Rebecca
“Was she sick?”
“No,” My mother rested on the edge of the coffee table zipping her duffel across from our dangling feet, plucked out of bed and uninformed on the kitchen sofa. Her motion undammed the acrid morning sunshine and it poured over her head when she shifted to pull on her cowboy boots. She leant forward and the light rumbled through the coarse top layers of her half pony-tail, falling on our faces in noxious, unavoidable puddles.
“Was there an accident?”
“She was murdered.” My mother turned to face us, “your father will be here. I’m going to take care of Patsy.”
Behind her the window was a sheet of light, trembling to break loose and drown us if she didn’t stay exactly still.
“It’s already the 28th, Steve,” she addressed my father in his revealing terry robe and we tried not to look there either. “The Christmas lights.” He nodded with an avuncular lift of his mug. My father had never molested us and he reminded us often. That morning he didn’t have to.
In the early weeks of 1997 we weren’t supposed to turn on the television. JonBenet Ramsey’s pre-murdered face was everywhere– as life-like in death as it had been doll-like in life. Amidst home videos and pageant footage were other, stranger, images. E! ran a projected portrait of JonBenet at twelve with straightened blonde hair and a glossy gold sheen to her pre-teen lips. She was enhanced onto a red-carpet virtual reality in the kind of photo detectives prepare in hopes of finding an abducted child years after she’s disappeared. Perhaps they expected to recover JonBenet as her Disney-celebrity-self doing publicity shots half a decade later.
When people wanted to know what JonBenet was really like I told them. “She wore dentures and she bleached her hair.”
Alex
It wasn’t required that I hear you speak. It was “strongly encouraged,” and I think by attending I was automatically entered in a raffle for a free yearbook, or something equally asinine. I didn’t win. I never win raffles. Most people don’t, and I didn’t expect to either. But you had already learned your lesson about expectations, hadn’t you? And today was going to be no different.
Your face and name were new to me. Had I been more precocious, maybe I would have read about you in one of the copies of Time or Newsweek that occasionally were dropped through my parents’ mail slot. You were something of a temporary news celebrity that my rich public shcool could easily afford. But I didn’t recognize you. I had more important things to worry about than the news.
You stood at the front of the large auditorium. Not on the stage, like so many other speakers during assemblies. Not even behind a podium or even with the assitance of a microphone. You stood before us with your light blue sweater and jeans, your soft pink lipstick, your straight dirty blonde hair and green eyes, vulnerable and personable. A survivor, we were told. This is a survivor.
You were here in my sacred space. What for most students was simply the auditorium, for me, was the theater. The strong black stage with its large lip hanging over the floor and the scene shop in the back, the closet full of props and the tiny room caked with make-up older than anyone was willing to admit. I resented you, for ruining my high school haven and filling it with your memories of trauma.
You began to speak. Your words were rehearsed but sincere. You talked about college, Ithaca, I think. The excitement of independence, books, and boys. One boy in particular you continued to descirbe. Your date. Your beautiful evening together, and how it became one of the worst nights of your life. How he raped you. How you spent the rest of the night balled up on the floor in his room. How, in the morning, he didn’t understand why you were so upset. How alone and confused you felt.
I admired your strength. My resentment turned to guilt and probably pity. Then it happened. Two boys, sitting near the front, not that far from you, started laughing. If they were laughing at you, it was impossible to know, but that wasn’t the point. We looked over at them in shock. How could they do such a thing? Instantly, the shock turned to nervousness. How were you going to deal with this? How strong were you, really?
You broke. I hoped, for your sake, you broke because this was the only time someone had laughed during your Story. That this was so unexpected, so unfathomable, so not-what-at-least-one-boy-did-each-time-you-spoke. Your voice faultered. You wiped tears from your eyes and a hint of a Southern accent you had worked so hard to conceal slipped out of your mouth as you gave your response, your defense.
Is this what you have come to expect?
Heather
If I get there before the last two Eucharistic Ministers, but after the first two, I am given Bread – Center. If I get there first (which has never happened, I get Cup – Primrose St. I get there last and its Cup – Tabernacle. People used to just sign up for the bread and leave the cup for the stragglers, but Fr. Sullivan changed that and made us sign up in order. But I’m still usually with the cup. Locking my car while turning off my phone, I rush two steps at a time up the side entrance stairs. The red brick church looks sharp, having just been re-chissled for the upcoming 150
th anniversary.
There will be a mass next month with the bishop that I won’t attend.
I leave the blazing fall sunlight and enter in to the dark mahogany holiness, making a quick right into the sacristy.
For 20 years I wondered what it looked like behind the altar, getting only glimpses the size of half-opened doors: a flash of priestly white and dark wooden walls, blurred faces of streak-haired priests.
Even though I have been going back here for a year to sign in, I still feel as though I am crossing a forbidden plane. The altar boys, like little cherubs in their white, pressed albs, sit and whisper to each other. I know their names and they always seem to take a small delight in being remembered personally, not just as another piece of liturgy: candle sticks and crucifix, incense and bulletins. They are far more committed than I am. I am sure someone will notice soon, if they haven’t already, that I only show up for mass when I’m assigned and even then am sometimes absent, leaving the Cup-Tabernacle slot empty and unfilled. One less place for someone to receive the blood.
Today, I have lined up wrong behind the altar and despite my timed arrival for Bread – Center, I am handed the ornate, gold cup and proceed down to Cup-Tabernacle. With one foot in the center and one on the side, I feel as though I am in a sacramental no man’s land: Too far off to make receiving easy. Occasionally people will head my way, take the cup and drink a slow bitter taste of blood, though most people turn quickly left back to their pew and avoid me. Something about blood is too personal. Bread like a body, feels more benign, less invasive. I think I will have to finish the magenta-flared liquid in the alcove behind the altar when a woman, the last in line, comes to me and takes the cup confidently in her wrinkled, ringed fingers. She drinks it till its empty and I see my muddled reflection in the golden, empty bottom. When I wipe the edge, her lipstick mingles with the wine and marks the purificator a deep red, leaving her lips the color of flesh wiped clean.
Anonymous
Your lips spread across me the way sunlight pours into a dark room when a window shade has been pulled too hard and lets go – shooting up the wall and spinning in the blinding yellow sun – that seems to have held off just as long as it could, before spilling across the hardwood floor, now alive with the skin of your smile, filling cracks and brightening corners, awash and blushing with your burn.
Lynn
When they came to visit us at Wild Duck, Jill and I would sleep on pullout mattresses—she in Alexis’ room and I in Patrick’s. Our lives took a different shape with them there. Mom forever on-call for coffee and conversation, dad often more stressed than usual. I remember once wanting to ask how long they were staying, but I knew how that could sound. What was certain was that they would eventually go home to Leisure Village. And at that point our house would once again be recognizable. For Jill and I, though, they never really left. We would return to a room saturated in musky cologne. The scent would linger for days. Slow to disappear, as it had seeped into our bedspreads, our clothes, our space. But then, after a while, it would—he would—fade away completely. She, however, seemed to never leave. Our dresser bore evidence of her stay—the mirror and table surface covered with redish brown spots, specks of make-up. Those marks we could remove with soap and water. The other spots—the ones that stained our bedroom altar special somethings—were permanent.
