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She is afraid of you. You, in earnest, you, in pressed pale shirts and brand new shoes, you, in blood and wonder. And you don’t know why. She is sitting behind you, she is looking up at you, she is letting you cover her face with one hand, letting you lead her through the valley of the shadow, expecting so much from you. And she is afraid.
When you were twelve years old you tended Aunt Louisa’s birds. They were large, grey, soft bodied little things. They looked boneless and stupid, bright orange eyes and dull dark wingtips. She loved them. Sometimes she sang to them, an ugly mirror of the local AM Spanish radio station where her cousin was a DJ. She loved them up until she gave them to you and you took them to the yard where Uncle Jack was loading his shotgun and you released these birds into the air and some of them vanished in black and red puffs like little squawking firecrackers but some of them stumbled from the sky and landed at your feet and when you picked them up, when you finally made contact with them, you knew they were afraid. Their whole body beat with their little hearts. Taptapttaptttttap. And you wrung their necks.
When you were thirteen. taptaptaptaptaptap tap tap ta- They were kittens and they didn’t feel a thing. You told yourself. You were sure.
She turns to face you. She has eyes as dark as coal. You want to tell her how your father died of black lung in the Powder River Basin. Not many people do that, these days. Die of black lung, that is. You want to tell her that she could kill a man. She’s afraid of you and you can’t understand it. You’ve always found yourself harmless.
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She speaks four languages. She has two BA’s and an MA and a day planner set out in perfect straight lines. She has four-inch heels and skirts that that stop just short of her kneecaps. She always smells like salt. Somewhere in the background there is the nebulous concept of family, of a small girl cared for impeccably by some frazzled but good-natured woman with children of her own that she sees only in the evenings, if then. Somewhere farther away, not out of the picture entirely but blurred, over-exposed, nearly whited out, there is a man in a navy-blue suit with sharp green eyes and a piercing smile but when he speaks, it’s not in English and slowly, Lydia is trying to phase out the syllables, trying to become only trilingual.
But this fails to take into consideration the language that is hardly words at all. That is stepping, gently and gracefully, across the hands and heads and hearts of the dead.
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You touch her when you think she isn’t looking, when you think she can’t feel your fingers against her shoulders, in her hair, near her waist. You want to leave stains on her, oil-marks, like rubbing your palms against old paintings. If you ever actually could touch her skin, if you could ever break her out of the casing of her linen suits and cotton blouses, you wouldn’t know what to do. When you imagine her naked, you feel a hot shame, a shooting pain in your upper thighs. You ought to know better. You ought to be on your best behavior. You imagine yourself grinding into her, breaking her, making her scream. You imagine yourself tied up before her, a prisoner of war. You imagine that her lips are not soft, but split open by the desert sun.
You imagine all of this in the most sincerely restrained agony. It’s a sin to release these thoughts. Your mother was Mormon, after all, imagine how ashamed she’d be.
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She dreams she is far away. She dreams of high-plateaus and rocky crags and fast cars and a life without whatever it is she has now. She dreams she can fly. She dreams she can breathe underwater. She dreams, sometimes, of a man with emerald eyes making love to her in bathrooms that are so clean they shine, they reflect the lovers on the floor, on all the walls of the stall. She dreams of burning. Of being shot. Of drowning. Of decomposing while still alive. Of thousands of hands pulling her down into bright copper dirt. She dreams of her childhood dog. Of her childhood home. She dreams in German. She dreams in Spanish. She dreams in black and white and only colors that can be lit up in halogen signs.
She does not dream of you at all.
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Maybe you could understand her fear if you were anyone other than you. If, say, you were Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack, with a rotating series of Aunts for you when you were growing up. It was important to have a Mother, even though your Mother was dead in a car accident and your Father was dead of black lung. Uncle Jack is terrifying. He hits the people he loves. He says he loves, anyhow. He has never hit you but then he’s never said he loves you, either. That is an unspoken agreement.
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But you see the fear in her eyes. And you wonder. And you wish for her. And you want to tell her all the beautiful things there are in the world that you want to do with her. And you want to tell her that you would kill anybody in the world for her. And you want her.
You want her.
And she will always be afraid.