Making Faces

by Amy Harmon

We don’t get to choose when we go or how we go. None of us do.” Angie looked her son squarely in the eyes and repeated herself firmly. “Do you hear me, Bailey? None of us do.”

2001 In the days and weeks following the attacks on 9/11, life returned to normal, but it felt wrong, like a favorite shirt worn inside out--still your shirt, still recognizable, but rubbing in all the wrong places, the seams revealed, the tags hanging out, the colors dulled, the words backward. But unlike the shirt, the sense of wrong couldn’t be righted. It was permanent, the new normal.

“Everybody is a main character to someone,” Bailey theorized, winding his way through the busy hall and out the nearest exit into the November afternoon. “There are no minor characters.

Everybody who is somebody becomes nobody the moment they fail.

“Accept the truth in it. Own it, wallow in it, become one with the shit.”

Maybe no one had been with him in his darkest hours because they were stumbling around in their own.

A big part of the reason Bailey is so special is because life has sculpted him into something amazing . . . maybe not on the outside, but on the inside. On the inside, Bailey looks like Michelangelo’s David. And when I look at him, and when you look at him, that’s what we see.”

“Maybe there is a bigger purpose, a bigger picture that we only contribute a very small piece to. You know, like one of those thousand-piece puzzles? There’s no way you can tell by looking at one piece of the puzzle what the puzzle is going to look like in the end. And we don’t have the picture on the outside of the puzzle box to guide us.” Fern smiled tentatively, hesitating, wondering if she was making any sense. When Ambrose just waited, she continued. “Maybe everyone represents a piece of the puzzle. We all fit together to create this experience we call life. None of us can see the part we play or the way it all turns out. Maybe the miracles that we see are just the tip of the iceberg. And maybe we just don’t recognize the blessings that come as a result of terrible things.”

Why do terrible things happen to such good people?” Ambrose asked. “Because terrible things happen to everyone, Brosey. We’re all just so caught up in our own crap that we don’t see the shit everyone else is wading through.”

“Have you ever stared at a painting so long that the colors blur and you can’t tell what you’re looking at anymore? There’s no form, face, or shape—just color, just swirls of paint?” Fern spoke again, and Ambrose let his eyes rest on the face that had once filled his memory in a faraway place, a place that most days he would rather forget. Bailey and Ambrose were silent, finding new faces in the clouds. “I think people are like that. When you really look at them, you stop seeing a perfect nose or straight teeth. You stop seeing the acne scar or the dimple in the chin. Those things start to blur, and suddenly you see them, the colors, the life inside the shell, and beauty takes on a whole new meaning.”

He felt a strange falling sensation in his chest and lifted his hand to rub the spot just above his heart, as if he could soothe the feeling and send it away. It was happening more and more often when he was around her.

“Fern decided superheroes weren’t for her,” Bailey said from the back. “She decided she would just be a fairy because she liked the option of flying without the responsibility of saving the world.

“I wrote your name across my heart so we could be together, so I could hold you close to me and keep you there forever.”

“Think about it. There isn’t heartache if there hasn’t been joy. I wouldn’t feel loss if there hadn’t been love. You couldn’t take my pain away without removing Bailey from my heart. I would rather have this pain now than never have known him. I just have to keep reminding myself of that.”

Fern walked to the hole and crouching down she pulled a handful of rocks from the pockets of her black dress. Carefully, she formed the letters B S at the foot of the grave. “Beautiful Spider?” Ambrose said softly, just beyond her left shoulder, and Fern smiled, amazed that he remembered. “Beautiful Sheen. Beautiful Bailey Sheen. That’s how I’ll always remember him.”

“We’ll take care of her,” Paulie repeated. “And I’ll take care of Ambrose. He needs someone to look after him too.”

This last year I’ve felt like one of those snowflakes we used to make in school. The ones where you fold the paper a certain way and then keep cutting and cutting until the paper is shredded. That’s what I look like, a paper snowflake. And each hole has a name. And nobody, not you, not me, can fill the holes that someone else has left. All we can do is keep each other from falling in the holes and never coming out again.

“True beauty, the kind that doesn’t fade or wash off, takes time. It takes pressure. It takes incredible endurance. It is the slow drip that makes the stalactite, the shaking of the Earth that creates mountains, the constant pounding of the waves that breaks up the rocks and smooths the rough edges. And from the violence, the furor, the raging of the winds, the roaring of the waters, something better emerges, something that would otherwise never exist.

“And so we endure. We have faith that there is purpose. We hope for things we can’t see. We believe that there are lessons in loss, power in love, and that we have within us the potential for a beauty so magnificent that our bodies can’t contain it.”