Time's Mouth, page 36
The Opal piece.
“How’s the anxiety these days? Are you doing the nightly breathing?”
“I am. It helps a lot. I don’t feel anything like the episodes coming on. All that feels like ancient history actually.”
“Good. I don’t hear you currently endorsing any psychotic symptoms. And I’m not seeing any disconnect from reality, either.”
“You sure?”
“That was something from your past, Cherry. You’re not dealing with that now.”
Phoenix glanced at the clock.
“We have to finish up. Before we end, though, I want to recognize the progress you’re making. Do you feel it?”
Cherry nodded. “I’ve never opened up to anyone before. It’s helped a lot.”
Phoenix beamed. “It’s the first day of spring, as you probably know. Even here in California, we’re able to witness this annual rebirth. It teaches us an essential lesson, don’t you think? About our resilience, about transformation. You’re coming back to your body, Cherry. You’re recognizing the wounds there, forgiving yourself as much as you can.”
As Cherry gathered her things to go, Phoenix leaned forward. “This week, I want you to ask yourself, what happens once I let go of this guilt? What’s in that new, open space?”
“An abyss?”
“You can’t change what you did, Cherry, but you can live differently going forward.”
As Cherry walked home through downtown Ojai, a little headachy from crying, she pondered Phoenix’s parting questions. What if she managed to forgive herself? When she began therapy in December, she didn’t think she’d get to this point. She was now able to calm herself when the panic crept in, and she was willing to look at what happened to her as a child. She didn’t push it away anymore. She was processing it, Phoenix said. This allowed her to think about Opal and to grieve what she gave up. Sometimes she could do it without blame clouding every hard feeling.
Phoenix was a little hokey, with her gemstones and her mini Zen garden from The Sharper Image, her seasonal metaphors, but a more cerebral approach would have been intimidating. Cherry needed someone approachable, someone a little maternal even. Someone who didn’t have to strain to imagine her woodsy, culty upbringing.
Someone who didn’t judge what she’d done to Opal.
Cherry reached her home in only a few minutes: a little one-room back house right in town, nestled next to a trio of olive trees. It was a spare yet lovely cottage, with a sturdy wood table by the biggest window and a brass bed she’d splurged on when she moved in. She kept the bed neatly made, two blush-pink pillows flat and smooth as wafers; the plates and the five-piece pots-and-pans kitchen set were always washed and put away. Growing up, she had never been tidy. Now everything had its place.
Her life was quiet and stable, and her job managing the movie theater brought in enough money, so she was happy with it. She no longer felt sheepish about waking with the sun and drinking tea in silence. She finally admitted to herself that she hated the taste of mint tea, and when she switched to Earl Grey upon moving here it was like everything clicked into place. She could do what she wanted. She used to whisper we are timeless before she took her first sip until she realized how absurd it was. No one was around to hear her, let alone say it with her.
Now she said I am timeless. Phoenix told her it caused no harm.
Hawk’s stones were lined on the windowsill, where they grew warm in the sun. After her morning ritual, Cherry touched each one with her fingertips and said, I perceive this loss.
In some respects, she’d come a long way. In others, it was like she’d never left.
“What you did, and what was done to you, will eventually coexist with how you’re living now,” Phoenix liked to say. “It won’t be forgotten or repressed but synthesized. Part of you.”
Cherry let herself into the house and set her bag on the table. She took in the space, which belonged only to her. This cottage was a privilege, and she practiced telling herself that she deserved it. The cool late-March air lapped at the curtains as she headed to bed. She was worn out from therapy and wanted a nap.
It was her day off, and she could give herself this small pleasure.
Phoenix knew about the 3:00 a.m. cab ride eighteen years ago, about how Cherry had spent half a year cleaning motel rooms in Hesperia in exchange for lodging and cash. Her first room had a view of the rusted dumpsters, and back then she didn’t allow herself any comforts; at dawn she would watch the rats slither out of the trash as if fleeing a fire. No tea for her; the stones were packed in the closet. There was no peace, no joy.
Back then, she wondered if Ray would find her. Six days a week she changed bedding and pulled hair from bathroom drains, working herself hard so she would be tired enough to sleep at night. She didn’t want Ray to find her, and yet she missed Opal deeply. It was a soul need, a bodily need. Her breasts hardened with milk, and when she expressed it into the shower’s prickly stream, she cried at the stinging, stretching pain. It was worse when the milk dried up, as if all messages for Opal, unheeded for long enough, had ceased. Cherry’s mother-body was nothing but a dead phone line. She missed how it felt to hold her baby. She missed the scent of Opal’s scalp, the drool on her chin, her tiny voice, her laugh, the soft skin of her tummy, her neck, her cry. Cherry longed for Opal in her arms. Her little body.
That body was gone by now—or not gone, but changed, which is the same thing as gone.
Cherry hadn’t been the only motel maid without her child. Leah was a recovering addict who was trying to get her twins back. Catalina and Alma were sending nearly every penny to their kids in Guatemala. But only Cherry had taken off like a ghost. Like her own mother had. It was the main reason she had to get away from those women, out of Hesperia.
It was her boss Susa who had instructed how to get the social security card, and after Cherry saved up enough money to do it, she moved away. She had lived so many places since then, always as Arnette Swanson. At first, her new identity felt like yet another trauma; her name was the only thing that tied her to own mother, and she had to let it go.
After a while, though, it became easier to push away that old life. She remade herself, like Ray had always wanted her to. She came from nowhere, from no one.
Occasionally she would dream of Ray. She told Phoenix about these dreams. In them, she and Ray were young again, back at the house in Ben Lomond. They weren’t themselves, exactly, it was more like they were pure beings filled with nothing but desire for one another. He’d been older, with more experience, he’d lived in the world, but he hadn’t forced her into anything. Or had he? Phoenix was the one to pose that question. Cherry had wanted him, she was certain of that even now, but she’d also been sheltered and needy. That was also true.
Sometimes when she was confessing to Phoenix she felt lighter, as if her history, all her secrets and shame, were a literal burden she was carrying on her back. It was time to set it down. She had punished herself enough, with those menial jobs, this quiet life—being away from Opal the worst poverty of all. Was she okay had she done well in school did she like to read how old was she when she got her period had she learned to drive had she lost her virginity was she in college was she in love did she wonder why I—
Opal was fine.
Cherry fell onto her bed and let herself think this for the thousandth time.
There was no way Opal had been possessed.
How could Cherry even think so?
The psychotic break. Was that it?
It was the biggest mystery of her life.
Phoenix said there was something called depersonalization. Perhaps it applied to Cherry, though Phoenix couldn’t be sure since Cherry hadn’t been assessed by a clinician back then. Depersonalization was a disorder. It made the people you know well suddenly seem like strangers. It made it feel like you were observing the world from outside your own body. It isn’t a fleeting feeling, Phoenix explained, but a persistent condition. It feels surreal, she said. Upsetting. She said it was more common in people who had experienced trauma.
Maybe that’s what happened. Cherry didn’t know. For years, she waited for another break to come. The second one would be worse. But none came.
Now, Cherry rubbed her cheek against her thin but soft pillow.
I deserve this, she told herself.
In the small set of drawers by her bed lay the key to the house on Edinburgh. Detached from a ring and others of its kind, it would have been easily lost were it not wrapped in tissue paper and tucked inside an orphaned glove.
For a long time, Cherry carried the loose key in her wallet. Those first few years, she would imagine herself sneaking back to Ray and Opal in the middle of the night, creeping into bed, being there when Ray woke up, as if nothing had changed.
No—that she would never do.
Maybe, she thought, she would let herself in to snatch Opal. And if she didn’t have the courage to spirit Opal away, Cherry thought she could at least stand over her daughter as she slept. She would take one good look at her, cataloging all the ways the girl had changed, trying to memorize what she’d missed. But she never did that either.
Cherry had never gone back to Opal. Why, she didn’t fully understand. The idea scared her, and what if she endangered her daughter again? She couldn’t.
Eventually, she moved the key from her wallet to her dresser. But with every move, every new town, she brought the key with her.
Cherry arrived in Ojai from Hemet a little over a year ago, after reading about the Topa Topa Mountains. Were it not for Marcia and the small library she presided over like a queen, those eight months in Hemet would have been unrelentingly depressing: desert heat like an oven, the job at the dry cleaners and its lecherous owner, a paycheck that barely covered expenses, getting mugged, stepping off a curb wrong and spraining her ankle. One day, a month into Cherry’s time in Hemet, Marcia discovered her crying in the stacks, Fiction K–L.
Cherry guessed Marcia was about seventy-five, reading glasses hanging from a beaded chain around her neck, beautiful skin as brown and glossy as an avocado pit. Marcia was so short that Cherry might have mistaken her for a child had she seen her from the back.
“Do you need help, dear?” Marcia asked.
Cherry didn’t know how to answer.
She wanted to say to Marcia, “My daughter may be better off without me, but I’m not.”
Or maybe, simply, “I’m lonely.”
Instead she said, “I need help with my literacy skills.”
This was true. Although Ray had taught her and Hawk and a few of the other kids how to read and she could do it well enough to get by, well enough wasn’t enough. She wasn’t a child, she was an adult, and as she got older it seemed more and more a crime that the mamas had not made her capable in this way. She wanted to get lost in a book. She wanted to be able to look up information and understand it as deeply as possible. That’s what the mamas tried to keep her from doing. But she knew she was smart.
“I’d love to help you with that,” Marcia said and smiled like a kindly aunt.
She and Marcia began meeting regularly to practice blending sounds and spelling. They read books aloud together, and Marcia gave her ones to take home. At first, homonyms in particular seemed to Cherry like a punishing joke meant to trip up the illiterate, until, eventually, she began to anticipate them, remember which word meant what, and then she saw those words as proof of the English language’s flexibility, of its tricky genius.
“We all need a little mischief,” Marcia said once.
Since the beginning, the librarian tried to pry some information from her. Had she lived in Hemet long, was she married, did she like to cook, had she ever gone fishing?
Marcia must have been able to tell that Cherry wasn’t raised like a normal person. Her upbringing, her tragedy, was on her like a bad perfume. She knew Marcia would keep asking questions; Cherry, at that point, hadn’t told anyone about her past, and she knew she would eventually tell Marcia something she regretted. It was the same reason she didn’t keep any close friends or get seriously involved with a man.
On what ended up being their last lesson, though neither realized it at the time, Marcia handed Cherry a book on the most magical places on Earth.
“There’s a fun chapter on California,” Marcia said. And then she leaned in and asked softly, “Where you from, Arnette?”
“Nowhere,” Cherry said.
That night and the next and the next she pored over the book. She found it fascinating, especially the stuff about California’s energy vortexes, places where the planet’s magnetic forces converged, retrieved energy or provided it.
Maybe this explained what happened with Opal, Cherry thought. The episodes. Or Cherry’s delusions of them. It was because of California. Maybe an energy force had torn them apart.
But there wasn’t anything about Los Angeles in the chapter.
Cherry might’ve given up on the book then, but she didn’t, it was too interesting. The science of the vortexes, if that’s what it was, eluded her, but she loved the myths surrounding these lands, how people had believed them sacred for hundreds and hundreds of years.
She read about Mount Shasta, where people believed the crystal city of Telos was hidden, its inhabitants seven feet tall and possessing a higher plane of consciousness. The book said there was a convergence of five energy vortexes not far from Hemet, in Desert Hot Springs; at the cleaners, Cherry had met a few locals, buckled with turquoise, their skin tanned to jerky, who wanted to tell her about how special the place was. Many of these vortexes were sacred sites for Native Americans, the book said, and nowadays seekers of all kinds flocked to them. These seekers believed they could feel the magnetic energy of a place, that these forces made their scalps tingle, their hands transmit subtle vibrations. They believed a vortex would amplify emotions and accelerate their healing. As if healing were something you could summon quickly, pedal to the metal, as if pain’s opposite were a heavenly destination just up ahead. What a scam, Cherry thought.
And yet she kept reading.
She thought there might be something about Santa Cruz County, if only a mention of the Mystery Spot, that campy tourist attraction not too far from the mamas’ land. The tour guides called it “a gravitational anomaly” where balls rolled uphill and trees grew twisted and slanted, though it was only a trick of perception. But like LA, there was nothing about Santa Cruz in the book. Was that possible? There had to be something in those forests. Was it God? Was it nature? Was it Ursa?
Cherry tried never to think of Ursa. Even now, she didn’t like talking about her with Phoenix. Somehow, the stories about Ray’s mother hurt most of all.
Cherry read the pages on Ojai three times. The book said the word was pronounced Oh-Hi, and that it meant either moon or nest in the Indian Chumash language. Whether this was error or homonym, Cherry didn’t know. The town was only ninety miles north of LA, fifteen miles inland from the ocean, not far from some of the other towns she had settled in.
Since leaving LA, Cherry had only been as far east as New Mexico. California kept pulling her back. The whole state was a vortex. She usually found somewhere cramped and ugly to live, a job that paid okay but not great, her daily life a penance for what she’d done to her daughter.
Until Ojai, there was no desire, only compulsion. But the place called to her; she wanted to go there. It would be beautiful, she thought. It would bring her pleasure. Should pleasure exist for someone like her? Something told her it should. The way the Topa Topa Mountains ran east-west. The seven vortexes. Seven! There were healers there, and good wine, and tiny oranges called Pixies.
“Where you from, Arnette?” Marcia had asked.
Ojai, Cherry imagined answering.
She worked her last shift, packed up her few belongings. On her way out of town, she dropped the book in the library’s after-hours slot, a note slipped inside like a bookmark.
Thank you Marcia for helping me. I was raised outside Santa Cruz. Yes I’ve been fishing.
It felt like progress, revealing that. That was the first step to seeking therapy.
And now here she was, a resident of Ojai, in this back house, olive leaves combing the window screens by her bed, on a street called Eucalyptus, a block from a street called Lion, with a therapist named after an immortal bird. She had a few friends—-more like acquaintances, but still. She read novels all the time, whenever she was alone at home, which was a lot. She loved anything with a detective.
She didn’t feel any electromagnetic pulses in Ojai and yet the town welcomed her, and the locals told her their stories. There was the woman whose father had made pornos from their house in the San Fernando Valley. Cherry’s neighbor learned to surf when he was three and was now, at forty-seven, afraid to swim. There were a lot of older folks who had settled in Ojai decades ago; a handful had come because of guru Krishnamurti, whose foundation still offered classes, even a school for children. Some locals were Ventura County royalty. A few owned olive farms, or they ran the vineyards outside of town, dirt under their nails, denim shirts frayed at the hem. They accepted Cherry’s presence easily; told her about themselves without any expectation of reciprocity. She and Phoenix talked about how she might reveal her real name to these people. Even just saying it was a childhood nickname she preferred would do the trick, Phoenix said. She assured her that this kind of thing—people shifting, remaking themselves—happened in Ojai all the time.
If she wanted to, she could be Cherry here.
Vortex indeed.
That night, Cherry woke with a start. This wasn’t out of the ordinary—it was one of the reasons that brought her to therapy in the first place, after all.
