When the Lights Go Out(76)

Jessie, I hear again, and I snap to attention. Who said that? Who’s calling me?

There’s a sudden chill in the air. I shiver. I pull my sweatshirt tighter around me, eyeing the people outside the coffee shop and taking them all in. But there’s no one here that I know.

I turn away but still can’t shake the feeling that someone is following. That someone is watching me. It’s a gut feeling and there, at the fringes of my awareness, I feel it. Eyes on me though they’re outside my field of view, burning a hole in my back.

On the other side of the intersection I pause, looking backward one last time, because I just can’t shake that sense of being watched. And then I hear it again.

Psst. Hey. Hey, Jessie, and I turn suddenly, a spinning toy top on its tip. I almost lose balance; I almost fall to the ground. The world spins on its axis and I don’t know what to blame for it, the lack of sleep or grief.

A man and woman walk behind me now, holding hands. Midthirties, pushing forty. They look slick and sophisticated, she taller than him in high heel boots, though they’re both pinched and slim. “Did you call me?” I ask, but they exchange a look and tell me no. They part ways, slipping around me, one on either side. Once they pass, they rejoin hands, looking into each other’s eyes before gazing over their shoulders at me. They laugh. I hear words giggled between them. Lunatic and crazy. They’re talking about me.

And then there’s a hand on my back. A warm hand that touches my bare skin from behind. It caresses me as every single hair on my arms and legs goes erect and I can’t help myself. I scream. I jerk away, spinning around to find no one there. There’s no one standing on the sidewalk behind me, though I hear it again. I feel it again. Lips pressed to my ear, whispering, Earth to Jessie.

I shake my head, willing it away, telling myself that it’s nothing. That it’s only the wind. I look up, coming to, realizing that I’ve lost track of the man I am sure now is my father. He’s gone. I listen for the sound of his footsteps, searching the horizon for the orange baseball cap. I start to panic—eyes desperately lurching this way and that, hoping to see that pinprick of orange way off in the distance. I stagger down the street like a drunk. I can no longer hold my body upright because it’s begun to collapse on me. I try running but I can’t run, and so it’s a shamble at best, feet dragging.

A hand latches onto my arm, a voice asks if I’m all right. I peer down at the hand on my arm, seeing a spindly hand, a bony hand. Rivers of blue veins roll across it. There’s dirt wedged beneath the fingernails, lining the edges of the nail bed, and that’s how I know. I know this hand; I’d know this hand anywhere. This is Mom’s hand.

My eyes shoot up, taking in the woman draped all in white. She looks nothing like Mom. And yet, she says, “Jessie.”

I’m so taken aback that I don’t have it in me to respond. She stands before me, a halo of sunlight bearing down on her. She wears a wispy white blouse that billows in the early-morning breeze, the top button undone so I catch a hint of the pale skin beneath. On her bottom half is a skirt, a long one, stretching clear to her feet so that I can’t be certain they’re there. She looks fragile, delicate and, as she draws her hands through her hair, strands come with it. Clumps of hair fall from her scalp just like that, getting trapped between her thin fingers. Through the thin, floaty blouse I catch sight of her breasts. The breasts flat, nipples gone. Serrated suture marks crisscrossing her chest, the way Mom’s used to be.

“Mom,” I say. As impossible as it sounds, this woman standing before me is Mom.

“Mom,” I beg this time, trembling as I reach for her, wanting nothing more than to draw her close, to wrap my arms around her shoulders and pull her in tight. I’m crying now, tears falling freely from my eyes. “Mom!” I plead, but before me she pulls suddenly back, sharply back, her eyebrows pleated. Her mouth drops open and she asks, “Do you need me to call someone for you? An ambulance, maybe?” as she stands a good three feet away and retreats a step for every step that I draw near. I grab for her again, but she tugs her arms out of reach from mine, setting them behind her back.

“I’m not your mom,” she states. And it’s so assertive, so firm, it gives me pause.

My eyes calibrate the image I see, the woman with the red hair and green eyes dressed in all white. Except that her hair is intact and what I saw as suture marks are instead lace.

It’s not Mom.

I drop my hands to my sides, as she asks again if I need help, if there’s someone she can call for me. I bark out no, though all at once I realize that I have no idea where I am, that the streets and the buildings are unrecognizable to me. That I’ve never seen them in my whole life.

Where am I?

How did I get here?

A siren wails off in the distance.

A car door squeaks open and then slams closed.

People push past me on the sidewalk, in a hurry to get here or there as the woman disappears into the crowds.

I cup my hands around my mouth, screaming up and down the street for my father.

And then, when I think all hope is lost, I see him. Out of the corner of my eye, somewhere in my peripheral vision, I catch a glimpse of orange as it slips behind the glass door of an apartment building on the other side of the street. I go to it, tugging on the door handle to follow him in, but find the door locked.

I press my face to the glass, staring inside. The lobby of the building is near empty. It’s dated and retro with 1970s linoleum tile, the kind that seeps with asbestos. Where are we? Does he live here? Does he know someone who lives here? The tile is partly covered with some sort of commercial carpeting, bland and gray, to disguise the ugly tile. A postal worker separates mail into a million bins and though I knock on the glass for him to let me in, he ignores me. Either he can’t hear or he doesn’t care. He just goes about sorting the mail as if I’m not here, as if he can’t see me, as if I’m invisible.