The Lovely Shadow (34 page)

You would think that at sixteen years of age
I would resent being called ‘Baby Doll’, and probably, I would have
if anybody but June or Miss Lilly had called me that, but at that
moment in time I found the term of affection to be deeply
comforting, like medicine for my sickly soul.

When we were done forgiving each other for
all the wrongs we had honestly committed and the wrongs we only
thought we had committed, we were finally able to sit and talk
through the situation without arguing.

Having pushed my own desires to be close to
June at all times aside I was able to understand that a nursing
home would be the best solution, for a while at least. June helped
me to see that I could not just give up on my own life simply
because hers was in peril. I needed to finish school and become
whatever it was that I was going to become.

We both understood that June’s chances for a
full recovery were slim, but we both had hope that she would end up
in that elusive eleven percent range. As we talked I became aware
that June had no fear of death. She had a fear of pain and
suffering, no more profound than your average person might have,
but death itself was not a threat to her.

Although June was not afraid of death, she
did not want to die. She understood that she was the only tether I
had left in this world and she was in no hurry to see me hurt by
the severing of that thin rope.

She did not know about Elle. I knew how crazy
it was for me to be infatuated with an invisible dead girl and had
never told June about Elle’s presence in her home. As understanding
as June had always been, I just wasn’t sure how well she’d
understand that situation.

As for myself, I was terrified by the
prospect of June’s death. She really was the last tether I had to
this physical world. Even though Elle was still in this world, she
wasn’t supposed to be, and I didn’t think she’d stay here forever.
Besides, I didn’t think I could exist in the physical world for
long if the only person I had left to love was in the ethereal.

June and I discussed the future late into the
evening, with as much hope as our bleak despair and fear would
allow, and finished the conversation with hugs and uttered
declarations of love; much the same way we finished many
conversations, and we went to bed.

I was exhausted. Seeing your shortcomings in
alarming clarity—in the glaring light of truth and face slaps—can
be a crippling experience. Furthermore, finding the strength to
admit that you were horribly wrong and apologize honestly is no
less debilitating, and I still had one more person to apologize to
before going to sleep.

I entered my darkened bedroom and left the
light off as I prepared for bed. I was intending to apologize in
the dark, thinking it would somehow be easier to do if I could not
see anything.

Instead of slipping beneath my covers, I sat
down at the edge of the bed before starting my dissertation to the
dark.

“Elle,” I started, speaking weakly and
uncertainly, “I’m sorry. I mean it from the bottom of my heart. I
can see now just how wrong I was and I want to thank you for
showing me that I was being an ass. Please forgive me, Elle.”

I was answered only by the wind blowing
frigidly outside my bedroom window. I got up and raised the blind
at my window and sat staring out into the dark night. It was
snowing again and the numerous lights around the house illuminated
the swirling snow into frantic patterns as it rushed by the window
on its way to its final resting place on the ground where it would
sit quietly, waiting for its transformation to groundwater in the
spring.

Sitting in the dark, staring into the dark
and watching the lonely snow falling to the ground filled me with a
loneliness that ached deep inside me. I knew that I had hurt June,
I knew that I had offended Elle, and I knew that I had been untrue
to myself by allowing myself to become a monster in my fear.

I decided that I deserved the loneliness.
Elle did not need to forgive me and I did not deserve to be
forgiven. June had forgiven me, but I was not worthy of her
forgiveness either. I did not think that June had the capacity
within her huge heart to carry a grudge and would have forgiven me
even if I had been Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, but Elle was a
mystery to me.

I knew she had love to spare. She had shown
it by coming to me every time I needed her most; making her
presence known when I most needed a friend. But I didn’t know if
that love would be able to transcend a mountain as high as my own
selfishness had built.

And what was that she had said about “The man
I fell in love with”? Did she mean me? Without her forgiveness, I’d
never know. It seemed to me that Elle had finally reached a point
where she trusted me enough to begin to reveal herself to me in a
more poignant way, and then I’d blown it by becoming a selfish
beast.

As I stared out the window I felt an uncanny
urge to write my feelings down, somehow intuiting that leaving them
bottled up would result in a cancer in my soul that was every bit
as black and destructive as the cancer that was currently ravaging
June’s body.

I always kept writing supplies at the window
bench as it was where I liked to sit and do my homework and so had
no need to get up and find supplies. The light shining in from the
pole mounted lamps outside was adequate to write by and so I
wrote.

WINTER’S CHILL

The snow drifts down in lazy flakes,

It lands upon the frozen lake.

The doe steals down in search of food,

I sit alone in solemn mood.

Trees now naked dance with breeze,

Raspy witness of cold’s disease.

Their tangled fingers grasp for sky,

I sit alone with silent cry.

Mice in burrows eat winter store,

But still come out to search for more.

At any noise they hide in fear,

I sit alone with frozen tears.

Winter starves the barren land,

Frozen lakes and buried sand.

Snowflakes blanket over all,

I sit alone and watch them fall.

I finished the poem and felt a bit better. I
still had a chill in my soul and the aching loneliness was still
pinching my insides, but some of the pressure seemed to have abated
since putting my emotion on the page.

Apparently, writing my feelings had an effect
not just on my own emotions, but on Elle’s as well, for just as I
was reaching down to pick up the page with the poem on it and put
it away, I smelled roses and felt a cold hand grasp my own, pushing
it away from the page, and a voice whispered urgently in my ear,
“Wait!”

I was so startled by Elle’s sudden appearance
that I gasped and jumped, banging my knee on the underside of the
bench in the process.

“Ouch! Sonofa…” I growled as I reached down
to rub my damaged knee. “For God’s sake, Elle, you scared the holy
crap out of me.”

I don’t know what reaction I was expecting
from Elle at that point but it was certainly not the reaction I
got. She laughed! Elle actually laughed at me. Her laughter sounded
like music to me and brought forth the mental image of water
bubbling over stones in a small stream in the forest, with moss
covered banks and slivers of warm sunlight shining through gaps in
the branches of majestic trees.

The last shadows that remained in my soul
were chased away by the light that Elle's laughter brought forth
within me. “You think that’s funny, Elle?” I asked, smiling. “I’m
sitting here with a broken knee and you think it’s funny?”

Elle continued to giggle and I could almost
see in my imagination the image of a pretty young lady covering her
mouth with one hand, trying to stifle her giggles while staring at
me with merry, twinkling eyes laced with faux guilt.

I couldn’t feign mock anger for long and soon
began to giggle alongside my invisible guest. As I began to giggle
I saw movement from the corner of my eye as a shadow crossed over
the page in front of me.

I shifted my gaze quickly towards the
shadowed page and the shadow vanished, but the page, which had been
turned slightly askew from the force of my knee impacting the
bench, was turned straight again, seeming to move under its own
power.

Elle’s giggles subsided as she read the page
in front of me. I began to feel awkward in the silence. I had never
been one to mask my feelings well, and I was generally pretty
forthright in telling people how I felt, but somehow this little
poem felt much more private and I wasn’t sure I was ready to share
those feelings with anybody.

After a silence that lasted about two
minutes, I felt Elle grasp my hand again and her voice again graced
my ears as she administered a gentle squeeze to my hand.

“All is well Johnny. The darkness has passed
from you, but darkness lies ahead. Keep your strength, keep your
light. I will not forsake you in the sadness; you will forever be
my hope.”

With those words she let go of my hand and I
felt her depart the room, leaving me confused. I was pretty sure
the words meant that she had forgiven me, but I could not fathom
what she meant by me being her hope, and I was afraid to
contemplate what further sadness and darkness was still laying
ahead.

On December 17th, 1999, June went in for
surgery. The procedure took six hours and I spent all six of them
waiting in the aptly named waiting room. I had brought several
books but could not concentrate hard enough to read them.

I kept opening a book and staring at the
pages trying to make sense of the jumbled text that swam before my
eyes. I may as well have been trying to read hieroglyphics for all
the sense I was able to discern from what I stared at.

My mind raced through the entire time and I
could feel my overacting brain sucking energy from me at an
alarming pace. June had not been allowed to eat or drink for
twenty-four hours prior to her surgery and I had been so nervous
and upset that the very idea of eating had induced acid to form in
my belly and so I had not eaten for twenty-four hours either.

I had not been able to sleep the previous
night, had not eaten and could not turn off my mind and the
resultant fatigue was making me twitchy. My eyes burned, my belly
burned and my muscles were beginning to ache.

I briefly wondered if a situation like this
could actually force a person to go insane. I quickly discounted
that idea as I had already promised myself countless times that I
would NEVER be insane, however that process of thinking did get me
to thinking about things I hadn’t thought about in many years.

I first thought about my father. I had never
known my father and wondered if he was still alive. I had forgiven
my mother for all the wrongs she had inflicted upon me, but found
that I still struggled with this one. I wanted to have a
father.

Next I thought about Joe. I thought about Joe
more often than I thought about my unknown father and quite a lot
more than I thought about my deranged mother. I missed Joe terribly
and often wished that he had not perished at such a young age.

I wondered if it was a selfish desire that
led me to wish that Joe had survived that car crash. If he had
survived he might have been forced to go through life disabled, he
would have had to witness our mother coming completely unhinged, he
would have been stuck with the responsibility of raising me after
our mother died, and who knows how many other horrors Time would
have dealt him if he had survived.

It might have been a sick idea, but I had an
idea that Joe was probably better off having died before Time could
abuse him than he would have been if he had survived.

That line of reasoning is a slippery slope
that leads one nowhere but downward into a bottomless pit of
despair where Snoopy nightlights rule kingdoms of darkness with
iron scepters and tentacular armies, but I could not resist the
temptation to wallow in my own despair of life at that moment.

After allowing myself to become properly
depressed I finally thought about my mother. I had managed to
resist the urge to think about her much over the years, fearing
that dwelling on her would remind me of painful memories that I’d
rather forget.

I wondered at her insanity. I wondered if it
was caused by a genetic malformation or whether it was induced
simply by her inability to deal with tragedy in her life. From all
accounts she’d had a happy childhood with loving parents and a
delightful little sister, yet according to hints that Miss Lilly
had given me, she was distant and self absorbed even then.

June had told me countless stories about the
grandparents I never knew, and they sounded like they were
absolutely delightful people, full of love and understanding. I
might have considered June’s interpretations of her parents to be
skewed by personal bias, but Miss Lilly had confirmed June’s
assessment.

When my grandparents died, my mother had been
twenty-one years old, married, and had already given birth to Joe.
When she attended her parent’s funeral she had appalled most people
by neither shedding a tear nor showing any type of grief at all.
Instead she spent the entire day parading herself around the
gathered friends and family with Joe in her arms showing him off to
everybody, as if the gathering was a family reunion rather than a
funeral.

The first great tragedy in her life had not
fazed her in the least. She had already outgrown the needs that her
parents had filled in her youth and they were, therefore,
disposable. She was so wrapped up in her perfect life with John and
Joe that the rest of the world didn’t matter; she already had
everything that she wanted.

Then John died. At that point I think my
mother began to realize that her perfect world was a house of glass
and Time stood beyond the walls with a slingshot and pocket full of
pea-gravel.