Skylight Confessions (8 page)

The noise could be deafening at times, and Arlie kept her windows closed and the shades drawn. It was June and she was dying while she listened to the bulldozers and the cement mixers.

It had been the rainiest spring on record and now everything was so green the leaves of the lilacs and the rows of boxwoods looked black.

The tumor reached under her chest wall and was entwined through her ribs. Her surgeon could not get it all. Her bones had turned to lace. She called her doctor Harry now; it was that bad.

The oncologists put her on a schedule of radiation and chemo, but after a month she was so desperately ill they took her off. She was not an experiment, only a dying woman, one who soon enough had lost her red hair. She had braided it before the chemo began, then cut it off, ten inches long. The rest fell out on her pillow and in the shower and as she walked along the lane, slowly, with Cynthia supporting her when she grew tired. "Hold me up," she told Cynthia. "I'm depending on you."

"I'm not that strong," Cynthia said once.

"Oh, yes you are," Arlyn said. "That's what made me want to be friends with you in the first place."

Arlyn kept the braid of hair in a memory box she was making for her children, stored alongside photographs of the family, pictures Sam had drawn for her, Blanca's plastic name bracelet from the hospital. When the time came, Arlie would add her pearls. After she'd gone through radiation, the poison from inside her skin had soaked into the pearls; they'd turned black, like pearls from Tahiti, exact opposites of what they should be.

Twice she had seen John Moody walk through the hedges at dusk, headed toward Cynthia's house. He thought she wouldn't know because he was now sleeping in the den, but she knew. She rarely left her room now so John must have felt safe to seek comfort next door. The last walk Arlie had taken was the one when she collapsed; Cynthia had stood in the street screaming for help and an oil truck pulled over. The driver was a heavyset man who had carried Arlie home.

"You must be one of those flying men from Connecticut," Arlie had told him.

His wings were probably huge.

"In my truck I surely do fly." The oil man's own mother had recently died. Although he was a tough, no-bullshit guy, he didn't seem that way now. "Just don't tell the police and get me arrested."

"I won't," Arlie assured him.

After that, John had hired a nurse whose name was Jasmine Carter. Jasmine gave Arlie her medicines and helped her bathe and dress. Jasmine took care of Arlie, and Diana Moody came up to take care of the children. Arlie still made sure to hold her daughter close at least once a day; every night she read to Sam, and when she couldn't see the words anymore, he read to her.

"Do you hate me without my hair?" she asked Sam one night. It used to be that they would read in his room and he'd be the one in bed. Now it was reversed, but they never mentioned that.

"I like you better this way," Sam said. "You're like a baby bird."

"Chirp chirp," Arlyn said.

Sometimes, when her hands were shaking, Arlie needed help in order to eat. She felt like a bird. She tried to hide her decline from Sam, but it wasn't easy. Arlyn didn't care what anyone said about Sam. He knew things other children did not. Certainly, he knew what was happening now. He held a glass of water so she could sip from a straw. When she was done, he put the glass on a woven coaster so it wouldn't leave a ring on the night table.

"Sometime soon you're going to take my pearls and put them in a special treasure box that I have," Arlie said. "They're for your sister."

"What do I get?" Sam wanted to know.

"You had me all to yourself for six years," Arlie said. "Maybe we'll get to seven."

"Or eight or nine or ten or a thousand."

It felt like a thousand years already. It was as though she had used up all her time, but was still hanging on. She could not stand the noise outside, the men shouting as they poured cement, the clicking as the tiles were put in, aquamarine-colored tiles from Italy; John had ordered them straight from the factory outside Florence, that's how good his Italian was now. He had sat beside Arlie's bed and showed her the catalogs of tiles. Sky blue, azure, turquoise, midnight.
Turchese. Cobalto. Azzurro di cielo. Azzurro di
mezzanotte.
She'd fallen asleep in the middle of the conversation, and in the end John chose the tiles he liked best.

George Snow didn't know about Arlie until one afternoon when he happened to meet up with his brother at a bar in New Haven.

George was having a late lunch, a cheeseburger and a beer. He wanted to be left alone, but Steven came to sit beside him. Right away, as though they hadn't stopped talking to each other months ago, Steve spoke of the man who was responsible for their failed business and their nonexistent relationship, though he'd sworn he'd never say the name aloud.

"That bastard Moody is putting in the swimming pool to end all swimming pools. And with her in the middle of dying."

George Snow would forever after remember that he had just put down his glass when he heard the news. His brother went on speaking, but George didn't hear a word. He heard only about her.

"Are you talking about Arlyn?"

Steve realized what he'd blundered into. "She's sick, man. I thought you knew. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was."

George threw some money on the bar and went for the door.

His brother called, and when George kept on going, Steven followed him into the parking lot.

"Seriously, George, she's not your wife and it's not your business.

They went ahead and had another kid, didn't they?"

"When was that?" George said, stunned.

"This past winter. I thought you knew."

George got in his truck and took off. He had a panicky feeling inside his chest. He could be angry at his brother all he wanted, but George knew he had only himself to blame for not knowing.

He'd moved to New Haven so he wouldn't run into Arlie; he'd been a coward in the face of her rejection. He'd figured if she had changed her mind, she would have contacted him. He'd figured she made the choice to stay with John. Now everything he'd been so sure of was evaporating.

George Snow was driving so fast little stones flew up and hit against his windshield. When he got to the street where she lived his panic worsened. There were four trucks parked in the driveway, so he pulled onto the grass. The lawn was soft from all the rain in the spring and his tires sank in deeply, but George didn't give a damn. As an ex—window washer he noticed that the windows were in bad shape, streaky and matted with leaves and pollen.

As he sat in his parked truck, not knowing what to do next, a woman came out of the house. George recognized her as the mother-in-law. She had Sam in tow — it was Friday, music lessons

— and in the mother-in-law's arms, the baby. A real, live baby.

George Snow watched them get into a car and pull away. He was dizzy and overheated; he felt as though he'd just woken from a dream in which he lived in a third-floor apartment with an old collie and worked in a pet shop. But now he was awake. He left his truck and went up the drive to knock on the door. When no one answered, he rang the bell; he just kept his hand on it until it sounded like church bells. A woman George didn't recognize opened the door. "Stop that," she said. "Have you no consideration?"

George Snow walked past the strange woman, into the hallway.

It was so dim inside, as though he'd wandered into a dark wood.

"Stop right there." The woman was a nurse. Jasmine Carter.

"You'd better do what I say or I'm calling the police." "I'm going to see Arlyn."

The house used to seem perfect to George; he knew it so well from looking through the windows. But it wasn't the way he remembered it. Standing in the hall, he couldn't see outside through the glass.

"Oh, no you're not," Jasmine said. "I'm in charge of Arlyn and I'll tell you what you'll do. Do you have any idea of what's going on here?"

"She'd want to see me."

Jasmine and George stared at each other and George knew he was being assessed. Who exactly was he to think he had any right to anything? He thought about the children in the driveway. He thought about all he didn't know.

"I'm going to see her no matter what you say," George told the nurse after he introduced himself.

One thing he clearly was was a man who would cause a ruckus if Jasmine tried to get rid of him. And he was more; when he said his name, Jasmine recognized it. It was the name Arlyn said in her sleep.

"Well, if you want to see her, you'd better be prepared. I won't have you upsetting her with your reaction. Get all of the bullshit out right now. What you're about to see isn't pretty."

"I'm okay," George said.

"You won't be," Jasmine said. "Trust me."

"You don't know anything about me."

"I know she talks about you when she doesn't intend to. Most probably, she wouldn't want you to see her this way."

George hadn't thought about how terrible it would be to love someone and see her in pain. He had not had a glimpse of Arlie in more than a year. He had begun to heal, if anyone could call a life spent alone and cut off healing.

"I'm okay," he said. "No matter how she looks."

He followed Jasmine upstairs.

"She's sleeping a lot. She wishes she could go outside, but it's just too hard for me to carry her. Fifty pounds is my limit."

As they walked along, the glass ceiling above them was streaked with pine needles, pollen, leaves, raindrops, a mourning cloak.

They walked past the children's rooms.

"Does the baby have red hair?" George asked.

"Blond." Jasmine had been a nurse for fifteen years. She could sense certain truths in an instant. "Like you."

Jasmine knocked when they reached Arlyn's room; she opened the door and peeked in. "Someone here to see you."

No response. Jasmine nodded to George to follow her inside.

They could hear the tile men finishing up the pool and the dreadful cranking of the water trucks unfolding their hoses.

Jasmine went over to the lump in the bed. "Lucky girl, you've got a visitor."

"Send them away." Arlie's mouth was dry and cottony from the high dosages of Demerol the doctor had prescribed. She didn't sound like herself. It was as though the words hurt.

Arlyn's back was to them, but George could see her head. No red hair, no hair at all. He could feel a stone in his throat. He hated himself and he hated the world and he hated this instant in time.

"Arlie," he said. "It's me."

He could tell that she recognized his voice because she responded; her back curled more rigidly, like a turtle in its shell. For an instant, she seemed to stop breathing.

"He can't see me," Arlyn said. She'd been snapped back into the world from her dreaming place and it didn't feel good. It felt as though her heart would break.

"Blindfold me," George said to Jasmine. "I don't have to see her to be with her. I promise I won't look at you," he told Arlie.

"You're crazy," Jasmine said, but she took a scarf from the top dresser drawer, wrapped it over his eyes and tied it tight. "He won't see a thing," she assured Arlyn. "He just wants to sit beside you, honey."

"I'm vain. I want him to remember me as I was." Arlyn was whispering but George heard her perfectly well. Jasmine had sat him down in a chair beside the bed. He could feel Arlie's breath.

He could feel the blankets against his knees and the wooden bedframe. He'd made love to her there once. Quickly, guiltily, with great pleasure.

"He doesn't even know about the baby," Arlie said.

"I'm going downstairs for a few minutes." Jasmine understood what this man wanted — the same thing everyone wanted: time.

"Call if you need me."

"I should have come back," George said. "If I had come here over and over again, you would have said yes and left with me."

Arlie took his hand. For a moment he was shocked by how cold she was. She brought his hand up to the pearls.

"Oh," George said. "I threw them under the hedge when you told me to go."

The pearls had never been off her throat, except during medical procedures, and even then she'd had one of the nurses slip the pearls into her uniform pocket beneath her surgical robe. During radiation she'd had them in her locker with her belongings, there at all times. For luck, for love, for no reason at all. They'd been his mother's pearls, he'd never gotten to tell Arlyn that, and his grandmother's pearls before that.

They sat there for a while, hand in hand, in an instant of time neither wanted to end. Her vision was going, but she could see him, the way people see clouds — beautiful, racing by, casting shadows.

"I was never going to leave Sam. Anyway, you're lucky I didn't come with you. Then you'd be stuck with me."

But he was stuck anyway, even though she hadn't come away with him. George lowered his head and cried. He made a sound that was low down inside him, all hurt, nothing else. He could see through the haze of the scarf Jasmine had tied over his eyes. He saw it all.

"Now I'm the one who's stuck," Arlie said. "I hate being trapped in this room. I've considered leaving my body before I die. I keep thinking about grass and the boxwood hedge. The way the sky looks when you're lying on the ground staring up."

This was the most she had spoken in a week and the words had exhausted her. She waved her hand. She couldn't say more. She felt like the luckiest person in the universe to have George Snow sitting beside her.
Put us in a jar,
she thought.
Put us in eternity.

Through the scarf George could study her pale face without a single freckle; they had all disappeared. There were her beautiful cloudy eyes. Oh, it was her. Arlie. So tiny. Wasting away. Sixty-five pounds, but still here.

"If you let me take the blindfold off, I can carry you outside.

Otherwise I might fall down the stairs and kill both of us."

Her laugh was like water.

He took the blindfold off. Jasmine was right. Seeing Arlie fully was harder than he'd thought it would be. He saw how blotchy and swollen her face had become. He saw the veins in her scalp.