“I’m so sorry, Lori. Your mother and I were friends. You probably don’t remember me. You were much younger when we met. My name is Charlene, but please call me Charly, with a y on the end.”
I looked over at her. We were almost the same height. Her face betrayed nothing of our recent journey together, and I was not about to bring it up. Not here. Not now.
She nodded at me and walked away. I turned and saw Brian standing alone in the middle of the room. A few friends and relatives had trickled in while I had visited my mother in the paper sky. Couches and chairs edged the room’s perimeter. Paintings adorned the walls. Flowers blanketed the floor to the rear and sides of the casket, but where Brian stood the room was empty. Or was it?
It seemed like a part of the paper sky had returned with me. It floated above Brian’s head like a large swirling halo of colors.
There are colors above your head
, I thought, and he looked up.
Thoughts ran through me so fast, I could not catch them in time.
Help me, please. I’m so alone and frightened. I think I may be going crazy. I’m so scared.
The eyes of everyone in the room seemed to be on me and I knew I was close - this close - to a complete nervous breakdown. Another voice in my head, another visit to a strange world, and I would have tipped over the edge.
He saved me then with the smallest of gestures. He winked at me. He was in on the joke. He winked at me and the two of us became one. It wouldn’t be for long, not then, but it was long enough to set my head straight. His wink, the blinking of his eye, rescued me.
The colors above him faded as he walked toward me. “Are you okay?” He asked.
“Yes, I think so,” I replied.
“I never met your mother,” he said. “I wish I had.”
“I’ll take you to her,” I said, and we turned together.
The viewing hours had ended and most of those paying their respects had left. I sat on a chair close to my mother; Barb on my right, Shirley on my left. We talked of school and all the upcoming activities in the year ahead, the prom and graduation, and they both comforted me as they spoke, thinking I was brittle and might break at any time.
Truthfully, I had never felt stronger, because I sensed that my questions would soon be answered. I was wrong. Three years would pass before I revisited the paper sky, three long years of not knowing the meaning of the place and my connection to it. It was long enough to think I may have imagined the entire thing. A door, once open just wide enough for me to slip through, had slammed shut. When it opened again I was twenty-one years old and married and scarcely prepared for the journey ahead.
DREAMLAND
Not long after my mother became part of the earth, or part of the sky, I’m not sure which, Brian and I began a relationship. It started with weekend dates and progressed throughout the school year to nights in my bedroom -
study times
, I informed Aunt Betsy, but she certainly knew better.
I’d be lying if I told you Brian was anything but a perfect gentleman, perhaps too perfect for my taste, but he did become an excellent card player with the hand I dealt him. He knew when to call and when to fold.
By the night of my senior prom, we might as well have been an old married couple. By then, I knew him as well as I knew myself. We talked of marriage often, but he insisted on waiting until we were more settled in our lives.
I started college, nothing fancy, just the community college outside of Columbus. Brian though needed to scratch the itch of the Mayfield men. He enlisted in the army.
Believe me, I gave him hell about it. Although we were still in the officially dating stage, I felt I knew him well enough to speak my mind. In my opinion it took a lot of nerve to leave a girlfriend in a still blossoming relationship to march off to a dangerous war on the other side of the world. It just wasn’t right, and I told him so in no uncertain terms.
He got around it by asking me to marry him, producing the engagement ring on the spot while he knelt in front of me on bended knee. Of course, I said yes, and Brian went away forty days later to begin his three-year enlistment.
There were tears when he left, and I think that deep down inside of him he felt a twinge of guilt for leaving me. I didn’t need to remind him of my parents, he knew, but the Mayfield men legacy was too strong for him to fight, and I paid the price.
He promised a wedding when he returned, not from boot camp, but from Vietnam. He was so sure of himself, so sure he would return to me.
We wrote to each other every day. I never missed one and I can’t recall him skipping a day either. He had been gone for nearly six months when I started to have the dreams; not of the paper sky, but of Brian in Vietnam, in the fields, on patrol.
I was always in the same spot, at the crest of a hill as the sun set behind me. It reminded me of the hill in the paper sky except instead of a town below me I looked down on a large expanse of tall thick grass leading into a jungle. In my dreams, I watched a small group of soldiers cross the field, pushing the waist high vegetation out of their way as they moved forward toward the jungle in the distance. Though he never turned my way, I recognized Brian by the way he walked, and by his blonde hair below his helmet.
I called to him often, but he never turned. He just walked a ragged line from the field to the jungle. I would watch him until he entered the trees beyond. Sometimes he got there before nightfall. At other times, the darkness fell on him while still in the grass. Every night I’d call his name and every night he kept walking, except one. One night he heard me.
I remained frozen in the same spot each time while he could move wherever he wanted, and he wanted to make for the jungle ahead of him. Maybe
want
was too strong a word. Although none of the soldiers said a word, I got the distinct impression that not a single one of them looked forward to entering the dark trees.
The dream seemed different this time. Something was in the grass in front of him, something dangerous.
The men had spread out and Brian took his place in the rear as always. He walked slowly, a rifle in his hand, glancing from side to side, but not looking down, and that’s where the danger lay.
“Brian, look down!” I shouted from my perch high on the hill. “Look down!”
He continued his march forward. “Dammit Brian, if you love me you’ll listen to me!”
That’s when he stopped. The rest of his group continued ahead, but he stood still. At first he stared ahead, but then slowly he turned towards me. I couldn’t tell if he saw me or not. His face gave no indication of recognizing me. His eyes fixed on the hill.
“You’re in danger!” I shouted as loud as I could. “There’s something on the ground!”
Still no recognition, and I thought that maybe he had heard something else and not my voice on the wind. And so, I told him I loved him. I shouted it as loud as I could. As I spoke, something rose up behind him - a shadow, dark and menacing. Its arms rose like smoke until they stretched out.
It wants you, Brian. It wants you and it doesn’t know love.
He stared a moment longer before he turned away and I would have turned away too, if I could have, because I knew something bad was about to happen and I could not stop it.
He stood in front of it, not moving, and the shadow grew bigger. Its arms elongated and moved toward Brian, wrapping around him. Then it suddenly stopped. It cocked its dark head and seemed to look to the sky. As I watched, it shrunk in size, and corkscrewed into the ground.
I saw Brian look down at where the thing had vanished. He brushed the thick long grass aside with his rifle before bending down. I held my breath as I watched him disappear too.
And then he rose, back to full height. He had something in his hand. He stared down at it. Then he lifted his arm in the air and called out to those around him. I couldn’t hear what he said, but they all stopped dead in their tracks. He lifted his arm in the air, and I saw the object in his hand.
It was a paper bird, so white in all the green around it. Brian turned around again and I saw the bird fly from his hand, its paper wings flapping in the wind. It soared upward and as I followed it with my eyes, I saw them, a flock of white birds hovering high above in the evening sky.
A deafening sound blanketed me, powerful enough to shake the ground beneath my feet. The birds scattered, racing away as fast as they could. I lowered my head to the field below, afraid of what I might see. A smoky fog covered a large area by the tree line. I saw two trees fall to the ground, others swayed back and forth.
Brian and the others were running toward the hill where I stood, coming directly at me. I would have run to him then if I could. If my legs were not frozen to the ground I would have run to him. Instead, I watched him vanish into the air as my dream collapsed around me.
I wrote Brian a letter about that dream only. I saw no need to tell him of my other nightly visits to the Far East. It took him two weeks to respond, through the snail paced army mail system.
Brian knew of the night. His squad had left the base camp for a recon mission, as he put it.
We were a short distance from the camp when I sensed something behind me. I turned, and for an instant, I thought I saw a hill there, instead of the flat terrain. The mind plays tricks on you sometimes, especially at that time of day when the light is fading in the sky.
I remember a strange feeling like something was behind me. I jerked around but nothing was there. At least that’s what I thought. I just had the feeling that something was hiding from me. I spread the elephant grass in front of me and that’s when I saw it, a claymore mine, freshly planted, waiting for me to step on it.
The thing about Vietnam is that the country increases your awareness. Your powers of perception become stronger. You can sometimes sense danger before it senses you.
Or, sometimes, the girl you love, the girl you plan to marry as soon as you return home, sometimes she saves you. Sometimes her love finds you on the other side of the world and is powerful enough to change the course of fate.
And in saving me, you saved the life of my buddies. The VC had seeded the entire area with mines. Would you like to know how I knew that? There was an explosion by the tree line, immediately after I found the mine. It wasn’t set off by one of us. We hadn’t made it that far yet. No, something fell from the sky and caused the blast. I saw it. From where I stood, it looked like a white bird.
Lori, it looked like a white paper bird.
There was more, but I put the letter down. I sat on my bed, in my room in my aunt’s house. Across from me, on my dresser, Brian’s origami bird faced the bedroom window.
I remember praying as a child. I said a prayer before I went to sleep at night.
If I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.
It found me and now it had found Brian, this thing of the paper sky. I thought that it might have found others, too. I thought that it might have found my parents.
I closed my eyes and thought of things real and imagined. I thought of those I loved, some gone forever, others as near as a dream. At some point, while my eyes remained closed, my thoughts became a prayer; a prayer for the souls taken, and those they left behind.
I will never forget the day he returned. Aunt Betsy had gone grocery shopping, and I had the house to myself. It was a Sunday, June the 8th to be exact, and I was bored, so I cleaned the house for something to do.
I was vacuuming when I thought I heard something at the door. I turned off the vacuum cleaner and listened. Nothing. I was ready to turn it back on when I heard the noise again. It sounded like a knock.
Brian
, I thought. I dropped everything and ran to the door. When I opened it, no one was there.
Wishful thinking, Lori
. I started to shut the door when I saw it, something on the welcome mat. I opened the screen and glanced down at the paper bird lying there.
“Miss me?” Brian said from the shelter of the bushes in front of the house. And when he rose, the year he had been gone melted away as if it had never existed.
Later, much later, in the night, we talked of our future together. His next duty station was Fort Dix in New Jersey. He would be leaving in thirty days, but not alone. I had a year of college under my belt and that would have to do, for now. We would marry during his leave and find a place to live when we arrived there.
Then there was the matter of the hill in the field, my observation point in so many of my dreams. Brian told me what I had already suspected. While my description of the field and the jungle beyond was accurate, there was no hill in the area; I had taken that parcel of land into the dream with me. Also, he was surprised at the number of times I’d watched him from my vantage point high in the air. He told me his recon patrol began in mid-June and ended in mid-July. The patrols stopped after the night of the explosion - or the white bird night - as Brian called it.
“I watched you on most of those evenings,” I told him. “Just those alone. I didn’t visit you on any other occasions.”
Brian murmured something under his breath.
“What did you say,” I asked him.
He sat up in bed and looked toward my dresser. “That’s the origami I made for you in high school, right?”
“It is,” I answered.
Brian jumped out of bed and turned on the room’s overhead light. “Sorry, but I need to check something.”
He went to the bird he made in French class three years before. He picked it up, studying it. “I remember its left wing, at the end, where the paper folded up slightly. I may have stepped on it in the field because the tip was bent down on the one side.”
Brian lifted the bird in his hand and turned it toward me. “Just like this one, Lori. The wing was damaged just like this one.”
I approached him. “One other thing,” he said. “My hands were dirty that night.” He pointed to the bird’s underside. “They left fingerprints.”