The Way We Bared Our Souls (13 page)

Settling it around my hips, I began doing every trick I knew, including revolving the hoop around my neck and arms. My dress allowed a surprising range of movement, especially when I hiked it around my knees.

“Okay, my go, McDonough,” Kit said, joining me in the grass. We took turns spinning the hoop around our appendages and then tossing it back and forth in the dark.

“Wait a sec,” I said to Kit, exhausted from laughing at the stunts he kept trying to pull off. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to try but was too scared. My aunt used to do it.”

I found three paper napkins in the picnic basket and wrapped them around the circumference of the hoop at regular intervals.

“Ellen, do you have a lighter?” She groped around in her purse until she came up with one.

I stepped into the hula-hoop, then lit the napkins on fire. They didn’t burn long while the momentum of my hips carried the hoop around my waist. That was partly because paper burned fast, and partly because I was suddenly soaked in cold water. Thomas, without warning, had emptied a full bottle of water on my torso.

“Thomas!” I said. I dropped the extinguished hoop and took stock of my damaged gown.

“Sorry, Lo.” He looked down at the empty bottle as if surprised at himself. “I just saw it ending badly. Because you wouldn’t be able to . . . you know.”

Kaya looked away. I wondered how many times she’d burned herself without realizing it.

“It’s all right,” I said. I really didn’t care about the dress. I was still high on endorphins from having danced with a burning hula-hoop. Maybe I could be as brave and adventurous as Aunt Karine after all.

“Speaking of ending badly,” Kit said, “look what I brought.” He opened his backpack to reveal boxes and boxes of Fourth of July sparklers.

“Whoa, Kit,” Ellen said. “What did you do, rob a fireworks stand?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Couldn’t let Old Man Gloom have all the fun.” Kit was so gung ho about everything, it was starting to make me slightly nervous. Thomas looked as anxious as I felt when Kit lit his first sparkler and began darting around the picnic blanket, raining fire on everything. We exchanged a glance.

“Okay, Kit, that’s enough,” Thomas said. But Kit just waved at least three lit sparklers in each hand at us, then started running in faster and tighter circles around the blanket. And he was beginning to stumble a little.

Suddenly, Kaya bounded to her feet and joined Kit, as if just remembering that certain activities were no longer off limits.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Thomas, but before he could stop her, Kaya was running around the blanket as well, grabbing sparklers out of Kit’s hands. They were already halfway burned away, and Kaya seemed determined to see them fizzle down to her fingertips. Then, abruptly, she went still and stared into the small fires burning in her hands. She looked like a goddess admiring a universe of her own design.

“Lights,” she said, the darkness in her voice the total opposite of what sputtered merrily on the ends of the sparklers. “All the lights will go out,” she said, trancelike. “All the people.” Her eyes darted around the park, as if she were being hunted.

Thomas gently removed the charred remnants from Kaya’s hands and then stubbed them out under his shoe. She seemed to calm down the moment Thomas placed his hand on her shoulder.

“It’s okay, Kaya,” he said. “Let’s just sit down and let Kit do his thing. I’ll pour you some lemonade.”

Kit scampered off to flirt with two freshman girls from school, while Kaya lay down on the blanket beside Ellen, looking into the Southwestern night sky. Thomas and I joined them, the tops of our heads all touching. We tried to identify shapes in the clouds of smoke.

“It’s a shame we can’t see all the stars tonight,” I said.

“I never had much to say about the stars,” Thomas said.

“What about you, Kaya?” I said, feeling her drifting away again.

“They never had much to say to me,” she said. “Until tonight.”

I lifted myself onto my elbows to ask what they were telling her and immediately saw strange movement at the edge of the park woods. A coyote? But then my attention was diverted, and all I could focus on was the central spectacle. At a distance, the wooden man was finally burning. Dancers emerged at his feet, their bodies lit by the glow of destruction. My body began to pulse to the beat of drumming and chanting. A fifty-foot torch stretched into the night sky. Scraps of scalded paper floated down from a great height, some of the edges still glowing red, and I imagined what the fragments of words might say. House . . . cancer . . . child . . .
corazon
. Anonymous burdens falling from the sky. Would the night carry away everyone’s gloom? I hoped that soon the whole park would feel as free as I did.

I heard a howl at the edge of the forest. Then the howling was absorbed by the sound of crackling wood. Even the wild animals had come to see the spectacle. Why not? It was theirs too.

A dozen blankets away I saw an Indian man who, as he danced, seemed to turn into a bird with a twenty-foot wingspan. The shapes around him kept changing, but he was always at the center, controlling the movement.

“You guys, look,” I said, pointing toward the metamorphosing figure. “Let’s get closer.”

Thomas said he wanted to stay on the blanket and watch the fire.

“Me too,” said Ellen, with an eye on Kit, who was still talking to the freshman girls. I pulled Kaya to her feet, and we walked barefoot to where the Native American man in buckskin ceremonial garb was manipulating at least a dozen small, interlocking hoops with his legs and arms, transforming himself into hybrid creatures in the process. First he was a bird, then a bear, then a coyote. On either side of him a line of musicians pounded on drums.

“What’s he doing?” I said, enthralled. I’d never known that hoops could have so much life in them.

“Native American hoop dance,” said Kit, who’d approached us from behind.

“I didn’t know that was a thing,” I said.

“Well, they don’t exactly sell these hoops at Toys “R” Us.” Kit hadn’t lost his sardonic edge after all. “This man is telling stories through dance.”

“Wow,” I said. “It looks like he’s holding up the whole world.”

The man concentrated all the hoops around his head and then held them aloft in a perfect globe.

“What does it mean?” I murmured.

“The circle of life,” Kit said. “The hoop represents the connection between spirit and matter.”

Behind the hoop dancer the wooden man still burned, and I thought about what it must be like to fly over such a fire, as my father and his crew did almost every day from their airplanes. I imagined being up there too, but instead of extinguishing the flames, I was admiring them. Letting history do its exhaustive work, letting it burn itself out, until not only the problems but all its beauty, all its people, were gone. The dancer threw his hooped world over his head, into orbit. I turned to go before he caught it safely in his hands.

“Let’s get back to the blanket,” I said, suddenly feeling a touch dispirited. “And to Thomas and Ellen. It’s starting to get cold, and we should stay together.”

WE RECONVENED ON OUR LITTLE
plot of Zozobra. Thomas invited me to rest my head in his lap, which I gratefully did. I shivered, and he laid his jacket over me. Kaya sat on the blanket in silent thought, watching the faraway man burn down to his toes. Kit was zipping around again, and I was so distracted by his antics and the warmth of Thomas’s lap that it took me a couple of minutes to realize that Ellen was missing. If I should’ve been looking out for anyone, it was the girl who’d taken on my burden, and she’d disappeared.

The drums and chanting amplified from the Zozobra stage as the festival organizers cheered on the burning man. Kit gave a whoop.

“Let’s have it! Burn, baby, burn!”

Then I spotted Ellen. She was about five blankets away, crouched next to a little girl in a floral sundress.

“Hey, look.” I grabbed Thomas’s arm, and we hustled over. The girl Ellen was talking to was probably seven or eight years old, and she looked terrified. As we got closer, I realized that Ellen was not talking to her in the soothing maternal voice befitting interaction with a lost child. She was nearly shouting at her. Thomas and I stopped short, shocked, when we heard what she was saying.

“Listen to me.” Ellen was crouched down, at eye level with the little girl. “Just listen. You’re not listening. I know you’re scared now, but that’s nothing compared to what it’s going to be like if you don’t listen.”

Ellen rubbed her temples, and I could tell from her posture and pained expression that she was in the midst of an acute migraine. The pain was inflecting everything she said, making her words sharper.

“But you might still be okay if you just listen. Maybe. Being a teenager sucks, and you’re going to suffer, but don’t start doing drugs, because they only make things worse. They only make it harder to fix yourself. They might even make it impossible. Do you hear me? Are you listening?”

I knelt down beside Ellen and wrapped my arm around her waist. “Ellen,” I said, “you’re scaring this little girl. Do you know her?”

“Where’s my mommy?” the girl cried.

“She needs to be protected,” Ellen said, shaking me off. “When I was her age, I wish someone had talked to me about
real
life and how shitty it is. Then maybe I could’ve been prepared. I could’ve been stronger. I wish I’d had someone like me around to tell
me
not to end up the way I ended up.”

“Ellen,” I said. “She’s too young to understand. And she’s lost. And scared.”

“Come here, sweetheart,” Thomas said, placing his hands on the girl’s trembling shoulders. “We’ll find your parents.”

Just then an agitated woman approached and snatched the girl away. “What are you doing with my daughter? Sophia, are you okay?” She looked up at us. “Did you do something to her?” She seemed to address this last question specifically to Thomas, and I bristled on his behalf.

Thomas and I apologized for Ellen. We brought her back to the blanket and set her down next to Kaya, and I rubbed her back until her breathing slowed.

“What happened?” Kit said.

“Lost girl,” I said.

On the other side of the blanket, Thomas seemed upset. “Don’t take it personally,” I said. “That lady was just really worried.”

“Sure,” Thomas said. He was preoccupied for a moment before speaking again. “Will you take a walk with me? I need some distance from this fire. I feel like I’m overheating. Are you?” He put his hand on my forehead.

“I’m okay,” I said. “But yes, a walk sounds great.” Kit promised he’d stay with Ellen and Kaya, so Thomas and I wandered away from the crowd.

“You weren’t burned by any of those sparklers, were you?” he said.

“Nope. I was careful.”

“I’m not sure if we should’ve come here,” he said. “It all feels too dangerous.”

Near the edge of the forest, people were beginning to pack up their blankets and go home.

“Everyone’s doing pretty well under the circumstances,” I said. “At least I think they are. But I definitely fell asleep on the job back there with Ellen. It’s weird—I’ve only ever seen her that intense when she’s been high, but this time it was
my
symptoms feeding the intensity. It made me think about how I must have appeared to everyone else these past few months.”

“Quieter,” Thomas said immediately. “More thoughtful.”

“Oh,” I said. True to form, I didn’t really have a response to that. “Can I confess something?”

“Of course.”

“I, um . . . read something of yours once.”

“Read something?”

“A poem. About the fire back home. And feeling like static. A few weeks ago I was waiting for the school counselor in her office—I guess I was really desperate to talk to someone about . . . everything—and I saw a piece of paper on her desk with your name on it. And so I read it. And . . . took a picture of it with my cell phone so I could read it again. I’m sorry.”

Thomas was quiet, and I assumed the worst. “So how was your talk with Ms. Vega?” he said eventually.

“I left before she got back. I’m a total chicken. You?”

“I’ve never had much luck with therapists. I had to see a few when I first got here because of all this legal stuff. I’d usually just sit there on the couch and wait in silence for the hour to be over. But Ms. Vega . . . instead of getting frustrated with me for being so unexpressive, she suggested I write poetry. So that’s what I’ve been doing, for better or worse. I’m sorry you had to see my crude efforts.”

“No, I loved it,” I said. “For me, you captured . . . that distance, you know? Between where your body is and where your mind is. It’s really painful to feel separated like that. Sort of alien to yourself.”

“Okay, now it’s my turn to confess something.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“I’m especially nervous about you this week, Lo. This painlessness puts you in a particularly fragile state. You must exercise precaution.” (Because Thomas learned English from antiquated textbooks along with Hollywood action movies and underground comics, his diction was sometimes overly formal. Not all the time, but when it did happen, I found it pretty adorable.)

“But I feel the exact opposite of fragile right now,” I said.

“I get that. But listen. It’s like . . . imagine if all of a sudden, you don’t know yourself. You don’t even know what it’s like to live in your own skin. You might snap. You might hurt someone else, or yourself, without realizing it. When people are given power—or even weakness—beyond what they’re used to, there can be a major disconnect between that and who they thought they were. They can get totally lost. They can create irreparable damage.”

“You’re thinking of something specific.”

“Yeah, I guess I am. The warlords back in Liberia. When they were given power, it dominated them. It completely overtook their humanity.”

“Their souls,” I said.

“Yes, their souls.” We were quiet for a moment.

“Please promise me,” he said finally.

“What? That I won’t sell my soul to Satan? I promise.”

“That you’ll try to stay centered. Not go around being a daredevil or anything. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “Cross my heart.”

“Good. When I was in the war, I also felt invincible. But you know what? I was just a kid, pretending to be omnipotent. I see that now. You’ll see it too.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

But I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Look under my bed again, new mom, new dad.
Find my brown parents burning.
Because I see them, and others with their matchsticks.
And most nights I am with them.
Not here with you.
Not here with me.

I wrapped Thomas’s coat tighter around me, hiding the many places on my naked arms where the sparklers had burned me.