Under the Light (23 page)

“You can call me every day,” she said.

“Mom?” I put my arms around her neck. I hardly remembered the last time she hugged me. “I love you, Mommy.”

She locked both arms around me, shaking. Then she pressed her hand to the back of my neck and squeezed me to her. She gasped in a breath and sobbed it out as if I’d been kidnapped as an infant and this was the first time she’d held me in fifteen years. “My baby,” she whispered.

“Call her from the road,” said my father, but he was the one with the phone. I knew he wouldn’t keep that promise.

As we pulled away, my mother just stood in the driveway, holding herself and weeping. I watched her in the side mirror. But then her head came up. Someone rolled into the drive on a bike. To my amazement, my mother shot out her arm and pointed toward my father’s van.

I whipped around and looked out the back window. Billy was chasing after our car on a ten-speed.

“Please sit back,” said my father.

My stomach was fluttering. This was like a movie.

“What is that boy doing?” My father sounded disgusted.

As he pulled up to a stoplight, I tried to roll down my window, but my father pushed the dashboard control and rolled it back up. Billy skidded to a stop next to my window. He was out of breath, slapped a hand on the glass, as if knocking to get in.

His voice was muffled, but I heard him perfectly. “What did you remember?”

My father honked the car horn irritably and beat the green light by half a second. We roared down the next block. Billy pedaled after us.

“Idiot,” my father muttered.

Yes, for a minute it seemed like a movie, but then we ran a yellow light while Billy was still half a block behind. I turned to see him stop, resting his foot on the curb. He looked after us for a few moments, then turned onto a side street and disappeared.

“It’s time to grow up and forget about that boy,” said my father.

“Won’t there be boys in San Diego?” I asked.

“There will be appropriate young men at church, I’m sure.”

“Will you help me choose the right kind of boy to go out with?” I asked my father.

“Eventually.”

“And you’ll help me choose the right man to marry someday?”

“Someday.”

“And someday, when I have an affair with my husband’s best friend . . . ?”

I tensed, expecting him to shout at me or maybe even slap me, though it would be the first time. But he forced out a laugh and shook his head. “Judy said you’d be bitter, but I told her no. Jenny’s a good girl.” He sighed. “I’m starting to think you’d be better off with very limited access to your mother.”

“Don’t you think it would be better for my walk with Christ if I lived with the parent who did not break the seventh commandment?” I asked.

Of all the things I didn’t expect—after thinking for a moment, he said, “I misinterpreted God’s message for me when I married your mother. But we all make mistakes and ask for forgiveness.”

If he hadn’t married my mother, there would be no me.

In a jarring change of subjects he said, “There’s a Christian school near our new place, but I’ll have to see it before I decide whether to have you homeschooled or not.”

“You’re going to homeschool me?” It made no sense. He was a workaholic.

“Or Judy.”

I’m sure homeschooling me would be the last thing my father’s mistress would ever want, but it would make no difference to my father. I suddenly felt sorry for Judy Morgan.

I glanced in the side mirror, but there was no bicycle coming up behind us. I felt myself caving in again, my ribs tightened up so it was hard to breathe. I knew what Helen would do—she’d reach up and tear the roof off of this bad dream.

I squeezed my bag to my chest, and that’s when I felt it. The top of the bag was stuffed with things in baggies my mom had tucked in it—a granola bar, some tissues, little bottles of hand sanitizer. But the bottom of the bag felt soft like a pillow. I reached in and pulled out what had been buried—Billy’s sweatshirt jacket. I held it to my face and breathed in the scent of him. I leaned forward and pulled the jacket around my waist, tying the sleeves in a knot in the front.

Maybe my silence annoyed my father. “You’re my child,” he snapped at me. “You don’t get to decide where you go to school.”

Strange for him to act possessive when a minute ago he had implied that I was a mistake.

We stopped at a red light.

I pushed my hands into the jacket pockets and felt the specks of lint and grit at the bottom. And there were three things Billy had left behind—in the right pocket a gum wrapper and a bus transfer, and in the left an old tardy slip. It was scrawled with the date and time and his first-period class, his name printed
BLAKE, W
., and on the back, sketched by Billy’s hand, not a ghost’s, a cartoon of a dinosaur devouring a math book. I smiled and hid the paper in the pocket.

“I decide where you go and what you do,” my father told me.

I took a deep breath and sat up straight.

“No,” I told him. “I’m the one who decides where I go and what I do.”

He glared at me as if I’d used a four-letter word.

“Hear me out,” I said, “because I have some very important information for you that you’ve never heard before.”

“Is that so?” He smirked. The light turned green and he drove on, turning right at the next corner. Only one block and we’d be on the freeway on-ramp, only a few miles from the airport.

“I’m not going to San Diego,” I said, “and I will never live with you.”

“Really?” He was amused.

“If you don’t let Mom have full custody of me,” I told him, “I’ll tell the judge how you treated me, everything, all the details.”

His face went chalky. “Plenty of marriages dissolve,” he pointed out.

The traffic was backed up—our car sat still.

“I don’t mean about leaving us for another woman or lying about it,” I told him. “I mean how you held a measuring tape against my thigh to see if my skirt was long enough. How you made me jog in place to see if my breasts jiggled.” These things sounded crazy when I said them out loud, but it was all part of his daily routine since I turned twelve. Once, after I’d been to a Bible camp party with a few college-age boys present, he’d threatened to take me to a doctor and have my virginity checked. All I had to say was “And remember how you wanted to take me in to the doctor’s—” before me stopped me, a raised hand in my face.

I stopped talking. He lowered his hand. I knew he was furious. Veins stood out on his temple and neck. Could it be he didn’t know what to say?

“That’s what I’ll swear to in court,” I added.

“Are you trying to blackmail me?” he asked. “I had no idea you were this far gone.” For one moment I thought I’d thrown him so far off his game that he was going to let me go quietly.

“You don’t have to worry about me anymore,” I told him as I unlocked my seat belt. “Just have your lawyer talk to Mom’s lawyer.”

Then he snapped. He tried to grab me as I hopped out of the car, then jumped out his own door, slamming it so hard, the whole van rocked. I just stood and watched, with no idea of how crazy he might get. He flung open the back and pulled out my suitcase.

“Get back in this car now or your things go in the gutter,” he told me.

This was his best idea? Once he had taken my favorite possessions, the objects that reflected my personality and my passions, and he’d thrown them in the garbage. Did he really not know how little I cared about anything packed in that suitcase?

I smiled, which sent him into a fury. He lifted the bag over his head and slammed in into the asphalt. The clasps popped open and my clothes exploded out. A wind whipped up and blouses, pants, even socks rolled and danced away between and over other people’s cars as if I were running away in little pieces, too many and far to chase. My clothes took every direction and fled with glee.

I watched in wonder, instead of the horror he expected, I guess, which made him even more furious. He went red in the face and pulled out my book bag, flinging it right at me. I dodged as it hit a stranger’s car in the tire. Someone honked at him. Someone else rolled down a window and yelled. Even if he hadn’t been stuck in traffic, I don’t think he’d have turned the car around.

I slipped between idling cars, stepped up onto the sidewalk, and walked downhill along the block where an empty lot stood open to my left, a field with a fence on the far side.

As I stared across the dry grass, I saw something curve out of the alley beyond. A bike hit the chainlink fence and someone jumped off and then tackled the fence like a prisoner of war escaping. By the time his sneakers hit the grass, Billy was running for the cars that waited to get on the freeway. He limped as if the landing hadn’t gone right, but he didn’t slow down. He galloped like a madman.

I thought I might be hallucinating. Amazed at what I was seeing, I stepped off the pavement and into the field. At first he didn’t see me—he headed for the white van, the top of which was visible behind another car.

“Hey!” I called. He stumbled when he caught sight of me. In his face I saw both of them, the boy I’d met in a field in the middle of nowhere and the boy who had broken down my bathroom door to save me.

“Hey!” He pointed at me. He was a hundred feet off and still limping, out of breath, his shirt torn from the teeth of the fence. “You lived in a field.”

I’d been moving toward him, but that stopped me. I wanted him to remember meeting me when we were outside our bodies, but now that he did, it took my breath away.

“I remember you,” he called, loping toward me. He laughed. “You took us to the Lincoln monument and the Great Wall of China.”

He stopped to catch his breath a few yards away. “You took us to the Eiffel Tower.” He dropped to one knee, exhausted but smiling. “And you were freaked out when I took us to the moon.”

“It was scary,” I told him. I couldn’t move—I was as light and breathless as if he’d lifted me straight up into the sky.

He got to his feet and walked the rest of the distance. “You.” He shook his head. “You took us to a volcano.” When he got to me, he took my shoulders and held me at arm’s distance. “We had a fight.”

I nodded.

“You told me to go away.” Then he released me, took a step back, looking astonished. “But you waited for me.”

“Of course I did.”

He gasped in a breath and came at me. The first kiss knocked us to our knees. “You told me I wasn’t dead,” he remembered.

“You drew a line down the middle of the field,” I laughed.

“I did!” He pulled us into the grass and held me so tight, I could hardly catch my breath. “What a stupid ass!” he laughed. “You took me to Paris and I took you to the bumper cars at Fun Zone! I’m such a loser.”

“You took me to a magic waterfall,” I reminded him. “You stopped time.”

We lay tangled up in each other, leg over leg, fingers in each other’s hair. And that’s when I realized what the kites had been. Our spirits had flown toward each other when the ghosts had come together in the bodies we’d left behind.

Bless them,
I thought.
Bless the souls that flew us together and tangled us up.

“Oh my God,” he sighed, staring into my eyes. “I’m going to jail.”

“Why?” For a moment I was frightened, but he laughed.

“That bike back there,” he confessed. “I stole it.”

“It’ll be okay,” I told him. “I’m holding on to you. Where you go, I go.”

CHAPTER 30

T
IME IS A RIBBON, A DELICATE ORGANDY,
so thin that you can see through it to the layer of time below and the layer above. Moments overlapping, lying on top of each other. In this way, past things and things yet-to-be are happening together. The hurt and the healing. The death and the reconciliation in heaven. The childhood and the womanhood. The first glance and the first kiss and the last.

This must be true, for I can see through this moment not only to my recent past and my far past, but into the next moment and the distant future. There was a child, my own little girl. And there will be another child. Not of Helen and James, but a little boy with Jenny’s gold hair and Billy’s eyes. Someday.

And if time is a ribbon, surely it could be rolled out all together, then looped on its spindle the other way ’round. Then one could unspool it backwards.

Instead of nearly knocking her down, a woman at a shop door catches Jenny and sets her on her feet. Holy water flies back into the pitcher of an angry woman as she stands over a frightened girl. Instead of walking backwards into the dark, I walk forward toward Jenny’s window, where I see her waiting for me to speak to her, the back of her hand lifted to the empty air. Messages James and I once wrote fold themselves back up and hide in Billy’s pocket. Jenny lies in her backyard as I recite a poem in reverse:
Seep we down as all us of mud make, deep press time of layers . 
.
 .

Jenny sees a forgotten boy beside her in the mirror, but then turns and the recognition fades from her eyes. Then in a bathtub, instead of waking, she falls back into the water and becomes still. I lay naked with James in Billy’s rumpled bed and the image of our smiling faces fades off of a small square photograph, which flies back into the camera. In a hidden place between two school buildings, James takes back the sin of his kiss and sets me down on my feet again. After my first glimpse through Jenny’s eyes, I close them, shudder, and struggle my way out of her body as she sits beside her mother at a church picnic. I am blown away from Billy’s house up into a storm and thrown back to Mr. Brown’s window.

All these moments of reverse time are leading to my first moment with James. The fear of being noticed after a hundred years disappears as I look into a pair of autumn-colored eyes.