Postcards from a Dead Girl (12 page)

Sit and breathe. This is what we do on top of Cherry Hill. All twenty of us, in loose rows of five, facing the instructor. We all sit on thin blue mats, stare out at the lake on a beautiful Saturday, and breathe.

At first it's difficult because I'm terribly distracted. A girl on the hill seems familiar to me, and I can't stop staring at her. Her hair is long and chocolate-brown, simply cut, plain. She's a beautiful stranger.

I name her Jane.

Jane sees me watching her but doesn't seem to mind. It's like she can sense my apprehension and knows it will dissipate once I surrender to the sitting-and-breathing groove. I close my eyes and fake contentment, but I can't seem to keep my balance, even though I'm only sitting. Who ever had difficulty with sitting?

Keeping my eyes closed helps. I can't see anyone's reaction to my insecurity. I remember why this was so effective when I was a child, the magical curtain of invisibility. But I don't want to disappear; I want Jane to know I'm here.

I open my eyes again and search the sky. Clouds build in vast piles like something out of a John Ford film—a towering anvil
bulging upward as it reaches for the stratosphere. Myna reminds us to inhale and exhale, which is good because I've almost forgotten to breathe.

I notice how my shoulders slump down as I stare upward—not exactly the lotus-blossom position. I straighten up and catch Jane glance and exhale through a grin. She pretends not to notice me noticing her notice. It's suddenly become very complicated, and my mind can't stop spinning with the infinite amount of possible outcomes due to this Jane girl breathing and sitting on a mat two rows over on top of a cloud-ridden Cherry Hill. We're supposed to be thinking of nothing and I'm busy with everything: should I smile back, should I say hello later, do I cause harm by thinking these thoughts, do I cause harm by believing there is something else out there, could it be a lunch date, would we have any commonalities, can I stop searching for the source of lost love, is that fair to Zoe, is that fair to Candyce, is that fair to Jane? Does she know what she's getting into by glancing at me, and when does it all really begin, and does it ever end?

The instructor strikes a small gong with a soft mallet. The sound is gentle but firm and all the other sitter-breathers look so calm, luminescent even, highly-evolved tranquil balls of shimmering light. I think I've drawn blood on the inside of my cheek from chewing so hard.

“Thank you all for coming,” the instructor says, her voice so soft and warm.

I cough.

“Let's remember,” she says. “Don't be bad. Don't be good. Just be.”

Just be, I think, just be. It's agonizing. Jane seems to have no problem just being. She has beautiful eyes, even when they're closed. The balls of light let out a collective happy humming sound,
vibrate off their mats, and float to their body-transportation devices.

Jane rolls up her mat and pretends not to notice me noticing her. She takes a few pulls from her purple water-bottle and with great purpose begins her stroll down the side of Cherry Hill. And here I sit, just being.

“Are you Sid?” Myna asks, gracefully tossing her tote bag across her shoulder. We are the only two left. “Natalie's brother, right? I'm Myna.”

“Hello Myna. Yes, I'm Dr. Nat's brother.” Jane is out of reach now, a dangerously safe distance away.

“She said you'd be coming. What'd you think?”

“It was really relaxing,” I say, and my tongue finds the crater in my cheek. Tastes like copper. “Peaceful.”

“You came on a great day,” she says. “You should come back next week. We'll be here.” She points to the horizon over the lake. “Don't stay too long. You might get wet.”

I scramble to my feet and wave good-bye. “Thanks,” I say. Far in the distance, the monster anvil cloud has become ominously dark, spreading with great determination. Fat cloud tumors burst forth in a frenzy of malevolent growth, and yet not a drop of rain nor howl of wind. But something is most certainly up there, brewing, waiting, being.

Back home, I sit on my front porch and stare at the mailbox. Mary Jo is out in her yard doing cartwheels, laughing, singing, enjoying this lovely day with wild abandon. She doesn't seem to mind the storm cloud on the horizon. She's focused on the sunny part of the day. I pretend to enjoy it as well. I smile up at the sun, imbibe the summer air. I can taste the rain even though it hasn't fallen.

What I'm really doing is waiting for the mailman. I'm waiting for him to come poking along in his blue-and-white Jeep, waiting for the way he leans out the wrong side of the car, his thumb covered with a little knobby rubber tip as he flips through envelopes like a Vegas blackjack dealer, sliding the mail into the box with a snap so it hits the back with a low-pitched
pang
. I listen for the intermittent revving of the Jeep's engine.

He usually drives by at 4:45, which seems late in the day for mail delivery. I used to deliver newspapers in the predawn hours, and my reward for finishing my route was sunlight, knowing I could go home and sleep until noon. But this guy, he's coming after 4:30. Some days it's as early as 3:30, but once it was almost 4:55, which makes me itchy with panic. Who delivers this late in
the day? And how did we get on the late schedule? Doesn't the post office work like the army? “Getting more done by nine a.m. than most people do all day,” like in their recruitment commercial? I can't take this waiting, especially on a Saturday.

What's sick is I don't even want these postcards, but since they started arriving I can't wait for the next one. It's been a while since the Barcelona card and I'm wondering if any more are on their way. Maybe a stranger's hands are holding my fate right this second, large, hairy hands sifting through a bulging burlap bag. Or maybe there's some big European guy loading a sack of mail into the belly of a plane, and saluting the pilot as the jet taxis down the tarmac. Maybe that bag of mail is flying over an ocean right now, on its way here above turquoise waters to entice me toward another fabulous destination.

I sit on the porch in this eager state. My stomach feels hollowed out by the sheer ache for new contact. I want to gather the postcards and present them to Zoe one day in the future so we can have a laugh together about how I used to sit on the porch steps day after day like a child waiting for the ice cream man.

My thoughts are interrupted by that wonderfully familiar sound: the intermittent revving, the slight squeak of front disc brakes, the low-pitched
dong
like a winner's bell at the circus. He is coming.

Mary Jo stops her cartwheeling and is now attached to her mailbox. She must have heard the same sounds I did. She shows no fear of me today, as if the sunshine erased all traumatic memories of her dark backyard encounter with my pseudo-grave.

“What'd you do to your hand?” she shouts, ever the inquisitor.

I forgot about my bandage and hold it out as if it's the first time I've seen it, this altered hand.

“Oh, it's nothing,” I say. “I fell.”

“In your mud bath?”

“So now you believe me.”

“My dad told me that some people do sit in mud to relax. He said that he likes to polish his sports car to relax. It's black, see?” She points to their driveway, where an ebony Porsche sits dormant. “He said he likes to make it look like nighttime, so it's like a shadow.”

“Wow. That sure is black,” I say, and turn to see the blue-and-white Jeep as it revs up to my neighbor's mailbox and pauses. The mailman rifles through his deck.

“Is your mud hole like a shadow?” she asks.

“I don't know.”

“Are you married?” she asks.

I give her my best that's-an-adult-question look, but she's not getting it. “No.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

I think about that. “No,” I say.

“Why not?”

“I just don't.”

She barely pauses before she's got another question. “Are you lonely?”

I watch the postal truck. The driver does something with a rubber band and a stack of envelopes, and then the Jeep surges forward.

“Are you?” she asks.

“What?”

“Are you lonely? Without a girlfriend?”

The truck drives right past my driveway, not even a friendly nod from the driver. No postcards today. I feel a new hole in my stomach begin to open.

Mary Jo stares at me from the other side of the street, waiting for an answer.

“What about you,” I ask, a little peeved, “always playing in the yard by yourself? Aren't little kids supposed to have friends or something? Aren't
you
lonely?”

She frowns a little, looks at her feet, spins around in a full circle. “So, you don't know any girls?” she probes. “Not any?”

What is wrong with me, taking out my frustration on a ten-year-old. I think about her question, really think about it, then offer her a real answer in a real, here's-a-serious-answer voice. “Well, there is—” I start, but before I can finish explaining, she gallops across her yard. She stops in front of her dad's black Porsche and stares into the inky finish for a moment, like she's under a spell, then runs inside.

“There is one girl,” I say to her empty yard.

Dream interpretation has never made sense to me, but Candyce seems to be handling it masterfully. She's dressed only in underwear and a T-shirt, stretched out before me on my bed, lying on her belly, her feet doing little swim-kicks in the air. “And so you were there in my dream, but it wasn't
you-
you, and we were at my house, but it wasn't my
house
-house, you know what I mean?” She searches my eyes for any comprehension. “Like instead of being a one-story ranch house in the Midwest, it was a tin shack in the Everglades, and it was upside down, and it didn't have any windows, but it was still my house, you know? Like I could
feel
it was my house.”

“Right.”

“And you were there, but weren't really
you
-you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Instead of being a thin white guy, you were, like, a giraffe.”

“Wow.”

“And you were blue, with three heads, and you didn't have any faces. But I knew it was you.”

“Wow,” I say again.

“Yeah,” she says, and flips over on her back. She takes a long
drag off her cigarette, and stares through the ceiling, deep into another dimension. She sits up then, a little more intense than before, and pulls herself closer to me. “And then, I'm remembering this now as we're talking, then we were having sex, but it wasn't
sex
-sex, like normal, because I was like a small brown dog, and you were a cloud, hovering over me in the yard, raining your seed in my fur.” Her eyes are urgent, anticipative.

“That's pretty wild.”

“Isn't it?” She opens her mouth, lets her chin hang in exasperation. We nod at each other a few times.

“I had a dream last night,” I say, surprised that I'm sharing.

Candyce taps her cigarette into a makeshift aluminum foil ashtray. “Do tell.”

“I was standing outside a bus looking in through its open doors, and all I could see was blackness, like a totally black cave.”

“What happened?”

“That's it.”

Candyce pouts. “That's all?”

“Yeah, that's all I remember.”

“That's so sad,” she says.

“Why?”

“You're depressed.”

“Because of a bus?”

“The bus obviously symbolizes your travels through life, and the darkness means you feel those travels are empty and meaningless. I mean, that's pretty textbook.”

“Actually, my neighbor has a black car, I was probably just dreaming of that.”

“Okay, sure. If that's what you think.” She lies back, staring at the ceiling. “What did you cut your hand on?” she asks.

“He really does have a black car. It's really, really black.”

“Cool,” she says, and crushes out her cigarette. Then she works her way over to me, snuggling close, tucking her head in my armpit. “Can we just lie here for a while?”

“Sure, that's fine,” I say, and wonder how I got this half-naked girl in my bed next to me. She smells good. She rustles around, and I feel the stirrings of something human again. Something about her lying next to me clears my mind. I rest my head on hers and breathe in her blue hair, and soon enough I slip into my dreams.

 

Jane doesn't scream as she slides down the length of rope. She tightens her grip, silently dangling, saving her breath to cling to life. The zeppelin we were so safely riding in has exploded in a gaseous hellfire cloud, and it's rapidly descending. Poor Jane was enjoying the view on the balcony's edge when the airship lunged forward, throwing her out of the gondola and along the canopy wall. It's a miracle she's not dead.

She works her leg around the rope like a big-top circus performer, but it's not enough. Even if she hangs on, it won't stop the blimp's collision with the ground, or the stadium walls. The only thing left for me to do is join her. I climb over the balcony and grab hold of the guide rope. It's not made for this kind of pressure, but the fire's too hot to worry about weight limits and physics ratios. Gravity pulls me down, the rope burns my flesh. But I don't let go. I yell down to Jane that I'm here, everything will be okay. Together we swing urgently back and forth as the burning blimp continues its dive. But the motion creates enough arc for us to jump into a glade of lush trees.

We tumble through the branches, our bodies collecting bruises
and scratches Snapping twigs that could be bones crack and give way. Suddenly, our movement stops. We're back on earth. It takes a moment for us to realize we've survived. I hold Jane's hand and we look up through the hole in the trees. She trembles; she is speechless, soundless, only breathing. The smell of burning gas is everywhere, like we've been bathed in it. To our right, plumes of smoke belch and billow, blocking the sun, making the day seem like night. We're safe now, covered only in huge bunches of the giant maple leaves that cushioned our fall from the fiery sky.

“Everything is going to be all right,” I tell her, and she believes me.