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Authors: Susan Palwick

Flying in Place

BOOK: Flying in Place
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Praise for
Flying in Place

A Selection of the Literary Guild
Winner of the Crawford Award

“Packs a huge emotional wallop
…Flying in Place
is a brave and honest work, an impressive and important debut.”

—San Francisco Examiner

“A powerful and harrowing story about child abuse, denial, and the withering of the soul…Dramatizes its horrific theme with unflinching clarity and great dramatic power; it is a book compact enough to be read in one long sitting and compels the reader to do just that. Susan Palwick, a young writer who has hitherto attracted some notice for her stories, poems, and essays, is with
Flying in Place
a novelist of moment.”

—Newsday

“Rewarding…Palwick’s characterization of Emma is superb, as truthful as that of Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Emma’s compelling voice carries this book, lifting it far above the standard child-in-peril fare, into the world of first-class storytelling.”

—The Seattle Times

“Simple, strong, and very powerful…A true page-turner…A book so achingly true you want to thank the author. A book like this, a story that can captivate us and raise our awareness, tells truths that need to be told.”

—The Raleigh News & Observer

“Beyond its advantages as story and as storytelling,
Flying in Place
offers a very real portrayal of a very real vulnerability: not only the acute vulnerability of the betrayed, but also the residual fear that our society forces upon all girls and women. The portrayal is a subtle one, and all the more effective for that.”

—Voice of Youth Advocates

“The trauma of sexual abuse is described with beautiful, almost lyrical writing…. The moving and compelling writing is sustained as the revelations unfold.”

—Library Journal

“Chilling and finely tuned…Palwick avoids pat solutions, offering instead a deeply felt, deeply moving tale.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A strong narrative voice that pulls the reader in…builds to a convincing climax.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Stories about child abuse often rely on shocking language, lurid descriptions, pitiable characters. Susan Palwick’s novel uses none of those. Told through the eyes of young Emma, it is an utterly convincing account of how she gradually acknowledges what is happening to her and what she can do about it, of unlocking the doors to the unconscious and locking doors against danger, of sad triumph rather than sadder tragedy. It succeeds on many levels: as literature, as polemic, and as a heart-pounding mystery.”

—Princeton Alumni Weekly

“Poignant and representative of the trauma and anguish of many victims.”

—Rix Rogers, director, Canadian Institute for the
Prevention of Child Abuse

“Strongly recommended to anybody, particularly women, interested in recovery…In addition to a compelling plot and admirable main character, the book contains useful and factual information. Palwick shoots for the moon in her first novel—and reaches it.”

—Recovery Today

“It is Emma’s struggle to understand, accept, and make sense of the world below her bedroom ceiling that tells the real story. And we are extremely fortunate to have Susan Palwick to tell that story to us—and to society
for us….
Really great fiction brings an immediacy and understanding that comes from feeling you have ‘lived’ the story.
Flying in Place
is fiction like that: sure to stay in the reader’s heart.”

—The Healing Woman

“By far the best novel I’ve read about abuse and childhood.”

—Feminist Bookstore News

“Palwick invests each scene and prop with such plain and appropriate feeling that the whole shines with the elegance and inevitability of pure function. It reminded me of a beautiful old cabinet, undecorated, made of native wood, each drawer full of carefully folded secrets. It is impossible not to admire the craftsmanship, even though what we most want to do is, with trepidation, open each drawer in turn, to be either delighted or appalled at the contents Palwick has so thoughtfully arranged…. A terribly beautiful book.”

—Tony Daniel,
The New York Review of Science Fiction

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

For Liz, Terri, and Claudia

Author’s Note

For their support, suggestions, and technical assistance, I’d like to thank Ellen Kushner, Gary Meyer, Gail Meyers, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Helen Palwick, Liz and Lloyd Palwick-Goebel, Sylvia Rosenfeld, Barbara Rozen, Alex Silverman, Valerie Smith, and Terri Windling.

 

Although Pamela quotes briefly from Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,”
Hamlet
, T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” and Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” most of her poetic rhetoric is paraphrased from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.”

 

Bret found the letters today.
I’d forgotten to lock the door to my study, and Nancy got in. I hadn’t locked the desk because I’m usually so careful about locking the door, so Nancy—large for her age, and with the determined energy of all toddlers—scaled my writing chair and dug a group of letters out of one of the cubbyholes. She was eating pieces of correspondence by the time Bret found her. “Thank God you use blue felt-tip and not red,” he told me later, “or I’d have thought she was dying.”

I’d gotten home to find a freshly scrubbed Nancy nursing a bottle of apple juice, and Bret on the floor of the study, gingerly sorting pieces of blue-smeared paper. “Hi,” he said when he saw me. “She was eating these. I haven’t been reading them, really I haven’t, I’m just trying to put them back together—”

“It’s okay,” I said. My drive home through autumn foliage had soothed me, and thirty feet from my study window shone the Delaware River, bright waterfalls chattering on rocks. We’re too high here for the river to be tranquil, but it’s usually merry. It reminds me of Nancy. “I trust you.”

Bret scratched his nose, getting ink on it, and said, “I know you don’t want anybody in here.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I forgot to lock the door.” I’d remembered that I’d forgotten to lock the door as soon as I was irrevocably ensconced in the supermarket checkout line, and all the way home, as the car swept aside falling leaves, I’d been wondering what would happen. I’d never forgotten to lock the door before. “It’s probably because I trust you.”

Bret looked at the pieces of paper surrounding him. Nancy actually hadn’t eaten much, maybe a year’s worth out of fifteen. I picked up one of the torn sheets, which recorded a fragment of my first vacation with Bret. A good year: the kid couldn’t be faulted for her taste. “Do you trust me enough to tell me what they are?” Bret asked.

“Letters,” I said, and looked away from him, out at the river. Water has always calmed me.

“Unmailed?”

“They’re to my sister.”

“Really,” Bret said, not happily. In my peripheral vision, I saw him scratch his nose again. “What about?”

“Myself. You, Nancy. Like a journal, really.”

“Oh,” he said. “You write her letters even though you never knew her? Or because you never knew her? Emma?”

You didn’t lock the door, I told myself firmly, finally failing to be comforted by the river, and said, “I knew her. I did.”

“How? When?”

“She visited me,” I said carefully, looking back at Bret, “when I was twelve. When we were both twelve.”

Bret shook his head and said just as carefully, “How’d she get there? I mean, she couldn’t exactly have walked. Could she?”

If you told Myrna you can tell Bret, I told myself. He’s your husband. He knows you’re not crazy. You love him. You didn’t lock the door. “Actually,” I said, “the first time I saw her she was doing cartwheels.”

Bret started to smile, and evidently thought better of it. Nancy, finished with her juice, discarded the bottle and let out a joyous shriek; Bret reached out and retrieved the bottle, beating it against his thigh in a tattoo that told me how tense he was, despite his seeming calm. “Cartwheels. Okay. Where?”

I closed my eyes, remembering the predawn grayness of that April Wisconsin morning, the ranks of shadows cast on the walls by the venetian blinds, row upon row of thin horizontal bars, and how I’d risen out of my body to try to get away from them, away from the bars and the grayness and the noise. My mother said that dawn was the noisiest time of day because of the birds, but birdsong wasn’t the sound I dreaded. Breathing was.

“Emma?” Bret asked gently. “Where was she doing cartwheels?”

I swallowed. Talking hadn’t been this difficult for years. “On my bedroom ceiling.”

I recognized her right away.
I probably would have recognized her even if her picture hadn’t been hanging all over the house, because she’d inherited our parents’ best features, the ones I’d always wanted: Mom’s blue eyes and flowing auburn hair, my father’s roman nose and firm chin. I’d gotten the leftovers: Mom’s gap teeth and propensity to freckle at the slightest hint of sunlight, my father’s frizzy brown curls and big ears. My tendency to fat must have been a recessive trait from several generations back, because neither of my parents was about to claim it.

“Ginny was light as a bird,” my mother often said with a sigh. She kept Ginny’s favorite nightgown—a frilly affair with lots of lace and ribbons—carefully preserved in a cedar chest, and often told me that Ginny was prettier in that nightgown than most little girls were in party dresses. I always wore pajamas. My mother hated pajamas.

To my surprise, Ginny was wearing a pair of yellow cotton pajamas with Snoopy on them, which must have made doing cartwheels a lot easier. I’d been hovering next to the ceiling, counting the lilac blossoms on the tree outside my window, when she came tumbling through the wall my bedroom shared with hers. Her red-gold curls were mussed from her calisthenics, but the cartwheels were perfect. She didn’t seem to know I was there, but she looked solid enough; to my satisfaction, she didn’t even have a halo.

I’d only learned how to leave my body a few weeks before, after years of feigned sleep, and I was still surprised at how easy it was: one of those skills that seems impossible at first but quickly becomes second nature, like tying your shoes. Because I wasn’t in my body, I could define directions any way I wanted to. I rotated so that my feet were on the ceiling and the breathing was coming from over my head. As always, I tried not to pay attention to it, but today it was louder than usual and counting flowers hadn’t been helping, so Ginny was a welcome distraction. She reached the opposite wall and I wondered if she’d go through it, into my parents’ room—Mom would really love that—but instead she turned and started doing cartwheels in the other direction, coming back towards me.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

She stopped and stood up—which meant that her feet were planted on the ceiling like mine—and squinted at me, frowning, her head cocked to one side. “Cartwheels,” she said. The breathing sounded like a hurricane now, but if Ginny heard it she didn’t let on. Mom never heard anything either; that must have been another congenital tendency. I may have been fat, but at least I wasn’t deaf.

“You can’t do cartwheels,” I told her. I’d never been able to do cartwheels, no matter what I was wearing. “You aren’t even supposed to be here. You’re dead. Go back to your own room, where you belong.”

“But I am supposed to be here,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t supposed to be here.”

“That’s called circular logic,” I told her, “but I grade easier than Mom does so I’ll let you pass this time, if you tell me why you’re here.”

She was there to distract me from the breathing; it was easy enough to figure that out. Maybe she’d be able to teach me how to go through walls too, and then I’d finally be able to get into her room. The door had been locked for as long as I could remember. Mom didn’t want anybody in there and my father acted like the room didn’t exist at all, and if the key was still around somewhere I sure hadn’t been able to find it. I’d have bet all my Nancy Drew books that Ginny’s room was nicer than mine.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Ginny said. She took a piece of her hair and put it in her mouth, biting at the ends the way Mom always told me not to do. Her hands were even smaller than I’d expected, the fingers like little sticks with knobs on them, something out of Hansel and Gretel. You could break those fingers without even trying. “I can’t remember. I can’t even remember who I am.”

“You’re nobody,” I said, disgusted. She wasn’t distracting me very well; I could still hear the breathing, heavy as waves crashing on a beach. What good was being out of my body, if I couldn’t get away from the breathing? “You’re a ghost.”

“I am? But ghosts used to be people. Didn’t I used to be somebody? I can’t—”

“Remember,” I said. “For somebody who made high honor roll every marking period of her life your brain’s really gone soft, you know that? Does being dead do that to everybody?”

Her face brightened. “Ha! See? You
do
know who I was!”

“Are you kidding? How could I not know who you are? It’s not like Mom would ever let me forget it! Most kids get Seuss stories at bedtime: I’ve gotten Ginny stories, as long as I can remember—”

“Ginny,” she said, and hugged herself. “That’s right! I remember! I had one of those bracelets with the little beads that said Ginny. And birthday cakes that said Ginny. And books—a lot of books with brown paper covers, and I wrote Ginny on them. Thank you!”

She unclasped herself and took a few dancing steps towards me like she was going to hug me, but I backed off and she stopped short, frowning. I hoped she was hurt. I wanted her to be hurt.

“That’s right: Ginny, my perfect sister, the one who was skinnier than I am and smarter than I am and had better manners than I do. The one who had pretty thick curls instead of mouse-brown frizz. The one nobody ever laughed at in gym, because on top of getting straight A plusses she was a champion gymnast. So why did you come back, anyway? Heaven wasn’t good enough for you? Didn’t they worship you up there the way Mom does?”

“I already told you, I don’t know!” There was the edge of a whine in her voice. Good. I was getting to her, then. She scowled at me and said, “Are you dead, too? Why are you here, if you aren’t dead?”

“Stupid ghost! You can’t even hear it, can you?” I waved a hand over my head, in the direction of the floor, and Ginny looked where I was pointing and then back at me, so quickly I wasn’t even sure she’d seen it. “It’s your fault,” I told her. “Because you went and died, and parts of Mom died when you did. Isn’t that nice? Doesn’t that make you feel good?”

She didn’t say anything; just stared at me, both hands over her mouth. “Maybe that’s why you had to come back,” I said. “So you’d have to look at it. Maybe they think they made a mistake, letting you into heaven. Maybe they think you’ve got it too easy, sitting up there singing hymns all day.”

She took her hands away from her mouth. “You’re mean,” she said, her voice breaking. She was crying, shining droplets rolling down her Ivory-Snow cheeks.

“That’s right. I’ve got to be mean to somebody, and it might as well be you. You aren’t even real.”

Ginny put her arms around herself and hugged, rocking. “I am so! I’m as real as you are! I am, even if I can’t remember anything!”

“No, you aren’t, because you’re dead. Anyway, I like being mean. I’m going to be mean some more, because I’m still alive and you aren’t. Did you know that Mom wouldn’t hold me for two weeks after I was born, because I wasn’t you? She told me that once. It’s not like I would have remembered it or anything, but she had to let me know. She puts flowers on your grave every month, every fourth Saturday no matter what the weather’s like, even if it’s twenty below zero—especially then, since you died in January. She won’t go into your room, but she goes to the cemetery every month. Figure that one out. And she drags me with her so she can tell me more stories about you, so I’ll be more like you—”

“But if you were like me you’d be dead,” said Ginny, wiping her face with the back of one hand. Her tiny fingers were shaking like twigs in a winter wind. “She doesn’t want that. I know she doesn’t want that.”

“I don’t. If I died she could pretend I was beautiful. You’re not as beautiful as she thinks you are, you know. You’re too skinny.”

“I know,” she said simply, and even though I hated her I was ashamed. She really was as pretty as her picture; she was so thin only because she’d been so sick before she died, battling pneumonia for weeks while Mom wept by her hospital bedside and my father, the omnipotent physician, railed at his inability to save her. I knew that story by heart. Once, before it had become so many words, it had even made me sad.

But it didn’t matter what I told this apparition, because she wasn’t real. I’d thought her up to distract me from the breathing, and if she made me feel bad I could send her away again. “Go away,” I said. “Go back to wherever you came from. You’re just a ghost. You’re a ghost with no memory, and that’s worse than nothing. What good are you, if you can’t tell me anything I don’t know?”

BOOK: Flying in Place
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