Free Skylight Confessions by Alice Hoffman

his closet. He knew what happened after death.
    "There's no such people," he said. "Yes, there are." "Prove it,"
    Sam said.
    So Arlyn did something crazy. She took Sam up to the roof. She led him through the attic to the door that opened onto a flat glass space. This was the place where George Snow had been standing when she first spied him. Clouds were rushing by the moon. The trees moved with the wind. Arlyn could feel those people her father had told her about all around her. They were the ones who never left you, no matter what.
    "See them?" Arlyn's voice sounded strange, small and lost.
    All Sam saw was the huge universe and the darkening sky. Blue, black, indigo; the horizon was a line so shimmery it made him blink. He realized that his mother's eyes were closed. He knew they were in a dangerous place. Something rustled in the trees.
    Something beautiful. "Yes, I do," Sam said.
    Arlyn laughed and sounded like herself again. She'd opened her eyes. She had already added this to her instants in time as the very best moment of all. A breathless, gorgeous, dark night. She felt so oddly free, untethered to earth. But even if she could have flown away, she would never have left her son. One more second was worth everything. They went down the steps into the attic, back to Sam's bedroom. Arlie tucked in his blankets and wished him a good night's sleep. She waited there beside him until he was dreaming, until his breath was even and deep; then she stayed a while longer, right there in the chair, until he opened his eyes in the morning. "I knew you'd still be here," Sam said, and for once in his life he had some small hope that not everything in the world was a lie.
    JOHN MOODY WAS A FIXER, AND A BUILDER, AND A PLANNER; in times of sorrow he did what he knew best. He designed a project in order to have something on which he could concentrate. A ridiculous endeavor, people in town said, a huge pool set behind the Glass Slipper, a beautiful thing as John conceived it, rimmed by slate with an infinity edge that led the water into a smaller pool below on the hillside. The hole had already been dug by the backhoes by the time Arlyn came home from the hospital. It was twelve feet in the deep end and the digging seemed endless, through rock and through clay. Clods of red mud and shards of shale littered the lawn.
    The noise could be deafening at times, and Arlie kept her windows closed and the shades drawn. It was June and she was dying while she listened to the bulldozers and the cement mixers.
    It had been the rainiest spring on record and now everything was so green the leaves of the lilacs and the rows of boxwoods looked black.
    The tumor reached under her chest wall and was entwined through her ribs. Her surgeon could not get it all. Her bones had turned to lace. She called her doctor Harry now; it was that bad.
    The oncologists put her on a schedule of radiation and chemo, but after a month she was so desperately ill they took her off. She was not an experiment, only a dying woman, one who soon enough had lost her red hair. She had braided it before the chemo began, then cut it off, ten inches long. The rest fell out on her pillow and in the shower and as she walked along the lane, slowly, with Cynthia supporting her when she grew tired. "Hold me up," she told Cynthia. "I'm depending on you."
    "I'm not that strong," Cynthia said once.
    "Oh, yes you are," Arlyn said. "That's what made me want to be friends with you in the first place."
    Arlyn kept the braid of hair in a memory box she was making for her children, stored alongside photographs of the family, pictures Sam had drawn for her, Blanca's plastic name bracelet from the hospital. When the time came, Arlie would add her pearls. After she'd gone through radiation, the poison from inside her skin had soaked into the pearls; they'd turned black, like pearls from Tahiti, exact opposites of what they should be.
    Twice she had seen John Moody walk through the hedges at dusk, headed