Rebecca Papin, Full Circle

When I decided to tell you what you did not know, I felt nervous. Maybe you did not need to know. Maybe you would not care. Or care too deeply. No scenario played out well in my mind so I did the rational thing and called you at two o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the week on the hottest day of June. 

“Are you driving?” I greet you when you answer my call. Such an intimate, random question for someone I haven’t spoken to in twenty-five years.

“No, I’m at home,” you answer, bemused. How we had hated each other once. For ten months in the mid-nineties there was no one I hated more than you.

Why do I want to know if you are driving? Maybe I want your full attention. Maybe I recall how I half-listen when people call me while I’m driving, tossing out yeah, uh huh, I see, focusing on the guy in the next lane not merging into the side of my car.

“I have to tell you something,” I say, running my fingers over the pebbled surface of my extended-stay suite’s living room walls, across the smooth leather surface of the bar stool backs, the cold granite kitchen countertop. My therapist encourages me to ground myself in the moment by appreciating the textures of the things around me. Three should be enough for now.

“I’m kind of nervous,” you admit.

What do you do with knowledge you never wanted? This is knowledge that will haunt you for the rest of your life. By telling you, I will become your ghost, my words will become the breeze running up and down your arms on a still night. I cannot help it. I must become your ghost.

“Your hands,” I blurt out before I can stop myself. Might as well get to the heart of the matter. Outside, the heat index is 116 degrees. The smell of baking asphalt rises from the parking lot. But that doesn’t matter. What matters are your hands.

“When we were in eleventh grade, we had Mr. Gilman for Study Hall, remember?” I am forty-two, reborn as a sixteen-year-old in our conversation.

“I remember.”

“You sat two rows over from me, in the fourth seat back, directly across from me and the row between us was always empty.”

Silence. I know you remember.

“One day I looked over and realized you had the most beautiful hands, like a pianist.”

“I hate my hands,” you shoot back. “I always have.” I hear the sixteen-year-old in your voice. You are back in Study Hall with me.

“You had the most beautiful hands,” I repeat, overruling you because I am the authority on this memory, not you. “Did you know my mother abused me in high school?”

“No,” you answer, inhaling sharply. Such a heavy conversation for a sunny afternoon. At least, it is sunny where I am. Maybe it is raining where you are, down in Atlanta. 

“Did you know my fa-?” You offer up your own pain on a platter, your heart is carved, diced. I did not know what you had been through until this moment. How could I have known? I hurt for the bully I hated.

“When my mother would hit me, or scream at me, or do any number of horrible things, I would close my eyes and think of your hands. Not in a sexual way, just focusing on how beautiful they were. If there was such beauty in the world, I could make it through the ugliness of these moments.”

“Becky, I-” 

Whatever you are saying, I do not hear you. I am standing in my kitchen, sixteen years old, watching my mother attack me and I am thinking of your hands. I am in the corner nearest to the laundry room, watching the back of my mother kick me and punch me against the kitchen counter and I am calm because there is beauty in the world, such beauty. Your hands.

I carry your pain in my heart like a tea stain. Now you carry mine. Maybe our pain cancels each other’s out and we are free.