Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  Jasmine and George stared at each other and George knew he was being assessed. Who exactly was he to think he had any right to anything? He thought about the children in the driveway. He thought about all he didn’t know.

  “I’m going to see her no matter what you say,” George told the nurse after he introduced himself.

  One thing he clearly was was a man who would cause a ruckus if Jasmine tried to get rid of him. And he was more; when he said his name, Jasmine recognized it. It was the name Arlyn said in her sleep.

  “Well, if you want to see her, you’d better be prepared. I won’t have you upsetting her with your reaction. Get all of the bullshit out right now. What you’re about to see isn’t pretty.”

  “I’m okay,” George said.

  “You won’t be,” Jasmine said. “Trust me.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know she talks about you when she doesn’t intend to. Most probably, she wouldn’t want you to see her this way.”

  George hadn’t thought about how terrible it would be to love someone and see her in pain. He had not had a glimpse of Arlie in more than a year. He had begun to heal, if anyone could call a life spent alone and cut off healing.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “No matter how she looks.”

  He followed Jasmine upstairs.

  “She’s sleeping a lot. She wishes she could go outside, but it’s just too hard for me to carry her. Fifty pounds is my limit.”

  As they walked along, the glass ceiling above them was streaked with pine needles, pollen, leaves, raindrops, a mourning cloak. They walked past the children’s rooms.

  “Does the baby have red hair?” George asked.

  “Blond.” Jasmine had been a nurse for fifteen years. She could sense certain truths in an instant. “Like you.”

  Jasmine knocked when they reached Arlyn’s room; she opened the door and peeked in. “Someone here to see you.”

  No response. Jasmine nodded to George to follow her inside. They could hear the tile men finishing up the pool and the dreadful cranking of the water trucks unfolding their hoses.

  Jasmine went over to the lump in the bed. “Lucky girl, you’ve got a visitor.”

  “Send them away.” Arlie’s mouth was dry and cottony from the high dosages of Demerol the doctor had prescribed. She didn’t sound like herself. It was as though the words hurt.

  Arlyn’s back was to them, but George could see her head. No red hair, no hair at all. He could feel a stone in his throat. He hated himself and he hated the world and he hated this instant in time.

  “Arlie,” he said. “It’s me.”

  He could tell that she recognized his voice because she responded; her back curled more rigidly, like a turtle in its shell. For an instant, she seemed to stop breathing.

  “He can’t see me,” Arlyn said. She’d been snapped back into the world from her dreaming place and it didn’t feel good. It felt as though her heart would break.

  “Blindfold me,” George said to Jasmine. “I don’t have to see her to be with her. I promise I won’t look at you,” he told Arlie.

  “You’re crazy,” Jasmine said, but she took a scarf from the top dresser drawer, wrapped it over his eyes and tied it tight. “He won’t see a thing,” she assured Arlyn. “He just wants to sit beside you, honey.”

  “I’m vain. I want him to remember me as I was.” Arlyn was whispering but George heard her perfectly well. Jasmine had sat him down in a chair beside the bed. He could feel Arlie’s breath. He could feel the blankets against his knees and the wooden bedframe. He’d made love to her there once. Quickly, guiltily, with great pleasure.

  “He doesn’t even know about the baby,” Arlie said.

  “I’m going downstairs for a few minutes.” Jasmine understood what this man wanted — the same thing everyone wanted: time. “Call if you need me.”

  “I should have come back,” George said. “If I had come here over and over again, you would have said yes and left with me.”

  Arlie took his hand. For a moment he was shocked by how cold she was. She brought his hand up to the pearls.

  “Oh,” George said. “I threw them under the hedge when you told me to go.”

  The pearls had never been off her throat, except during medical procedures, and even then she’d had one of the nurses slip the pearls into her uniform pocket beneath her surgical robe. During radiation she’d had them in her locker with her belongings, there at all times. For luck, for love, for no reason at all. They’d been his mother’s pearls, he’d never gotten to tell Arlyn that, and his grandmother’s pearls before that.

  They sat there for a while, hand in hand, in an instant of time neither wanted to end. Her vision was going, but she could see him, the way people see clouds — beautiful, racing by, casting shadows.

  “I was never going to leave Sam. Anyway, you’re lucky I didn’t come with you. Then you’d be stuck with me.”

  But he was stuck anyway, even though she hadn’t come away with him. George lowered his head and cried. He made a sound that was low down inside him, all hurt, nothing else. He could see through the haze of the scarf Jasmine had tied over his eyes. He saw it all.

  “Now I’m the one who’s stuck,” Arlie said. “I hate being trapped in this room. I’ve considered leaving my body before I die. I keep thinking about grass and the boxwood hedge. The way the sky looks when you’re lying on the ground staring up.”

  This was the most she had spoken in a week and the words had exhausted her. She waved her hand. She couldn’t say more. She felt like the luckiest person in the universe to have George Snow sitting beside her. Put us in a jar, she thought. Put us in eternity.

  Through the scarf George could study her pale face without a single freckle; they had all disappeared. There were her beautiful cloudy eyes. Oh, it was her. Arlie. So tiny. Wasting away. Sixty-five pounds, but still here.

  “If you let me take the blindfold off, I can carry you outside. Otherwise I might fall down the stairs and kill both of us.”

  Her laugh was like water.

  He took the blindfold off. Jasmine was right. Seeing Arlie fully was harder than he’d thought it would be. He saw how blotchy and swollen her face had become. He saw the veins in her scalp. Around her neck there was a string of black pearls that looked nothing like the necklace he’d left under the hedge.

  “They’re the same ones,” Arlie told him. “They turn colors.”

  “Really? Magic?”

  “Radiation. I think they soak up whatever is inside me.”

  George lifted her out of bed. She weighed nothing. She smelled like illness and soap. The pearls looked like strange black marbles.

  “Will we fly?” Arlyn asked.

  “Possibly,” George answered.

  He grabbed a blanket and folded it around her, then carried her down the stairs. Jasmine was in the kitchen, fixing herself some tea.

  “Diana will be back with the children in half an hour,” Jasmine warned. “Who told you you could take her outside?”

  “She wants me to.” George opened the back door.

  Jasmine came over. “I don’t know about this,” she said. “She gets chilled so easily.”

  “It’s what she wants,” George said.

  The nurse didn’t stop George from taking Arlie into the bright light of the backyard. The water pumps were chugging; the tile men finishing up the rim of the pool were shouting to each other. George went up to the pool man in charge.

  “Shut off the water and get out of here,” he said.

  The pool man looked at Arlie, then shouted to his men. The pool was nearly full. No problem. They could come back another day.

  “Get out of here,” George told the tile men. Tiles from Italy sat in a pile. A few were chipped, most were perfect. The tile men didn’t speak English. George kicked an empty box in their direction.

  “Go!” he shouted. He stomped his feet like a bull. “Leave!”

  George Snow looked like a cr
azy man carrying a ghost. The tile men were afraid of blackbirds and ghosts at the workplace. Bad luck and accidents, that’s what such things meant. Crazy men were even worse. Bad luck all around.

  While the workmen were packing up, George took Arlyn out to the lawn.

  “Faster,” she said. “Fly me there.”

  He ran, then spun in a circle.

  Arlyn laughed. “Not that fast.”

  She was out of breath. George stopped. He dropped the blanket on the grass, then set Arlie down and rolled the blanket back to cover her, like a cocoon. He heard shouting, but he ignored everything except Arlie’s face. It was John Moody doing the yelling, home early, chastising the workmen, who were supposed to be finishing the pool that week. When John heard they’d been ordered to stop by the fellow on the lawn, he approached George Snow. John figured George must be one of the pool men. How dare he hold up the work?

  “I want you off this property,” John told him.

  “Do you?” George said.

  “Don’t come back looking for a paycheck.”

  George got up from the grass. The clouds were flying overhead. When John Moody was close enough, George punched him straight in the face.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” John was bleeding heavily from his nose. The grass under his feet had turned red. “Don’t think I won’t call the police. I’ll have you arrested right now. The cops will be here before you have time to get away, you son of a bitch.”

  George walked over to John and grabbed him. “You had a fucking pool put in while she’s dying. All she can hear all day long are the bulldozers. Every noise goes right through her. Is that how you take care of her?”

  John Moody saw the blanket on the grass then. Something small was wrapped inside. It was Arlie. His wife. John looked at George carefully. Now he recognized him. The window washer.

  “I’m going to be here every day,” George Snow said. “And you’re not going to call the police or anyone else.”

  George Snow looked dangerous, insane. John understood why he’d never noticed him working on the pool before. He was someone who didn’t belong.

  “George,” Arlyn said faintly. “Make him go away.”

  “There’s nothing you can do to me,” George told John Moody. “I have nothing to lose.”

  “Okay,” John agreed. He did not wish to be punched in the face again.

  “I mean it!” George said.

  “Look, if she wants you here, you’ll be here.”

  George went back to Arlie. He lay down beside her, feeling the prickly grass through his shirt.

  “Did you kill him?” Arlie said. A whisper.

  George laughed. “Nope.”

  Arlie closed her eyes.

  “Closer,” she said.

  George moved as close to her as he dared, afraid he might hurt her.

  “Did you see the baby?” Arlie’s voice was so weak it seemed to be coming from another planet.

  “You don’t have to talk.”

  “I named her for you. You understand, George, why I didn’t tell you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” George felt as though he’d never understood anything in his life, least of all what was happening to Arlie. He felt like jumping off a building, stopping time. Instead, he looked at a blade of grass. He looked into Arlie’s cloudy eyes.

  “Don’t fight for her, George. I want her raised with her brother. I want her to be happy. I’m sorry if I hurt you by not telling you. I wanted everything to be simple, but it’s not.”

  “It’s all right, Arlie. Stop worrying.”

  “Do you think she’ll remember me? She won’t have either of us now.”

  “Maybe it’s more important for us to remember her.”

  Arlyn laughed. “You’re a funny man.”

  “Hilarious,” George Snow said.

  The sun had shifted and shadows were pooling, so George lifted Arlyn and carried her back into the house. There was the mother-in-law at the table, looking at him with frightened eyes. And the baby in the stroller. Seven months old. Blond. His little girl. She would grow up here and have everything. Except her mother.

  George carried Arlyn upstairs and put her into the bed, then backed out so Jasmine could bathe her and dole out her medicine. The mother-in-law had come up behind him. She looked worried.

  “You don’t work on the pool,” she said.

  George felt as though he could tear someone apart. “I’m Blanca’s father,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?” Diana Moody asked.

  “I’m going to come here every day,” George Snow said. “I won’t be in your way.”

  “I mean after that. When Arlie is gone.”

  George Snow looked at Diana.

  “John doesn’t have to know anything,” Diana said.

  “He’s not my concern.”

  “No.” Diana understood. “He doesn’t have to be.”

  Diana had known there was someone else. One night when Arlyn was in horrible pain, Diana had sat on the bed rubbing her back. It was then Arlie had told her mother-in-law she’d done something wrong; she admitted that Blanca wasn’t John’s child. She didn’t even regret it; inside her marriage, she’d been dying of loneliness.

  “I understand,” Diana had said to her daughter-in-law. She herself had been lonely in her own marriage. “What’s done is done. Now you have a beautiful daughter, so it’s all for the best.”

  Afterward Diana couldn’t help studying the baby, her blond hair, her dark eyes, her singular features, so unlike John or Arlie. She had known Blanca’s father as soon as she saw him. So now she asked the hard question.

  “What are you going to do about Blanca?”

  “After Arlie’s gone I’m going to drink myself to death. So you don’t have to worry about me stealing the baby.”

  Diana Moody put a hand on his arm, which was a terrible mistake. He started to cry. How embarrassing to be embraced by a woman you didn’t know, a woman old enough to be your mother; even worse to be grateful that someone was telling you everything would be all right, that time would heal, even if every word she said was a lie.

  ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN THE SKY WAS CLEAR AND THE weather was hot, Arlie called her mother-in-law into her room and asked her to buy a cemetery plot.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Diana said. “That’s for your husband to do.”

  “I can’t ask John.”

  John Moody had become somewhat unwound. He couldn’t be around sickness, he said. He was no good with it, no good to anyone. Several times Diana had gone downstairs for a drink of water or a Tylenol in the middle of the night and had caught him out on the lawn, walking home in the wet grass. When she’d switched on the porch light, John had blinked in the glare, stunned and guilty, but not guilty enough to stop sneaking to his neighbor’s house in the evenings. Sometimes he spent all night. Diana gave her son the benefit of the doubt. Surely, this nonsense with the neighbor started after Arlie took ill. Marriage was complicated, after all; Diana Moody understood that. Maybe John was reacting to that George Snow fellow coming by every day. Anyway, John was not adept at grief or at showing compassion. The truth was, he was not someone you’d ask to buy a cemetery plot.

  “I trust you to do this for me. Find me someplace where there’s a big tree,” Arlie told Diana. “So I can fly away from the top branches.”

  Diana asked Jasmine to watch the children. She put on her good black suit and her gold necklace and earrings and she wore a hat that she saved for special occasions. She drove out to the cemetery, stopping to ask directions at the gas station. The life she’d led here once seemed like a dream. The lanes here in Connecticut were winding, green, shadowy. There were fields with stone walls she’d never noticed when she lived here; she’d been so busy with her life, although, frankly, the meaning of that life escaped her now. Dinner parties, tennis, her son, her husband. Not even the time to look at the stone walls, built a century earlier when cows roamed the pastures.

  When Diana reach
ed the cemetery she parked and went in. It was the oldest cemetery in town, Archangel. Diana had scheduled an appointment and a Mr. Hansen was waiting for her in the chapel. He was very compassionate, and he offered to drive to the site, but Diana said she would follow along in her own car.

  “Single or family?” Mr. Hansen asked.

  Diana could not bear to think of Arlie out there all by herself. “Family.”

  As she drove behind Mr. Hansen’s van to the far side of the cemetery, she heard rustling in the back of the car. She hoped a bird hadn’t flown in through the open window. She looked in the rearview mirror. Someone was under the blanket she kept in the car for the baby. If a carjacker had suddenly leapt up, insisting she drive to the Mojave, Diana would have been grateful. I will, she would have said. You bet. I’ll drive forever if I can just get out of this mess.

  “Who’s there?” Diana said in her sternest voice. Probably not the best tone to take with a carjacker, but clearly the right way to get her grandson to sit up and reveal himself.

  “Sam Moody,” Diana said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see where you were going,” the child said.

  The funeral director’s van was slowing down. Diana was pleased to see lots of big trees. Oak, cedar, ash.

  “The boneyard,” Sam said.

  He really was an odd little boy. Was it possible not to like your own grandchild?

  “The cemetery,” Diana corrected.

  “I know what happens to things when they die,” Sam said. “Dust and bones.”

  “There’s more. There’s a spirit.” Diana felt sick to her stomach. The heat, perhaps, and all this bad luck.

  “Yeah, right,” Sam said. “That’s a load of crap.” They had come to a stop. “Nice trees,” he noted. “Can I climb one?”

  “Absolutely not.” The funeral director was motioning to Diana. She did have to keep the child in line. “Maybe if you’re good.”

  Diana and the boy got out of the car and walked over the grass. They reached a cool, green spot with six plots. “Fine,” Diana said to Hansen. “I’ll take it.”

  Sam went to the center of the empty circle beneath a huge sycamore tree. He lay down and gazed through the leaves. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.