Song of Renewal by Emily Sue Harvey

Author:Emily Sue Harvey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Story Plant, The
Published: 2011-02-20T15:00:00+00:00

Liza watched Charlcy leave an hour later, reflecting on how her sister had chosen teaching as her calling.

Her big sister had dressed Liza for recitals and applauded her budding talents. At the same time, by weather-woman reading of their mother’s bipolar flip-flops and rear-guarding Liza, Charlcy had perfected the art of sailing perilous waters.

To Liza and their dad, Charlcy had become a force of nature.

Thus, Charlcy’s heavy load could only be lightened by yoking with like creatures. She’d decided to teach special ed, a choice only her brilliant, overcharged psyche could rationalize. Liza had wondered at that decision, but then decided that Charlcy, from somewhere deep in her gene mosaic, had drawn on a primitive strain of nobility.

Who was Liza to second-guess her nurturer?

Today, in the quietness of Restorative Care, Liza drank a cold Coke from the bottle, savoring its effervescent, chilly flow to her stomach, relaxed and contemplative – when her mind spun back to another day when she received a call from Charlcy.

Liza had listened to her sister’s ever-evolving dialogue through the years and always understood. Unlike Charlcy, she’d not actually taken all the pummeling but had, from the sidelines, like standing on the side of a busy interstate, absorbed the whooshing impact of the barreling eighteen-wheeler’s violence and velocity.

Liza felt Charlcy’s heartrending howl for redemption. Experienced by osmosis the need for a raison d’être, a term Charlcy, in her halting French, often used. “Come on, God,” she would wail when strain graduated to overkill, “give me a raison d’être, a daggum reason for this shipwrecked history!”

Other times the dialogue was poignant and melancholy.

“These kids in special ed with their desolate wishes just a’spilling from their big ol’ eyes tug at my heartstrings, you know?”

In the beginning of those first, passionate years, Charlcy poured herself into each student, feeling that her own needy years equipped her with the compassion to help reach the untouchable places and guide them to impossible success.

Liza had watched, year after year, as the hope inside her sister first exploded and lit up the heavens. Later, it flashed and scattered skinny rays helter-skelter. Then it finally sparked and fizzled. So many failures. So many kids from whom the teacher Charlcy failed to excavate and eradicate the torment. So many tears and snotty noses she’d wiped…yet unable to wipe away the bleakness of unattainable goals and unavoidable learning fiascos.

Liza felt her sister’s pain and knew Charlcy’s desperation came from trying to relive her own pathetic childhood through these children, feeling that somehow, if she could navigate them to stunning success and happiness, all her own losses might pale beneath their brilliance.

One day, after a particularly heartbreaking disappointment, Charlcy had called Liza. She usually stoically dealt with whatever popped up in her classroom world of disorder, peril, and lunacy. That day was somehow different. Charlcy seemed poised on the brink of something gaping and ravenous, lusting to suck her in.

“Remember me telling you about Willie, the one-eyed black boy? He’s always been a challenge, but today he – ” For an instant, Charlcy’s voice choked and Liza’s antennae shot up.

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