Light Up and Break

67 AMY BUTCHER LIGHT UP AND BREAK T hey call it hypnagogia—that transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. Awake, I see only a boy and a girl, their figures black, their outlines crisp against the matte gold backdrop. In his, the boy stands at attention, a cane in his hand. In hers, the girl holds a biscuit and leans forward ninety degrees, as if in motion to hand it to the small dog that sits at her feet. They are silhouettes, two framed portraits that hung in my childhood bedroom. The girl’s fluted skirt and the boy’s small hat seem to me almost colonial, their shapes suggesting refinement and sophistication, implications I long held onto. It was because of this that I believed they had once been my mother’s, and that they held history, and that they were the last thing she saw each night, too, when she was a girl. They hang on the wall above the nightstand, above the alarm clock and house-shaped lamp, and do not move. But in the last moment before sleep, in that state called hypnagogia, that boy and girl come alive. We lived in that Pennsylvania home for twenty-two years, and I remember every night in that house this way: my brothers and I played street hockey alone in our long driveway while our parents sat on the porch drinking wine. It was an hour past our bedtime, but so long as we didn’t raise our voices—didn’t get in a fight about which direction the puck had gone, didn’t argue about feet crossing the goal line—there was the idea that we could stay up forever, shooting the puck along the dark pavement until we at last lost it in the tall weeds that bordered the drive. When we tired, we brought our heavy bodies to the porch, and our parents slung us over their shoulders or else followed us up the carpeted steps. My father smelled like almond extract when he bent down to kiss us good night. My mother’s perfume lingered in the air for hours. They dimmed the lights, and from the warm spot where I lay, I watched the silhouettes. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, as my mind slipped into colorado review 68 sleep, I always saw the girl bend down, then the dog rise up, the two of them linked in their moment of pleasure. When my father called to tell me they were selling the house, I drove the three hours east from my college town to sit on the porch. I sat silent in my rocker, watching swallows dive and swoop across the fields of our backyard. He explained to me that by summer, he and my mother would leave that Pennsylvania town where they had lived for twenty-five years—abandon the dusty gravel roads and decaying bridges not out of want but necessity. The company for which my father worked had relocated him to Boston, and what was once a ten-minute drive on Cowpath Road would now be a ninety-minute commute on the Massachusetts Turnpike. “Imagine the change,” he told me, and I did: honking cars, eighteen-wheelers, steady rows of blinking red lights. I imagined my father waking each morning at four a.m. to get a head start on the traffic, pulling his boots on in what was still the dark of night. The move would force my father to do many things—learn to use a gps, abandon the garden where he’d grown corn for a quarter century, feed coins to meters—but most unsettling, he said, was the move itself. He feared what it might do to us. “I can adapt,” he said. “I can adjust. But our family has always had this place.” This place—our home—was a haven, providing the sort of childhood people rarely believe possible. Located on five acres of pristine Pennsylvania wilderness, our house was two-stories of brick set atop a hill in the countryside. There was no house behind us, and no busy, trafficked roads for miles. Each morning , my brothers and I left my mother...