Free Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll Page A

my own bed. The banister of my stoop loomed up out of the fog. I’d go inside and watch the TV news to find out what was going on.
    After I unlocked the door, entered, and punched in the alarm code, I leaned my back against the door as if to keep the fog outside. Only the fog seemed to already
be
inside. The hallway was murky, the shadowed corners smeary and blurred. I must be getting one of my migraines. The distinctive jagged-edged blind spot that always heralded the headaches, which I’d grown to think of as an evil airborne sprite, was bobbing across my line of vision. It was no wonder after all I’d been through. I needed to take two Advils and lie in a dark room for ten hours. That was all.
    I trudged up the two flights of stairs recalling how my mother used to say that we’d need to install an elevator when she was an old lady.
    “You’ll never be an old lady,” Roman would always quip, meaning, of course, that my beautiful mother would neverlook old, not that she would die in a car crash at sixty-one. Roman had been right about one thing: Margot James had still looked like a woman in her thirties when she died.
    When I opened my apartment door, I found that Becky and Jay had been up there too. Someone had swept up the paper confetti and dusted away the fingerprint powder and someone (Becky, probably, whose carpentry skills had been honed during a summer working for Habitat for Humanity) had nailed a board over the broken skylight. I could see a sliver of sky between the board and the frame, though; I hoped Becky had been a little more thorough in those homes in Ecuador. It even looked as if Becky had gotten to do what she’d been threatening to do for years: she’d dusted and polished my shelves of jewelry supplies and scrap metal. The bent street signs, discarded bicycle wheels, lengths of chain, and junk car parts that I had culled from city streets and abandoned warehouses gleamed like brand-new toys. Even the tanks of acetylene and oxygen looked as if they’d been wiped down with a rag. The one object that hadn’t been dusted was the dragon sculpture that hung over the worktable. Becky thought it was creepy. I couldn’t blame her.
    The head was a hydraulic spreader and cutter that I’d found in a dump out in Greenpoint. Even lying in a heap of garbage it had looked like the snout of a reptilian monster. It was the monster I saw every night in my dreams. The last time I had seen it in real life had been when my mother died.
    I was sixteen. My mother had rented a car to drive me to a college interview at the Rhode Island School of Design. We’d argued the whole way back, driving through a snowstorm, over where I wanted to go to school. I was so angry at her that I moved to the backseat when we stopped for gas. I had decidedI would rather stay in the city and go to FIT. It was a fraction of the cost of a private school such as RISD and way less pretentious. My mother kept insisting that she’d find resources to send me to RISD. “You can be anything you want to be, Garet. You have to be free to choose . . . you’ll be better off out of the house.”
    “So I don’t have to listen to you and Dad fighting?” I’d asked, putting on my Walkman headphones and turning my head to the window, which was fogged over by the falling snow. I was still staring out the right rear-seat window when the driver of a red Ford Expedition changed lanes without checking her blind spot and rammed into our rental, flipping it over and sending it skidding across three lanes of traffic. A second SUV hit the upended left rear fender at an angle, sending our car spinning into a low concrete wall against which it came to rest. I found myself pinned between two walls of metal, the passenger-side door and an accordioned version of the door on the other side. I could see the back of my mother’s head and hear my name being said over and over.
    “Garet, can you hear me? Are you okay? Garet?”
    “I’m here, Mom. I’m okay,