Beauty on Fire

“Who were they?” Helen would ask, squinting and tilting her head as though she were on the verge of remembering. “Who were they?” In the end, though, the question hovered over the photo unanswered, like a candle casting light on some features but deepening shadows over more. This flickering of recognition was all Helen ever knew for the faces in the pictures because she could only imagine the lives of people she’d never met.

Helen collected beautiful things the way I collected memories. While I filled my scrapbook with friends, family and milky gel pen inscriptions of dates and names and feelings, Helen glued and paper clipped hers full of mystery and longing. It was swollen with postcards of places she’d never been, pages on jungle plants torn from library field guides, Shakespearean verses scribbled wherever there was room, and hymn verses hastily transcribed onto offering envelopes. And faces. Nameless eyes and noses and mouths from countless magazines and newspapers overwhelmed all her other almost-memories. Helen liked to look at them and wonder who they belonged to, what those people were like, and if anyone would miss them when they were gone. I asked her once why she collected these strangers, and she said only, “It’s the sort of thing where I’ll know what I was looking for if I find it.”

I don’t know if she did discover anything at the end of that book of beauty, but I do remember the last photo she clipped. I remember, not because I knew then that it was an omen of some impending crossroads, but because it was clipped on the right day to join a list of more dramatic lasts: The last day I ever ate my lunch from a brown paper bag, the last day I was unable to leave a room to use the bathroom without a teacher’s signature for clearance, the last day I ever thought of myself as “too young,” and the very last day of my middle school career.

“Hey.” I approached an engrossed Helen at her usual spot in the cafeteria. She threw me a glance, and then continued to scan a musty newspaper she had pilfered from the library’s recycling bin.

“Who were they?” she asked, not of me, but of the paper itself. “Who was she?” She pointed to a light-eyed long-haired girl standing behind a Great Dane in the middle of the city region section. Both were decorated with long ruffled blue ribbons. The caption below the picture identified the dog as Lady Brownfoot: The county fair’s most recently titled “Best in Show.” The name of the girl, however, had been omitted. Her blank countenance betrayed no disappointment at her misplaced identity, but Helen’s eyebrows were knitted in agitation. Unlike the girl in the photo, her face was always an elaborate mish-mash of everything she felt at any given second.

“How does that happen,” she murmured to herself, “How do you just get…forgotten like that?” She moved her blue Fiscar scissors to the edge of the page and began to cut. When she had finished, she looked up at me as though I had just arrived.

“Oh, Nell. Hey.”

Used to my friend’s absentmindedness, I smiled. “Hey. How’s it going?”

“What? Fine. I’m just…trying to remember some stuff I must have forgotten.”

“It’s the last day of school, Helen. Why aren’t you more excited? Get happy! I’m not gonna let you mope around for no reason and make me sad too.”

“I’m not sad. I am excited. I just feel like thinking right now.”

“You mean you feel like worrying?”

“No, just thinking.”

“Okay, about what? What’s making you all dramatic?”
“I’m not-- I’m just…I told you I’m trying to sort some stuff out in my head before we leave each other forever."

“Oh please, Helen. It’s not like we’ll never see each other again after today. We'll be at different schools next year, not different countries.”

She cocked her head and smiled at me in a puzzled, sad way, “But, after the bell rings…we have no idea what happens next.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds before Helen spoke again.

“Hey, do you remember Rex?”

I nodded, knowing better than to be startled at the sharp turns conversations with Helen took. “Yeah, I remember. He died on the last day of school last year, right?”

She nodded solemnly. “He’s been dead for a whole year today.”

If Helen had asked me whether I remembered any other pet, my answer would have probably been no. Helen’s house was always teeming with various stray cats and pound puppies and terrariums and aquariums. Her father had a soft spot for creatures the rest of society deemed unlovable. Their back yard was peppered with dozens of flat white stones marking the graves of mangy souls lost to creature heaven. Rex, though, stood apart from all the other serendipitous inhabitants of Helen’s menagerie. He was an investment.

Helen’s parents purchased the blue-eyed pure bred Husky after much careful planning with the thought that, once he was trained, he would make an excellent show dog. He wore an indifferent expression and a cool, imposing majesty like king’s robes. Though Rex never bared his teeth at me and I never heard him utter so much as a growl, he was the only pet of Helen’s to ever make me nervous.

In the end, he was a gamble that never paid off. Before he could even begin his training, Rex found his way around the chain link fence enclosing Helen’s yard and attacked a ten year old boy who was walking home from school. The boy needed 57 stitches and a full leg brace, and the county court ordered the Husky’s immediate execution. To this day, Rex remains one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever witnessed.

“It’s been bugging me,” Helen continued. “I can’t remember what color his tail was.”

“Seriously? His tail?”

“Yeah. Was it gray or white? He was so pretty. I should at least be able to remember what color his tail was.”

“It matters?”

“Of course it matters. If I were him, I’d want to be remembered right.”

“Helen….”

“You know, he never even got a real funeral. Even our fish get little ceremonies when they die. But we didn’t bury Rex ourselves so I have no idea where he is now. He probably just got dumped in a compost heap somewhere or something.”

“Why do you care all of a sudden?” She hadn’t mentioned him since the day he was sentenced. At the time, she had been too angry at him to mourn his passing. Rex was more than just a dog, and his actions were a more than just unfortunate misbehavior. They were betrayal of everything he was supposed to be. She punished his memory with silence.

“I have to have a reason? Sorry if that’s a problem for you.” Though her words were defensive, her voice wasn’t. She didn’t know why she cared, but I could tell it annoyed her more than it did me. She continued, “I want to give him a memorial service.”

“A memorial.”

“Yeah. I’ll spend the night at your house and we can do it in those woods by the big park. We’ll make it an event. We can remember Rex and celebrate the end of our childhood at the same time.”

“I don’t know. My neighborhood gets kind of freaky at night.”

“Oh, come on.” She began to plead. “It’s not like we haven’t done it before, and we won’t go anywhere near the street or that place with the pit bulls. Please Christa? It’ll give us… what’s that word? …closure.”

I sighed and Helen grinned. We both knew I would give in eventually. I always did. Why should today be any different?

**********************

That evening, Helen emptied my backpack of middle school things and replaced them with all the supplies she deemed necessary to invoke the spirits of memory: a mass of candles we scavenged from my house, matches, one cloth rose, and her entire scrapbook. Around a quarter to midnight, after my mother bid us both goodnight, we fashioned ourselves ceremonial shrouds out of two thin fleece blankets and ventured into the clean night air. I locked the door behind me. Even though buzzing streetlights cast ample light over our path, Helen and I huddled together behind the beam of a single Maglight as we hurried past the sidewalk and down a damp, grassy slope towards our destination.

The “woods” Helen had in mind was really just a patch of trees which separated the neighborhood playground from another suburban development, but it felt wild to Helen and me. Surrounded by those trees it was possible – if we ignored the abandoned fire rings and beer bottles and screams of reckless children enjoying the nearby playground in the daylight – to feel adventurous and undiscoverable.

I trailed Helen as she picked up speed towards a particular stump at the center of the woods. It had proved, in the past, to make an excellent altar.

“Lay out the blankets,” She commanded upon our arrival, removing her blanket from her shoulders and handing it to me. “I’ve got to light all these candles.”

I obliged. Then, I waited while Helen organized our hastily assembled candle collection into a series of intricate circles around the altar. With her back to me, she spoke.

“Nell, I have a new plan for high school.

“A new plan, huh.”

“Yep. We don’t go. We run away instead.”

“Sure,” I laughed, playing along, “Okay. We run away. I hear high school sucks anyway.”

“No, I’m serious.” She spun to face me, unblinking. “We can do it. I’ve read stories about kids who run away when they’re being abused or something. They hitchhike. We could really do it.”

“Helen…”

“No, don’t give me ‘Helen…’ Just answer me. For once in your life will you do something brave? Will you come with me?

I blinked. “No.”

Helen swallowed and sank back onto her heels. She drew a box of matches from her pocket. “Whatever.”

“Seriously Helen, that’s got to be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had. We—“

“I said whatever. I’m just worried about you, you know. I figure once we’re not seeing each other as often, you’ll forget everything I taught you and you’ll go back to being the old Nell. Afraid of everything.”

“God, what is up with you, Helen? Why are you being so mean?”

Whatever she was about to say gathered behind her face like storm clouds, tightening her lips and furrowing her brow. I had the sudden urge to hold my breath. She took a long moment to light a small fish shaped candle before she spoke again. “I’m moving to Ohio in three weeks.”

Lightning. Once I was sure I had heard and understood her properly, my stomach rose to my throat. Panic came rushing at me from all sides.

“Wha-- Why? Since when?”

“Since my dad got laid off a few months ago. We’re leaving in three weeks.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I mean you didn’t even tell me. Ohio is like, a million miles away! And now you’re…Three weeks? I wish you’d told me a little sooner.”

“Yeah, well, tough.” She thrust her face inches from mine, “I wish a lot of stuff too, Christa. I—” The words caught in her throat. When she continued, her voice was breaking. “I wish I could remember Rex’s fucking tail!” Abruptly then, she fell silent and went back to lighting candles so I couldn’t see her face.

“Don’t forget why we’re here,” she growled, “Rex wouldn’t want us fighting on a day like today.”

I crossed my legs and waited on my makeshift prayer mat as Helen lit one last votive. I tried to believe that tonight was only about Rex. Too many anxieties and regrets were tearing through my 14 year old soul at that moment for me to focus on anything besides 20 odd candles fending off the night and the memory of a dead dog’s eyes like ice.

“I shall now begin the ceremony of memory for the dead.” Helen’s voice became low and melodic. As she spoke, her strange, patchwork religion grew heavy in my stomach. Helen’s faith was one unique to her. Like her scrapbook, it was pieced together with pretty fragments of every denomination close at hand from Catholicism to Greek polytheism. I knew, in the daylight, that these ceremonies were only products of an overactive imagination. But, beneath the moonlight, all alone except for Helen and her dark conviction, they acquired gravity. Tonight, the things that Helen believed felt a million years old; thick, hard and cold as stone. She, bathed in candlelight, was high priestess of all things beautiful, and I was drowning in prayer. She kneeled by the stump, opposite me, and began quietly.

“Spirits. In this place, on this night, we invoke your name in memory of Rex. He was magnificent in passion and in beauty. And…and he should be remembered by someone.”

She drew her scrapbook from my backpack lying open next to the altar. Her voice was growing louder. “They all should have been remembered. They should have been loved by someone. Were they? They were blessed. You blessed them and you made them beautiful. You picked them for something special. So why don’t I know any of their names?”

She was yelling now, and it was as though she had lost control of the words pouring from her mouth. She seemed fascinated by the sound of her own voice even as she was terrified by it. As she spoke, she placed a tapered candle on the altar between us and dipped the cloth rose into its flame. When it lit, she set it next to the candle’s base and lifted the scrapbook above her head.

“Who were they? Who were they? Where did they come from? Where were they going? Did they get there?”

Now, like it had been planned all along but not by her, Helen ripped page after page from the book and added them to the flaming altar with determined shaking hands. The sound of tearing paper turned my bones cold. I sat transfixed in disbelief as faces and verses and pansies and sonnets dissolved into midnight.

“Did you bless me in the name of beauty? Who will wonder my name when I’m gone? Was I the only one who cared about them? Then who will care about me? Will I disappear just like these…these pictures? These Shadows? Who am I? What’s the difference between me and them? Who were we? ANSWER ME. Who—“

She stopped, startled. When she sprang to her feet I saw why. One dark curl close to her chin had caught fire. Her countenance twisted sharply into horrified agony. She opened her mouth to cry out, but before she could, the night came to a slow halt while I forgot for an instant that Helen was flesh and blood. She had always seemed to me to live in a movie. Her longings for intangibles like love and charity and passion thrust her away from the dull world where I existed. She was too vibrant to be real. Now I was caught up in the gorgeous cinema of this climax, and she was further away and more on fire with each passing second. I found myself watching; wondering what was going to happen next. How would this heroine be saved? Would she burn as quickly and as quietly as her pictures had? Her screaming, however, soon pierced my trance and I understood that no one else was going to save my best friend. I was the difference between Helen and the paper faces in her scrapbook.

I grabbed for the blanket I had been sitting on and hurled myself at Helen’s flames. After some struggle and clumsy smothering, we ended up on the ground sobbing, gasping for breath and tangled in fleece, but safe. Unsure what to do next, I searched for her hands by the dying light upon the altar and held them in mine.

“We’re friends Helen,” I whispered, sitting up and gathering the rest of her shaking frame into my arms.

“That’s what we are. Best friends. We are, we are, we are we are....” I let my words fold into the breeze not caring where they ended up. She might not have heard me, but I think she understood. We stayed like that for a while, in the trees, beneath the sky, knowing -- if only for a while -- exactly who we were.