The Stories Our Bodies Tell
Ghosts and spirits, haints and traces of before. On the drive back from the church service, Russell and I had talked about whether or not we believed in such things. Looking for what isn’t there. I’d been doing just that all these weeks in Smyte. Waiting for Russell Wallen to appear at my door, his black hat tilted over an eye, a bouquet with a note wired to it. Welcome home, my own baby girl. I wanted my mother so bad right then, I nearly cried. I wanted to be a girl again, wanted Ruby telling me to do and fetch. Me fetching her tarot deck with the first card on top always the same. The Lovers, holding hands. But I wasn’t a good daughter. I never had been.
I couldn’t have slept more than a few minutes when knocking woke me. I pulled the pillow over my head, but the knocking continued.
I was cold in my nightgown as I padded over to the door, held it open a few inches.
Della stood there, her winter coat half unbuttoned. She put her hand against the door, nudged it open a few more inches. Her nails were as clean as they got from the engines she’d worked on.
I sat on the edge of the bed and folded my arms across my chest, bringing myself awake, feeling her there.
She moved around the room, looking at my few things. A paper-weight. An empty wine bottle with a candle in it. A postcard from Miami. She picked up the box of tarot cards, looked at a photo I’d taped to the dresser mirror. Ruby, her back turned to the camera, the long shadows of afternoon behind her.
“Where were you tonight?”
“Russell’s been taking you a lot of places.”
“We’re friends, Della.”
“There’s friends and then there’s night after night.” She looked at the floor. “You and him.”
I set the kettle on the hotplate going while Della walked past the framed photographs on my walls, stopping at a photo of a little baby in its coffin. She shook her head. “Ellen Johnson’s great-grandbaby,” she said. “She still talks about laying her out her own self.”
At Tince May’s photo she put her hands against the glass like I had done often enough. “I haven’t seen a picture of her in forever,” she said. “You can almost think you’re touching her.”
“I touch that picture most every night,” I said. “I’m not sure what wants healing most.”
“I used to come to see her. It was a sight, her in those beds against that wall.” She pointed. “And her a lake of skin. A river you could touch, all warm. And you stood there and asked your question.”
“Like what?” I put spoons of coffee and lots of sugar in two cups.
“Just about anything, from a heart that hurt to a lost soul.”
“Which one were you?”
We sat side by side on the edge of my bed.
“I was there the day she passed.” Della sipped her coffee, stared at the picture and told me about that day.
“Folks think this house is haunted.” She clicked her lighter, inhaled deep.
I shivered and drew the edges of my nightgown close.
“What’s this?” Della reached over, touched my upper arm where it was bared.
“A little body art reminder of Knoxville,” I said.
I drew the cap sleeve back off the shoulder, let her see the road, the woman standing at the crest of the mountain.
“A road and a mountain,” she said as she leaned in, studied the tattoo.
“If you follow that road to its end, there’s a town,” I said. “You have to imagine that. The road’s end.”
“What town would there be?”
“A town called Radiance,” I said. “Have you ever heard of it?”
She was so quiet I could hear her breathing. “I hear tell that in some towns,” she said after what seemed a long while. “In some towns you wake up in the mornings and your heart could almost break for wishing.”
“I think Radiance could have been a town like that once.”
“And who would she be?” Della ran her forefinger along the outline of the woman, the long strands of her hair.
“I think that might be a woman who wished just like you say, Della. And I think maybe you knew her.”
“A road and a mountain and a woman,” she said. “What would I know about that?”
“I think you might even have known her name, Della.”
“What name would a tattooed woman have that I’d know?” she said.
“It’s a name I believe you’ve known a good while.”
She reached again, touched the lines of the tattoo, but I pulled away, pulled the gown around me.
“Your name, girl,” she said at last.
“My name?”
She laid her hands on my shoulders, looked at me straight on. “Your name’s one I knew the minute I saw you.”
“You’ve known my name all along. Waydean Long.”
“That’s not your name. We both know that.”
“We do?”
“I knew the minute I saw you that you’re her daughter, that you had to be.”
“Her?”
“You look like her, every bit of you in every part of her I knew.”
I shivered as much as I had every time I’d heard my mother’s voice inside me, though there was no word from her now.
“Your name’s not Long,” Della said. “It’s longer than Long. It’s Loving.”
I tried not to sound like I could cry. “Tell me what you know about my mother.”
At the window Della lit a cigarette, and smoke left her nose, traveled against the cold glass. “Your mother? The only thing I can tell you about her is how a body can be a stranger to love, as much as they want it.”
“Say what you mean.”
“Hearts don’t always hold love,” she said. “As much as you try to make them.”
“Whose heart?” I asked, and took a deep breath. “Ruby’s? Is she who you mean?” The name was there, said and done.
Snow was falling, and under the streetlights we could see the streets, covered already. “You’ve known all along who I am? And you never said?” I stood beside her, close enough to touch her but not. “He’s never said a word.”
“I can’t speak for him,” she said. “For what his heart knows. Maybe I never could.”
“Why now, Della?” I clenched my hands, felt my nails digging into my palms. “Why are you here now telling me anything at all?”
She touched the window with one finger and drew a square in the frost. “Had a ghost of a song in my head all day, so maybe that was the sign I needed.”
“What song was that, Della?”
“One from a long time ago.” She hummed it a little, and I thought it was a hymn we’d heard, him and me, then she added the words. Love me in the morning, love me at night. Love me, Radiance, honey, till long past midnight.
“Radiance,” she said as the square in the frost became a house. Thin lines of smoke trailed from a chimney. “That’s where your mother came from, and where your father never really left, the minute he saw her.”
I thought I’d fall into it, the words. Mother. Father. But the world was spinning and I fixed on it, the tiny patterns of falling snow outside.
“Miracelle,” I said. “My name is Miracelle Loving.”