Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  “Don’t cry,” Sam warned his sister.

  “I wasn’t about to.” Blanca made a face and stuck out her tongue.

  But she did cry when it came time to leave. Daniel slipped Sam a hundred bucks when no one could see.

  “Not for drugs. For food.”

  “I am not a drug addict,” Sam said. “I’m a recreational user.”

  Meredith was making up the bed with Sam’s pillow and quilt. The girl, Amy, was watching.

  “He told me his mother was dead,” Amy said.

  “Me? I’m not his mother. His mother died a long time ago. I’m nothing to him.”

  “You’re something,” Amy said.

  “A well-wisher.”

  The apartment was dark, shades drawn, but there was enough light coming in to allow them to see one another.

  “Me too,” Amy said.

  It was time for Meredith to leave. She hadn’t rescued him, but she’d done all she could. She would just have to live with that. Daniel was in the car waiting. Sam was on the sidewalk in his bare feet, his hair sticking up, cold in just a T-shirt and jeans. Blanca was beside him, her arms looped around him.

  “We’ve got to go,” Meredith told Blanca.

  “Maybe I won’t.”

  “Yeah, well, you have to,” Sam said to his sister. “There are monsters on this street at night.”

  “Very funny.” But Blanca looked around, nervous.

  “They eat little girls.”

  “That isn’t funny, Sam!”

  Sam hugged Blanca, and watched her get into the car.

  “Your father didn’t mean to hit you,” Meredith told him.

  “I know that. He probably never meant anything. It was all unintentional, right?”

  Meredith took out the cash John Moody had sent to his son. “He asked me to give you this.”

  “I don’t think so, Merrie. Daniel lent me some money. My father doesn’t owe me anything and I don’t owe him. That’s just the way it is. Give it back to him.”

  For the first time Sam sounded like a grown-up.

  “So you’re staying here?” Meredith asked. “You’re sure?”

  Sam nodded. Once he made up his mind about something, he wasn’t easily moved. He’d been that way ever since he’d been a child.

  “Then I’ll have to accept your decision.” Meredith would have done anything to save him. “Whether or not I like it.”

  “What are the odds I’ll survive?” he said.

  Meredith knew Sam didn’t like to be touched, but she hugged him anyway. He was so thin she didn’t expect him to be muscular, but maybe he was stronger than she’d thought. He didn’t hug her back but he didn’t pull away, either. “I’ll miss you,” Meredith said.

  Sam laughed. “That wasn’t the question. I mean it. What’s your honest assessment?”

  So she gave him the best odds she could. “Fifty-fifty. That’s probably true for us all.”

  Sam nodded, pleased. “I’ll take that. That’s fine with me.”

  They didn’t go directly home. Meredith made up her mind while they were driving through the Bronx. They went as far as Greenwich, then took the first exit they came to. Blanca was sleeping in the backseat, so exhausted she didn’t budge until Meredith shook her shoulder.

  “Bee, I want you to be my witness.”

  Blanca rubbed her eyes. The pearls were warm around her throat. They flushed a faint coral.

  “Okay. What’s a witness?”

  “When we get married we need one special person there with us.”

  “That’s me,” Blanca said.

  They pounded on the door of the town notary, who was also the justice of the peace. He came down thinking someone had died. His wife had already begun to collect his black suit from the closet.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the justice said.

  “Oh, no.” Daniel was apologetic. “It’s a wedding we want.”

  They looked rumpled and somewhat desperate, so the justice of the peace agreed. His name was Tom Smith and he had performed so many marriages he could recite the service in his sleep. Sometimes he did and his wife would lie in bed and listen to him, the whole service through, comforted that someone could know the words of love by heart.

  After the ceremony the three went to celebrate at a diner that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day. Blanca phoned home to let her father and Cynthia know she was sorry to be so late but she was on her way.

  “The party’s still going on.” Blanca was nearly falling asleep, exhausted from the day, but thrilled to have been a witness. “Do I have special responsibilities and duties now?” she asked Meredith when Daniel went to pay the bill.

  “Nope. All a witness has to do is be there and remember.”

  “Fine,” Blanca said. “I will.”

  They went out into the darkening air. It would rain later; they could feel it. Already there were beads of moisture on the leaves and the asphalt. But that was later; right now the sky was clear and endless. Even though she was overexcited, and had vowed to herself that she would stay up all night, Blanca fell asleep the minute they were back on the road. She dreamed of oysters and of pearls. She dreamed of men who could fly. She dreamed she was walking down a lane with a woman she didn’t know who had something important to tell her but didn’t speak the same language. By the time they got back to the house, the anniversary party was winding down. It was late. There were a few guests who had decided to jump into the pool, tipsy and fully clothed.

  “Wake up,” Blanca heard someone say.

  When she opened her eyes she had no idea where she was.

  PART THREE

  The Red Map

  SHE LIVED IN A HOUSE IN LONDON THAT WAS filled with beetles and books. There was a reviewer from the Guardian on the first floor, a history professor on the third, with Blanca, the proprietor of a bookstore, sandwiched in between. It made sense that a girl who had grown up in a house called the Glass Slipper would be partial to fairy tales; her senior thesis at university had been entitled “The Lost and the Found,” a study of those who managed to find a way out of the woods and of those who were never seen again, whether they’d been snagged on thornbushes or caught up in chains or stewed into a soup of flesh and bones.

  Blanca’s personal library was piled into cartons in an unheated glassed-in porch that overlooked a small garden in which a lime tree grew. Her flat was perfect — airy, with large, lovely rooms — but Blanca always felt restless. She’d been a good, serious, worried girl who had grown into a less good, but still worried, young woman. Blanca believed in very little other than the assured cruelty of fate. That had been the theme of her thesis. Lost or found, there was no way to avoid the heartbreak. Glass shattered, bones broke, apples rotted.

  Blanca thought she’d found the signifier of her own bad luck when the insects arrived en masse, an infestation of paper-eating beetles, Paperii taxemi. All of the flats had to be fumigated; Blanca and the book critic and the professor had sat under the lime tree shivering in the chilly late spring air discussing local restaurants until they were allowed to go back inside their now acrid rooms. It was on this day that Blanca received word that her father had died; the phone rang just as she’d discovered little black and silver balls of dead matter falling out of her books, as though the words had come unglued from their pages.

  Blanca had been the sort of little girl who always carried a book with her, but she hadn’t become a truly serious reader until the year her brother died, during her junior semester abroad. She’d started on the evening when Meredith had phoned with the horrible news; now, five years later, she still hadn’t stopped reading. She’d never gone back to the States, taking an extra year to finish her degree in the UK. Naturally she had a book in her hands when Meredith called this time as well — it was a first edition of Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book, which she’d recently found in a church-fair odds-and-ends bin, water stained, but otherwise in good shape. Of course it would be Blanca’s childhood nanny to call w
ith the bad news yet again, rather than anyone in her family. Not that anyone was really left. Not now. John Moody had died on the patio outside his house earlier that day. He had asked Cynthia if she could get him a glass of water; when she returned his head was bowed. It was as though he were praying, Cynthia had confided to Meredith, who now relayed the story to Blanca. As though in his very last moments John had seen something that filled him with emotion, an angel perhaps, right there on the grass, showing the path to the state of grace.

  The lawn was covered with mourning doves, Cynthia had reported, eight or ten or twelve. They always traveled in pairs, so silent a person might not see them in the grass until they cooed. Cynthia took this mass of doves to be a visitation from the other side. After the funeral home had come to collect John’s body, Cynthia had set out birdseed, but the doves hadn’t returned.

  “As if an angel would ever visit my father,” Blanca said when Meredith passed on Cynthia’s interpretation of John Moody’s death. “He wouldn’t recognize an angel even if it ap-peared right in front of him and tapped him on the shoulder.”

  Till the end, John Moody had remained a distant, quiet man. He had never come to visit Blanca, not in all the time she’d lived in London; he’d called only on holidays and on Blanca’s birthday. Actually, Cynthia had been the one to call, then she’d hand John the receiver at the end of the conversation for a few awkward moments. He and Blanca had nothing to talk about. The weather. The news. It felt dangerous to speak about anything that mattered. Blanca could not remember when they’d last agreed on anything.

  “It wasn’t an angel he saw,” Meredith said. “It was her.”

  They had a bad connection and Blanca thought she’d heard wrong. She loved Meredith Weiss and trusted her to be dependable and steady in times when others were not. Meredith now had four children of her own, all of whom had come to London to visit this past Easter. Blanca adored them all, especially the two eldest, Amelia and Ellis, for whom she’d often babysat during the two years she spent at the University of Virginia. She’d applied there because Meredith’s husband, Daniel, taught in the physics department. She’d followed them, yearning for a family of her own, even a pretend one. By then, Blanca’s grandmother, Diana, had passed on and Blanca did indeed feel she was an orphan. Some of Blanca’s friends at school had assumed that Meredith was her mother, and as much as Blanca had wanted to say, No, she was our babysitter, our friend, nothing more, she never told them they were wrong.

  Of her own mother, Blanca remembered next to nothing. She had only the stories her brother had told her to remind her that she’d had a mother at all, and of course the pearls she wore every day; Blanca refused to take off the necklace even in the bath. It was her talisman, she supposed, a sign that someone had once loved her.

  “I doubt that my father saw anything more miraculous than the gardener or a dead branch on a tree. And how perfect that my stepmother called you before she called me. Such a close family.”

  “She was too confused to place an overseas call. You know how she gets. I offered to do it.”

  “It’s not just the phone call. I’m not part of the family.”

  “Come home for the funeral. I’ll meet you.”

  “I have a lot to do here.”

  There were the books filled with dead beetles to deal with, after all, and the lime tree, greening in the garden with all the rain they’d had that season, in need of pruning, and the fact that she was broke and might not have enough cash for a plane ticket. A thousand reasons to stay away, and how many reasons were there to go?

  “When it happened Cynthia and your father were about to have breakfast on the patio. She went inside to get him a glass of water and when she came back he was gone. All of the dishes were broken in half. The doves were on the lawn.”

  “So he had a seizure and broke the china. Then the doves came to eat the crumbs. That doesn’t mean a radiant angel appeared to him and that all was forgiven.”

  “I’ll leave my kids and fly up to meet you in Connecticut. You don’t have to stay at the house. I’ll get rooms at the Eagle Inn. You can bring that boyfriend of yours.”

  That would be James Bayliss, the man Blanca had refused to marry even though she found him consistently interesting. She had hired James to install the bookshelves in her tiny shop, an undertaking begun with the small inheritance her grandmother, Diana, had left her. Blanca was drawn to James, not only because he was tall with dark hair, but also because he had the ability to do real things, things that mattered, ordinary tasks such as lifting boxes and stepping on the squiggly roly-poly bugs that came out of the floorboards. Blanca had fallen hard for James when he made a trap out of a shoebox, string, and some orange cheese to catch the mice that rudely ran about. He didn’t even kill them, merely carried them out to the garden.

  But the real clincher happened one morning when Blanca spied him on the street, headed for her shop. James had come upon two teenaged boys going at each other in some horrible row. Get the fuck away from each other, she’d heard him shout, as he held the bigger fellow off. He wasn’t afraid to deal with real and unpleasant matters; should he ever stumble upon a hedge of thorns, he would clearly hack it to pieces and make firewood out of it.

  All that day Blanca waited for James to say something about the fight he’d stopped, but he never said a word. Quiet modesty, that was the last charm. Blanca was done for then, head over heels; her only escape would be for him to finish the bookshelves, collect his check, and disappear. But James Bayliss took so long with the work in Blanca’s shop that it seemed they’d both go bankrupt if she didn’t sleep with him. All right? she’d said afterward. They were in her bed. The scent of the bark of the lime tree had risen through the open windows. Now we’re done. You can go home.

  James had refused to leave. He’d made plenty of excuses: his own flat was being painted, his brother had moved in, he’d sprained an ankle. Soon enough he was living in Blanca’s flat, about to build shelves there as well. Blanca never imagined going home, but if she had to return to the States she certainly had no plans to bring James along.

  “I don’t want James in the world of my past,” Blanca told Meredith over the phone. “He never needs to set foot in Connecticut.”

  “You think worlds are divided? Like the levels of hell?”

  “I know they are. Plus, I have a business to run.”

  Nonsense, really. Blanca’s shop, Happily Ever After, sold only fairy tales; the entire endeavor was a labor of love, with no profits involved and only a very small possibility of any to come. James had recently built two child-sized tables, then set out chairs for the neighborhood crowd who had become regular customers, most of whom read their chosen stories in the store rather than actually purchasing anything. Blanca would have to sell a thousand volumes of Andrew Lang fairy books, from Red to Olive to Pink, simply to break even.

  “Don’t you regret not coming to Sam’s service?” Meredith said.

  “Not for a minute. That service wasn’t what Sam wanted. It was what my father and Cynthia wanted.”

  “You can fly in Tuesday. The funeral is the following morning. Close the shop. I’ll make the reservations. If you come, I’ll tell you what your father saw on the grass.”

  Blanca laughed. “How could you know? You weren’t there.” But Meredith had already hung up the phone and only static remained, the faint watery click of a dead line with no one on the other side.

  BLANCA COLLECTED BOOKS FROM THE TRASH AND AT jumble sales and at church-fair bins the way other people rescued orphans. She kept a stack of books near the tub so she could read in the bath, even though the edges of the pages turned moldy. She read on trains and on buses, which often made her late as she was forever missing her stop. She could not sit at a restaurant without a book in her hands and sometimes she became so engrossed she forgot her cutlet or her pasta or her dinner companion completely. A dear friend, a devoted friend, Jessamyn Banks, who had been Blanca’s roommate during that dreadful term when Sam
died, had gently suggested that perhaps Blanca was creating a buffer between the real world and the imagined world. In response Blanca had laughed, something her friends rarely heard. “Well, good for me. I can’t think of anything I’d like more.”

  For Blanca, worlds were indeed divided. The before and the after, the dark and the light, the real and the imagined, the world of books and Blanca’s personal history, the lost, of course, and the found. The attraction of fairy tales was how aware such tales were of these boundaries — countries were divided into kingdoms, kingdoms into castleholds, castles into towers and kitchens. Fairy tales were maps formed of blood and hair and bones; they were the knots of the subconscious unwound. Every word in every tale was real and as true as apples and stones. They all led to the story inside the story.

  The fairy tale Blanca was reading on the night of Sam’s death was “Hans the Hedgehog.” Unloved children were everywhere in fairy tales; some survived, others did not. Hans was a sorrowful creature kept behind the stove because his father couldn’t stand to see his offspring. Hans was not what his father had wanted and so he ignored him, forgetting his disappointment, just as John Moody had forgotten his. Poor Sam had never done anything right in his father’s eyes. If he’d had whiskers and a tail it would have been no different, no better and no worse.

  It had been years since Blanca had seen her brother; still, the world without Sam was so unreal, so impossible. Could there have been a mistake? It was possible, Blanca knew, for a person who’d been thought to be lost to reemerge from the woods, thorns clinging to his clothes. In Sam’s case, however, the woods were everywhere; the thorns cut far too deep. There had been a mountain of stones, too high to climb, and far too many apples with black centers, too bitter to eat. He had never found his way.

  All the same, Sam had left a trail — the Icarus paintings, graffiti signed with the mark of a man with wings, chalk and paint artwork that could be found all over New York City. Still, no one could find Sam himself. He’d been lost in a place no one else could get to, a twisted path that led through the air.