By Light We Knew Our Names

by Anne Valente

  Since Jane won’t be home for another hour anyway, I stop by the Super Cuts a few blocks from our apartment. Jane claims places like this are what made her a stylist, after one incident in particular when a Fantastic Sams cut bangs to her hairline. But what I need is simple, a trim straight across. Just enough for presentable parent-teacher conferences in August—nothing someone here couldn’t do.

  A stylist seats me in front of a mirror and begins trimming away, dipping the comb in water every so often to straighten the strands.

  “You’ve got split ends.” She meets my eyes in the mirror. “Been awhile since you’ve had it cut?”

  And all I can do is nod, before she pushes my chin down to trim the back.

  At home, the tomatoes have ripened into bright red gum-drops almost overnight, so I pull four from their vines, to surprise Jane and show her the garden wasn’t futile. The poison ivy near the plants has receded, so far that Jane could even plant more vegetables if she wanted, maybe mums or squash for fall.

  The tomato salads I’ve made are ready when Jane walks through the door, sets her bag down, and sits at the table. I start to tell her about the pinatas, the kids’ worried questions because I know she’ll laugh, and the roster for the new semester. I want to tell her too that Toby asked about her, but I hesitate before the words come.

  It is only when I set the salads on the table that I notice she hasn’t responded. She is staring at me instead, her mouth set, eyes tapered into slits.

  “You got your hair cut,” she says.

  “Well, yeah. For the fall.”

  Jane’s jaw shifts beneath her skin. “Why didn’t you just ask.”

  “You’ve been busy. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Bullshit, Jonathan.” My full name, only when she is furious.

  “It’s just a haircut,” I tell her. “Really, it’s not a big deal.”

  “Oh, my poor girlfriend.” Her voice mocks mine. “My girlfriend’s so fucking fragile that I won’t even ask her for a haircut, the same goddamn haircut I’ve had for years and years.”

  The room falls quiet between us, a silence with space for me to begin to understand.

  “Do you know what the police asked me, before you got there?”

  I don’t know what to say to this. We are characters in a flipbook; we’ve switched scenes entirely.

  “Why were you walking home alone, a pretty girl like you?” Her voice is mocking again. “You city girls and your sundresses, you always think you can take care ofyourselves.”

  She’s never told me what they said, or anything else about that night. I step closer to her and she steps away.

  “You want to know what happened to my tooth?” She grins at me, but it’s not a smile. I can see the chip, its jagged void. I shake my head no. There is nothing I want to know less. “I punched the first guy in his goddamn face, when he tried to push me down. That’s when he slammed my face into the car window.”

  These are things I cannot hear. These are things I will think about in detail, for days and months and years.

  “I saw that minivan again.” She is staring at me. Adrenaline tingles, explodes through my arms. “I saw it again two weeks ago. I wanted a gun before the police would ever do anything about it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She hears me though my voice falters, though I barely speak.

  “Because you’re no different,” she says, and my heart is an egg, shell fragile hiding yolk, more fragile than she’ll ever be as she moves past me and out the door.

  I am in bed, listening to my headphones that are now hers, when I hear her come home. The volume is low though I want to hear it anyway, this retreat from the world, lights out so I understand the same darkness. But when Jane walks into the bedroom, she flips on the light and stares at me. Her face indicates some threshold, like she wants to tell me something or I should begin first.

  “That haircut sucks,” she finally says. She approaches me tentatively, then grabs my wrist and leads me to the bathroom.

  Once I am seated in a chair, over bathroom tiles for easy cleaning and she’s sprayed my hair with water, Jane moves around my head determining how to shape it, how to fix this devastating mistake. She doesn’t speak to me, doesn’t even look me in the eye but concentrates instead, her chipped tooth biting the edge of her lip.

  “Tell me about the minivan, Jane.”

  “The lineup is next week.” She snips hair from my temple, her voice short and terse. I feel her hesitate, then she starts trimming again, quick. “If it’s them, I’ll get rid of the gun.”

  She says this offhandedly, a small step in my direction.

  “I’ll go with you,” I say. Her fingers hug my scalp but she continues to cut, a focused professional with no space for dialogue, no room for error.

  I want to tell her I’ve failed her. As she moves around my head until she is standing in front of me, scissors held above my forehead, I want to tell her I am sorry, for all my mistakes and theirs, the hospital and the police and the faults of men. I will eat every single mistake until there are no more left; I will swallow them so she is safe, no guns and no minivans, no sidewalks and no darkness. But when I look up at her and she finally meets my eyes, there are no words for how the world has lost her.

  Because there is nothing else, I reach my hand out to her chest.

  “Breastbone,” I say.

  She holds my eyes for a moment, then looks away when hers begin to brim.

  So she can concentrate again and finish the haircut, I tell her Toby asked about her today, to lighten this space and help us forget. She is so quiet I think maybe she hasn’t heard me, but then she laughs a little and the sound spills through the bathroom, a sound like marbles, as though we are children again.

  “Toby,” she says. “I’ll have to come see him soon.”

  When Jane finally completes the haircut, she stands back and observes my head. Her expression is the same as when she inspects her own scalp, like she’s looking for the faults, the hairs that don’t belong. But when her eyes move down and meet mine, her face softens and for a moment we are who we’ve always been, small as a seed, a moment where we begin.

  NOT FOR GHOSTS OR DAFFODILS

  After Ben Mortimer’s wife left him, and after he sat his daughter down to say her mother wouldn’t be coming back, Maple took her blankie and hid under the bed for three days. Ben called in sick and worked from the child-sized desk in her room, bringing crackers, grape juice, and Twizzlers to the edge of the dust ruffle every so often, all of which were pulled beneath the fabric by a small hand.

  Grace had said she wasn’t happy, that she didn’t feel like a mother or wife, that her own life expanded far beyond her, some unexplored terrain. And though Ben pleaded, though he’d gestured upstairs toward their still-sleeping daughter’s bedroom, Grace turned away, moved her eyes from her packed suitcase to the driveway beyond the front window where her car sat idling, to take her where, she couldn’t bring herself to say. Ben thought of this, of her audacity, that Grace—grace!—could leave so inelegantly, so abruptly, and he stabbed his fingers into the computer keypad atop Maple’s small desk. Right in the center of a company report, he typed a list, the clacking of which stirred Maple under the bed; he heard her shift, repositioning herself beneath the quiet cloak of box springs.

  YOU ARE:

  The nerve of chewed bubblegum, clinging to shoes.

  A black stain of coffee, darkening teeth.

  As bad as mother rabbits, once their babies touch human hands.

  Maple sighed below the bed, and Ben saw the bed skirt move, puffed up in her exhalation of breath. He lowered a juice box toward the dust ruffle, and Maple reached out her tiny fingers, pulled it under.

  On the third day, after Ben had switched from sliding snacks beneath the bed to full meals, Maple crawled out and stood blinking at him, a swirl of dust bunnies clinging to her hair.

  Ben took Maple back to preschool, her days of cloistered mournin
g apparently over, and returned to work, a nonprofit organization where he hid inside his office to avoid the inevitable questions, brows scrunched in concern. But at home, after Maple went to bed and Ben retreated to his study to immerse himself in fundraising reports, she developed a new habit, one that showed itself when Ben thought she’d finally fallen asleep.

  “It’s raining bugs.”

  Ben looked up from his desk, saw Maple’s round face peering in at the door.

  “Raining caterpillars! Inchworms everywhere!”

  Ben sighed and pulled off his glasses. He picked Maple up and took her down to the kitchen, poured her a glass of milk, and sent her back to bed, once he’d checked every window in her room to make sure no insects fell from the sky.

  After similar incidents on following nights—a frog soaring across her room on lily-pad hovercraft, an oak tree in the yard screaming so loud she couldn’t sleep, a talking spider spun down from her ceiling fan—Maple padded into the office and stood there sucking her thumb.

  “I’ve caught a ghost in a jar.”

  Ben heaved a breath, stared at Maple’s toes peeking out from her small nightgown.

  “Want to see it?”

  Ben took his daughter by the hand, and she led him to her bedroom where an empty Mason jar stood on the night-stand. Where she’d even found it, he had no idea.

  Maple moved toward the nightstand, held her face to the glass. “Her name is Harriet.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me.” Maple tapped a moon-shaped fingernail against the jar.

  “What kind of ghost is she?” Ben felt tired.

  “She’s a bright yellow daffodil.”

  Ben sat down on Maple’s bed. His brain hurt. He’d heard of imaginary friends, of friendly phantoms. But never the ghosts of flowers.

  After he read Maple a bedtime story, pushing the mason jar farther away on the nightstand so she would forget it and sleep, Ben turned off the computer and settled into his own bed, its shape strange to him, a two-man rowboat now unmoored, adrift with one. The sheets on Grace’s side lay smooth as the flatline breaking sea from sky, and Ben rolled away and faced the wall, teeth clenched, eyes shut. You have abandoned ship, he thought.

  YOU HAVE:

  Cancelled your pacts, with me, with her.

  Left no instructions.

  No idea what this is like.

  Maple carried the ghost with her everywhere. To the breakfast table, where she set the jar against the window, so Harriet could soak in the solidity of sun. To the bathtub, where she flew Harriet around like a rocket above her while Ben scrubbed shampoo into her mess of curls. Maple even brought the jar to school, which Ben allowed warily, so long as she kept the container in her backpack. Ben looked on with vigilance, unsure what this ghost, this daffodil meant to his daughter, but her nighttime awakenings had stopped, her fanciful stories subsided, so Ben let Maple proceed, let her pour water every so often into the jar to replenish Harriet’s wilted, invisible petals.

  Ben progressed as usual at work, put together files on the organization’s major donors, sipped coffee through the afternoon and tried not to think of Grace: his phone silent, no midday calls from her as there once had been. He’d promised himself not to look her up, though the research he compiled made possible such things—property values of prominent patrons, their political donations, their family history and social involvements. But he promised he wouldn’t do it, that he’d move about his days, that he and Maple were better off without her, without a woman so easily budded to full bloom without them.

  But when he picked Maple up from preschool and tucked her into the backseat, her report of the day made him waver, reconsider.

  “I saw a pink dolphin at school.”

  Ben watched his daughter in the rearview mirror, where she stared back at him, eyes big as golf balls. He imagined a rose-hued porpoise sitting next to Maple in the classroom, assembling puzzle pieces with her until they’d formed the solar system.

  “A pink dolphin?”

  “Swimming in the cove.”

  Ben knew the preschool’s playground butted up against the water. But the cove was too far inland, so many miles from sea, no place for a dolphin to reside.

  “Maybe it was a raft. Someone’s lost inner tube.”

  “A pink dolphin. Miss Griffith said so.”

  Ben glanced at Maple in the rearview again. If her teacher said so, that settled things! Ben looked away, thought of Grace, imagined her sipping daiquiris by a poolside while her daughter slowly unraveled. He turned left onto their street, so hard Maple’s backpack rolled off the seat and she burst into tears that he’d smashed Harriet’s petals.

  Ben chopped celery and garlic for dinner, then onions, eyes tearing while the evening news blared from the living room. After he put Maple to bed, he would find her—he would search and search until he found Grace, her new telephone number, no lines disconnected and no posted letters to return.

  “There he is, Daddy.”

  Maple’s voice came from the sofa, where she sat cradling the ghost in her arms. He peered over the sofa to the television, where a news reporter stood at the edge of Herring Bay Cove, a splash of coral skin in the water behind her.

  “Well, there you have it.” The reporter smiled, teeth flashing white as bleached plastic. “We can’t say why he’s here, or even where he came from. But the little guy appears to be an albino, and he seems to be here to stay.”

  Maple stood up on the couch. “What’s albino?”

  Ben stared at the television, then at his daughter holding her Mason jar, its contents as impossible as the pink dolphin on TV. He set the chopping knife down, moved into the living room, and sat on the sofa.

  “It’s when the body doesn’t produce any melanin pigment at all.” He looked at Maple. “Melanin gives our body color.” “But the dolphin’s pink. He has color.”

  “Some forms of albinism produce a pink color. All over.” Maple peered into the Mason jar. “Could Harriet be albino?”

  “I don’t know.” Ben sighed. “She’ll have to tell you herself.”

  When he tucked her into bed, Harriet’s ghost presiding over them from the nightstand, Maple looked up at him, her features cracked with sorrow.

  “What color is the dolphin’s heart?”

  Ben didn’t understand. He asked what she meant.

  “Is his heart colorless too?”

  Ben laughed, and the lines of worry on Maple’s face melted away and she began to laugh too, and soon they were both giggling so hard it hurt. The sound pierced a dull ache into the center of Ben’s chest. He felt the wish inside him then, just for a moment, for his own jar to keep. Not for ghosts, not daffodils, but for the sound alone—to hold his daughter’s laughter in a Mason jar, to bottle and store, to set on his nightstand like fireflies, to hold light to the black.

  At work and at night, Ben promised that he would keep the promise. He would not track down Grace, his research would not stray her way, he would not look for her nor think of her. This resolution, it felt good, since he knew now, tall fire burned to ember, that his anger was fading, replaced by some slow wash of grief, and he thought of Maple from his office at work, wondered when it would be right to bring up her mother.

  After dinner, Ben sat reading on the sofa while Maple watched cartoons on the carpet, clasping Harriet’s jar between her palms. She turned and looked at Ben, then left the living room and came back with a giant afghan from the cedar box.

  “Let’s make a fort.”

  Ben set his book on the coffee table. An animated mouse screeched on the TV.

  “What makes you feel like doing that, sweet pea?”

  Only Grace had ever built blanket forts with Maple.

  Maple turned away and grabbed another blanket from the cedar box, and Ben didn’t ask again, just pulled blankets over the couches.

  When they at last sat inside their fort, a knitted halo of colors and yarn above, Ben lay on his back looking up, hands behind
his head. Maple folded herself into a pretzel, rolled the Mason jar over the carpet.

  “Harriet told me she misses the sun.”

  Ben sat quiet, placed a hand on his daughter’s hair.

  “She said ghost flowers have trouble. Getting the sun they need.”

  Ben studied the knitted patterns of the blankets surrounding them. Maple shifted beside him, set the jar upright, held it close to her chest.

  “Miss Griffith said the pink dolphin’s a baby.”

  “She’s right. I saw that on the news today.”

  Maple rolled onto her belly, slumped her face into Ben’s shirt.

  “Miss Griffith said the baby’s lost.”

  Her voice came muffled through the fabric, and she was quiet for a long time. Ben moved his arms to reposition her, but she held her face buried in his shirt.

  “Miss Griffith said the mama’s somewhere out to sea.”

  Ben turned toward his daughter but she curled away from him; he felt her breathing heavy through the fabric of his shirt. He put a hand on her small shoulder, over which he could see her rolling the Mason jar away and back, away and back.

  He thought of Grace, that despite the coldness of the way she’d left, she always knew the rites of handling scraped knees, broken toys. He’d never considered himself good at that part of parenting, and now the strange shade of his daughter’s emotions pooled out before him, unfamiliar hue, some foreign palette he had no words to name.

  “Things will be better, sweetheart.”

  It was all he could think to say.

  After she finally fell asleep and Ben carried her up to bed, he lay on the couch watching television, imagining Grace instead. He considered her puzzling temperament, complicated makeup—what strands of DNA could make a mother go, and if the same genes that stained dolphins pink could drain every shade from the human heart.

  He rolled onto his side, flipped off the television, closed his eyes.

  After brushing his teeth, Ben moved down the hallway toward his bedroom, turned into his office instead. He turned on the computer, mouse hovering above his search program, above every tool he would need to find her, to recover some combination of numbers—an address, a telephone—some code cracked to bring her home. But he sat paralyzed instead, the screen staring back at him, the computer’s low hum filling the hollowed silence of the room.