Neville Island


When she cries her whole face gets wet. Even her forehead, don't ask me how. Her penciled-in eyebrows dissolve and stream down her face, her mascara runs off until her eyelashes are blonde and invisible, and her long nose becomes sharpened by the glare of its wetness. My mom cries every night when she comes home from her job as a secretary, and every night when she comes home, I'm doing the dishes, so I never have a clean hand to wipe her face dry. But she never needs me to extend any gesture of consolation; she grabs my stringy hair without a word and weeps into it as I stand rigidly in front of the sink.

I also have two little sisters. My mom and I call them the babies, but they're six and eight now. After my dad left, they became a single person because they only had enough strength to survive between the two of them. Even I mistake them for twins sometimes, though they're nearly two years apart. They sleep together with their hands tangled in each other's dark hair, and the stillness smudges them into an indistinguishable figure. I can't bear to kiss either goodnight. To kiss each one goodnight would mean I would have to disentangle their embrace-an impossible feat in itself-but their conjoined body, intersecting at every point, is too alien to touch. Even when they're awake, they act as if they're sewed together, like in Peter Pan, so that one is the shadow of the other.

We live on Neville Island, a dingy blue collar Utopia on the Ohio River. There's a steel mill on the island where all the dads work, and a tiny grocery store down the main street where housewives buy their staples. My mom only buys buttermilk and eggs there, she grows her own vegetables and bakes her own brown bread every weekend. We eat brown bread so often, in fact, that I imagine my flesh is ninety nine percent bread by now-the mysteries of the Catholic Church are no longer so very mysterious to me. The other one percent, I suppose, is canned corned beef. She buys a whole case of it twice a year—it's cheaper in bulk—so we are never at a loss for that.

There's a bridge connecting Neville Island to the mainland, but because the island is so self sufficient, it really isn't necessary except to take the bus over to Coreapolis when our football team plays theirs. We never win anyway. The bridge rests on long knotty legs of crisscrossed steel beams that were once painted in horizontal stripes, so that anyone could tell how high the river was just by looking at what color the water reached. Only, the paint is so faded and rusty now the colors are indistinguishable. The road from the bridge becomes the main street down the length of the island, which has rows of minor streets crossing it like the stitches on a scar. Because we have such a steep drop off our backyard into the red waters of the river, if we ever want to go swimming we either have to throw a rope down or jump off the bridge. I prefer the latter; it takes less effort.

We live about thirty miles from Pittsburgh. You can't see it from the island, but the smog from all the steel mills over there make the sun look orange. My teachers say that in most places, the sun looks yellow at noon, and only reddish when it sets. I'd like to see it yellow for a day, and then I'd watch it so much I'd probably forget I even have a shadow. Or, at least, I'd like to see the steel mills that make it red—I bet they're a hundred times bigger and have a thousand more pipes than the one here. All the pollution makes it extra hot here in the summer too, so when you wake up on an August morning, there's grains of salt in your hair and in the creases of your eyes, from sweating. I used to think it was from the sandman.

It is every Neville Island boy's dream to join the Navy, and every Neville Island girl's dream to be a secretary at the mill. A secretary, that is, until they marry a handsome service man and raise a family at the Great Lakes naval base. Some of us, however, were stripped of those ready made dreams before we could even pretend to harbor them. My best friend Jimmy Sullivan, for instance, had blue lips. When I first met him in third grade, I thought that they were something rare and beautiful-like having purple eyes, or red hair. Turned out, his lips were blue because of a congenital heart defect; his heart was so weak that he was always blue or purple on some part of his body, as though he were iridescent. He was adopted, too. His foster parents hadn't been able to have a child, but two years after they took Jimmy in, they miraculously had a baby of their own. The baby's presence made Jimmy feel like an intruder in the family, since he was the solution to a problem that no longer existed. That's why Jimmy tried to keep out of his house as much as possible. He was number two hundred and fifty three in line for a heart transplant.

My dad could never join the service either, because he lost all the fingers on his right hand in a machining accident in the steel mill when he was nineteen. Well, he had stubs enough to light his cigarettes, my mom said. I can't remember seeing them at all, because he kept his hand in his pocket ever since he met my mom's brother, who recoiled in horror when dad shook his hand for the first time. "Jesus, boy, I thought you handed me a fish there!" That's what Vern said. If my dad ever needed his right hand for something, he'd turn his body to shield us from the sight. Since he couldn't do steel work, he was a teacher in the school. All the other teachers were young women, so he never had any friends. It wouldn't be proper for him to socialize with Neville Island's most eligible bachelorettes; they're being saved for our young heroes. I wouldn't want to be friends with them anyway, especially Ms. Flynn, who yelled at me for writing a page of sloppy z's when we were learning cursive in third grade. "How do you expect me to be able to read this?" I wanted to tell her that it was just a page full of z's, it didn't mean anything, so why should she care if she could read it or not? But you're not allowed to talk back to teachers.

My dad left about three years ago, so the babies were too young to remember him, but I do. On Sunday mornings, I used to wake my parents up and lie in their warmed bed as they took showers and got dressed, leaning into my dad's pillow and smelling his nightmare sweat. By the time my mom made breakfast I was so hungry I felt like I'd throw up. Then for dinner, sometimes dad would take us to Minella's diner, we'd bring Jimmy too, and they'd put a maraschino cherry in my soda, because I loved cherries. I would save it for last, then eat it reluctantly, since I knew it would be over all too soon. On the walk home my dad would slip away, back to Minella's to grab a few maraschino cherries from the obliging cooks, and return like a triumphant warrior with a handful of severed heads.

But all this was just to apologize for the Saturday night beforehand, for staggering home from the pub, angry and trembling with the impulse to hit us. He never did, of course-he couldn't take his hand from his pocket. So he'd stand there for hours, towering over the babies and I pretending to be asleep in bed, but tottering, burping, drooling like an infant. I was afraid to speak, that my breath might knock him over. It was kind of like watching the sea from the shore. The waves crescendo to a furious height, but by the time they reach the sand, they've been torn into threads of bubbles and fleck. That's what he reminded me of. I imagined he might lean over and hug me the next moment, and his embrace would grow stronger, until my ribs were crushed. He was mad at us for something, he probably still is. I wish I could go tell the priest what I did wrong, but I don't know what to apologize for. I'd walk into the dim church and wait in line to confess, fumbling with the pink rosary beads I got for first communion. I'd step into the booth and choke out the Confiteor, but by the end I'd have no air left in my lungs. The priest would lean into my booth to see what became of his confessor and, seeing me throttled by my own breath, he'd suck his tiny teeth and know that my sin was terrible.

"What is it you've done?", he'd ask.

"I don't know!"

"But ignorance is the greatest sin of all!"

The only big sin I can think of is when I got the chicken pox. My dad forced me to sleep in the same bed as the babies, so they'd get it too. I cried all that night, because I didn't want them to get sick, and prayed that they wouldn't. My dad told me that the younger you get the chicken pox, the less suffering you go through, but I couldn't bear to see my sisters with those horrible scabs and know it was my fault. Maybe that's why he's so mad, I probably should have put up more of a fight. I shouldn't have slept in their bed at all, even though he asked me to. Anyway, I already confessed it to Jimmy, and he told me that probably isn't the reason my father's mad at us.

When they were first dating, my father gave my mom a Celtic lever harp as a token of his affection. She learned how to play it in order to return the compliment. Her long fingers were always chapped and red from the strings, and I only wished there were some similar deformity on my body that could prove to my father that I loved him. One day the harp was taken away, but it came back a week later with an infinitely complex gold knot painted on its spine. My mother used to play for money in department stores, at the weddings of strangers, at office parties. But I don't think she could ever play for money the way she played at the ceilidhs our friends held in their backyards, dozens of people spread out on picnic blankets, with Mark Carol accompanying her on the hammer dulcimer and Mike Malone on the fiddle. The next day I would stare at the harp in its dormant state, concentrating on the tiny high strings of transparent catgut and the low bass strings of wire wrapped elastic, but it was never the same harp as it had been the day before. My dad gave her a second harp on the last Christmas we would ever spend together. It was smaller than the other, and more precious, with a simpler knot on the spine culminating in a copper colored gemstone, but its strings were made out of brass wire and cut my mother's fingers when she tried to play it. She keeps it in the front room for decoration, because it's so pretty, but if you look closely, you can see she never wiped the blood from her cuts off the wires.

She sang, too-Jimmy once told me he thought she sang like an angel—but I don't remember how she sounded. I do remember the shape of her mouth, though-her tongue a quiver of arrows, and her lips a taut bow vibrating with each plucked syllable. She had a mole on her lower lip, and when I asked her about it she told me that moles were where angels kissed you. I showed her the only mole I had at the time, and she laughed out loud. "Eight years old, and already angels are kissing your ass!"

The first time I ever saw my mom cry, I came into the kitchen one morning to find her scrubbing at the grout in the floor tiling. One of the tiles, I noticed, had been broken into a spider web of cracks, with a crater nested in the middle. I found the hemisphere of missing white tile under the kitchen table, like some broken moon, its other half still hanging in the sky. Mom had been trying to scrub red out of the grout; I asked if it was blood. "No love, it isn't blood. But it would've been the blood of Jesus if it had found itself in a happier bottle." I knew what that meant. Even when it wasn't consecrated, my dad drank wine with a religious fervor. He had thrown a bottle of it at my mom the night he left, as if to christen a ship. Bon Voyage! Only he raised anchor, and not the kitchen floor.

The tile with the chip in it is my excavation site. Like an archeologist building up an entire culture out of a shard of pottery, I study it in hope that some information is still hidden there. By measuring its slope into the ground, I can envision what angle the bottle hit the floor, where my mom must have been standing, where my dad threw it from. I can tell by the color of the stain in the grout that the bottle contained red wine, Almalden. By the dark color of the underlying clay, I can determine that it was night when the bottle struck, that the bottle broke into roughly sixty thousand pieces of which only twenty three were large enough to be visible. The cracks in the tile tell me the shape of the deep creases in the corner of his mouth that night, the length of his chin stubble if you plucked it out and stood each hair end to end, and the direction in which his hair curled, counterclockwise. There are many things, however, that the excavations have not told me. For example, his arms were dark and shaggy on top, but pale and opalescent on the underside, like a fish's belly. Yet I have no proof of such things, so I can't ever be sure that they're true, and not just my imagination.

It was shocking to me, that morning, to see my mom cry. But I still don't know how to comfort her—though I've grown used to her sobs, I am constantly amazed at my lack of soothing words and gestures. Because I can never bear to look at her tortured face, I watch myself in the greasy dishwater as she leans into my hair. When she's done, she shuffles to her room, and her eyes look calm and bovine.

I can't imagine where my dad went to. I sometimes think he's still around, watching us from behind the bushes, so whenever I skin my elbow I don't let myself cry, and I roll my sleeve down to hide the scrape. Only then, my mom gets mad at me for bloodying up my shirt. On Christmas Eves, when most other children hear Santa stumbling about on the roof, I imagine the noises I hear are my father, if only returning to try to suck that wine he wasted out of the grouting. With blind courage I creep into the kitchen, but each year am sorely disappointed to learn that the noises had only been St. Nick after all.

The night he left, I think my dad stole everything we had. He took our livers and muscles, all our sinew and intestines, our rib cages and nerve endings, and filled us with the sand that the river barges carry. He pulled out all our teeth and swallowed them with a glass of water like the aspirin he took Sunday mornings. He even snapped the tips of our fingers off like green beans-I imagine my bones are frail and hollow, like a sparrow's. And now we have river water coursing through our sand castle bodies. Maybe one day the tide will grow so high that we will melt, and that day my dad would come home to find the kitchen floor covered in sand, flopping with dying fish and scabby with dried seaweed.

As he stumbled away that night, maybe he kept his head turned to watch our house receding behind him, bowing and pitching along with each step. The walkways here are all broken and buckled and littered with crab apples, but he probably didn't pay attention to sidewalks or streets or street lamps, he just watched the house and walked in the opposite direction. Which makes me wonder how he managed to find the bridge. Maybe he really fell off the side of the island, and got washed out to sea. But, then again, the streets here are white cement, and lighted. In the middle of the night, the glare off windows and the white roads are all you can see on Neville Island; everything else is totally dark. Even a drunkard could navigate that.

It was weeks before it occurred to me that he might never come back. I had still been setting his place at the dinner table, like I always did. The whole island must've known he was gone before the babies and I realized it. Only—I never knew why. I asked Jimmy why his real parents didn't keep him. He stared hard for a few moments, like it was the first time he'd ever wondered about it, though I knew it was just about the only thing he ever thought about. Instead of answering, he told me he had decided to run away, and I agreed to join him. We stopped before we even got to the end of my street. Of course we couldn't run away. Running away is reserved for adults, because only they have anything to run away from. Jimmy and I only had each other, and even if we'd been able to cross that infinite bridge, we'd be in the same place we'd always been. We sat back down, and Jimmy studied his purple fingertips. "I don't think he left just because of the alcohol." I didn't either, but I didn't reply—I was out of ideas. I still am. It's better to have some idea, no matter how unlikely, than no idea at all. I'm sure Jimmy knew this better than I did.

For as long as we knew him, the babies and I would meet Jimmy every day after school. The year my dad left, I was in fifth grade, and the babies were in first and second grade. Jimmy was a grade ahead of me, and went to the middle school I go to now. We'd come from separate directions, and our shadows, made massive by the low hanging sun, would darken him yards before we even met. One year, when the dandelions had turned to fluff, the four of us picked every single dandelion we could find on the island, and blew on the bouquet with all our might, each of us making some secret wish. The air was choked with all the seeds. Then we went home and fell asleep as the world around us died of asphyxiation. Upon waking, however, we each found a wet lump of dandelion fluff beside our beds-the wind had coughed it back at us.

When he got sicker, Jimmy went to live in the big Pittsburgh hospital. He didn't get a transplant in time, of course. I used to wonder what would've happened to his old heart when it was taken out. Would they throw it away? If that were the case, I think I would've stolen it out of the trash when no one was looking. Mom told me he died in peace, sleeping in his foster mother's arms. I know what that really means.

Since Jimmy's gone, it makes me wonder where he came from. I bet someplace far off, like Russia. And it even makes sense, because the map in our school has Russia colored in mostly white, as if it's snowy, and if it's such a cold place, maybe that's the real reason Jimmy was blue all the time, and he actually froze to death. The map in our school has "U.S.S.R" instead of Russia, the teacher says it's an old map but new ones cost too much. And our social studies books even say that America is having a war with the U.S.S.R, except it's a cold war. My teacher says that's all over now, and the reason they call it a cold war is because no one actually died in it. But I know it's not over, because Jimmy is its first casualty. I still remember Jimmy's funeral, it was open casket, but he was barely recognizable-they painted his lips red, and his face was dark as a new moon. The rest of him was covered up, because he was an organ donor and so was missing almost everything from his neck down to his hips-besides his heart, that is.

My fingers are red and chapped like my mother's, but only because I chew off my fingernails and, when I have no more fingernails to bite, the skin from the tips of my fingers. When Jimmy died—I didn't even realize it—I started biting straight through the flesh. I guess I could rob a bank pretty easily because most of my fingerprints are gone. My mom came in my room, and saw blood pouring from each of my fingers, like one of those statues that spout water into a fountain, and screamed for the babies to call the doctor. While I was staying at the little hospital, the doctor told me he remembered when I was born. He told me that, two weeks before I was due, my umbilical cord got a kink in it, and I started to die. My mom must've felt the pain in her womb, because she rushed to the hospital. The doctor had to perform an emergency cesarean section-and when I got out, I was dead, but they were able to revive me. The doctor said that my dad took his newborn from the nurse and pressed me to his chest. He came out of the embrace all smeared with blood, like a wolf after feeding. Then he gave me a bath in the hospital sink, because the nurse was still busy attending to my mom. I asked mom if the story were true, and she lifted up her shirt to show me the long white scar on her belly, as if that could explain everything.

After I got out of the hospital, my one hand got infected, and a blood vessel popped, so I have a big red mark that clouds my thumb and palm. My CCD teacher told us that a proper praying position could send our prayers directly to God. "All you have to do is press your palms and fingertips together, pointing to heaven, and cross your thumbs, like this. Hold your hands close to your face, so your breath tickles the tips of your fingers when you speak." I can't bear to pray that way anymore, I could never send a wish to God through anything as ugly as my hands. I decided to write all my prayers in marker on the little stones by the river, and throw them in. That way, the words would dissolve into the water and be carried away to God. It took me hours, I threw in so many stones. But the next day, after I stepped out of the shower, I found that all those prayers had come back through the pipes and stained themselves on my skin.


Kelly Clancy