CONTEST ENTRY #13

Sirens in the Distance
By John Kaufmann

There was a window in the high school library, looking into a study room, and Rebecca was inside, studying alone. I remember pointing her out to my friends. “She looks like a witch,” I said. And she did. With naturally tightly cured, naturally light, light-blonde hair, pale-white skin and long, black-painted fingernails, she did look like a witch. The environment where I saw here didn’t help. She was in my AP English class, where we read spooky novels of repressed love and stark punishment of sin. A class for which we’d been assigned gravestone rubbing along with our readings. Rebecca even dressed in all-black Nathanial Hawthorne chic. But it was a personal style, not a class assignment.
My friends and I laughed partly out of admiration. We were stupid kids, band and drama geeks at the bottom of the food chain. She seemed to exist outside of the food chain. We struck up a friendship over the course of the semester.
Rebecca was in the theatre club. She did costumes or backstage assignments. At the Hamlet cast party, she was the one who held me as I barfed, and even gave me a toothbrush. I don’t remember where we were. But it was a magical place with no other people. Vomiting out in a yard, and then into an empty house. Then, and at other times, I remember that she really wanted to have sex with me. Instead, we would just fool around and watch Cure videos. She loved Robert Smith so much. Rebecca skipped senior year of high school and went to college early, but we stayed in touch. I’d never seen her parents, and she moved into her own place before she was done with high school. We had a relationship that was completely under the radar of all my others. I hung out with Rebecca a lot, but my family and friends never heard her name.
It wasn’t really her place. It was her boyfriend’s. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember that he was an ambulance driver with one real leg, and one prosthetic leg. We fooled around when he was at work, at odd hours, that as far as I knew, could be over at any time. We didn’t smoke pot or drink. We talked, watched videos, fooled around.
We lost contact for a year or so when I went to college. We began to correspond through letters. I probably still have some somewhere. I can picture her swirling, oddly-girly-for-a-witch handwriting. She’d had a child, and the one-legged ambulance driver was the father. But the thing was, they’d broken up, and she didn’t want him to know about the child. She loved being a mother, but would shop for diapers and baby food in the middle of the night, for fear of being seen by somebody she knew. She’d moved back in with her mother (who was aware of the child). I had to promise to keep the secret.
This was many years ago, but I guess there is legitimate danger of my outing this. I have never written or spoken of this before, nor have I changed any names. Even if I had, the detail of the one-legged ambulance driver is a give-away. A detail that probably seems fabricated, except to the man himself, who I have never met. Might he be sitting in the audience? To find out tonight that you have a son or daughter… Or maybe you know. You found out in the 20 years or so since Rebecca and I lost touch.
And as these memories come back in sudden spurts of hibernating detail, I question my own sexual connection with Rebecca and thus to the child. Did we have sex? It would have been my first time, as I remember the shame of being a virgin throughout high school. But I remembered we “fooled around.” I remember the light blond hair around her fascinating witch-vagina (All vaginas were fascinating to me back then. Hers may wall have been the first I’d seen or touched). But did my shame of virginity save me from acknowledging a deeper sin? Of forgotten sex? Of fatherhood? Was she protecting me with the midnight trips to Rexall for baby wipes? Was I bewitched? Or, like the characters our class encountered in The Crucible, does my memory frame her as a witch to absolve me of staying in the picture? She did have long, black fingernails and blond hair.