Skylight Confessions (22 page)

He was late, naturally, but at last he arrived. He'd come to meet her in a coffee shop across the street from the train station, his hair unwashed, wearing that filthy gray overcoat he'd come to favor, which made him look like the sort of person no one wanted to sit next to. As Blanca told him how terrible things were at home, Sam played with his silverware, stabbing the tips of his fingers with a fork. The pupils of his eyes were so big his eyes looked completely black. Like a well into which you drop a stone that is never seen again, like the water down below, dark and motionless and so very still. Even Blanca could tell he was high on heroin. He did this thing where he scratched at his face and wasn't aware that he'd started to bleed. Little drops of blood fell on the plastic tabletop, and still he didn't notice a thing.

Crying is what they want you to do,
Sam told her that day.
Tears
leave a permanent mark- If you cry, people like Dad can find you
whenever they want to. You'll never be able to hide. Don't you get it?

Blanca had missed him so much she couldn't bear it. She didn't understand what he was talking about; all the same, she made herself stop crying. He was right about one thing: it was a stupid waste of time. Sam ordered toast and black coffee. He laughed and said he was on a diet, though he was bone thin. There were abscesses on his hands and arms.
Check it out Peapod,
he whispered to Blanca. He opened his coat and there was Connie the parrot, dozing in an inside pocket.
No pets allowed,
Sam said.

He stroked the parrot's green feathers and spoke to it in a guttural, nonsensical language he said was Birdish, words Blanca couldn't possibly decipher. He was hushed and paranoid and brash all at the same time. There were things in this world that Blanca couldn't be expected to understand; things he couldn't tell her.

Someday you'll get it,
he said to her.
It all adds up to the same thing.

All that shit about math? It's a load of crap. They want you to thinly
things make sense if you break them down, but they don't.

Sam only stayed twenty minutes. Amy was waiting for him at home and she was getting fed up with his antics.
She thinks I'm
unreliable,
Sam said, and he and Blanca both laughed.
Unreliable
had been a vocabulary word this term, and Blanca knew its meaning only too well. Sam was in such a hurry that he didn't take a single bite of his toast. Blanca had a hot turkey sandwich in front of her, but she couldn't eat. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe that turkey had died for her sins. Sin of omission, sin of jealousy, sin of girls who were not as sweet as they seemed.

When Sam left, Blanca realized that she was freezing. She'd rushed out of the house without her warm coat, and had only a heavy sweater. She couldn't wait to get out of New York. Blanca paid the bill, and she took the train back to Connecticut. When she got to Madison, she sat on a bench in the station until it was nearly midnight. Then she walked home, slowly down the lane. Oak tree, lilac, shadow, lawn. There was frost on the grass, and she was shivering by now; still, she waited on the patio until all the lights in the house were out, until she could let herself in through the back door and go up to bed without having to see anyone.

She saw Sam less frequently after that, and each time was more difficult. Cynthia was right about the drugs; they'd taken hold, they were all he cared about, it seemed. His temper was dreadful.

He got into fights with people; he was arrested for causing a public disturbance and for defacing public property. What was inside him was now outside, in the paintings of winged men he left all over lower Manhattan. Men with huge wings were falling into hell, set on fire, turning to ashes. They called him Icarus, and he signed his graffiti with a
V,
the shape of a bird in a child's painting.

And then, when Blanca was fourteen, Sam disappeared for good.

She went to the apartment he'd shared with Amy and they were both gone. The landlord let her in and the place was horrid — a large birdcage had been left in the center of the room, a fetid, filthy mess filled with torn-up newspapers that spilled out from between the metal bars. There were mattresses on the floor and used needles in the bathroom and forgotten rancid bits of food everywhere. But the walls were brilliant, covered by Icarus paintings, alive with color. For years afterward Blanca searched lower Manhattan; she lied to her father and stepmother and took the train in at every opportunity, desperate to find Icarus paintings, the sign that Sam was still alive. She'd see his artwork every so often, usually rising through a fresh coat of paint on the brick wall of a deli or the side of a bus. Still, the Icarus paintings were recognizable through the whitewash with what were now familiar themes: in his vision those

Connecticut men who were said to fly away from disaster couldn't escape; they were all caught in a web of horror.

Once Blanca left a missive of her own, in an alley off Canal Street where she'd found the image of a man wrapped in thorns.

She couldn't make out the signature
V,
but she thought the painting was Icarus's. It had to be. The look of ecstasy on the man's face: the dusting of scarlet chalk over paint. Blanca took a black Magic Marker from her backpack and wrote her name and her phone number on the wall. For months afterward there were crazy calls to the house. Nasty, filthy messages, but none of them were from Sam. He would never have done that if he'd called. He would have said,
Don't slip, don't take chances, don't bother with me, let
me burn, little sister, just let me fall.

Perhaps someone else might have turned to what family she had, chosen to befriend the little sister who was there rather than remain allied with the brother who'd disappeared. Not Blanca. She had vacated. Even when she was home, she wasn't there. She spent weekends at friends' houses, spent summers as a counselor at various camps, visited Meredith during school vacations, signed up for ballet, soccer, the school newspaper, anything to keep her out of the house. At night Blanca often sat out on the lawn until everyone else was asleep. She looked at the stars, but she couldn't bear to look at the roof. He wasn't there. What was the point?

The Glass Slipper, though still lauded in the Sunday sections of the local newspapers and design magazines, was certainly not Blanca's home. Nothing belonged to her. Nothing was worth caring about. Even when she found Lisa in her room, dressing up in her clothes, face streaked with Blanca's blush and mascara, Blanca did nothing more than turn and walk out.
Take it,
she thought.
Take it all.

"I'm sorry," Lisa had called after, but her tone was angry, almost as though she'd been the one whose belongings had been sullied.

Lisa was a tadpole of a girl, tall and awkward with big blue eyes, clearly her father's favorite. John Moody, who'd barely been home when Blanca and Sam were growing up, now attended all of Lisa's parent-teacher meetings and piano recitals. One year he took Lisa to Disney World during Christmas vacation, leaving Cynthia at home to keep an eye on Blanca. This was during the time of the bad Blanca, the one who was never home, who slept around, the sour, green-with-jealousy teenager who felt she was an orphan.

The cold, harsh girl who got out of Connecticut as fast as she could, first to college in Virginia, then to London. The one who was never going back, the one who picked beetles from in between pages until her fingers were stained with their blue-black blood, like ink she couldn't rinse off, not if she washed her hands a thousand times.

JOHN MOODY DIED IN THE YARD OF THE HOUSE HIS FATHER had built, that award-winning design made out of right angles, glass, and sky. It was a house John hated, but could not leave, because of its architectural value and history, because he had grown up there, but mostly because he had become a captive of his own failure.

Every day when he awoke in his father's house, John was reminded that he himself had never accomplished anything as worthwhile.

All of his work was derivative — a reaction against his father's actions. If questioned, John would have denied that he believed in predestination, he would have said he thought fate was a muddled stew of half-beliefs and wishes and that people made their own destiny. Yet here he was, stuck, unable to change something as simple as his address. It was as though John Moody's life had already been written in some great book in a language that was impossible to erase. Scrawled in blood-ink, invisible ink, life-and-death ink. Unwavering lines of print.

The only time John had veered from the path before him was that one instance when he'd gotten lost. It had been so misty and foggy, the entire trip over on the ferry from Bridgeport had seemed like a dream. A person could wind up anywhere with a single step on a night like that; knock at a stranger's door, fall into bed with her. Even a man like John could shift so far from the path he was on he might never get back where he should have been in the first place. His real life. The life that was meant to be and had unraveled because of a single night, a wrong turn, a girl with red hair standing on a porch.

What if he'd done what he'd set out to do, become the young man who went to study in Italy? Would that path have revealed a different self ? A loving person, a good father? Or maybe those choices would have made no difference. In the end, perhaps he was who he was regardless of any other possibility. John carried his mistakes with him until he was nearly too weighed down to remember what might have been. The children from his first marriage had flown away like birds. What were birds to him?

Creatures that hit against the glass roof, dirtied the windows, unwelcome, untrustworthy beings. There were no pictures of his first wife in his house, no mark that she'd ever existed, and yet he saw her when he came down to the kitchen in the dark, early morning. He saw her on the lawn in the evenings. John Moody spied her whenever he took a plane, up in the clouds or there beside him in the very next seat. John really didn't believe in such things — spirits, specters. Yet there she was, Arlyn Singer, exactly as she'd been when he first met her. She never spoke, only gazed at him. Maybe she wanted something from him, but he had no idea what it might be. She wore the same white dress of some thin fabric he could see right through. In the beginning he thought he was going mad; he went to psychics and psychologists, but in the end he accepted the fact that he was a haunted man.

Arlie wouldn't just leave him and let him get on with his life. Did she want him to suffer? After all, where had he been when she drew her last breath? Next door with Cynthia? Walking across the lawn? In his office, eyes closed, hoping for sleep? He no longer expected sleep and hadn't for years. He avoided it, dreaded it; sleep was blank space in which he drifted unprotected. Whenever he did finally manage to sleep, John had a single recurring dream. He was walking through the Glass Slipper; all of the rooms were dark. He went along a glass hallway, never reaching any destination. He woke up feeling lost, gasping for air. He was always on the verge of discovering something, but at the very last minute, he couldn't find his way.

In the last weeks of his life John had felt tired and his heart hurt, but he paid no attention to his health. Never had.

He was busy, with work, with his family. He'd been teaching his daughter, Lisa, to drive. She was a darling girl but a terrible driver.

During those last two weeks of his life they went out to practice several times; once, when they were halfway to Greenwich, he became so rattled he'd asked Lisa to pull over. He'd gotten out and stood there shaking by the side of the road. He simply had no idea where he was. He started to flag down a passing car, convinced they were miles off track.

Luckily Lisa had a good sense of direction. She was a practical, no-nonsense girl. She got out and led him back to the car.

It's okay, Dad,
she'd said to him.
I
know where we're going. We're
almost home.

He'd sat in the passenger seat, his long legs folded, weakened somehow, more quiet than usual, not bothering to criticize Lisa, even when she nearly went through a stop sign. When they got home, Lisa told her mother about her dad's odd behavior. Cynthia wanted to phone the doctor, but John insisted he was fine. He wasn't. He sat beside the sliding glass doors; there was his first wife out by the pool, naked, pale as milk, the way she'd been in the kitchen the night he'd met her. John felt drawn to her again. He went outside. His heartbeat quickened.

Cynthia had been a good wife to him; he'd been lucky that way.

He'd fallen into an affair with her, terrified by Arlie's illness, by death itself, by his own children. Frankly, the woman next door could have been anyone and he would have knocked on her door in the middle of the night, begging for comfort, desperate for companionship. Considering all that, the marriage had worked out fine. But now he found himself pulling away. It was Arlie he wanted. He noticed the mourning doves that had collected on the lawn.

Earlier he'd seen ashes on the kitchen countertops; he'd noticed cracks and chips in all the dishes. He felt as though something wanted his attention. He went up to Sam's room, closed and locked for years, took the key and went inside. He sat on the edge of the bed. There were ashes in here, too, as though they would never get Sam out of the room: cigarettes, needles, sour-smelling laundry. Sam was gone, yet in some ways he remained. There was a bag of his clothes in the closet, things Arlie had bought, sweaters and overalls. There were his drawings still on the walls.

The odd thing about identifying Sam's body wasn't that Sam had seemed like a stranger, but that in death he'd somehow been returned to John. He looked exactly as he had as a little boy, back when they lived on Twenty-third Street; a good, serious child John hadn't bothered to make time for. Arlie had adored Sam; John himself couldn't understand the ferocity with which she'd loved him. He'd been a terrible father and maybe he had no right to mourn, but he sat on a bench outside the morgue and wept. John hadn't known he could make those sorts of sounds. He hadn't known he could feel anything for his son. He hadn't been certain he could feel anything at all.