Secrets

"Knock, knock, knock"

I waited until they left, just like they always do, in a huff and with the screech of car tires. After that my day started like the last ten, one hundred, one thousand days have started. A good stretch, a good cry, holding my wife's pillow and a drawing. I pulled out my sketchbook and wandered around the house, looking for where the light shone through the window best. I dragged my stool close to the window so I could sit with my back to the outside world. I peered down at my shadow, faint today with the cloudy sky but there nonetheless. I was never especially good at portraiture according to my mentor. After Diana, I stopped drawing altogether. But my therapist said it would help me cope so. Looking at my shadow, I start to piece together my shape as seen on the floor. Light shifts and changes so I have to work fast but time constraints don’t stress me much.

Diana told me that Dan was “a rude little shit who only says you aren’t very good so you’ll keep coming back to line his pockets” and I was fairly certain she was right but I liked telling people that I was studying to be a real artist. One that actually made money and wasn’t an embarrassment my aunties brought up around holiday meals, to the eternal shame of my mother.

“Baby, you don’t have to do all that now. 4 mirrors? Really? Move over, lemme see what you’re doing. Wow, see, I told you, you don’t need that crappy-"

“c'mon now Di, he’s not that bad.”

“You know I’m right. He’s a crook!”

“He’s a starving artist who deserves to be paid a fare wage.”

“He’s not starving, he literally just spilled his $25 salad on your sketches. He’s a wannabe martyr with pretty colors at his disposal. YOU however-”

“Okay okay,”

“No I mean it! You are so incredible, I don’t know why you stay with that weirdo.”

The silhouette was done so I went back to the bedroom and rummaged through the pictures Di had taken of me. I liked my eyes in photo one, my nose in photo seven. My cheekbones were a little more prominent in photo four but it was starved chic so I decided on photo two, from Jamie’s graduation in ’83. Satisfied with my choice, I made my way downstairs, making sure not to step in the broken glass again. I liked to do my “real drawing” in the living room, by the lamp my brother had gifted me. I thought it was a pretty crappy gift but Di loved it.

“The shade is prime, look at how soft the light is! And its still enough to read by. That’s major. You honestly have no appreciation for the finer things.”

I got to work cobbling together some semblance of myself, pulled from across time, across breakups and birthdays, shitty dive bars and concerts and eventually I had something that felt like me.

I moved the throw pillows, no longer sticky but still, a terror to look at, onto the floor and stared at my work. I never cared much what I looked like and there’s no time like the present to constantly mull over and regret all of times you didn’t appreciate yourself in the past. Because now I’m stuck with it. Past me, stagnant in the present and slowly creeping towards a future I have no business existing in. Not anymore. I turned the lamp off, tried to judge my work by moonlight. I’ve been getting sloppy with my values and I wanted to know if they read in low light.

“Listen, you’ve got to feel the pull of the piece. What is the paper telling you, right now? What’s it saying to you?”

“Help, I’ve got salad dressing all over me!”

“If you aren’t going to take this seriously, you can find a different studio to practice your stick figures in”

“Jesus my bad, okay. Um, I think its telling me to draw a tree?”

“you think…its telling you to draw a tree…in a portraitist’s studio. Seriously?”

“I don’t know if you know this, but its paper Dan. Last I checked, there were no paper led podcasts anywhere.”

“It is speaking but you haven’t honed your skills enough to listen to it. Look, we can use this bit of dressing I’ve given you as our starting point. You see how it sort of looks like an eye? You can carve out a person from that if you just follow this contour here…”

A furtive knock at the door broke me out of my memory. 2:30AM is a little early (or late?) for guests but I had a feeling I knew who this was. Another knock, more assertive this time. Shuffling about by the window, a knock on the glass. Muffled grumbling and huffing. I slowly made my way over, tossing the crusty pillows behind the couch and kicking some stray glass under the rug. I wasn’t in the mood for shitty comments and half-baked explanations. Humid air hit me as I stared down at the tiny woman waiting on my porch. She couldn’t have always been this small. She was so frightening to me a short time ago. She stared at me, eyes wide, mouth screwed into a deep frown, just like mine. She had rollers in her hair. She never used to go outside with her hair undone.

“Hey.” I scratched the back of my head, suddenly self conscious and awkward.

“ I was wondering when you’d-”

She moved quick, faster than I thought possible with her age and slapped me hard across my face. My mouth hung open and I didn’t move.

“I’ve been calling you. I’ve been writing you. I’ve been all up and down the damn east coast looking for you just to find out you been here the whole time? Whatchu been doin? Ignoring me? Avoiding me? I’ve been nauseous every goddamned day thinking about what could’ve happened to you and I find out from some, some, strung up fool that you been squatting in this place for years! Years! Years I’ve been looking. And you knew. You knew I was coming by. You knew. And didn’t do nothing but wait in the dark, like some creeper, waitin for me to git gone. Back to my lonely ass house, quiet as hell since Jaime-”

“No. no. Don’t say that. Don’t talk about that.”

“Oh. Oh so we can make demands now? We feel grown up enough to make demands? That’s funny. That’s real funny because you still look like a child to me. Same face. Same body. Same wrinkly clothes. And now you talkin to me any old way?”

“Ma, I don’t want to do this with you. I don’t want to fight. I should’ve answered the door and picked up the phone to at least let you know I was alright. I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have left you hanging for all that time.”

“You damn right you shouldn’t have.” She sniffed, and palmed away a tear before it fell. To this day I’ve never seen her truly cry. “Alright now. Let me in. These bugs are eating me alive.”

“I…I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Whatchu mean? You can’t let your mama into the house your daddy bought? You let me in right now-”

“I said no Ma! No. I don’t have guests. Not unannounced.”

“I’ve been announcing myself for months!” I flinched at her yell and peeked over the porch to the house next door. A light had just flicked on. My neck got hot and I whispered,

“You’re making a scene, please. Just come back come back tomorrow okay?”

“A scene for who? The katydids and mosquitoes? I ain’t coming back tomorrow, I been wasting years worth of tomorrows lookin for you so, you either gonna let me in or I’ll sit here til the sun rise, I don’t care.”

“Then have a nice night.”

I closed the door before she could say anything else and rushed back to the couch, hands over my ears. My mother’s tiny fists were beating on the door so hard, I could feel it in my teeth, in my chest. I felt like she was knocking through my skull. About 10 minutes passed like that; her banging on my door, me rocking on the couch with my fingers in my ears like the child she still thought I was. Then silence.

The sun was going to rise soon and the sky had that back light, like a tv that isn’t quite powered off yet. Ma’s voice slipped under the door like a note, startling me out of my almost sleep. “You know. I always liked Diana. She was smart. Sweet. Maybe a little too sweet but that’s alright. She still had lessons to learn and the world ain’t beat the goodness out of her yet. She made you better. She had gift for that. A God given gift. You were like your daddy. Loud and stubborn but loving. Loyal. A little sad. He had…had some secrets he wanted to lock away for good. Secrets don’t do nothing but hurt you. Like poison, killin you over time. Daddy knew it and he kept em anyway. Kept em close to his chest so they wouldn’t touch nobody else. But it ain’t work. Cuz secrets, secrets will leak outta anything you try to keep em in and stain whatever they touch. And your daddy was stained from the inside out. I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want for you to die with secrets, by your own hand. I was scared I'd lose you; that I’d let you go like I did your daddy. The heaviness of this family weighed on you. Took its toll on you just like it did the rest of us. Nothing was right after Jaime… But you let Diana in on what you was going through. And she listened and she held you the way a lover is supposed to and you got to live right for a while. She got you to live in the sun.”

My breath was coming shallow. All I could smell were the pillows behind the couch and I could feel my eyes pushing against my lids, hot and tight. My self portrait was staring up at me from the floor. And I hated it. I hated that I couldn’t see the way I looked, I hated that I probably still looked the same as I always did. I hated that even in a drawing, I could see my parents’ faces looking back at me when all I wanted was to be free of them. Maybe that was why I was drawn to landscapes. A way to escape, if only for a little while. Because every face I made looked like them. Every face had their eyes, their smiles. Every face looked like a freeze frame of someone I could never be because I was stuck, stagnant, here in this fucking house that my wife should still be laughing but instead. Instead I’ve got broken glass in the soles of my feet and faded photographs to keep me company.

“The sun is gonna be up soon baby. You gonna let me in?”

I stared at the door, shaking, fists clenched.

“Its alright. You ain’t have to answer. I been here a long time. Its alright. Before I leave, let me share something with you. I been doing all this talk about secrets and I got some of my own.”

I was 27. I was standing over an empty casket, holding hands with my brother. This had to be a dream because Jaime died before daddy and this was daddy’s funeral. The moon was bright and I could see the eyes of everybody there, wet and glistening like dew. Jaime took a shuddering breath and squeezed my hand. “Why do you think he did it? He had to know we’d find him. Why do this to us and then leave?”

“I don’t know. He always said we deserved the world. Maybe this was his way of giving it to us.”

Jaime scoffed pulling away from me. I clenched and unclenched my hand trying to keep the sensation of his still being in it.

“I never asked for the world. I didn’t even ask to be here. But I am and all I wanted was for him to come home. He spent all of his time out there looking for some shit that didn’t exist! Just to fuck us over and die like a coward.”

I cringed, knowing daddy couldn’t hear us but I was nervous all the same. He hated cussing.

I rubbed my eyes, stinging with aggravated tears. “Listen, maybe we just make the best of it. And if we hate it, we can just do what he did.”

I felt a sharp sting on my face and instead of Jaime, Ma was there, furious with her ungloved hand poised for another slap.

“don’t you ever say that shit to me again! You hear me! What he gave was a gift. A gift. It don’t matter that you don’t want it. Cuz you got it. And you might as well do something good with it. Jaime was selfish and gave up the ghost too quickly. And I think your daddy was too broken hearted by his passing to think about what his would do to the rest of us here on earth, living on without him. But you got that sweet girl and ain’t she worth living for?”

I stood, forehead pressed against the door, sunlight gilding the door jamb. I stood there for hours replaying what Ma told me. About how this secret wasn’t born from daddy. About how his daddy had given it to him and he was just doing what came naturally. How she had begged for him to share with her, and how he wouldn't because she was already too old, that her quality of life wouldn’t be the same. So, she convinced my father to share his gift with me. He didn’t want to because he didn’t want to see me die like Jaime. She told me how daddy killed himself because he couldn’t live with the guilt of what he’d done. That he felt responsible for the death of both his kids. And that for years, before he died, in that time when he was catatonic with grief, she would prick his fingers and lick the gift right out of him. Because why wasn’t her old life worthy of something better? Something bright and new? Why couldn’t she have more time? She told me about how she had sent a letter to some woman from church who had a daughter of her own. How her daughter had certain “proclivities” that weren’t welcomed in their religious community. About how she sent that daughter up north, to spend time with “people like her” and about how my falling in love with her was orchestrated for my happiness, for my sticking around, since I wasn’t taking to daddy’s gift so well. Diana was like a prize for not taking the coward’s way out. My reward for not wasting daddy’s gift.

“Ma?” I pressed my ear to the door. “Mama?” I knocked lightly, hoping against hope that she’d knock back.

Silence.

I cracked the door open to see the ash in a neat pile just outside. Nothing else. Not even a roller was left. The sun was setting, leaving the porch shaded but the yard flooded with light. I scooped as much ash as I could into my hands and walked to the stairs. Tilting my hands, I let the breeze blow what was left of Ma away. I couldn’t blame her for keeping her secrets for so long. Not really. It runs in the family, and I had plenty of my own. Diana was my sun after it was taken from me. I didn’t care if she was some plant or something. I loved her with everything in me. I still do. When she died, the warmth I had welcomed back into my life left me all at once. After Diana died – no, after I killed her- I wandered aimlessly for months, looking for the same thing my daddy was looking for. Any medicine, drug, chemical or god that could take this from me. There was nothing. I didn’t mean to kill her. I wanted her to be like me. I wanted to have her with me, to have someone to love for as long as I lived. To have someone who didn’t leave. But she didn’t want it. She told me she didn’t want to live forever, that she was happy with the life she had. That life was special because it ended and there was beauty in that. That death and dying weren’t terrible things, but something to look forward to, because “who wouldn’t want to rest after a long day baby”? But it was too late. I had already bitten her, three nights prior, while she was sleeping. I guess my mother’s poison stained me too.

I looked up, letting the sunlight torch my eyes as I stepped off the porch. I allowed myself a moment to smile through the flash of pain, letting my tongue and gums cook in my mouth, my teeth splintering and falling down my cracked throat. My blood bubbled as it leaked out of my body; the smell of my burning, disintegrating flesh overpowering everything else. A laugh escaped my throat, rough and raw like sandpapered wounds and spreading my arms wide, I welcomed the sun like a lost lover.