Half of my heart is here with me,
the other half’s in the hills.
I’m not ashamed of where I’m from.
I carry them in me –
my mountains, my people,
those places and faces
and powerful memories.
See, you can take the girl out,
but she’ll come home
whenever that strong heart wills.
They arrive
and darken the skies.
With a boom
and a crack,
like sprinters on a track,
they test their mettle for
the measure of a moment.
And in the end, they are
like victory – so very short,
nearly fleeting.
But never, ever sweet.
Somewhere by the blue gray sea,
just after the pink sun
peeks over the horizon,
when the water sparkles like diamonds
and the sand turns golden,
that’s our place.
(Let’s go back.)
I see Jesse’s face in my dreams at night, still and pale, and young. She’s always young, even after all these years. I can’t call it a nightmare. She doesn’t scare me. She doesn’t move and she doesn’t talk. Her eyes are closed, heavy lids and dark lashes, her mouth a thin line. It’s not the dead we should be afraid of.
Jesse was my cousin. She was all quiet moments and pretty things. When we were up to our knees in muddy creek water, hands digging in the muck for crawdads and river rocks, she’d be up on the bank, making flower crowns woven so tight and so clean, every flower perfect, you’d think they were plastic. I wore torn denim overalls and dirty sneakers. Jesse wore white linen, soft cotton in pastel shades. She loved checkers and cherry colas, always in a tall glass with big ice cubes. Her blonde hair lay braided and neat, trimmed bangs framing her freckled forehead. She offered to braid my hair once, and to help me comb out the tangles. I told her it wouldn’t be worth the time.
She was three or four years younger than me. If she’d grown up, we’d be in the same spot – mothers and wives and almost old women, both of us. But when I was eleven, nearly a grown-up, she was a baby. I often wonder what kind of teenager she would have been, what kind of mother, what kind of person. I try not to think of her often, but it’s gotten harder now. See, place is a powerful thing, and this is Jesse’s house.
I’ll tell you a story. Over the years, the details have gotten fuzzy, and most of the people who remembered it well are gone now. I feel like someone should tell it and remember it, though, even if it’s done poorly, because I don’t know if there are even any pictures of Jesse left.
On her last day, we’d gone out into the woods. The weather wouldn’t let up. It hadn’t rained for days, but the dewy air stuck to our arms and faces. The heat wouldn’t break, even at night. Nothing to do in that kind of weather but live with it. So the neighbor kids had strung up a rope swing into one of the old oak trees in the clearing near the river, under its shade and out of the brightest sunlight.
There were five of us that day. Me, my brother, Bill and Audrey from down the road, and Jesse. We headed out after lunch time, our faces and hands stained pink and sticky from the watermelon we’d snuck out of the refrigerator. Except for Jesse’s. She’d decided to save her watermelon for later. Our plan was to cool off in the river, and then to spend some time on the swing, maybe see who could get the highest and then jump the farthest.
“Audrey’s scared of heights,” Bill said.
“I am not,” Audrey yelled, and crossed her arms and stomped on ahead.
“She is so,” Bill told me. “She won’t even climb up the ladder in the barn.”
I wasn’t really listening or not listening. Bill and Audrey argued a lot, and it played in my head like the music on a radio station. Constant background noise. Jesse trailed along behind us, picking the dandelions from along the path and blowing their fluff out around her. She giggled, and I smiled. I turned around at one point and threaded a stem behind her ear.
“It’s itchy,” she said, but she smiled too.
The river was low and warm when we got there. It almost stood still.
“There are mosquitoes everywhere,” I said. “Let’s just go back.”
But the group decided we’d come all this way and we should at least get some time in on the rope swing. So we did, and took turns.
“It’s too high,” Jesse told me. “I don’t want to.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Next year.”
We headed back at about 3:00, a little more dirty and tired for the time, but pretty happy and mostly distracted from the still sweltering summer day. Jesse trailed along behind again, clean as a whistle, but with a wrinkle in her brow and downcast eyes.
“What’s wrong,” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nah,” I said. “I can tell it’s something.”
“You’ll laugh at me.”
“I would never!”
Now, this wasn’t strictly true. I’d laughed at Jesse plenty. She was an odd kid. But I could tell something was eating at her, and I wanted her to tell me. I especially wanted her to tell me before she told her mom, in case what was troubling her meant trouble for us.
So I added, “You can tell me, promise.”
And she said, “I want to go back and play on the swing.”
“I thought you were scared,” I said.
“I was, but that was dumb. Now I can’t even try.”
“We’ll go back tomorrow,” I told her. “We’ll go just us.”
She grinned a little then, and I thought it was fine. I held her hand most of the way home, and only let it go when Audrey tripped over a rock in the road and needed help to get up. I don’t know how Jesse slipped away from us. But she did. And when we all walked through the kitchen door, Jesse wasn’t with us. I’ve never felt so terrible for anything in my life as I still feel for letting her disappear like that.
“Jesse still outside?” My aunt sat at the table with my mother, shelling sweet peas.
“She was right behind us,” I said. And I thought it was true.
But by 5:00, Jesse still wasn’t back. And people started to worry, and then, before dinner, they went out to look.
They found her in the swing, all tangled up in the rope. She looked like she’d been there a long time. I’ll spare you the details. I don’t like to think of them.
They brought her into our back room, and laid her out on the little twin bed. If you didn’t know, you’d have thought she was sleeping. She looked peaceful there in the dark. I hope she was.
Or, I suppose, I hope she is.
I don’t think she ever left.
Everyone else did, though, and now it’s just me and my husband in this old house. My brother left for the Army. Bill and Audrey moved away. My parents died, and Jesse’s mother, my aunt Margie, she could never come into the house again.
“She’s still in there,” she’d say. “I know she’s still in there.”
I thought she was just sad. Sad and a little crazy. They say she went a little crazy after Jesse died. Now that I’ve had children, I don’t blame her. I’d go crazy, too. I’ve had a hard enough time knowing they’ve moved away to start families of their own. The house is too quiet without them.
Except when it’s not.
Every once in a while, I’ll hear a giggle. Sometimes a creak on the floor, or a rustle on the bed. Sometimes, I’ll hear a door open and close, slow and quiet. Jesse was always so quiet. And when that happens, I’ll say to my husband: “Jesse’s in the back room.”
Whether he believes me or not, he’s never said.
************
Thank you for reading! This is the seventh of twelve stories I’ll write as part of my 2021 Short Story Challenge. Twelve months, twelve stories, and the theme this year is: Home.
Here are the first five stories, if you’d like to read them:
And if you want to join in the fun, here’s more information. I hope you do! But just reading is good, too, and I’m glad you’re here!
The next story will be posted at the end of August.
Breathe it in –
saltwater and sea air –
and feel the sunshine
on your skin,
almost too warm.
Be
(just be)
without a care
for a moment,
a day,
a tiny fraction of
your total time.
Give yourself this –
this memory,
this place.
For now, right now,
the rest of the world
can wait.
A secret thing,
three little words
I need to hear
from you.
Maybe I’m selfish
to want them,
to feel like I have
something to lose.
So small, and fleeting,
those three words.
Out of your mouth and
into the ether they’ll go,
as if they never existed
at all.
But I’ll know.
“It was a beautiful wedding, my friend,”
I say, as I work to remove bobby pins.
Her hair falls around my hands
in tendrils, finally flowing and free,
and I add, “I’m glad to be here.”
A weekend a year in the making,
give or take, and three different locations,
and that’s all I can think to say.
I’m good with words at the wrong moments,
it seems. But I know this one
I’ll remember, regardless,
as the end of the happy (happiest) day
when my friend married her best friend
by the water in Maryland.
The hush of the day.
The slow and
steady step of night,
dawdling along
like a happy child.
The sleepy, changing
slant of light
on a pastel painted sky.
Try as you might,
in this world high on
hurry and worry,
you just can’t rush
a summer sunset.
No more,
no more.
It is gone
and lost to us now –
the how and the where and the why.
All that’s left
there in the remains of
a million Saturdays
is a listless, wondering haze
of woulds and coulds and shoulds:
the regrets of age.
And the rage,
the rage,
in flashes and waves
that the end of days
makes equal ash and bone
of both the fool and the sage.
The game was Two Truths and a Lie. The players, my best friend, Michelle, and me. The stakes: one bag of tropical-flavored Skittles.
We’d settled into the old back yard treehouse at a little after 10:00, just after peak lightning bug hour, and just before the moon crested the treetops.
It was after midnight now. We were down two bottles of Coke, one slice of the coconut cake we’d made together earlier in the day, and one shoe, which had fallen just after we’d climbed up, and which we were too lazy to retrieve. I’d never minded going barefoot.
Between bites of barbecue chips, I said, “You know I know everything about you, right? Like, this will not be a challenge.”
“Then you know I am full of surprises,” she answered.
That was true.
“You also know that I am allergic to bananas, and that I am secretly a pop star living a double life because I am super talented but also crave normalcy.”
“Too easy,” I laughed. “You’re allergic to strawberries.”
“So you acknowledge my superstardom, then?” She held her chin high, and then she laughed, too.
“That, my friend, is the plot of Hannah Montana, which we are much too old for, and I’m claiming all the Skittles for myself, since you don’t want to play fair.”
We sat in silence after that, listening to the rhythmic sounds of a summer night. Crickets, little frogs, and somewhere in the distance, revving engines and a police siren.
“That’ll be the kids racing down Main Street again,” Michelle said. “Jeez, how many of them are there?”
My mother had told us last night that racing had only recently become a problem in town, but that there also seemed to be an endless supply of foolhardy teenagers with an irrational need to win a stupid game with no actual prizes. Except maybe an arrest record.
“Can’t be that many. There aren’t that many kids in this town.”
That was also true.
“When did we get old?”
“You shut your mouth,” Michelle snorted, and punched the side of my arm. “I have never looked better.”
“Yes, the gray really brings out your eyes,” I told her.
“And the laugh lines make you look like Emma Thompson,” she told me, “but better.”
“Well, that’s good, because Botox terrifies me.”
“And I’m way too lazy for hair dye.”
Thirty-five years we’d been friends. Since elementary school, when Michelle had decided she liked me because of the unicorn on my shirt. I’d liked her because she had pink, hand-drawn scribbles on her tennis shoes. Our friendship had developed from there, mostly against the backdrop of the treehouse. It was our refuge, our secret base, and occasionally, where we’d stashed the beer and cigarettes and other sneaky teenager things. I was certain if we looked now, we’d probably find something tucked away, waiting for us.
Michelle’s father was a doctor, and her parents had put her through an ugly, acrimonious divorce when we were in high school. It was around that time she’d started spending most of her nights at my house, and we’d gone from best friends to near sisters.
“I feel safe here,” she’d told me, one night around Christmas when we were seventeen, standing in the bathroom taking off our makeup. “This feels like what life should be.”
“This house?” I’d asked.
“No, dummy. This friendship.”
We’d slept that night in the treehouse, under a heavy blanket my parents had brought home from Greece before I was born. Michelle stole that blanket a year later, when we left for college.
“Your mom would want me to have it,” she’d said.
And she was probably right, because my mother hadn’t even mentioned it was missing.
As we’d gotten older, we’d left town, we’d left boyfriends, she’d left college early to paint and I’d left a string of unfulfilling jobs, but we’d never left each other.
“You’re stuck with me and my wrinkles,” I told her, back in the moment. “And I’m stuck with heartburn.” I rubbed four fingers flat against my chest. I could almost feel the acid bubbling. “God, why did we think this was a good idea?”
Michelle pulled a couple of Tums out of her pocket and handed them to me.
“Do you just carry those with you?”
“Yep,” she said. “You don’t?”
“I will now,” I said.
“We thought this was a good idea,” she said, “because tomorrow you turn forty-five, which means you’re practically fifty, which means you’re 75% on your way to death, which means you should eat the damn cake.”
“I think you did your math wrong,” I said.
“I still think you should eat the cake.”
“Noted,” I said. “Consider it done. Tomorrow. I’m not crawling down that ladder in the dark.”
We made a point of celebrating our birthdays together, mine in summer and Michelle’s in October. We hadn’t spent a birthday apart in years. Last year, for Michelle’s, we’d gone to Vegas. This year, for mine, I wanted something a little more simple.
“Fiji,” she’d complained. “We could have gone to Fiji, or anywhere else.”
“I know,” I’d replied, “but it’ll be nice to see my parents and just relax. Low-key doesn’t mean bad.”
“You just wait,” she’d warned me. “You’ll wish you’d done something bigger.”
“We can go to Fiji next year,” I’d said. “Or when I turn fifty. Or when you turn fifty.”
“I claim Fiji, then” she’d said.
And knowing Michelle, she was already making plans.
“I broke my arm in third grade,” I said, as I popped open the Skittles and poured a generous helping into my palm. “And I don’t really like people most of the time.”
“I think both of those things are true,” Michelle said. “Or did you actually break you arm in second grade?”
“Thanks for coming,” I said to her, “even though it’s boring.”
“Well, thanks for existing,” she answered, “even though you probably have better things to do.”
I looked around the treehouse, at our blanket nest and the pile of wrappers and bottles we were in the process of creating, just like old times, and at Michelle.
“Nah,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything better than this, right now.”
“That,” Michelle said, “is actually, surprisingly, very true.”
************
Thank you for reading! This is the sixth of twelve stories I’ll write as part of my 2021 Short Story Challenge. Twelve months, twelve stories, and the theme this year is: Home.
Here are the first five stories, if you’d like to read them:
And if you want to join in the fun, here’s more information. I hope you do! But just reading is good, too, and I’m glad you’re here!
The next story will be posted at the end of July.
A Virginia Writer's Diary 