Shine - Lauren Myracle [3]
Sometimes we’d catch bugs and carry them to Mama Sweetie, despite being technically too old for bug hunting. But Mama Sweetie herself was a little kid when it came to bugs and nature and stuff, so we did it to please her. She taught us to be gentler than gentle, because it was terribly easy to tear a butterfly’s wing or pull a leg off a daddy longlegs, she warned us, even if we didn’t mean to. Life was precious. Life was fragile.
We’d present her with our treasures, and she’d draw our attention to things we might not have noticed on our own, like how a roly-poly curled up into a ball not to entertain us, but to protect itself from danger.
I’d seen roly-polies do their rolling-up trick and, sure, I knew they did it to guard themselves from harm. Who wanted to be poked by some dumb girl with a stick?
Mama Sweetie made me slow down and appreciate the finer points of the equation. She explained that since roly-polies were small and helpless, God evened things out by giving them the sense to curl up tight if something came along wanting to hurt them. There was a reason for everything, she said. God knew what He was doing, even if we were unable to understand.
Her wisdom applied to more than butterflies and roly-polies, because life was fragile. Things happened. Things changed. A girl full of light could get that light snuffed out, and when everything around her was dark, she could roll up into a ball and ignore the whole world, starting with her best friend.
But that was where Mama Sweetie’s vision hit a snag, because why? What possible reason could God have for letting people treat others like dirt? “Just ’cause we can’t see the pattern doesn’t mean there ain’t one” didn’t cut it, not when it came to flat-out cruelty.
My aunt Tildy blamed what happened to me on puberty, an explanation about as helpful as blaming it on the moon or drinking bad water or forgetting to throw salt over my shoulder to keep the devil at bay. But that was Aunt Tildy’s way. If there was ugliness to be dealt with, she dealt with it and moved on. If the ugliness left a scar, she brought out her whitewash and got to painting. When the damage was covered, she considered it gone, and it exasperated her to no end that I couldn’t forget the rot beneath the surface.
“You can’t expect gumdrops to fall out of the sky just ’cause you want ’em to,” she scolded me. “No, ma’am. There’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad. That’s just the way of it.”
“But . . . I don’t want it to be like that,” I whispered.
“You think that matters, what you want?” she said. “Where’d you get that fool idea?”
Though her words stung, she wasn’t trying to be cruel.
“No one ever said the world’s an easy place, ’specially for a girl,” she went on. “’Specially for a pretty girl, and that’s just the way of it, too. If you’re a pretty girl, you’re gonna get . . .”
She pressed her lips together. She couldn’t say it, not without scraping off a layer of fresh paint.
“Some things ain’t worth dwelling on,” she said crisply. “Now help me get the laundry off the line before the rain comes on.”
Today, there wasn’t a rain cloud in sight. Today, all I saw was an endless blue sky shimmering above the trees at the edge of Patrick’s yard. I pressed the back of my head against the house. My fingers found the grass, and at its roots, the cool soil. I would have been content to sit here for hours, but I needed to get up. I needed to bike on over to church, where Aunt Tildy would be waiting, saving me a seat in a pew and craning her neck to look for me.
Not yet, my body said, heavy with the desire for things to be like they once were.
But that was impossible.
I was sixteen now, no longer that girl full of light and life. No longer Patrick’s kindred spirit. If I was like anyone, it was my aunt Tildy with her dogged blindness, because eventually I had adopted her approach to dealing with all things ugly. Blindness, at the time, seemed like my best chance at survival.
So I’d stabbed needles into my eyes