Mary In Darkness

"I remember the moment I saw her, and my life hasn't been the same since then."

I don't remember the first time I saw my mother, and I didn't ever think about being loved or loving back.  That was no more a decision or consideration than having to decide how to digest a meal.  It was part of my life.  It would have been ludicrous to think otherwise, make it a conscious choice or evaluate the quality of love, just like it was ludicrous for Mary to assume the opposite.  She had no more idea about love than I did about fear, especially her fear, which consumed her.

It could have been a mistake to have been so naturally loved and unconcerned with the bigger world around me, but that was my existence.  I lived, I was healthy and I was confident.  I grew strong among a family of five, thrived on many things that were good in life for children.  My life was good.

Childhood memory begins at some point when the brain is developed enough to retain it.  Maybe many points in time are blended into a softly blurred image, a quiet development of solid clear memory.  The effect is that your memory has no exact starting point; you just exist and life moves forward and then you start to be able to recall things that happened before the present time.

That's true if your life is serene and tranquil.  If you're like Mary, thin and trembling, with meager clothes and a spooked appearance, nothing is safe, and many memories are horrors.  She was the older of two children and was one year older than me.  I had seen newborn foals in movies, and she was built like one, all gangly and awkward, with sweet pale blue eyes, but she was not growing strong like a foal does.  Instead, she had haunted eyes that seemed very old.  She seemed something other than alive, but I was too new at life myself to know what she might need.  I knew who she was, but her life was unknown to me almost entirely.

Her brother Johnny was as quiet as Mary and had no friends.  He stuck beans in his nose and wrote scrawling doodles on his papers.  He was incomprehensible to me, but I had no point of reference other than my own safe existence with which to compare.  I watched him sometimes at his desk, a few rows over from my own.  His hair was cut with sheep shears, and it stood up here and there in tufts.  He had a few small bruises on his arms and he rubbed his ears.  He couldn't answer questions and was left alone eventually, sitting still, going nowhere, not even forward.  There was something about him that did not invite friendship nor did it repel it.  It was almost as if he didn't really exist in spite of his small, odd behaviors.

I saw Mary sometimes at our church, and I noticed eventually that she wore one dress almost all the time, and I began to wonder what a girl was like who had one dress and was so quiet.  The memories I had stored in my mind that included her by then amounted to a girl who did not move or speak or laugh with the same joy that I felt.  I saw that she shrank away from people and looked down at her shoes most of the time.

By the time I was nine, I had known of Johnny and Mary for about two years, but they could have been around longer.  Their reticence and my lack of outward awareness prevented clearer images of them.  They remained thin, always thin and ragged.  I was swept along on my way by a thousand things to notice and feel every day, so I did, and most of the time I had no awareness in the slightest about Mary and Johnny.  I am pretty certain the entire community experienced them in the same way, as if they were thin ghost-like resemblances of children who did absolutely nothing to draw attention to themselves.

One night, while I was at home with my family, I heard my parents begin an animated talk, an agitated interchange that caught our attention.  My brother and sisters and I moved toward the talk and began to overhear the words.  "...found at the post office lobby, cold, by herself..."  and "...crying, shaking..."  My hair began to prickle, a new sensation for me.  We glanced at each other and sidled closer to hear better.

"The sheriff is trying to contact someone, but they think she's been hurt.  She can't talk."

"Mom," I called.  "Mom, what's going on?" I was trying to imagine someone hurt, but my mind could only think of scraped knees and cut fingers. It was all I had to go on.

"You know Mary?  She's about your age?  Older?  Someone found her at the post office, in the front part, the lobby.  She was all curled up in a ball, crying, and can't talk.  She could have been abused by that awful father of hers, but they're not sure. She won't go home, so it's kind of a mess.  No one knows..."

Mary had an awful father?  I'd never seen her father, but now I remembered hearing some whispers about him, how he was loud and mean at home, but even that information was barely more than words to me.  I felt a shock inside, a small jolt of recognition, of dots connecting, the words "awful father" and the appearance of Mary and Johnny, ragged and uncertain.  I'd been missing something.  Now it was big, frightening and the thin boy and girl were in danger.  Wherever they lived was an ugly place.

"Mary and Johnny's parents are alcoholics, and they have been hurting their children.  No one did anything about it because...They wanted to.  I mean, that is, the kids probably wanted to say something.  We weren't sure what we should do.  Parents are allowed to keep their own children even if they are rough on them.  No one wanted to interfere, butt in, but I guess they should have.  Something bad must have happened for Mary to go hide at the post office in the middle of the night."  My mother was standing near a doorway glancing outside of it, as if the world out there was going to shove its way inside and confront her.  She looked edgy and unhappy.

"Mom, why does she always wear the same dress?"  I asked, looking past her out into the dark yard.  "She's so skinny.  Where do they live?"  I felt sick for Mary, did not know where to begin, but also felt a strange sense of curiosity.

"We'll wait to hear from the sheriff if they need help.  It's time for you to go to bed now.  Try not to think about it."

Naturally, I couldn't stop thinking about it at all.  Eventually I fell asleep with unclear and jumping images of a girl in a dress she always wore hiding in a cold place where strangers found her crying and shaking.  I woke up in the morning with the same shivering cold ideas in my head.  I was resolved to do something though.  My sleep had given me an idea.  

(to be continued)