Be Not Afraid (5 page)

“Hello?” My voice was stiff from having been silent for so long, and I cleared my throat. “Hello? Who is that?”

I watched in amazement as the screws began to drop to the floor, each one making a small, pinging sound as it hit the wood, and then the door swung open. Dad stepped through the opening. I turned over before his eyes met
mine and pulled the blankets over my head. “You took my
door
down?”

I could hear him talking, his voice muffled through the material.

“It was either that or the wall,” he said. “You gotta get up now, Rinny. Enough’s enough.”

“No, thanks.”

“Yes, thanks.” He strode across the room, pulled back my blankets. I covered my face with my hands. “We’re leaving.”

I didn’t move. “Leaving?”

“Maine,” he said. “We’re leaving Maine. We’re going to Connecticut, to live with Nan. I just got word about a job today.”

Something inside clutched at me—fear? anger? dread?—until I realized that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

“School year’s over,” Dad went on. “You’re lucky you only had a week or two left, or I would have knocked down this door a lot sooner. We’re heading out day after tomorrow, and then you’ll have the whole summer to settle in before you start eleventh grade.” He paused then and cleared his throat. Maybe he realized how gruff he sounded. Or maybe he was afraid
I
would go and kill myself if he didn’t start being a little nicer. Whatever it was, he sat down on the edge of my bed and folded his hands. A silent moment passed. He breathed in. Out. “Rinny.”

I didn’t answer.

He put a hand on my shoulder, left it there. “Talk to me,” he said. “How are you?”

I’m nothing,
I thought.
Which is actually worse than anything I can think of. Worse than being dead, even. I’m dead-nothing.
His hand felt like a weight on my shoulder, something pushing me down. I shrugged it off, most of my face still hidden by the pillow.

“Rinny.” I could hear the pleading in his voice, and I turned over, an inch at a time. His face was pale with deep shadows under his eyes. The deadness was still there, a fossil embedded in his pupils, and he was thinner, too, as if he had been subsisting on coffee and air. But something else caught my attention: a small red dot against the flat of his cheek. It was so faint that at first I thought something had flown into my eye, but then I blinked and looked again. It was still there, even brighter this time, as if a raspberry had exploded against his face.

“What’s on your face?” I asked. “You have paint or something, right on your cheek there.”

He reached up with two fingers and drew them along the spot I had indicated. “Where?”

“Right there.” I pointed as Dad moved his fingers again. “Lower. A little lower. There. Right there.” He looked at the tips of his fingers and then back up at me, perplexed. There was nothing on them. I sat up and squinted. The shape was still there, but now it was glowing, as if a light had been turned on behind it. It pulsed around the edges. “That’s weird.” I leaned in even closer. Dad stood still, staring over
my shoulder like an obedient patient as I examined his cheek.

“Is it pollen?” he asked, looking up at the ceiling. “There’s a ton of it this year. My allergies are going crazy.”

“No.” I frowned, rubbing at it. “But whatever it is, it’s not coming off.” I blinked again, as if my eyes were playing tricks on me. I didn’t know how it was possible, but up close, I could tell that the little spot was
beneath
my father’s skin. Stranger still, with every second that passed, the color, which seconds ago had brightened, now seemed to be draining again, as if it were fading right before my eyes. I pressed on it with one finger. “There’s a little red spot right there. I can
see
it.” I pressed on it again. “Can you feel that? Does it hurt?”

“Marin.” He jerked his head out from under my fingers and strode into the bathroom across the hall. I waited, my head buzzing with hunger, until his voice barreled out into the hall. “What are you even talking about? There’s nothing there!” He appeared in the doorway again, looking aggravated. “You need to get up. Seriously. You’ve been in bed too long. You’re starting to see things.”

It was still there. I could see it, plain as anything, dark as a cherry now. “I am not! Let me look just one more time.” I threw back the sheets and moved toward him. Rolling up on my tiptoes, I scanned the broad planes of his face, settling my fingers along the red dot. “It’s there! Right under …” My words faded as I realized the spot was diminishing, right before my eyes. Three more seconds, and it was gone.
Completely. There wasn’t even a hint of it on the surface of—or beneath—his skin anymore. “Wait,” I said. “It’s gone now.”

“I don’t have time for this,” Dad said, shaking his head. “We have a lot of work to do before we leave. Go take a shower, get cleaned up, and find Nan. She’ll tell you what to do.”

I stood there for a moment after he left, feeling dazed. I was sure I had seen the red shape on his cheek. But maybe I hadn’t. Maybe Dad was right. It had been so long since I’d maintained any sort of regular schedule, much less gotten any exercise, and I’d lost so much weight that my pajama bottoms hung off me. My brain was foggy; maybe I was seeing things.

“Is that my angel?” Nan entered my room, wiping her hands with a white dishtowel. “Are you up, sweetheart?”

I turned to go back to bed, angry at Dad’s dismissal, not wanting to deal with Nan’s coddling and then her orders, which were sure to include packing and cleaning instructions to the nth degree. But as I did, I caught sight of the blue shapes inside her hands. Dots, maybe, or tiny beads, some the color of blueberries, others a paler shade, like lilac buds. They flowed fluidly, in tandem with her movements, almost as if sitting atop a wave.

“Marin?”

I looked up, stricken. “What happened to your hands?”

“My hands?” Nan paused, drawing the dishcloth a final time over her fingers, which were thick and chapped at the
tips. “Well, I have arthritis, honey. And liver spots. Maybe even a little bit of that carpal tunnel thingie from all those years typing letters at the post office. But that’s what happens when you get old.”

“Nan.” I took her hand in mine and stared down at the blue beads, which were already starting to fade, even as they continued their swift headway beneath her skin. “Please. Look at your hands.” I traced a fingertip over the tops of her knuckles. “Tell me you can’t see those.”

“See what?” Wisps of her cottony hair trailed along her shoulders, and the red neckerchief, combined with her old denim overalls, made her look like a farmer. She flexed her fingers and then straightened them again. The blue beads kept moving, never once losing their gait. “What am I looking for?”

“Those,” I whispered. “In your knuckles. The blue …”

Nan turned her hand over and then righted it again. She peered closely at me. “Sweetheart.” There was an edge of sorrow to her voice, a you’re-in-mourning-so-you-can’t-help-acting-crazy look on her face. “What in the world are you talking about? What’s blue?”

“Nothing.” I turned away, pulling my hands through my hair. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t feel good, I guess. I need to take a shower.” I ran my tongue over my slimy teeth. “Use a toothbrush.”

“Well, go slowly.” Nan put her hand on my arm. The blue beads persisted. I looked away, desperate now for them
to be gone, seriously starting to freak out. “There’s no rush. How about some tea? Would you like some tea?”

I drank two cups of tea and ate a bowl of Nan’s chicken stew with biscuits before standing under the running hot water until the mirror fogged over and a thick cloud of steam engulfed the bathroom. I flossed and brushed my teeth and then flossed them again, just for good measure. After braiding my wet hair, I secured the ends with matching white rubber bands and put Vaseline on my chapped lips. My limbs felt rubbery and heavy, but I put on my favorite pair of jeans and an old T-shirt and slid my feet into a pair of flip-flops. Then I walked out into the kitchen. Dad and Nan were sitting at the table, drinking coffee.

“Good,” Dad said, turning to look at me. Another red dot glowed from his cheek, this one on the opposite side of his face, bright as a sticker.

“Atta girl.” Nan’s voice was soft. “Now we can start packing.” The blue beads in her hands raced along, as if trying to overtake something I could not see.

I sat down hard in my chair and tried not to look at either of them.

It got worse after the move, the colors and shapes I saw in people increasing in number and intensity. When I went to the grocery store for Nan, I saw a pink, grapefruit-sized ball curled up beneath the ribs of the cashier and a lime-sized
red oval staring out from behind the kneecap of the boy who bagged the groceries. Celeste, who was Nan’s hairdresser at Kut-n-Kurl and who shaped my hair into the short pixie style I wore now, had a lavender, pea-shaped blob inside the back of her mouth. One night I went to the movies with Nan and became so overwhelmed that I had to close my eyes and keep them closed. Everywhere I looked inside the theater, shapes and colors bloomed. It was like sitting in a garden of mythical lights, their hues bleeding into the darkness like small, exploding stars. When Nan asked what was wrong, I told her I had a headache. We left early.

After another month, I told Nan, who convinced Dad that I had to see a doctor. July passed by in a flurry of medical tests, most of which, despite their deceptively brief names—EKG, EMG, MRI, AFP, ABEP—were so long in length that I fell asleep during most of them. I spent whole days lying inside long, smooth machines, holding my arm out for another blood sample, and sitting in blue chairs, answering questions. Dad and Nan held their breath along with me, only to exhale every time another test came back negative. There was simply no indication that anything was wrong. Nothing was askew inside my brain, my head, my eyes, my blood, even my heart. Nothing. Anywhere.

At the doctor’s insistence, two psychiatric visits were next, their questions ranging from the idiotic—“Do you experience any kind of scent awareness along with the colors?” and “Would you say that you have an overactive imagination?”—to the painfully personal—“Do you think
you might be trying to get attention, since your mother just died?” or “Is it possible that you might be acting out now that you are becoming sexually mature?” They used words like
psychosomatic
and
latent juvenile depression,
both of which I realized after a while were just big words, none of them rooted in anything tangible. Sure, I was depressed about the fact that my mother had committed suicide, but what did that have to do with the things I was seeing? What did that have to do with anything at all?

And what exactly, the psychiatrists wanted to know, are you seeing?

By then, I had a pretty good idea of what I was seeing. It had to be pain. I kept this information to myself, of course, because I knew it sounded crazy, and maybe I was going a little bit crazy, but I also knew that there was nothing else it could be. Whether the color and shape were simply an indication that the pain was there or whether it was the actual physical pain itself, I could not be sure. But it was not a coincidence that Nan’s arthritic hands flared in exactly the same spot where I glimpsed the blue beads. Or that on the day of my haircut, Celeste had confided that she didn’t know how she was standing upright since she’d just had root canal surgery that morning. The red blob inside Dad’s cheek (which returned again and again) had to be connected to his repeated sinus infections, and when I overheard the bagger at the grocery store telling the cashier that he’d been off for so long because he’d just sprained his knee, my suspicions were confirmed.

I began to notice patterns, too, in the shapes and the colors. Blue, for example, seemed to indicate muscular pain, while red only appeared inside cartilage or bones. Yellow ran the gamut from heartburn to hunger, and orange only seemed to surface inside people’s heads. I assumed the size indicated the severity of the pain, but there was no way of knowing that for sure. Not really.

I didn’t know why I was seeing pain in people—or more disconcertingly, what I was supposed to do about it—but the whole thing was so bizarre that after a few weeks, I just stopped talking about it altogether. I found a pair of dark sunglasses and wore them whenever I was in public. Unless it was absolutely necessary, I also stopped looking at people, ducking my head when someone walked by or leaving the room when someone came to the house. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the way it would always be. Was I going to spend the rest of my life seeing colors and shapes inside other people’s bodies? Or was it just a temporary thing, a fleeting affliction that I would only understand later?

There was no way of knowing.

And the one thing I did know—that the person whose pain I would have given anything in the world to see—was lost to me now.

Forever.

It was almost dusk by the time I came back in from the garden, the blue draining from the sky like water through a sieve. The kitchen was infused with the smell of Nan’s cooking, onions and apples and butter. I went to the sink and washed my hands before she noticed how dirty they were. She was the last one who needed to know anything about the bulbs I’d just thrown into the woods. Irrational acts like that (which was what she called any unexplained action of mine these days) would lead to an entire night of prolonged questions, and maybe even another visit to a psychiatrist. There was no way I wanted to risk either one.

“Mmmm,” I said, turning from the sink to survey the table. “Looks good, Nan.” A platter of fried pork chops was nestled beside a bowl of buttered peas and carrots. The
wicker basket was filled with pieces of Nan’s homemade sourdough bread, and there was a bowl of white beans and bacon too. Nan always cooked as though an army were coming to dinner. There were always leftovers.

“I hope you’re hungry.” She withdrew a pie from the oven and placed it on a wire rack arranged on the counter. “It’s apple-rhubarb. Your favorite.” She grinned, wiping the sweat from her upper lip with the back of her wrist. I leaned over and kissed her cheek.