Cycles

(t/w: mentions of csa and dv)

The last time I saw Aunt Lisa was at Pap’s funeral.

I was eight, and although I’ve already experienced what death looked like, I never knew how cold a body can grow, or how pale the skin turns when all the blood stops moving inside it and grows stagnant like the bottoms of dried ravines.

I watched Lisa keel over the casket and use the American Flag draped over it like a handkerchief. She dotted her cheeks with stars, blowing her nose into the stripes. It really was a dismal scene— a daughter mourning her father, a small child hidden in the meat of her heart, still using her adult lungs to breathe and eyes to cry with.

“She’s lonely,” my mother told me. “She’s lonely and broke.”

The funeral procession passed in a long, drawn-out droll of noise. We sang soft hymns while the priest, no older than forty, spoke of my Pap in a removed, sterile manner. His mouth opened only an ounce when he talked, his tongue darting out to lick his lips in between sentences.

“May God be with his spirit,” he said, his arms outstretched to something invisible floating in the air. I craned my neck. I wanted to see it, too.

Aunt Lisa dropped down to her knees. Her whimpers bounced off the walls of the church. They shook the statue of Jesus nailed to his little ceramic cross.

Nobody moved to console her, because she was a thief, and a recluse, and a failure of a daughter.

My older cousin told me she stole hundreds of dollars from Pap’s safe while he was in the hospital.  He also said that her boyfriend, Damien, left bruises on her face the size of his big hairy knuckles. He said she stopped showing up to Christmas because she had no money for gifts and didn’t want to look poor.

Even though I felt bad for her, my mother said I shouldn’t since she never sent me birthday cards anymore.

Throughout the day, I kept staring at her. I tried to memorize the size of her nose and the space between her eyes, in case I didn’t see her for a long time and forgot what her face looked like. I felt bad to admit that I didn’t feel too sad about Pap, and, even worse, I felt sadder about the fact Aunt Lisa didn’t stare back at me once.

“Does death mean you’ve become invisible?” I asked my mother.

She shot me an odd look and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Invisibility means you’re still here.”

“So… he’s not here anymore?”

“Well, he’s in the sky,” she said. “He’s always watching.”

“What if I don’t want him watching me?”

Her hands smoothed over my braids. “He loves you, Kaylie bird. He wants to look out for you.”

That night, I slept with my head beneath my sheets. I thought of the photograph of my grandparents that was taken on their wedding day sixty years prior. My grandmother was a young bride— she was only sixteen. She’d started her period a week before Pap proposed.

The photograph sat beside the futon he slept on in his tiny apartment in Ozone Park. I slept over his once a week. We shared the living room; my aunt slept two doors down.

Each night, I rolled over and stared at the small picture frame. I stared into my grandmother’s eyes, into the browns of them. Pap’s eyes were closed. Their heads were turned towards the camera but off kilter, leaning to the side.

They were lovers. I knew that plain as day. And when his hand slunk beneath the covers and inched towards my little legs, I wondered how adult lovers laid together. Did they look like us? Were their bodies contorted the same? Two puzzle pieces, jagged at the edges and indiscernible from one another. You try to mash them together and when to squint, you convince yourself they fit.

We never did. I’m not sure they ever did, either.

The night of his funeral, I laid in my twin bed alone. I brought my fingers to my own thighs and my own chest. I imagined what I would look like when I was a woman, and if he would be watching me from above when I grew.

---

Aunt Lisa called me from a pay phone when I was twenty-one.

“You’ve grown so much,” she told me. “I’ve been stalking your Instagram for years.”

“Where are you?” I asked. “Where did you go?”

“North Carolina. I got married.” She sighed, airy, into the phone. “Damien treats me so well, you wouldn’t believe.”

I wanted to scream at her and ask her if she remembered the night he beat her so bad she had to go to the emergency room and get stitches. I wanted to yell at her for changing her number. I wanted to cry like a child and beg for her forgiveness for something I didn’t know I did.

“Where did you live all these years?” I asked instead. “We couldn’t find you.”

“I was in that apartment,” she said. “In that same apartment. Right in Ozone Park. Slept in my daddy’s room. Right on his bed.”

“That’s impossible,” I told her, dizzy. “My parents must have… someone must have gone looking.”

In the silence that followed, I realized no one had. No one even mentioned her name. When she left it was as if she had never existed at all.

“I was right there the whole time, Kaylie,” she said. “The whole damn time.”

We hung up with promises to keep in touch, but we never did. Time passed the same as always, and still, she remained a memory who flitted in the back of my mind.

“Do you think Pap… you know,” I asked my mother. “Do you think she’s brainwashed?”

“She’s something,” she said. “And it ain’t right.“

I found her Facebook account and check in every few weeks. She’s friendless in North Carolina, but she has a pitbull named Noodle. He stands by the door and protects her when Damien’s out.

The last time we spoke on the phone, she asked me to visit her.

“It’s lonely over here, and I hate being alone.”

“Me, too,” I said. “It’s scary.”

“It is! It really is. It feels like something’s watching me.”

“Try sleeping with your head under the blankets,” I said. “It helps.”

“That’s good. That’s really good.”

I think about her whenever I’m scared. I wonder if she feels the same kind of afraid that I do, especially when the lights are out, and it’s windy, and the door creaks open. Just an inch.