Outside The Frame

The last thing John saw each night before turning off his lamp was a sculpted brass picture frame - ivy wrapped around oak - that was the last remnant of his dead mother. The picture in the frame was not of his mother. It was of himself with one of the two other women in his life, and the only living one: his daughter Abilene. He made a point of looking into her eyes at the end of each day, saying his prayers.

In the picture, Abby is a small child and John is a new father for the third and last time. They are both smiling and laughing at something, some toy or game or person outside the frame, lost to memory. When he looked into her eyes he could sometimes catch a flash of that moment and feel the pain leave his body and soul for the few woozy minutes it takes to redirect thoughts from the waking world to the dreamworld.

Night has to fall. There is nothing anybody can do about that. It wakes up the ghosts.

The itch above John’s knee, disregarded as long as possible, finally worked its appeal through the judiciary system until one of the magistrates was curious enough to authorize an expedition through the dense jungle of John’s nervous system and issue its unappealable judgment: scratch, scratch, scratch.

The questions bloomed and loomed: Why do heat and anger work so well together? Or is it play? When did time get so thick and sticky? Why does the background noise of copulating worms never go away?

It wasn’t like he didn’t love his boys, because he did. As dangerous as he found self-reflection, and as unreliable as his memory was, John had done his due diligence and felt confident in his declaration: he loved his boys. But there was a unique ache that afflicted him when he thought about Abby. It wasn’t just that she had moved thousands of miles away after their mother died, while the boys were still near, but the absence of a woman always leaves a more distinct emptiness.

The boys were the ones who held up the sky in case he wanted to skip a few steps beneath it before he joined his bride on the other side.

Abby is wearing two tiny white sneakers in the photo, unblemished, with two little pink socks curled over them, lace at the ends.

Love. You can see it in the sunlight. It is so easy when it is true. Her mother was no angel but…it had to be her. That toy or game or person outside the frame had to be her. The person whose job it had been to keep the other side of the bed warm. You can see it in the sunlight.

Of course everything spun out of control when she died. How could it not? What kind of wife and mother would she be if life moved on without a hiccup?

When the boys were small they liked to run into the woods, jump up to the highest branch they could reach, and swing from it until their skinny little arms seemed to lengthen from the effort. Abby had a compulsion to do everything her brothers did, even though her skinnier, littler arms were not as equipped to the task. Because they were good boys they indulged their sister’s desires and made her safety a priority, except for the time they let her fall and break her arm.

You hold people in your arms sometimes because you don’t know any other way to let them know that, no matter how terrible the moment, there is at least one person in this world that would be happy to sell the time left to them to buy you one more day.

When John was small a swarm of cicadas crawled out of the dirt underneath his neighborhood, droning and flapping and leaving their dry shells on trees and fences and driveways. He believed they would come back for him one day. Patience is one of the virtues with an excellent track record in eluding him.

It wasn’t until John had fallen from his perch and got a good look at it from the depth of despair that he realized how lofty it had been. He indulged in the American fetish for dissatisfaction, devoting his thoughts to what is missing, rather than what is not. Fortitude was another one of the virtues that gave him the slip.

It was always: how old would she be now? And: wouldn’t she just love this? And: moments that are meant to be shared fall flat on their face when you are alone. And when you can’t take any more of being alone, and none of the people who are willing to share your company are capable of filling the holes she left behind, you fill them up with anything you can find, and some of those things are not good. Some of them are not good at all. And your children – who you know love you – hate you for what you’ve become. They don’t blame you for her death, but they do blame you for everything that came after. When the boys were at their angriest, when they yelled until you could see the sweat staining their armpits, Abby defended the indefensible. She convinced them to forgive the unforgivable.

One night Abby came to him, crying unintelligibly. They were beyond words but communicated enough with their tears and the salvation of their embrace to understand that they would love each other until the end, no matter what. And that is something that helped break the curse.

One afternoon he came to Abby with his new perspective. The light kept shifting in and out with the clouds so that he couldn’t figure out if she was smiling through her pain or if the muscles of her face had been sculpted by agony into a grotesque new form. She said, “I can’t take it anymore,” and he understood “it” to mean a 14-year old girl holding together a family of four that had once been a family of five. And he told her he would take it from there. And that was another thing that broke the curse.

Her death cast its web the way a spider does in the empty space between a branch and a flower. The more you struggle, the harder it is to break free. Your limbs are pinned against your torso and any cry you make is muffled by layers of suffocating web.

A light flashed. The phone rang.

As John fumbled for the lamp on his night stand, he knocked the picture frame to the floor where its glass exploded and scattered. Some of the shards were going to find their way into his foot no matter how well he believed he cleaned. He looked from the picture on the floor to the identical one on his phone.

He said, “Is everything OK, honey?” and was deeply comforted by her voice and reassuring reply.