12. light, air, and intention

I suppose you're right, Child. Not empty. Not really. From where I am now, everyone looks like a hologram--a construct of light, air, and intention--even Karen. Especially Karen. I wish you would stop coming here. All these years, you keep coming here as if he'll change his mind and be someone to you, to us. Go, Dolo. I'll stay. This business has never been finished.

Karen pulled a loose wave of brown hair off her forehead and tucked it behind her ear. The dog wagged its tail and followed her up the steps and into the house.

You look like shit, Karen. You do. Close the front door behind you. She did. Like that. It won't keep me out. I interrupted your family every time the television flickered. And here I am again. Not so easy to get rid of, am I? My girl and Garrison's is at the end of your block, and I am tapping away at you like an annoying habit.

Karen opened a drawer in the entryway console, upended bills and wrinkled post-it notes, dug past pens and pencils. Spare keys jingled. "Lillith," she said as she replaced the drawer and its junk and continued to the kitchen where the sink was full of bubbles losing their foam.

Where is he while you stand here at the sink washing dishes with your quivering hands? And why do they quiver? On any given night so many years ago, it could have been she who found you lingering in front of our house. Oh, I knew. Jesus God, woman, you were obsessed.

Brown crust clung to the sides of the pot, and Karen scrubbed. The kitchen smelled of cajun spices.

Fine, I understand. You had your family. I get it. A mother must protect. I may not have been much of one, but I understand this well. Still, it appears you were not successful. Nothing makes you feel more of a failure than a pig-headed child. This Lillith of yours, good luck. What did she take?

"Cigarettes."

"Excuse me?" Garrison wore gym shorts and a Cubs t-shirt with half-moon stains under each armpit. His bare feet made naked thuds on the hardwood as he cleared the doorway.

"She took your cigarettes."

"Who took cigarettes?" Jars on the refrigerator door rattled as he opened it. He bent in half and stared into the light.

Karen scrubbed at the pot until her forearm pulsed. "Lillith took your cigarettes--the ones you think no one knows you hide in the back of the hall console."

Garrison pulled a bottle of Snapple from the back of the refrigerator and closed the door. The cap popped when he twisted it open. He drank loudly.

I hate the way your Adam's apple slides up and down when you drink, asshole.

Garrison breathed heavily with one hand on his hip then tipped the bottle back, and guzzled again, each swallow exploding noise bubbles in the kitchen's atmosphere.

"The girl is back," said Karen. She turned on the water and watched it push soap off the pot and into the sink drain.

Garrison replaced the cap on his Snapple.

"Have you sent a check this month?"

Garrison opened the refrigerator.

Karen turned off the water, resting her lower back against the sink. "Have you?" The water seeped through her pants and cooled her skin.

"She doesn't cash them," he answered.

"It doesn't matter." Karen left the pot on the counter and dried her hands on a towel. She found the checkbook in a drawer full of miscellany, filled the spaces, and left it open on the kitchen island. "Sign it. I'll mail it tomorrow."


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To hear previous songs, click HERE.

Found (a song for Dolores & Karen)

Found

Words & Music by Patresa Hartman, December 2012

Found

I whisper Sorry
through a closed front door.
I feel so sorry,
but I don't know what for.
Do you?

Everything I knew
is in your closed right hand.
All I thought I knew
has turned to air and sand.

Here comes the tide rolling in with a furious sound.
Washes this house of bones away.
Now I'm lost as you are found.
You're found.
Found.

You say you're angry.
A growl becomes a roar.
You feel so angry,
but you don't know what for.
I do.

You  knew everything
but you chose not to say.
You saw everything,
and you pushed it away.

Now here comes the tide rolling in with a furious sound.
Washes your house of fire away.
And you're lost as I am found.
I'm found.
Found.

Secrets spill into my boat made of glass.
I'm sinking deep, and it's rising fast.

I've lost home and my boat made of glass.
I'm treading water, but it's rising fast.

Here comes the tide rolling in with a furious sound.
Washes this heart of hurt away.
Now I'm lost as you are found.
You're found.
Found.

You can read chapters 1-11 RIGHT HERE.

11. She had lost her map.

Richard had spent the entire two hours sitting in his car. Dolores knew this, but did not confess when she accepted his $20, agreed to come again in two nights, and left through the front door. She walked her bike, did not ride. It wasn't far, never had been, which was part of the rub.

In four blocks, the houses turned to brick and grew into four and five bedroom homes with fenced in yards and wrought iron gates. The trees grew wise with years and touched limbs over quiet streets. Quirky foreign cars sat clean inside well organized garages. Garrison's was the second from the end of the block on the north side of the street. The lights were on and a golden retriever gnawed on a stick under the porch swing.

A pretty blonde teenage girl slammed through the front door, startling the dog who jumped to his feet and barked. The girl stretched one arm above her head and raised her middle finger, holding it high as she charged down the driveway and stuck a key into the driver's side door of a blue Rav4.

Dolores stopped ten feet short of the girl and bent to feign tying her shoe.

"Lilith!" Garrison's wife stormed down the porch steps and half way down the drive in the girl's wake. Karen was barefoot; it was dark; she was not as pretty as Dolores remembered. Too empty to be pretty. "Lilith!" she hissed again. But it was too late. The girl named Lilith--her baby sister who did not know--started the engine, hit the gas, and left.

Dolores made adjustments to her bicycle seat, felt trapped.

Karen stood with her hands on her hips and was silent. The dog barked again and sniffed at the ground, retrieved the stick. The television was on in the house next door, and Will & Grace bickered through an open window followed by a studio laugh track.

"I see you," Karen said.

The houses, the trees, the sidewalks and waiting cars, all held their breaths as each syllable ripped through a still canvas. "I see you," Karen repeated, calmly.

Dolores re-tightened the bolt under the seat she had loosened and stood, making great effort to appear casual. She opened her mouth to say, "Hey," or "How's it going?" or "Cool. Nice night for a ride," but the words were superglued and all she could do was swallow and stare back. Her mother had been wrong: The woman was not empty. Karen was tired, had been wrung out and then filled with something Dolores could not slow her brain enough to name.

Karen did not move, did not adjust her stance, shift weight from one leg to another, blink, or lick her lips. It was Changing-of-the-Guard, and Dolores was the tourist. She had lost her map.

"Sorry." Dolores pushed the word through dry, barely open lips. She scrambled onto her bike and pedaled to the end of the block and turned left. She did not stop until Todd's wet nose greeted her inside her own front door. Her mother had been wrong about other things, too. Karen knew, and this changed everything. Dolores would have to go.

To catch up on previous chapters, CLICK HERE.

10. That Patrick

Patrick. Christ. I'd forgotten about him. You know, dear, he did that to himself. They all do. I am who I am, my girl, and they are who they are. That's all any of us ever are; sometimes we just explode when we're mixed.

It had been much too hot to wear shorts in a car with vinyl seats for eight hours. When they arrived in the Black Hills, the backs of her mother's thighs were graffitied with red welts. This Patrick, this new boyfriend, pressed against her mother and moved them slowly, clumsily, through the Avenue of Flags at a zigzag. Dolores traced one welt with her finger. Her mother's skin felt slick and slimy. "Stop it," her mother said, and batted away her hand.

Concrete pillars held flags that made sounds like bed sheets from a clothes line when the wind kicked through. Blues and reds, whites and golds, stripes and stars and squiggles and circles: They waved to her. She stopped to stare, her head tipped back, her mouth open. The universe said Hello. "Hi," she said back and smiled.

Photo © 2008 by Brandon Cox
www.angelslanding.com

She returned her attention to the walkway; her mother and This Patrick were replaced with the legs and waistbands of strangers. She rotated in a circle, careful not to inch forward or backward. "Mom?" she called. This had happened before with That Leland in Kansas City on The Plaza. What had her mother said to there then? If you're lost, stay put. Stay put. She sat, her legs, criss-cross, in the middle of the cement.

The flags above her continued to wave, no longer hello. They summoned one another, rallied. Child down! she heard them cry as the wind kicked through. Has anyone seen the mother? they yelled. Maybe one from Israel scanned the horizon. She'd heard of that--Israel--on the news.

"Sweetheart, are you okay?" a man said. His knees were locked and hairy; he bent over with his hands still in his pockets. His breath smelled like maple syrup. A woman in a plaid skirt clutched her purse behind him. She was impatient.

"I'm okay," she told him.

ETA on the mother? Anyone? Maybe it was Brazil. She'd seen a postcard from That Samuel. The people lounged by a beach and were beautiful.

"My mom is coming."

And she arrived, breathless, and with her hair out of place. "Jesus, Dolores. You've got to keep up," she said, and scooped her up by the elbow.

Patrick scowled. "I told you it wasn't a good idea to bring her."

Her mother brushed dirt from the seat of Dolores's shorts. "You know what's a good idea, Pat? You go sit in the goddamn car if you don't like it." She held Dolores's hand and pulled them forward, no zigzag, always ahead, straight line, don't dawdle. "Sorry, Dolo. He won't last. You and me the rest of the day, okay?"

The wind kicked through, and the flags cheered for you, my girl. Remember that?

To catch up on previous chapters, CLICK HERE.

9. across a gaping sea

Phillip went to bed at 8:15. He wore footy pajamas with cartoon elephants playing tennis and soccer and basketball across sleeves and legs and behinds and bellies. He slept easily and did not stir when Dolores crawled into the corner of the room next to the closet and gently tugged the carpet free. It gave and folded back toward her, revealing scuffed hardwood and tack strips.

Dolores flattened her hand and dug under the carpet until her fingertips felt paper edge. In three tries, the ragged flooring let loose its grip, and she pulled free the dirty greeting card envelope. Inside, a birthday card, a princess in a castle, a fairy tale window framing endless green hills and blue sky and fluffy broccoli trees. "Love, Garrison-Dad" and a photograph.

He was handsome, and his wife was pretty (…but too empty to be useful, her mother had said, before tossing the photo back to her across the kitchen table. Why would he send you this? Asshole.). The children--one just an infant--her siblings who did not know it, posed smiling on a bench under a tree with their parents, arms around one another. It was like an ethnographic study of a foreign culture, somewhere across a gaping sea where the seasons fell in reverse. Dolores wanted to understand this way of being in the world--as family, connected--but could not. Fifteen years had passed since this card and this photograph had arrived in the mail, and Dolores felt the same lopsided ache that spread through her chest then.

She folded the card and the photograph into a stiff and awkward rectangle, and slid it into her pocket along with the magnet from their trip to Mount Rushmore with a man named Patrick who had pined openly for her mother until his pride left him a ragged and discombobulated mess of bones in clothes. Her mother could do this to a man.

Once home, she would undo her treasures into a dresser drawer and pretend for a moment that resolution was possible.

8. messy piles of noise.

He was spending too much time in the car. If this were to continue, he would remember to pack granola bars and graphing paper in the glove compartment.

Richard did not like the chatter of radio and left it off, listening only to the throaty bass of his college-aged neighbor's stereo rattling window panes and mashing indistinguishable melody lines into messy piles of noise.

"You could go to the store," he said aloud. But he didn't need anything, and it was not like him to shop without aim or spend without purpose. It also was not like him to exercise indiscretion and invite strange young women to his home to watch his son. He would remain parked and ready should it all turn south--fires, intruders, disallowed parties. Harm to Phillip would reflect unfavorably on him. A judge in a black robe would shake her head while reviewing his file of psychiatric diagnoses and wonder how it had ever been allowed to pass that he should be granted charge of a child without supervision.

Thirty-two minutes had passed. The woman who lived kitty-corner from him backed out of her driveway in a red Grand Prix and waved in her rearview mirror before pulling ahead. Richard was unsure if she was waving at him behind her or at something he did not see before her, and so he did not wave back.

7. 6218 Oak Hill Drive

She didn't need directions, and when she arrived, nothing had changed. She turned left down the drive and mentally ticked past 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 tan garages before the sidewalk branched into the front lawn of 6218 Oak Hill Drive. The familiarity of it sucked the air from her lungs.

Phillip sat waiting on the front step and smiled broadly. She wished she had brought Todd.

The walls were white inside the foyer, and in the living room, too, and beyond, Dolores guessed. Her mother would never have conceded to white. It lacked courage, she said. Her mother was here in spite of it; her mother was everywhere.

Phillip led her through the living room, past the kitchen, and into the guest room. It was an office, and Richard sat at a desk too bare to be useful, Dolores thought.

"You've arrived on time," Richard said.

Dolores noted 6:57 on the digital clock atop the filing cabinet beneath the window.

"Did you have any trouble finding the place?" he asked her.

"No," she said.

They had no idle, scripted chatter before Richard pulled a manila file folder out of the top right drawer and handed it to Dolores. "Some instructions," he said.

A detailed schedule of Phillip's eating, toileting, dressing, reading, and bedtime routines, was typed and bulleted in 12-point font. "This is very thorough," she told him. Jesus.

Dolores followed Richard into the kitchen where he affixed the schedule to the unadorned refrigerator using one familiar, Mount Rushmore magnet. Richard pointed out his cell phone number, starred, italicized, and left-justified at the bottom of the page, pulled his keys from a delicate hook nailed into the wall beside the door to the garage, and left.

Dolores heard the mechanical grind of the garage door opening and the car start and shift into gear. Behind her, Phillip ran a small plastic car across the tiled floor. Dolores pulled the magnet from the refrigerator and turned it over. "D, D, P '92" it said, in black marker. She dropped the magnet into her pocket and left the schedule on the counter.

"Wanna go upstairs?" she asked.

Phillip drove his car straight up the front of the cabinet door under the sink, a perfect 90-degree angle from the floor, then flew it like an airplane to Dolores, where he tucked it into her pocket with the magnet. He took her hand. Together, they climbed the carpeted stairs and then turned into the bedroom just to the right of the landing: Phillip's room.

Dolores took in the narrow, twin-sized bed with the simple navy-blue comforter and plaid pillows, fastidiously made. Phillip ran to the opposite end of the room to a black trunk centered perfectly under the window Dolores knew overlooked the front lawn and drive. He flipped open the lid and began to pull out stuffed animals and colorful, plastic odds and ends with movable parts.

"This used to be my room," she said, joining him.

Through the open curtains, she saw Richard sitting in his car, parked on the other side of the street.