Flying in Place (14 page)

I nodded, because I couldn’t talk, and he gave my hair another sharp tug and let go. Nothing that would leave marks, not this time: just burning tears in my eyes, and that awful gag in my throat.
Such knowledge is too high; I cannot attain unto it
. Had Ginny really been saying that he was going to save her?

I don’t remember getting into the car. I remember sitting in the back seat while my father drove too fast and Donna and Mom talked about a pet dachshund they’d had when they were little. Mom? A pet dog?

“What happened to it?” I asked, as if knowing what had happened could change anything.

“It died,” Donna said. Yes, of course it had. Dogs always died. Everything died. I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of trees and telephone poles going past too quickly, and Ginny was there instead, sitting in her yellow pajamas, curled up in a pool of darkness with her arms around her knees.

How could she be here? She’d never seen this car; we’d only gotten it two years ago. But she wasn’t really in the car. She was in my head, in my skull, behind my eyes. What did that mean? That she’d already seen all my thoughts? That once she’d felt so much like I did now that we might as well have had the same memories?

“Now do you understand?” she asked me.

I swallowed. “Such knowledge is too high. I cannot attain unto it.”

Ginny buried her head on her knees and shivered like a wet dog, the same way she had when we were in my bedroom and Mom was trying to shake me awake. Had Mom and Donna’s dachshund shivered like that when it was dying? Then she looked up at me and said, “Do you know the rest of it?”

“The rest of what?”

“The poem.” Ginny swallowed and recited in a thin voice, “O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.”

“He told you not to tell,” I said. “He told you not to tell anyone, didn’t he? And you couldn’t. The only way you could tell was to use someone else’s words, to make it pretty, to recite poetry.”

“Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.”

“You had all those bruises,” I said, “and everybody thought it was just from gymnastics. They thought you were practicing for the circus.”

“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”

“You ran away to New York,” I told her. “And Aunt Donna sent you back home. And then you died.”

“If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

The wings of the morning. “Ginny was light as a bird,” Mom always said; and even I, the neighborhood butterball, had learned to fly. I remembered the way Ginny had looked at the bed the first time I saw her, the way she’d covered her mouth with her hands. She’d seen that, all right, even if I couldn’t show her Woolworth’s.

“Did you hate dawn too?” I asked her. “Did he—did he—”

“If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.”

“You told Mom all that?” I said. “That whole poem?” Far away, someone was saying
Emma, Emma, we’re home now
.

“It’s Psalm 139,” Ginny said, and disappeared. I opened my eyes. We were in the driveway back at the house, and Mom and Donna and my father were all staring at me.

“Emma?” said my father. “What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

“Yes,” I said. My head still hurt; I felt like I was going to throw up. Their faces were swimming in circles in front of me, and I knew that if I tried to stand up I’d pass out.

My father carried me into
the house and deposited me on the living room couch while Mom fluttered around, looking worried. “I’ll be okay,” I said. “I’m probably just hungry.” But when they talked their voices reached me as if through water, and light hurt my eyes.

“I’ll start cooking right away,” Mom said. I closed my eyes to keep the room from tilting, and opened them again to find a cool hand on my forehead and Donna standing over me, frowning. I kept getting the eerie feeling that Ginny was hiding somewhere just out of sight, and that if I moved my head quickly enough I’d be able to catch a glimpse of her. But I was too weak to move.

“Would you hand me the Bible, please?” I asked Donna.

“The Bible?” said my father. I could hear his voice, but I didn’t have the energy to turn to look at him. “Isn’t that a little melodramatic? You’ve caught a rotten virus, Emma, but you don’t need last rites.”

“That’s not what I’m looking for,” I said, and felt Ginny’s unseen presence come closer as Donna handed me the old, thick book with its tattered leather cover.

“What are you looking for, Emma?”

“Psalms,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her which one.

“Yes, the psalms are lovely.”

Lovely, I thought. You really are Mom’s sister, aren’t you?

Here it was. Psalm 139, and Ginny had only quoted half of it. The next four verses were about me.

For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb
.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well
.

My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth
.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect, and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them
.

Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. Ginny had brought Mom the poem the night before she went into the hospital; by then, Mom was already pregnant with me. The Bible slid off my lap, hitting the carpet with a soft thump, and Donna bent to retrieve it. “Sleep until dinner,” she told me. “We’ll wake you up when it’s time to eat.”

I closed my eyes and slipped out of my body. Ginny was curled up in one corner of the ceiling, looking down at me, beautiful again but sad, so sad. I flew up to join her, misery weighting me like lead.

“I read it,” I told her. “I read more of it. You brought Mom that poem just before you died, and told her it was about him.”

She nodded, her thin hands trembling.

“Only Mom didn’t understand. You’d found the most beautiful way you could to say it; you must have searched for weeks to find just the right poem, so that maybe she’d listen. And it didn’t do any good.”

“For lo,” Ginny said, her voice quavering, “there is not a word in my tongue…”

Last rites, my father had said. Had he seen Ginny searching through the psalms too? Had she been lying on the couch the way I was now, too weak to move? “Ginny,” I said, “how did you die?”

She just looked at me, as pale as ghosts are supposed to be. “Pneumonia,” I said. “But healthy kids don’t get pneumonia, not unless something else is wrong with them. And you were so skinny. Why were you so skinny?”

Ginny was always a picky eater
. She plucked at a strand of her hair with thin, thin fingers, and I remembered my health teacher’s droning lecture about anorexia. “Nobody should want to look like me,” Ginny had told me. “You have to eat.” And Donna had said she was skinny even before she got sick, because she’d been saving her lunch money for a train ticket.

And the bruises were from gymnastics. Sure. “You stopped eating,” I said. “Maybe it was to save money at first, but after Donna sent you back home it was so he’d stop bothering you, so you wouldn’t have to be a woman, so you’d die and be able to get away from him. You stopped eating and you got pneumonia and you died. And he’s a doctor, and he blamed it on the fucking flu.”

She was shivering again, and I wanted to comfort her but I couldn’t. She was a ghost, and I was alive. Nothing I could say to her would make any difference. “Ginny,” I said, “is that what happened? Please tell me. Is that the way it happened? I need to know.”

“He said—he said he couldn’t help himself.” I could hardly hear her. “He said it was because he loved me, because I was so beautiful, even more beautiful than Mom. He said if she found out it would break her heart, because then she’d know I was more beautiful than she was. I told him there wouldn’t be anything for her to find out if it wasn’t happening, but he wouldn’t stop. I told him he was hurting me, and he wouldn’t stop. ‘I can’t help myself,’ he said. ‘You’re so beautiful, and I love you so much. Any man who sees you will love you. You have to find some way to stop us, because we can’t help ourselves.’ How could he do that, if he loved me? I tried everything I could, but he wouldn’t stop.”

“And so you stopped everything,” I said. “To get away.” I was glad I wasn’t in my body then, because if I had been the rage would have killed me: shattered my lungs, burst some vital artery in my brain, destroyed crucial organs past any ability of my father’s to repair them. “You got away as far as you could. You died, because that was the only thing you could do to stop him—and even then it didn’t stop him, because he’s doing the same thing to me, and I’m not even beautiful. Ginny, he was lying:
it wasn’t your fault
.”

“But he said—”

“He was lying! The same way he lied to me! He told you it was because you were beautiful and he told me it was because you were dead, but it happened to both of us!”

I remembered pointing to my bed, that first dawn I’d seen her, and saying,
It’s your fault
, and I was so ashamed that I couldn’t look at her anymore. I had to make her understand, somehow. I had to. “Ginny, I was lying too. It wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could. You tried to be strong and you tried to be perfect, and then you ran away to Aunt Donna’s and everybody thought it was just because you wanted to join the circus, and then you started starving yourself so you wouldn’t be beautiful anymore. And then you did the hardest thing there was, the thing he’d told you never, ever to do; you told Mom, and you didn’t even do it for yourself. You did it for me, and I wasn’t even born yet.”

I remembered the balloon animals my father had made for me, those fragile creatures with their pitiful little legs, and how unconcerned he’d been when one of them broke.
Don’t be upset. I can make another one, see?
Is that what he’d told Mom, when Ginny started getting sick? Had he gotten her pregnant again because he knew Ginny was dying, because he wanted another kid to breathe on?

I couldn’t think about that now, because it hurt too much. I had to keep talking. I had to make Ginny understand. “You told Mom for me, to try to protect me. You didn’t need to do that. You were going to die anyway. You could have just died, and been rid of all of it. And when you told her she didn’t believe you. She didn’t want to know what you were talking about; she wanted to think you were a poetic little girl quoting the Bible. And so you had to come back, and remember all of it, to try to save me. To stop him.”

I’d been talking in a rush, fast, fast, like swallowing medicine as quickly as you can so you won’t taste it going down. When I stopped I felt like I’d run a race, and she hadn’t said a word. “That’s it, Ginny, isn’t it? That’s why you came back. For me.”

“Of course,” she said sadly, her voice fading even as she spoke. “Hadn’t you figured that out by now?” By the time I looked up, she was already gone.

Back in the world,
there was a great commotion coming from the kitchen. I opened my eyes, blinking at the sudden light, and heard my father ranting. “I told you this would happen, Pamela! Now let’s stop the charade—”

“Stewart,” Donna said, not quite as loudly but with just as much force, “you were the one who made the crack about your daughters getting sick whenever I enter the picture. If you think that’s a joke—”