Don't You Cry(85)

It’s inevitable that someone will get hurt.

It’s bound to happen.

It’s then, as the knife slips through my skin with the ease of a foot sliding into a pair of socks or a shoe, that I hear it: the sublime sound of police sirens hollering through the streets of town, coming to save me.

It’s as the blood begins to seep from the aperture of my skin that I feel it: a searing pain that immobilizes me. I can’t move, though all around me the others have begun to drift away, watching on with round, agog eyes, mouths parted, fingers pointing. Before my eyes, Ingrid and Genevieve, the both of them, begin to blur. The knife remains inside me, protruding from my abdomen, and at seeing the knife, I slowly smile. After the commotion is through, I’m the one who’s managed to walk away with the knife.

I’m the victor, for once in my life. I won.

The room around me begins to wax and wane like the lake at high tide. And this is what I see: the lake, Lake Michigan, my anchor. The cornerstone of my existence, my mainstay.

They say that your entire life drifts before your eyes in those last few minutes before you die.

This is what I see.

The room around me turns blue and begins to ripple from the walls, across the wooden floors, a breaker coming at me, my feet sinking into sand. I sink into the water then, the blue water of the lake threatening to drown me, or to carry me home perhaps. Home. The lake, Lake Michigan, my home.

Before I know what’s happening I’m three years old again, toddling along the beach for the very first time, gathering beach rocks in a plastic pail. Geodes and lightning stones and quartz. Rocks, all rocks, making my pail grow heavy with time. My mother is there, loitering where the water meets sand, sitting on the beach, her feet lost in the lake’s surge. The sand sticks to her feet, her legs, her hands. She wears cutoff denim shorts and a frumpy T-shirt, one that once belonged to Pops. The shorts she made herself, sheared a pair of jeans off between the waist and the knee so that the edges turn to rags. They fray at the hem, white threads falling from the denim shorts, trailing the length of her gaunt legs.

What she loves is the beach glass, and so when I find it, I collect it in my uninhibited hand and run to her, tiny fragments of beach glass in my sandy palm, pale blue and a washed-out green. My mother smiles at me, this timorous sort of smile that says smiling doesn’t come with ease. But still, she smiles, a forced smile that tells me she’s trying. She runs a hesitant hand along mine as she takes the pail from my hand. She invites me to sit down beside her, and together we piece through the rocks, sorting by shape, and then by color. My mother has a rock for me, as well, a tiny tan saucer that she sets in the palm of my grimy hand, telling me to Hold tight; don’t lose it. An Indian bead, she tells me. Crinoid stems. I’m far too young for words like this, and yet they’re ones that wind their way to my heart like a tree’s sinuous roots, anchoring me to the ground, feeding my soul.

I hold tight; I don’t lose it.

And then, like that, I am eight years old. Eight years old and sad and alone and awkward, a boy too tall for his lanky frame. Sitting by myself on the beach, kicking bare feet at the sand, my eyes obliviously searching the sand for crinoid stems. I watch the way the granules of sand rise up in the air and then fall, dispersing through the air like dandelion seeds. Again and again and again. Rise up and fall, rise up and fall. I dig myself a hole in the ground with an old toy shovel some other kid left behind. I think I might just want to bury myself inside. Bury myself inside and never come out. All I want is my mother, but my mother isn’t here. I stare at that place where the water meets sand, where the waves come crashing onto the shore. I do it to be sure, but sure enough, she isn’t there. She’s nowhere.

But there are other mothers who are here, other mothers that I take in one at a time, wishing each and every one of them were mine.

And then it’s nighttime, and the world around me is nearly black. I’m twelve years old, staring through a telescope lens with Leigh Forney at my side. She doesn’t touch me, and yet somehow, in some way, I can feel her skin, barely, just barely, the nebulous sensation of skin on skin. I’ve never felt this way before. This is different; this is new. And it’s not bad at all. I like the way I feel as I stand there on the lake’s shore, looking at the sky, listening to the waves, reminding myself to breathe. It’s a night committed to memory, the particulars stored someplace safe to draw on in times of need. Leigh’s romper, a purple gray thing with shorts and a T-shirt conjoined at the center with a drawstring waist. Her feet, barefoot. A pair of sandals dangling over a single finger so that it stretches too far one way. On her hair: a headband. In her eyes: excitement and fear, like mine. The night is dark, save for the stars. The moon is foggy and vague. And Leigh says to me in a voice that is both playful and pure, “Bet I can beat you to the carousel,” and like that, we’re off and running, feet sinking in sand, through the parking lot, over the orange partition and onto the sleepy carousel where it’s there, as I climb on a sea serpent chariot and the dormant carousel begins to spin, that the world around me ebbs from view.

The room turns darker, the ceiling illuminated like a nighttime sky, my mother’s craven smile flecked across the drywall like a constellation. I’m five years old and all around me the world is black. It’s nighttime still and I’m asleep in my big-boy bed, senseless to the touch of a hesitant hand that strokes my hair in the darkness, heedless of my mother’s hurting words breathed into my ear before she goes. You deserve so much more than me.