Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  Once Blanca left a missive of her own, in an alley off Canal Street where she’d found the image of a man wrapped in thorns. She couldn’t make out the signature V, but she thought the painting was Icarus’s. It had to be. The look of ecstasy on the man’s face: the dusting of scarlet chalk over paint. Blanca took a black Magic Marker from her backpack and wrote her name and her phone number on the wall. For months afterward there were crazy calls to the house. Nasty, filthy messages, but none of them were from Sam. He would never have done that if he’d called. He would have said, Don’t slip, don’t take chances, don’t bother with me, let me burn, little sister, just let me fall.

  Perhaps someone else might have turned to what family she had, chosen to befriend the little sister who was there rather than remain allied with the brother who’d disappeared. Not Blanca. She had vacated. Even when she was home, she wasn’t there. She spent weekends at friends’ houses, spent summers as a counselor at various camps, visited Meredith during school vacations, signed up for ballet, soccer, the school newspaper, anything to keep her out of the house. At night Blanca often sat out on the lawn until everyone else was asleep. She looked at the stars, but she couldn’t bear to look at the roof. He wasn’t there. What was the point?

  The Glass Slipper, though still lauded in the Sunday sections of the local newspapers and design magazines, was certainly not Blanca’s home. Nothing belonged to her. Nothing was worth caring about. Even when she found Lisa in her room, dressing up in her clothes, face streaked with Blanca’s blush and mascara, Blanca did nothing more than turn and walk out. Take it, she thought. Take it all.

  “I’m sorry,” Lisa had called after, but her tone was angry, almost as though she’d been the one whose belongings had been sullied. Lisa was a tadpole of a girl, tall and awkward with big blue eyes, clearly her father’s favorite. John Moody, who’d barely been home when Blanca and Sam were growing up, now attended all of Lisa’s parent-teacher meetings and piano recitals. One year he took Lisa to Disney World during Christmas vacation, leaving Cynthia at home to keep an eye on Blanca. This was during the time of the bad Blanca, the one who was never home, who slept around, the sour, green-with-jealousy teenager who felt she was an orphan. The cold, harsh girl who got out of Connecticut as fast as she could, first to college in Virginia, then to London. The one who was never going back, the one who picked beetles from in between pages until her fingers were stained with their blue-black blood, like ink she couldn’t rinse off, not if she washed her hands a thousand times.

  JOHN MOODY DIED IN THE YARD OF THE HOUSE HIS FATHER had built, that award-winning design made out of right angles, glass, and sky. It was a house John hated, but could not leave, because of its architectural value and history, because he had grown up there, but mostly because he had become a captive of his own failure. Every day when he awoke in his father’s house, John was reminded that he himself had never accomplished anything as worthwhile. All of his work was derivative — a reaction against his father’s actions. If questioned, John would have denied that he believed in predestination, he would have said he thought fate was a muddled stew of half-beliefs and wishes and that people made their own destiny. Yet here he was, stuck, unable to change something as simple as his address. It was as though John Moody’s life had already been written in some great book in a language that was impossible to erase. Scrawled in blood-ink, invisible ink, life-and-death ink. Unwavering lines of print.

  The only time John had veered from the path before him was that one instance when he’d gotten lost. It had been so misty and foggy, the entire trip over on the ferry from Bridgeport had seemed like a dream. A person could wind up anywhere with a single step on a night like that; knock at a stranger’s door, fall into bed with her. Even a man like John could shift so far from the path he was on he might never get back where he should have been in the first place. His real life. The life that was meant to be and had unraveled because of a single night, a wrong turn, a girl with red hair standing on a porch.

  What if he’d done what he’d set out to do, become the young man who went to study in Italy? Would that path have revealed a different self? A loving person, a good father? Or maybe those choices would have made no difference. In the end, perhaps he was who he was regardless of any other possibility. John carried his mistakes with him until he was nearly too weighed down to remember what might have been. The children from his first marriage had flown away like birds. What were birds to him? Creatures that hit against the glass roof, dirtied the windows, unwelcome, untrustworthy beings. There were no pictures of his first wife in his house, no mark that she’d ever existed, and yet he saw her when he came down to the kitchen in the dark, early morning. He saw her on the lawn in the evenings. John Moody spied her whenever he took a plane, up in the clouds or there beside him in the very next seat. John really didn’t believe in such things — spirits, specters. Yet there she was, Arlyn Singer, exactly as she’d been when he first met her. She never spoke, only gazed at him. Maybe she wanted something from him, but he had no idea what it might be. She wore the same white dress of some thin fabric he could see right through. In the beginning he thought he was going mad; he went to psychics and psychologists, but in the end he accepted the fact that he was a haunted man.

  Arlie wouldn’t just leave him and let him get on with his life. Did she want him to suffer? After all, where had he been when she drew her last breath? Next door with Cynthia? Walking across the lawn? In his office, eyes closed, hoping for sleep? He no longer expected sleep and hadn’t for years. He avoided it, dreaded it; sleep was blank space in which he drifted unprotected. Whenever he did finally manage to sleep, John had a single recurring dream. He was walking through the Glass Slipper; all of the rooms were dark. He went along a glass hallway, never reaching any destination. He woke up feeling lost, gasping for air. He was always on the verge of discovering something, but at the very last minute, he couldn’t find his way.

  In the last weeks of his life John had felt tired and his heart hurt, but he paid no attention to his health. Never had. He was busy, with work, with his family. He’d been teaching his daughter, Lisa, to drive. She was a darling girl but a terrible driver. During those last two weeks of his life they went out to practice several times; once, when they were halfway to Greenwich, he became so rattled he’d asked Lisa to pull over. He’d gotten out and stood there shaking by the side of the road. He simply had no idea where he was. He started to flag down a passing car, convinced they were miles off track.

  Luckily Lisa had a good sense of direction. She was a practical, no-nonsense girl. She got out and led him back to the car.

  It’s okay, Dad, she’d said to him. I know where we’re going. We’re almost home.

  He’d sat in the passenger seat, his long legs folded, weakened somehow, more quiet than usual, not bothering to criticize Lisa, even when she nearly went through a stop sign. When they got home, Lisa told her mother about her dad’s odd behavior. Cynthia wanted to phone the doctor, but John insisted he was fine. He wasn’t. He sat beside the sliding glass doors; there was his first wife out by the pool, naked, pale as milk, the way she’d been in the kitchen the night he’d met her. John felt drawn to her again. He went outside. His heartbeat quickened.

  Cynthia had been a good wife to him; he’d been lucky that way. He’d fallen into an affair with her, terrified by Arlie’s illness, by death itself, by his own children. Frankly, the woman next door could have been anyone and he would have knocked on her door in the middle of the night, begging for comfort, desperate for companionship. Considering all that, the marriage had worked out fine. But now he found himself pulling away. It was Arlie he wanted. He noticed the mourning doves that had collected on the lawn.

  Earlier he’d seen ashes on the kitchen countertops; he’d noticed cracks and chips in all the dishes. He felt as though something wanted his attention. He went up to Sam’s room, closed and locked for years, took the key and went inside. He sat on the edge of the bed. There were ashes in here,
too, as though they would never get Sam out of the room: cigarettes, needles, sour-smelling laundry. Sam was gone, yet in some ways he remained. There was a bag of his clothes in the closet, things Arlie had bought, sweaters and overalls. There were his drawings still on the walls.

  The odd thing about identifying Sam’s body wasn’t that Sam had seemed like a stranger, but that in death he’d somehow been returned to John. He looked exactly as he had as a little boy, back when they lived on Twenty-third Street; a good, serious child John hadn’t bothered to make time for. Arlie had adored Sam; John himself couldn’t understand the ferocity with which she’d loved him. He’d been a terrible father and maybe he had no right to mourn, but he sat on a bench outside the morgue and wept. John hadn’t known he could make those sorts of sounds. He hadn’t known he could feel anything for his son. He hadn’t been certain he could feel anything at all.

  When he left the morgue, he made his way to Sam’s last address on Tenth Avenue. Were there belongings John needed to pick up? Was he supposed to have a key? Should he talk to the super? This was the building from which Sam had fallen. The hallways were dark and there were smudgy paintings and chalk drawings in the stairwell, disturbed black and red and blue inkblots of men and birds and clouds. John Moody was never supposed to be in this hallway or have Sam as a son. He was never supposed to get lost that night.

  It had been nearly eleven years since Sam first disappeared. The horrible truth was that John had been happy that he was gone. He’d never spoken it aloud, but he’d been relieved. Out of his hands; not his problem; far better this way. Now he was exhausted from walking up four flights of stairs. No one had ever cared about this building. It was lightless, ugly, a concrete box. It was everything John Moody had worked against in his life: disorder and despair. But this was the place. This was his son’s last known address, so he knocked on the door. It was iron; it hurt his hand. He had a racing thought — I could still get away.

  A boy of ten opened the door. John Moody recognized him. The boy was Sam, but that was impossible.

  Sam? John said.

  My father’s gone, the boy told him. I’m Will. He was a serious fellow, very much in need of a haircut. Do you want to come in? My mother will be back soon.

  Sam as he might have been, without that look in his eyes, that boneyard, black night, uncontrolled look. Just a little boy.

  No, I think I’m at the wrong place. Wrong address.

  John Moody hurried off. Two steps at a time. He quickly hailed a cab. He already knew he would keep the boy a secret, even from himself. What wasn’t spoken of soon disappeared, at least on the surface, enough to let him get by. What he didn’t think about, he wasn’t responsible for. Instead, he went for long walks. He was distracted. He attended Lisa’s piano recitals. He talked to her guidance counselor about which college would be best and went over her schedule and class selections, but all the while he was lost. He thought about that hallway in New York more than he should. He had conversations with a grandson he didn’t even know. John began to keep a tape recorder in his pocket. Cynthia recorded not only his daily appointments for him, but directions on how to get there as well. John was that confused.

  But he remembered to go to the cemetery once a month. The old cemetery, Archangel, where Arlie was. No one had to tell him to do that; no one even knew that he went. He parked and looked at the big tree, a sycamore, he thought, not that he knew much about trees. It had a mottled peeling bark. John knew glass and steel. He knew what it felt to be hollow inside. He had missed Arlie all this time. He had a photograph of her in his wallet; he’d snapped her picture on the ferry one day when she insisted they go back so she could see the house where she’d grown up. Arlie was wearing a white dress that was unsuitable for the weather, but John had bought it for her as a gift. He wasn’t a man who thought about gifts, but when he’d seen the dress, he’d known it was right for Arlie. The sky was dark and threatening and for an instant John worried that his wife would be carried off by the wind.

  Don’t be silly, she’d called to him. She was holding on to the railing. I’m not going anywhere.

  The day before he died John had trouble breathing. He went outside to get some fresh air and there Arlie was, surrounded by mourning doves. He thought perhaps he had taken the right path all along. Maybe he was meant to get lost that evening, meant to find Arlie in the kitchen, meant to be a father to Sam, his only child with her. He knew that. He knew why George Snow had sat at Arlie’s bedside, not that he loved Blanca any less for it. He didn’t even blame Arlie. Not one bit. He’d gotten lost, that was the problem; he hadn’t been there for her and he’d never been the sort of man who could ask for help.

  “I really think you should try to get more rest,” Cynthia said on the night before he died. He was logy, distracted.

  “She was absolutely naked in the kitchen,” John Moody said.

  “Who?”

  John took hold of himself. “Some movie. I saw it on TV last night. They have nudity.”

  “You shouldn’t be up watching TV so late,” Cynthia said.

  On that night John Moody did as he was told. He fell asleep and began to dream that he was walking down the hall. This dream was different from the usual one. He heard something breathing; he smelled smoke. There was soot on the floor. He came at last to a room he hadn’t known was there, in the very center of the house he’d grown up in. The room he’d always been looking for. The door was closed but he could hear something flying around inside. It hit against the wall with a thud; there was the sound of wings beating. Like a heart, just as regular, but louder, so loud he could feel it inside his own head.

  The key to the room was made out of glass. It cut John’s hands and made him bleed. The blood itself had a steady rhythm, as it dropped onto the floor. Something was flying around in the dark, something large and dark with leathery wings. It had talons. It had been there all along. It had broken all the glass, the ceiling, the windows; glass was everywhere, like falling stars.

  John lit a lantern. All at once he saw the truth. It wasn’t a bird trapped inside the room; it was a dragon. Red and wounded, wings beating. A dragon in his very own house.

  John Moody held the glass key in his hand even though he continued to bleed. He could hear himself breathing, his sleeping real self. But his dream self couldn’t catch his breath. He didn’t dare move. For here was the problem, as it always had been: he didn’t know if he was supposed to kill the dragon or rescue it.

  John had a headache when he woke in the morning, and decided not to go to work. A rarity, and cause for concern. Cynthia phoned the doctor to make an appointment as she was fixing his breakfast. Best to be safe rather than sorry. They weren’t young, after all. They didn’t always agree, but she was a good wife, and he a good husband. She made up a tray: fruit, eggs, decaffeinated coffee with skim milk.

  When John came downstairs he was still in his bathrobe. He said he couldn’t breathe; he needed a bit of fresh air.

  I’ll bring you some water, Cynthia had said. We can have breakfast outside.

  After he’d gone into the yard, Cynthia watched John sink into one of the patio chairs so he could look out over the lawn. He loved that view. He was a handsome man, even now, and Cynthia appreciated him. He’s finally resting, she thought, but that wasn’t it at all. John Moody was waiting, and in no time she was there. He could see her clear as day. Her long red hair, the thin white dress he could see through. She was perfect; he’d forgotten that. Surely, he understood why he’d stayed.

  When he had woken on a strange couch in a stranger’s house all those years ago, he’d quickly sat up and put on his shoes. John Moody wasn’t some fool ready to be waylaid. He got his car keys and found a map on top of the desk in the parlor. There was the route he was supposed to take, a thin line of color cutting across the North Shore of Long Island. Easy enough. Easy as pie. But then he heard something that caught his interest. A sound he couldn’t ignore, like wings flapping, or fabric slipping off a woma
n’s shoulders. Twenty steps to the kitchen door. The carpet was worn, the floors wide yellow pine. How could he ever have forgotten how much he had wanted her? His hands were actually shaking when he pushed the door open. Big, white hands, clumsy, young, a man in search of what he wanted. Here was the path, the future, his destiny. Italy was nothing compared to her. Everything that might have been fell away.

  He stared out at the lawn and understood himself at last. A dozen mourning doves. Pools of dark shadows on the lawn. She was gone, but he didn’t need her to remind him anymore. The way she had turned to him. The way she walked to him. The way he was waiting for her.

  He remembered everything now.

  A RED MAP ISN’T EASY TO FOLLOW. ANY DOCUMENT MADE of blood and bones is tricky. Wrong turns are easily made, and there are often piles of stones in the road. A person has to disregard time and sorrow and all the damage done. If you follow, if you dare, the thread always leads to whomever or whatever you’ve forgotten: the little girl lost in the woods, the hedgehog, the strand of pearls, the ferryboat, your own father.