ABC

Albany, my last summer there, remains a gray speck on the cluttered map of my mind, seated at some oddly poignant intersection of memory and myth. Benches and streetlamps, a messy tangle of potholed avenues, indiscriminate and crumbling estates. Cat liked to say it was a “fixer-upper,” the whole city, just like that.
Down by the muddy banks of the Mohawk, a low sun painting our silhouettes against the river, we ate cheese sandwiches and sipped warm beer. Everything looked like a painting that day and I remember feeling big, like I was growing really fast but everything was growing with me so I didn’t notice; the whole scene was just getting huge. For a while, sitting there with Cat, listening as the echoes of our voices were trapped under the Rexford bridge, two giants tossing flat stones and bits of bread into the green water below, I was home. God could have swam in our shadows, we were that big.
Her little white house was the last on a dead end street. It had faded-yellow shutters, smelled of jasmine most of the time, and I knew she’d never leave it. Just because. Ken and Barbie dolls littered the floor of the pink room that had been hers before she took over her mother’s, their waxy limbs still reaching out, their forever-smiles glowing up in the dark. Leaving them there, I think, was her way of holding on to something, of not having to be the twenty-two year old girl sleeping in a dead woman’s bed. Maybe she just liked to play with dolls, I don’t know, I never asked.
Nothing changes; it’s been fifteen years and I can still smell her perfume, like lavender and watermelon. On summer nights, sitting with my daughter in our backyard, listening to the strange music of insects, I think of Albany and of Cat. Probably she’s still there, haunting the flowered walls of her sweet-smelling prison. Queen Cat, my gray eyed girl.
Rexford bridge still holds the sound of our voices, as they flutter up into its pigeon-cluttered rafters, the echo getting bigger, bigger, filling the sky. Someday I’d like to go back there, but I know I won’t.
There is a gray speck, a green river, a girl playing with dolls in a pink room. Ultimately, the words said, our thoughts, her touch, it all becomes color. Varying shades of memory. When I want to see Cat or revisit that summer, I press the tips of my thumbs hard into my eyes, until I see a thousand orbs of light, like technicolor stars blooming against the black drape of my lids. This is eternity, the mossy underside of a bridge. Years later, I am still trapped there with our voices. Winds carry me out into the river, but always back again, always bigger.