Skylight Confessions (14 page)

THE COURT ORDERED THAT SAM UNDERGO REHAB IN THE hospital for three weeks if the drug charges against him were to be dropped. Luckily, he'd had only a small amount of hashish in tinfoil stuck in his pocket. During this time he refused all visitors, requesting only that his sister come to see him. John Moody forbade this. There was no reason for a ten-year-old girl to be subjected to drug rehab. But the children's father could construct whatever rules he wanted; Blanca still managed to get over to the hospital every day. It was Meredith who discovered this; she'd come to retrieve Blanca from dance school and noticed that while all the other girls were piling out of the front door, Blanca was approaching from the road. The next day, after dropping Blanca at the library, Meredith waited in her car, parked behind a hedge of pines. Blanca left the library after fifteen minutes and Meredith drove after her, following at a distance as Blanca walked to the hospital. When she came out a while later, Meredith honked the horn. Blanca got into the VW. No excuses. Nothing. She looked straight ahead.

"Did you get to see him?" Meredith said.

"I write notes and he answers. One of the nurses takes mine in and then brings me his."

"What does he write?"

"I write. He makes pictures."

Meredith thought this over.

"I can just drive you here and then we don't have to pretend you're at lessons or at the library."

"Really?" Blanca was such a good girl that all the lying she'd been doing had taken a toll. Her hair seemed dull and stringy and her face had broken out.

"Really."

On the day Sam came home, they made a chocolate cake to celebrate. He had to still like chocolate; he couldn't be that changed. Cynthia went and got ice cream and when Blanca and Meredith seemed surprised, she said, "I don't wish bad things for Sam, you know. I wish him well."

During this time, whenever the children's grandmother called and Cynthia answered, Diana Moody hung up. Diana wanted to speak with Meredith.

"Cynthia knows you're hanging up on her," Meredith told Diana. Diana had recently had a stroke, and she was upset that she couldn't come to help out. She thought of Meredith as her alter ego, the one person who would tell her the truth.

"I didn't like Sam when he was a little child," Diana admitted one day when she phoned. "I thought he was rude, but he was simply honest. He didn't keep anything inside."

"He's still the same," Meredith said.

"That's why he hurts," Diana Moody said. "There's no barrier to stop the pain."

John Moody was the one to go and get him. Sam glared as his father signed him out and he was given his wallet and packet of chalk. "Thank you and fuck you all," Sam said to the nurses.

"That's enough," John Moody told him.

"I'll bet this was for my own good," Sam said.

"I don't want to play games with you." John felt so old he couldn't believe he'd ever been a young man out for a good time, looking for a party, thinking his whole life was ahead of him.

"Actually, I can't remember you ever playing a single game with me. No wonder I can't play baseball. Or basketball. Or tennis. Or fucking horseshoes for that matter. Thanks, Dad."

"You want to blame me for your lack of athletic ability?"

They hadn't even left the ward and here they were, already.

"What's the point?" Sam said. "You don't understand me any more than you ever understood my mother."

"Don't you dare mention her," John said.

"Fuck you. She's my mother. She was nothing to you. I'll mention her all I want. If I want to say one word for the rest of my life and it's her name, I will. So don't push me."

They didn't speak again on the ride home. In the driveway, they got out, slammed the doors shut, then tried their best to avoid each other on the way inside. Sam didn't bother going into the kitchen, though they called to him, and Blanca chased after him.

"Thanks but no thanks, Peapod," he said to his sister when she told him about the cake. "You have it."

Things turned really bad two days after he'd come home.

Forty-eight hours and he was up on the roof again, high as could be. He'd only been to the corner store and for a long walk, and somehow he'd managed to score. It was early morning, and John Moody was headed out to work when he realized what was going on. He was in the driveway and he felt a chill. He stopped and put one hand up to shade his eyes. He felt as though he were watching a film: a man's son climbs onto the glass roof and stands there, waiting for the next gust of wind. Does the man run and rescue him? Does he stand there, so incapacitated he cannot move? Or does he climb up alongside the boy and make the leap himself ?

Going to the tearoom on Twenty-third Street had done no good.

That was just a foolish last-gasp attempt to be free of Arlie. It wasn't just soot and voices and dishes and ashes. He truly saw her.

In the morning, walking down the hall; at dusk, beside the boxwoods. Other men might have convinced themselves all they were seeing were shadows, only a grid of light, but John knew better. It was her. She was young, the way she'd been when they first met, when he'd gotten so lost he couldn't find his way. He saw her now, as a matter of fact, up on the roof, in the reflection of a cloud, in the movement of the wind. The white dress, the long red hair. He spied her from the corner of his eye, just the shape of her, and every time he saw her he knew: he hadn't done right by her.

And now. Once again. What was the right thing in this situation?

Call the police to rescue his son? Or would that make matters worse? He wished he could ask Arlyn's advice. There on his perch on the roof, Sam seemed to be nodding off; his eyes were closed.

The drugs must bring him peace, John thought. For an instant that poor boy could stop thinking, stop being himself. He could float there, above them all.

Meredith ran outside in her nightgown. She'd spied Sam through the glass ceiling of the second-floor hallway. She couldn't remember having run so fast before, down the stairs, onto the grass.

"Go after him," she said to John Moody, who seemed to be paralyzed, as always. "Go up to the roof and talk him down."

John wished he had a net, or another lifetime, or a different pair of eyes. More than anything, he wished he could find a way to go back in time.
One, he had been lost since the day he made a wrong turn.

Two, he had married the wrong woman, although which one had been
more of a mistake he couldn't say. Three, he was a man of reason who
never expected to have to deal with such things.
John Moody was overwhelmed. He wished he could stretch out beneath the boxwoods and breathe in their spicy scent and never have to think or talk or do anything again.

"Are you just going to stand here and watch him fall?"

Wasn't it John who was falling? When he dreamed, he was in a tree or on the top of one of his own buildings; he dreamed he was tumbling down and yet there were stars rushing at him. At night, when he opened his eyes, he knew Arlie was close by. Behind the curtains, on the window ledge, beside him in bed, her head on the pillow. What had once felt like a curse had become a comfort. He'd wanted to get rid of her, yet now he found himself searching her out.
Arlie?
he whispered late at night, while he sat in the kitchen, while Cynthia was asleep in their bed.
Are you there?

"Good lord!" Meredith said, disgusted. "Why can't you ever do anything to help him!" Meredith raced back into the house, then took the flights of stairs to the attic door. She climbed through so fast she was dizzy. Her heart hurt. She pushed the door slowly so she wouldn't accidentally knock Sam off the roof. "Knock knock,"

she said. She saw his sneaker a fair distance off, so she popped the door open the rest of the way.

"It's not a suicide attempt," Sam said. "So don't start with that crap, Merrie. I'm not an idiot."

Meredith crept out onto the glass roof. Her nightgown made it difficult. She hoped she wouldn't fall. God, it would be a horrible obituary if she did.
Unmarried, overeducated nanny slips to death and
breaks every bone in her body. Lost woman found in pieces. She could
never save anyone, least of all herself

"There are reasons to live, you know."

"Jesus, the next thing I know you'll be getting me a fucking puppy. You'll tell me everything will be fine if we just clap our hands and believe."

Sam looked shaky. He was wearing jeans and a jacket and he was sweating. He'd been more unstable than ever since he got home; he moved like a sleepwalker, unsteady on his feet. He was done ingesting any kind of garbage he could get his hands on.

Psychedelics took him to a place he didn't want to be. He had his own nightmares; he didn't need any assistance with expanding his mind. He wanted to close his mind down, give it a rest. It was heroin only from now on. The sleep without dreams. Everything he needed, wanted, had to have. He kept his works in his night-table drawer; the needle and strap and spoon neatly rolled up in a piece of worn suede. It was what gave him a reason to live, actually. Wake, live, move — all of it revolved around getting high.

"Actually, that's not a bad idea. I think you should have a pet."

"Don't even think about it."

"Unconditional love," Meredith suggested.

"Doesn't exist. And why are we even having this conversation? I wanted fresh air. Not the air that bastard breathes and exhales."

They looked down on John Moody.

"He means well," Meredith said.

Sam spat out a laugh. It was an unremarkable day for most people in their town, and here he was, deciding whether or not he should attempt to fly.

"I come from another race of people entirely," Sam said.

He glanced at Meredith, gauging her reaction.

"Me too."

Sam rolled his eyes. "No, you don't." "Living is better than the alternative, Sam. I swear on my life."

"In all honesty, what's that worth? A nanny's salary and a used VW?"

"Someone with a terminal disease would want to shake you.

They'd trade with you in a second, for just another day, a week, a year. You're wasting what you've got."

"Maybe I could fly," Sam said more to himself than to Meredith.

"It's a possibility. You can't know if you don't try."

"Maybe
I
could."

"Will you stop that? Don't repeat every damn thing I say. Don't think you're like me. Why don't you just call the police and leave me alone?"

"I happen to love you. I didn't want to or think I could, but I do."

"Well, if you do, there's something seriously wrong with you,"

Sam said.

They both laughed and the laughter drifted down to John. When he heard them, John Moody didn't know if he was relieved or angry. Laughing on the roof while he was sweating down here, late for a meeting, trapped in a big mess of a life that he could have avoided if he'd never stopped to ask for directions.

He never did that now. He wouldn't even think of slowing down.

He'd circle around for hours in his car rather than pull into a gas station and ask for help. It wasn't pride that stopped him, it was fear. Look where a wrong turn had led him. He simply couldn't risk it again.

Often, the life he might have had came to him, the life he was supposed to have before he made a wrong turn. There were two well-behaved children who waited for him at the door when he arrived home from work and a perfectly trained German shepherd dog who went running with him in the evenings. Or it was Paris, and he lived alone in a vast apartment. Or it was Florida, somewhere on a golf course, someplace quiet, not even the sound of birds. But in all these places, there was always a woman in a white dress. She was so young, little more than a girl. She must have put a spell on him; that's how the whole thing began. He wasn't the sort of person who would walk into a stranger's house, sleep on her couch, find her naked in the kitchen, be willing to do anything in order to have her. He'd been with only three other girls before Arlie, one in high school, two in college; they'd been furtive encounters, less sexually exciting than anxiety provoking, with the girl saying no while John begged until she finally relented and they did the deed.

It was the way Arlie had given herself to him that stayed with him. A perfect instant in time. His footsteps in the kitchen. Arlie turning to him from the sink. Lost and then found. Discovered in some deep way. He was stuck there, he realized that now; that young girl with red hair sifted through his reality forevermore.

Now, for instance, he'd been so intent in his thoughts that when he looked up he was surprised to find that Meredith and Sam were no longer on the roof. It was as though they had flown away when he wasn't looking.

"My father never cared about me," Sam said.

They had gone downstairs to the kitchen, where Meredith was fixing tea, hoping to sneak some food into Sam. She made toast, but Sam waved it away. He was watching out the window. John Moody was staring at the lawn.

"Maybe I jumped and he just doesn't know it," Sam said. "Maybe he'll stumble over my body."

"Eat this toast," Meredith said.

"Without peanut butter?"

Merrie got the peanut butter from the cabinet.

"You can't see love," she said.

"Bullshit." Sam opened the peanut-butter jar. He went through a period when he was younger when he would eat only peanut butter and jelly. "You definitely can."

"Really?" Meredith said. "Show me."

Sam grinned and tore his toast apart, offering her half. Merrie sat down beside him at the counter and ate toast and drank tea. They decided to leave the dishes for Cynthia to wash.

"Thanks," Meredith said even though she hated peanut butter.

"You were right."

Sam grinned. "Finally right about something."

* * *

BLANCA AND MEREDITH WERE WALKING ALONG MAIN Street on the way to the bookstore, when they came upon the pet store. Snow's Pets. Meredith had never noticed the shop before. Behind the glass were basset-hound puppies.