Only X-rays Are Black and White

Abstract

Only X-rays Are Black and White Ellen O’Connell (bio) I was nineteen the spring I broke my back and lay flat on the carpet next to my parents’ age-swollen grand piano. The ceiling hung low and the sky above it lower, and even my clothes draped heavy over me in those days. The only thing I was good at anymore was skipping meals and hiding it, but at least the smeared handprint was still up there on the ceiling in the cream paint, and I was thankful for that. My parents’ worried faces appeared over me from time to time, and when I turned my head to the side I saw their ankles making paths around me. I was apologizing right and left for being crabby, but just then, kindness was a mountain. To my left was a piece of furniture we called Raymond’s hutch because it belonged to my Great-uncle Raymond, the long-dead man responsible for giving my father so much of our furniture and all the bound Dickens novels. Raymond’s hutch housed my mother’s crystal vases and the complete works of Mozart, and when I reached out for it I could touch the wood without rolling over, so I came to love it. The other side of the room had windows that reached nearly from floor to ceiling, where I could keep track of the sky wringing itself of sun and the apricot tree in a neighbor’s yard whose limbs stretched to our house. In that room everything reached for everything else but nothing quite touched, and nothing was a consolation for long. That spring Sophie left, running away with the family’s carpenter and leaving all her clothes behind. She didn’t have far to go, but neither had her parents all those years ago when they were eighteen and everyone told them the only thing to do was give her up for adoption. I wondered whether she had been planning to leave this whole time; I think we all did. The difference was that they had left her as a baby years ago while she had left the whole family that spring. Sophie’s family sat around and looked at each other and wondered where she had gone and for how long, but to me she was already a ghost [End Page 94] the way all beautiful people are when they seem out of place. Her bedroom was waiting for her as though she might sneak back late at night. Jane Austen waited on the nightstand, a bookmark holding Sophie’s place. Her mother began giving me her clothes, which felt as if they had belonged to a dead girl, but they fit me fine, and after all, no one had died, not really. It was 2005 the spring I lay flat on my broken back, counting all the things I wasn’t doing as days unpeeled into still more days. I was someone new that spring. My parents brought me back home from my college accident. On the floor I often looked at my hands, the only part of myself I could still lift up, and saw that from far away they looked like anyone else’s, but up close my fingertips on one hand looked just like my mother’s, and on the other just like my father’s. I was lucky that way. I could not have said for certain, but I could have guessed that the sunlight dripped over the house as though spilled from a pitcher. There were moments when I looked at my hands and grew tired of them and the way the freckles were always in the same place like a landscape that never changes. It did not comfort me the way it might someday, or the way it might comfort someone else to see things always the same. I wish I could have said what constellations I saw when night fell outside, before my parents helped lift me up to eat and sleep, but I never had the patience for constellations. Instead I spread my fingers and looked through them to the ceiling and the hanging light fixture that...