The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  I grabbed his transistor radio from the worktable and carried it off, through the house and past the City, to my tent, holding my thumb on the place on the dial where he had left it. My toe throbbed. I fell asleep to my father’s scratchy, incomprehensible station.

  After my father left us, my mother changed. All the dance went out of her. She got very quiet and still and listened to my father’s old Bob Dylan records constantly. I thought Bob Dylan sounded like a sarcastic tree stump or some kind of enchanted troll lurking under a bridge. He haunted our house day and night with his endless sorrows. We made it through the first winter because my mother’s two older sisters kept bringing things over, casseroles and gloves and hats, and they must have brought money, too, though I never saw them giving it to my mother. We had to keep the heat down low, which made my nose run. The raspberry silk seemed to darken and sag with the chill that was always in the air.

  I asked my mother, “Where did he go?”

  She said, “To California, the creep. The coward.”

  “What’s in California?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Can we go?”

  “No.”

  She put the casserole in the oven and slammed the door shut. She picked up the scissors to continue cutting out Buy One, Get One Free coupons from the newspaper, though she never did use those coupons. They piled up on the kitchen counter, week after week, like drifts of leaves, acquiring coffee stains and soap spatters.

  Why is it that people get so much bigger when they disappear? When he lived with us, my father had always been like an extra planet that had somehow strayed into our solar system: rare, awkward, uncanny. He had never fit, exactly, but now his absence was everywhere, it got into everything, like the sound of Bob Dylan. Gone, he loomed. The car made an ominous noise because of him; the stray cats got into the garbage because of him; the house was cold because of him; idiots looked at my mother in the grocery store because of him and then she dropped the bag on the way to the car, spilling groceries into the slush, and then she burned her finger on the stove when she got home and was just trying to make herself a goddamn cup of herbal tea.

  He was like a ghost, bent on some kind of revenge against us. A long time ago, my father had been his high school’s football star and even with the curly brown beard and the loose jeans he had seemed formidable, strong. He had once run with extraordinary grace down football fields from Newton to Medford; he could hurl a spinning football for miles; he moved, my mother said, like a panther, which was also the name of his school’s team: the Panthers. Even later, long after that glory, you could see the panther in him from time to time. After a few beers, he smiled a panther’s smile. His eyes were blue. My mother, curled in his lap in the good years, had looked like a slender beauty to my father’s beast, resting unafraid in his power. They looked famous together, then. He never knelt down to hug me; he always picked me up, lifting me high, holding me against him effortlessly. Once he was gone, I wanted him to come back, but I was also afraid that if he came back he would do us all some terrible harm, he would spring, tear us apart with his ferocious paws, claw the lining out of the sofa, sink his teeth into the curtains and shred them, shred us, before springing back into the night.

  I asked Caroline as we walked home from school, “Do you think he’s coming back?”

  She shrugged. “Who cares?”

  I started to sniffle, blinking back tears.

  She stopped dead, putting her knapsack down on the snowy sidewalk. She took me by the shoulders. “Listen to me, Gabriel. You can’t be like that. Things are going to get worse. We’re screwed.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mom told me. We don’t have any money. We don’t have any credit cards that work. People are suing us about work that Daddy didn’t finish.”

  I had never exactly thought about money before, not in any concrete way, but our not having any suddenly seemed like an enormous pit into which we were about to fall, and I was afraid. My father had dug the pit. I began to cry, and then I peed myself, the hot pee running down my leg and into my sock. I cried harder as it reached my toes. I felt I might pee forever, that I’d engulf the world in pee, a yellow tide washing over everything, flooding all the cities, drowning all the people.

  “Gabe, shit. Stop. Stop it.”

  “I can’t.” Panic engulfed me, made my ears hot, though it was so cold outside and the pee was already chilling my foot. I tried desperately to stop peeing, which only made me pee more. “Are we going to die?”

  “Only if I kill you for being such a retard.”

  “I hate him.”

  “Take a number,” Caroline said, picking up her knapsack. I stopped peeing, more or less, and we trudged home in silence. My pee and my tears dried on my skin. Why hadn’t I heard his truck that night, pulling away? That truck was always so loud. I could have banged on the window, gotten everyone up.

  Sometimes I imagined that my father had had another family the whole time, even when we were in Bishop, a secret family. And that they all moved to San Diego together; he finally chose. Maybe that was what my mother had meant by “coward,” or maybe she meant something else. I no longer understood what she meant by anything. My father had done that, too: scrambled language. It was all so unfair, so wrong. I lay in my silk tent at night and imagined that he was with his other family, building big houses and throwing footballs to his other sons on the beach, who caught every throw in their big, meaty arms, and I hated what I thought of as his fucking guts. He could have his stupid fucking California family, I thought with voluptuous contempt, like shooting arrows high into the air.

  But my arrows didn’t matter. As the winter dragged on, we were caught in his enormous, spectral grip. It dimmed the lights and thinned the soup, burned the pancakes, turned over the garbage cans, knocked the City flat, put the needle back at the beginning of Blood on the Tracks.

  One damp March afternoon after my father left, I was sitting on the floor in the kitchen trying to get one of my papier-mâché dinosaur’s legs to stay on with more glue. It had fallen off during an epic hundred-year dinosaur war. Bob Dylan was complaining about everything on the record player. My mother, in a kitchen chair, had her back to me. The chair had an uncertain leg, too. My mother wore her hair in a long braid all the time now, like a red rope reaching down for a red anchor. Her face was bony. She had on two sweaters, both very fuzzy and bright white. I thought she looked like the North Star. She was also wearing a pair of my father’s huge, old slippers with woolly hiking socks. She wore those slippers every day, big soles slapping on the wood floors.

  Aunt Sheila said, “Mary, Kathleen ran into Mark the other day.”

  I glanced up. My mother was sweeping crumbs into a little design on the table with a forefinger. I wondered what the design was: a whale? In my memory, the light in the kitchen was yellow, but I don’t know if that’s possible, if it was really yellow.

  “Remember Mark?” continued Aunt Sheila. “He went into the Peace Corps?”

  “I remember,” said my mother. “Mr. Earnest Mustache. Mr. Saltwater Conversion. Isn’t he gay now? Maybe that’s what happened to Jeff. Maybe he went gay.” She laughed roughly.

  “Mary,” said Aunt Sheila, leaning forward. I could see the tip of her sharp nose. “You really have to focus.”

  “Well,” said Kathleen in her gentle, reasonable way, “I ran into Mark at the Galleria and your name came up. Anyway, his uncle has this property—”

  My mother’s red braid didn’t move, no part of her moved, as she said, “A property?”

  “In Florida,” Kathleen said. “A motel. He needs a manager.” She paused.

  “It’s warm there,” said Sheila. “The kids can swim.”

  I took the dinosaur leg off, put it on again, backward. I thought about what it would be like to be a dinosaur with a backward leg, if that leg would walk backward on its own.

  Sheila said, “I’ll sell the house for you. I won’t take a commission. We can get you som
ething, at least, for the house. You might be able to break even, after they clear up Jeff’s mess.” Aunt Sheila, twice divorced, was a real estate agent.

  My mother didn’t say anything. Her red braid remained perfectly still. After a while, she said, “Did you tell Daddy about this?”

  “Daddy thinks it’s a good idea,” said Kathleen softly. “Considering.”

  My mother shook her head. She rubbed her face with her cold, small white hands. “And where is it that we’d live exactly?”

  “There. On the property,” said Sheila. “That’s the way they do it. There’s a school right down the highway. Mark says it’s kind of a nice little town. You could start over.”

  “Jesus,” said my mother, which startled me. She never came close to swearing. “Jesus Christ. A motel.”

  There was a silence.

  “Oh, man,” said my mother.

  “Mary,” said Aunt Kathleen, gently.

  “Mary,” said Aunt Sheila, loudly, as if trying to wake her up. “Your life is shit. Jeff isn’t going to send anything, you know that. He’s not coming back. You have to think about your kids.”

  Sitting on the floor, my thumbs covered in glue, I somehow had the idea that we’d be taking the house with us, that the whole house would move to Florida with us inside, rattling slightly from the motion, like the house in The Wizard of Oz. I just deleted the “sell” part. And then, since it was warm in Florida, I thought I could put up my raspberry silk tent in the yard and stay there all the time, eating oranges. We could make the City outside, in the dunes. I thought there would be dunes.

  A few months later, the house in Bishop got smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, then disappeared. I wasn’t sure if we were running away from my father, or if we should have left him a note saying where we were going. We didn’t take his unfinished guitars. They went to an excited high school boy, cheap, at the tag sale. As we drove down to Florida in our old car, I noticed how everything outside was getting not only warmer but bleached, all the color draining away as we headed south. I held tight to my father’s radio, the dial fixed on his station. The shouting men broke up and faded away; eventually they were replaced by a scratchy Jesus Christ, who, like Bob Dylan, was always upset.

  The motel was two stories high, in a town called Brewster. The name of the motel was the Sunburst. It had a tiny pool in front. There weren’t any dunes. In front of the motel was a two-lane highway, and on one side of the motel was a store called the Surf Shack. Mannequins in neon-colored bikinis waved from the window of the Surf Shack.

  “Shit,” said Caroline slowly.

  My mother got out of the car and stood in front of the motel, her hands on her hips. I watched from the back seat, waiting to see what she would do, what we were supposed to do next. Caroline got out of the car, marched up and down the length of the motel, then went to where our mother stood and said something to her. She nodded in response. The two of them looked up at the second story, pointing. My sister pulled her black hair into a knot and came back to the car. “Come on,” she said to me through the window. She was already sweating, her forehead damp. “We’re here.”

  I wish I had never gotten out of the car. I wish I had stayed in the car until I grew up, that they had passed me my meals through the car window and maybe a comic book or two now and then. The car would have been better. Purgatory would have been better, though it was purgatory in a way, dim sandy purgatory by the Surf Shack. The house we had to live in—it wasn’t exactly a house, more like a hived-off part at one end of the motel—was the only place in Brewster that wasn’t sunny; it was dark, with linoleum floors and bad windows and someone else’s television set, left behind on the dining room floor. In the shower were bars of thin motel soap, and in a closet there was a stack of thin, white motel towels. Every towel that I unfolded, then refolded, had a shadowy, indelible stain on it.

  “A single man had this place before us,” said my mother. “That’s what Sheila said. He had some kind of trouble.” She walked toward the kitchen, which wasn’t really a kitchen; it was just a raised place between the living room and dining room with a stove and a sink. My mother opened the two thin, white cabinet doors, closed them again. For an instant I wondered if that single man was my father. Maybe we had luckily, coincidentally, followed him, like in a movie. Maybe he was at a diner in town, having a cup of coffee.

  I went to plug in the television set, but found that the cord was cut, like a bobbed tail. Ragged bits of wire stuck out of the stump that was left. Why, I wondered, would someone do that? Would my father do something like that? But I couldn’t convince even myself of my story. I had gotten so much older on the drive down. I knew he hadn’t been there. It wasn’t him. He wasn’t waiting for us at the diner, or anywhere else. Aunt Sheila was right: he wasn’t coming back. I set his radio on the kitchen counter.

  “Whoa,” said Caroline, walking around, making a hollow noise on the linoleum. “Whoa.”

  Sometimes I ask myself if it would have been different if we’d never had to move. If I would have been different. Maybe I mean the opposite: if we’d never had to move, I wouldn’t have changed in the way I did. And did the change begin in Brewster? Or before? Things have a way of flowing on, one rivulet leading to the next. I can’t make it all out. When I go back in my mind, I see a gate connected to nothing, a house with a City inside, five unfinished guitars, and then all the rest, eventually bumping down to Florida like a ball bumping down a staircase. It’s only in retrospect that it all seems inevitable, that I seem inevitable. Maybe it happened because we were in Brewster for such a long time, longer than I ever would have thought was possible when we got there, when I was eight. We were there so long that the house in Massachusetts started to seem like a dream, a dream of a City made out of wrapping paper where purple rivers ran over ice and City Hall was an overturned Jupiter Telescope box and lions twined themselves around chair legs. Or maybe it was always supposed to turn out the way it did. I don’t really know.

  What broke my heart was that my mother and my sister seemed to have forgotten the house in Massachusetts, and the City, and the symphony in the kitchen sink, to have forgotten everything that mattered. Somewhere on the long road from north to south, possibly while I was sleeping, they had let our life melt away, like ice in the sun. Instead, they were always busy. My mother took charge of the Sunburst Motel with a vengeance. She and my sister got up early every day to mop the floors, turn on the cash register, kill any snakes that needed killing. They saved change in a coffee can. They briskly washed the sand off their feet at night; they painted their toenails; they watched The Love Boat on television every week. Every day, I dragged myself off to the stable for broken-down nags that was disguised as Brewster’s elementary school. When the teachers talked, all I heard was whinnies. At night, I lay in bed and watched the shadows moving restlessly over the ceiling: bears chasing girls in pigtails, clouds that might be ships, puffs of smoke. I tried to will myself up there, where they were, but I always failed.

  Maybe it was because I couldn’t make it up onto the ceiling with the bears and ships, but at the time it felt like I started breaking into houses because it was easy. Nobody locked their doors in Brewster, not back then, and I didn’t even take anything at first. All I wanted, at the beginning, was to slip inside other houses, try them on, haunt them a little. I was about eleven the first time, still runty and skinny with big eyes, and I knew I could say I was lost, or fake a limp as if I were hurt, if anyone came in. I could try to pretend now that I was tired of getting beaten up, but that would be a lie. I was tired of the endless, bloody wars at school—they felt longer than any dinosaur war—of my role, you might say, but to be honest, I think I would have done it anyway. I had a yearning. And a talent for it.

  That first house was a cozy house, for Brewster, with bright blue decorative shutters and a clothesline in the backyard hung with clean white T-shirts about my size. I used to cut through that yard on the way home from school, and one day I just st
rolled in through the open back door. I carried a paper clip in my pocket so I could quickly jab myself in the leg if I needed a little bleeding injury. But inside, not a soul was home. The air was still. Someone liked roosters and chickens: ceramic fowl lined the windowsills and crowded together on the counters. The clock was in the shape of a crowing rooster; the oven mitts were rooster-shaped, too. Inside the refrigerator was a bowl of blackberries with a white paper towel resting lightly on top. I ate a blackberry; it had a dark, slightly malevolent sweetness and it crunched at the center. The blackberry tasted like joy, a secret, stolen joy. It emboldened me. It thrilled me. It led me deeper into the house, through the small, dim, neat living room with the flowered drapes drawn against the heat, through the dining room where a porcelain rooster with cold black eyes perched in the center of the dining room table. I couldn’t believe how easy it was, as if I had acquired special powers. I knew—suddenly, wildly—that no one was going to stop me.

  I wandered toward the back of the house. An adult bedroom, with a flowered bedspread that matched the drapes. Next to it, there was a room with a set of bunk beds and a Dukes of Hazzard poster on the wall. On the dresser was a hairbrush that had a cartoon picture of flying pink ponies taped on the back. I picked up the hairbrush and, looking at myself in the mirror, brushed my curly red hair. It made me feel strange, and mean, and related. These girls—twins?—would find a strand of bright red hair in their hair and brush it away, unthinking. I liked that: being almost a part of them. A presence in the house that had just disappeared, that the people, when they came home, could almost sense, but not quite. One blackberry gone from the bowl. One strangely bright strand. They would miss me, the way the Darlings missed Peter Pan. They would wish I would come back without having met me. Or so it seemed to me as I ran one finger down the hard, unmoving feathers of the porcelain rooster. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s what I wanted: to be missed, but like a dream you can’t quite remember the next morning. None of them would be able to tell the others that they had dreamed of a wonderful boy, a boy with curly red hair and long eyelashes, and in the dream the boy lived there, right there in the house, but he always disappeared in the morning.