Sister Moon

Sister Moon

By: Robert A. Goldsborough

         There is a certain anxiety in knowing that you are haunted.  Not the wringing of hands sort of anxiety, nor the agoraphobic wrapped in a fetal position on the floor either.  It is more like a nagging at the base of the brain, as if a microscopic gnome has taken up residence inside your skull and yells out in his tiny voice.  You can only hear him when the sounds of life calm down, usually when you are trying to get to sleep.  In those quiet hours you can hear him deep down reminding you that there is something there, something coming for you.  And like the bad dreams that always follow you remember why.

         Some of the first things I remember as a child were my afternoon dreams.  We forget that we used to be put down for naps in those early years.  We needed to sleep halfway between morning and night because we burned twice as fast, as if we were different animals and we could live two days in the course of just one.  As we get older our days shorten with school and then work until we just want to sleep in the afternoon because our lives are too busy.  In maturing we forget a lot of the child we all once were.  I will never forget as long as my life shall be those early afternoon dreams.  Dreams in a small house my parents rented in a long ago northern town where the sky felt like iron and snow was always a threat that I was once another animal burning through the mornings.

         Like most small children I hated taking naps.  I was overwhelmed by a sense that there was going to be some great event that I was going to miss out on.  After all, everything so far in my young life was a great event.  But after some soft words and wonderful persuasion on my mother’s part I would crawl into the bottom bunk while my older brother climbed onto the top.  He did not complain as much as I did.  He was already indoctrinated into how things were; being the fact that he had three years on this planet more than me.

         Even though I had been coerced into bed by no means did I simply slip into sleep.  I was waging my own war against it.  I would let my ears go straining through the thin walls to hear the great secrets that where being told without my presence.  All that came back were those same muted echoes that fold words like Japanese papers into unrecognizable creatures.  I would toss and turn, kicking at the quilt my grandmother had made for my mother when she was a girl when I felt sleep coming. The disembodied whisper of my older brother floating down to me to quit shaking the bunk beds.  Didn’t he know that today was going to be the day that I triumphed over sleep and would be honored by knowing all the secrets that adults tell when the children are out of the room?  It wouldn’t matter.  His three years gave him a sort of lordship over me, a ruling nature that if I did not get it in line there would be a painful punishment later on when I least expected it.

      Oh the boredom of lying on one’s own back staring at nothing until you have no choice but to close your eyes and recant wakefulness.  That is when the dreams would start to form.  I could still sense myself in my body and if I dared to open my eyes I would see them.  The shapes.  Triangles bending into squares, rectangles losing their sides, tracing the edges and filling the gaps were the colors of autumn.  I could feel them as well as see them, but as soon as my eyes could trace the patterns they would shift.  It was like looking at the multi-patterned carpet of a fancy hotel, or an art deco stain glass through a kaleidoscope.  I felt them surround me like a bubble trapping me.  These visions terrified me, choked me.  There was no release.  Of course not, this was a door creating itself in my young mind, the door that would lead me to dreams.  Much later in life I would discover that these shapes have a name and everyone, whether we remember them or not, see them as we start to fall asleep.  They are entoptic forms, some of our first images we see only with our minds, like an early hallucination.  Without even knowing it my young mind passed through that door and into the ever-changing ephemeris that lies behind.  Now, I can’t tell you the very moment that my consciousness changed or how and by what greeted me there, but there is a part that has stayed with me all these years.  It was not a color or radiant light, nor was it an impression or sense of being.  It was a person.  Not just any person either, but my sister.

      Let me go back a few steps just so that this makes a bit more sense.  My parents married young, the month after they both graduated from high school.  Both of them grew up in that same iron skied town way up north.  They were young in so many ways.  They had their first child when they were only twenty-two.  Both of them worked hard.  My father training constantly at the job that would become his career and my mother doing what she could just to help make the ends meet.  They were poor, but thankfully driven.  The American dream was only years away from their reach.  In that dream were us, their children.  Three boys in all, but one was supposed to have been a girl.  When my parents were just twenty-four she was on her way to being born, but as life has it she just wasn’t meant to be.  I cannot imagine the pain and grief they must have gone through.  Even though I can sympathize now, I do not truly understand having to survive the death of your own child.  I was the next to be born, but just barely.  My birth was rough.  I had twisted in the womb and came out face up and veiled, the color of a deep bruise.  Thankfully the physicians were more then just competent and saved my life that day.  Funny thinking about having your life saved in the very seconds of your own birth.  At the time I was born my parents had left that small town where they had grown up allowing me to be in a much warmer climate.  Of course I do not have any memory of those times, but I find it curious that years later it is that city I now call home.

      My father had to move around in those early years chasing the best education for his career, so things became a bit shuffled.  My brother and I would wind up staying with grandparents or other relatives.  I believe it was my mother, always a strong harbor in my family, who put down her foot and rented that small house back up north in the town where she was from to settle our family.  If it took a few more years to suss out the American dream then so be it.

      The neighborhood was old even for back then.  There were no tract homes as such, just random wooden squares miss-matched yet collected on to a little street that was nothing more then a thin layer of tar and gypsum.  This was where my earliest memories formed.  The little house was two stories, but the second level was nothing more than an attic with wallpaper.  I remember my parents could not even stand upright in that room.  The wallpaper was a dull blue with anchors and other nautical themes, probably due to our proximity to the great lakes.  The ceiling was bare board at a sharp angle to define the roof.  Any kind of weather sounded like it was in the room with you.  This was the room my brother and I normally shared, but when the weather turned bad or the heat of the day was just too much we shared the wooden bunk beds down stairs.  This was where we usually napped.  The only room in the house, besides the single bathroom, that had real doors that closed.  The drapes over the single window were well-worn blankets thumb-tacked up to darken the day.  Directly across from the bunk beds was a solitary dresser four drawers high that was just a dark smudge against the bare white walls in the dim light.  Through the thin walls I would hear the timbre but not the words of my parents or grand parents talking.

         I felt a pull or a tug at the air around me.  There was enough of a disturbance that I drifted back from the darkness of sleep.  I could not move, but my eyes sucked in as much light as they could.  There was movement coming from the other side of the room.  Just above the dark smudge of the dresser the wall changed.  Still unable to move I had to lie there with ever building terror in my young guts and just watch.  I could feel the sound of the wall stretching, a fracturing that was unheard like a breaking of boards and sheetrock that could only tickle the ear as if the true sound rode on other waves.  Just under the elastic surface of the white paint something was pushing through.  A hand stretched out from the wall as if it were a single sheet of rubber, then two hands and the impression of a face.  I could feel my body tremble in its stiffness and even though my body was yelling at me to scream my throat would not hear of it and continued to betray me.  When I thought the paint was beyond its stretching point a seam burst wide and dazzling light pin spotted the rips tracing a form before the elastic of the wall resealed and settled flat against its surface.  She was naked, silhouetted by the old blankets poor attempt at keeping all the light out of the room.  She was not very young to my eyes, maybe as old as my parents, but lean with a mess of hair that coiled in knots on top of her head.  She was scanning the darkness unaware that I was seeing her.  Then, as I had felt the noiseless sounds from the wall, I felt her eyes settle on me.  They were dark, darker then the silhouette that was mere feet from me.  I could feel her trying to speak, but there were no words.  Crossing the room she reached up and touched the blankets.  A thumbtack flew free and a beam of daylight shot through the darkness.  She was gone, dissolved into a shadow.

      With the spell broken my throat opened and my mother heard my scream.  A handful of things happened at once.  My mother was in the room white as a ghost having flicked on the light of the bare bulb in a panic.  My brother was starting in with his complaints in the top bunk.  Questions and questions, why do parents ask what the problem is when you have no idea?  How my young mind had interpreted what had just happened made such little sense to me how could I, with a child’s vocabulary, do it any justice?  I remember just loosing the floodgates of my eyes, pointing at the wall a lot and repeating the words ‘people came through the walls’ between sniffles and deep inhalations of air that made me light-headed.  It was concluded that I had had a nightmare.  Then that had to be explained to me no matter how I argued and said how I was not asleep nor was it night, it was still only a nightmare.  Needless to say I became more of a handful after that when it came to nap time, or even just going to bed at night.  But, time passed and she was absent from my thoughts for a while.  Naptime and bedtime calmed back down except the time my brother rolled off of the top bunk and landed smack on his rear hollering like a banshee that he was broken.  Of course he wasn’t broken.  We were still kids after all, made of rubber and curiosity like every other kid since kids began.

      I don’t know for sure how long it was before I saw her again, but I do remember it was night and my brother and I were once again in the downstairs bunk beds.  I was tired this time; tired from all the running around and learning to fly from jumping off the couch’s arms onto the brocade cushions.  I knew I was close to getting the trick because those brief seconds of being airborne touched a primitive sensation in me of wind and height without the fear we learn later of falling.  I had gone to bed with only a small fight left in me, as I said I was tired after all.  I pulled the old quilt that smelled of dust and age up to my chin.  It was chilly in the room; autumn and its moonlight came through the open window.  There was no need for the threadbare blankets to block out light after the sun had set and the cool air made me even more tired.  My mother had the belief that the fresh air made you sleep sounder.  I think she was right, in my case anyways.  I passed through that doorway of ever-changing shapes into dreams.  There was a comfort there, a sense of belonging.  I must have been asleep for hours when I heard her calling my name.  She used the child-like version of my name that my parents used ending in a strong vowel sound so as to drag out the calling.  My eyes opened and worked to find focus.  I remember the moon first.  It was a huge silver disc framed in the window.  I thought about how cold it must be to touch a thing that silver.  Then she spoke again from the shadows behind the moonbeams.  Her voice sounded raw and airless as if the words had been stored away for a long time in an empty canning jar in some forgotten root cellar.  But, someone had found that jar and after fighting to free the lid only words came out and the words sounded angry at being stored away and forgotten.  She was pointing at me as she spoke.  A slim hand traced in that icy silver from the moon.

      “It’s not fair. My life. You stole my life.”

I couldn’t see her face but I knew her mouth did not move it just lay there open and frigid as the words formed in the darkness of her breathless throat.  The words passed through the streaks of the enormous moon growing tendrils of ice that latched onto my spine as they entered me.  Freezing me upward like a broken thermometer.  I felt the words with all of my being.  My ears were forgotten in this trick of light and wavelength.  I was frozen.  Too frozen to protest or even argue that she was wrong.  For at this time I still had no notion of who this woman was.  But, I remember finding her familiar and beautiful.  Like a castle made of the purest ice that we see while remembering the fairytale.

      Then she moved into the light, not as a phantom, but as a whole and beautiful woman.  The knots of her long dark hair had been brushed down around her shoulders and all the slack ran from her face as her mouth closed with an audible click.  Her dress was gossamer traced in the moonbeams and I saw her form.  She was still pointing at me as she stepped forward but moved her hand up to point out the window at the moon.  Her eyes were still dark and made even more so by the paleness of her skin.  This time her mouth did not move as she spoke.

      “I’ll be waiting.  One day.”

She turned to face the moon and in its light her profile smiled.  I must have recognized the heredity in her profile.  My Mother’s thin features and slim neck were there.  The initial terror and rigidity was leaving my body as I saw her bend and arc out the window turning into a brighter beam of silver and ride it up and out to that cold, cold moon.  The frost left me chilled but able to move again.  My breath, which I had not realized that I had been holding, exhaled in a wintry cloud.  I must have laid there in mild shock for a while before sleep stole me back away.  I had not cried out.  There was too much familiarity in the terror, a familiarity that took several years for my Mother to confess about who it could have been.  Besides, these are not things you discuss with such a young child.

      It wasn’t until my teen years that my mother and I had a chance to sit and talk about those early nightmares.  She had been joking with me about how long my hair has always been and about how when I was a small child they would just let people think I was a little girl with long curly locks.  After all, she continued, they had lost a daughter just before I was born and what was the harm in pretending?  There was a trigger buried in our conversation that blew open a sealed door to those early childhood memories.  I had forgotten about the lady in white who used to visit me, rushing about my youth in such a hurry to grow up I had buried her in my mind.  At that moment I understood that it was my dead sister visiting me the entire time.  I told my mother about her, but she gave me that same sideways look that said she knew I was strange, but she was not going to bite on this one.

      My teen years became a whirlwind of complications of my own doing.  Even though my parents had felt like they had reached that American dream it was only briefly realized before some of their improprieties found us sliding financially backwards.  My father’s work tangled with this country’s recession sent us into an uncertain sense of security.  My lack of understanding why and my father’s agitation at the situation drove a large wedge between our relationship.  I fought everything, trying to build an identity that was juxtaposed to what I believed was my father’s negligence and overbearing.  We fought with more than just words and after an extremely nasty confrontation I was told to never return.  I did not.

      I was seventeen when my experimentations with illegal substances became more.  The drugs themselves wrapped around me like a shield and I wore them as badges earned in battle.  They became part of my identity at the time.  I would joke about the occasional use of sobriety.  It was only occasionally when I did indeed find myself sober.  I had crafted my own sphere of dream-shapes to comfort me through my waking though oft-delirious days and nights.  The drugs masked themselves as my friends and the friends I had in those times I needed like drugs.  They comforted me in my self-torment and the tears I shed for something I had left behind in my childhood.  I had surrounded myself with others that understood and felt the same way.  With no direction you are never lost, but the lack of security no matter how much you tell yourself that your friends are your new family begins to eat away at your self-worth.  Now, do not get me wrong I was not surrounded by bad people, these were just people who had bad things happen to them and in all that badness we were drawn together in a friendship that tried as hard as any drug-addled mind could to make some sort of joy.  Most of my memories from those times were good memories because of the people; it is just too bad so much of those times depended on a common thread of dependency to chemicals.

      Now it was in one of these fugues of overindulgence that she came to me once more.  I was on a cocktail of so many mixed stimuli it makes my chest hurt just remembering.  The music was liquid, painting shafts of multi-colored illuminations in the darkness of the room.  I was not alone, my best friend Shea, his girlfriend of the time and 3 or 4 others lay motionless in the dark twitching along to the heavy beats.  They were likewise dumbstruck by the massive intoxication and the music that was burrowing into them.  I felt her first.  She moved into the room triggering the fine hairs on my neck to quiver in response.  I felt her walk in as if she had just opened a door in my dream sphere and then slammed it behind her.  I was frozen in the familiarity.  The music fell behind as if I was only remembering it.  Her face formed luminescent through my hallucinations of color.  She was there; in some sort of my conscious she was made substantial.  More then the reflection of a shadow she stood solid and brimming with substance.  She had not aged and now she felt younger to me.  Where once I thought I had remembered sadness in her eyes was apparent anger.  Her finger snapped to with a reproachful crack stabbing the moving atmosphere and pointing in my direction.  She moved as if underwater, her thin dress wandered about her with a mind of its own.  She came to where I was laying and stood over me.  I never remembered her being this close before.  My eyes traced the relations of our faces on hers, but the colors were off like her image was still trapped on old film.  Her hand shook just at the point of my nose and I saw her mouth struggle to speak.

      “My brother what have you done with my life?”

I saw the anger tighten behind her eyes.

      “This is not, this is not right.”

I tried to move.  I wanted her out of my face.  I wanted her gone.

      “Oh, I will leave, but you will see me again.  In the eyes of your daughter and then I will take what is mine.”

She bent into me.  I felt that cold silver moon from so long ago as her lips touched mine.  I inhaled as if from the shock of being dropped in a frozen lake and she disappeared into that breath.  The ice traced its way down my throat.  I felt a blade stroke my heart and leave the smallest of scars before descending the rest of the way into my bowels and seizing my groin in a tight-fist of frost.  The pain snapped me out of my paralysis and I folded in half on my side gasping for fresher air.  I cried out in the pain.  My friend Shea snapped out of his fugue to try and help me, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying, then I realized the music was once again loud and filling the room.

I did not discuss what had happened with my friends.  I just let it get chocked up to a bad reaction to something in that particular mixture of drugs.  But, every once in a while I swear I could feel something just under my skin moving, trying to get comfortable.

      Thanks to the self-induced haze that I existed in at the time I am not sure how long after that it was when I met her.  Not my sister this time, but that knockout draped in tight-black-everything that would change my life.  We never realize at the time how such a simple act, like the desire of a woman can rearrange everything.  We should, we most certainly should, but I have come to realize that it takes a certain amount of wisdom, wisdom we seem to lack at such moments, to show us these things.  She was everything that I desired, at least for one night.  So gathering as much of my cool as I could, draped in black myself and astride my jet-black motorcycle I asked her to come home with me.  She explained, with an obvious mutual attraction in her eyes, that she might after her shift at the comic book store was over.  We exchanged numbers and I went back to my friend’s house to wait.  I did not have a home in those days.  I was what was commonly referred to as ‘couch-surfing’, which meant I would sleep on one friend’s couch until that was uncomfortable enough for me to hit up another friend for a roof over my head.  Less then an hour later she called and asked for directions.  I had lied and said there was going to be a party, but at this particular friend’s house almost every night was a party.

      From the moment she arrived we were locked in a chemistry that verged on the bestial and even though I had planned on this being only a one-night affair we did not emerge from the back bedroom for three days.  She had lost her job in the interim loss of time, but had not lost my attention.  Now, realizing that if I wanted to maintain this wild and voracious attraction I was going to have to do better then just offer random friend’s kindnesses.  We came up with a plan.  We could not go back to her place because in the time it took her to lose her job she had also lost the ability to maintain her residence.  So it was decided that she go home to her parents for just a few weeks while I sorted out the logistics of us getting our own place.  Providence has a way of sorting these things out sometimes, even for the young and crazy at heart.  In just a few days we were set.  We had our own studio apartment, because how much room did we really need, and by the next week we were entertaining those friends of mine that had once shared with me.  Needless to say the party came too.  Rather than finding a sobriety in such bliss I allowed the two to mingle in what I was unfortunately not able to see as an eventual and mutual destruction.

      It was the night of my twentieth birthday and I was just returning home from someplace that’s not important enough for me to remember to discover that my best friend Shea and a handful of other friends had thrown me a surprise party.  I was overwhelmed by the fact that they had remembered; I had let time slip and forgotten the day.  Of course there was a party fueled by narcotics, but my favorite hallucinogen was there which I consumed en masse.  The night was dreamlike with mixed conversations, loud music and my frequent disappearance to the mattresses behind the cheap folding doors with that girl of my desires.  We were spending so much time fucking on these mattresses it was understandable the party moved in that direction.  So naked and higher then sensibility would normally allow we entertained from there with each of my friends eventually sprawling and passing out at the foot of our bed.  We joked about them being our ‘pets’ and what good things they were before we too fell into the coma of ‘coming down’ in each other’s arms.

      I dreamt of my sister as I slept.  She was sitting, legs crossed, at the end of the bed smoking a cigarette.  Her ashtray was balanced atop Shea’s snoring head and when the ash was long enough she flicked it into the clear glass dish.  She was smiling.  I was pretending to be asleep.  There was nothing ephemeral about her here.  She was just as substantial as any of my sleeping friends.  It was as if she had been at the party all night, but refused to let the drugs slow her down.  She smoked the cigarette down to the butt blowing rings with the last of it.  I winced as she ground out the ember in the ashtray wondering if Shea was dreaming about having a cigarette put out on his head.  She stood and lifted the ashtray patting Shea’s cheek as she did so.  She smiled again as she carried the remains of her cigarette and herself out of the cheap folding doors.  I can still hear her soft feet padding away and the sound of the door as she left.

For some reason the dream relaxed me.  ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘she has changed her mind, decided to be nothing more then a shade that would just pop in and out to check on me?’  The piercing midday light woke me.  Still dazed from the last night’s adventures in intoxicants I lit a cigarette.  I blew smoke into the thin beams of daylight that broke through my scantily clad window dressings of old blankets and as I watched the gray smoke spiral into blue eddies that made the dust motes dance I thought about those long ago blankets that had once tried to hide the sun in my nap room in that small house way up north with the iron colored skies.  My girl was still asleep tucked in close under my arm.  I traced her face over and over with my eyes trying to sculpt her forever in my mind as she was in that particular moment; so peaceful, so beautiful.  I can still see her there even though it has been many years since I have even seen her face.  Time does have a way of changing or distorting the way we remember certain things, usually its small things, the fine details.  But, if we allow ourselves to slow down enough in those most important of moments and collect as much as we can, we can hold fast to the truth and a lifetime of moments like that saved is proof of a life well-lived. 

    I left my musings to themselves and slipped out of bed before I had finished my cigarette.  Tripped into a pair of jeans as I danced around the bodies that spread out from the mattresses.  If it weren’t for their breathing the sight would have made you think that there had been a gas leak and they all dropped from the poisoning.  I made my way to the tiny kitchen and looked in the fridge to see what I had for food.  Oh what luck, I did have everything I needed to make some kind of late afternoon breakfast for the comatose masses.  Anything in a tortilla is standard Texas food.  So I scrambled up a dozen eggs mixed with sausage and cheese balancing cigarette ashes as I cooked.  The smells roused the sleepers almost immediately except one.  She slept until I dropped down next to her in the bed with her own breakfast burrito.  She swatted at the midday light and me until she noticed the food.  There was a bleary smile and a grumbled ‘happy birthday’ before she attacked the food dropping molten egg and cheese on to the blankets.  The rest of the partygoers found renewed strength and slipped out wishing me a likewise happy birthday after eating and closing the door behind them as they left.

We were alone again in our small apartment, snuggled up tight and naked under the sheets.  The food and quiet relaxed me enough to close my eyes and sleep.  At sometime she had crawled out of the bed without disturbing me, looking back I wish she would have.  Hours later when I did reawaken she was sitting there at the foot of the mattress naked with her face in her hands.  I knew she had been crying, but for how long?  I reached for her.

    “What’s wrong my dearest?”

She turned towards me and my heart fell twenty stories to solid pavement.  When she woke up she must have started to put on her makeup but something had stopped her after she had fixed her eyes because now there were streaks that ruined the black she had applied there.  There were lines tracing her cheeks all the way to her mouth and the black had smeared around her eyes to give her the impression of the saddest raccoon in the world.  She held out her hand to me.  In it was a white piece of plastic.  I looked at her hand and then back at her.  Her hand was not willing to let go of the thing, but her eyes were locked onto mine with an inner fear.  I gently pried apart her fingers to see what was causing so much grief.  It took my brain a few minutes to realize what it was she was showing me.  It was a pregnancy test, a pregnancy test with two bright blue lines in the little window.

“What does it mean?”

         “It means I’m pregnant.”

         “Are you...”

         “Yes, I did three of them.”

She picked up two different plastic wands from the floor and handed them to me.  A new numbness was tracing its dead fingers through my brain and down my spine.  I felt years slip past before I could react.  I was too late.  She was already standing with a fresh round of tears smearing her face even more.

         “You think I did this on purpose!”

I was not thinking that.  I knew she was on the pill.  But, a part of my brain reflected on what Shea and I always referred to as trailer-park-pregnancies.  Those happen when a girl from the sticks wants to keep her city boy and her new city life.  But she was already a city girl and she already had me lock-stock and barrel.  My brain jumped into gear.

         “No, no.  I know better than that.”

I reached for her hand, but the time delay was just those few microseconds too late.

         “I need to be alone.”

She locked herself in the bathroom.  I could hear her weeping against the door.  I crawled out of bed.  Her infectious tears were pulling on my eyes.  I was on all fours and began pawing at the locked door.

         “This is us.  Please don’t leave me out of it.”

         “Go away.”

I think every man has had that punch to the junk with those same words.  It’s one of those few things that separate men and women.  We, as men, do not understand how to accept or disassociate ourselves from that mental stab.  It hurts, but at the same time we wish it was physical so we could just overcome the bruise, or at least brag to our buddies at the battle we just survived, but no bruise, nothing to show, we are stuck alone to try and heal.  We never really do.  After all aren’t we just supposed to stuff it way down so no one knows?

         The sun was setting before she came back out.  When she saw that I was still crumpled at the door she collapsed into my arms.  We didn’t say another word to each other that night; we just went to bed and held each other.  I do not think either of us really slept.  We needed time to get our heads straight.  Decide what our next steps were going to be.  After all we knew what kind of people we were, stupid kids that still enjoyed being stupid kids. 

         The next morning, as the sun rose she did too.  I heard her in the kitchen banging glass and fumbling with the stove.  I fumbled into some clothes and went to see her.  She was naked boiling water.  I came from behind her and put my arms around her thin waist and straightened them at the elbow allowing my arms to caress the sides of her breasts while my hands slipped between her thighs.  It had become one of our things many months ago.  I felt her attempt a smile, but she swatted at my hands.

         “Not now, please.”

         “Thinking still?”

         “Still thinking.”

I kissed her neck dragging my nose across her warm flesh and let her go.  I turned out of the kitchen when she stopped, grabbed my arm and kissed me, open mouth with a smile that hung so close to dropping.

         We did not have much furniture, but we did have a table, just big enough for two, that folded out of the wall.  I sat there in one of the folding chairs one of my friends had left with another across from me.  There was a nervousness that played up under my skin, the kind you feel when you are about to take a test that you did not study for.  She brought in the tea she had been making with a little plate of cheese and crackers.  We ate like this often, not having much in the way of appetites due to our proclivity of being drug users.  She was still wearing nothing but that strained smile; I knew it would take very little to break it into tears.  I smiled back.  We waited, sipping tea for the other one to start.  It should have been me.

         “We can’t do this right now.”

         “Look, I know accidents happen.  Birth control is never one-hundred percent.”

         “You need to find the money.”

         “We should go to the doctor.”

         “We will.  I’ll find one.”

         “What money?”

         “Abortions, they cost like three hundred bucks, right?”

         “I meant a doctor, just to confirm that we really are pregnant.  I wasn’t there yet.”

“I know I’m pregnant.”

“I believe you.  I just want to make sure we do this right.”

         She was staring into her tea.  I could feel a wave of pain and tears coming over both of us.

         “I’ll find us a doctor after the weekend.  We will both go and get the test done.  Then he will tell us where to go.”

         She nodded in agreement.  I saw the smile crack and a single tear slid off her cheek into her tea.

         We played the game of ignorance until the appointment was made.  The tests came back positive as she said they would and the doctor gave us pamphlets on both pregnancy and abortions writing down a few names of physicians that we could go to for either.  When we left the office she sat down on a curb to smoke a cigarette and cry.  I smoked with her trying to be brave for us both.

         “I need to go home for a bit.”

         “How long?”

         “I don’t know yet.  Maybe just a week.  This is too big for us right now.  I just want to be at home with my family.”

         “Whatever you need.  I’ll be waiting with open arms for you to come back to us.”

         The week became two weeks and I began to worry.  She had asked to be left alone so I had not even tried to call her.  About the fifteenth or sixteenth day, in the middle of the afternoon, I was startled awake by someone hammering on my door as if their life depended on it.  Someone’s did.  I stumbled into jeans and a t-shirt and hurried for the door.  The sunlight blurred my vision for a few seconds but it did not take long to see the shotgun. 

         “What kind of person is still asleep at this time of day?”

         There was anger there in that familiar voice.  I heard it but was fixated on the gun.  Her father was not even trying to conceal it; he wanted me to know he meant business.

         “I’m coming in.  We are going to talk.”

         “Where’s...”

         “She’s in the truck, for now.”

         “I don’t appreciate the gun.”

         “You’re not supposed to.  Let me in.”

I turned and pointed at one of the folding chairs leaving the door ajar.

         “What kind of tea would you like?”

         “Coffee.”

I went to my kitchen to make two strong cups as he closed my door and took a seat laying the shotgun down on the small table that jutted out from the wall.  His breathing started to slow as he waited.  I was hoping his temper was cooling also.

         I brought in two large cups of black coffee and set them at the table.  The gun went into his lap where he held it like a pet.  My mind was racing, trying to finish waking up.

         “I figured black was okay?”

         “Fine.  You look like you need it.”

I could still hear the anger sounding like he wanted to jump through his normal parental skin and throttle me half to death with some secret beast he kept there.  He sounded like a very pissed off father.  This was something very new to me.  Usually I never met, I never wanted to meet, the parents of a girl I was seeing.  Most parents rejected me at first sight because my appearance was not typical, not normal.  I understand most parents want what is best for their daughters, but they weren’t able to get past my black clothes or piercings to find out that I am actually a nice guy.  I can’t really blame them either, I designed my appearance in those days to chase off typical and normal.  Typical was what got my father in trouble.  Normal was what my father drilled into me and drove me out.  I had the need to be unaccepted and in so being it helped me feel exceptional, exceptional without earning the right.

         “I’m not an idiot.  I know you’ve been sleeping with my daughter.  I should have realized that it would just take time for you to get her pregnant or fuck something up.”

In those days I had not yet learned the wisdom in keeping my mouth shut.  At every one of his breaks in thought, no matter how small, I had to interject my explanation or definition of what he was trying so hard to say.  This makes things more difficult.  He didn’t care that I needed him to know that his daughter and I were in this together and that it does take two to fuck up this bad.  I wish I had realized that by bringing the gun he was not trying to scare me, he was trying to give himself enough courage just to confront me.  This was about his baby girl, not my lover.  His voice rose with his anger.  I started to feel like a rusty nail that wouldn’t be driven in straight.

She must have been at the door listening.  When his voice reached a certain level she came in, went straight to her father and threw her arms around him to calm him down.  His red faded to a light pink along his knotted brow.  She was begging him in quiet whispers mixed with tears.

“He won’t understand.  Let me explain, please?”

Her voice hitched with tears as he returned her hugs in agreement.

         “You have fifteen minutes.”

He stood, tossed back the rest of the coffee and walked out the door with the shotgun hanging slack in his left hand.  She sat unable to make eye contact with me.  I stretched an open hand across the table welcoming anything she had to say.

         “What is it my dear?”

         “Well, you know how Catholic my family is, right?”

Of course I knew.  This had been a running theme for us.  Promises of how we were never going to be like our parents.  She was almost atheist for it.  At least I thought she was.

         “They’re my family, right?  Catholics don’t do abortions.”

I felt myself go pale.  Something inside me broke, something that I thought was carved in stone.

         “If I have an abortion, my parents will disown me.  I’ll lose them.  I won’t be able to see my younger sisters and brother grow up.”

My mind reeled.  Everything I felt told me she had been brainwashed by the nastiest things anyone could tell their child.  At that moment I hated the Catholic Church, with all its guilt and easy excuses it allowed.  I didn’t give her time to start crying again.

         “What?  They told you, what?  Well, Fuck them then!  This is our life.  They’ll just have to get used to the fact that you can make your own decisions.  It’s not like they can really ban you against seeing your own family.”

         “My dad said he’d get a restraining order.”

         “He can’t.”

         “They said they’d tell my sisters and brother that I was a horrible person and that they couldn’t see me.”

I was horrified.  This whole time I thought she was going home to seek some maternal solace from a loving home in such an enormous and confusing situation just to find out she was being indoctrinated away from her own core beliefs.  I was livid.  I could not find the words to express how mad I was, but I stumbled around every corner I could think of for the next fifteen minutes trying to help her regain some kind of footing as to the independent woman she had once been.  I couldn’t reach her.  The door opened at exactly fifteen minutes.

         “Well?  What’s it going to be?”

Her fathered leered across the room at me.  I matched his gaze and did the only thing I could think of.

         “I think you guys need to take me back to your place and explain what is going on here.”

He had not expected that.  I won a minor victory by unsettling him, but just for an instant.

         “Fine.  You can ask your questions with me and her mother there.”

I saw the eyes of my girlfriend as she looked up; they were full of a shocked terror as if asking what I thought I was doing.  I thought there still might be hope for us.  I thought everything could still be worked out.  I wanted to convince her parents they were wrong and no matter what, they still had to love their daughter.

         We had moved to that part of the city because her parents were not far away.  I wanted her to be close and mend the relationship that had become frayed with her folks and siblings.  She was the oldest child with three younger sisters and a brother that looked up to her and had wondered what had happened to her.  Just because my family was broken did not mean that I wanted hers to be.  Besides, I also enjoyed having someone’s family that did not treat me like a leper.  They had even begun inviting us over for dinner and trusting us to watch the other kids when they wanted to go out.  Maybe I was the one that had made it so easy for her to get turned around and lost in all of this.  She had been holding my hand on the drive over to her folks’ house, her grip getting tighter the closer we got, but she couldn’t make eye contact with me.  I could feel the fact that she was feeling guilty.  Guilty at betraying what we had been becoming, what we were together.  We were a team, an ‘us’ against ‘them’, independent and young, misunderstood by a narcissistic generation that didn’t realize what the world was now and couldn’t remember what it had once meant to them.  Our ‘us’ did not need ‘their American dream’, just ourselves and our ability to live the way we wanted to.  I wish I saw the real truth under that, the fact that we were our own worst enemy.  Narcissistically wrapped up in ourselves chasing the same thing, but just afraid to call it the same thing.  Funny how youth masks its arrogance in definitions, just like how recovering junkies can rationalize any reason just to get one more fix.  We think we are so knowledgeable in youth, we think we can change the world by just example, but all we are doing is rearranging the words so we can convince ourselves that this is really the last time we are going to mainline and if it hasn’t killed us yet why should this last one.  It always kills us, maybe not all at once, if we are lucky, but every time it takes enough away.  Enough so we walk around scratching our heads wondering what it is we are missing.  So it hurts to be betrayed, but it hurts even more to be the betrayer.

         It was dark when we reached her folks house.  The sun had set, but the mood was darker still.  Her father’s gaze followed us in with the gun still slack at his side.  Her Mother had a smile for her daughter that dropped flat when she saw that I was in tow.  The younger kids were already put to bed and the house was quiet.  I had never heard their house so quiet.  We sat in the living room on the old cream-colored couch.  I wondered how many speeches had been given to that old couch and how many more did it need to expect.  Her father put away the gun and began to pace the brown carpet in front of us.  He was spitting orders under his breath to his wife.  She went to busy herself making coffee.  I needed something to settle the spin that was starting in the back of my skull like a tiny whirlwind of vertigo.  I watched him watching me as he went across the room back and forth.  A rosy hue was building across his brow.  Now that I was in his domain he wanted to throttle me within an inch of my life.  I just needed to give him a reason to.  I was the prey in the lion’s den.

         My girlfriend had become a weeping island since we sat.  I tried to maintain a feeble tether to her through my hand that she had not let go of.  Still she could not look me in the eyes and her voice was held back by a waterfall that threatened if her mouth chose to move.  It was her mother that cut through with a rough clink of coffee mugs.

         “So, what are you doing here? Milk, right?”

I nodded thanks to her mother whose eyes were no longer their usual soft and sympathetic brown, but they pierced through her spectacles dark and shimmery like the glass in the head of taxidermy.

         “I feel like we need to talk.  All of us.  This is not just you and your family’s life anymore.  Your daughter has reached out and away to start one of her own.  Even though you might feel betrayed by this, it’s not her betraying you guys.  It’s her trying to be herself without you always there.  It’s about her becoming who she wants to be without you telling her it’s wrong.  Without you conforming her to what you believe to be right, even if she doesn’t.  You will always be her parents, but you need to recognize that no matter what she will always be your daughter.”

         There were looks of absolute horror handed around the room.  I think her mother swooned just a bit before recovering from the verbal blow I had just delivered.  Then the predators readied their pounce, but just a second before they did I felt a squeeze on my hand and looked my girlfriend square in the eyes.  Behind the dampness was an apology, an apology that stated no matter what happened nothing was going to change and that she was sorry.  My passion was tapped and syphoned out by that gaze.  I knew my youthful arrogance would continue the fight for truth’s sake, but in that instant my heart crumbled under the weight of it all.

         “You’re damn right she’s my daughter and I’m her father.  You’re nothing and you never will be to this family.”

         I didn’t feel the spray of spittle hitting my face as her father continued to yell.  He had clenched both fists and traded his pacing for standing over me bright red with a back arched enough to hold the entire weight of his world upon it.  But, her mother patted his back and soothed him back to a more mild temper.  I know she saw my defeat.  She was preparing for the long conversation ahead, but did not want it with voices raised loud enough to scare the smaller children.  Besides, she knew I was the only one left who had to come to terms with the situation as it was and that was going to take some doing.  I still thought I saw multiple outcomes, she saw that there was only two.

         “You look like you need to go smoke a cigarette.  Go outside, both of you so we can all calm down.”

         It was true I needed a smoke, probably a couple of shots of whiskey too.  The vertigo that had begun in the back of my brain was swirling towards the front like a menacing tornado threating to take away my home, my life and my love.  That’s when I had to ask my stupid questions of my poor distressed lover.

         “Why are you letting this happen?  We don’t need them.  We can take care of all of this.  Don’t walk away from us.”

         “I’m not walking away from you, I just need them too.”

         “But we were making plans.”

         “And plans change.”

         “Look, I want you to need them.  They’re your folks for Christ’s sake, but where are we?  Just come home with me.  You’ll feel better about this in a week in or so.”

         “Why can’t you see that this is the way it needs to be?  You don’t have to leave you know.  You can stay.  Things will, must change, but you can stay.”

I hot-boxed my way through another cigarette staring down her answers.  She, the one I had desired and found was lost to me.  Another young women stood in her place, a place I knew in my deepest of hearts that I could not yet stand next to.  How fickle youth can be in our own arrogance.  I prepared my tears and speeches and went back in for a long night of debate.  Her father was resistant to the point of anger at my every word.  It was her mother who laid it out plainly after he had finally given up on me.

         “We are Catholic and even if my daughter chooses not to be she still sees the morality in it.  We will not accept an abortion, but there are other alternatives.  If you truly love my daughter you will think about these.”

         “What are your acceptable moralities?”

         “There is adoption, but if you want to continue to see her you should make it right.  I hope you don’t and just go away, but it is there.”

         She was telling me in no uncertain terms that I could marry her daughter and they would deal with that, but she hoped that was beyond me.  The thought of marriage was beyond me at that time.  Maybe, I thought, I could use that to my advantage.  That’s it.  Tell them whatever they wanted to hear to get her back home with me and bring her back round to what we were, what we could still be if she only let go of this bullshit that they were dumping on her.

         “Let me talk with her.  I do love your daughter, but marriage is never something that came up between us.  Maybe it should.”

         She drove me home just before dawn promising that her daughter would join me later that week after they had taken her to the normal round of doctors.  I didn’t argue.  I just wiped at my own tears and thanked her.

         A few days later my girlfriend was home with me in our little apartment.  I let her settle in before we started our conversations.  First about how we were going to proceed with the pregnancy and the doctors and then about marriage.  The taste of it was foul to both of our mouths and I knew that would be my in to get her back.  My friends would come on occasion to try and lighten our moods, but she was not so much in for the party as she was to just get fucked up.  I pried at her reminding her how life was just a few weeks earlier and how easy it would be to go back.  We could still be those rebel angels, I whispered in her intoxicated ears.  She heard me.  I scared her.  The next day she was back at her folks terrified that she would break if she stayed around me any longer.  I had to visit her at her parents if I wanted to see her, and dutifully I went along to her appointments.  She began to talk about a simple wedding, just our friends at a courthouse.  The words still clawed at my mind like a nasty thing that threatened our youth.  The day came and she had just begun to show the first bulges of growth when we were supposed to walk down the hall from her OBGYN to another office to get our blood checked for a marriage license when I was the one to crack.  I took her by the hand and ran out of the hospital, lit a cigarette and dragged back as much of the smoke as my lungs would take.  I shook my head as I exhaled.

         “I can’t.  I can’t.  It’s so very, very wrong.”

Tears came to her eyes.  She knew what I meant, but it couldn’t change anything, not now.

         “Fuck you.”

         “We can’t get married because we have to and we aren’t ready to either.  Why can’t you just...”

         “I know! But, fuck you anyways.  I don’t want to marry you.  I don’t want what we had.  And you’re never going to see this child.  I’ll grab a taxi.  Go fuck yourself!”

         She disappeared back inside.  I tried to follow her, but she had ducked me.  On the other side of the hospital I caught a last glimpse of her, head down against her knees weeping in the back of a yellow cab pulling away into traffic.  The cigarette I was still holding burned out against my skin and I cursed and shook it away.  I sucked on the feverish blister between my fingers and thought about how much more I preferred physical pain to this emotional shit.

         The next day her father was beating on my door again.  I was awake.  I hadn’t slept a minute that night.

         “I’ve come to get her things.”

         “Where is she? Is she here?”

         “No, and she’s not going to be just put her stuff in a box and let me go.”

         In his voice I detected what I thought to be a very tiny speck of condolence.  He did see how we were together and for a minute he had liked me, but that was shrouded by his honest sense of relief at this drama ending so he could just take care of his little girl.  I took as long as I could putting her things away into the cardboard.  I let myself cry over the memories I packed.  He waited outside in his truck until he saw me appear with the first of several boxes.

         “How many?”

         “Too few.”

         I had packed more then just her things into those boxes.  I had packed things that had been ours.  I didn’t want to look at the history without her around.  In one special box I packed things that I wanted her to give our child.  Just things, but when you don’t have much to begin with it’s a book of fairytales that your mother used to read you, with the bookmark from your grandmother who died, it’s your favorite leather jacket that you painted by hand so she might feel you when she wears it, it’s treasures that you need to give away to say your sorry.  Sorry, that you will never be there.  He loaded his truck and left, but I told him before he drove away that I truly did love his daughter and if she could forgive me she would be welcome to call me.

         My best friend Shea came over that night and did the best he could to console me, but it just turned into drugs and tears.  I wish he were still around today.  I wonder what he would be like.  It’s hard to imagine those we’ve lost, as they should be.  We just want to remember them the way they were.  She never did call.  It was Shea who found out that she had given birth to a baby girl.  I always knew it would be a girl.  That was the way my sister had planned it.  I wonder if my sister knew if she would ever see me.  A few weeks later the adoption papers came.  They told me nothing except that even if I refused to give up all rights the courts would not grant me any.  I contacted lawyers who said nothing could be done.  I was not even allowed to know my daughter’s name or where she would be growing up.  After all these years and many lawyers later I am still unaware of her name or where she is.  All I know is that when she turns seventeen she can search me out if she wants to.

         She turned seventeen this year.  Now, I wait to see what my sister, that cold, cold moon will do.  I wonder if I’ll recognize her in those eyes.  I wonder if she will recognize me.  I hope she knows that I am truly sorry.  I hope it doesn’t take too long.