When I was six years old, a ring of shingles wound around my mother’s waist like a belt, and she stopped breathing when the ends met. Dr. Avery Schoenfeld’s Bedside Guide to Good Health says death by a girdle of shingles is a myth. It says it is a superstition dating back to the early Greeks. Evidently it is a myth in which my mother believed.
Claire took me in when disease cinched my mother’s shrinking waist. Claire lived by myths of her own making.
I hope my mother felt no pain as the skin scabbed round her middle. I hope it was like slipping into a dream. She told me she had dreamt me, my birth. She said it was clean and painless. She was relieved I was a boy, she said, because boys depart from the mother, splinter from God, more quietly than girls. She said I dropped from a cloud, rain dark at the edges with my expulsion, and tumbled down a shaft of wind, wet and silent as a mackerel.
Muddy-brown pin curls decoratively framed my mother’s oval face. They were so perfectly circular, they made me dizzy if I looked at them too closely. They looked like they’d been scribbled on with a Busy Buzz Buzz. She had tiny hands that nearly disappeared when she closed them and three freckles in a row above her upper lip, like ellipses, like there was more to be said.
After the burial, I became Claire’s full-time charge.
Claire was a beauty operator, which made me think she carved good looks from flawed faces with scalpel and suture, but it was hair she shaped. She worked out of her basement, where she had two pedestaled chairs bolted to the floor. Whenever Claire pumped the chair up so that the customer’s head was at a workable height, it made me think of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny in the “Barber of Seville” cartoon. I imagined Claire perched on the heads of the customers, massaging hair oil into their scalps with all four paws. I saw wet-headed women careening toward the ceiling and bursting through Claire’s roof. When I told Claire about my vision she said, “That Bugs Bunny. Whatever happened to him? A huge talent.”
Claire wasn’t like the adults I knew. People in the neighborhood and at the grocery store and the filling station called her “Claire the Loon.” She said she was flattered. She loved birds.
Some people thought it a scandal that my mother had made Claire, no blood relation, my godmother. My mother respected a well-crafted pin curl. Claire was always very polite to her and brought her a brisket when our German shepherd was poisoned. My mother and Claire had the same sense of kindness.
Claire’s daughter and husband drowned in a boating accident during a fishing trip five years before I went to live with her. The only thing she ever said to me about it was that it made her feel sad for stealing the worms from the robins that had worked so hard at unearthing them that morning. Once she told me she had phantom pains of maternity that made her bowels ache and that she missed the smell of aftershave on the pillowcase. Then she sucked on my toes and stroked my feet and fell asleep.
I was both surrogate spouse and child to Claire.
And I was sweet on her.
She gave me apples she’d picked herself. “They’re not from my trees,” she’d say, “but God doesn’t mind and Johnny Appleseed is dead.” And then she’d laugh, her eyes turning to tiny fists, the gap between her front teeth threatening to pull me in. Sometimes they were only crab apples, and we pitched them at cats when they stalked the birds, stealthing along near the shrubbery. Claire said they were called crab apples because if they could talk, they wouldn’t have anything nice to say. Claire, my godmother, had spoken with angels.
They were sitting on her kitchen table, dangling their feet when she came in the back door. They smelled bad and had dirty knees and necks. One had white hair, a wrinkled face, and a crusted, runny nose; the other had red hair, red freckles, and wore silver high heels and white socks. They were both small and shifty, ungraspable as beads of quicksilver. They had eaten all Claire’s sugar and vomited on the floor. They’d stayed to apologize.
I asked Claire how she knew they weren’t just neighbor kids or ghosts. She said she recalled them from her time in heaven. She said as she was waiting to be born, they brought her a box of Good and Plenty and a bottle of grape Nehi with a crazy-curl straw. She remembered them. She said angels are as distinct as snowflakes.
That was when she first saw her father—in heaven. He had been in an airplane that was shot down over the Pacific Ocean exactly one month before Claire was born. He was entering the Kingdom just as Claire was departing. As they passed, he told her to help her mother with the daily chores when she was old enough and to act surprised the first time she saw a picture of him. She said he was thin and young and handsome and made her think of an antelope. When I asked her what her earliest memory was—and I asked her often, thinking it might change—she always grinned and clutched her elbows and told me about making her father’s acquaintance in heaven.
Claire believed we carry with us prenatal knowledge that is mostly lost to us at that moment of induction, that first unencumbered pulse, that first slap into the material world. From that moment on, we forget and spend the rest of our lives trying to remember, grasping at dim and darting shadows of distant occurrences. Before we are born, though, we’re tiny fibers coiled in a cosmic blanket that connects us with everything, a throw God covers himself with when he’s chilled. Claire believed God dwelled on the inside. Inside all things. Inside the body like a benevolent growth, benign but swelling. She believed you could see God in the furrows of a peach pit if you looked hard enough.
And she believed in genetic memory. Claire said she was often surrounded by antiquated objects in her dreams, like buttonhooks or railroad lanterns, things that felt familiar but that she swore she’d never seen before, not even as a child, in a flea market, or on television. This belief was influenced, I think, by a newspaper article about a young boy who dug up a small fortune buried in the backyard of what turned out to have been an estate once owned by his great, great, great, great grandfather. Supposedly, this knowledge had been passed along genetically from generation to generation, like a pocket watch. It had slipped through the seed, through the blood, through the twisted cords of chromosome into this little boy’s unsuspecting brain. Claire’s conviction about this phenomenon was more hopeful than heartfelt, though she clung to her celestial recollections with the kind of tenacity that comes only from being touched by something pure and unimaginable, something beyond bald data and observable evidence—something no Freudian interpretation could tarnish.
One midnight in May when I was ten, Claire and I lay on our stomachs with the sides of our faces resting in the freshly tilled dirt, listening. I heard nothing.
“Silence,” Claire said. She could sniff out skepticism at twenty paces. I was a new soul and so naturally incredulous she said. Silence was all that I heard.
After a while, I felt something, something infinitesimal burrowing in the ground beneath my cheek. I imagined it was a tiny organism invading the dwellings of sleeping nits. At this same moment, I heard a distant chorus of muffled wheezing that seemed to emanate from someplace deep and hollow. I thought this might be a trick of Claire’s, like when I could tell she was moving the Ouija pointer. But the sound was too removed, too disembodied and eerily pitched to be Claire. Claire spread her arms and legs out and flapped and scissored them across the earth. She was making earth angels.
“I heard it, Claire,” I said. We had just planted our garden by the flat light of the moon. On this night it looked more bilious than silvery, but it was in full bloom and Claire believed this was the best time to sow, because of the gravitational pull on the sap. She believed you could hear the inception of life if you listened closely enough, and Claire’s ears were often to the ground. I believed she could hear the rustling of insect wings in Outer Mongolia if she tried.
* * *
Claire had a porcelain pallor. Her skin was that shade of white that was so white it almost glowed a moony green. The skin of her doughy thighs was the best. It was so pure you were tempted to drink it.
Claire and I amused ourselves in the evenings with board games. She had a closet full: Mousetrap, Operation, Mystery Date, you name it. Claire would quote the commercials while we played: “Roll the dice, move your mice.” “Take out wrenched ankle.” “Will he be a dream or a dud?” Claire cut out pictures from the front of Simplicity patterns so that I could play Mystery Date. The girl with blonde corkscrew pigtails, an embroidered peasant shirt, psychedelic culottes, and white knee socks was deemed the least desirable date. Claire had kept all her daughter’s toys, among them a Frosty the Snowman Snow-Cone Maker with bottles of flavored syrup, an Easy Bake Oven, and an Etch-A-Sketch, on which we drew pictures of stiff, boxy cows and grinning bears sitting on boulders, warming their feet by small fires.
Claire and I enjoyed playing Yahtzee. She had a special fondness for it because she always won. In her hands those dice were quintuplets; in mine they were distant acquaintances, fellow integers adding up to zilch. Claire said it was because she believed in the power of numbers and patterns and claimed her luck was “all in the wrists.” She had wrists that were unusually thin, as though they were an evolutionary legacy left by birds. I imagined her skeleton filled with air, weighted down by flesh, waiting to skin itself and ascend.
Once when I went looking for Claire to play a game of Parcheesi with me, I walked into her bedroom and found her clutching her knees and gulping air. There were pictures spread on the bed around her, spilling out of a Florsheim shoebox. Black-and-white snapshots of a man with a long face and thin waist, and a little girl patting a brown dog, eating cake, wearing shiny Mary Janes, sitting in a tiny pool. And one with Claire between the two, a light glowing behind them as though they were on fire, smiling, happily aflame. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a little girl began to sing scales. “Hear that?” Claire asked, looking at her knees. I patted her bare feet, hoping the child’s singing would make her happy. “That’s the sound a swan makes at the end of its life. They sing themselves to death.” She gathered the photographs into her lap. “Only other swans can hear it, swans on the way out.”
* * *
The only time I recall Claire ever getting angry with me—and it wasn’t anger exactly—was the time in seventh grade when I brought Damita Davis home and we played Yahtzee and ate Vanilla Wafers. Claire looked on from the doorway as I rolled my way to a big victory. My wrists seemed to glow gold; I rubbed them between turns. It was the first time I’d ever won at Yahtzee. After the game, Claire shuffled out of the kitchen in her fuzzy lavender slippers and holed up in the bathroom. She stayed in there for two hours after Damita had gone home. When I finally dared to check on her, all I could see were her wrinkled, white fingers hanging over the edge of the bathtub and a meringue of pinned-up hair floating above the bubbles that rose up out of the tub like a dream. There were candles burnt down to pools of wax on saucers, and it smelled like the time we ironed Crayola shavings between pieces of waxed paper. The empty, wet and puckered box of Mr. Bubble beside the toilet alarmed me, I don’t know why. Maybe it was just the sheer emptiness, ten baths’ worth of bubbles extravagantly frothed for a single bathing. I flushed the toilet to cut the silence. Claire parted the foam with her hands, peering mystically through like a movie star in a soft-focus reverie.
“What?” she asked.
“I thought you were …”
“What?”
“Forget it. You’re going to be a prune soon,” I said.
“Do you love her?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Damita? No! I think she let me win. I could never respect a woman like that.” Claire gathered the bubbles around her again and sank out of view.
* * *
Nothing was ever really the same after the séance. At the time, it just seemed like a bitter bite, something she’d swallow and forget. Now I see it must have been a mouthful of disease.
The day of the séance, Claire was nervous and excited—the way I used to get before the Oak Grove Elementary school carnivals or the field trips to the Agricultural Hall of Fame. She picked red clover and daisies and marigolds and strewed them throughout the house like a fertility goddess. She even floated some bachelor’s buttons in the cat’s water. She took everything elevated and breakable off shelves and tables—plates, lamps, clocks, candlesticks—and laid them on the floor, as if she were anticipating a quake. She explained that the collision of the spirit realm with the physical world was known to send actual vibrations all through the house and sometimes beyond. Claire was cautious and reverent when it came to consorting with spirits.
We decided we would try to contact my mother, since she was the only dead person we had in common. Claire made me take a bath, wash my hair, and dress up in my stiff suit even though it was hot and the suit made me itch. She had a high regard for those who now knew “the geography of death.” Mrs. Moody, a spiritually compatible customer of Claire’s, joined us in hope of hooking up with her late brother, Harold. We sat around the kitchen table and grinned politely at one another for a while, pointing at the bird feeder outside the kitchen window whenever anything more colorful than a starling alighted.
Finally Claire told me to fetch my clackers—two translucent lavender balls with flecks of foil inside. Each ball dangled from a string. You held the clackers by a plastic ring and snapped them up and down, clacking them together, faster and faster until they looked like fluttering wings. I hadn’t played with them since a kid at school told me a boy in Saint Louis clacked his a little too hard, and they splintered and flew into his eyes. My mother had given them to me on my sixth birthday. I’m sure she’d had no inkling they’d prove to be dangerous. She also gave me a small, plastic Scrooge McDuck that collapsed in a heap when you pressed on his foundation, snapping back into shape when you released it. Claire thought the clackers would be a better spiritual conduit than the duck.
We all held hands. Claire dangled the clackers between our clasped hands, and Mrs. Moody held a flat, soiled rabbit fashioned out of braided pipe cleaners between ours. She had fat little link-sausage fingers that bulged out of an already sweating palm. She smiled apologetically as we locked fingers, but I didn’t mind the sweat because she smelled like cookies. We all closed our eyes, and Mrs. Moody started humming “Amazing Grace.” She sang the words but now am found and but now I see aloud and then stopped.
After a few moments of silence, Claire’s grip tightened, and I felt her arm stiffen. When my hand began to go numb, I breached séance etiquette and looked over at Claire. I saw a thread of blood trailing from her lip where she was biting it. I saw that Mrs. Moody was looking too. She was staring at her clenched hand, which was white and bloodless and would probably turn the bluish color of her hair before long—hair Claire herself had recently colored and styled. Neither of us said a word. We were afraid to disturb Claire in this state, as though she were sleepwalking among the dead and in peril of being trapped in a limbo world if roused.
As Claire walked among spirits, I thought about my mother’s hands; they were soft as flannel. Sometimes at night as I fell asleep, she would rub my feet and talk about movie stars. She told me she had always been a little bit in love with Cary Grant and knew if he met her, he would want to buy her a pair of black satin pumps. She felt certain Dana Andrews paid his bills long before they were due and invested his money wisely. Gene Tierney, she said, would certainly go out of her way to care for limping dogs and fallen birds, despite what some of the vixenish roles she’d played might make you think of her. After these stories, I often dreamt of large and kind and beautiful people who brought food wrapped in tinfoil to our house or gladly drove us, in cars with seats as soft as feathers, anywhere we wanted to go. I wondered if my mother would remember any of this or if she had left her earthly recollections behind.
Claire let out an explosive gasp, like someone long submerged bursting to the surface of a lake. Mrs. Moody screamed, and I kicked over the bowl of plastic fruit at my feet. Claire sat stone still until Mrs. Moody asked in a trembling voice, “Did you see Mrs. Yulich?”
Claire turned her gaze to Mrs. Moody, but her expression remained fixed. “She’s dead,” Claire said. She turned to me and said, “You’re to sleep in your own room tonight.”
I can’t be sure if Claire made contact because it was never mentioned again, but I think she experienced something on the other side that pained her terribly. Maybe she saw my mother weeping. My mother cried so quietly, you could tell she was crying only by the rounded shape of her shoulders. It always made me wish I could step out of my skin and wrap her in it. Maybe Claire saw my mother crying, quiet as a sick child.
* * *
The good days grew less and less frequent after that. Claire gradually phased out her beauty business and withdrew from me too. She forbade me to go in her bedroom unless she wasn’t in it, which was increasingly rare. Tiny wrinkles began collecting around her eyes and mouth, as if she hadn’t allowed them until now. She began drinking her coffee with heaping spoonfuls of sugar, and she chewed her fingers until they bled. But sometimes she’d sit in the garden and pull weeds and seem strong and steady in her dirty dress and rubber shoes.
* * *
One day, after an extended period of brooding silence, Claire snapped out of it just like that, like Scrooge McDuck, as though strings in her limbs had been pulled suddenly taut. It was a Saturday, and I was watching Lancelot Link on television. Claire and I used to sit together on Saturdays and I’d watch her straining face as she tried not to laugh. She claimed the star of the show, a trained chimp, was my first cousin and always remarked on the family resemblance. On this day, she swept into my room like a warm wind and cupped my face in her hands. She began kissing my fingers and wrists and pecked her way up to my closed eyes. It was a startling change, and I was afraid to move. She laughed out loud and drew me to her, patting my back gently.
“Things are going to be different,” she said, looking into my eyes, trying on different grins as she stared into them, as if she had just gotten a new mouth and was testing its range. “Let’s go to that new Exotic Animal Drive-Thru Paradise. What do you say? I hear they have bears!”
So we packed a picnic lunch and headed for the park, ignoring the silence, the days and months of anxious quiet that had preceded this transformation. On the way there, we sang with the radio, honked at the grazing cows, and kept track of out-of-state license plates, like we used to. Claire even laughed for the first time in a long time when I imitated Buck, the German shepherd that was poisoned, by hanging out the window, licking the air, snapping at bugs, and threatening to jump.
When we got to the park, a man in a safari hat and leopard-spotted scarf gave us a map and told us to keep our windows rolled up at all times because of the bears. He said not to try to feed them no matter how friendly or harmless they might appear.
We traveled down a road identified as Mallard Avenue on the map. We didn’t see anything but trees for quite a stretch. Finally, we saw a large herd of sheep grazing near a pond.
“Pretty exotic,” Claire said. One side of her mouth was pursed.
They looked like clouds on legs from a distance. As we got closer, we could see their chewing faces, and I said, “Maybe they’d let you fix their hair.” Claire had always shamelessly solicited customers wherever we went, though she claimed to target only the choicest coifs.
“Those mops?” she said. “That would require sheer talent, hardy har,” We both laughed, a foreign sound. It felt good to laugh together again, a feeling of convalescence or release like we’d just gotten over a malingering cold or out of an interminable winter.
We turned onto Bison Boulevard. The map made it appear as if this were the wildlife hub. We didn’t see anything but some ducks and a couple of deer for the first few hundred feet, then we saw brown, white, and black bodies bumping along the road ahead. As they came into view, we could see they were llamas. We pulled off to the side and stopped in the grass. There was a huddle of llamas a few feet in front of us, and they kept turning around and looking at us as though they were gossiping. The group dispersed, strategically it seemed, and one of the rust-colored llamas walked toward our car. It walked over to Claire’s side and looked straight in at her. Claire knocked against the window, but it just stood there staring at her, then it pressed its mouth and nose against the window and slobbered on it.
“Think he wants a tip,” Claire said, and she rolled down the window and offered him a shelled peanut. He took it gently from her hands with his thick, sticky lips and tongue.
In spite of the injunction to “keep the windows rolled up,” we decided to have our picnic at this site, beneath the cloak of a large weeping-willow tree. Claire found the llamas soothing. As we spread out beneath the tree, we could see two peacocks sauntering toward us. We ate grapes, cheese and crackers, celery stuffed with peanut butter, marshmallows, and we each had a can of lukewarm grape Nehi. As the peacocks came closer, Claire threw out a handful of pastel-colored miniature marshmallows. The birds came near us, but walked on the marshmallows without interest, as though they were only cushioned stones, unworthy of scrutiny. They stopped once they got safely past us, fanned out in the sun, arched their necks, and I imagined they were absorbing energy and color through the eyes in their tails. I imagined they’d lift up in the air and spin colorfully like fireworks.
As we stretched out on our backs, three llamas inched cautiously closer and cleaned up the marshmallows. Then they stood there with stiffened ears, looking at us, baring their big teeth, perhaps waiting for second helpings. One of them hissed at us, and Claire hissed back, causing them all to back up. Claire reached into the picnic basket and pulled out a box of powdered sugar. She pushed my T-shirt up around my shoulders and sprinkled the sugar on my stomach carefully, as if I were a cookie. She pulled out some strawberries and rolled them in the sugar. The llamas looked on like big, curious dogs, dipping their noses and sniffing the air as we ate. When we had eaten all the strawberries, Claire licked the remaining sugar off my stomach, and my muscles tensed. She laid her head on the moist circle.
“I can hear your intestines laboring,” she said. She traced a winding path along my stomach with her finger. “The food sprouts, grows, takes shape, and we eat it. It changes and is passed along to feed the earth. It assumes a new form, a radish, a pear, and we eat it again. We could be partaking of the organic leftovers of… Akhenaton … Fatty Arbuckle …”
“Who?”
“We could be breaking bread with Christ in a manner of speaking.” Claire sat up and gently kissed my eyebrows, my nose. “Do you suppose resurrection disqualifies him?” she asked. “How human was he really, if there was no putrefaction?” She leaned on her elbow and twisted my hair around her finger.
“Life is an endless meal, a banquet, and this moment, this succulent moment, is merely a bite.” My stomach lurched. This was an observation Claire had been fond of making, but in her privation the metaphor had not been apt for a long time. I wondered if it could last, if she’d savor that arm-in-arm companionship again, if it would be like before when the warmth we shared—each of us clumsily reckoning with loss—kept the boxed-up memories from haunting her, from making her sit so still and dead, staring at her knees, our intimacy interrupted by phantoms whose sternness she buckled beneath. I missed the feeling of her hand on my stomach.
And then I imagined choking on a bad day, the unpleasant hours sliding down my windpipe, blocking my breath as I struggled to dislodge them. As I lay there thinking, a black-and-white zebra-striped jeep pulled up and parked behind our car. A man dressed from head to toe in khaki stepped out and shined a flashlight at us, as though the beam would hold us in place. It shone through the drooping branches, competing with the threads of sunlight that embroidered our faces. We sat up. Claire positioned her head in the light’s path and stared into it.
“You folks are clearly in violation here,” the man said, lowering the flashlight. “It states right there on your ticket that you are not under any circumstances to get out of your car. In so doing, you have jeopardized your own lives as well as the welfare of the park and do hereby relinquish your rights as guests. I must escort you out of the park immediately. Your tickets are nonrefundable.” The words came out of his mouth rapid and shaky. I could tell it was a speech that he had long waited for the opportunity to make and now that it was over, a look of letdown crimped his face.
“I am not frightened of peacocks or llamas,” Claire said in a formal drawl. “Nor they of me.”
“You are very near the wild boars’ favorite watering hole. They’re a rough lot, them boars. They’d just as soon skewer you as look at you,” he said.
“I’ve only seen llamas and peacocks and assorted barnyard stock,” Claire said, as she stood and smoothed her dress.
“I bet you don’t even have any old bears,” I said.
“We have bears. Just because you didn’t see them doesn’t mean we don’t have bears. They don’t appear on demand. We have bears.”
I’d hit a nerve.
“Please gather your things, get in your car, and follow me out of the park.”
Just before we came to the exit gate displaying a sign that read THANK YOU FOR VISITING THE EXOTIC ANIMAL PARADISE. HOPE YOU HAD AN UNBEARABLY GOOD TIME, the man in the truck pointed his arm out the window at a dense stand of trees in the distance. “Bears!” he yelled, as we drove out.
* * *
That afternoon was the last savory bite Claire and I shared. It seemed the moment we arrived home, the day became instantly something to be filed away in a mental scrapbook. Claire tried hard to hold on to her good humor, but she quickly lost all resolve. The bitter bites came back, consumed her. Or her soul had decided to fast. Sometimes I could see her face straining so to form a smile, thoughtful with effort, as though it were heaving an anvil. I held Claire’s slack and thinning body to mine, felt the sharpness of her shoulders, tried to be bone and muscle to her. I imagined pushing my hand inside Claire, straight through her navel and into the nucleus of her history, casting out sad pictures and making more room for her god—the god of a glorious growth you could hear if attuned—to take root. I imagined something cool and small at the center, something untouched by pain or memory or shame, and I clasped it in my hands, a shriveled seed, tried to shore up the last fragments of an ailing spirit.
* * *
Some months after the trip to the animal park, she agreed to go to a movie.
Fantasia was playing at the Bijou. Claire moved slowly about the rooms of the house as the steps of grooming came back to her one by one. She dabbed circles of rouge on her dry cheeks and pinned knotted curls back with a pearl-studded comb. She pressed a flowered dress and found a pocketbook the same watery blue as the petals. Claire had grown so thin, the dress hung on her. There was only a faint suggestion of body beneath the fabric. You could see through her skin that even her spirit was withered. Claire’s eyes were wide open, wet and restless with longing. I felt sure the movie would bring her back to me, hungry, joyful.
As the coming attractions played, two young girls sat down in front of us. Claire, who had been speaking of the plush comfort of the theater seats, became quiet again. She smiled periodically and nodded at me, twisted her hair, fingered the pearls on the comb. When the movie began, I looked over to see if it registered any expression on Claire’s face. She was staring at the back of one of the girls’ heads. I reached over and took Claire’s hand in both of mine. I smoothed and patted her arm as though trying to tame it. She pulled away and reached into her purse, took out a brush. She leaned forward and freed the girl’s hair from the back of the chair. The girl turned slowly around, looked at Claire, then locked her gaze on me. Claire brushed the long blonde strands in her hand. I half-smiled at the girl, as if I had just asked her for a favor. She turned back around and sat perfectly still as Claire stroked her hair. The other girl turned and stared at Claire, who grinned down at the rope of hair in her hands.
The subtle music behind the movie changed abruptly, bellowing deeply and thumping beneath our feet. I heard someone behind me ask, “Where are the words? When are they going to say something?” Claire dropped the hair and stood up. She stared absently at the screen. Popcorn hit her back. She apologized to the people sitting next to us and moved to the aisle, walked toward the screen. People in the audience turned to look at her and began whispering. She walked up the steps at the side of the stage. The audience became audibly hushed. She walked to the center of the screen and raised her hand to it. Mickey Mouse capered about, ankle deep in water, a pail in his hands. He scrambled frantically through Claire’s shadow, sweeping the water away. Claire gracefully eased herself to the floor like a falling leaf. A battalion of angry brooms marched above her. Some of the kids in the audience clapped, others giggled, and some threw empty candy boxes at the stage. I caught the worried eye of the blonde girl who was seated in front of us as I walked down the aisle. When I reached Claire, I knelt beside her and put my hand on her forehead. The projectionist stopped the film, houselights came on, and teenaged ushers rushed toward us and stopped short, uncertain. Claire looked at me, at my mouth. She licked her lips. “I can’t taste a thing,” she said.
* * *
After that Claire and I lived together in silence, Claire’s hunched figure deforming into a shape of increasing resignation and sorrow I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—make out. I fed her and bathed her, read her stories from Life magazine about the world’s transformations and setbacks, and sometimes she’d smile, shake her head. One day, at the instigation of a concerned neighbor, two men and a woman dressed in crisp, white clothing came and took Claire away. They held her by the arms and escorted her into a van. She offered no resistance.
* * *
I visited her once—last year, June 29, my seventeenth birthday. It wasn’t Claire really, just a facsimile, a loose satchel of cells unable to cage the roaming soul, fled, in search of soiled seraphim. I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for the Claire I’d known. In the garden, maybe, clinging to the slick pink and green underside of a rhubarb leaf. In the scraps of earth, the dirt beneath my fingernails. Or maybe drinking a soda with friends in heaven, waiting to be born again. Hibernating like bears in a drive-through paradise, napping in inaccessible places.
A nurse told me she’d become fully unresponsive and they were forced to feed her through a tube. She’d shed all superfluous gestures, one by one. Claire and I sat together quietly, her eyes looking past me, weary with the onus of sight, her gaze resting on my shoulder. I put my finger between her dry lips and pressed against her teeth. She parted her teeth slightly and I waited, hoped for the gentle pressure of her bite. I closed my eyes and listened for distant singing, listened for signs of invisible growth happening somewhere in the world.