Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [78]
I had never been more painfully conscious of the fact that I slept alone, but the awareness of my solitude was followed by an equally profound awareness of an invisible Presence in the room, filling the corners, over my bed, protective and jealous. The knowledge that I was not completely alone comforted me, like the arms of a mother or the familiar nearness of a lover.
15
It has been my experience that when you ask God for help, He often responds by asking you to help someone else.
Since our conversation about her sister’s death, I continued to worry about Ashley Mulligan. Though she’d been a contributing member of workshop since the first half of the semester, her attendance was becoming a problem. She came to class late or left early. She crossed her arms and sank her chin down to her chest so that the red ball cap she now wore to every class concealed her tired eyes. She seemed intent on vanishing from sight.
The day her fiction piece was due, she managed to arrive on time. She walked slowly and silently through the room, dispensing copies of her story to fellow students, who said “thank you” more politely than was usual. I scanned over her story on my way back to the office. I was so struck by the elegance and simplicity of the prose, I didn’t put the manuscript down until I had read it all the way through to its end. The story followed a high school girl through the night she finds her parents have been in a car accident. She’s taken to the hospital to say good-bye to a father whose body is alive, but whose mind is dead. Between the night of the phone call and the funeral, she walks along the bay, trying to wrap her mind around the reality of his permanent absence.
… Natalie stood at the entrance to the hospital feeling her heart pound in her chest like a bird that could not escape its cage. She felt the walls of the hospital shrink back and the reflection of her face looked hollow to her as it stared back from the many windows of the long hallway. She did not recognize herself. She didn’t belong in this life. She had seen it before in movies and had read about it in books, but it was a life twice removed from reality, a world she had thought only existed for others and never for herself.
… They say time is relative. Natalie had even heard it said that any teenager knows this principle: four hours on a couch with a lovely girl is a second to an enraptured love-struck boy. Thirty seconds with your hands on a burning oven is an eternity.
People often speak of eternity when they speak of the dead. But, Natalie wondered, why do they only speak of it in terms of the dead themselves? Anyone who has watched their loved one buried in the earth knows eternity. Eternity is the hours of the Sunday afternoons spent at a table without your husband of fifty years; it’s the long, forced cheerfulness of birthday parties without the little sister you shared a bed with growing up. Eternity is the way a minute becomes an hour and a lifetime becomes unbearable at the thought of being without someone.
I read the story a second time to provide criticism, but I forgot I was reading. In other words, this was a story.
Though Ashley had demanded that I treat her like the other students, I had yet to give her demerits for missing class. I noticed when she wasn’t there Monday, but, as usual, I didn’t pencil in the absence. Wednesday I was so distraught about Eli leaving, I forgot to take roll. Friday she didn’t show, even though we were discussing her story. Realizing she had been gone an entire week, I panicked. She’d never missed more than one class a week, and I’d never thought that failing to mark her absences would lead me to forget them entirely.
I e-mailed her directly after class:
To: mulligaaj@copenhagen.edu
From: gallagham@copenhagen.edu