Pins & Needles

by Karen Brown

  His eyes took her in. “You are something,” he whispered, sorry and sickened, his hands damp with regret along the sides of her face.

  “Just forget this,” he told her. “Forget everything I said.”

  ———

  But watching the dragonflies she remembers. She sees how he must have called her into the office that night to let her go, how Larry had to do it the next day, telling her on the phone that they were cutting back, business was too slow. She recognizes her grief, the taste of oranges and bitterness mixed with his saliva in her mouth, all of it, in her confusion then, a betrayal. Now, standing in her front yard by the blooming plumbago, she can read Arlo’s tortured eyes, feel his skin under her fingertips, hear his hoarse pleas against her neck, in her hair, and see how she has spent a long time foolishly searching for him in the faces of others. How could she have realized it was her love, expended that night, breathed out into the shoddy office, worn down under the fluorescent lighting, that would emerge flailing and beating, the most beautiful thing she has ever known?

  apparitions

  I saw Auntie Sister in my grandmother’s barn when I was five. She sat in her black habit on a bale of hay in a shaft of sunlight. I waited nearby for her to notice me. Once, she had come to my house and sat on our front steps, her eyes full of laughter. Pieces of her dark hair snuck out of her wimple. She gave me a white leather-covered missal with gilt-edged pages, a silk ribbon bookmark, and colored illustrations—Jesus in all of them, a golden half-moon floating over his head. In the barn she sat still, imperturbable, and did not turn to greet me. I felt the cold of the damp stone floor. I felt I had interrupted something. I ran outside to where my mother and grandmother sat in garden chairs by a border of crocuses. Behind them the house’s long porch trim had lacey cutouts. The driveway shimmered, tiny white pebbles. I didn’t tell them what I had seen. Much later, I learned that Auntie Sister, my grandmother’s only sister, died in a car wreck on the Massachusetts Turnpike the year before I saw her, or didn’t see her, sitting in the sunlight in the barn.

  I thought of Auntie Sister as I stood at my window watching the black-haired teenage boy walk past my house. It was his fourth time by. His hair hung long and fine to his shoulders. He kept his eyes on his toes and placed his feet carefully down onto the pavement. Once in a while he stumbled. The shirt he had on could have been his father’s, the kind of sport shirt worn by men who carry a cigar in their breast pocket, or tickets to a game. Over the shirt he wore a too-large navy blazer. It was a cold, gray morning that looked impossibly like snow. The smell of jasmine came through the open window. My acacia tree bloomed the yellow of northeastern spring forsythia. I remembered the chill of the barn floor again, and felt that the boy, like Auntie Sister, was someone I shouldn’t have been seeing, that I was the only one privileged to witness his passing.

  It had been a month since my daughter took back her three-year-old son, Nicholas. He had been mine for a year while she spent time in rehab and found a job and purchased a car, all things done under the guidance of a social worker. She had not ever wanted to listen to me. There were years of resentment between us—prompted by my divorcing her father. She did not trust or believe me. I might say that she did not love me, but it is childish to admit such things, even to yourself. Assume that love exists. She did not want me to have Nicholas, but there was no one else, so she was persuaded by the social worker to relent. Nicholas was born blind. He came to me with a little white cane, tapping it in my doorway. He held his two hands out and the social worker told me to kneel down. I knelt onto the kitchen’s worn linoleum. I smelled his breath, cloying and sweet. He placed his small hands on my face.

  “This is how he knows you,” the social worker said. Her name was Renee, and she ran her own veined hand through her hair and dropped her folder of paperwork on my kitchen table. She sighed and asked me for coffee. Her eyes were creased, brimming with sad acceptance, and I would learn to trust her enough to eventually, at the end of a year, give him up. I measured time this way now, in relationship to this event. So when the teenager walked past my house, I marked it as a month plus a day that Nicholas had been gone. I had the windows open, and the cold air came through the room. Early spring is the only time Florida reminds me of New England. The humidity hasn’t settled in. The temperature is unpredictable, and there is often a breeze. Everyone’s yard holds some unexpected, tender bloom, and the trees brighten with the shoots of leaves. I live in a neighborhood of bungalows built in the 1940s. Our houses, cement block or wood, with metal awnings, are all in a modest state of disrepair. Most of my neighbors are old people, but there are some young families moving in. I am neither young nor old. I am just alone, which is justification to live here. We are all seemingly lonely. We walk the grid of neighborhood streets with dogs on leashes or singly in our Windbreakers. The young mothers push their strollers. Even their lives seem tiresome and routine. Their faces show resignation. They are pale and slightly overweight. Their great diamond engagement rings flash from their fingers. At their houses they have expensive cars waiting for them in the driveways. And still, they recognize that they are bound to their children and their lives in a way they hadn’t expected. The burden pulls them down and subdues them and they cannot see beyond it.

  It was never this way with Nicholas, though at first, I did not especially want him to live with me. I had agreed out of a sense of guilt for having failed my daughter. I blamed myself, but now I see I was the bandage she undid by leaving. I didn’t know if I was capable of caring for her son. I was set in my own routine. I didn’t own a television and sometimes I drank too much. I told this to Renee when she first called me.

  “How much is too much?” she asked me.

  “I wake up the next morning and my dishes are washed and put away, and I don’t remember doing it,” I told her.

  I heard her scoff. “Do you wake up in your own bed?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Too bad,” she said, and laughed. I laughed, too.

  The day she brought Nicholas over we poured shots of Johnnie Walker into our coffees. We looked at each other across the vinyl tablecloth and I saw that she understood me.

  “You don’t know what will come of this,” she said. “Maybe something unbelievably trying, maybe something amazing.” I have learned there are people with a certain wisdom let loose in the world. Like milkweed, they are aloft and drifting. Once in a while they land into your open palm. Other times, sensing them, you must situate yourself in their path.

  I watched the teenager pass my house for the fifth time. I opened my front door and went down the cement walk just as he turned the corner to the next block. He stopped then, with his back toward me, and bent down to scoop up something in the grass by the curb. The blazer and the shirt rode up his back. His pants were low on his hips. His back was thin, and I could see the ridges of his spine.

  I remembered then the town picnic at the LaSalette Novitiate when I was fifteen. The Novitiate had been vacant for a long time, a large three-story brick structure built in 1904 with added ells, acres of woods, and meadows the Brothers of LaSalette used to farm. The picnic was given by the town’s historical society as an attempt to raise funds and interest in the renovation of the building. I went to the picnic with my friend Celia. We cut through the fields behind my house to get there. We brought a bottle of wine I took from a cupboard filled with bottles I was sure my parents would never miss. I remember the label now, a Château Latour 1947, an expensive one they would allude to, perplexed, for years. It was Indian summer, and the fields smelled of dried grass and withered leaves and goldenrod. We sat in the tall grass and drank. I had befriended Celia for her knowledge of sex, her talk about boys’ mouths and hands and what they might do with them. We lay back in the grass so that only the sky with its reeling birds was visible. Celia’s voice had a little ringing to it, like small bells. The order of LaSalette was founded on the apparition of Mary, and I knew the story and told it to
her, how Mary appeared, weeping, to two children in the French Alps. The children had been cowherds. Mary gave each of them a secret. She appeared and disappeared in a globe of light and moved over the blades of grass without touching them. Celia asked me if Mary was really a virgin.

  “She’s supposed to be,” I told her.

  Her eyes widened. She gasped and put her hand over her mouth. “How awful for her,” she said.

  We drank most of the wine and left the bottle. We went to the picnic, our arms looped together, our faces flushed and laughing, and sat on a grassy bank and watched a band along with the rest of the town: parents and neighbors and little brothers and sisters. There were long tables covered with flapping paper cloths, and food spread out in aluminum tins. Balloons twisted together in the trees. The band sang the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” and little kids stood up and danced, and the grass was trampled from so many people walking back and forth. That afternoon as we sat in the sun Celia told me to keep my eyes open for the boys we’d picked out, and I did, believing I now knew what I wanted from them.

  Outside on my curb, I waited for the teenager to come around again, and when I saw him approaching I stood. I smoothed down my blouse. I blocked his path so he would have to stop, which he did, abruptly, without really looking up. His hair covered his eyes. When he did glance at me it was through a veil of black strands. His eyes were large, deeply blue, and arresting.

  “Are you lost?” I asked him, a mother offering solace.

  He smirked at me. “Why would you ask me that?” he said. His voice was soft and clear.

  “You keep passing by here,” I told him. I would not be put off, and he seemed amused by my persistence. He stared at me through his hair. His eyes were glazed, unfocused. I knew I could not discern what drug he had been taking. I never knew with my daughter, either.

  “Do you want to use the phone?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “No,” he said. He brought his hand to his face and moved his hair back. His hand was thin and gentle.

  “Do you need anything? A glass of water, maybe?” I said. We both stood feeling the wind through our clothes. He hesitated.

  “Are you inviting me inside your house?” he asked. “Is that wise?”

  I liked him, this doped-up boy. He didn’t seem to want anything from me. I owned no small valuables he might covet and pocket. There was nothing he could take that I wouldn’t be willing to give. I sorted all of this out before I invited him in. I held the porch screen door for him. His footfalls on the wooden boards were soft, barely perceptible. He paused by the plastic horse Nicholas used to ride. The day he left I had emptied the house of his things, placing them all on the screened-in porch for my daughter to pick up. I saw the horse’s springs had begun to rust, and my heart swam and swam. The boy put a hand on its plastic forelock. I opened the door into the living room and he followed me inside.

  The room was warm despite the open windows. I inherited all of my grandmother’s furniture, but only the smaller pieces fit here. The rest was stored in a climate-controlled storage space two miles away. Sometimes I went there and opened the door and the jumble of furniture—breakfronts and chintz-covered wing chairs and Heppelwhite tables—imparted the smell of her house. Once in a while, the smell inside my own house reminded me of hers. It did at that moment, like woodsmoke and lemon-polished maple. I told him to sit down, and he chose the farthest end of the couch. He balanced himself there, his narrow knees jutting out, and looked around.

  “Would you like something to eat?” I asked him.

  He put his hands on his knees. “No,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”

  He didn’t say Thank you anyway. He didn’t seem at all grateful to be there. It struck me, suddenly, that I might not have anything to offer him. I sat in the wing chair opposite the couch. I gave him a small, forced smile, but he would not meet my gaze. I was used to this, with Nicholas. I thought it would be easy to hide how you felt with a child who could not see you. In those first frustrating weeks, when he spilled something over and over, I believed my anger was hidden. And later, after we had put up the swatches of soft fabric for him to touch at the entrance to his room, on his chair at the table, and I watched him find his way around the house, he did not see how I cried over his resolve to please me. But all along he was able to read my silences, to know what I thought by the way I moved through a room, or helped him dress, or set his milk down on the table. He would listen to my voice and know its disingenuous tones and somehow sense below them to the truth.

  I sat across from the black-haired boy and looked him over. He was older than I had thought, no longer a teenager, but with the build of one, awkward and lean, unfinished looking. His hands were red-knuckled, resting on the worn knees of his jeans. He kept his face averted, glancing toward the kitchen.

  “Where is the kid you live with?” he asked.

  The question surprised me. I hadn’t expected it from him, and I felt a vague unease.

  “He isn’t here anymore,” I said. I kept my voice level and light. I had answered this question before, posed by the neighbors I passed out walking. They’d noticed I didn’t have him with me. They suspected, of course, what had happened. They were hesitant to ask, almost sorry. This boy didn’t have that same concern. He stared at me now, with his own surprise. There was a line of tension between his eyes.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. He leaned forward a bit, and almost tumbled from the edge of the couch. I saw how unsteady he was, how hard he worked to maintain the appearance of normalcy. My daughter often did the same. We would sit at the table during a meal and the fork would slip from her fingers and clank onto her great-grandmother’s Limoges dinner plate. Her eyes slid over me and away, refusing to meet mine. The world she saw, the one her body moved through, was shifting and unclear. I was always touched by her struggle to convince me otherwise.

  “He is with his mother now,” I said.

  I had received a letter from my daughter the other day, detailing Nicholas’s adjustments to his school. I knew Renee had told her that corresponding with me was part of her therapy, that it was necessary for Nicholas to keep in touch with me. But we had not arranged any visits yet. I called the number I was given and left messages. I wrote notes that she may or may not have read to him. I reminded him of the day we were at the neighborhood park and there was a loud crash, and the smell of splintered cedar, and I described how a bureau full of clothing had fallen off the back of a passing truck, and balls of socks rolled to the park’s chain-link fence, and shirts and underwear flew up and floated down to the sidewalk. Some things, the ones that happen only once, chance things, accidents and mishaps, were the most difficult to describe.

  In my living room, the boy leaned back into the cushions of the couch. He tipped his head to view the ceiling and sighed. I stood from my chair then and turned to the kitchen. “I think I’ll make some tea,” I told him.

  “My name is Davy Thompson,” the boy said.

  “Do you want some tea, Davy Thompson?” I asked. I was in the doorway, looking back at him. I saw his dark hair, the gentle hands, the startling quality of his eyes. Often, we know things and our body reciprocates. This, for example, is a great height and we will not survive if we leap from it. But there are other times our body complicates what we know. Out of old habit it refuses, even, to acknowledge evidence—the tremor of hands, a quickening in the chest, like tiny, beating wings.

  “Tea is fine,” he said then, his voice still soft with amusement. I went into the kitchen and left him alone while the water boiled. I filled a teapot and let the tea steep. I opened the back door to the patio and stood on the stoop and lit a cigarette while I waited. The red amaryllis had come up, the blooms alien and odd on their long, thick stalks. I thought if I left him long enough he would leave, but then he came to the doorway of the kitchen, looking for me.

  “You never told me your name,” he said.

  I exhaled and kept my back to him. “Oh,” I said. I still did
n’t tell it to him. I watched the wind bend the amaryllis, stiff and formal on their stalks. He came up behind me and reached around and took the cigarette from my hand. I watched him bring it to his lips.

  “I saw you and the little boy sometimes, in the yard,” he said. He smoked and I listened to him talk about the times he’d seen us. I realized I had been too preoccupied then to notice him walking past. I watched him smoke the cigarette down to its filter. Then I went inside to pour the tea. I took the teacups into the living room, and he followed me and sat back down in his spot on the couch. He took the proffered cup with a shaky hand and sipped from it and said nothing more. I watched him look for a place to set the cup down, hesitant to use the coffee table.

  “You don’t walk every day,” I said.

  He eyed me and set his teacup, finally, on the wood floor at his feet.

  “Only when I need to think,” he said.

  I felt the breeze from the open window. On it came the jasmine smell.

  “And today?” I said.

  He leaned back into the couch cushion. He laughed, softly.

  “I was trying to decide something.” Through the window behind him the neighbor’s jacaranda bloomed startling as smoke against the whitish sky.

  “And have you, yet?” I asked him. I felt a sense of tumbling, of lost bearings. Davy Thompson shook his head back and forth, slow and weighty, never taking his eyes from me.

  I remembered that on the day of the town picnic, Celia and I found the boys we liked and split up. I was still drunk from the wine. I held the boy’s hand and we went out into the field. My legs trembled. His palm was soft, and I could not wait for him to touch me, and yet when he did I didn’t feel anything. His mouth never fulfilled its predicted wandering. It stayed on mine, or on my neck, wet and sucking, like a snail. There was no undressing. Clothing was pushed hastily aside. The meadow grass scratched and poked. It was all as I had expected, but deadened and flat. Afterward, I could not say I regretted what I’d done. It was as if nothing had happened at all.