Cycles

Abstract

Cycles Elizabeth Bevilacqua (bio) The question I always come back to is the date. Does it mean anything that these things all happened on December 21? In 1948, my father and his twin brother were born. In 1990, my dad’s sister woke to her house on fire and by the time the sun had set, her husband and three of her children were dead. And in 2007, my grandfather died hours after my father and I visited him. It is the winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. But the day is not actually any shorter. All 24 hours are there, it’s just that most of them are dark. My aunt says she thinks of the date as a portal that opens up for kinds of passage. She’s Catholic with a tinge of the mystical. After the fire, my father and I drove three hours to the hospital in New Haven every weekend and stayed at the Ronald McDonald House while my one cousin who survived—a girl, my age, my friend (my double)—got skin grafts to mend the burn on her back and huffed into a plastic tube to make three balls of varied shades of blue rise in their distinct columns of air. Still today she has a cough that overtakes her at times. In the hospital, we made earrings and made fun of the nurses. Then, my aunt and cousin lived with us. We had a finished attic that made for two bedrooms. My aunt would look at me and her face would go red, crumple, and dissolve. I would hug her and say nothing. My family, with four kids the same age as her own, must have been an excruciating haunting. Dad said if it were not for my cousin, my aunt would take a long swim in the ocean and never come back. All my cousin’s clothes had burned, and Dad took me to the mall to choose new ones for her. She’d always been a tomboy in rugby shirts and khakis. I [End Page 188] tried to pick things I thought she’d like. I taught her how to peg her pants and to double-layer her socks and scrunch them down. Once, Dad brought home a bouquet of flowers for her and I was unbearably jealous. I began to sneak into her room and steal bras from her drawer. “Training bras.” What were we training for? Perhaps I did not want her to grow up, grow boobs, outgrow the rugby shirts. Perhaps I did not want to grow into a woman with a family to lose. Perhaps I was jealous of my father’s attention. I snatched that symbol from her and hid them in my own chest of drawers. A few years later, when we hit womanhood, terrified of my body’s thickening, its capacity for hunger and life-bearing, I denied all of it as best I could. I’ve been outpacing this a long time. Trying always to keep moving lest it catch up with me. Not the pain of loss—the grief is elemental and plain; I mourn plainly my uncle, my cousins, their short lives, their phantom friendships—but the other tangle, the fear of loss and the true and horrifying uncertainty of life. My aunt says there’s no sense in trying to control things because, as we know, you can’t account for accidents. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand how you could go to bed one night—the longest night of the year—and wake up hours later to your house in flames and your husband and three of your children dead. Seemed someone was owed an explanation. These portals, as my aunt calls them, rings of time that orbit one another and occasionally conjoin to open a small fissure through which someone could make the passage from one to another, are the reason I’ve always wanted to live lightly. To live light, to be light, without excess of body, or possessions, or attachments. So that, should I glimpse the opening, I’ll be ready. I heard things about what happened that night and...