Secrets

Every Sunday her mother and grandmother meet at her aunt’s house, where Marion has been living for the past six months. They come to smoke cigarettes at the kitchen table and bicker over trivialities ten years dead, to size up the products advertised on TV and, in the same tone of voice, to discuss their men. Marion sits in the living room, still in sight and in earshot, but far enough away that she’s not expected to participate in the constant harangue. Instead, she rips pictures from her aunt’s interior design magazines, constructing piece by piece the home she’ll one day build or discover.

Six months of Sundays means Marion’s seen her mother two dozen times since she lost her job. Her mother has been clear-eyed each one of those times. Affectionate. Because she’s not exhausted from trying to stay sober all week. She has another job, but nothing has changed. The man who moved in last month smells of cigarettes and gin, like Marion’s stepfather did. He hasn't been around long enough to have caught on to her mother's secret.

After she washes the dinner plates, Marion tells them she’s heading out to buy eggs for the morning. Her mother knows she’s lying. Her mother always knows, because she’s based her life on just the same kind of plausible excuses. Her aunt thanks her. She's married to a Christian evangelist, and describes herself as being “born again.” She’s up to a pack and a half a day, but alcohol, drugs, and sex are Satan’s tools. At seventeen, Marion would prefer a life of sin to a life lived in a smoky room, ripping pictures from magazines.

Her mother doesn’t say anything except, “be careful.” Gives Marion five bucks. Stays behind to take shit off of her mother and sister. In a small way, one she won’t recognize until well after her mother’s funeral, Marion loves her for this. Loves her and hates her, for giving her too much freedom.

The sun has already fallen behind the rooftops. Marion’s aunt lives closer to the outskirts of town, in a neighborhood of three-story rowhouses with a good slice of purple sky. Marion stands in the mouth of an alley, smoking and watching the sky grow darker. Slowly, she drifts away from her life, and towards herself. No matter, that if her aunt smells the smoke, she will kick Marion out of her house. No matter that her grandmother is dissolving into dementia, each day becoming a little more hostile and paranoid. No matter that there are fresh bruises in the crook of her mother’s elbow.

No matter that this drifting dulls her, limits her in some vague way. That the smoke she exhales each time is her soul, and she watches it dissipate, slowly turning into nothing. She feels this like a little daily suicide, but the smoke makes it easier to sit, flipping through magazines, surrounded by bitter voices and floral print wallpaper.

At her feet, something remarkable is happening. There is a trickle of water running down the alley, and directly in front of her it is flowing to either side of a little island of sandy gravel. Around this island, bubbles run downstream on one side, then change direction and just as easily glide upstream on the other. Each time a bubble comes to the end of the island, it hooks around and begins to climb the hill. Bending down with her face nearly to the asphalt, Marion can see little slivers of black gravel likewise carried in the current, first downhill, then up, circling around the island. Moving against gravity.

The day before, her boss walked in on her smoking in the walk-in freezer, and Marion had held her breath, fighting the paranoia, nodding at curt instructions until she could escape with a bag of shredded mozzarella. She isn’t addicted. She just likes being high when no one else is. During school, at church, while grocery shopping. It makes things a game where she has to convince everyone that she is as normal as they are. That she can act like them, feel like them, and all the while carry a secret self inside. Something that sets her apart. She has this in common with her mother.

The drifting away is the other important part. The calmness. And the fact that for all the things that stop mattering, new things begin. All of a sudden the purple slice of sky matters. The island in the stream, with bubbles flowing uphill, against all reason. The fact that she is the only one who has seen it. The night is full of small, secret worlds.

The flow of water grows, pulling the little island apart one granule at a time. The sky is getting purpler and purpler. She smells her hands. They reek. She decides to take a bit of a walk. To air out. How stupid, to risk getting kicked out of her aunt’s house. But no matter. She follows the stream uphill through the alley. It is May. The trees the city planted, some little ones, have white flowers on them. People’s window boxes are full of flowers, all different kinds, their colors muted in the dark. This is a quiet neighborhood, a safe one, except for a few things. One of these things happened to a girl at her school, a girl Marion sort of knows. She keeps her eyes up. Walks fast and avoids people. But tonight there is no one around, so she walks slowly, looking for islands in the swelling stream.

The water turns a corner. Like it’s a car or something. Takes a left out of the alley and heads up the middle of the street where the pavement has collapsed on itself. Nowhere near the drainage grates. Marion walks on the sidewalk. On the hill, people’s windows are at eye-level. Yellow kitchens, blue bedrooms. Old people, young people, laughing people, yelling people. People watching TV. Their slackened faces reflect the muted colors of high drama. Of comedy.

The water is coming from the neighborhood on the other side of the overpass, where people have lawns and fences. That neighborhood goes uphill, as well, with a stone retaining wall like a pedestal beneath the whole thing. The stream keeps getting bigger. Too big to be someone washing a car. Maybe someone has opened a hydrant?

The water goes right, Marion goes left. They go the same way. Backwards through time. Forwards through time. Or both. She’s not sure. Around a third corner she follows, up another alley, between the stone walls with the picket fences on top. Five houses up, a surprisingly skinny hose is sticking out from under one of the fences. The water pouring into the alley, still in the shape of a tube, hits the pavement with the sound of somebody getting smacked, except constantly.

She stands in front of what she was looking for. Someone emptying out their swimming pool. The hose looks like it’s peeing into the street. She closes her eyes and listens. Beneath the water, bats are also looking around with their ears. An owl hoots once, but no more. Minutes later, a wind chime speaks, and likewise goes silent. Power lines are humming electric Om.

She opens her eyes and bends down beside the flow of water to wash her hands. It is cold, much colder than the air. This water has not seen the sun all winter. Marion wonders if that makes it clean or dirty. How much darkness and how many chemicals can bacteria stand before it is all wiped out? It takes the smell off of her hands, though. Now they smell completely neutral. This water is dead. Clean.

It is fully dark out. Soon she will have to go into a store, and under fluorescent lights find a carton with its eggs unbroken, then convince the store clerk that she's no threat to anyone, or to herself. But for now the night hides her. It will keep her secrets.