There There(41)

PART III


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        People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

    —JAMES BALDWIN





Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield





EVERY TIME she gets into her mail truck Opal does the same thing. She looks into the rearview and finds her gaze looking back at her through the years. She doesn’t like to think of the number of years she’s been working as a mail carrier for the USPS. Not that she doesn’t like the work. It’s that it’s hard to see the years on her face, the lines and wrinkles that surround her eyes, branch out like cracks in the concrete. But even though she hates to see her face, she’s never been able to stop the habit of looking at it when she finds a mirror there in front of her, where she catches one of the only versions of her face she’ll ever see—on top of glass.



* * *



—

Opal thinks as she drives of the first time she took the Red Feather boys in for a weekend at the beginning of the adoption process. They were at a Mervyn’s in Alameda for new clothes. Opal looked at Orvil in the mirror, at an outfit she’d picked out for him.

    “You like it?” she said.

“What about them?” Orvil said, pointing at himself and Opal’s reflection in the mirror. “How do we know it’s not one of them doing it and not us copying?”

“Because look, I’m deciding to wave my hand in front of it right now,” Opal said, and waved. It was a three-panel mirror outside the dressing room. Loother and Lony were hiding inside a clothes rack nearby.

“She could have waved first, then you couldn’t help but copy. But look at this,” he said, and then he broke out into a wild dance. Arms flailing, he jumped and spun. It looked to Opal like he was powwow dancing. But he couldn’t have been. He was just trying to act crazy in front of the mirror to prove no one else was in control but him, the Orvil on this side of the mirror.



* * *



—

Opal is on her route. Same old same old one. But she’s paying attention to where she steps. Opal doesn’t step on cracks when she walks. She walks carefully because she’s always had the sense that there are holes everywhere, cracks you can slip between—the world, after all, is porous. She lives by a superstition she would never admit to. It’s a secret she holds so tight to her chest she never notices it. She lives by it, like breathing. Opal drops mail in slots and in boxes trying to remember which spoon she’d eaten with earlier. She has lucky and unlucky spoons. In order for the lucky ones to work, you have to keep the unlucky ones with them, and you can’t look to see what you’re getting when you pull one out of the drawer. Her luckiest spoon is one with a floral pattern that runs up the handle to the neck.

    She knocks on wood to cancel out something she’s said she wants or doesn’t want to happen, or even if she just thinks it, she’ll find wood and knock on it twice. Opal likes numbers. Numbers are consistent. You can count on them. But for Opal, certain numbers are good and others are bad. Even numbers are generally better than odd ones, and numbers that have some kind of mathematical relationship are good too. She reduces addresses to a single number by adding them together, then judges the neighbors based on their reduced number. Numbers don’t lie. Four and eight are her favorites. Three and six are no good. She delivers mail on the odd side first, always having believed it’s best to get the bad out of the way before getting to the good.

Bad luck or just bad shit happening to you in life can make you secretly superstitious, can make you want to take some control or take back some sense of control. Opal buys scratchers and lottery tickets when the jackpot gets high enough. Her superstition is one she would never call superstition for fear it would lose its power.

Opal is done with the odd side of the street. When she crosses, a car stops for her—the woman inside impatiently waves Opal across like she’s doing all of humanity a favor. Opal wants to lift her arm, lift a single finger as she crosses, but instead she slow jogs across in answer to the woman’s impatience and feigned generosity. Opal hates herself for the jog. For the smile that came to her face before she could stop it, turn it upside down, straighten it out before it was too late.

Opal is full of regrets, but not about things she’s done. That damn island, her mom, Ronald, and then the shuffling, stifling rooms and faces in foster care, in group homes after that. She regrets that they happened. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t cause them to happen. She figures she must deserve it in some way. But she couldn’t figure it out. So she bore those years, their weight, and the years bored a hole through the middle of her, where she tried to keep believing there was some reason to keep her love intact. Opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her—rise up to her eyes. Sometimes she can’t move. Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. But that’s okay because she’s become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. More than one thing at a time preferably. Like delivering mail and listening to an audiobook or music. The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.