A nightmare of him with her and all that was in between awakened me with an insurmountable nausea. I kicked the covers to the bottom of the bed, releasing the sweaty heat, repelling visions of the dream. I laid there, not wanting to get up, feeling as if the Sandman sucked all the energy out of my limbs. Painfully, I cranked my head to the side to squint out of the window. Paint peeled off of the sill like skin from a sunburned body. Watching the sun grow out of the jagged mountains relieved me and reminded me that I was awake and it was only another dream that would haunt my day. 

The sky there always seemed so big and endless. When the sun rose and fell it did it with passion and grace. There, more than anywhere I had been, the sun was omnipotent - it really did seem to govern the lives of its people. The days were formed by the heat. Intense heat and dry air was foreign to me. Being born in the winter and raised in a part of the country which had quite noticeable seasons, made this temperature and climate leave me with the empty feeling of not being at home. Yet, I did feel at home there, eventually.  

The immense sky gushed giant tears of rain in the evenings of a month when certain winds, of which I cannot remember their name, carried puissant heat in the morning that would stretch throughout the day.  

This month was August. At the time, I felt as if this was the worst month of my sixteen years. Eight months had past since Mother and Daddy were killed in a car accident. The nightmares of their bodies being hurled into a ditch had subsided. These nightmares turned into dreams of memorabilia, and when I awoke in the bright mornings, I would cry.  

I knew that the only family blood left was that of my own and of my dying Grandmother. She was not really dying - just old. From my room, I would hear her choppy, high-pitched snores. They were sporadic, not at all constant. She would breath in loudly and deeply, then stop, and then exhale with a breath sounding like a breeze. 

Every time her breath would stop, I thought she had died. Some mornings, or even in the middle of the night, I would slip into her rose colored room just to see the covers rise then fall. If she wasn’t snoring, I couldn’t sleep. Seeing her tiny frame lying there that close to death sickened and covered my days with an undefined loneliness. 

Her silky, white, long hair framed her high cheekbones and her deep, sunken blue eyes. The street light beamed into her window, caressed her face, and made her look saintly. After I would watch her, I would go back into my room, into my bed and into my dreams. 

On my flight, which transported me from a sad, snowy, bitter-cold January in Pennsylvania to a warm, dry January in the desert of Arizona, I created visions of what my grandmother would look like now. I wondered if she would look like all of those pictures that hung on our living room wall at home. She did, but older. I guess Mother hadn’t had any recent photos up.  

When she greeted me at the airport, she received me as if I was a gift. She ran her long, bony fingers through my hair and flipped back my collar. Her eyes were bright and looked glossy, almost as if she was going to cry, but she didn’t. Her hug was that of my mother’s. Her smell wasn’t an old people smell - it was more like roses or baby powder. Her hair, how beautiful it was, was tied up in a soft bun at the crown of her head. I think she did that to make her look taller and show off her high cheekbones.  

She admired me without a word and then asked me if I was hungry and how my flight went. She hadn’t seen me since I was five and the memory for me was more of the tales told to me from Mother. I had a lump in my throat that hurt, but I couldn’t let her see me cry. I thought that if I would upset her she would die of a heart attack or develop a brain tumor. 

So, eight months later, there I was in the desert, at my new home, feeling I had no reason to get up. The dream I had kept jabbing into my stomach and it built its way up to one of those disturbing lumps in my throat. The night before I had talked to my high-school sweetheart, John. He broke up with me and told me that he was going out with Pilar Valdez. Pilar was the kind of girl who had the body of a goddess and the mind of an idiot. She used to throw back her head, stick her chest and butt out and giggle like Marilyn Monroe. She had big, round, firm breasts that jiggled slightly under her tight sweaters. I was insanely jealous of her breasts, but I felt disgustingly pompous when engaging in conversation with her. 

Knots that felt like tiny fists punching outward bombarded my stomach. I was reminiscing about the night at the park by the river when John took my mouth in his and we French-kissed for a very long time. He said, "Lisa, you’re so different from other people. You’re smart, funny and beautiful. I mean, your probably someone I would marry some day - not that I want to get married or anything but.." That night, under the bridge, on a knit blanket, John and I entered the nexus between childhood and adulthood. Moreover, I fell madly and blindly in love with my first male.  

"Lisa honey, breakfast is almost ready." Thoughts of John making love to Pilar, of my parent’s bloody bodies, of finding grandmother dead on her chase lounge, and of blood squirting from my sliced wrists flipped the pages of my twisted mind. Being at the peak of my self-pity and complexity, all that I’d wanted was pity and remorse from others. Then, I didn't know that pulling sympathy and compassion from people is something that, although it may be haughtily be given, is rarely authentic.  

My feet slapped to the dark, wooden floor. It felt body temperature. My favorite blue, cotton tank p-j’s were in a soft rumple at the foot of my bed. Dazed, I slipped them over my sticky skin. The smell of bacon had pulled me like a magnet to the kitchen, where I knew I would see grandmother fully dressed and in the midst of her morning. Ever since she’d pushed my mother out of the womb at 4:08 a.m., she would never sleep through another dawn again. Although she was a sweet, endearing old lady, there was a melancholic quality to the image that I had of her. Not until I read the diaries had I realized that she too was a woman. She, also, was once in love and felt the drama of life as if it were a stage. 

I shuffled into the bacon-fumed kitchen and pitifully dumped myself onto the chair. Her back was to me, and she was humming a quivery Glenn Miller tune that she always hummed when cooking pancakes and bacon. I always wondered why but just figured that she had a memorable morning one-day when that tune was playing. I watched her flip the bacon and jiggle the pan. Every chore or avocation that she did was methodic. When she watered the course lawn in the evenings, regardless of the rains, she always slowly waved the hose from left to right: east to west.  

"Good-morning Grandma," I winced.  

"Oh, Good-morning sweetheart. I didn’t hear you come in." 

I squirmed in my seat and pouted, trying to get her sympathy. I didn’t tell her about John because I thought that she couldn’t possibly understand. I didn’t know, until later, that she had mistaken love and had her share of misfortune. I knew that my Grandfather had left her a long time ago, but I didn’t know why until days later. 

Following, each day could barely be remembered as being different from one another. Nevertheless, an intrepid teen I was. Yearning to know more about the woman that I was to spend the rest of my teens with, I became nosey. When Grandmother left the house to go grocery shopping I looked through her sweet smelling cedar chest and found a cluster of lace swaddled diaries. My heart raced and I almost wept from excitement. I knew that she’d be gone for at least another hour, and I was aching to solve the mystery of June Platt. This was my grandmother’s name - June Aveeda Warren Platt. Tattered, yellowed, old shoe boxes were filled with photos and morsels from another era. They lay, like a wife next to her husband, in a grave of memorabilia.  

There was one particular diary that stroked my curiosity more than the others. It peaked up from the very bottom, and I could see that by the smooth, aged leather that it was one of the oldest relics. The large piece of cream lace that enfolded all of them was tied at the top with a strip of red velvet. It entered my mind that maybe my grandmother had tied and laid it in such a specific way that she would know if it had been tampered with.  

So, I carefully inspected how it looked and took a picture with my mind. Then, I untied the velvet and proceeded to lift each diary out and place them in order on the floor. The first diary’s shell was made of brown leather, the front cover was embossed with wax, and what was once probably a rose. Although my mother always taught me, and her mother taught her, that privacy is something to be respected; I was possessed with a meddling mind. 

There was no date. I found that to be a dissimilarity from the structural woman that I knew her to be. This intrigued me all the more. I began to dive into her past. This diary began with the usual description of the events of that particular day. As I continued to read, I discovered that this was her first diary. She had just met my grandfather and wrote very little about anything else but him. She described his thick, blonde, wavy hair and his eyes that were as green as her lawn. She reveled in the smooth way that he walked and the slow rhythm of his talk; how he dipped her when they danced in the dance hall. 

She knew that this was the man of her dreams. He worked as a banker. Although, there was little job description. She expressed how she was impressed with his authority at his job and how she felt secure because he made an ample living. After reading about twenty pages, I looked up at her big ole clock and panicked. Grandma always spent about an hour at the grocery store. I thought I might have had a little more time to read, but I wanted to be careful about my paltry miscarriage of justice. 

I reviewed with my mind’s eye the picture that I took of the scene. Frantically, I put them back the way they came to me. At the moment that my sweaty hand quietly released the cedar lid, my grandmother opened the front door. As usual, she announced her return with such pure sweetness that it made me feel sick. She actually induced vomit to surface to the back of my throat. Because she seemed so perfect, so flawless, I was swollen with guilt. Yet, at the same time, I knew that the nucleus of my guilt and my curiosity for doubting her infallibility and invading her past was simply created out of my intuition. 

The mid-teen crisis was, as for most humans, a time of anomalous, naïve cynicism of the internal and external worlds. I realized that reality was not nearly as sweet as fantasy, and my grandmother was not as pure as she appeared. Disillusionment with childhood dreams was slowly seeping into the walls of my psyche. The discovery of the diaries had become a mission that I had to carry out, a goal that I had to reach.  

I wasn’t disillusioned with my grandmother, but I was aching to get proof that the only saint I know is not a saint and that there are no such thing as mortal saints. My parents were not religious. They went to church on holidays, weddings, or for yard sales. Never once did they share an opinion on the topic of religion with me. Only, they did say that God is within all of us and its like energy. I thought, "Gee, I wonder what part of the body does he or she or it occupy." I ran down the creaky stairs and tried to be cool. So, there I stood. I watched her as she carried a bag of groceries into the kitchen, dumbfounded - not even thinking of offering a hand. 

"Lisa, would you mind getting the other bags from the car? I’m awfully tired today. This heat is unbearable, did you know that it’s supposed to get up to 110 today?" 

"It doesn’t feel too bad in here today because of the fans. I haven’t gone outside yet today, but then again I don’t have any reason to," I said in a near-whine. 

"What do you mean by that honey?" 

"Oh nothing. It’s just that I don’t feel like going outside, that’s all," cooing with conviction. 

I gave her a quick grin then made a quick dash for the front door. She was right, it was getting really hot. It almost made me gasp. Arizona heat is so dry, unlike the wet, drowning heat of the Northeast. I liked the dryness better. Suddenly, I felt guilty; like I should be the one who is doing the errands and chores. I envisioned her dying of heat stroke while carrying groceries from the car to the house. At that time, I decided that I was going to do her chores. Partially, to be a good granddaughter and show my appreciation, but mostly to relieve my unwieldy guilt. 

Conversations with Grandma were not at all like talking to my mother or one of my peers. I felt as though I could never act myself, or at least my age. To her, I was a little girl. She had to know that I was swimming into my sexuality; after all, I had breasts and my period. Well, after I got to the second diary I knew she knew and felt what I did at that time - apparently with more fervor.  

My parents used to be fairly open when they had to discuss sex with me. They let me know that it was not a bad thing to touch yourself and to be touched by the one you loved and trusted. Grandmother and I never even came close to talking about sex. 

I hadn’t yet met anyone my own age, so I occupied my time with reading books and watching movies on TV. Going out to see a movie alone would have admitted my defeat at being a teenager. My loneliness had not reached it’s paramount and in knowing this I felt that waiting for a social life to reappear in my life instead of searching for it would help me regain my strength. Some nights, mostly nights after watching a movie on TV that involved some sort of romantic interlude, I would lock my bedroom door, slide into bed without my p.j.’s, and fulfill my dormant fantasies. Because of my Grandmother, it would take a considerably long time to do this. I was overwhelmed with guilt. The thought of her in the next room, possibly knowing what I was doing, inculcated repulsion and remorse, which were very hard to block out of a James Dean fantasy. 

She was putting away the canned goods. Tip-toed on her little kitchen stool, she still had to stretch to reach the top shelf. 

"Grandmother, let me do that." 

She turned around and smiled at me and without a word she gracefully stepped down from her stool. 

"Thank you sweetheart," she huffed with relief. 

She was too kind to tell me or ask me to do things for her that used to come easily to her.  

Methodically, as she would, I placed the canned asparagus, corn and peas on the top right hand side of the shelf where she kept them. "Lisa, I’m going to take a nap on the back porch," she called out from the next room. She never "yelled" to me with the intensity that the word itself contains. The back porch was off of the kitchen. It was one of those classic screened-in porches and at that time of the day, it was completely shaded. As I was stepping down from the stool, she walked slowly and languidly through the kitchen and out the back door. 

I watched her from the door as she settled into her creaky chase lounge. She folded her arms beneath her saggy breasts, then crossed her ankles and sighed. Her paper-thin eyelids gave way to gravity; she fell into her nap as easily as she would fall into her death. Watching her breaths, I felt an encumbering lump surface to my throat. 

She slept for quite some time. The sun percolated through veil-like clouds that seemed to waltz above the mountains. With the evening and my grandmother’s soft breaths (sometimes little snores) came a sudden calm to me. I sat on the porch, staring. The air began to cool after hours of silence. I let her sleep; checking to see if she was breathing. The air cooled slightly and I remember that I started feeling happier then. Although I wanted to slip back into the diaries, I knew that I could wait until tomorrow. I searched for events to look forward to. 

After she awoke from her long nap, she walked into the kitchen to find me preparing dinner. We skipped lunch, so I thought we could have an early dinner. I was preparing the only meal that I knew how to cook: baked chicken sprinkled with paprika and pepper, canned asparagus and wild rice. During dinner, we didn’t talk but she continually praised my culinary talent. 

The next morning I found a note from her on the kitchen table which told me that she’d gone to the swap meet and then to her friend Pearl’s house to visit. Again, in a solicitous manner, she apologized for leaving me and said that she’d be back to make dinner. She didn’t like to wake me up. I was thrilled. After scantily dressing myself, I ran like a thief into Grandma’s room and lifted the casket of her past. 

My memory served me well. I began from where I left off in my dubious mission. As I read, I fell in love with my Grandfather. She wrote a day to day account of every action and every feeling that passed between them. After the first diary, they were preparing to marry. On the evening of the proposal my Grandfather wept in the palm of her hands; told her that without her love his soul would die, and thus would he. She wrote that she felt a pity in her love for him and couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him. That night, they ate pheasant and drank champagne. They danced at the dance hall until they couldn’t stand. When it was time for her to go home, my Grandfather ran around to various neighbors’ gardens and stole the carefully groomed desert blossoms so that he could lay them like a wreath at her feet when he bent to his knees. 

Still panting from his quixotic chivalry, he asked her to share the rest of her life with him. Ecstatically, she agreed that she too would like to spend the rest of her life with him. The second diary didn’t bare the same aesthetic quality in its cover or it’s content. I sat, legs crossed, at the foot of the cedar chest. I noticed that after the marriage she wrote less and less in her diary. It only took a few weeks before the words that once spilled with passion were words gradually turning to dismay and solemnity. It seemed it happened so fast. The paragraphs that she used to write for one day were transformed into strained sentences for a few months. Although, she gave the pregnancy and birth of my mother several pages. Briefly, during that time, her passion surfaced between the dullness. 

It was if the marriage had stifled her soul and replenished my Grandfather’s. The mundane was suffocating her. She didn’t complain about her life, Grandfather or my mother; she dictated her life, as would a court stenographer. The second diary moved so slowly that I’d skipped pages and began to lose interest. I began to scan the pages of repetition and with that, I also began to feel sorry for her. 

A couple of hours had passed, but I still had time to read the next diary. Checking the date, and knowing her sense of orderliness, I knew that the one below the last was in chronology. This book was black leather and covered in red lace that looked tattered and even older than the others. For the first few pages the drizzling events continued. Then, the rain began and her life started to pour like the evening storms. Her days, once again, grew into fervent paragraphs. 

After a two-page description of her newfound cousin James (Jimmy), I knew why. James used to play hairdresser with my mother. He would buy Grandmother tulips and play his guitar for her while she danced. They would talk for hours about authors, films and things that she had never talked about with anyone. She didn’t dare write of how she loved him, but in her flowery words, I felt a tragedy slowly erupting. This love was without pity and was not for what it gave to her - this seemed a love as pure as the waters that trickled down the mountains after the evening storms. She, like the desert, was temporarily replenished.  

My eyes devoured the words and the love that was sinful. Looking at the old, brass clock, I had realized that I’d read faster than I knew was possible. I skipped around in this diary and went further toward the back. Nearing the end of the black and red laced diary, I sensed a fear from Grandmother. 

The next diary, and the last, had a dreary grey canvas cover - a subliminal sign of what I was about to read. Her passion was fertilized by the uncertain fear of her destiny. The playful visits continued until a year later when my Grandfather came home for lunch for the first and last time in his life shared with June Aveeda Warren Platt. 

Until this page, she hadn’t revealed but one shared kiss with Cousin Jimmy. Although, I suspected by the pressure that her pen was applied to the paper and the thickness of the ink that her descriptions of how they "danced" were more than futile. Covering the pages of the horrific episodes were small, round embossments on the paper where the tears had fallen from her deep blue eyes and landed on her words. 

I felt my heart sink into my bowels and my stomach turn to spurs as I read. My Grandfather burst into the door with dozens of desert blooms. He stopped as if shot with poison as he looked into the kitchen to see his wife lay on the floor, nude, blue eyes looking at him in fear, underneath her favorite cousin. She thought she could have predicted his every move, his every whim. She was wrong. Then, she realized that she loved her husband. She knew as he dropped the flowers onto the floor and walked with grace to the bedroom to pack his bags that she he would never be back. 

The rest of the grey diary was filled with empty pages and an emptiness that would never leave her. As I replaced her history and took the last breath of cedar, I heard the car door softly shut. Tears streamed from my eyes while I ran into the kitchen and started pouring us some iced-tea. I thought of hugging her and kissing her before I handed her the tea, but instead I just decide to talk to her. I wanted to tell her about John and my nightmares, about how I feared her death and about how I loved my parents and how I missed them. Mostly, I was going to tell her that I loved her. After I grabbed her bags and handed her the iced-tea, I did just that. For the first time in our brief months together, I felt a warmth radiate from her. She would never know what I did. I never told her. She would have thought that I would hate her for what she did. I knew it was wrong and knowing the grief that she had carried with her throughout her life was her redemption. She was no longer perfect - she was human and my only family. When she put her glass down on the table and reached out her tiny arms to mine, I saw her eyes looking like globes glistening with years of tears and forgetting. 

Kathryn Lewis moved from Philadelphia to Seattle seven years ago and is presently getting tired of the rain. She has been published in The Welcomat, The San Diego Reader, Art Matters, and Hunger Magazine. She was accepted to the Ploughshares International Fiction Writers Seminar in the Netherlands, but could not afford to go. She has a small business of her own so she doesn’t have to deal with Corporate land. Her education was at York College, Temple University, through travelling and in the observation of and the participation in life itself.