A Bright House

Backtracking from the fall of weight, large splashes of fat tears into her own cupped palms, then running down her slender wrists into pools at the crook of each inner elbow, and his voice... the words in blurred pastels but the voice... as much a part of her as the years of pain, but anything but pain. Backtracking to four o’clock on Saturday of an interval between seasons, in time to be revealed as an interval between lives experienced in one vessel.

Jenny and Ray had settled into something indescribable during his light breakfast; a knowing without a certainty of the details. He finished his sandwich, refused a coffee refill, and smiled his bolt of sunshine as he handed her a ten dollar bill and told her to keep the change. He’d held the ten between his long fingers, creased down the middle of its length with three quarters of the bill exposed, but Jenny reached past more than she recognized to let her cool fingertips lightly brush across the rune tattoo on his right hand. She trailed the fingers back in slow motion to grasp the money, suddenly surprised by what she had done. Not risking the look at his face then, but inwardly remembering a younger version of herself that walked with confidence; loved, wanted, needed... one of the blessed.

Ray’s voice had been unruffled; “See you at four, then.”

And he was through the door as she held the ten dollar bill and gazed at his long easy strides... four wouldn’t come soon enough, it seemed to her, and yet she couldn’t find the truth of the why in that. Not yet.

Backtracking from the sight of a beautiful man standing in an entrance, a narrow foyer with a sloping floor. A tall radiant aura-wrapped being, standing still in the spaces that Scott had never filled. Because he had been taken from her. Had never seen the house on Bright Street even as his Jenny brought him there and mourned herself into invisibility. Backtracking from the held breath sight of a man in a hallway where no man had stood who shared her heart. This man reached into a front pocket to produce a beautiful marble that looked to contain the coppery shine of a cat’s eye, mottled in greens and cherry red, and he gently placed it on the old oak floorboards. The marble rolled from his fingers, angular across the open concept parlor and dining area, until it found the baseboards in the corner beneath the tall southwest window. It was an act of pure whimsy; something silently able to summarize her plight, hope, latent dreams.

Five minutes prior to the strike of four o’clock, Ray Townes appeared through the front window of the diner. He leaned against the ledge with his long braid pressing the pane, arms folded casually, watching the traffic and pedestrians. Jenny saw him from the back of the main room and felt a fresh relief, whether or not it puzzled her unimportant compared to its truth of emotion. The biggest letdown, the most crushing, had been the removal of the love of her life. Without her having a say in it. Without her having even a flash of time to prepare for its devastation. Through the tunnel, mostly a dark intervening space between then and now, little progress had been made other than the perfecting of “getting by”... every day had felt like baby steps toward an unknown. Merely having this interesting and somewhat confounding stranger show up when he said he was going to... was, what? As she mulled this over and bid her employer a good Saturday, reaching for the front door handle, Jenny had no answer.

When she greeted him with “hey Ray”, he stood to his full height and beamed one at her, eyes crinkling. “How did the shopping go?”

“Very well, thanks” he nodded, smiling. “Found an affordable outfit for tomorrow, a couple of nice casual shirts...” with this he indicated the parchment paper colored button shirt beneath his open denim jacket... “and I was wondering if you’d be interested in showing me a little of the Toronto Islands over the next few hours. I’ve always meant to visit them.”

Jenny had held no idea that they would do much more than have a coffee somewhere, and she found the lurch of excitement in her chest alarming, almost amusing. Without pausing to think of possible ramifications, and certainly without giving herself time to refuse this window of what felt like opportunity, she spoke as though from another Jenny’s thoughts.

“We could do that. I haven’t been to the islands in years, and this is a perfect time to avoid crowds. I do have to go home to quickly shower and get changed... ” her voice trailed off as another of those knowings flooded in. This man’s energy was pure benevolence bordering on an unnerving compassion. If timber wolf eyes could swim with warmth, his did. As Jenny lowered the volume of “quickly shower and get changed”, Ray began to nod with thoughts in advance of what she was about to say next. “If you don’t mind walking a few blocks and waiting for me?”

And so they walked south. Jenny being by far the quieter of the two, Ray did most of the talking, making idle banter about the busy streets, the amount of beggars, his quick methods of choosing items to purchase. He remarked favorably about the old homes still standing as they passed through one particularly intact block on Sumach street. Jenny listened to his voice, felt his presence keenly beside her, and grappled with a potent “this is a memory” sensation that would not let go once she identified it. Unbeknownst to Jenny, Ray was tuned in to her open energy during their stroll. Her guard had lowered. The characteristic of this new and more vulnerable soul signature was immediately affecting; he wanted to take her hand, place his right arm around her shoulder, protect her, from the element of her psyche that was self injurious.

As they reached the top of Bright street, Ray and Jenny both felt a relaxing of shared energy between them. In differing ways but matched through the depths of feeling, they were made smaller as individuals in order to feel larger as a combined movement. Toward something, and that much was vividly felt without details. To feel swept up in another’s energy field, no matter the application of myriad human emotions, is to let go of barriers. It requires courage, for these walls often come down with great risk. For someone as wounded as Jenny, who had always been a damaged but gentle soul, a foundling in search of some meaning in that peculiar cruelty, just walking beside Ray Townes and knowing that she would invite him into her home was a breathtaking development. It had to be the precision of meshing persona, perception, and timing. Absolutely, timing. Ray looked down the west side of the narrow street and marveled inwardly at the drastic tilt of the houses; some of the facades near the middle of the curving sidewalk were angled back by as much as ten degrees.

“Utterly charming” he guessed at something while speaking; “yours is the bay window?”

Amazing, she thought, and then said it aloud.

He laughed a beautiful baritone that ended in a rising note. They approached her front door and Jenny felt a slight tremor in her grip on the keys. Another infusion of excitement with bewilderment. This was new territory no matter where it was or wasn’t going, and as she turned the key in the lock there came a gentle welling up of the sick awareness that he was leaving after Sunday; that she was allowing her thoughts to wander into recklessness.

Upon first seeing the tilted houses of Bright street, Ray had reached into his left front pocket for the marble. The one he had saved that his mother had given to him after finding it in the flower bed soil one Spring afternoon on the day of Ray’s sixth birthday. Sheer impulse with a sure guiding nudge that he never questioned; Ray selected the marble from his little tin of keepsake treasures just before leaving for Toronto. For some, the more pragmatic and less romantic in vision, the bringing of a small glass marble to a tilted home owned by a troubled woman would seem of little importance. One of the many thousands of wasted energies, gestures, slices of time, when so many more vital things are at hand. For Ray, and certainly for the Jenny who had retreated into solitude and sketching, wandering, disappearing... his seemingly tiny act of whimsy in her front hallway served as a metaphoric ushering in.

She opened the door, stepped through, and he followed. She slipped off her work shoes and asked him if he would like something to drink. Ray stood with a slight smile, appraising the open concept main room, admiring the antique newel post and banister. “Water is fine, or iced tea, apple juice...” he rolled the marble between his thumb and index finger, retrieving it from the pocket. Jenny had turned to face him after removing her shoes, and although four feet apart, she felt as though she stood directly beneath his chin. The sight of a man in her home, and one not wearing a contractor’s garb, was startling. He seemed gigantic there, his impossible to read eyes roving the room, then fixing on hers.

Ray was perceiving something about the love lost for Jenny; that the man inside her heart had never set foot in this home, but was very present. The energy of extended loss fairly seeped from the walls. “You can come through to the kitchen, Ray, or you can sit out in the yard while I shower and change, if you want?”

He smiled at her, bent his knees and placed the marble down at his feet. She watched it with a childlike fascination, loving its coppery innards and flecks of green and red. It rolled with a soft sound past her socked feet and across the middle of the bare floorboards, under the dining room table and chair set, to rest with a solid clack against the quarter round trim of the Victorian baseboards in the far southwest corner. She laughed gently, turning from the resting place of the marble back to his crinkled eyes. His incredible, solid, warmth. No words could follow directly, but she swirled in a knowing of what his innocent gesture had “said”... it was an acceptance, an assurance, and some form of promise. This, she knew.