Skylight Confessions

  Every traveler needs a warm coat, walking shoes, a bottle of water, a watch that can be trusted, an honest man, and a mirror that reflects back truthfully. James Bayliss drove Blanca to the airport. He was angry, but most people wouldn’t have been able to tell. Blanca, however, could. She knew James well enough to notice that his shoulders were a bit higher than usual, tensely held, and there was more silence; his work boots were especially heavy on the gas and the clutch. James was pissed because Blanca wouldn’t let him go with her. It made no sense to him at all.

  “Don’t be mad. You’re not missing anything. It’s a reprieve, really.” Blanca was traveling light — one small carry-on case filled with black clothes, shampoo, books. “James, please,” she said when he didn’t answer. James was searching out a space even though she told him not to bother with the car park, just to drop her off. “Right there,” she said, pointing out the departure section. “They’re not even technically my family,” Blanca insisted. “They’re all semi-relatives. My real family is dead.”

  “You don’t want me to go inside the terminal with you and wait?”

  “Well, why would you want to do that?” Blanca said. “You can’t go with me to the gate. It’s a waste of time.”

  “I want to. That’s the point, Blanca.”

  “Well, that’s just stupid,” Blanca said.

  James nodded. There it was, a jab at the fact he hadn’t gone to university. “Exactly.”

  “I don’t mean stupid in that way.”

  “No, you meant it in a positive way.”

  They both laughed at that, even though this moment seemed as though it might be the end of them. They said good-bye on the sidewalk outside the British Airways terminal. It was noisy and crowded. James didn’t make a move toward her, just stood there and handed Blanca her overnight case. It was awkward. James had played semi-professional soccer when he was younger and now someone recognized him and patted him on the back. That happened often, strangers coming out of nowhere to address him.

  “I’ll be back in no time. I promise.” Blanca hugged him, then stepped away. He hadn’t hugged her back. “This isn’t about us. It’s about going home.”

  “You can’t keep dividing your worlds.” James kept his hands in his pockets “It’s all one big rotten mess. We’re either in it together or we’re not.”

  Blanca simply wanted this journey over and done. She could come back and fix things with James. Her life was here, after all. She checked in and waited in the lounge; when her flight was called, she boarded, took a sleeping tablet, and closed her eyes. She was asleep in no time. She dreamed of a swan out on the lawn of her father’s house. It moved with difficulty, slow, exhausted, then it lay down in the grass. It was giving birth, and it labored horribly. The delivery was sudden, pouring out of the swan with the great force of birth — a full-grown duck encircled by a thick, mucusy casing. As she woke, Blanca thought to herself, But swans lay eggs.

  It was dark and they were halfway across the ocean; Blanca’s head filled with the droning of the jet’s engines. She thought of the way James had stood there on the sidewalk. She thought of the many ways love could hurt you. She was not an open person; she knew that. She’d assumed James had known that about her as well.

  Blanca rented a car at Kennedy and drove to Connecticut; because she wasn’t sure she remembered the way, she’d had the rent-a-car attendant go over the map several times. Still, she was nervous as she drove. She felt panicky, imagining she was on the wrong side of the road; she felt confused and out of sorts and she hadn’t even bothered to comb her hair. When she got off the highway, most of it came back to her. Turn left, and there was the market. Turn right, and the road led home.

  There had been a brief, uncomfortable phone conversation with her stepmother. Thank you, but no, she wouldn’t be staying at the house, but would instead be at the Eagle Inn, just on the other side of town. Meredith had already made the reservation. When Blanca pulled up, she remembered the inn, a white house with a stone foundation and patio. The school bus had taken this route, but Blanca had never looked much beyond the hedges.

  She parked and walked down the path. There was the sound of bees and of traffic on the road. Blanca suddenly wished she’d brought something other than black to wear; she was broiling. How humid summer was here. The air was sticky and it was difficult to breathe. Blanca was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and a pair of corduroy slacks that should have been packed away for the summer.

  The owner of the inn was a local woman, Helen Jeffries, a recent widow herself, who seemed to know the Moody family. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Helen said as she checked Blanca in and handed over a key. “Your father was a lovely man.”

  Blanca went up the carpeted stairs and found her room — a bed with a dust ruffle, a view of the lawn. She thought about the swan she’d dreamed about on the plane. The inn wasn’t air-conditioned and she felt feverish. There were no private bathrooms, so Blanca went down the hall to wash up. The dress she’d brought to wear to the funeral was wool, totally inappropriate for the weather. She’d forgotten what June could be like here. She’d roast, she’d burn, she’d burst into flames as she stood at the gravesite.

  Blanca ran the cold tap and dashed water on her face. If she opened her eyes would she be back in her flat? If she blinked would she be in her driveway, where the lilacs grew all those years ago?

  There was a knock at the bathroom door.

  “Don’t use up all the water!”

  It was Meredith, teasing her. Blanca opened the door and they embraced.

  “Let me look at you.”

  Meredith still saw Blanca as the ten-year-old girl she’d first come to babysit, even now, when Meredith’s own youngest child was nine and her eldest thirteen. Merrie had been in Connecticut only a few hours, but she’d already phoned her kids; she missed them terribly despite their racket and their constant demands. She could not imagine what it was like to leave your children behind for good, to know you wouldn’t see who they grew up to be. Well, here Blanca was — if only her mother could see — a beautiful woman with a life of her own.

  “You’re gorgeous, even if you haven’t combed your hair,” Meredith said.

  “God, I’m dreading this.” Blanca was wearing heavy black boots as well. Where had she thought she was going? The frozen tundra? Some arctic location where workers had to chip away the ice with picks in order to bury a man?

  Meredith was wearing a pale gray suit with black trim and a black silk blouse. She’d been married for fifteen years, was the mother to four children; she had gone back to graduate school and now taught English in the local high school. Meredith was far too busy to come to a funeral for a man she hadn’t seen in years and hadn’t even liked to begin with. She looked into Blanca’s face. She thought about her first day with the family: Sam on the roof, so dangerously close to falling. Blanca running down the driveway.

  Meredith’s time in Connecticut had allowed her to learn who she was and what she wanted. Just last night in bed, for instance, Merrie had turned to her husband and asked if when he died he would promise to come back to haunt her.

  “Why would I do that to you?” Daniel had long given up thinking about spirits. He was the head of his department and he concentrated on the real world now.

  “Because I’d want you to.”

  Daniel laughed. “You wouldn’t want that.”

  Meredith had circled her arms around him. She’d never in her life thought she would love anyone this deeply. “Yes, you must.”

  “So that’s it, Merrie. That’s why people are haunted.”

  It was a discussion they’d been having since the night they first met, back when Meredith claimed the house in which she worked was haunted. What kept a spirit tied to earth? Love or hate, time or desire?

  “People are haunted because they want to be,” Daniel said.

  Meredith was missing her husband. He was right about ghosts. She would want him to haunt her; she’d never want to let
him go. “You’d better get a move on,” she told Blanca. “We have to leave in ten minutes.”

  “Why do we have to leave so soon? The cemetery’s right down the lane.”

  “No. It’s farther.”

  “Isn’t it the one with the big tree? Archangel? Sam took me there once to visit our mother’s grave. He didn’t have a license but he hijacked Cynthia’s car. It was late at night and there was a full moon and I was terrified.”

  “It’s a different cemetery, Bee. One Cynthia has chosen.”

  “Ah. He’s not being buried with my mother.” Blanca felt her face flush. She had been here for only a few hours and was already furious. “And not with my brother, either. Well, of course. It makes sense. He certainly wouldn’t want to spend eternity with my mother or Sam.”

  They went out to the car Blanca had rented. Meredith had come by cab, but now she insisted on driving; at least she knew which side of the road to drive on. Blanca brushed her hair in the car, brusque, wrenching strokes. She still had beautiful pale hair, but she quickly wound the length of it into a knot before savagely running a clip through it. She looked out the window as Meredith drove. They merged onto the highway and traveled past two exits, then found their way along the back roads. There was to be a graveside service at the cemetery; already there were so many cars Meredith had to park outside the gate. Blanca rummaged through her purse for a little black knitted hat. Perfect for Antarctica. Sweat was running down her back and her wool dress itched. Thank goodness for the cool strand of pearls around her throat. She and Meredith walked down a cement path.

  “Do you know why I came to work for your family?” Meredith asked as they walked.

  “Because you were a masochist?”

  Meredith laughed. People at the graveside gathering looked around as they approached.

  “Well, yes. I suppose I was. I took the job because I saw your mother’s ghost.”

  “Look, Meredith, I don’t believe in any of that. When you’re dead, you’re gone. So maybe it doesn’t matter whether or not my father and mother are buried together.”

  “Your father had gone to a psychic. I was at a party for my college roommate and I saw her. She had long red hair. She was wearing a white dress. I had the feeling I was supposed to follow her home.”

  “That’s how you made your decision? God! I thought you were the sensible one in the household.”

  “It was a good decision.”

  Meredith hugged Blanca. She thought of Blanca as her first daughter, her practice daughter. “I saw her in the house, on the lawn, on the roof. Your mother was there the whole time.”

  “What do you think she wanted? Don’t ghosts always want something? To right a wrong? To change the past? To get even?”

  “I used to think ghosts wanted to be remembered, that they refused to be put into a drawer like a pair of old stockings. Maybe she was looking out for you and Sam, but I think it had a great deal to do with your father. He was seeing her on the lawn the day he died.”

  “You can’t know that,” Blanca said.

  “No, but I believe it.”

  Blanca didn’t know anyone at the gravesite except for Cynthia, who was wearing a black silk suit and a hat with a small veil. And there was Lisa; it must be her, a girl of sixteen with honey-colored hair, weeping. She was hardly recognizable; the last time Blanca had seen her half sister she’d been a child, not a leggy teenager.

  The Connecticut heat was overwhelming. In truth, Blanca wished James were there. She liked the way he felt beside her, even when he didn’t speak.

  “I wish I’d seen my mother,” Blanca said. “I don’t even remember what she looked like.”

  “You were too young to remember. I’ve come to believe that spirits don’t choose whether or not to remain. They stay because the living won’t let them go. That was why your father continued to see her.”

  “Are you saying it was my father who was holding on to her? He didn’t even want to be buried beside her.”

  They had reached the mourners and several people greeted Blanca as though they knew her, offering condolences. Perhaps she had known them once, when she was a girl, but now they were just a dizzying collection of strang-ers. Meredith pointed her in the right direction and Blanca approached her stepmother.

  “Cynthia,” she said tentatively, as though she didn’t quite expect to be recognized.

  “Oh.” Cynthia lurched forward and hugged Blanca. She’d obviously been crying for days. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “No,” Blanca agreed, shocked by how frail Cynthia seemed within their embrace. When they backed away from each other, Blanca realized how much older Cynthia appeared, even with the veil hiding her face.

  Blanca nodded at her half sister. Lisa stared at her.

  “I think I’ll go stand over with Meredith,” Blanca said.

  Cynthia didn’t seem to notice as Blanca slipped away. By now Blanca’s pale skin was blotchy. Even the pearls she wore — usually so cool and refreshing against her skin — burned like little coals. She remembered now that the pearls had been black when she first saw them, covered with ashes.

  The service began and Meredith took Blanca’s arm when Cynthia and Lisa began to sob. They were wailing, joined in the deep sound of grief. The minister spoke so softly Blanca could barely hear him. There were robins on the grass and the hum of a lawn mower somewhere far away. Her heart hurt against her ribs.

  “We will miss him,” the minister was saying. Blanca heard that part at least. “Now and forevermore.”

  There was to be a luncheon held at the house, but Blanca wasn’t ready for that yet. She needed time to catch her breath. So what if they’d be late? Let people talk.

  “Let’s just drive,” Blanca suggested.

  They rolled down the car windows and let the air whip through. Blanca unlaced her boots and took them off. She took off her stockings as well. When they stopped for gas, Meredith got out and bought two bottles of soda; they drank them in the gas station lot. A bit more time. A few more minutes before they had to face the Glass Slipper. Blanca’s bare feet were burning from the hot asphalt, but she didn’t care. At least she could feel something. By now people would begin to wonder what had happened to them.

  “I want to rip off my clothes,” Meredith said of her silk suit. “I didn’t think it would be so hot up here.”

  “I want to rip off my skin.”

  They both laughed and then Blanca started crying, all at once. She’d thought she would never cry again, but here she was, in tears.

  “Oh, Blanca,” Meredith said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m supposed to go and mourn with them and I don’t even know them. I wish Sam was here. I mean, what kind of person am I? I can’t even cry for my father.”

  “You are crying,” Meredith said.

  They got back in the car, but instead of turning left toward the house when they got off the highway, Meredith made a right and headed along the town green.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You said you wanted Sam.”

  When Sam had sneaked Blanca up onto the roof of the Glass Slipper when she was a girl he’d told her that when walking on glass, bare feet are always preferable. They don’t slip and slide as much as shoes, plus you can feel the icy cold through your feet, up inside your bones.

  Try it, Peapod, he’d said.

  But Blanca had been too afraid to unlace her sneakers.

  “I do want Sam,” she said now.

  Meredith drove to the other cemetery, the one with the big tree and the iron gates, the one Sam and Blanca had run off to the night Sam stole Cynthia’s car. He’d driven eighty miles an hour and Blanca had been terrified, but she never once told him to stop.

  This is how it feels to fly, Sam had told her.

  Meredith and Blanca circled around the cemetery, lost. Every path looked the same, ivy and hedges and long, blue shadows. And then Blanca recognized the big tree.

  “There it is!”


  They parked, then walked toward the graves. The grass was soft and cool under Blanca’s bare feet.

  “Sam climbed way up that tree when we snuck out here one night. It was pitch-dark and I couldn’t see him. I was terrified. I didn’t know how I would ever get back home if he fell and broke his neck.”

  “You would have managed,” Meredith said. “You were that sort of child. Practical. Smart.”

  Indeed, Blanca had always been self-reliant, but all her confidence had disappeared. If it had been confidence in the first place and not just a thin veneer of bravado to cover up her fear. It was cool here in the cemetery, and the grass was wet. The dampness and cold were rising up through Blanca’s feet, into her bones. It had been much easier to mourn her brother from a distance, there on the banks of the Thames. That had been paper and stones and water, not flesh and blood. What you don’t see, what you don’t know, what you don’t feel.

  “Let me take a breath.” She was so dizzy. She counted to fifty and back down to one.

  Meredith waited. There was no rush, after all. She knew what this felt like, to walk across the grass toward someone you’d lost.

  “Okay,” Blanca said after a few minutes.

  But it really wasn’t. The closer she came to the graves, the more stones there were in the ground. She wished then that she had kept her boots on. She wished she’d stayed where she’d been, with her books and her beetles and her lime tree in the garden; a place where there were no stones at all, only moss, the sort that is so soft to walk over you might think you were far above the earth and all its rocky paths, someplace in the clouds, where the temperature was cold enough to turn breath to ice crystals, even on a hot June day when the leaves were falling off the willows, curled at the edges, dry as dust.

  WILL ROTH WAS TURNING SIXTEEN. HE HAD ALREADY arranged his own birthday party. He was like that, clearheaded in the face of disaster, joyous in times of good fortune. Will was a planner, a doer, a guy his friends could depend upon. On Will’s birthday, his classmates would be treated to bowling, pizza would be ordered, and a good time would be had by all. Will had been saving money for months and had enough to pay the bill in case his mother was short on cash, but as it turned out he needn’t have bothered. His mom had come into an inheritance. Her parents had died and now Will and his mom were rich, more or less. Well, at least they weren’t poor. They had been on welfare for a year or two, and Will had lived with his grandparents when he was too young to remember while his mother was recovering from her misspent youth. Misspent except for him. Love of her life, child she couldn’t believe she was lucky enough to have. Her only family now.