in another. My rib cage
didn’t scrape my hip. And
my life of being
photographed from behind,
faceless,
had not begun.
But it was coming.
It was all coming.
And I wanted it to stop.
One evening my mother caught me
in front of my bedroom mirror
standing in my underwear and
holding myself in such a way
that I might look
straight.
Ashamed,
I tried to explain.
“That imperfect reflection,”
she said, “is
all in your head.”
Was it?
This imperfection.
All in my head?
Of course
I thought about Lidia.
Was Lidia’s
missing hand
all in her head?
But Lidia was missing something.
That was real.
I wasn’t missing anything.
I had a spine.
Two facts Dr. Sowah
gave me when I was eight:
1. In most cases of scoliosis
there is no known cause,
and
2. In all cases,
there is no cure.
This second part brought me back to
God.
I prayed.
Lidia prayed,
too.
For my spine.
Not her hand.
Spines having
nothing to do
with hands,
back then.
By the time I turned thirteen,
I prayed only that He stop
the twisting.
Lidia prayed
harder.
And I thought,
Who wouldn’t listen
to Lidia?
I always listened
to Lidia.
He didn’t.
By fourteen, I was begging for a miracle.
Lidia begged, too.
For my spine and
for her hand.
Spines and hands being equal
when it came to miracles, and
breasts and hips beginning to make miracles
more necessary.
By fifteen Lidia said,
“God can
fuck himself.”
I couldn’t help feeling
fucked, too.
I once read that females are eight times more likely than
males to progress to a curve magnitude requiring treatment.
Maybe my mother was right.
The Telescope
THE FIRST THING I SEE WHEN I OPEN MY EYES IS THE STREETLIGHT shining through my bedroom window. The second is my mother. She’s holding a glass of water and saying something about running to the office for a couple of hours. She won’t be long.
The office?
She slides my phone closer to me on my bedside table while she talks about her staggering workload.
She’s going to work?
How it’s been piling up because of all the time she spent in the hospital.
She’s leaving me?
But it’s only my second night home. I’ll be alone. Though not totally alone. My mind drifts to the box under my bed. But then my mother picks up my orange bottle and my heart jumps along with the Roxanol tablets as she removes the cap and hands me a smooth pill.
So light.
Sticking it in my mouth, I sip from the straw my mother holds to my lips and swallow, already caring less about boxes or being alone. The chalky Roxy sticks in my throat for a second, making my eyes tear up. She lowers my shade—halfway, due to her hurry—and I watch her go through a weepy blur.
I listen to her bumping about, getting ready to leave.
The apartment door closes.
A few moments later there is the rumble of a car motor. The crunch of gears. And then her engine fading away.
How long did she say she’d be gone?
I glance over at my phone. It sits next to a bell my mother placed there yesterday so I can ring it if I need her. How many things do I need to call someone who isn’t there?
Reaching out, I pick up my phone, squinting at its bright blue light.
Hitting Messages, I stare at her picture and name sitting second from the top. It’s not at the top because Thomas Aquinas is at the top. Again.
I delete his text.
Again.
I should put my phone down, but my thumb hovers for just a second… and then I’m doing it. Typing her name.
Lidia.
And swooshing it out into the universe.
Staring at the screen, I’m not really waiting. I know what will happen. Nothing. Nothing will happen.
Nothing happens.
Not being able to stand the stillness of it, I press call and listen to it ring. Listen to the mailbox-is-full message.
I call again.
This time, the ringing seems to go on forever. When I hear the click of the robot voice as it comes back on to tell me what I already know, I snap the phone off, not wanting to hear its soullessness.
Instead, I listen to the throbbing of blood in my ears.
I sigh. Just to hear a bit of noise.
It’s not enough.
“Hello,” I say, to no one. To myself… maybe.
Minutes pass. And like butter melting into a warm piece of toast, the Roxy begins to soak through the millions of cell walls throughout my body. The scratchy flutter in my chest settles, but the pain never fully, truly leaves. It’s like a shark circling me in dark water.
I don’t mind that the pain stays nearby. I actually kind of like it. It reminds me how lucky I am to know I’m no longer in pain. If the Roxanol erased everything, I probably wouldn’t appreciate the pills half as much as I do.
Now I lie listening to the nothingness. Unlike the hospital, home is silent. And dark. My toes slide into a cooler spot under my covers while my eyes wander about the room. They stop on my telescope.
It’s not really my telescope. It’s my mother’s. Although I don’t think she’s ever used it. She bought it in one of her fits of feeling like she needed to expand herself—the same way she ended up with the jumble of mountain-climbing equipment still in its packaging in the storage space, or the barely worn martial arts uniform folded neatly on her closet shelf. Or the way she decided to be artificially inseminated to have me.
I rescued the telescope from the hall closet, thinking I’d use it one day. And I do use it. Kind of. To hang clothes on that aren’t dirty enough to throw into the hamper but aren’t clean enough to hang back up.
There are no clothes thrown over it tonight, and the light from the streetlamp makes the black cylinder glow. I stare at the sheen. Slowly, the telescope bends and twists, stretches and turns. And when it speaks to me, I’m not surprised or scared.
“How do you do, Miss Abbott?”
I grin at the extreme formality. It seems like how a teapot should sound, not a telescope.
I’m also not surprised it knows my name. Lots of things know me. Roxanol makes the world come alive with movement, and everything and anything can become animate. In the hospital, the people on my little TV spoke to me all the time. And last night, on my first night home, the stuffed rabbit Lidia gave me for my tenth birthday woke me from a sound sleep and accused me of stealing its house keys. I didn’t steal them, and I didn’t know what to do. So I called Lidia. It was the millionth time I’d called her since that night, though the first time I’d done it at four o’clock in the morning. I knew she wouldn’t pick up. Maybe that’s why I called again. And then twenty or so more times after that… whispering a bunch of stuff that I don’t remember following the beep. I do remember that once I filled her voice mail, I called her mother next. Why, I don’t know. It was four o’clock in the morning, and you always do weird shit at four o’clock in the morning.<
br />
Mrs. Banks answered. I wish I hadn’t cried so much. But she was as kind as ever. In her soft Polish accent, she told me to go back to sleep and said that she was sure I’d find the rabbit’s house keys tomorrow. For a minute, it felt just like the old days when Lidia took care of everything. I hung up and fell asleep, hoping that just like the old days, Lidia would show up in the morning.
She didn’t.
“Miss Abbott?” The telescope persists.
I glance over at the bell. Would my mother hear it ringing from her office at the community college? Maybe she didn’t really go to work. Maybe she went out with Mary Fay. My mother likes Mary Fay a lot. I know because she’s been dating her for four years, and my mother has never dated anyone that long. Does my mother like me a lot? I have this urge to ring the bell. But I’m afraid she won’t come.
“How are you tonight, Miss Abbott?” Its voice seems to be rising from deep within the long cylinder leading to the lens.
“Not that good,” I answer.
There’s no reason to lie to my telescope.
I see myself reflected in the dark circle of the lens, which is facing me instead of the stars. My nose looks very large and wide, and my long hair is wild on one side and smashed flat on the other. I always wanted a short bob, but Lidia insisted it looked better long.
“Let me help,” the telescope says. “Have you ever been to Minnesota?” it asks.
I sigh. “You mean the state shaped like a mitten?”
“That’s Michigan,” it says.
Being corrected by my telescope makes me feel like the sun is setting inside my chest.
“I feel like shit,” I confess. “Just so… so shitty.”
My body fills with a tremendous ache that rolls and swells and heaves itself against my sawed-off ribs, my tender spine, my fresh incisions lined with staples.
“I can help,” says the telescope, the sound of his deep voice making the hairs on the back of my neck come alive and the terrible aching recede.
“How?” I sniff.
“Leave the how to me. Just tell me something: Have you ever been to Minnesota?”
Minnesota? “Please, I’m so tired…”
“Eve.”
He uses my first name. The sound of it wrapping warmly around me.
“No,” I tell him.
“Do you care about Minnesota?” he asks quietly.
Cold. Lakes. Snow.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, then. I can help you, Eve. But each time I do… a tiny piece of Minnesota will disappear. Do you mind?”
“What?” The medicated fog in my head must be pretty thick because I have no idea what the hell my telescope is talking about.
“Every time I help you, Eve, a tiny piece of Minnesota will disappear,” he repeats.
“Why not a tiny piece of Idaho?”
The sound of his laughter makes the top of my head tingle.
“Okay,” he says. “Idaho.”
“No, no, Minnesota’s fine,” I tell him.
He laughs again. “Minnesota it is.”
Collage
A tiny piece of
Lidia—her
favorite hair tie—pinned
over the light switch
so not to be
forgotten.
This is how it
began.
For whatever reason,
the hair tie stayed there, joined soon after
by a picture of a swimming pool I cut from
a magazine—I’d always wanted a swimming
pool.
Next came a page
ripped from The Little Engine
That Could—a happy group of
fruit and candy.
That night,
the growing collection won
a smile from my mother.
“A collage,”
she noted.
A collage.
Pieces of my life tacked,
taped, and glued onto
the green wall across from
my bed.
After a few years, I began
a second assemblage in the center
of the wall, gluing
two sets of eyes cut from
third-grade school photos—
Lidia’s and mine.
“So creepy,” Lidia said. But
she laughed. And
I added our noses.
Gradually, I surrounded
the pieces of our faces with
other pieces of us.
Tickets to a
movie my grandparents took us to see,
Lidia’s mother’s business card
because I didn’t know what else
to do with it, a fast food
cup Lidia told me not to touch
when I plucked it from the curb
to throw in the trash. With the germs
already settling in on my hands, I carried it
home and
stapled it to the wall.
The collage surrounding the light fixture
spawned the collage surrounding our eyes
spawned another and another, until
my wall resembled
the effect of multiple rocks
thrown into a green pond, rippling outward.
Each original piece
the sun
in the solar system
of my bedroom wall,
or, as Lidia liked to call it:
“A vertical mess.”
She wasn’t wrong. Collage wasn’t beautiful.
Not in the way a single photograph or
a painting might be. It was clunky, uneven,
and random.
When we jumped to middle school, the
collage jumped to a second wall—
Our seventh-grade algebra homework,
shredded and shellacked.
A ferocious act of release.
A testament to mathematical fortitude.
Art.
Then a spray of notes
passed between us through eighth.
Each scrap
torn apart
words scattered.
We didn’t need them whole
to know what we’d said.
Over time, the green paint of my walls
disappeared, and my bedroom became
a world made up of
other worlds made up of
other worlds, so that
my desk, the bed, the telescope, me—
we are all just pieces in the
collage.
Lidia Returns
I WAKE TO THE SOUND OF WIND GUSTS FLAPPING THE LOOSE siding of the old triple-decker. Naked tree branches swing in and out of the square view from my window. A flock of birds flies across a gray morning sky.
They remind me of something. Something I can’t remember. A warm feeling of hope flutters in my stomach.
Then I see why.
Lidia is here.
“Hi,” I croak, my voice still asleep.
She smiles that Lidia smile that shows up in her eyes even more than on her mouth. “Get your lazy ass out of bed,” she says. “You’re sleeping the whole goddamn day away.”
“I’ve missed you,” I tell her, my eyes watering.
“You’re such a fucking wimp.” She laughs. Hopping up, she neatly pushes in my desk chair with her one hand, and I remember the other. I remember it all.
“Lid,” I whisper. “Lid, I—I’m—”
“Oh, look.” She cuts me off, walking over to my window. “It’s starting to snow.”
Snow?
Minnesota.
I turn to my telescope and silently mouth the words:
Thank you.
Lidia takes one look around my room and gets to work. She stacks my books into a neat pile. She refolds the extra blankets that had slid off the end of my bed. She picks up the dozens of pieces of shredded tissue littering the floor surrounding my bedside, placing them inside one of th
e three half-empty glasses of water sitting stagnant on my bedside table, all the while complaining about my destructive habit. She’s overly familiar with my love of ripping things into tiny pieces so I can build something new out of them later. Just as I’m overly familiar with her extreme love of tidiness. She doesn’t miss a single shred.
Lidia, who has cleaned my room a thousand times. Lidia, who I haven’t seen for so long. I can’t take my eyes from her, or stop smiling, or keep the tears from running down my cheeks and into my pillowcase.
Her job complete, she heads to the kitchen, expertly balancing a pile of dirty dishes and trash. Even though she was born with a single hand, not much ever got in Lidia’s way.
Not the cardboard milk cartons from kindergarten that said Open here, and never did.
Not the rope that snaked its way thirty feet up to the rafters of the middle school gym.
Not the complex microscopic system of threading a sewing machine, the tedious building of a kinetic sculpture out of toothpicks, the impossible physics of a chin-up bar… not even team sports, where a sweaty symmetrical body seemed a requirement.
Lidia would ache, strain, sweat, boil, grunt, tear, smash, leap, quiver, burn, and bleed before failing to accomplish it all.
Lidia pops her head back into the room.
“Don’t fall asleep,” she says.
That’s your trick, not mine, I think through closed eyes, because she’s already gone.
Something I Don’t Know
“Lid,”
I whine.
“Lidia, you’re sleeping.”
It happened every time I slept over.
Lidia would fall asleep
and I’d be left
awake.
“I’m not,” she mumbled,
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