by Liza Nelson
I have always possessed the gift. My ability to lose myself, will myself lost within a given environment, has grown over the last ten years, but it has always been there inside, waiting for my recognition. I can do it anywhere, but out there on the Point is the best, at the tip of the peninsula, past the crumbling remains of the other bungalows. It takes some scrambling to get out there past the marsh, through the beach nettles, but once I make it to the thumbnail of limestone that sits like a turtle’s back in the shallows, I’m home free. None of the noise of civilization to interfere with my inward hearing. Only the shushing of the tide, the shriek of the gulls, my own ragged breath. I become nebulae, like meditation without the mantra.
Even in this heat. Maybe the heat helps. Last Thursday was one of the hottest, muggiest days I can remember around here, and that’s saying a lot. My toes squished deliciously deep into the wet muck of sand and dirt on what’s left of the old road. The sand would have burned my soles but for the mud. My jeans and T-shirt stuck to my skin, so once I reached the Point I stripped them off, lay back, and opened my pores to melt into the natural sauna of salt spray, gray rock, and sky. I was transformed into leaf, cloud, foam, air. Bodiless, coming and going with the tides. My mother used to accuse me of daydreaming, but she had no idea.
So there I was peering into my own unconscious. A contradiction in terms, you might argue, but that is what happens. Like adjusting to the dark. Suddenly you see where everything fits despite, or even enhanced by, the blackness. Thursday, lying in that cocoon of heat, I traveled into a black room, windowless, doorless. I did not feel trapped. I felt the expansiveness of empty space. After a while, scissors cut slits in the walls and the walls curled like paper. Through the slits I saw blue sky filled with bleeding moons. Black to blue to red. Slices to circles to sharp moon points, silver-fish bodies slithering, lines of unborn dead. And, strange or morbid as it may sound, a sense of profound peace.
I stayed there, inside wherever I was, for maybe an hour, maybe ten minutes, maybe only a few seconds. No matter. And then gradually it all faded back into the shimmer of sea and sky, the physical world I inhabit with everyone else. I could feel the physical reality of my body and the rock and the heat. I slipped off the turtle’s back exhilarated by awareness that being alive was, is, the thing. Gray-green slime came off all over my arms and legs. Wet leaves and sand clung to my shoulder. Strings of seaweed wrapped around my ankle. They were life, life, life.
It is true that I am an unusually enthusiastic person.
I don’t remember how I got back to the studio or sitting down to work. I was in a creative euphoria. But I do remember velvety browns and slippery blues and singing reds, a spiny silver. And the light. God, the light. Thick with heat. Tingly, stretching through the open double doors and along the walls, carrying me forward like a wave of energy as I sketched and cut and pieced.
Then the briefest shadow. I looked up. Dylan stood at the doorway beside a taller, dark-haired girl. Louise Culpepper’s daughter, Cassie. For a fraction of a second, I thought they were another vision before I delineated the particulars of their presence. Identical black T-shirts and thigh-hugging skirts. Only, despite the multiple earrings and the painted eyebrows, Dylan, my Dylan, still chubby with baby fat, had not quite pulled off the look. She paled beside the other girl’s theatrical, almost haggard disdain. Dylan’s mouth and eyes formed small o’s, the geometry of her horror quite wonderful from an artist’s view.
But artist and mother are separate sensibilities sharing side-by-side space inside my brain. The mother side saw only disaster.
Maternal awareness moved in slow motion from Dylan’s eyes to my knees, still covered with slime. Then I heard an intake of breath, hers and mine in discordant harmony.
“Shit.”
I was stark naked. I grabbed an old shirt off the stool and buttoned it around me, not knowing whether to giggle or to sob. Even now the memory makes me smile and blush together. The absurdity. Those two painstakingly punked-out kids shocked by my less-than-youthful, far less-than-perfect body.
Needless to say, the mood was broken. I could not find my way back to any inner wisdom that day.
DRIVING ALONG Highway 12 this afternoon, though, watching the clouds stretch over the Gulf as the radio cut from the news to a commercial for strawberry wine coolers, I decided my dream vision out on the Point had been some kind of real premonition: a sealed black room, a sky the color of the cafeteria ceiling, which is pretty spooky itself when you think about it, blood and death. My God, what had I seen coming? Someone who believes as strongly as I do in trusting my unconscious should have paid closer attention. Let no sign slip away, remain on constant guard, I began berating myself.
Then I saw the bicycle. Just barely noticed it, the way you half see a thing on the side of the road as you drive by. If I had not lifted my foot halfway off the gas and shifted my glance as I leaned across the seat for my cigarettes, the bike probably would not have registered at all, but in my state of heightened attentiveness it did register. As all wrong.
There were two bikes actually. One lay on its side. The other stood upended, halfway through a decrepit guard rail, the pedals revolving furiously in the breeze. I forced myself to get out of Miranda and walked toward the blue two-wheeler, an old-fashioned boy’s Schwinn. Not Dylan’s, was my first thought, as if Dylan has been near her bike in a year. Then I heard the cries and began to run.
A young boy, no more than seven or eight, lay several feet down the embankment. The bushy overgrowth had cut his fall, possibly saved him. Let him be breathing, I begged the powers that be, before I saw his face. He was awfully still, but his eyes stared up full of terrified life.
“There’s blood. There’s blood. Is he going to die? Is he going to die?” A second boy, the one whose screams I’d heard from the road, rushed at me as soon as I scrambled down to them. Tears were streaking sandy stains down his cheeks. He grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go.
He started sobbing, “We snuck off. I knew we shouldn’t. I knew we shouldn’t. Oh, is he going to die?”
“No, of course not.” I needed to calm him down but had no idea how. “What’s your name?”
“Philip.”
“And his?”
“David.”
“Well, Philip, let me take a look at David.”
I let Philip keep hold of my shirtsleeve while I bent over the injured child. There was blood, red and oozy, a cut above his forehead, but it did not look terribly deep.
“Do you hurt real bad anywhere, David?” Dumb question but at least I kept my voice calm and used his name. I’d read somewhere that in a medical emergency you should use the victim’s name whenever possible. The boy barely moved his lips. “I hurt okay.” Whatever way I wanted to interpret that one, pain or terror.
“You’re going to be fine. We’re going to take good care of you.” The gears had kicked in I guess, emergency automatic. By some act of fortune I had thrown a bathing suit and towel in the backseat this morning. I stanched the cut with the suit, and used the towel as a blanket. Whether he had broken bones or internal injuries I could not tell, but I was not about to move him. I flagged down a car of teenagers and sent them off to phone 911.
Inside the cramped ambulance when it finally came, reality shifted somehow. David grew smaller strapped down on the stretcher, already attached to an IV-drip. Not small like a baby. More than anything else, he resembled at that moment a little old man, fear and pain stripping all the childhood out of his face. When the driver asked Philip if he wanted to sit up front, Philip shook his head and reached for my free hand. David already had my other. In a matter of an hour we had developed the visceral, physical intimacy of family.
Almost. As involved in the boys as I was, I also found myself thanking God, even if I didn’t believe in him, that Dylan was safe. When she’d told me she was invited to dinner with the Reverend and Mrs. Brasleton after choir practice, I was not thrilled. This phase Dylan was going through, this flirtation with the
Baptists, was annoying. But at least at this moment I knew where she was.
“What about my bike?”
I turned to Philip, but it was David speaking, worried even now about his bike.
“It’s safe. I put the lock on,” Philip answered before I could say anything. Kids can be so amazing.
“David, you hang in there.” I gave both boys’ hands a quick squeeze. “You’re being very brave, the two of you. Aren’t they?” I turned to the medic sitting on the other side of David, a young guy with acne who had tried to describe the equipment to Philip earlier although the boy was too frightened to pay attention.
“Oh, yes, ma’am.” He rubbed his palms along his knees as if to follow a musical beat the rest of us couldn’t hear. “You have a very brave little boy here.”
Gradually, David’s grip lightened, exhaustion or painkiller. Philip stared straight ahead, holding on tight as ever.
What if I had not happened by? How long would the boys have waited before someone else stopped, and who, what kind of person? How would life be different, for them or that other passerby, now reaching another destination untouched? And what if I had not glanced over when I did, had kept driving, what other road would my thoughts be traveling now? Those planes colliding, finding these boys. What is life but the friction of one coincidence against another?
Thousands of miles away, victims and survivors were going through their private, enormous anguish. I tried to see them, but my imagination closed down. All I knew were these children’s hands in mine, small and dry, dirt etched deep in the lines of the knuckles. I knew David, his dilated eyes, the matted damp hair above the bandages on his forehead, the blood drying to a muddy rust at the edges. And I knew Philip, his almond eyes the color of tree bark, the two pinpricks of nervous energy high on his otherwise drained cheeks, his narrow lips set in stubborn stoicism. For now at least, the ambulance had become the donut of my life. These boys had me completely claimed.
Two
OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. I almost wish those little boys had never entered my life. Or at least that I didn’t have such a way with them, as everyone tells me I do. Saving people, being involved with them at all, creates burdens. Since finding those children, my life seems to be complicating in ways I do not want. I swear I don’t.
The hospital waiting room when we finally got there was a dreadful place, too brightly lit and disinfected. A Muzak version of “You’ve Got a Friend” was playing along with a muted television talk show on a mounted TV in the center of the wall. Someone had decided primary colors would be cheerful for the furniture. David Franklin’s mother somehow managed to arrive before the ambulance and was waiting for us, frantically pacing in front of a row of hideous green and purple chairs.
God, I hope I never have occasion to feel the way she looked, every muscle, every nerve ending taut with dread, fear and hope as she got her first glimpse of David. The rest of the world had stopped existing for her. Her eyes, her mind, her entire body could focus on nothing but her child. I introduced myself but doubt she heard me before the doctors whisked her down a hall beside David’s gurney.
I was left with Philip still holding my hand. A doctor gave him a quick once-over. Not a scratch on him. Then we sat together waiting another ten minutes before his mother stepped off the elevator and rushed over to us.
Mrs. Rainey turned out to be one of those small-boned, pinched-cheeked women who never quite let loose. She was all porcelain delicacy in her aqua and beige suit with its little butterfly pin on the lapel, her smooth black hair pulled tight into a French knot. Obviously shaken, she hugged Philip stiffly against her chest. I felt for her, mother to mother, I truly did. But in the perfunctory glances of Thank-You and You’re Welcome that passed between us, I recognized her critical sizing up. Mine, too, if I’m honest. Each of us was everything the other was not. Instant antipathy. I began wondering how to make my graceful exit.
I was still wondering a few minutes later, when a thin weathered guy in work boots and a stained cowboy shirt walked up and Mari Rainey introduced her husband, Joe. What an unlikely couple. He was not unattractive exactly, but his rough-and-ready, slightly sweaty masculine edge did not mesh with her pastel precision. How these two ever found each other I couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to; their marriage was none of my business. Joe Rainey mumbled hello, his attention really on Philip, who was leaning against his mother and studying the linoleum.
We sat together, side by side by side, wanting to be anywhere else but riveted to the uncomfortable purple chairs. Philip sat on his mother’s lap for a few minutes, then his dad’s. I headed to the water cooler to give them some space and privacy, as if there is such a thing as privacy in a hospital waiting room. Finally a nurse came out to say that since the doctors would be running tests for some time, Mrs. Franklin suggested we go on home.
By now I was itching to get out of there, but I wasn’t sure how. I decided to call good old Cleo. She’d love it that I was stooping to asking for a ride in that damn pink Lincoln Continental of hers she knows I hate to death. Cleo, unlike her car, I am crazy about. She is such a hoot. The citizenry of Esmeralda call her the Pink Duchess—God knows what they call me. She dresses only in pink, drives the pink Lincoln, two tones of pink, thank you, and lives pretty much in a bubble of pinkness, from the pink-frosted tip of her pageboy to the pink-painted nail of her big toe. She paints watercolors that have a pink quality all their own, and she is owner and operator of The Pink Heron, Esmeralda’s one gallery and frame shop. She is also my patroness. Every artist deserves a Cleo Gallagher in her life, even if she does drive me nuts. She believes in me completely, and what is more, she sells my work as fast as I bring it in.
Not to the locals. Cleo has a whole different set of clients. She started out selling mainly to her various friends from resorts along the Florida coasts, but over the years, she’s developed a reputation. If you’re browsing for art or antiques along the Gulf, from Tampa to Destin, somebody along the way is bound to suggest The Pink Heron for one-of-a-kinds. Or maybe people come to see the Pink Duchess herself. Who cares as long as they buy, and they do buy. Along with the typical seascape crap you find everywhere in Florida, Cleo has her specialties. Local primitives, handcrafted furniture, her own watercolors, which do have a charm of their own, and my boxes for the more avant-garde fringe. Those boxes are turning into Dylan’s college fund.
Basically, Cleo has been as close to a guardian angel as I’m likely to get. So I knew she’d be over in a flash if I asked her. I began rummaging in my purse for change for the pay phone.
“Why, Mrs. Blue, you need a ride back to your automobile, don’t you?” Mari Rainey called across the room. “Joe, we have both our cars here. Why don’t you give her a lift? It’s the least we can do.”
He looked as surprised as I was, but under the circumstances he could not exactly contradict her offer. I didn’t care. I just knew I was ready to go.
“Hope you don’t mind the truck,” he said as I climbed in. “I’m a little like a turtle; I carry my office and factory on my back everywhere I go, work or home, or hospital.” I had no idea what he was talking about, as I guess he noticed, but I was mildly charmed by his choice of words, thinking of my turtle-back rocks out on the Point. “I’m a farrier,” he went on. “I shoe horses. You can’t guess how many horses there are between here and Gainesville.”
“No, I probably can’t.” I asked him would he mind if I smoked.
“Hell, no,” he said, smiling for the first time, and I couldn’t help noticing that he had one of those toothy, crooked smiles that can be lethal under certain conditions.
I rolled down my window, he slid in a Hank Williams tape, and I don’t think either of us said another word until we reached Highway 12. I’ve never been much for country music, but it was oddly comforting listening to the sweet crooning while surrounded by the smell of leather and horse shit and fired iron. Leaning back against the torn seat cover beside Philip’s father, whose arm stretched out
behind me, not touching of course but giving off a welcome human warmth, I realized how badly I needed comforting. I could not stop thinking about David, about a nervousness I’d picked up in the nurse’s voice. Was she holding information back? Like how seriously he was hurt? I had told the child he would be fine and I had believed it, believed I had saved him. But what did I know?
It took one side of the tape and two cigarettes to get to the accident site, just enough time for me to regain my equilibrium. Joe Rainey made sure my car would start, as if Miranda has ever failed me. I helped him load the bicycles onto the truck.
“Thank you,” he said, or I did, or we both did. He smiled again, and off he went.
In the morning, I rang up the hospital to find out David’s condition. He was listed as stable. A few hours later, Mrs. Franklin phoned out here to say she was sorry she hadn’t properly thanked me at the hospital. I could hear her exhaustion.
“You didn’t need to call.”
“Oh, but I did,” she protested, maintaining her Southern good manners no matter what. Then she took a deep breath and told me about the spinal damage; how serious was not yet clear. I asked if I could visit in a few days. I felt a tremendous need to see David for myself.
“Of course, he may not even remember me.”
“Oh no, he asked about the lady with red hair. I am assuming that’s you.”
“Yes, that’s me.” I laughed, overcome by a rush of protectiveness not only toward David but toward his mother, too.
I heard nothing from Philip’s parents and did not expect to. Then two nights ago one of those coincidences happened, the kind that makes me wonder who’s stirring the pot up there in the heavens. I was at The Pink Heron, dropping off some new pieces to Cleo, enjoying one of her little tirades.