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Portrait of a Paralyzed Priesthood: James Joyce’s “The Sisters”

Dappled Things

Joshua Hren

Graphic stories, given by so many victims of Catholic priests and made explicit in (for instance) the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, leave the listener transfixed in terror over how one person could be so broad—in persona Christi and unspeakably perverted—at once. Still more startling is the silence that so many victims kept, especially as such quiet moves us to wonder how many more remain stifled by confusion and the maddening pressure to keep up appearances. What stays silenced, what stays suggested or suspected but not known, discolors all the faithful, even those who do not, like the abused, inhabit a place of paralysis.

This sense of paralysis permeates “The Sisters,” James Joyce’s story of a troubled priest and his troubling relationship with an unnamed narrator. True, his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man culminates in the protagonist Stephen Daedalus’s rejection of his Holy Mother in favor of a strict adherence to the priesthood of art (“forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being”). And yet, the Jesuit-educated Joyce remained haunted by the realities of Catholicity for his entire life. As Father Colum Power notes in James Joyce’s Catholic Categories, although he formally severed his relationship to the Church, the Irish apostate kept “continuing devotion to the Easter liturgy, to the point of ‘secret tears.’” In “The Sisters” he gives us a powerful poetic initiation into the pains that quiet those crippled by priestly abuse.

Paralysis. The word, which “had always sounded strangely in my ears,” now “sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being.” Although this first story of Dubliners is filled with elusiveness and ellipses, we gather that, for the boy, the word is affiliated with Father Flynn, whose “third stroke” leaves the priest with “no hope.” The story starts, then, in an infernal state. When we try to arrive at express and certain answers, we seem to hear the words that hang over Dante’s underworld: ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE.

When the boy descends the stairs for supper, the family friend Old Cotter is sitting fireside, smoking, speaking to his uncle: “No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly . . . but there was something queer . . . there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion. . . .” Indignant, the boy remains silent but is interiorly infuriated by this “tiresome old fool!” who is, through frustrating indirection and interrupted opinions, casting suspicion on Father Flynn. “I have my own theory about it,” Cotter continues. “I think it was one of those . . . peculiar cases. . . . But it’s hard to say. . . .” The uncle, less animated in his concern, tells the narrator that his “old friend is gone, you’ll be sorry to hear;” still, even here, the enunciation on the considerable difference in their ages, and the idea that the priest was not just a Father but a “friend” advances the sense that their relationship was atypical.

The boy has a hard time absorbing the news, but unsettled by Old Cotter’s insinuations, he feels himself “under observation” and strives to continue eating with feigned indifference. The death comes hard on the boy, his uncle suggests to Cotter, because “the youngster and he were great friends.” The old Father taught the boy much, and “they say he had a great wish for him.” What is this wish? We never come to know. Though the story suggests, at various points, that Father Flynn was grooming the boy to follow him into Holy Orders, perhaps his “great wish” was more nefarious. Cotter’s elliptical hints cover the “peculiar case” with darkening fingerprints: might the priest have had a pederastic relationship with his young mentee? As Ali Günes indicates, “even the doubt of such a rumor clearly defiles and defames the image and reliability of the Church and the priest.”

Old Cotter won’t let up: it is bad for children to be around the likes of Father Flynn “because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect. . . .” What precisely the “things like that” could mean remains unnamed, maybe because Cotter, in spite of his outspokenness on the matter, wants to maintain discretion in front of the boy, whose wrath toward the alleger grows.

That night the narrator puzzles with Old Cotter’s words, tries “to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences,” but he falls asleep before he can make sense of them. In his dreams the priest, with “the heavy grey face of a paralytic,” approaches him, “and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region.” Here, outside of Cotter’s suspiciousness, inside the boy’s own soul, our concern increases. What could the priest need to confess to his charge? Why would this lead him into a region both pleasant and vicious—a region defined by connotations of sexual abuse? Our disturbance reaches an unbearable pitch when we find that the purportedly penitent priest “smiled continually” with “lips . . . so moist with spittle.” Although the narrator tries to rationalize this bizarre image by remembering that Father Flynn died of paralysis, and though he finds that he too is “smiling feebly” as if to “absolve the simoniac of his sin,” this does nothing to ameliorate our worry that he has been abused in some way. Instead, he seems to offer evidence, however partial, that the priest was a pederast. Later we learn that when the priest smiled in the boy’s presence he would “let his tongue lie upon his lower lip—a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.”

With Günes, and wishing otherwise, I too find that this tongued lip “implies sexuality,” an implication that gains credence when combined with the spittle-moistened lips of the post-mortem priest of the boy’s dreams. Speaking of dreams, when the boy recalls Father Flynn’s distended tongue, he is moved to revisit old Cotter’s words, is driven to try and “remember what had happened afterwards in the dream. I remembered that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion.” Where are we, here? In a bedroom? In the confessional? Once again, our search is cut short, kept in the dark.

When the priest’s sisters try to make sense of his death, though they try to press on with the funerary courtesies, they can’t help recalling a weird instance wherein the lost Father Flynn was found “sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide awake and laughing softly to himself.” One of the sisters, Eliza, assures us that his confused (and clearly maddened) state was caused by “the chalice that he broke . . . that was the beginning of it.” The chalice, we learn, “contained nothing,” which is both reassuring, given that the alternative would mean Christ’s Precious Blood spilled on the floor, and curious. For, if the sister is correct in assuming that “it was the boy’s fault” that the chalice broke, what exactly could the priest and the boy have been doing to bring about such an accident, that it would be the boy’s fault? When “they say” that the narrator is to blame, we can’t help but hear yet another iteration of that pattern of priests who try to persuade their victims that they are the guilty. The sisters do not wish for their sympathies to be interrupted. At the funerary meal where they “commun[e] with the past” memories of “poor James” their brother, one of the sisters is piqued when the narrator refuses her offer of “a little glass of wine and some cream crackers,” a profane sacrament seemingly meant to transubstantiate their disturbed and disturbing brother into a spotless victim. In the last lines of the story, she again tries to absolve Father Flynn: because others found her brother James in a confessional, “laughing-like to himself,” when “they saw that that made them think that there was something wrong with him.” Notice the way in which she hedges a halo of innocence around her brother: they think there is something wrong with him, but, she implies, they exaggerated the case.

Father Colum Power speaks of Father Flynn’s “frustrated masculinity” and “unhealthy” religiosity. He roots Flynn’s case in the fact that “the Catholic priesthood sometimes bore an authoritarian (as opposed to authoritative) power that is difficult for the contemporary mindset to conceive of; a power and prestige that conjoined the mystical, the social, and the political.” Perhaps, he muses, this is why the priest sought absolution for his “simony.” Maybe. Maybe it is our unhappy familiarity with too many abusive priests, protected and explained away, that makes it hard to shake Old Cotter’s suspicions. But maybe there is more substance in the sense that the broken empty chalice, the loss of the Catholic Church’s credibility, is not the start of the crisis but the consequence of sins less easy to speak than simony.

We know how often, in cases of clerical abuse, sexual exploitation and monetary exchange go hand in hand. Are we wrong to shake our heads knowingly when the boy finds himself “annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death”? Is it only the “old woman’s mutterings” that make the boy “pretend to pray” at Father Flynn’s funeral? Joyce’s story of a paralyzed priest masterfully brushes with all of the signs most of us know from a distance: the elliptical, elusive indirection, the blamed boy. Resorting to a style that is both subdued and cryptic, his portrait of the young man is confused and confusing at once. Old Cotter’s allegations are never proven true. All fears of pedophilia may be a misguided projection, prompted by too many portraits of a dubious priesthood smoked and mirrored by a self-interested clericalism. No, such suspicions do not amount to definitive verdicts. Still, in passing through the suspiciousness of Joyce’s “The Sisters,” we come closer to grasping the sufferings of many of the formerly faithful who, paralyzed by the crisis of sexual abuse, find the chalice of belief half-empty.

Joshua Hren is co-founder and assistant director of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey. He is founder and editor in chief of Wiseblood Books. He is the author of the short story collections This Our Exile (2018) and In the Wine Press (2020), published by Angelico Press, Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J. R. R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy (Cascade Books, 2018), and most recently of How to Read and Write Like a Catholic (TAN, 2021).

Filed Under: Deep Down Things, Essays, Mary Queen of Angels 2020 Leave a Comment

Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Dappled Things

Feature

Portrait of a Paralyzed Priesthood: James Joyce’s “The Sisters” Joshua Hren

Poetry

Grasping the Hem of Divinity Sara Parrott

How Deeply Should A Root Drill Down? Geoffrey Smagacz

Grievous Angel Greg Rappleye

St. Brendan and the Foaming Sea (1964) Greg Rappleye

For His Wife, Thirty Years On Randel McCraw Helms

Church Cleaning J. C. Scharl

Mass with Julia Greeley: A Revival Cathryn Shea

Vision Linda Ann LoSchiavo

An Amaryllis for Christmas Linda Ann LoSchiavo

Letters Jeannine Pitas

I Do Jeannine Pitas

Nursery Hannah Carrese

Spare, Strange Hannah Carrese

Fiction

Carmelúcia Arthur Powers

Open House Jennifer Marie Donahue
Honorable Mention, J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction

Unfinished Business Rob Davidson
Honorable Mention, J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction

Nonfiction

Deep Joy, Small Steps: A Conversation with Sarah Cortez of Catholic Literary Arts Katy Carl

Into the Pagan Substrate of Catholicism: The Fiction of Andrew Michael Hurley Steven Wingate

Book Reviews

Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir by Ron Hansen Jeffrey Wald

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell Maryanne Hannan

Motherland by Sally Thomas Meredith McCann

God’s Liar by Thom Satterlee Katy Carl

Visual Art

Winners and Honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Art

Headlines – Bahkita Prize Winner, Oluwatobi Adewumi

Content of Character – Bahkita Prize Runner-Up, Howard Fullmer

Our Lady of Loreto in the refugees’ cloak – Honorable Mention, Margherita Gallucci

Black and Blue – Honorable Mention, Robert Forman

WE MATTER – Honorable Mention, Michael Riley

Wonderfully Made – Honorable Mention, Eva Crawford

Thurman by Firelight – Honorable Mention, Martin Dunn

A Mother’s Struggle – Honorable Mention, Rachel Singel

Why Divide? – Honorable Mention, Gurneet Kaur

Alisa – Honorable Mention, Hannah Thomas

Headlines, Oluwatobi Adewumi
Content of Character, Howard Fullmer
Our Lady of Loreto in the refugees’ cloak, Margherita Gallucci

Black and Blue, Robert Forman
WE MATTER, Michael Riley
Wonderfully Made, Eva Crawford

Thurman by Firelight, Martin Dunn
A Mother’s Struggle, Rachel Singel
Why Divide? Gurneet Kaur

Alisa, Hannah Thomas

$10.00 – Purchase Checkout Added to cart

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Table of Contents Leave a Comment

Review: God’s Liar by Thom Satterlee

Dappled Things

God’s Liar by Thom Satterlee
Slant Books, 2020; 176 pp.; $18.00

Review by Katy Carl

After such a strikingly brutal year, it feels only natural to be experiencing a thirst for perspective. Paradoxically, perspective can flower from the dirt that is the nightmare of history (whose demise has been much exaggerated). As this year’s litany of cancellations—due to ideology, epidemiology, or both—rolls on, readers may find echoes of the present day in this timely story. Through the eyes of fictional Anglican priest Theodore Wesson, Thom Satterlee details a richly imagined version of the time John Milton was nearly “cancelled” for opposing the English monarchy and then had to go into quarantine to avoid catching a potentially deadly illness (in 1665, that would have been bubonic plague). Milton’s flight to the countryside in search of refuge from the worst human society can deliver reveals that, from the worst the human heart can do, there may at times be nowhere to hide.

Satterlee’s achievement in God’s Liar is to dramatize the consequences of questions that, in themselves, are often reduced to abstract terms in philosophical theology. For Wesson, Milton, Toland, and the constellation of characters who surround and support their hiding places, these questions are live issues with concrete implications: can we fully believe and trust in God’s Providence, in the face of the sometimes devastating plot twists of each person’s life? If Providence somehow includes and accounts for all the ways nature and experience may harm us, all the ways we may bring harm to others through self-interest or thoughtlessness or mere lack of clear intention, all the ways we deceive ourselves and others both knowingly and not: what stringencies, what penances, must we then accept to limit the damage of which we are capable—and what mercies are still available to us?

For all its backdrop of monarchical intrigue, assassination attempts, intra-church politics, and Manzoni-reminiscent plague drama, Satterlee’s storytelling is at its best when it addresses itself to the interior worlds of characters responding to otherworldly realities. Broader context is rendered in brief glimpses rather than Balzacian disquisitions. Individual human motivation—love, shame, grief, ambition, fear, and the longing for transcendence—remains consistently in the foreground.

As a result, the novel wears its author’s learning with a praiseworthy lightness, a grace not always conspicuous in historical fictions. Facts about the political and religious landscape, as well as quotes from work by Milton and his real-life biographer Toland, blend seamlessly in, so that the reader learns effortlessly by immersion—a pleasure proper to good historical fiction, one that the liveliest nonfiction can at times strive in vain to offer. An impressive list for further reading sprawls through the acknowledgments, an authorly generosity both to researchers and to the curious.

The text is not free of occasional infelicity, mainly in the rendering of the sound of the seventeenth-century English that Milton so thoroughly commanded. In all fairness, to render imagined Miltonian English with perfection is a task to give vertigo to any talent. Where the effort succeeds, it delights; where it falls short, it distracts from another of the novel’s charms, the presentation of characters who seem less like visitors from the foreign country of the past and more like people you might bump elbows with at a parish potluck. Purists may find themselves wishing the implied translation of the past into modern idiom either a bit more or a bit less thorough; others may find the blend of deliberate archaisms and contemporary syntactical patterns just right; this may be a matter of personal taste.

In constructing his fictional argument, Satterlee plays with, even turns inside out for exploration, St. Augustine’s dictum that “God does not need my lie.” Satterlee makes Wesson into what James Wood in The Art of Fiction calls a “reliably unreliable” narrator, but in a twist on the tradition, a self-consciously unreliable one: Wesson believes he can knowingly practice dissimulation for the sake of deeper truth. This may tend to suggest an analogy to the act of fiction writing (insofar as a responsible fiction is, precisely, a complex “lie” or fabrication constructed, arguably, in such a way that it points to truths higher than itself). As the plot winds its way toward completion and the consequences of Wesson’s self-deception play themselves out, readers are invited to reflect on honesty’s insistent demands and the places where real refuge is alone to be found.

Katy Carl is the 2020 Wiseblood Books writer-in-residence and the editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine. Her nonfiction has appeared in the National Catholic Register, Evangelization & Culture, and St. Louis magazine, among others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in 2021.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Reviews Leave a Comment

Review: Motherland by Sally Thomas

Dappled Things

Motherland by Sally Thomas
Able Muse Press, 2020; 126 pp., $19.95

Review by Meredith McCann

Sally Thomas is one of my absolute favorites among all the poets we’ve published in Dappled Things. There’s something Philip Larkin-ish about the elegant yet easy flow of her verse, with its unsparing meditations on aging and its remembered English landscapes. Larkin, of course, was a grumpy agnostic librarian who famously regarded marriage and children as a death sentence, so perhaps that’s where the similarities end. Thomas’s new book is called Motherland, and maternal energy is its “ground of being.” The book’s foreword enumerates the possible meanings of the title: “Thomas’s own motherhood,” “Mother Nature,” “the maternal birthing of poems,” “English as Thomas’s mother tongue,” “Mother Church,” and “Mary as the Mother of God.”

It has been widely recognized that the past fifty years have seen an explosion of “the poetry of motherhood.” The Poetry Foundation’s website introduces a page of mother-themed poems with the rueful judgment: “Before the 1970s, very few realistic poems about motherhood were published.” After Sylvia Plath, poets rapidly began to make up for lost time, and in the words of Stephen Burt in his essay “The Poetics of Motherhood,” “It is no wonder, then, that if we look back on American poems since the 1970s, giving birth and caring for young children are salient topics, perhaps the topics (if we want to segregate poems by topic) that have prompted the most widespread stylistic invention, the greatest number of poems by the most poets that sound the least like the poems of the past.”

Sally Thomas takes her place effortlessly in this new tradition, although her poems are not deep in the thick of milk and sleep deprivation. Her voice has a cool, leisurely authority to it: she is the mother in middle age, past the intense confusion of babies and screaming toddlers. When she does look back on those days, every reader with children will feel the stab of recognition:

You too had a pram, and children. You walked
beneath windows.

You pushed your little loneliness up the road.

Time and mortality loom large in Thomas’s work. Here is one of my favorite poems from the book, quoted in whole:

“Deer Apples”

While you’re still wondering what happened to the spring,

In cool moonlight and the crickets’ whispering,

 

The season turns. No more bridal lace.

Purplish heat flushes the shifting face

 

Roadside dogwoods wear, this hurried day.

Back home, you’re chopping apples to put away

 

In the deep-freeze for the winter: soft, bruised
windfalls—

Deer apples, people say—the fruit stand sells

 

Six dollars for a twenty-odd-pound box,

To bait hunters’ stands. Worm-bitten Gala, Cox,

 

Granny Smith, some little ones whose name

You don’t know, all together breathe the same

 

Ripe smell, almost fermented. Now you cut

The grainy flesh right down to the chambered heart,

 

Rigid as cartilage, where the black seeds nest.

You fill ten Ziploc bags, but mound the best,

 

Least-bitten apples in a bowl. It used to be

That passing children ate them up immediately.

 

Who’ll eat them now, before they liquefy

Inside their loosening skins? A waste, you’d cry,

 

Except that in this moment they’re a feast

To look at, heaped together in the last

 

Off-kilter light—curvaceous, red, or gold

As pollen, wax-cheeked, radiantly cold.

This is the best sort of contemporary formal poetry: not just metrically correct, but lithe and conversational. The music of the poem builds and builds until the gong-like shimmer of the final two words. How is it that our lives begin speeding up, quietly at first, while we still believe we’ll be “twenty-something” forever, and then “the season turns”? What happened to the spring and the “bridal lace” of summer (which is both a wildflower and the memory of being a young newlywed)? How do children grow up so quickly? All this relentless change, even the apples with their “almost fermented” smell, threatening to liquefy. And yet, the defiant beauty of this still life of apples “red, or gold as pollen” will persist—that has always been an important function of poetry since ancient times. (Remember Horace and his boast of creating a “monument more enduring than bronze.”)

Crowning the book is a sequence of poems called Richeldis of Walsingham, which first appeared in this journal. Like Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, it is a series of poems linked to an ancient Catholic pilgrimage site. Hopkins name-dropped the shrine in one of his poems when he said “a starlight-wender of ours would say / The marvelous Milk was Walsingham Way”—that is, the medieval pilgrims used the Milky Way as a signpost to their destination. According to legend, the Virgin appeared to Richeldis in the year 1061 and told her to build a replica of her house at Nazareth. She tried and failed three times, only to awake one day and find that angels had built the house while she slept. The house and its holy well became known as “England’s Nazareth,” the most popular destination for pilgrims after Canterbury. Eventually the shrine was destroyed under Henry VIII.

Gary Waller, a literature professor who made a little secular pilgrimage to Walsingham in 2006, wrote about his experience and mentioned the literary impact of Walsingham’s destruction, which “uncannily haunted the Elizabethan age in poems and folk songs.” Rather like Philip Larkin in “Churchgoing,” Waller visited the holy site with mixed feelings of mockery and nostalgia, only to be unexpectedly moved. “As I stood up and left the Holy House, pausing to regret the dryness of the well—no ritual of sprinkling for me that day—I asked myself what so many pilgrims ask: Have we listened? Perhaps the Guardians of the shrine would have had me listening to a more orthodox lesson, but what I was hearing was: Have we nurtured in all of us, men and women, what Shakespeare’s Cymbeline terms the “woman’s part”? Not, I think, enough. Walsingham gently suggests, to this pilgrim at least, that doing so is where our salvation may most profoundly lie.” His trip strongly impressed on him (despite his unbelief) that Walsingham “is a place of devotion to the female religious experience—that is experience not just by, but of, the female.”

For Thomas, this female presence radiates through the shrine’s history. She creates a polyphony out of many different women’s voices: Richeldis looks back on her life; a nurse returns home from the First World War; a medieval innkeeper complains that she is run off her feet serving crowds of pilgrims. I’ve mentioned before that Thomas’s poetry is often haunted by an anxiety about time—flowing relentlessly towards death, or looking back as our memories recede further and further into the past. And time is constantly confronting us in the Richeldis poems as we zigzag between the present day and the past, visiting 1080, 1918, 1854, 1659, 1216, and returning to 1080 again. Modern vignettes are braided together with the historical poems:

Through green May softness every year, the people
come

Barefoot into town, calling each other Pilgrim

 

In the self-conscious way that people do

When their world’s ceased to believe.

The medieval-sounding opening is a wry misdirection: the pilgrims are modern; the scene moves to a hostel where “an American couple / Watch with mounting dismay as their two-year-old / Smears herself with red jelly and cream beneath the mild / Horrified gaze of more cardigan-armored ladies.” This gently mocking tone does not, however, cut the modern readers off from the past, as if we can no longer relate to it. In a poem dated 1401, an innkeeper shouts irritably to a pilgrim that she has run out of room:

God found Our Lord a bed. Ale, ale.

Let Him—God save us—find you,

By Our Lady, a clean straw bed without fleas.

Everyone is demanding something of her at once—someone wants beer, another lodging—and her exasperation links her sympathetically with the modern American couple and their wild, jelly-smeared toddler. Richeldis herself speaks in Thomas’s usual poetic voice, except in the last poem where her words are charged with Anglo-Saxon and the pre-Norman world of Beowulf and Caedmon:

High heaven harrowed a dew-fallow field,

Planted what pleased it. The first building blundered:

Square, Saxon-style. Wrong.

Bad in its bones, the treasure-ship sank.

Each day the doing mocked and unmade me.

Like those deer apples, her very English is doomed to ferment and become something unrecognizable to her. And yet her words aren’t completely forgotten, as Thomas has named each poem in the sequence with an Old English title: “wif,” “sceadu,” “halig dag,” “brimfugol.”

Perhaps I can end this review with the observation that Sally Thomas is a pro when it comes to endings. That “click” of a good final line closing like the door of an expensive car is half the pleasure of poetry for me, and I will leave you with an assortment:

The polished slab that keeps his bones in place.

My unmaking made this.

I’d dress up now and marry you again.

A recurrent longing for something else.

And always to the sea are hastening down.

Meredith McCann is a poet and reviewer as well as the poetry editor of Dappled Things magazine. Her work has appeared in Presence and Able Muse, among others.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Reviews Leave a Comment

Review: Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

Dappled Things

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Paraclete Press, 2020; 128 pp., $19.00

Review by Maryanne Hannan

With the Heroides, a series of imaginary letters written by legendary lovers in elegiac couplets, Ovid (43 BC–17/18 AD) claimed to have invented a new literary genre, the persona poem. While this claim can be debated, poets, since then, have frequently released themselves from the confines of their own ego minds in order to enter imaginatively the minds and hearts of real or fictional characters.

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor takes on the inner life of the acclaimed Catholic author Flannery O’Connor. Despite her early death at age thirty-nine, she left behind a large literary legacy, two novels, thirty-two short stories, numerous reviews, essays, and bundles of correspondence, some of which has recently been made public. Fordham University professor, associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, and the author of four books about Flannery O’Connor, including the recent Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is ideally suited to the challenge of writing in the persona of this brilliant, complex, wickedly funny literary giant.

The book draws its title from Andalusia, the family’s so-named dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia to which Flannery withdrew in 1951 to live with her mother Regina for the last thirteen years of her life. Here she would write her oeuvre, while continuing to correspond with the literary world she was forced to leave behind when she developed lupus, the disease that had killed her father. Rather than limiting her work, as she had feared, living in relative isolation enriched and grounded her work, where she’d come as “the magnet pull home to this red clay, / like a stone saint who has wandered away” (“Flannery’s Pilgrimage”).

Hours in the title refers to the divine office, which gave form to Flannery’s days, in addition to the daily Mass she attended with her mother. O’Donnell weaves poems about Flannery’s deep spiritual yearning throughout, expanding on “Flannery’s Prayer:” “Oh Lord, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately.” Hours also refers to the book’s organization, according to the Catholic liturgy of the hours: Lauds for poems mostly concerned with Flannery’s early life, from the death of her father to Iowa; Terce for poems of converse with the outside world, from James Baldwin to Thomas Aquinas; Sext for poems exploring the centrality of her work; None for poems of Andalusia; Vespers for poems outside Andalusia, including actual journeys, her trip to Lourdes, and imagined, the Camino; and finally, Compline for end poems, threshold poems.

Each of the one hundred sonnets written from Flannery’s point of view opens with an epigram, chosen primarily from one of her brash comments or insight-filled stories, letters and essays. They provide O’Donnell opportunity to explore problematic aspects of Flannery’s inner life, including race, amour, her fiction, family, and death, while preserving the characteristic sardonic humor, intellectual acuity, dedication, and self-scrutiny. Then, in cadences and language that Flannery might have used, O’Donnell’s sonnets unpack, react, or expand on the quote. For instance, “Flannery’s Existential Thoughts while Porch-Sitting” expands on her observation that she and her mother might both have named a dog Spot; her mother, “without irony,” herself “with irony.” O’Donnell uses this wry comment as an entry point into Flannery’s complicated relationship with her mother: “I almost envy her her darkness— / or should I say her light.”

The poems are loosely chronological. Important issues are addressed more than once, circling around and building based on earlier references. A notable example is the sequence of poems referencing her failed love relationship with Erik Langkjaer. The epigram for that series, “Flannery in Love,” is a quote from Erik, noting that kissing Flannery was like “kissing a skeleton.” Despite the revenge she exacted, “So I became Hulga, made him Manley, / the saddest story that I ever told” (“Flannery in Love, Take III”), she ultimately admits the value of the experience in “Flannery in Love, Take IV:” “When you left / I was myself again, lonely, odd . . . Even so. I treasure those long rides, / the thrill of your kiss on a red hillside.”

During her time at the Iowa workshop and time subsequently spent with the Fitzgeralds, she developed important contacts in the literary world, which she was able to maintain and increase through correspondence and the occasional visit. One correspondent in particular, Maryat Lee, elicited from Flannery troubling racist comments that O’Donnell develops in a couple of poems. Of her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Georgia, Flannery admits: “Where I live we kill our prophets, / beat and butcher them, hang them from the trees. / Queer or Catholic, Negro or Jew” (“Flannery and James”), concluding “I choose to tell the truth in quieter ways.”

O’Donnell gives space for Flannery to express how central her work was and even to offer some critical understanding: “Here Jesus comes to me in every comma. / I do my best to make straight the way / for his incarnation every day” (“Flannery’s Christmas”). In “Flannery’s Manifesto,” she declares: “But what else can I do but write what my crooked heart tells me to?” And, then: “But what else is making fiction for / if not to trouble folks . . . / make them question why they rise from their beds.” God is good; creation is good; and writing in service to these truths is definitely good.

Both parents appear frequently. Regina, as above: they are devoted to each other and their way of life, but so different. Flannery felt a greater likeness with her father, who died when she was fifteen. His early loss ushered in “Flannery’s Fear:” “When my father died I could not bear / the grief that fell on me like hard hard rain. / But that was nothing next to the fear— / full knowing my mother was mortal, too.” When she too was diagnosed with lupus, “when the Red Wolf / ate up my dreams” (“Flannery Country”), that identification deepened.

The concluding poem, outside the cycle of sonnets, “Poet’s Apology,” written in O’Donnell’s voice as a farewell to Flannery, admits to “brief trespasses on your private mind.” To delve deeply into another’s psyche and try to make plain what perhaps even the subject herself has not fully realized is risky, especially with our contemporary sensitivity to cultural appropriation, but neither Ovid (nor any author of persona poetry that I can think of) felt compelled to justify their “stealth / and nerve to steal your mind and heart.” Perhaps because so many of us assume personal Flannery ownership, we react proprietarily, but in accepting these sonnets as literary creations, authorial what-if musings, I was thoroughly engaged. Did I agree? Disagree? Ever thought of that before? And so forth.

With her thorough understanding of Flannery scholarship, her nuanced critical understanding of Flannery’s work, and her own widely recognized skill in the sonnet, O’Donnell brings intrigue and insight to an acknowledged fictionalization. It was as if I were given access to a previously unimagined three-way conversation between Flannery, Angela O’Donnell, and myself. As a decades-long Flannery fan, I relished these exhilarating forays into Flannery’s world.

Maryanne Hannan, a poet and former Latin teacher, is the author of poetry collections Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo and This Can’t Be Good, as well as a series of short books on classical literature.

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Review: Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir by Ron Hansen

Dappled Things

Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir by Ron Hansen
Slant Books, 2020; 183 pp., $20.00

Review by Jeffrey Wald

One of the most enjoyable experiences for any reader is to be introduced to a writer and to find in that person a new friend—and then to turn that new friend loose to participate in the ongoing conversation in one’s own head. Such has been the experience I have had with two of my favorite writers, Ron Hansen and Walker Percy.

After a heavy dose of large Russian novels in my early twenties, Walker Percy was one of the first contemporary Catholic novelists I encountered. I remember picking up a used copy of The Moviegoer and being blown away by its Christian existentialism. I was a sophomore in college at the time, studying philosophy and literature. I was daily confronted with new ideas and ways of living I had never before encountered. I found Binx’s pilgrimage toward the transcendent apropos for my own inner search, and I soon ordered the rest of Percy’s corpus; Lost in the Cosmos remains a top-five all-time read.

Not long after, my professor introduced me to Ron Hansen. What, I thought, a Catholic novelist who is still alive and writing? This I had to encounter firsthand. So I picked up Atticus, and here I found another quest. But unlike Binx’s open-ended movement out of the malaise of postmodernity, Atticus Cody’s journey aimed to discover what happened to his lost drifter of a son. Whereas Binx may have been something of a “prodigal son” (with no father), Atticus was a true prodigal father, willing to descend to the depths of human misery to find and rescue his son.

Although Percy and Hansen are perhaps best known for their novels, they are also formidable essayists. Percy’s posthumously published Signposts in a Strange Land covers an impressive range of topics with both seriousness and humor, and Hansen’s first collection of essays on faith and fiction, A Stay Against Confusion, transcends its focus by means of a Catholic worldview at once particular and generous. Hansen’s second book of essays, Hotly in Pursuit of the Real, was published by Slant in April. These twenty-two short essays and two interviews again have put my mind on Hansen, and by extension, on my old friend Walker Percy.

Like Percy’s essays, Hansen’s succinct gems can be read and enjoyed in two principal ways. First, they can be savored in their own right for the beauty of the prose, the clarity and precision of the writing, and Hansen’s ability to express the hints of transcendence that inhere in created objects. Hansen sees reality as sacramental. He is at his best when portraying the salvific narrative ever-present in God’s world. His titular essay “Hotly in Pursuit of the Real” details how this narrative began to unfold in his own life as it drew him toward writing from an early age:

Looking back on my childhood now, I find that church-going and religion were in good part the origin of my vocation as a writer, for along with Catholicism’s feast for the senses, its ethical concerns, its insistence on seeing God in all things and the high status it gave to scripture, drama and art, there was a connotation in Catholicism’s liturgies that story-telling mattered. Each Mass was a narrative steeped in meaning and metaphor, helping the faithful not only to remember the past but to make it present here and now and to bind ourselves into a sharing group so that, ideally, we could continue the public ministry of Jesus in our world.

For Hansen, the world is haunted by a Creator, steeped in deep meaning and discoverable truth. Like Percy, he perceives the strangeness of existence. But also like Percy, Hansen’s writing is all about illuminating the signs and symbols that surround us, and thereby seeking to come nearer to the One behind the signs. For example, read Hansen’s response to an interviewer’s question in “Fiction as Encounter:”

I once read that according to ghost hunters, when you go into a house you almost never see a ghost by looking straight at it, but you can often see it out of the corner of your eye. I think that’s what happens in fiction: If you address something straight, people either accept it or reject it. But if you approach it tangentially, then they absorb it and it becomes more theirs.

Hansen’s essays, like Percy’s, can also be read as insights and interpretative lenses into his own fiction. The two writers cover different ground: Percy is fascinated with existentialism, science, the American South, psychology, and language; Hansen with history, the American West, crime, Scripture, and Ignatius. Both writers bring these deep interests into their fiction. Their topical nonfiction provides insight not only into their source material but also into what they are trying to accomplish in their narrative art.

In the third section of his new collection, Hansen directly addresses his own writing. He specifically discusses writing four of his historical biographies: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Exiles, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, and The Kid. These essays are some of the most enjoyable in the entire book. In them, the reader comes face-to-face with Hansen’s fascination with outlaws, outcasts, assassins, and adulterers. Here, Hansen’s empathetic imagination shines. For instance, of Billy the Kid, Hansen writes:

Reading everything I could about the Kid, I only found myself liking him more and wishing he’d had a father or mentor—which he persistently sought—in order to show him the right path. The older men he did find and admire were all soon killed.

Hansen also provides insight into more recent figures. Although I’ve long intended to dive into Thomas Merton’s work, I have yet to do it. Previously, everything I knew about Merton was contained in Paul Elie’s wonderful joint biography of Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, and Percy (again!), The Life You Save May Be Your Own—until I read Hansen’s essay “Goodbye to All That.” The essay is part Merton biography and part analysis of Merton’s WWII novel, My Argument with the Gestapo. I had never before heard of Merton’s sole novel; now I want to read this book that Hansen describes as “an interior monologue about Tom’s conflicted hankering, vacillation, uncertainty, and the naysaying voices that seemed to be railing against him,” a book that was “essentially a journal of his wistful intention to find solitude, renounce the world, and give up everything, even his writing talent, for a God who was the Solus Tuus.” I’m sold. Now I just need to get a copy.

Another of my favorite essays is “Shakespeare & Me.” Owing to my denseness as a reader, I was completely unaware how much of Hansen’s fiction owes a deep debt to Shakespeare. Not only does Hansen pay tribute to Shakespeare for the general form of much of his fiction—i.e., biographical fiction, akin to Shakespeare’s biographical plays—but Hansen also illustrates the specific illusions to Shakespeare’s work in many of his novels. The screwball comedy Isn’t It Romantic? was directly inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream; A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion owes much to Macbeth; the extended ending of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford owes its form to Julius Caesar; Sallie Chisum quotes Shakespeare in her conversations with Billy in The Kid. Why the captivation by Shakespeare? Hansen is ever in pursuit of the enduring, the infinite, and the eternal. And by his own estimation, “what seems to be everlasting is Shakespeare.”

Finally, I simply love “Why the West?” This short essay, perhaps inspired in form by Percy’s “Questions They Never Asked Me,” is composed of a series of twenty-five questions on the West. Here are a few representative questions:

Why does Big Sky country lift my spirits?

Why is it that the British automobile manufacturer Rover named its high-end model a Range Rover? And why are GMC SUVS named after the Alaskan wilderness?

Why is it that the cigarette named after the Duke of Marlborough, an English lord, was famously advertised by a cowboy?

Why do movie characters on the run always head west?

Why do so many Americans feel their country is overpopulated when 96 percent is parkland and open range?

Here’s one more question to add to the mix: why do I like this little essay so much? Again, I can’t help but think of Percy’s wacky and wonderful questions in Lost in the Cosmos. And again I’m reminded of the power of good literature, of the connections between writers that one finds, of the literary friends that one makes along the way. If you haven’t yet made friends with Hansen, Hotly in Pursuit of the Real is a great place to make his acquaintance. If you’re old friends, what a perfect way to continue the conversation. And if you’re so inclined, perhaps you might invite Percy to join in as well.

Jeffrey Wald is a writer and attorney whose work has previously appeared in periodicals such as Dappled Things, Touchstone, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere.

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Unfinished Business

Dappled Things

Rob Davidson

1.

Claire dropped by Mark’s midtown gallery one morning, visibly upset. “I just got the worst phone call from Mom’s roommate.”

Apparently, Solange had gone for a walk in Golden Gate Park and gotten lost. She found the roommate’s number in her cell and texted her. The roomie walked down to the park, found Solange, and brought her home. Solange was perfectly sweet about the whole thing, but the roommate told Claire: Your mother misses work shifts. She can’t remember where she works. Some days she’s fine, has it all together, but on the bad days she just seems lost.

“I don’t mean to pry,” the woman said, “but I think there’s something, you know, way wrong.”

The lapses had started years ago, when Solange still lived in Sacramento. Missed lunch dates. Misplaced keys and wallets. Forgetting where she’d parked her car. She laughed it off, making quips about middle age. Mark didn’t think much of it. Solange had always been absent-minded, caught up in herself, the star of her own absurd cabaret.

Now his daughter stood before him, insisting that it was time to do something. Her mother needed tests. She needed help, their help.

Mark closed his eyes. Claire might be right, but damn if it didn’t touch a nerve. It seemed he would never, ever get past this woman’s place in his life. Just hearing her name sometimes felt like being stabbed in the side.

One good thing to come out of the divorce, he’d decided, was the freedom from obligation. And Solange, bless her fickle heart, never asked for anything. She had at least that much dignity—that and a truckload of pride.

He rose from his chair and hugged his daughter. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I can’t.”

“Dad!”

Claire might not understand, but Solange would. Not that she’d ever ask. Anyway, that was enough.

And so Mark stood idly by as Claire made several trips into San Francisco to visit her mother, getting her signed up for health insurance, scheduling appointments and escorting her to them. Finally, after rounds of referrals, the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF delivered a diagnosis: early-onset Alzheimer’s. Solange spoke of putting up a fight, defying the odds, but there were no odds. This wasn’t a bet on chance. She would eventually need an assisted living arrangement, the doctors counseled. It was hard to say just when; EOA developed at different rates. But every time Claire tried to talk to her mother about it, Solange became angry and defensive. She had no plan and seemed unwilling to formulate one.

All of this angered Mark. Solange was colossally irresponsible, self-centered, naïve—oh, the thousand complaints he’d harbored in the years since the split. And Claire, poor Claire, always willing to step in, to try again, to speak reason to this, this, this . . .

Who was he, criticizing a woman diagnosed with Alzheimer’s?

Mark and Claire spoke about it often. Solange’s diagnosis meant Claire had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the condition, an entirely frightening thought. More immediately, there was the question of what to do about Solange. Claire wanted her mother to return to Sacramento. She and Mark discussed it one morning in the living room.

“She hates Sac,” Mark reminded her. “And anyway, where would she live? Rents are getting nearly as bad here.”

Claire said nothing, only smiled. Mark felt his ears burning. He hadn’t seen this coming, but he should have.

“Out of the question,” he said.

“Why?”

A long, fiery reply flashed through his head, but he held back. His tirades against Solange upset Claire, and now, with the diagnosis, they could only be cruel.

“She’ll never agree,” he said.

“I think we can persuade her.”

Mark tapped a finger against his coffee cup. “What if I don’t agree?”

She sat forward, elbows on knees. “We’ll set her up in the second bedroom.”

Mark smiled. There was no second bedroom. Claire meant his study.

“It’s just temporary,” she explained. “A year, maybe two. Then we transition her into a home.”

“You really think your mother will agree to assisted living?”

“At a certain point she won’t have a choice.”

True enough. But he didn’t see how any of this could work. Solange still had a few of her wits about her, and she would never agree to any of it.

“I can talk her into it.”

“Solange has never been talked into anything,” he quipped. “She does all the talking.”

“This is different.”

“How?”

Claire drew in her lip. “She’s scared.”

Morning sunlight illuminated a golden slice of polished wood floor, revealing dust and dog hair. Everything needed a good sweeping. Mark suddenly resented the sunlight.

“We’re the only people she can rely on,” Claire added, breaking the silence.

This was basically true. There was an older sister in Maryland, estranged. Mark hadn’t spoken to her since the divorce. He doubted Solange had, either.

This was all a bad idea, a crazy idea. Solange would never agree, and if she did she’d drive him nuts. It’d taken him years to get over the divorce, to make his peace with it. Selling the house in Land Park, downsizing into the Tower District bungalow, completely reorienting his life as a single parent, a divorced dad. Alone.

Yet not alone. Claire had lived with him through that long and painful time, returning to Sacramento after one difficult year at UC-San Diego. Unlike her mother, Claire didn’t suffer from wanderlust. Coming home had been good for her. She was doing reasonably well at Sac State, not stellar, but holding it together. She’d finish her degree in another year or two—it was looking like the six-year plan for Claire—and then test the job market.

When Claire was young, Mark used to joke that he’d change the locks the day she left for college. But the truth was he was happy having her around. If she were to leave, and one day she would, he would not cherish the isolation. He liked having someone to talk to; he liked cooking dinner for two, splitting a bottle of wine.

In the end, Mark agreed to think it over. Claire deserved as much. But Solange? He had a few ideas about what she deserved. She was, he supposed, just being herself: guileless, defiant, profane. But so what? No one could fault him for turning away. No one but Claire, and that truly meant something to him. More like everything at this point. For her sake, the situation required a certain, specific delicacy. He did not have the words—not yet, anyway—to reject her plan. Of course it would never, ever happen. Which meant that some other thing must happen. Solange’s failure to plan for herself was his chief obstacle at this point.

He needed to see Solange, to talk to her, to sound her out. But he must be careful. Any direct inquiry would be rebuffed. If he were to approach, he’d need a pretense. Something compelling, irrefusable. They exchanged a quick round of text messages. He had something important to discuss about Claire, he said. Nothing dire. He would be in the City next week on business. Could they meet? It was agreed.

On the day, he drove around the San Pablo Bay, coming into San Francisco via the Golden Gate to Solange’s place in the Outer Richmond. A little early, he walked over to Sutro Heights and stood overlooking the ruins of the old bathhouse. He remembered a visit years ago with Solange, scouring the site for bits of blue and green glass which she collected and later arranged into a collage. She presented it to him for his birthday. He remembered being pleasantly surprised by the gesture, and the collage wasn’t bad, either. One of her better pieces. It was early in their marriage. She still thought of herself as an artist.

And then it was time. Solange met him at the door, blinking her eyes and smiling. “Mark! What on earth are you doing here?” She looked thinner, with cheap plastic bracelets on her wrists and a fuchsia headband.

“We agreed to meet.”

“We did?”

He showed her their text exchanges. Her eyes narrowed as she read them. “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Silly me.” She smiled.

“May I come in?”

He followed her up a narrow, dark staircase to Apartment 2A, which opened into a spacious living room with windows facing the avenue, filling the room with natural light. Billowy couches with bedspreads draped over them bookended a low coffee table. There were paperback books piled here and there, a ceramic tea mug, somebody’s Apple laptop with stickers plastered all over the back. Exactly like a college apartment.

He followed her into the kitchen. “What on earth ever made you come and see me?”

He didn’t feel like spinning yarns. He muttered something about being in town on business and Claire urging him to drop by.

“Did she leave something here?”

“She thought it might be good to touch base in light of the diagnosis.”

“Oh, that!” she said brightly. “It’ll be years before it kicks in. I’m not about to let it slow me down. Now let me fix you a cup of tea, and you tell me how the gallery is doing.”

He rattled on about the gallery. He could tell she didn’t know any of the names he was dropping, though they were good names, names to know, names on many people’s lips; in fact, the gallery was doing well. But she wasn’t really listening, so he stopped.

On every kitchen cabinet were colored sticky notes: bowls, mugs, plates. On the fridge a big fluorescent note: “Solange: rent due on the 5th!” He asked what she’d been up to that morning.

“I did yoga with this teacher I’ve been following. In her forties but so fit. And the most amazing tattoos. Did you ever get one?”

“A tattoo? No. You?”

“Two on my back. This afternoon I’m job hunting.” She regaled him with the tale of her last job, waitressing at a fondue place in the Mission. She’d been let go after a decline in business.

“I thought you were temping,” he said. “A lawyer’s office?”

“Oh, that. You know lawyers. They want you there at nine o’clock on the dot. And I try, I really do, but it doesn’t always happen.” She placed a mug before him. Behind her, the teakettle began its gentle rattle on the stovetop.

“Why not?” Mark asked. “Lots of people in San Francisco have be at work on time, or they’ll be fired.”

“But you know me. I’m not a slave to . . .” She tapped her wristwatch. A puzzled look crossed her face. “This, this . . . hand-clock.”

“Most people call it a watch.”

Her chin trembled. “I know that.”

The kettle whistled. Solange turned off the gas. Then she began opening and closing the cabinets. “I can never find the tea. My roommates keep moving things.”

Mark reached over and pulled open a drawer with a sticky note on it that read “TEA” in Claire’s handwriting.

“Oh, thank you.”

She sat across from him. He watched as she bobbed her tea bag up and down in a precise, sinuous rhythm. Even the way she pulled her tea bag out, wrapping the string around it and squeezing the remaining liquid, was graceful, even mesmerizing. He missed simply watching her. She was pleasant to observe.

“Are you seeing anyone?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You?”

“A couple of guys off and on. I keep it light. But they can be so demanding. You’d think at our age they’d have gotten over the commitment thing.”

He frowned. “Yes, you would think that.”

She gave him a hard stare. “Why did you come?”

“I told you. I thought I should check in after the diagnosis.”

“I’m fine. Can’t you see that?”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “Do you have any sort of plan for what happens next?”

“Do any of us?”

“Come on, be serious.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, here it comes.”

He reviewed what he knew. Claire had signed her up for Healthy San Francisco, the city health plan, but it didn’t cover long-term care or hospice. He’d been researching her options.

Solange raised an eyebrow. “Whatever on earth for?”

“Because you need a plan.”

“Eventually,” she conceded, blowing on her tea. “I’m years away from that.”

“But by the time things take a turn, when you’re . . . Now’s the time to plan, is what I’m saying.”

Solange gave him a patronizing smile. “Mark, darling, it’s really none of your business.”

So far, he’d planned for this. Almost line-for-line. He knew where he had to go.

“Claire is concerned. It’s eating her up. That makes it my business.” He sipped his tea, which tasted bitter. He reached for the milk. “I trust you understand what’s happening. Within a year or two . . . I mean, worst case.”

She picked up a spoon from the table and turned it around in her hand. She shook her head.

“You will need help,” he said. “You just admitted it.”

“I did not.”

“Just a minute ago, when I said you needed a plan. You said ‘eventually.’”

She sat back and folded her arms. “You’re beginning to annoy me.”

“And you’re making this difficult.”

Her eyes flared at him, jaw set tight. “How am I making it difficult? You show up, unannounced, and start making demands on me. For no reason at all.”

Mark pressed a finger to the tabletop. “We agreed to discuss this because our daughter, Claire, is worried. Very worried.”

“She worries too much,” Solange said.

“If you won’t do something for yourself, can’t you do it her?”

“You know what she needs? She needs to finish school. Finish, or just quit.”

Mark gave a little laugh. “Sure, quit and walk away. Just start over, isn’t that the next step? Great advice.”

“She’s wasting the best years of her life.”

“Is that what you call it? A husband, a daughter, a home. Wasting your life?”

Solange threw up a hand. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to acknowledge this condition, how serious it is. You have no plan, and you’re worrying our daughter sick about it. Claire is concerned—more concerned than you, apparently!”

“Yes,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “She’s like her father, meddlesome and predictable. And in that regard a disappointment.”

Mark seethed quietly, letting the sting throb. He could accept the jab at him, but Claire?

“How dare you,” he hissed.

Solange rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Please don’t tell her I said that.”

They sat quietly, each stewing. Mark found himself studying a corner of the kitchen floorboard, a dark line of mildew along its seam.

“It’s just life, Mark. Things happen. And when they do, people find solutions. New things happen. You can’t control every little thing. That’s always been your problem. You don’t know how to let a person just be.”

He leaned forward, over the table. “This isn’t about me, Solange. It’s about you. This diagnosis is real. And guess what? You don’t get to hit reset on this one. The usual drop and run, it ain’t gonna work!”

She slammed a fist on the table. “You’re not my doctor! Or my shrink! Stay out of it!”

“I’m trying to help you!”

“How are you helping? You came here to insult me. You came to pick open old wounds, your wounds. You’re like a child.”

A nasty comeback rose to his lips, but he squelched it. He knew where all this was headed. He’d been there too many times already.

He stormed out of the apartment, stomping down the hallway, letting the heavy security door slam shut with a resounding thud. He walked for a while in a blind rage, his mind a red-hot tangle. He made his way to a barstool on Geary Boulevard, where he ordered a double whiskey and began to collect his thoughts. He didn’t know what angered him more: Solange’s stubborn rudeness, or his willingness, once again, to step into her field of fire. It had been a mistake to see her, a mistake even to reach out to her, to initiate contact. It violated a cardinal rule he’d set for himself after the split. Damn it, he knew better! He wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If Claire wanted to help, Claire could find a way. He was through.

2.

Mark and Solange each had their own version of what went wrong and who was to blame. For him, Solange’s choices amounted to a protracted midlife crisis. (She hated when he called it that, but what else was he going to call it?) There had been the unfinished business of living, things that, according to Solange, could not be accomplished within the strictures of marriage. These had included the predictable sexual escapades, none of which Mark would have objected to, had he been asked. (He hadn’t been asked.) They included the requisite drifting around: to a spirituality center in Vermont; to a meditation retreat in British Columbia; to an arts co-op in Marfa, Texas. When she returned to Sacramento, she wasn’t ready for anything permanent, not even a lease. She rented rooms in people’s houses, or flopped on couches. She spent a few weeks in a teepee in Grass Valley. Each situation was deliberately tentative, with as few ties as possible. She had become, she announced, “resistant to commitment.”

“Not exactly news,” Mark quipped.

“I mean in new ways.”

“You mean in all ways.”

Mark believed she was experiencing a second childhood. Raised by a brilliant but distant father, a professor of classics, and a mother more attuned to marching on the state capitol than parenting, Solange had enjoyed maximum freedom and she’d done, in her own words, exactly nothing with it. She’d been adrift all her life, searching for the missing puzzle piece. But every time she thought she’d found it, it failed to fit. And so she ran to the next thing. Eternal window shopping, Mark had once explained to Claire. The tumbling tumbleweed, that’s your mother in a—

“Don’t say ‘in a nutshell,’” Claire groaned. “Mom could never be contained in a nutshell. Her life is too big, too expansive for that.”

“Yes, like an oil spill. Messy and toxic.”

Claire rolled her eyes, a curt dismissal she’d mastered at the age of ten. “The only person interested in reducing anything to a nutshell is you. You like compact meanings, small truths.”

“You make me sound narrow-minded.”

She smiled and put a hand on his forearm. “You are narrow-minded, Dad. But in the most adorable way.”

Claire loved and respected her mother, which was her right, but she couldn’t live with her, either. The two quarreled endlessly, the mother incapable of imposing rules on a daughter who openly asked for guidance, for boundaries. And that’s why, in those years of rambling and drifting, Solange left the day-to-day business of parenting to Mark. He gave Claire curfews, balanced meals, limited screen time. When she turned sixteen she got a job sacking groceries. (“Safeway!” Solange protested. “Don’t you know they’re in bed with Monsanto? It’s unconscionable.”) Claire learned to balance her checkbook, paid for her own gas and a share of the car insurance. She willingly accepted it all, keen to learn how “adult stuff” was done.

Claire had never been happy about the divorce. Twelve at the time of the split, she was old enough to comprehend that her parents were unhappy. Solange, always a little too eager to share, explained her reasons for leaving. It was not well received. Mark could do little to help. He understood Solange’s yearnings, perhaps even the need to act on them, but not at the expense of their marriage. Privately, he suggested she be free to roam for a time, to do whatever she needed to do, but to stay married. Solange would not have it. It was she who insisted on the divorce, a final, irreconcilable parting.

What she wanted, Mark finally decided, she wanted for herself. It was not mutual; it was not a good idea; it was not anything other than a wife and mother walking away from her family by choice. Through it all, father and daughter drew closer, united in their suffering, both of them bewildered by Solange’s decision. What can a twelve-year-old know of wanderlust or weltschmerz? Her mother had walked away and left her. What was there to say? There might be reasons, but those reasons wouldn’t make sense to a kid. After one of her many breakdowns, a teenaged Claire confessed to Mark that she had one wish, one desperate dream: for her parents to reconcile, for someone to wave a magic wand and put it all back together again, the way it had been.

Mark tried to explain, in the gentlest way possible, that it couldn’t happen.

“Why?”

Her mother had other plans. He couldn’t explain it, exactly. That wasn’t his job.

“But what if she did come back?”

The look on her face, so frank and vulnerable, too earnest to be anything other than heartbreaking—ah, what could he do?

“I don’t know.”

“So . . . maybe?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmured, pulling her close.

After many moments like that, all handled by him alone, Mark’s hurt turned into bitterness and resentment. Solange was weak and selfish. She missed the best years of Claire’s childhood, the ultimate cut and run. People like that—they didn’t deserve your sympathy, generosity, or tolerance.

3.

Mark sat in his Midtown Sacramento gallery on a March morning, the back windows open to the warm spring air. He loved best the quiet, peaceful hours before the gallery opened at eleven. It was then he could focus on queries, make plans, and see all the possibilities.

He was interrupted by a phone call. A sergeant from the San Francisco police department, looking for Mr. Mark Stroud. Concerning Ms. Solange Stroud. The officer reported that Ms. Stroud had been found beaten, possibly raped, in Golden Gate Park. Likely she’d been there for several hours. There were injuries. Ms. Stroud had mentioned him and a Claire Stroud by name.

As Mark listened, an icy wave washed over him.

“Claire, yes, our daughter,” Mark said. “Have you called her?”

“We have no contact information. The victim has no ID or paperwork on her. I’m working off an internet search at this point. Found you at your place of business.”

Thank God for that website, which he’d paid through the nose to develop. “Where is she now?”

Zuckerberg SF General, the safety net hospital for the homeless in the city. Mark winced at the word. Had she been? Claire would have told him. Or he should have known.

Solange lay in bed, all bandages and IV lines and a cast on one arm, in an open ward. No privacy. She was pretty doped up from the pain meds and slept a lot. When she was awake, tears glistened on her cheeks. Mark dabbed at them with a tissue, whispering comforting words. The nurses came by often, assuring both of them that Solange would be all right. She was in the clear now, and safe. The worst was behind them.

Mark took comfort in their words, and hoped Solange did, too. In all the years he’d known her, he’d never seen her so broken. Even at her lowest moments, she’d always had spunk and zeal. It was what he’d loved most about her. He’d always been attracted to intelligent women, outspoken women, assertive women. Even now, when their love had dissipated and been transformed into other energies, he respected this about her. Maybe that was what shook him so terribly when he saw her in that hospital bed. To see a strong person broken, dispirited, weeping and incoherent with pain . . . it frightened him.

When visiting hours ended, he assured Solange that he’d be back the next day. An attendant pointed the way out. He walked in a kind of daze. The hallways of the trauma ward were lit with buzzing florescent lights. The floors were dull and streaked from the rubber tires of gurneys speeding through, the nicked walls yellow like rancid butter. Emergencies all the time, bodies hurling down hallways in crisis. The smell, a grim mix of sickness and bleach, the stench of injury and death.

From far down a hallway, a solitary voice screamed, desperate and hoarse. “No one’s helping me! Why won’t anyone help me!”

Over the next two days, they pieced together what they could. Solange had been evicted from her apartment in February after falling behind on the rent. No known current address. She’d been flopping on friends’ couches. Then things took a turn. She couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, how she’d ended up sleeping in the park. She had no address book. Her phone had been stolen or lost. Then the attack, of which had no memory. Probably a blessing, the doctors said. The rape kit confirmed there had been a sexual assault.

Mark returned to Sacramento. He had a show opening in two weeks for which he was behind schedule. Claire stayed on in San Francisco, sitting with Solange for every available visiting hour, holding her hand. She called home each night to update Mark and discuss options. They agreed that Solange could no longer care for herself. The days of independent living were over. The question was where she would go. Mark insisted they research every option.

The next Sunday, when the gallery was closed and Mark had a little time, he drove back into the City to see Solange, who looked much better, and have lunch with Claire. He took her to Delfina in the Mission for lunch. Then they walked over to Mission Dolores Park. They sat on a bench at the top of the hill, overlooking the downtown skyline. Kids took turns riding skateboards down the long, curving sidewalk that ran the length of the park, rushing at breakneck speed, spilling out onto Eighteenth Street.

Claire reviewed what she’d learned. The city health plan did not cover long-term care. There were assisted-care facilities for the homeless, but with limited space and availability. The same held true for hospice, when it came to that. “But I will never allow her to—”

“—Of course not,” Mark agreed. “We’ll upgrade her insurance. What’s she got in the bank?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“She must be eligible for assistance through Medi-Cal or something.” He’d do the homework, research their options. He could pay some of it. Hell, he’d pay all of it—though even as he said it, he knew that might be impossible. God bless America, land of cheap guns and overpriced healthcare.

“The consultant says Mom is one of the lucky ones,” Claire said, softly. “She still has family who care. There’s a lot who don’t.”

A skateboarder came screaming down the sidewalk, crouched low, arms spread, sweeping back and forth in wide arcs until his board flew out from under him, spilling him into the grass. A shaved-ice vendor pushing his cart up the steep hill stopped and shook his head. “Tonto estúpido.”

Mark laughed; he wasn’t sure why.

“Dad,” Claire said, “it’s time.”

“Yes, we should get back.”

She put a hand on his arm. “To take her home.”

Mark looked into Claire’s gray eyes, strikingly identical to her mother’s—one of their closest shared features. The urgency of the moment had settled on her, he saw that. A resolve emanated from her, something cool and focused. She was a woman now, twenty-two years of age. She knew what she wanted. She wanted to care for her destitute, broken mother. This meant taking Solange into their home, an impossible and yet somehow inescapable conundrum. The look in her eyes, a fierceness that demanded consent.

4.

They set Solange up in the home office with a cot. She had no belongings. She couldn’t recall where her things had gone, with whom she’d left anything. She entered the house physically feeble, seemingly having aged ten years. She wept frequently. She didn’t want to be left alone. She spent long hours sitting in front of the television watching nature shows or travel documentaries. The old Solange had never owned a television, scoffing at the drones wasting their lives glued to it.

She was not herself, not exactly. And though neither Mark nor Claire said as much, he knew they both were worried: when was that point where the identity slips away, like dissipating smoke? When are you no longer you?

Claire tracked down the remaining friends she could find. A few of them had some of Solange’s things—books, photos, vinyl LPs. A roommate from the apartment had graciously tossed a few items in a box when the landlord evicted Solange in absentia. The rest of it was just gone: Solange’s art pieces; her photo albums; her clothes, jewelry, and books. Even her passport. A life in things, vanished.

Something about all of this—its seeming suddenness, its irrevocability—startled Mark. He’d never told Claire how, after Solange left, he kept smelling her all over the house, the earthy, raw human scent of her. In towels and bedsheets, in the linen closet, in his car. How she left various pieces of herself behind: a bracelet dropped behind a chest of drawers; a pair of panties inside a pillowcase; a pair of her reading glasses in the pocket of his shirt (she was eternally misplacing them). He never told her of finding strands of Solange’s hair, graying and kinky with curls, on his shirts and sweaters, each strand pulling at his heart.

Solange gradually improved, and when she could get up and walk on her own, things took a turn for the better. Physically, her appetite returned. Mark enjoyed cooking for all three of them, big meals that required a bit of planning, especially if he and Claire wanted to eat meat. (Solange was still vegan. She hadn’t forgotten that.) But her spirit was slow to recover. She didn’t want to leave the house. She puttered around in the backyard, tending Mark’s flower beds. She wanted to start a small garden. Mark knocked together a few planting boxes, raised beds for tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce. Solange spent entire mornings out there, patiently tending each bed. They were immaculate, not a single weed to be seen.

During that summer, Solange seemed physically healthy, recovering from the bulk of her injuries. But she moved slower, and her mind continued to slip gears. There were good days when she could hold a conversation, when the memories came bubbling back up to the surface. She was lucid then, but it was never long before the sparkle died out of those eyes and the glassy, half-vacant gaze returned.

Claire and Solange went out a lot together. Shopping (Solange still liked to buy scarves), coffee, the movies. When Mark asked if it wasn’t nerve-wracking, having to keep an eye on her mother all the time, Claire just smiled and said they held hands or linked arms and that made it easy. Mark rarely took Solange anywhere by himself. He saw the hours he spent alone with her as a kind of sentence, only he was in jail, too. Hell, they might as well still be married.

Only they were not married. They were divorced. He had no formal obligation to this woman. All of this was, he privately reminded himself, because of Claire. Claire’s choice, Claire’s wish, and Claire’s authority, for it was she who held power of attorney. When the time came, she would be the one to move Solange into assisted housing.

As summer moved slowly into autumn, Mark asked Claire about returning to school. She said she was taking the next year off.

“You mean the fall term,” he said. She’d withdrawn from last spring’s classes to be with her mother. Taking fall off would make it an entire academic year.

“I know that.”

“But by spring don’t you think . . .” He looked to Solange, sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through a travel magazine.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m planning to take the whole year off. I don’t want to rush anything.”

“I don’t want to rush, either,” he said, “but don’t you think sooner might be better, in a sense? It’ll be hard later, for her.”

“We’ll move her when it’s the right time. This isn’t the right time.”

“Your life is on hold.”

Claire looked into the kitchen, smiling. “This is my life.”

One afternoon Claire was gone. Mark arranged for an employee to cover his shift at the gallery, but she canceled at the last minute, meaning the gallery was now closed on a Saturday during peak hours. Mark knew it was not a catastrophe in the grand scheme of things, but it needled him. Somehow, by some strange twist of fate, he’d been saddled not merely with receiving his ex-wife into his house, but also babysitting her. The cosmic injustice of it seemed like a personal slight.

Solange was moody and restless, moving between the kitchen and the living room. She couldn’t sit still. She said several times to Mark, “I don’t know why I’m here. Why am I here?”

He explained, again, that she was living with them now. They were taking care of her.

“Who is?”

“Claire and I.”

“Where is Claire?”

“She’s out with a friend. She’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Solange shook her head and frowned. “I don’t know why I’m here.” She walked into the front hall and started arranging a scarf around her neck. “I’m going for a walk,” she announced.

“You want to go for a walk? All right, give me five minutes.”

“I’m fine by myself.”

“No, you are not.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I’m not a baby!”

Pretty damn close, he thought. He looked at the clock. “You need to take your pills.”

“I already took those!”

“Not today, you haven’t.” He showed her the little chart they kept, which she initialed every time so they could all keep track.

“Oh, shove them up your ass.”

It was outrageous, what he was putting up with. From her, of all people. The nurse who visited every two weeks told him that people with dementia often lash out. “They’re frustrated because they don’t understand what’s happening to them. They’ll say things you wouldn’t believe. But you have to remember why it’s happening. You can’t let it get to you.”

Mark’s phone rang from somewhere in the house. He remembered he’d agreed to take a business call, and as he darted off to find his phone, he barked at Solange to stay put and wait for him. He took the call in his bedroom study—it was an artist Mark would be showing in a few weeks. The guy was bickering about his contract, angry about shipping costs—all things they’d already gone over. It took Mark several minutes to calm the guy down and close the deal for a second time.

He returned to the living room and Solange was gone. He searched the bungalow quickly, every room, then the back and side yards. Nowhere.

A sharp stab of panic struck, followed by a flush of anger. He dialed her phone. Straight to voicemail. He got in his car and began driving around the neighborhood, muttering to himself all the while about this fucking bullshit disease and the ex-wife he’d somehow been burdened with . . . again. What version of hell was this?

He found her ten minutes later, thank Christ, clinging to a stop sign on a quiet side street, utterly lost. She was trembling.

“Solange!” he exploded out of the driver’s seat. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the car, aggressively fastening her seatbelt. “What in the hell were you doing?”

“I didn’t know where anyone was. I thought you’d left me.”

The irony of this did not escape him. “I was on the phone. I told you to just stay put. But you can’t do that. You can’t remember what I told you. You can’t remember any damn thing at all!”

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She buried her face in her hands. “Don’t be angry with me.” Those words stabbed at him, quelling his fury.

He got her back to the house, calmed her down with a cup of tea and a nature documentary on the Roku, then sat with himself at the kitchen table. In twenty minutes—hell, in five—she wouldn’t remember any of it. But he surely would. Now he was the one trembling, startled by his own carelessness, his impatience, his pettiness, and his rage.

Don’t be angry with me.

He poured himself a stiff whiskey, sipping it as he stared out the kitchen window at Solange’s garden beds, so orderly and clean. Now he wasn’t even allowed to feel spite. Bitterness, hereby banished. All that anger, years of it banked up, the very thing that had sustained him in those dark years, useless now. Beside the point.

He chuckled miserably. The real problem was what to grow in its stead.

5.

One evening, Solange and Mark sat watching a romantic comedy on Netflix, something recent. A couple sat at a picnic bench on the coast, sipping white wine and talking. The movie was innocuous and saccharine. Mark was only half-interested. Solange turned to him and said, “It reminds me of that summer we spent in Half Moon Bay. You remember.”

Mark sat up, startled. He paused the film. “Yes, of course.”

It was the summer before they’d married. Solange was painting; Mark was working at a local gallery. They house-sat for a big shot art dealer, a summer of long evenings drinking jug wine, watching the sun sink into the Pacific. They were young and hungry, making love in every corner of the house. There was nothing more important to Mark than to keep Solange laughing, this girl with the faraway eyes.

When Solange unexpectedly became pregnant, neither knew what to do. There was talk of termination, or giving the baby up for adoption. Solange insisted it was her decision, her responsibility; Mark shouldn’t feel beholden in any way. Even if she had the child, he needn’t be involved if he didn’t want to. She would never demand that. Oh, the sweet fool! She didn’t know what she wanted.

Mark’s spontaneous marriage proposal surprised them both, but as the words left his mouth he felt absolutely sure that it was the right thing. He didn’t expect her to agree, but she said yes. She said yes! Life, in that moment, felt radiant.

“You remember that little Italian place on Highway One,” Solange said, smiling. “The one with the funny old guy with that big moustache? What did we call him?”

The accuracy of her memory in that moment astonished him. “Il Brontolone,” he said, smiling. The Grouch.

“He was always surly.”

“But who cared. His eggplant parmesan was out of this world.”

“And the wine,” Solange added, “whatever that house red was, served in those nicked carafes. And the tablecloths, spattered with candle wax.” She pulled the blanket up close to her chin. “I don’t suppose any of that is still there.”

“It was ages ago,” Mark said. “Probably all condos and Starbucks now.”

They were quiet for a moment. In a soft, sleepy voice, Solange said, “It was good, wasn’t it?”

Tears swam along the lower lids of his eyes. He reached out for her. She let him put his hand atop hers, resting it there. “Yes,” he said, “it was good.” Gazing into her eyes, he saw the old sparkle, the merry, dancing energy. And then, gradually, like an ice cube dissolving in a warm drink, her gaze turned glassy and unfocused.

She withdrew her hand from his. She asked if he wanted to watch television.

Mark resumed the movie, though he couldn’t focus. He felt awash in many things—memory, affection, but also a deep sadness. For what they’d had, for what they’d shared, for what they could have had. It’d taken him years to recover, years to cauterize the wounds. How strange that she could pierce all of that so quickly, so cleanly, in just a minute.

Such moments were rare, a trick of memory. Tomorrow, she wouldn’t remember what film they’d watched the night before, let alone what they’d talked about. But it meant something to him to know that in the catacombs of her mind she—they—remembered it all. It was locked up there in some vault, inaccessible for the most part. Memories of the good times, when they were happy and in love. Just the two of them, with everything spread out before them. The future was nothing but a bright and breezy promise, and the possibilities of tomorrow shone like a thousand diamonds.

Rob Davidson’s most recent book is What Some Would Call Lies: Novellas (Five Oaks, 2018). His previous short fiction collections include Spectators: Flash Fictions (Five Oaks, 2017). Davidson’s fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, New Delta Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. His honors include a Fulbright Award, multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in fiction. He teaches creative writing and American literature at California State University, Chico.

Filed Under: Fiction, Mary Queen of Angels 2020 Leave a Comment

Open House

Dappled Things

Jennifer Marie Donahue

Estelle woke every morning to the sound of birds chattering outside her window. “Meet the day!” their chorus sang, like a secret only she could decipher. On this day, like many others, she lay in bed until the light moved fully across the wall and illuminated all the dark corners. In the stillness, she catalogued the different voices: dark-eyed juncos trilling, the warbling zee of the house sparrow, and the churrr and steady tapping on a nearby tree from the red-bellied woodpecker. When Estelle was ready, she raised her own call: “Mona.” The word traveled to her mother via the baby monitor, whose little green flickering light had become her constant companion.

Morning required time to negotiate basic tasks of dressing in her elastic-waist sweatpants, moving from the bed to the wheelchair, using the bars in the bathroom to manage the toilet, and then washing up and brushing her teeth. Breakfast of two eggs, a strawberry yogurt, and two clementines. Estelle liked the way the citrus smell lingered under her nails all day. Wheelchair exercises came next, following the instructions her physical therapist had written down, a pattern of rolls, stops, turns and reverses. Then her mother stretched out her legs, starting on the right side, the side she couldn’t feel or move at all. Up and down, bending at the knee because muscles need work to avoid atrophy. Next, her mother manipulated her foot, flexing and pointing, rubbing along the sole to loosen tendons grown tight. Her left leg and foot were much the same, but on this side she could work her muscles on her own with directed assistance, up and down. Despite mobility, sensation was largely missing. The only thing Estelle could reliably feel was the pressure of her mother’s hands on her leg and intermittent pain. This she consistently lied about because she hated the way the pills made her feel as if she were underwater.

By late morning, Estelle had spotted five of the ten differences in the two pictures she was tasked to compare side by side. This was one task in a seemingly never-ending series of brain exercises. “Do you see any more?” Estelle asked her grandmother’s parrot she’d named Jack, after the song by Ray Charles, “Hit the Road Jack.” The parrot tilted its head sideways and coughed, and said in an old man’s drawl, “Hello, bird!” Her grandmother had adopted the bird from a shelter, and instead of learning multiple phrases, it only knew this greeting, the previous owner’s asthmatic cough, and a handful of whistles.

Estelle wheeled herself over to the bay window in the living room. Her easel was set up here, tubes of paints and brushes, colored pencils at the ready. There was a sketch from yesterday, giant leaves—dinosaur leaves!—and red orchids in bloom. Here Estelle would perch for hours, sometimes drawing or painting, but often just watching the people walk by on the sidewalk and observing which birds came to visit the two feeders hanging from a low branch of the magnolia tree in the yard. The sparrows were in attendance today, a cluster zooming in and out, seeds spilling on the ground. What was missing? Cardinals. They always showed up in a pair. Her mother said they were dead relatives come to visit. Maybe her father? Also missing, the blue jay. He always came alone. It was like the pictures she’d been working on. Something was different. Estelle expanded her view, beyond the birds, beyond the tree. She considered the street, the houses all in a row. What was different?

Cars were parked in spaces usually empty. People walked where usually only squirrels scampered. A flash of color. Estelle squinted. Something round. Red, blue, green. Tied down. They couldn’t get free. One . . . two . . . three. “Mona!” she called out, panic-laced in her voice. Pericolo. Danger became a wave, ready to crash down. Numbers could assemble in sinister fashion, countdown to something bad. There. She knew that place. A cardinal’s home? “Mona! Mona!” each call of her mother’s name reaching up in pitch and volume.

Mona ran into the living room expecting the worst. Estelle’s wheelchair overturned. Estelle on the floor, the aftermath of an unobserved seizure. But all she found was her daughter, pointing out the window. “Three!” she screeched. This one word was enough. Estelle had developed a strong aversion to odd numbers since the accident. They would be driving along listening to the radio, but if the volume was set at five or seven, Estelle frantically adjusted it to an even number. When pressed, Estelle could not fully explain the trepidation odd numbers gave her. “These type of superstitions and fixations are common in brain injuries,” Dr. Paxen had assured Mona months ago, when it had started. Mona had to be careful to only give Estelle even numbers of crackers, for instance, but she hadn’t even thought to count the stripes on the new T-shirt she’d offered her daughter. That article of clothing had been rejected for possessing twenty-one stripes.

Mona peered out the bay window, down the street, and spotted the three balloons tied to the “For Sale” sign. Now she understood. The Cavanaughs’ open house. The Cavanaughs hadn’t lived in that house at the end of the street in over twenty-four years. Still, that was how Mona thought of the home in her mind. How could it be anything different? That was the house where Richard Cavanaugh had hung himself in the garage. How many people even knew that anymore? So many of the original owners in the neighborhood, like Mona’s own parents, had died or moved on. Suicide wasn’t something they had to disclose in the MLS listing.

Mona unlocked the wheels and then maneuvered Estelle away from the window. She glanced back and took in the details of Estelle’s unfinished artwork; it looked like a rainforest. She had painted in the bird they’d inherited with the house. And yes, there it was, the familiar face, hidden in the bright green leaves. All of Estelle’s drawings and paintings had one thing in common: the face of her former fiancé. It could be found hidden in the corners, upside down. Hanging in the kitchen was her painting of a beach scene with a lighthouse. Henry was there, tiny, hidden inside a shell. Mona didn’t know this young man well, only his steady presence in the hospital room for two-and-a-half months after the accident. He bore the sadness of being erased from Estelle’s mind with a certain stoicism Mona had found unnerving. “It will come back to her,” he’d assured Mona. But the memories of him still hadn’t come back over a year and a half later. Estelle was painting him everywhere, but when asked, she didn’t know who he was. Here was the love you don’t remember, but can’t seem to forget.

Mona knew about love like that. She’d loved Richard Cavanaugh. But could a fifteen-year-old truly love a grown man? Mona wheeled Estelle into the kitchen. The bird whistled as they entered, and then greeted them with his usual annoying words: “Hello, bird!”

“How about we have lunch early?” Mona asked. Estelle fidgeted in her wheelchair. She chewed on the side of her mouth in a familiar tic of agitation.

“My fa-fa-father,” Estelle stuttered, expelling the word with great effort.

It felt like a hot spike in Mona’s head, the word, the knowledge—father. Richard had been gone so long and yet he was always there, invisible, hovering over everything. Mona swiveled around, away from her daughter, away from that goddamn bird that had started whistling again. Whistling could be dangerous.

Sonny’s brother, Michael, had sent her the email with the real estate listing for their childhood home. This was the place where she’d first taken on the nickname “Sonny” when Michael couldn’t say her real name, Sonya. As soon as she opened and viewed the twenty-two pictures of their former rooms, now different, she knew she had to see it in person. During the 148-mile drive, Sonny repeated to herself the justifications she’d devised: “I need closure,” and “By confronting this part of my past I can let go of anxiety about the future,” and “My father is not haunting me and this will prove it.” Yet all these words sounded like the phrasing of her therapist, and she didn’t quite believe in any of it, not really. Sonny sat in front of the house in her car for more than an hour, until her legs were cramped and her lower back ached from being in one position, one place, and not being stirred. Occasionally the baby kicked and rolled, an elbow or knee moving in a ripple across her skin. She rubbed on the hard spot that may or may not have been a foot. The blue, red, and green balloons tied down to the “For Sale” sign in front of her childhood home bobbed in the gentle breeze coming off the water you couldn’t see from here. Brine saturated the air with an aroma a shade away from decay.

A steady flow of people made their way to the front door, a dark wood stained affair with a small moon-shaped window. There was a brand-new black knocker that looked straight out of a catalogue that catered to a new class of vintage-obsessed designers. Everything old was new again. The neighborhood had all the markers of transition, some of the homes freshly painted in grays and greens with sharp white trim and flower boxes overflowing with lavender and rose hues. Bird feeders twirled on tree branches and shepherd’s hooks. She’d heard the call of a rooster, an urban farmer nearby—raised cedar garden beds, orderly and edged lawns. Other homes had faded paint, cracked concrete walkways and tall hedges that hadn’t changed at all in the more than twenty years she’d been gone.

The people arriving to tour her old house, mostly young couples, their faces flushed with possibility. Sonny watched them walk away, arm in arm, turning their heads back to the house, their faces longing. She glanced in the rearview mirror where she could see the Quinlin house. Sonny knew by way of her mother’s gossip that her old babysitter Mona still lived there with her own half-sister, now disabled, that she’d never met. How long had it been since Sonny’s mother had told her about Estelle’s accident? Before she’d gotten pregnant. All Sonny could really remember was that dread she’d felt at the news, that same dread she’d always felt hovering like a shadow in the shape of her father over her life. It was the curse of being associated with him; it had touched all the women—herself, her half-sister, her mother, and Mona, too. That was why she’d come here now, to face her father’s curse, dispel it. She wanted to see her old childhood home again, see the place where he’d died. Maybe then she could be free of him.

Sonny opened the car door and made her way down the front walk, carefully stepping along flagstones that had replaced the concrete walkway of her youth. The front steps were now two large planks of stone, but Sonny could spy the joint where they laid upon the concrete foundation. She remembered her father replacing the listing wooden steps one afternoon, mixing the powdered bag of concrete and slowly adding water until it turned soft like pudding. He poured it down and smoothed it out with a big trowel. They’d both put their handprints in that concrete, her tiny five-year-old fingers alongside his grown-up hands. She’d also written her name and drawn a smiley face inside the “o.” It was all preserved down there still, she guessed, beneath what could be seen.

She signed a fake name, phone number, and email address into the register the real estate agent, a short woman with platinum hair, asked her to fill out. Sonny went upstairs, wandered from room to room, but the space had taken on an unfamiliar facade with the new hardwood floors and closet doors; someone had even smoothed out the old popcorn ceilings. There were new light fixtures and the bathroom boasted a granite counter, a new cherry vanity with drawers that pulled out smooth. Not like the old ones that always swelled with humidity and got stuck; inside had been a tangle of her hair ties and lip gloss that smelled like bubble gum. If Sonny didn’t know better, she could forget that she had walked through the front door of her childhood home. There were no real clues inside that this was, in fact, the same dwelling at all.

Her bedroom was now a sleek gray, decorated with a nautical theme for a young boy. A model sailboat was displayed on a floating shelf, an anchor lamp, and a bedspread with sea creatures embroidered on it. She ran her hands along the walls and wondered how many layers deep the soft butter yellow of her childhood resided.

Downstairs, Sonny elbowed around the crowd of people admiring the new kitchen with the shiny, silver appliances. Someone had knocked down the wall between the dining room and the living room and created an open space. She hated it. The girl she’d been would have hated it. When her parents had fought she could at least seek shelter in the other room where the accusations were muffled. Walls in this house were safety. The agent was making her rounds, asking without much subtlety what potential buyers thought, her mouth pulled tight into a pink-lipsticked smile.

A young woman, holding a squirming toddler, remarked, “There isn’t very much storage.” Sonny considered this woman, this mother with her diaper bag and tired eyes, her frumpy jeans. Fast-forward two years and there was her hollowed-out future.

“Did you see the garage?” the realtor inquired. “Go have a look. There are built-in shelves that would be great for storage, and a workbench for the handy gentleman.”

Sonny lurched, and inside she felt the baby move abruptly, as if that memory surfacing in her mind had the power to reach them both. She followed the family with the toddler out to the garage, and here, at last, she found the house she knew preserved. The shelves were the same ones that her father had built, the workbench; it was all there. It still smelled the same, like oil and sawdust and boxes. In the cool, dark space with squares of light on the floor from the small windows near the ceiling, Sonny felt herself shrink in size, and in that shrinking felt the kind of magical thinking of childhood return. Time could be reversed. She observed the place where he’d hung that red-and-white rope over the rafter. Had he tested it out first, to be sure it would hold his weight? How long would she have to bear the burden of his death? She rubbed her belly and remembered that acute fear of a few months ago; it was still lodged down inside her.

When Sonny and her husband, Connor, had gone in for the sonogram at twenty weeks, she didn’t have many expectations, only hope for a cute photo to put in the silver “Baby’s First Picture” frame her mother had sent. The technician, a short woman with frizzy hair, had squirted the cold jelly on her stomach and strained to reach across Sonny’s long body. The woman had been so chatty, all the ordinary pregnancy topics one expects: First baby? Do you want to know the sex? Sure, Sonny had said, but she already knew it was a boy. She was sure of it. Connor squeezed her hand and smiled.

Images appeared on the monitor, black, white, gray and fuzzy. It reminded Sonny of science class and looking through a microscope, the complete disorientation of not knowing what the eye observed. It almost looked like another, empty planet. But then toes, five, the distinct outline of a foot. “What a big foot!” the technician exclaimed, and they all laughed.

There was a leg, then another. “Open your legs, little one!” the technician cooed, as if the fetus could hear. “Mom,” she said and looked up to Sonny, “brace yourself, dear, because you are having a girl.”

“What? How? Are you sure?” They would wait for the doctor, the technician assured her, but adjusted the monitor and zoomed in. To Sonny, it looked like a swirling ocean, a hurricane. “See here, we’ve got one thing and not another.”

Sonny didn’t want to, but she started to cry despite the feeling of wanting everything reeled in, a disappointment private and full of shame. A girl would be in danger of feeling the cast of her father’s shadow, like all the women around him had suffered.

“Oh, honey, don’t cry. Girls are the best, you’ll see.”

The technician gave her a little pat on the leg and then returned to the screen, clicked onto a new angle, and zoomed. She moved the wand down toward Sonny’s pelvis. “Here we are, here is her head.” She stopped and frowned. Sonny could see the change crawl across the woman’s face, the understanding that something was wrong.

“What is it?” Sonny’s question came out like a scratch.

“We need to wait for the doctor,” the technician replied, the sing-song and lighthearted tone evaporated. She narrowed her eyes as she searched the grainy image for something important visible there. Then she offered Sonny and Connor a strained smile and left the room. The room could swallow them with emptiness, with the little screen still bright with the baby’s profile on the screen. There was nothing to do, nothing to understand. The waiting felt so much like standing in this garage. She was only a breath away from the day her father died. And the after, the terrible sound of emptiness in the house, of questions with no answers. The feeling of him hovering over them still, cursing their lives.

The doctor bustled in, took a detailed look at the screen, and proclaimed, “Chances are, everything is fine. We just want to be sure the baby is healthy.” Connor pressed the doctor to explain the worst; Sonny couldn’t form any words. “There is a shadow on the image which could indicate an enlarged brain ventricle,” he explained. Worst case? Severe disability. Brain damage. They would do a 3D ultrasound, fetal MRI, blood work, amniocentesis. “Chances are it’s not anything to worry about . . .” The words offered no balm to her fear.

For the two weeks of waiting for the new ultrasound, the results of the new tests, she agonized over all of the insults she’d hurled at her body by way of drugs and alcohol. It was a tsunami of rebellious trauma, stored, she thought, in the cells now. Ruining everything. The baby, her daughter, was not normal and she knew it was all her fault. Her father’s fault. It was the shadow of him that cast itself over everything, that dark domino intent on knocking down every good thing one after the other.

But Sonny was wrong. Weeks later they learned that everything was fine; it was just an errant shadow on the ultrasound, not an enlarged brain ventricle. The baby’s brain was perfect, healthy, and the right size, the doctor assured her.

But was it? Sonny wondered.

Sonny went over to the workbench and ran her swollen hands along its surface, and she thought of her father’s slim figure sitting here, hunched over, tinkering with the impossible bottles he used to build. He had been gone for so many years and yet she could still see his bright blue eyes. For a long time, she didn’t think about what had happened, what he had done. It wasn’t just the suicide; it was the things he’d hoped to cover up with his death. His relationship with the fifteen-year-old babysitter who lived down the street. Mona Quinlin’s pregnancy would expose him, he knew. This Sonny learned later, the story slowly unfolding as she grew older. For many years, Sonny didn’t even put together the events, her father’s death and Mona’s disappearance, as connected. Sonny’s mother had told her that Mona had been sent to a home. It wasn’t until Sonny was nearly fifteen herself that her mother revealed the picture of her half-sister in a Christmas card from Mona. Sonny then understood about the pregnancy, the home for pregnant teenagers, and her father’s role in the whole thing.

“Please,” Sonny whispered in a voice that sounded like her five-year-old self. A plea to her father? To the universe? She didn’t know. She opened the side door to this version of her childhood home that was no longer her home and stood on the small porch facing the backyard; the day felt brighter than she remembered. Even as she slipped on her sunglasses, she winced with the sun’s intense light reflecting off all the car windows parked on the street. She stood there, feeling dizzy for a moment, watching the balloons weighted with humid air, helium battling this density of water. Water is heavy. Most of her belly was water, and here she was far from home hoping hers didn’t break. She stiffened. A sheet of darkness burrowed into her thoughts. She imagined an alligator ten feet long, hiding under her old house. Her thoughts circled and circled, sought safety, stillness. There’s nothing to fear. Sonny rubbed her eyes as if to wipe away that anxiety from herself. She looked down the block and before she could consider enough to talk herself out of it, she marched down the street to the Quinlin house. There was a long metal ramp to the front door, but other than that everything was exactly the same.

When the doorbell rang, Mona was secretly hoping the blond Jehovah’s Witness girls had come calling again. Not because she felt on the edge of conversion, but because they spoke to her so kindly. They would sit with Estelle too and talk, like friends. In fact, they were about the same age as Estelle, and no one else came around to see her daughter anymore. Mona could tell that Estelle made them uncomfortable, how she blurted out whatever thought came into her head, whether appropriate or not. Their desire to listen to Mona’s troubles felt so earnest that she craved their arrival and approval, even going so far as to buy more of the gingersnap cookies with the white icing they’d eaten and seemed to enjoy on their last visit.

Four weeks running now those two girls had shown up at her house with their wide smiles and knapsacks full of Watchtower pamphlets. Those were the kind of smiles that had never seen anything vile yet, and there was a sense of being close to innocence, as though one could capture the scent of it in their presence and wear the memory of it all day like a perfume. Mona breathed it in and could believe, if even for a few minutes, that her world could be different. From a distance, she would watch Estelle chat with them, far enough away that she couldn’t hear the brain-injury stutter her speech.

So, it was with this sense of anticipation that Mona opened the front door. Who else could it be besides those nice girls? No one else came calling anymore except the old ladies who scheduled to have their hair done in the dining room Mona had turned into a home salon. But there on the stoop, instead of the two girls bearing God’s word, was a young woman in a sweat-soaked, pale yellow dress who appeared to be on the edge of giving birth. Her large stomach invaded the doorway as she turned and drew the sunglasses down her long nose. She tucked her hand underneath the bulge as if to reel it back to her body.

The woman looked familiar to Mona. She said hello in a soft, shy voice.

Mona felt a dizziness settle in her head, and she had to take a step back and lean against the door frame. It was all there in the curve of this woman’s jaw, a familiarity of her face but a complete absence of her name to go with it.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. She blushed, the shame clear in the red rising to her cheeks. “You probably don’t remember me. I’m Sonny. My family lived down the block,” she said. She ran her fingers through her long, stringy hair. It was hair desperately in need of being trimmed, the ends split and curled. Mona recalled Sonny as a young girl, how the overlay of her face on that saved image was similar but very different. Knowledge bloomed in Mona—Sonny looked so much like Estelle. Mona had always feared this day, when Sonny might come calling, might want to see her half-sister.

“Please come inside,” Mona said. Though, unlike those nice Jehovah’s Witnesses for whom she fixed tea and offered cookies without hesitation, Mona wasn’t sure she wanted Sonny inside at all.

Mona led Sonny through the darkened dining room. It still smelled of fresh paint.

“Sorry about the mess,” Mona turned and said to Sonny as dust motes swirled in the air and followed the women into the kitchen. Sonny took a seat at the table. Mona watched her pick at the raw cuticle on her thumb and wondered if it would bleed. There was an old flower arrangement, now dried and stiff on the table, and some of the rose heads had fallen over and petrified in a nodded state.

“Are you a stylist?” Sonny asked.

“Yes, I used to work at the salon south of town, but I had to leave after Estelle came home and needed so much care,” Mona replied. She turned on the faucet to fill the tea kettle and put it on the stove.

“I wish I could go back to work, but . . .” Mona trailed off.

“Do you have many clients that come to see you here?”

“Quite a few. This isn’t as nice a space, obviously, but I tried my best to spruce up the room.” Mona smiled, but she was thinking about that old worry that threaded her thoughts—did her clients come because they felt sorry for her? How long could you sustain a business on pity?

The parrot whistled from the cage in the corner of the room. It called out its incessant single phrase and fluttered its wings as it jumped from bar to bar. Mona leaned up against the counter and squinted at the bird.

“Cute bird,” Sonny said.

“He’s named Jack. It was my mother’s bird,” Mona replied. There was a catch in the words, in her throat; the words were sticky and too thick, and it made her feel self-conscious for a moment as if the grief were evident in every phrase or gesture. Sonny’s eyes felt sharp on her and like she had experience in riddling out the secrets Mona had never worried the religious girls would find.

“I’m so sorry. My mother told me she passed. How long ago?” Sonny asked.

“Almost two years now,” Mona replied.

“It’s hard to lose a parent,” Sonny said.

Mona narrowed her eyes at Sonny and then turned around to take the kettle off the stove and pour the tea.

“Some ways more than others,” Mona said, finally, as she brought the two cups to the table and sat down. She watched for some response, but found nothing that hinted at Richard’s death. Mona wasn’t sure how much Sonny knew about Richard’s suicide. She’d only been six years old, after all.

Both women drank their tea; Sonny scooped sugar into hers and clattered the spoon back and forth as she mixed it in. The parrot had ceased to hop around, but sat on the small perch and whistled again. One of its yellow feathers wafted out of the cage and fell to the floor.

“How’s your mother?” Mona asked.

“She’s doing well, excited for the baby,” Sonny said.

“She sent me a really nice card not long ago.”

“I know. She told me,” Sonny said.

How much had she really told her, Mona wondered, about what happened all those years before?

“Well, I guess she must still have friends here. And you know how it is with small towns. Anyway, I thought it was really nice of her to reach out.”

The telephone rang, and Mona got up to answer it. She was grateful, even though it was the realtor again.

“Have you given any more thought as to when we can list the house, dear? We’re getting great traffic today at the open house down the street. Multiple offers.” The realtor was a salon client; she came every six weeks on the dot for a trim and color. Mona made the mistake of asking, in a small-talk sort of way, her opinion of selling the old house. She thought maybe she and Estelle could find something more wheelchair friendly. She’d never given up on the hope she could escape St. Mary’s, the small-town, narrow-mindedness of the place.

“Can I call you back? I’ve got company right now.”

The realtor was agreeable enough, but didn’t hesitate to let her know that buyers were waiting.

“I just signed a new client and I know they would love to take a look. We can capture the people who are bidding on the other house,” the realtor said in closing. Mona said she’d think about it, but she couldn’t imagine inviting someone into the place as it was, with half-packed boxes in one room, a salon set up in the other, all the evidence of the accident around—handrails in the bathroom and shower, ramps out both doors. Plus, the bird that wouldn’t stop whistling and saying hello to itself. What kind of effort would it take to put these things in order?

Mona apologized as she sat down at the table.

“Your old house is going to get multiple offers today, apparently.”

“I was there. I saw all the people.”

“How does it look? Like you remember?” Mona asked.

“No, nothing like I remember. It is like a whole different house. Except the garage. That’s exactly the same.” She fiddled with the spoon in her cup.

Mona couldn’t imagine the garage would ever be different; it was always frozen in time in her mind.

“Do you want to move?” Sonny asked. It was a simple question, all things considered, but it was the first time anyone had asked Mona directly. It was the first time she had asked herself. Did she?

“Where would we go?” Mona wondered aloud.

“Where is your daughter?” Sonny asked.

“She’s sleeping right now. She sleeps a lot; the brain injury she suffered makes her really tired.”

“How is she?” Sonny asked. Her face scrunched up like she’d just cut herself.

“Well . . .” Mona trailed off, unsure of how to answer. People asked this question all the time. Mona had learned that most people didn’t want to hear the honest truth; they needed the positive spin, the hopeful answer. She could see that desire in Sonny’s face. “She’s doing better. Her therapists say there is still hope she could walk again, one day, with assistance. The paralysis is only on the right side of her body, although she can’t feel very much sensation on the left. It’s called Brown-Séquard syndrome. The biggest challenge is the brain injury. She’s had to relearn how to do everything, how to talk, eat, brush her teeth.”

Sonny said nothing, but took a deep breath and then fiddled with her hair, running her hands through it and then tucking it behind her ears. Mona noticed the scar tissue there on the edge of her ear and her neck. The skin was shiny, rose-colored. What secret did that scar hold?

“Can I meet her?” Sonny asked. “I mean, I’ve always wanted to meet her.”

Mona rubbed her fingers along the back of her hairline, squeezed the place where the bump of her vertebrae poked out. She’d gone to an acupuncturist recently because she couldn’t sleep, and she’d placed pins there in the back of her neck. But now it felt like the bone had melted together, fused in pain. It was a permanent portal of ache as though the skin, once punctured, would never heal.

“She may ask about your father,” Mona said. Sonny looked down at the table and rubbed along the breach in the Formica. “She has it in her head that he helped save her from drowning.”

“Does she know how he died?” Sonny asked.

“Yes, but not all the details,” Mona replied. “She has always wanted to meet you, too. I thought about getting in touch, but . . .” She didn’t need to elaborate. The secret of the relationship between Richard, a thirty-eight-year-old married man and father of two, and Mona at fifteen had long ago divided the Quinlin and the Cavanaugh families. Mona remembered her own mother’s insistence that Estelle was theirs. “There is no need to be in touch with those children or that woman,” she said when Mona had pondered trying to connect. As if they could mandate that the parts of Estelle that came from Richard were from some other source.

The baby monitor in the corner buzzed; a small weak voice said, “Mona,” and nothing else. Mona stood up, went to the door, and turned back.

“Please know that I—” Mona took a deep breath and blew it out. “I’m sorry.”

Estelle pulled off the sheets, sat up, and leaned against the headboard. Outside, birds were chirping by her window, a dull, low cheep, cheep sound that was regular enough to be music. She closed her eyes and tried to capture the phantom dream image she could feel like a presence around her, hovering just out of reach. Often, after her naps, she woke exhausted. It felt like she lived in two different worlds, the dream world and the real world. Had she been on a boat? Swimming? A man? Quanto è profondo il mare? There had been birds, the sound of squawking, but it had been the harsh scream of seagulls. When she opened her eyes, she stared down at her legs. Always, there was that moment of reconciling to them. To their strange disconnection. That right leg, inert, unable to be moved. For a time, she insisted someone had stolen her right leg, cut it off and replaced it with someone else’s. “Just the brain injury,” they had told her, her mother, the parade of doctors in their white coats and blue scrub uniforms. But when she woke, there was always that sense of someone else’s leg on her bed having been sewn on to her body.

Her mother knocked on the door, smiled, but Estelle felt her mother was pretending like she did at church.

“We have a visitor today. Are you up for seeing someone?” Mona asked. She explained about Sonny, all her words like soldiers—marching straight up and down, matter-of-fact. Mona brought over the photograph in the brass frame as a point of reference: the two children, Sonny and Michael, with young Mona. Estelle had spent hours in her youth staring at the image of the girl with the strawberry blond hair and the big smile with a missing front tooth. She touched the faces through the glass.

“Have I, I met her be-be-before?” Estelle asked. There was a discomfort she felt, like an itching in her scalp, as she stared at the young Sonny. No, no, no, her mother assured her.

Estelle blew out a breath; it ruffled her bangs. “I was, I was worried I’d forgotten.” How many of them were there in the world, people forgotten to her?

“You always wanted to meet her,” Mona replied.

Estelle laughed, a high-pitched vibrato. It sounded like the bird’s language.

When Mona wheeled her daughter into the kitchen, Sonny felt disoriented. She didn’t know if she should stand or sit, or how to greet her half-sister. The resemblance between this young girl and herself was there, but it was Estelle’s eyes that were most striking. Sonny felt as though she was looking right into her father’s eyes again; here was the blue of a bright sky over a wide open ocean, the rich color of a nasturtium that grew in their backyard, the spokes of yellow inside the iris like a starburst in replica. Sonny and her brother Michael had inherited much from their father, but their mother’s brown eyes had dominated to create a hazel hue. Would her daughter have these strange eyes? Could the genetic code for them be hiding in her DNA and waiting to emerge, that ethereal and otherworldly blue? Unnatural blue. Eyes that have seen the way a line dissolves and where the water empties. Her father loved the way the horizon could disappear on the ocean.

Here Sonny felt the strange sensation, as though these were her father’s eyes, cut away from his body long ago and saved for the girl, the daughter he would never know. Maybe he did save her, like she believed. It wasn’t simply her father’s eyes; she’d forgotten the other parts of their father that she now found in Estelle’s blurry edges. Estelle cracked all of the knuckles on her hand using the same hand’s thumb. The hair at the top of her eyebrows reversed direction. There was something strange and injured in her laugh that she gave instead of words as a greeting. Sonny turned her attention to Mona, the way she didn’t sit back down in the chair but hovered next to Estelle.

Finally, Sonny said, “Hello, my name is Sonny. It is nice to meet you.” She very rarely went by this old childhood name anymore. Everyone called her Sonya now. But Sonya wouldn’t be here, in this house, wouldn’t have driven all that way to see a garage that captured her father’s final moments.

“I, I, I . . .” Estelle stammered; she curled her bottom lip into her mouth, squeezed her right hand into a fist so tight her knuckles turned white. She closed her eyes. Sonny felt relief that her father’s eyes were shut.

“I’m Estelle. I have a brain injury,” she started and once begun, the speech flowed like a waterfall, so little space between the individual words. “Irepeatmyselfandgetconfused. Ican’tfind
therightwordsIminawheelchairbecauseIdamagedmyspinalcordin
anairplanecrash.”

Sonny struggled to parse the words. The speech had the feel of something rehearsed. She could imagine Estelle telling it to grocery store clerks, therapists, the server at a restaurant in town. “I’m so pleased to meet you,” Sonny said. Mona hovered so close, like a shield. Sonny shifted around in her seat and folded her hands together. “Where is the boy?” Estelle asked, looking around as if she expected someone to pop around the corner. Surprise. She held the picture frame clutched tightly in her hand. Sonny tilted her head to get a good look at the younger version of herself, of her brother. “That’s Michael,” Sonny said. “Michael,” Estelle repeated, after a long pause. She frowned and for a moment Sonny felt she could hear the slow wheel of her thoughts coming together. “My brother,” Sonny started, then corrected herself. “Our brother is a biologist. He’s working very close to here, on Cumberland Island. He’s studying the Kemp’s ridley turtles.” “Turtles,” Estelle repeated. “Tartarughe.” Her eyes were on the parrot in the cage, which had resumed a steady prancing. She ran a hand along the long braid of auburn, shiny hair. Sonny remembered how Mona had braided her own hair, tucking dandelions inside the folds and proclaiming her ready for the royal ball. “You and Michael,” Estelle said and held the picture frame out for Sonny to take. She took the offering and studied the picture more closely. Maybe it was sitting across from Estelle, seeing those resemblances to her father and pieces of herself, but here in the suntanned cheeks and the long strawberry blond hair of her younger self she could see the imprint of Richard all over herself. Surely, he would leave a trace, a mark on the baby, too. Her daughter. He would be there like a shadow on the face, like that shadow that had shown up on the ultrasound. Would her daughter truly be healthy and normal like the doctor said? Or would she be damaged, brain injured, struggling to do every ordinary thing like Estelle? Would the curse manifest itself in the same way? A sharp pain radiated along the side of Sonny’s stomach. She rubbed at the spot and as she moved, wincing; those unnatural blue eyes followed her every movement.

“A baby!” Estelle said. Sonny flinched. Mona didn’t say anything, but she could feel the weight in the room—she should’ve mentioned the pregnancy before she’d brought Estelle out. Sonny’s discomfort was radiating off her body like heat. Sonny stroked her belly, running the palm of her hand back and forth, a reflexive, automated movement of control. Estelle’s eyes were darting around wildly. She should have done a better job prepping Estelle. She forgot sometimes how the smallest things could set her off.

Estelle’s face creased with bewilderment. It was the same face she made in speech therapy when she was given those word association exercises. “What is the name of the animal that symbolizes the United States?” the therapist would ask and then pepper her with clues: It has wings, it has feathers, it has a beak, it is on money. Nothing, nothing. That word, that name wouldn’t come. It was the associations she struggled to find; she couldn’t easily locate the names in the swimming void of her thoughts. Here, Sonny’s belly was another detail she had either failed to notice or didn’t understand, so it was like it didn’t exist. Until, of course, it was all she could see. Then it would be an absolute focus.

Sonny smiled, but Mona could see the veneer of it. There was fear laced inside.

“Yes,” she replied, her voice a whisper, “I’m having a daughter. I’m due in three weeks.”

Although it had been over twenty years since Mona had carried a child, she knew that being that close to your due date wasn’t the time to travel. When Mona was in the home for unwed, pregnant teenage girls, she didn’t have to work at all that last month. Those few weeks were the time for final preparation, for rest. It was in those final weeks for Mona that the path of her whole future had changed. When her mother Margaret had come to the home, had offered to let her come home and keep her baby.

Estelle’s brow wrinkled; she tucked her bottom lip under her teeth in thought. Her feelings always so close to the surface like tender little plant shoots from her brain; there was no way to hide them. Mona didn’t know what words were knit together in this moment, but she could imagine what they might be, how they would be a primal sense of the loss deep inside her. Estelle moved her hands, making a shape that Mona couldn’t decipher. Mona knew she was drawing whatever it was that she couldn’t say. The speech therapist had been the one to notice that Estelle moved her hand to trace out an image when she did those word quizzes. “She’s drawing the answer,” he marveled and gave her a pencil and paper, and sure enough, there was the eagle, with its detailed feathers and beak rendered perfectly to scale.

Mona watched her daughter’s hands and tried to connect them to an invisible line in the air. Was she drawing her own loss? A picture of herself pregnant? There was a time when Estelle’s future might have contained this possibility. She could be the one possessing the knowledge of the gender of the person swimming inside her. She’d been engaged, new to her career, but all the cluster of those possibilities had been wiped clean with her accident. What would Mona draw, if pressed, of her own lost possibility? Would it have been going away to college? Finding a love that felt true and real and not like a crime?

“Three,” Estelle said, gravely.

The bird, attuned to the air, let out a series of urgent whistles and hopped from bar to bar in the cage, fluttering its wings as if ready to break out, slip between the bars and fly away.

Mona put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. Take deep breaths, she instructed. Then Estelle rolled her wheelchair closer to Sonny and reached out and placed a hand on her belly. Sonny didn’t recoil, but put her hand atop Estelle’s and guided it along. “There, do you feel that?” she asked.

Estelle could feel the baby kicking in steady beats beneath her palm, the tiny legs of the child making its presence known. These were good strong legs—tap, tap, and tap, thunk. Was she saying hello? Looking for a way out?

“You can swim again,” they’d told her recently at physical therapy, as if learning to swim without the full use of one’s legs could alleviate the problems she’d had. “Your mother told us about your butterfly swimming record.” But there would be no more butterfly. Butterfly felt like a word that cut, a word with sharp teeth.

Her eyes were underwater again, the world fuzzy. The unseen legs spoke again: tap, tap, thunk, tap. Maybe she could go back one day, back to where she had come from. Spots swelled in the center of her vision and it felt like a hole a person could slip inside, back beyond that jagged break.

Estelle opened her eyes; she hadn’t even realized they were closed until the light flooded in. She whistled a response to the bird, which cocked its head to the side and stared at her.

“Four,” she said, counting her sister, her niece, her mother, herself. Four was her favorite number. She pressed on the lump under Sonny’s hot skin that pushed up again. She could feel the resistance; she could feel those beautiful new legs testing their power.

Jennifer Marie Donahue’s work has appeared in Catapult, Grist Journal, Flyway Journal, Pidgeonholes, Yalobusha Review, The Rumpus and elsewhere. Her writing has been named a finalist for the Barry Hannah Fiction Prize and the So to Speak! Nonfiction Prize. She lives in Massachusetts.

Filed Under: Fiction, Mary Queen of Angels 2020 Leave a Comment

Carmelúcia (Rio de Janiero, 1980)

Dappled Things

Arthur Powers

“Oh, Tony.” Carmelúcia’s voice whined ingratiatingly. “Get water for me.”

“Get it yourself,” the boy answered, not looking up from his comic book.

“Little black bastard,” she shot back. “I don’t know why Mãe took you in.”

“So she wouldn’t have to be alone with a pale tramp like you,” Tony answered calmly. He turned a page.

“Filho da puta,” she said, and grabbed the bucket angrily. It banged loudly against the metal stove as she stormed out of the shack, and she heard Tony laugh quietly. How incredibly irritating that an eleven-year-old boy could always get the best of her—and she, seventeen—make her mad, get her to go banging into things. And he always calm. Even when he was four years old, when Doña Rosa had run off next door, leaving Tony alone, and Mãe had taken him in, even then Carmelúcia could almost never get him to cry. He would stand looking at her with his big deep eyes and, if he hadn’t then learned the trick of laughing at her, still he made her feel insignificant and small.

The morning sun was already growing hot as she came back up the steps from the faucet carrying the heavy bucket. Thirty-seven steps, thirty-seven concrete steps, some of them cracked, some of them so small you could hardly put your foot on them, climbing straight, almost as steep as a ladder up the hillside. She had counted them ever since she could remember, and she hated them. Thirty-seven steps, and beside them tufts of grass with garbage caught in them and then, at the top, the bico stretching straight, slanting gradually up the hill: a path, paved in front of the first few shacks, then turning to dirt in front of the twenty or so others strung out side by side. Beyond the shacks the path went up the steep grassy mountainside toward the granite rocks, then on out of sight to the Rocinha slum on the other side of the mountain. Sometimes at night drug runners, escaping the police, came down the hill, into the bico, then down the steps, between the lower houses, and out onto the streets of Botafogo. You were careful never to see them.

You’d never think the mountain was in the middle of Rio de Janeiro, Mãe always said when she stood outside their shack and looked up at the green grass and gray rock, but maybe in the country, where Mãe was born. Carmelúcia didn’t care about that. The hill and the city were all she’d ever known.

Their shack was the first one at the top of the steps, and from there, looking around the other way, you knew you were in the city: the small houses in the alley below running down to the backs of stores, the busy streets of Botafogo with their apartment buildings and, beyond them, the slum of Santa Marta running up Corcovado Mountain toward the giant gray statue of Christ, his arms outstretched, embracing the city beneath him.

She set down the bucket and looked back at it all for a moment, not Christ’s statue, but the teeming, life-filled streets below, alive with energy. She laughed and shook back her long curly dark hair, her own aliveness reflecting the energy of the streets. Then she stopped laughing suddenly, the shadow of last night’s dream passing lightly across her mind.

Carmelúcia’s dreams had a geography all their own.

The hill loomed large in them—a mountain, always the steps leading up—the small, concrete steps—thirty-seven of them, but never-ending. And then, suddenly at the top, the bico running straight away, and the people there. . . .

Mãe was also a mountain in Carmelúcia’s dreams, Mãe’s large black figure looming up on the steps, lugging her heavy body up the hill. So giant was her mother, so filled with love demanding she do right, that Carmelúcia trembled. An enormous love, objective and distant so that, in its light, Carmelúcia saw her own emptiness and littleness, saw her body lit up and all that she had done clearly shown as if by a giant beacon. And yet a love so close and strong, calling to her inside herself, offering to guide her. In her dream Carmelúcia was trying to hide from it.

Further away in her dream, way out beyond Botafogo Bay, a tiny ship danced up and down on the blue water. Carmelúcia had never been to the ports, and the only ships she had seen were moving in and out of the bay beyond Sugar Loaf. The ship in her dream was like those, but toy-like and fragile. On that ship stood a white man in a white uniform and this, she knew, was her father—of him she knew nothing except that he was white and had been a sailor.

More recently there had been added to the geography of her dreams the labyrinthian streets of Copacabana, leading to the store where she worked. In her dreams she was always lost in the streets, trying to get to the store, and she would struggle and struggle but never really get there. Then suddenly, she would be there in the quiet of the store, with jewelry in the glass cases and the shelves filled with soapstone and wooden carvings the foreigners and rich Brazilians would come in to buy. It was cool in the store, the quiet air conditioning keeping out the sounds of the street, a chapel of tranquility in her dreams. There she was safe. Mãe with her enormous love had no place there—it was Carmelúcia’s world—free, cool, filled with expensive things.

Last night João Luiz had shot across her dream, but not the bright neon light he usually was. Last night he had been small and troubling, a rich woman’s spoiled child on a tricycle. Never before had she thought of him like that.

“I have to take a bath,” she said, putting the bucket down.

Tony got off the narrow bed where he’d been sitting, reading his comics.

“Who’s the man?” he asked.

“Get lost.”

He laughed quietly and walked outside. She closed the door behind him and locked it. She took a sheet and hung it to cover some of the cracks between the boards of the shack’s front wall. She turned and looked back at the room.

It was a small room—the kitchen alcove where she stood with a four-burner stove and its small tank of gas, a two-by-two table, then the room itself: the narrow bed where she slept at night and Mãe slept when she was home during the day, the old wardrobe, the television standing on a set of shelves. The shelves were stuffed with odds and ends of their life: old schoolbooks, Tony’s comics, a china cup and saucer. The top of the wardrobe was piled high with cardboard boxes. In the corner beyond it, rolled up, stood the foam rubber mattress Tony slept on at night. Under the bed was an old suitcase filled with clothes.

A single wooden window stood open and, because they were at the edge of the hill and the window was high above everything, they could leave it open almost all of the time. Their shack was the best location on the upper part of the bico. Carmelúcia was aware of this, aware of all the things that made her superior to the drunks and slum whores and drug addicts, unemployed laborers and workwomen who lived along the bico. Mãe was black but she was proud and had worked nights in the kitchen at the Hotel Meridien for twelve years; she didn’t sell herself to men, or even give herself. Not that Carmelúcia knew of, not since Carmelúcia’s father. And he’d been white and a sailor; an officer in the navy, Carmelúcia always said to herself when she was imagining him.

This was their home. Every month the heavy-set, balding Portuguese whose bar was at the street end of the bico and who owned the land the shacks were on, came to collect the rent. Every month Mãe, her large black body moving slowly, would get up and reach down her purse and open it, would take out the rent money and, strong and defiant, hand it to him, looking at him in such a way that the Portuguese, taking her money, would lower his eyes. Most of the money Mãe earned working night shift went for the rent. She earned extra cleaning house twice a week for an old lady and taking in laundry.

If her family was above the bico, she, Carmelúcia, was even higher. There were Edilson and Nilva, older than Carmelúcia, Mãe’s children from her husband who had died. They were almost as dark as Mãe, and Nilva wasn’t anywhere near as pretty as Carmelúcia. Anyway, they were gone now, Edilson working on trucks somewhere near São Paulo and Nilva living with her husband and kids over in Rocinha, dirt poor and never going to be any better. Carmelúcia smiled; she was going to do better.

She set the metal basin on the floor and took an unframed mirror out of the wardrobe, propping it up against the wall. This was one of her favorite times: alone, the door shutting out the squalor of the bico, the window open on the live city below.

Stripping off her clothes, she stood naked in front of the mirror, looking at herself—her dark curly hair, her pert lively face, her light brown skin. She ran her hands down over her small well-shaped breasts, her taut abdomen, her shapely thighs. So beautiful, she thought, her body tingling alive.

She shook her hair and hurled her thoughts toward João Luiz. He was hers—her body, her beauty, her ability to shift moods, to always be just a little hard to catch—she had caught him, held him captive. João Luiz—not bad-looking, white, strong, rich. At least, rich enough.

First there had been the store. Carmelúcia had heard that the new store was opening; she had dressed carefully and gone for an interview. Doña Vera, the woman who owned the store, had talked to her. How old was she? Nineteen, Carmelúcia lied. How many years of school did she have? Eighth grade, she lied again; she had only finished the sixth. Doña Vera looked at her; Carmelúcia smiled. She knew the smiles, the expressions, to make women like her—so different from the smiles and expressions for men. She got the job.

She had been working in the store a month and a half, six days a week, eight to six. She was standing behind a glass case counter toward the back of the store, sorting sales slips, when João Luiz came in. He was with his mother and aunt. Dangling car keys from his finger, he leaned back against the wall, one blue-jeaned leg up, the top three buttons of his sport shirt undone, his brown hair neatly trimmed. His mother and aunt were busy looking at jewelry. João Luiz’s bored gray-green eyes roamed around the store, and alighted on her.

Instinctively she knew. All her life she had been waiting, waiting for the moment to use the secret power that had been growing in her, that power that could capture a man, power she would not squander away like the women on the hill. She did not now smile at him cheaply, she did not flirt like most girls would, but looked straight into his eyes a moment and then glanced down, as though indifferent, yet moving her body slightly in a special way, letting him know she could be pursued.

He meandered his way over to where she was, pretending to look at merchandise on the shelves. She smiled to herself, as she reeled him in, busying her hands with the sales slips, amused at his hesitation, sensing his growing nervousness. He was almost in front of her now, across the counter, a few feet to her right. She glanced up.

“May I help you?”

He looked around, then pointed—randomly, she guessed—to a dark wooden carving of the Corcovado Christ—the Christ she could see from her shack, the Christ visible to everyone from almost anywhere in the city. She turned and stretched up to reach it down, aware as she reached upward of the beauty of her body in profile. She handed the statue to him—their fingers touched and he glanced at her to see if she had noticed—she had, but pretended not to. He, in turn, pretended interest in the statue, turning it over in his hands, looking at the carving. It was a good statue—Carmelúcia had an innate sense of quality, and the items sold in this store ranged from good to excellent.

“João Luiz!” The two women had made their purchases and were preparing to leave.

“A moment, Mãe,” he called back. He smiled at Carmelúcia. “Have to go,” he said. “I’ll be back another time.”

She gave him a quiet, professional smile.

2.

He was back two days later, and bought the statue. Then again, a couple of days after that, buying earrings, he said, for his sister’s birthday. Each time he would browse about the front of the store until Carmelúcia was alone behind the counter, then come over and talk to her. The earring selection took quite a bit of discussion, with Carmelúcia holding up earrings to her own nicely shaped ear so that he could see them. He bought three pair. On the next visit, it was a bracelet for a cousin—Carmelúcia modeled several on her wrist.

There were four other girls working in the shop besides Doña Vera and Carmelúcia. It was not unusual for regular customers to have a favorite sales clerk, and to seek her out each time they came. But most of their customers were not good-looking young men, and João Luiz’s visits were noticed.

“That young man is coming in quite a bit,” Doña Vera remarked to her one afternoon as he was leaving.

Carmelúcia shrugged. “He always buys something—jewelry, an ornament.”

Doña Vera looked at her. “As long as that’s all he’s buying.”

Carmelúcia flashed her brightest, most innocent smile.

Doña Vera shook her head. “Be careful, girl,” she said.

“Can you meet me after you get out of work?” It was his fifth visit to the store, a Saturday.

She was wrapping up the package—a pendant for his aunt. She looked up at him, feigning surprise.

“Tonight?” she asked. “Oh, I don’t think so. I have other plans.”

He looked discouraged. Afraid she had gone too far, she said, pretending shyness “. . . maybe, maybe some other time?”

He brightened. “When?”

“I’ll have to check my schedule.”

Nonetheless, an hour later when she came out of work, he was waiting for her, down the block about three stores, leaning against a lamppost. It occurred to her that he knew what time she got out of work, knew which direction she took when she left the store. Had he been following her? The thought gave her a little thrill, yet. . . . He would have seen her get on the bus to Botafogo, but that was no problem—Botafogo was a solidly middle-class neighborhood, only at the edges running up into the slums where she lived or, at the other side of the valley, up to the slums of Santa Marta. Besides, the bus went on to richer neighborhoods—Humaitá, Lagoa, Ipanema.

She was almost up to him now. He held up one hand in greeting.

She shook her head, smiling, letting him know that she was only pretending to be irritated.

“João Luiz,” she said. “I told you I’m busy tonight.”

“I thought you might change your mind,” he said.

He stood up straight. Outside of the store, she suddenly realized, the energy between them was different. No longer did they have a counter between them, the formality of a business relationship, the protective structure of a store run by women primarily for other women. Here they were not customer and clerk, but man and woman. Here he seemed bigger, stronger, more masculine. She suddenly felt wary.

“Just coffee,” he said. “That won’t take half an hour. There’s a place down the street.”

She hesitated a moment. “All right,” she said.

The other girls in the shop chatted freely about their boyfriends, families, activities. Carmelúcia listened, smiling gently, recording information in her sharp mind—it would have startled the other girls how much she knew about them, how thoroughly she read their personalities, their strengths, their weaknesses. She very seldom shared—though she had a way of doing it that made the others not notice she wasn’t sharing. She tried to avoid lying, but if the other girls assumed things about her—that she had a father, for instance, or lived in an apartment—she wouldn’t correct them.

Sometimes, however, she needed information. One day she asked Leah, the girl she trusted most:

“Have you heard of USCUDA?”

“USCUDA? What is it?”

“Some kind of college.”

“Oh. USCDE. That’s one of those colleges that kids go to who can’t get into the good ones. The ones for sons of rich fathers, who pay for the diploma. Why, are you thinking of going to college?”

Carmelúcia shrugged and smiled.

“Well, don’t go to that one.”

It was João Luiz’s college—where he went to classes a few times a week. She had learned that about him, that he was nineteen, that he had three sisters—all older and married, that his father was part owner of a small company that had something to do with airplane parts (João Luiz was vague about that), that his mother was a medical doctor who worked part time. They lived in an apartment in Ipanema overlooking the beach, and two of his uncles had apartments in the same building.

When he asked, she told him her father was dead, but had been a naval officer. Her mother worked in the hotel industry.

She was seeing João Luiz regularly now, almost every day after work. Starting, the first few days, with coffee; then dinner a few nights. A hidden kiss behind a tree. Then going to a movie, where João Luiz’s passion flared in the dark—she returned his kisses but had to control his hands. Sunday rides in his car—a ten-year-old Puma convertible—out to beaches. Stopping the car to kiss passionately—she tried to control his hands, but he was strong. He wanted to go to a motel, but she refused.

He picked her up Sundays in his car. She had given him the address of an apartment building in Botafogo, located about six blocks from the bico on a prosperous, shaded street—a building she had always admired for its clean glass and stone front with small palm trees in the tiny yard. She would wait for him in front of the building. She had struck up a friendship with the doormen at the building, and would chat with them, so that, when João Luiz picked her up, she would wave brightly to the doormen—as she had seen girls in apartment buildings do—and they would wave back.

“Do you want to see our apartment?” João Luiz asked one Sunday afternoon.

“Is there anybody there?”

“Sure. There are always people there.”

“Okay then.”

He parked in the garage of the apartment building. They went up the elevator from the garage, not encountering the doormen who sat by the front elevators. He opened the back door with his key, and they walked into the kitchen. The kitchen was all white tiles and chrome, and bigger than Carmelúcia’s entire home.

“Anybody here!” João Luiz called out. There was silence. “They must be in the family room,” he said. “Come on.”

The kitchen door led to a dining room and, through an archway ahead of them, she could see the living room with huge glass windows. She walked into the living room and looked down—they were on the fifth floor—onto the Avenida Vieira Souto and the beach and ocean beyond it.

“This is beautiful,” she said.

“Yeah,” he answered. Then called out, “Mãe. Pai!”

There was no answer. Suddenly suspicious, she glanced up at him, but he looked innocent enough.

“Come on,” he said. He showed her the family room, his parents’ home office—lined with bookshelves.

“Do you want to see my room?” he asked.

“No, João Luiz,” she said firmly. “Not when there’s nobody here. We should go.”

She turned and went back into the living room, pausing once again to look out at the beach, at the ocean. He came up beside her and put his arm around her waist, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. He was looking down at her.

“I love you, Carmelúcia,” he said. “I love you so much.”

She turned her head, and he leaned down and kissed her—gently at first, but then passionately. He pulled her closer to him. “I love you so much. I want to marry you.”

Pushing away from him, she looked up into his eyes.

“Do you mean that?” she asked.

“Yes, yes.”

She stood back, smiling. “Then get me a ring,” she said.

“Today,” he said, and then he was kissing her. She felt her body arouse and tingle, responding in a way she had never expected.

Mãe stood looming in the kitchen of the shack.

“Tony says you’ve been getting home real late,” Mãe said.

“So.”

“Don’t so me, girl. What are you up to?”

“I can take care of myself.”

Flame rose up in Mãe’s face, and she lifted her right arm. Carmelúcia scooted back, out of reach. She’d felt the slap of Mãe’s hand often enough to know she didn’t want to feel it again. Mãe took a step toward her, and for a moment Carmelúcia thought her mother was going to chase her, catch her. But then Mãe sighed and lowered her arm, and her shoulders sagged as though she were carrying a heavy weight.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.

3.

They were together almost every evening now—though Carmelúcia was careful to not make it every night, to hold back now and then. One of João Luiz’s uncles and his family were on vacation in Argentina, and João Luiz had a key to their apartment. They would lie in the dark (they were afraid to turn on the lights) on one of the big beds, or on the carpet by the big front windows overlooking the ocean. They made love fiercely—he had always wanted to touch her, hold her, kiss her, but now Carmelúcia was amazed at how fully she responded to it. Once she overheard Leah say to one of the other girls, “Be careful what you chase, because it may catch you.” Was that what was happening to her? Was she—the capturer—becoming a captive?

Her engagement ring—the customary simple gold ring worn on her right hand—had caused a stir at the store. “It’s João Luiz,” Leah said, and Carmelúcia smiled noncommittally. But of course she had to finally admit that it was. She gained status among the girls, and they wanted to talk about it—“How did he propose?” “What are his parents like?” “When will the wedding be?”

“Calma, meninas,” she would answer, evading their questions expertly. But her smiles were genuine—glowing with success and pride.

She slipped the ring off her finger when she went home. She didn’t want to explain it to Mãe or to Tony.

It was a little more difficult when the uncle’s family came back. João Luiz wanted to go to a motel, but she wouldn’t. “That’s for cheap whores,” she said disdainfully, though everyone knew that middle-class women would go there too with their lovers. Finally he found a friend who had a vacant apartment, and he got a key.

A month passed, and then another. Carmelúcia smiled to herself. João Luiz still couldn’t keep his hands off of her. She had heard that, once men got what they wanted, they lost interest—but she was smart—never giving in easily, always holding back a little, teasing him so that his passion flared up. It was easier for her. Though she responded to him fully, when he was not physically touching her, she almost never thought of sex. She liked him well enough—he was a good sort of guy, not as smart as she was—and she could handle him. But she didn’t particularly miss him when he was absent, certainly didn’t have the passionate, caring love that Leah, for instance, had for her boyfriend. Strange, because Leah’s boyfriend was just a simple kid who lived in Rocinha and worked as an office boy—not nearly the catch the João Luiz was.

It was over three months since they had started making love. They were lying naked on a cheap mattress in the vacant apartment, in the peace after sex.

She propped her head up on her elbow and looked at him. His body was profoundly restful, as it usually was after sex. He was looking up and slightly away, at the sky outside the window. With her index finger, she started to trace the pattern of hair on his chest.

“João Luiz, when do you want to get married?”

He turned and looked at her.

“Huh. Oh, plenty of time for that. When I finish university, I guess.”

That was four years off.

“I don’t want to wait that long,” she said.

“Well, I can’t really get married before that. Where would we live?”

“Your father said he could get you that job while you’re studying. And I could make us a really nice home. I don’t care how small it is.”

His look sharpened a fraction.

“No. You wouldn’t care about that.”

It was an odd response, but she ignored it and pushed on.

“And besides. . .”

“Besides what?”

“Well . . . we have to think about our baby.”

He half sat up, his face confused.

“What?”

“Our baby,” she said. “I’m going to have our baby.”

“Baby? You’re going to have a baby?”

“Our baby,” she said, smiling.

“But . . . isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing to prevent that?”

She looked at him. He got up and stood, his back to her, hands on his hips, looking out the window.

“João Luiz?”

He turned around, leaned down, picked his underpants off the floor, and pulled them on. Armored, protected with them on, he reached down and picked up his pants.

“João Luiz?”

“I’ve got to think,” he said. He was putting his shirt on. “Get dressed. I’ll drive you home.”

They were silent as he drove the twenty minutes from Ipanema to Botafogo. When she started to say anything, he would answer, “Be quiet. I’ve got to think.”

He pulled up in front of the apartment.

“Do you want to get out here?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. Why?”

“Because you don’t live here,” he said.

There was silence for a moment.

“I never said I did.” She had been very careful not to say so.

“No, I guess you didn’t.” He was sitting looking straight ahead, the car idling. “I came by one day, looking for you—I wanted to talk to you. They said you didn’t live here, that you live back there somewhere” —he pointed with his thumb— “on the hill. In the slums.”

She was silent. She forgot, sometimes, that Botafogo could be like a small town—not for the rich, but for the people who worked there. The doormen didn’t know her, but everyone on the hills did—beautiful, lively Carmelúcia with her smile. Anyone could have seen her—a janitor, a maid, a laundress—could have mentioned her to the doormen.

Silently she got out of the car, closing the door behind her. He revved the motor and drove away.

She didn’t hear from him for four days. On the fourth day, coming out of work, he was standing there, waiting for her, just where he had been the first time. She walked up to him.

“Can we go somewhere?” he asked. “I need to talk with you.”

She nodded. He led the way down and around the corner, where he’d found a parking space. He opened the car door for her, and she got in. He moved around the front of the car, got in on the driver’s side, and started the car, moving out into traffic.

“João Luiz . . .”

“Not here. Let me get out of this traffic to someplace we can stop.”

Silently, he drove them toward the beach, turned onto the Avenida Atlántica. Two blocks down, he found a parking place and pulled into it. He switched off the motor, turned and looked at her. Behind him she could see the beach, stretching out to the ocean.

“I found a way to take care of it,” he said.

She looked at him, silent.

“I had to be careful,” he said. “All these doctors know one another, and if my mother found out . . . But guys who do this stuff don’t talk about it. I found a place. I can take you in next week. Then, after that, when you’re feeling better, I’ve arranged for pills so this won’t happen again. I’m sorry, I should have thought of that. I just thought . . .”

“I’d never been with a man before.”

“Yes, I know. I should have thought of it. I didn’t. But it’ll be okay. We love each other. After you’re feeling better, we can be like we were before.”

She looked at him.

“You want to kill our baby?” she asked.

He shook his head, frustrated. “It’s not killing a baby, Carmelúcia—it’s just preventing it from becoming a baby.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said.

“Carmelúcia, what else can we do? We can’t have a baby. I can’t marry you.”

“You said you would. We’re engaged.”

“All that was fun. It was fun being with you, will be fun—fun pretending we’d be married. Like kids playing house. I love you. But I can’t marry you. My parents expect things of me—I’m already a disappointment to them, you know. How can I marry a girl from the slums with, what—an eighth-grade education?”

“I’m smart.”

“Yes, you are.” She looked at him, but there was no touch of sarcasm in his voice, in his face. “Smarter than I am.” He turned and looked out the front window of the car.

“It wasn’t pretend to me,” she said. “It wasn’t playing house.”

“No,” he said.  He sighed.  “I was your ticket out of the slums.”

4.

He offered to drive her home, but she just got out of the car and started walking. Walking the length of Copacabana, then across Arpoador to Ipanema—avoiding the street where his parents lived, but sitting for a long time in the plaza of Our Lady of Peace, watching people, being, not thinking. Then walking again up to the beach promenade in Leblon, then down the canal at the end, and back toward the Lagoa de Freitas. She sat again, a long time, on a bench by the side of the lagoon, watching the city lights sparkle in the shallow water. It was getting very late, and this wasn’t a safe place to be, but she didn’t care. She stared and stared at the water, then got up, walking again, all the way around the lagoon to Humaitá. The Church of the Immaculate Conception was closed, but she sat on the step outside it, her body tired, her mind empty. She sat until she noticed the sky starting to get light. She hauled herself up and began walking the half mile home.

She turned the corner into the lower part of the bico. Mãe was sitting on the bottom of the steps going up the hill—as, Carmelúcia suddenly thought, she almost knew she would be. Mãe stood up as Carmelúcia approached, and Carmelúcia stopped, a couple of feet in front of her.

They were silent for almost a minute. Then Mãe motioned to Carmelúcia’s belly.

“This one. How far along is he?”

Mãe knew. Nothing showed. But Mãe knew.

“Two months.”

They were silent again.

“Mãe, he wants me to kill the baby.”

The slap hit Carmelúcia’s cheek—not a hard slap (Carmelúcia knew Mãe’s hard slaps), but it stung. Like ice-cold water in a shower, like an alarm going off in the morning. And Carmelúcia knew that slap carried her mother’s hopes and fears.

Mãe sank down on the step again, as if the effort to stand was too much. After a moment, Carmelúcia sat down beside her. Yet another moment, and Mãe put an arm around Carmelúcia, pulling her closer. Carmelúcia rested her head on Mãe’s shoulder.

They stayed sitting like that for a very long time. Then Mãe sat up straighter, reached over, and touched Carmelúcia’s belly.

“This one,” Mãe said, “is one of us. This one is family. And we will be family.”

There was a pause.

“Do you understand me?”

Carmelúcia nodded. “Yes, Mãe.”

Mãe heaved herself up to standing, turned, and started climbing the steps. Carmelúcia could hear her—the heavy footsteps, the hard breathing—until she reached the top. Carmelúcia sat for a while, looking down the bico to the street, where morning traffic was beginning to get busy. Then, standing up, she started climbing the concrete steps, following her mother.

Arthur Powers has received the Fellowship in Fiction from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, three annual awards for short fiction from the Catholic Press Association, the 2008 Tom Howard Fiction Award (2nd place), the 2012 Tuscany Novella Prize, and the 2014 Catholic Arts & Literature Award. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. He is the author of A Hero For The People: Stories From The Brazilian Backlands (Press 53, 2013) and The Book of Jotham (Tuscany Press, 2013). He was judge of the 2014 and 2015 Tom Howard/John Reid Short Fiction & Essay Contests and of the 2015 Dappled Things J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction.

Filed Under: Fiction, Mary Queen of Angels 2020 Leave a Comment

Spare, Strange

Dappled Things

Hannah Carrese

If one day your hand healed—
if, I mean,
you and your hand met a Lazarus and he rose
or washed water into wine
and bread into birds of the sea if, that is,
it was you
a girl leading the kings of France, you Francis
mending the breach between lion and lamb
you—virgin—told of the child
if all this:
do you believe or go mad or dismiss the ruse
of it—do
you submit your hand to scientist and skeptic
do you pocket it hoping that denim will
keep it from miracles? If?

(Do not mock the men the women who
know the oddity of themselves and
use it anyway.)

Hannah Carrese is from Colorado, where the prairie meets the Rocky Mountains. She now lives in Oxford, where she studies political theory and also the wolds and streams of England’s green and pleasant land.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Poetry 1 Comment

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Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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