The Sky Below (3 page)

“Daddy thinks it's a good idea,” said Kathleen softly. “Considering.”

My mother shook her head. She rubbed her face with her cold, small white hands. “And where is it that we'd live exactly?”

“There. On the property,” said Sheila. “That's the way they do it. There's a school right down the highway. Mark says it's kind of a nice little town. You could start over.”

“Jesus,” said my mother, which startled me. She never came close to swearing. “Jesus Christ. A motel.”

There was a silence.

“Oh, man,” said my mother.

“Mary,” said Aunt Kathleen, gently.

“Mary,” said Aunt Sheila, loudly, as if trying to wake her up. “Your life is shit. Jeff isn't going to send anything, you know that. He's not coming back. You have to think about your kids.”

Sitting on the floor, my thumbs covered in glue, I somehow had the idea that we'd be taking the house with us, that the whole house would move to Florida with us inside, rattling slightly from the motion, like the house in
The Wizard of Oz.
I just deleted the “sell” part. And then, since it was warm
in Florida, I thought I could put up my raspberry silk tent in the yard and stay there all the time, eating oranges. We could make the City outside, in the dunes. I thought there would be dunes.

A few months later, the house in Bishop got smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, then disappeared. I wasn't sure if we were running away from my father, or if we should have left him a note saying where we were going. We didn't take his unfinished guitars. They went to an excited high school boy, cheap, at the tag sale. As we drove down to Florida in our old car, I noticed how everything outside was getting not only warmer but bleached, all the color draining away as we headed south. I held tight to my father's radio, the dial fixed on his station. The shouting men broke up and faded away; eventually they were replaced by a scratchy Jesus Christ, who, like Bob Dylan, was always upset.

The motel was two stories high, in a town called Brewster. The name of the motel was the Sunburst. It had a tiny pool in front. There weren't any dunes. In front of the motel was a two-lane highway, and on one side of the motel was a store called the Surf Shack. Mannequins in neon-colored bikinis waved from the window of the Surf Shack.

“Shit,” said Caroline slowly.

My mother got out of the car and stood in front of the motel, her hands on her hips. I watched from the back seat, waiting to see what she would do, what we were supposed to do next. Caroline got out of the car, marched up and down the length of the motel, then went to where our mother stood and said something to her. She nodded in response. The two of them looked up at the second story, pointing. My sister pulled her black hair into a knot and came back to the car. “Come on,” she said to me through the window. She was already sweating, her forehead damp. “We're here.”

I wish I had never gotten out of the car. I wish I had stayed
in the car until I grew up, that they had passed me my meals through the car window and maybe a comic book or two now and then. The car would have been better. Purgatory would have been better, though it
was
purgatory in a way, dim sandy purgatory by the Surf Shack. The house we had to live in—it wasn't exactly a house, more like a hived-off part at one end of the motel—was the only place in Brewster that wasn't sunny; it was dark, with linoleum floors and bad windows and someone else's television set, left behind on the dining room floor. In the shower were bars of thin motel soap, and in a closet there was a stack of thin, white motel towels. Every towel that I unfolded, then refolded, had a shadowy, indelible stain on it.

“A single man had this place before us,” said my mother. “That's what Sheila said. He had some kind of trouble.” She walked toward the kitchen, which wasn't really a kitchen; it was just a raised place between the living room and dining room with a stove and a sink. My mother opened the two thin, white cabinet doors, closed them again. For an instant I wondered if that single man was my father. Maybe we had luckily, coincidentally, followed him, like in a movie. Maybe he was at a diner in town, having a cup of coffee.

I went to plug in the television set, but found that the cord was cut, like a bobbed tail. Ragged bits of wire stuck out of the stump that was left. Why, I wondered, would someone do that? Would my father do something like that? But I couldn't convince even myself of my story. I had gotten so much older on the drive down. I knew he hadn't been there. It wasn't him. He wasn't waiting for us at the diner, or anywhere else. Aunt Sheila was right: he wasn't coming back. I set his radio on the kitchen counter.

“Whoa,” said Caroline, walking around, making a hollow noise on the linoleum. “Whoa.”

Sometimes I ask myself if it would have been different if we'd never had to move. If I would have been different. Maybe
I mean the opposite: if we'd never had to move, I wouldn't have changed in the way I did. And did the change begin in Brewster? Or before? Things have a way of flowing on, one rivulet leading to the next. I can't make it all out. When I go back in my mind, I see a gate connected to nothing, a house with a City inside, five unfinished guitars, and then all the rest, eventually bumping down to Florida like a ball bumping down a staircase. It's only in retrospect that it all seems inevitable, that I seem inevitable. Maybe it happened because we were in Brewster for such a long time, longer than I ever would have thought was possible when we got there, when I was eight. We were there so long that the house in Massachusetts started to seem like a dream, a dream of a City made out of wrapping paper where purple rivers ran over ice and City Hall was an overturned Jupiter Telescope box and lions twined themselves around chair legs. Or maybe it was always supposed to turn out the way it did. I don't really know.

What broke my heart was that my mother and my sister seemed to have forgotten the house in Massachusetts, and the City, and the symphony in the kitchen sink, to have forgotten everything that mattered. Somewhere on the long road from north to south, possibly while I was sleeping, they had let our life melt away, like ice in the sun. Instead, they were always busy. My mother took charge of the Sunburst Motel with a vengeance. She and my sister got up early every day to mop the floors, turn on the cash register, kill any snakes that needed killing. They saved change in a coffee can. They briskly washed the sand off their feet at night; they painted their toenails; they watched
The Love Boat
on television every week. Every day, I dragged myself off to the stable for broken-down nags that was disguised as Brewster's elementary school. When the teachers talked, all I heard was whinnies. At night, I lay in bed and watched the shadows moving restlessly over the ceiling: bears chasing girls in pigtails, clouds that might be ships, puffs of
smoke. I tried to will myself up there, where they were, but I always failed.

Maybe it was because I couldn't make it up onto the ceiling with the bears and ships, but at the time it felt like I started breaking into houses because it was easy. Nobody locked their doors in Brewster, not back then, and I didn't even take anything at first. All I wanted, at the beginning, was to slip inside other houses, try them on, haunt them a little. I was about eleven the first time, still runty and skinny with big eyes, and I knew I could say I was lost, or fake a limp as if I were hurt, if anyone came in. I could try to pretend now that I was tired of getting beaten up, but that would be a lie. I was tired of the endless, bloody wars at school—they felt longer than any dinosaur war—of my role, you might say, but to be honest, I think I would have done it anyway. I had a yearning. And a talent for it.

That first house was a cozy house, for Brewster, with bright blue decorative shutters and a clothesline in the backyard hung with clean white T-shirts about my size. I used to cut through that yard on the way home from school, and one day I just strolled in through the open back door. I carried a paper clip in my pocket so I could quickly jab myself in the leg if I needed a little bleeding injury. But inside, not a soul was home. The air was still. Someone liked roosters and chickens: ceramic fowl lined the windowsills and crowded together on the counters. The clock was in the shape of a crowing rooster; the oven mitts were rooster-shaped, too. Inside the refrigerator was a bowl of blackberries with a white paper towel resting lightly on top. I ate a blackberry; it had a dark, slightly malevolent sweetness and it crunched at the center. The blackberry tasted like joy, a secret, stolen joy. It emboldened me. It thrilled me. It led me deeper into the house, through the small, dim, neat living room with the flowered drapes drawn against the heat, through the dining room where a porcelain rooster with cold
black eyes perched in the center of the dining room table. I couldn't believe how easy it was, as if I had acquired special powers. I knew—suddenly, wildly—that no one was going to stop me.

I wandered toward the back of the house. An adult bedroom, with a flowered bedspread that matched the drapes. Next to it, there was a room with a set of bunk beds and a
Dukes of Hazzard
poster on the wall. On the dresser was a hairbrush that had a cartoon picture of flying pink ponies taped on the back. I picked up the hairbrush and, looking at myself in the mirror, brushed my curly red hair. It made me feel strange, and mean, and related. These girls—twins?—would find a strand of bright red hair in their hair and brush it away, unthinking. I liked that: being almost a part of them. A presence in the house that had just disappeared, that the people, when they came home, could almost sense, but not quite. One blackberry gone from the bowl. One strangely bright strand. They would miss me, the way the Darlings missed Peter Pan. They would wish I would come back without having met me. Or so it seemed to me as I ran one finger down the hard, unmoving feathers of the porcelain rooster. I don't know how to explain it, but that's what I wanted: to be missed, but like a dream you can't quite remember the next morning. None of them would be able to tell the others that they had dreamed of a wonderful boy, a boy with curly red hair and long eyelashes, and in the dream the boy lived there, right there in the house, but he always disappeared in the morning.

That cozy house with the roosters and flying ponies was on Dragonfly Drive. There were others, on Locust Lane and Cicada Court and Ocean Drive. I slipped into them all, whoosh, swish, then away again. It was romantic to me—dangerous, faintly pointless in the way of many dangerous endeavors, lonely. I was some sort of reverse rebel: I didn't run away from home, I ran away to other people's homes and stood around.
When I looked at myself in other people's mirrors, the world was my diorama:
Early Gabriel I with Pink Pony Hairbrush on Dragonfly Drive. Early Gabriel II on Locust Lane. Early Gabriel III on Cicada Court.
I discovered that spying on Brewster was much better and more interesting than actually living there. When I was spying and sneaking around it, the entire place took on a glow. I took on a glow. I could see that I was getting taller in other people's mirrors, house after house.

Meanwhile, my mother and Caroline were slowly becoming part of the same army, the Braid Brigade: one red, one black. The two of them marched around the motel like sentries. Caroline kept the books. You'd think my mother would have been flattened, like an origami bird on the highway, but instead she got tight and wiry. She began having long conversations on the phone with Aunt Sheila, jotting things down. The woman who had been so dreamy and impractical in our other life, before, never stopped moving now, like the dancer in
The Red Shoes.
She learned to play bridge, and began playing with a bridge club in town. She must have started in the hopes that she'd meet a new man that way, but instead she just got incredibly good at bridge. She sued my father for child support, though she wasn't sure where he lived. She licked the stamps and slapped them down, wrote
FIRST CLASS
on every envelope and sent them to the address in San Diego.

She drank black coffee all day. I'd see her, with her straight spine and her small feet, standing on the Sunburst balcony, drinking black coffee and closing her eyes in the sun. She refused to protect her fine skin, letting it crumple like a piece of paper in some invisible hand. It was her revenge on my father, I think. Part of her revenge. Her love. We didn't make the City anymore, or anything else. There didn't seem to be time. We were always busy. My mother and Caroline took turns telling me what to do, which was fine with me. I had no intention of claiming that place; being the hired help was great. I never let
myself into any of the motel rooms to steal a look or a trinket, because by definition anyone staying at the Sunburst was beneath my contempt. I wouldn't do them the honor of breaking in.

No. I was after something else. As I said, at first I didn't take anything. I wandered around, free: no one could stop me from going anywhere, from looking at anything, from touching anything. I opened drawers and medicine cabinets, I ate things from out of other people's fridges and kitchen cabinets. I would eat one or two Fudgsicles or Pop Tarts so when the people in the house next opened the box, they'd think,
Weren't there more in here before? Trevor, did you get into these before dinner?
I ate sugar from out of sugar bowls with my hands. I stood inside people's showers and looked at all their soap and shampoo. I could hop out a door so quickly and silently that if you walked in the room just after I'd been there, you wouldn't suspect anything more than that a stray breeze had blown in the window. People going into their own houses are mostly pretty loud and insensitive, especially in Brewster. They don't think of who else might have been there. They don't imagine anything. But standing in their houses, I imagined them, in detail. I thought that sometime maybe I'd just stay in one of the houses, be there when they got home as if I belonged there, sitting on the sofa with the family dog, eating a Fudgsicle. All the dogs always liked me; I never got bitten once.