Because of the Sun Read online

  Shelly leads me down the hall. I pass blank white walls that reveal nothing, two other rooms that look large and empty except for miscellaneous boxes, a chair or two. None of the rooms look like they belong to anyone.

  I wonder if she has a husband or boyfriend who will come home and I’ll have to meet him. I look for pictures but there are none.

  As if reading my thoughts, Shelly says, “It’s just me here, so you don’t have to worry about sharing a bathroom or anything like that. And I work a lot, so…” She lets the end of her sentence drop off before opening the door to a room at the end of the hall.

  I notice it’s the one farthest from what seems to be the master bedroom on the opposite side of the hall.

  “Here you go,” she says. I step past her and into the room, struggling with my suitcase and duffel bag and the backpack strapped on to my back. She doesn’t offer to help. She barely looks at me.

  The room has only a bed and a dresser. Both look new, and the room is filled with the smell of new furniture. A mirror on the dresser reflects me standing there with my bags. I know it’s me, but it doesn’t look like me. I’m surprised when I see myself. I’d forgotten what I look like.

  “I have the graveyard shift. Starts at three a.m. Make yourself at home. Use the bathroom if you want to shower or whatever. There’s stuff in the fridge if you’re hungry.” She looks at me, then looks away. “I…I think I’m going to try to get a couple hours’ sleep before I have to go. Any questions?”

  Who are you?

  Who was she?

  Why did she lie?

  I keep my lips closed. My voice silent. But Shelly waits for an answer.

  She used to do that, too. Just wait.

  “I’m good,” I say.

  Shelly nods and turns to head out. In the doorway she looks back at me.

  “You look like her,” she says quickly. “Your hair is lighter, but your eyebrows…your cheeks…” She looks at the floor suddenly, like she can’t stand the sight of me. And I wonder if she, too, will hate me. I don’t say anything. I stand perfectly still.

  “Well, anyway…”

  I nod. And she turns and goes down the hall, to what I had already guessed was her bedroom, and closes the door. I take my backpack off, let it fall to the floor, and throw myself on the bed. The covers are scratchy.

  She’s wrong. I look nothing like her. My mom’s hair was blond, a full ten shades lighter than my own light brown. And suddenly, the thought that child services got it wrong enters my mind and bubbles with possibility. Maybe this woman isn’t my aunt, or maybe my mother wasn’t even my mother. Maybe my real mother is somewhere safe and sound, not mauled by a bear, and there is still a chance for me to meet her, to be happy. But just as quickly, the bubbling comes back down to a simmer and stops.

  Because if this woman isn’t my aunt, then Mom was right. I had no one. No one but her.

  I think about showering. I think about eating. Just thinking about both is enough.

  I close my eyes and fall into darkness and dream I am climbing walls and clinging to the beams of a ceiling in a house that is mine but not mine. A house with secret rooms and extra halls that get narrower and narrower. A house with doors made of broken wood, kept closed with broken locks.

  Be careful of the bear, I tell no one.

  He stalks around below, pretending he doesn’t know where I am. But he does. And it’s only a matter of time before he looks up and spots me clutching the beams.

  I hear the sound of doors opening and closing, of footsteps and car doors slamming. Then the roar of an engine and the crumbling of gravel under rolling tires.

  I let the night swallow me up again.

  I dream of planes. Of a bear on a plane.

  I try to remember the directions for the yellow vest. I look for the exit. I search for the airplane safety card, The Stranger, anything that might help, but find nothing. And the woman with sour breath is shoving my chocolates in her mouth while everyone else is reading.

  No one is worried. They shouldn’t be.

  It’s me he’s coming for, after all.

  I pull the yellow vest over my head and close my eyes.

  Play dead! I remind myself.

  I wake to a loud brightness and a house silent except for the whir of the ceiling fan blowing hot air over me. I lie there and stare at the fan and let everything sink in. It always takes a moment, especially with my head full of heat, to remember where I am, that this is not just another time we moved.

  I’m in New Mexico.

  I live here now.

  With an aunt named Shelly.

  The air conditioner is still broken.

  Shelly’s Post-it note flashes in my head. That’s what she wrote and left on the kitchen counter for me—The air conditioner is broken—a few days after I got here. I notice she prefers to leave notes rather than talk to me. Quick scrawls in black marker.

  Went to work.

  Went to grocery store.

  There’s food in the fridge. Help yourself to anything.

  Be back later.

  I sit up and listen for her. My head feels heavy.

  It feels like I’m alone, but I get up and check for her anyway. Every room is empty.

  So I do those things I always do, things that are automatic and feel normal. Like brush my teeth. Wash my face. Get dressed. Make toast and pour juice.

  And then I do things that don’t feel normal but somehow have become my normal. Like stare at toast for an hour and at a clock until the numbers don’t make sense. And search Shelly’s house.

  I walk slowly through each room looking for I don’t know what. There are three bedrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen, and a basement. All of them large and barely furnished. There are no pictures on the walls.

  I tell myself I’m not like Helen, I’m not interested in taking or collecting anything as I go in Shelly’s closet and look through her clothes. I just want to know who she is. But all I see are lots of jeans and T-shirts, which are mostly plain but a few have simple graphics. I think it’s strange that she hangs up her T-shirts. I look at each one and realize she must be wearing the one with the faded peace sign on it today. I wonder if she knows I come in here, if she can sense that I’ve touched her clothes. I wonder if she notices the hangers are not quite spaced how they were. I only sort of worry what she might think if she catches me.

  I open her dresser drawers and look through her stuff, which is mostly more clothing. There’s a Bible in her nightstand. I open it and look at the words but don’t read them. Not really. In her bathroom, I spray her perfume and smell her shampoo.

  I also go through drawers in other rooms, in the whole house. Bills and junk mail. I read the fine print. I find pennies and dimes, safety pins. I go down the stairs, into the basement. It’s cooler down here. I notice some boxes in one corner, and I think about building a maze or something since I know they’re empty, but I don’t.

  There’s nothing. No trace of anything. Each search turns up nothing. But I keep looking even though I don’t know what I’m looking for.

  When I’m done inside, I go outside because there’s nothing else to do. I sit on the porch and wait for time to pass.

  I used to tell Mom I was in all kinds of after-school clubs so I’d have an excuse not to go home. I roamed everywhere, looking to be anywhere but there. I spent whole days and nights roaming.

  She didn’t know a fucking thing about me.

  Not a thing.

  Nothing.

  I stare at the vast brown nothingness of the land.

  I wait for darkness.

  Some nights I dream of my mother and some nights there is nothing but black and I don’t know if I slept or not. I wake up to the same brightness and whirring fan every morning. Sometimes Shelly is home and sometimes she’s not. Sometimes the heat makes me feel like I’ve slept for days, which I don’t mind. I hope whole months have gone by, and then I realize it wouldn’t matter if they did. Every day is the same.

  Some
times Shelly asks me if I want to go to the grocery store with her. Or into town to Walmart if I need anything. But I shake my head, tell her I’m fine, because I don’t want to be in the truck with her. And I know she doesn’t really want to go anywhere with me.

  Sometimes I get up and she’s coming home from work and she’ll sleep most of the day and then I’ll go to bed early.

  Sometimes she tends these little trees and plants she has growing in buckets in the front yard and she doesn’t know I’m watching her from my window.

  Sometimes she sits on the porch and when she comes inside I go sit on the porch until she goes to her bedroom.

  We say as little to each other as possible.

  I can’t keep track of the days here. Each one seems longer than the one before and they form one long ribbon of time that keeps unfolding.

  I don’t know what to do with myself. I just keep waiting. Waiting for something to happen.

  This morning I wake up to a cool room. The sheets aren’t sticking to me. My head doesn’t feel like it will burst from the heat. The same silence hangs in the air. When I go to the kitchen, Shelly’s at the table, reading the paper, coffee mug in hand. She looks severe.

  “Air conditioner is fixed,” she mumbles. “Finally.”

  I don’t want to sit down with her, but it seems strange to immediately turn around and go back to my room. I stand in the doorway before deciding to go to the fridge.

  Open it, look in, close it, say you’re going to take a shower. I see the black marker on the counter and get the urge to write I’m going to take a shower on the table in front of her.

  As I close the fridge and head to the hallway, Shelly clears her throat.

  “Hold on,” she says. “Sit here a moment.”

  She watches as I come closer and take a seat not quite across from her. We sit there a long time, she mentions some stuff in the newspaper and I nod, say the appropriate ohs that we’ve come to rely on, but today she’s getting mad. I can tell; I can sense anger in a person before they can.

  “Do you, you know, talk?” she asks finally. She puts the paper down, fills the air with the sound of rustling as she folds and refolds it incorrectly before giving up. “I mean, you’ve been here, what, three weeks now and you’ve hardly strung more than two words together at once. Do you actually speak?”

  Three weeks?

  Three weeks?

  How can I have been here three weeks?

  She’s saying something else, but my mind is stuck.

  Three weeks? I want to ask her. Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?

  A part of me, I think, wants to scream.

  Shelly looks at me strangely. But I don’t say anything, so she slaps the table and sighs.

  “You see? God! What have I gotten myself into?” she says, obviously to herself. But I’m right here. I can hear what she’s saying, how she’s saying it, the tone of her voice, and she doesn’t even care. “I mean, what the hell have I gotten myself into?”

  My face burns with shame and anger and I suddenly remember this feeling. How I used to feel like this all the time with Mom.

  I look at Shelly and wonder just how much like Mom she is.

  Somewhere in all those forgotten days, I remember watching the way she moves, the way she’s never here, the way she seems to want nothing to do with me.

  I want her to know I’ve noticed.

  I almost laugh at myself. I almost laugh out loud, at her. When or what part of me had ever thought she would be different?

  I stare at the yellow table and wait. I wait for her to tell me how terrible I am, how ungrateful, how I messed up her life.

  I could have not had you, Dani! Did you ever think of that? I could’ve gotten rid of you.

  How many times had I heard that before? How many times had I been reminded that she had me and so I was to quietly and without question accept all of her shit?

  You shouldn’t have! I told her. Now there are two of us who are miserable.

  I wait for Shelly to say the same things to me.

  I could have not brought you here, Dani! You could’ve stayed wherever you were with some screwy neighbor!

  I brace myself. I remind myself words are dull arrows. I close my eyes.

  Shelly gets up from the table and stands a long time at the sink. If this were a movie, she’d cry. But she takes a deep breath and says, “I’ll make you some toast and eggs.” She goes to the fridge, takes out the butter and a carton of eggs, then grabs a pan and puts it on the stove.

  I know she wanted to slam that pan. I waited for the loud clatter, but she set it down carefully. I watch as she controls each move, as she turns on the gas stove, sending a blue flame flaring up, and then turns it down. Shelly moves like Ruby Falls and I can’t stop looking at her even though I want to. There are a thousand little similarities, even among the differences. The way she rubs her arm. The faces she makes. Her profile. Her wrists. The tilt of her head. It’s easy to pretend it’s her. If I blur my eyes just a little…it is her. I make myself focus.

  She cracks two little suns into a pan. I hear them sizzle. I watch the way she stands over the stove, lost in her own thoughts.

  She scoops the eggs onto a plate, grabs the toast, and sets the plate in front of me.

  The eggs look alarmed. Are you really going to eat us?

  I cut into the white and take a small bite. Shelly sits down, watches me. I stare at the blurry little suns on my plate.

  “I’m sorry…,” she says. I shake my head. I don’t want her apologies. I don’t need anyone’s apologies. Apologies are a joke, an excuse for people to explode and spew hate and then pretend no one got burned.

  “I want to go home,” I say. It’s a ridiculous thing to say and I don’t know why I say it. As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I realize the impossibility. I don’t have a home, and home was never a place I wanted to go to anyway.

  Shelly’s eyes are on me. I can feel them. I stuff the eggs and toast down my throat and then go to my room. I hope she won’t come in. I hope she’ll just leave me alone.

  I choke back the eggs. I sit on the bed and remind myself not to feel.

  I think about Helen’s stuffy room. I think about the oppressive heat that filled Shelly’s house. How it dulled my thoughts. Maybe it had made me delirious.

  I look at the chair next to my bed and grab The Stranger. My airline ticket falls out from between the pages and I look at the date. June 1.

  I open the book to the inside back cover. I mark twenty-one little slashes.

  Three weeks.

  I try to count backward from there, trying to pinpoint the days I left behind.

  What day did you die? I try to push the thought away, but my mind keeps going. I hadn’t been at school. Neighbors had been home. The night before, I’d gotten home late because it was Friday and I went everywhere but home. So that day must have been a Saturday.

  Was it a Saturday?

  I mark more slashes, trying to figure out how many days—weeks?—passed before I came here.

  But I lose track quickly and then there are too many slashes and I don’t know which days they stand for, so my hand just keeps making more until the whole back cover is full. And then I look at them and wonder which one, which one exactly, marked the day.

  The day the bear came for you.

  Shelly’s truck roars and I’m alone. I don’t know if she has left for a few hours or if she left for work. And I don’t care.

  I close the book.

  That night, I feel like something is calling me, but I don’t know what it is or where I’m supposed to go. I don’t even know if it’s a voice, but when I close my eyes, I see my mother looking at me softly. And I can’t stand it.

  Go away, I tell her.

  Her face falls, sad, not annoyed, the way she usually looked when we got upset at each other. But I want her to look annoyed. I want her to look at me the way she used to, like she couldn’t stand me.

  Leave me alone, I tell he
r. Go away!

  Why was she calling me anyway? How could she possibly ask anything of me?

  She closes her eyes and disappears, and I’m left with just a fading outline of her face, the word wait on my tongue.

  I wake up, my pillow damp with sweat. I’m afraid to go back to sleep, to see her again, so I don’t. I wait for morning.

  Maybe it’s The Stranger calling me.

  It’s a relief when I see the darkness in the room start to disappear. Except that means it’s another day. The ceiling fan comes into view and stays still. The room gets brighter and brighter. I take a deep breath, reach over, and pick up the book from the chair. Black and blue, like a bruise, with a small yellow square around a bright yellow dot and a blurry image of a man. That’s him, I suppose. The Stranger.

  If I can read this, I’ll be fine, I tell myself.

  I can handle it.

  I suddenly see myself at the kitchen table of one of the places where we lived. Mom’s boyfriend’s lighter is in my hand. I remember rolling the small metal gear, the tiny grooves hurting after so many tries, and finally seeing the flame flicker to life. I sat there, running my finger back and forth through the yellow because it didn’t hurt. It was magic. And I dipped down to the blue flame and it hurt, but I knew I could handle it.

  I stole that lighter and did that same trick until my fingers were callused and not even the blue flame hurt.

  The book is a blue flame.

  It’s salt in my wounds.

  I open to the first page.

  But reading the first few lines makes my brain white-hot and things explode in my head. It leaves me dizzy and dazed. I put the book down, take a deep breath, and try again.

  If I get through it, I’ll survive. I’ll be thick and callused. The pain will calcify and turn to stone. The words will be a hot blue flame that burns my memories and turns them to dark plumes that disappear into the air.

  I focus and refocus on the print, but the words keep moving and black dots fill the page. So I stare out the window, at the bright sun, the promise of numbing heat. Maybe that’s what is calling me.

  That’s what will burn everything away.