Above Us Only Sky (3 page)

Next week, I have a group that's supposed to take a charter boat to see the purple martins flock in the tens of thousands to roost under Mariner's Bridge, one of their many stops, en route to South America. I won't be able to go this year because I need to get online and buy a plane ticket. I have to find a replacement to tell the students and visitors about the importance of building and protecting the man-made structures that the purple martins call home. Their homes are no less important than anyone else's.

I know logically that I met the Old Man in 1989 when I was sixteen, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like we've always known each other, like we're spokes on the same bicycle wheel. We've been part of this vehicle for as long as Lithuania has been a nation, since our homeland was a grand duchy, the wealthiest land in Europe. At the wheel's center are Aušrin
ė
and all the other Vilkas birds who blurred the line between grounded and free, between imprisonment and flight. In that way, the Old Man is also a bird. We are Lithuanian freedom fighters, and now is the time to stay and fight.

When I see the Old Man, I will remind him of this.

3

Prudence

I
n 1980, Veronica and I went away. We migrated like geese, except that they have a destination, and we did not.

Veronica did not understand that leaving Freddie would be irreversible, that the farther she drove from his guitarist's hands, the harder it would be to go back. We drove south past McDonald's, Howard Johnsons, Holiday Inns, and Motel 6s. I remember that the roads, the rooms, and the fast food tasted the same—how gray would taste if you could eat it. Even though it was December, there would be no Santa photographs, no tree trimming, no presents.

At first, Veronica planned to stop in Chattanooga. It was a decent-sized city, but then she figured that if she was leaving Nashville, she ought to at least leave the state of Tennessee. Next, she decided on Atlanta, Georgia, but approaching the city, there were too many highways with too many lanes; too many billboards and too many cars. She kept driving through the small town of Cordele, where she thought about heading due east to Savannah but couldn't make up her mind. While I pretended to sleep, Veronica pulled off the side of the road. She turned on the overhead light and opened her map to choose a destination. All the while, I kept my mouth shut, just praying that we'd go back. Moving her finger circularly above the map, she landed on Jacksonville, Florida, and folding the map willy-nilly, tossed it to the passenger's seat.

We got a room with a stained burgundy carpet and a dead-bolt chain hanging from one screw. Veronica told me that her father had never loved her, that it was no surprise that Freddie never loved her. I was only seven, so I wasn't going to convince her otherwise.

Veronica was A plus number one at feeling sorry for herself. She had somehow forgotten that
she
had made this decision, no one else but her. We stayed in this room off Interstate I-95 for three days until Veronica's eyes nearly swelled shut from drinking and crying. Then two child abductions were reported on the local news, and that was it. She was done. Jacksonville was not for us. She stuffed our clothes in a paper bag and we were once again in the car, directionless. In 1980, the last thing I wanted to do was run. I sang along to the radio, Stevie Nicks, “When you build your house, well then call me home.” It was like Stevie Nicks was speaking to me. Home didn't seem like a tall order, but it was.

I listened to Veronica lament how she met Freddie in this juke joint in Troutville. He was playing country standards, and right away, she thought he was the man for her. She liked the looks of him, but there was something else too: his passion for music. When Freddie played “Long Black Veil,” Veronica got onstage and took the microphone. She imagined herself a siren and Freddie her sailor. She bewitched him. I didn't doubt that they loved each other, but even at seven, it seemed to me that they were too selfish to be together.

There were no cell phones back then, no GPS, no way to track anyone down. Who knows what my father was doing that December? Waiting for us to return? Playing tributes to John Lennon? A little of both?

Veronica was reminiscing, talking about their first night together, how they split a beer and had sex with her head sandwiched between a banjo and an amplifier. All the while, I was thinking that maybe she was talking herself into turning around, but unfortunately, she wasn't and we weren't.

This was the beginning of the end. It's sad how things devolve, how if you hear just the early part of Freddie and Veronica's story, this romantic romp between a blue-eyed guitarist and knobby-knuckled songstress, you imagine they'll go on forever.

Veronica had tied her line to Freddie's. That's how she put it. I know all about ties, lines, rope, grass, cords, glue, paste, knots, yarn, floss, the stuff of nests stringing us together. I understand. I think I've always understood. I even understand why Veronica had to sever her line to Freddie and strike out on her own. I just didn't like it.

My mother grew up in Troutville. Freddie was the bigger fish she'd been looking to fry. One trip, headfirst, through her darkened bedroom window while her father slept, and she was ready to go, to leave forever, squeezing my dad's hand, pretending that she had to sneak off, when in reality she could've traipsed through her father's front door, and he would have gladly let her go. Veronica was pulling anchor, setting course, and reeling in this fine-looking out-of-town musician. She was pretending that her father would care that she was leaving. She was pretending that her mother hadn't left when Veronica was three. She was pretending that she knew how to be loved, that somebody had loved her before. Veronica was great at pretending.

After my parents were married, they got a room at the Moby Dick Motel, where they admired their adjustable bubble-gum wedding bands. Freddie never did buy her a real wedding ring.

I remember our destinationless trek, listening to Veronica's stories, kneading the hem on my T-shirt, craving clean clothes and a hot bath, real food: steak and mashed potatoes, something homey, but Veronica kept driving. We only stopped when the road ended, when we were face-to-face with the Atlantic. I remember squinting in the light that glinted off the water. We weren't the first homeless people to drive until the road ended. Los Vientos, Florida, was a township for the troubled. Whether you'd run out of luck or out of love, you eventually ran out of road. If they'd had a billboard for Los Vientos, it would've said, “Where the uprooted and downtrodden hide between sand and surf.” Nothing concrete, nothing stable. We sat Indian-style on the beach, watching seagulls skim the surf. I knew there were worse places to be.

Within two weeks, Veronica got a job assisting an uppity Realtor. She thought it was a far cry better than working at the Piggly Wiggly. Next, she found us a home, a rental property in a dilapidated section of Los Vientos where the houses were squat with tar paper roofs, the doors hidden behind crumbling latticework.

Most of Los Vientos was dilapidated. There were a few nice homes, but the majority of the money was across the causeway in Saint Mark's. We got the keys to our clapboard shack on January 20, 1981. Our suitcases were piled largest to smallest like a fancy cake on the front lawn. Veronica was on the back stoop smoking and hiding, stifling cries that intermingled with the squeaks and squawks of grackles preening in the yard. This was the same afternoon that I met my best friend, Wheaton Jones. Veronica and I had been at our new house less than two hours when Wheaton walked up our cracked sidewalk. His right sneaker was torn around the rubber sole, and there were sandspurs on his tube socks. His curly hair was long, swooped at his shoulders. He said, “I'm Wheaton Jones. I live across the street.” He brushed the curls from his eyes, which were white like bowls of milk, like you could fall into them.

He said, “I'm glad you're here.”

“What's wrong with your eyes?” I asked. Needless to say, he was peculiar.

He shrugged. His eyes had turned an iridescent green. Even now, twenty-four years later, I remember every detail of that first meeting. I asked him his age and he asked mine. We were both seven. My birthday was March twenty-ninth and his was April fourth. Using the concrete walk, he pulled back the torn rubber sole of his shoe and I could see a hole in his sock. “Are you a Girl Scout or a Brownie? Do you know how to darn a sock?”

“I don't sew.”

“Where's your dad?”

“In the country music capital of the world.” It sounded better than saying Nashville. Then we were quiet, in our own ways equally defeated that there was nothing else to say.

Wheaton and I sat side by side on the front stoop. Seagulls squawked. Occasionally we'd hear Veronica take a deep breath. The suitcases remained, like a statue, on our prickly lawn. For lack of anything better to say, I confessed to Wheaton, “My mother thinks my father never loved her.”

“Did he?”

“I think so.”

“That's good.” He fingered the hole in his shoe. “I think my mother is in love with Mr. Doddy.”

“Who's that?”

“Just this man who lives down the street.”

“I might be able to darn a sock. I've never tried.”

“You have pretty hair,” he said.

“Thanks. My mother calls it unruly.”
Unruly
was a good word to use.

Wheaton said, “I'm generally unruly.” I liked how he picked up my good word.

“Tell me more.”

He said, “People don't like me.”

“Why?”

“I can see things that other people can't see.”

I didn't believe him. Of course I didn't believe him. “What are you talking about?” I said. “Can you see God or something? I knew a girl in Nashville who said she could see God.”

“What did he look like?”

“Same old, same old, like an old man with a white beard, which is why I never believed her.”

Wheaton said, “I don't see God. I don't even know if I believe in him.”

“What do you see?”

“You used to have wings like a fairy or a bird or a butterfly, or like a mythical creature.”

Immediately, I was terrified, more scared and more uncertain than I'd been since leaving Nashville. How could this boy, this nobody with ripped-up shoes and milky eyes, know about my wings? Dropping my head between my knees, I threw up the Fruity Pebbles I'd had for breakfast.

Wheaton said, “Are you all right?”

I was staring at the bright oranges and pinks of upchucked cereal. “I'm all right.” I reached back to feel the two seams that were my scars. I didn't want Veronica to know what Wheaton had said. I didn't want her to know that I'd thrown up.

“I can see stuff,” he said. “That's all.” We were quiet for a minute. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

“You didn't upset me.” I lied. His right knee touched my left. I was pretending that I hadn't thrown up. I was pretending that everything was going to be okay. I was pretending that Wheaton couldn't see things no one else could see. I guess I was a lot like Veronica—good at pretending things were okay when they weren't. Wheaton and I, in our different ways, were painfully old for seven.

If I knew where Wheaton was, I'd call him and tell him that the Old Man is in the hospital, but I don't know where he is. I haven't known for years.

“What do my wings look like?” I whispered, tugging at my shirt to show Wheaton my scars. “They thought I had a birth defect.”

He said, “It seems like the scars should be bigger.”

“They cut them off when I was a baby.”

He ran his fingertip along one seam. His hand was moist from a habit of pulling on his fingers, thumb to pinky, counting noises, birdcalls, and syllables. It was a habit I eventually tried to break, the pulling on his fingers. Now it seems stupid that I cared so much about a boy trying to decipher the universe. All he was doing was counting, trying to line things up. It was one of the few things that kept him sane.

He said, “I don't usually tell people what I see or hear. It's dangerous.” His fingers were still pressed to my scars. When he was five, the year he started kindergarten, his parents placed him in Magnolia Gardens, an institution designed to fix problem children before they became adolescents. The Gardens, as they were called by Wheaton, had killed the voices and visions, but only temporarily, and only by using a low dose of lithium. The drug had not only quieted the visions but had dulled Wheaton. He couldn't think, and when he tried to talk, his words were garbled. He also got confused about time: days of the week and the order in which things happened. His dreams and his waking life were one and the same.

Before the Gardens, Wheaton had been close with his mother. This closeness was one of the reasons he was
placed
in the Gardens. He always used that verb
placed
. He never said “locked away” or “institutionalized.” His mother's name was Lily.

When Wheaton heard the voices, Lily had quieted them. She taught him to sing and count sheep. When he saw people no one else could see, Lily called them “imaginary friends.” She did everything she could to normalize Wheaton's experiences, but then he started school, and Lily wasn't there to reassure him. Rather, the guidance counselors thought he needed professional help. At home, his father tended to agree with them. It wasn't normal for a boy to be so attached to his mother. Like a skipping record, Wheaton heard his father say, “There is something wrong with him.” Seven syllables, thumb to pinky, ending on the pointer finger. Thumb to pinky is the only way to count.

Lily chain-smoked as she drove Wheaton to Magnolia Gardens. Wheaton's father, who aspired to be a great American novelist, sat in the passenger's seat reading lines of dialogue aloud. He was oblivious to Wheaton's nervous finger pulling.
I don't want to go away.
Seven syllables, thumb to pinky, ending on the pointer finger.
Pointer finger.
Four syllables ending on the ring finger.