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Brian Helt << continued from Part 1 Beneath the lip of the pay phone, hanging by a chain, a phone book is enveloped by a black plastic case. With my steno pad resting on the shelf of the kiosk, I part the laminated pages and collect them one by one: Cordova. Diego. Bickford. Addison. I write them all down on a fresh page under the name KETTLEMAN. On nights like this one, I am left to wonder if she kept our name after these five years, if she looks into the mirror and touches the keloid shape that covers where her breasts should've taken shape. I wonder if she sees me in the collagen. It is hardest at night because I can no longer fool myself out of the knowledge that I am truly alone. And when I lay in the underpass, or on the park bench or in a locked bathroom stall, I reach under my shirt to feel the mark she left. I can feel it disappearing little by little each night. I can feel her fading with it. I drank it in with my eyes, that house we could barely remember. The thick gauge wire of the chain-link fence had long since begun to rot and the windows on the upper floor had been broken. Spotty shingles covered the roof like the scales of a sick and molting fish. The sound of the wind was caught in its frame like tender stone fruit, pinched between the fangs of something ferocious. Next to me, Wendy leaned against the fence with her forearm heaving and wheezing to catch her breath. "You okay?" I asked to which she only replied with a nod before rising upward. She put her hand on my shoulder and I saw the sweat dripping from her nose and running down her cheeks. Inside, the smell of wetted earth, mold and dust rose up from every corner of every room of the house that haunted our infant selves and fumigated all the memories we failed to retain. Graffiti in neon pinks, lime greens and electric blues were muddled and muted by the tags in black and white and gathered into a clashing painted lacework that concealed the wallpaper, which I thought I might've recognized, that peeled down in jagged shards, exposing the pulpy white cellulose still clinging to the adhesive long since set onto the dry wall. The warped floorboards that lifted at the edges of their settings bellowed and groaned with each step that compressed them. "I don't remember it." She said between slowing breaths. "It was a long time ago," I replied. "I don't think we were even two before they gave us up." "I don't remember them either." "Don't think there's much to remember," I said. The night froze in stillness and though I had found something like comfort in that moment which burned up like onion skin, the folded papers in my back pocket reminded me that I was no closer to home in truth. I reached for them, thumbing their edge. "Would you ever want us to be apart?" My voice careened through the night like a freight train. "Why would you ask that?" She replied. "Promise me that whatever happens tonight, you won't go back to George and Erin's." "Why not?" She asked. "Because." "What's wrong with you, Nora?" There was a moment of hesitation, a moment to convince myself that this was to keep us together. "They don't want us." I began. "Not both of us." "What are you talking about?" I pulled the adoption dissolution papers out of my pocket and handed them to her, creased into quarters. As her eyes darted from left to right I felt my face get red hot. "What does this mean?" She asked. "They still want to adopt you." I replied. "But what about you?" I looked down, unsure of what to say. "They're splitting us up." She said. I choked from fighting the words out of me. "Not if we don't want to." "You mean, like, run away?" She asked. "I'm sick of it, Wendy. Bouncing from foster home to foster home just to land back at the group home. None of them want us, not together. They want to pick and choose. Like we're just dogs at a pound. We're just a pair of freaks to all of them." The word freaks had conjured up the torment from grade school before the separation when other kids pointed and stared or laughed, experimenting with creative cruelty. Middle school had proved to be no better. She heaved and gasped as she fought down her sobs. I took her in my arms. I could feel her heart racing as she worked desperately to catch her breath. "Want to put it back?" I asked. "Like how we used to? Like it was before?" She nodded, head weighing heavy on my shoulder. I stepped back from her and lifted my shirt, tossing it on the linoleum before kicking it back into the blackness of the unlit room, exposing the scar that covered my chest. In the darkness, I could hear her do the same and watched the contour of her shape rise out of the onyx night giving way to the dreary daylight bit by oily bit. We laid down on the ground and feel asleep on our sides, the scar of our separation pressed against itself. We were whole again. Unbreakably one. The Palm Shores complex on Cesar Chavez Boulevard stands two stories tall and takes up the entire block. The stairs are concrete slats bound to strips of steel by wide gauge bolts and you can smell the fruity laundry detergent pouring out into overgrown courtyard where the moss finds its way through each of the channels of the mortar set between pale-bone cinderblocks. Wendy Bickford is in apartment 218 and as I approach the turquoise painted door, I can see that the two is missing, leaving the darker shadow of its figure where the sun could not reach until now. When my knuckles strike against the door, I see her in my mind: thirteen years old, dark hair that extends down past her shoulders, a petite frame that speaks for her condition. In the landscape of my mind, she is running through thicket in the oak forest behind the old house and I am chasing after her. It is in my mind that she is alive and smiling and breathing free. The door opens and a middle aged Latina woman is looking me in the eye. She is short and her belly hangs just over her beltline. She looks at me questioningly. "Lo siento." I say through white hot anxiety. Hopelessness closes in on me. I rush across the balcony to the stairs when I hear the voice of a man from behind her. "Quien era?" He asks. "No se." She replies. "Pinche esqueleta blanca." His voice is carried back into the belly of the apartment. Over my shoulder, I can see that she is still looking at me from her door. I fight back the urge to turn around and ask her in broken Spanish to explain how this ends because the nobility painted in her face tells me that, like the trucker from last night, she knows. She holds the secret, the truth of this thing we call human life and the survivor's guilt that follows us around throughout it despite our best efforts. She holds it in her heart, which I can tell is stronger than mine - stronger than Wendy's. I have killed all the greatest things about myself out of the fear that it will never be quite enough penance. I want to ask Wendy Bickford all the questions about how she continues, how she maintains given all the tiny monsters that must live in the small space of her ears, whispering dirty little lies to her as she sleeps. But I don't. I keep walking to the entrance and down the block and back to highway five because underneath it all, I already know the truth. Wendy was never supposed to have survived. They reminded us of this at every follow up appointment in an effort to maintain low expectations. Each day that she lived was a miracle. I remember back then, seeing doctor after doctor and they'd all say the same things. She had been left with the weaker heart and it would fail at any given moment. I wanted to give her something, a way of showing her how thankful I was. That even though they'd told me different, that I knew I owed her my life. Almost any hope that'd we'd ever eat had evaporated from me when the coaster finally danced and shined and I had to keep myself from sprinting across the parking lot to the takeout window where an impatient young woman recited my order back to me. I nodded to her, not hearing a word she said as I handed her my coaster and took the warm bag of food in my arms, hugging it like a child. As I began my long walk back to the house, the scent of the food permeated the paper bag, wafting into my face. I fought against my instinct, trying to focus on returning to Wendy. I pictured her face as it leapt into joy when I handed her the bag of warm food, the scent of which still penetrated my thoughts. |
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ISSN 2150-6795 |