Letting the Light In

There was a change in the weather when he called.   

The hairs on my arm stood up. Only my brother called me Donni, instead of Donna.

He told me he was living in Idaho, in the part that shoots up between Montana and Washington like a finger; where people live in the woods and do things their own way.

I asked him if he knew our parents were dead.

He said he knew. He’d dreamt about it. I hadn’t heard his voice in twenty-three years.    

I live in the middle of the city, with people all around me. It feels like a huge nest; all us baby birds snuggled in together with the smog settling down over everything to keep us warm.

I like carpeted floors and cushioned chairs. I don’t like wood.

He tracked me down through the services of the Montana Flathead Public Library. He couldn’t find any Dalwell’s listed in the Dakotas.

At first he thought I’d married. He didn’t think I’d head south. He doesn’t know I need to be warm. When it gets cool here in Southern California, it’s freezing in North Dakota.

My brother said he would visit me. He had nothing better to do. They’d taken his guns for disorderly disturbance and he couldn’t get them back until March.

I shook my head. No, was the word inside of me. No, was rising up from my belly; it pushed up past my lungs and exploded, into a cough. No, melted in the air.

I hung up.  Dr. Butler said it is best to do one thing at a time.  Since I was coughing, I coughed.

I watched to see if the phone would ring again. My brother’s name is John. He ate toast at the breakfast table and talked about his science project, how he fed plants, aspirin and cola. He took my orange juice for his experiment, but he wouldn’t let me in his bedroom. 

Now I have two plants growing. I don’t know what they are called. My friend Marley gave them to me for a song and I didn’t even know the tune.

My brother’s call made me remember too many Johns. My father was the first John. He was John Howard, but everyone called him Bud. He died in the tractor accident when I was seven. My stepfather came last. He was the boss of me. His name was John Winslow and he didn’t want my brother to have the same name.

First he said he would call my brother, son, but my brother said, “Over my dead body.”

My stepfather told me I was to call him father, except when we were alone and then I was supposed to say JohnJohn, only louder.

He said my brother’s middle name Matthew was a goodly name. Matthew sat at the right hand of Christ.

My brother said he was left-handed.

The phone did not ring again. I wondered if my brother went back to the woods.

Once, he spat at the table. My stepfather locked him in the basement. I was supposed to sing O Come All Ye Faithful so we wouldn’t hear my brother, but I couldn’t do a song.

My stepfather liked to hit, but he never hit me.

My brother went away when I was ten. He was already sixteen, but we didn’t have a party.  My mother’s sister took him. She said they’d not notice one more.

I stopped watching the phone because I had other things to do. I’m thirty-three and soon I will be thirty-three and a third. Marley said that is the best birthday ever. Then the music is yours.

When my parents died the police wanted to tell my brother, but he wasn’t at my Aunt’s anymore.

If my brother had looked for me before, he couldn’t find me because all the years I was in the institution at Ponoka I didn’t have a phone – my own I mean. I was welcome to use the pay phone on the ward, anytime from six to nine at night, but I didn’t have anyone to call, and all my words were gone.

At Ponoka, they don’t like wood either. All the chairs are plastic.

We didn’t have to go outside. The television set was on all day and the voices rose out of the box and danced down my arm and swirled around me in layers of green and gray and pink and I was warm.

In North Dakota, when it’s been below zero for six weeks in a row, it is too cold.  I lost two toes and part of my ear. They asked me why my parents weren’t at work that day, but I don’t know, I only remember the cold.

Later on, in Ponoka, they got a cat to catch the mice. I would take my carton of milk into the stairwell and tear off the top so that Twitch could drink it. He was gray with white stripes and he would curl in my lap and knead my leg, his paws pumping and pushing me. He was comfy, and toasty, and he made the words come out of me. 

I told him what I saw, the stair, his paw, my finger, my knee, and then we were quiet together, except for the sound of our breath going in and out, because that’s what Twitch and I liked the best. One day Twitch came back to my room, and Mrs. Michaelson saw him and she didn’t tell. Twitch slept in the sunshine on the windowsill.

After the detective heard the words had come back he asked me all the same questions about the day my parents died, but I told him I didn’t know the answers. Then they discharged me. I didn’t ask them to, but Mrs. Michaelson, who is the boss, said it was time. She told me I would always be welcome to come back. And visit. She gave me her card and on the bus to California I made a song from it, the numbers bouncing along with me while the bus tires rolled me away.

For seventeen years the insurance money had been growing. I get a check every month. I have my own apartment. At night I watch reruns, but on Bewitched, I only like Samantha’s first husband, Darren. Well, the second husband was Darren too; they pretended he was the first husband. I turn it off if he is on.

Ordering groceries on the phone, I can stay in for two weeks. The trash makes me open the door.

Did I say my stepfather never laid a hand on me?  I get the lines wrong sometimes. He never spanked me, is what I meant to say.

When my brother stole a soda, my stepfather picked up a board and hit him on the back of his legs and on his back. He was squished in the corner, hiding his head. I was very quiet. He had to stay home from school. My mother said she needed my help so I stayed home too. We tied rags on my feet and I skated and skated until the waxed floor was shiny. My brother was in his room. We did not talk to each other.

I was stretching my body, after my brother called, when a familiar knock made the hairs on my arm stand up again. I opened the door and my brother walked in.

That old word started to rise up in me. No is the word my mother keeps saying in my dreams. You can put two words together and open the crack and let the light in; you just have to find the right words, but no isn’t one of them.

My friend, Marley, had the words. She could stand in the spot where the past and the future are happening at the same time and she said that’s when the light floods in and when you know you’re a part of it.

Dr. Butler told me to fight for the words.

My brother sat on my sofa and turned off the sound of the people on the television, then made up his own words. He wasn’t even close. He asked me what I do all day. I tried to tell him about my programs, but he said besides that. I tried to tell him about my shiny floors, but not that he said. He asked me if I’d ever tried swimming upstream. He asked me if I’d jumped off a bridge into water. He asked me if I was still mad about our parents. Then he laughed. “Didn’t you hate the way he chewed with his mouth open?”

In Ponoka, I could sit in the stairwell if they were watching a bad movie, but my apartment doesn’t have a stairwell. I breathed in and stood in one spot and told him there wasn’t room for him in my apartment. He said my couch would make a good bed and he would use it just fine.

I can hold the yoga plank position for two minutes. At first I tipped over because of my missing toes, but I have learned to compensate. Dr. Butler told us we must learn to compensate and then Marley would say, “But! But! But! Butler!” and we would all laugh.  

I learned Yoga in Ponoka because I wanted to stretch like Twitch and have the light flow along me. When he arched, the light would ripple up his legs, along the curve of his back, all the way to his head.

My brother, John – he wants me to call him John – just one and not too loud – walks around a lot, touching everything. He calls my people a collection. They are treasures, people treasures I got from Marley when she left Ponoka to go to Cleveland. She said I knew a treasure when I saw one and no one appreciated her people like I did. She made them out of foil from the cigarette packages; folding and twisting until they became a little person with arms and legs and a head. She said they couldn’t be moved because they belonged in Ponoka, but that wasn’t true. When Mrs. Michaelson said it was my time to go, they helped me wrap them up carefully and my friends and I came to the sunshine together.

John wants to know if they are worth anything.

“They are to me,” I say. I don’t show him the garden I am making out of gum wrappers. It is in a box under my bed, but not ready for the light.

John lost the ends of two fingers, his ring and his baby. He said he was dusting off a saw that was still going, but he couldn’t hear the hum because he had music in his headphones.

I showed him my missing toes and ear. I told him the cold did it.

He asked me if I had money in my bank. He asked me to share because he needed a gun for his birthday.

He took me to register for one. I tried to hold my breath while I was outside. He held my arm, his knuckles brown against all my little hairs. I felt so cold. When we got home, I crawled into my bed to get warm. I dreamt he invited me into his old room, the one he had when I was little. At first I thought it was filled with pieces of broken cement, but when I touched them they were chunks of dirty ice.

In the morning, it was the orange juice and the way he took it out of the refrigerator and tipped it back that made me remember that day, the day my parents died.

We hadn’t spoken of my brother for three years and then, there he was in our house.

It wasn’t his house anymore.

Our stepfather told him so.

He brought the cold in from outside and said “Hey Donni,” his voice coming from far inside his coat, and then he pulled off his glove, and walked over to the refrigerator.

My stepfather came out of the den and my mother stood on the steps. We all watched him drink the orange juice. I could see the two-by-four tucked under my brother’s arm.

Ice was melting and dripping off one end of it.

As he drank the orange juice in my apartment I got up. The front door invited me to open it. I walked out. I had my socks on. It’s easier in Southern California, to get up and walk out.

I don’t know how I got out the door in North Dakota. My slippers kept coming off as I climbed the piles of frozen snow to get on the road, my parents screams echoing into the icy air.  They found me that night, curled up in the phone booth, outside the Conoco Station.

This time, I called Mrs. Michaelson from the pay phone. She accepted my call.

She said, “Stay where you are.”

 I watched the police car pull up in front of my apartment. They had guns like my brother. They surprised him because he didn’t use his like he told me he would. My brother seemed so small. He sat in the car for a long time and then they drove him away.

I leaned against a tree to take off my damp socks. The wood was warm on my fingers and the grass tickled my toes, even the missing ones.

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Published in the Marathon Literary Review in April 2015