On Little Wings

 
 
 
 
 
By Regina Sirois

ISBN-10 1468096478
ISBN-13 978-1468096477
ASIN B006MITQRC

On Little Wings
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2011 Regina Sirois
v1.10

Cover photo and design © 2011 Justin Sirois. All rights reserved.
Used with permission.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without expressed written consent of the author except in cases of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

www.reginasirois.com

I write this story for Audree,
who looks like a Kansas wheat field on a summer day.

May your little wings always take you where you want to go.

Can anyone know exactly what it means that I shut the door
softly
? That I
walked
away? Despite the shock, I didn’t slam it. The sound would have shattered me. I refused to go fast. I knew if I started running the hard knot of feelings in my chest would fly free and unravel, leaving me forever tangled, forever bound. To stay in one orderly piece I commanded my feet to take long, slow steps, but the rest of my body rebelled against the mandate to keep calm: my fretting lungs, punching heart, pounding pulse.

“Nineteen houses,” I exhaled, which brought my tally of spoken words in the last half hour to three. The only thing I uttered to my parents before leaving was, “Cleo’s.” It told them where I was going, and frankly, they deserved nothing else.

I possess an impressive arsenal of tricks to stop tears before they start. My favorite is blinking while saying the Pledge of Allegiance, but I like to imagine goats eating random things around me, as well. For this special occasion I used pointless facts. I looked hard at my surroundings and repeated silently what I saw like it could save me.
That is a bed of red pansies…. There is a chip in that brick on their house…. The Larson’s car has rust on its muffler… That window is losing its trim to wood rot….
In noticing every mundane detail, I attempted to forget the biggest one – everyone had lied to me for my entire life.

I let my mind drift outside my fevered head and watched myself walk down the quiet street. The girl I saw looked so peaceful, so normal. I continued my silent narration:
That blond girl is whispering to herself. She forgot to put her shoes on. There is a hole in the knee of her jeans. Her breath smells like chocolate. She has tiny freckles on her nose. She just saw her parents yell at each other for the first time in her life. She is trying not to cry. She has an aunt….

She has an aunt.

I have an aunt.

I squeezed the photograph in my fingers until the paper threatened to buckle under the pressure, but avoided looking at it. It contained too many facts that I couldn’t say out loud. Not yet. But one clawed like roots into the dark recesses of my brain. I didn’t speak the words, but they thrummed against the bare spots of my soul.
I have the same freckles. I have the same freckles. I have the same freckles.
All my life my mother told me that I had thirty seven perfect, sugar-sprinkle freckles running across my nose. (I tried to count them once. I stopped at forty three because I knew by then that she just made up the number. I didn’t mind.) My mother never told me who else had perfect freckles. There is nothing particularly unusual about looking like your aunt. I imagine it happens all the time. But it is indescribably jarring when you are sixteen and your aunt doesn’t exist one second and then is living, breathing flesh the next.

I should have known the photograph was dangerous as soon as I saw the faded colors. I learned that lesson in eighth grade when my father showed me a colored photograph over one hundred years old. He held up his copy of Popular Mechanics and a Russian peasant in a red and gold skirt looked sullenly at me from under her purple head scarf. It is easy to look at people in old black and white photos; easy to pity them. Easy to dismiss them. But when they challenge you with blue eyes and red cheeks and you can see blood in their skin, then it is a strange phenomenon. You become
responsible
for them. It’s your job to keep looking and wondering and hurting for them. You are forced to think of her first kiss, her last breath. And then you have to admit that she is dead, which seems horribly rude. I slid the picture of my smiling aunt Sarah into the dark safety of my back pocket and tried to guide my thoughts back to safer waters.

That leaf has been eaten by a bug and is turning brown… Mr. Turner’s kids left his hose out again….
Sixteen years of being told that my parents were both only children.
I caught myself as my hands started to tremble in anger and forced my thoughts back to the visible facts.
Cleo’s house is only one block away now… Cleo has green eyes the exact shade of a crocodile in the sun… Cleo will know what to do…

My best friend, Cleo, and I knew the route between our homes the way most people know their birthmarks and scars – intimately. Nineteen houses, two cul-de-sacs, eleven privacy fences, three trellises, five swing sets, one swimming pool, seven dogs, one ‘beware of dog’ sign, only one concrete statue of a dancing frog using a mushroom for an umbrella (thank goodness) and one wooden wheelbarrow overflowing with pink flowers. Everything familiar, predictable, and suddenly, thoroughly meaningless.

I wondered for a moment what Cleo would say. All I knew for certain (as certain as anyone
can
be with Cleo) was the way my story would make her blank face twitch until her reluctant mouth finally rounded into a satisfying, silent ‘O.’ I paused my thoughts on her stunned face and smiled at the dimple that dug into only one of her cheeks. That dimple always softened her ferocious beauty into something comical.

Thinking about Cleo’s face is not uncommon in our town. She is one of our regional points of pride. A natural resource. But Cleo refuses to notice. It is her unbreakable rule not to notice. And when you begin life as ugly as Cleo, I think you get to make some of your own rules. (And yes, I know it’s wrong to call a child ugly, but you weren’t there.)

Since Fortune eventually favored her, I don’t mind saying that Cleo might have been the ugliest child nature ever allowed; If not in the history of the world, at least in the living memory of Eastern Nebraska. I know some people can tell you where they were when man walked on the moon or the Challenger exploded or the World Trade Center fell. In Constance, most people can tell you where they were when they first saw Cleo.

For me it was age five. Sitting at the puzzle table. She entered the Children’s Garden Preschool clutching her mother’s hand, standing a head shorter than any of us. Her protruding stomach and bowed legs gave her an undeniably ape-like appearance. Two enthusiastic claps and the teacher announced, “Boys, girls, this is Gerry. She will be joining our class. Let’s all say hello!”

Her mouth hung open due to a severe overbite which made me think she was what all of our mothers called “special.” Thick, plastic glasses magnified her lazy eye which wandered at random before coming to a rest staring ponderously at her nose. The same James Barry, who now sits behind us in third hour and would happily give up food for a week to have Cleo look at him in disdain, wrinkled his nose and eyed me with an expression that said “Are you seeing what I see?”

Oblivious to all of us, Cleo stomped to the art table. When her stare caught me out of the crowd I met it. I was trying to tell which eye she was seeing out of because the lazy one was wandering toward the ever-reproducing snails in the fish bowl, but she mistook my thoughtful gaze as an invitation. Her hand whipped to the table, grabbed a paintbrush and thrust it toward me. At a loss for what else to do, I took it. Cleo claimed me with that paintbrush like pilgrims staking a flag in the New World. I accepted it because I pitied her as a pet of sorts, and she offered it because she saw me as a kind of servant. Both secure in our superior positions, we mutually entered our friendship.

How ugly Geraldine turned into beautiful Cleo bewilders the people of Constance as much as the question “how did she get that ugly in the first place?” Most people look at her today and think that Cleo is short for Cleopatra, in homage to her shining dark hair, satin skin and large eyes. I am the only other soul on earth who knows the truth. Her name was gifted to her in the first grade by an animated fish. One Saturday morning we were watching Pinocchio. I was gazing catatonically the way all children do with cartoons, but Gerry was shaping her life. When the movie ended I tried to get her attention by snapping my fingers (a newly acquired skill) and saying her name, but her only reply was, “My name is Cleo.”