In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [82]
I don’t remember how I found my way from that room. It’s as though a shade were drawn, leaving only the silhouettes of bodies and their coarse movement visible in my memory: no detail, no emotion, no faces or fingers, just the dense and undefinable figures of people going on with their lives, and I somewhere among them.
I do know that I was shunned. Even though I continued to attend church, I sat alone in the long pew. I ate in silence, my throat constricting so that the food swelled in my mouth and I spat it into my napkin, afraid that if they saw my plate still full they might find more proof of my evil: demons feed not on flesh but on the spirit. Sleep became my only comfort. By some mercy I did not dream and welcomed the impenetrable darkness, feeling the water close over my head as though I were tied to a stone. And it is this I remember most: the sense of being anchored yet drifting languorously, like one drowned and made to love her own death.
The remaining days of the summer between my eighth-and ninth-grade years come to me in memory like smoke from a distant fire. Someone must have told me what day my parents would arrive to pick me up, and I awoke that morning, made my bed, packed my few belongings in a bag, then sat before my window and waited until Sister Lang called me downstairs.
I moved with my eyes down. I didn’t think, didn’t remember. What was in front of me commanded my full attention: dicing onions, grating cheese. Only when the car pulled into the driveway did I look up.
I greeted my parents kindly, as though they were old friends instead of blood kin. The dinner was served outside—a casserole and salad, a plain hamburger patty for my father—laid out on a cheerful, red-checked tablecloth. I ate and nodded in quiet agreement: Yes, the weather was good, the church was growing. No comment was directed toward me, no questions were asked. I had only to remain upright and silent not to shatter.
What my parents saw before them was a girl, modest and willing to acquiesce, a girl who bowed her head and said grace when asked. Were they stunned into the same state of unreality in which I found myself? Could this girl really be their daughter, the angry and spiteful child they hadn’t seen for months? Changes so dramatic and seemingly sudden can hardly be reconciled except in retrospect, and all that is left to ground us are the expected and familiar motions of the present: the salt must be passed, the ice cream served, the coffee perked.
After the dishes were washed, I gathered my things and climbed into the backseat. We pulled away from the church, my family and I. The Langs were waving, and in the sharp light of August, I could see Luke’s face, in his eyes nothing I recognized as regret or desire.
My brother was asleep almost immediately. His head rolled and nodded against the window until I pulled him gently down and pillowed his head in my lap. I had not seen the fields since late spring, and their golden color infused with the pink glow of twilight soothed me.
Nothing was spoken as the car glided silently across the prairie, its shadow growing and shrinking, absurdly deformed, finally swallowed by the earth’s umbra. It was then that I felt it well up, the panic and overwhelming pain, and I began without reason to tell it, from the end back to its beginning, as though in the unraveling I might find the cause, the one offending stitch.
The road passed evenly beneath us. Nothing broke the rhythm of my story, no one questioned or interrupted. When it was done, I leaned back exhausted, not caring what they understood or what they doubted. I had spoken it, had brought it into the world, had made it real. In the rearview mirror I saw the small ruby glow of my father’s cigarette, brighter as he inhaled, then fading. Nearly dreaming, I heard the only words he would ever speak of that summer. He said, “I was afraid something like this might happen.” In his words I found comfort and I slept.
I do not know what meaning lay in my father’s words