The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  Abra set what felt like pretty broad parameters for her search: single male of any race between the ages of forty-two and fifty-two within fifteen miles. She wasn’t averse to crossing the Cuyahoga River to the west side for the right guy. Age-wise, that gave her five years on either side of her own age, which seemed just right. The search turned up nearly six hundred results. There had to be a few decent, like-minded men in there.

  The first thing that struck her was how many guys had grainy, unflattering profile pictures. Two had selfies that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to mug shots. The good-looking ones wrote the least; the dorky-looking ones wrote the most. Abra tried to click equally on the profiles of the good-looking ones and the ones who perhaps weren’t conventionally handsome but had a kind smile or a playful expression.

  “Okay, SlimDaddy, let’s see what else you like to do,” she murmured as she clicked on SlimDaddy’s name. His profile photo showed him after a race—he was wearing a bib number. They obviously had running in common. SlimDaddy also liked sailing, farmers’ markets, and nature. He was forty-four to Abra’s forty-seven. He had one child (a teenager). Not a problem, Abra thought. She was seriously considering messaging him, when she got to the end of his profile and saw that he was only interested in women aged thirty to forty-three.

  “Fine,” she said out loud.

  She cruised around her search results a bit more, clicking on a profile here and there. One profile showed a heart-stoppingly handsome guy with thick salt-and-pepper hair, light olive skin, and a jaw that could be used to chisel marble. “Hello, Monty1226…” Abra said. She knew it was shallow, but she clicked on his profile. There were six other photos there, and he looked equally as good in all of them. The great profile pic wasn’t a fluke; he was just a fine-looking human being. He listed his profession as “business owner,” which could be anything. Abra scrolled down to the rest of his profile. “I’m a self-made man who knows what he likes. In no particular order, I’m a fan of fine wine, fine women, classic cars, the 2nd Amendment, and AC/DC,” she read. Could you base a relationship on wine and AC/DC? Monty1226 was fifty, but his profile said he was interested in women twenty-five to forty-five. “You’re older than I am, but I’m too old for you?” she said to her laptop.

  She clicked back to her search results and scrolled down. That’s when she saw the photograph for Foodie815. “Richard…” she muttered.

  The picture was unmistakably The Evil Richard Brewster. She had taken it herself two years ago while they were hiking at Punderson State Park. Richard was standing by the edge of Punderson Lake in autumn, the sun was bright to his left, and behind him you could see a forest at the peak of fall colors. The light and trees made Richard look better than usual. Now the bastard was using it as a dating profile picture. Against her better judgement, Abra clicked on Richard’s profile. The least she could say for him was that he didn’t misrepresent himself. He really was forty-nine and really was a restaurant manager who enjoyed camping and hiking, food, and Cleveland Browns football. At least I don’t have to see the Browns lose anymore, Abra thought. Richard was a season ticket holder, and Abra had frozen her tail off far too many times watching a sport she didn’t even like. She looked further into Richard’s profile. Under “longest relationship” he had put “six years.” That was her. Those six years had been part of her life too. This sidelong mention of their relationship seemed to nullify the whole thing. She was just a footnote in his life. Bastard. “Next time I’ll find someone who loves basketball,” she muttered.

  “Hey, Miss Abra, why are you talking to your computer?”

  Abra looked up to see two of her next-door neighbors, sixteen-year-old Ariel and her six-year-old brother, Darnell, who was staring at her with huge brown eyes. Between the eyes and the still-chubby cheeks, Darnell knew he was damned adorable. “Good morning,” Abra replied. “Actually, I wasn’t talking to the computer. I was talking to somebody on the computer.”

  “Oohh! Video chat! Lemme see!” Darnell squealed and ran up the short driveway to the porch at the same time that Ariel said, “Darnell, leave Miss Abra alone.”

  Abra quickly closed out her web browser. The neighborhood kids certainly didn’t need to know she was cruising dating sites. “Sorry, Darnell. All done.”

  “Awww. Can I see your computer? Please?”

  Abra was pretty sure the family didn’t have a computer at home. “How can I resist that face? Five minutes, but don’t touch any of my open documents,” she said as she put the laptop on the porch.

  “I won’t!” Darnell said, reverently taking the computer and settling in on the concrete steps of the narrow porch.

  Abra looked up from Darnell to meet Ariel’s eye. “You know you’re just making him more spoiled, Miss Abra.”

  “Sorry.”

  Darnell was the youngest of five kids. He knew how to get attention. Ariel was the one whom Abra thought needed a little spoiling. The eldest, her life seemed to revolve around sports and taking care of her younger siblings. Ariel was the kid taking shot after shot on the beat-up basketball hoop in her front yard at all hours. The bounce-bounce-bounce of the basketball used to get on Abra’s nerves until she realized that Ariel would use any excuse to get out of the house.

  “How’s your ankle, Miss Abra?”

  “Much better, thank you. What are you doing with yourself this summer, Ariel?”

  “Not much. Babysitting, practicing my basketball, maybe running. I’m thinking of doing soccer next year.”

  “Read any good books lately?”

  “I read a couple of the mysteries you told me about, the ones with the lady detective in Chicago? Those were good.”

  “Glad you liked them.”

  Abra always felt she was walking a fine line with Ariel and her family. She wanted to help, but she didn’t want to play the crusading do-gooder neighbor either. “Ariel, do you have any time to do some yardwork for me? Maybe mow the lawn and do some weeding? Between my ankle and work, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do. I’ll pay you, of course.”

  Ariel’s eyes shone behind her square-framed glasses. “Sure. Thank you.”

  Abra had never paid anyone to do yard work before and, frankly, knew she couldn’t afford it. But she was pretty sure Ariel could use a few extra dollars in her pocket. Frankly, half the people in the neighborhood could. South Euclid had developed as a bedroom community during the fifties and sixties. It had a few neighborhoods with spacious homes on big lots, but probably half the housing stock consisted of small bungalows like hers. And just like most other older suburbs, the city was now falling prey to the same crumbling infrastructure and fleeing middle class that had emptied out the big cities. Between age, the mortgage loan crisis, and the recession, their neighborhood probably had more in common with neighborhoods in the city than those in suburbs farther east. Their block alone had two foreclosed houses.

  She and Ariel watched Darnell as he played a game at an online site called Math Maniacs.

  “We used this site in school last year,” he said knowledgeably, navigating it like a pro.

  “Wow, when I was in kindergarten, we spent most of our time coloring and playing Farmer in the Dell,” Abra said.

  Darnell looked up at her in wonder. “Dell like a computer?”

  “No, dell like out in a field. There were no computers. No internet. It was the Dark Ages.”

  Ariel snickered. “I’ll come over later to do the lawn,” she said to Abra. “Although I might only be able to do it for part of the summer.” Ariel looked at the sidewalk and then at her house. She lowered her voice a little: “We might be moving.”

  “You’re kidding. Where to?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “We’re gonna live somewhere else,” Darnell said in a sing-songy voice that didn’t seem nearly as concerned as his older sister’s.

  “Come on, Darnell. Miss Abra has st
uff to do,” she said, and took Darnell’s hand. “See you later!”

  She watched as they walked down the street, maybe toward the playground at Bexley Park, although that was a pretty long walk for a kid Darnell’s age. Maybe just somewhere out of the house.

  She’d had enough of the internet. Abra shut down the laptop and brought it inside. There was plenty of Sunday left. She stepped back out onto the porch and made her way down the steps to the driveway. A little fresh air was the best medicine. She tentatively walked down the driveway to the sidewalk. It was tempting to do a short run, but she knew her ankle wasn’t strong enough for that. Just walking for now. She walked up and down the drive a couple times, focusing on maintaining a proper walking gait, no limping, seeing if the ankle would withstand a longer walk. The second time she turned around in her snug little backyard, she heard loud voices coming from next door.

  Ramon and Latrice, Ariel and Darnell’s parents, were good neighbors. Ramon worked graveyard shift at the UPS facility out near the county airport, while Latrice worked a series of retail jobs. Ramon was one of those guys who always appeared to be in a good mood. He seemed to like Abra because they were both part Hispanic, as though that gave them common ground. Between working jobs that kept her on her feet all day and taking care of five kids, Latrice always seemed friendly but tired.

  With a lot of kids in the house, there was typically some noise coming from next door, but not angry yelling. Not like this. There wasn’t much of a divider between her yard and theirs, just a quartet of forsythia bushes that had already lost most of their yellow blossoms. The forsythia had been planted long before Abra bought the house. They were large enough that sometimes she saw Darnell and his friends climbing in them as though they were trees.

  Ramon and Latrice were in their kitchen, near the open window. Instinctively she knew this had something to do with the family moving. It wasn’t any of her business. It wasn’t. Not your monkey…not your circus, she thought in a vain attempt to squelch her curiosity.

  Abra had never tried to turn invisible. Each time it had happened, it just happened—more more like a daydream than reality. What if? What if I really can? She concentrated for a moment on nothing, on everything. How do you turn invisible on a beautiful Sunday in early June? It felt like an actor looking for an emotional memory. It felt fake. Her body knew the difference. Even if she did manage to turn invisible, how would she know? Each time it had happened, she’d been too preoccupied with what was going on around her to notice if she could see herself. The thing she did remember was how it felt—a quick sensation of having her body turn inside out then the glorious feeling of being something that light didn’t need to bend around, as though she was light, made of light.

  Abra stood in her driveway, feeling the early-afternoon sun pulse down on her. Katherine’s voice kept running through her head, saying, “You can make something invisible; you just have to bend light around an object so that it doesn’t cast a shadow.”

  How do I make you bend around me? she murmured softly. I’m not here. I can’t be seen, she thought. It was like trying to find the magic word to a charm or a spell. Growing up with a name like “Abra,” every third person she met thought it was clever to call her “Abracadabra.” Would that it were so easy. She whispered, “Abracadabra” then, “Now I’m invisible,” “You can’t see me,” and “Disappear.” None of those worked. This was a stupid idea. You can’t turn invisible, she thought. You can’t bend light around you.

  Then she thought perhaps the light didn’t need to bend.

  “Pass through me,” she murmured to the light. And it did.

  Abra looked down and didn’t see herself. She saw the wavy tendrils of the old baggy shorts she was wearing, small waves of her T-shirt, and on the ground, she could see half of her sandal—just the part that covered the Ace bandage on her ankle. It took a moment for her to realize that everything directly touching her skin was invisible; everything that wasn’t touching her skin was visible. She slipped off her sandals. Now the only thing visible was the loose fabric of her shorts and shirt. Well, if no one could see her, no one could see her, right? She took them off.

  A pair of stray shorts and a T-shirt lying in the middle of the driveway looked odd, so she walked a few steps to the corner of the house and stashed the clothes on one of the faded chairs that sat on her uneven brick patio. As she walked, she noticed something else: her ankle felt great. It didn’t hurt, and she could walk normally, smoothly.

  The low rumble of Ramon’s and Latrice’s voices was still audible. Feeling as nosy as she ever had, Abra walked across the driveway and through a narrow opening in between two of the forsythia bushes. Her bare left foot hit a rock.

  “Dammit,” she hissed. There wasn’t much point in being invisible if she was making noise. No more talking. Instead, she focused on keeping her mind open, allowing the light to pass through her. She wasn’t sure if that’s what was actually happening. The thought that she was standing in her bra and underwear in the neighbor’s backyard made her stifle a laugh. She held her hand in front of her face. Nope, couldn’t see it. Crazy or invisible, she thought.

  Latrice’s voice through the window brought her back. “I am not letting them throw us out of our own house,” she said. “We are out of here before that.”

  “Baby, I know, I know…” Ramon kept saying.

  “Why didn’t you make them change the rate?”

  “You know I tried, but they had a million different fees. I told them we haven’t got enough for the house payment now.”

  “You fix it. You’re the one who said we could afford it. You’re the one who said you’d be making more money in a few years so it didn’t matter if the payment went up.”

  “I didn’t realize it was gonna go up that much! NorthCoast Home Mortgage are bunch of crooks.”

  Their conversation went around and around. Abra gathered that they’d been snookered into an adjustable rate mortgage a few years earlier when mortgage companies were handing out mortgages to anybody with a pulse, regardless of whether they could afford it. Now it was ballooning. She stood in Ramon and Latrice’s backyard for a moment, listening to them fight and worry, wondering how she could possibly help them, when she heard new voices. Ariel and Darnell were back, walking up the sidewalk toward their house, with Darnell singing a made-up song about being hungry. Ariel had said she’d come over to do the lawn. This seemed like a good time to make her exit.

  Abra started picking her barefoot way back into her own yard when she realized she could see her own feet. Darn, darn, darn, she thought. Light, light. I don’t bend light. “Pass through me, pass though me,” she breathed. Again she felt as though her weight had lifted. Stepping on a couple of acorns in bare feet just sort of tickled, and her ankle again felt strong and sure. Looking down, she couldn’t see her own feet, couldn’t see her shadow. Darnell’s loud, off-key singing covered any noise Abra might have made rushing back to her yard.

  She grabbed her shorts off the patio chair and held them close to her stomach, hoping no one would see a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt flying through the air on their own. She could wait until she was safely inside the house before putting them back on. For a moment, she merely stood on the patio, marveling at what had just happened.

  She had turned invisible, of that she was sure. And she had done it on command. She was standing outside in her underwear and nobody could see her. Abra had to run inside before half the neighborhood started hearing disembodied laughter.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Margie knew Eli kept a blog. A few years back his therapist had suggested he keep a journal to work through his struggles with cutting and self-acceptance. Somewhere along the line, the handwritten journal had become a blog. Why Eli would choose to write about his problems and deepest feelings in a blog that anyone with internet access and a working knowledge of English could read, Margie wasn’t sure. To that end
, she and Karl had made him promise not to use any real names or locations and no photographs of people’s faces. Margie used to check the blog on a regular basis just to keep an eye on things, like a park ranger taking a walk through the territory to scan for smoke. She never left a comment, but a surprising number of kids and parents had. The blog seemed to have served its purpose. It helped Eli through the toughest period their family had yet experienced, and it even seemed to have touched a few other families in a positive way.

  He didn’t do the blog anymore, said he didn’t need it. And that was a relief. It seemed a signal he genuinely had put that phase of his life in the past. Margie hadn’t visited A Cutting Tale in months, so she was a little concerned when Eli sent her an email one evening. Not a text, a proper email. For him, this was the equivalent of sending a handwritten letter in cursive. The email was short and cryptic. It just read, “Mom, I wasn’t sure how to share this with you, but I know I have to. Hope you don’t mind too much. Love, Eli.”

  Margie had to take a couple of deep breaths and remind herself that just because Eli was updating his blog didn’t mean that he was cutting again. It didn’t. She was so focused on trying not to worry that she didn’t read the URL in the link he sent; she just clicked.