Ginny,” I said, “how did you die?”

  She just looked at me, as pale as ghosts are supposed to be. “Pneumonia,” I said. “But healthy kids don’t get pneumonia, not unless something else is wrong with them. And you were so skinny. Why were you so skinny?”

  Ginny was always a picky eater. She plucked at a strand of her hair with thin, thin fingers, and I remembered my health teacher’s droning lecture about anorexia. “Nobody should want to look like me,” Ginny had told me. “You have to eat.” And Donna had said she was skinny even before she got sick, because she’d been saving her lunch money for a train ticket.

  And the bruises were from gymnastics. Sure. “You stopped eating,” I said. “Maybe it was to save money at first, but after Donna sent you back home it was so he’d stop bothering you, so you wouldn’t have to be a woman, so you’d die and be able to get away from him. You stopped eating and you got pneumonia and you died. And he’s a doctor, and he blamed it on the fucking flu.”

  She was shivering again, and I wanted to comfort her but I couldn’t. She was a ghost, and I was alive. Nothing I could say to her would make any difference. “Ginny,” I said, “is that what happened? Please tell me. Is that the way it happened? I need to know.”

  “He said—he said he couldn’t help himself.” I could hardly hear her. “He said it was because he loved me, because I was so beautiful, even more beautiful than Mom. He said if she found out it would break her heart, because then she’d know I was more beautiful than she was. I told him there wouldn’t be anything for her to find out if it wasn’t happening, but he wouldn’t stop. I told him he was hurting me, and he wouldn’t stop. ‘I can’t help myself,’ he said. ‘You’re so beautiful, and I love you so much. Any man who sees you will love you. You have to find some way to stop us, because we can’t help ourselves.’ How could he do that, if he loved me? I tried everything I could, but he wouldn’t stop.”

  “And so you stopped everything,” I said. “To get away.” I was glad I wasn’t in my body then, because if I had been the rage would have killed me: shattered my lungs, burst some vital artery in my brain, destroyed crucial organs past any ability of my father’s to repair them. “You got away as far as you could. You died, because that was the only thing you could do to stop him—and even then it didn’t stop him, because he’s doing the same thing to me, and I’m not even beautiful. Ginny, he was lying: it wasn’t your fault.”

  “But he said—”

  “He was lying! The same way he lied to me! He told you it was because you were beautiful and he told me it was because you were dead, but it happened to both of us!”

  I remembered pointing to my bed, that first dawn I’d seen her, and saying, It’s your fault, and I was so ashamed that I couldn’t look at her anymore. I had to make her understand, somehow. I had to. “Ginny, I was lying too. It wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could. You tried to be strong and you tried to be perfect, and then you ran away to Aunt Donna’s and everybody thought it was just because you wanted to join the circus, and then you started starving yourself so you wouldn’t be beautiful anymore. And then you did the hardest thing there was, the thing he’d told you never, ever to do; you told Mom, and you didn’t even do it for yourself. You did it for me, and I wasn’t even born yet.”

  I remembered the balloon animals my father had made for me, those fragile creatures with their pitiful little legs, and how unconcerned he’d been when one of them broke. Don’t be upset. I can make another one, see? Is that what he’d told Mom, when Ginny started getting sick? Had he gotten her pregnant again because he knew Ginny was dying, because he wanted another kid to breathe on?

  I couldn’t think about that now, because it hurt too much. I had to keep talking. I had to make Ginny understand. “You told Mom for me, to try to protect me. You didn’t need to do that. You were going to die anyway. You could have just died, and been rid of all of it. And when you told her she didn’t believe you. She didn’t want to know what you were talking about; she wanted to think you were a poetic little girl quoting the Bible. And so you had to come back, and remember all of it, to try to save me. To stop him.”

  I’d been talking in a rush, fast, fast, like swallowing medicine as quickly as you can so you won’t taste it going down. When I stopped I felt like I’d run a race, and she hadn’t said a word. “That’s it, Ginny, isn’t it? That’s why you came back. For me.”

  “Of course,” she said sadly, her voice fading even as she spoke. “Hadn’t you figured that out by now?” By the time I looked up, she was already gone.

  Back in the world, there was a great commotion coming from the kitchen. I opened my eyes, blinking at the sudden light, and heard my father ranting. “I told you this would happen, Pamela! Now let’s stop the charade—”

  “Stewart,” Donna said, not quite as loudly but with just as much force, “you were the one who made the crack about your daughters getting sick whenever I enter the picture. If you think that’s a joke—”

  “Stop it!” my mother said. “Just stop it, both of you! I can’t listen to this!”

  “Well, maybe you should start listening!”

  “Donna,” sa
id my father, “shut up.”

  “No! I bloody well will not shut up! I shut up for twelve years, and I’m half-convinced that that’s what was eating my insides—”

  “Cancer was eating your insides, dear lady.”

  “Ah, Stewart, compassionate as ever. You’re terrified of me and you know it, and if you hadn’t hypnotized my sister she’d know it too. Here’s some poetry for you, Pam: I’m Stewart’s Achilles’ heel, the chink in his armor, the weak link in his lies. I’m the truth he can’t cut out or intimidate or lull into illusion. He can throw away my letters and deny my existence, but he’ll never stop me from knowing what really happened the night before the funeral—”

  “The night before the funeral,” my father said, “is closed! History! And I refuse to discuss it!”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll discuss it instead.”

  “Donna, there’s a lot more wrong with you than cancer! You want to open that up again? Have a pleasant chat about how you made a pass at your sister’s husband—”

  “I did not make a pass at you, you son of a bitch! You came into my bedroom, drunk, and—”

  “Stop it!” Mom said. Through the kitchen doorway I could see her, leaning against a counter, both hands pressed to her temples. No wonder she’d been so upset about Jane. You’ve just learned that someone you care about can’t be trusted to act the way she should. “You’re tearing me apart! Stewart’s right. It’s over. It doesn’t matter what happened. Stop doing this to me, both of you!”

  “Stop doing what, Pam? Stop making you face reality? It does matter. It matters very much, because it cost me my sister for twelve years. You can’t believe both of us, and I have no way to prove that I’m the one telling the truth, except that I’ve never lied to you, Stewart came into Ginny’s bedroom the night before the funeral and—”

  “Time to leave,” my father said firmly.

  “—and said, ‘You’re it,’ and grabbed me—”

  “It’s time for you to leave now. Donna, can’t you see what you’re doing to her?”

  Dad used to play tag with me, but it wasn’t fair because he always won. I stood up, dizzy, and wobbled towards the kitchen, leaning on furniture, while Donna talked. “Pam, think: think! What made you come into the room in the first place? You heard me yelling, that’s what, not that it did a bit of good until you came in—”

  “She heard me asking you what you thought you were doing, Donna. You called me into your bedroom—Ginny’s bedroom, for God’s sake, do you think I’d try to seduce my wife’s sister in my dead daughter’s room?—because you had stomach cramps, and then you tried to—”

  “Stewart, I’d sooner fuck a chainsaw!”

  “Stop this,” my mother said, begging. “Please just stop it.”

  “She’s right, Donna. That’s enough. This is why we didn’t want you coming here in the first place, and this is why you’re going to leave now. I’ll drive you back to the hotel.”

  “Stewart, I don’t even want to be in the same car with you!”

  “Well then, you’d better walk. Because I won’t have you badgering my wife, and someone has to stay here with Emma.”

  “I’ll call a cab,” Donna said icily.

  Please, I thought, no, no, let both of them leave, because I can’t talk to Mom if he’s around. Please. Please. He was lying: he lied to me and he lied to Ginny and he lied to Mom and Donna, so maybe he was lying when he said Mom would die if she ever heard the truth.

  Please let him have been lying. Please. Please let her believe me when I tell her what happened to Ginny. He’s lying to Mom too; he’s been hurting Mom too, but I can save her instead of killing her. We can both leave. We can both go to the Hallorans’. Myrna will take care of us. But I have to make her believe me first, because if I don’t she won’t let me out of the house. How can I make her believe me, when she wouldn’t even listen to Ginny?

  “This isn’t New York, Donna. A cab won’t get here for twenty minutes, and by then you and Pamela will be at each other’s throats—”

  “If you drive me to the hotel I may be at yours.”

  “I’ll take that chance. We’re leaving now. Right now. Pamela—”

  “Yes,” my mother said, “that’s best. Go now. Please go.”

  They went, and my mother sat down very heavily at the kitchen table. She looked up dully when I walked into the kitchen.

  “Emma, you look terrible. How do you feel?”

  “Rotten,” I said. “Mom, he thought Donna was Ginny.”

  “What? Go up to your room, darling. I’ll bring you some cold juice.”

  “He thought Donna was Ginny,” I said again, doggedly. “The night before the funeral. She was in Ginny’s room, right?”

  “The house was full of people,” my mother said defensively. “Diane and her boys and the Idaho cousins. That was the only room left. I never would have put Donna there if we’d had more space.”

  “She was in Ginny’s room,” I repeated. “And she and Ginny had the same pajamas.” I think that’s why I’m here. To tell you that. “The yellow ones with Snoopy on them that they got at Macy’s.”

  My mother frowned at me and said sharply, “How did you know about those pajamas? I hated those things. Donna’s been telling you stories, hasn’t she?”

  “No, Mom! She didn’t tell me anything. Please listen to me, Mom.”

  She got up and started carrying coffee cups to the sink. “I’m sorry you heard that ugly argument, Emma, but don’t worry about it. You can’t be expected to understand these things. Now go back to sleep, dear. You have a fever. Go up to your room and rest so you can get well.”

  My room was the last place I wanted to go. “Mom, listen to me. Please listen. He was drunk, right? That’s why you got so upset when I asked you if you’d ever seen him drunk. And Donna looks like Ginny. I thought she was Ginny too when I saw her.”

  She turned from the sink to look at me. “Emma, I don’t know what Donna told you—”

  “Nothing! Donna didn’t talk about it!” This wasn’t getting me anywhere. That was why she kept the room locked up, so she wouldn’t have to think about what had happened. If she couldn’t even stand being in the room, how was I going to get through to her? “Mom, that poem Ginny brought you, the Psalm, think about what it meant—”

  “I know what it meant! Emma, you didn’t even know Ginny. You don’t know anything about her.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, as forcefully as I could. “I do. I’ll tell you what I know about her. I know one of her front teeth was chipped and she used to chew the ends of her hair. I know she wanted to go to Disneyland. I know she loved the lake and she went there a lot when you thought she was at the library. I know that when she laughed she sounded like the little birds on the beach, and she loved to watch the animals come down to the water to drink. I know she didn’t even like that frilly nightgown, because she was afraid the ribbons would strangle her, and I know she told you not to want another beautiful baby. Why would she say that, Mom?”

  My mother was staring at me, because I was telling her things she’d never told me, and my father never talked about Ginny at all. “My word,” she said. “You and Donna certainly had a thorough little chat at the cemetery, didn’t you?”

  “No! Donna doesn’t know anything! Mom, I know Ginny stopped eating, just stopped, because she didn’t want to grow up, and she got skinnier and skinnier and she got sick and then she died. In anybody else it would have been just a cold, but Ginny got pneumonia because she wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. Because she hadn’t been eating. I know she wanted to disappear so Dad wouldn’t see her anymore, so she ran away, but she wasn’t running away from you, Mom, really she wasn’t. It wasn’t that she liked Donna better than she liked you. She was running away from him, so he wouldn’t sneak into her bedroom at dawn and—and breathe on her. Mom, that’s what she was trying to tell you. That’s what the poem from the Bible meant, Mom, Psalm 139, look at it now, you’ll see.”

 
Her eyes had narrowed to slits, but at least she was looking at me. I had to keep talking, had to, had to, because if I stopped I wouldn’t be able to start again. “Look at it, Mom! Read it again! She brought you the psalm because—because you were going to have a baby. Because she knew the same thing—Mom, the blood on the sheets—”

  The gag rose from my stomach and slammed into my throat. I couldn’t talk about myself at all; couldn’t, couldn’t. Ginny had come back to give me a way of telling the story, the same way she’d used the psalm as a way of telling the story, but it wasn’t going to do any good, because my mother didn’t believe me.

  She turned around and ran the water in the sink, hard, and started washing the cups. “Emma, you’re very ill and very upset. I’m sorry Donna disturbed you so much, but she’s gone now. We’ll talk about all this when you’re feeling better.”

  “Don’t blame it on Donna! It has nothing to do with her, except for the pajamas! You know it’s true! Mom, you have to know! You feed me so much because Ginny starved to death! You were happy about the—the blood because—because Ginny never got her period, because she worked not to get it. Because she died instead. And you don’t want that to happen to me, you don’t, you don’t, you must love me after all, Mom—”

  Her back had stiffened. I swallowed and said desperately, “Mom, please listen to me. Please turn around, Mom.”

  She turned around and looked at me as if I were one of the Hallorans’ dogs, caught shitting in the rosebushes. “That must be some fever, Emma. How in the world did you manage to invent all this?”

  “I didn’t invent it. I didn’t! Ginny told me.”

  “Ginny told you?”

  “She talks to me,” I said. “The first time was when—was when he—breathing—in my room—but other times too, now, she—”

  The coffee cup Mom was holding dropped and shattered on the floor. She laughed, a high-pitched whinny not like her at all, and said, “Oh my God. Dear Lord. Myrna was right: you’re crazy.”