GlassFire Magazine

Home     Editorial     Fiction     Poetry     Nonfiction     Reviews     Submissions     Contact Us

Christopher Woods

It was still night when he reached the railroad station on the end of Long Island. It was also colder than he had anticipated, and he regretted not having brought a jacket. He reminded himself he wouldn’t need one in the city. For now, he would just have to be cold.

Lights from train windows glowed like a long, electric jaundice, a continuous stream in the darkness. He picked a car at random and took a seat opposite a woman who was knitting. After exchanging smiles, Adam folded his hands in his lap and waited for the train to begin moving. It wasn’t long before the mechanical lurch was felt.

He looked out the window. Lights were coming on in passing houses where people were waking. The sky was changing, becoming dawn grey with light. Adam was tired, but he was not one to sleep on trains, and reading upset his stomach. He continued looking out the window. East of Amagansett, he watched a soccer field fly by. He could now distinguish objects in the growing light: a small hill with random trees, a pond now amber with daybreak. He longed to see a deer.

Suddenly a large house on top of a hill caught his eye. The windows were without light.  The house seemed still webbed by sleep, by night. He wondered about the family that lived in that house, their routines and rituals. Normally he would not have considered such a thing. But by the time he began thinking about the house, both it and the hill were gone.

The first phone call from his mother had alarmed him. She was nearly hysterical. His own sense of anxiety prompted his response, to say that he would come to the city in the morning on the first train. He sensed that this had a soothing effect on his mother.

What bothered Adam greatly is that his mother called again, twice, later in the night. It disturbed him that his mother’s voice, so shrill and frightened in the first call, later seemed inexplicably calm.

Passing the Jamaica station, Adam stared at his hands. He thought about his father. They did not get along and hadn’t since Adam was still in school. He had refused to join his father in a struggling retail business. Later, when that business failed, his father never quite forgave him. Things had not improved much.

Going uptown from Penn Station on the subway, Adam thought about the odd nature of his mother’s calls again. He found it unusual that she was not concerned about the origin of the light. That it was there seemed to be enough. And then there was the change of tone in her voice from one phone call to the next. The longer the light remained, the more readily she accepted it.

            He could not remember the last time he had visited his parent’s home without having a quarrel of some kind. This time, light or no light, he was sure it would be the same. A door slammed, a silence that lasted weeks.

His father had not worked for several years, not since taking ill. He had melanoma, and he also drank. He was bitter about his financial situation as well and resented the fact that Adam’s mother had to work part-time in a department store to help met their obligations.

Adam took a deep breath as he rode the elevator in his parents’ apartment building. He hesitated before knocking on their door. And he noticed something. There between the bottom of the door and the worn linoleum was a dim, phosphorescent glow. Quietly, he used his key to let himself inside. Opening the door, he found he had to squint. The apartment was unusually bright and strangely golden. He found his mother in the kitchen.

“I’m glad you came,” she said, coming to hug him.

“I said I would.”

“Your father said you wouldn’t. He said you wouldn’t believe us, about the light.”

“I’ll believe what I see,” Adam said, and he noticed that his eyes had begun to adjust.

All the small oaths he had made to himself about remaining objective seemed to fall away now. How could he explain his mother’s appearance? Her face was radiant. She looked younger than she had in years. Her facial wrinkles, so pronounced before, were now barely visible. Her hair seemed less flecked with grey. Her eyes sparkled.  In all his life, Adam could not remember his mother’s eyes shining so. He couldn’t understand it.

“Go see your father,” she said. “Let me take you to him.”

Adam followed his mother from the kitchen to the living room. There was something different about the room. A new brightness, he thought, but he could see nothing that had changed. The same worn furniture, the familiar paintings on the wall, even the faint paths across the hardwood floor. Whatever had happened, Adam saw the room in a new way. It was as though he had grown up in a different place entirely.

She led him down the hallway toward the bedrooms. But he saw that the end of the hallway was not visible. Instead there was a soft, amber glow, and a shaft of light that came from the linen closet. The light was like a piece of sundown carved from the sky and then left, never to set completely, in the hallway of his parents’ apartment. His mother stopped and motioned for Adam to go on.

 “Talk to him,” she said.

His father sat in a straight back chair facing the shaft of light. He held his hands in front of him, rubbing them together as if before a fire on a cold night. His head was cocked to one side, listening as Adam approached.

 “Your coming is against your better judgment, isn’t it?” his father said, never taking his eyes from the light.

“I’m here. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

His father nodded and rubbed his hands some more. “Tell me what you see, Adam.”

Adam looked at his mother for a reaction, but she said nothing. She was not listening to either of them. She stood with her dishrag in hand, transfixed by the light.

“Come closer, Adam,” his father said. “Have a good look.”

Adam moved slowly in a small circle around the man who held his hands in mid-air until he stood between his father and the light. He could find no explanation for the strange glow. Neither could he understand the soothing warmth he felt over his entire body. He was drawn to it, to the light.

“What do you see?” his father asked. “Tell me.”

“Your hands,” Adam said. “They look better than they have in years.”

From the time Adam was a child, his father’s hands had been gnarled from arthritis. Later in life, his father’s hands curled inward like obscene looking claws. Now those same hands looked normal. They could easily hold a cup of coffee, turn the pages of a book.

“The skin comes next,” his father said. “With enough light, I’ll be well again.”

Adam stayed there for several hours. His mother brought him a chair. He sat there with his father in silence. But it seemed there was a silent conversation between them, one that spoke of putting away old hurts and grievances, of fairness and forgiveness. When he finally got up to go, Adam felt as though a great weight had been lifted from him.

On the train home, Adam could think of nothing else. He did not even look out the window. But the next day he returned to his parents’ apartment.  Everything was the same, except his father’s skin seemed clearer. It was fresh looking, like that of a child. Adam had dinner with his mother and father, sitting in chairs arranged in a semi-circle around the light.

There had been a disagreement between his mother and father about the light. His mother had wanted to call a priest. But his father refused. He said a priest would only want it explained, would only want to take the light away. In such a short period of time, his father had become possessive of a light he did not even understand.

Two weeks later, his father’s skin was normal and healthy. His doctor could offer no explanation for it. The doctor was not told about the light. No one was.

Adam had begun noticing changes in himself as well. He had no ailments to speak of, but he noticed periods of euphoria after his visits. If he stayed away for a day or two, the feeling waned. He even considered moving back in with his parents. He mentioned it to his mother, who thought it was a good idea. Even if the two men in her life had never gotten along well until now, she said.

It was in this way that they began to describe everything: Until now.

The morning Adam had packed his suitcase and was preparing to catch the train into the city, the telephone rang. He could hardly recognize his mother’s voice. She sounded hideous. There was a wrathful tone in her voice. It terrified him.

 “It’s gone,” she whispered. “Last night, the light went away.”

 “Are you sure?” he asked.

 “Your father has been sitting in shadows all night, watching his hands. They’re beginning to curl again.”

Adam could see his mother standing in the kitchen, the rack of bills and unanswered letters staring at her from the wall. Probably there was fresh coffee on the stove and the newspaper, unread, on the counter.

He thought of himself, of his own plans, and of his hasty decision to move back home again. Until now, he not considered how thinly woven their situation was. Until now.

 “I’m sorry,” he said, then hung up the phone.

Standing in his bedroom on the end of Long Island, he felt tense and shaky. His suitcase was on the bed. Bending over it, he began unpacking.