Read Online The Sky Below by Stacey D'Erasmo - Free Book Online

with it all, how they spent my money. I could feel the cold hollow, the invisible ruins, where the shoeboxes had once been, under me as I slept. It gave me bad dreams. To ward them off, I slipped into my mother’s room one day when she had gone to one of her endless bridge afternoons. Her room was extraordinarily neat, like she had joined the army. The white sheets, the two modest pillows, were crisp as salutes on the high, single bed. The venetian blinds shone like clean blades. She had an antique mahogany dresser with curly feet that she’d refinished with great determination; on the dresser was a small, square mirror in an oak frame. The floor was no-color linoleum, just like everywhere else in the Sunburst, though hers was scrubbed until it was almost a not unpleasant beige, with maroon stars. When had she become so selective? No more paisley. Velvet banished. Though we lived in Florida, she had never saved a single shell.
    I looked at my face in her small square of mirror:
Gabriel, Brewster, midafternoon.
The funny thing was that I couldn’t see G anymore. G had vanished entirely. I wasn’t sure if I even missed him. I was Gabe now. Gabe the fuck-up, the skinny red-headed kid who lived at the Sunburst Motel and got expelled from Brewster High for dealing drugs.
    At first I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I looked on the bedside table, in its one drawer—an old
New Yorker,
a stick of lip balm, and a calculator. I looked under the bed: nothing but scrubbed linoleum. I was sure it was here somewhere, and I knew it wasn’t downstairs in our little tilted motel living room, where we almost never opened the curtains, since we were on the ground floor. The dresser scowled at me, warning me off. With a certain amount of trepidation, I opened her closet door. Inside, set precisely heel to heel, toe to toe, were her work shoes: black, laced, no heel, thick sole. White insoles that bore the faint impression of her feet. A slight bump on the left shoe that marked her bunion. In the back, a cheap pair of heels with silver buckles, a few pairs of sneakers splattered with paint and stain, the soft gray slippers Caroline and I had given her for Christmas that she never wore. They still looked new. A belted coat, a blue dress, a poncho the color of an Appaloosa pony that I remembered from the Bishop days, all on hangers.
    I was tall enough now to reach the high closet shelf. I felt around. I was sure that, secretly, she had kept it. She couldn’t have thrown that overboard. No matter the sharp-cornered white sheets, the square of mirror barely big enough to see your face: she was inside somewhere, like a spirit in a rock. I felt carefully past boxes, a phone book, a flashlight, then there it was, its crumbling spine in my hands. I was almost crying as I took it down, so gingerly, from the high shelf. I stood by the window and let it fall open, as if magically: there was the fleeing girl, Daphne, her arms twining and leafing, her untied sandal; Phaethon tumbling headfirst from his chariot with the sun and moon and stars all whirling chaotically above him; a bull (Zeus, in disguise) with a vast span of lethally sharp horns swimming in the swirling, thick lines that were the sea. Last, most thrilling, the savage Tereus becoming a bird—crest of his head, beak of his nose, sword in one hand, feathers sprouting almost obscenely from the other. The feathers were etched,
cartoonish, aggressive. I turned the pages with my dirty, nicotine-stained hands, entranced.
    I picked up a few stray navy-blue scraps of spine that had fallen to the floor. I wouldn’t leave any traces. Although my mother wasn’t home—no one was home except the spacy, pregnant girl who worked the desk on weekdays—I tucked the big, old book against my chest, under my shirt, and spirited it away to my room, where I covered it in plastic wrap and slid it between the mattress and the box spring. I didn’t have any