The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  That cozy house with the roosters and flying ponies was on Dragonfly Drive. There were others, on Locust Lane and Cicada Court and Ocean Drive. I slipped into them all, whoosh, swish, then away again. It was romantic to me—dangerous, faintly pointless in the way of many dangerous endeavors, lonely. I was some sort of reverse rebel: I didn’t run away from home, I ran away to other people’s homes and stood around. When I looked at myself in other people’s mirrors, the world was my diorama: Early Gabriel I with Pink Pony Hairbrush on Dragonfly Drive. Early Gabriel II on Locust Lane. Early Gabriel III on Cicada Court. I discovered that spying on Brewster was much better and more interesting than actually living there. When I was spying and sneaking around it, the entire place took on a glow. I took on a glow. I could see that I was getting taller in other people’s mirrors, house after house.

  Meanwhile, my mother and Caroline were slowly becoming part of the same army, the Braid Brigade: one red, one black. The two of them marched around the motel like sentries. Caroline kept the books. You’d think my mother would have been flattened, like an origami bird on the highway, but instead she got tight and wiry. She began having long conversations on the phone with Aunt Sheila, jotting things down. The woman who had been so dreamy and impractical in our other life, before, never stopped moving now, like the dancer in The Red Shoes. She learned to play bridge, and began playing with a bridge club in town. She must have started in the hopes that she’d meet a new man that way, but instead she just got incredibly good at bridge. She sued my father for child support, though she wasn’t sure where he lived. She licked the stamps and slapped them down, wrote FIRST CLASS on every envelope and sent them to the address in San Diego.

  She drank black coffee all day. I’d see her, with her straight spine and her small feet, standing on the Sunburst balcony, drinking black coffee and closing her eyes in the sun. She refused to protect her fine skin, letting it crumple like a piece of paper in some invisible hand. It was her revenge on my father, I think. Part of her revenge. Her love. We didn’t make the City anymore, or anything else. There didn’t seem to be time. We were always busy. My mother and Caroline took turns telling me what to do, which was fine with me. I had no intention of claiming that place; being the hired help was great. I never let myself into any of the motel rooms to steal a look or a trinket, because by definition anyone staying at the Sunburst was beneath my contempt. I wouldn’t do them the honor of breaking in.

  No. I was after something else. As I said, at first I didn’t take anything. I wandered around, free: no one could stop me from going anywhere, from looking at anything, from touching anything. I opened drawers and medicine cabinets, I ate things from out of other people’s fridges and kitchen cabinets. I would eat one or two Fudgsicles or Pop Tarts so when the people in the house next opened the box, they’d think, Weren’t there more in here before? Trevor, did you get into these before dinner? I ate sugar from out of sugar bowls with my hands. I stood inside people’s showers and looked at all their soap and shampoo. I could hop out a door so quickly and silently that if you walked in the room just after I’d been there, you wouldn’t suspect anything more than that a stray breeze had blown in the window. People going into their own houses are mostly pretty loud and insensitive, especially in Brewster. They don’t think of who else might have been there. They don’t imagine anything. But standing in their houses, I imagined them, in detail. I thought that sometime maybe I’d just stay in one of the houses, be there when they got home as if I belonged there, sitting on the sofa with the family dog, eating a Fudgsicle. All the dogs always liked me; I never got bitten once.

  I grew, and grew. The other kids stopped beating me up; it was as if they knew that I had changed, that I got up to something bad outside of school. I think I had acquired an aura. Some of the girls at school said to the girls who could be counted on to whisper it to me that I was foxy. They invited me to make-out parties. Some of these girls’ houses, of course, I already knew. I had rummaged through their kitchen cabinets, their record collections, lain down on their beds. It made me feel sweeter toward them; I got a reputation for being a really good kisser. I knew that some of the girls would have liked to go steady with me, but I wouldn’t let them, which got me invited to even more make-out parties. Around school, everyone started calling me “G.” When I slipped into houses, I felt like him, like G, the sly fox. A day shadow, swift, just slipping out the back door. Around the time I began to go to the make-out parties, I started taking things. Little things. Souvenirs. The kinds of things that would never be missed, that were treasure only to me. Once I slipped them into my pocket, they acquired a magic. It was as if they were all ingredients in some spell that hadn’t been revealed to me yet.

  The Sunburst never turned into an architectural masterpiece, but through sheer force of will my mother and sister made it cleaner, brighter, crisper, almost profitable. I was becoming profitable, too. Treasure was flying into my hands: lighters, lanyards, Mickey Mouse pins, kids’ watches left on kitchen counters, cheap bracelets and earrings (I liked to take just one), and definitely any stray cash. I kept it all in shoe-boxes under my bed. I’m sure my mother thought I had porn in there, because she was incredibly careful not to touch my room or anything in it. She was trying to do the right thing by me as a boy; she went into Caroline’s room unannounced so often that Caroline finally got mad and put an extra lock on the door. But in that way she left me alone, so at night I closed my door and pulled out a shoebox and looked at what I called my Collection. My stash. It was almost like being in my tent again, with the desert outside.

  Late at night, I would pull out some of the shoeboxes and arrange things in a particular way. If you opened each box and looked into it from above, it was like looking into a single house or apartment with the roof missing. I would move around the objects inside according to how I thought they should go together. For instance, the gold pin in the shape of a Christmas tree, with little red stones, like lights, at the tip of each branch, could be propped in a corner of the box, and then ranged in front of it, as if lolling on the floor, several of those bracelets and necklaces that spelled out names in fat cursive: Laurie, Anne, Traci. This was the family with the fat, crosseyed triplets. A big men’s watch was propped in another corner, yawning, its thick black leather straps undone. In the next box I might toss some shiny barrettes in a glittering pile on one side, then put in a lighter, a little stuffed ox with glittery silver horns, and one of those tiny plastic tubs of grape jelly you get in diners if you order toast: these were the hippies. I could do this for hours, loving my Collection, my glittering pile of junk, more than anything. My box village grew, and relations became complicated among the inhabitants. I whispered things to everyone, chat and various ideas and possibilities, events. I felt as if they were all my citizens, or my subjects, and I was as tender toward them as a good god.

  My master plan was that when the time came I would sell my Collection and fly away. By a backward alchemy, turning gold into common coin, I could get us all back to Massachusetts. The bright gold necklaces that said Laurie or Anne or Traci would become the old house locked in the ice up north. I was going to buy our house back from the imposters who lived there now. My Collection wasn’t exactly the City, it was more like a refugee camp outside the City; the City was where my box people—especially Laurie and Anne—wanted to go. They couldn’t wait to get there. We would all go together. I felt like Robin Hood. I was stealing for a good cause, for the sake of beauty. What did it hurt the universe if a few ugly cufflinks in the shape of the American flag were traded in for something so much more important?

  I might have gotten a little carried away when I started moving people’s belongings around among actual houses. I’m not sure how that started. Probably something, a comb or a silk flower I had cut from a fake bouquet in another house, fell out of my pocket onto somebody’s floor during an afternoon’s prowl and I thought how nice it looked. It must have been an accident. Turn of fortune’s wheel. Like Benjamin Fra
nklin and the kite. Newton and the apple. G is for the gift I’d leave behind. I was always careful to scatter things casually, subliminally. I also hid various items in closets and the backs of drawers where no one would notice them: a mother-of-pearl tie clip tucked behind those big, gauzy bandages that no one ever uses in the medicine cabinet. An earring added to a box already overflowing with costume jewelry. Ties, in fact, were great for this kind of reorganizing, because so many ties look alike and most men don’t know if they have three dark brown ones and one black one, or the reverse. Every once in a while I’d have a little fun and tie the relocated tie on a hanger, but if anyone ever thought it was odd, I didn’t hear about it. Life in Brewster went on the way it always did: a long, hot, scrubby drive to nowhere. I moved a yellow throw pillow with red fringe. I moved a square green vase with those bubbles in the glass that look like boils, adding it to a house that already had one, so they’d have a pair. I thought that was very funny. It was just a game, an extended game. I don’t know how you’d call it stealing, really. What kind of thief puts things into your house? I was making things magic, part of a spell, and then spreading the magic around, for free.

  It was because my Collection had become so brilliantly vast, an underground cave full of treasure, that I went to Jenny, and then all the rest of it. She and I were in the same tenth-grade class. I guess Jenny had a gland problem or something, because she was huge and always either sweating a river or shivering in Brewster’s sticky heat. She had cornered every black market in school, maybe from sheer size. Jenny was the go-to girl for everything, including all kinds of gossip, so it made sense to me that she would know where I could start fencing my hoard and begin getting us back our house. She came home to the Sunburst with me one day after school and huffed down onto my bed.

  “I’m hot,” she said. “You guys own this place?”

  “No.” I was trying as delicately as I could to reach behind her thick legs and under the bed to begin pulling out the shoe-boxes, which she was threatening with the straining springs. “We’re from Massachusetts.” I pulled out my best, richest box first, the one with the diamond rings in it.

  Jenny took off the lid as if she were pulling the icing off a cake and peered inside. “What is this shit?” she said.

  “It’s not shit,” I said right away. “It’s great.”

  “Gabe,” she said wearily. She dragged her hand through the box and picked up one of the diamond rings. With a thumb, she popped the diamond out. It fell like a tiny worthless thing onto the linoleum. When Jenny stepped on it with her big sandal, not even that hard, it broke apart. “It’s shit,” said Jenny flatly. She yawned. “Do you have any Mountain Dew?”

  I looked at the little pieces of glass on the linoleum floor. My heart and my eyes and my stomach hurt. “I stole it,” I said. I tried to sound hard and careless. “I stole everything in there.”

  Jenny picked up a gold wedding band—one of my best finds; somebody had forgotten it on a dresser top—and bit it.

  “Hey, stop!” I said. I was afraid she was going to eat it.

  She took the ring out of her mouth. I don’t think she knew what that biting gesture was; she must have seen it in a movie or read it somewhere. But gamely, like a pro, she tossed the ring back into the box and lay back. “It’s all shit,” she said calmly. Jenny had incredibly pretty eyes, indigo blue, which was part of how she confused people. Because you weren’t sure what you were looking at: a mean, fat girl who had just told you that all your treasure was junk, or a pretty girl who was on the brink of getting out of the cage of her body. It was like she was enchanted, and if you brought her the right treasure, she would be free. Or maybe she was an ogre who would chomp your head off.

  “I stole money, too,” I said in my new hard voice. I was starting to like the sound of it.

  Jenny studied me with her indigo eyes. “How much?”

  I reached under the bed again, all the way in the back, and with great difficulty extricated the shoebox with the cash. I wriggled upright, took the lid off the box, and handed it to her. “Look.”

  Jenny pawed through the bills. “You got all this by yourself ?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  Jenny held a twenty up to the light, rubbed it against her cheek. Carefully, respectfully—Jenny was no fool—she put the twenty back in the box. “So what do you want to do with all this dough?”

  I shrugged.

  “Want to get more of it?” She looked happy, almost relaxed.

  “Sure.”

  “C’mere, I’ll tell you.”

  I clambered up onto the bed beside big Jenny and we began our famous partnership. Famous, anyway, at Brewster High, which wasn’t ready for one thin, pale, dreamy kid with capital and one big, fat girl with gorgeous eyes and no scruples at all. I invested in her business, she made me a partner, and we went wild. I mean wild. There was no drug we couldn’t, wouldn’t, get. Jenny was fearless and, in her way, protective of me. She was always the one who would take the bus to Fort Lauderdale to meet her connection, and she never told me who the connection was. She’d come back with her pink Samsonite suitcase full of goods, and we’d giggle uncontrollably, thinking of all the money we were about to make. I was great for business, because the popular girls liked me. At make-out parties, they’d reach into my pockets for the little plastic bags, sliding bills where the plastic bags had been. Jenny never said she minded that I got invited to parties she didn’t. She never even mentioned it, except to make sure I had enough product to sell.

  Now, it occurs to me how dangerous it must have been for Jenny, and maybe that was why she stayed fat. Wherever it was she went in Lauderdale, they’d be more likely to leave the fat girl alone, especially in that big, shapeless, cherry-red wind-breaker she used to wear. I didn’t sample the goods except for a little weak pot once in a while; Jenny helped herself to one magic mushroom every few months, which she savored, including the crying jag she always had the next day. She was a good businesswoman. Smart. I kind of loved her, in a strange way. I was always curious to know what her big breasts looked like, but I never tried to see them.

  I don’t think she would have liked that, anyway. Once I got to know her, I could see that Jenny was a funny one, underneath. Really, she was shy, like me. She collected stuffed animals, teddy bears and soft lions and Raggedy Anns and pandas. When you went into Jenny’s room, a million glass eyes stared at you, unblinking. Her parents were like two thick snakes, circling each other. Jenny said she could hear them having sex at night, for hours. She liked to talk about it. Jenny’s father had indigo eyes, too; he sold auto parts. I like to think that maybe Jenny’s married somewhere now, with kids; I like to think that she has a business, maybe selling handmade teddy bears, called Jennybears or Bigbears (because her husband is a big, sweet guy)—something like that. Or stuffed pandas. She treasured her pandas. They were exotic to her; they made her feel rich. She made money, obviously—she took a seventy percent cut, because, she said, she was the original owner of the business—but I never saw her spend it on anything except her stuffed animals. The rest: I don’t know what ever happened to it. Maybe she buried it somewhere. Of course, if it’s in the ground, it’s less than what it was, or rotted. Jenny didn’t know about investing. I sometimes have to remind myself that she was only a high school kid, too; she seemed so much older to me, decades older.

  Together, Jenny and I made money, and more money, and more money. I moved the watches and wedding rings and gold cursive necklaces into one or two shoeboxes to make room for the money, and to sort it: singles in one box, then fives, tens, twenties in others, all neatly rubber-banded. Coins in a box of their own. When I shook the heavy coin box, it made a sound like an army marching over ice. I liked to hear that on hot nights, alone in my room with my money. I liked it when I went to bed knowing that I slept less than a foot above all my neat boxes of cash. In the beginning, I fanned the money out, made designs with it, stacked it on the long side like ancient walls, but that got boring. It
was how it added up that mattered. My heart was still broken, of course; sometimes I’d turn on the light in the middle of the night and count my money, full of melancholy. I knew that there was still nowhere near enough yet to buy back our house. It was like trying to build a ladder to the moon. Eventually I was going to have to do something else, something bigger, though I didn’t know what.

  In the meantime, I found another way to add to what was in the shoeboxes. Jenny and I were taking the local bus to the big bus station in Fort Lauderdale. Probably it was a Monday, after school; Jenny usually made the Lauderdale run on Monday afternoons. The pink Samsonite suitcase sat between us on the floor, empty, bobbing lightly. Jenny rested a hand on it. I had the roll of money in my pants. I liked to be the one to carry the money to the bus station, and Jenny, indulgently, let me.

  “Rain’s coming,” she said, looking out the scratched window.

  “Tornado?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. Brewster’s never going away. We’re almost there.” She licked her lips, zipped her cherry-red windbreaker to her chin.