Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  Blanca came up behind Meredith. “My father says that sort of thing is crap.”

  “Does he?”

  Meredith carried half the books once they were checked out and Blanca the other half. Blanca seemed to be favoring Buddhism. She was a believer, although she didn’t quite know in what. Her bookaholism was growing. She was always ducking into the bookstore, spending too much time at the library. Beneath her bed she had a cache of books Cynthia would never have approved of, all sorts of things a girl her age was not supposed to read, from Salinger to Erica Jong.

  “My father says psychic phenomena is nonsense,” Blanca amended. “I added the crap.”

  “Lovely vocabulary, Bee.”

  “Thank you ever so much.”

  On the drive home, as they were rounding a corner, chatting about what their favorite section of the library was — fiction for Blanca, history and biography for Meredith — and listening to a country-and-western station, they saw Sam. They had, for a few brief moments, actually forgotten he was missing. Libraries and an armful of books could do that to a person. And even when they spotted him, Sam seemed like a ghost himself, pale, wavery, an image they might have conjured. But no, it was truly Sam. He was outside the market drawing on the sidewalk. A small crowd had gathered around to watch. There was color everywhere. It looked like blood and blue feathers and white bones. But it was only chalk and concrete.

  “Why are all those people around him?” Blanca asked.

  Meredith pulled the car over and opened her door. “Stay here.”

  Meredith walked toward the crowd. People were laughing as though they were watching a circus act. Maybe it was amusing if you didn’t know him: a stoned-out kid in filthy clothes scribbling madly, drenched in colors.

  Sam had covered nearly an entire block with his chalk drawings. He’d done this in his room, illustrating every wall with glow-in-the-dark paint; now he seemed intent on covering the rest of the world, or at least this part of it. Saturating everything in a vision of his own. It was not a world anyone would choose to enter of his own free will. These were nightmares, dead bodies, dead birds, skeleton men carrying two-bladed axes, winged figures without faces flying above burning buildings. Sam’s arms and face were turquoise and scarlet and black.

  Meredith made her way to the front of the crowd. Sam was so busy he didn’t even notice her. She crouched down beside him. He glanced up and didn’t seem surprised in the least to see her.

  “Hey,” he said without stopping work. Sam’s eyes were all pupil; he was seeing what others could not, would not, want to see. He’d been taking psychedelic drugs for several days. He would never remember how he’d gotten back to town. Maybe he flew. Maybe that was it. He was in a tunnel in Bridgeport and he simply willed himself back to his hometown.

  “How long have you been doing this?” Meredith asked.

  An entire block’s worth. His hands, she saw now, were bleeding. Halfway between the dry cleaner and the market there was a chalk drawing of a woman in a white dress. Her hair was red.

  “I started around midnight. I was on my way home, and it just came to me. All in one piece. I didn’t even have to think.”

  He’d been at it for fifteen hours, all through the night and morning, into the afternoon.

  The market manager came out and tried to disperse the crowd. “The police are on their way,” he shouted to Sam. “I’m not kidding. This is private property.”

  “Actually, the sidewalk belongs to everyone, asshole.” Sam didn’t stop drawing for an instant.

  “Why don’t we go home now?” Meredith suggested.

  She glanced toward the parked VW. There was Blanca, opening the door so she could watch. The red-haired woman seemed to rise from the concrete. She was translucent; Meredith could look right through her to a parked minivan.

  “Come on.” Meredith reached for Sam.

  “Fuck it, Merrie! I’m busy!” Sam snapped his arm back. His eyes were bright. “Don’t you see I’m doing something! For once! Really look at me!”

  No one had called her Merrie for years. She felt as though everything she’d ever done was a mistake; she’d never been able to save anyone and she couldn’t seem to do it now. All at once she knew that was why she was here. The true answer to Cynthia’s question. How could an educated, attractive young woman such as herself accept this thankless task? Because she couldn’t let Sam sink.

  There was a siren somewhere. People in the crowd were jeering. Someone said something about Satan at work. Those nightmare figures. The skeletons with the double-bladed axes. The woman with blood instead of hair.

  “Here’s my plan,” Meredith said. “We’ll leave this here for people to enjoy and we’ll get some supper and talk things over. Blanca’s in the car waiting. She’s missed you, Sam.”

  “There is no fucking we.” Sam continued to work. His knuckles were bleeding, but blood meant nothing to him. “We’ll leave this here and go back home to prison, ” he said in a singsong, mocking Meredith. Instantly his fury returned. “This is me. Only me!”

  “I want to hear about it. I want to talk about it.” The damned sirens were almost on top of them. “Come on, Sam.” The one thing Meredith didn’t want was for them to have to deal with the police. Was she an enabler? Then so be it. She truly believed no good would come of a drug test or a jail term. Not for Sam. He would drown in the authorities’ good intentions. “We have to go now.”

  “You might think I’m crazy, but I can see what a person thinks in his eyes.” Sam swept his hands out over the sidewalk. The mass of color, the crimson, the ghosts. “I can put the inside outside. This is me on the sidewalk. Nobody ever sees me.”

  Blanca had left the parked car and was close by. She’d overheard her brother; her face looked so solemn she didn’t seem like a child anymore.

  “Go back and wait for us, Bee,” Meredith told her. “Call your father at work.”

  Blanca didn’t listen. She was a good girl who never disobeyed, but she disobeyed now. She went to Sam and knelt beside him. A film of blue chalk dusted the cuffs of her coat. “I know it’s you.”

  Sam stopped coloring. He was breathing hard.

  “I see you,” Blanca said.

  Sam started to cry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wept. It hurt, like little daggers inside his eyes. He was exhausted; he’d been there on the sidewalk since the middle of the night, thinking and thinking, making his world appear, and now his hands were scraped raw.

  “Come home with me,” Blanca said.

  “I don’t think I can,” Sam said.

  “We’re begging you,” Meredith said.

  “Never beg anyone, Merrie. It’s beneath you. You have more character than that.”

  Two police cars and an ambulance had pulled into the parking lot of the market. The manager was waving his arms around, signaling the authorities. Sam remembered the feeling he was having now. He’d had it before, a long time ago. The knives against his legs, the pins in his fingers, the bones of his squirrel, the way his heart had broken. Everything was in pieces. He’d put the pearls his mother had given him in the cardboard box, and he hadn’t looked at them since.

  Two officers approached and tried to speak to Sam.

  “Don’t fucking talk to me, man. I’m busy. Can’t anyone see that? Why don’t you open your eyes? That’s all it would take.”

  When the officers reached for him, Sam scooted out of their grasp. When they grabbed him, he hit anything he could connect with. They got him down on the sidewalk then. Chalk dust flew everywhere. Blanca covered her ears. The way Sam screamed was too terrible to hear, as though he would die if he didn’t finish his drawings. His world would not be complete and then he would fade away into nothingness. Ashes. Soot. Broken china. Hollow bird bones. Ghostlight.

  Meredith held Blanca when the police dragged Sam through the parking lot. Blanca was calling for her brother, but no one heard her. The crowd was still there, and some people applauded. Someone must have pointed Me
redith and Blanca out to the police, because an officer from the second car came over and asked for Sam’s full name and address and telephone number.

  “Don’t tell them anything!” Blanca said. She tried to get away and run to the ambulance, but Meredith held her back.

  “Can we go with him?” Meredith asked the officer. “This is his sister.”

  “Let me just take down all the information we need for the files,” the officer said. “Everyone calm down.”

  So they did. They had no choice. Blanca cried quietly and hid her face in Meredith’s coat. The ambulance pulled away while Meredith was reciting their address. Glass House. Last House. Lost House. They could see him soon enough at the hospital, the officer assured Meredith, where he would be held for observation and drug testing. There were official procedures. Weren’t there always? They had to give the situation some time. Already, the manager of the market was hosing off the sidewalk.

  “Look what they’re doing!” Blanca cried. “He’s disappearing.”

  It was amazing how many colors there were, all running into the gutter in a stream: a dozen shades of blue, twenty different reds, and all that black soot, like a nightmare given form, the insides of a heart, destroyed so easily, done away with before anyone could stop the damage, or salvage what was lost, or even try to save him.

  THE COURT ORDERED THAT SAM UNDERGO REHAB IN THE hospital for three weeks if the drug charges against him were to be dropped. Luckily, he’d had only a small amount of hashish in tinfoil stuck in his pocket. During this time he refused all visitors, requesting only that his sister come to see him. John Moody forbade this. There was no reason for a ten-year-old girl to be subjected to drug rehab. But the children’s father could construct whatever rules he wanted; Blanca still managed to get over to the hospital every day. It was Meredith who discovered this; she’d come to retrieve Blanca from dance school and noticed that while all the other girls were piling out of the front door, Blanca was approaching from the road. The next day, after dropping Blanca at the library, Meredith waited in her car, parked behind a hedge of pines. Blanca left the library after fifteen minutes and Meredith drove after her, following at a distance as Blanca walked to the hospital. When she came out a while later, Meredith honked the horn. Blanca got into the VW. No excuses. Nothing. She looked straight ahead.

  “Did you get to see him?” Meredith said.

  “I write notes and he answers. One of the nurses takes mine in and then brings me his.”

  “What does he write?”

  “I write. He makes pictures.”

  Meredith thought this over.

  “I can just drive you here and then we don’t have to pretend you’re at lessons or at the library.”

  “Really?” Blanca was such a good girl that all the lying she’d been doing had taken a toll. Her hair seemed dull and stringy and her face had broken out.

  “Really.”

  On the day Sam came home, they made a chocolate cake to celebrate. He had to still like chocolate; he couldn’t be that changed. Cynthia went and got ice cream and when Blanca and Meredith seemed surprised, she said, “I don’t wish bad things for Sam, you know. I wish him well.”

  During this time, whenever the children’s grandmother called and Cynthia answered, Diana Moody hung up. Diana wanted to speak with Meredith.

  “Cynthia knows you’re hanging up on her,” Meredith told Diana. Diana had recently had a stroke, and she was upset that she couldn’t come to help out. She thought of Meredith as her alter ego, the one person who would tell her the truth.

  “I didn’t like Sam when he was a little child,” Diana admitted one day when she phoned. “I thought he was rude, but he was simply honest. He didn’t keep anything inside.”

  “He’s still the same,” Meredith said.

  “That’s why he hurts,” Diana Moody said. “There’s no barrier to stop the pain.”

  John Moody was the one to go and get him. Sam glared as his father signed him out and he was given his wallet and packet of chalk. “Thank you and fuck you all,” Sam said to the nurses.

  “That’s enough,” John Moody told him.

  “I’ll bet this was for my own good,” Sam said.

  “I don’t want to play games with you.” John felt so old he couldn’t believe he’d ever been a young man out for a good time, looking for a party, thinking his whole life was ahead of him.

  “Actually, I can’t remember you ever playing a single game with me. No wonder I can’t play baseball. Or basketball. Or tennis. Or fucking horseshoes for that matter. Thanks, Dad.”

  “You want to blame me for your lack of athletic ability?”

  They hadn’t even left the ward and here they were, already.

  “What’s the point?” Sam said. “You don’t understand me any more than you ever understood my mother.”

  “Don’t you dare mention her,” John said.

  “Fuck you. She’s my mother. She was nothing to you. I’ll mention her all I want. If I want to say one word for the rest of my life and it’s her name, I will. So don’t push me.”

  They didn’t speak again on the ride home. In the driveway, they got out, slammed the doors shut, then tried their best to avoid each other on the way inside. Sam didn’t bother going into the kitchen, though they called to him, and Blanca chased after him.

  “Thanks but no thanks, Peapod,” he said to his sister when she told him about the cake. “You have it.”

  Things turned really bad two days after he’d come home. Forty-eight hours and he was up on the roof again, high as could be. He’d only been to the corner store and for a long walk, and somehow he’d managed to score. It was early morning, and John Moody was headed out to work when he realized what was going on. He was in the driveway and he felt a chill. He stopped and put one hand up to shade his eyes. He felt as though he were watching a film: a man’s son climbs onto the glass roof and stands there, waiting for the next gust of wind. Does the man run and rescue him? Does he stand there, so incapacitated he cannot move? Or does he climb up alongside the boy and make the leap himself?

  Going to the tearoom on Twenty-third Street had done no good. That was just a foolish last-gasp attempt to be free of Arlie. It wasn’t just soot and voices and dishes and ashes. He truly saw her. In the morning, walking down the hall; at dusk, beside the boxwoods. Other men might have convinced themselves all they were seeing were shadows, only a grid of light, but John knew better. It was her. She was young, the way she’d been when they first met, when he’d gotten so lost he couldn’t find his way. He saw her now, as a matter of fact, up on the roof, in the reflection of a cloud, in the movement of the wind. The white dress, the long red hair. He spied her from the corner of his eye, just the shape of her, and every time he saw her he knew: he hadn’t done right by her.

  And now. Once again. What was the right thing in this situation? Call the police to rescue his son? Or would that make matters worse? He wished he could ask Arlyn’s advice. There on his perch on the roof, Sam seemed to be nodding off; his eyes were closed. The drugs must bring him peace, John thought. For an instant that poor boy could stop thinking, stop being himself. He could float there, above them all.

  Meredith ran outside in her nightgown. She’d spied Sam through the glass ceiling of the second-floor hallway. She couldn’t remember having run so fast before, down the stairs, onto the grass.

  “Go after him,” she said to John Moody, who seemed to be paralyzed, as always. “Go up to the roof and talk him down.”

  John wished he had a net, or another lifetime, or a different pair of eyes. More than anything, he wished he could find a way to go back in time. One, he had been lost since the day he made a wrong turn. Two, he had married the wrong woman, although which one had been more of a mistake he couldn’t say. Three, he was a man of reason who never expected to have to deal with such things. John Moody was overwhelmed. He wished he could stretch out beneath the boxwoods and breathe in their spicy scent and never have to think or talk or
do anything again.

  “Are you just going to stand here and watch him fall?”

  Wasn’t it John who was falling? When he dreamed, he was in a tree or on the top of one of his own buildings; he dreamed he was tumbling down and yet there were stars rushing at him. At night, when he opened his eyes, he knew Arlie was close by. Behind the curtains, on the window ledge, beside him in bed, her head on the pillow. What had once felt like a curse had become a comfort. He’d wanted to get rid of her, yet now he found himself searching her out. Arlie? he whispered late at night, while he sat in the kitchen, while Cynthia was asleep in their bed. Are you there?

  “Good lord!” Meredith said, disgusted. “Why can’t you ever do anything to help him!” Meredith raced back into the house, then took the flights of stairs to the attic door. She climbed through so fast she was dizzy. Her heart hurt. She pushed the door slowly so she wouldn’t accidentally knock Sam off the roof. “Knock knock,” she said. She saw his sneaker a fair distance off, so she popped the door open the rest of the way.

  “It’s not a suicide attempt,” Sam said. “So don’t start with that crap, Merrie. I’m not an idiot.”

  Meredith crept out onto the glass roof. Her nightgown made it difficult. She hoped she wouldn’t fall. God, it would be a horrible obituary if she did. Unmarried, overeducated nanny slips to death and breaks every bone in her body. Lost woman found in pieces. She could never save anyone, least of all herself.

  “There are reasons to live, you know.”

  “Jesus, the next thing I know you’ll be getting me a fucking puppy. You’ll tell me everything will be fine if we just clap our hands and believe.”

  Sam looked shaky. He was wearing jeans and a jacket and he was sweating. He’d been more unstable than ever since he got home; he moved like a sleepwalker, unsteady on his feet. He was done ingesting any kind of garbage he could get his hands on. Psychedelics took him to a place he didn’t want to be. He had his own nightmares; he didn’t need any assistance with expanding his mind. He wanted to close his mind down, give it a rest. It was heroin only from now on. The sleep without dreams. Everything he needed, wanted, had to have. He kept his works in his night-table drawer; the needle and strap and spoon neatly rolled up in a piece of worn suede. It was what gave him a reason to live, actually. Wake, live, move — all of it revolved around getting high.