by C. S. Lakin
Jake left Simon to his packing. No doubt he’d end up crashing at his friend Shane’s, or some other druggie’s place, one of those kids in that band Simon played in. Jake couldn’t stand seeing Simon strumming his guitar, his fingers like Leah’s forming chords, his mouth half-humming, half-singing words to songs, and Jake only and always remembering back to the night he had followed her to that club, watching her as she sat on a wooden stage in front of a darkened audience, the spotlights on her and her alone, singling her out as her black rope of hair spilled over one shoulder and she tipped her head back and sang, her throat aglow in the light and making Jake’s heart ache so hard he could barely breathe, knowing he’d lost her way before he truly had.
After Rachel died, he gave Simon back his guitar. He didn’t know why. He’d kept it in a work locker at his job for weeks, thinking he’d just sell it or smash it or toss it in the dumpster. Reuben was the one that suggested it, thought maybe it would calm Simon down, veer him away from the drugs and the drinking and give him a creative outlet. It made sense at the time, but nothing had changed, not really. As much as Jake hated to do it, he needed to kick Simon out. Maybe Simon’s absence would have a positive effect on Levi—although he doubted it, considering how much Levi was gone, hanging onto Simon as if they were cojoined.
As he walked down the back steps toward Joey, his thoughts drifted to Dinah. Maybe when Abby came back from strolling Ben around the neighborhood, he’d see if she’d be willing to try to talk to his daughter once more. Dinah was unwilling to talk with a doctor, and the way she refused him, fear in her eyes, made him see Leah all over again, resisting Jake’s attempts to get help for her, her black, bottomless depression that kept a grip on her. How it pained him to see his own daughter with the same blank expression, the joy smudged off her face leaving nothing but emptiness masking a virulent misery. She had loved Rachel so much and Jake couldn’t begin to understand the depth of her loss. Dinah needed a mother, her mother, and Rachel had loved her so tenderly and with such affection. Would Dinah ever dance again? He would be grateful just to see her eat a meal and come out of her room, but neither coaxing nor threats budged her.
All these children, in so much pain. More pain. Hadn’t they already been through enough—having been abandoned by one mother, then another? Once again the pointed conviction railed against him, the feeling of having been singled out, picked on, or worse—punished for something he had done or failed to do, which brought him back to the tiresome loop of questioning God and Jake’s belief in that God. He couldn’t deny it, not anymore, the omnipotent presence permeating every atom around and in him. The clarity of intent. But that was the question, wasn’t it? Just what was God’s intent in putting him—his family—through such pain? No matter how hard Jake struggled to see the situation from every angle, he could find no acceptable answer. None. So that either meant God didn’t exist, didn’t care, or was cruel and heartless. Yet, creation told him otherwise. There was no reconciling an evil God with a stunning planet. There was no reconciling faith with reality. The things unseen with the things seen.
It was hard enough for Jake to function, go through the motions of life, waking up to the blessed mindlessness of routine—brushing his teeth, showering, putting in a long workday on automatic, measuring and cutting boards, loading up people’s cars with building materials, seeing dreams and projects and ideas swimming in their eyes, envisioning better things while Jake just moved his arms and legs, nodded his head and said the right words like some automaton. He had no choice; he had obligations. He didn’t have the luxury of questioning his own existence or the continuation of it. But his children—what did they have? A foundation broken to bits, leaving them bruised and bleeding in the wreckage and rubble, seeing nothing on the horizon but devastation and disappointment.
Jake came up to Joey. “I’m sorry about your books. Simon is going to live somewhere else for a while. He won’t bother you anymore.”
“He shouldn’t have done that. Burn my books. That was wrong.”
“Yes, it was. I’ll buy you more. Why don’t we go over to the bookstore tomorrow after school? I’ll let you pick out some new ones.”
“Okay.” Joey looked up at Jake, his expression hard to read. Jake could never really tell what was going on in Joey’s head; he seemed too serious all the time. Serious and sad. Maybe all that time Joey was spending with his grandparents and aunt was only feeding Joey’s obsession with religion, and it was making him dour and unhappy. Rachel’s parents took Joey home two afternoons a week after school, and they spent all Sunday with him, first at church, then to their house for dinner. Jake needed tried to pry Joey away from them, sensing some kind of possessiveness on his in-laws’ part—for both Joey and Ben, Jake getting the feeling they were trying to take those two boys away from him, but what could he do? He was grateful Abby was practically raising Ben. Jake had no time to care for a baby, and frankly, he didn’t want to. Ben was precious to him, certainly, but he couldn’t separate his condemnation from his love, the two elements fused together, knowing how much Rachel so wanted this baby and would not terminate her pregnancy to save her own life, and Ben the source and reason for her death. She had given her own life to save another. An unselfish sacrifice, yet wholly selfish, seeing what pain she caused everyone else. Ben would always represent that to Jake—the price she paid. But he would love this child, for Rachel’s sake, because she would want him to.
“Dad, you know Ben is sick.”
“He’s not that sick.”
“What if he gets worse?”
“Then we’ll take care of him.”
“It’s my job, Dad.”
“Your job?”
“Yes. I’m supposed to save him.”
“He doesn’t need saving, Joey. Just some medicine, and in time he’ll get better.”
“He won’t.”
Jake studied Joey’s face, tried to see past the surface to what Joey was implying. When Joey started talking like this, it wrenched Jake’s gut. He didn’t want to hear his seven-year-old’s pronouncements as if he were God’s mouthpiece. Maybe his son did have some uncanny gift, some ability to sense things no one else could sense, like the way he knew beforehand that Ben would have some health problems. And that rainy afternoon in the car, when they all would have been killed if Joey hadn’t pointed the way to safety. But Rachel had always acted so excited, like God had spoken through their chosen son, like he was some Old Testament prophet anointed to pronounce gloom and doom.
“Enough, Joey!” He squeezed his eyes shut; he hadn’t meant his words to come out so harsh.
Joey flinched, tears building. “You don’t understand, Dad. That’s why I have to be a doctor. So I can save him. I have to save him.”
Jake pulled his son into his arms and Joey broke into hard sobs, the tears soaking Jake’s shirt. “Shh, shh it’s okay. Joey, listen, you don’t have to save him. I know you want to be a doctor because you feel bad Mom died. Because you couldn’t save her. But no one could have saved her—don’t you understand? Even if all the doctors in the world had been there when your mom fell, they wouldn’t have been able to save her.”
Joey pulled back. “That’s not true! It’s not!”
Jake exhaled hard and felt his aggravation build. There just was no dissuading his son. At least not now. Maybe as he grew older his compulsion would lessen, this drive to be a great doctor, to be some sort of superhero and save the world. At some point Joey would have to face the hard truth—that even though the world needed saving, it was beyond redemption. His son would have to set his sights lower, maybe direct his noble goals toward helping those in need, one person at a time—and that would be a wonderful thing. But Jake worried that for Joey it wouldn’t be enough, that he would spend his life expecting miracles and, as always proved to be the case for all people everywhere, would end up horribly disappointed when they failed to manifest.
She felt so light—like she could float away, sitting up in the tree, the ramshac
kle fort her brothers had built years ago when they’d been little and first moved to the house. They never let her come up; they put up a “keep out” sign which meant no girls, or more pointedly, no sisters, although apart from their mom, that meant Dinah. But her brothers hadn’t been up here in years and she wondered why. It was a pretty nice place, up high, where you could look over the fence at the street, watch neighbors walk by or kids ride their bikes and they wouldn’t notice you up there, peeking out the slit of a window on their world.
Dinah had forgotten all about the notebook with Leah’s poetry and sketches, and the three photos she had taken from the box the day after Simon had spread them all out on their parents’ bed. Dinah had gone back the next morning when her dad was at work, slipped the three into her pocket, then stuck them between pages in the notebook. Then she had stashed the whole bit on the shelf in her closet, under her boxes of ballet shoes. The notebook had fallen off the shelf when she was trying to fit a stack of clothes up there—clothes that were either too short now, or too big and loose.
Already she was almost weightless, like air, like the wind. She felt just as invisible too—in her home, as she walked the halls at school, the kids looking through her or past her like she was invisible. She treasured that gift of invisibility. It kept her from having to talk and explain and justify her presence in a room, in a crowd. But there was a price attached—loneliness. Her heart constantly ached but she was getting used to it, now more than a year since her mom had died, but still a big hole in there, like a sore you couldn’t touch, so tender and stinging.
When her mom died, she stopped going to dance classes and church and to the mall with her friends. At first they hounded her, tried to cheer her up, filling the uncomfortable silences with hot air, with stupid jokes and sappy platitudes that only made her feel worse, like she was some leper singled out. She could sense their discomfort and even her closest friends only chided her for not eating, didn’t really want to ask her how she was feeling or why she floated through the hallways, whipped by the currents of wind as crowds moved past her, students full of purpose and direction and her just wandering like a ghost, haunted by her memories and the big empty hole in her heart. Her mom had held her in place, in this world, like holding the string of a brightly colored balloon, and Dinah had always hovered above, not too far away, but dancing on the breeze and leaping to the clouds, spinning and whirling so freely. But the string had been severed and now she was at the mercy of the wind blowing her around, directionless, disattached, knocking her into life and bruising her in tender places.
She pulled out one snapshot from the loose-leaf pages and the glossy paper became a mirror, with her own eyes and high cheekbones and even the pouting lips reflecting back at her, studying her, as if her mother had caught sight of her, all those years ago while posing for the camera, knowing her daughter some random day in the future would be staring back, about to ask an avalanche of questions Leah would not know how to answer.
Dinah had never wanted to know this woman, Leah. Leah, she said, tasting the name on her tongue, a bland, nothing taste. Her brothers each tasted something different when they said her name. She had heard from Levi what had happened in Washington last year, his hushed confession full of anguish and ire, the name Leah a poison, a curse, on his tongue, on Simon’s tongue. Rube hadn’t even reacted, not visibly at least, when he’d heard how she had looked down at Simon from the window, then closed the blind. But Dinah had seen it in Rube’s eyes, the clamping down and shutting his own blinds over his face, Rube’s own way of facing pain. Dinah was glad the name did not hold sway over her as it did her older brothers.
However, Leah’s name may have failed to stir an emotion, but her picture did not. For Dinah knew now this stranger staring at her was akin to her in more than one way. Dinah had inherited not just Leah’s face and body but her moods, her temperament, and maybe even her darkness.
Until Dinah had begun reading Leah’s poems and prose, she’d never been able to put shape and weight to the darkness inhabiting her soul. It abided in hidden corners and crevices, giving her the sensation she was being followed, or watched through a scope. It frightened her, this blackness she couldn’t see through or out of, yet Leah’s words imputed meaning to it all. Perhaps, though, not understanding, for even Leah had no knowledge of where or why darkness descended when it did. But Dinah found an odd comfort in knowing this darkness was not a unique solitary experience; this, they shared—a bond linking them across the chasm of space and time separating them.
Dinah opened the notebook and began again at the beginning, reading the first of perhaps a hundred pages scrawled upon with different colors of ink. The first time, she had only skimmed, sitting in her room, afraid someone would barge in and discover her secret. She knew she couldn’t tell anyone, especially not her dad. She knew this notebook was a Pandora’s box of earthly troubles that would unleash more chaos into her family. Now she would take her time, let Leah’s thoughts become her thoughts, hoping like a balm or potion that might ease a throbbing pain that her mother’s musings might likewise dispel some of the oppressive darkness.
She let herself be carried away, turning one page after another, forgetting who and where she was, vaguely aware of the late afternoon September sun baking on her shoulders, the feel of the day lengthening and slipping into shadows, then cooling. Hungry for the first time in so long, but a different kind of hunger waking, this time growing into a voracious need for communion and consolation—something Leah’s magical words knew just how to sate.
It’s like yelling down a long corridor / the rebounding silence / the awesome loneliness / a lack of warm familiarity. / My life mirrors the miles of naked halls / mirrored a million times / and only emphasizing the infinite steps. / How many footsteps will it take to reach the end?
Only when she heard her name like a sharp report slicing the air did she look up, extricate cold, numb fingers from the edges of the notebook, numb from gripping so tightly untold hours. Her dad came out into the yard, calling her again, and she set the notebook down, noticed the goose bumps on her arms and rubbed the skin briskly, barely making out his outline in the twilight as he stood at the back door.
She called to him and his head swiveled in her direction. By the time she descended the rickety makeshift ladder nailed to the tree, he stood next to her.
“Dinah, what are you doing in the tree house? Are you okay?” Her dad reached out his hand to her and she took it, although she wasn’t sure why he offered it. She let him hold her hand as they walked back to the house, his skin warm and soft and comforting. Suddenly, she was Leah, wandering lost down a hallway of misleading mirrors, Jake trying to lead her out, to some place of safety. A shiver raced up her spine.
“I just wanted some time to myself. It’s nice up there.”
Her dad nodded. “You’re cold. Come have some dinner. Abby made macaroni and cheese.” She didn’t want to meet her dad’s hopeful eyes, the look he always displayed when prodding her to eat.
“Okay,” she conceded. She thought about the notebook lying in the tree, how she’d have to go back and get it, sneak it into her room. Already the poems had sunk their claws in her, clamped onto her soul; she felt naked without them, already half-forgetting the words that defined and delineated her life. Leah was starting to take shape in her mind and heart, and although Dinah had scant memories of her, now she felt so close, so understood, even more so than she had with Rachel, who had been the best mom, wonderfully loving and kind and affectionate. Yet Dinah now saw Rachel as deficient, lacking true understanding of the girl she had raised as her own daughter but who truly wasn’t. This, Dinah saw now, oh so clearly. The differences, the way Rachel would smile blankly, confused, as if Dinah spoke in some foreign language at times. A mother in action and heart but not indeed. The ties that had connected Rachel to Dinah were fabricated, manmade, constructed. They had held fast and nourished her. But the ties that linked Dinah to Leah were organic and sprang from one source
. She shared with Leah the same blood, and in that blood flowed all the molecules of personality and DNA and disposition, as well as a private language only they could comprehend. Dinah had felt it in Leah’s words, as the words triggered and sparked recognition, a hidden code. Words that both renewed and redefined her very being.
Dinah followed her dad into the kitchen warm and infused with the aroma of dinner. Joey sat waiting at the table and Ben, on his booster seat, smiled at her, his lackluster eyes welcoming her. She thought of all the poems Leah had written about her babies, how much she loved them, their smell, their innocence. How she saw herself as their protector and champion; they were so needy and helpless. She looked at Ben and her heart shifted, as if she saw him from a new angle. She had dismissed her baby brother from the day he’d been born, struggled with blaming him for their mom’s death, ignored him, but now. . .
She put her arm around Ben and hugged him, drew in a deep breath and smelled his baby-powder scent. A pang of love struck her hard, made her realize how long she had been wandering lost, bumping into walls, following dark corridors for miles upon miles. She sat in the chair next to Ben, reached for the bowl of steaming noodles, and put some on all their plates. While their dad got out the milk and came over and filled their cups, Dinah handed Ben his little plastic spoon with Tigger on the handle. She ate beside her brothers and dad, tasting food for the first time in a long while, enjoying the sensation of chewing and swallowing. When she lifted her cup to take a sip of milk, she saw Leah reflected in the glass and the sight both startled and comforted her.
In that instant, Dinah realized a profound truth. Rachel had brought her through life this far, but Leah would be the one to take her the rest of the way home.
