Suddenly Light, page 15
Amia’s hair was a black bowl around her round face. “There’s a new boy starting soon,” she said plainly. “My brother said.”
She wasn’t really listening. She was trying to hit a small ball against the ground so it bounced up against the building and returned to her, dutifully. She was trying to find a rhythm with it. She was also counting in her head, although she was beginning to suspect it was not fun anymore—but still she was counting, and she liked ending on fives. Amia was standing off to the side, watching.
She was focused on the satisfying pop-pop of the rubber ball against the concrete ground and the brick wall—and the counting. Ending on a five, taking a short break. Amia didn’t say anything else.
A few days later, a thin, strange boy stood at the front of class.
She looked at him, alarmed.
1990
That she could see, Kinn did not talk to anyone at school. Ever. Teachers asked questions of him, and he quietly answered, one word or two, but there was nothing else.
She watched him, carefully, for months. She waited to catch him on a break from his game. She rarely saw him at recess—he went to a hiding spot somewhere or maybe stayed in the school; she could not figure it out. Once in a while, he was outside, wandering around, looking at boys but not going to them.
She wasn’t sure why she watched him. She examined the speck of it, carefully, not knowing what it meant. She would turn away, scratching her arm, looking at the rows of houses beyond the loose collection of trees. Then she would turn and look back.
Kinn was slim and dark, with thin arms and legs; he had tight black hair and eyelashes that seemed to flick upward at the corners of his eyes. He was slight but moved slowly, like a much larger animal would. His neck like a deer. The other children streamed through the halls and fields, crowding and dispersing in noisy herds, chasing and laughing. He was a small thing at the edge of her vision at all times—apart, and unwounded by it. Mostly she was curious to watch him start talking, feeling she would notice something that was special. But he held still, and silent.
She hadn’t been counting days, but eventually she realized she could recall his first day of school—the day and the month it was. It occurred to her while she was in class, and she waited until she got home to count the days on a calendar, and then she kept the number in her mind, adding one as each day passed. It was her new game.
When he finally spoke, it was on a five.
He walked over to some boys, and they spoke to each other. She was too far away to hear what they said; she stood halfway across the field and froze as if a dark doom was approaching in the sky.
“What is it?” Amia said, pulling her juice box down from her mouth.
She didn’t hear the question.
She went home after school and put her bag down on the pile of shoes by the front door, kicking off her own, hurrying to be alone in her room. One of her brothers stopped in the hall, holding a bag of chips and chewing. His hair was lighter than everyone else’s in the family, blondish, spiky. He saw where her backpack fell, shouted “Not on my fucking shoes!” and picked up a tissue box from a nearby table. He whipped it at her. The box didn’t have enough weight to get close; turning gently in the air, it fell to the ground. Her mother, sitting in the adjoining room, said nothing. She moved her bag roughly, off the shoes, and went upstairs.
She closed the door and crawled onto her bed, turning and lying on her back. Her blood was moving quickly, but when she thought of Kinn it started to slow down. All this time, she could have spoken to him herself—and he would have spoken back. It was curious that she did not think of it before. Now she saw everything within this frame. The dead rabbit she found along the edges of backyards. The neighbour’s fat dogs, how it was funny at first, but not later. Her three brothers, mean and loud. She thought of what she could tell him, thinking of the words, choosing them, choosing them again. She wondered what he might say in return.
But in the days and weeks after, she did not speak to him. When he was around, she went into a black mood—grasping at something, becoming angry and silent. She found she could not.
Kinn soon talked to the boys regularly. She watched, not having anything to count, from different parts of the school field.
Amia was drifting away from her, toward other girls, joining the edges of a group with a loud girl in the middle. She noticed it but did not follow. Already the teacher was telling her mother she was different, and she was sensing that other people were noticing and distancing themselves. The empty space around her was growing.
1992
In Grade 7, Kinn stopped talking again.
They had come back from the summer and assembled in restless packs in the same familiar hallways, moving to different rooms. She saw his delicate shoulders, his long neck, his head set slightly forward and always looking in that direction, straight-gazed—she felt again, as she had felt before, that he was older than everyone else. But unhurried. In those loud halls—quiet and potent.
The summer had been a long, bland stretch of time that she did not count until it was closer to the end. Five weeks left, four. She had spent some time in those months reorganizing her closet and refolding her clothes, then watching television into the evening. Her eldest brother was growing quieter, lost in thicker moods, sensing manhood in some of his peers and older boys in the neighbourhood. He ignored her. Her other brothers still sought her out for occasional lashes of cruelty, and she avoided the living room, where they often languished in the heat. At night, she stood in the backyard with her small brown dog wandering around the edge of the fence, sniffing, and waited for him to relieve himself. His name was Pancho. She studied the stars and thought they didn’t look real, or at least it didn’t seem possible. The summer had passed slowly.
And now, standing in the hallways, lined up to enter a class, she saw the back of Kinn’s head—a short patch of white hair dashed across it.
Coming out of classes, slipping by in the halls, she studied him in her distracted, almost angry way—from eye corners, head thrown back as if she did not care. He did not appear at recess; she never knew where he went instead. He did not talk that year.
She would never stop seeking him out, and its meaning was revealing itself to her. She looked around at the pieces of her life and saw only ugly things. Her mother’s flat face and wide, heavy build, that early betrayal as a child, slapped and pushed, foul moods, the blank stretches of time when she was ignored and alone. Her brothers and their mindless smashing of toys, their casual abuse, her filthy home. Sitting in the backyard while Pancho walked around the scrubby grass, letting small gravel stones slip slowly through her fingers before picking up another handful. Inside the house, her mother rousing herself to yell at one of her brothers—the effort was becoming rare—the smell of onions frying with salt.
And school—crowded with all the other kids from crowded homes. Everyone loud, clamouring over each other, the humid closeness of them all, pressing up against the glass of her life. Everything else a blind calamity of noise.
Kinn was, at last, a quiet thing.
He did not seem to grow at all. The curve of his brow and cheekbone slipped into the gently upturned jaw, fell into that long neck. Her own big limbs, her own broad, flat face, her tall body—she could not even claim to be like him. Only to be able to see what he was. A delicate animal stepping into a clearing, looking around with ears softly turning.
Late in the year, he was out at recess, walking along the edge of the playground before it became the field, and some boys approached him, loping like ugly dogs. She guessed they would bother him. Two of them did—a remark, some laughter, and more words when he did not respond, then a shove. Like a glass falling and shattering on the ground, her mind split into a thousand directions and her body operated alone, swiftly standing and suddenly breaking across the field. She kicked one boy down from behind before either of them knew what was happening. He fell like a snapped branch. A second boy flew back in shock, his face deformed with fear. But two other boys, shouting, pushed her until she fell, and other children ran at them. The boys kicked at her while she, from the ground, kicked out at them. A shoe struck her jaw, and she whipped her upper body off the ground to save her head. She was still as big as them, and she kicked at a knee, bending it in a direction that it was not supposed to bend, and the shouting turned into a long, horrific shriek that froze everything for three or four blind moments. Teachers were coming. She did not return to school for the rest of the year.
2003
She exited at the rear of the building, near the two loading docks, by the picnic benches, and sat on the concrete stairs. On the leg of one of the picnic benches it was carved into the wood:
only poor boys
give good head
She looked at it often because it was so many letters and not so poorly done. Someone had spent time.
She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, replacing the lighter in her pocket. She tried to understand it—not as a vulgar thing, but as something to know about men. She had known poor boys, turning into young men in the clumps of housing where she grew up. Belonging, and not. Growing up aching and not knowing why, leaving school for work, putting all their money into a car, good shoes, and smoking up. Getting lonely in the evenings. Does that type of man give better head? Boys in nice houses, in sports and camps, bookshelves filled with things—they don’t get on their knees? She thought it might be true. She saw the words several times a day, smoking at the back of the building, once or twice before lunch, once or twice after.
Of course it hadn’t been true for her. She tried a young man once, but it was all wrong. He was not serious; she was too serious. Hurrying, he pulled down his pants to reveal red boxers covered in yellow smiley faces—she stopped everything and stared at them. Her pride stung her, a great wound in whatever she was attempting. She knew her body: out of the shower, pale and gleaming, this formidable thing. Her shoulders were set back, locked in defiance; she could run without tiring on legs of incredible power. That she should undress for the red boxers with yellow faces was pathetic—he was absurd, a peasant. It was over.
For a long time she had not even known she was poor. Growing up everybody was, and so she didn’t suffer for it. If you had heat in winter and ate every day, you were every other kid. Her mother was homebound and couldn’t drive, so they never left the neighbourhood; they took a short bus for food. But her brothers started driving and later, when she was a teenager, taught her. She got a high school job and spent years in a cheap, shuddering car, driving across the city and dropping into small plazas along the highway. Cruising through other areas, going downtown, passing gleaming cars with silent children in the backseat and two well-groomed parents up front, seeing other teenagers from other parts of town, their later models glittering. Only seeing all this did she know she was poor. She sensed that she was to submit to it: the humility of it, the lowered position. But she couldn’t. And she didn’t.
Driving through her neighbourhood, she saw packs of young men in strip plazas, leaning on their cars, white shoes glowing, wolf heads hanging low on their shoulders. Watching her pass. Thousands in rims but still living at home—crashing with half-girlfriends in basement apartments. Living a half-life while waiting for something better.
Stopped at red lights, she would turn and meet their eyes.
She had dropped out of school in twelfth grade and went full-time at a restaurant, first in the kitchen and then serving during the dinner rush. They moved her to grill after a while, gave her a raise. But she was bored. She finished her GED over a summer and got a job with a good company in manufacturing, packing boxes and checking orders. Later, after a year of that, they promoted her to supervisor—the last supervisor got pregnant with her third child and wasn’t going to come back. She was making good money now and barely twenty, checking orders from a desk and occasionally helping other teams. She had money, more than enough. She still liked to count sometimes, ticking things along her fingertips, up to five, then starting again. She went to work every day with a sense of duty and the details of it didn’t matter. But the truth was, she was bored—a final thing, settling in her bones.
Kinn had died before she dropped out, late in eleventh grade. They had announced it solemnly at school: Our classmate has passed away. There was a photo of him in a frame standing upright that the teacher had pulled from a wrinkled plastic bag at the bottom of her desk. The students listened at first but eventually grew restless at the back. She heard chatter in the desks behind her; a pen dropped to the floor. A chair scraped under the heavy lean of somebody picking it up. The teacher was talking. He had a condition and was in the hospital for much of that year; he’d had the condition his whole life. A girl muffled a sneeze. The teacher struggled to pronounce the medical term with three long words but said it was always fatal. Words blurred out. The talk behind her fell away as she seemed to be standing quite separate now, somewhere out of the room—a thickly silent place where she couldn’t remember anything else from that day. She remembered, outside the windows, it was spring, yellow and green.
It seemed Kinn had known all along. That fact stayed with her. She decided then that everyone was dying but not everyone knew it; most people pushed it to the back, but a few people held it at the front. She never spoke of him, not once, to anybody, in all those years.
Sometimes, she saw Kinn in others.
She could see him in children when they were still young and wandering—delicate things, before they started clamouring amongst themselves. Once she saw him in twin sisters sitting side-by-side on the bus, girls with long black hair in single braids, long necks with chins lifted. It was rare she saw children ten or eleven years old sitting quietly like that, hands resting in their laps, gazing out the windows with such calm consideration. It was rare she saw anyone. They stood up to leave the bus in such sweet and simple movements, careless and elegant—twins from a strange dream. Like a sign. And she remembered Kinn’s languid movements as he walked or slowly turned his head. A smooth, sensitive animal—vulnerable, but without fear.
All of her brothers had disappeared. They got jobs and left the house, sending her mother, on disability, some money sometimes. She stayed home with their mother and paid a small rent, and they mostly stayed in different parts of the house.
She was at the grocery store on a Wednesday night, buying heartburn pills for her mother and picking up a pack of cigarettes for herself to save the morning trip. A man was watching her. She looked at him for a few moments and felt a subtle movement beneath the ground, a shift in her understanding. A deep memory rose in her.
It was Kinn’s older brother.
He was older, thicker, darker, with a heavy beard that was cropped close to his face. He was staring at her, recognizing her, recalling images. She looked back and did the same. He remembered her from school: the girl who got in trouble, who got mad, the loner in the shadows. Got in a fight over Kinn. She could not remember anything about him, but she saw the likeness and remembered his presence, distant, somewhere at the edge of things.
She realized a few things very quickly. He likely still lived in the area. He was curious about her. He would come back again and try to talk to her.
2004
She was, ultimately, a shy thing. Easily wounded but strong-hearted, willing to defend herself. That was the part that no one understood about her, that she barely understood about herself—how the anger was frustration, the mute wall she had built around herself, the height and distance that deprived her of air. But she was also saving herself. Without the wall, she would be exposed and bare, struck by so much blunt indifference. Like body blows.
She could never handle people’s casual relationships, especially with important things. People let beauty and meaning pass them by. Everyone was dying but pretended they weren’t. Disinterest. Indifference. She took little offence to actual insult but felt brutalized by people who didn’t care—and there were so many.
“Birchmount Park?”
She had avoided the grocery store for almost six months but later trickled back, it being on her way home from work. She went on odd weeknights—Tuesdays, Mondays—rather than late in the week when most people went. The truth was, she was scared to see him again. That day something had leapt out of her—a wild terror—and silently immolated itself.
It had rained in the early evening and the streets were still wet, glowing with pink and yellow strips of lights from cars. She was feeling young lately, simple-hearted. She was putting more money into her car, paying for cleanings and upgrading her sound system for the second time. She was going to the grocery store to get ice cream and got about halfway through an aisle before she recognized him, in profile, standing close to the end. He looked up and saw her.
He asked about Birchmount Park, and she said yes. She looked at him without emotion; he was animated.
“Yeah, I remember you,” he said.
“You’re Kinn’s brother?” she asked. She wanted to say his name.
He hesitated for a short moment. “Yeah,” he said.
They talked for a few minutes, and she could read the simple messages that showed in men’s faces when they were not prepared. Hello, hello, hello, hello. He seemed to grow taller as they spoke, smiling easily and warmly. But she already saw that he was not Kinn; he didn’t even understand how his brother was different, an elegant shadow on a cave wall. He was ordinary and—its primary characteristic—did not know it.
