Editors – How can I thank you? Here’s how: by addressing your suggestions and finishing the final draft! For starters, several of you suggested different endings – could Mayim be the murderer (Interesting! I tried it. Doesn’t really work), and, why all the drama about Jim? I did rethink the ending to simplify things – Now, it ends two years after the murder – Mayim is not married, no children, just back at work at the Pennysaver and keeping a low profile. She still puts Jim's ashes in the bay, but I added a Chapter 23 to bring the story back to the beginning. Tell me what y’all think.
Gail
CHAPTER 22 RESURRECTION BAY
May 1984
On a Saturday in early spring, Mayim decided to tackle the accumulating boxes in the garage attic, hoping to find some of her black dresses. Her fellow Chamber of Commerce members were gathering up costumes for Anchorage Community Theater’s production of After the Fall, by Arthur Miller. Mayim had attended rehearsals one night, and hadn’t liked it much, finding the self-destructive slut theme a bit shallow. Who was she to judge? The actress chosen to play Marilyn Monroe’s character looked surprisingly familiar; Mayim left before the rehearsals were over, but vowed to search her boxes for appropriate costumes.
The garage’s upstairs space barely had headroom to stand up. Two windows at either end and a bare bulb provided dusty light; she brought with her a small heater to ward off the spring cold, and began opening boxes – some labeled, some not.
Old diaries, letters from her parents and brothers, newspaper clippings related to the murder, baby clothes, toys outgrown, games with missing pieces, silverware that had been replaced, her own school papers mixed in with old birthday cards, photo albums and one childish scrapbook of her own, created at eight years old, assembling the details of the Great Alaskan Earthquake. For several minutes, she turned the pages of the book, letting memories of the disaster wash over her, before she replaced it and floated off to the next box.
Then she found them, in a box labeled simply “Fourth Avenue.” Her collection of black dresses had been neatly folded with several lavender sachets, gifts from Dawnell’s grandmother. The small sachets had been made with some sort of soft fur – was it rabbit? Mayim held one of the sachets to her cheek, felt the animal softness, breathed in the mild smell of comfort, then pulled out the dresses.
Suddenly, there he was, at the bottom of the box. A shoebox-sized cardboard container that was Jim Welch’s remains, taped and labeled by the Anchorage Coroner’s office.
“No known survivors,” the clerk had insisted, a few days before the trial. “Do you want them?” Shocked that she would be appointed to care for Jim’s remains, Mayim had held out her hand, just to feel the weight of the box. The clerk had walked out of the room, leaving the box in her hands.
In the garage attic, Mayim lifted it out and sandy bits sprinkled her pants – a tiny tear had developed in one corner.
Mayim jumped up, brushing Jim’s ashes from her lap, banging her head on the low ceiling, dropping him into her piles of black dresses. She rubbed her head, and looked down at the thing – just a small gray cardboard container, heavily taped against leakage but even so, was leaking from the corner seam.
“Jim, you asshole,” she said. “You’re ruining my dresses.”
Mid-April, the temperature promising to be in the mid-50s, Mayim set off for Seward. Jim, sifting but rewrapped in his crumbling box, sat silently in the passenger seat,. Her plan was to sprinkle his ashes in Resurrection Bay, for no other reasons than it’s fitting name, its proximity to the sea, and her love of that particular part of Alaska. Jim did not complain, nor did she think he would if he were alive and sitting there, warm-blooded.
Rolling down the window, she let the cool spring air loosen her hair, noting as she drove down the Seward Highway along Turnagain Arm, the difference in smells – here was a relief from the break-up, spring rains and melting slush in Anchorage, where the ripe smell of melting dog shit, oil spills, and garbage thrown into snow banks all winter still lingered. On the highway, the snowy Chugach Mountains looming to her left, the smells were of moss and mud flats mixed with pine and wood smoke. The ice chunks were gone; the break-up in the bay was over. The tide was out. As she drove on toward the tip of the arm, ebb tide left mudflats at the bottom of the mountains. Past Alyeska where she learned to ski. Past Girdwood, she drove alongside a train, the clickety-clack of the rolling train wheels soon behind her. At Portage, she resisted the impulse to take the short drive up to the glacier, always amazed at the change in it since she had first set eyes on it as a child in 1962. Would she live to see it disappear, she wondered, as she turned around the Arm, looking out on the endless flats. Centuries of muck had melted out of the glacier, depositing it to be washed to the Pacific, or more likely, to sink and harden to stone, memories once locked in ice and snow, now loosed to the water, to sink or swim. On the deposits: cow parsnip, lily pads in the bogs, huckleberries on the hillsides, fireweed and lupine along the road, spruce, alder; they had managed to extract sustenance from whatever the glaciers left. Hadn’t she, too? Hadn’t she survived, even thrived?
Mayim looked over to the box in the passenger seat and patted it, feeling kindly to Jim today, hoping this trip would set her free of his haunting demands.
At the end of the Arm, she turned south, continuing her journey along Seattle Ridge, across the forested neck of the Kenai Peninsula, toward Seward.
A year after the earthquake, Mayim rode this same route with her parents and brothers to Seward, her father intent on visiting a church there whose minister had abandoned it. Dad had helped set up the church a year before the earthquake, working to build a congregation that first met in a home, and then in a borrowed Oddfellows hall. A young minister from Dad’s Portland Christian College had just moved into a back room of the hall with his young and pregnant wife and was setting up a temporary household when the quake hit. The quake was followed by the huge waves of the tsunami that destroyed the town, cutting its residents off from civilization for months, leaving the congregation in mourning for lost lives and homes. As soon as they could, the young minister and his wife flew out of Seward back to Oregon, apologies flying behind their retreat. An elder had maintained church services for the past few months, but Dad’s Portland colleagues had asked him to check on the status of the Seward church, in preparation for a new minister. Dad, always game for an adventure, loaded up his family and headed to Seward.
Mayim remembered that ride: Twisted railroad tracks and splintered ties, detours around landslides, buckled roads that suddenly came to an end, falling off into oblivion, or entire lanes of the highway that dropped off into Turnagain Arm, for miles; the construction bulldozers and crews in military uniforms, plowing new roads; cars and boats sticking out of the mud of the bay; a fear in the pit of her stomach at the sight of the disastrous consequences of the earthquake. Then the town itself: the smell of burnt wood and plastic still permeating the air; houses and buildings and boats thrown together in a mash of confusion; the sound of hammers and saws. The airplanes overhead, coming and going, day and night. Luckily, Mayim’s mother told her, the Oddfellows hall had been built on the hillside above the port. From the yard outside the hall, while their parents were talking to members of the congregation who came and went, Mayim and her brothers could sit and watch as tractors and earthmovers and workers attempted to scrape away the remaining damage from the quake and the tsunami.
At night, the family took over the small quarters abandoned by the young minister; Mayim on the bed with her brothers, Mom and Dad in the living room, on the pullout sofa. The next morning, Dad preached to a small group of bedraggled construction workers and residents. Mayim only remembered that it was his Noah and the Ark sermon; the one that ended so happily with a rainbow, the family and the animals climbing out of the boat onto dry land, led there by a dove. At the time, she thought a flood would be the most exciting of disasters: to ride a wave to a new land on a boat filled with cats and dogs and ponies, what fun! After visiting Seward though, noting the destructive forces of a tsunami followed by fire, she changed her mind. She’d had her share of disasters.
Driving toward Seward on this spring day nearly 20 years post-earthquake, the effects of the tsunami it caused were barely visible, unless one knew what to look for: The newer bridges, the old grown-over road 20 feet below the main highway, the odd hillside vegetation where a slide had been, and at low tide, the occasional boat hull or rooftop uncovered from the mud.
Mayim entered Seward from the north, enchanted, as she had been before, by Mount Marathon and Mount Alice looming across Resurrection Bay; part of a ridge in the Chugach Mountains filled with fjords, ice flows and glaciers separating this bay from Prince William Sound and all of its bays.
Slowly, she drove through town, trying to relate it to her childhood memories as seen from the perch of the Oddfellows hall, before she realized: The entire town had been rebuilt on the ledge around the hall; no longer as vulnerable to tsunamis. The port, with its harbor and railroad yard and what looked like an expanded airport, had remained near the bay, but homes and businesses had crept up to the safety of the hillside.
Mayim smiled to herself and addressed Jim: “Some of us learn our lessons, eh?”
At the boat harbor, she parked on a street ironically named Fourth Avenue, put Jim’s ashes in her bag, and walked toward the water where ancient tattered pilings poked their fingers to the blue sky, pointing to the mountains across the bay. The beach is really no beach at all, but actually a long bayside stretch of large and small rocks, concrete blocks covered with algae and seaweed, bleached logs and stumps. On a stump close to the water, Mayim sat, pulled out Jim’s ashes, and opened the box.
Between this place and the Pacific Ocean, Mayim thought, there is only Resurrection Bay; there is only this beautiful expanse of water, frozen and immobile before, crushed by ice and snow, and now cold and flowing out to sea. What had crushed her? What had crushed Jim and Roger and Kellie and Charlie? How do we know what we will become in the wake of a disaster?
She took a deep breath and sifted the gritty ashes through her fingers. This is what we become, she said, out loud. Small waves from the incoming tide lapped some sort of an agreement. Light glanced off the water. Snow on the mountains across the bay was so white, it seemed blue, a reflection of the sky and the water, infinite.
She breathed out, felt the spring breeze on her neck, the sun on her head.
“I’m still here,” she mentioned to a gull, wheeling overhead. “I’m not ashes. Living it up to me, now.”
Jim’s sandy ashes did not float out sea; no, of course not. They were heavy – bone and teeth reduced to fine grit, but certainly not buoyant. When she dumped them into Resurrection Bay, they sank into the clear cold water, some bits rearranging on the bottom of the shore as the small waves lapped at the shore; others staying right where she left them. She took a long stick and pushed at the small gravelly pile for a few minutes, but there was no current to speak of, the tide was slack, Jim was happy to remain near the shore of Resurrection Bay, possibly until the next tsunami. Back on her log, Mayim smiled to herself to think of Jim’s ashes battering a hillside, ending up in someone’s garden, or gulped down by a fish which was eaten by – who would it be -- a stripper eating Chinese with a man who ends up murdering his roommate? Irreverently, that thought also made her hoot, loudly, frightening the gull that had landed near her, hoping for a handout.
Mayim rose from her log, stretched out her arms, closed her eyes and tried to hear what the water was saying.
Clap, clap, clap, it said, slowly. When she opened her eyes again, she saw only beauty.
She dipped her hand into the frigid Resurrection Bay waters and left them there until her hand was numb, then drew it out. Slowly, as she drove back home, her hand thawed, leaving a tingling sensation like pins and needles. By the time she reached Anchorage, even that had disappeared.
CHAPTER 23 FORGIVENESS
When I dream of 4th Avenue, Jim, it is not you, or your dead blown-away face, or even your living scarred-up body that frightens me most. It is not Roger’s tortured letters, or his sad end, or even Charlie’s or Kellie’s.
It is my hands I dream of, covered in blood I know is theirs.
If you did not deserve to live, as my low-life friends had decided, then why should I have saved you, Jim? Why? And why fret about those murdering friends?
Here’s why: Because I could have saved you, Jim, and Roger and Kellie and Charlie. And you all might have gone on to be better people. In my worst nightmares, I realize I had the power to decide your fate during this one short moment in my life when we crossed paths. In that crossing, I did not have the insight or the courage to stop, turn and hold out my hand. The nightmare is that I am still not sure what I would do, if I could do it again.
This is not a “what if” question for me, or for you, Jim, Roger and Kellie. This is not me wishing to return to that moment, to unravel the could-have-beens and could-have-dones. This is me, Mayim Cairns, looking at my bloody hands, night after night, and wishing for some sort of metaphysical soap to wash them clean. What ifs are a waste of time. I can’t go back. I can only go forward. And so that makes it a “how” question, Jim.
How will I go forward with these hands, stained in your blood, the result of my own fear and lack of courage and insight?
How will I go forward?
Jim, I don’t know. That is the truth. Since the day I left you on that gurney, since those days I abandoned your murderers claiming self-protection; since then Jim, I think I have lived a better life, perhaps with more attention to my friends, and an awareness that my life, my actions, impact others. Maybe since then I’ve lived less selfishly, less self-indulgently. Or maybe not.
Jim, it’s been two years. I don’t ask you to stop the dreams. I have no right to ask anything of you. But I’ll confess: I am not perfect. I am still learning to be Mayim, and she is a veritable graveyard of confused and contradicting allegiances. Learning to be Mayim is still more frightening than taking off my clothes in public.
Never mind, Jim. Already, I can feel the dancer in me begin reworked in the hands of Debra and my coworkers at the Pennysaver. Already, that 4th Avenue Mayim, the Mayim who let you die, has become the stuff of legends, stripped of her real motives and wrapped in a gauzy cloud of story. In that narrative, I am heroic, adventurous, intriguing. How I wish I could live that story, Jim.
Instead, in my dreams, I am a pilgrim surviving storms and earthquakes and sins, keeping my hands in the boat, when I might have pulled four people from the flood.
Jim, let your blood be my own baptism; the mark on the door above the mantle to signify escape from doom; the rush of water over my head, my body, baptizing me into my new life; the blood of birth and death; the beginning and the end and then the beginning again.
I am a newborn, Jim. I don’t know where I’ll go next, but I do know this: I will hurt. I will laugh. I will live. Come with me, Jim.
Gail
CHAPTER 22 RESURRECTION BAY
May 1984
On a Saturday in early spring, Mayim decided to tackle the accumulating boxes in the garage attic, hoping to find some of her black dresses. Her fellow Chamber of Commerce members were gathering up costumes for Anchorage Community Theater’s production of After the Fall, by Arthur Miller. Mayim had attended rehearsals one night, and hadn’t liked it much, finding the self-destructive slut theme a bit shallow. Who was she to judge? The actress chosen to play Marilyn Monroe’s character looked surprisingly familiar; Mayim left before the rehearsals were over, but vowed to search her boxes for appropriate costumes.
The garage’s upstairs space barely had headroom to stand up. Two windows at either end and a bare bulb provided dusty light; she brought with her a small heater to ward off the spring cold, and began opening boxes – some labeled, some not.
Old diaries, letters from her parents and brothers, newspaper clippings related to the murder, baby clothes, toys outgrown, games with missing pieces, silverware that had been replaced, her own school papers mixed in with old birthday cards, photo albums and one childish scrapbook of her own, created at eight years old, assembling the details of the Great Alaskan Earthquake. For several minutes, she turned the pages of the book, letting memories of the disaster wash over her, before she replaced it and floated off to the next box.
Then she found them, in a box labeled simply “Fourth Avenue.” Her collection of black dresses had been neatly folded with several lavender sachets, gifts from Dawnell’s grandmother. The small sachets had been made with some sort of soft fur – was it rabbit? Mayim held one of the sachets to her cheek, felt the animal softness, breathed in the mild smell of comfort, then pulled out the dresses.
Suddenly, there he was, at the bottom of the box. A shoebox-sized cardboard container that was Jim Welch’s remains, taped and labeled by the Anchorage Coroner’s office.
“No known survivors,” the clerk had insisted, a few days before the trial. “Do you want them?” Shocked that she would be appointed to care for Jim’s remains, Mayim had held out her hand, just to feel the weight of the box. The clerk had walked out of the room, leaving the box in her hands.
In the garage attic, Mayim lifted it out and sandy bits sprinkled her pants – a tiny tear had developed in one corner.
Mayim jumped up, brushing Jim’s ashes from her lap, banging her head on the low ceiling, dropping him into her piles of black dresses. She rubbed her head, and looked down at the thing – just a small gray cardboard container, heavily taped against leakage but even so, was leaking from the corner seam.
“Jim, you asshole,” she said. “You’re ruining my dresses.”
Mid-April, the temperature promising to be in the mid-50s, Mayim set off for Seward. Jim, sifting but rewrapped in his crumbling box, sat silently in the passenger seat,. Her plan was to sprinkle his ashes in Resurrection Bay, for no other reasons than it’s fitting name, its proximity to the sea, and her love of that particular part of Alaska. Jim did not complain, nor did she think he would if he were alive and sitting there, warm-blooded.
Rolling down the window, she let the cool spring air loosen her hair, noting as she drove down the Seward Highway along Turnagain Arm, the difference in smells – here was a relief from the break-up, spring rains and melting slush in Anchorage, where the ripe smell of melting dog shit, oil spills, and garbage thrown into snow banks all winter still lingered. On the highway, the snowy Chugach Mountains looming to her left, the smells were of moss and mud flats mixed with pine and wood smoke. The ice chunks were gone; the break-up in the bay was over. The tide was out. As she drove on toward the tip of the arm, ebb tide left mudflats at the bottom of the mountains. Past Alyeska where she learned to ski. Past Girdwood, she drove alongside a train, the clickety-clack of the rolling train wheels soon behind her. At Portage, she resisted the impulse to take the short drive up to the glacier, always amazed at the change in it since she had first set eyes on it as a child in 1962. Would she live to see it disappear, she wondered, as she turned around the Arm, looking out on the endless flats. Centuries of muck had melted out of the glacier, depositing it to be washed to the Pacific, or more likely, to sink and harden to stone, memories once locked in ice and snow, now loosed to the water, to sink or swim. On the deposits: cow parsnip, lily pads in the bogs, huckleberries on the hillsides, fireweed and lupine along the road, spruce, alder; they had managed to extract sustenance from whatever the glaciers left. Hadn’t she, too? Hadn’t she survived, even thrived?
Mayim looked over to the box in the passenger seat and patted it, feeling kindly to Jim today, hoping this trip would set her free of his haunting demands.
At the end of the Arm, she turned south, continuing her journey along Seattle Ridge, across the forested neck of the Kenai Peninsula, toward Seward.
A year after the earthquake, Mayim rode this same route with her parents and brothers to Seward, her father intent on visiting a church there whose minister had abandoned it. Dad had helped set up the church a year before the earthquake, working to build a congregation that first met in a home, and then in a borrowed Oddfellows hall. A young minister from Dad’s Portland Christian College had just moved into a back room of the hall with his young and pregnant wife and was setting up a temporary household when the quake hit. The quake was followed by the huge waves of the tsunami that destroyed the town, cutting its residents off from civilization for months, leaving the congregation in mourning for lost lives and homes. As soon as they could, the young minister and his wife flew out of Seward back to Oregon, apologies flying behind their retreat. An elder had maintained church services for the past few months, but Dad’s Portland colleagues had asked him to check on the status of the Seward church, in preparation for a new minister. Dad, always game for an adventure, loaded up his family and headed to Seward.
Mayim remembered that ride: Twisted railroad tracks and splintered ties, detours around landslides, buckled roads that suddenly came to an end, falling off into oblivion, or entire lanes of the highway that dropped off into Turnagain Arm, for miles; the construction bulldozers and crews in military uniforms, plowing new roads; cars and boats sticking out of the mud of the bay; a fear in the pit of her stomach at the sight of the disastrous consequences of the earthquake. Then the town itself: the smell of burnt wood and plastic still permeating the air; houses and buildings and boats thrown together in a mash of confusion; the sound of hammers and saws. The airplanes overhead, coming and going, day and night. Luckily, Mayim’s mother told her, the Oddfellows hall had been built on the hillside above the port. From the yard outside the hall, while their parents were talking to members of the congregation who came and went, Mayim and her brothers could sit and watch as tractors and earthmovers and workers attempted to scrape away the remaining damage from the quake and the tsunami.
At night, the family took over the small quarters abandoned by the young minister; Mayim on the bed with her brothers, Mom and Dad in the living room, on the pullout sofa. The next morning, Dad preached to a small group of bedraggled construction workers and residents. Mayim only remembered that it was his Noah and the Ark sermon; the one that ended so happily with a rainbow, the family and the animals climbing out of the boat onto dry land, led there by a dove. At the time, she thought a flood would be the most exciting of disasters: to ride a wave to a new land on a boat filled with cats and dogs and ponies, what fun! After visiting Seward though, noting the destructive forces of a tsunami followed by fire, she changed her mind. She’d had her share of disasters.
Driving toward Seward on this spring day nearly 20 years post-earthquake, the effects of the tsunami it caused were barely visible, unless one knew what to look for: The newer bridges, the old grown-over road 20 feet below the main highway, the odd hillside vegetation where a slide had been, and at low tide, the occasional boat hull or rooftop uncovered from the mud.
Mayim entered Seward from the north, enchanted, as she had been before, by Mount Marathon and Mount Alice looming across Resurrection Bay; part of a ridge in the Chugach Mountains filled with fjords, ice flows and glaciers separating this bay from Prince William Sound and all of its bays.
Slowly, she drove through town, trying to relate it to her childhood memories as seen from the perch of the Oddfellows hall, before she realized: The entire town had been rebuilt on the ledge around the hall; no longer as vulnerable to tsunamis. The port, with its harbor and railroad yard and what looked like an expanded airport, had remained near the bay, but homes and businesses had crept up to the safety of the hillside.
Mayim smiled to herself and addressed Jim: “Some of us learn our lessons, eh?”
At the boat harbor, she parked on a street ironically named Fourth Avenue, put Jim’s ashes in her bag, and walked toward the water where ancient tattered pilings poked their fingers to the blue sky, pointing to the mountains across the bay. The beach is really no beach at all, but actually a long bayside stretch of large and small rocks, concrete blocks covered with algae and seaweed, bleached logs and stumps. On a stump close to the water, Mayim sat, pulled out Jim’s ashes, and opened the box.
Between this place and the Pacific Ocean, Mayim thought, there is only Resurrection Bay; there is only this beautiful expanse of water, frozen and immobile before, crushed by ice and snow, and now cold and flowing out to sea. What had crushed her? What had crushed Jim and Roger and Kellie and Charlie? How do we know what we will become in the wake of a disaster?
She took a deep breath and sifted the gritty ashes through her fingers. This is what we become, she said, out loud. Small waves from the incoming tide lapped some sort of an agreement. Light glanced off the water. Snow on the mountains across the bay was so white, it seemed blue, a reflection of the sky and the water, infinite.
She breathed out, felt the spring breeze on her neck, the sun on her head.
“I’m still here,” she mentioned to a gull, wheeling overhead. “I’m not ashes. Living it up to me, now.”
Jim’s sandy ashes did not float out sea; no, of course not. They were heavy – bone and teeth reduced to fine grit, but certainly not buoyant. When she dumped them into Resurrection Bay, they sank into the clear cold water, some bits rearranging on the bottom of the shore as the small waves lapped at the shore; others staying right where she left them. She took a long stick and pushed at the small gravelly pile for a few minutes, but there was no current to speak of, the tide was slack, Jim was happy to remain near the shore of Resurrection Bay, possibly until the next tsunami. Back on her log, Mayim smiled to herself to think of Jim’s ashes battering a hillside, ending up in someone’s garden, or gulped down by a fish which was eaten by – who would it be -- a stripper eating Chinese with a man who ends up murdering his roommate? Irreverently, that thought also made her hoot, loudly, frightening the gull that had landed near her, hoping for a handout.
Mayim rose from her log, stretched out her arms, closed her eyes and tried to hear what the water was saying.
Clap, clap, clap, it said, slowly. When she opened her eyes again, she saw only beauty.
She dipped her hand into the frigid Resurrection Bay waters and left them there until her hand was numb, then drew it out. Slowly, as she drove back home, her hand thawed, leaving a tingling sensation like pins and needles. By the time she reached Anchorage, even that had disappeared.
CHAPTER 23 FORGIVENESS
When I dream of 4th Avenue, Jim, it is not you, or your dead blown-away face, or even your living scarred-up body that frightens me most. It is not Roger’s tortured letters, or his sad end, or even Charlie’s or Kellie’s.
It is my hands I dream of, covered in blood I know is theirs.
If you did not deserve to live, as my low-life friends had decided, then why should I have saved you, Jim? Why? And why fret about those murdering friends?
Here’s why: Because I could have saved you, Jim, and Roger and Kellie and Charlie. And you all might have gone on to be better people. In my worst nightmares, I realize I had the power to decide your fate during this one short moment in my life when we crossed paths. In that crossing, I did not have the insight or the courage to stop, turn and hold out my hand. The nightmare is that I am still not sure what I would do, if I could do it again.
This is not a “what if” question for me, or for you, Jim, Roger and Kellie. This is not me wishing to return to that moment, to unravel the could-have-beens and could-have-dones. This is me, Mayim Cairns, looking at my bloody hands, night after night, and wishing for some sort of metaphysical soap to wash them clean. What ifs are a waste of time. I can’t go back. I can only go forward. And so that makes it a “how” question, Jim.
How will I go forward with these hands, stained in your blood, the result of my own fear and lack of courage and insight?
How will I go forward?
Jim, I don’t know. That is the truth. Since the day I left you on that gurney, since those days I abandoned your murderers claiming self-protection; since then Jim, I think I have lived a better life, perhaps with more attention to my friends, and an awareness that my life, my actions, impact others. Maybe since then I’ve lived less selfishly, less self-indulgently. Or maybe not.
Jim, it’s been two years. I don’t ask you to stop the dreams. I have no right to ask anything of you. But I’ll confess: I am not perfect. I am still learning to be Mayim, and she is a veritable graveyard of confused and contradicting allegiances. Learning to be Mayim is still more frightening than taking off my clothes in public.
Never mind, Jim. Already, I can feel the dancer in me begin reworked in the hands of Debra and my coworkers at the Pennysaver. Already, that 4th Avenue Mayim, the Mayim who let you die, has become the stuff of legends, stripped of her real motives and wrapped in a gauzy cloud of story. In that narrative, I am heroic, adventurous, intriguing. How I wish I could live that story, Jim.
Instead, in my dreams, I am a pilgrim surviving storms and earthquakes and sins, keeping my hands in the boat, when I might have pulled four people from the flood.
Jim, let your blood be my own baptism; the mark on the door above the mantle to signify escape from doom; the rush of water over my head, my body, baptizing me into my new life; the blood of birth and death; the beginning and the end and then the beginning again.
I am a newborn, Jim. I don’t know where I’ll go next, but I do know this: I will hurt. I will laugh. I will live. Come with me, Jim.