I stood over my workbench, pieces lined in neat rows, running my fingers over each of them. I waited for that electric pull, that itch to pick one up and turn it over in my palm. I tried to look at my sculpture, the one I’d been slaving over for months, and not just see a mess. But that’s hard to do when you feel like one yourself.
My emotions on the day before a new trial always existed on this manic spectrum between reserved hope and total indifference. There was a part of me that believed it would work as if that belief was its own serum and if I just let it fill every inch of me, maybe it would tell my body to relent. To let the cure work. To be a miracle for once. But there was another part of me that knew my body would never be a miracle, that I would never get better, and sometimes that ache filled me too, snuffing out everything else.
That’s where I was sinking to as I gripped the sketches I’d done, pages ripping as I wadded them in my fist. I thought about how it was my self-righteous defiance that had always sustained me in the past. I’m sick but I’ll get better. They said I can’t do it but I’ll prove them wrong. Mantras that suddenly felt like lies. The kind that settle at the base of your stomach and make life feel even heavier.
Because the truth was I was tired. I was tired of fighting but more importantly I was tired of losing, of being disappointed. And as I stared at my sculpture, hand hovering over a broken spotlight like a finger poised over a trigger, I was trying to figure out how to keep it from turning into another disappointment.
I heard my uncle’s truck pull into the driveway, heavy footsteps in the grass, him clearing his throat as he lifted the door to the garage.
“How’s it coming?” he asked.
I tossed the broken spotlight in the trash. “It’s not.”
“Maybe you need to take a break.”
“Maybe,” I said, even though I was already searching the table for another piece.
“You thinking about tomorrow?” he asked.
“Trying not to.”
“Nervous?”
“Kind of.”
He was quiet. He knew I didn’t mean the needles or that warm chemical smell of the dying. I’d spent enough time in hospitals to know what to expect and I’d been poked and pricked so often I didn’t even feel it anymore. He knew I was talking about the trial, about whether or not it would work.
“You’ve got time,” he said, as if that was some kind of reassurance. “If this one doesn’t work you can keep trying.”
“And keep being disappointed?”
I expected a repeat of his last lecture. You’re not weak. This isn’t you. But he didn’t say any of it. He didn’t say anything for a long time and I thought maybe he was finally giving me permission not just to be weak but to be honest about it.
But then he said, “I’m sorry.”
And it was more than I’m sorry that you have to do this, that you’re sick, that you’re scared. I could see it in those dark shadows on his face, in those lines that hadn’t been there before I was born. It was an, I’m sorry you’re going to be disappointed again. I’m sorry he left you.
“I know,” I said.
He gripped my shoulder, squeezed, and gave me a kiss on the head. “It’ll be okay.”
Those three little words were so generically beautiful that I felt raw. I tucked them away—the sound of his voice, his grip on me—like all of the other things he’d said to me growing up. Truths and secrets, lessons and white lies, bedtime stories and cautionary tales. Things my dad should have said to me. But all he’d ever said was goodbye.
I watched my uncle climb the steps into the house and I stood there waiting for his words to sink in but all I could think about was that aluminum trailer on FM 685, about the sound of footsteps on the gravel drive; me running to the window to see if it was my dad. If he’d come back. If he’d come back for me. But it was always my grandfather or my aunt, my uncle or the postman or some guy looking for work, out-of-towners needing directions. But never him. I never saw him.
My mom and I finally left the trailer. We waited there for six months and then one day my grandfather came with his work truck, he and my uncle loading the bed with mattresses, bags of clothes, my obnoxious collection of stuffed animals, and my mom’s china. Only the necessities. We moved in with my grandparents while my mom went back to school. I only really saw her on the weekends and it made her seem like this romantic rarity. Like someone who probably had more important things to do than spend time with her eight-year-old daughter—more mysterious things, more exciting. But she did it anyway and every Saturday felt like my birthday.
My dad showed up three years later. I was eleven. We had our own apartment by then but somehow he’d found us. I was watching TV when someone knocked on the door. I shouldn’t have answered it. When I stood on my toes, finding his bulbous face inside the peephole, I shouldn’t have opened the door.
But I did, pausing to run a hand over my hair, to rub the crust out of my eyes, to waste ten seconds on the idea that maybe it was me. That maybe I was the reason he’d left and that maybe this was my second chance, not his. So I reached for the knob, trying to look like my mom, like the pieces of her he’d fallen in love with, and then I cracked the door open.
He stayed in town for two months. Two months of trying to get my mom to let him take me out to lunch, to let him buy me a new bike, to let him pretend like the last three years hadn’t happened. He was persistent. He seemed changed and my mom caved. Four weeks later he was gone again.
Every once in a while I’d get a birthday card in the mail, a spontaneous phone call from an out of state payphone, his voice crackling before it finally cut out. When we moved again I thought I saw him idling in his truck across the street one night. He never came to the door.
It had been eight months since I’d seen my dad, though I knew how he’d aged; every nuance of his face. I tried not to look at my uncle and see my dad’s shadow but I did and it hurt.
That’s why I spent every waking hour fighting the temporary. That’s why I liked sculptures. My mom took me to see one of the outdoor exhibits at the museum when I was ten and the first piece I ever saw was called Infinity.
It was fifteen feet long, a rushing river curled out of thin sheets of gold and copper and iron. The description written by the author said: The plight of mankind—stalling infinity—and in that one piece, she’d done it. She’d stopped time, folding it into the metal, trapping it there in something equally as infinite. Something strong. Something that would last.
I wanted to make something that would last. I liked knowing that there were pieces of me—strong, unyielding, permanent pieces that weren’t sick or weak or afraid. They were perfectly intact even when I wasn’t and when I disappeared for good, slipping into one last long sleep, those pieces of me would still be there. Somewhere.
I held one of the license plates over the flame, blowing out the embers and then molding it with a gloved hand. Some of the fingertips were fraying, my skin absorbing the heat. But I didn’t flinch.
I clipped the metal, twisting each individual strip, and then I slipped off my gloves. I smoothed out the edges with a flint stone and knocked it against my thigh to shake off the ashes. Then I held the flame under each strip until they drooped like the petals on a lily.
A shadow caught in the sheen of the piece I was working on. I looked down at the metal flower and saw a drop of my blood. I checked my hands, palms up, and I saw it trickling down from the tip of my index finger.
I set the piece down on my worktable and stuck the wound in my mouth. But it didn’t taste like blood and when I stared down at my finger again there was suddenly no hole. I turned my hands over, searching for a wound but there was nothing.
Something scraped across the garage floor and I jumped, a sharp edge cutting into my skin. I looked down and I was still holding the flower, the tip of one of the petals biting into my index finger. I held it up, watched the blood trickle down from the very same spot it had bubbled from just seconds before, and
then my grandmother’s shadow was pouring over me.
“You’re just like your grandfather,” she said. “Gloves on the table instead of on your hands.”
I watched my blood trickle onto the metal.
“You deaf, girl?”
“Sorry.”
I stood but my legs felt weak.
“Since when are you afraid of a little blood?” She reached for my hand, twisting my finger in a dishtowel until I could feel my pulse.
It swelled in my ears. What just…?
“Bryn.”
“What?”
My grandmother pulled me over to one of the shelves. “Hand me those pruning sheers.”
She was still gripping my finger but I managed to reach them. I handed them to her and then she was dragging me into the yard. She bent over her herbs, checking their leaves, plucking a few free before sticking them in her mouth.
“Mint.” She pressed the leaf between my lips. “Chew.”
I did.
She dragged me all around the backyard, each of us sidestepping over metal cages full of green tomatoes and ducking under potted plants hanging from the trees. She clipped some more rosemary and stuffed it into the pocket of her overalls.
“Oh no.” She stomped over to the side of the house. “This damned drought.”
She ripped a rose bulb from the stem, petals crumbling in her hand. I’d given her the seeds for her birthday last year. Pink. Her favorite. Now they were black.
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Dead.” She let out a long breath.
But they looked more than dead. They looked rotten. They looked…like the flowers in my nightmares, black vines scaling me until I couldn’t breathe.
My grandmother pulled a piece of rosemary from her pocket, chewed on it.
“Grandma, what’s the rosemary for?”
She looked at me, eyes strange as if I should already know the answer. Then she said, “Bad dreams.”
“But I don’t have bad dreams anymore, remember?” I tried to make my voice light. “I sleep fine.”
“Oh, Bryn.” She looked at me for a long time, expectantly, almost anxious, and then she said, “Bad dreams don’t just come when you’re sleeping.”
She was still holding my hand, still looking at me as if there was more she wanted to say or more she was hoping to hear. But I just tried to smile, shaking off whatever in her voice had felt like some kind of accusation.
She let out a faint sigh and then she stuffed a piece of rosemary in my pocket before finally letting go of my hand and walking inside.
I stared at the roses, at the dark veins carving across each dry petal. The breeze shook a few free and suddenly I heard my mom’s voice, then my uncle’s, and I leaned against the side of the house, matching his lips with the stilted voice coming through the screen.
“Give her something to look forward to,” he said.
My mom’s words were thin, trapped in a sigh, and I couldn’t make them out.
“I’ll pay for her school,” he said. “You know you don’t have to worry about the money.”
“She can’t.”
He shook his head. “That kid can do anything she wants. She always does.”
“But—”
“Give her this. Don’t give her your fear. Give her something to look forward to.”
I thought my mom had started to cry but I was still clinging to my uncle’s words. Anything. Always. Maybe he was right. And maybe my mom would give me her blessing, maybe she wouldn’t. But maybe I could give myself something too—permission to keep trying. Even when it felt like it was all for nothing. Even if trying was all I ever did, I shouldn’t stop.
I made my way back to the garage and looked at my sculpture—raw and twisted—and I realized that it would only be another disappointment if I abandoned it for good. I saw my sketch sputtering, wind kicking it out into the grass, and I chased after it, uncurling it in my palm, pressing it down until I could see the lines again and then I got back to work.
Chapter 12