In her apartment, she wondered what it would be like to wander in the woods by the stream alone, in the dark, but went to sleep instead.
“At night he turns into a snake and comes and taps on my window.” The children gather around Leah when she visited the shelter, begging for her to play. One boy whispered in her ear and Leah looked at him confused. One girl asked Leah if she was white and Leah felt embarrassed to answer. The boy told the little girl, as they sat next to Leah, that he could “see him outside at night.”
Listen: The rooms are cool. Moss reminds her of home. A gale of smoke. They pushed up the nails and her heart stopped. She carved our place into the banister. Listen: Sun teeming on warm grass. Glassy rays. A dogwood, the bloody crowns, maple and magnolia. At night she would press her hands into her eyes as she lay in her bed and watch the phosphorescent blips recede into the milky black. She knew her name would be gone if she looked. See how high I can climb? The stream eddied and her eyes went slack. Listen: Daylight walls dun colored, carpets crème, halls mint, ceiling eggshell. Tiles sagging from rainwater. Plaster buckling from rainwater. At night all blue-black nothing. Already going gray. Thick wrists and hands. Far from attractive. Watery blood dried quick around the nails. Look at me. Listen: A pawing at the window. Look. Listen: The girl drew a boy with a city behind him, a farmhouse and grapes under ground. A man on a hill clawing the sun. Rays dripping down his arms in gold and silver. Leah! Listen: A rake’s gaze at the lazy girls, drying themselves off. Leeaaah! Listen: A cracked blue egg. The edges of the field, lined with tobacco or corn or dead rot disappear over the full-bellied knoll. Or warehouses blown down. Or houses burned. Or barns falling in from the wheeling of seasons. From an odd spot above, see the little boy running deeper. The stalks sulking, the Easter best, a last swish of sun-bleached hair and then he slips below the surface like a coin into a fountain, his shadow more than enough to set off a commotion of brightly shaped flashes in the front of his sister’s eyes. His mother calls and calls from a porch, painted Passover pink. Leah never remembered these evenings, even as they took more and more of her time, though she often had thoughts of large white machines, smooth, flowing lines of lights.
Wake, wake! It is time for work, will you children never listen? And the stream too ruined by rain to see her face in any longer. She dialed John Rhodes’ cell phone number.
In the hyper-clear sky hung the moon and Orion in full. A splash of pale light, the swirling disc of their galaxy, the arms of an octopus. She tallied for her brother the stars of all of the constellations, named and unnamed, known and forgotten and not yet charted. The stars don’t know their own names. The constellations can’t see what shape they are. Leah sat in the window of their bedroom and looking out, named them for Jacob. The black dome of the void centered above their house on the corner of the street where thin dry grass juts through cracks in the sidewalk and sun-bleached bottle caps and broken glass from old wrecks rests.
Communion trays ready to be taken to the shut-ins. The broken body and spilled blood. The small white tiles of bread and plastic cups of grape juice. Leah opened the car door, lifted the tray, walked to the house and knocked on the screen. When they were growing up, Leah and Jacob would go with their mother to take communion to the shut-ins. Leah hated it. She felt uncomfortable around the old women. They were all women. She was scared to see them curled in their beds, thin, trapped between bed sheets, mouths open, moaning, eyes unseeing, the smell of urine and bodies and cleaning fluid, the women curling up like a dried leaf, but Mrs. Shepherd took her children with her because they were doing an Important Thing. Jacob would go right up to the women and if they were awake, if they called out to him, called a name of a son in some other state, he would answer and they would reach out and he would take their hand. But Leah would linger by the door and wait. Knobs of spine through a nightgown. A papery voice asking her name.
Leah called the old woman’s name and waited a moment before she walked in. A morning and the moon still clung to life like a crescent cloud. Some things are just for the night. Leah called her name, carrying communion. For how many years did she bring communion to the wrecked rooms? The stale bed? Still when Leah took communion to the church’s shut-in members, she dreaded it for the week leading up to Sunday. But she did it and the old woman in the house she’d come to enjoy being around and Leah would visit her on other days, just to sit and talk, or sit and look out at the evening coming on.
She called out to the old woman and saw the light on in the basement.
After the suit was filed, Leah had a meeting with Judge James Whitehead (retired). The judge had been on the board of directors of the nonprofit since his retirement and had been one of its founders years before. The judge had known Leah for a very long time, since before he was appointed to the bench. When he’d been in private practice, he’d represented the Shepherd family on a number of matters, beginning with defending Mr. Shepherd when he was charged with the assault and battery of a Sunday school teacher.
“Leah,” the judge said as she walked in. She began to say something to defend herself, but he waved his hands emphatically, a gesture the local bar had learned meant You should be quiet now and said, “None of this means a pinch of puppy shit. Their attorney is a moth-eaten gasbag out for a fee, but, listen, we have to get this settled now. I am behind you because I know you and I will go to bat for you, but the board is skittish.” Leah was looking out the window of his office at the Crow Station skyline. On the office stereo, she could hear a Tallis motet. The judge smelled like cough drops. He smiled at her and she felt, for a moment, that it would, in the end, be okay.
Despite the three years between them, Leah and Jacob Shepherd were rippling reflections of one another. Soft round faces and short unruly hair and cheeks quick to turn red when bodies darted and whirled. Their throats wailed the same strong wails when angry and their hearts beat the same rapid beats when winded from their running and when bad, their lips turned into the same red comma. Capering across limestone, slipping down mossy bank, slipping, skittering, spilling down green, smearing green on knees, drawing red, all four knees, both of them capering, they were the same, Jacob only a smaller version of his sister. Refractions split by facets. One in two places, bilocated, capering and splashing and yelping. In public, passing parents tsked at these bad children.
Mrs. Shepherd wanted Leah to grow her hair out, but whenever it began to tickle her neck, Leah would sneak into her parents’ bedroom and take the scissors, or if they were hidden, she would slip into the kitchen and take a butcher knife, and chop chunks of it away, leaving irregular whorls of brown wherever they fell. Her brother didn’t have this problem as no one ever commented on his hair, leaving him to decide how he wanted it, yet he always cut it to match his sister’s hair. “Why do you do this?” Mrs. Shepherd would ask. “You have such lovely hair. You would be so beautiful if you would let it grow out.” She said this as she smacked the girl across the backs of her thighs. Leah raised red, wet eyes, a sore backside, and slithered to her room to sulk and moan. You could have been so beautiful.