Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  Sometimes he called Meredith for money, which she sent to a post-office box in lower Manhattan. He crashed at friends’ apartments, showing up in Bridgeport or New Haven or the Lower East Side, and when that didn’t work out, he lived on the street. He’d been visiting his old girlfriend Amy in Chelsea, and had been out on the roof having a smoke, when his parrot, Connie, the pet he’d had for so long, had suddenly taken wing. Usually the bird stayed on Sam’s shoulder, but perhaps the wind was too high, or the horizon too inviting. Sam chased after, worried that the parrot, unused to flying any distance, might rise for only an instant, then fall to the pavement below.

  Instead, it was Sam who did so.

  Amy had relayed Sam’s wishes to be cremated and have his ashes dispersed over Manhattan, but John Moody wouldn’t hear of it. He had decided to bury Sam beside his mother. Spreading someone’s ashes over an urban area was against the law; John Moody was well versed in bylaws, rules, and regulations. No matter how Amy had begged, she had no legal rights. She and Sam had never married. His father was his closest kin.

  “Do whatever the fuck you want,” Amy had said over the phone. She and John Moody had never even met in person. “Make a cake, and blow out a candle, and wish he never existed. You didn’t even know who he was.”

  What had John Moody wished for Sam? Surely, he’d wanted a different sort of son, not one made out of porcupine quills and nightmares and bleached bones. There were times when John wished Sam would indeed curl up behind the stove, to be picked up by the tail, swept into the trash, and forgotten. Amy had been right. He had often wished that Sam would disappear, into thin air as a matter of fact, quietly and cleanly gone from their lives. All the same, it was John Moody, legal next of kin, who drove into Manhattan to identify a body that had his son’s face and fingerprints, whether or not he really knew Sam.

  Because their father did not respect Sam’s wishes and never had, Blanca had stayed in London rather than attend the funeral. She was never going back home. Not ever. She decided that while sitting cross-legged on her dorm-room bed, crying as she read “Hans the Hedgehog.” And she certainly was not going to watch them put Sam into the ground. She thought to herself, If only he’d flown away. He’d be in the air right now, where he belonged.

  Blanca had held her own service on the banks of the Thames. She wrote her brother’s name on a small piece of paper and tied it to a stone with a black satin ribbon. She threw it as hard as she could and it fell with a plash, into the deep. She hadn’t thought something so small would sound so loud. She half expected Sam to rise from the river after she’d thrown his name in, a damp and waterlogged Sam, conjured from words and tides, ink-stained, re-formed on the muddy banks so far from his home. After that ceremony, whenever Blanca walked through the city, she looked closely at homeless men in dark overcoats like the one Sam had worn in New York in the winter, ragged, gray, sleeves and hem unraveling. She found herself drawn to neighborhoods she usually avoided, rough-and-tumble places near the docks, looking for a man who might remind her of him.

  Day after day, she searched for her brother, in her garden, on the road, in her dreams. But Sam was gone. In time, Blanca could barely call up his face. Just the gray coat, his graffiti paintings, the way he had whispered to her the last time she’d seen him and asked how he was holding up: You don’t want to know.

  Blanca had learned from Meredith that the service in Connecticut had consisted of a few words spoken at the gravesite by a minister no one in the family had ever met before. Amy, Sam’s girlfriend of so many years, did not attend. If Sam could have, Blanca imagined that he would have climbed out of his coffin and chased the minister off, throwing spitballs and clods of dirt. Sam had always enjoyed a good scare. He was a connoisseur of the wild scene, the evening of deranged doings, the overdose, the wrong turn, the frightened innocent bystander; he was a believer in art for art’s sake, pain for the pure and utter realness of sensation, and he’d always been partial to the raw, the bloodstained, the weightless, the orphaned, the dead, the lost.

  Burn me, he would have said. Set me free. Let me fall from the tallest building, the farthest tree.

  “Tell me about your brother,” James had asked when he found a photograph of Sam in her desk — Sam in his threadbare gray coat, his dark hair sticking up — but Blanca had refused. It was the only photograph she had of him, of them together: Sam at seventeen and herself at eleven, a snapshot taken by Meredith on one of their outings to the shore not long before Sam took off for New York. It was windy and their hair was streaming across their faces, their eyes were half closed, and they had big smiles, as though everything were perfect. Maybe it was that one day at the beach, a brother and sister so caught up by the wind it was amazing that they didn’t just fly away.

  When Blanca thought of her brother she most often remembered him standing on the roof of their house, arms thrown wide. Fearful and fearless. A stork, a stranger, a man desperate for flight. How could she ever explain that to James? What if the wind came up and took him? she used to think. What if he slipped?

  When she was very young she had nearly believed Sam was capable of rising over the rooftop, just as the people did in the story Sam had told her about a secret race of people in Connecticut who waited for the most desperate moment — the ship sinking, the building burning to ash — before they revealed their ability to fly. Dark wing, gray wing, cloud, and air. Who was her brother, this strange creature who could perch on glass and was never afraid of the things that terrified most people? Blanca had wondered if perhaps Sam had hollow bones, as birds do, and rows of black raven feathers along his spine.

  One night, when Blanca was six or seven, and Sam was high on drugs, he’d taken her up to the roof with him. It was before Meredith came to live with them, when they could do pretty much as they pleased. The outing had sounded like fun until they were actually out there. Then Blanca felt panic rise in her chest.

  Don’t slip and kill yourself, Sam told her.

  Blanca forced herself to calm down, and once she had, she felt an odd, dizzying joy. At that moment Blanca understood why people sometimes haplessly jumped from heights; they didn’t necessarily mean to smash onto the concrete below, but to soar, to disappear, maybe to find the next world, the one they couldn’t quite see.

  She never told her father or stepmother or even Meredith about being on the roof with her brother. She never spoke of half of what Sam told her or what she’d seen when she was with him. The times she went by bus with him to Bridgeport and waited in the station while he went to buy drugs. How far out in the ocean they’d gone swimming when Cynthia was too busy with her friends at the beach to notice they were too far from shore; they were bobbing unnoticed, out with the rocks and the seals.

  What do you want to do, Peapod? Do we go back to Connecticut or stop right here?

  Connecticut, Blanca always answered, and she’d laugh at the disappointment on Sam’s face when she decided she didn’t want them to drown.

  Sam was scary, but he was worth it. When they were children, there was no one Blanca would have preferred to be with, no matter how terrifying his behavior might be. The good times they had were exhilarating — shoplifting candy in the drugstore, jumping off the deck of the ice-cream shop into the soft grass below — but Blanca remembered the other times as well. The nights she heard him crying. At first she thought it was the wind or some animal. A wild thing, trapped behind glass, wounded and in despair. Whatever was inside his room, whatever the sound, it was inhuman, or maybe all too human. It broke her heart.

  Though she’d always loved books, the most fascinating stories of Blanca’s childhood were the ones she heard when she went into Sam’s room, no matter how terrifying they might be. There were tales of stabbing himself with pins in order to see if he could learn to control pain and stories concerned with the statistical probability that the sun would burn up and they would all die of the cold; there were sagas that were really dreams brought on by hashish and cocaine, long and involved
and poetic and hopeless. But the best stories were about their mother, how her hair was as red as blood, how she had seventy-four freckles on her face, how she was a ferryboat captain’s daughter who believed that people could fly.

  And then one day Sam stopped telling stories. It was after Meredith had come to live with them, after the drugs got bad, and he’d been forced to go to rehab. Blanca kept begging him for stories after he came back home from the hospital.

  Tell me about the possibility of a new ice age when we all freeze to death. Tell me about birds that can travel six thousand miles and find their way to a place they’ve never been before. Tell me how our mother could talk to squirrels in their own language.

  Don’t you understand? Sam said to her then, her once fearless brother, wrecked and blank. I only have one story now.

  The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year. She did her best to hold on to him, but it was impossible, like carrying ice into the desert or making time stand still. After the final fight when Sam moved out, Blanca saw him less and less often. He no longer had a presence; he was like the outline of a person, an absence rather than a full-fledged human being.

  Their father refused to speak about Sam, and soon enough the new baby was born, Cynthia and John’s new little girl. It should have been a calmer time in Blanca’s life, but the happier John Moody seemed with his new wife and child, the angrier Blanca became. As soon as she was a teenager, the good sweet girl she’d been disappeared. Sweetness was for babies, like her little sister, Lisa. Goodness was for the false and the childish. Those days were over for Blanca. What she had inside now was something poisonous and green, just below the surface, beneath her skin.

  She missed Meredith, although often when she phoned during the worst fights with Cynthia and her father she couldn’t even put her despair into words. She simply called Merrie and cried.

  “I miss you, too,” Meredith would say. “And I miss him.”

  It was thoughts of Sam that sent Blanca into despair. She could not look at her father without thinking of Sam. How dare you forget him? How dare you go on with your life? How dare you think that happiness means anything at all? One Thanksgiving dinner when Sam’s name wasn’t even mentioned, when everyone was so joyful and thankful and selfish, Blanca had accused her father of driving Sam from their house. Cynthia had quickly taken her aside.

  “Your father did everything for that boy,” Cynthia said.

  “Such as?” Blanca had been reading at the table. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Blanca already preferred paper over flesh, ink to blood.

  “Listen, dear, there’s a lot you don’t know,” Cynthia told her. “There’s plenty.”

  Lisa, Blanca’s half sister, was only a toddler at the time, a cheerful pudgy girl sitting at the dinner table, playing with some squishy mashed potatoes. Blanca wished she could make Lisa disappear and have Sam reappear in her place. He’d always hated Thanksgiving. A bullshit imperialist holiday. This turkey died for our sins, he would have said to their father and Cynthia. For your sins, for what you did to me.

  “Like the fact that you’re a bitch and you’re happy that Sam disappeared so he can’t cause you any more trouble?”

  Cynthia had slapped her then, and as soon as she did, Blanca knew that was exactly what she’d wanted. Now she could hate her stepmother. Now she had every right.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Cynthia said, shocked by her own actions. “I’m not like that.”

  “Oh, yes you are.” Blanca felt her cheeks burning. There was something pleasurable about seeing Cynthia squirm. Blanca was taller than she was by now. She had no attachment to Cynthia, no reason to let her off the hook. Sam always said if they weren’t vigilant Cynthia would come after them with knives. Oink oink, he’d said. Blanca had had a fear of carving knives for years. That’s how she sees us, kiddo, Sam had told Blanca. Pigs in her sty.

  “You know what drugs did to him,” Cynthia said. “Your brother fought whatever we tried to do for him and you know it. Whatever I did was wrong.”

  Cynthia wasn’t young anymore and she’d never been pretty. Not the way Sam had said their own mother was, with her rose-red, bloodred hair. There was no way Blanca was going back to Thanksgiving dinner. She could see through the doorway; her father was wiping mashed potatoes off Lisa’s fingers. Blanca actually felt sick to her stomach. She felt weightless and mean and powerful and orphaned.

  “Why don’t you tell the truth?” she said to Cynthia. Her voice didn’t sound the same. It was all that poison inside, all the years when she’d said nothing, when she was such a well-behaved little girl. “You never wanted either of us. You would have been happier if my father didn’t have children when you met him. You probably didn’t wait for my mother to die. I’ll bet you and my father were already sleeping together while she was struggling for her last breath.”

  “Did Sam tell you that? Because there’s a lot more to the story. We waited. We did the right thing by Arlyn no matter what else had happened in this house.”

  “It’s a little late for you to tell me stories. To hell with you all.”

  Blanca slammed out of the house. She took the train into Manhattan and called Sam from a pay phone, crying. He was still living with Amy then, still reachable. It was a holiday after all, no matter how imperialistic, and she missed him. She was thirteen years old. Tall, grown-up looking, but a child all the same. The noise and crowds of New York scared Blanca.

  “I don’t go out on Thanksgiving. They fucking kill turkeys and take out their intestines while they’re flapping their wings around. Is that what I’m supposed to celebrate? Don’t make me do this,” Sam said over the phone. He and Amy weren’t getting along, and he told Blanca he had to pretend he liked holidays so that Amy wouldn’t kick him out again. He sounded stoned. He was thinking too fast and talking too slowly.

  “I need you,” Blanca insisted.

  “You are making a big mistake if you’re turning to me.”

  “You’re it for me,” Blanca said. “There is no one else.”

  “Just stay where you are. And don’t expect me to eat turkey.”

  He was late, naturally, but at last he arrived. He’d come to meet her in a coffee shop across the street from the train station, his hair unwashed, wearing that filthy gray overcoat he’d come to favor, which made him look like the sort of person no one wanted to sit next to. As Blanca told him how terrible things were at home, Sam played with his silverware, stabbing the tips of his fingers with a fork. The pupils of his eyes were so big his eyes looked completely black. Like a well into which you drop a stone that is never seen again, like the water down below, dark and motionless and so very still. Even Blanca could tell he was high on heroin. He did this thing where he scratched at his face and wasn’t aware that he’d started to bleed. Little drops of blood fell on the plastic tabletop, and still he didn’t notice a thing.

  Crying is what they want you to do, Sam told her that day. Tears leave a permanent mark. If you cry, people like Dad can find you whenever they want to. You’ll never be able to hide. Don’t you get it?

  Blanca had missed him so much she couldn’t bear it. She didn’t understand what he was talking about; all the same, she made herself stop crying. He was right about one thing: it was a stupid waste of time. Sam ordered toast and black coffee. He laughed and said he was on a diet, though he was bone thin. There were abscesses on his hands and arms. Check it out, Peapod, he whispered to Blanca. He opened his coat and there was Connie the parrot, dozing in an inside pocket. No pets allowed, Sam said.

  He stroked the parrot’s green feathers and spoke to it in a guttural, nonsensical language he said was Birdish, words Blanca couldn’t possibly decipher. He was hushed and paranoid and brash all at the same time. There were things in t
his world that Blanca couldn’t be expected to understand; things he couldn’t tell her.

  Someday you’ll get it, he said to her. It all adds up to the same thing. All that shit about math? It’s a load of crap. They want you to think things make sense if you break them down, but they don’t.

  Sam only stayed twenty minutes. Amy was waiting for him at home and she was getting fed up with his antics. She thinks I’m unreliable, Sam said, and he and Blanca both laughed. Unreliable had been a vocabulary word this term, and Blanca knew its meaning only too well. Sam was in such a hurry that he didn’t take a single bite of his toast. Blanca had a hot turkey sandwich in front of her, but she couldn’t eat. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe that turkey had died for her sins. Sin of omission, sin of jealousy, sin of girls who were not as sweet as they seemed.

  When Sam left, Blanca realized that she was freezing. She’d rushed out of the house without her warm coat, and had only a heavy sweater. She couldn’t wait to get out of New York. Blanca paid the bill, and she took the train back to Connecticut. When she got to Madison, she sat on a bench in the station until it was nearly midnight. Then she walked home, slowly down the lane. Oak tree, lilac, shadow, lawn. There was frost on the grass, and she was shivering by now; still, she waited on the patio until all the lights in the house were out, until she could let herself in through the back door and go up to bed without having to see anyone.

  She saw Sam less frequently after that, and each time was more difficult. Cynthia was right about the drugs; they’d taken hold, they were all he cared about, it seemed. His temper was dreadful. He got into fights with people; he was arrested for causing a public disturbance and for defacing public property. What was inside him was now outside, in the paintings of winged men he left all over lower Manhattan. Men with huge wings were falling into hell, set on fire, turning to ashes. They called him Icarus, and he signed his graffiti with a V, the shape of a bird in a child’s painting.

  And then, when Blanca was fourteen, Sam disappeared for good. She went to the apartment he’d shared with Amy and they were both gone. The landlord let her in and the place was horrid — a large birdcage had been left in the center of the room, a fetid, filthy mess filled with torn-up newspapers that spilled out from between the metal bars. There were mattresses on the floor and used needles in the bathroom and forgotten rancid bits of food everywhere. But the walls were brilliant, covered by Icarus paintings, alive with color. For years afterward Blanca searched lower Manhattan; she lied to her father and stepmother and took the train in at every opportunity, desperate to find Icarus paintings, the sign that Sam was still alive. She’d see his artwork every so often, usually rising through a fresh coat of paint on the brick wall of a deli or the side of a bus. Still, the Ic-arus paintings were recognizable through the whitewash with what were now familiar themes: in his vision those Connecticut men who were said to fly away from disaster couldn’t escape; they were all caught in a web of horror.