Drenched in Light

by Lisa Wingate

  Dad didn’t answer at first; then he finally smacked his lips suspiciously and said, “You hate baseball.”

  “Yeah, but for you, I’d do baseball, Dad.” There was a world of unspoken appreciation in the statement. I hoped he understood the things I couldn’t say.

  “That’s my girl.” He chuckled softly, then let me off the baseball hook. “Maybe instead of season tickets, we could just do a game or two.”

  “All right, Dad. I’ll see you later on this evening. It might be late.”

  “Leave your cell phone on, all right? Mom tried to call earlier and got your voice mail. You know she worries.”

  “Yes, I know, Dad.” I could feel us slipping into the same old routine.

  “Where did you say you are?”

  My body tensed up. Now we would have to go through the litany of explanations. “Helping with an arts minicamp. I’m going to stay for dinner, so it’ll be a while.”

  “All right.” And then the sound of papers rustling. His mind was already back to the taxes and fantasy baseball. “Be careful driving. Call us when you’re headed home.”

  “I will. Bye, Dad.” Hanging up the phone, I fished the substitute teacher list from my briefcase and began making calls. Once people went out for Saturday night, it would be that much more difficult to fill the vacancies.

  Propping the paper on the dashboard, I started down the list. The sad story of the teacherless algebra class netted me three answering machines and four negative replies. The prospect of having to teach math all next week, on top of having been AWOL half of the weekend, loomed large on the horizon. I said a little prayer that one of the answering-machine owners would call back and accept the job.

  A knock on the passenger window startled me from my thoughts, and I looked up as Dell opened the door.

  “Karen said I could show you the way out to the farm, and they’ll be along in a little bit. Kate needs to get some stuff at the grocery store for tomorrow, and Keiler’s gotta fill a prescription for pain medicine for his leg. Kate said he’s probably not supposed to be riding around on a Harley, and he ought to leave it here tonight and ride out to the farm with her.” With an exasperated eye roll that was a perfect imitation of Karen’s, she added, “He’s such a goofus.”

  “He seems to be,” I agreed, moving my briefcase out of the way so that she could slide in.

  She reacted with a look of concern. “But Keiler’s, like, real smart and stuff. He only seems like a dope. He’s really not.”

  “I can see that,” I agreed, charmed that she felt the need to defend her friend.

  “He’s, like, really cool and stuff. He does all those silly things on purpose, so the kids will have fun. He calls it the Jumpkids secret—if he’s the biggest gooberhead in the room, none of the kids feel too embarrassed to try stuff.” Her face brightened with sincere amazement. “It works, too. It’s hard to feel stupid when Keiler’s around.”

  I started laughing, and Dell smiled sheepishly as we pulled out of the parking lot. “Turn left here, then right at the next one, then left on the highway,” she said, pointing down the road. “It’s about ten minutes to the farm.”

  “All right. Here we go.” Piloting the car through the small-town streets to a winding ribbon of highway into the hills, I had a sense of moving farther from my own world and deeper into Dell’s. I imagined her growing up in this tiny town, living in some ramshackle house along the riverbank, maybe riding her bike up and down the rocky slopes by the water, like the kids at the edge of town were doing. Far from any house, unsupervised and unrestricted, they glided down the slope with their jackets flapping and their feet spread out like stabilizers. At the bottom, they zipped under the highway bridge, then pumped up the other side.

  I slowed to watch, recognizing Sherita among the group, and thinking that where I came from, kids would never be allowed such unstructured folly.

  I was struck again by how it must be for Dell, having one foot in this world and one foot in another. It was no surprise that she felt like the shoes would never fit. Beside me, she leaned closer to the window, as if she wanted to be with the other kids, gliding down the riverbank in the late-afternoon sunshine. “Want to go for a walk when we get home?” she asked. “Just for a little while, and then we can study?”

  I felt a rush of sympathy. She looked tired, worried, slightly lost—a little girl in mismatched shoes. “Sure. That sounds great. I bet both of us could use a break.”

  “We could go down to the river.”

  I pictured the river being like the one in my dream. “That sounds good. I’d like to see it.” We fell into silence, Dell lost in her thoughts, while I remembered the sensation of dancing on the current, bathed in sunlight. Before the dream, I’d been empty and useless, ragged as I drifted into sleep. Those emotions seemed far away now, and I realized I hadn’t fallen into that pit lately. I was healing in some way, growing stronger, slipping more firmly into the body of this new woman, this guidance counselor who was searching for a mission in life.

  When did that happen? How did it happen? I couldn’t say, but looking over at Dell, I knew that she was part of the answer. Somehow in helping her, I was finding my way out of the darkness.

  “Turn there.” She pointed. “That’s the road.”

  I piloted the car into what looked like a long gravel driveway leading lazily through a winter-bare farm field, then uphill toward an old two-story white house, high atop a bluff overlooking the river.

  “What a pretty place,” I commented as we drifted past an ancient hip-roofed barn and started uphill toward the neatly kept clapboard structure.

  “That’s Grandma Rose’s house.” Leaning to peer out the front window, Dell pointed toward it. “Kate and Ben live there now, though. And their kids, Josh and Rose. Grandma moved out and gave them the big house. She said the little house was closer to the river, and she liked it better because she could open the windows and hear the water passing.”

  I imagined having a river running by my bedroom window, falling asleep to the sounds of the current trickling over rocks. “That must be wonderful.”

  Dell nodded solemnly. “I used to hear the river from my granny’s place. Sometimes I’d lay and listen to it until late at night. It’s a good sound. Like music.”

  “You must miss it.”

  “Sometimes,” she whispered, then lifted her shoulders and let them fall in a gesture of helplessness. “Karen got me a little fountain for my room. It doesn’t sound the same, but I like it.”

  “That’s nice.” Reaching across the car, I squeezed her hand. “It’s OK to miss the way things used to be. It doesn’t mean you’re not grateful for the way they are now. Both lives are always going to be part of you, Dell. That’s the way it should be. The past is always part of who we become.”

  Her eyes searched mine, as if she knew those words weren’t just about her. “Do you miss being a dancer?”

  “Sometimes.” The word hung in the air between us, barely a whisper. “I miss how it felt. The good parts of it.”

  Her fingers squeezed mine. “Me too,” she said.

  Pulling up behind a detached three-car garage, I turned off the ignition. By the yard fence, a dark-haired man was trimming the winter-bare branches of a climbing rose and tossing the clippings into a barrel.

  Dell waved to him as we got out. “Hey, Uncle Ben. This is my guidance counselor, Ms. Costell.” She introduced us from a distance. “I’m going to show her the river before everybody else gets here, OK?”

  “Sure, go ahead.” Smiling, he lifted the pruners into the air in greeting, and we waved in response.

  “Where’s Rowdy?” Dell called.

  “Not sure.” The man returned to his pruning. “Out chasing rabbits or burying bones. You might run into him on your walk. He’s missed you.”

  “My old dog lives here now,” Dell explained. “He wasn’t happy in the yard in Kansas City.” Leading me away from the car, she angled toward a small guest cabin out back. “The
trail’s behind the little house.” She glanced over her shoulder at the driveway as if she were afraid someone would prevent our escape. Skirting the yard fence, we slipped through a seemingly impenetrable wall of barren blackberry brambles to a well-worn forest path. Ahead of me, she moved with a natural grace, her body twisting and curving in and out of overhanging branches and dangling briars, her passage as soundless as a slip of breeze, as if she were as much a part of the landscape as the soil and the trees.

  I stumbled along behind her, stopping to push back tree limbs and pry myself from the clutches of marauding brambles. Dell moved farther ahead, seeming to have forgotten I was there. When she disappeared around a bend in the trail, I had the disquieting sensation of being alone in the forest. A moment later, I passed through the last of the dry underbrush and emerged on the riverbank. Dell was standing at the water’s edge, mesmerized by the play of light and shadow. I watched, thinking of the girl in the river. Even now, was part of her wishing the current would rise up and carry her away?

  She looked over her shoulder at me, her eyes narrowing contemplatively.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, but my voice seemed out of place.

  “I’ll be back,” she whispered, then turned and crossed the shallows, hopping easily from rock to rock. On the other side, she used a nest of exposed sycamore roots as a ladder and disappeared into the tall brown grasses.

  Glancing uncertainly up and down the river, I considered following or waiting, then finally decided to cross the water myself. Other than sliding one toe briefly into the icy water, I made it across relatively unscathed, and climbed the opposite bank to a well-worn path that led through the dry leaves and up the hill. At the edge of the woods, the trail disappeared among thick unmowed weeds and cattails, now clothed in winter brown. A dog barked somewhere nearby as I pushed through the tangle and emerged on a gravel road. Turning toward the sound, I surveyed a row of decaying cracker box houses, the yards strewn with the carcasses of rotting furniture, trash, and discarded bits and pieces of automobiles. In front of one of the homes, a dog was straining at its chain, barking at Dell, who stood motionless in the road. She seemed oblivious, transfixed by something beyond the bend. Moving closer, I followed her line of vision toward a tiny house crouched in an overgrown field where the road turned. The place may have once been painted pale green or white, but was now just a fading relic with weathered wooden siding and a sagging roof partially bare of shingles. The entire structure leaned toward the river, as if it might slide down the slope and float away when the spring rains came.

  “That’s where we lived.” Dell spoke the words with some amazement. Her eyes reflected the road, the decaying houses, the cornucopia of trash in the ditch. “I guess somebody else lives there now.”

  I was momentarily mute. It was hard to believe that anyone could be living there, or had lived there recently. The distance Dell had come in the months since her grandmother’s death suddenly seemed so much more vast, her talent for music that much more amazing.

  “I guess so,” I whispered, tugging the zipper upward on my jacket as a puff of breeze traveled past, warning of a cold night ahead. I tried to imagine what it would be like surviving the winter in that tiny house, where, as Dell had written, the walls were paper-thin.

  Her gaze moved slowly back and forth, scanning the yard, the house, the rotten mattress, box springs, and recliner in the ditch. Watching her, I understood her in a deeper sense, and I realized something important about my job. Dell was coming from a place I couldn’t imagine, but so were all of the kids who passed me in the halls at Harrington. Some lived in good places, and some lived in difficult places, and I would never be able to tell the difference just by looking. In order to know who they really were, I had to go below the surface.

  “What do you think of when you look at your old house?” I asked.

  Shrugging, she turned her shoulder to it and started back the way we had come. “I think it’s gross,” she said flatly, her lips a thin, determined line. “I can’t believe I lived there.”

  Falling in step beside her, I sighed softly, and she glanced over, surprised. “But there’s part of you that misses it,” I said.

  “No, ma’am.” Her steps quickened, as if she couldn’t be gone from the place fast enough and wished she hadn’t been drawn to return there. “What’s there to miss? It’s a rat heap, and my granny was out cold on the couch most of the time from all her prescriptions, and I slept on a mattress on the floor, and half the time nobody got me up for school, or all the clothes were dirty, or there wasn’t any food in the house and all the food stamps were used up. Who would miss that?”

  “Someone who suddenly feels a lot of pressure to keep up,” I said, watching my tennis shoes crunch through the dead grass as we crossed the ditch again. “To keep a schedule, keep up with grades, and music practice, and spring performance with the symphonic, and relationships with a new foster family.”

  She shrugged. “But those are good things.”

  “Yes, they are, but, sometimes we can get so focused on all those outside things that we don’t find time for the inside ones.” I pointed to my heart, swallowing an unexpected rush of emotion. “And while we’re doing all those outside things, the to-do list in here is getting longer and longer and longer until it’s so big we can’t face starting on it.”

  Lips twisting into a one-sided smirk, she turned toward the trail again, her hair swinging around her shoulders. “Like when you clean the room by stuffing everything under the bed, and pretty soon you don’t want to look under there at all,” she interpreted. “Grandma Rose told me always sweep out under the bed and clean the closets; then you’ll be happy to have folks over to visit.”

  I chuckled at the analogy. “Exactly. That’s it exactly. We all need time to look through the closet and consider what’s in there. We’ve stored all that stuff for a reason. It’s all part of who we are. If we let it stack up, then pretty soon we’re afraid to have anybody over, because we’re hiding a mess.”

  Grabbing an overhanging vine, Dell flipped herself onto it like a gymnast, then sat looking down at me from above. The vine was worn smooth, as if she’d completed the maneuver many times before. “You sound like Grandma Rose.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and moved on down the path, feeling surprisingly content with the footsteps I was walking in.

  By the time we reached the farm, Karen and Kate were in the kitchen preparing supper, and Keiler was in the yard giving lawn-chair airplane rides to Kate’s kids, preschooler Josh and toddler Rose. The afternoon was growing dim, and an evening chill was coming in, so they followed us inside. We sat at the table with Ben as Kate and Karen took prepackaged lasagnas and garlic bread from the oven, and set them on the table with a hastily prepared salad and bottles of dressing.

  “Sorry it’s nothing fancy,” Kate said as she and Karen sat down. “I figured easier was better, considering that there wasn’t anyone home to cook.”

  Coughing indignantly, Ben raised his hand. “Excuse me, what am I—Casper the Friendly Ghost? I’ll have you know I slaved away all afternoon putting this together—boiling those noodle … things, and putting those other”—he leaned over to examine the concoction in the prefab foil pans—“things in there.” Grabbing the spoon, he scooped small portions onto Josh’s and Rose’s plates to cool. “See? I sliced mushrooms, and made minimeatballs, and put in some kind of white … cheese-looking stuff.”

  Frowning, Rose bent close to her high chair tray, then curled her top lip. “Eeewkie,” she said.

  “Not eewkie,” Ben countered, pilfering a minimeatball and popping it in his mouth. “Good stuff. Daddy made it.”

  “Eeewkie,” Rose insisted, and the rest of us laughed. Then Keiler said grace over us, and Ben began dishing up lasagna. Only when my plate came back with a huge helping and a butter-covered piece of garlic bread did I consider the ramifications of having to eat in front of strangers—especially having to eat something as fattening as lasagna a
nd garlic bread.

  As I took a helping of salad, all the old excuses ran through my head—

  I’m not feeling well… .

  I’m on a diet… .

  I have this food allergy… .

  I ate a big lunch… .

  That was delicious. May I use your restroom?

  The rest of the table, completely unaware of my insane mental dialog, fell into a conversation about Keiler’s road trip from New Mexico.

  Taking a deep breath, I started picking at my food, trying to focus on the table talk rather than my plate. Keiler was telling the ski lift story again. The kid who fell on him was up to a hundred and eighty pounds by now.

  Dell started laughing. “Sherita told him not to get between a fat boy and the ground.”

  “That sounds like Sherita,” Ben observed. “So where does the Harley come in?”

  Keiler began telling the tale of his wild night stranded in a truck stop-slash-Harley-repair-shop, during which he developed an understanding of biker Zen while sitting around a burning trash barrel with a traveling motorcycle gang. By morning, he had traded the broken-down green Hornet and the remainder of his ski resort salary, plus a small injury stipend, for a Harley that probably had more miles on it than the green Hornet. He ended the story with a hand over his heart and a few words of homage to his old car and his lost nest egg, then closed with, “Guess when I get back to the folks’ place in Michigan, I’ll have to get a job.”

  Kate pointed a fork at him playfully. “Hopefully, something that doesn’t involve ski lifts.”

  Frowning at his foot, propped on an extra chair beside the table, he nodded. “Not this year, anyway.”

  “I wish we could keep you on at Jumpkids,” Karen said, giving Keiler a weary look. “We’re so understaffed, and Mrs. Mindia’s daughter just called and told me Mrs. Mindia has a serious case of the flu, and they’ve taken her to the hospital, so it might be a while before she’s back. You could stay at our house, but I don’t have any salary money available until summer internships start.” Her brows lifted hopefully. “We’d feed you.” Kate elbowed her, and she sagged, hatcheting the air with her hand. “I’m sorry; ignore me. Begging has become second nature since I took over Jumpkids. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”