Bright Before Us (6 page)

I know it was. The police
—I paused, waiting to see what I would say—
they identified the body.

She turned away, and for a moment I thought she was disgusted—by the obviousness, the desperateness of the lie. But when she turned back, she was crying. She stepped toward me, extending her hand. She had asked me never to say that name in her presence, and now she was crying and holding out her hand.

She loved me so much that my grief was her own.

 

She drove us home. The sky had turned an angry shade of peach, and beneath the settling sun I felt weakened. We had gone all day without food.

You can't do that, you know?
I said.
You should really carry a granola bar around at least.

Greta was allergic to correction of any kind, fuming when I asked her to wash the dishes, snapping at me if I said the chicken needed salt. Suggestion, to her, was condemnation.
She had no problem, however, asking me to sweep up, unclog the toilet, never buy that brand of sliced turkey again. But that day she said nothing, and I knew I would get a pass: I had been through enough. I was untouchable.

You need to start thinking about this baby, you need to start taking care of this baby better,
I said.
We can't take any chances, Greta.

Her jaw set.
You're right.
Her voice was sharp and cool.

She slapped me, or tried to—she was driving and couldn't get a good purchase on my face. Her palm bounced against my open mouth, my tongue touching her finger long enough to detect the dim tang of salt. She wiped her hand on her lap as yellow highway stripes passed beneath the car, both of us stunned. Finally she spoke, imitating calm:
I know what you're trying to do.

Instinctively, I touched my mouth where she had hit it.
What I'm doing is trying to get you to eat a granola bar.

You think I'm stupid, but I'm not,
she said.

It was always like this. I held it back as long as I could, and when it arrived it surprised both of us.

But I cut her off, punching the dash hard enough that a thin curl of skin lifted from my knuckle and blood began to bead. I watched her flinch, glaring at her profile like a dog about to spring, our hair fluttering in the breeze from the open windows. The sun was retreating. I looked away, feeling the wind begin its nightly easing of the heat.

Once home, she walked into the bedroom and shut the door. I saw the answering machine, blinking an angry red 6. I sprawled across the cat-scratched couch and put the television on mute. I tossed the remote above my head, catching it some and dropping it some. Blood had dried on my knuckle. I was starving. I walked over to the answering machine, pressed play, heard a woman's firm, clipped voice—my boss, the principal—and held the erase button down until the flashing ceased.

Outside, a half-dozen neighborhood kids played tetherball with their flimsy rig: the pole, anchored by a plastic base filled with sand, wobbled whenever someone got a hit in—too hard, and it fell against the pyramidshaped topiary next door. Another kid rode by on a bike, taunting the rest.
How come you only got some shit to say when you're on your bike?
one of them called back.

I could hear Greta moving in the bedroom—opening dresser drawers, walking to the bathroom to wash her face. I felt a still calm overtake me, felt myself sinking into sleep and then dream. I was hunting for ladybugs in my grandmother's backyard at age nine, like I always did in the summer; the dream wasn't invention, just replayed memory. I placed hundreds of the insects into a mesh prison fashioned with scrap from the garage. Their insect feet crawled along, poking through the holes, and I held my hand against their flutter. As the sun left the sky, I pulled a final ladybug from a bowing blade of grass. I held it up to the mesh jail, but instead of putting it inside, placed it on my tongue and crushed it against my mouth's ridged roof. And then I stood in the grass and felt my head lifting, my legs lengthening, the smeared bug on my tongue. And in
the way of dreams, where every shift makes sense without explanation, I knew I was growing up, becoming big in time lapse. Once my body had stretched itself fully, I was standing on yesterday's beach, looking down at a depression in the sand. The police had just gone. The bridge was swinging like a lazy hammock. In the parking lot was a tiny red car; it belonged to me.
Put your shoes on,
said a voice. I laughed, looking at the sky. The voice came from there. An airplane flew over in air-show loops. I waved to it.
Put your shoes on,
the voice said again, and my laugh halted sharply when I realized the voice was closer. The words were coming from beneath me—I looked down and the body was there, filling the depression. Ladybugs were crawling over it, lifting off and away. The face was hers, familiar and devastating; her red hair was speckled with wet, filthy sand.
Put your shoes on,
she said once more, as I looked up and saw that the red car was gone. I was stranded; Nora's body and I were stranded together. I knew there would be no escape.

I woke with a snap as the streetlights buzzed on, hearing the tetherballers start to leave and walk home. My pulse was in my ears. On the television a bounding dog covered stretches of grass in slow motion before a man entered the frame to hawk pet food.

There were no sounds from the bedroom. In the kitchen, the faucet dripped. The muted pet-food commercial continued, the text appearing in bold white letters at the bottom of the screen:
Don't waste your time with imitators,
it said.

I had forgotten all about eating that bug when I was nine. In my tiny twin bed that night, I had felt, bizarrely,
as though I had stumbled upon the way things worked. My mother often cried to herself in the kitchen, my father often sat grimly on our apartment's balcony, smoking for hours—now I understood that adults felt pain because they carried burdens, and those burdens resulted from the choices they made. I had made a choice, too—to eat the ladybug. No one had seen. No one would ever know. Just as adults had secrets, I had one, too. My thoughts and actions—my choices—I realized, were my property alone. No one could take them from me.

T
he summer camp where I met you had been less a camp, really, than a holding pen—just a broken-down old rec center a few towns beyond the city. We might have been at school, save for the absence of desks. Three times a day, we moped our way outside to the tangledchain swings, to goalposts without soccer balls. We swung from rusting parallel bars, our palms blooming with wet, cratered blisters. Inside, the mancala game was played with kidney beans, the marbles long since lost. We sang
Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar!
as we sat on stale tweed couches, the bottoms of our feet nowhere near the floor. When we got too loud, a counselor turned off the lights and put her finger to her lips. We were supposed to raise our hands in answer, to show that we understood. That year I wore thick glasses, and without them the world was underwater. I would take the glasses off and pretend to swim through a private ocean, cupping the air
in broad, slow strokes until I ran into something, or a pale, face-shaped orb came into view and placed them back on, saying, in my mother's voice,
Keep your glasses on so you don't fall down.
At camp once, alone on the soccer field, I set my glasses down in the grass and swam away, leagues deep before I understood with a shock that I would have no way to find them again.

The night of your parents' funeral, I dreamed of that place. You and I were in the soccer field, both of us wearing glasses now—four feet tall, eight years old again. The neglected grass came to our waists. But we were also us at twenty-two, and I was frantic; I wasn't sure if you knew they were dead. If you didn't, I wasn't prepared to tell you. Next to the field was a swanky restaurant, its lighting tinted amber like those souvenir Gold Rush photos taken at the county fair. The waiter seated us at the only table left. There were two chairs, though the table was barely comfortable for one. Our knees smacked.
Don't bring us any meat,
you said to the waiter accusingly.
It's gone bad.
It was Christmas, suddenly, and so from everywhere came hackneyed carols sung in sped-up voices.
We're little again,
I said.
We have to do it all over, I guess.
We accepted this glumly, looking at our hands. A plate of meat came.
I'm sick,
I said.
Because we drank on the stoop after the funeral,
you said. I smacked my forehead.
Right!
You remembered. You did know. I wouldn't have to tell you.

I woke with a start on your parents' sofa, beneath a blanket I hadn't fallen asleep with. The cable box's clock read 12:00. I blinked at it, and it blinked back. I sat up, sticky with sweat, and cleared my throat loudly. It was
pouring rain, the water falling in sheets. The streetlights had gone black.

Power's been in and out,
you called from the kitchen.
Because of the storm.

There was a pause.

You don't have to stay,
you said.
The lawyer's coming, plus I've got stuff to do.

The first part was true, about the lawyer. I don't think you knew why, but you disliked him: you deleted his messages until it hit you that nobody else was going to take care of it, that nobody else
could
take care of it. You didn't even know what “it” was—just that he was coming to tell you the surreal, formal things that you would now need to know.

But the second part was bullshit—you had nowhere to be, nothing you needed to do. The bookstore had told you to take as much time off as necessary. You called to tell them what had happened, and I could faintly hear the voice you spoke to. My God, what kind of accident?
A car accident,
you said. You used the same flat tone as the officer who had come to your door. By now, I knew the story in detail. On a rural highway, witnesses saw the car take a curve too fast and hit a patch of gravel. The fishtail marks meant your dad had tried to recover, but they had hit the guardrail. The momentum pushed the car up from behind. Here you paused, as whoever was on the line made a sympathetic noise. They didn't yet know how the story ended. In a moment, when you told them, I knew they would reframe the conversation in light of the final revelation, wondering if their reactions had been hitherto appropriate. You continued. It might have been
okay—maybe a busted eardrum from the airbag, bruises from whatever projectiles escaped the glove box. Worstcase scenario a punctured spleen from the seat belt. But they were driving along the edge of a wooded ravine. It was steep. When they rolled, they went over.

I imagined the reply:
Oh my God, were they hurt badly?

They are dead,
you said.

I heard you say
they are
instead of
they're
, my skin tensing at the sound of your calm, android voice. You needed time off to make arrangements, you told them, though by then they had all been made. Of course, they understood completely. Whatever you needed. And then you just never went back. When they called, you erased their messages too. You cashed your last paycheck after they finally gave up and mailed it.

I came into the kitchen, finally. The way you looked at the paper, I knew you hadn't read a word. You still wore your black dress. Your pin-straight red hair was rumpled in the back, your eyes raccooned with makeup. Every breath snapped inside me like a cracked knuckle.

Hung over?
I whispered.

No, actually, I feel okay.
You looked up.
Relatively.

I poured some orange juice.
Lucky you.
The house smelled like cigarettes and the sink was full of lipsticked butts. You didn't smoke, your parents hadn't: the guests had left them.
I feel chewed up and spit out,
I said.

You don't have to stay,
you said again.
You've missed enough class.

You gave me a tight, false smile.
I know you're probably needed elsewhere.

I set my glass down. I had a nasty remark ready without knowing why. So I held it there, like a sore on my tongue. You had every right to say it: I knew what would be waiting for me when I checked my messages.

I'm sorry,
you said, smoothing the skirt of your dress.
I had no right to put you in that position.

The light in the kitchen was clinical and sallow. You looked like a Halloween costume of yourself, like your face was on crooked. You looked like you had been up for hours. You probably had been. You probably woke up on your parents' bed, dazed and ill, suffocating beneath your grief; the funeral over, all that remained were the beginnings of your life without them. You tossed me that pitiful apology and I imagined you fretting upstairs, certain that your hand on my leg had split things at the seam, that I had gone disgusted into the night. I stepped forward to tell you not to worry.

No,
I said.
No, don't be sorry. You were drunk, it was a rough day. To say the least. I mean, for God's sake ...

You glowered.
I meant I'm sorry for making you stay with me for four days.

My fingers went numb.
Fuck,
I finally said.

I'm going to take a shower,
you said, getting up.
I'll call you in a couple days.

You disappeared up the stairs, and I heard your footsteps above me. I pulled on my shoes, gathered my keys and wallet, and made for the door. I turned the knob, listening to the water starting in the upstairs shower. And then the humming flow of electricity died once more, taking with it the soft layer of noise you never hear until
it's gone. The room turned gray. I heard the water stop, the shower-curtain rings jingle. You were up there in the dark. I let go of the doorknob. Plastic cups were stacked on the coffee table, the stereo speakers, the lid of the fish tank. I gathered them, feeling the vague and pulling sense that I was expected somewhere else. But the dead clocks and the gray October sky made time a mystery, and I couldn't tell what part of my life I was missing.