I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl Read Online Free Page B

sun. Kentucky Man’s eyes are closed, and I think he’s asleep. I’m in trouble. I hadn’t called home. At twenty, still living with my parents, I have to be home by 2 a.m. Or I have to call them with a decent lie fairly early in the evening. I find my keys in the tangle of blanket and bedspread on the floor. Sit next to him on the bed’s edge, lean over quietly. Kiss him. “Be careful,” he said. I spring back. “No, no.” He laughs, pulls me onto his chest. “Not careful of me. I meant be careful driving home.”
    “Oh. Right. Sure.”
    Years later, my brother will ask, “Remember when you used to be a groupie?” I’ll be in the passenger seat of his minivan, his kids in the backseat. He’ll say it like, “Who are you? How do I talk to you?” I could say that I had been a picture of a sister, cut from black paper. That the imprint of skin on my skin means I’m still here. When the man from Kentucky touched me I materialized. I felt alive. How could Sophie expect me to give that up? It was the only thing that connected me to the earth.
    That spring in 1982, when my son is fighting leukemia, people close to my family ask me how we’re doing. I respond, but it’s like reaching into an empty room. As if I’ll have to cross that long room first before I can reach my hand out, touch the answer. I say things like, “We’re hopeful.” All the news I have about him travels to me long-distance: by phone from my aunt and uncle in Massachusetts, filtered through my parents, and then to me. My hair looks like weeds, knotted, as if I spend a lot of time underwater.
    The scientist had to kill himself when he killed Godzilla. He did it in a matter of seconds. Godzilla, whose radiation could change who you are just by touch, change your DNA. I don’t know much about leukemia yet, but I know it comes from something in the environment that can change your DNA. I know radiation can hurt your DNA. I wonder what changed Tommy’s cells to make him sick? What hurt his chromosomes? I think of every X-ray I’ve had taken for broken bones, lung trouble. I hope it’s not my touch that poisoned him. In March 1982, all I can do is poison myself.

Book of Lifesavers
    Sometimes the future comes to me in a dream. Or I take a trip forward at night. I don’t know how it works. One night in 1989, I go into tomorrow, and I’m on the stairs at the Winter Park health food store with a girl. Her long blond hair between her shoulder blades. I face her, but can’t see her face. Outside the dream, I’ve been working here and at the downtown Orlando store for six years. The store, restaurant, and storeroom are below. From the high point of the stairs you can look down on everyone. At the top of the stairs is the bathroom, and to the right, a glass-fronted office where Mrs. Collins, a former beauty queen who’d gained an enormous amount of weight sits under her white gold crown of hair, braided and wound in a tower. From this height, she would look down on not only the storeroom but the entire store, even the customers pushing the glass door open. Her breasts are so large they are like a shelf for figurines. When she says my name, she replaces the first short “e” with an “a” stretched out for several beats, “Kaaa-Lee.” Within the dream, I see she’s not there, the glass empty. It must be a weekend. The girl on the stairs lifts her knee, twists it, to show me the cut on her sole, the blood. I help her to the bathroom, but I don’t remember the soap and water, just her hair, her bloody foot, helping, and the spot where we stand.
    The next day, John the cook comes in. John, who made milletmashed potatoes for me, my favorite, who circled me when someone I loved had died, not speaking, just keeping an eye on me at the order desk. John, who once gave me $300 to fly home for a funeral. His mother, Lola, the baker, said the money was John’s, John said it was hers. So, Lola said, they decided to give it to me. The day after the