I really need to be hit over the head and pointed in the right direction with this. So be merciless!!
______________
Two years passed. I never saw her or heard from her. I was in college and tasting the world on my tongue. It was surprisingly sour, but sometimes so sweet I would cringe.
I worked and went to class. My hood pulled over my head, I didn’t look at people as I scattered across campus. The friends I made were just like my high school friends. People I understood, people who smiled down at me and knew I had been where they had been too. Every one of these individuals was compared alongside Sherry, the bizarre and ruthless ideal in my head. Were they prettier? Smarter? Dumber? Wilder? Crazier?
I should have known she couldn’t leave me alone. Her memory wouldn’t, why would the rest of her?
I was sleeping in my dorm room on the night she returned; my cellphone began to vibrate, moving across the desktop beside my bed, teetering toward the edge.
I slapped my hand on it, stopping it’s downward demise.
Her voice was laughing as I opened my phone.
“Lace? Lace?” And I knew who it was right away and slid off my bed.
She begged me to come meet up with her. That she was in my city and she could have sworn this is where I had went off to after high school and now that she was sure I just had to come spend some time with her. She was staying in a motel downtown and that she had met up with some people but none of these people were me.
“You.” she crooned on the other end of the phone.
I slid on my coat and tied up my hair. It was raining outside and thunder moaned in the distance, beyond the power lines. I called a taxi and got whisked away.
She met me in front of a bar and grill, wearing stilettos and a little black skirt. She paid for flavored tobacco in a hookah and we tasted plum for an hour at the restaurant, smoking and talking.
She looked much older. My two years had been her five. Her skin was a pale, olive tone and the circles under her eyes bloomed. Her hair was no longer red but a bright yellow that shone like chemicals and daffodils. It only made her skin look even paler.
The ribs in her chest cast shadows, and her collar bones strained like tight wire. She wore a loose top that hung off her, showing cleavage, showing thin shoulders that rose and fell with her conversations.
She told me all about her exploits. All of the guys.
“And he was a drummer in this ska band. The crappiest crap you’ll ever hear at a crappy venue. But he knew what he was doing in other areas.” She inhaled from the hookah, blowing smoke into the night. She smiled happily, through all the thin hollows of her face. “That one only lasted about two months. He was always stealing my shit. Some guys! You know? Oh! And then there was this real dud…”
She smiled as she spoke and I realized that she was supremely happy. Or possibly she could fake it better than anyone. But her eyes grinned with her lips and I felt myself believing that this was true, that she somehow had everything she wanted, with all of the men, with all of the shadows across her face.
She asked me about my men. I had never had a serious relationship so told her of all the male faces that passed through the beds, the concerts, the classes, the parties. All of them distant; I simply didn’t know what to do with them outside of a small room.
I stared at her as we headed back to the motel. She walked like she was pursued by adorers, she beamed at me, and I could see she was exactly the same: manic for a good time. Her physical self was weathered, but she acted the same.
“I love you, Lacey, dear.” she said to me at the front of the motel lobby. “You are my rock. Everyone around me changes toward me, but you always stand by me and never tell me to stop.”
This didn’t make me feel good, and she saw my skin go ashen. She pulled a remedy from her purse. She brandished her tools. We placed the little round tablets on our tongue as we called for a taxi, the rain making our makeup run.
The remedy was quick.
Sherry held my hand and we ran down the sidewalks of the city. She took off her shoes and threw them in a vent, splashing barefoot down the rows of bright lights. I fell all across her and she fell across me; we held each other up and people in the doorways of bars and clubs called to us. Sometimes we went to them.
We never went back to her motel room. We fell asleep in someone else’s house.
Before we went to sleep, Sherry kissed my forehead and whispered things in my ear, speaking quickly, her voice so slurred I could hardly pick it all up.
“I have only so many pieces left. I understand completely what it means to be human. I know myself and can look into the eyes of those around me and see through all the crap. I can see better than most.”
“What do you see in me?” I asked.
She turned away from me, staring into the darkness like she saw thousands of answers in the particles there, rather than any in me.
“Love never claims, it ever gives.” was all she replied. Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked too thin, still pretty, too pretty, still manically happy.
*
I never truly saw her again.
But I saw her all the time. Sherry in the stars, in the wine. In the music, in the stories, in the jokes; in the heat, in the calendar, in my head.
Some people never leave us alone, even when it’s been years since seeing them.
*
Five years since that night, seven years since high school: I was holding a little pink baby that was my life now. She had no daddy but her mommy would always be there. There was never anything more sure for me, when I held my baby and felt her frailty, bundled up in my arms.
I worked in an office. Every morning I woke up early, fed my baby, dropped her off at her grammy’s house, worked nine hours, and then came back to my baby. Bottle in the fridge, linoleum tiles, flower and butterfly decorations.
My life.
I came home from work one day and heard the phone ringing as I walked in the door. I didn’t look toward it as I slapped my hand over it and picked it up.
“Hello?” My mind was not on the phone call, but on cleaning that needed to be done, on toys I needed to get from my mom’s house, on dinner.
“Lacey.” a gravelly voice responded. It wasn’t familiar, and my mind snapped to attention. I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Ana. Remember me? High school…” Her thick voice sounded familiar then, and my lips formed an O. I didn’t say anything and she continued. “I found your number from your mom. She still lives in the same place, so I thought…”
“What is it?” I asked. The call was too out of the blue, too strange, and there was no friendliness in me.
“Lacey, um…” Ana’s jazzy voice sounded old. She exhaled, hesitated, then seemed to acquire some confidence.
“Sheryl’s dead.” She paused. “I just thought I should tell you. I mean, you probably wouldn’t have found out otherwise. At least not for a while.”
Dead? What did that mean exactly, what were the details? What was it to be in that state of being again?
Lack of breath, rotting corpse, not Sherry.
The air fizzled and my heart sank to my feet. I grasped the edge of my kitchen counter and let my eyes dart around the room. What was I looking for? Memories of her? Settled in the kitchen ware?
“Lacey…?” Ana’s voice drawled. I gasped, uncertain why, such a late reaction. My hand crept up my wrist and I pinched my skin. The moment was certainly too surreal, these things simply did not interrupt my day anymore. And Ana was a shadow in my past, not a voice on the phone.
“How?” I croaked out, turning around frantically, pushing dirty dishes into the sink. They made a racket, so I turned from them and closed an address book that was open on the table.
“She killed herself.” Ana breathed out slowly, then continued on in a slow, patronizing voice. Somewhere, in someone’s head, there was an “of course”. “She was found in a motel room up out west with her hair shaved off and her wrists cut.” She paused again. “I don’t know about the funeral. I don’t know who would pay for it anyway. You’ll need to find out from someone else.”
“Mmm.” I murmured, sounding pained. Why? I shook my head. I accidentally knocked a fork to the floor. I picked it up and began cleaning it viciously.
Ana was quiet on the other line. I dropped the fork into the sink.
Off in her cozy room, my baby started crying.
“I have to go.” I said quickly, dropping the phone to the kitchen counter, shutting it off, hanging up on this long-ago girl who I couldn’t picture as a woman.
I walked quickly toward the baby’s room.
Her little cries were slowing down, little burping yelps. I picked her up, held her to my chest, touched her silk wisps of hair, kissed her fat red cheeks.
Dead.
My baby was only whimpering now, a coo here and there.
Sherry, Sherry. Dead Sherry, torn to pieces Sherry.
I couldn’t mourn her. I wouldn’t cry or fall to pieces. I wouldn’t go to see what was being done to her, what she had done to herself.
I circled the crib, walking slowly, patting my life on the back and murmuring a song in her little ear.
I tucked Sherry away, carefully scooped up all the memories that came bursting out in torrents, and placed them back in their compartment. I put all the thoughts back to where they would always be.
Always in the back of my mind. Always to haunt me. Always to be carried with me, so I could see her in everything. As a human being, helpless to remember this person, this individual, who had come into my life and led me down a road. Who I had let lead me; I never called out, “Stop! Let me go!”. I only ever crept along.
And now here I was, with my little girl, with my memories, with my ghosts.
I kissed baby curls.
I would know better now. Without regrets, with things I should regret, I would carry it all with me and hopefully one day my baby may know better too.
I held something precious in my hands now with lessons in my head, because I had lived, because I had learned.
I sang a lullaby, trying to remember the words
______
Blech.
