For how long?

by Chelsey Weber-Smith

"Deidra."

No. Do not turn around.

"Darling."

Do not turn around.

The covers of the bed were tucked so tightly around me this morning that upon waking I thought only minutes had passed. But I could see light pushing its boney fingers through the cracks in the curtains and realized it was well into the afternoon. A child screeched outside like some enormous bird.

The last two days I have been hallucinating. Not simple and fleetingly, fully. As full as a person can hallucinate, every sense involved. I saw him first at the foot of my bed, as godly as a cemetery statue, staring at his pocket watch exactly the way he did the first time I saw him. The same full moon face. The same heavy brow that kept his eyes from seeing mine. Those big hands, like the paws of a lion and how tiny that little clock was inside one. Like the center of a closing flower. And his jacket! Torn at the elbows but no so much as to dismiss him right away. Just slightly, the crisscross of single threads still holding it together. But for how long? I wondered this forever. From the second I let my eyes wash over him like so much water. For how long? It wasn't forever.

He married me in April, on a long, quiet road lined with cherry blossom trees like cotton candy. Like balloons. Like pretty pink lollypops. I wore a white dress that I sewed from an old curtain. My mother had promised me hers, the one I wore since I was five, my tiny head poking out as if I had been buried in so much white sand or snow. But she saw the crisscross threads that were holding on (still holding on) and she saw the mess of his hairy cheeks and she saw the little chip in his tooth and she said no. And I said alright. And I left that night through the window.

And when he kissed me that day, I saw pink and I let myself see it and forgot about my question. I forgot about for how long?

And some days we slept on the beach because all he knew how to do was play an old guitar with a missing string and all I knew how to do was make clothes. But it was warm in California and it was warm against his skin and sometimes we would write songs together and he let me know that I had a lovely voice and he asked me to sing for him when the guitar parts were too complicated for him to sing along. And sometimes we lived in a very small apartment when he would stay at the factory for twelve hours a day gluing ugly rubber souls on ugly rubber shoes and when he came home he'd say I wish I was gluing pretty golden souls on ugly rubber fools instead. And then I would laugh at him and call him a poet in a voice that let him know that I loved him and thought he was one of those fools all at the same time. And he would climb into the bed with me and tickle me until I finally would say that he was a genius in poor worker's clothes and then he'd kiss my neck until I pulled off his shirt in the same clumsy way I always did.

Then one day he said he was going to the store and someone shot him for his wallet. His worn leather, empty wallet that they tossed aside like a crumpled page a few feet from my dead husband. Red blood blooming around him like a California sunset.

And I knew I had forgotten the most important thing. I had forgotten to remember for how long? I had forgotten about the cycles of the sun, the moon, the rain. How it all comes down. I had forgotten that blood red apple that hit that man on the head. I let myself into forever and closed the door behind me. So that's where I stayed until I grew old.

And now, in the chair across the room, he sits, as young and flawless as he was fifty years ago, glass in hand. He is sipping from the edge like it is hot, like he always did with whiskey. He wanted so much to be a man, to cock back the glass like a shotgun and fill his gut. He couldn't, he sipped it like a woman and I could drink it like a man. But I am not looking at him. I won't look at him because he is not there. Because he is dead and I am used to that.

"Deidra, why won't you speak to me?" He says it with all the sadness of a single ship in the center of the calmest, open sea and takes a sip. I do not even glance up, though I am aware of every movement. I get up and go to the kitchen to make myself a drink.

As I am pulling the bottle down from the cupboard I feel two hands walk onto my hips, big lion paws. It is not real. It is not really happening. He's dead. And then I feel the rosy softness of two petal lips below my ear. I pull away quickly and knock the bottle over. Damn! The waterfall of silver gin like the fountain at the beach. No. Like the way the water falls over the cliff and is gone into the ocean. Away.

I catch my reflection in the hallway mirror. I can see him behind me, reading a newspaper, his perfect face like sand. Little bird feet of worry. That valleyed brow. My face, dry desert earth, long cracks and canyons dug deep from roaring rivers. The sun took those too. Up and up into some heaven. He catches my eyes in the mirror. I want to look away but his eyes are bluer than I have ever seen. Inconsistent as watercolors and as bright. He opens his mouth to speak and I break my stare. I lift the mirror off its nail and let it drop and walk away.

I decide I need to sleep awhile, that I must not be sleeping well enough. That this will all go away if I sleep. It has to go away if I sleep. After an hour or so I wake up and see he is not at the foot of my bed. I dress and walk through the kitchen, he is not there, and then into the living room. The chair is empty and I am relieved in the saddest of ways. Then I see the mirror. Hanging slightly crooked on its nail, every piece put back like some broken scenery. Jagged mountains meet a jagged sky. Oh my god.

And now I cannot find him. And now I am forgetting about for how long? I am remembering the beach. I am remembering the silver water and the pink cotton candy trees and I am forgetting that red apple that hit my head. But he is gone. He is not in the kitchen, not in the living room, not drunk and passed out in the bathtub like I would sometimes find him, nose only slightly above the threshold of water. Not outside. Not even in all the kitchen cupboards I threw open and left open that scared me when I ran back through again. Nowhere. And now my heart, that awful stone that for a moment opened again like some fucking golden rose falls deep into my stomach and I lie on the floor and I cry. Great, enormous tears. Lion tears. And forever rolls over like waves.

And then I hear someone playing guitar.

No. No. No. No. Do not get up and look. Stay here in this life that you so foolishly wove around yourself. Wear it. This is what you are. But the music grows louder, I can almost see the notes wafting in through the open window. No. No. No. There is nothing there. He is dead and he will always be dead and that's it. But without asking me my body pulls itself up and walks to the door. And there he is. Leaning back in his chair, one foot kicked up on the side of the porch, toothpick between his lips. Fingers sliding and stroking the strings just the way he used to touch me. And then he looks over.

"Hey baby, I was wondering when you were gonna get up. I fixed the mirror, I kind of like it better that way." I blink hard. Then I let him put down the guitar against the wall and walk right over to me and I watch his eyes change into two perfect California skies. He takes my hands and leads me back into my bed and kisses both my eyelids closed. I feel the bed move as he crawls in next to me and wraps himself around me. "Now why don't we go to sleep, darlin', we don't have nothing to do all day." And we did, just like that.

And all the while I dreamed about the cycles of the sun and the moon, about how wrong I had it all. About how that apple went up and then it fell down and how it sat there and rotted. And how the seeds stayed whole and buried themselves in the dirt and how a big tree shot up and grew fat apples on its long branches that fell themselves, in time. About the water that pours over the falls and lives in the ocean until the sun sucks it right back up and drops it back in the river so it can fall again. And I woke up to a California sunset in my white curtain wedding dress with my dirty, crisscross husband wrapped like seaweed around. And I shook his shoulder and he woke up. And I remembered forever and I forgot for how long? And he picked up the guitar and asked me to sing.

Chelsey Weber-Smith is a student at Fairhaven College. As she says, "Her favorite flowers are Forget-Me-Nots and their perfect color schemes allow her to believe in some kind of god. She likes to hunt for ghosts and explore abandon buildings. Her favorite poet is Edna St. Vincent Millay and her favorite book is The Secret History by Donna Tartt. She plays the guitar and writes music in addition to writing for the page. She wishes she was a lion. She thinks drastic change is necessary. She has been writing since she was a small child and has an overwhelming tendency to rhyme. She will be backpacking this summer as a part of Art Adventure Team, an idea her and a friend came up with in which they will travel and spread their art and others' across their path and set up free stations in cities for children and adults to participate in. She likes color. She is nineteen and a native of Washington State."

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