Skylight Confessions

  The worst was how little she remembered of her mother, only bits and pieces — red hair, like her own, but with a darker sheen; a song she sang, “Stormy Weather”; a single story she told, “Red Riding Hood.” Three years with her mother and that was all Arlyn could recall. Her own little girl was three months old, not three years. What would she possibly remember? A red shadow, a voice, a strand of pearls she played with as she nursed.

  Arlie thought carefully about what she wanted to do before her surgery. She treated it as though it were her last day on earth. She kept Sam home from school. He had been more withdrawn since his pet squirrel died, though Arlyn had tried to explain why the loss had happened. She’d told him there was a natural order to all of life, and that he had done his best to care for the creature. No one, not the president, not the man in the moon, could say who would live and who would die.

  Arlie read to Sam all morning on the day before her surgery. They were up to Magic or Not? — almost done with the Edward Eager series of Connecticut marvels. Arlie brought the baby into bed with them so she could feel how alive both her children were. Blanca’s gurgles; Sam’s warm body stretched out beside her. Sam was tall for a six-year-old; he’d be like his father, rangy, needing to duck under doorways. Arlie wanted Sam to have everything; she wanted the world for him. With so little time, she did the best she could; at lunchtime, she took the children to the ice-cream parlor on Main Street and let Sam order a Bonanza, the sundae of his dreams — four flavors of ice cream, chocolate and butterscotch sauce, lots and lots of whipped cream, red and green maraschino cherries. He ate about a third of it, then held his stomach and groaned.

  As for John, he was at work. Not as heartless as one would think: Arlyn had told him to go, said she wanted the day to be normal, otherwise she wouldn’t get through it. Or maybe he simply wasn’t a part of her perfect day. Maybe she wanted John gone for reasons she could barely admit to herself. Maybe she had to see George Snow one last time.

  Late in the afternoon, she brought the children to Cynthia’s.

  “Arlie,” Cynthia said. Her eyes filled with tears at the sight of her neighbor.

  “Can you watch them for me?” Arlie had her car keys still in her hand. It was April and everything outside was greening.

  “No,” Sam said. “Don’t leave us. We hate her.”

  “You see,” Cynthia said helplessly.

  Arlie led Sam into Cynthia’s hallway, then handed the baby to her neighbor. They might not be friends anymore, but sometimes friendship was the least of it. “I need you,” Arlie said.

  “I won’t stay in a witch’s house,” Sam told his mother.

  “He won’t.” Cynthia looked down at the baby in her arms. Blanca gazed back at her.

  “Okay, then take them home, the back door’s open. They’ll be happier over there. Let Sam watch TV and give Blanca a bottle. Heat it under hot water, then test it to make sure it’s not too hot.”

  “I’m not an idiot.” Cynthia sounded as though she might cry. “Just because I don’t have children doesn’t mean I would burn her mouth.”

  “Of course you won’t. I know that, Cynthia. I trust you.” Arlie turned to Sam. “Do what Cynthia says for the rest of the day unless it’s utterly stupid. I’m asking as a favor. I need you to.”

  Sam nodded. He had an awful breathless feeling, but he knew when his mother meant something.

  Arlie got into her car and drove to New Haven. She knew where George was living. She had looked him up in the phone book months ago. She’d called once, then had hung up before he answered. If he’d known Blanca was his, he would have come after them. It would have been a mess. Now, everything was a mess anyway. Arlie drove too fast. She felt hot all over. Around her neck, the pearls George had left for her were feverish, colored with a rusty tinge. She parked across from the three-story house where he rented an apartment. She guessed it was the top floor. She wished she could see the mailboxes and find his name printed there, but she stayed in the car. Good thing; just then his truck pulled into the driveway. He was working in a pet store. George and his brother no longer spoke; they’d had a terrible argument after they’d been fired by the Moodys. Frankly, George avoided most people, preferring the quiet camaraderie of parakeets and goldfish. He got out of his truck, then went around the back for a backpack and a lunchbox. His collie, Ricky, jumped out. The dog looked older, but George looked the same, just far away. It had been only a year since Arlyn had seen him, so how could it feel like forever? He was whistling as he walked from the driveway, up to the steps to the porch. Then he was gone, the collie at his heels, the door slamming.

  She didn’t get out and tell him. She almost did, but she had always been afraid of stones, and the path to his house was made of them, small round bits of gravel. It was too late. It was too awful and unfair to come to him now. Arlyn was holding on to the steering wheel so tightly her fingers turned white. Lights went on in the third-floor apartment. If she’d gone with him when he asked her to leave John, they would have had this year together. Now there was only pain and sorrow to share. She didn’t want Blanca fought over, pulled apart, even at this cost. At least she’d seen him. Another perfect moment in her perfect day.

  Arlie drove home slowly, trying not to think of anything but the road and her children at home. She’d been granted more than most people. Real love, after all, was worth the price you paid, however briefly it might last. There was one glitch in the day, a horrible one: a pre-op consultation at the hospital, scheduled late so that John might accompany her. The sky was turning dark blue. April blue. Inside the hospital it was terribly bright. Arlie was the last patient of the day. Did they save the best or the worst for last? That’s what Arlyn wanted to know. The doctor was young. He told her to call him Harry, but she couldn’t do that; she called him Dr. Lewis. If he wanted her to call him by his first name the prognosis must be bad. John was there with her and she was grateful; his presence stopped her from breaking down. She knew John didn’t like bad news, difficult women, tragedy. Could it be that she had never cried in front of him? Not even on that day in New Haven when she came to his dorm so convinced of the future; she’d only wept after he was gone. She wasn’t about to start now.

  Dr. Lewis would see the extent of the cancer when he operated; there would be two other doctors, residents, assisting in the surgery, and the thought of a team of people inside her made Arlie shudder. It took a while before she actually understood they planned to cut off her breast. She stopped thinking after that, didn’t even consider further complications. She cleared her mind. Time had stopped. She had insisted that it do so and it had. The drive home was silent and lasted a decade. She thanked Cynthia, who had made dinner for the family. After dinner, John walked Cynthia home. She put her arms around him and he fell into her. Cynthia was there for him, the way she’d promised to be. She took him home, then upstairs to her bedroom; her love wasn’t a crime, it was a gift, that’s the way Cynthia saw it, and that was the way John Moody received it.

  Alone in the Glass Slipper, Arlie put the baby to sleep, then washed up. Every dish was an eternity, but that was fine. She wanted it all to last. She didn’t mind John’s absence; she liked the stillness. That night in Sam’s room, the story Arlie whispered took a hundred years to tell. It was Sam’s favorite story, her father’s story about the flying people in Connecticut. “If I’m gone,” she told him afterward, “that’s where I’ll be. Right above you, flying. I’ll never really leave you.”

  Sam had the bones of his squirrel in a cardboard shoebox in the back of his closet. He knew what happened after death.

  “There’s no such people,” he said.

  “Yes, there are.”

  “Prove it,” Sam said.

  So Arlyn did something crazy. She took Sam up to the roof. She led him through the attic to the door that opened onto a flat glass space. This was the place where George Snow had been standing when she first spied him. Clouds were rushing by the moon. The trees moved with the wind. Arl
yn could feel those people her father had told her about all around her. They were the ones who never left you, no matter what.

  “See them?” Arlyn’s voice sounded strange, small and lost.

  All Sam saw was the huge universe and the darkening sky. Blue, black, indigo; the horizon was a line so shimmery it made him blink. He realized that his mother’s eyes were closed. He knew they were in a dangerous place. Something rustled in the trees. Something beautiful.

  “Yes, I do,” Sam said.

  Arlyn laughed and sounded like herself again. She’d opened her eyes. She had already added this to her instants in time as the very best moment of all. A breathless, gorgeous, dark night. She felt so oddly free, untethered to earth. But even if she could have flown away, she would never have left her son. One more second was worth everything. They went down the steps into the attic, back to Sam’s bedroom. Arlie tucked in his blankets and wished him a good night’s sleep. She waited there beside him until he was dreaming, until his breath was even and deep; then she stayed a while longer, right there in the chair, until he opened his eyes in the morning. “I knew you’d still be here,” Sam said, and for once in his life he had some small hope that not everything in the world was a lie.

  JOHN MOODY WAS A FIXER, AND A BUILDER, AND A PLANNER; in times of sorrow he did what he knew best. He designed a project in order to have something on which he could concentrate. A ridiculous endeavor, people in town said, a huge pool set behind the Glass Slipper, a beautiful thing as John conceived it, rimmed by slate with an infinity edge that led the water into a smaller pool below on the hillside. The hole had already been dug by the backhoes by the time Arlyn came home from the hospital. It was twelve feet in the deep end and the digging seemed endless, through rock and through clay. Clods of red mud and shards of shale littered the lawn. The noise could be deafening at times, and Arlie kept her windows closed and the shades drawn. It was June and she was dying while she listened to the bulldozers and the cement mixers. It had been the rainiest spring on record and now everything was so green the leaves of the lilacs and the rows of boxwoods looked black.

  The tumor reached under her chest wall and was entwined through her ribs. Her surgeon could not get it all. Her bones had turned to lace. She called her doctor Harry now; it was that bad. The oncologists put her on a schedule of radiation and chemo, but after a month she was so desperately ill they took her off. She was not an experiment, only a dying woman, one who soon enough had lost her red hair. She had braided it before the chemo began, then cut it off, ten inches long. The rest fell out on her pillow and in the shower and as she walked along the lane, slowly, with Cynthia supporting her when she grew tired. “Hold me up,” she told Cynthia. “I’m depending on you.”

  “I’m not that strong,” Cynthia said once.

  “Oh, yes you are,” Arlyn said. “That’s what made me want to be friends with you in the first place.”

  Arlyn kept the braid of hair in a memory box she was making for her children, stored alongside photographs of the family, pictures Sam had drawn for her, Blanca’s plastic name bracelet from the hospital. When the time came, Arlie would add her pearls. After she’d gone through radiation, the poison from inside her skin had soaked into the pearls; they’d turned black, like pearls from Tahiti, exact opposites of what they should be.

  Twice she had seen John Moody walk through the hedges at dusk, headed toward Cynthia’s house. He thought she wouldn’t know because he was now sleeping in the den, but she knew. She rarely left her room now so John must have felt safe to seek comfort next door. The last walk Arlie had taken was the one when she collapsed; Cynthia had stood in the street screaming for help and an oil truck pulled over. The driver was a heavyset man who had carried Arlie home.

  “You must be one of those flying men from Connecticut,” Arlie had told him.

  His wings were probably huge.

  “In my truck I surely do fly.” The oil man’s own mother had recently died. Although he was a tough, no-bullshit guy, he didn’t seem that way now. “Just don’t tell the police and get me arrested.”

  “I won’t,” Arlie assured him.

  After that, John had hired a nurse whose name was Jasmine Carter. Jasmine gave Arlie her medicines and helped her bathe and dress. Jasmine took care of Arlie, and Diana Moody came up to take care of the children. Arlie still made sure to hold her daughter close at least once a day; every night she read to Sam, and when she couldn’t see the words anymore, he read to her.

  “Do you hate me without my hair?” she asked Sam one night. It used to be that they would read in his room and he’d be the one in bed. Now it was reversed, but they never mentioned that.

  “I like you better this way,” Sam said. “You’re like a baby bird.”

  “Chirp chirp,” Arlyn said.

  Sometimes, when her hands were shaking, Arlie needed help in order to eat. She felt like a bird. She tried to hide her decline from Sam, but it wasn’t easy. Arlyn didn’t care what anyone said about Sam. He knew things other children did not. Certainly, he knew what was happening now. He held a glass of water so she could sip from a straw. When she was done, he put the glass on a woven coaster so it wouldn’t leave a ring on the night table.

  “Sometime soon you’re going to take my pearls and put them in a special treasure box that I have,” Arlie said. “They’re for your sister.”

  “What do I get?” Sam wanted to know.

  “You had me all to yourself for six years,” Arlie said. “Maybe we’ll get to seven.”

  “Or eight or nine or ten or a thousand.”

  It felt like a thousand years already. It was as though she had used up all her time, but was still hanging on. She could not stand the noise outside, the men shouting as they poured cement, the clicking as the tiles were put in, aquamarine-colored tiles from Italy; John had ordered them straight from the factory outside Florence, that’s how good his Italian was now. He had sat beside Arlie’s bed and showed her the catalogs of tiles. Sky blue, azure, turquoise, midnight. Turchese. Cobalto. Azzurro di cielo. Azzurro di mezzanotte. She’d fallen asleep in the middle of the conversation, and in the end John chose the tiles he liked best.

  George Snow didn’t know about Arlie until one afternoon when he happened to meet up with his brother at a bar in New Haven. George was having a late lunch, a cheeseburger and a beer. He wanted to be left alone, but Steven came to sit beside him. Right away, as though they hadn’t stopped talking to each other months ago, Steve spoke of the man who was responsible for their failed business and their nonexistent relationship, though he’d sworn he’d never say the name aloud.

  “That bastard Moody is putting in the swimming pool to end all swimming pools. And with her in the middle of dying.”

  George Snow would forever after remember that he had just put down his glass when he heard the news. His brother went on speaking, but George didn’t hear a word. He heard only about her.

  “Are you talking about Arlyn?”

  Steve realized what he’d blundered into. “She’s sick, man. I thought you knew. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was.”

  George threw some money on the bar and went for the door. His brother called, and when George kept on going, Steven followed him into the parking lot.

  “Seriously, George, she’s not your wife and it’s not your business. They went ahead and had another kid, didn’t they?”

  “When was that?” George said, stunned.

  “This past winter. I thought you knew.”

  George got in his truck and took off. He had a panicky feeling inside his chest. He could be angry at his brother all he wanted, but George knew he had only himself to blame for not knowing. He’d moved to New Haven so he wouldn’t run into Arlie; he’d been a coward in the face of her rejection. He’d figured if she had changed her mind, she would have contacted him. He’d figured she made the choice to stay with John. Now everything he’d been so sure of was evaporating.

  George Snow was driving so fast littl
e stones flew up and hit against his windshield. When he got to the street where she lived his panic worsened. There were four trucks parked in the driveway, so he pulled onto the grass. The lawn was soft from all the rain in the spring and his tires sank in deeply, but George didn’t give a damn. As an ex–window washer he noticed that the windows were in bad shape, streaky and matted with leaves and pollen.

  As he sat in his parked truck, not knowing what to do next, a woman came out of the house. George recognized her as the mother-in-law. She had Sam in tow — it was Friday, music lessons — and in the mother-in-law’s arms, the baby. A real, live baby. George Snow watched them get into a car and pull away. He was dizzy and overheated; he felt as though he’d just woken from a dream in which he lived in a third-floor apartment with an old collie and worked in a pet shop. But now he was awake. He left his truck and went up the drive to knock on the door. When no one answered, he rang the bell; he just kept his hand on it until it sounded like church bells. A woman George didn’t recognize opened the door. “Stop that,” she said. “Have you no consideration?”

  George Snow walked past the strange woman, into the hallway. It was so dim inside, as though he’d wandered into a dark wood.

  “Stop right there.” The woman was a nurse. Jasmine Carter. “You’d better do what I say or I’m calling the police.”

  “I’m going to see Arlyn.”

  The house used to seem perfect to George; he knew it so well from looking through the windows. But it wasn’t the way he remembered it. Standing in the hall, he couldn’t see outside through the glass.

  “Oh, no you’re not,” Jasmine said. “I’m in charge of Arlyn and I’ll tell you what you’ll do. Do you have any idea of what’s going on here?”

  “She’d want to see me.”