Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  Even when Sam took up normal habits, things went wrong. For a while he lifted weights obsessively, more and more rings added on; he couldn’t seem to stop until Cynthia got so sick of hearing the barbells clanking all night long she had someone come and take everything away, donating the equipment to the homeless shelter downtown. She geared herself up for a huge explosion. But Sam didn’t say a word when he saw the weights were gone. In the morning, however, all the good china from Cynthia’s first marriage was broken into shards.

  Sam denied having anything to do with it.

  “Fucking fingerprint me!” he’d shouted. “Take me to the police station. I fucking dare you!”

  “Actually, it was my fault.” Blanca had heard the ruckus and was watching from a doorway. “I was reaching for a pitcher to make lemonade and everything fell down. I was too scared to say anything.”

  Sam turned to Blanca. He laughed out loud. He knew his sister. “No, you didn’t. It’s completely out of character for you, Peapod.”

  “Next time I promise I’ll tell when I do something bad,” Blanca said prettily. “I thought I could sweep up the dishes and make everything right.”

  “Liar, liar,” Sam chided, but no one paid the least bit of attention. Except for Blanca; for her brother’s benefit, she waggled her crossed fingers behind her back.

  “It’s fine,” Cynthia assured her stepdaughter. “Don’t worry about it. Everything from my first marriage was bad, even the china. I never used it.”

  Blanca had grinned and stuck her tongue out at her brother. She could get away with things, too, especially when it meant protecting him.

  “I really didn’t do it,” Sam said to Blanca and Meredith later on.

  “Who cares? She said they were horrible dishes,” Blanca said.

  When she had some time alone, Meredith went out to the garage to look through the trash. There was the broken china in a barrel. The shards felt like pieces of ice. On the very edges of the plates was a black line. Soot. One of the signs of a specter. Meredith had heard a voice outside her room the first night she’d slept there. It was the room where Jasmine Carter, the nurse, had lived during the worst of Arlyn Moody’s illness. Meredith had been lying in bed looking up through the glass ceiling at the wash of stars above her. There was the Milky Way swirling through the night. Someone said, Water. Well, it was probably herself, thinking aloud. She was thirsty, so she went downstairs and got a drink. She was wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, what she always slept in. Her feet were bare. She stepped in something and looked down. A neat pile of bird bones had been heaped on the floor. There must be a cat, and this his dinner, all that was left of a poor wren or a mockingbird. Meredith went outside. She liked the country at night, the darkness of everything. It was odd for her to live in such close proximity to a pool. Still, she was drawn to the sound of water. She walked through the damp grass and sat at the edge, dipping her feet in. John Moody didn’t overheat the pool. It was a perfect temperature.

  “Not going to drown yourself, are you?” Sam was outside in a chaise, there in the dark, smoking hashish. The scent was perfumed and rich.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught?” Meredith said.

  “I just did,” Sam said. “Water, fire, air. Which do you pick?”

  “Water,” Meredith said. “I meant caught by your dad or Cynthia. What you’re doing is illegal, you know. If I find it in your room I’ll throw it out. Fair warning.”

  “My room’s double locked. Plus, there’s an endless supply of drugs available if you know the right people.” Then Sam announced, “I choose air.”

  “What is that pile of bones in the kitchen?” Meredith asked.

  “Found them on the lawn. I thought I’d leave them as a present for Cynthia.”

  “You are the perfect son.” Meredith laughed. “Put out the pipe.”

  “Stepson.” Sam took another hit, then tapped the ashes onto the patio.

  “I heard a voice outside my room.” Meredith swiped the pipe when Sam placed it on a glass table. She planned to toss it in the trash basket.

  “First sign of insanity,” Sam said. “What did the voice say to you?”

  “Water.”

  “Hmm,” Sam said. “Interesting. To me the voice always says that life is a pointless mess of dust and bones and shit.”

  “Sam,” Meredith said.

  “I’m warning you,” he said to her. “Don’t even try to get through to me or whatever it is you’re doing. I’m a lost cause.”

  But she did try. It was her job, after all. But it was something more, her mission, perhaps. Maybe that’s why John Moody had so wanted to hire her in the first place; he could tell she was a fixer. She desperately wanted to succeed where others before her had failed. Still, there seemed to be no way to get Sam up in the mornings. She tried multiple alarm clocks, loud radios, banging pots and pans together outside his door. No response. Blanca was the opposite, prompt as could be. She came down to the kitchen ready for the day, her hair braided, her homework packed neatly away, a book open before her as she ate toast and jam.

  “We better not wait for him,” she usually advised Meredith. “If you drop me off and then come back for him you can still get him to the high school in time for homeroom, but I wouldn’t count on him being awake.”

  They were still trying. Sam hadn’t officially dropped out of high school; he just never went.

  “Maybe we should get him a tutor,” Meredith suggested to John Moody. “Or I could do it. Then he could pass his GED and have a high-school diploma.”

  “He wouldn’t agree to do it,” John told her. “If something might possibly make me happy, he’s constitutionally unfit to accomplish the task.”

  “I don’t think it’s about you.”

  They looked at each other. They were in the kitchen and John was fixing himself a drink. There was the sound of ice.

  “I think it’s about her,” Meredith said.

  “Cynthia has tried her damnedest with that boy. She’s gone way beyond the call of duty, so let’s not blame Cynthia.”

  John Moody was already done with the conversation. But he had to get past Meredith, who blocked his way.

  “I meant his mother,” Meredith said.

  For all Meredith knew the red-haired woman might be out behind the boxwoods right now. There were always shadows where there shouldn’t be. In the driveway, on the lawn, beneath the lilacs. All anyone had to do was look.

  “His mother is gone,” John Moody said. “End of conversation.”

  “Is she?”

  “Isn’t she?” John said.

  “You don’t feel haunted? You don’t feel her presence?”

  Cynthia was out in the hall. She’d been listening in, not liking the intimacy between Meredith and John. Now she stepped into the kitchen and looped her arm around her husband’s waist.

  “You don’t mind if I take him away, do you?” Cynthia asked.

  Ever since Meredith had come to Connecticut, she’d felt Cynthia watching her. This wasn’t the first time Cynthia had lurked, eavesdropping. Narrowed eyes and a smile each and every time, as though trying to figure out a puzzle. She’d sit on a chaise and watch as Meredith stretched out on a blanket spread over the lawn, reading, making the most of the time when Blanca was off at school. Sam still isolated himself in his room, which he was coating with fluorescent paint that would glow when he turned on a black light. Blanca and Meredith, on the other hand, spent huge amounts of time together. Meredith had had no idea that children could be so interesting and smart. Frankly, she felt more comfortable with Blanca than she did with most adults. Connecticut felt safe, a bubble floating above the real world.

  “I still don’t get it,” Cynthia said one September afternoon. Everything green was turning to gold. Meredith was out in the driveway waiting for Blanca. The school bus stopped at the end of the lane, and it took Blanca seven minutes to get to the house if she ran, eleven if she dawdled. Cynthia had come outside to wait with Meredith
, something she’d never done before. She was usually too busy. She was probably missing a tennis lesson at this very moment.

  “Get what?” Meredith asked.

  “Your presence.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You seem so happy here. Could it be that you’re fucking my husband and this is all a big joke on me?”

  Birds seemed to be attracted to the Glass Slipper. Now, for instance, a flock of blackbirds alighted in the hedges all at once, filtering down from above.

  “What happened? Really. You can tell me,” Cynthia said. “How did it start? Did you meet in the city? Did you start off at hotels, fucking him all night long? Then I suppose you thought, what the hell — you might as well move into his house, do it just a few doors down from the wife. She’s only a second wife. She has no authority.”

  “I think you’d better stop this.” Meredith was deeply embarrassed for them both.

  “Do you? Am I supposed to believe that you were desperate to become a full-time nanny for a delinquent teenager? That you just happened to show up at this house?”

  “You’re imagining this.” Meredith felt like pouring a bucket of water over her employer. Why would you ever think I’d want him in the first place? I want nothingness, that’s why I’m here. The bubble. The green lawn. The blackbirds. The quiet. “And you obviously don’t trust your husband.”

  Cynthia let out a laugh. “He’s doing to me what he did to her. Screwing someone new while I’m sleeping in our bed.”

  The school bus approached. Meredith always made certain to be out in the driveway at the right time, waiting. Today was Monday, Blanca’s free day, no dance lessons, no soccer; all Meredith had to do was fix her a snack and help with her homework.

  “Blanca’s on her way.”

  “And you still haven’t told me.” Cynthia wasn’t letting this go. She was ready to make a scene, whether or not Blanca might overhear. “Are you and my husband involved?”

  “I haven’t had sex with anyone for twelve years,” Meredith said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “What royal bullshit,” Cynthia said.

  “Whether you believe it or not, it’s true. I’m here because I have nowhere else to go at the moment. I have no career. I thought I could take this time and think things through.”

  “You really haven’t had any sex? As in nothing?” Cynthia was sounding a little less hysterical.

  “Nothing. Not even anonymous sex. Not even virtual sex. I had a boyfriend who died in high school, and that was the end of things.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. I had no idea. I just couldn’t figure out why on earth a well-educated, attractive woman would take a job here.”

  “I like the kids.”

  Simple, really, though it was a conclusion Cynthia would never have reached. Sam was like a dog who could tell who was afraid of his bark and his bite; he scared his stepmother. He always had. “As in both of them?”

  “I get Sam. I understand him.”

  “Good lord,” Cynthia said. “I don’t know whether to revere you or pity you.”

  “Both will be fine.”

  Cynthia grinned. “I just won’t attack you. How about that?”

  “Do you see anything over there?” Meredith pointed to the hedge. The shape of a woman’s foot, a leg, green leaves, a knee. There were bits and pieces mostly, except when John was around and it was possible to see the entire person.

  “I see that the lawn needs to be mowed,” Cynthia said. “The landscaper is horrible.”

  “Just so we’re clear — I have absolutely no interest in your husband. I mean none.”

  “Well, neither do I, but I’m still fucking him.”

  Both women laughed. They looked at each other, not sure what they were if they weren’t adversaries.

  “Well, I’m not,” Meredith assured Cynthia. “And I don’t intend to be.”

  Here came Blanca whistling and hopping along the driveway. Meredith waved.

  “Hey, Bee,” Meredith called.

  “Tons and tons of math homework,” Blanca called back.

  “She likes you better than she likes me,” Cynthia said sadly as Blanca approached.

  “I’m not a threat, Cynthia. I’m just here to help out. That’s all.”

  Meredith had a picnic set up on the patio, a place where math might not be so distasteful. “You made limeade!” Blanca’s favorite. Blanca ordered the universe in terms of a list of favorites: Favorite food — pasta. Favorite family member — Sam. Favorite grandparent, well, only grandparent, really — Granny Diana. Favorite subject at school — anything but math. Favorite novel — whatever she was reading that week.

  Meredith met Blanca halfway to the patio and together they headed across the lawn. Meredith was barefoot and the grass was prickly on her feet.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Blanca said. “You’re so good at math. You’re good at everything.”

  “I wish.” Meredith laughed.

  “You are,” Blanca said.

  Maybe that was why Meredith was in Connecticut; just to be near someone who thought she was worthwhile. Twelve years ago Meredith had been sixteen. Sam’s age. Those years had passed in a blur, pointless instants melding together into a single shadow. They said time healed all wounds, but Meredith hadn’t gotten over what had happened. The past continued to feel current, every moment before a thousand times more important and truer than the life she had led since. She hadn’t felt anything for twelve years. She hadn’t even tried.

  She had seen the needle marks on Sam Moody’s arm and the cuts on his arms. Those Japanese knives in his room that he swore were dull-edged antiques were sharp enough to do damage. Meredith had been there herself. She understood exactly what Sam was doing. Trying to feel something, anything at all. She would be a far superior tutor in such matters than she was in algebra. She knew all the angles. The one thing she knew for certain was that when you were in pain you knew you were alive, if being alive was what you wanted. If, when you came right down to it, it was of any worth at all.

  SAM WENT MISSING IN OCTOBER. HE’D DONE IT BEFORE, but for only a night or two, giving them a good scare before dragging himself home from Bridgeport, hungover, sick from drugs, ready with some cock-and-bull story not even he expected his father and Cynthia to believe. But this time was different. Four nights passed, and then five. There was something sorrowful in the air, a shock wave of regret. John Moody sat in the living room every night, but Sam didn’t appear. It got so that John would have been happy to see a sheriff’s car pull up, lights flashing. Yet John believed that a call to the police could easily create more trouble, so a private investigator was hired. Sam had been seen in Bridgeport, running with a crowd of drugged-out friends, but he was difficult to pin down, and his snarky little circle didn’t tend to be helpful; even when they were paid off, they gave false information. Sam was elusive; he knew how to get lost.

  On the sixth night of his disappearance, Meredith went to look for him herself. She rattled down the trash-strewn streets of the projects where Sam was quite well-known. People said, Sure, Sam, that crazy dude, but offered nothing more. Meredith noticed very few women hanging out on stoops and in doorways; only young men. Men in trouble, men worn out, men who had nothing more to lose. Meredith drove past the bus station, looking for teenagers, and parked her car outside a seedy liquor store. She showed a photograph of Sam to everyone who went in the store, but no one could help. “Give it up,” some nice older woman told her. “He’ll come home when he’s good and ready.”

  When Meredith got back to the house, John Moody was in the living room, still waiting.

  “I think it’s hopeless,” he said.

  “Not quite yet. Maybe he’s staying with a friend.”

  “I don’t mean Sam. I mean me as a parent.”

  Meredith sat on the couch. She was wearing her navy blue coat because there’d been a chill in the air. She didn’t take it off.

  “I must have done somet
hing wrong in a previous life,” John Moody said.

  Meredith laughed. “This isn’t about you being punished. It’s not about you at all. It’s about Sam.”

  “But I am being punished. That’s become clear to me. That’s what I believe.”

  Meredith wished she had come in through the kitchen and had managed to avoid John. She felt guilty that she’d never let on how she’d come here in the first place, that she’d known who John Moody was before she ever arrived at this house. She knew exactly what type he was: a desperate man willing to ask a psychic for help.

  “I don’t think I believe in anything,” Meredith said.

  “How nice for you,” John said. “If you don’t believe in anything, nothing can let you down. Unfortunately, I believe we all pay for our mistakes. We burn for our sins.”

  John Moody excused himself and went upstairs. It was unseemly for him to be talking to a babysitter about such things. Bone close, blood close, close as sorrow moved you. Anyway, Sam clearly wasn’t coming home; it wasn’t even night anymore. The sky was brightening, and in the Glass Slipper light spilled down from above.

  Meredith had almost told John Moody the truth: I see her, too. I followed her here. I think if I believe in anything, I believe in ghosts. Instead, she said nothing; as always, she simply did her job. When she found ashes, she swept them into the dustpan. Birds in the house were caught and set free. Broken china was tossed in with the trash. Shadows were overlooked. But Sam — how did they overlook his absence?

  “I’m sure he’ll be back by tonight,” Blanca had vowed for six, and then seven, and then eight days in a row.

  They had to go on about their lives, didn’t they? The world didn’t stop because one person was missing, whether or not they wanted it to. Real life continued more or less unchanged. Newspapers were delivered, dinners served, chores done. One afternoon Meredith drove Blanca to the library to take out books for a report on religions of the world. While there, Meredith noticed a sign announcing a lecture at the end of the month: “The Physics of Ghosts.” A Yale professor and a graduate student would be debating the “reality” of the next dimension.