Chasing Shadows
Jo Varnish
You saw me as you were unlocking your car. You had perched your coffee cup from Ray’s Diner on the roof, and you looked up at me as I made my way towards you. You’ve changed, of course, over the past few years. Your hair more salt than pepper, the pores on your face wide. Broken veins punctuate your cheeks and nose. Your lips, dry and cracked with white pasty deposits at the corners, are pursed. The deep lines that frame your features couple with the yellows of your eyes to give an impression of tiredness, of stress, of unease. That made me smile.
You didn’t expect to see me, did you? Motionless, you gasped, and if fear had a sound, that’s what you made. I took you in: your thinning hair, your flaccid belly overhanging your belt line, down to your boots. I remember those boots, they smelled of musk and leather and plastic all at once. Their dark brown skin was smooth and the metal eyelets proudly gleamed. Now they are dappled with small abrasions, a triangular shaped stain blackens the front of the left, and the laces are stretched and exhausted.
When I pulled my eyes up to yours, you clamored to get inside your car. Driving off, you left your coffee on the roof, and I watched it trying to maintain balance while you pulled forward, but failing as you swerved. It landed with a satisfying whump; the lid popped off and its contents emerged, pooling on the cool tarmac like blood.
I was ten when mom and I moved into the small, sparsely furnished apartment next to yours. “I used to be a cop, till I got shot," you told us the day we arrived. You were in the hallway, black baseball cap on, sporting a wide cowboy style belt buckle, helping us carry our few boxes of belongings. Mom had her dark red hair tied back in a tight ponytail. She wore jeans, drug store flip flops and a white and navy horizontally striped fitted t-shirt that she called her “boating” shirt, although I never knew her to go on a boat.
I remember thinking you were trying to impress her, but you had no chance. Mom said my last two dads were more trouble than whooping cough, and she was done looking for another. I never met my original dad. My favorite was Jeff, the last of the four. He was kind to me, he bought me red cherry candies and let me choose the music when we drove to the store in his wooden sided car. But they started to fight, and when they fought, I wished for peace, and the only way that was going to happen was for Jeff to leave. And one day he did.
One of those first few nights, mom lay down beside me on my bed. “Sweetie, this is a good move,” she said. “I spoke to Bill next door and I’m going to clean for him, and when I’m working nights, he’ll watch you. Who better than an ex-policeman?” I was used to Jeff being home with me while mom had to work. We would make a pile of pasta, and play Monopoly or The Game of Life, and he always let me have two scoops of ice cream. Mom and I lay there brim full of plans for our apartment.
“Can I have purple blinds?” I asked.
“Sure, and I’ll get paint, we’ll find a you a rug. I’m going to get on track, Sweetie. Things are going to get better.” Mom’s bare arm was wrapped under my neck and she was facing me. I breathed in her rose scent, and watched the subtle flashes of expression cross her face as she succumbed to the dream drawing her in. The apartment was new to me, but Mom was here. I was home.
~ ~ ~
I would lie on the sofa, my body stolen, and I would look at any stray lint or thread, forever lost from its original form. I would focus on those tiny hexagons that made up the pattern of the green sofa, and soon enough they would blur into one and I would get away. Away from the sofa and the noises and your sour breath, away from you. I would be in the field I saw on a commercial. I forget what it was trying to sell, but there was a girl with long straight platinum hair, parted in the middle. Her skin was creamy gold and her eyes were blue. She twirled and swayed in a white summer dress, its spaghetti straps draping over her shoulders. The field was vast, with rows of waist high grasses to play between. I called her Katherine, and when I was there, I was Clare. “Run with me, Clare, let’s run the length of the field!” I had a dress like hers and the sunshine found our faces as we tipped our heads back to laugh, the laugh that girls make when it’s summer, and they’re beautiful, and all they have to do is play and dance and chase their shadows.
“Get and take your bath now,” you would say gruffly afterwards. And I would clutch my clothes to my body as if they offered protection. I would run a bath as scalding hot as I could take it, and lower myself in, letting the water cover me. I would sit there, with the light off, the yellow streetlamp decanting through the rippled window pane, providing an eerie glow. I would count the pale blue tiles that lined the tub, joined by yellowing grout flecked with mildew splatters. And eventually, my knees pulled up to my chest and my body trembling from the cold, I would get out, and slide on my pajamas. I would creep past you, timing each step with your ugly guttural snores.
Lying in bed, I would search for ideas, praying for a god to make you stop. “I know cops,” you told me. “If you say nasty things about me, they’ll put your mom in jail.” My face asked the question that my voice could not. “Oh, she doesn’t need to have done anything at all… They’ve got plenty of crimes they call ‘open’, where they need someone to pin it on. Worst thing is, she’d know it was all your fault. God knows where you’d end up.”
She told you my idea to change her shifts, didn’t she? I sat after school, my knees pressing together under the table. Mom gave me a tepid bowl of Campbell’s mushroom soup and she sat opposite me, flicking through a Macy’s catalogue. “Would you look at that dress, Sweetie? So beautiful.” I moved the spoon through the soup, making wake trails in a figure eight.
“Mom, the hospital cafe, why don’t you work there during the day instead?” Mom’s tongue was licking the edge of her lip and her focus remained on the catalogue. “I mean, then you wouldn’t be tired at the wrong times.”
Leaning forward, she turned the corner of the page down, running her press-on nail along it twice to make a crisp fold. “Hmm?”
“I said, maybe you could work day shifts at the hospital?”
She looked at me. Her hair less dark, less red than when we had moved in. Her face was drawn, but she was attractive. Her skin was smooth and light, and her hazel eyes sloped upwards at the edges, giving her an exotic look. She leant her chin on her palm and gave me her attention. “Why’s that Honey Bunch?”
“It’s hard, working nights,” I said.
Mom smiled. “Oh, aren’t you adorable? I get seventy-five cents more an hour working nights, and I’m here after school for you. And I can always take a few cleaning hours during the day.” She gestured for me to eat, and I obliged. “If I had to work days, I’d have missed your shows, missed you as a pilgrim and, who was it now, the civil rights lady.” I looked at my spoon and loaded it up again. “Honestly though, it isn’t just that. Those girls, you know I tell you all about my girls?” I nodded. “They keep me sane. Thin Barb, Sue, Barb T. I don’t know how I would have gotten through the whole Jeff thing without my girls, you know?” I nodded again, but I didn’t know.
She told you about that conversation. Your smug face set in a toad smile, you said to me the next evening, “There’ll be no changes around here, so you can keep your mouth shut.”
One evening in early fall, before I stepped into the scalding hot bath, I opened the silver mirrored medicine cabinet. I emptied the mustard brown glass medicine bottles. Mom’s painkillers from her carpel tunnel syndrome. The sleep aids she didn’t often use. “My hours are all over the place, but I’m always tired so I don’t really need them,” I once heard her tell you. Her anti-anxiety drugs for after Tucker, my dad before Jeff, took off. That bottle had cotton wool lodged in its neck. I took it out and used it to wipe the steam from the mirror.
I looked at myself. Thirteen months had passed since we moved in. I ran my hands down the sides of my face, feeling the sharp dip under each cheekbone. “You’re growing up, my love,” Mom had said a while back. “Your puppy fat has disappeared.” My mousy hair was thin, my collar bones jutted forward from the flat of my chest and the bumps of my preteen breasts sat apologetically as my shoulders rolled forward to keep them close to me. I watched myself swallow every pill. Three, four at a time, cupping water in my hand from the faucet to ease the slide down my throat.
I stepped into the bath and lay back. My eyes traveled the swirl of the plaster pattern on the ceiling until I was in the field. I saw Katherine ahead of me and I called out, “Katherine, I’m here!” She turned and put her hand above her eyes to shield her line of vision from the bright light.
“Clare!” She ran to me and we joined hands, swinging each other round and round until we toppled over, dizzy and laughing.
You wouldn’t know how Mom is. She moved soon after the funeral, joined a weekly bereavement group. There, she met Hal, whose wife had passed away from skin cancer that spread to her brain. He’s a few years older than her, and while not classically handsome, he has a kind face, a gentleness. Mom loves like she grieves, a quiet glide rather than a disruptive splash, and Hal is patient and steady.
A tax return accountant for a few local businesses, Hal arranged an interview for Mom at Edgar’s Ladies’ Fashions, and Edgar hired her on the spot. Mom moved into Hal’s duplex and while he tends to his vegetable garden, Mom has taken an interest in cooking. They stopped going to the bereavement group, and replaced it with volunteering at a youth program, helping disadvantaged children with arts and crafts each week. Every night, Mom traces her fingers over a framed photograph of me. She is silent for a moment, and at those times, I whisper that I love her, and she often touches her heart.
And now I see you smoking in your armchair, the tan fabric on the arms frayed, the light white-blue from a cheap bulb overhead illuminating the rings that hover above you like a sarcastic halo. Your hands are shaking, and you haven’t touched the meatloaf TV dinner you microwaved forty minutes ago. You are ashen. And just when you relax and allow yourself to think you were mistaken, I will appear to you again.
Jo Varnish
You saw me as you were unlocking your car. You had perched your coffee cup from Ray’s Diner on the roof, and you looked up at me as I made my way towards you. You’ve changed, of course, over the past few years. Your hair more salt than pepper, the pores on your face wide. Broken veins punctuate your cheeks and nose. Your lips, dry and cracked with white pasty deposits at the corners, are pursed. The deep lines that frame your features couple with the yellows of your eyes to give an impression of tiredness, of stress, of unease. That made me smile.
You didn’t expect to see me, did you? Motionless, you gasped, and if fear had a sound, that’s what you made. I took you in: your thinning hair, your flaccid belly overhanging your belt line, down to your boots. I remember those boots, they smelled of musk and leather and plastic all at once. Their dark brown skin was smooth and the metal eyelets proudly gleamed. Now they are dappled with small abrasions, a triangular shaped stain blackens the front of the left, and the laces are stretched and exhausted.
When I pulled my eyes up to yours, you clamored to get inside your car. Driving off, you left your coffee on the roof, and I watched it trying to maintain balance while you pulled forward, but failing as you swerved. It landed with a satisfying whump; the lid popped off and its contents emerged, pooling on the cool tarmac like blood.
I was ten when mom and I moved into the small, sparsely furnished apartment next to yours. “I used to be a cop, till I got shot," you told us the day we arrived. You were in the hallway, black baseball cap on, sporting a wide cowboy style belt buckle, helping us carry our few boxes of belongings. Mom had her dark red hair tied back in a tight ponytail. She wore jeans, drug store flip flops and a white and navy horizontally striped fitted t-shirt that she called her “boating” shirt, although I never knew her to go on a boat.
I remember thinking you were trying to impress her, but you had no chance. Mom said my last two dads were more trouble than whooping cough, and she was done looking for another. I never met my original dad. My favorite was Jeff, the last of the four. He was kind to me, he bought me red cherry candies and let me choose the music when we drove to the store in his wooden sided car. But they started to fight, and when they fought, I wished for peace, and the only way that was going to happen was for Jeff to leave. And one day he did.
One of those first few nights, mom lay down beside me on my bed. “Sweetie, this is a good move,” she said. “I spoke to Bill next door and I’m going to clean for him, and when I’m working nights, he’ll watch you. Who better than an ex-policeman?” I was used to Jeff being home with me while mom had to work. We would make a pile of pasta, and play Monopoly or The Game of Life, and he always let me have two scoops of ice cream. Mom and I lay there brim full of plans for our apartment.
“Can I have purple blinds?” I asked.
“Sure, and I’ll get paint, we’ll find a you a rug. I’m going to get on track, Sweetie. Things are going to get better.” Mom’s bare arm was wrapped under my neck and she was facing me. I breathed in her rose scent, and watched the subtle flashes of expression cross her face as she succumbed to the dream drawing her in. The apartment was new to me, but Mom was here. I was home.
~ ~ ~
I would lie on the sofa, my body stolen, and I would look at any stray lint or thread, forever lost from its original form. I would focus on those tiny hexagons that made up the pattern of the green sofa, and soon enough they would blur into one and I would get away. Away from the sofa and the noises and your sour breath, away from you. I would be in the field I saw on a commercial. I forget what it was trying to sell, but there was a girl with long straight platinum hair, parted in the middle. Her skin was creamy gold and her eyes were blue. She twirled and swayed in a white summer dress, its spaghetti straps draping over her shoulders. The field was vast, with rows of waist high grasses to play between. I called her Katherine, and when I was there, I was Clare. “Run with me, Clare, let’s run the length of the field!” I had a dress like hers and the sunshine found our faces as we tipped our heads back to laugh, the laugh that girls make when it’s summer, and they’re beautiful, and all they have to do is play and dance and chase their shadows.
“Get and take your bath now,” you would say gruffly afterwards. And I would clutch my clothes to my body as if they offered protection. I would run a bath as scalding hot as I could take it, and lower myself in, letting the water cover me. I would sit there, with the light off, the yellow streetlamp decanting through the rippled window pane, providing an eerie glow. I would count the pale blue tiles that lined the tub, joined by yellowing grout flecked with mildew splatters. And eventually, my knees pulled up to my chest and my body trembling from the cold, I would get out, and slide on my pajamas. I would creep past you, timing each step with your ugly guttural snores.
Lying in bed, I would search for ideas, praying for a god to make you stop. “I know cops,” you told me. “If you say nasty things about me, they’ll put your mom in jail.” My face asked the question that my voice could not. “Oh, she doesn’t need to have done anything at all… They’ve got plenty of crimes they call ‘open’, where they need someone to pin it on. Worst thing is, she’d know it was all your fault. God knows where you’d end up.”
She told you my idea to change her shifts, didn’t she? I sat after school, my knees pressing together under the table. Mom gave me a tepid bowl of Campbell’s mushroom soup and she sat opposite me, flicking through a Macy’s catalogue. “Would you look at that dress, Sweetie? So beautiful.” I moved the spoon through the soup, making wake trails in a figure eight.
“Mom, the hospital cafe, why don’t you work there during the day instead?” Mom’s tongue was licking the edge of her lip and her focus remained on the catalogue. “I mean, then you wouldn’t be tired at the wrong times.”
Leaning forward, she turned the corner of the page down, running her press-on nail along it twice to make a crisp fold. “Hmm?”
“I said, maybe you could work day shifts at the hospital?”
She looked at me. Her hair less dark, less red than when we had moved in. Her face was drawn, but she was attractive. Her skin was smooth and light, and her hazel eyes sloped upwards at the edges, giving her an exotic look. She leant her chin on her palm and gave me her attention. “Why’s that Honey Bunch?”
“It’s hard, working nights,” I said.
Mom smiled. “Oh, aren’t you adorable? I get seventy-five cents more an hour working nights, and I’m here after school for you. And I can always take a few cleaning hours during the day.” She gestured for me to eat, and I obliged. “If I had to work days, I’d have missed your shows, missed you as a pilgrim and, who was it now, the civil rights lady.” I looked at my spoon and loaded it up again. “Honestly though, it isn’t just that. Those girls, you know I tell you all about my girls?” I nodded. “They keep me sane. Thin Barb, Sue, Barb T. I don’t know how I would have gotten through the whole Jeff thing without my girls, you know?” I nodded again, but I didn’t know.
She told you about that conversation. Your smug face set in a toad smile, you said to me the next evening, “There’ll be no changes around here, so you can keep your mouth shut.”
One evening in early fall, before I stepped into the scalding hot bath, I opened the silver mirrored medicine cabinet. I emptied the mustard brown glass medicine bottles. Mom’s painkillers from her carpel tunnel syndrome. The sleep aids she didn’t often use. “My hours are all over the place, but I’m always tired so I don’t really need them,” I once heard her tell you. Her anti-anxiety drugs for after Tucker, my dad before Jeff, took off. That bottle had cotton wool lodged in its neck. I took it out and used it to wipe the steam from the mirror.
I looked at myself. Thirteen months had passed since we moved in. I ran my hands down the sides of my face, feeling the sharp dip under each cheekbone. “You’re growing up, my love,” Mom had said a while back. “Your puppy fat has disappeared.” My mousy hair was thin, my collar bones jutted forward from the flat of my chest and the bumps of my preteen breasts sat apologetically as my shoulders rolled forward to keep them close to me. I watched myself swallow every pill. Three, four at a time, cupping water in my hand from the faucet to ease the slide down my throat.
I stepped into the bath and lay back. My eyes traveled the swirl of the plaster pattern on the ceiling until I was in the field. I saw Katherine ahead of me and I called out, “Katherine, I’m here!” She turned and put her hand above her eyes to shield her line of vision from the bright light.
“Clare!” She ran to me and we joined hands, swinging each other round and round until we toppled over, dizzy and laughing.
You wouldn’t know how Mom is. She moved soon after the funeral, joined a weekly bereavement group. There, she met Hal, whose wife had passed away from skin cancer that spread to her brain. He’s a few years older than her, and while not classically handsome, he has a kind face, a gentleness. Mom loves like she grieves, a quiet glide rather than a disruptive splash, and Hal is patient and steady.
A tax return accountant for a few local businesses, Hal arranged an interview for Mom at Edgar’s Ladies’ Fashions, and Edgar hired her on the spot. Mom moved into Hal’s duplex and while he tends to his vegetable garden, Mom has taken an interest in cooking. They stopped going to the bereavement group, and replaced it with volunteering at a youth program, helping disadvantaged children with arts and crafts each week. Every night, Mom traces her fingers over a framed photograph of me. She is silent for a moment, and at those times, I whisper that I love her, and she often touches her heart.
And now I see you smoking in your armchair, the tan fabric on the arms frayed, the light white-blue from a cheap bulb overhead illuminating the rings that hover above you like a sarcastic halo. Your hands are shaking, and you haven’t touched the meatloaf TV dinner you microwaved forty minutes ago. You are ashen. And just when you relax and allow yourself to think you were mistaken, I will appear to you again.
