Читать книгу American Histories - John Edgar Wideman - Страница 15

MUSIC

I find my sister in the big, soft chair where I’d usually find Charles. Television playing with no sound. She is asleep until I pat her shoulder and her eyelids flutter. Leaning down closer to her ear I say, “Time for bed, miss.”

She’s dressed for bed. Probably had been upstairs to bed at least once before she wound up in the chair in front of a muted TV in the living room at three in the morning where I had wandered after bed and sleep failed me, too.

As I had tipped down the dark stairs, blinks of light from the living room did not help much, and my hand used the wooden banister on the stairwell’s open side to guide me, to remind me that a rail laid atop the steps ran down along the opposite wall, a steel track for an incline that carried a chair up and down, a rail that could trip you up and break your neck if you weren’t careful.

“Dreamed of my girl,” my sister, eyes shut again, halfway whispers as if worried speaking too loud might disturb somebody’s sleep. Her own. Her dream.

Dreaming of a daughter who had died only a few months before this visit, whose long illness had confined her to a wheel-chair that required the motorized lift I’d just been avoiding. This is what I think first when I hear my sister’s words, but something soft in her voice had opened to let me enter, and I understand the girl she dreamed of was two girls, my grown-up niece whose untouched room I’m not yet prepared to enter alone, and the baby, not quite two, lost how many, many years ago, and as usual when I recall the one who never grew up, always strangely older and younger than her sister, a song starts to play, silently as pictures moving across the screen until I turn off the TV. That old Spinners song we had danced to in this same room, dark then, too. My niece tiny, fever sweaty, swaddled in a nightgown, me cradling her in my arms, blowing on her brow to cool it with my breath as we swayed, near to sleep like my sister in the chair who bestirs herself, reaches back to plant her palms on the armrests, scrunches her weight forward to get it balanced on her feet to stand. To smile, to go up to bed.