Page 11 of Bent Heavens

Aggie wrapped her arm around Liv’s waist.

“You’re so strong,” Aggie sighed. “Feel those muscles. You’ve got such a nice body.”

“I feel like that’s gross, Mom.”

“Shush. I’ve been holding you since you were itty-bitty.”

Liv, though, was holding her mother. How could Aggie not notice that? Aggie’s free fingers ran through her daughter’s hair, her long nails slicing through damp strands and sliding along the sweaty scalp. It did seem motherly, Liv had to admit, this acceptance of her child’s dirtiness. Curled up against Liv, nearly in her lap, her mother looked tiny. The years revealed by the corners of her eyes and the backs of her arms only made her smallness more heartbreaking.

“I’d hold you,” Aggie cooed, “while your daddy read you poetry. He wanted to turn you into a little … what’s her name. Sophia someone. Sophie. Sylvia. Plath.”

“Sylvia Plath killed herself,” Liv said.

“Well, I’m sure he didn’t want that. He wanted the whole town strolling around being all poetic all the time. He had this whole fantasy.”

“Mom, I know. Resurrection Update, remember?”

“Oh mercy. If I never see another book-shaped package, it’ll be too soon.”

Lee Fleming’s poetry push had solidified around the hardscrabble collection of poems by James Galvin, who scowled from the back cover in an old denim shirt, as if furious about being photographed. Lee had won some victories in broadening the curriculum—wedging Toni Morrison’s Beloved into the mix of dead white guys, carving out a whole week for Philip K. Dick—but no one understood why you’d dump Frost and Thoreau for a living poet, despite Lee’s insistence that Galvin being alive was half the point, not to mention his Iowa connection. When the school had balked at the purchase order, Lee bought thirty-five copies out of his own pocket, scouring the Internet for used paperbacks and, when they ran out, paying full retail price.

“He always wanted me to pick my favorite poem from the book,” Liv said.

“Me too. I’d make it up. ‘The seventh one.’ Something like that.”

“I always chose ‘Sapphic Suicide Note,’” Liv said.

“Blarg. Suicide again. That’s poets for you.”

Liv shrugged against her mother’s warmth. “I only liked it because it was short.”

Aggie snapped her fingers in a pretty funny pantomime of a slam-poetry fan. She was loose. Liv could imagine her being plenty charming before steakhouse patrons, and wasn’t loose and charming better than what she’d been during her husband’s final year—tense, helpless, sick with worry?

“Recite!” Aggie cried. “Recite!”

Liv could have. Seeking a leg up on future classmates, she’d cracked Resurrection Update as a freshman. At seven words, “Sapphic Suicide Note” was the first—and only—poem in the book she’d read, one so short she’d unwittingly memorized it while trying to figure out how someone got paid for putting a mere seven words on a page.

day out

no worldly joy

italics mine

The whole thing puzzled her, though it was the last two words that most baffled. When she’d asked her dad what they meant, he’d explained that “italics mine” was a phrase writers used when adding their own italicized emphasis to a quoted source. Fine, but there weren’t any italics in “Sapphic Suicide Note.”

“Dad always said poetry was full of secrets,” Liv sighed into her mom’s hair.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Aggie said.

Liv didn’t think Aggie was apologizing for the thirty-five copies of Resurrection Update missing from Baldwin’s shelf.

“It’s okay,” Liv replied.

“One day it’ll be better. You’ll see. The house and the yard. The bills. Somehow they all got lost, but we’re going to find them. They’re around here. I’ll neaten up the place. We’ll find them. My phone has a flashlight. Does yours, baby?”

Liv’s eyes swam in tears.

“Mm-hm,” she said.