Every night I flopped into bed, exhausted. I had never been so busy in my life. Even weekends were filled with school stuff and friends. My visits to the women’s yard now happened only on Saturday mornings.
This is not to say that I was too busy to think about Eloda. On the contrary: I thought of her from the time I got up in the morning till I went to bed. Motherwise, you might say I was worse off than ever: I now had two of them to miss.
Then one Saturday in November, I returned to the apartment from the women’s yard. I was sitting on the living room sofa. For once I was doing nothing. I was alone. Just sitting there. And I started to cry.
I had no idea why. I hadn’t been thinking or feeling anything in particular. The tears simply came out of nowhere. Not a heavy, blubbery cry. A soft cry. And then after a minute or two it was over, like a sudden summer shower.
I got up from the sofa. I let myself out. I climbed the steps to the Tower of Death, something I had not done since before school began. Gone were the lopped salamis I’d hacked with the Civil War sword. A squad of new ones, wrapped in burlap and twine, hung from the ceiling. The air up there was chilly. Winter was coming.
I stood in the middle of the circular room, slowly turning, sensing I was here for a reason—but why? I beheld the familiar attic trappings of my childhood, my second bedroom: the old wooden file cabinets, the hangman’s noose, the tub of yarny rag dolls, the NO SPITTING sign. I touched the wooden drawer that held Thomas Browne’s letter. I opened another drawer and took out my mother’s shoe. I cradled it. I kissed it and returned it to the drawer. Everything seemed the same as before. I stood still. I closed my eyes. Perhaps if I stopped looking, it would come to me. It did not.
I left the high room. I was halfway down the tower stairs when I heard a voice. It seemed to come from the wall stones that circled me. It was a man’s voice, and it spoke the familiar words with such authority that I knew it must be Thomas Browne: The bad time is over.
I stopped. I listened for more. I leaned my face against the pale green stones. But the voice was gone, returned to The Letter.
I descended to the apartment. I put on a jacket and went outside. Small, dry white flakes skipped across Airy Street. A brief flurry? Or the first snowfall of the year? Time would tell. This time I did not run. I did not hurry.
Along the way I began to feel so light it seemed I might fly with the flurries. I knew now what I had been looking for and had failed to find. It was, of course, the gloom. The gloom and the anger that had incarcerated me all my life behind walls no one could breach nor stringball fly over. The only home, the only life I had known. Now I understood that when Eloda had sent me to The Corner, she had set me free from my own prison.
At The Corner I did not cry out this time or throw myself down. I stood close by the brick front of 203 West Oak and I felt my mother there and I closed my eyes and I whispered to her: “The bad time is over, Mama. The past is done. I have a future now. I’m okay.”
And then I walked home.