The Summer That Melted Everything (19 page)

As night came, Dresden pulled a chair to her front bedroom window so she could sit and watch him move the branches just for her. It was late and she tried desperately to keep her eyes open. Before she knew it, her head was in her hands. Then it was on the windowsill. And then it was on the pillow in her bed. She apologized to him in her sleep.

Even with her asleep and curled up with her back to him, he did not stop. He was up in that tree until the middle of the night, when a real wind came and made his something special into something everywhere.

He crawled home, hunched and sore. All that for just one girl. I asked him why, out of all the girls in the world, why Dresden Delmar?

He winced from his sore limbs as he told about the time he went on a drive.

“I went with my—” He stopped himself, swallowing what he was going to say.

“With who, Sal?”

“With a man and a woman I used to know. The man's eyes drooped from tiredness. Her eyes drooped for that and more. The two of them together could stunt a chance. Still, the drive looked to be a fine one. The woman even turned on the radio and sang along. I didn't know she knew any songs. I certainly didn't know he did. I certainly did not know they could make music together.

“Everything seemed all right. I even think I sang with them. And then the man lost control of the car and we swerved to a stop by the side of the road. Something had punctured the tire, and we didn't have a spare. The man was angry because it was the woman's idea to go driving in the first place. It was autumn. She had wanted to see the leaves.

“He kicked the tire, said ‘Goddamn,' and then punched her. Not the first time. Not the last time. Just another time that would black her eye. The man looked down at his fist, stuffed it into his pocket, and went walking toward the town we'd passed a couple miles back.

“The woman sat down on the ground by the car, her dress her best rag. I sat with her, leaning forward with my arms wrapped around my legs. I could feel her fingers trace the scars on my back under the overalls.”

“Your wing scars?” I felt my own back tightening.

He wiped his hand over his mouth, the way an old man might dust food crumbs.

“As she traced them, she said she was sorry. I traced her eye and its coming bruise and said I was sorry. And there, both sorry, we held each other until the man returned with the night and a spare. He smelled like a barstool. Looked like one too, with his wobbling eyes.

“Her hand shook as she held the flashlight while he changed the tire. He yelled at her to stop shaking the damn light like that, so she handed it to me and I held it still. Though I don't know how.

“After the tire was changed, we drove the dirt roads, his anger driving off. He pointed out the windows at the leaves. Told her to look at all their yellow and red and orange. She squinted and really tried, but said she couldn't see them. It was the night's fault, she said, not his.

“He reached over and she flinched. He said it was okay, he wasn't going to hurt her, he said. He was just unrolling her window. She still looked nervous as he reached across her lap. He unrolled the window quick and beamed at her. Now you can see, he said with hopeful certainty. But she sighed. It was too dark.

“He looked at the tears slipping down her cheeks. He caught one on the back of his finger. He was sorry about earlier, he said as he looked down at her trembling hands folded on her lap. When it got later, he always got sorry about earlier.

“She said it was all right. The way she always did. He slowed the car and parked off the road. Without a word, he got out and me and the woman watched as the dark of him was swallowed by the dark of the woods.

“When he emerged from those woods, he carried something. Fallen leaves that he spread throughout the car. Over the seats and floor, the dashboard, the woman's lap, my lap. Then he took the flashlight and shined it on a leaf.

“‘It's not too dark now, is it? Do you see the leaf, Mother?' he asked. ‘How yellow it is?' And she answered, ‘Yes, Father, I see. I see now.'

“They always called each other Mother and Father even though they weren't that to each other.”

“What'd they call you, Sal?”

He did not answer me. He instead smiled and said, “It was beautiful. All them leaves. All that light. The smile on her face. The relief on his that she still loved him. That he hadn't smacked it out of her just yet. He kept shining that light and she told me to come up from the backseat, onto her lap.

“From there I saw orange maples, yellow oaks, red elms. When there were no more leaves to see, when we had seen each and every one he had collected, he patted his lap and said to me, ‘Here, prop your feet up here.' I laid my feet there and he laid his hand on top. It was warm. It was nice. And it stayed there the whole way home.”

“Sal, is this the same man with the rope? The same woman beaten in the kitchen? The same boy with the stool for his father?” I wanted to ask those questions, but I feared the answer.

“You asked me, Fielding, why, out of the whole world, why Dresden Delmar?” He looked off into the distance and squinted as if what he saw there was quite possibly the brightest thing in the world. “It's because her freckles are scattered like the leaves across the woman's lap. Her eyes shine like the light in the man's hand. Her hair is as red as the red leaf we passed between the three of us, like the love we could not simply say.”

 

14

 … with a pleasing sorcery, could charm

Pain for a while or anguish, and excite

Fallacious hope

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
2:566–568

T
HE FINALE OF
fear is first neared by small labors of bravery. These small labors will eventually lead to the last laboring of the great defeat of the fear altogether. That is the breathing text of hope anyways, that we branch an escape from fear's trapping circle.

For my mother, her small labor of bravery was learning how to swim. The acoustics of which involved no splashing water, as her swimming was in her fear's circle and therefore in the house. She was nearing the finale of her fear, and though she was not yet there, Sal was tiring her to the nightmare and introducing her to the dream.

Let it be said that my mother didn't always live life inside. Before I was born, she went out into the world quite regularly. Soon after I was born, she refused to leave the house without an umbrella. By the time I was one, the umbrella proved not to be enough, and she found herself fleeing the world and its lack of ceiling.

For a number of years, Dad tried to help her conquer her fear. He brought in therapists and read various psychological books himself to better understand. Ultimately, the therapists failed and the answer was not found in any book.

Dad, as well as me and Grand, accepted that she may never leave the house again. It was Sal who did not accept this. He was calling out her world and letting her know it would win a carpenter a prize, but it'd never be a darling of the universe where the stars commit to the real thing.

Every day, he asked her to go outside with him. Every day, she said no, but he was wearing her down with the way he described what she was missing. Simple things like the new bench outside Papa Juniper's. The Fourth of July parade down Main Lane and its red, white, and blue confetti. The language of the farthest reaching echo shouted in the coal mines, the just-built windmill in the sunflower field outside town, the way the sky looked when standing on the last claim of Breathed land.

His observations and carefully detailed description of the world were making her antsy. Making her wring her hands and suddenly suck in her breath as if for the longest time she'd not been breathing.

I'd find her looking out the windows or craning her neck off the edge of the porch, longing to see beyond the limited landscape her stuck life afforded her.

At the very best, she'd linger on the edge of the porch, reaching her hand out and testing for rain before snapping it back to her chest, swearing she'd felt a sprinkle, when in reality, it was the slight falling from her own eyes.

Melancholy is the woman with ribs like nails and lies like hammers. My mother's lie was that our house could be enough. That its countries could keep her from feeling like she was missing out. What a housebound woman fears is not the knife in the kitchen drawer. It is the outside being better.

“Stella, please come outside,” Sal begged.

“It looks to pour any minute.” She folded her arms and rubbed her hands up and down her mole-speckled shoulders as she paced in front of the sunny windows.

“You'll never get her outside.” Dad was passing by and had overheard us on his way to his study. In his hand was a new box of pushpins. The bulletin board had gotten crowded with more papers, more pins, more lines zigzagging this way and that. The progressing investigation meant more stacks of interviews with the families of the missing black boys, of eyewitness statements, of theories and speculation. Stacks and stacks of paper that were taller than Sal, but never him.

The phone number for the hospital was still in his study because Dovey was still there. She'd been kept on suicide watch ever since losing the baby. She was also having a psychological evaluation after she took a black marker and drew a staircase on the wall of her hospital room. She had numbered the steps but didn't get to her goal of seven million before Otis and the nurses stopped her.

Otis stayed with her, dividing his time between Columbus and Breathed. Even Elohim was taking the long drive to go see her. His visits were said to be doing a world of good. Of course, that would be thought. It's easy to be the boulder rolling through what is left of the dandelion field when everyone has their backs turned and are looking at the already flattened ground.

“You'll never get her outside,” Dad said again before closing the door of his study.

Mom frowned, angry that he'd given up on her and her fear so easily. Not like in the beginning, when he tried so desperately to get her out.
Why didn't he try anymore?
she wondered.
Doesn't he still love me?
Her anger shifted to nervousness, which put her face in a slope to the right that played favorably with the cluster of dark moles on that cheek side.

“Stella, you know it's not going to rain today.” Sal held the curtains back even more, pointing out to the brown ground. “We are in a drought.”

She winced as if she was full of shards as she lay back onto the wall, closing her eyes. “What if I do go outside, and it suddenly and unexpectedly starts to rain?”

“Why are you so afraid of the rain, Stella?”

“Oh, you don't wanna hear that.” She burst away from the wall, patting her cowlick and licking her hand to do the same to mine.

“No, Mom, stop.” I swatted her hand like it was an incoming wasp. “I said stop it already.”

“Fine. Hey, I know, let's watch a movie.” She skipped, feigning cheer over to the cabinet full of our VHS collection. “What movie you boys wanna watch? Hmm?
Something Wicked This Way Comes?
How 'bout
Mr. Mom?
I just love that one. Oh, here's
Psycho.
”

“Yuck, Mom.” Grand leaned in the doorway, along with his friend Yellch. “Anthony Perkins is in
Psycho.
”

“So?” Mom shrugged and we shrugged with her.

“I hear he's a fag.”

Mom pulled
Psycho
out of its cover sleeve as she said, “I don't want you readin' tabloid trash, Grand. And what'd your father say 'bout usin' that word?”

“I love that movie,” Yellch added his two cents before taking a bite of the peach in his hand, the juices slipping down his lanky wrist and dropping to the rug.

“Really?” Grand turned to Yellch. “You don't mind Perkins? That he's a—”

“Nah.” Yellch dragged his gapped teeth through the peach's yellowed flesh.

Yellch was seventeen, soon to be eighteen like Grand. Both of them soon to be seniors in the coming year at Breathed High. While Grand was pitcher on the baseball team, gangly Yellch was first baseman. He was someone I always thought had the profile of Lake Superior looking out to the northeast. He wore these gold-rimmed eyeglasses that were round and old-fashioned, contrasting his dark, curly mullet.

His real name was Thatch. The reason for the change to Yellch was because of one day in 1975, when he was eight and Grand was nine. Yellch and his Jewish family had just arrived in Breathed. When they came, it was thought they would live Jewish lives. Maybe they'd want to build a synagogue, invite rabbis, constantly smell of matzo ball soup. These were the fears of a town that wasn't comfortable with the Jewish identity.

One day a group backed Yellch into an alley and threw stones at him. Grand happened to be walking by. He ran to stand in front of Yellch, shielding him from the stones. Not only that. Grand picked up the stones and threw them back.

“What should I do?” Yellch cowered behind this nine-year-old god who stood fighting for him.

“Yell.” Grand did so himself. “Just yell, as loud as you can. Throw stones at them from your throat.”

Yellch yelled so loud, Grand had to look back just to see if it was still a boy behind him or something bigger. Those throwing the stones ran away. From that day on, everyone called Thatch Yellch.

Grand and Yellch became best pals after that, and as Mom slipped
Psycho
into the VCR, they went upstairs, most likely to play
Space Invaders
on Grand's Atari.

We weren't even past the FBI warning of the movie before Sal started to beg Mom to tell him why she was afraid of the rain. She ignored his pleas and tried to concentrate on the big knife, the shower curtain, and Janet Leigh's screams. Finally she could stand Sal's pleas no more and muted the movie.