A Bright House

Jenny wasn’t one to luxuriate in the tilted bathwater of her old claw foot tub. She was more apt to take a shower, pour a glass of dry red from Argentina, and find her place in a dog eared book. Perhaps after a particularly demanding shift, her feet aching to match the throb of thoughts, she would prop herself up in bed and watch the bought and sold world of television.

Movie nights were usually reserved for weekends. Sunday was her day to walk the city. To find new vantage points where she could sit with her pencils and sketch pad. Jenny had a facility for great depth of detail given the inherent challenges of a two dimensional monochromatic mode of expression; her eye pleasing gentle presence often afforded her with opportunities to fix her gaze upon those who became her subject matter.

People hardly ever protested or shot back with intruded upon energy. This was one of the many dichotomous elements within the ever alone Jenny. She went forth daily to do her job, interacted with hundreds of souls each week after week, was a fixture in her neighborhood where she shopped and frequented a favorite coffee house on her Sundays, but was removed from the depth of fabric that comprised her reality. Behind those pretty blue eyes, under that thick unruly waving mane, beneath the gently freckled countenance, the heart of a purposely retracted soul kept time with stasis.

In an era of eco-consciousness where the tint of green became so much the echo of humanity’s stamp, the phrase “reduce your footprint” almost seemed a command for Jenny the quiet. She barely made a sound. The wind went around her. Her feet refused to transfer the weight of her slender body to the earth. Loss had reduced her to a fraction of a person. A man buying clementine oranges could look up and be instantly drawn into her ethereal beauty, and she would look through him for a moment that would imprint his memory, only once. She was the ghost of surviving, and she wore it well. Jenny could vanish into herself so completely, dressing in baggy track pants, hair tucked beneath a ball cap, as to become boyish, anonymous.

She could give in to sudden impulses of a Sunday morning and fix herself up with a sun dress, a floppy straw hat, bright peach sandals, and make her way to a far flung part of the city where nobody recognized her. There, she would silently enjoy the attention of men without wanting anything to do with them. None of them were Scott.

Scott.

Jenny wasn’t one to luxuriate in the tilted bathwater of her old claw foot tub, but on the Friday evening of the day that brought Ray Townes into her world, she felt herself extra raw and very tired. She drew a tall bath, liberally applied scented balm, and stepped gingerly into the heat. On such occasions that she chose to soak in hot water,it was next to impossible not to imagine her husband’s final struggle to live. Ice cold water sapping his limbs, slowing his heart rate, the boots and winter jacket dragginghim down into the deathly silence of no return.

His beautiful human form, taken and never given back. There were urges, perhaps on the Saturday evenings when she’d poured liberally from the wine bottle, to draw a final bath. To join him where he must surely be waiting.

On an elongated stretch of two lane highway that snakes along north and south, parallel to its rugged great lake shoreline, the two living beings in the front seat of a Buick Skylark share internal space with something that has perished. Its vessel emptied of life, seemingly prematurely, in some way occupying more of the vehicle’s interior through its very silence. The utter completeness of its demise, a shout without voice. The driver has asked the passenger where he wishes to be taken, as in his thoughts there is no other protocol when picking up a distressed hitchhiker and the corpse of what looks to be an unknown species of raptor.

“I have spent most of my life living here” the driver says over windshield wipers that work in near futility against hard pelting rain that has begun to angle in from the west, “and I’ve never seen a bird like that one.”

The passenger is silent for a moment and then reaches to crank down the window beside him, stopping to fix pale blue eyes on the driver. “Do you mind?” He doesn’t wait for the reply and the driver’s “not if too much rain doesn’t get in” is buried under a rush of wind.

Large drops verging on hail are slashing sideways from west to east, spattering the left side of the vehicle. This stretch of highway is lonely. The ferocity of the weather seems directly proportionate to the passenger’s emotions, and his voice is hoarse above the cold moaning air.

“This is an extremely rare specimen. Far from home.”

With that, he reaches above his head without asking to unlatch the sunroof, pushing it upward at the rear and creating a violent vortex in the center of the interior that is quick to spread in a chaotic lashing throughout.“Hey!” the driver protests but can’t take his right hand off the wheel for the sudden feeling of fluidity in the grip of his tires to the road. He glances with hard eyes at his guest and sees sudden tears spilling there on the man’s sallow cheeks, then fills up with the keenest regret he has ever known.

How many good Samaritans does it take to learn a lesson about the supreme indifference of random selection? Turning his attention back to the blurred out two-lane curving ahead of his car, the driver feels a maelstrom of anger to match the helical motion of winds whipping the Buick’s interior. He will have to pull over and be rid of this passenger. It might become violent. He is unsure of how or when, lightens the weight of his foot on the gas; a large butterscotch tipped feather floats up behind him in the rear view mirror and skids along the roof fabric. It hovers for a second and is sucked out through the sunroof.

The passenger has turned his face away and is leaning slightly out through the open window. Another feather, and then another, lifting up from the back seat to dance on whirlwinds that carry them both to the front seat. The driver recoils at the feeling of a scrape across his right temple, bats the feather away and feels the car lurch toward oblivion for a blood ice fraction of precious time remaining. He grips the wheel firmly and takes his foot off the gas, stealing a glance at the passenger with his head out the window. Wracking sobs fill the senses and just as suddenly there are feathers beyond count floating and dancing wildly within the car as it reaches a speed that only heightens the commotion of moving air inside the cabin.

A dreamlike scream of this-isn’t-possible declaimed by dozens of wind animated proofs filling and spiraling.

“Far from home” he hears the passenger say in a strangled throat.

The Friday evening of Jenny’s luxuriating bath being a late Spring one, sunlight still illuminated the smallish washroom at the end of her second floor hallway. She lived in a row house and therefore windows were very important to her, being relatively few. The front parlor and upper level master bedroom both had bay windows that were badly angled and in need of repair, but to what end? The ground beneath Bright street was in constant shift. That the old homes were over-built with large support beams beneath, and were all in it together, so to speak, lent an air of nonchalance to the collective settling experience in the minds of the occupants along the row. With what little extra money she had been able to salt away at the time of purchasing the weary old house, Jenny had replaced the bathroom window with an expensive frosted one that cranked open via handle, letting in breezes and protecting her need for privacy. After long hours on her feet, working a busy diner almost always on her own, she and her shower were good friends.

Quite often she would get into the Victorian curtain enclosure right after the half hour walk home from work, and then again just before bed. On this particular Friday after meeting the fascinating Ray Townes, she opted for the long soak.

There, with sunlight waning and her pony tail flung back behind her over the tub rim, she sank deep into the water and peered at her exposed knees, the feet together and shapely legs bent. She spared idle thought for the body that housed her soul, about how little she thought to pamper it, even take care of it.

Wasn’t it ironic that she had given up hope of all new love entering her life?

That she had become more than the comfortably numb of Pink Floyd fame? That her ongoing years of self removal from even a hint of interest in having a new partner had not eroded at her physical appearance with commensurate power to reflect the steadfast shutting down of her emotional needs? Jenny sipped of the large wine goblet, soaked in the cooling water, and felt herself both sinking into a familiar weekend sadness and feeling a strange nudge of excitement at this stranger who had entered the Logan Street Grill and dialed up her name from thin air. Were she a person with a computer, or even a passing interest in social networking, she would have been able to research the man’s name and history as a clairvoyant.

She felt a twinge of self anger, soaking there and starting to prune around the fingertips. Time had been a mute voice, as a concept or a threat, to her. She liked it that way. Sinking lower into the bath water, her chin touching the surface, Jenny drifted into the reverie of unfinished thought swirls. Ray Townes.

What would he mean to her by the time he left the city? Would she even bother to call his number? Would he return for breakfast in the morning? How long would she allow herself to remain stuck between her old ways of stubborn armor and this new stomach flutter that made her want to open that doorway that had been slammed shut after the disappearance of her beloved? Would it actually harm her beyond all recovery, were she to learn the fate of her Scott? She drifted into this looping of possibilities; tired, cynical, hopeful... and the sunlight in the room quite suddenly snuffed out like a flame extinguished rapidly by air movement.

It wasn’t the effect of a light switch thrown and immediate darkness, but rather a sideways dimming as though massive cloud banks had blown instantly across the star shine. Jenny gasped and pushed herself upward into a full sitting position, the water sloshing violently. Her eyes sought the meaning through the then darkened rectangle of Pella casement window. Not a sound came through the opened glass.

Traffic stilled. City erased. World halted.

There came a heady moment of utter freedom, where the immensity of the unknown in it held a promise of total liberation. It echoed violently in her skull the way her sick sense of subliminal relief did, when she received the phone call so many years prior about the fate of her ice fishing husband. She had harbored a deeply shadowed fear of becoming a mother, since her own history had deprived her of a mother’s love and guidance. The enormity of the decision to have a child, even then as her heart was devoted to the man who wanted to be a father, had weighed its peculiar anxiety upon her soul, and heavily.

Years of isolation and reflection, before the cloak of survival’s numbness and imposition, had provided ample guilt for that split second feeling of very wrong relief when she took that fateful phone call from the provincial police. The darkness in the washroom was so pervasive, Jenny had to grip the sides of the tub for a moment of deep breathing as her eyes adjusted. She could barely make out the hallway door frame. Her ears felt muted, as though filled with water. A strange pressure behind her eyelids. She could feel her chest rising and falling with breath, but could not hear the breathing. Panic rose like so much bile in her throat. Her hands gripped the tub edges tighter and she pushed herself up to her knees first, and then to a standing posture where the effort to do so made the loud splash of water startle her back to a position she then remembered occupying; her hair over the back of the tub, knees raised, chin touching tilted liquid surface.

Sunlight, as it had been doing all along, flooded the one hundred and twenty five year old room. It angled through the ajar window and highlighted the old pine wainscot that ran the perimeter of the space from floorboards to three feet in height. She tilted her head back to press her neck harder against the curve of the tub’s upper lip. A throb of temple met with her heavy breathing. The water rippled back to calm. Jenny felt her pulse, thick in slender wrists, pushing against the soft skin of her neck.

Over on the three tiered stand where she kept extra towels, her neatly folded t-shirt held atop it, the business card handed to her by mister Townes. She couldn’t have known it then, in her bi-locational confused slumber, but across the city to the east he had just devoted five minutes of his focus upon her.