Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,57
there was some trick to do with the horizon folding like a piece of paper, but I was muddled again.
The lights in the house were all dark now. But as I began to worry that I would never find my way to heaven, I saw Jenny’s bedroom lamp come on. She couldn’t sleep. My fault, no doubt. I was ashamed. I couldn’t help myself—I floated to a place along the garden wall where I could see into her bedroom window. She sat in bed, looking around the room, holding the back of her hand up for me to send her a message.
But I couldn’t risk bringing her pain that was not her own. Without a plan I began to run through the wall in her backyard and into the next yard and the next, through fence and hedge and over the silver surface of swimming pools.
I tried to remember the moment I’d climbed into heaven when I left her the first time, but there was a darkness in the place of that memory like a night sky where stars refuse to gather. I stopped running and found myself in the driveway of a stranger’s yard, the light from their kitchen window tilting down into the grass.
If I couldn’t recall how I’d entered heaven the first time, I’d have to retrace my steps from my arrival in Jenny’s life the second time. I’d left James in heaven and come back to Jenny. There was a path there, there must have been.
When I tried to imagine heaven and being there with James, images came to me so vague and small, I hardly believed them. There was a table under a tree and someone played piano. Could I have actually left him by simply slipping my fingers out of his grasp and turning away, stepping down a staircase, or perhaps the slope of a hill? I moved toward a place where the shadow of the path ahead and the trees on either side became one darkness.
Now I began to walk forward through this stranger’s yard and felt distinctly as if I was moving farther and farther from my destination. So, like a fool, I stopped and placed my right foot back behind me, then my left, walking slowly backwards toward what I hoped was heaven.
I closed my eyes, since I was not using them to guide me. The harder I tried to remember how to get back, the more the idea became confused. A shadow, a blank wall, an empty road. I would briefly, every so often, forget what I was trying to concentrate on. Finally all I was left with was the peculiar idea that when I came to earth and landed beside Jenny’s bathtub, what lay ahead of me just before I slid back to earth had become still, like a scene from toile de Jouy wallpaper, thin and then unreadable, as if I was passing out of the room and the wall was shortening. The picture became darker and narrower and eventually unrecognizable.
That’s what had happened, wasn’t it? I found the thin place in the curtain between heaven and earth by moving toward the tilting, narrowing focal point on the shadowed horizon. That’s when I slipped through the slit like a letter, as fragile as a pressed flower.
I wasn’t walking anymore, I was running blindly backwards, causing spider webs to tremble and owls to startle and flutter to other branches. Crickets hushed as I rushed by. Though invisible, I set off a motion light in one backyard, and while I crossed a street a plastic bag swooped up after me, drawn by my anxiety rather than my disturbing the actual air.
But by and by my lack of direction curled my path into a circle and I slowly spun to a stop in an empty lot crisp with dead weeds and dry grass. I feared that my failing to protect Jenny, my abandoning her, was keeping me from finding my way. I shook with horror—I tried to steel myself with anger.
“It’s not fair!” I shouted.
My voice rang around me, vexing me with echoes. I curled in on myself and huddled on the ground. I tried to comfort myself by picturing James or the sweet face of my daughter, but they were clouded. I couldn’t recall the needle-eye slit of heaven, but now in my wretchedness I remembered the other place.
It didn’t take anything more than that, just the admission that I could remember hell. The space was small, only a little