Even when my mind is quieter, I never know how to lay. I like to lay on my side or my stomach, but neither of those work. On one side, I have my back to the door, and that makes me afraid because I can’t see if there was a scary noise and I needed to know if someone was there. On the other side, I have my back to my stuffed animals and I can tell from their eyes that they are a little sad already and putting my back to them would make them more sad. My stomach is most comfortable, but I can’t do that because then my back’s to God and you should never turn your back on God. So the only thing to do is lay on my back because the devil’s down there. It’s hard for me to fall asleep on my back, but at least I know it’s okay to put my back to the devil. He can get as mad and he wants and that won’t change anything. I think.
Lately, I’ve had a lot of questions for God so before I go to sleep I write them on the purple paper and make sure they have a question mark at the end. I just write one question each night and then I put the pencil and the paper on top of my headboard. I don’t understand why God answers some prayers and not others. Like, how I got my Kangaroo shoe out of the storm drain when my leg slipped in, but how we had to move from the farm or how Grandpa doesn’t talk to Dad.
Right now I write little, curious questions. Like “What is heaven like?” and “Are there cats there?” Then in the morning I check to see if God wrote an answer there. He hasn’t yet, so I don’t write any big questions. Questions like, “Do you love me?” I wonder that. Because God loves everybody just because he’s God, but I wonder if he loves me all alone. Because even though Dad and Grandpa love each other, Mom says so, Grandpa doesn’t love Dad all alone, he just loves him the way he has to.
I just don’t think I could write the love me question. Because I don’t know what would happen if I already prayed to love God and then he didn’t answer.
Last night Mindy came to my room in the middle of the night. She had a bad dream so she ran up the stairs. Most the time we go in Mom and Dad’s room when we have bad dreams, but it’s scary to wake up mom because she jumps so high. I always sneak across the hall and as soon as I cross the line on the carpet I whisper “mahhom?”
Their room is darker than mine and the shadows change as soon as I cross the line on the carpet. When they are sleeping, their room is scarier than mine is. My room has light spots and dark spots, but Mom and Dad’s room has lots of grey, nothing is just bright or dark. When Mom doesn’t move, I step closer and then check behind me. “Mahhom?” Nothing. Then when I’m right next to her I touch her arm, “mahhom?” “—HHU?—WHAT?” She’s sitting up and loud and her eyes aren’t even open. She can’t see without her glasses so she reaches for my face to feel if it’s me or Megan or Mindy before she opens her eyes. “It’s okay mom I just had a bad dream I just had a bad dream it’s okay it’s okay” “Alright Sweetie, shh. Grab the blanket on the end of the bed and you can sleep here on the floor, but be quiet so we don’t wake up Dad.” Someday I’ll tell her that she’s the one who’s so loud.
So, when Mindy came to my room I heard her run up the stairs so I was awake when she came in. I gave her the pink afghan and told her she could sleep on the floor. I should have two blankets because my carpet is crunchy to lay on and it makes pokey marks on your arms and cheek. I was scared too when I heard her coming up the stairs—I looked past her when she was in the doorway to be sure no one was following her. When she was laying down I tried to make sure she didn’t see me checking the door. But her scaredness made me less scared. I told her it was okay. “It’s okay, Mindy.” She believed me.
When I woke up this morning one of the corners in my room had grey in it. It made me wonder if Mom and Dad and God lie sometimes too, to make things more simple, to make us feel better. I wonder if that’s okay. And I wonder if lying is something different if you do it because you love someone or because you feel like you have to.
Sons
The sun wrapped around her slim wrist as it rocked over the heads of red geraniums, forward and back, her thin tanned fingers grasping the spent blooms and popping them from the plant. The green, cracking smell of the stems baked off the broken heads and seeped onto Betsy’s warm skin. Standing next to my best friend, I bent my shoulders over a white geranium and began plucking too. Two high schoolers, we circled the temporary fence around the seasonal greenhouse unburdening plants of their dead parts. Betsy slipped the crisped buds into her palm until it was full then bent closer to the radiating asphalt and shook them into the base of the pot over moist black soil.
Picking up an obvious metaphor from our surroundings, we talked about what we always talked about: love.
“It just seems like I want too much,” I said, unusually tuned to statements rather than questions. Betsy ran her thumb and forefinger over the crown of her head to brush her honey-wheat hair from her narrow face. Her crescent brows open, she nodded to encourage me to keep talking. She was a good listener, attentive.
We always took ourselves seriously, our gaze toward Music, Art, Love even in radio tunes, novels and movies. Raised in different limbs of the Christian church, Lutheran, Evangelical, we’d been dealt serious things from an early age and it upped the ante all around. And both firstborns, every time someone said something was important we believed them. By 18, we’d each already gathered a long list of to-do’s and a high wall of expectations: hers about the value of the present, process, beauty, relationship; mine about the planning of the future, standard, outcome, truth.
“I just don’t know what’s a challenge and what’s a sign,” I continued. “I’ve said I love him, and I do. I’m just beginning to wonder about the difference between loving someone and being in love with them. What’s the proof someone really loves you? What’s the proof you really love them?”
I had been dating Brian since my sophomore year, growing up with him in the relationship. We’d been different in the same surroundings, but now that I was going off to college and he was floating around a tech school, the differences were starting to crescendo. In high school it was fine I sang chamber music while he played guitar with a garage band—we surprised teachers as a pair, but it made us both well-rounded. Now, away from lockers and lunch periods, different pastimes meant different lifestyles. But I loved him. I said I loved him, and that carried some kind of bond.
The nature of love was one of Betsy’s specialties, the thread that bound her favorite novels—The Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, My Antonia—and the topic on which she always had an opinion. We moved to another cluster of pots and I sat on a stray concrete block in front of a wide collection of purple. The spent flowers in it were curled and wet, liable to rot rather than dry. Different risks for different species. I asked for instructions.
Betsy wiped her fingertips on her cut-off shorts and looked at my pot. Her slight frame always made the pockets on the back of her pants seem too big. I wondered if mine looked that way too. She nodded for me to do the same with these pots as the last, her wrist still rocking back over the buds, her fingers moving the leaves as if sorting it, searching for hidden huddles of petals.
“What are these called?” I started pulling the wet twists and dropping them through the plant.
“Petunias—double wave.”
We worked for a moment in a strange pause. Even in small things we weren’t quite accustomed to her owning the information and experience. She’d always known flowers, but our relationship functioned on the cogs of another machinery. Between us, I was always the one giving advice, introducing the system, functioning like a world-wise older sister. I’m not sure either of us ever wanted that, but when we met she’d walked into a group of people I already knew and the role of presenter had stuck with me and become familiar to us both. She broke the silence, speaking thoughtfully.
“I’m not sure there is a difference, between loving someone and being in love with them.”
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