by Jen Jensen
Johnna rested in her arms. “I love you to the far side of the moon and back.” Emma kissed her head again and squished her tighter with both arms. Johnna giggled but didn’t pull away.
“I love you to Pluto and back.” Emma held her and then let go. She tipped Johnna’s face to her with a finger on her chin. “To the far end of the universe and back. Through time and space, heaven and earth. From this life to the next and every life after. You’re stuck with me. That’s how much I love you.” Johnna rested her head on Emma’s shoulder. She’d told Johnna this every day since she opened her eyes on planet Earth. Johnna never tired of hearing it. Sam and Jacob flailed and pulled out of her arms, but Johnna always stayed, even if she knew it by heart.
“I have to go to Mrs. Ojeda’s funeral today, and I feel very anxious about it,” Emma told her quietly.
“Want me to go?” Emma shook her head and kissed Johnna’s forehead. She didn’t know how her children got to be who they were, but she was grateful something in the long arc of her unhappiness manifested in love.
“No, you don’t need to.” She studied Johnna and hugged her again, not able to stop herself. She closed her eyes and hoped to any being who might hear her prayers that Johnna’s path would unfurl with more gentleness and ease than her own. When Johnna came home to tell her she was gay, she would celebrate with her, and weather every unkind reaction for her. Then she’d pack her up and move her far away, so she could live the life she wanted.
“What?”
Emma smiled. Johnna was intuitive and sensitive, even if she tucked it away. “Afterward, do you want to go get dinner and see a movie? We won’t let Sam or Jacob pick.” Johnna’s head moved only a little in agreement, but Emma felt it. Emma squeezed her tight again. “I don’t know what to wear.” Johnna tilted her head. “Any ideas?”
“Not the black flowery dress. I hate that.”
Emma laughed. Flower barged into the room, looking for Johnna, and with a leap, jumped into the middle of the bed. Emma ignored the fact that a ninety-pound dog, of undetermined mixed breed, was in the middle of her bed. Stephen didn’t like that Flower was allowed in the house, but Johnna loved her. Emma fought and won that battle with him, and silently she was proud of it.
“What’s so funny?” She turned at the sound of Johnna’s giggles.
Johnna pointed at Flower’s feet, covered in mud. “Dad would have a cow.” Emma sighed at the paw prints on the bed and the bedspread. “Don’t worry. I’ll clean it up before you get back.”
Emma stood forlorn in front of the closet. Nothing in her life felt like it fit, including her skin.
“Wear the yellow dress,” Johnna said. “I love that color. It’s my favorite.”
“You don’t think it would be rude to wear a yellow dress to a funeral?”
“I think everyone at the funeral will be sad and seeing you in it will make them feel better. Because you’re so beautiful,” Johnna said. Emma turned to look at her, met her eyes, and smiled.
“So are you,” Emma said. Johnna grinned and shrugged. “Yellow it is. For my baby girl.”
Emma slipped the simple yellow dress over her shoulders. It flowed to her ankles. It was still warm outside, so she decided against nylons and slipped on sandals. She held up her arms and turned, eyebrows raised at Johnna. Johnna held up a thumb. Emma touched Johnna’s shoulder as she bent to adjust her sandal. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Make sure your brothers don’t burn down the house.” Johnna and Flower followed her from the room.
They stopped together in the kitchen. The counters were covered with white powder. “Sam, Jacob. Get in here.” Sam and Jacob raced down the steps, their footfalls heavy and loud. Johnna perched on a barstool to watch. “What is this?”
“What?” Sam answered nonchalantly, arrogantly, his hand on his hips. Jacob hid behind him and looked at her from behind Sam’s arm.
“What?” Emma said, pointing to the white substance all over the counter and floor in the kitchen. “What is this?”
“Cocaine,” Sam said. Johnna laughed and punched his arm.
Emma smiled at him, though she tried to remain stern. “Both of you need to clean this up. What were you doing?”
“I was helping Jacob with a science project. We mixed vinegar and baking soda together. Boom.” He smiled, eyes gleaming.
“Well, that’s fine, but clean it up now.” Sam started to speak, and Emma raised her finger. “No argument, no nothing. Now.” Sam turned to open the closet to get the broom. Jacob wiped the counter. “I’ll be gone a few hours. Don’t go anywhere. We’re going to go eat tonight and see a movie.”
In the car, Emma turned off the radio and drove in silence to the Catholic church. She had known Mrs. Ojeda her entire life. Her time there with Carmen was the best in her childhood. Carmen’s house was always busier than hers. Carmen’s sisters and brothers, eight in total, were constantly moving in and out with their spouses and kids. The kitchen thrummed with activity, and the house always smelled of freshly cooked food. Emma remembered Mrs. Ojeda’s home as one of emotional abundance and warmth and tried to re-create it for her own children.
Emma remembered this with the clarity reserved for memories of total presence and peace. The air in the car was hot, and she rolled down the window. The wind brushed against her face, and she tucked her hair behind her ear. Emma pulled into a parking space. She looked in the mirror, blotted her lipstick, and then rested her head on the steering wheel. Anxiety crept through every limb. Her hands tingled, and she moved her legs to be certain she wasn’t paralyzed. Her stomach knotted.
Her episodes had begun years before, a year or two after Jacob’s birth. She’d lost track of time. The first one came while she was in the kitchen, putting a plate in the cupboard. Suddenly, the ground beneath her feet gave out and the atoms in her body rearranged themselves, or so it felt to her, and she fell through the earth. Her thoughts had careened through the length of her body, and her identity had leaked out the soles of her feet. She came back to her body, pulled through the atoms she’d traveled, and found herself on her knees. They were bruised the next day. Jacob cried from his booster seat.
She felt this downward movement of her consciousness, as though she was dropping through her own body, and grasped the steering wheel. She closed her eyes and counted, only focusing on the numbers. In May that year, she’d gone to a healer in Salt Lake City whose advertisement she saw on the corkboard at the public library. It read “Mildred. Healer. Intuitive. Psychotherapist. Can I help you?” She pulled the number from the sheet and called. She planned a trip to the doctor on the same day as an excuse. A physical, she told everyone. She’d be gone until late afternoon.
She told Mildred about her episodes, in the dimly lit small room in the back of Caravan, Salt Lake City’s only new age bookstore. Mildred held up her hands. “You pack so much psychic discord,” she told her. “I can barely breathe near you. How do you breathe? You’re living a life you were never meant to live. You sold your soul. For what? For nothing.” Emma collapsed on the small couch and cried harder than she’d ever cried before. The words pierced her carefully manicured shields, and she felt hopeless, weakened, and empty.
Mildred held her hand. “This is why you’re having attacks. When we are out of alignment, our body tells us. You’re awake and aware, and you can only pretend to be asleep for so long before your body can’t handle it anymore. You say you feel like your atoms are rearranging themselves. That is what they are doing. They’re trying to make sense of this life you are living. Are you ready to be brave, Emma?”
Carmen. Twenty years ago, she’d begged Emma to leave Sage Creek. It was a different time, and it was not easy. She last saw Carmen the night she returned home from the hospital where her parents sent her when they discovered her secret. Carmen called from below her window, and she climbed out, as she had done so many times before. They stole quietly down the street to the park, on a bench far away from the overhead lights. Carmen held her hand, but Emma couldn’t
look at her. She was ashamed, scared, confused. Sitting in her car that day, she couldn’t remember if this version was justification or the truth. “Go away, Carmen,” she said. “Just leave town. Go somewhere else. Live your life.” Then she left, but Carmen wouldn’t let her go alone. Emma sobbed remembering how Carmen escorted her home.
At her window, Carmen said, “Please, Emma. We can do it together. You and me.” Emma climbed into her window and closed it behind her. She’d not seen Carmen since.
After she left Mildred, she wondered about this moment. Why hadn’t she gone with Carmen? It felt so far away. Where once the certainty resided, she now felt the awful weight of realization. Her awakening punctuated itself through her being. She was afraid to leave her mom and dad. She was all they had. She couldn’t leave the town. It was all she knew. She couldn’t reconcile who she was, a pervert, with what she had been taught. She had images of outer darkness awaiting her with death, of her family basking in the eternal light of Heavenly Father, in the celestial kingdom with God while she was condemned for unnatural desires, in hell.
The doctors at the hospital told her that her desire for other women was unnatural and she needed to be saved. They forced horrible medicine into her mouth. The pills at night put her to sleep. As she drifted to sleep, her chest tightened, and her breathing slowed so much she prayed and hoped she’d not wake up. She held her breath and imagined her lungs empty of air, shriveling and dying. But morning came, and the pills upset her stomach, and she threw up each day after breakfast. The afternoon medicine gave her hives, and she picked at her arms until sores opened on her skin. The doctors and staff forced her to repent and share her secrets with the others there. They excommunicated her, and then baptized her again, and for three awful months, she suffered, and finally believed them when they told her she could not be that person.
The burden of her culture’s fears wrapped around her legs, like the chains of the condemned, and she carried them with her for twenty years. She saw them dragging behind her, and as they did, they pulled parts of her soul to them. The best parts of her dragged behind, wrapped in the weight of the iron. The episodes began when too much of her soul had leaked into those chains and she could no longer function. Her transgression was not loving Carmen. It was believing it was more vital to her salvation to be Mormon than gay. She lifted her head and looked through the windshield.
How could a whole group of functioning, somewhat rational human beings, get it so wrong?
Her wounds called out for healing. Was it time? How could she have known? How could she begin? She wiped the mascara from her cheeks. She had a funeral to attend. Emma climbed from the car, pushed down the awful weight of her wasted life, took a deep breath, and put on a perfect smile.
She walked into the church with confidence and purpose and wondered if the chains bound to her legs were silenced by the force of her smile. She smiled at people she had known all her life, and greeted them all by name. Emma Addens Yager, the beautiful only child of Rose and William Addens, homecoming queen, valedictorian, wife of Stephen Yager, and mother to Sara, Johnna, Sam, and Jacob, always greeted everyone by name. The perfectly molded, sculpted, untouchable Emma Addens Yager remembered everyone’s birthdays and children’s names, and could talk to anyone about anything. She grimaced inwardly, thinking she’d just written her own obituary.
She settled into an aisle seat in the back row of the church and crossed her legs. Her mother was six rows ahead and waved at her to sit with her. Emma ignored her. She scanned the crowd and found Carmen on the end of the first row. She stood, bending toward her sister, unrepentantly wearing black pants and a gray shirt. Her hair was short. Emma’s heart lurched and face flushed. She ducked her head, not ready for Carmen to see her.
The hymnal began, the procession music played as the casket moved up the aisle. Emma settled back into her seat. She remembered lying in Carmen’s arms, snuggled into a sleeping bag on the eve of her seventeenth birthday. There was Carmen’s mouth on her neck, her hands as they roamed over her body, unlocking her. She remembered the utter pleasure of the moment, the feeling of wholeness. She took a deep breath and remembered the warmth and softness of Carmen’s skin pressed against her. She wiped tears from her cheeks, surprised by them.
The tent was where her mother would find them a few months later. She pulled Emma by her hair while she screamed and threatened to kill Carmen. Carmen left to run home to her mother, who came to the house to try to talk to her mom. Her mom screamed at Mrs. Ojeda to leave them alone. Emma clenched her hands in her lap and struggled to leave the memory.
Emma looked up, finding Carmen again. She had long hair when she saw her last, always pulled up and away from her face. She liked it better short. She wondered if it still felt the same way, or if like hers, was coarse with time. Emma crossed her fingers in her lap, looked at her wedding band. Ashamed again, she slipped it from her finger and slid it into her purse. She rubbed where her skin was whitened by time and clenched her hands tighter.
She slipped from the church unseen as the funeral ended. The procession to the cemetery would take time, and she didn’t want to go. Instead, she drove across town to the park and bench where she rejected Carmen all those years ago. She waited in silence, enveloped by the weight of her grief.
Chapter Twenty
Saturday, August 24, 1991
When she arrived at the town recreation center, the room was loud with voices and music. Emma slipped into the side door. Her mother was with her friends, whispering. Emma approached them. Her mother touched her shoulder. “You look so nice. I wish you’d do this more often.” She waved her hands in front of Emma’s face. Emma smiled, perfectly obliging to her mother.
She looked again for Carmen and wanted nothing more than to talk to her, to whisk back in time with her and say, “Yes. I’ll go with you.” She clasped her hands neatly in her lap and resented her mother, even as she fought to keep the emotion from her face. She listened to the women half-heartedly and excused herself after fifteen minutes to talk with Maria, who cried by herself in the front of the room. Just three years younger than Carmen, Maria had occupied a prominent place in Emma’s young life.
“Maria?” Emma spoke quietly, waiting for her to respond.
Maria turned to look at her. “Emma.” She hugged her tight. Emma returned the embrace, and then pulled back. “You are as beautiful as ever.”
Emma ignored the compliment. “I’m so sorry about your mom, Maria. She was a remarkable woman.” Maria looked sad again. “How are you? Where are you living now?”
“Colorado. My husband and I moved there years ago.” She smiled, touching Emma’s cheek. “And you?”
“Here. I’m still just here.” They chatted until someone else recognized Maria. Emma waved at her to attend to the interruption and then was alone. Her thoughts pulled her inward, but she felt a presence call to her and looked up to see Carmen standing in front of her, staring. She took a deep breath and rose to walk toward her. Carmen’s color faded.
“Emma,” Carmen said. Emma looked in her eyes, still so brown they were almost black, and still gentle. She smiled at Carmen, barely, and wanted to touch her. “How are you?” Carmen struggled to recover.
Emma didn’t know what to say, and so said, “Okay. I’m sorry about your mom, Carmen.”
Emma looked down at her sandals, studied the knots in the wood on the basketball court floor, and tried to look up again. She couldn’t. Tears threatened her. “Thanks for coming,” Carmen finally said.
“How long are you staying?” It felt like the most important question Emma had ever asked.
“Forever. I’m moving into Mom’s house and taking over the store. She asked me to.” Emma’s heart raced. She continued to stare at her feet.
Mustering courage, Emma looked up again. She couldn’t talk or respond.
“Carmen.” They both looked to Maria, who was waving to Carmen. “Come here.” Carmen held up her finger. Emma retreated and stepped back.
“I won’t keep you. Take care, Carmen.” She turned to leave, and Carmen grabbed her arm, gently. Emma felt the contact to the center of her soul. She hadn’t realized that nothing had touched her since Carmen left. She also realized Carmen was always asking her to stay.
“Don’t go. I’ll be right back,” she pleaded, her eyes warm, questioning.
“I shouldn’t. I should go.” Emma turned, panicked, fled from the recreation center, and rushed to her car.
* * *
At dinner, Sam and Johnna huddled over the same menu, their shoulders touching. Jacob was next to Emma, bored and restless. Emma put her arm around him and squeezed his shoulders. He pulled away and she kissed his cheek and ruffled his hair. He shook his head, disgusted. Emma laughed, and Sam pulled a pouty face at him.
“Mom, how was the funeral? Were there a lot of people?” Sam looked over the top of the menu.
“Yes. She was loved.” Johnna twirled a straw wrapper in her fingers. Sam was so confident, such a juxtaposition to Johnna. As extroverted as she was introverted, as jovial as she was serious. And as short as she was tall. Their hair and eyes were the same color, mannerisms were the same, but they were so fundamentally different in every other way. Twins who were mirror images of each other. Jacob’s dark hair spilled over his ears. He needed a haircut. She felt a rush of affection for them and then fear. Had she condemned them to the same sort of life she lived, one rife with fear and ritual? Of Sunday morning church services and Wednesday night church activities. A life where they must heed the words of a madman named Joseph Smith or fear they would be condemned to hell. She teared up, looking down at the menu.
“Are you going crazy, Mom?” Sam put his elbows on the table, trying to get closer to her.