The Summer That Melted Everything(47)

“He kicked the tire, said ‘Goddamn,’ and then punched her. Not the first time. Not the last time. Just another time that would black her eye. The man looked down at his fist, stuffed it into his pocket, and went walking toward the town we’d passed a couple miles back.

“The woman sat down on the ground by the car, her dress her best rag. I sat with her, leaning forward with my arms wrapped around my legs. I could feel her fingers trace the scars on my back under the overalls.”

“Your wing scars?” I felt my own back tightening.

He wiped his hand over his mouth, the way an old man might dust food crumbs.

“As she traced them, she said she was sorry. I traced her eye and its coming bruise and said I was sorry. And there, both sorry, we held each other until the man returned with the night and a spare. He smelled like a barstool. Looked like one too, with his wobbling eyes.

“Her hand shook as she held the flashlight while he changed the tire. He yelled at her to stop shaking the damn light like that, so she handed it to me and I held it still. Though I don’t know how.

“After the tire was changed, we drove the dirt roads, his anger driving off. He pointed out the windows at the leaves. Told her to look at all their yellow and red and orange. She squinted and really tried, but said she couldn’t see them. It was the night’s fault, she said, not his.

“He reached over and she flinched. He said it was okay, he wasn’t going to hurt her, he said. He was just unrolling her window. She still looked nervous as he reached across her lap. He unrolled the window quick and beamed at her. Now you can see, he said with hopeful certainty. But she sighed. It was too dark.

“He looked at the tears slipping down her cheeks. He caught one on the back of his finger. He was sorry about earlier, he said as he looked down at her trembling hands folded on her lap. When it got later, he always got sorry about earlier.

“She said it was all right. The way she always did. He slowed the car and parked off the road. Without a word, he got out and me and the woman watched as the dark of him was swallowed by the dark of the woods.

“When he emerged from those woods, he carried something. Fallen leaves that he spread throughout the car. Over the seats and floor, the dashboard, the woman’s lap, my lap. Then he took the flashlight and shined it on a leaf.

“‘It’s not too dark now, is it? Do you see the leaf, Mother?’ he asked. ‘How yellow it is?’ And she answered, ‘Yes, Father, I see. I see now.’

“They always called each other Mother and Father even though they weren’t that to each other.”

“What’d they call you, Sal?”

He did not answer me. He instead smiled and said, “It was beautiful. All them leaves. All that light. The smile on her face. The relief on his that she still loved him. That he hadn’t smacked it out of her just yet. He kept shining that light and she told me to come up from the backseat, onto her lap.

“From there I saw orange maples, yellow oaks, red elms. When there were no more leaves to see, when we had seen each and every one he had collected, he patted his lap and said to me, ‘Here, prop your feet up here.’ I laid my feet there and he laid his hand on top. It was warm. It was nice. And it stayed there the whole way home.”

“Sal, is this the same man with the rope? The same woman beaten in the kitchen? The same boy with the stool for his father?” I wanted to ask those questions, but I feared the answer.

“You asked me, Fielding, why, out of the whole world, why Dresden Delmar?” He looked off into the distance and squinted as if what he saw there was quite possibly the brightest thing in the world. “It’s because her freckles are scattered like the leaves across the woman’s lap. Her eyes shine like the light in the man’s hand. Her hair is as red as the red leaf we passed between the three of us, like the love we could not simply say.”





14

… with a pleasing sorcery, could charm

Pain for a while or anguish, and excite

Fallacious hope

—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 2:566–568

THE FINALE OF fear is first neared by small labors of bravery. These small labors will eventually lead to the last laboring of the great defeat of the fear altogether. That is the breathing text of hope anyways, that we branch an escape from fear’s trapping circle.

For my mother, her small labor of bravery was learning how to swim. The acoustics of which involved no splashing water, as her swimming was in her fear’s circle and therefore in the house. She was nearing the finale of her fear, and though she was not yet there, Sal was tiring her to the nightmare and introducing her to the dream.

Let it be said that my mother didn’t always live life inside. Before I was born, she went out into the world quite regularly. Soon after I was born, she refused to leave the house without an umbrella. By the time I was one, the umbrella proved not to be enough, and she found herself fleeing the world and its lack of ceiling.

For a number of years, Dad tried to help her conquer her fear. He brought in therapists and read various psychological books himself to better understand. Ultimately, the therapists failed and the answer was not found in any book.

Dad, as well as me and Grand, accepted that she may never leave the house again. It was Sal who did not accept this. He was calling out her world and letting her know it would win a carpenter a prize, but it’d never be a darling of the universe where the stars commit to the real thing.