Easter

[The second in a series about growing up on the outskirts of Appalachia and trying to escape it.]

Months before my fourth birthday, I was living with my brother and both parents in a square two-story house in Parkersburg, West Virginia, when the doctor gave me pills for worms. Our home sat on Sixteenth Street with the mysterious repeating numbers of its address—1212—nailed in gold to the brown shingles of the porch. A low step in the sidewalk led from the street up to the front door.

How I contracted worms is lost to history, but I’d been known to wash my hair in mud puddles and often felt a deeper curiosity about the world than was entirely helpful. Possibly with this in mind, my parents tried to put the pills out of reach upstairs in the bathroom on a high shelf.

Moonlight swept in between the thin curtains that night, making the porcelain flare and turning my cotton gown pale blue. I looked at the shelf and thought about the pills, purple and small. The bottle might be impossible to reach, but I liked to climb. I waited until morning, when I pulled myself onto the cabinet below the linen shelves then stood up to claim my treasure.

It was Easter Sunday. The pills had a candy flavor on the outside. One by one, I swallowed them all.

That my mother had eyes in the back of her head and knew or would soon know everything I did stood as gospel to me then. She wasn’t prone to spanking; instead, she would exile me to sit on the stairs for two minutes, condemned to my own thoughts.

I was never afraid of her. That morning, I wasn’t even worried about getting in trouble. Taking all the pills seemed like the start of an amazing story whose end no one could know.

Before I had a chance to get dressed to go to my grandparents’ house for the holiday, my mother confronted me with the open maw of the prescription bottle missing both lid and contents. I was betrayed by my tongue, which had turned a violent purple, as if a tiny painter had spent hours illuminating my stigmata.

“What were you thinking?” my mother asked. “The wrong medicine can kill you, and the doctor’s office is closed on Sundays, especially Easter.”

Whatever her feelings, she was calm. In my early years, I never had a sense of her as someone who knew how to be angry.

She called the poison control number printed on round green stickers in the kitchen drawer, relaying what I’d taken and how much. They told her a visit to the emergency room was probably unnecessary, but I might throw up. They said to keep an eye out for any unusual developments.

We crossed the old bridge over the Ohio River that afternoon on the way to my grandparents’ house. I sat in the back with my brother and peeled foil from the melting bits of chocolate that filled the pockets of my jumper, waiting for something exciting to happen.

I did not die. I didn’t even throw up. My grandmother gave me more candy on arrival, and Easter continued without incident.

At the time, I was too young to suspect that luck for a whole life might be given in a lump sum at birth, and mercifully unaware that I would run out of it while still a child. I thought only about the possibility that the pills could confer some strange blessing or trigger wild magic.

Each morning that followed, I braced my hands on the flat ledge of the sink and hoisted my belly onto it, feet dangling in open air while I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, waiting for an unusual development. Day after day, thin brown hair framed an unremarkable face, as my livid tongue faded slowly back to flesh.

I was small and plain, but I had a busy mind. In dreams, I learned to fly, realizing somehow it was just a question of jumping then keeping momentum. The physical sensation of lofting my body skyward would persist for years; I can feel it even now. How simple it was to leave the planet, as if it were something I might do at any time.

Books had already revealed that lost worlds were waiting to be discovered. Even everyday people, I understood, might be swept into adventures. The only requirement was finding a secret entrance or a trick that had to be mastered—one that would let me pinch the edge of reality like a sticker and peel it away from what lay beneath.

For a long time afterward, I checked for changes in the mirror at random moments, as if I might need to catch my new self by surprise in order to see it. And even once I stopped watching for a visible change, I convinced myself against diminishing odds that there might still come a moment when the pills would start to work, and something unusual would happen.

I never stopped waiting to be transformed. At odd times—on a swing set, digging up flowers, drawing a picture of myself—I would wake from the spell of whatever I’d been doing and wonder if it might happen today, if this was the day the rest of my life would begin.

[You can read another story in this series here, or find out more about me and this newsletter in my introductory post.]