Skylight Confessions (13 page)

She had seen the needle marks on Sam Moody's arm and the cuts on his arms. Those Japanese knives in his room that he swore were dull-edged antiques were sharp enough to do damage.

Meredith had been there herself. She understood exactly what Sam was doing. Trying to feel something, anything at all. She would be a far superior tutor in such matters than she was in algebra. She knew all the angles. The one thing she knew for certain was that when you were in pain you knew you were alive, if being alive was what you wanted. If, when you came right down to it, it was of any worth at all.

* * *

SAM WENT MISSING IN OCTOBER. HE'D DONE IT BEFORE, but for only a night or two, giving them a good scare before dragging himself home from Bridgeport, hungover, sick from drugs, ready with some cock-and-bull story not even he expected his father and Cynthia to believe. But this time was different. Four nights passed, and then five. There was something sorrowful in the air, a shock wave of regret. John Moody sat in the living room every night, but Sam didn't appear. It got so that John would have been happy to see a sheriff's car pull up, lights flashing. Yet John believed that a call to the police could easily create more trouble, so a private investigator was hired. Sam had been seen in Bridgeport, running with a crowd of drugged-out friends, but he was difficult to pin down, and his snarky little circle didn't tend to be helpful; even when they were paid off, they gave false information. Sam was elusive; he knew how to get lost.

On the sixth night of his disappearance, Meredith went to look for him herself. She rattled down the trash-strewn streets of the projects where Sam was quite well-known. People said,
Sure, Sam,
that crazy dude,
but offered nothing more. Meredith noticed very few women hanging out on stoops and in doorways; only young men. Men in trouble, men worn out, men who had nothing more to lose. Meredith drove past the bus station, looking for teenagers, and parked her car outside a seedy liquor store. She showed a photograph of Sam to everyone who went in the store, but no one could help. "Give it up," some nice older woman told her. "He'll come home when he's good and ready."

When Meredith got back to the house, John Moody was in the living room, still waiting.

"I think it's hopeless," he said.

"Not quite yet. Maybe he's staying with a friend."

"I don't mean Sam. I mean me as a parent."

Meredith sat on the couch. She was wearing her navy blue coat because there'd been a chill in the air. She didn't take it off.

"I must have done something wrong in a previous life," John Moody said.

Meredith laughed. "This isn't about you being punished. It's not about you at all. It's about Sam."

"But I am being punished. That's become clear to me. That's what I believe."

Meredith wished she had come in through the kitchen and had managed to avoid John. She felt guilty that she'd never let on how she'd come here in the first place, that she'd known who John Moody was before she ever arrived at this house. She knew exactly what type he was: a desperate man willing to ask a psychic for help.

"I don't think I believe in anything," Meredith said.

"How nice for you," John said. "If you don't believe in anything, nothing can let you down. Unfortunately, I believe we all pay for our mistakes. We burn for our sins."

John Moody excused himself and went upstairs. It was unseemly for him to be talking to a babysitter about such things. Bone close, blood close, close as sorrow moved you. Anyway, Sam clearly wasn't coming home; it wasn't even night anymore. The sky was brightening, and in the Glass Slipper light spilled down from above.

Meredith had almost told John Moody the truth:
I see her, too. I
followed her here. I think if I believe in anything, I believe in ghosts.

Instead, she said nothing; as always, she simply did her job. When she found ashes, she swept them into the dustpan. Birds in the house were caught and set free. Broken china was tossed in with the trash. Shadows were overlooked. But Sam — how did they overlook his absence?

"I'm sure he'll be back by tonight," Blanca had vowed for six, and then seven, and then eight days in a row.

They had to go on about their lives, didn't they? The world didn't stop because one person was missing, whether or not they wanted it to. Real life continued more or less unchanged. Newspapers were delivered, dinners served, chores done. One afternoon Meredith drove Blanca to the library to take out books for a report on religions of the world. While there, Meredith noticed a sign announcing a lecture at the end of the month: "The Physics of Ghosts." A Yale professor and a graduate student would be debating the "reality" of the next dimension.

Blanca came up behind Meredith. "My father says that sort of thing is crap."

"Does he?"

Meredith carried half the books once they were checked out and Blanca the other half. Blanca seemed to be favoring Buddhism. She was a believer, although she didn't quite know in what. Her bookaholism was growing. She was always ducking into the bookstore, spending too much time at the library. Beneath her bed she had a cache of books Cynthia would never have approved of, all sorts of things a girl her age was not supposed to read, from Salinger to Erica Jong.

"My father says psychic phenomena is nonsense," Blanca amended. "I added the
crap."
"Lovely vocabulary, Bee." "Thank you ever so much."

On the drive home, as they were rounding a corner, chatting about what their favorite section of the library was — fiction for Blanca, history and biography for Meredith — and listening to a country-and-western station, they saw Sam. They had, for a few brief moments, actually forgotten he was missing. Libraries and an armful of books could do that to a person. And even when they spotted him, Sam seemed like a ghost himself, pale, wavery, an image they might have conjured. But no, it was truly Sam. He was outside the market drawing on the sidewalk. A small crowd had gathered around to watch. There was color everywhere. It looked like blood and blue feathers and white bones. But it was only chalk and concrete.

"Why are all those people around him?" Blanca asked.

Meredith pulled the car over and opened her door. "Stay here."

Meredith walked toward the crowd. People were laughing as though they were watching a circus act. Maybe it was amusing if you didn't know him: a stoned-out kid in filthy clothes scribbling madly, drenched in colors.

Sam had covered nearly an entire block with his chalk drawings.

He'd done this in his room, illustrating every wall with glow-in-the-dark paint; now he seemed intent on covering the rest of the world, or at least this part of it. Saturating everything in a vision of his own. It was not a world anyone would choose to enter of his own free will. These were nightmares, dead bodies, dead birds, skeleton men carrying two-bladed axes, winged figures without faces flying above burning buildings. Sam's arms and face were turquoise and scarlet and black.

Meredith made her way to the front of the crowd. Sam was so busy he didn't even notice her. She crouched down beside him. He glanced up and didn't seem surprised in the least to see her.

"Hey," he said without stopping work. Sam's eyes were all pupil; he was seeing what others could not, would not, want to see. He'd been taking psychedelic drugs for several days. He would never remember how he'd gotten back to town. Maybe he flew. Maybe that was it. He was in a tunnel in Bridgeport and he simply willed himself back to his hometown.

"How long have you been doing this?" Meredith asked.

An entire block's worth. His hands, she saw now, were bleeding.

Halfway between the dry cleaner and the market there was a chalk drawing of a woman in a white dress. Her hair was red.

"I started around midnight. I was on my way home, and it just came to me. All in one piece. I didn't even have to think."

He'd been at it for fifteen hours, all through the night and morning, into the afternoon.

The market manager came out and tried to disperse the crowd.

"The police are on their way," he shouted to Sam. "I'm not kidding. This is private property."

"Actually, the sidewalk belongs to everyone, asshole." Sam didn't stop drawing for an instant.

"Why don't we go home now?" Meredith suggested.

She glanced toward the parked VW. There was Blanca, opening the door so she could watch. The red-haired woman seemed to rise from the concrete. She was translucent; Meredith could look right through her to a parked minivan.

"Come on." Meredith reached for Sam.

"Fuck it, Merrie! I'm busy!" Sam snapped his arm back. His eyes were bright. "Don't you see I'm doing something! For once! Really look at me!"

No one had called her Merrie for years. She felt as though everything she'd ever done was a mistake; she'd never been able to save anyone and she couldn't seem to do it now. All at once she knew that was why she was here. The true answer to Cynthia's question. How could an educated, attractive young woman such as herself accept this thankless task? Because she couldn't let Sam sink.

There was a siren somewhere. People in the crowd were jeering.

Someone said something about Satan at work. Those nightmare figures. The skeletons with the double-bladed axes. The woman with blood instead of hair.

"Here's my plan," Meredith said. "We'll leave this here for people to enjoy and we'll get some supper and talk things over. Blanca's in the car waiting. She's missed you, Sam."

"There is no fucking
we.
" Sam continued to work. His knuckles were bleeding, but blood meant nothing to him.
"We'll leave this
here and go back home to prison"
he said in a singsong, mocking Meredith. Instantly his fury returned. "This is
me.
Only me!"

"I want to hear about it. I want to talk about it." The damned sirens were almost on top of them. "Come on, Sam." The one thing Meredith didn't want was for them to have to deal with the police. Was she an enabler? Then so be it. She truly believed no good would come of a drug test or a jail term. Not for Sam. He would drown in the authorities' good intentions. "We have to go now."

"You might think I'm crazy, but I can see what a person thinks in his eyes." Sam swept his hands out over the sidewalk. The mass of color, the crimson, the ghosts. "I can put the inside outside. This is me on the sidewalk. Nobody ever sees me."

Blanca had left the parked car and was close by. She'd overheard her brother; her face looked so solemn she didn't seem like a child anymore.

"Go back and wait for us, Bee," Meredith told her. "Call your father at work."

Blanca didn't listen. She was a good girl who never disobeyed, but she disobeyed now. She went to Sam and knelt beside him. A film of blue chalk dusted the cuffs of her coat. "I know it's you."

Sam stopped coloring. He was breathing hard.

"I see you," Blanca said.

Sam started to cry. He couldn't remember the last time he'd wept. It hurt, like little daggers inside his eyes. He was exhausted; he'd been there on the sidewalk since the middle of the night, thinking and thinking, making his world appear, and now his hands were scraped raw.

"Come home with me," Blanca said.

"I don't think I can," Sam said.

"We're begging you," Meredith said.

"Never beg anyone, Merrie. It's beneath you. You have more character than that."

Two police cars and an ambulance had pulled into the parking lot of the market. The manager was waving his arms around, signaling the authorities. Sam remembered the feeling he was having now. He'd had it before, a long time ago. The knives against his legs, the pins in his fingers, the bones of his squirrel, the way his heart had broken. Everything was in pieces. He'd put the pearls his mother had given him in the cardboard box, and he hadn't looked at them since.

Two officers approached and tried to speak to Sam.

"Don't fucking talk to me, man. I'm busy. Can't anyone see that?

Why don't you open your eyes? That's all it would take."

When the officers reached for him, Sam scooted out of their grasp. When they grabbed him, he hit anything he could connect with. They got him down on the sidewalk then. Chalk dust flew everywhere. Blanca covered her ears. The way Sam screamed was too terrible to hear, as though he would die if he didn't finish his drawings. His world would not be complete and then he would fade away into nothingness. Ashes. Soot. Broken china. Hollow bird bones. Ghostlight.

Meredith held Blanca when the police dragged Sam through the parking lot. Blanca was calling for her brother, but no one heard her. The crowd was still there, and some people applauded.

Someone must have pointed Meredith and Blanca out to the police, because an officer from the second car came over and asked for Sam's full name and address and telephone number.

"Don't tell them anything!" Blanca said. She tried to get away and run to the ambulance, but Meredith held her back.

"Can we go with him?" Meredith asked the officer. "This is his sister."

"Let me just take down all the information we need for the files," the officer said. "Everyone calm down."

So they did. They had no choice. Blanca cried quietly and hid her face in Meredith's coat. The ambulance pulled away while Meredith was reciting their address.
Glass House. Last House. Lost
House.
They could see him soon enough at the hospital, the officer assured Meredith, where he would be held for observation and drug testing. There were official procedures. Weren't there always?

They had to give the situation some time. Already, the manager of the market was hosing off the sidewalk.

"Look what they're doing!" Blanca cried. "He's disappearing."

It was amazing how many colors there were, all running into the gutter in a stream: a dozen shades of blue, twenty different reds, and all that black soot, like a nightmare given form, the insides of a heart, destroyed so easily, done away with before anyone could stop the damage, or salvage what was lost, or even try to save him.