Chapter Thirty-Six
The night returned to me and so did the voices in the darkness. At first I hoped they were Esther’s beckoning or Daddy calling me down for a piece of midnight pie. In truth, the cries in the night were screech owls calling me outside, their whinnies wavering through the single-pane windows.
If I were still locked away, I would have had no choice except to will myself to return to sleep and pray the drugs would make that possible. But here, I could decide what to do, so I reached for the afghan that Mama had left at the foot of my bed and I wrapped it around my shoulders. I walked down the creaking steps and through the kitchen, still remembering the path in the darkness. The fall air cut through the openings of the blanket’s granny- square pattern as I walked out of the house and onto the porch, where moths dizzied themselves around the flickering light.
My feet had once been calloused and conditioned enough to be numb to the jagged pokes of the gravel, but they had softened over the years. I considered going back for shoes, but I wanted to keep moving forward. I walked across the grass and through unsuspecting spiderwebs that pulled across my cheeks and caught in my eyelashes. I kept going until I reached the rooted soil beneath my tree.
Instead of the buzz of appliances and overhead lights, I listened to the soft hum of the final cicadas who were still too stubborn to wind down for the season. The calls of coyotes in the distance used to send me running back inside. Now I sat still, less fearful of those distant predators than I was of the
screams of fellow inmates that had bellowed through the hallways and tormented me each night.
“Luuuuu-cyyyyyy, come in from the dark.” That’s how Mama used to call me in at night, as dusk turned to twilight and Daddy’s day in the field had come to an end. On the nights when I lingered long enough that the dew dampened my feet, I counted it as a win, as if I had drunk the fullness of the day and gotten a taste of the impending night as well. But I knew after the second singsong call of “Luuuuu-cyyyyyy,” my time was done.
Mama had tried to call me in from the dark for all those years. What she didn’t know was that some summer nights while the others slept, I would sneak outside and gather fireflies. One time I placed them in a mason jar. I thought myself so clever; I had created a lantern out of nature! I had caught a dozen or so and placed them inside the glass jar, twisting the lid on tightly. I held it in front of me as I walked through the grass and back onto the porch. I sat it on the railing and watched them until my eyes became heavy.
In the morning, I ran downstairs and onto the porch, ignoring my mother’s calls for me to eat breakfast. “Such a petulant child,” she told Daddy as I pulled open the door and ran to the jar that no longer glowed.
My small hands, still soft with baby fat, shook the jar, demanding the fireflies gathered on the bottom to wake. When they didn’t, I thought for a moment before realizing the solution. They, like me, preferred darkness. So I took them beneath the porch, into the shadows, hoping to trick them into thinking it was nighttime. I shook the jar again, willing them to wake and shine and be the light they had been the previous night.
But they couldn’t wake, because they had suffocated in the stale air I had contained them in.
After breakfast, I sprinkled them under the peach trees. To dust, you shall return. I repeated the line I had heard the reverend say.
Mama had taught me that darkness was not to be trusted. I believed her for
a long time, but as those tranquilizers released my mind, I felt at home again when those hours of dormiveglia returned. It was when my thoughts felt most real. Of course, I couldn’t tell them, because they wouldn’t understand.
Especially not Henry.
In Dr. Ruthledge’s office, Henry had promised that we’d get through this together, but what was together? We had vowed “in sickness and health, till death do us part.” I wanted to believe that he meant it. Each visit could be evidence that he had chosen me and he continued to, but that didn’t mean he knew what was best.
Together does not mean sameness. He didn’t know—wouldn’t know— what it felt like inside my body and mind. He would never understand existing in a body that fought itself. He would never know the urgency to live as the clock ticked louder, faster, time suddenly having a different quality to it. He wouldn’t know what it was to be the light caught in a jar, watching the lid turn and tighten, each breath one closer to the final, last suffocating one.
