the lady of shalott

Mitzy & Jinx are be-bopping around Belize with Devetta & George for the week so we borrowed a car last night and tried to race the sun down the county and home to bed. Gramcracker is here from Jerusalem to stay with Little Rat which means answering to Katie again, but it also means chocolate cake and explanations about the minor prophets and the best way to make sausage gravy. Little Rat gets slightly, silently unhinged when our parents leave; a twinge more melancholy & solitary than usual. His skin is clearing up, though, and Gramcracker bought him a case of Sierra Mist for his stomach which are reasons good as any to perk up for a spell.

I haven't slept well all week and I don't know why. Sleepless nights take different forms. There are nights of delicious sleeplessness -- when you're in love and dreaming awake of the promise contained in another person, when you can't put down a book, when it's dark and cool and summer rain starts to fall as Friday night slips into a lazy Saturday morning. The possibility & hope of these nights restore the soul more than REM. But then there is the another kind of sleepless night --the nights when all the decisions that aren't yours to make grind the gears of your mind or you've been cruel to someone and can't make it right or when someone has been cruel to you. These nights leave you creaky and spent the next morning, often unable to see beyond your own nose.

But last night the moon hung just so in the picture frame window, looking down as the old truck sidled up to the tree below. It was perfectly round, I think, and cast a pool of light for me to float on through the shadows, awake, toward morning. Laying there, I thought of my parents and of all the trips they've taken over the years, leaving me in charge of the crew at home. Inevitably, after they left for the airport, I'd fling myself on their bed and cry at the thought of them dying in a plane crash. I would mourn their deaths and the premature end of my childhood, my wedding without my father to give me away. Then I would pull myself together and begin rehearsing my plea before the judge to take custody of my siblings away from my well-intentioned but clueless relatives and give it to me. I'd keep us all together in a house that I bought with the insurance money and we'd live of the royalties of the book I'd write about my struggle to keep our family together. I'd send the kids to college after Lifetime made the TV movie staring Sam Waterson and Lucille Ball as my parents and Winona Ryder (ha!) as me. We'd make it somehow. I'd looked tragedy in the face and made friends with the shadowy future.

Now there is no one left to take care of besides Little Rat. Everyone else is all grown up, even though my sister still calls and asks me questions that I haven't even found answers for yet. I try to nudge Squirrel with this thought to see if she's only pretending to sleep, but she makes the soft whimper signaling that it's time to keep my thoughts to myself. Last week at lunch, Mitzy made a comment about something happening to them on their trip and Little Rat said If you die I will hunt down your killers and avenge you. We all laughed and tried to explain about accidents and no-fault deaths, but he would have none of it. After all the hard parts of adoption over the past months, I was happy for this display of simple love tinted with vengeance. Somebody'd pay; Little Rat would see to it. And then he and I would eat cereal in the living room and watch cartoons and run out of Kleenex and generally fall into complete disrepair.

This line of thought takes me in the wrong direction and the moonlight doesn't help either, because I am a sucker for moonlight, especially when it filters through the trees. For a moment I am sad that there is no one special boy who would want to take my sleepless call (or even text message in this day & age). I think about writing a letter to a stranger but I am tired of writing equations for a future with so many unknown variable, so instead I try to recall all the times when someone was needlessly kind to me. For some reason I land on Mr. Morrow, the librarian at Marcus Whitman elementary. I think I was in fourth grade when Jinx was the principal there -- right before we moved to Japan -- and I wandered into his library one day while waiting for my dad to finish his meeting. Mr. Morrow asked me what I was looking for and I said please, do you have a copy of the Lady of Shalott? If he was startled by my request, he didn't show it. And he didn't try to hand me a copy of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie or whatever book was supposed to change young lives that year. He didn't have any Tennyson and my dad came looking for me and that was the end of it. Two days later, though, my dad brought home a pink little book from Mr. Morrow. He'd gone to the public library and found the poem, folded it into a little booklet with a line drawn cover of a beautiful lady, and laminated it just for me. I've taken that book everywhere with me since then and I used to know it all by heart, just like Anne of Green Gables. I try to remember it but I only get as far as But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often through the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot; Or when the Moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed. "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott before sleep delivers me from myself.