After the People Lights Have Gone Off (24 page)

at the digital clock on the stove, and try to call up the way those greenish letters would shiver the instant before they changed, like they were about to hatch? Like they held the future in their vertical lines, their muted glow.

And I’d always be waiting for them to change.

It’s my fault, what happened to Kelly.

You can ask why I’m still here, and that’s my only answer: that it’s my fault.

She woke falling, the cool, unbreathed air of our new house rushing past her, all around her, her nightgown fluttering back from her upper arms, from her thighs. And it was a dream, she says, in her little girl voice. The air was cushioning her, was soft around her. She was safe. She knew because she’d been floating there for minutes, it felt like. For hours.

Since then, I’ve read up on dreams. How they’re not what we think, aren’t grand and Freudian, aren’t these strange windows into those parts of our heads we’re not familiar with.

Trick is, if our eyeballs don’t stay in some state of motion throughout the night, then they would dry to the backside of our eyelids. It’s that simple. So they twitch back and forth on their own schedule, and, because our mental defenses are down, each of those muscular twitches sparks up a knee-jerk association: what we saw the last time our eye was looking this way, and that way. Keeping our eyes wet so we can see in the morning, it kicks up random images all night.

That’s not dreaming, though. All that is is you, lying in bed, all these mismatched flashcards floating in a jumble above you. But—you know how sometimes when your alarm rings, or you hear the garbage men on the curb talking before sunrise, how that can weave its way into your dream? And how, even though that alarm, those voices, they’re what’s waking you, can’t have lasted more than a few seconds, still, the narrative you cough up to contain them, it feels like the alarm’s been going off for hours. Like those garbage men have been telling their life stories out there.

It’s not that dreams unfold at a different pace than waking life, it’s that, when you wake, all those flashcards floating above you, they fall onto the floor of your mind, and, because we’re human, always insisting on faces in wood grain and in bowls of soup, what we do is run a story thread through all those images. It’s why dreams don’t make sense, half the time: of course that apple doesn’t go with a talking carburetor. The apple just happened to fall by that engine you saw earlier, and that engine, the reason it can speak is because it happened to fall by this grey blazer a woman in line at the coffee shop was wearing, and—you can remember if you try—she wouldn’t stop talking on her phone, would she?

Because we want our mental time to count, though, we assign meaning to those dreams. Or try to extract it. Try to make them these magical communiqués from our subconscious.

And it can be meaningful, sure, but it’s the self-analysis that actually gets you somewhere. You’re just using the dreams as a springboard to dredge up whatever your real issues or concerns are. You’re using them as a trigger to look inside yourself, for whatever you’ve been denying. But they’re inherently empty, are always accidental.

And I didn’t want to know any of that, understand.

I wanted Kelly’s last memory, of floating, to be a gift the world had given her. An apology for what was coming.

Instead, it was just physiological: she was asleep when she rolled out of the loft, off the edge of our bed, and she slipped away, her senses delivering those sensations to her all at once—air rushing past, weightlessness, no impact—and when she glimmered awake mid-air, she maybe grinned a little in the darkness.

To be flying, to be floating.

Those are always the best.

Until the ground rises to meet you.

•

When I say it was my fault, what I mean is that I shouldn’t have smuggled her from her office that Friday, even going so far as to carry her giggling over the threshold of the elevator. I shouldn’t have already had a bottle of red wine in the backseat. We shouldn’t have stopped for the family meal of fried chicken to go, and then the Rolos from the gas station, an impulse buy because she never allowed herself those anymore.

It had been a special day, though.

We ate the Rolos at the first stoplight, the wine at the second, and only got to the chicken later, and didn’t have nearly enough napkins for what it did to our fingers, our chins.

It didn’t matter.

I killed the car maybe two hundred feet from what was going to be our driveway—what was already our driveway—but left the headlights on.

We coasted in like thieves, the windows glinting at us, the plywood exterior still showing streaks of blue spray paint from its former life in the lumberyard, or on a truck.

What we were doing was breaking in.

Not the kind of break-in that would land us in jail—her father was building the house, the lot was ours—but still, we weren’t supposed to be there yet. Later Kelly would have to make decisions about fixtures and doorknobs, later I would have to say how high I wanted the mailbox, and together we might decide on a wind vane for the eave above the third floor study—this was the country, after all—but there weren’t supposed to be any midnight picnics, any sexual romps like we were teenagers, our fingers greasy with dead animal.

But, sonograms: if you could, you would reach into that black sheet, wouldn’t you? Run the pad of your finger along the delicate curve of your unborn child’s forehead, anointing him into the family, into your care?

That’s what we were doing. Christening this room with Mark and Kelly, then, when we could, the next room, until, by the time we retired to the third floor loft, all we could do was take turns blowing up the air mattress I’d had in the trunk. It was supposed to be for guests, for old college friends someday, but for now, it was for us.

Later, her father would look away and ask me why way the hell up there?

Because it was cool, Stan. And because we were hot. And because our love buoyed us up to the dizzy heights.

What I told him was nothing, because there was no answer that would explain, really.

I just shrugged.

We were standing in the antiseptic hallway of the hospital, then. Were the only ones there for minutes and minutes, the only time I ever saw it like that, all the months I lived there.

And, as for why I slept on the left side of the air mattress that night, not the right, it was because that was my assigned place. In our townhouse downtown, the left side of the bed was the side closest to the door that opened onto the hall, and it had never locked right. Or, the knob would lock, but the brass tongue would never catch in the strikeplate properly, so sometimes when the air conditioner sighed on, the door would just drift open.

It freaked us both out a few times, but, because I was the new husband, was trying to be the protector, the brave one, I switched sides of the bed with Kelly, so that anything that rushed gibbering down the hall, through the door, it was going to get me first.

We were kids, yeah.

Nine years later, though, it was habit, it was custom: the left side of our marriage bed, that was my side.

Which is no excuse, I know.

Sometimes I think that my dream flashcards, they’ve all spilled in my lap. A bed in the clouds, a straw, a squirrel. And all I’m doing is threading myself through them, ducking into this one, stepping into the next one.

She never screamed, either, Kelly. That night.

And we’re not even for sure when it happened.

Our best guess is that we finally nodded off close to midnight, our mouths sticky with wine, and each other. And, though I’d thought ahead enough for the air mattress, the wine, the chicken, and to ask off early for the afternoon, I’d of course forgotten about any kind of flashlight.

Kelly’d told me it wasn’t my fault, I was just being the typical male, worried only about certain developments, but still, before bedding down, to sleep, we’d had to go barefoot, hand in hand out to the car. The lighter was the closest thing to a flashlight we could think of, and we were each too jumpy to feel our way to the one working toilet in the dark. And, since there were no walls around it yet, and we’d always been bathroom shy, somewhat, the solution we came up with was that one of us would sit in the driver’s seat of the car, pass the lighter up when it popped, then the other would take it, scramble for the bathroom, and sing to him or herself the whole time so the other would know everything was cool.

We were still kids, yeah.

The world never lets you stay that young, though, does it?

•

So, sometime during the night, and in spite of the chicken bucket I’d set up as railing for us—it had the lighter from the car in it, which was supposed to rattle if we nudged the bucket—Kelly rolled over, rolled off into open space.

I’m thinking it took her between three and four seconds to reach the concrete floor of what was going to be our foyer.

When she landed, I imagine the sawdust kind of whoomphed up around her and hung in the air for long moments after, insulted. Or curious.

The reason I can guess at the seconds is because our family meal, it had come with drinks, even though we had wine.

Before bed, we’d laid bellydown across the mattress, our faces and arms hanging over the edge, and we’d sucked drops of lemonade and tea into our straws, held them there by sucking, then, on the silent count of three, opened our mouths, let them hurtle down to the floor below.

There’d been just enough moon through the stained glass framing the front door for us to see the splashes we were making. Just enough moon for us to laugh at what her Dad was going to think when he saw it. How he was probably going to send the youngest kid on site up onto the roof, to check for leaks, even though there’d been no rain. And why were the ants so interested in these splashes?

But that’s not how any of it went.

That squirrel I mentioned earlier?

It wasn’t a squirrel. Even though I could see it in my mind so clear, could mentally track the tremble of its cheek each time it puffed out to make its distinctive rattling screech, still, it wasn’t a squirrel.

It was Kelly.

I’d woken with the sun in my eyes, the country sun of our new house, and that noise I was hearing, it was the only thing it could be, all the way out here: a squirrel.

And, the reason I can’t say for sure if Kelly fell for three seconds or four, it’s because the foyer, it’s where the stairway starts. Where the thick railing comes to a stop, where the banister swirls up into a knob of wood the size of a cantaloupe.

On the way down, Kelly’s lower back cracked into that knob of wood.

And then her momentum flopped her over, facedown on the concrete, two of her teeth cracking halfway up, blood seeping from her left ear. There was sawdust on her open eyes, too.

Stan told me about that part. That that’s why he thought she was dead. That that’s why he thought his little girl was dead.

But he spit into them—fathers are the most desperate, stubborn people in the world—and he rubbed them wet again, got her to cough, pulled her head into his chest because he didn’t know the first thing about first aid.

And, me? Mark, the husband, the protector, the brave one?

I was up in the loft with a hard-on, listening to a squirrel chatter.

Kelly’d been making that noise all night, the way she tells it. It was all she could do, all she had left. The only way she could scream.

I haven’t eaten a piece of chicken for months, now.

But the house, our house.

It’s finished, now. It’s ours.

•

Because Stan’s Stan, the whole time Kelly was having surgeries and doing physical therapy and telling me it wasn’t my fault, he kept building. I know it didn’t go down like this, but the way I picture it is he fired everybody off the job, even the subcontractors, and did it all himself. The wiring, the plumbing, the taping and the bedding, the tilework in the foyer. The high gloss trim on all the molding. Staying late to get it all just perfect.

His listing in the phonebook has always been STAN THE MAN, with a cartoon picture of how handy he is, how resolute, how fair.

What really, happened, though—I’ve seen the work orders—is he doubled up on workers, called in favors.

The house was done in two months. The only thing was, because he thought it would jinx her—builders, I’ve found, are the most superstitious people you’ll ever meet—he refused to make any of it wheelchair accessible. Because she wasn’t going to need any damn wheelchair, he’d grumble to me if I asked, which I finally stopped doing.

How he would have made it wheelchair accessible, though—man.

That front stairway? It’s grand, no doubt, but the footprint of our house, it’s small for the square footage involved, something our architect had had to do because of our craggy lot. Translation: our staircase doesn’t sweep up dramatically, like Kelly had probably been dreaming of. It can’t. What it does is go up about ten steps then switch back, to hug the wall. That wall-hugging part of it, sure, we could put a chair lift there. Those first ten steps, though, they just have railing to either side. Throwing up some structure solid enough to allow a lift to be attached—Stan could have done it, but it would have gone against his aesthetic, his sense of ethics, his push to always preserve the resale value, and a ramp, to be long enough to actually use, it would keep the front door from opening.