By Allison Stein
I would like to share with you a short story I have created. Enjoy!
Edge of Sky
Jill stands in her childhood backyard with her father, Tom. She holds his hand more out of physical support than love. Today the horizon lingers beyond their understanding as sky and ground meld in a thin, blurry line.
“Blue used to be your favorite color,” Tom says suddenly.
“Periwinkle,” Jill murmurs.
Their eyes trace the wispy silhouettes of cirrus clouds, as if they are little kids again, as if they are discerning shapes from the chaos.
Jill says, “What do you suppose happens to those clouds when they reach the edge of the sky?”
“Some question.”
“I guess there’s no edge to the sky itself. Only to our perspectives.”
Jill doesn’t understand what she is saying. She feels as though her soul is detached from her body and she is watching her small life unfold from atop the clouds themselves. She speaks only to make the moment more real. The white noise helps them both.
“I think I’ll like this memory one day,” she says. “Frosty clouds and clean horizons and periwinkle.”
“Then take a picture with your mind.”
“I already have. Anymore, I’m so afraid to forget.”
He almost smiles, “I’m only afraid to remember.”
Jill is laughing now, “Those are the only choices we have today. Remember or forget. And I’m not sure which is the right choice to make—which is easier.”
“Forgetting is easier,” says Tom.
“Forgetting is easier.”
***
Jill’s mother, Mary, feels her way through life with the blessing and curse of intuition. In the old days, she could predict marriages five years in advance, detect white lies exchanged among her friends, and diagnose heartbreak in strangers. Now she grumbles that dementia dried up the only gift she ever had.
On her good days, Mary’s aged soul is still impressionable. Today is one of her good days. Twenty miles away from her daughter and husband, in a nursing home with no visitors, Mary already knows that Tom is going to die.
A gravity within her will not subside. This is the signal of impending death. This is the universe telling her that time is short and sharp. And Mary is angry—not that she will lose Tom but that he will escape with an easy death. He will abandon her in her own lonely anguish.
***
All that is beautiful is temporary. When periwinkle turns to velvet black and threads of moonlight fall upon their backs, Jill guides Tom to the front door of the house. For a moment, she is his mother; and he, a little boy.
She tucks him in on the couch, then gingerly sits beside him and slips under the blanket herself. The fabric feels cold against her palms. “Daddy, we ought to talk about the paperwork,” she says. She has never called him Daddy before.
“Not tonight, Sweetheart.” He has never called her Sweetheart either.
Jill prays a little, in her head. The words don’t come easy, but the feelings do.
Finally, Tom says, “I’ll tell you a story. A true story.”
She nods mechanically.
“You ever hear how I fell in love with your mother?”
“No.”
“We met at the break-wall about five miles north of here. I was fishing, and she was looking out at the water. I’d seen her around town, heard people call her Mary. She caught my eye. Shoot, your mama caught everybody’s eye.”
Tom swallows hard.
“I remember she was wearing a green dress that day. Probably a hand-me-down, but it seemed new on her. She was real pretty back then.”
Jill falls silent. She wishes he had adored her mother’s intelligent mind or her passionate heart or even her frightening imagination. Any attribute but the superficial beauty that had been passed down another generation. It was all people found in Jill’s fiery eyes—that she was a pretty girl, now a pretty woman. Jill marveled that she was so often looked upon, yet she had never been seen.
“Another memory,” Tom muses.
“Another memory.”
***
Mary has decided that tonight her room smells like Pledge furniture polish. She has also decided that she does not love her husband, nor can love be manipulated by humanity. If it comes, it comes, she reasons; and if it leaves, it leaves.
She wishes she could warn her daughter. Not about men, because Tom is a kind man. About caring for someone else in this isolated world. About the pain of caring.
She would tell Jill how the love was gone before they knew they were losing it—the invisible decision to let go—how the sun woke them one silent dawn and they had nothing to mourn.
***
Tom absentmindedly moves his fingertips along the seam of a quilt hemmed by his wife some decades ago. He hums a song Jill doesn’t recognize. In many ways, he is already dead.
Jill cannot look him in the eye. The image of her childhood superhero melds with the empty silhouette before her. She realizes it is not this man she will miss, but an extension of herself.
“Jill?”
“Daddy.”
“Jill.”
“Daddy, I love you.”
Jill did not intend to say those words. She cannot promise they are true. She is not particularly certain she has ever loved anybody.
Tom studies the windowsill, lined with sunlit dust and a vase of crimson-edged marigolds. Jill squints in her attempt to trace his fixed gaze. He doesn’t say he loves her back.
“I wonder what you’d think if I got married,” Jill says finally.
“Do what will make you happy.”
“I don’t know if there’s anybody that could make me happy.”
“That’s the trouble of it.”
And then her father reaches for the paper cup on the end table next to the couch. He takes a sip of water, coughs, takes another. His body reminds her of a fossil whose insides have eroded with time.
“What about you? Do you still believe in it, I wonder?”
He pauses, smiles a little. “No. But I think it’s an awfully pretty delusion.”
***
Yes, Mary is having one of her good days. When the spirit so moves her, she can remember. Or at least she can invent, as the doctors explain it to her. They say she fills in the missing memories with “contextual imagination.” They say she is making it up.
But Mary does remember. She remembers a cloudy afternoon on the break-wall a century earlier. Buried under layers of mind-space are the patterns of faint sunlight which fell upon her emerald dress. A boy whose smile made her too brave told her she was beautiful. And silly her, she believed him.
Mary remembers her wedding vows—not the words so much as the years. Perhaps her life has been no more than a collage of blurry photographs, black and white and posed. She has been made to smile for a picture.
Mary remembers holding her baby girl for the first time. She replicates within herself the feeling that the entire world belonged to her. How quickly she had learned that it did not, that not even her own daughter belonged to her. The things to which we give life so often take on life of their own.
She remembers being naïve, and young, and hopeful. She remembers when birthdays meant a celebration rather than the mark of death’s immediacy.
And then the nurse comes in and tells her she must stop remembering. It is making Mary too upset. This isn’t good for her recovery, this dwelling on years past.
***
At exactly 8:30 p.m., Tom stands up feebly. Out of instinct, Jill rises with him. She places her hands on his hollow shoulders to brace this dying man’s balance. Inside his eyes is a twinkle of fear.
He is supposed to be the one to brace her.
He whispers, “Jill, take me to my car.” It may as well have been a scream.
“Daddy, you know you can’t drive.”
“You must drive me then. Drive me, or I’ll do it myself. Take me somewhere, anywhere but here. I want to go someplace where there are no pictures on the walls and no footprints in the driveway and no memories. I want to be free from all of this.”
Jill’s fingertips dangle a set of car keys. She will lead her father to the edge of the sky.
***
Before bed, Mary searches for the words to describe to herself the clean, white, empty walls of the nursing home. She knows she has lost her mind, they tell her every day, but she wishes she had lost her heart instead.
Fragile, skeletal fingers nudge away a strand of graying strawberry hair that has brushed against her cheek. She notices the time-rusted wedding band and tries to remember his name. She can no longer paint his face in her mind, especially not here. There is a vacancy here that even intelligent minds cannot manage to articulate.