Read Online The Sea of Light by Jenifer Levin - Free Book Online
Authors: Jenifer Levin
Tags: Fiction
Ads: Link
darkness, bury my face against her neck and, in sleep, she sighs.
Yes everything is okay. We are all, all safe here in this house I’ve bought, with plenty of food in the refrigerator and money in the bank. I have a terrific job, a beautiful wife, four children, two sons, two daughters. Nearly perfect family. Perfect life. And it’s a free country. Why do I hurt inside?
*
Things change. Something happens in an instant to alter the course of your own life, or the life of someone you love—a thing beyond your control. So there is nothing you can do.
What Bart Sager said, There was the matter of Babe and the Hedenmeyer boy. Her inexplicable failures.
There was Angelita.
Then the hospital. Nightmares of her. Of that tortured Kenny living inside machines.
The fight with Barbara. Already, it had begun—sacrifice. The Powers were here, I’d called them, and simply failed to know it.
What did she say, that foul old witch? Shame of my family in Havana as well as in Miami.
Your house disappears like wind.
As soon as Babe began to eat again, I sensed it.
One weekday evening when it seemed as if things were returning to a little normalcy. Barbara went out with friends for the first time in weeks. Jack was at cross-country practice, Roberto banging something together with hammers and nails in the garage, burning incense to obscure the odor of the cigarette he was secretly smoking. Teresa was riveted by the television in the den. And I sat on our living room sofa glancing through a newspaper, sensed shafts of light streaking out into the upstairs hallway from behind the half-opened door of Babe’s room.
I lifted my head to look up. Something rose along the back of my neck with a buzzing, snapping sound so that I broke out in sweat. Saw my house drifting into wind. The center that had held us a family—happy, successful, winning and beautiful and spectacularly American all these years—about to diffuse like fragments of flesh on skeletal bones. And I saw—suddenly, without having words for it, because there are no words in the world for it—that Tia Corazón was right, I had to choose. But before knowing it or being able to stop it I had made my choice—a choice that came before understanding, out of nowhere but a dark place in the primitive past, in my primitive heart—from the wind and the death of Angelita, from the pain of seeing my firstborn child swollen and desiccated in a white hospital bed, her body shriveled to unrecognizable proportions. Something had come to me, offered itself, and without knowing it I’d opened my heart to it, and because of that the unknown thing had planted itself inside my beautiful American family and inside my magnificent, expensive, American showcase house.
I looked up that evening and things became silent for a moment. Then I felt it—I felt it: the ineluctable working of the Powers. Something like insects gnawing the innards of everything I’d lived in and purchased up until now. Silent tremors making almost invisible cracks in the house beams, shingles, concrete.
Sacrifice. For the seven saints.
Look, Felipe. Into the life of your child. Into the heart of the candles. Into your own heart, the sacred heart of flame.
Purple-tinged fingernails trailed the powders. Feathers floated. Kneeling on the floor amid the incense and incantation, something flashed from the corners of my eyes. My daughter’s passive chest and neck and the spattered drops of sacrifice, warm tinted water, thick scarlet. Flame of life from the hearts of the candles.
Listen, Felipe, don’t be ridiculous. Calm yourself, dry your tears. Make your choice. Bring her back from the air, give the spirits something else instead.
Hold the egg, my child. No more sacrifice. The house will be wind, and you return to flesh. Eat. Eat.
The heart or the world. There is your choice. And time helps you see this. So look to the clock.
But the house, I said. The plans.
Then said nothing.
Candles burned, water from my
Yes everything is okay. We are all, all safe here in this house I’ve bought, with plenty of food in the refrigerator and money in the bank. I have a terrific job, a beautiful wife, four children, two sons, two daughters. Nearly perfect family. Perfect life. And it’s a free country. Why do I hurt inside?
*
Things change. Something happens in an instant to alter the course of your own life, or the life of someone you love—a thing beyond your control. So there is nothing you can do.
What Bart Sager said, There was the matter of Babe and the Hedenmeyer boy. Her inexplicable failures.
There was Angelita.
Then the hospital. Nightmares of her. Of that tortured Kenny living inside machines.
The fight with Barbara. Already, it had begun—sacrifice. The Powers were here, I’d called them, and simply failed to know it.
What did she say, that foul old witch? Shame of my family in Havana as well as in Miami.
Your house disappears like wind.
As soon as Babe began to eat again, I sensed it.
One weekday evening when it seemed as if things were returning to a little normalcy. Barbara went out with friends for the first time in weeks. Jack was at cross-country practice, Roberto banging something together with hammers and nails in the garage, burning incense to obscure the odor of the cigarette he was secretly smoking. Teresa was riveted by the television in the den. And I sat on our living room sofa glancing through a newspaper, sensed shafts of light streaking out into the upstairs hallway from behind the half-opened door of Babe’s room.
I lifted my head to look up. Something rose along the back of my neck with a buzzing, snapping sound so that I broke out in sweat. Saw my house drifting into wind. The center that had held us a family—happy, successful, winning and beautiful and spectacularly American all these years—about to diffuse like fragments of flesh on skeletal bones. And I saw—suddenly, without having words for it, because there are no words in the world for it—that Tia Corazón was right, I had to choose. But before knowing it or being able to stop it I had made my choice—a choice that came before understanding, out of nowhere but a dark place in the primitive past, in my primitive heart—from the wind and the death of Angelita, from the pain of seeing my firstborn child swollen and desiccated in a white hospital bed, her body shriveled to unrecognizable proportions. Something had come to me, offered itself, and without knowing it I’d opened my heart to it, and because of that the unknown thing had planted itself inside my beautiful American family and inside my magnificent, expensive, American showcase house.
I looked up that evening and things became silent for a moment. Then I felt it—I felt it: the ineluctable working of the Powers. Something like insects gnawing the innards of everything I’d lived in and purchased up until now. Silent tremors making almost invisible cracks in the house beams, shingles, concrete.
Sacrifice. For the seven saints.
Look, Felipe. Into the life of your child. Into the heart of the candles. Into your own heart, the sacred heart of flame.
Purple-tinged fingernails trailed the powders. Feathers floated. Kneeling on the floor amid the incense and incantation, something flashed from the corners of my eyes. My daughter’s passive chest and neck and the spattered drops of sacrifice, warm tinted water, thick scarlet. Flame of life from the hearts of the candles.
Listen, Felipe, don’t be ridiculous. Calm yourself, dry your tears. Make your choice. Bring her back from the air, give the spirits something else instead.
Hold the egg, my child. No more sacrifice. The house will be wind, and you return to flesh. Eat. Eat.
The heart or the world. There is your choice. And time helps you see this. So look to the clock.
But the house, I said. The plans.
Then said nothing.
Candles burned, water from my
Similar Books
