Summer
That day the rain was so loud I thought maybe somethin’ broke up there. I watched it from the trees and Samson stood dripping beside me. He stands awkward, he’s such a funny shape I ain’t sure there’s anywhere he’d fit.
We talked for a long time ’cause I didn’t have nowhere to go and I reckon Samson didn’t neither. I’d see him at the church, always lookin’ at me like he wanted to talk but couldn’t manage it.
“You ever want to move out on your own, Sam?” I said, ’cause he said sometimes he still felt like a kid, like he hadn’t never left school.
“My daddy said I don’t earn enough for that. He keeps my books, gives me what I need.”
I nodded. “He’s sick though.”
“Mr. White looks after the money now, he . . . I ain’t sure I’d know how to do it.”
I wondered about Samson, about nature and perception and all that’s between.
“It’s nice that your daddy cares like that,” I said.
We heard a snap and saw a flycatcher, it was gray and lookin’ down from the treetop.
“People reckon he’s hard,” Samson said.
I couldn’t imagine no one harder but I just smiled.
“Momma said it’s ’cause he cares, about all of us and where we’re headed. I didn’t want to let him down, I just . . . you ever feel there’s somethin’ dark inside you, Summer?”
“Yeah.”
“Momma said it’s temptation, to do somethin’ you know ain’t right. How come it feels right, though?”
I shrugged. “You seen that apple, in paintings, gotta be the sweetest-lookin’ thing I ever saw. Wouldn’t be no test otherwise.”
“I thought I was strong.”
“Everybody does. The truth comes hard at you, Sam. I bet even your momma did shit she knew weren’t right.”
I worried I’d stepped far but Samson grinned.
“She used to pick flowers, and she used to get me to pick ’em, flowers you ain’t supposed to pick,” Samson said. “But then that don’t seem much, not really.”
“Right and wrong and shades of gray.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a pink flower. “I brought one for you, thought I’d see you at church maybe. I was thinkin’ about how you like the colored glass.”
I took it from him careful.
“That dark,” he said. “You reckon God will give me a chance to make it light again?”
“Sure, Sam.” I stepped out and felt the rain but it weren’t the cleansing kind. “I didn’t reckon it’d be so hard.”
“What?” he said.
“Everything.”
I turned and walked and he called me back, and he told me to hold that flower up to the light when I got home.
*
Sometimes the dark turns on me till I switch on my lamp and reach for a book. I move into their world, no matter if it’s ’20s West Egg or ’30s Maycomb, it’s all so much warmer and brighter. It’s like headin’ home again.
The Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns. That’s my favorite piece of music I ever heard and ever played. There’s notes in there that can stop my heart.
One day I played it for Savannah and watched her eyes close like usual but I could tell somethin’ was different ’cause she scrunched them pained tight.
She got up and took Michael’s photograph in her hand. She walked to the window and she bent double. She cried till there weren’t nothin’ left of her but a perfect shell with a perfect crack down the center. I watched her insides trickle out and I kept playin’ ’cause I reckoned maybe she needed what I gave her.
And then Bobby was in the room and he was holdin’ her so I closed my eyes and I went to the place where the real swans were. Their grace and Raine’s eyes as she took them in. I saw them with their necks entwined and I knew what bliss was and how far I existed from it.
I could take my life.
It’s all right to say that if it’s true but if it’s just a cry for help then you’re really fucked ’cause a part of you clings to all of this. When my mood digs me down in the dirt, till I’m so deep the sky ain’t nothin’ but the earth, that’s when I’m the girl who could slip from this lifetime. And if I did what would happen is nothin’ much at all ’cause hearts would still break and the world would circle like I’d never been a part of it.
He held her so close they became one, but his eyes fixed hard at the sky and I knew he’d moved far from her and from me and from Grace.
If I didn’t have Bobby, or even Savannah, ’cause I needed her too, then I had the kinda nothin’ that made me the sum of my parents’ parts, a chemical reaction that went wrong somewhere vital.
We can’t all be well.
I was so sad.
So sad.
So sad.
*
“It’s freezin’,” I said to Raine. My teeth were chatterin’ like a wind-up set.
Raine’s hand shook as she held the cigarette out in front of her. We were eleven and snow fell light around us.
I lit a match and brought it up to the end of the cigarette and Raine sucked hard on it.
She coughed and spluttered.
“How is it?” I said.
She looked up at me and her eyes watered but she nodded as she spit in the snow.
“You try,” she said.
I brought the filter to my lips and sucked.
“Now breathe it down,” Raine said. She was excited ’cause she wanted me to cough too.
She stood and stared at me, her head cocked to the side.
“Blow it out,” she said.
I tried.
Raine looked at me with her perfect eyes wide, a smile formin’. “Where’s the smoke?”
I shrugged.
“Could still be inside,” she said, pattin’ my back hard.
Nothin’ came.
“You’ve eaten it,” she said, startin’ to laugh.
I blew and blew, wheezin’ all I could.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “What’s gonna happen to me?”
Raine laughed so hard. “It’ll come out at some point. Just try not to breathe round Daddy.”
I pushed her. She fell back and sat in the grass. She laughed even harder as she pulled me down too. Cold seeped through our pants.
“You reckon we’ll see another special star?” Raine said, lookin’ toward the sky.
“Yeah, if we keep lookin’.”
She pulled a bottle of Seagram’s from her coat.
“Momma will be pissed if she smells gin on your breath.”
“Momma’s always pissed.” She drank and smacked her lips and then grimaced. “Tasty.”
She offered me the bottle and I took it and drank. “Christ,” I said.
“I know, good, right.”
“Hmm.”
“You reckon we’ll ever get married?”
I nodded. She took my hand and held it.
“Imagine us married, livin’ on the same street. Our kids could play together. We might get twins of our own.”
“Shit,” I said.
She laughed.
There’s a sweetness to Raine that’d ruin you.
“It’s comin’ down now,” she said.
I looked up at the snowflakes swirlin’ round and down and dizzying.
That was one of those moments too pure and perfect, the memory I’ll forget, the still at my funeral.