The View From Who I Was

by Heather Sappenfield

  They stared at each other.

  Corpse held up her phone. “Making a call. You?”

  “I was greeting the sun.” Angel’s voice was just as we remembered it: slow yet soft, lilting.

  “Oh,” slipped out of Corpse.

  “I have to get going.” Angel grimaced and resumed descending, then paused. She looked at the ground. Kicked a rock. It sailed before gravity grabbed it. She didn’t turn around, just said, “I dreamed of you three nights ago.”

  “Me?” Corpse said, but there’s no way Angel heard. She was hopping over rocks and rough spots, her braid swinging like a pendulum.

  In the dining hall, two white women—one with a ponytail and one with gray hair like a scrub brush—sat talking, their trays pushed to the middle of their table. From the buffet Corpse noticed Angel, in jeans and an orange T-shirt now, sitting alone with a full plate. Angel saw Corpse, and her eyebrows pressed close.

  Corpse spooned scrambled eggs and refried beans onto a plate, ladled chunky salsa down the side, and started toward a table near the windows. She stopped. Turned.

  “May I join you?” Corpse said.

  Angel nodded once.

  Corpse sat two chairs away. “Why aren’t you in class?” she said.

  “I don’t have first period. I have enough credits to graduate already.”

  “Me too,” Corpse said. I wondered why she’d spend the morning ahead doing homework but knew she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.

  “Are you an urban Indian?” Angel said.

  “A what?”

  “An Indian from the city. One who maybe doesn’t know traditions, Indian ways.”

  “No. How could I be Indian?”

  Angel shrugged. “There’s a lot of mixed-blood or northern Indians here that don’t look Indian.”

  “My dad’s Portuguese. I inherited this olive skin from him.”

  Angel examined her. “When the newspapers or television or magazines come to report on the school, they always take photos of the kids who look Indian. They never take photos of the kids who don’t. We get pretty sick of it.”

  Corpse felt dumb again. “I just needed a change of scenery.”

  Angel took in the red scars on Corpse’s hand holding her fork.

  “People visit here all the time,” she said. “Journalists, educational researchers, other teachers. Almost every week we have a visitor.” Angel pulled a face. “People like to visit Indians. It makes them feel like they’ve done a good deed or something.”

  “Then why does everyone keep staring at me?”

  “You’re a legend: the girl who ran out during our presentation.”

  Corpse set down her fork and put her hands in her lap.

  “We tease William.”

  “William?”

  “The guy who’d just read when you left the room. ‘Beauty Repellent’ is his nickname now.”

  “It wasn’t his fault.”

  They analyzed one another. Angel’s high, silky forehead and the forward tilt of her face made her seem honest. A pale line of scar meandered from her cheekbone to her chin. Corpse wondered at its history.

  “You must be a senior then?” Angel said.

  “Yes.”

  “Going to college?”

  “Not sure.”

  Angel shot Corpse a questioning look.

  Corpse shrugged. “I’m not sure if I want to go.” I heard her words’ hollow ring. Away from home they’d lost their potency and sounded, well, spoiled.

  “Where’d you get accepted?” Angel said.

  Corpse told her.

  Angel looked out the bank of windows. “I got accepted to Yale. It’s a long way, Yale.”

  “Yale’s nice. Have you been there?”

  “I’ve been to Harvard,” she said, seeming to watch something out the windows. Corpse couldn’t see anything but the view.

  Angel’s eyes darted back to Corpse and then traveled directly to her shoulder. To me. I forced myself still.

  “I need to get to class. See you around,” she said.

  “See you.”

  Angel walked to the table by the kitchen door and bussed her tray. Once in the common area, Angel didn’t follow the sidewalk toward the dorms but a sidewalk leading right, past the empty swimming pool toward a big building. Probably meeting rooms converted to classrooms.

  Corpse sliced me with a glance. “Bullshit,” she said, like I thought so.

  That glance shoved me to the ceiling. I remembered Angel looking at me, and I dreaded her dream.

  After lunch, Mr. Handler and Corpse strolled toward the office. The valley bottom was warmer now, so Corpse carried her fleece instead of wearing it. Mr. Handler’s face was still drawn, but his shoulders sagged less beneath his white golf shirt. I wondered what he’d encountered that morning. Corpse tried to make out the logo on his shirt, but couldn’t. She searched for something to say that might lift his spirits. I let her. She remembered the photo on his desk in his office back home.

  “Your sons,” she said, “where did they go to college?”

  Mr. Handler’s shoulders straightened. “They’re both at CU. Doing well. It’s a good school.”

  “What are their majors?”

  “Phillip is a business major. Paul is a freshman, so he has no idea, but I suspect he’ll go into teaching.”

  “A teacher?” Corpse remembered Paul in the halls at Crystal High, could see him sucker-punching his buddies. How weird to consider him the opposite of student. Adulthood pressed close. I tried to shove it away, but Corpse drew it close and pictured herself in a white scientist’s coat, hair drawn back.

  Roberta sauntered toward them, and they turned to her.

  “Okay, Lone Ranger,” she said. “Save me.”

  Mr. Handler chuckled and we entered the office, the screen door clapping behind us. Louise was working at her desk and glanced up as Roberta sauntered to the back room.

  “Louise has a project for you, Oona,” Mr. Handler said. He followed Roberta, leaving the door open a crack like he did when we were in his office back home. I felt sorry for Mr. Handler and Roberta. I pictured them sitting across from each other like opponents: Mr. Handler offering Roberta opportunities and her repelling them. I had an image of Roberta’s swan body slithering along that pole with an angry glare. Blaming everything in life but herself.

  “Oona,” Louise said.

  Corpse blinked and turned to her.

  “You all right?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” Louise said. “I have a project for you. Since you’ve just done this, and must have done it well because I heard you got into Yale, I’d like you to review the online application pages and procedures for the schools on this list.”

  Louise handed Corpse a piece of lined paper with names as headings, short lists of colleges under each. “We’d like you to coach our juniors on filling out the Common Application and in looking at the requirements for the schools they’re interested in. We’ll save what we can and refer to it again in the fall. They may change their minds about schools, and that’s okay. These applications can be daunting. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.” Corpse simmered with apprehension; she’d had a hard time with her own applications. These kids were plenty smart; she’d seem like a fool.

  “Good. We have twelve juniors applying next year.” Louise shook her head. “I wish we could get all twenty-one to apply. Let’s plan for you to meet with three students each afternoon. Tomorrow you’ll meet with … ” She walked to an appointment calendar on her desk and ran her finger to tomorrow’s box. “Pauline, John, and William. See how I’ve listed the schools under their names?”

  Corpse scanned the paper and nodded. William. Beauty Repellent.

  “Excellent. Here’s the computer you’ll be using.” Louise walked
to where the two upholstered chairs had been pushed apart, a short wooden table squeezed between. “When they’re finished, please print off their applications and store them in here.” She pointed to a folder. “Save them on this flash drive too.”

  “Are you sure they need my help?”

  “Can’t hurt,” Louise said without looking at her.

  Corpse flushed. Louise and Mr. Handler were just creating something for her to do. She wondered what the staff was telling the students about why they’d have to endure this with her. I pictured them sitting there, bored, humoring her, thinking the whole time how screwed up she was. She wished she’d never come.

  “Okay,” Corpse said. She took a pencil from a tin can next to the computer and marked hashes next to Pauline, John, and William. She drew back the folding chair at the computer and sat down.

  Louise returned to her desk.

  Corpse pulled up the first school under the first name and began to navigate the site. The upholstered chairs on either side of the desk seemed like pudgy guards. From the inch-wide opening to Mr. Handler’s office, voices trickled out. If Corpse strained, she could make out words, but she concentrated on not listening. I loitered around, nervous about Corpse’s comment at breakfast.

  She was well into the second college site, Gustavus Adolphus, when Roberta swooped out, wiping her cheeks. Right through me.

  She missed a step and froze.

  I shot to the ceiling, jolted by her fury and confusion. Her touch mirrored Corpse’s, yet emitted such sexuality.

  Mr. Handler leaned against his office door frame. Roberta scowled over her shoulder like Corpse was a disease, then bolted. The screen door clapped behind her. Mr. Handler looked a hundred years old. He smiled sadly at Corpse and Louise.

  Louise shook her head. “You’re a god, Perry.”

  He patted Corpse’s shoulder and disappeared back into his office. The chair’s creak as he settled into it seemed part of his sigh.

  Fifteen

  From Oona’s journal:

  In the moonlight falling directly onto the crystal clear water … the large trout disappeared in the jet of the waterfall, which glistened like falling metal. I saw it … dancing in a wild spinning movement … It then came out of this spinning movement and floated motionlessly upwards. On reaching the lower curve of the waterfall, it tumbled over and with a strong push reached behind the upper curve of the waterfall. There, in the fast flowing water, with a vigorous tail movement, it disappeared.

  —Viktor Schauberger

  Though I’d willed Corpse to stay in that warm bed, she strode up the double-track through murky early light, partly to get warm, and partly because she didn’t want Angel to see her. She was huffing when she reached the halfway point where she’d called Gabe the day before. It seemed a week ago that she’d made that call rather than yesterday.

  She kept going. All this walking was great practice. Her missing toes still shouted, but her stride was definitely smoothing. What we’d thought was the top was actually a swale where the mountain flattened before continuing up. Angel kneeled in a clearing, facing east with her head bowed, silhouetted by a rising sliver of sun that ignited the horizon and the mountain’s ascending edge. Corpse prowled behind a juniper and peered through its scented branches.

  Angel began chanting in a language we didn’t understand, and Corpse suddenly felt like a peeping Tom. She turned the other direction and picked a blue-gray berry. Sliced it with her thumbnail. Held its sharp, clean smell to her nose. It reminded her of the cleaner Sugeidi used on the woodwork of Chateau Antunes. Across Corpse’s chest, a stick of longing seemed to connect her shoulders and tug toward the maid she wasn’t supposed to call.

  Angel grew quiet, and Corpse turned as Angel rose, brushing off her knees. She spotted Corpse and Corpse froze, looking like an idiot.

  “Are you spying on me?” Angel said.

  Corpse stepped out, but I stayed in the tree. Twenty yards stretched between them, and Corpse held up her palm to shield the sun. “When you tell a person you dreamed about her, it gets her attention. But I didn’t spy; I turned my back.”

  Angel wore the same gray sweatshirt and navy sweatpants. She blew out her breath and started toward the road.

  “Why do you do it?”

  “I’m showing him I’m ready for the day. And worthy.”

  I wondered what the sun saw when it looked at Corpse.

  “Do you do it every morning?” she asked.

  “Most mornings. Sometimes I’m lazy.”

  “Do they greet the sun back home?”

  “Yes,” Angel said.

  “Do you miss it? Home?”

  “A little.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Fort Defiance, Arizona.”

  “What do you miss?”

  “What is this? Twenty questions?”

  “Sorry.”

  Angel shrugged, but it seemed more like something inside her giving up. “I miss my family. Especially my grandfather.”

  “I used to hate my mom.”

  “You don’t anymore?” Angel looked interested for the first time.

  A breeze rose from the valley, draping Corpse’s hair across her face. She hooked it back with a finger and returned that hand to blocking the sun. “I understand her now.”

  “What changed?” Angel said, really looking at her.

  “I tried to kill myself.”

  Angel nodded. Her eyes swerved to me in my tree.

  Corpse’s hand dropped, and she went limp all over.

  Angel glanced at the sun. “I’ve got to get going.” She took two steps. “Want to come?”

  No! I said. Enough was enough.

  Corpse couldn’t move. Her mouth barely worked. “I need … to make a call.”

  Angel traced Corpse’s sagging outline with her eyes. “See you at breakfast?”

  “Breakfast.”

  Corpse listened to Angel’s footsteps descend the double-

  track till they disappeared. I hung back, nervous. After a long time, Corpse turned to the sun. “What do you see? A dead girl? Bullshit?” She shut her eyes, and red ignited their lids. Her thoughts turned to flame, her hands made fists, and she rocked back and forth. “What’s wrong with me?”

  She willed the sun’s energy to scour her like a laser beam. She imagined that searing beam inching from her toes to the top of her head, smoke rising off her.

  Two magpies landed in a nearby tree and started a racket. She stumbled back like a drunk and opened her eyes. She reached her hands up and yelled, like sending a long ray back at the sun, and the magpies took to squawking flight. For a long time she stood, arms outstretched, her eight digits reaching like twigs. It was freaky, and I hoped nobody could see her from below.

  She pulled out her phone. On the third ring, Sugeidi said “Hello,” the word like a box in her mouth.

  “Hola, Sugeidi. Es Oona,” Corpse said.

  “Sí, Oona. Cómo estás? You are no hurt?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Corpse’s voice rose to that kid voice. “I just missed you. That’s all.”

  Before the muffled sound of fingers over the mouthpiece, she heard Sugeidi’s breath catch in her throat.

  At breakfast Corpse didn’t talk much. She felt limp, exhausted, like she’d trudged a thousand miles. She wondered if it was from getting up so early and hiking up the mountain these last two days, but she knew better. This fatigue was from what had happened up there. Angel eyeing me in that juniper kept playing in her head like a song. Corpse sensed me sensing her and poked at her eggs with her fork. She felt Angel’s eyes on her now. At a table behind them, those same two white women, the ponytail one and the scrub-brush-haired one, murmured, the only other people in the room.

  “Did you already know I’d been dead?” Corpse said.

  Angel shrugged and
glanced my way.

  “Try me,” Corpse said. “If I’d said I was an urban Indian, would you tell me?”

  Angel’s face hardened. She rose and gathered her tray.

  “Can I join you tomorrow? To greet the sun?”

  Angel closed her eyes and sighed. “It’s private.”

  Corpse set her hand on the table and studied her missing fingers.

  Angel watched her, seeming to weigh things.

  Corpse longed to ask about the dream.

  “See you,” Angel said.

  Corpse watched Angel walk across the common area toward the big building. The women still murmured behind Corpse, and she peeked over her shoulder at them. They leaned close. Their hushed voices lured her attention.

  “I’m just not sure what I’ll do next year,” the ponytail woman said. “This has been a great experience, don’t get me wrong. But it’s been a wild ride, and I’ve never been able to forget, even for a minute, that I’m an outsider.”

  “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” the scrub-brush-haired woman said.

  “Did I ever tell you about my first week here?”

  No response. Corpse imagined Scrub Brush shaking her head.

  “I think it was the second night. And one of the girls came banging on my door, whimpering about witches and something in her room.”

  “What? Like a ghost?”

  “I don’t know. It was the middle of the night, for God’s sake, and I tried to calm her. I mean, a witch? I eventually got her to sleep—she spent the night in my room—and in the morning she seemed fine. At lunch Yazzie took me aside. Apparently I’d handled it all wrong. When something like this happens, you inform him immediately, and they call a medicine man.”

  No response again.

  “I read the faculty handbook. It doesn’t say anything about this kind of thing.”

  “But now you know. I’ll take this place any day. I taught at this boarding school for at-risk teens outside Chicago. Talk about challenges. Every school—”

  “And then,” Ponytail continued, “there was the time I was directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had all these kids that were sprites, and I was trying to get them to sprite across the stage. They were having a hard time with it, so I said, ‘How about if I play some drum music?’ Well, they all rolled their eyes and got pissed off, saying, ‘Just let us be teenagers!’”