The Love That Split the World(2)
“I missed you too.”
“I thought you said it was only a minute for you.”
“It was.”
For a while we’re both silent, staring at one another. Then she asks, “How are the twins?”
“Good,” I tell her. “Coco’s transferring to a performing arts high school next year. Jack’s still playing football. Mom’s so proud of us all that she’s liable to explode any day now, so that’s good. At the end of summer she and Dad are taking us to San Francisco then up to Seattle.” The trip is a tradition they’ve had since they got married. Mom had never really traveled anywhere before, and her only reservation about marrying Dad was that she knew he loved Kentucky so much he’d never leave. They were poor then, but Dad still promised they’d see the world, or, at the very least, the continental U.S. Thus the annual Cleary Family Road Trip was born.
Grandmother closes her eyes for a long moment, and their corners crinkle prettily when they open. “I thought this year was Boulder down through Denver and into Mesa Verde,” she says. “Jack gets food poisoning, and Coco won’t eat anywhere that’s not a chain after that.”
“That was last year,” I say. “This year it’s all Highway 101. Probably a good time to buy stock in Dramamine, if you’re looking for a hot tip.”
“And you? How are you?”
“I’m great. Moving to Rhode Island in August, to go to Brown—but you probably already knew that.”
She nods, and again we fall into stillness and silence. I’ve missed this feeling, of sitting awake at night with her while the rest of the world dreams. The last three years have felt chaotic without these moments of quiet.
“Is it true that God leaves you when you grow up?” I ask. “Is that why I haven’t seen you?”
“I’ve never said I was God.”
It’s true—she’s avoided the question of what exactly she is since she first appeared when I was six, and not for lack of my asking, guessing, and hypothesizing.
Before Grandmother, the hallucinations had all been terrifying: black orbs floating a foot over my nose, grizzled men in green jackets with eyes like endless pits, women painted like clowns posing at my bedside. When they came, I’d scream, reach for the light, but by the time my parents came running to my bedroom door, the things would be gone, evaporated into the walls as though they’d never come at all.
“It was just a nightmare,” Mom would assure me, running her long fingers through the tangles in my hair. Then Dad would get blankets from the hall closet and make a nest on the floor beside their bed, and I’d finish the night in their room.
But when Grandmother appeared beside me that first time in the dead of night, things felt different. It’s not like I had an extensive vocabulary for the spiritual or metaphysical—my family is the “church twice a year” type, and those biannual visits have never done anything for me—but I also never had any aversion to the concept of God Itself, just to the idea that we could possibly nail down all Its details.
God is a thing I think I see in glimmers all over: an enormous and vague warmth I sometimes catch pulsing around me, giving me shivers and making tears prick my eyes; a mysterious and limitless Thing threaded through all the world and refusing to be reduced to a name or a set of rules and instead winding itself through millions of stories, true and made up, connecting all breathing things.
And I’d given Grandmother that nickname not because I thought she was that Thing but because I saw It in her, and knew she belonged to It. I had no other word at my disposal that could encompass a being who came out of the walls to protect me from the dark.
While The Shining-esque visitations hadn’t been enough to make my parents take me to a shrink, an elderly American Indian celestial being showing up to tell me creation stories had. When I’d mentioned Grandmother over breakfast, Mom immediately left the kitchen to call Dad. It was obvious I’d done something wrong—I just didn’t know what until a week later, when Mom got home from her meet-and-greet with a child psychologist and had her first talk with me.
“It’s only natural to wonder about your heritage, honey,” she’d said, voice shaking. It sounded like a line from one of the You Were a Special Gift books she read to me as a toddler, in lieu of the more devastating “You’re adopted” speech some other kids I knew got later. “It’s okay to explore your identity.”
“My eyes were open,” I told her then. “I wasn’t dreaming. Grandmother’s real.”
I couldn’t convince Mom or Dad or Dr. Langdon, but I still knew: Grandmother was real. And she may have never admitted to being God, but I knew she was something, or a part of something, sublime.
“Fine,” I say, “the Great Spirit, the Above Old Man, the Earth Maker, or Holitopa Ishki, or whatever exactly you are or call yourself—just answer the question. Are you going to leave me now that I’m an adult or . . . whatever it is I am?”
Grandmother’s mouth tightens. She stands, and my heart starts to pound—she’s never stood before, in all the dozens of nights she’s come to me. She crosses the room, perches on the edge of my bed, and takes my hands in hers. Her skin is impossibly soft, like velvet, like powdered sediments or antique silk.
“This,” she says, “may be the last time you’ll see me, Natalie. But I’ll always be with you.”