A Golden Light
After her father died Sadie stopped moving.
It started with her throat. The day her mother called and told her he was dead she opened her mouth to scream or cry or shout or something, and nothing came out. She pushed her throat muscles together and moved her tongue around until she felt ridiculous and then, at last, a bubble of sound slowly pushed its way out of her mouth. It was a tiny, tinny no quickly buried underneath the sobs which flagged in and out from the receiver. She tried again to say something more, but this time she spoke only silence.
Hello? her mother called over the receiver. Sadie, hello?
I will never be able to talk again, Sadie thought mournfully, and she placed the phone back in its cradle.
But the loss of sound was only the beginning. It was soon followed by a loss of movement. Walking up or down a flight of stairs became an insurmountable effort; soon even walking on the flattest of flat sidewalks seemed an undertaking too painful to bear. She began to feel as if she was struggling underwater each time she stood up on her own two feet. By the time of the funeral her hands had become slow and dim-witted, clumsy and uneasy to manoeuvre.
At the burial Sadie stood in the front row, and as they lowered the casket into the ground, she realized that she could no longer hear the morbid sounds of the coffin scratching along the dirt. She strained her head forward, listening for the sounds of sobs and the indelicate noise of noses being blown, but there was nothing except a strange humming void.
I’ve misplaced my ears, she thought, and tried to remember if she had put them on that morning or had simply gone out without them.
She looked around for her sister or her mother or her brother-in-law; instead she caught the wandering eye of a middle-aged woman, some variant of cousin or family friend. She touched Sadie’s hand, her eyes watering in a fresh wave of tears. Be strong, Sadie read off the woman’s lips. Sadie nodded vaguely and let her hand be clutched, let herself be dragged into the sea of black cloth that wept and reminisced on her shoulder. They all seemed so sad, but Sadie, dazed from the loss of her senses, kept forgetting what they were being sad for.
After the burial she fell under a wave of exhaustion. She couldn’t make it to the car; on the way out of the cemetery she sat down to rest on a little bench marked Viner and never got up. If it wasn’t for her brother-in-law, who noticed her absence in the car and came looking for her, she might have remained there forever, hunched on the bench like a small frightened creature. He found her sitting there, her fingers roaming desperately over her ears, as if to reassure herself she had not lost them. He had known Sadie since she was a little girl and when he saw her sitting there, looking for her lost ears, it was as if they had fallen through time and were children again. He plucked her up from the bench and carried her to the car where her mother and sister were waiting. She fell asleep before he had finished buckling her seat belt.
The next thing she knew she was back in her parents’ house, surrounded by people she did not know who all seemed to know her. Her mother did not know what to do with her, so she was ensconced among the nearly dead, a group of forgotten wheezing elderly people who pinched her cheeks roughly with their papery fingers and patted their leaking eyes with wrinkled handkerchiefs. Sadie could tell from the force of their expirations on her skin that they were shouting their words into each other’s dim ears. She was grateful that she could no longer hear them and slid her eyes away to avoid reading their lips. And then, as she waited, hearing nothing and feeling nothing except the slow, mournful reverberations of many feet on the living room floor, she felt her limbs petrifying. Her eyelids began falling slowly down, then up, then back down again. Terrified, she somehow managed to excuse herself and stumbled away towards the stairs. She crawled up the steps to the warmth of her old bed, kicking off her shoes and curling, blissful-deep, under the covers. When she woke it was dark outside and the warm, familiar body of her sister was curled cat-like around her.
Get out, she said, or tried to say. She found she could still turn over and so she did that and wedged her elbow cruelly into her sister’s side, wriggling deeper and deeper until she woke up. What? her sister queried in the raspy voice of the newly awoken, but Sadie was deaf to her.
In a quick minute the last of Sadie’s patience was lost, run off perhaps to join all the sounds which she could no longer hear or make. Rallying the last of her strength she planted her feet firmly into her sister’s back and pushed her off the bed.
She could feel the slam of the door that indicated her sister had left. When she could not sense even a trace of angry feet stomping down the hallway she began to regret having pushed her out. She felt very small and alone in the dark of her room and for a while there was no difference between her opened eyes and her shut ones. She thought she had gone blind. She wanted to go and hug her sister and beg her forgiveness for her own selfishness and say, I’m sorry I can’t cry with you, I’m sorry I can’t give you what you need, I love you, but it was already too late for that. She had grown roots, she was immobile, and her vocal cords had died away, so rather than try to uproot herself she fell asleep instead.
When she woke up again her mother was there. It was morning and she was smoking and staring out the window, smoking as if nothing had happened, as if she belonged there in Sadie’s room by her window, as if Sadie were a little girl again and her mother had come in to check on her daughter, the most natural thing in the world to check on your daughter, leaving her husband alone in their bedroom to sleep. Sadie tried to think of the last time that they had been together in this room and she fell upon a memory of long ago. When she was little she had lost her sister’s hat and her sister had yelled at her and her father was gone, as usual. It had been her mother who had coaxed her into opening the locked door of her room, who had pulled her onto her lap and told her that there was no use crying over spilt milk or lost hats and kissed her until all the tears ran away.
She willed her mother to come to her again as she had come to her before and run her hands through her hair and hold her as she cried. Instead she stood there smoking as if she hadn’t realized that Sadie had woken up and that she needed her. She was filled suddenly with an insensible hatred, a pulse of anger which coursed through her body making her flush with fatigue. Get out, she started to say and fell asleep halfway through saying it.
The psychiatrist that her mother lured up to Sadie’s room told her that this was normal. She wore a beautiful plum skirt suit and round-toed brown shoes, the same shoes that Sadie owned, the same shoes she had worn to the funeral and then kicked off her feet on her way to bed. Sadie thought their matching shoes were a sign, from God, the universe, or whoever, and so she stared at the shoes as the psychiatrist told her that there was no normal reaction to grief which, conversely, meant that any reaction was normal. As she said this, Sadie realized that she could hear again. The suddenness of this abrupt return of sound and sense startled her; she almost began to laugh. Instead the laugh turned into a yawn which went on for a century in which everything stayed exactly as it was. The psychiatrist blinked and the yawn was broken, the century over in a second. The psychiatrist asked Sadie all sorts of questions which Sadie might have answered had she been able to speak. I need to sleep, Sadie thought as her eyes closed and she drifted off. The psychiatrist seemed to understand.
Sadie’s mother and sister and brother-in-law all took turns watching over Sadie. Our Sleeping Beauty, they called her as they watched the slow rise and fall of her breath. They humoured her for a few weeks. A sleeping girl, after all, requires nothing but a little food and a little worry, and the worry was a blessing, a reason to look in front of themselves and not into their own hearts. They prodded her gently into wakefulness and tried to feed her the lightest of foods: juice and Jell-O, dried toast and soup. She nibbled at their offerings in a daze then fell into sleep again and again. They tried to get her to talk or to move or to see, but it seemed she could no longer do any of these things very well at all. They brought in doctors who sometimes said her soul was sick, or that she was a medical mystery, or that there was nothing wrong with her at all. The latter type of doctor they considered to be complete quacks and they would be sure to always smile and nod, being kinder and gentler than they would have with someone they considered sane. No matter the doctors’ opinions of Sadie, no one knew how to fix her. Her family began to believe she was broken forever and adjusted themselves accordingly.
And then a strange thing happened. Sadie woke up one evening to find her room lit up in gold. It was the magic hour, the last hour of sunlight of the day, when everything was bathed in golden light and the warmth of the fading sun made the colours of the sky glow ember-bright. She wondered if she had read that in a book or if her father had told her that. And as she thought that word, the word father, a golden flicker burst into the golden room and danced across her legs and arms and face before settling gently on the wall beside her bed. She reached out and placed her hand upon the dancing flicker. Papa? she asked.
It was the first word she had spoken in a year.
In the morning she was a little better. She sat up in bed and said please and thank you to her mother’s shock and amazement. For a few minutes strung together she had a brief, quotidian conversation about breakfast foods with her sister. But her mind was elsewhere; she could think of nothing but the flicker of light, a beam of brightness in a field of gold.
From then on, every evening at the magic hour, the golden flicker danced into Sadie’s bedroom. She placed her hands on the light and let it thread through her fingers. She found that the flicker let her fall asleep with her heart at ease and wake up in the morning with the strength to last through the day. She could get up and get dressed and go downstairs and eat breakfast with her mother like a normal person. She could hear and speak and move her limbs, her flesh no longer cold as a statue. She could be good for her mother and strong for her sister, she could count on both hands over and over again the good things that she did every day. Yes, she was good. One morning they ran out of milk at breakfast and she volunteered to go to the corner store and buy more. When the cashier flirted with her she flirted back and gave him the first smile she had been able to give since before her mother had called her that long, long time ago. She was happy, in a way.
One night she went to her room at the hour only to find her sister already there. She was sitting on Sadie’s bed with a book in her hands and when she heard Sadie’s footsteps she looked up at her with a smile that reached out to Sadie’s heart. She opened her mouth to speak only to close it again and Sadie wondered wildly if her former disease was catching and her sister had gone mute as she once had.
The sun was setting and the room had turned a brilliant gold.
Look, her sister said.
It was the magic hour and the flicker danced in a beam of light between them. Sadie’s sister reached out her hand and Sadie’s light, a glimmer of brilliance in a room of gold, played across her fingers. Suddenly Sadie felt happy: happy that her sister was in her room and that she had seen the light and that Sadie could explain everything to her. She felt sure quite suddenly that her sister would understand, that she was the only one who could understand, and that even if Sadie hadn’t stumbled upon her sister in her room unexpectedly like this, she would have brought her here eventually in order to show her the flicker. Sadie reached out for her hand and saw that she wasn’t looking at the flicker at all anymore, but out, out through the window. She turned to see what her sister was looking at and saw her little next-door neighbour, a child named Tanya, whose room was directly across from her own. She was playing with a pocket mirror, flicking it lazily back and forth, now catching the light, now letting it go. It flashed across Sadie’s face and for a blissful second she was blind.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
