They arrive in the night, in the dark sleepless times, they are most vivid in the dark, the people who were my family. But they are always here, just out of reach. My brother would hold a strawberry out of my reach, demand I say the word strawberry and I could not speak yet. I could say: da, da, da. I reached for the teddy bear my sister held high, too high, demanding: say it, say it. I wake up in the night to the sounds of a child calling: Mommy. Momm-eeee. This voice is my own voice. I am one of the ones hovering, wanting to find my way back to fit into the house that was home. I have lived away from the house so much longer than the time I lived in it, decades since that short time I lived with my family. They come to me now wanting. What do they want?
My sister came to me again last night. It was a night with hazy stars, the moon thin and low in the west. My sister wore a hat. This startled me – the hat, my sister, the dark bedside. The curtains were pulled open. But the dark plains, the hills, the red rock outcroppings I knew were there did not bring any light. Nothing glowed or glistened. The darkness did not illuminate and yet, I could see my sister. My sister’s hat was white and it fit her head like a clamp. A hat without a brim, almost a headband. A decorative hat. From Easter, she said, reaching up to settle the hat more firmly upon her dark hair. The only light in the room came from my sister. She glowed like those transparent human bodies, sculptures on poles above the Place Messena in Nice. I once lived in France. Did my sister ever go to France? My sister did not change colors the way the statues do, from blue to pink to pale green. The light from my sister was not white light as she stood by the bed. There was no true color to it. I could see her is the only way I can describe it.
There were her hands with the long fingers. Hands I had forgotten. There were her pale lips, the way she bit at one corner of her mouth, and the long scar that never faded that shot down her forehead like a flash of lightning. The hat and the little white vinyl purse came from a much younger time in my sister’s life. The scar came later. I hear you been thinking of me, she said. That voice. I would recognize it anywhere. The smell of her, the way a saltine cracker dipped in cold milk tastes, and here she was with cracker breath. She made no shadow. When I reached for the lamp, she shook her head slowly.
The little dog nestled closer to my side but did not rouse herself. The dog only reacts these days to sounds I cannot hear. The dog will stand in a circle of sunlight and bark with her new bow wow wow bark. Fourteen years of no barking and now the dog barks, warning me of what I can’t know. My sister removed her hat and placed it on my head. It gripped my skull.
I am the one who tried to make sense of it. Always asking why, what, who. The wondering goes on so much longer than the time I lived in that house with these people. I have outlived them all, I think, and yet, I don’t know if my sister still lives. How would I know?
Like a rock shot from a catapult, hurled into the atmosphere, the twirl, a whirl, a whistle close to your cheek. I flung myself so far away from them. I orbit the night sky alone. What do I want? To go home. Spend another evening around that supper table. Just to see my mother clutch her fork and cross her skinny ankles. Just to hear my father holler, Put your foot on it, when my brother struggled to cut the leathery steak. Just to sit at that table again, me and Linda on a Saturday afternoon, eating the grilled cheese sandwiches she fixed us, cut on a diagonal–, she learned to do this in Home Ec. I’ll be reading Little Lulu and she’ll have her Modern Romance magazine and we won’t speak. We will read and eat our sandwiches. Just to hear my sister chew the way she’d learned to chew in school, lick her finger to flip the page of her magazine. Clear her throat.
