Maddie walked out in the rain, holding Eduardo’s hand. Rain fell in bored, slimy puddles in the streets, which were gaudily dressed up in smoky, shallow neon lights. Neon swam in the gutter. Around Maddie, couples were spinning in galaxies of their own kisses, dancing and hip-swaying like they had invisible hula-hoops. Neon made them feel all lit up and decorated. Maddie knew too well what lay behind the flash and glare. She’d known the hollow screams of her mother, and her father getting out his camera to record himself beating his family. She’d walked into a cold-water apartment and seen a pile of chewed-up chicken bones on the floor. She’d known the light bulbs which shattered and cut her bare feet.

“Baby, baby, serenade me.

Hold me in your arms,

Tonight’s the night

I give my whole self to you,

I give my whole self to yoo-u-yoou—

Oh, ooh, babbby—

Music poured out from a boom box, serenading Maddie and Eduardo. He was talking brilliantly and rambling. He was planning his musical career, which would lead him to Broadway stardom. He spoke of costumes, makeup, choreography, and words not his own—a gauzy world of dizzying, endless neon lights, the art of faking.

“Why are you so quiet tonight, Maddie?” They had reached his car, and he was staring at her across the black distances. He took her childish tears for longing—he just knew she’d been pining for him all her life, poor lonely thing. He gently wrapped her clutching arms around him. She knew the kiss was coming. Neon lips. A show of love. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see, just feel…

Rain picked up speed. Maddie jerked away from Eduardo, touching her changed face in horror. What had she done? Oh, God, what had she done?

“Don’t you dare lay a hand on me, or I’ll send my brother, the Gangster Disciple, after you with a six-shooter,” she screeched.

Rain beat hollowly on the car, a steady drizzle begging for a downpour, mixing with the factory smoke and the smoke from stoners’ apartments. Tainted rain. It was like black warpaint, trying to cover the glittery makeup of neon lights. The whole time she endured her first kiss, she watched the rain. Her soul was up there in the rain clouds, falling fast.

“I love you,” said Eduardo, in his special Broadway voice.

She felt ashamed of her outburst, ashamed of confessing that she had a Gangster Disciple brother. When she was with Eduardo, she tried hard to keep silent so she could earn his respect. Everyone but Eduardo mocked her for her family.

“I…love…you,” stammered Maddie, forcing each word. She couldn’t hear her own fake voice over the rain. She was so changed, drained, and quiet.

“How would you like to escape those people?” Eduardo said, referring to her abusive family. “How would you like to stay with me forever and ever? You would always be safe, and you would never leave me—I’d never let you go.”

A new light swung onto the block, dashing out neon. Police lights. They were headed for Maddie’s dad’s apartment. “God, no…” she buried her head and cried like a child, “No, daddy, don’t, don’t! He’ll really come out with the guns now, he will!”

“Never mind them. You heard what I said,” said Eduardo, grabbing her hand. “Now say you will.”

“I will,” Maddie said, swearing her life away in a moment of desperation. It was true. She would never see, hear, or speak to those people again. She would no longer cover for them when the cops came to pick up her dad for drunk driving. She would no longer spend her days cowering and washing bruises. She was free.

Rain-soaked kisses and neon bravery would style her life. Face it, the night was tender and beautiful. She didn’t have to fight it, and she didn’t have to hunt any longer.

Several nights after their honeymoon, she wrecked their bedroom. She hurled down suitcases and clothes, spilled drawers, lunged for the windows, toppled the bed, shattered the lightbulb, picked up a stone door-block and left a huge gash in the wall. As Eduardo tried to comfort her, she sobbed for hours, sobbed until she couldn’t move anymore, and her eyes were swollen shut. “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right, baby,” Eduardo crooned to Maddie. He wanted to find the words to help her, but he didn’t know how, or he couldn’t.

For months, life seemed glittery and gauzy, but life was cascading downwards fast.

Eduardo was sweating like crazy under his stage makeup as he came home from an early rehearsal. “I am on my way up to the top of the world,” he constantly told Maddie. “You don’t have to be sad when you see me onstage,” he sang. “Your love is like fireworks to me,” he belted out. She would smile faintly.

Your love is like fireworks to me, he thought groggily. Then why do fireworks go up with a flash and bang, only to burn up to ashes?

The house where Eduardo and Maddie lived was their dream palace. They had balconies, verandas, elevators, hot tubs, and a live-in babysitter for their six-month-old daughter when childcare became too much pressure for Maddie. He felt mighty proud of getting his hands on luxury just four years and one winning lottery-ticket later, after he’d first met Maddie. She had once lived in a cold-water apartment, and now she was a regular princess. This didn’t happen, except on TV and in Eduardo’s life. Dream life! Fancy Mexican dinners, wine glasses with glitter umbrellas, trips to the theater, all-night dances, a vacation to the Congo planned for next year. She could live like a girl on TV in jeweled sandals and pouty lips. He would make it happen.

“I did it myself,” he breathed, delighted. “I worked hard, day and night, and I rescued Cinderella from the gutter. Life is magic.”

She still smiled faintly and disappeared into herself, taking walks in New York all night, but he’d cure her. He’d promised her a dream marriage, and he’d make sure she smiled, the widest smile in the world. He’d pay for her medicines, no matter how expensive. How could anyone be sad under tiki lanterns and neon lights in New York, under the neon grin of Broadway?

He wiped his sweaty hands on his vest, as though wiping off glitter-dust, before ringing the buzzer so the night maid would let him indoors. He noticed the wrongness from that moment. Was this his dream house? It was freezing cold!

Next discovery, he found the snoring babysitter on the sofa. A bowl of mushed-up carrot glop was on the highchair, and a note said, I couldn’t get that colicky kid to stop bawling. We both are asleep.

Was that a baby’s crying he heard? Eduardo, kind soul, was instinctive to stop all crying, so he quickly located the nursery. Lacey, the infant, was pink with teething and sprawled on her stomach in nothing but a diaper, beside her stuffed toy of Peter Rabbit. He had to grin, ruffle her wispy hair, and say, “Sweet dreams, future primma donna.” When she grew up, she would have the most expensive dancing lessons money could buy—she’d have everything her own way.

Next stop was the bathroom, to wash off his hideous, sweaty night makeup. Gosh, the house was cold, his sweat freezing. He thought of Maddie, asleep, and instantly he went feverishly hot. He threw off his luxury jacket into the crystal bathtub and felt like a blundering idiot, stranded in a sleeping house where nobody knew him. He felt like Alice in Wonderland, who drank the wrong bottle and grew so large that everyone was afraid of her.

“Who cares? I’ll show the world! I’ll tell Maddie I love her, and make sure she loves me, and I’ll tell her I’ll get her absolutely anything she wants, anything.”

He hated to wake Maddie. She was a poor, nervous sleeper who relied on pills and stirred, moaned, and tossed all night. She would run outdoors if he put his cold feet on her warm ones and woke her. Her worst grievance was Eduardo hiring a night maid with Tourette’s syndrome, and it took a long time for her to recover from that trauma. He tiptoed now, opening the creaky door. He went cold instantly. Her slippers were under the bed, her necklace glittering on the nightstand, her bed made, everything neatly in place.

“Hon?”

He had the uneasy sense that he was talking to the walls. A light flickered automatically, and he saw that she was gone.

Everybody who could help him, helped him—the firetrucks, the paramedics, the sheriff, the police detectives, the search party, the Missing Persons crew, a private investigation, a team of doctors and nurses. Eduardo gave his lavish money to anyone who could help him, please help him, please, please, please. Everyone was very kind and sad when they gently told him Maddie would never come back. They rallied around him to prepare for the excruciating days to come.

In the end, though, he had to walk out in the rain. Alone. He would always be alone now. He called out her name till he was hoarse, and everyone stared. He tore at the sidewalk and cursed the sky and pounded his fists against houses, deafening the world as he cried, “MADDIE!”

He thought, People are strange. People would rather be understood than loved. Why? Why do I expect her to answer my call, now, when I never listened to her calling my name? When I had her, I never knew what she was always talking about, so I pretended she wasn’t talking.

His fists curled around the piece of notebook paper, her last note, the note he didn’t dare look at. Well, he’d better look at it now and get it over with. What was she saying to him? He opened the note. “Give my necklace to our baby, Lacey, and tell her about me when she is old enough to understand.”

Now what did that mean?

Back inside his house, Lacey was awake and whining for her babysitter mama to give her a bottle. She never knew she had a mother, and if Eduardo kept silent, she’d never know. Sweet faced darling child.

He wandered in a drunken looking way, between his wife’s room and the nursery. Finally, he made up his mind. He took Maddie’s necklace and dropped that heart pendant into a hole she’d gouged in the wall. Three, two, one…it fell. It was gone.

Then he picked up Lacey and stared into her milky, beautiful, baby eyes. He picked her up and serenaded her with a kiss. No more neon-drenched rainy love—this baby was the last trace of himself, and she would grow up better. He promised.

VISITING YOU

Nights fall, too many nights, too many fights. Too many reaching arms. Going into the hospital, I see white arms reaching out. Find me, your arms beg. Yet I stay planted in the hallway. A permanent marker falls from my hands to the floor in the poisoned air. Reaching out against the push and shove of nights, wind, hospital food, and hatred, reaching out to me, you stretch out your arms to me for reconciliation, and I cross the battle lines. Suddenly, I’m staring into me through your eyes. The next minute, I ignore your beseeching arms. Don’t care what you’re looking for in me. I walk on down the hall. The elevator swallows me, and your life falls apart. Destroyed by the start—you were on fire with problems from the very start.

People speak, and love comes from their mouths, then the fists and the holes in the wall. Nights and lessons. Why do we spend lifetimes burning and pushing people apart, just for the bitter music it makes inside us? Oh, the shape of your heart. Oh, the sinking space I feel, when I realize how love and death are so closely related, when I think about the pain I’ll have to undergo with no easy answers. Even sympathetic listeners can’t understand. They can’t fathom the pain of the word I. I and You.