When is a story worth telling?
When it's you that's lived it? That can't be enough. That's inviting the whole world to become nothing but babble.
It's so hard to put words together into any shape worth the trouble.
I want this to be more than I-did-this. I-lived-that. I-was-here.
I want it to be a story worth hearing.
"You should see this," Dog said.
He came over yesterday to lure me and Cam out to see an eclipse of the moon that night. Cam looked interested, if a little dubious.
"Isn't that at two-thirty in the morning or something?"
"Past your bedtime?" Dog asked.
"Some of us have to get up in the morning," Cam said.
Dog looked at me. I was in my usual spot -- wrapped up in everything I could find in the middle of the bed. I had on the jacket Dog left the last time he was here, and he smiled just a little when he saw it.
"It's really worth seeing," he said to me.
I shook my head. I've seen eclipses before.
"This isn't just any eclipse," Dog coaxed, as if I'd said it. "This one's going to be blood red. It'll be like having Mars up close and personal."
"I'm up for it if you are," Cam said to me. He looked at the jacket I was wearing as if he hadn't seen it before, and glanced at Dog. But he just added, "It's not like we have to travel or anything."
I don't think so, I said.
Cam looked at me again, surprised, and I felt vaguely guilty. I haven't been talking; I haven't been able to. But somehow Dog coming over like this, asking us to go out not to see a new group or a club but the night sky loosened me up. It made me feel like I was ten years old again, a bad girl sneaking out of my room in the middle of the night with that book about the stars someone gave me.
I didn't know what anything was about back then. I didn't know I was a catastrophe. I was just my family's child. Waiting until my parents were asleep, hiding in the dark under a sycamore tree too skinny to give me shelter by day, looking at my star book by the glow of a tiny flashlight I bought at the drug store for a couple of dollars, was the worst I could be accused of at that point.
It felt bad enough. It felt great. I was easy to please in the bad girl department. And they must have had even lower expectations, since they never caught me. One summer I went out almost every night, and still they never caught on.
I'd painted the lens of the flashlight pink with my mother's nail polish. The book said that a white flashlight was too glaring. You had to color it pink. They even suggested nail polish, and it wasn’t like I ever used that kind of thing. So I'd waited until my mother went to the store, and I'd used her really good polish -- the stuff she saved for weddings and funerals. Another betrayal of my parents' trust by their dastardly daughter.
"All we have to do is go outside," Dog said. "Nice of it to fall in the middle of the week like this. No crowds. All the losers with jobs will be asleep."
"Thanks," Cam said.
"Almost all of them."
"Again, much appreciated."
Dog looked at me expectantly. I shook my head again, but he didn't back off.
"You could use the air," he said.
Cold air. No, thanks.
"We'll bundle up. Bring a flask."
I don't drink, dummy.
"Maybe you should start."
Cam looked like he didn't know whose side he was on. "Fine," Dog said. "We'll bring cocoa."
"Look, if she doesn't want to -- " Cam began.
"Your government needs you," Dog talked right over him.
I gave him the look that deserved, and he smiled sardonically. "It's true," he said. "NASA wants the volunteer nerd squad looking for meteors hitting the moon. It's the kind of thing you can only spot during an eclipse."
Now Cam looked skeptical, too. "Since when are you an astronomy geek?"
Dog shrugged. "What can I say? When the universe starts acting up, I like to watch."
He smiled at me like we were alone in the room. "A blood red moon," he said. "When are you going to see that again?"
Dog came to see me today. He just came over. Cam wasn't even home. I guess he has a key. That's all right if it's only him. I don't think Cam would give one to anyone else anyway.
"Hey," he said. I like the way his voice rumbles just a little, even when he's speaking softly.
I nodded.
"I hear you've been holed up pretty tight back here," he said. "Thought you might like some company."
I smiled a little and nodded again.
He sat down at the foot of the bed. I was kind of wrapped up in the middle. I had taken everything off but the fitted sheet and just kind of fluffed it all around me. It was like a nest.
He looked at me. Dog doesn't ever seem like he's staring, even though he tends to keep a pretty long steady gaze on whoever he's with. Staring is uncomfortable. Dog's just paying attention.
"Not feeling too chatty," he said rather than asked.
I looked away.
"Cam's worried about you," he said.
I fiddled with the threadbare edge of a blanket and tried to imagine what Dog does all day. He doesn't seem like someone who has ordinary days.
He sat back and watched me for a while. I waited a bit, but Dog was obviously comfortable where he was. He wasn't going anywhere, and he'd already done the talking he was going to do for the moment.
I picked up the little notebook Cam got for me, and the pen I keep latched on to it. I don't want him to worry, I wrote.
Dog looked over at what I'd written. He cocked an eyebrow at me. "What's with the new medium?"
I can't exactly remember how to talk just now, I wrote.
Dog is about the only person in the world who could take a statement like that and just accept it for what it was: the truth. "That why you shut yourself up in here?" he asked.
I don't know, I wrote.
My hands started to shake. I put the pen and paper down quickly, but he noticed.
"Hey," he said. He got up and shrugged out of the jacket he was wearing and wrapped it around me. More of a shirt than a jacket. Heavy black corduroy. It felt warm from him.
"Come on," he said. He was still kind of holding it around me. Then he touched my face and I wondered why his fingers felt wet.
"You're in a bad way," he said.
I hate it when I don't know I'm crying. It's supposed to be about feeling bad enough to do it, and for me it doesn't seem to have anything to do with me. Like my hands shaking. I can sit and watch them and not feel a thing.
They took my body away when all that happened. It doesn't feel like mine any more.
"Okay," Dog said. His hands were on my shoulders. I could feel that, anyway. Dog knows how to make himself felt when he wants to be.
"We need to get you out of here," he said.
I shook my head. I knew he wanted to help, but out really wasn't what I was looking for.
Even when I lived with my parents, I liked my room best. The worse things got at home, the more I clung to it. Which doesn't make any sense, unless I was thinking maybe if things did get any better, I didn't want to miss it. But I just wanted to be where I felt safe.
Now that I have somewhere I really am safe, you couldn't knock me out of here with a cannon.
Cam's fine with that; I'm fine with it. Dog would just have to deal.
I didn't think I was saying anything, but maybe something came across. "Hey," he said. "I mean it. This isn't good for you, burying yourself alive back here. You're in need of a just plain good time."
I don't even know what that would be, I blurted out, and he smiled.
"Guess we'd better find out," he said.
From where I'm sitting, I can see outside a bit, though no one could see in. The curtain isn't open, but one bit of it slipped to one side in kind of a fold.
Some birds are going crazy out there. Crows.
I read somewhere that crows are very intelligent, they can talk to each other. If you listen, they don't all sound alike at all. Even the same bird can sound completely different, depending on the situation.
They really do have different word-calls.
I think I could know what they were saying if I listened in just the right way, but it's kind of nice not to know.
For some reason, it used to really bother me that once I'd learned to read -- and I don't remember ever not knowing how -- I could never see words in print as just the lines and shapes they are. They would always tell me what they were saying before I had time to think about it.
I wanted to be able to choose to read or not to read. But it wasn't up to me any more.
I like looking at words in a language I don't know. They don't tell me anything. I have to go find out about them, or ask.
At least I can keep my eyes shut. Then all the books in the world could be around me and they wouldn't say a thing.
It must be terrible not to be able to shut things out.
I knew some people like that.
People who couldn't stop hearing.
It's terrible to hear things other people can't.
I like listening to the crows and not knowing what they're shouting to one another. Their voices carry. Anyone could hear them. Lots of people probably do right now.
I'm not any different from anyone else.
My mother sobbed and hitched about it. My father was more serious and silent even then before. They were both so terribly upset by what I'd done.
And so relieved.
So glad when I did something normal like "acting out," as they called it. That's the kind of thing teenagers do all the time. So ordinary.
And so sad, of course. If you're a perfectly normal middle-class couple who've always tried to be good parents -- gone to PTA meetings, baked cookies, lived in a good neighborhood -- then you get a year's free membership to the sympathy club (renewable annually) when your kid flips out and shatters all the breakables in your bedroom and threatens to do a lot worse than that.
Especially when you respond by getting her the help she needs. Get some really good doctors, and the hell with the expense. Put her somewhere where she can't hurt herself or anyone else.
They visited me for a while, until I made it really clear that it didn't matter how many drugs they pumped into me -- I was going to scream about what liars they were until they either admitted I was right or cleared out. And the way I screamed, I could make it hurt.
Not that they ever said that was the reason they stopped coming. They would go through any amount of pain for me, their only child. (And not that they would admit that there was any pain involved in getting near me when I didn't want them to, since that might get a little too close to the truth. Psycho-child was acceptable in their reasonably enlightened and liberal circle of friends; psychic was something else.)
No, they got a doctor to agree that their presence might be having a painfully agitating impact on me.
Which is the polite way of dumping your kid at the loony bin and going back to your normal lives.
I went into my parents' bedroom. My mother was on the phone downstairs, and there was one up here next to their bed.
I waited until I could hear my mother talking before I picked up. I wanted her to be concentrating on what she was saying, rather than listening to what was coming from the other end.
Just to throw her further off the scent, I tossed a little ambient noise her way. A tree branch snapping. The distant sound of a car. A phoebe singing just outside her window.
I was thinking too much about that to hear what she was saying for a minute. Then she stopped talking and my father started.
For a minute, I thought I'd made a mistake about who she was calling. His voice sounded so different. I thought it must be because I didn't usually hear it over the phone.
But it wasn't the sound quality. It was the tone, the whole feel of it.
I realized that he hadn't been using his real voice around me for so long that I didn't know it when I heard it.
"Christ, I don't know," he said, and it was nothing like his usual hail-fellow-well-met tones. "I just don't know if I can ignore this."
"Excuse me?" My mother's voice ranging high with disbelief and anger. "Did I ask you to ignore anything?"
"I mean, I don't know if I can just dismiss what he's saying if -- "
"Our daughter," my mother said, enunciating icily, "is not a freak."
I dropped the phone as if it had just started bleeding.
I didn't know why that was the worst thing she could have said.
It should be good news, right?
I mean, wouldn't it have been pretty horrible if she'd called my father and said just the opposite? "Our daughter is a -- "
A voice outside the door.
I heard my name.
"Are you in there?"
She couldn't get in. I hadn't noticed I'd pushed the little lock on their door. Theirs was the only door in this house that had a lock, other than the front.
Why was that?
The doorknob rattled.
"Open this door!"
Go away.
Quiet for a moment. Hesitation.
"Look, I know you're in there -- "
Nobody in here but us freaks.
"Let me in!"
You don't want to come in here. You just want me out.
I looked around. My mother's room.
I think it's always that way. One room can never belong to two people. It can't look like both of them, anyway. It should have been both of theirs, but really it was hers. He was an afterthought in here.
The mirror on one wall -- large, and shaped like a harp. The small tables at either side of the bed, and the delicate writing desk near the window. She used to watch for me to come home from school, sitting in that chair like wooden lace.
Three roses on the desk: china, crystal, brass. Buds, not blossoms.
I threw the first two at the mirror to see which would break.
The glass held up pretty well. One rose smashed; the other disintegrated.
"Stop it! What are you doing? Damn it, let me in!"
I told you, nobody's in here.
"Stop saying that!"
I picked up the brass rose. It was heavier than I expected.
My mother never let me touch any of these.
I'm not saying anything. My lips aren't moving. Just ask the doctor.
I waited.
If she'd wept, I'd have wept, too, and at least we'd be together. If she'd screamed, I'd have opened the door just to make her stop. Anything to make that stop.
She was quiet.
And then, "Show me," she said in a quieter voice. Negotiating. "Let's talk about this. Open the door so I can see what you mean."
Treating me like I was crazy.
She wanted me to be crazy.
Anything but that other thing.
You only see what you want to see, so what's the point?
"We need to talk about this, sweetheart."
She hadn't called me that since I was seven. The time I was drowning. Damaged, maybe, beyond repair.
I CAN'T TALK!
And just not to have to hear her answer to that, I threw the brass rose at the mirror.
It shattered the glass quite nicely, splintering it right down the middle.
My mother drove us home from the doctor's office, coldly furious. "All these years," she said. "Here I thought we had a competent medical practitioner, and he turns out to be some -- some ideological crank.
"Where the hell did he get his medical degree, anyway?" she asked no one in particular. "Doctors 'R' Us?"
"UCLA," I said, but she didn't notice because she didn't want to know.
"Go upstairs," she said the second we got in the door. Not looking at me, walking away from me.
She didn't drink often, but I knew she was going to get something now. A glass of wine, at least. Didn't take any superpowers to figure that one out.
I was angry. What if I'd wanted something to drink, or eat? We'd been there a long time. It was almost dinnertime and I hadn't eaten since lunch, and not much of that because I'd been too clenched up about this appointment.
But I didn't say anything. I knew it wasn't any use.
I went up to my room, but didn't shut the door all the way. I sat on my bed and picked up a pillow just to have something to dig my fingers into.
The doctor believed me.
My mother didn't believe the doctor.
If he'd said what she wanted to hear -- that there was nothing going on, it was all a silly dream, nope, no mutants here -- then she'd have believed him. She wouldn't have called it belief, even. She would have called it facts. She'd have said that it wasn't just her opinion; she had scientific backup here. This guy was a doctor. A man of science. He had a degree. He had logic and evidence and facts.
Which was all exactly what she wanted, right up until they added up to something that she'd already decided wasn't true.
I lifted my head. Her voice, downstairs. She was on the phone.
Calling my father, probably. Telling him what a quack we'd been relying on all these years.
When I was little and my left lung collapsed and I thought I'd never be able to breathe again, that doctor was the one who helped me. I hadn't always enjoyed his attitude today, but at that early time there was something vastly reassuring about his looking and sounding so composed and slightly amused at any fuss about something that, after all, wasn't anything to be frightened of. I just needed a little repair job, and he'd be happy to give it to me. And I'd stopped being frightened even while I still felt like I was drowning on dry land.
I put the pillow down, wiggled my fingers to get some life back in them, and quietly pushed the door open. My mother's voice got a little more audible, still too far for me to make out words.
They thought I was listening in on them even when they weren't talking.
Might as well do a little old-fashioned eavesdropping.
We become what we're accused of.
