Before We Were Yours

by Lisa Wingate

In my multifold years of life, I have learned that most people get along as best they can. They don’t intend to hurt anyone. It is merely a terrible by-product of surviving.

“So sad when it happens this way. So out of order when a life has not even one breath in this world.”

I’d do anything for him, but I hope it’s many more years before we’re forced to reverse the roles of parent and child. I’ve learned how hard that is while watching my father struggle to make decisions for his mother.

We’re just like other families. Every available avenue is paved with guilt, lined with pain, and pockmarked with shame.

This is what’s possible when love is real and strong, when people are devoted to one another, when they’ll sacrifice anything to be together. This is what I want for myself, but I sometimes wonder if it’s possible for our modern generation. We’re so distracted, so…busy.

I swallow another swell of emotion. A breath shudders past my lips. I press my shoulders back, turn my eyes away, and focus on the window, studying the woman in the garden.

Happiness and emotion swell the room, stretching it like a helium balloon. Any more joy and we’ll all float away.

On occasion, it is as if the latches in my mind have gone rusty and worn. The doors fall open and closed at will. A peek inside here. An empty space there. A dark place I’m afraid to peer into. I never know what I will find.

Triggers. That’s what the psychologists call them

When you’re born on the river, you take to it as natural as drawing breath.

One of the best things a father can do for his daughter is let her know that she has met his expectations. My father did that for me, and no amount of effort on my part can fully repay the debt.

Thunder rumbles far off. Lightning flashes, and the night turns to day, then puts on its black veil again.

“That’s what you get for thievin’!” She stops short of repeating the woman’s naughty words. Camellia’s eaten enough soap to clean up the inside of a whale in her ten years. She’s practically been raised on it. It’s a wonder bubbles don’t pour out her ears.

Grief and a change of location can often be more than the mind and body can handle.”

His eyes are dark as midnight on water. They reflect everything he looks at—

The shadow of the big white house slides over the car, swallowing it whole.

A hope spark tries to catch fire in me, but I can’t find it much tinder.

a sick feeling bubbles in me like a black-water eddy. It’s got no place to go. It just spins round and round in circles.

Since coming home I’ve readopted words like y’all, which I had expunged from my vocabulary up north. They’re good words, I’ve now decided. Like the humble boiled peanut, they serve perfectly in many situations.

Maybe I should let this go. But the question nags me. It whispers and pesters and teases. It will not leave me alone all afternoon.

Economy versus environment—so often it comes down to those two heavyweights duking it out in the ring of public opinion and, of course, upcoming legislation.

We plan our days, but we don’t control them.

My mind runs like a squirrel on a spring day, jumping from branch to branch. Think. Think of something. Always use your brains, Rill, Briny says in my mind, and you’ll find your way out of a scrape quicker’n anything.

I lose track of her voice as the car goes over a hill and comes within sight of the river. May fades like a speck of sun on the water, and Rill comes out. She stretches toward the crack at the top of the window, and pulls in air and catches all the familiar scents. For just a minute, she’s home.

These people can control everything about me, but they can’t control where I go in my mind.

Standing in the entry now, I reach for that sense of comfort, but this visit is pungent with opposing tastes. Bitter and sweet. Familiar and strange. The tastes of life.

“Well, that’s one of the paradoxes of life. You can’t have it all. You can have some of this and some of that or all of this and none of that. We make the trade-offs we think are best at the time.

Outside the cottage windows, the sea oats sway over the dunes, and the moon rises above the palmetto thicket. Waves thrum the shore as I rifle through drawers and search closets and blanket chests and wardrobe cabinets.

Leaves and sea grass whisper, and on the beach ghost crabs scuttle sideways through the sand.

The breeze slides along my neck and through my hair, and I want to walk and relax and enjoy the soothing song of the sea.

I’m cold on the outside, like I just fell off in the winter river and all the blood’s gone deep down inside to try to keep me from freezing to death. My arms and legs seem like they’re somebody else’s. They move, but only because they know what they’re supposed to do, not because I tell them.

Dread steals over me when we get inside. It’s the kind of dread that comes on a swolled-up river when the spring melt happens and you see an ice floe headed straight for the boat.

Her eyes are puffy and red, like she’s been crying, but it’s the look inside them that bothers me most. It’s like I’m staring through a window into an empty room. There’s nothing inside but the dark.

“Secrets have a way of coming out.”

A trail of glistening waves leads to the moon, and a starry carpet glows impossibly bright overhead. How long since I’ve just sat in the dark and enjoyed a night like this?

I need to go. I need to help them, but more than anything, I just want to disappear. I want to be alone in a place where nobody can find me. Where nobody I love can be stolen away.

I drop her on the cot and turn away and grab my hair and pull until it hurts. I want to pull all of it out. Every single piece. I want a pain I understand instead of the one I don’t. I want a pain that has a beginning and an end, not one that goes on forever and cuts all the way to the bone.

Do we carry the guilt from the sins of past generations? If so, can we bear the weight of that burden?

Overhead, katydids and crickets give the sky a heartbeat, and a million stars shine like far-off campfires. The half-moon hangs heavy, rocking on its back. Its twin rides the ripples in the rain barrel as I pass.

I see sparkle fairies. They dance wild in the dark.

It’s just a little ache, and I know where it comes from. I can stop it any time I want. The one in my heart is way bigger. I can’t fix it no matter how hard I try. It scares me so much that I can’t even breathe.

I feel the music coming from the piano and slipping through my body. Now I know what it’s like for the birds when they sing.

I’m home. I’m wrapped in the lullaby I know by heart. I let the dark and the night sounds come inside me, and there’s not a dream or a worry anywhere. The mother water rocks me soft and gentle until nothing else is around me at all. I sleep the deep sleep of a river gypsy.

It’s funny how what you’re used to seems like it’s right even if it’s bad.

“What the mind don’t ’member, the heart still know. Love, the strongest thang of all. Stronger than all the rest.

Secrets ain’t a healthy thang. Secrets ain’t a healthy thang, no matter how old they is. Sometimes the oldest secrets is the worst of all.

Flames curl and stretch upward from the shanty, burning through the roof and the walls and the deck, skinning the Arcadia down to her bones, stripping her of her beauty. Pieces float on the air. Up, and up, and up they whirl until they fly overhead like a million new stars.

The trees lean close after we turn, and I take one look back. I let the river wash away something inside of me. It washes away the last of Rill Foss.

The truth is still the truth. It has value.”

“I learned that you need not be born into a family to be loved by one.”