Jackson was still at the age where praying could be a vagary, and before he slept he made bargains with whoever might accept them. Please, he breathed in and out, let me stay quiet and I’ll be nicer to James. Let me stay in one place while I sleep and I’ll never again ridicule my mother’s cooking until she cries. Please.
~ ~ ~
The church around the corner from our street is long gone (at least in its identity as a church); for years it was left alone, the marquee blank and its plastic yellowing, although the drab add-on unit where the preacher and his family lived was rented briefly several times, always by single people who kept their curtains drawn behind the very small windows. Eventually a gay couple in their forties bought the building, oohing and ahhing at the high ceilings, laughing at the ironic potential of the altar, and envisioning many parties. They kept the windows open for days on end, letting out the smell of Christ, painting all the walls yellow and hand-oiling the floors with organic orange cleansers, shrieking with amusement, playing David Byrne or chaotic piano ensembles. But different sorts of noises began to echo out the windows, and the two gay men became one gay man who did not find the yellows to his suit anymore and certainly did not keep the windows open.
But: it was a church, and there was a preacher, and there was a preacher’s daughter, and her name was Heather, and Heather was in the same grade as Jackson and me, and we did something bad to Heather.
She had the brand of eerily white-blond hair that does not get darker with age, skin just as pale, and slits of brown eyes. Her father had encouraged her to befriend the children in the neighborhood, after her arrival in the third grade, and she took a special liking to me. Perhaps because I lived with just my father, perhaps because I did not attend church, perhaps because I was fearless on the rope swing that hung from the oak tree in the front yard. I didn’t want her around. I pushed her too high; she wrapped her legs tight around the two-by-six and squealed as if being held over a fire; I pushed harder and pretended to misunderstand her cries as joy.
Heather was always regurgitating bits of her father’s sermons. Possibly she didn’t yet believe them, but they were the only bits of conversation she had to make, and she wanted badly to be my friend. I was quick and vile in response, and Heather didn’t seem to mind one way or another. It seemed to her that as long as both of us were making sounds, that meant we were bonding. She wanted to play innocuous games with my dolls. “Pretend,” she would say, “pretend she has to go to a dance, but, but”—her imagination was for shit. “But what, Heather?” I’d reply. “But her house is on fire? But Spanish pirates are about to kidnap her?” It was no use. Heather just dressed and redressed the dolls, asked me what I thought of the pink shoes with the blue dress. When I complained, my father said I had to be nice to her, but I think he found the way her normalcy intricately tortured me privately amusing. At dinner when she said please and thank you and talked about heaven, he had to suppress a smirk while I notably slammed my milk glass, scraped my teeth on my fork, made fart noises in my elbow. “Stop, Ida,” he said sternly, but later laughed until he cried and told me I was his favorite daughter. But I am your only daughter, I would say. That’s right, he said with a firm furrow of the forehead, the only one. When he said “only,” it meant something different.
Heather got the hint, or at least gave up trying. With the eventual relegation of dolls, the more complex math problems, the beginnings of breasts, Heather’s insipid nature leaned more toward cruelty. We arrived at junior high school and she took to carrying a Bible with her in the hallways, even leading this as a trend of sorts among other girls in high-buttoning shirts and beige pants. When we passed she took to tilting her head in mock sympathy and God-blessing me, she and her comrades snickering in my wake. In classes she raised her hand frequently, fingered the cross around her neck and offered her thoughts, generally framing them as direct from her Father or her father. She declined to engage in certain required reading, brought notes from her dad that forbade her from doing so.
Adolescence had descended on us, though not without our knowing. Jackson and I didn’t speak of the mysteries of antiperspirant versus deodorant, or the different kinds of underwear the girls in the locker room began to wear, but we related to each other differently, as if circling. We sat on my stoop but spoke of doing something else. We played catch from farther and farther distances down our street, and sometimes, watching the baseball land somewhere besides our mitts, neither of us went to grab it.
One of the first afternoons of spring that year, Jackson and I settled on my front lawn with our Spanish textbooks in our laps and conjugated verbs, learning all the different ways to eat, to listen, to cry, to run. Somewhere between past and present tenses, we lost direct contact with the newly returned sun and found Heather in its path there, blocking our warmth. She was clad in the deep sort of pink that looks good on no one, her backpack adjusted high up her shoulders.
Sensing my choice not to speak, Jackson did. “Hey,” he went, without warmth.
“Hi, Ida.” Heather spoke from her nose.
“I saw your father out walking late last night,” she accused.
“He likes to do his thinking like that.”
“My dad saw too. He says it must be hard on you.”
I went back to quiet, poured my energy into I go, you go, she goes, we go, they go.
“Growing up the way you do. Your dad always working. He thinks it’s not right, you spending all your time alone with those boys. But you know? I told him the Lord forgives you. Having basically no family and all. You’re always welcome for dinner at our place, you know. It might be good for you to be around a father and mother. People who really care for your soul.”
“Hey, Heather!” Jackson speciously enthused in the same voice he used when tricking James into doing his chores by some clever trade or another. “Wanna see something we just found? Out back?”
Her eyes lit up like she hadn’t just been pushing at the weakest folds of my heart, and she followed him but immediately.
The tree outside our living room window was sickly and small, but it served its purpose. How long Heather remained hanging there, strung by her wrists and ankles by a string of Christmas tree lights, a bandanna tied around her mouth, I’m not sure. She did not cry out or protest, and right before Jackson covered her thin, pallid lips she asked God to save us.
“Shut up!” cried Jackson. “Shutupshutupshutup,” his words coming fast like a metronome gone mad.
When I returned after dinner, terrified, the preacher’s daughter was gone, the ghosts of tiny lights hanging in apostrophe of the day’s events. I tore them violently from the branches, shaking boughs and loosening leaves, crossed the street, and placed them in my neighbor’s garbage can. The thud of the black plastic lid falling behind me as I raced across the asphalt was deafening, and I expected every window on the street to fill with light as if to ask: What are you doing? What have you done?