house!”
“What?”
“That hideous, hideous college shit is over!” Samuel screamed. The small room absorbed his voice, barely bouncing back an echo from its thick walls.
“Not for me, it isn’t,” my sister said.
Samuel got up off the floor, where he had been lying beside my sister, and came to his knees in front of her. “Marry me.”
“Samuel?”
“I’m tired of doing all the right things. Marry me and I’ll make this house gorgeous.”
“Who will support us?”
“We will,” he said, “somehow.”
She sat up and then joined him kneeling. They were both half-dressed and growing colder as their heat began to dissipate.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I think I can,” my sister said. “I mean, yes!”
Some cliches I understood only when they came into my heaven full speed. I had never seen a chicken with its head cut off. It had never meant much to me except something else that had been treated much the same as me. But that moment I ran around my heaven like… a chicken with its head cut off! I was so happy I screamed over and over and over again. My sister! My Samuel! My dream!
She was crying, and he held her in his arms, rocking her against him.
“Are you happy, sweetheart?” he asked.
She nodded against his bare chest. “Yes,” she said, then froze. “My dad.” She raised her head and looked at Samuel. “I know he’s worried.”
“Yes,” he said, trying to switch gears with her.
“How many miles is it to the house from here?”
“Ten maybe,” Samuel said. “Maybe eight.”
“We could do that,” she said.
“You’re nuts.”
“We have sneakers in the other pannard.”
They could not run in leather, so they wore their underwear and T- shirts, as close to streakers as anyone in my family would ever be. Samuel, as he had for years, set a pace just ahead of my sister to keep her going. There were hardly any cars on the road, but when one passed by a wall of water would come up from the puddles near the side of the road and make the two of them gasp to get air back in their lungs. Both of them had run in rain before but never rain this heavy. They made a game of who could gain the most shelter as they ran the miles, waltzing in and out to gain cover under any overhanging trees, even as the dirt and grime of the road covered their legs. But by mile three they were silent, pushing their feet forward in a natural rhythm they had both known for years, focusing on the sound of their own breath and the sound of their wet shoes hitting the pavement.
At some point as she splashed through a large puddle, no longer trying to avoid them, she thought of the local pool of which we had been members until my death brought the comfortably public existence of my family to a close. It had been somewhere along this road, but she did not lift her head to find the familiar chain-link fence. Instead, she had a memory. She and I were under water in our bathing suits with their small ruffled skirts. Both of our eyes were open under water, a new skill – newer for her – and we were looking at each other, our separate bodies suspended under water. Hair floating, small skirts floating, our cheeks bulging with captured air. Then, together, we would grab on to each other and shoot up out of the water, breaking the surface. We sucked air into our lungs – ears popping – and laughed together.
I watched my beautiful sister running, her lungs and legs pumping, and the skill from the pool still there – fighting to see through the rain, fighting to keep her legs lifting at the pace set by Samuel, and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing – braiding into a scar for eight long years.
By the time the two of them were within a mile of my house, the rain had lightened and people were beginning to look out their windows toward the street.
Samuel slowed his pace and she joined him. Their T-shirts were locked onto their bodies like paste.
Lindsey had fought off a cramp in her side, but as the cramp lifted she ran with Samuel full-out. Suddenly she was covered in goose bumps and smiling ear to ear.
“We’re getting married!” she said, and he stopped short, grabbed her up in his arms, and they were still kissing when a car passed them on the road, the driver honking his horn.
When the doorbell rang at our house it was four o’clock and Hal was in the kitchen wearing one of my mother’s old white chefs aprons and cutting brownies for Grandma Lynn. He liked being put to work, feeling useful, and my grandmother liked to use him. They were a simpatico team. While Buckley, the boy-guard, loved to eat.
“I’ll get it,” my father said. He had been propping himself up during the rain with highballs, mixed, not measured, by Grandma Lynn.
He was spry now with a thin sort of grace, like a retired ballet dancer who favored one leg over the other after long years of one-footed leaps.
“I was so worried,” he said when he opened the door.
Lindsey was holding her arms over her chest, and even my father had to laugh while he looked away and hurriedly got the extra blankets kept in the front closet. Samuel draped one around Lindsey first, as my father covered Samuel’s shoulders as best he could and puddles collected on the flagstone floor. Just as Lindsey had covered herself up, Buckley and Hal and Grandma Lynn came forward into the hallway.
“Buckley,” Grandma Lynn said, “go get some towels.”
“Did you manage the bike in this?” Hal asked, incredulous.
“No, we ran,” Samuel said.
“You what?”
“Get into the family room,” my father said. “We’ll set a fire going.”
While the two of them sat with their backs to the fire, shivering at first and drinking the brandy shots Grandma Lynn had Buckley serve them on a silver tray, everyone heard the story of the bike and the house and the octagonal room with windows that had made Samuel euphoric.
“And the bike’s okay?” Hal asked.
“We did the best we could,” Samuel said, “but we’ll need a tow.”
“I’m just happy that the two of you are safe,” my father said.
“We ran home for you, Mr. Salmon.”
My grandmother and brother had taken seats at the far end of the room, away from the fire.
“We didn’t want anyone to worry,” Lindsey said.
“Lindsey didn’t want you to worry, specifically.”
The room was silent for a moment. What Samuel had said was true, of course, but it also pointed too clearly to a certain fact – that Lindsey and Buckley had come to live their lives in direct proportion to what effect it would have on a fragile father.
Grandma Lynn caught my sister’s eye and winked. “Hal and Buckley and I made brownies,” she said. “And I have some frozen lasagna I can break out if you’d like.” She stood and so did my brother – ready to help.
“I’d love some brownies, Lynn,” Samuel said.
“Lynn? I like that,” she said. “Are you going to start calling Jack ‘Jack’?”
“Maybe.”
Once Buckley and Grandma Lynn had left the room, Hal felt a new nervousness in the air. “I think I’ll pitch in,” he said.
Lindsey, Samuel, and my father listened to the busy noises of the kitchen. They could all hear the clock ticking in the corner, the one my mother had called our “rustic colonial clock.”
“I know I worry too much,” my father said.
“That’s not what Samuel meant,” Lindsey said.
Samuel was quiet and I was watching him.
“Mr. Salmon,” he finally said – he was not quite ready to try “Jack.” “I’ve asked Lindsey to marry me.”
Lindsey’s heart was in her throat, but she wasn’t looking at Samuel. She was looking at my father.
Buckley came in with a plate of brownies, and Hal followed him with champagne glasses hanging from his fingers and a bottle of 1978 Dom Perignon. “From your grandmother, on your graduation day,” Hal said.
Grandma Lynn came through next, empty-handed except for her highball. It caught the light and glittered like a jar of icy diamonds.
For Lindsey, it was as if no one but herself and my father were there. “What do you say, Dad?” she asked.
“I’d say,” he managed, standing up to shake Samuel’s hand, “that I couldn’t wish for a better son-in-law.”
Grandma Lynn exploded on the final word. “My God, oh, honey! Congratulations!”
Even Buckley let loose, slipping out of the knot that usually held him and into a rare joy. But I saw the fine, wavering line that still tied my sister to my father. The invisible cord that can kill.
The champagne cork popped.
“Like a master!” my grandmother said to Hal, who was pouring.
It was Buckley, as my father and sister joined the group and listened to Grandma Lynn’s countless toasts, who saw me. He saw me standing under the rustic colonial clock and stared. He was drinking champagne. There were strings coming out from all around me, reaching out, waving in the air. Someone passed him a brownie. He held it in his hands but did not eat. He saw my shape and face, which had not changed – the hair still parted down the middle, the chest still flat and hips undeveloped – and wanted to call out my name. It was only a moment, and then I was gone.
Over the years, when I grew tired of watching, I often sat in the back of the trains that went in and out of Suburban Station in Philadelphia. Passengers would get on and off as I listened to their conversations mix with the sounds of the train doors opening and closing, the conductors yelling their stops, and the shuffle and staccato of shoe soles and high heels going from pavement to metal to the soft
Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn’t watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I’m afraid. A one-sided cajoling and coaching of the young, a one-way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never be signed.
The train would be still or stop-starting from 30th Street to near Overbrook, and I could hear them say names and sentences: “Now be careful with that glass.” “Mind your father.” “Oh, look how big she looks in that dress.” “I’m with you, Mother,” “… Esmeralda, Sally, Lupe, Keesha, Frank…” So many names. And
