It’s Sunday, the morning after our first night back in our old apartment with Daddy, and the place is quiet. I’m lying in bed in the room I share with my sister Irene, looking around at the things I left here, the things I didn’t take with me when we left Daddy. I didn’t want us to stay with him, but I didn’t want to live with Aunt Peggy and Uncle Johnny either. I thought if I left enough things behind—my old dolls, some clothes—that we’d have to come back. Maybe he would move out instead. And I could be back in my old school.
We don’t have a television here, so we couldn’t watch Gunsmoke last night, but I don’t really care. It feels good to be here, with the room to myself, not having to hear anyone complaining. Mama made Daddy go to Mass with Irene and my little brother, Kevin, a rare event. I got out of it, pleading I didn’t feel good.
On the wall above me at the head of my bed, within arm’s reach, is a small shelf, only about a foot long. I used to keep a candle on it—which Mama never wanted me to light—and whatever book I was reading. I loved that shelf and the way the candle looked on it. The shelf has a brace underneath each side and each one is carved into curves and tiny recesses, and in the place where each brace meets the shelf there’s a rose carved into the wood. The edge of the shelf is a smooth, curvy line that I used to trace with my finger. The thing looks like it came from some really fine home. In a room full of elegant furniture, it would be just an afterthought. It definitely doesn’t belong here. It has an attitude. You can’t put just anything on it. It has to be something important, something you care about. This shelf can keep a secret too. It’s where I used to hide whatever poem I was writing. The brace closer to the window—the side you can’t see from across the room—isn’t flush against the wall. There’s a little space behind it, just big enough to slide a folded paper into. That’s where I’d hide the poems.
I reach up to see if anything is there. I feel the edge of something, pull it out. It’s a piece of notebook paper with a few lines of a poem on it, umbrellas and daisies doodled in the margins. I remember thinking it might work as a song, something like the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown.” But I see it’s just junk. Corny junk. You’d never find Irene wasting her time on poetry or lyrics.
Light is coming in along the edges of the shade, making the room look familiar again. I pull myself up to peek out the window. The sunlight is playing on the glass of the building across the alley, but it’s being pretty shy about it. Maybe even the sun isn’t so sure about how things will go today. Nothing outside is moving. A cat is sitting between a couple of garbage cans, but he’s absolutely still. He’s got a suspicious look on his face, like he can’t trust the neighbors anymore. The stillness outside makes the world seem like it’s suspended, like I’m suspended too, as if the old dangers are tucked away somewhere waiting, as if whatever my mother knows or doesn’t know about how we’ll manage to pay the bills doesn’t matter yet. There’s only this window, this almost-dark room, this intermission.
I close my eyes again, dreading the day, knowing that even here, back in this familiar place, among the lies of a new start, there’ll be no way to escape from my family, no poems or books that will shield me from the way we surrender to the idea that this is the best we can do, the way we settle for gratitude, relief that things aren’t worse.
I roll over, mush my face into my pillow to try to recapture my dream, but it won’t come back and I’m feeling hungry. I hear Mama in the kitchen, singing, her voice soft and deep, an old song, “Stormy Weather.” I get out of bed as quietly as I can, impress myself with how stealthily I open the door.
I settle myself down on the floor outside the kitchen. If Mama knows I’m here, she’ll stop singing. And I want to hear her. I close my eyes, listen to what she does with the words, the smooth, unpredictable way she lifts them up, then down, then back to the song’s simple melody. It’s so delicious to hear. This is a woman unlike my mother, not a victim, not angry, but gifted, confident, victorious. I imagine her on stage, in a spotlight, a long black glimmering dress, people inspired by her song.
Mama finishes the song, and I wait for another, but nothing comes. When her voice starts again, she’s talking this time, to her plants. I get to my feet, go into the kitchen. She’s reaching up, trimming dead leaves from a huge philodendron that hangs from the ceiling. “Come here. Look at this,” she says. She seldom bothers with hellos. I think she’s lost the need to mark beginnings.
I come closer to her, follow her to the plant in front of the window. “Look,” she says, and I see that the violet has a lovely pink flower blooming from its middle.
“That’s really nice.”
“I was sure it would die while we were gone. But there are more buds beside it, see?”
“Yeah.”
This would be a gift, these few moments with her and her plants, a short delay before the reminders of who we are crept in again. So I ask her something about each plant, anything that might make the moment last.
“You should work with plants, Mama. I mean for a living.”
“I probably wouldn’t like it anymore if it was a job.”
“What if you had your own shop?”
“You’re a dreamer.”
“Lots of people work doing things they love.”
She grins at me. “Like writing?”
I feel my face go red. Mama always knows my secrets. “You could have been a singer, I bet.”
She turns her attention to her plants again, pulling off dead leaves, shaking her head as if I’ve said something silly. “That’s not important,” she says. I feel her sadness come out of hiding, changing the smell of the air in the room, even the color of the light.
“I’m never going to be a writer,” I mumble. “I’m no good at it.”
She turns toward me then, her hands dropping to her sides, as if about to scold me. “Don’t say that. You can be anything you want to be.”
I have no reason to believe this, no evidence to show me I can be anything other than who I am, a scribbler who should write only in secret. But I want to believe it, because I don’t want to stop writing, and I don’t want to stop listening for the songs she sings when she thinks no one can hear.
Mary Ann McGuigan’s work appears in Brevity, The Citron Review, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. PIECES includes Pushcart Prize-nominated stories. THAT VERY PLACE reaches bookstores in the fall. Her novels have been named best books for teens; WHERE YOU BELONG was a finalist for the National Book Award. www.maryannmcguigan.com.