Fiction – Page 12 – Philadelphia Stories

Fade to Beige

“Butter is too bold,” Caroline announced, tossing the sheet of color samples to the floor. “In fact, this entire strip is too loud.”

“Why not buy the sofa first and paint the walls after?” Paul suggested.

“I’m waiting to find one I absolutely love-but I can’t live another minute with these tacky white walls.”

Paul wanted to say that dingy beige walls were no less tacky than white ones. Or that he’d rather have a place to put his ass. There was a time when living without furniture seemed appropriate, if not welcomed, when an extra chair equaled an old fruit crate and his dresser was made of plastic, but now that he was nearing forty, an empty den felt like a regression to his failed twenties. Still, they were in the cautious stage of living together, when she closed the bathroom door to pee, and he waited to trim his nose hair when she wasn’t home.

Paul handed Caroline the paint samples and kissed her forehead. “You choose the color, and I’ll paint the walls.”

“Don’t be silly, I’m hiring professionals. Instead of wasting those hours on menial labor, you could be learning techniques to improve your efficiency or just relaxing. Do you know how many dentists burn out before their prime? Really, Paul, we met at one of my “Using Your Free Time Effectively” lunch and learns, weren’t you listening?”

“I was too distracted by your legs.”

“People sign up for my lunch and learns to hear what I have to say, not gawk at my legs.”

When he opened his mouth to reply, she yanked down the hem of her skirt and headed for the large bay window. Paul took a step towards her on the off chance she’d asked for help, but she attacked the task with same precise, quick fashion she did everything. As she stood on her tip toes and stretched her lean arms to extend a metal tape measure to the top of the window frame, he marveled, yet again, that she was his.

She was beautiful, more beautiful and successful than he ever thought capable of attracting, and she knew it. With a flawless face and a few impeccably tailored suits, she had built a career as a D.C. dental sales rep with a higher paycheck than his, for the time being. There was an imbalance between them that would steadily shrink over the years, as she aged and he built his practice. He would ask her to marry him when they were on more equal footing, when to be refused by her would leave him shaken, yet able to move on. In the meantime, they would share a house, beige walls, and, eventually, the sofa of her dreams. Unromantic perhaps, but like everything in his life, he had learned to be more rational with his feelings.

From the endless bland samples with delicious names like popcorn ball and toasted oatmeal, Caroline finally chose winter garden, a greenish beige that resembled the detritus of supple summer leaves. She had placed the color strip on the table between them during breakfast and lauded the color’s versatility, never asking what he thought of it. As he waited for his eight o’clock patient to arrive, Paul browsed home improvement websites, searching for an alternative: a cadmium red or vermillion or alizarin crimson, a pulsing color to arrest his attention each time he entered the den. He wanted something that forced him to stop, for just a moment, and feel the blood pounding through his veins.

Reds always had that effect on him. Of the hundreds of paintings he created in his twenties, only three were stowed in the attic of the new house, and all were predominately red. The rest, a decade’s work of varying success and palettes, lay rotting in the Henrico County dump beside the double mattress he had shared with his ex-wife Emily.

Emily had favored blues. Ceruleans, sevres, and cobalts featured heavily in her work, at least while they were married. Though he hadn’t spoken to her in years, he still kept one of her paintings, a portrait of him sitting beside a barred window in their studio, examining the dust floating in the interrupted light. She had glanced up from her easel one morning and smiled at him until he abandoned his still life to pull her onto the paint-splattered drop cloth beneath their canvases. When they finished, she had asked to paint him, and he had sat with his skin covered only in flecks of oil colors, watching the dust they had disturbed move in and out of the light.

She gave him the painting when they separated, asking him to keep a small part of her and their life together even after he threw his own work in the dumpster behind their apartment. On the day she moved out, he watched her pull a small canvas from the trash and load it into the tiny U-Haul she had rented for her share of their meager household. It was a nude of her, abstract like all his paintings, yet he doubted any woman could walk by a dumpster display of her naked breasts unmoved, no matter her feelings for the artist or the quality of the rendering.

After she had driven away, he had descended the four flights to the ally and salvaged the remaining three nudes, leaving the rest of his work behind the sagging mattress with all his paints, brushes and canvas. He never painted again.

The paintings remained sealed with the same bubble wrap and tape he used when moving them to Baltimore for dental school. He had carried them, unopened, to a series of progressively nicer apartments until Caroline helped him heft the four bundles up the stairs to the attic of their new house. She never asked what lay beneath the nearly opaque layers of plastic, just as he had lifted several heavy boxes of hers to the attic without comment. As far as she knew, his only artistic skill was matching composite shades to teeth, and he saw no reason to correct her. Years of coaxing endless dollops of paint to blend and express the world he saw and felt had been reduced to a mere sixteen, premixed shades of beige: the yellowish As, the brilliant Bs, the gray Cs, and the reddish Ds, each with four levels of brightness to represent every tooth in the world.

He once clung to the belief that he could live an artistic life as a dentist. One of his first-year professors in dental school had likened building a posterior restoration to sculpting, saying: “You must replicate the natural shape of the molar using composite and a condenser, just as Michelangelo chiseled perfection from a slab of granite.” Granite. Not marble. As though Il Divino installed countertops for upper-middle class Florentines. Had Paul been a true artist, he’d have catapulted from the uncomfortable lecture hall seat, stripped, and tossed his scrubs in the trashcan by the door. It would have been more dignified to walk across campus in his boxer shorts than remain seated as he did, choosing to embrace the professor’s poorly executed metaphor as confirmation that he was still an artist. His medium had simply changed.

“Dr. Weston, your eight o’clock has arrived,” his assistant Megan announced from the doorway of his office. Her eyebrows rose slightly at the end, as if to add a silent finally. “He’s complaining of pain on tooth number twelve.”

She handed him the chart and stepped aside so he could walk ahead of her. Such deferential gestures always made him feel slightly uncomfortable, but every dental assistant he ever had behaved the same way. He eventually realized that their training must include a minute understanding of the doctor-assistant power dynamic.

“Thank you, Megan,” he said. She gave him a perfunctory nod, and he hoped that in her personal life, which he knew nothing about, others stood aside for her.

As they walked to the operatory, Paul flipped through the hastily scribbled medical history and decided Andrew Brookfield may have a slight sense of the inconvenience he might cause by arriving late to his introductory appointment. He glanced up from the chart to see the patient and stopped so suddenly that Megan collided with his back.

“I mixed the color myself,” the young man said in a proud voice. He tucked a strand of electric purple hair behind his ear and stared back at Paul in mock astonishment.

“It’s nice to meet you, Andrew,” Paul said, forcing a smile. “I’m Dr. Weston.”

They shook hands briefly while Megan took her seat on the other side of the reclined dental chair, and Paul couldn’t help thinking that Andrew Brookfield had been handsome before he dyed, pierced, and tattooed himself into something else. Beneath the heavy eye makeup and facial piercings, his face was perfectly symmetrical and his irises were an arresting shade of green, nearly the same as Emily’s. Weeks or months typically went by between Paul’s thoughts of his ex-wife and yet in one morning, he seemed incapable of thinking of anyone else.

At the realization that he was again staring, Paul fumbled with a pair of the Megan’s small, pink gloves before snapping on a pair of his large, blue ones. “Which tooth is bothering you?” he asked since most patients rarely understood the inside of their own mouths well enough to direct him to the same place as Megan.

Andrew pointed to number twelve with the tip of his tongue and banged a piercing against several non-offending teeth. Paul wanted to tell the young man it was a wonder he had any teeth left with so much metal assaulting his enamel. Instead he used an explorer to pull at an amalgam filing on twelve and asked “Does this hurt?”

Andrew simply nodded and closed his eyes, retreating into himself from the pain. Most people let out a little moan or jumped slightly whenever Paul found a trouble spot. The more dramatic the reaction the more he disliked the patient. It was bad enough knowing he was hurting someone, however temporary, without the accompanying sound effects and flailing. He decided Andrew Brookfield, despite his lateness and questionable fashion choices, might be a welcomed addition to his clientele.

“Is it a dull, achy pain or a sharp pain?” Paul asked.

“Definitely sharp and only when I chew.”

“You probably have a slight crack. I’ll need to replace your old filling with composite, but you could need a crown.”

“Just take the tooth out,” Andrew said, opening his eyes. “I don’t want to have to come back.”

“That’s really a last resort,” Paul said gently, searching for fear in the usual places: pursed lips, shifting eyes, a sudden foot jiggle. He’d come to expect the tell-tell signs of dental fear from a certain percentage of otherwise reasonable patients, grown men and women who sat trembling in the chair as though he were a sadist about to get off on torturing them. But Andrew’s mouth and feet were relaxed, his eyes focused directly on Paul’s face. “It might only need a new filing,” he added in a more assertive tone. “Worst case scenario, we do a temporary crown and then a root canal, but either way, we can save this tooth.”

“Just take it out. I don’t want to have to deal with it.”

Paul pretended to read the young man’s chart and breathed deep to stave the anger he felt building. Everything he had been taught urged him to try a filing, then a temporary crown, then a root canal, if needed, before removing the tooth. But despite Paul’s years of schooling, Andrew Brookfield had the option, however asinine, to do what he wanted with his own mouth, and Paul would comply as long as it wouldn’t lead to a lawsuit. When he started dental school, Paul thought giving up painting would be his greatest challenge. He never anticipated the daily torment of convincing complete strangers to let him do what he wanted with their teeth.

“Andrew, you’re only twenty-five. If I take that tooth out, you’ll have a hole there for the rest of your life. People will see a gap when you smile.”

The young man shrugged. “I don’t smile often.”

“Andrew, the tooth might only need a little composite to feel and look as good as new. We can even work out a payment plan if you’d like.”

“Take it out,” he said, opening his mouth wide.

Paul nodded and used the seconds it took Megan to ready the instruments to force his breathing to slow.

After the extraction, Paul decided red walls might be too drastic of an alternative and googled neutral interior paint. As he searched for a color that fit Caroline’s couch plan without resembling rotting vegetation, he discovered samples to match every number and letter in his composite shade guide. He even found an interior paint called Country Dairy identical to A2, the closest shade to Andrew Brookfield’s left premolar.

He turned off the computer screen and decided to continue the search later, forgetting Caroline’s impressive ability to get things done. The winter garden walls that greeted him on his lunch break cast a gloomy pallor throughout the spacious den that no amount of sunlight could brighten.

“It’s so soothing,” Caroline squealed when she found him staring at the drying paint. “It really makes the whole room feel balanced.”

He examined her perfect face for a moment, hoping for some sign of sarcasm, but finding none, asked cautiously, “You don’t think it’s a little plain?”

“It’s tasteful,” she said, narrowing her indathrone blue eyes. “I’ve decorated over nine apartments since I moved to Northern Virginia. Trust me, Paul, I know more about paint than you.”

In the weeks that followed, the color of decay slowly permeated the rest of the house: a lamp in the hallway, a throw pillow on the oversized bed they shared. Decorative ties, Caroline called them, all the color of brittle leaves. By the time Caroline found a bland sofa to complete the house, winter had settled in Northern Virginia, the outdoors muted to the same shade as the den walls. Their bodies drifted slowly to opposite sides of the bed once the novelty of sleeping entwined had worn off, and they settled into a routine that eerily mirrored Caroline’s PowerPoint slide of a sample day in the life a successful person.

Everything had become so colorless, that Paul found himself hurrying into the operatory when, after several cancellations, Andrew Brookfield finally returned for his follow up appointment. But the young man had stripped the dye from his hair, leaving it a pale yellow that dulled his impressive eyes to the color of moss.

“How’s that extraction healing?” Paul asked in an overly chipper voice to hide his disappointment.

“It’s fine,” the young man said. He smiled, flashing the gaping hole where number twelve had been. “Actually, I want you to take out the tooth on the other side. I like the gap here,” he said, sticking his tongue between eleven and thirteen. “But I think there should be one on each side.”

Megan pulled a surgical mask onto her face to hide whatever reaction she was having to Andrew’s request, forcing Paul to realize that his own jaw had gone completely slack. He closed his mouth and sat numbly for a moment before he felt capable of speech.

“I can’t extract a perfectly good tooth, Andrew,” he said finally. “That goes against everything I believe.”

“I want you to take out a tooth, not murder me. Besides, it’s my mouth, and I want it to be balanced.”

“Fuck balance,” Paul said before he could stop himself. “Life can’t all be about making everything the same.”

Megan swiveled in her rolling chair and began arranging toothpaste samples on the far end of the operatory.

“Sorry,” Paul added quickly, taking a deep breath.

“Don’t apologize.” Andrew unclipped the paper bib from around his neck and swung his feet onto the floor. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me. I’ll give you some time to think about it and come back later.”

As the young man left the operatory, Paul stared at sterile gloves he had reached for to begin the examination. He let out a gasp when he realized that instead of the usual blue, they were beige. Looking around the room, he saw that everything, the instruments, his clothing, even Megan’s anxious face, had faded to various shades of brown. He blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes roughly with his balled fists.

“Dr. Weston?” Megan asked.

By the time he removed his hands from his eyes, she had crossed the operatory and was

leaning over him. “I need to go home,” he said. She was apparently too startled by his behavior to remember her training, forcing him to push past her into blanched hallway.

On the short drive home, his eyes flitted to as many things as possible: Storefronts, pedestrians, stop signs, an endless sea of nearly-identical houses, all sepia-tinted. The homes in his subdivision were so similar without different exterior paints that he had to rely on the street numbers to find his own. In the kitchen, he opened the fridge to jars and jugs with contents all resembling mayonnaise. He rifled through the drawers to confirm that every item had faded and accidently raked his thumb across a cheese grater. A small drop of alizarin crimson rose to the surface of his skin.

Relieved to finally see a color other than beige, he began searching for red throughout the kitchen. The panic that had begun when everything faded threatened to overtake him when he realized the red apples on the countertop still appeared a rotten brown to his eyes. He ran up the two flights of stairs to the attic, shoved aside the boxes where Caroline had buried her own past, and tore the bubble wrap from his paintings. Each vibrant image of Emily’s supple curves ignited the wash-out world. He examined her painting last, and felt his racing heart slow as the sober mood of her work overtook him.

She had captured the moment so differently than he remembered, the blues tones making the arch of his fingers more seeking than analytical, almost nostalgic. It was as though she had sensed, months before the fighting started, his increasing impatience to feel successful, to move beyond a life of fruit crate furniture and eviction notices, and painted him a prophetic memento of who he had been with her. He laid all four pieces carefully across the attic floor and went back downstairs.

In a drawer of seldom-used cooking gadgets, he found a basting brush similar to a crude hake. He then pulled each knife from the wooden holder on the countertop and pressed his thumb against the blades before selecting a sharp paring knife. He carried his tools to the den and, turning his left hand palm-side up down, made a tentative cut between his wrist and elbow. His hands shook slightly when he pressed the basting brush against the small line of blood, but the tightness in his chest began to relax with the first, imperfect stroke on the den wall. The tremor in his fingers stopped as he made a second arch in one fluid movement. He paused to examine his work and frowned when he realized the color had tapered near the middle of the stroke. Before making his next mark, he drew the knife directly across a vein near his elbow. His breathing slowed with each brushstroke, and despite the pain in his arm, he felt elated, calm. By the time Caroline arrived, he had finished painting and lay exhausted and weak on her beloved sofa.

“He isn’t answering my calls either, Megan,” she said, stepping into the den with her cell phone to her ear. When she saw him, she backed silently out of the room as though an intruder lurked in the kitchen. Only from the doorway did she comprehend the scene before her and began shouting orders to Megan.

“What have you done?” she asked, dropping the phone to press her hands against the deepest cuts.

He smiled at her and motioned with his chin to the wall beside the fireplace.

“You did that?”

He nodded.

“It’s beautiful.”

The indathrone blue returned to her wide eyes as each of the colors in the room emerged, one by one, and blended to the truest black Paul had ever seen.

Before moving to the Philadelphia suburbs, Kathryn Hively Lane earned an MA from Rutgers University and an MFA from George Mason University. She has taught at Rowan University and is currently completing her first novel. Though a native of Virginia, she has settled into life in South Jersey with her husband, daughter, and an amazingly supportive clan of in-laws. This is her first published story.

The Pits

The summer my father left us, our front yard was filled with deep, grave-sized pits. There was nothing else to look at, nothing to do but watch those cavities and the flurry of activity around them. Grandma and I sat in white wicker rockers, watching from her side porch, which looked directly onto my parents’ property. The house my parents had built stood on four acres, a flat stretch of what was once farmland at the edge of a dense forest.

Mom was getting less waitressing shifts at Longville Tavern and Dad was struggling to sell timeshares. Our kitchen cabinets were lined with cans of corned beef hash and Spam. My little sister and I drew the line when they tried to make us drink powdered milk.

Land was the only valuable thing we had, so my parents called a developer to discuss selling off part of the property. The first step was to see if a second well could be dug.

The diggers came on the last day of school. They must’ve been opening up holes in front of our house while I stood on the stage with my classmates, accepting my blue and gold sixth grade certificate. When Kristine and I came home that afternoon, there in the middle of our yard were four long, deep pits. The only funeral I’d ever been to was Grandpa’s, but the image of the hole that swallowed his silver casket had been burned into my mind.

The pits had a similar look about them. They were three feet by seven and a good six feet deep. Loose dirt was piled around them. We stared. Someone banged on the picture window in the living room and when we turned, Mom scowled at us. Kristine and I trudged inside.

Mom rushed into the kitchen in her work uniform, a white collared blouse and a knee-length skirt the color of hot fudge. “Girls, I need you to stay away from those holes.” She maintained a stern expression while looking up at the ceiling, fumbling to fit her turquoise earrings into the tiny holes in her ears. “They’re coming back to fill them in, but right now they’re too dangerous for you kids to play around, okay?”

Kristine climbed under the table to retrieve a naked Barbie doll. “Okay, Mommy.”

“Sure,” I said, handing my mother the plastic grocery bag with her dinner in it. It smelled unmistakably of corned beef-salty, oily slop from a can. She refused to eat at the restaurant because she’d “seen too much.”

“Alright, I’ll come in and kiss you when I get home tonight. There’s leftovers in the fridge. And make sure you girls do your homework before you watch TV.”

“School’s over, Mom,” I said.

She laughed and gave me a hug. “That’s right-exciting. I’ll see you later. Bye, Krissy Bean!” She waved to my sister, who lay under the table, making Barbie fly over her head.

“Bye-bye!” Kristine called back.

I stuck my certificate on the brown fridge next to the electric bill. Elementary school was over, but I didn’t feel any different. The only thing I was looking forward to was finally working on the tree fort with my dad. Otherwise, I figured it would be a typical summer: I’d play with Kristine and go to Grandma’s every day, and my parents would keep fighting and trying to make it seem like they weren’t. Nothing would really change until the fall. Or so I thought.

I found out before anyone else that Dad was leaving. The day after school let out he left a note on Mom’s dresser while she was at work. When she worked Saturday brunches, I often snuck into their bedroom and played with her jewelry-silver bangles, diamond teardrop earrings, a thick yellow-gold bracelet studded with emeralds. I’d overheard Dad trying to convince her to sell some of these, saying that unlike his father’s land, her jewelry was replaceable. Mom told him she would sooner die than give up her jewelry. Besides, she said, it wouldn’t bring in anywhere near as much money as the land.

I stood in front of the mirror, three inches taller in my mother’s patent leather heels as I pinned a purple brooch to my T-shirt. A folded sheet of yellow paper tucked under Mom’s hairbrush caught my eye. I picked it up and opened it.

I read my father’s note over and over, until I couldn’t differentiate between yellow paper and blue ink. With unsteady hands, I refolded it and set it back on the dresser. I kicked off Mom’s pumps when I realized that Dad might hear me pacing their bedroom. He was still home, moving things, banging tools around in the garage…packing? I turned off the cartoon my sister was watching, took her by the hand, and went to Grandma’s. If Dad wasn’t going to say goodbye to Mom, then he wasn’t going to say goodbye to us either.

Grandma’s pale blue eyes seemed to darken when I told her what was happening, but she said nothing. Since I could remember, my grandmother had told me stories from her life: surviving the Great Depression, losing several babies in childbirth, being widowed twice. She wasn’t someone who reacted to many things. Still, I’d hoped she would at least go yell at my dad. Instead, she tapped her thick, reptilian fingernails against the armrest of her chair while the two of us sat on the porch and watched my house. Kristine busied herself in the yard, making a fort out of the clothesline and some old paisley sheets.

Dad and I were supposed to start building the tree house any day. We’d been talking about it for years, and finally we made a plan. A month before school let out, we went to a lumberyard and bought cheap boards, full of knots. We picked out my tree, a gnarled oak behind our house with a wide trunk and thick branches. Dad said he guessed it was close to 75 years old. The two of us practiced hammering nails in the garage and he said I was a natural.

We decided to call my tree house “Annie’s Attic.” It was going to be the one place that was just for me. “You deserve something of your own,” my father had said.

Now I stared at my tree in the distance, the brown-gray knives of its branches stabbing at the sky, and knew that it would never be anything but a tree. I was no carpenter, despite what Dad had said. The boards would rot in the garage until one day Mom threw them away without realizing what they’d been for.

My gaze had drifted to my bare feet, brown with dirt and the beginnings of a summer tan. For some reason my feet always darkened first. I was puzzling this over, when I glanced back up at the house. My father was on the front porch. He descended the stairs and took slow, deliberate steps in the direction of the pits. With maybe two acres between us, I couldn’t read his facial expression. He brought his hands together. It looked like they were wrestling each other. Suddenly they leapt apart and he flung something into one of the pits.

“Lord.” Grandma pulled at a strand of silver hair that had come loose from her bun.

“What was that?” I asked.

“His ring,” she murmured, her chair creaking back and forth.

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Anne. Why would he want to sell his father’s land?”

After staring down into the pit, unmoving, Dad got into his car. He drove in our direction and slowed when he was almost to Grandma’s. Had he known the whole time that we were sitting there, watching? He gazed at her, then at me. I didn’t recognize the emotion on his face. My father was the most self-assured person I knew. Even when he shattered a plate from Mom’s good china set, he said it was her fault because she hadn’t rinsed off all the soapsuds.

Dad shook his head, accelerated, and sped off down the driveway in a cloud of dust.

“Do you know who she is?” Grandma asked.

I bent down to scratch a bug bite on my heel. “Who who is?”

“Nevermind,” she said, and kept rocking.

On Monday, they came to fill in the pits. There were no machines, just two guys with farmer’s tans and yellow hard hats, who pulled up in a white truck, each carrying shovels. I hadn’t told my mother about the ring and I doubted Grandma had either. Mom hadn’t even said anything about Dad leaving. As far as she knew, I had no idea he’d moved out.

With every shovelful of dirt, the men buried the ring deeper and deeper.

“Was Grandpa buried with his wedding ring on?” I asked.

Grandma drummed her fingernails on the armrest of her chair. “Men didn’t wear wedding rings when we were married. That’s new.”

“Do you think it’s bad?”

“No.” Grandma hesitated. “I think it keeps them honest. Or at least it’s supposed to.”

One of the diggers, a man whose pale gut sagged over his belt, used his foot for leverage, so he could force more dirt onto the shovel. To him, digging was just a job. He had no idea what was down there. There was no way for him to know that he was helping to erase our family.

We saw them at Happy Harry’s. Mom had to fill a prescription and she told us if we came along she’d buy us candy. My sister picked Sweet Tarts and I chose a Snickers. Mom was talking with the pharmacist at the back of the store. Her eyes were all red and veiny and her brown hair was piled up on her head like one of the twiggy birds’ nests from Grandma’s collection. I had never seen her this way.

Behind me, a woman called out, “Eric, look, they already have a Halloween display.”

At hearing my father’s name, I turned. She was short, not much taller than me, with waist-length red hair. As far as I could tell, she was younger than my parents but older than our last babysitter, who was about to start college.

“Eric,” the woman said again. “Come here. They’ve got pumpkin decals!”

Eric came around the corner and froze when he saw us.

“Daddy!” Kristine flung herself at our father.

He scooped her up in his arms. The woman with the red hair stared at them, her mouth a little pink Cheerio.

“Hey, Annie,” Dad said, setting my sister down. He waved at me and I frowned.

“Are these…?” the woman started.

“My daughters, Kristine and Anne.”

Kristine tugged on Dad’s hand, bare without the gold band. “Where did you go? Who’s that lady?”

“This is my friend Madelyn.”

I pretended to consult my Garfield watch. “We should go. Mom’s waiting for us.”

“Where is she?” Dad straightened, scanning the store for her face.

I ignored his question and motioned for my sister to follow me.

Do you know who she is? Grandma had asked. One of my classmates, Olivia Johnson’s mom had been caught having an affair with their family doctor, a fact Olivia made sure to broadcast. Her soon-to-be-stepfather was a rich doctor, she’d informed us. An affair meant you weren’t a family anymore. It meant your mom or dad loved someone else.

I dragged Kristine through the store, yanking on her wrist until she cried out. I thought we could hold Mom off until they left, but she was already headed for us. “Hey, girls,” she said in her fake cheerful voice. “Got your candy?”

I tried to think of an item we could look for in a back corner, something to take us far away from Dad and the redhead, but all that came to mind was pantyhose and I knew Mom would just look at me like I’d lost my twelve-year-old mind.

“We just saw Daddy.” Kristine twirled her Sweet Tarts like a baton. “He was with this lady named Mandolin, like that thing Uncle Bill plays.”

My mother narrowed her light brown eyes. “What?”

“Oh, he was just-” I began.

Mom swept past us down the feminine needs aisle, and it looked as though her feet never touched the ground. We followed. I knew I should probably stay behind and shield my little sister, but whatever was about to happen seemed too important to miss.

There was screaming as we approached the registers. Mom was yanking magnets off of a spinning rack and throwing them at Dad, who stood like a castle gate in front of a cowering Madelyn. My mother used words that I’d only heard from late night movies and boys on the playground. A bald man in a blue vest appeared and escorted her to the exit. She shook him off, charging ahead of him out the door.

She’d just disappeared from sight when she ran back inside and took my sister and me by the hand, which made my cheeks burn. “This is you taking time to think things over, Eric? You’re a sorry excuse for a man and a father. Come on, girls.”

As she pulled us out the door, I glanced over my shoulder. Dad and Madelyn had their arms wrapped around each other and he was whispering in her ear, the way he did when I had a bad dream.

I went to my tree. Grabbing a low-hanging bough, I pulled myself along the trunk, until I was sitting among the fat center branches. A light breeze, carrying the sweet smell of honeysuckle and mown grass, stirred the leaves overhead. I closed my eyes and imagined being surrounded by the walls of the tree house. If we’d put them up, no one could have seen me sitting there. Without them, I was exposed. If Mom or Kristine came around the side of the house, they’d spot my yellow tank top and jean shorts outlined against the tree. My sister would beg to join me, while my mother would demand I get down before I broke my neck. I wondered if my father even remembered the tree house.

After Dad and I had bought the building supplies, we got milkshakes. He asked me what he should get Mom for her birthday. I sucked too much cold, thick chocolate through my straw and got a brain freeze. If I complained, I knew Dad would just tell me that I should learn a little self control, so I forced a smile and said, “There was this green shirt we saw at JC Penney the other day. She really liked it. I could show you if you want.”

“Listen to you. When did you get to be so grown up?” He ruffled my long, dark hair. “Let’s go get the shirt on Friday then. Just you and me.”

I took a satisfactory pull on my milkshake.

“He wasn’t even wearing his wedding ring.” Mom slammed a pan on the stove and pulled a familiar blue and gold can of Spam from the cabinet.

“Maybe he had a reason,” I said

“Oh, I’m well aware of his reason,” Mom said, jerking metal tab on the can. “I wonder if he sold it. He was always trying to make me pawn my jewelry.”

“He didn’t sell it,” I blurted out.

She dumped pink squares of meat into the pan and as they sizzled, I thought of the egg in those commercials about “Your Brain on Drugs.”

“Don’t be stupid, Annie,” Mom said, more to herself than to me.

“He threw it in the pit,” I mumbled, resting my chin on the kitchen table.

“What?” she lurched in my direction, greasy spatula in hand. She hadn’t spanked me since I was Kristine’s age, but the wild look in her eye and the way she clutched the utensil gave me chills. “What did you say?”

I swallowed and sat up. “I said he threw it in the pit.”

“Your father may be an idiot, but I don’t think he’d be so petty.”

“I saw him do it,” I said.
The spatula clattered to the floor.

Grandma and I sat on her porch, cloud watching. Kristine was sprawled across the floorboards between our chairs, her tummy poking out from her pink My Little Pony T-shirt. After spotting no less than twelve clouds shaped like puppies, she’d fallen asleep.

Grandma gestured to a long, bumpy cloud. “A lilac.”

“And the one next to it, a hairbrush,” I said, pointing.

“Even flowers have their vanity,” she said with a chuckle.

A low rumbling sounded from the direction of my house as my mother raised the garage door and stepped out into the sunlight. Her disheveled hair was knotted in a low ponytail. She wore black sweatpants and the green shirt I’d helped Dad pick out for her birthday. It was short-sleeved and ruffled, with buttons down the center. She had been so surprised when he gave it to her. I’ve never understood why he even bothered.

The shirt and all of its implications might have held my attention longer if it hadn’t been for the shovel slung over my mother’s shoulder. Her posture erect, she strode toward the pits.

“Did you tell her which one it was?” Grandma asked.

“No. I just said…” I cocked my head. “How’d you know I told her?”

Grandma’s blue eyes met mine. “Well, it wasn’t me, and I’d wager it wasn’t your father.”

Mom started one pit over from the one that contained the ring. Unlike the men who had filled the pits in, who seemed most interested in scratching themselves, my mother appeared to be stabbing something every time her shovel met the earth. She sifted through each shovelful with her bare hands. Mom had taught me not to stare when we passed a car crash, but now she was the accident, unfolding with terrible slowness, and I couldn’t take my eyes from her.

Her movements grew jerky, almost theatrical. After an hour, she marched to the next pit, dragging the shovel with her. I hoped to God she would find the ring soon.

Kristine sat up, her pigtails askew. She followed our gaze. “What’s Mommy doing?”

“Digging,” Grandma murmured.

“But she said those holes were dangerous.”

“They are,” I said.

Mom scoured the second pit, flinging dirt high overhead once she’d combed through it, not bothering with piles anymore. Still, she didn’t come up with the ring. Daylight receded, though it was only mid-afternoon. My mother moved on to the third pit.

Grandma fixed her eyes on the sky, which had turned the color of a grape freeze pop. Lightning slashed the sky like a white hot zipper. I used the trick Dad had taught me and counted the seconds between the lightening and thunder to see how close the storm was. One, one-thousand. Two, one-thousand. Three-Boom! Thunder rattled the porch. Less than three miles.

“Mommy’s gonna get wet,” Kristine said.

On any other day, Grandma would have herded us inside at the first sign of a dark cloud, but she just sat there, gripping the armrests of her chair, her eyes glued to my mother.

I chewed my nails. “Should I go see if she’s okay?”

“She’d likely beat you silly if you did,” Grandma said.

The sky opened up on my mother, the water turning the dirt around her into slick piles of mud. She continued digging. After awhile, the rain came down so hard that we couldn’t see her anymore. It sounded like nails were striking the tin roof over us.

Leaning on her good hip, Grandma pulled herself to her feet. “Let’s go inside.”

Kristine was quick to follow, but I remained, staring into the wall of water, trying to see my mother, to understand what she was thinking.

After the rain stopped, I took my sister home. Mom was no longer at the pits. Her bedroom door was locked when I tried to open it. She mumbled something that sounded like “go away,” and so I did.

Hours passed. Kristine and I played Chutes and Ladders, I made mac and cheese for dinner, and when my sister complained that she was bored, I put on The Little Mermaid for her. I tried Mom’s door again, and this time she said clearly, “I’m fine, Annie. I’ll be fine.” I mimed the expression I knew she was making on the other side of the wall, the same look of fake optimism that she would need from me in the coming days.

It was dark outside now, cloudless. The stars came out, plugged into the sky like so many little nightlights. I stood in front of the pits. Who knew where the ring was now that my mother had flung around the dirt that held it hostage. I stuck my hand into a pile of mud, as though I could find it by dumb luck.

I decided if I ever did find the ring, I wouldn’t tell her. Just like if she ever found it, she would probably never tell me. But I knew we’d both continue to search. It would become our ritual: on days when his absence grew a little sharper, one of us would go out there, sometimes with a shovel, usually with just bare hands, and dig. Neither of us would acknowledge why grass never grew back over the pits, why they were like scabs that wouldn’t heal.

Melanie Unruh received a BA in English and Spanish from Rider University and an MFA in fiction from the University of New Mexico. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Post Road, Echo Ink Review, Pear Noir!, and The Inside Mag. She lives in Albuquerque with her fiancé and their two cats. Currently she is finishing a YA novel set in her hometown, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Fudgsicle

The city roars outside the window. She grows tired of the perpetual noise: cars honking for no reason, buses lurching along, and occasional yelling. She usually runs a fan to drown out the cacophony; but this summer she’s found a sound that she likes.

***

The ice cream truck drives by every night around 10:15. Like an old tire, the music sounds like it could deflate and go out of tune at any moment. I wonder if whoever is driving the truck can turn the music off, or if the music turns on as soon as the keys are in the ignition. These are the things I think about.

I’m doing the dishes when Vinny gets home. Every night is the same, and I wonder if other couples repeat their conversations night after night, too.

"Hey hon. how was your day?"

"It was good, no big sales, just another day, you know" Vinny shouts, as if I’m standing across the street.

He walks into the kitchen, wiping sweat off of his face, kisses my forehead and then gives my belly a quick rub.

"How’s my girls?" he opens the fridge, pawing at the contents.

"We’re fine, heard the ice cream truck again"…I’m dying to talk about it with someone.

"I dunno what’s so damn interesting about that," he cracks open a beer.

"I have a feeling there’s a story behind it."

"Nah sweetie, it’s just some creep, out lookin’ for some tail." He thinks all of my ideas are worthless.

He sits down in front of the television, and I look down to see my hands ragged and red from leaving them under the hot water too long, again.

***

It was the fourth of July. The air reeked of hot dogs and burnt hamburgers. The smoke from the vendor’s grills rose up and quickly rushed into my eyes. My belly was big now, and I wished that someone could help me carry the weight. Vinny dragged me to the fireworks, despite my reservations.

"What if the noises scare the baby?" I worried.

"That won’t happen, sweet cheeks. We’re gonna have a good time, you’ll see" and patted my knee.

Now I was drenched in sweat. It was nearing nighttime but the heat had yet to subside. Vinny and the boys from work were having the good time he’d promised, only they were chugging beers and I was contemplating standing all night, fearing that sitting down may leave me in the same spot until a tow truck could come.

"Hey, VINNY!" I yelled, "I’m thirsty, you got anything other than beer?"

"No, doll. C’mere."

I made my way over.

"Now you take this five dollars and go get yourself something to cool you down. Alright?"

He obviously thought he was doing me a big favor.

"Thanks.." I murmured, but he was already gone, yelling at the guys.

I started walking towards the vendors. There were ice cream trucks everywhere. My heart was beating fast now. I wanted to rush every truck, looking for the driver from my neighborhood. I wanted to escape, but I knew that Vinny would find me. Things weren’t so bad, were they? He took care of me and would take care of the baby. I got in line for a drink. A bottled water would do fine. I even got nachos for myself. Processed cheese would surely make me feel better. This nonsense about the ice cream man was all in my head.

I knew I was wrong. I would be better off if I wandered away from Vinny and out of this city, but it didn’t matter anymore.

I fell asleep during the fireworks.

***

I’ve still been thinking about meeting the ice cream man one of these nights. Now I pace nightly by the window, sometimes standing so long in waiting that the baby kicks until I sit down. The truck was probably white, but is now cloaked in grime. Pictures of the ice creams being sold are on the side, typical, and the packing tape which holds the pictures to the truck has dirt underneath it too. I couldn’t call this an obsession, no, but a distraction. Simply an event to look forward to at the end of the day.

I like to think that the ice cream man and I have isolation in common, perhaps a sort of shared desolation. Only he voiced it with his nightly musical interlude, cutting through the darkness and entering through people’s open windows, hoping to grope them and finally get some attention.
A Pennsylvania native, Christina Snyder studied literature at the University of South Carolina. She currently works for F.A. Davis Company, a Philadelphia-based publisher. Christina is currently at work on a teen novel. This is her first published story.

Getting Out

Drew’s phone vibrated off the top of the nightstand and fell to the floor. Before his buddy Fred had introduced him to the recreational potential of the anesthesia cart, Drew’s on-call dreams had revolved around forgetting to check on a patient and ordering the wrong medications, but now he was trimming delicate mucosa with Metzenbaum scissors on one of Dr. Eric Xavier’s complicated vulvoplasty cases. The phone started its St. Vitus dance again and Drew cursed the helpful intern who was calling to remind him they were starting morning report. He could have sworn he’d set an alarm when he’d crawled into the narrow call bed forty-five minutes ago. The Old Bastard would be pissed.

Drew rooted around for a clean set of scrubs and settled for a top one size too small. At St. Basil’s Medical Center, a few miles from the watchful gaze of William Penn atop City Hall, the solution to linen theft was to consistently fail to provide anything worth stealing. He brushed his teeth with the spit-flavored toothpaste the hospital inflicted on patients who hadn’t time to pack their own and ran a wet, ward-issue comb through his hair.

Drew apologized to the Old Bastard for being late, and fearing certain retribution, kept his head down through rounds and clinic. While he rushed to sign out his team and crawl home, the call came from the surgical scheduling desk: the Old Bastard needed him to assist on a case.

Dr. Xavier who’d finished his residency three years ago, wanted Drew’s help too. He’d opened his own surgicenter and had offered Drew a job as soon as he finished. “You tighten this, you tighten that, and the best thing of all,” Xavier typed, “it’s all self pay.” Drew was in the process of getting licensed to practice medicine in California: he’d filled out the forms, submitted photographs and fingerprints. The confirmation email from the medical board had included their most recent newsletter, and Drew had been bored enough one night on call to read through the roll of physicians variously reprimanded, their licenses suspended and some revoked. A familiar name caught his eye: Dr. Eric Xavier was on probation.

Two hours after reporting to operating room nine, Drew stood, gowned, gloved and angry, across the table from Dr. Owen Bates. Patients and the medical board called him Dr. Bates, but everyone else called him the Old Bastard, or OB for short. He’d been at St. Basil’s since before Hippocrates and claimed he’d been too close to retirement to jump ship when the head of obstetrics and gynecology had moved the department’s talent to the medical Mecca across town. Rumor had it the OB hadn’t been asked to go.

“Ever see anything like it, Dr. Spight?” the Old Bastard said.

Drew tensed his hold on the retractor. “No, Dr. Bates, I haven’t,” he said for at least the tenth time while the OB trained the CO₂ laser on a vulva the size of a cauliflower.

Drew shook his head and wondered when he was ever going to get out. The OB had started by sawing at the worst case of condyloma acuminatum any of them had ever seen with scalpel and cauterization before switching to the laser to annihilate the widespread lesions.

Drew flexed his right trapezius until the seventh cervical vertebrae cracked. Dr. Frederick Yee, the anesthesiologist, shot him a sly look that seemed to say he had something for that. Fred Yee had something for just about anything in his pharmacopoeia including something to help him forget the last thirty-six hours.

The Old Bastard poked the wart-encrusted labia majora with a gloved finger and waved the hand with the laser to get the anesthesiologist’s attention.

“How many babies did you say again, Fred?” the Old Bastard said.

Fred looked up from the Friday crossword puzzle. He liked to do them in red pen. “G6P5,” he said. Six pregnancies, five births. Fred took the opportunity to glance at his watch and survey the patient’s solid vital signs before he ticked off the box for another fifteen minutes of high risk anesthesia time.

Drew watched Fred crack open another vial of fentanyl, and he inclined his surgical mask ever so slightly in that direction. Researchers sampling OR air claimed they had found minute amounts of aerosolized narcotics, enough, they postulated, to prime some surgeons and anesthesiologists so inclined to seek more of the same.

“Don’t see how anyone got his pecker past this once let alone six times,” the OB said.

Drew averted his eyes. He remembered examining the patient in clinic the day he’d confirmed she was pregnant again. Her vulva had only grown stiffer with the thick, warty growths, and there was no way she was going to deliver a baby through the rock-hard concretions that surrounded her vagina. Even worse, any infant delivered through genital warts could inhale the virus and develop lesions on the vocal cords that could occlude the airway.

“Better exposure,” the OB barked.

Drew repositioned and the Old Bastard wielded the laser again. “Set phasers for stun,” the OB said.

Drew held the retractor, his arm motionless, his breathing even and perfectly measured behind his surgical mask. He wasn’t about to talk and risk breathing in any more of the fried stench than he had to. The aerosolized live virus was a risk to every airway in the operating room.

The OB sliced at the tissue and wisps of infected smoke rose from the surgical site. “Not likely to see this in a fancy-pants private practice,” he said. “But you won’t be working on the pretty pussies next year, will you?”

The scrub nurse discreetly pointed the suction catheter in the direction of the effluent. Drew breathed slowly, controlling his anger. He wasn’t going to let the Old Bastard bait him today. It was Friday, and this was the last case. He was post-call and had the rest of the weekend off.

The OB laughed. For any other case, they would have scrubbed in with an intern and a pair of medical students. But as soon as Fred had anesthetized the patient, the OB kicked them out along with everyone else who’d seen the cauliflower case on the OR schedule and wanted to observe. Drew knew the OB didn’t care enough to worry about exposing the entire department to the virus, and he wondered why he’d been called in since the OB wasn’t even pimping him with petty questions about anatomy and physiology.

Still, it was nice without the medical students tripping over themselves trying to be helpful and cheerful while doing everything absolutely wrong. Their grades, their futures, depended on it, and that was the first place Drew had gone bad. He’d never been bright eyed and bushy tailed, and trying to suck up bullshit never did much for his mood. Private practice could be like this: one surgeon, one assistant, an anesthesiologist, and two nurses: one to scrub, one to circulate. A very private party.

“You’ll be leaving us after this year,” the OB said.

Drew couldn’t decide if it was a question or a statement.

“I wanted to tell you that I’ll be writing your recommendation letter,” the OB said, his voice low.

Mirroring his own reaction, Drew felt the patient’s abdominal muscles tense against his hands.

“I’m not getting muscle relaxation” the OB said.

Fred connected the patient to the anesthesia bag and demonstrated that the patient had so much medication on board that she made no spontaneous respiratory effort.

“Relax her,” the OB barked.

Fred injected something into the IV and flushed the line.

The air conditioning kicked on and Drew shivered, glad for his surgical gown. The nurses kept the OR cold so no one melted under the intense overhead lights. During deliveries and most surgeries, Drew kept warm wielding instruments and sweating a few technical decisions, but the Old Bastard was having too much fun decimating the warty nooks and crannies to hand Drew the laser. At the head of the table, Fred pushed up the sleeves of his scrub jacket before putting red pen to paper again.

Conventional wisdom held that anesthesiologists who never showed their arms had something to hide. In Fred’s case, that was true, but he was careful to stock fine gauge needles and never reuse them. Why should he? He’d shown Drew scanning electron microscope pictures of needles, the tips of their beveled ends barbed like a fish hook after a single trip through skin and vein. Trained to rotate their injection sites like good diabetic patients administering insulin multiple times a day, neither of them left tell-tale needle marks.

Drew had been tracking how many days the new circulating nurse wore her scrub jacket with the knitted cuffs. Most nurses, hot to show their tits or tattoos or whatever else it was they thought they had, didn’t. Drew hadn’t decided if the new nurse was in the club or just cold.

The OB put down the laser and manually retracted the labia majora and minora to expose the introitus. “Open, Sesame,” he said. “Bet it won’t be long before she gives it a spin.”

Drew didn’t want to look anymore. The raw vulvar tissue looked like it had been pressed onto a heated waffle iron. He stripped off the surgical drape and grudgingly admitted to himself that the OB was right: a significant proportion of St. Basil’s patients were loathe to obey the edict of six weeks’ pelvic rest after surgery and childbirth.

The circulating nurse elbowed past him to reinforce the cloth tape that held the catheter tubing to the patient’s thigh: she’d had a bitch of a time spreading the gnarled, inflexible labia to catheterize the patient’s urethra, and she wasn’t about to lose her prize. After she’d affixed a thick sterile pad to the vulva with more tape, the anesthesiologist extracted the endotracheal tube from the groggy woman’s throat. She gave a weak cough then mumbled something, her voice hoarse and low.

It was after seven o’clock and the last case was finally over. In a proper hospital, the doctors walked to recovery, wrote orders, and retired to their lounge. But this, Drew was fond of telling the medical students, was St. Basil’s. And at St. Basil’s, they practiced a different kind of medicine. He grabbed the sides of his gown, popped the paper ties across his neck and back, and pulled off gown and gloves in one smooth motion before snapping on another clean pair of gloves from the box on the wall. He left his mask on.

Here there were no orderlies and no cushy lift team. Drew rolled the gurney in from the hallway and parked it beside the operating table. The medical students had been smart enough to bolt when the OB banished them, so he stood on the far side of the gurney with Fred and they pulled the white sheet beneath the patient towards them to slide her from OR table to gurney.

The patient’s head lolled to one side, but Fred brought her chin back to midline and repositioned the mask of one hundred percent oxygen that was washing all the good drugs out of her system. Her breath would reek of the chemicals while her liver worked to break the bonds that had held her, immobile and insensate, during the procedure to raze the field of warts.

Fred lifted the patient’s one arm, then the other and rolled her side to side, checking for pressure marks or redness that might have been caused by improper positioning or padding of her generous hips and ass during the procedure. He documented that there were none; the nurse initialed his sheet.

“Getting out?” Fred said. He’d already written his orders for post-operative pain medications.

“Yeah,” Drew said, “pretty soon.”

Getting out was important, but timing was everything lest he cross paths with the OB again. Drew looked at his watch. The OB would still be holed up in the single stall of the doctor’s lounge. He didn’t want to hear the Old Bastard bearing down into the Valsalva maneuver, willing his stream past a prostate engorged with age.

Drew punched orders into the computer system’s ancient amber monitor in recovery. He picked up the phone and dictated the case. He’d learned not to obsess. The OB would criticize and correct it and make him dictate it again. But that would be later. He padded to the lounge and dialed the combination on his locker quietly. He wanted out of the contaminated scrubs, but when he heard OB’s clogs scuff toward the bathroom door, he grabbed his clothes and bolted. He didn’t want to hear about sticks or pricks or holes or whores for the next sixty hours.

Drew was out. It didn’t feel like autumn, but then every patch of dirt that had once fronted the row houses on his block had been replaced with cement decades ago and not a single tree or bush grew. He returned to his ground floor room in the three story row house he shared with Fred and a social worker to shower. The envelope to pay for his California medical license was on top of the pile on his desk. A thousand dollars was a lot of money. Upstairs, Fred had left the deadbolts for the second floor door unlocked. Drew entered the narrow kitchen and heard his housemate call from the small front room that overlooked the street.

“I already ordered,” Fred called. “Come help yourself.”

Drew slumped onto the couch. The walls were covered with printed pages of school ID pictures that dated back to Drew’s first year of medical school. Some of the names beneath the indistinct black and white faces had been underlined in red.

“Long day,” Fred said pushing the pizza box at Drew. “I’d been doing pediatric cases up until the OB pulled me for your papilloma party,” he said working his second slice. “I love kids. I had all my drugs drawn up for a tonsillectomy, but when someone wasn’t watching, the kid grabbed a handful of jelly beans in pre-op.”

Drew chalked up one cancelled case and waited for Fred to swallow.

“Then another kid wouldn’t go for the rectal Valium his local doc had prescribed as a sedative, and I assured the mother I’d dispose of the medication safely,” Fred said. “We can’t have kids getting their hands on drugs that depress the respiratory system.” He bit into his third slice thoughtfully.

“Great cases,” Drew nodded. He tallied Fred’s take for one day: a little ketamine, the Valium, some fentanyl, maybe even some propofol, and grinned.

Fred toasted the air with his beer bottle. “Fuck the days of the giants.”

After the pizza was gone, they prepared to pleasure themselves with Fred’s private crash cart, and Drew reminded Dr. Yee he that he wanted to remember some of his weekend. Fred pulled open the bottom drawer of his red tackle box and removed a handful of thirty gauge needles, two tourniquets, and a well-worn cardboard box that contained a prefilled syringe of naloxone, the antidote in case of an overdose.

While Fred laid everything out, Drew quizzed himself on the naloxone dose and found he still remembered 0.4 to 2 milligrams every two to three minutes as needed. Then he got up and closed the window. Winter was coming, and if Fred left next summer, so would the drug supply. Drew would have to be enterprising. He stood and stretched before the wall of photos until Fred signaled he was ready for his last case of the day. Drew took the syringe of fentanyl Fred handed him and decided he’d have to make notes before Fred took the ID photos down. Some of the people on the wall still had to be at St. Basil’s or at least in the city. They would have contacts.

No stranger to difficult IV starts, Drew had no trouble injecting a plump, healthy vein inside his ankle. Then he leaned back to appreciate all the pharmacology he’d learned: how synthetic opiates bound to the brain’s receptors, concentrated deep in the area of pain and emotion. How the dopamine levels rose in the reward center to create euphoria and relaxation.

Fred tossed both syringes into a sharps container. “I got my letter,” he said. “Penn’s taking me for a cardiothoracic fellowship.”

“Choice,” Drew said. “Congrats.” He’d never had any doubt that Fred would rectify the great injustice done when he’d been matched to St. Basil’s for residency. Fred had attended a swank college on a scholarship and attended the University of Pennsylvania for medical school but then his luck ran out. Fred’s mother said it stemmed from his refusal to wear the red outfit she’d bought him for the new year when he was sixteen.

“It’ll be a shame to leave all this,” Fred said waving an arm at the stalactites of damaged plaster hanging from the ceiling, “but I’m looking to trade up to something in west Philly that hasn’t been condemned.”

Fred could have bought himself a house on the Main Line selling the narcotics he’d appropriated with his various waste scams, but he’d been careful not to draw attention to himself while atoning for the shame his residency had caused his family. Even Drew was tired of hearing Fred’s father tell the story of how he’d eaten tree bark to survive after escaping his village to emigrate to the United States.

“You weren’t planning on renewing the lease, were you?” Fred said.

“Don’t know where I’ll be,” Drew said. “You’re coming out of anesthesia, a great department. All those excellent trauma cases, gunshot wounds to the chest, the head, the abdomen, not to mention all the bread and butter appendectomies on the garden variety poly-substance abusers. Everyone wanted you because every case you’ve ever done is high risk.”

“St. Basil’s Ob-Gyn department still has a great reputation outside of Philadelphia,” Fred said. “Only the attentive know the best attendings left.”

Drew knew he’d damaged his marketability last year when they’d called him in to cover for someone stuck in traffic on the Tacony-Palmyra bridge before he was capable of remaining vertical, but any recommendation letter from the OB would be carefully worded to decimate whatever status he might have enjoyed having trained at St. Basil’s. Their former department chair hadn’t been stupid enough to damage her program by exposing a resident with a drug problem before her grand exit: it reflected as badly on her as it did on Dr. Andrew Spight. She’d put him in the medical staff’s diversion program that forced him to submit to random drug tests. So far he’d aced them, but stealing urine samples from the basket of outgoing labs on pediatrics was getting to be a real pain in the ass.

Fred slapped Drew’s arm above the red line left by the tourniquet. “You show the Old Bastard!” he said. “Put your head down, work hard. Get out of here. Plenty of places looking for young docs with a broad experience base.”

Drew snorted. Broad experience base. Sometimes Fred cracked him up. He watched the anesthesiologist prepare two new syringes. Pity the poor losers stuck sucking fentanyl patches.

St. Basil’s hadn’t been Drew’s first choice for residency either, but unlike Yee, his father had only escaped Philadelphia for the suburbs where he serviced fire extinguishers. Four years of state school and four years of mediocre performance in medical school had left Drew little chance of trading up.

Drew injected again and slipped to the floor where he stared up at the pattern of the thumb-print sized faces, the unsullied slurpers and ass-kissers interspersed with the users of marijuana, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and more whose names Fred had tricked out with a thin, red line. Sure, recreational drugs were illegal. But it was even more risky to use drugs and practice medicine. Never mind the patients, they could lose their licenses. With that in mind, Fred had carefully cataloged the users. They were deemed safe to speak and party with: they all had something to lose.

“With your indulgence,” Fred said, “I think my fellowship warrants something special.”

Drew nodded, his gaze fixed on Fred’s hand as it disappeared into the hinged box. The fifty milliliter bottle he withdrew had the coveted baby blue label. Propofol. Fred held the glass vial to the light between thumb and forefinger. The liquid, ten milligrams per milliliter, was cloudy white like the diluted formula some patients fed their babies to make it go farther when they sold their WIC vouchers to support their own habits.

Fred dealt and they pushed the plungers on their respective syringes. Drew felt warm and safe and happy. The textbooks barely scratched the surface when they enumerated propofol’s effects: a sense of well being, hallucinations, and sexual fantasies. With the first flush of dopamine bathing his brain, Drew felt a sense of purpose. He would ask the OB about writing up the nasty condyloma case, get it published, and find himself a decent job. Maybe even do his own fellowship.

As he slowly exhaled, the blurry face of Dr. Eric Xavier smiled down at him. The room darkened and the presentation on reconstructive gynecology that Dr. Xavier had sent him commenced with Netter’s famous illustrations of the perineum with its anterior and posterior triangles. Photographs of the vulva followed: the labia majora and minora, the introitus with and without hymeneal remnants, the clitoris. There were testimonials from women who said they lacked confidence to wear string bikinis, tight pants, and skimpy thongs. Women who required pubic liposuction and lift, labia majora remodeling, labia minora reduction, clitoral hood reduction, and clitoropexy. The pursuit of the aesthetic pussy was everything. And for the women who regretted pushing babies the size of bowling balls out through their vagina, there was vaginal rejuvenation. Dr. Xavier guaranteed that his technique could make a woman tight as a virgin again, and the accompanying photo showed him holding a ruler beside one of his newly post-operative creations. Drew clapped twice before blacking out.

The next morning Drew woke and scratched before padding to the bathroom to stand on the crusty hexagon tile in front of the toilet and piss away the degradation products of the previous night. He was still fascinated by science and the mysteries of the human body. He hadn’t meant to be a horrible, drug-addled obstetrician-gynecologist; there was just so much he hadn’t anticipated: delivering a woman with a toxicology screen that had come back positive for everything, coning a cervix riddled with cancer, watching 300 grams of red, gelatinous miscarried fetus expire. As fast as he learned, he wanted to forget, and now, just months from finishing, he was afraid.

Fred knocked hard on the door.

“If you don’t get out, they’re going to start calling you the new bastard,” Fred said.

The following June, on his last night on call at St. Basil’s, Drew sat, feet up in the nurse’s station, reading the latest report from the medical board. One physician had diverted controlled substances for personal use. Another, who practiced in southern California like Dr. Xavier, had been on probation for lewd conduct. Drew pictured a consultation room with palm trees waving outside the window. He imagined patients with smooth, shaved vulvas, too beautiful to have genital warts. While on probation, this doctor had been found guilty of having sexual relations with patients: license revoked.

Fred had moved out the week before, and maybe that was a good thing. Drew, broke as usual, found himself limited to alcohol.

The charge nurse blew by and knocked his clogged feet off the counter.

“Delivery,” she ordered.

The cracked vinyl pinched the back of his thighs through the thin scrub pants. Drew pushed himself up. Next week the new interns would arrive and he’d get no rest until they demonstrated basic proficiency. He still couldn’t believe that after writing him a crappy recommendation letter the OB had offered him a position at St. Basil’s providing obstetrical and gynecological care to the tsunami of patients on public assistance. Why they were going to let him near residents and medical students was anyone’s guess, but then again, what choice did the skeleton department have? Last year’s exodus had left bitter, overworked attendings desperate to fill the ranks. Drew had been too embarrassed to tell Fred about the job or that he’d renewed the lease.

The pregnant patient had been moved to the surgical delivery room because her blood pressure was elevated. Drew reviewed the chart and chatted up a new nurse who was wearing a scrub jacket covered with red roses.

Drew gowned and gloved then asked the nurse to adjust the light. He examined the patient’s vulva and checked the pelvic proportions. Her pendulous labia majora was already swollen and her labia minora were as thin and wide as bat wings. No, the OB was right, he didn’t practice among the pretty pussies.

The patient bore down and the baby’s head crowned against the pitted, scarred skin. Drew ticked off the months on his fingers and glanced at the name on the nurse’s handwritten notes. It had to be her, the patient whose genital warts the OB had burned off. He remembered talking with Fred that night. What had he done about getting out?

The head delivered easily, and the next contraction propelled the rest of the baby into the world. G6P6. Drew leaned in to secure the baby in the crook of his right arm and pinned its slippery movements against the texture of the disposable gown. He looked at the bawling baby. Another girl. Someone he’d be delivering in thirteen or fourteen years. God, let him not be here. Let him get out.

L. M. Asta has published fiction in The Battered Suitcase, Inkwell, and Schuylkill, as well as having been previously published in Philadelphia Stories. Her essays have appeared in Hippocrates and the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Getting Out" is from Report From the Medical Board, a novel that tracks the physicians who come to the attention of their state medical board and are variously reprimanded, put on probation, have their licenses suspended, and sometimes revoked. She is a graduate of Temple University School of Medicine and did her residency at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. www.lmasta.com.

Dog People

Because I no longer have a yard, at least not a yard that suits me (not like the one we had back in Wyndmoor), and because I am not the type, yard or no yard, to stay cooped up indoors—not on an evening where the summer heat has mellowed and the sun is orangeing—because of these things, I’ve been sitting out on the stoop these days, making it the place where I can undo my belt, slouch, and let my belly unfurl onto my knees. Where I can drink Bacardi and Diet Coke from the tiki glass that Lana abhors. Where I can stare down the cars creeping past, looking for precious street-parking while my station wagon sits in the middle of two perfectly good spots.

At this time of day, little things happen all on their own: dirty rain water drips through a sagging awning, and the breeze scatters glass, wrappers, and other detritus to reveal skeletal forms in the filth. And the stray cat, the longest, thinnest cat I’ve ever seen, comes out from under my station wagon to rub shyly against my back before I let it climb into my lap.

“Hey you,” I say to the cat, rubbing my hand across it. “Hey cat. Hey puss. Hey kitty.”

The cat isn’t all that grimy for a stray. I’m not sure what to call it: it has that quality between an it and a she.

“Are you a Catrina or a Catherine?” I ask it. “Or do you prefer to be called Mrs. Cat? Or even maybe Dr. Cat?”

The cat meows. I like to imagine she was once gainfully employed in the cat world, as a college professor or a medical doctor. When she fell on hard times, she became depressed, and rightfully so. Given how introverted a cat is to begin with, she must have been real unpleasant, so her family put her out on the street. But she’s ready to turn a new leaf, so I give her the respect she needs to get back on her feet. I tell her about what I’m reading. We converse. After all, isn’t this why people keep cats in the first place?

“Tough times, huh? You want a snack?” I ask. “Wait here.”

Inside, Lana is preparing dinner. There aren’t enough hallways, not enough alternate routes in this townhouse; to get to the kitchen, I have to walk through the living room where the three dogs lounge like a plague. Why even have a sofa? Why not just spread some hay in front of the television and let whoever wants lay in it?

I rattle the ice remaining in my cup until Charlie, the pit bull, shoots his head up and begins to whimper.

“Is that you, King of The Street?” Lana calls. “How does everything look out there?”
I answer her question with one of my own. It’s not that I don’t hear her. That’s just how we talk nowadays.

“What’s cooking, Lan?”

“Don’t you want to guess?

“Steak?”

“Quinoa salad and baked fish,” she replies.

“Aha.”

I step into the kitchen, grab her bony hips, and watch her denude a ratty carrot over the compost bin. Then I go into the fridge and reach into the back corner for a slice of turkey.
“You’re not feeding that cat, are you?” she asks.
“Nope,” I say, putting the lunchmeat in my pocket and filling my glass with ice.
“Good. I don’t want it to think it can come inside. We’re dog people, now.”

Lana likes to say that. But we aren’t dog people by nature, and had never been when we lived in Wyndmoor. Dogs have conquered our new house, bit by bit. It all started when Lana adopted Charlie as a young pit bull from the animal shelter, where they’d told her that Charlie was the sweetest, most friendly dog, but good for protection too. And for the most part he was. But the day he was brought home, Charlie killed our cat, Bootsy, just killed her like there was nothing to it. He bee-lined for her, grabbed her in his jaws, and shook the life out of her like a plush toy. It was horrible. I had to wrestle Charlie to the ground, which got Charlie even more excited, and he started to lick my face with his bloody tongue.

“On second thought, there’s no point in us losing two pets,” Lana had said, after I had loaded Charlie into the trunk of the station wagon. The animal was circling around back there like an excited particle, pausing once in a while to look at us gleefully, his tail whacking alternately between seatback and windowpane. Not only did I blame Charlie for killing Bootsy, but somehow I blamed him for the fact that Lana, visibly, was not nearly as upset as I was. I started to hate Charlie that very day.

Charlie was soon followed by Megan the Weimaraner (a yuppie dog, grey, athletic, vacant—in other words, a yuppie herself) and George St. George, a shih tzu that I was allowed to name. I named him that way because he walked into the house the first day and stared down the bigger dogs into submission. George St. George is the one I dislike the least.

After dinner, we go for a walk. It’s dark now, and the breeze is refreshing. Lana walks all three dogs at once, pulled along like a warrior on a chariot, driving through the night. She gets ahead of me instantly, so I sneak a glance under the station wagon. A pair of marbly eyes tells me that the cat is there.
“More turkey when I get back,” I reassure it.

Lana pauses now and again to let one of the dogs shit. It’s a shameless show that they take turns stoically performing while Lana and the other two dogs watch on. Once the dog has finished, everybody is reanimated, and while Lana stoops to clean up, the dogs gambol about as if nothing has happened.

“Good doggie,” Lana says.

I lag behind on purpose, because I don’t want to get caught up in these chores of being a dog person. The upkeep of my own life is hard enough. Lana is good at it though—taking care of things, that is. We moved into the city because she wanted to be closer to the yoga studio, the farmers market, and the animal shelter, and because she was tired of taking care of our big old house. She wanted something cozier, cuter; wanted to be more active in a community. She said being active might do me some good too. But the only thing I was ever good at taking care of was the yard.

Thinking about our old house, I get uneasy. My buzz is wearing off and my belly starts to feel hollow.. I start to look around and see the cat slinking ten paces behind me (you see, if dogs gambol, cats slink). I want to tell it to shoo, but I like the idea of this unlikely parade making its way to the park. Besides, I know that it won’t follow us around the corner.

We cross through the park. Up ahead, Charlie and Megan are barking at a Rottweiler that belongs to some vagrant kids who smoke cigarette butts off the ground. George St. George starts to bark at the whole lot of them and Lana has to drag them away. I take this moment to turn around and see if the cat is still there, but it’s not.

“That’s right, fuck off, lady,” one of the kids says.

When I get up to where they are, the same kid asks, “Hey man, spare some change?”
I reach into my wallet and pull out a five-dollar bill.

“Sorry,” I say. I don’t know why.

The next morning, while Lana is out at yoga, I make a pot of coffee and go out onto the stoop. But the cat is nowhere in sight. So I go back inside, lift George St. George from the couch, and leash him up, relishing the look of disappointment on Charlie’s face.
“I’ll outlive you,” I promise him. “You too,” I say to Megan, who’s done nothing other than to watch dumbly with a plush toy in her mouth. It’s her failure to understand me that I can’t stand. In Charlie, it’s the opposite.

I walk George St. George to the park, where we throw the ball around. This is my attempt at being active. The other morning dog walkers are there and another shih tzu runs up to George St. George. They start to sniff each other.

“How old is he?” its owner asks me. “Is it a he or a she?”

“A he,” I say. “And I don’t know at all how old he is. I have no idea.”

She smiles behind her oversized sunglasses. She’s in her twenties and very fit, yoga-fit, but not yet all ropey like Lana.

“They seem to be getting along,” she remarks.

“Us or the dogs?”

She titters (women titter), and walks over to fetch her dog. Her pants cleave her ass like the cleft on a large peach, and while I know that I should find this arousing, I don’t. Through my pocket, I check to make sure my testicles are intact.

Suddenly a big boxer comes running across the lawn and starts bouncing around the shih tzus in a circle, barking. The shih tzus start barking back and backing up a little bit. I see the owner of the other shih tzu swoop in to break it all up, and at the same time I see myself standing by doing nothing, George St. George’s leash dangling in my fist like a lasso. What kind of dog-person am I? I wonder. Do I rescue my dog or let him fend for himself? Isn’t part of owning a dog having something that can fight and kill and die on your behalf? I decide then that I’m really a cat person—that what dogs do is none of my business.

The young woman shoots a stern smile at the boxer owner, and one at me too. She picks her shih tzu up and cradles it. I try to apologize with my eyes, whatever that looks like. Then I walk over to George St. George and put his leash back on.

We stop off at the grocery store so I can pick up some breakfast, and I tie George St. George up as loosely as I can.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I dare him.

When I come out balancing milk and eggs and bread in my arms (Lana’s on an eco-friendly kick, so I’m afraid to come back with a plastic bag), I see that George St. George’s leash has come undone, though he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Why didn’t you run for it, son?” I say. “That ingrate Charlie would run. He would run and never look back.”

There’s no point in taking the leash – George St. George leads the way back to the house and I follow ten paces behind. Back home, Lana’s just come out of the shower, and when she sees me with all the groceries she says:

“How come you didn’t bring a tote? It would have simplified your life.”
“Sometimes I forget to do the things that simplify my life,” I say, and head for the sputtering old shower, to let it lurch invectives of host rust-tinged water on me.

[img_assist|nid=9857|title=Untitled (Shadows and Bones Series) by Kim Mehler © 2012|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=573]

That night, after Lana and the dogs have gone to bed, I lure the cat inside with lunchmeat. We go into the living room where I’ve set up a little spot for it under the bookcase with Bootsy’s old food bowl and litter box. The dogs are all upstairs—sometimes they take my place in bed and I don’t even bother to kick them out.
I sit down on the couch and watch the cat eating as if this food and being in this house were the most unremarkable thing, as if it were expected even. I’m reminded of Bootsy, and the way she stalked about the old house in Wyndmoor with utter nonchalance. Indifferent to the infestation we had, Bootsy used to stare blankly as we chased mice and roaches ourselves. It wasn’t for a lack of eyesight, because she would chase a ball or well-aimed point of light. I once went so far as to capture a mouse and dangle it live and wriggling in front of Bootsy’s face, only to prompt a lazy bath.

“Ok, kitty,” I say, kicking off my shoes and laying down now on the couch. “Time for bed.”

I tap my belly, inviting the cat to come sit on me. But it just looks at me from across the room. I close my eyes and try to sleep. Ten minutes go by. Still the cat has not come to sleep with me. When I open my eyes, I’ve lost it.

I get up and walk the perimeter of the living room, and suddenly there it is in the corner, quietly watching. I’m getting frustrated now and hot at the same time, and I’m remembering a Poe story or two where the narrator is spooked again and again by the indifferent gaze of his cat. They can scare the hell out of you when they want to. And once they’ve done it, you can’t help but think that, even when they’re friendly, there’s something removed and awful about them. Maybe that’s what Lana was glad to be rid of the day Charlie mauled Bootsy. Maybe that’s what she was glad to be rid of when she sold the big old lonely house in Wyndmoor. That indifference. Maybe I should have been glad to be rid of it too.

I sit back on the couch and silently will the cat to come over, maybe I even murmur a prayer. And finally it does, but only to the edge—it doesn’t jump up. I desperately want to take off my shirt and pants and sleep now, with or without the cat, but I don’t dare undress as long as it is in the house, watching.

I wake up the next morning, fully dressed. The cat has gone; I don’t know where. I spend the day out on the stoop and it doesn’t show up, not once. Evening comes and Lana charges out of the house with the herd and I watch them disappear down the street to go perform their shitting and playing spectacles in a more public place. The cars still creep by and the ice melting in my tiki glass gives off a pop. And I think, somebody is making these nice things for me. Somebody is composing this world in a way that it hasn’t been all year, for my enjoyment and my enjoyment alone.

Max
McKenna’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apiary,
Cartographer: A Literary Review, and First Stop Fiction, and he has
contributed essays to The Millions, Full Stop, the Journal of Modern
Literature, and Filament, among others. He works at the Kelly Writers
House in Philadelphia.

Two Trailers

Two weekends after Myra’s old neighbors vacated the trailer next to hers, this man and his bony brown Lab pulled in with all his furniture tied down in the bed of his pickup. His and Myra’s two trailers sat on either side of a broad driveway, fronting a small thicket of trees nested deep by hills of rolling corn. Myra introduced herself, and he shook her hand with a big grin and eyeballed her breasts.

A day after moving in he tacked a confederate flag beside his front door, and after a week of waking early to his truck revving and revving, Myra gave up on sleeping as late as she used to. She slid from under her covers. When her feet touched the cold bathroom floor she tucked her hands under her arms, sat on the tub’s rim, and squeaked the hot water faucet. She was accustomed to men looking at her the way Booker had; she was twenty-five and waitressed at Hildebrand’s where Nancy, another server, had once told her, “Myra, you could land any man you wanted.”

But Myra had never wanted men, and since last year, when Tracy left, she hadn’t wanted many women either.

After breakfast the air hung blue and misty when she locked the trailer behind her. In Booker’s back yard his Lab pined at her over its shoulder. In the past week she’d once seen Booker out there threatening his dog with a stick, charging then hiding the stick behind his back and calling sweetly again. She smiled at the pooch and ducked into her Chevette.

She followed the line of telephone poles that ran with the road into town. As a kid she had often seen her father working the tops of poles like these. Standing way up there in the unfolded arm of his cherry picker, he’d salute her in his hard hat as she walked to school. Now she drove this route five days a week, past barns and silos and the tree-covered mountains she never tired of looking at. She pictured herself as an old woman still living in this valley in the middle of Pennsylvania. She climbed the mountains often, whether alone or with a girlfriend, and had found the hidden cliffs, ridges, and pockets, secrets between her and the landscape. The view of it had been what sold her on the trailer, besides her limited means.

When she moved in four years ago, the Levis, a retired couple, invited her to dinner in the other trailer. During the summer she helped with their yard work and sat outside with them, their two trailers quiet. They’d been good neighbors.

As she neared downtown, the scenery turned to brick row houses, sidewalks, and stoplights. She parked behind Hildebrand’s and walked in under the second story porch in the back. The hot kitchen smelled like hash and coffee.

“Happy Tuesday,” said Norma, the owner, as Myra tied on an apron. Norma had freckles and a hint of crow’s feet, and a red braid that swung between her shoulder blades when she walked. “That neighbor still waking you up early?”

“He says he revs the truck to warm it now that it’s getting chilly,” Myra said. She breathed in the steam and warmth from the stove, and watched Norma crouch in front of the counter until she was eye-level with a dish, adjusting the garnishes until it looked just so.

“Baloney,” Norma said. “He likes to hear that engine roar.”

Myra checked her apron pockets for her pen and pad. Though she mostly waited tables, Norma talked to her over many lunches about refining recipes and developing new ones, and Myra helped cook sometimes now too. Not long after meeting Norma, her enthusiasm catching and charming, Myra brought garlic and olive oil home to her trailer and tried things she’d never made before. She moved on from the canned soups and boxed macaroni she’d habitually made for dinner, staples from when she lived alone with her father, growing up.

Myra pushed open the wobbly door from the kitchen and went out serving her breakfast patrons a wide and trusting smile. They were all regulars, happy to be up, people she would see and say hi to when she went shopping. Dr. Kingsboro started his practice at eight sharp, and Gracie Stoltzfus opened the thrift across the street at eight-thirty. Myra laughed and traded news of the valley while bringing them their sausage and orange juice, and the morning was over before she bothered to look at her watch.

At lunch, tables and booths grew crowded. Guests barked over each other and forks clinked on plates. Myra sweated as she bustled with meals from the steaming kitchen and cleared piles of napkins and morsels left behind. Her neighbor walked in today, wearing coveralls, thumbs hooked in his pockets. He sat in a booth and looked around at the vintage advertisements and postcards on the walls. When Myra went to him he grinned.

“I’ll have a black coffee.” The skin on either side of his moustache crinkled. “And Myra’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks. My mother thought of it.” She gave him the imitation smile she gave all the men who looked long at her nametag. “I’ll have your coffee right out.” Mentioning her mother to him felt bitter, like the dregs he’d leave in his mug. Her mother had been dead since Myra was six, her father now single and full of stories. She put the coffee down in front of Booker.

He ordered a burger too, and took his time eating. When he finished, Myra found the tip wedged under his plate. She stood there and held the folded five in her hand. Fifty percent.

That night she stood at the counter dicing potatoes when she heard a knock at the door. She cracked it open partway, the chain still in place, and held the paring knife in her apron pocket. “Can I help you?”

“Howdy.” Booker had put a denim jacket on over his coveralls. His Lab sat on a leash beside him. “Thinking about taking my grill out this weekend, having a few beers. I thought since you’re alone out here you might want to come over awhile.”

She gave him the same waitress smile from before. “I can’t. I’m visiting my father this weekend.” That was a lie. She looked down. “Handsome dog you have.”

“Thanks. I keep her trained pretty good.” He ruffled the dog’s neck. It blinked at him, licked its lips. Myra still stood behind the chain. Booker said, “Feel free to stop over. There’ll be plenty of food on Saturday.” He turned and crunched across the gravel, unleashed his dog into his back yard.

Myra closed the door and slid the deadbolt into place. Leaving town for a day or two didn’t sound bad. If she called her father and asked if he’d like her over, of course he’d say yes.

Two days later in Hildebrand’s, after helping a pair of wrinkled women in hats, she turned and almost smacked into Booker’s chest. She had to look up at him, that grin growing repellent the closer it got. “Hi,” she said. “Just pick whichever seat you like. Nancy will be over to take your order in a second, okay?” She carried her load of dishes to the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind her. She stayed out of sight of the little window and waited for him to sit down or leave.

Norma looked over her shoulder from cooking. “You all right?”

Myra smiled her waitress smile. “Catching my breath a second,” she said. Booker left without ordering.

After work she drove home as the sun set behind the mountains. The slope of them on either side rose gentle but firm, cradling the valley. Their green turned to warm gold in the light. Soon she walked behind her trailer, through the thicket to the edge of the corn. The stalks were brown and would be harvested soon, but for now they stood shielding and tall. On summer days she would get lost in them, the green leaves brushing her arms until she found a hollow and shade to sit in.

She held herself in the wind and watched the shadows creep up the hill. The last tip of sun sank out of sight, and she was cold. She went inside and called her father, said she’d drive up on Saturday for lunch. He said her old room was always ready.

On Friday, after stopping at the supermarket, Myra saw Booker in his yard in a lawn chair, Bud in hand, wearing a white tank top and baseball cap. He faced her trailer like he was lounging at the beach, waiting for a wave to roll in.

“Afternoon,” he called, raising his beer can.

“Hello,” Myra said. She carried two paper bags of groceries, and felt him watching her backside as she turned and climbed the steps. Inside, she put the chicken in the freezer so it wouldn’t spoil on the road tomorrow. She made dinner standing by the sink, and kept glancing out the window above it to see if Booker had gone. After eating she packed clothes into a shoulder bag. Booker finally went inside when it got dark, and his windows glowed.

She shut the curtains and sat in the easy chair her father gave her when she moved into the trailer. The cushion had a hollow in it six inches deep now, and the snugness made her think of when she’d still been with Tracy. Of the comfort in a woman holding her, of curling against a smooth back before sleep. On the weekends, they had sat at a patio table in Myra’s back yard, thicket on three sides, trailer along the fourth. It gave her the feeling of safety she’d had in the clearings in the woods and on the slopes where she’d taken girls in community college. Back then she still lived with her father, and none of those girlfriends ever saw her house. Once, her father twisted his face at two women holding hands on the street, and she’d never forgotten it. After two years full of brief relationships, she finished her Associate’s in history and decided she needed space. With what she made in tips, the trailer was all she could afford.

Myra’s father waited on the porch where they’d read and talked and on warm nights listened to frogs and crickets when she was a girl. As always his gut stuck out, and she’d forgotten how gray his hair had gone. A grin cracked his face, and the boards creaked as he treaded down the stairs to meet her. He gave Myra a bear hug as she stepped from the Chevette. It was good to be in his arms. When he let go he left his big hands cupping her shoulders.

“It’s good to see you,” he said.

She walked to the house with him. “Want to see what I’ve been cooking?”

Her father sat at the table while she put together a chicken sandwich with sautéed mushrooms and peppers. He told her about preparing to retire from the phone company after thirty-three years. It was hard for her to picture him without his gloves and tools, the driveway next to the house empty of his cherry picker. She asked him what he would do.

“Bill next door’s getting a group together to fix old hiking trails,” he said. “It might take all next year. They say being outdoors helps you live longer, and now’s no time to stop.”

Myra tried never to spend a day all indoors either. She had hiked with her father a lot, and he’d even taken her shooting once or twice. “You should tell me when you start,” she said. “I could go along.”

“You bet.” He watched her cook, got quiet, and looked at his lap. “I was also thinking I’d get more involved at church. I always felt it’d be right to give a bit more.”

She thought of the chair back at her place, the silverware set, and other furnishings he’d bought for her when she paid for the trailer. For most of her childhood she’d gone with him to the Baptist church three blocks down, though when high school and weekend homework rolled around, she stayed home. On the Sundays when she was free she slept late. Readings like Paul’s letter to the Romans talked about women lusting for women, and she felt like whoever read them looked straight at her, small in the pew, even though she hadn’t told anyone she liked girls. On the way out of worship it unnerved her to shake the pastor’s hand and see him smile back when maybe he wouldn’t if he knew the truth.

“How about you? Anything new and exciting?” her father asked.

She put the finished sandwich in front of him, open faced with the bread toasted and every layer visible, a pickle wedge by the side. “Still talking to Norma. She’s sharing tips and tricks.”

Her father started eating, and she sat down with half a sandwich herself. He frowned and nodded at the taste as he chewed. “You thinking about doing something with this?”

“There isn’t a culinary school around.”

“You could make more as a chef than a waitress.”

“I know.”

He took a pause and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “And no one’s holding you back?”

She looked at her food, then picked it up and bit in. Her father had met Tracy once or twice when they’d been together, had seen the picture of her next to Myra’s bed, framed, the picture that was gone now. He must have figured out she loved Tracy, though she never told him the whole story. How New Hampshire was where Tracy always wanted to be. When they first met at the one local gay club she’d told Myra over a beer that she was saving money to go north, leave Pennsylvania behind. And if people here ever closed in on her, she’d be gone, money or not. Body toned taut and carried in combat boots, Tracy needed to be visible.

Myra looked up at her father eating his chicken. She’d never had a heart to heart with him about loving women, and supposed she might never do so. She had accepted that between them there would long lie certain silences.

The next day Myra smelled bacon and buttered toast when she sat up in bed. The sun broke through the curtains. Her father had been to church and back by now, and she pictured him closing the front door as he left, gently so as not to wake her. When they’d lived together she was always excited for her father’s cooking on Sundays, the one day of the week he took his time and made the food his own. Afterward they used to walk to the river.

He never spoke to her the way the pastor preached, as if she’d wasted her chance at heaven. Myra doubted her father could imagine that for her. She’d wavered for a while about believing in heaven, but there’d been times, when she sat outdoors alone or with a girlfriend, that had forced her to reconsider. Once she’d sat with Tracy in a pair of folding chairs in her yard, and next to a table torch they talked long into the night, moving inside only when they realized how late it got. Hours when she was happy enough to forget her yard was a hiding place, hours when she was simply Myra.

After dressing she headed downstairs and in the kitchen found her father reading the Sunday edition. He smiled big when he saw her and folded the newspaper up. “Let me get you something,” he said. She sat at the table. He brought her a plate of breakfast just as always. She ate, looked at his eyes, shared the silence with him. “Can we go for a walk?” she finally said.

They finished eating and put on jackets and followed the sidewalk to the river bank. She told him about her neighbor. His lonely dog, his noisy truck.

“He seem nice?” her father asked. He watched her as they walked, and she wondered how much to tell him. “Everything okay?”

“He’s just not like the Levis is all.”

“You give me a call if he bothers you.” He put his hand on her shoulder, close to her neck. “I mean it. You don’t have to be by yourself all the time.” She looked up at him and touched his cheek with the back of her hand and smiled. She didn’t tell him how alone she often felt.

That afternoon, she put her travel bag in the back seat of her Chevette. Her father stood next to her. She shut the rear door and turned to him. Gave him one more hug.

“Take care of yourself, Myra.”

“You too.” She let go and got into the car, and they shared a wave.

Making to turn off the road in front of her trailer, she saw a red compact sitting where she usually parked the Chevette. She left her car on the shoulder. Brown bottles lay strewn about in Booker’s yard, and a black barbeque stood next to some plastic chairs and a cooler. She opened her door and Booker’s back gate squeaked. Over her shoulder she saw a short blonde with a mop of bobbing curls, cigarette pack in her hand. The woman walked sideways between the vehicles and got into the compact.

Good, Myra thought. She closed the door behind her and put her bag in the bedroom. She heard Booker’s gate whine again and touched the curtains open a sliver. Booker was out in his yard in just cutoff jeans, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His pale belly hung over his belt as he bent over and plucked the bottles one by one from the grass. He dropped them clattering into his trash can and banged down the lid. The Lab bounded out of its doghouse, but he swung his hand at it and said, “Back.” He went in, leaving the dog in the yard.

Myra put some veggies on to steam, and sat in her easy chair holding her arms, watching the news while she waited. When Tracy had stayed over, Myra felt the peace of waking to hear someone in the shower, the security in knowing the trailer wasn’t empty. She’d had that as a girl sharing the house with her father. Though right after her mother died, Myra would find him sitting alone in dark rooms, sometimes with his head in his hands, and he would squeeze her tight. She wondered if he still got that lonely, and tucked her legs under her in the chair, curling close.

That Friday, after work, Myra put on heels, a halter, and earrings. She let her hair down. She hadn’t been out to the bar in months, and hadn’t dated at all in the year since the night Tracy came home bruised and almost in tears, talking only of leaving town the next day. Myra held her until she fell asleep, and then sat outside in the moonlight. She had put down roots here, and Tracy hadn’t.

The sky got dark early, the night clear as Myra’s car passed through acres of farms, the stars so close like she was out in the middle of them. She opened the window a little and let the cold whip in. Driving in the middle of nowhere could some days feel like freedom. Nothing but land and trees and dark houses where no one would ever know her name.

She crested the next hill, and there stood the sign. Purple and blue neon, a lone building at the intersection, the traffic light yellow and blinking. Inside the club only the bar was lit. There were tables, dancing poles, and a jukebox. Myra slid onto a stool, and ordered a beer from a spiky-haired man in mascara and hoop earrings. She looked around. Lots of couples tonight, mostly men, and some older pairs of women in sweatshirts. A woman closer to Myra’s age with an afro and high-heeled boots massaged a pole with her hips while a girl in a leather jacket waited her turn. Men sat around the tables, some young enough to be teenagers, some older than her father.

The barman handed Myra her beer, and she took a cold swallow. She noticed a trim blonde wearing thick glasses, sitting alone with a red laptop. Brown leather boots poked from under her long skirt. Myra watched her, then walked to her table, carrying the beer.

“Like some company?”

She looked Myra up and down. “I’d love it.”

Myra sat and introduced herself. The woman said, “My name’s Carolyn.”

“You writing something?”

“Senior presentation. I’m at Shippensburg.” She stopped herself and smiled. Shut her laptop. “Get this. You hear about that homophobe governor who came out?”

“Which one?”

“Exactly.”

They laughed. Talked politics awhile and then went to a cozy corner. It brought Myra back to the days she first found the bar after moving out of her father’s house. More than once she’d wound up outside in a woman’s back seat. After she met Tracy, the swing life lost its appeal. But she’d always been attracted to intelligence, and the thought of this pretty woman giving a talk on some academic topic or other was alluring. She was on the verge of making an offer, it had been so long since she’d been with anyone.

They shared a lingering moment.

“What are you thinking?” Carolyn said.

Myra glanced at their empty glasses. “Trying not to.”

“Interested in going outside?”

She smiled. “I live nearby.” They got up.

Carolyn followed Myra’s Chevette in her Civic. On the drive home Myra felt five years younger, at college and taking a girl to the woods. By the trailers, Carolyn left her Civic parked on the roadside. Faded stickers covered the back bumper, like “if you didn’t vote, don’t complain” and “gay marriage won’t affect your straight divorce.”

As the women walked down the driveway, Carolyn stopped. “Damn.”

She was looking at Booker’s confederate flag.

Myra grimaced. “Sorry, I should have warned you.”

They went inside and sat with each other in the bedroom and kissed, a long one Myra held. They lay down and touched each other’s hips, and Myra let the moment carry her where it chose. Their legs laced together, and she imagined the hills and mountains outside rolling hers and Carolyn’s bodies into one anther.

Half past midnight they put on clothes, smiling when they glanced up and reaching to fix each other’s hair. They traded numbers. Myra went with Carolyn to the door, took her hand and in gratitude kissed her again, watched her walk to the shoulder. When Myra went back to bed she held a pillow to her chest, the blankets warm as she waited for sleep.

Monday morning the first frost of the year tingled white in the sun and mist. The squeak of Myra’s screen door echoed off the trees. The air stung her nose, sunlit clouds of her breath rising, the gravel slippery. Usually Booker’s truck was gone by this time of day, and Myra stared at it. She’d heard the echo of a gunshot while eating breakfast and now made the connection.

A bark behind Myra made her jolt. She turned expecting the dog to be on her heels, but it stood behind Booker’s fence, eyeing her through the slats. She hesitated, then started back up the driveway toward it. It watched her and wagged its tail, tags jingling. Myra stood at the fence, its rim to her waist. The dog whined. She reached down and ruffled the stiff fur on its neck, cold and wet from sleeping outdoors. A silver water bowl sat empty in a corner. She wished she could help the animal get warm, though she’d be late if she didn’t leave now.

“Finally decide to come over, then?”

Myra spun and saw Booker standing in front of the thicket, a shotgun crooked under one arm, a lot like the gun her father taught her to use. Booker’s other hand held a brown rabbit hanging by the feet, a neon cap above his eyes blazing orange in the sun.

“She looked cold,” Myra said. “I was seeing if I could help.”

He walked up to her. “Why don’t you run along?”

He stood there until she moved away from his yard, watched her step back to her half of the driveway. Before going to his door, he spit once on the ground. He left the water bowl empty. Myra got into her Chevette, cleared the windshield frost with her wipers, and drove.

The frozen ground was steaming. The wood of the telephone poles looked like masts of old ships rising out of the fog, the sun glowing yellow as the wires rose and fell outside her window.

She got to work late. Norma was waiting on customers but said nothing about it, so Myra walked past her and took orders. Four years now she’d worked for Norma, but she was young. The arc of her life was still climbing, and maybe one day Norma would help her open a place of her own. Back when Tracy had left, Myra had told herself she ought to sell her trailer and leave Hildebrand’s behind, but in the end she never called the newspaper up to place an ad in the classifieds, and never wrote the “home for sale” sign to put inside her window. The valley hadn’t loosed its hold.

With her mail the next day Myra found a sheet of paper, handwritten in blue. It said DYKE. She imagined Booker peering from inside his window now that it was cold, as she and Carloyn walked up to her trailer. Maybe he’d wandered out for a smoke, read Carolyn’s bumper stickers. Smiled to himself as he finally got it.

Outside, Booker’s driveway sat empty. The confederate flag’s corner curled up in the wind, faded red and coming unstrung. She wrinkled the paper in her hand and considered calling her father. Somehow she could see Booker facing him down, demanding evidence of guilt, thinking up more potshots for when her father left.

Still holding the sheet, Myra opened the door and stepped down. It clapped behind her, and she walked around her trailer to the trees, meaning to throw the paper away. It felt like a dead animal in her hand. She blocked branches from her face with an arm until she stood where the corn used to be. Prickles of sharp tan broken stalk ran downhill, splinters shifting in the breeze. The harvest had skinned the landscape. Myra could see clear to the bottom of the rise, where the field crept into the darkness cast by the mountains.

Tracy and Carolyn had refused to hide.

She walked back to Booker’s trailer, climbed the stairs, and rapped on his door. It stayed shut. The peeling doghouse stood vacant in his yard. After a minute she stepped to the gravel and looked out at the street, hoping he’d pull in right then so she could hold the note at his face, ask him if she should wear it as a nametag. Or tack it above her door. She kept the crumpled paper and sat on her steps waiting, watching the shadows of their trailers lengthen in the sun.

James Dunham’s fiction has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Glossolalia, and Plain China. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University. He acknowledges the contributions of many a friend and mentor throughout the writing of "Two Trailers."

Security Breach

Wednesday, March 20

54 Cedar Lane, Teaneck, NJ

6:30 p.m.

I don’t know where Teaneck is, but John drives me here twice a week. Doctor Berger’s house is on the residential side of a park, opposite the stretch of strip malls with glatt kosher delis. It’s cold today, even for March in New Jersey. Doctor Berger places the space heater close to the couch and pointed toward me in her basement office.

I can talk to Dr. Berger. The crisis counselor at the hospital made me nervous. Her name was Claudia, and she was on call that Friday morning. She was sent to my room, the one closest to the secured doors of the maternity ward. She looked fresh out of school and scared to sit by my bed. She tapped her pad with her pen instead of taking notes. New babies cried further down the hall, but Claudia never shut the door to my room.

Claudia didn’t know what to say. She hesitated even when asking easy things like my name. She never said the words stillbirth or baby, but we both knew that’s why we were there. I had arrived to the hospital in labor, and waddled into the emergency room like I was about to claim a lottery prize. Instead, I got Claudia in my room. My baby Liam died before I delivered him.

“The way she looked at me, like I was a monster,” I tell Dr. Berger again. “She didn’t want to be in the room with the woman whose baby was in the morgue.”

“Did she ever say anything to indicate that?”

“She didn’t have to. I saw it. I didn’t want to be there either.”

I couldn’t tell Claudia about the Rubic’s cube. Today is my fourth session with Dr. Berger, but I told her about it at our first meeting. I watched her record my words. Doctor Berger is a professional and can do something with my words. She doesn’t take notes as I tell her again today.

“My cousin gave me a Rubic’s cube when I was twelve years old because it was a good gift for smart kids.” I look at Dr. Berger. She nods at me to continue.

“I was smart but couldn’t solve the cube. I’d get the red, white and green sides, but the blue, orange and red would be mixed up, and I couldn’t solve those without messing up the sides that were already solid. There was this book called “Conquer the Cube in 45 Seconds”, and the guy who wrote it held the record for solving it in 20 seconds. He said anyone could learn to solve the cube in under five minutes. I believed it. I followed the diagrams, step-by-step, but I couldn’t get it. I spent that whole year turning a cube and feeling stupid.”

“Your expectations of yourself at that age seem unforgiving.”

Doctor Berger has pointed this out in past sessions. I look at the framed diploma on the wall behind her, still askew. It’s embarrassing to retell how I took the cube apart and reassembled it so it was solid on all sides. It remained solved and untouched on a bookshelf until I tossed it out during a summer visit home from college.

“Did you feel satisfied when you looked at the solved cube?”

“Yes, but that’s not how I feel today.”

“Go on.”

“I feel the same as when I was in the hospital. There’s something wrong with my mind. It’s scrambled, the core is off track like it got pounded by a brick. There’s cubelets missing. The ones that are still attached don’t turn smoothly. No, they just don’t turn at all. Here, right here.” I tap above my eyebrows with the fingertips of both hands. “My head. It feels like that, like someone kicked me right here.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “Right here. It’s broken.”

“This is not unusual,” Dr. Berger reassures.

I ask her again if I’m losing my mind. John brings me tea in bed many mornings, and I think how nice he is but don’t recognize him as my husband. I don’t leave home alone. I forget where I am. It’s like I suddenly wake up, but I wasn’t sleeping.

I look at my cuticles, picked and gnawed raw. Doctor Berger hands me “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”. She asks me to look at the bold letters on page 463 again: 309.81, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

“You’re reacting to cues that remind you of the event or something that creates anxiety. At those moments, yes, you do lose touch with reality. Visualize the happy place in your mind. You can stay there until you feel safe.”

She forgets I’ve asked her to call it a safe space. Happy place sounds like a drug-induced fantasy where trees turn to lollipops. It makes me feel defeated and pathetic. She asks how I feel about my trip to Puerto Rico. I’m leaving in the morning to spend ten days with my family. I’m afraid to interrupt my treatment, but I can’t stay in New Jersey.

“Can I call you, please, if it’s necessary?” I ask.

“Of course. Remember what we’ve been working on: recognize the signals. Breathe before you react. Think of the happy place. You’re safe now, Nancy. You’re not in the hospital.”

Doctor Berger reminds me to be patient. It’s only been six weeks since I left the hospital. I don’t know if six weeks is just yesterday or another lifetime. Our session is up after 45 minutes, and she walks me to the door. I see my truck at the curb with John waiting in the driver’s seat.

“I’ll see you in two weeks,” she says. “Have a safe and restful trip.”

***

Thursday, March 21

5 Liberty Avenue, Jersey City, NJ

5:47 a.m.

Everyone says going away to Puerto Rico will be good for me. I will surrender to the intensive care of the Marreros, my family, for ten days. I might rest. John and I have not slept since I was released from University Medical Center. No one warned us empty cribs keep you awake at night. John is afraid I’m not resting enough. He watches me as I keep my eyes closed and pretend. Hours pass every night, both of us suspended in silent darkness. We’re raw, edgy, and confined to our condo by this bitter winter.

John returned to work two weeks after my release. I still have six weeks of what was originally supposed to be maternity leave. I don’t think it’s good to be by myself. I got lost in our building. Right in our building. The hallways didn’t look familiar. The man who owns Freddy, the grey schnauzer, found me on the second floor and accompanied me back to the fourth. I didn’t recognize him but I recognized Freddy, and felt I could trust someone with such a nice dog.

I need to get away from the highway overpass being built yards from our windows. The traffic improvement project began before I was even pregnant. It continues every day, day and night, through this snowless winter. The construction crew started up again about 30 minutes ago. The pile drivers thud and unsettle the inside of my head. I squeeze my head between my hands and pace our bedroom, but I still hear the pounding. I want to tear at my skin with each pound. Some days I feel the bathroom tile tremble beneath my feet. That’s why I had called my Aunt Cruza in Puerto Rico. I needed to tell somebody to take me away.

“Mi amor, what do you need? I’ll come to you. I’ll book a flight right now,” she had said.

“No. Please. I need to be with you. I need you.”

I begged her repeatedly until I wasn’t sure if I meant Cruza, all the Marreros or someone else entirely. John and my family made the arrangements. Electronic communications between New Jersey and the island must have crashed networks worldwide. I had an itinerary within 36 hours: Nancy Marrero-Twomey; one adult passenger; Continental Airlines flight 527; departs Thursday, March 21 at 11:57 a.m.; non-stop to Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport.

***

8:07 a.m.

I shouldn’t have believed Slim Cognito’s promises. The body shaping undergarment looks like a pair of black cycling shorts for a circus monkey. The packaging claims the super-duper body shaper is a luxe wardrobe solution, ideal for every occasion when you want to wow. I write marketing copy for a living, and know bullshit when I read it. My family won’t be wowed when I land in Puerto Rico in a few hours. Things might get ugly when I bloat in the plane’s pressurized cabin, and compromise Slim Cognito’s compression technology. I gyrate and try to pull the elastic fabric to below my breasts. I’m sweating from the effort.

“Need help?”

I don’t hear John enter our bedroom and he startles me. The waistband slips from my grip and snaps my lower belly.

“I’m not sure you can.” I grab the fabric in my fists again, determined.

The mirror reflects John standing behind me. He keeps his distance, confused by my hopping, the Slim Cognito, or both.

“It’s called a body shaper. It’s fat-girl underwear to make me look smooth.”

“You’re not fat.”

“I look like I’m still pregnant.”

“It’s only been six weeks, Nan.”

“I’ll die if anyone asks if I’m pregnant.”

John pauses, as he does before he questions a volatile witness. “Do you think anyone would?”

“I don’t want to find out. People say stupid things.”

“They mean well.”

“Whatever they mean, it makes me feel like shit. I wish they’d shut up.”

Our eyes meet in the mirror. I look at myself to break our gaze. I’m a wreck. My breasts hang like empty sock-puppets against my stomach. At another time, I would have looked at John in invitation to reach from behind. Any touch reminds me that I’m not looking good, but I’ve been able to hide under winter layers.

It’s eighty-two degrees in Puerto Rico. I’ll be there in less than seven hours, in shorts and a tee shirt. The last time I dressed so lightly was September. I was pregnant. John and I hadn’t told anyone we were still trying to conceive. We wouldn’t need to deliver bad news again to family and friends if no one knew. But this pregnancy was different. I made it past the first trimester.

See ya, I thought when I exited the waiting room of the fertility clinic for the last time. Let other women sit in that limbo. My nipples were as prominent as my belly button in the thin tee shirts I wore past Labor Day.

That was September. I still carry a belly that makes me look pregnant. It rests on my lap when I sit. There’s no baby in that space. Our baby died in my body. At thirty-nine weeks of pregnancy.

I had looked perfect. I held my belly like a jewel set between my hands. Our baby was perfect. John and I kept the ultrasound images tucked into the mirror. I could see right into him, his vertebrae a string of impossibly miniature pearls against the dark backdrop of my womb. I stored those images in the box with the sympathy cards, in what was to be Liam’s room.

I look at me and John in the mirror this morning.

What a pair.

“Could you give these things a hike in the back as I pull up the front?” I ask him.

“Uh, okay.”

John steps forward, the master of unsexy tasks for the past six weeks: stuffing ice packs into my sports bra to numb my engorged post-partum breasts. Rinsing my vaginal stitches. Carrying the life-preserver orange circle cushion, the only thing that makes sitting tolerable.

“Damn, these things are tight. How do you breathe?”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to.” I wiggle my hips and hop. “I just need one last tug. Pull like you’re giving me the mother of all wedgies.”

“It doesn’t have to be that much.”

“Yes it does. Now get ready. On three.” I hold the front of the waistband in my fists. John grabs the back and leans over me. Our eyes meet in the mirror. He gives a small nod.

“Okay,” I say. “One. Two. Three.”

We hoist simultaneously with a force that almost sends me into the mirror.

***

8:42 a.m.

My carry-on and toiletries are the last things to pack this morning. The medicine cabinet is overwhelming. Do I need antibacterial bandages? There’s floss, a supply of contact lenses. Will I need extra pairs of contact lenses?

John enters the bathroom. Before I can ask him why I’m standing by the sink, he begins to put toiletries into clear Ziploc baggies.

“That’s my stuff, silly,” I say as he dries my toothbrush before bagging it.

“I’m helping you pack. You’re going away, Nan. Your flight’s this morning.”

“I remember.” I turn away. I can’t watch him packing my cosmetics like an aide.

A woman’s face looks at me from the mirror above the sink. Her forehead is aged. I recognize the Marrero crease between her eyebrows. Her nose, full cheeks, and unsmiling lips are familiar. I saw them on Liam’s face. Those features were beautiful on him.

I forget why John and I are in the bathroom.

***

Parking Lot C

Newark Liberty International Airport, NJ

10:32 a.m.

I agreed with John that leaving for the airport after 10 a.m. would leave time to catch my flight. It took 15 minutes just to get through the construction outside of our building. Take-off is in less than two hours. We’re still in the airport parking lot. The web sites for Newark Airport and Continental Airlines both strongly recommend checking-in two hours before domestic flights. We should have left earlier. We’d already be inside the terminal. I might already be sitting at the gate with a coffee.

John takes my wheeled carry-on from the back of our truck. He rests one hand on the rear gate and pats his coat with the other.

“Yes, the keys are in your pocket. Hurry up,” I want to yell, but it’s too cold to uncover my face. My hat and hood muffle the slam of the truck’s rear gate. John reaches out his hand to me. I hold his arm like an anxious elderly aunt. I watch my feet and the ground. Pebbles of Ice Melt crunch under our treads.

The flat landscape of the parking lot is alien. I see three men in the distance. They’re sexless in thick coveralls, insulated from the 18 degree temperature. They push Ice Melt spreaders around the lot. I’m afraid they’ll spatter me. John guides me past the parking lot barricades, assures me it’s okay to cross the three car lanes, and we continue into Terminal C.

The terminal lower levels are dim. The escalators are slow and catch as we ascend. I remind John to stand on the right side of the escalator so others can pass. I don’t laugh at his comment that I’m usually one of those left-side sprinters.

“It’s a joke, Nan. It’s good you’re standing still.”

The concourse level opens around us at the top of the third escalator. Light comes through the walls of windows and the ceiling soars three levels above us. The sounds of wheels, on luggage and clinking carts, slip inside my hood and into my ears. I hear beeps, pages and soft-toned announcements. There are monitors and directional signs to show where you are and where you need to go. I see an airline employee, a young man, smiling and chit-chatting with the woman in the wheelchair he pushes. She’s white, very heavy, spilling over the edges of the seat, and holding a tote on her lap. She’s smiling, too. She looks nothing like me. I had been giggly with anticipation when the young Filipino man wheeled me to the maternity and delivery ward. I put my mitten over the scarf covering my mouth.

“Are you okay?” John asks. “Are you going to be sick?”

I shake my head. Port Authority officers walk through the terminal, carrying semiautomatic weapons. The back of my throat tastes sour. I hope silently that they won’t notice me, just continue walking.

There is no safe place for terrible mothers. Only a monster leaves her baby in the ground on a February morning. Officers on motorcycles escorted us to Holy Name Cemetery that day. They held traffic at intersections. The morning was flash-explosion bright. I saw the cops’ faces through my reflection in the limo window. One looked so young, his boy face red from the cold. The windows were tinted, but he knew I was in there. Baby killer, I read on his face. Only monsters give birth to dead babies.

“This is too much.”

John lowers my hand and scarf from my mouth, pulls back my hood, and takes off my hat. I’m puffy as a marshmallow in my coat, like a theme-park character without the oversized head. “There. Maybe now I can hear you.”

“It’s almost eleven o’clock. I can’t miss my plane.”

“It’s only 10:40,” John begins, but I’m already approaching the Continental Airlines kiosk.

The screen blinks. “Please wait as your boarding pass is printed”. I pull at the pass as soon as an edge appears.

“Okay, check the departures,” I announce and walk to my right.

“Nan, this way.”

“I know!” I turn to the left.

“Departs to San Juan, 11:57 a.m. Status is on time. I need to be at Gate 36.”

“Did you want to get a coffee?”

I inhale, and look over my shoulder.

“There’s no time now, John. Please. I need to go through security to get to my gate.”

There is only one ticket agent checking boarding passes and IDs by the sign that reads “Only ticketed passengers allowed beyond this point.” The line of travelers snakes around repeatedly. John and I stand four deep from the entry. I sweat like I’m already in the tropics.

“I told you we should have left earlier. There’s not enough time.”

“You have plenty of time.”

“No, I don’t. Can’t you see?”

John pauses before he answers. “Don’t start.”

“What? Don’t start what?”

John glances around, then looks at me with his swollen eyes. They’re just like Liam’s. “Get in line if you’re worried about time.”

I step into line before an approaching clump of women. John and I stand behind four spring break types, female undergrads in Montclair State University sweatshirts and shorts with “Juicy” and “Pink” printed across their butts. The group immediately behind us doesn’t sound like they’re from the Northeast. They are excited about their first trip to “Perderico.”

“It could become the fifty-second state,” one of the women announces.

John looks distant, standing right next to me and holding my luggage. We’re silent, just as we were on the drive to the airport. That’s the thing about losing a child: There are no words. I get angry when John speaks about Liam’s death. I talk about “being in the hospital.” It makes other people less uncomfortable. No one has to say, “When Liam died.” Those words don’t make sense.

The line barely moves. A man to my left talks on his cell phone to his administrative assistant. He guides her step-by-step through his computer’s directories and folders to find his urgent presentation. I want to tear out of my skin.

“Aren’t you hot?” John asks.

“No,” I answer, shivering. “How can they only have one person up there? How can they not be prepared?”

“They’re professionals. They can handle it, I’m sure.”

It’s ridiculous. The agent greets each passenger individually. She looks at the face, the boarding pass, the ID, then the face again. I can’t believe she’s allowed to waste time like this. She should concentrate on her job as intently as I’m staring at her. The sign states clearly everyone must be prepared for their turn with documents already in hand. If John wasn’t with me, I’d tap the shoulders of those undergrads ahead of me and tell them to be prepared.

John interrupts my thoughts. “Was that you as a kid?”

He points toward a boy, maybe middle-school-aged, standing ahead of us. A minor traveling alone, wearing a lanyard with an ID around his neck like I did every summer when I was growing up.

“Kind of. Except my parents would hover till the last minute when they had to hand me off to the stewardess. They would have escorted me onto the plane and buckled my seat belt if they could.”

John snorts. I’m almost forty years old, but my family will be waiting on the other side. They’ll stand right in front, where I can see them, like they’ve done since I was little Nancy. I envy that kid. He’s as casual as if he’s on line at McDonald’s, engrossed in his texting, and backpack straps hanging off his bent elbows. He looks Puerto Rican, honey colored and curly haired like me. I imagine there’s family on la isla preparing for his arrival, too: an uncle grumbling about traffic to the airport; an aunt preparing arroz con gandules frescos to keep warm on a stove top. I’ve joked with John that my childhood summer visits to the island were the family sponsored Fresh Air Fund, coordinated so little Nancy could escape the projects and inner city.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“You have time.”

“Could you just tell me what time it is?”

John looks at me. It is not gentle. His eyes are red. I don’t know when or if he’s slept.

“Never mind.”

“Good.”

“I just don’t want to miss my plane.”

“Nancy,” he says and takes his hand from his pocket. I barely feel his touch through the sleeve of my coat. “Believe me. I’ll get you on that plane.”

I don’t ask for the time again. I can see the watch of the woman to my left, a full line length ahead of us.

“Any big plans while the wife is gone?” I ask to make conversation and ignore that it’s past eleven o’clock.

John shrugs. “Just work.”

“Will it be busy?”

“Busy enough.”

“How’s the trial going?” I ask, though I know. John and his client were on the front page of The Hudson Journal just last week when the judge denied the multipersonality defense. The man faced capital punishment until it was repealed in New Jersey. Now he faces life. I know John will visit his client at the jail as he does twice every week. He’ll speak with his client’s doctors, make sure the man is taking his medications, and provide the only genuine interest the man gets. It’s typically the calm personality who’s present during John’s visits, but I worry. The man has a very violent side. I insist John call me at the end of every visit.

“The work just keeps going. You know how it is. It’ll be going for a while.”

Two additional employees join the original agent. The line stirs, and the momentum worries me, like a current might sweep my feet from under me. I remember the advice the guide gave me and John when we went white-water rafting a few years ago.

“Keep your feet up.”

“What was that?” John leans toward me.

“Nothing. I was just thinking of when we went rafting that time in Frenchtown.”

“That was a while ago.”

“Yeah.” I remind myself I’m not in a river. My feet won’t get caught in a tree limb nor my body weighted by my down coat.

“You’re almost up,” John says. “Got your¼”

“Yeah,” I answer, pulling my driver’s license from my wallet.

John looks at the photo on my license. “Your hair was so long.”

I don’t recognize the woman in the photo. Everything is different about her. The photo isn’t even two years old. I don’t answer John and don’t want to engage in small talk. We’re approaching the checkpoint, and one of those agents might decide I’m not the woman in the photo. I have to remain calm and focused.

The original agent is still all smiles. The male agent to her right squints at the snaking line, and the woman to her left is humorless.

“Excuse me. Excuse me,” says the male agent, too weakly to get anyone’s attention.

“Attention!” barks the humorless woman. “Everyone should have their boarding pass and ID in hand. Do not wait until it is your turn. Be. Ready. Now.”

I do not want to take my turn with that woman. I count the number of people ahead of me, but there is no way to predict which agent will check my ID. The woman whose wristwatch I’ve been watching gets through the male agent without incident. I look again at my license, then at John, who’s staring ahead.

The minor traveling alone is attended by the smiling woman. He waits to the side for another agent to accompany him through the metal detectors to the gate. I’m getting closer. My tee shirt sticks to my back. I don’t ask John how well-trained these front-line workers are in identifying unusual behavior. It’s better if one of us can remain calm and natural.

The undergrads each take their turn. I stand behind “Juicy”, and she gets waved forward by the male. The smiley woman is still wasting time grinning at everyone. I stand at the head of the line and hope she calls for me. The humorless one becomes free and stares right at me.

“Next!” she yells.

I wonder if I should let the women behind me, the ones who’ve never been to the future fifty-second state, go ahead.

“It’s you, Nan.”

“I know! Don’t rush me.” I try to act normal as I approach. John walks behind me with my wheeled carry-on. The agent’s name is on the ID on the lanyard around her neck: Lorraine. Her photo is dated but the penciled eyebrows and hard-set jaw are clearly hers. I can smell the cigarettes on her clothes. I hold the boarding pass over my license.

“I need your, oh, you have it already. Hmm. Nancy Marrero-Twomey.” She glances at the boarding pass, my license, me, the license again.

I’ll be taken out of line if she notes a discrepancy, escorted to a room and questioned. I don’t know why that woman in the photo is not me. John is an attorney, but he can’t defend me if he doesn’t know why I’m not that woman.

Lorraine hands everything back to me. “Okay. Will it just be you traveling today?”

I nod.

"Did anyone pack your bag or give you anything to carry?”

A lump lodges in my chest. It’s a trick question. I watched John bag my eyelash curler and eczema lotion this morning. Lorraine won’t believe I’m incapable of packing my own toothbrush. The woman in my license photo can pack her own bag, but I’m not her. I stand in front of Lorraine, with John by my side, afraid she will ask more questions.

Lorraine breathes out loudly through her nose and looks upward. "Did anyone…"

"Yo no se," I blurt.

Lorraine places both hands on the stand before her and leans toward me. "Excuse me?"

She could unravel everything, keep me from getting on the plane, keep me in New Jersey. I begin to pant, shallow, like a dog sensing thunder. Why did I let John pack my bags? He prepares his clients for questioning, why didn’t he prepare me? If I had more time, I’d know what to do.

"My wife has trouble with English," John lies.

"Well, does she understand the question? Can she answer?"

I know John can’t repeat any of this in Spanish. I grab his sleeve and say the few words I know he understands. "Si. Si entiendo."

"Okay, muy bien," he answers with the few words he knows and pats my hand.

"She understands. Yes, it’s her bag."

“That’s not what I asked. Does she understand the question?”

John steps forward. “She understands English. She doesn’t feel comfortable speaking it.”

I steady myself with John’s arm. My tee is sopped under my coat, and my tongue is stuck in my mouth. I pucker for saliva and repeat, “Si. Si entiendo.”

“Is she talking to me or to you?”

I am suffocating. My face quakes even though my molars clench the inside of my cheeks. “Por favor,” I plead. “John, me tengo que ir. I need to go. Por favor, Dios mio.”

“My wife is indicating yes, she understands. It’s her bag, which she packed. She’s very upset. She’s very afraid of flying.”

I squeeze John’s arm, and he keeps his hand on mine. The metal detectors are yards away, like time counters at the finish line of a race. Other people are getting through and continuing to Gate 36. I inhale audibly to expand my chest and fill my stomach, like Dr. Berger has taught me.

Lorraine doesn’t even look toward me. "Jesus Christ. Always on my line. She’s traveling alone, right?"

"Yes."

“Tell her she needs to get to Gate 36, straight ahead after the metal detectors.” Lorraine jerks her head as she gestures for the next people on line to hurry and approach.

John and I step aside. My heartbeats throb in my ears. My hands fumble as I unwind my scarf, slip off the ankle length coat with its hood and the zip-up wool sweater. I stuff the random small articles into the sleeves of my coat. John rubs my upper arm, cups my shoulder, and squeezes as gently as if it were my cheek.

“Ah, there you are. Tropical Nancy.” He leans in, and adds, “We know you’re not afraid to fly. Lovely Lorraine back there wouldn’t understand. I can tell these things about people.”

I nod to play along. I’ll be in Puerto Rico in less than four hours. A new woman. I collapse at the joints like a spring-loaded toy. Tears run down my cheeks before I can get a tissue. I’ve cried so much over the past six weeks, but these tears come fast. I tremble and look down at my exposed knees.

John places my coat on the ground, and gathers me to him. “Hey,” he repeats into my hair, my ear, my cheek and neck.

My nose swells and I clutch his coat. “I’m okay,” I say, muffled by the wool.

“This is good for you. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

“I love you,” I say and it makes me want to cry more, so I think about making it to my gate in time. The delays of going through the metal detector, of standing behind people who have to unlace shoes. I need to make one last trip to a normal-sized bathroom before boarding the plane.

“I love you too, Nan.”

I lift my chin and close my eyes. Even without sight, our lips find each other. I kiss him as if I’d not seen him for weeks. We look like lovers whose rendezvous is ending too soon: Me, the small brown woman returning to my island; John, the white man, staying behind. The image of us is more romantic than the truth. We are long-married. We lost our baby boy. This is breaking me. I am afraid.

I take the handle of my carry-on and pull it behind me as I walk past the rope barrier. I turn one last time to wave to John. He raises an arm in uncertain response. My quilted coat is draped over his other arm. The stuffed sleeves hang down stiffly. It looks like a small woman John has caught just as she fell back in a faint.

***

Wednesday, April 11

54 Cedar Lane, Teaneck, NJ

7:00 p.m.

It got warmer in New Jersey while I was away. I sit on Dr. Berger’s couch and tell her I don’t need the space heater. She comments on how tan I look. I wore as little as possible in Puerto Rico. I would have walked around naked to feel the sun on every inch of me.

“But I don’t think my family would have been into my being naked. They think I’m still little Nancy.”

“Is that how they view you?”

I say yes and laugh, realizing Dr. Berger doesn’t know the Marreros. Years pass so quickly on the mainland, but time is suspended on the island. The Marreros are always the first Puerto Ricans I see when I get off the plane. They must camp out at the airport the minute I book my flight. They were waiting right in front at the arrival gate, crying, and seeing them like that unhinged me. I stumbled and thought I’d have to crawl on the rough airport carpet to reach them, but my Uncle Pedro ran and caught me. I was nested in their arms, and we were all one shuddering, wet mess, but that’s what Puerto Ricans do at airports: We cry whether we’re arriving or departing. Me and my Marreros looked like a normal boricua reunion. My family drove me everywhere during those ten days and hovered over me like I was just learning to walk.

“Did you enjoy that?”

“It was nice to have everything taken care of,” I admit. “It’s okay when it’s temporary. I haven’t been little Nancy for a very, very long time.

We’re silent, but that’s okay with Dr. Berger.

“Doctor Berger, what I’m saying sounds crazy.”

“What does, exactly?”

I hesitate.

“It’s okay, Nancy. Just say it.”

“I sound like I’m talking about different Nancies. I feel like I’ve been away for longer than ten days. I recognize New Jersey. The diploma on your wall is always slightly crooked. Everything is familiar, but it doesn’t feel mine. This is the life of someone else. I recognize the lives of little Nancy and the old Nancy, but none of those are mine.”

“What experience is your own?” Dr. Berger asks.

“I’m not sure.”

“Let me ask another way. What Nancy are you now?”

I look at her in the arm chair across from me, legs crossed under her, and notepad on the side table. She waits. I know I can talk to her.

“I don’t know, Dr. Berger. I’m not any of those Nancies.”

“Are you a new Nancy?”

“No. New means never scrambled. The old experiences are too familiar. I’m different.”

“Can you describe how?”

“I tried to do things I used to do, but nothing feels the same. I started running again. I ran every day while I was in Puerto Rico.”

“It must have felt good to do something you enjoy.”

I tell Dr. Berger it wasn’t the same. I expected running to feel different after being pregnant for 39 weeks and delivering a baby, but my limbs were reluctant. Doctor Berger knows about the mind, but I’ve learned about the body. The body is not faithful; it can only be counted on for betrayal. All those tens of thousands of miles I’ve run over the years should have earned interest like a bank deposit. I felt ripped off as I lumbered and gasped around the track in Puerto Rico.

My Aunt Cruza went with me every morning. She’s the other runner in the family, the one who remembers my marathon finishing times. We would arrive at the track before sun rise but were never the first ones there. The temperature in San Juan hits eighty degrees before 8:00 a.m., so runners complete their daily miles predawn. We’d go round and around the track. I’d think about the years when I competed and my running was fluid. I had transcended the barrier between the mental and physical. I didn’t wear a watch when I trained or raced because I could feel my pace and knew I was running seven-minute miles.

It wasn’t anything like that in Puerto Rico. I felt like I was pushing through Jell-O. I did three frustrating miles in the dark every morning with Cruza. My breathing was too labored for chit-chat and Cruza is a silent runner. The white lane lines of the track were barely visible. The sound of other runners approaching and passing guided us.

Every morning, I wondered if I still had it in me to reach the post that marked the end of our last lap. We’d be on our final laps when the line of pink appeared above the treeline, grew wider and split the sky open like a papaya. The other early morning runners ahead of us became visible. Past races played in my mind, and I willed my legs to turn over faster. My arms pumped faster, hands open, as if there was a winner’s tape at the finish, and I anticipated the snap against my hips as I burst through. I ran like there was still a medal for me. I cursed God, my body, and my life as I grunted through those final early morning sprints. I ran as if I heard the crowds from past races instead of my lone aunt, calling after me and asking if I should be running so fast.

I’m breathless as I recall this and tell Dr. Berger. She asks if I completed the final laps, and I tell her I did. I reached that post every morning and slapped it, knowing I can never run fast or far enough.

Nancy Méndez-Booth was born and raised in Queens, New York. After receiving her BA from Amherst College, she relocated to New Jersey, where she received her MA and MFA from Rutgers. Nancy’s work has appeared in phat’titude, Jersey City magazine and The Packinghouse Review. She has been a featured blogger on mamapedia.com and also blogs at http://www.nancymendezbooth.com. Nancy teaches writing, Latina/o literature and cultural studies in the New York City area. She lives in Jersey City with her husband, John.

Igloo

My brother killed himself one Saturday morning, just to spite my mother. It was late May, the weather unusually hot. I was eight. My mother was having a yard sale to make extra money a week after our stepfather, Bill, left "for good," and she’d warned David that she’d sell his favorite video games, like Contra and Pac-Man, if he didn’t clean his room before Saturday. Her anger had been mounting for weeks, ever since David got kicked out of school. She had been surprisingly patient those first few days, smoothing his thick red hair and talking to therapists over the phone, asking frantically if they had a name for what was wrong with him. But when he kept acting out, randomly breaking dishes or toys, cursing at her and Bill, she tried being more strict. Suddenly, we both had a lot more rules.

After setting up the tables outside for the yard sale, Mom came in the house to monitor David’s progress on his room. She found him sitting Indian style on the floor, watching television while his Voltron pieces lay in separate pieces all around him. I bit my nails from the doorway. I had cleaned my own room the night before, then moved onto his, picking up dirty tissues and candy wrappers from around his bed, tucking stray clothes inside his drawers and closing them. When David found me, he grabbed me by the wrist and led me away. “I can help,” I said, but he shook his head and said lowly, “Get out, Shelley.” I always did what he said. David never hurt me because I knew when to back away.

Mom was clearly upset that he disregarded her warnings and waved her hands in front of her, saying “That is it!” She grabbed his video games from the bureau and stormed out of the room. David screamed and gripped her legs, and I followed behind, watching his body hit the cracks and corners of the old house every time she made a turn. When we got outside, David’s face was wet with tears, but it didn’t matter. Mom untangled his hands from around her ankles and headed for the front yard, where a few people picked up old records, vases, and crocheted baby clothes and set them down again. They looked up as we came out, first hearing David’s yell, then watching as Mom stepped quickly across the lawn, the video games under her arm. What got him the most upset, it seemed to me, was when she let out a hollow laugh and said her son was “a little eccentric.” The browsers chuckled nervously, giving us all sideways glances.

I felt David’s anger, and I almost knew what he was going to do before he did it. But I didn’t believe myself. I knew he wanted to avenge my mother, but he wasn’t sure how. He looked around with his large brown eyes, his cheeks flaming, teeth bared. His gaze stopped at me. He squinted, tilting his head a little to the side. I wouldn’t be much help in my flip-flops and terry-cloth jumpsuit. My mother heard his heavy breathing as he focused on the street, but she chose to ignore him.

I wonder how often she looks back on that day and thinks of what she could have done differently. She might still have taken the video games, but maybe she would have locked David in the house afterward. Or maybe she would have held him around the shoulders as she talked to approaching customers, the rattling gray cassettes safe in his room. She could have just smiled at him, told him it would be okay. Maybe something that small would have saved him.

Instead, he stepped quickly into the street where she always complained cars went too fast, right into an oncoming pick-up truck. At ten years old, he may not have known exactly what kind of damage it could do. The horrible, gnawing instinct in my gut, though, told me that he did.

In January, five months before David died, I walked out to the kitchen for breakfast and saw Mom and Bill—the man David and I secretly referred to as The Stepfather—standing in front of the counter in robes. They were laughing quietly, smoking cigarettes. Mom jolted when she saw me.

"Shelley. Hi."

I wore a Winnie the Pooh nightgown, and my legs grew suddenly cold. I didn’t know The Stepfather would be coming back. Not by the tone of their voices the last time he left, when my mother threw his clothes out to him on the lawn and he got in the car and started driving before his door was even shut. Because he had been yelling about another person from the front lawn, a "she" who he was going to "live with, rent free," who didn’t have “a crazy kid” and who gave him the "best head of his life."

"Well, say hello to your father."

When Mom married Bill and became Mrs. Middleson a couple of years ago, she said that we should start calling Bill “Dad.” Our real father left when David and I were really young, and whenever we asked about him, Mom said he was never going to come back, so there was no use talking about it. He had problems, she said. Serious problems. Sometimes I looked at myself in our bathroom mirror and wondered if I got my blue eyes from him. "Hello," I said to Bill, then turned back to her. "Can I have Apple Jacks?"

"How are you, Shelley?" The Stepfather asked. “I’ve missed you.” He walked over and put his arms around me, his brown mustache tickling my neck. I moved my hands quickly to his shoulders and back again so Mom couldn’t get mad at me for not giving him a hug, but she was too busy humming and reaching for my favorite blue bowl in the cabinet to notice.

"Do you want to watch cartoons while you eat?" she asked.

I nodded and smiled. This was unusual. Most days, she made me eat my cereal at the kitchen table, then dress before I could even consider turning on the television. She and Bill probably wanted to kiss in the kitchen some more.

"David!" She yelled happily as she set my cereal down on the coffee table atop a cotton checkered placemat. "Come down for breakfast. Wait until you see who’s here!"

I ate the orange and green circles in my bowl and watched the milk turn peach, knowing that when David came down and saw The Stepfather, he’d be upset. I didn’t understand how my mother could forget about the shouting at dinner or in the car, David always banging the TV while the Stepfather watched football, the pack of beer bottles David had taken from refrigerator and smashed on the cement driveway. Maybe my mother’s greatest flaw was her optimism.

My eyes were glued to the TV screen when I heard David shuffling down the stairs. By this time the Muppet Babies were planning an escape out of the playroom and into the den with the grownups. They were climbing on top of each other in order to turn the knob, just about to fall with a loud crash to the floor.

"David, honey," I heard my mother say. Even though he was what my family called “difficult,” I thought sometimes that she loved him more. She talked on the phone about him all the time, but never about me. When I asked her about it once, she told me that I was being silly, that we were both wonderful children and she loved us exactly the same. Then she looked off to the side and said softly, almost to herself, that David was just the person who had made her a mother.

The sunlight from the living room window formed a halo around her as she turned off the television and held out her hands to us. Her wavy blonde hair fell to her shoulders, and she pulled us toward her. David wriggled away and scrunched his nose. She sighed, trying not to look perturbed. "I have something special to tell the both of you." She looked at David, then me. The Stepfather lingered in the doorway to the kitchen, smoking his cigarette. "Bill is coming back to live with us. We’re going to be a family again!” David and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, and she pulled us to either side of her. “And there’s more. Bill got a new job. We’re moving to California!” She smiled, her cheeks a little too wide. “It’s so beautiful there. We’ll all be so happy!"

Now Bill moved like a shadow behind her and in the dimness, her cheeks became pale. My heart started to pound. She waited. “Don’t you guys have anything to say?"

I knew that California was where Michael Jackson lived, and maybe Cyndi Lauper, and most of the people we saw in movies. Still, I didn’t want to move. I liked our house, my school, the familiar state of Pennsylvania. I liked driving to my grandmother’s on Saturdays to see Aunt Clair, who made me chocolate milk and let me try on her make-up.

"What about school?" I asked, glancing over at David, whose lips were pushed so tightly together I could only see white skin.

"Well,” my mother said, sitting on the couch and tapping her knee for me to come over. “There are plenty of schools in California. And you won’t ever have to walk to the bus in the cold. It’s always warm."

"Now, Tina, that’s southern California you’re talking about and we’re not going that far south…closer to San Francisco,” Bill interjected, then paced until he found an ashtray for his cigarette in a corner cabinet.

"Well, still, the winters aren’t as cold as they are here, right?" She said, turning back to look at him.

I stared at her, too startled to know what to say. The creases around her mouth dampened as the moments passed.

"I don’t want to go,” David finally muttered, and moved away from us into the kitchen.

I didn’t like when my cereal got soggy, and I didn’t like how The Stepfather came over and started to rub Mom’s back, so I followed David. I put my cereal bowl in the sink and went upstairs to get dressed, wishing I could have seen the end of my cartoon.

From my bedroom door, I listened hard to see if they talked any more about moving. But the whole downstairs was completely quiet.

I didn’t know much about death until I found our cat, Ruby, cold and still next to her water bowl one morning before kindergarten. Her eyes were like blocks of ice as she stared at the floor. I screamed and Mom came and picked her up and started to cry into her fur. We wrapped Ruby in an old blanket and I held her in the back of the car as we drove to the veterinarian. Why did this happen? I asked. Where did she go?

That was when Mom told David and I about Heaven. It was where her father was, and a lot of other old people, and even dogs and cats.

“But what if you die?” I asked her, my voice small in the backseat.

“Don’t worry, Shelley. I won’t die for a really long time.”

“Well, I don’t ever want to die,” I whispered.

“How old?” David asked. Mom put on her turn signal and pulled into the veterinarian’s parking lot.

“What?” she said.

“How old do you have to be?” David repeated.

She turned to look at us. “Older than you can even imagine.”

The nights after Ruby’s death, I asked what Heaven looked like, and why our bodies had to stop working. Mom brushed the hair on my head with her fingernails and told me that even though Ruby was gone and we couldn’t see her, she was still around. Mom knew this because she felt her father with her all the time. “Where?” I had asked. “In my heart,” she answered, and said I should stop worrying and go to sleep. Nothing bad was going to happen.

David and I pretended to die for weeks afterward. We shot each other and fell to the ground, our legs splayed and our tongues hanging out of our mouths. Then we stood up, staggering from one end of the room to the other, haunting the furniture. By the time dinner came, though, we were always alive.

Even though I watched it happen—the truck hitting David, my mom’s shriek, the driver getting out and falling to the ground, David’s body twisted and motionless under the tires as someone grabbed me and covered my face—even then, it didn’t seem possible that a boy, my brother, could really die.

The night before David’s funeral, I lay under covers and listened to my grandmother’s cough downstairs and my aunt Clair murmuring on the phone every time it rang. I stared at the butterfly border in my room until David appeared.

It was all a mistake, he said, his voice like a whisper, his arms and legs hidden underneath a puffy white snowsuit. (Heaven was cold.)

He wouldn’t be able to go to school anymore, he explained, but he’d always be here, hanging out and watching my life like I was on TV.

That I can deal with, I said. Maybe you should tell Mom about this, because she’s been crying for days.

No, Shelley. He rubbed my back as I drifted into sleep. This is just between us.

The next morning, Aunt Clair helped me put on the dress she had bought me at the mall. She wanted me to wear stockings, but I shook my head emphatically. The humidity had made it hard to sleep at night, and there was no way I was going to wear any more layers than I had to. Clair had promised to stay with me while everyone went ahead so we could talk. She was dressed in black pants and a jacket, her forehead sprinkled with tiny beads of sweat. I noticed a small gold angel pinned to her jacket.

She held my dress open and told me to step in. As she pulled the sleeves up over my shoulders, I pointed and asked her, "What’s that?”

She looked down. "Oh.” She touched the pin. “I got this when I was a teenager. A friend bought it for me when my father died."

My grandfather, I almost said. “Sometimes I think that maybe my father died, too, and that’s why he never comes to see us.”

Aunt Clair froze for a moment before smoothing the sleeves of my dress.

"Can I touch it?" I asked and pointed to the pin.

She looked at me with a frown, rested on her knees, and began to unclasp it. She then clipped it to my collar, trying hard to smile. "There you go. You can have it. How about that?"

"Thanks!" I said, and strained the muscles in my eyes as I went to the bathroom, still trying to get a good look.

Later, in the car, I asked Aunt Clair if angels really existed.

"Sure, I guess. It depends on what you believe. But a lot of people believe in angels."

"Do you?"

Aunt Clair stared straight ahead before looking at me out of the corner of her eyes. She took a long time to answer.

"I don’t know."

"Then why were you wearing one on your shirt today?"

We stopped at a red light and she rubbed her forehead with her left hand, leaning her elbow into the window. The light turned green.

"I hope, Shelley. But sometimes I don’t know."

I had always thought of Aunt Clair as a happy person. She had a beauty about her, the way she walked with her toes pointed out, the way she laughed and her shoulders bunched up toward her cheeks. I still liked to step into her high-heels at my grandmother’s and walk around the dining room pretending to be her, my hips slow and graceful. Now, in the car, she seemed sad.

"Is it because of David?" I asked. I didn’t look at her as the words came out of my mouth. It was raining outside, and I watched the way the raindrops on my window slithered down like tiny crystal snakes.

Aunt Clair turned her neck to see if anyone was behind her, and then pulled the car over to the side of the road. She put her flashers on and stopped, looking at me only after she took a couple of deep breaths.

She finally spoke. "I really miss your brother, Shelley. I know you do, too. Are you doing okay?”

I thought for a moment, wondering if I should tell her how David came to my room the night before and made me feel like everything would be okay. Maybe she’d believe me. "I think so.”

Aunt Clair unhooked her seat belt and leaned over to unhook mine. Then she held me tightly, so tightly that my mouth was open against her polyester jacket, and I was sure I was drooling on it. She didn’t seem to mind. I felt her body shake and tiny sobs slip out of her throat. After a few minutes, she calmed down and let go. I watched as she wiped her eyes and talked into the steering wheel. "Shelley, this is going to be hard for you. It’s going to be hard for everybody, but it’s really going to be hard on you. You looked up to David.”

Of course I looked up to him, I thought. He was taller.

“Do you know what happens when a person dies?” she asked.

I nodded. When David came down, he told me Heaven was a large igloo in the sky. Everyone milled around with paper cups full of hot chocolate. He said he kind of liked it.

“He never comes back,” Claire said.

I opened my mouth, but couldn’t speak.

Clair swallowed. “No one can ever see him again, except in pictures. And memories.” By this time, her hand was on my shoulder, rubbing until I felt raw.

“But you live in people’s hearts,” I said, correcting her. “It’s just your body that’s gone.” I looked back at the windshield, at the glass-stemmed snakes floating toward the car’s hood. Aunt Clair was silent next to me, and I thought she might never understand. “Can we go?” I murmured. For the first time ever, I was tired of talking to her.

"Yes,” she whispered, and took her hand from my shoulder. I stared at the crystal snakes as they danced down the glass and melted against the windshield wipers. Clair put her blinker on, pulled the gearshift toward her, and drove back onto the road.

* * *

At the funeral home, a gray-haired man I’d never seen before was standing in a white robe at the front of the room. As people approached the casket, he took their hands and stared deeply into their eyes.

“Who is that?” I asked Aunt Clair and tugged on her hand.

She looked down at me and whispered, “That’s the priest. Father Martin.”

I had only gone to church a few times when I slept over my grandmother’s. I liked the pictures in the windows and the smell of burnt candles, but usually I was embarrassed that I didn’t know when to sit or stand, that I couldn’t get up with everyone else when it was time for communion. Once, I fell asleep. My grandmom stopped taking me, said that it was my mother’s job to give me “a spiritual life.” When I asked Mom to go to church, she told me she didn’t like that church very much and she was going to find a better one for us. She must have never stopped looking, because on Sunday mornings, we all just watched cartoons and ate donuts. Now, in front of the room, the priest looked like an intruder, and it bothered me when he started talking as though he knew David.

“Some children are not long for this earth,” Father Martin began, and Aunt Clair and I took our seats in the front row, next to Mom and Bill, who had flown back from California when he heard about David. I gazed around at all the people who dabbed their noses with tissues. As the priest spoke, I let my eyes drift to every corner of the room except the solid brown casket in front of me.

After Father Martin finished talking, I wandered into the foyer where there was a deep red rug with tiny flowers. When I thought no one was watching, I knelt down and counted them, knowing that this would be David’s favorite spot. He’d lie on his stomach and gaze at the patterns until Mom hissed at him to get up, that someone was going to trip over him.

I had never seen so many people that I didn’t know in one place, all of them crying.

Most of them stood in a line so they could kneel at the casket, then light a thin white candle. Old people I had never seen stood off to the side and shook their heads at how beautiful the flowers were. My mom stayed in the front row with a tissue in her hand, occasionally lowering her face and blowing her nose. When I returned to my seat, she squeezed me to her for a few minutes and kept her eyes closed. I thought she was pretending I was David. He and I used the same apple shampoo.

After a couple of hours, people filed out of the room until it was only our close family left: Mom, Bill, me, Aunt Clair and Grandmom. Mom leaned over and asked if I wanted to see David before we went to the cemetery. I could feel everyone looking at me as we walked up together. I was scared, but I watched and copied as she made a cross on her chest.

Looking at David up close, I could see that he was yellow and wooden in a navy jacket and tie, not in the white snowsuit I had expected. His hair was flat on his head instead of messy, his eyelids closed, like a doll’s. It was almost as if someone had come with a vacuum and sucked out all of his organs. He was there, but he wasn’t. I wanted him to act like he used to, to get mad and leap up, screaming that we should all stop staring.

He wouldn’t, though. He was dead.

For a moment, everything was quiet and cloudy, but then I heard Mom’s sobs and heaves and felt her being pulled away, falling onto Bill’s chest. Now she screamed and moaned like an animal, and it made my mouth fall apart so that I sounded like a monkey, too. I ran out of the room and spread myself on the rug and put my eyes close to the flowery print, hoping that if I looked hard enough and long enough, it would erase the picture of my brother flat in the casket, the sound of my mother’s scream.

***

Mom wouldn’t leave her bedroom. Aunt Clair slept every night on the couch, making me breakfast and lunch and filling up the tub for my baths. My grandmother, her gray hair in plastic curlers, came over every day to do laundry and eat dinner with us and take a bowl of soup to my mom. Sometimes I saw my grandmother wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, and other times Aunt Clair stared straight ahead and didn’t hear the phone ring or me asking her a question. They took me to the park a couple of times, but I just climbed the wooden steps in my flip-flops and loosely gripped the monkey bars. It didn’t seem right to have fun when your brother was dead.

I missed David, but I still talked to him in my bedroom at night when everything was dark. He always appeared in his snowsuit, blowing into a paper cup. Steam rose in the shape of an O.

I hate him, he said, referring to Bill, who had started to come over each day and spend long hours in Mom’s room. Why can’t he just go away and stop coming back?

Mom loves him, I heard myself whisper. Maybe he makes her feel better.

David shook his head. She has another kid, you know, and he nodded in my direction.

I stared back.

He’s not our real father, David said. She should stop pretending.

I shrugged. At least Bill comes back.

I’m going to find him, Shelley, David said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about Bill. He started to fade into nothingness again as I closed my eyes. Maybe that’s why I died.

* * *

My mom didn’t leave her room for days, but finally, on a Friday afternoon when Bill went to the store and Aunt Clair sat with me playing Legos, she appeared in the doorway to the living room and looked around nervously. Mom had put on jeans and her favorite t-shirt, but her body looked like a deflated balloon. Her hair seemed to have grown since I last saw her.

"What are you guys doing?" she asked softly and sat down on the couch. I wondered if she’d ever get her normal voice back, or if it was something that had left along with David.

"Playing Legos. I’m making a house and a garage," I told her. "Aunt Clair is making a barn." I paused and leaned back on my feet. "Do you want to help?"

Mom shook her head, her hair greasy as she tucked it behind her ear. "I think I’ll just watch you." She gazed at me from the couch, her eyes falling to the floor. When I got up and went over to give her a hug, she held me so tight I thought she might not let go. It felt like I might stop breathing, but that would be okay.

***

There was a reason we never went to California.

The day after my mother had made her big announcement to us in the living room, the sunlight streaming like tentacles around her, David’s school had called and said he was being “expelled.” He bit a girl on the shoulder and then tried to hurt his teacher when she pulled him away. Security had to come and keep him in the principal’s office. As the bus dropped me off and I saw her car in the driveway, I knew something was wrong. Usually the babysitter, Theresa, stayed with us after school, watching soap operas in her bare feet with an algebra book open on the coffee table.

The first person I saw was David, sitting on the loveseat with his head down and his hands tucked under his legs. He didn’t look up when I came in, although I knew he heard the door. His eyes seemed to be transfixed by a pull in the couch, cushiony white stuffing that bulged through beige corduroy. My mother was on the phone arguing with someone, yelling about "this condition" and "What am I supposed to do with him?"

I put my backpack down and sat on the couch next to David, tucking my hands under my legs, too. "What happened?" I asked.

He shook his head and kept looking down. “I was bad.”

We both listened to Mom on the phone telling the story, her voice growing squeaky and desperate.

Finally, after a few minutes of my staring at David and his staring at the couch cushion, Mom came out of the kitchen and looked at us.

"Listen, Shelley. I’m going to drop you off at Mary’s, and I have to take David somewhere."

"Where?"

"To a doctor. So you’re going to go to Mary’s, okay? She’s having spaghetti for dinner. I told her you love that." Mom knelt down in front of David and touched his knees. "David, we’re going to go talk to someone for a little while, okay? I think you’ll like him.” I was surprised by how nice she was being to him, treating him like a sick old person.

David looked up after a minute and nodded, then returned his gaze to the cushion.

"Come on, Shelley. Grab your backpack. Mary will help you with your homework."

She got up and led David toward the door. He kept his head still, his eyes sad as a dog’s.

That night I stayed with Mary Connors, our neighbor from a couple of houses over, until 10 o’clock. I watched TV with her kids, ate spaghetti, and helped put the dishes in the dishwasher. Mr. Connors even bought us milkshakes from the pizza parlor around the corner. By the time Mom came back to get me, I was sleeping on the couch in a pair of someone else’s pajamas. I was only half-conscious as she led me into the front seat of the car and took me home. The next morning, Mom didn’t get ready for work as usual, because she said she had to stay with David. It wasn’t until I saw Bill sitting on the couch, after school, smoking a cigarette and staring out of the window, that I remembered our big plans. He looked over at me, but slowly turned his head again. Mom came in from David’s bedroom and asked me if I wanted a snack.

"Are we still going to California?" I asked, looking at her, then at Bill.

"Come on, Shelley. Do you want some pretzels? Or crackers?" She waved me into the kitchen.

Later, I heard Mom and Bill shouting in the bedroom, Mom saying something about "stability" and Bill shouting back, "your promise." They fought every day until the night he stomped out the door, David and I listening on our hands and knees from the top of the stairs. I don’t know if Bill would have come back if not for David’s funeral.

***

Before David jumped in front of the truck, he looked at me. I thought it was an angry look at first, but now I think it was his way of saying goodbye. He wasn’t good at talking, at explaining why he got so angry all the time. Mom couldn’t figure out what it was that caused him to explode. Maybe he knew that day at the yard sale that nothing would ever change. Maybe he wanted to escape.

After school and during the summers, Mom often nagged David to play outside with the other kids his age, to start a game of kickball, to make friends. What she didn’t realize was I was his only friend in the whole world.

I talk to David each night before I go to bed. I tell him that Mom is doing better, that I even saw her laugh during a movie she was watching with Bill, that her giggle was like a burst of flowers in the house. I tell him that Aunt Clair and Grandmom left when Bill moved back, that I saw him hugging Grandmom in the kitchen and swaying back and forth with her, tears in his eyes.

You mean, you saw him cry? David asks.

Yes, I say, my eyes wide. It was weird.

I tell him that we’re planning to move to another house. A fresh start.

Hmm, he says, and listens. More than anything else, the white-snowsuit-David always listens.

* * *

"My mother says it’s a tragedy that your brother died and your father still didn’t come back." It is recess, September, about four months after David’s death. Even though Mom and Bill and I moved, I still go to the same school. Sometimes, I wish I could go somewhere else, a place where no one knows about my young dead brother. Now, Molly Leonard corners me by the fence, where I am tracing pictures in the dirt. She blows bubbles with her gum—which she isn’t supposed to have—and waits for a reaction.

I wish our playground had swings, or even a sliding board, but all kids do during recess is chase each other and stand in circles and ask stupid questions. "Well,” I say finally, my forefinger drawing tiny clouds in the dirt. “My father did come back. He bought us the new house we’re living in.”

"Oh.” She pauses. “But my mom said he lived far away.”

My heart stops for a second. And then I remember what David told me a few nights ago, that he flew around the country for days, looking to find where our biological father was. He even asked some old people while they were shoveling snow in heaven. Poof, they told David. Gone. Just like a magic trick. "Well, your mom is wrong,” I tell Molly.

Molly is quiet as she drags the side of her shoe against the dirt.

"My father drives me to school in his car every morning. And he helps my mom make dinner.” My finger traces another line in the dirt, a boy with spikes coming out of his back, like a dragon.

"That’s your stepfather, though. Not your real dad. Not the man who made you with your mom." She holds her palms up, her hip cocked to the side. “See?”

I shake my head and stand up to correct her. I begin to smooth over my picture with the toe of my shoe. "No. Bill is my dad. All your dad needs to do is love you to be a dad." Mrs. Cohen, my new third grade teacher, starts to ring the bell from the school steps, our sign that recess is over.

"Well, that can’t be. Cause how is he different from an uncle, then? Or a brother?"

The picture I made is gone, smoothed over like sand. Tomorrow, I’ll come to the same spot and make another one, like I do every day at recess. "Because an uncle has his own family he lives with. And a brother is someone your own age." I run to the school steps to get away from Molly, and I look up into the sky and roll my eyes.

Molly Leonard, I whisper.

Such a brat, David says.

I get in line behind Judith Paulson and in front of Gary Pullman, right where Peterson fits in, the name I share only with David.

Jana Llewellyn taught English and writing for over a decade. She is now Associate Editor at Friends Journal magazine. She lives in Havertown with her husband, son and daughter.

Red Eye

This is her second trip to Kiev, with its challenge of teaching computer programming through translators. She sits in seat 16G of the Boeing 767, the window, and pulls out a Jodi Picoult novel she picked up in the airport. Passengers file by and she gets her hopes up that the seat next to her might be empty, give her room to stretch out. But then a decent looking man, forty-fiveish, nods at her, puts his carry-on in the overhead and sits in 16F. She discreetly eyes his spread, as she calls it; she hates passengers who ooze onto her side of the arm rest. He is thinnish and self-contained. She is relieved.

Three hours into the red-eye, most of the cabin lights are out, passengers asleep. 16F reaches up to turn off his light, pulls the blanket up to his neck, leans his head back, closes his eyes. She has trouble sleeping on night flights and has developed a routine. She asks the flight attendant for some herbal tea, sips the tea to empty, quietly crushes the cup and slips it into the magazine sleeve. 16F is breathing deeply, slowly–how do people fall asleep so quickly? Now she places her two right fingers over the crease in her left wrist– the Spirit Gate of acupuncture, the path to sleep, according to one of her Chinese friends– and applies pressure.

About an hour later—it could have been longer, or shorter—she wakes up, feeling a weight on her left shoulder. It’s the head of 16F, sound asleep. She surveys the invisible vertical shield between their seats—yes, he is definitely on her side. She feels invaded, almost repulsed. Excuse me, she starts to say, and her shoulder tenses as if preparing to toss him off.

At thirty-six she has never had a man fall asleep with his head on her shoulder. She has never been touched before. Not like that. Not by a man. Or a woman. It’s not that she’s untouchable, no one specific thing has taken her out of contention. A bit stocky, though not a candidate for Weight Watchers, with a friendly smile that would benefit from braces. Unpocked skin discretely made up. She dresses decently, not the epitome of style, but thoughtfully and professionally. Plain, is what her mother had called her. Has a good job that takes her traveling. Is a voracious reader. Has friends, mostly women, all of whom she knows have slept with someone, will sleep with someone. Friends who never talk about their sex lives when she is around. She accepts her life without sex, you can’t always get what you want. People learn to live with the cards that are dealt them—limited intelligence, or a suicide in the family, or dreams after a war. Not that she feels like a survivor of something; she just knows that no one will want to sleep with her. Work, friends, books, travel: it could be worse. And it’s hard to miss what you have never had, so unknown.

His head seems so light. It reminds her of her one-year-old niece, who she baby-sits and rocks to sleep, head tucked in the nape of her neck. She prepares to reach over and tap him on his arm, excuse me, but you fell asleep. This man’s head on her shoulder, so light, breathing quietly in the dark cabin. Her breath falls in step with his. So. This is what it’s like. Not yet, no need to wake him, no hurry to do that. She closes her eyes and lets her head lay back on the seat, feels the lightness of his head. She has an urge to touch his face, just brush it with the back of her hand; but no. She closes her eyes, tries to sleep, but is unable to. Slowly, her head fills with images: of her hand going under his blanket, finding the V in his legs, un-zipping in the dark, his hand finding her. She holds her breath, trying to feel that, and realizes that this is beyond her imagination. But this head sinking into her shoulder now, this is real. She inhales, seeking an odor, something more of him. Yes, some kind of aftershave, maybe a little musk gathered since his shower this morning. She feels a slight dampness seeping through the upper sleeve of her blouse. So: sleeping men sometimes drool, like babies. She closes her eyes and sleeps. Every few minutes she awakes, the head still on her shoulder, the wonder of it; then falls back to sleep; then awakes. So light. The wonder of it.

Six a.m., the lights come on in the cabin, the captain announces they will be landing in forty-five minutes. 16F stirs, rubs his eyes, realizes he has been sleeping on her shoulder. I’m terribly sorry, he says, I hope I didn’t bother you, have I been on your shoulder a long time?

Not to worry, she says, not too long.

Did I snore?

No, no snoring.

Whew, he says, it could have been worse.

It was, she says.

How so?

You drooled.

Drooled? Oh no!

Just like a baby.

Like a baby? he says. He glances at her shoulder, takes a napkin and reaches over as if he is going to dry her sleeve. The flight attendant comes down the aisle, passing out hot towels and coffee. 16F holds the towel to his face, turns to her, I’m really sorry. She likes that his teeth are slightly crooked.

No, really, she says, it’s fine.

On the other side of the whirring carousel regurgitating luggage she sees him, waiting for his bags. He has collected one piece, there must be more. He picks up a small second bag, puts the strap over his shoulder. She wants him to look across the carousel, just nod. He looks at his watch, then turns and heads toward the ground transportation sign.

Her right hand reaches over and feels for the dampness on her sleeve.

Mark Lyons has lived in Philadelphia for the last forty years. His fiction has been published in numerous journals and was a part of the "Reading Aloud" series at Interact Theater. He also authored Espejos y Ventanas/Mirrors and Windows, Oral Histories Of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Familes. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and awarded Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in literature in 2003 and 2009. Currently, Mark is co-director of the Philadelphia Storytelling Project, which works in the immigrant community and with high school students to teach them to create digital stories about their lives.

When She Could Fly

A few months before she died, my grandmother taped a new picture to the bedroom wall of our beach house. A curly-haired man in a black suit stood on a hilltop, holding hands with a woman who floated above him wearing a dress the color of grape juice.

“That’s Marc Chagall and me.”

Until then, we were sure Grandmom’s only husband had been Grandpop. Each year on her anniversary, Grandmom let down her hair and took her bridal veil and shoes out of a Wanamaker’s hatbox. “Is my veil on straight, P.J.?” she’d ask. “Hand me that mirror.” Then she’d slip her feet into white satin pumps. “Look, kinderlach, they still fit.” If Mom was anywhere nearby, she gave Grandmom a pinch-face look; I don’t know if it was the Yiddish or the wedding outfit that got to her.

Sometimes Grandmom asked P.J. to help her with the shoes. “You too, Cookie,” she’d add if she remembered I was there. My name isn’t really Cookie—it’s Ella—but we were all called something else, as if our real names were just placeholders. Paula Jean was “P.J.,” and my oldest sister Susan was “Princess.” I think Mom gave us nicknames so we’d be more like the kids at the Baldwin School—Muffy, Bitsy, Chip—but our names didn’t sound anything like theirs; and I’m sure no one at school had a grandmother from Russia who lived with them.

Grandmom’s skin looked laundered smooth, and with her face framed in lace, you’d almost think she was a bride. She’d stand and point to the old wedding photograph that used to be on the wall: a young man with licorice-slick hair, his arm draped around his bride. “He was such a sweet man. Always gave you kids candy. Remember?” P.J. remembers because she’s two years older; but I was only four when he died in 1951, so I only had shriveled memories.

Now there was a new wedding picture on the wall. I ran my finger over the jagged edge, and traced the smiling man waving his purple banner bride.

Marc Chagall? Why was P.J. nodding like she knew who he was?

“He looks happy,” said P.J., “but there’s a funny expression on your face, Grandmom, like you were dizzy or maybe afraid he was going to let go of your hand. Were you scared?”

“No, P.J. He’d never let me go.”

Why were they pretending those were real people? “Grandmom, that’s not you.

Where are your white shoes?”

When she didn’t answer, I turned. My lower lip did a shimmy shake.

“Why are you making stuff up?”

“Cookie, what are you talking? Don’t you recognize Vitebsk? In Russia?”

Grandmom barely had an accent, so it was easy to forget she came from somewhere else. Only when she said things like, “I don’t vant to move. I’m stayink in my house,” could you hear the Vitebsk in her voice. She may have talked to P.J. about the famous artist who came from the same town, but I’d heard her mention the name Marc only once before, so I didn’t recognize Vitebsk as I stood in Grandmom’s bedroom at the intersection of real and make believe.

“That’s just a stupid drawing. Where’s the real picture? The real you?”

P.J. stood next to Grandmom’s rocking chair looking at me with shut up all over her face.

“Tell her that people don’t fly, P.J.” My sister was so smart she never even believed in Santa Claus. That’s why she was going to be a lawyer like Daddy. “Tell her P.J,” I yelled.

Grandmom rocked slowly, mumbling as if she were praying.

“Cookie, it’s time for the cake.” P.J.’s voice brought Grandmom and me back to now.
“You can do the honors.” It was my turn to perform the closing ritual.

I unwrapped a pack of Tastykakes, handing one chocolate cupcake to P.J., taking one for myself, and handing the wax paper with the third cupcake stuck icing side down to Grandmom. She peeled off the last cupcake, ate it, then licked the chocolate icing off the paper. “Wrapper icing is the best thing about Tastykakes,” she said, wiping her mouth with a Happy Anniversary napkin. The party was over.

The Ventnor library smelled like old paper marinated in sea salt. I wandered around the children’s room waiting for the librarian to turn her back so I could sneak into the adult section. The librarian was a shriveled stump of a woman with a seagull beak and a voice made for shushing and shooing. You had to be thirteen to read the grown-up stuff, but I didn’t care. If I wanted to be a reporter like Brenda Starr in the comics, I’d have to start bending stupid rules. What kind of dirty stuff did they think I’d find in art books except maybe pictures of naked ladies, and I already knew how they looked. Like a good reporter I’d brought a notebook to record the facts about Marc Chagall, the mysterious painter from Russia who drew flying people and may or may not have been married to my grandmother.

The oversized art books were lying flat on a bottom shelf. I pulled out the one on Chagall and crouched in a corner. The book was printed on glossy paper, even the text part. There was a short section about his life, but it was mostly pictures—people flying, men playing fiddles, weird-looking animals. I stared at the picture of a guy in a white suit with a sad upside-down head. Behind the man in the picture were some houses like the ones in Grandmom’s picture, except they were black. The words “Ox Bowe” were printed at the bottom in funny letters, and there was a jagged gap in the binding where a page had been ripped out.

The photograph of Chagall in the book showed a curly-haired man who didn’t look anything like slick-haired Grandpop in the old wedding photo. Chagall had moved to Paris and married a woman named Bella who’d died many years ago. Grandmom was still alive and her name wasn’t Bella, so she couldn’t have been married to Chagall.

“You knew she made it up,” I told P.J. later that afternoon.

“She believed she was married to him.”

“That’s impossible”

“Anything’s possible if you believe it, Cookie.”

“You’re not making any sense, P.J. I thought you wanted to be a lawyer.”

“I do.”

“Well you don’t sound like one to me.”

If Mom had had her way, Grandmom wouldn’t have moved in with us. I know because I heard her arguing with Daddy late one night.

“She can’t stay where she is, Sonia. They’ll rob her blind.”

“We could set her up in an apartment.”

“But you promised you’d never leave her alone. Signed on the dotted line.”

“She wouldn’t be alone in an apartment.”

“Alone is alone.” Dad was probably thinking of his own mother who’d been found dead in her apartment a day after suffering a stroke.

“I know I signed, but is it legally binding?”

“Technically you’ll have to give up your chunk of the estate if you don’t abide by the agreement.”

Mom sounded beaten. “It won’t be pretty, the two of us in the same house. Not that she was a bad mother. More like she was someone else’s mother. She kept telling me I was smart, I should go on to college. I told her all I wanted was an engagement ring at nineteen and a mink coat at twenty-two. No joke. That’s what we all wanted back then. I told her I wanted to live the American dream.”

“I think she wanted that, too. Just a different dream.”

“The way she looks at me sometimes—feels like she’s still waiting for me to make something of myself.”

Before Grandmom moved in with us, she lived in Overbrook Park, in Philly but close to the suburbs. Grandmom and Grandpop had converted the basement of their row house into a dress shop, and we visited as often as Mom would take us. The room was crammed with racks of dresses, blouses, skirts, and gowns. When there were no customers, Grandmom let P.J. and me pick dresses off the racks and try them on in the laundry-cum-fitting room. P.J. was chunky like Grandmom, with light skin and freckles. Her hair, once defiantly red, had betrayed her, turning weak coffee brown. I was dark like Mom and built like her. Susan, with her straight blond hair and porcelain skin, resembled no one in the family. Decked out in strapless gowns with beaded tops she had yet to grow into, tottering around in the high-heeled shoes Grandmom had scattered around for the ladies, Susan was molding herself into the nickname she’d been given.

When P.J. and I got tired of dressing up, we’d duck under racks, pretending we were lost in the jungle. We’d undress the mannequins, laughing at their flattened lady parts. Mom always waited for us upstairs. I wondered if she’d ever played downstairs when she was growing up or whether then, like now, the clothing business had been beneath her.

We behaved ourselves when customers came into the shop. P.J. and I watched Grandmom size up the ladies with her eyes, the way artists on the boardwalk draw someone’s picture in five brushstrokes; then she’d hand them the skirt or dress they were meant to have. Her regulars didn’t even bother scanning the racks.

“How do you do it, Grandmom?”

“One part art, P.J. to three parts practice.”

“What about magic?” Grandmom shook her head, but her smile suggested that magic might indeed be part of the equation.

When Grandmom first moved into our house on the Main Line, she wandered ghostlike from room to room. “It’s not like you don’t know this place,” Mom complained. “You’ve been here hundreds of times.”

“So many rooms. It’s like a castle.”

“Three thousand square feet. Not much compared to some of the other houses in the neighborhood.”

“Well I prefer the summer house in Ventnor. This place feels like a dress that’s three sizes too big.”

“Momma, would you stop with the dresses already. You’re out of the clothing business.” She made the word “clothing” sound like something slimy you’d find under a trash can.

When Grandmom wandered our house, I think she was looking for the house she’d left behind and the shop where she’d worked magic. We asked her what she’d done with the clothing, but she wouldn’t say. I pictured her plucking the racks like chickens, feeding her regulars one last time, until there was nothing left but metal bones.

The night after Grandmom moved in, P.J. and I sat at the foot of her bed as she rubbed Nivea into her arms and neck. “I remember things,” she said, eyes half closed.

“Russia. The smell of the cows and the way it looked when the sun went down, like the church steeples were on fire. Papa blessing the bread. He was so smart, studying all day.” Her voice trailed off.

When I asked Mom if she knew Grandmom had come from a different country, she shrugged. “That was a long time ago. I heard those stories plenty when I was younger.”

A few nights later I heard voices in Grandmom’s room. Through the half-open door, I saw P.J. and Grandmom in bed, laughing. “You started telling your stories without me!” I cried, sounding like the little kid who tagged along behind her big sisters squawking me too so much, they called me “Me Too Cookie.” But once P.J. “discovered” me, I had no further use for me too. It was the year I turned seven, and I told her how people got polio.

“It’s the foam,” I said, pointing to the sudsy outline left by the waves. We were standing near the water’s edge on our beach in Ventnor. “My friend Mikey told me. He heard it from a doctor.”

P.J. scanned the frothy line extending along the water’s edge to infinity. “A line of death,” she said. I nodded, and we spent the rest of the summer jumping the line of death, making up games, weaving ourselves tight as braids. When she told me how much fun I was, there was a note of surprise in her voice as if to say, So you were in there all along. I had no idea.

Sometimes I noticed Susan staring at P.J. and me. I’m not sure what I saw in her eyes, but I think I understood how she felt—same way I felt watching Grandmom and P.J. laughing in the bedroom.

Grandmom’s stories began with her childhood in Vitebsk and ended when she got married, as if those were the starting and ending points of her life. She told us about the crossing, and how her father had died on the ship, but she never spoke of Marc Chagall.

Some nights after we’d gone to bed, I’d hear footsteps in the hall and voices on the other side of the wall. I don’t think Grandmom intentionally left me out. It’s just that I floated like something in a Chagall painting, just outside her range of vision. She seemed to find a kindred spirit in P.J. I saw how she smoothed P.J.’s hair and told her how smart she was, something she did with me, but with less intensity. I resented Grandmom’s intrusion into our lives, and the way she made me feel like an outsider. I discovered that if I brushed my hair over half my face and looked to the left, I could make Grandmom disappear.

Soon after Grandmom moved in, another intruder entered our house: a Christmas tree. It had bluish needles and smelled outdoorsy, like stuff the cleaning lady used in the bathroom. When P.J. and I came home from school, Mom was hanging the last of the blue and white balls that Susan handed her, as if she’d been decorating trees all her life.

Grandmom sat on the sofa, watching; she didn’t notice P.J. settle in next to her. Mom stepped down off the ladder and walked around the tree a couple of times before facing her mother, anticipating Grandmom’s objections.

“It’s blue and white, like Hanukkah.”

Silence.

“For God sake, Mom, it’s just a tree. I didn’t want the kids to feel left out. Remember how you wanted a tree, P.J.?”

“Yeah, when I was little and thought everyone had trees.” P.J. turned to the menorah on the mantel.

I don’t want a Christian tree,” said P.J., grabbing Grandmom’s hand and kneading her doughy skin. I sat down next to P.J. but I don’t think she noticed.

“Well I do,” said Susan, brushing against the tree as she moved closer to Mom. Lines were being drawn.

The sound of a Christmas ball exploding against the hardwood floor shocked us into silence.

“When Marc moved to Paris, he didn’t stop painting Russian villages.” Grandmom’s voice cut the silence.

“Who the hell is Marc?”

It was the first time I heard Grandmom mention Chagall and the only time I heard Mom swear.

“Everything he painted stayed in the air.”

That’s all she’d say about Marc Chagall.

Two weeks after the anniversary party in Ventnor, Grandmom went missing for the first time. P.J. and I knew something was wrong as soon as we walked up the porch steps with a Necco Skybar and two Archie comics and saw the empty rocking chair. Grandmom had given us money for chocolate, and we knew she’d never pass up a chocolate opportunity. If Grandmom wasn’t sitting in her chair on the screened-in porch, she was either in the bathroom or napping in her room. But she wasn’t in either of those places. The call came from the Ventnor police department just as Mom walked in with a bag of groceries. They said the librarian had reported an old lady wandering around the stacks wearing a bathing suit she’d put on backward. The policeman who answered the call recognized Grandmom. He’d covered her with a striped beach towel, but by the time he got her home, the towel had slipped off one shoulder and a wrinkled grandmom boobie bounced up and down like a Slinky. Mom scolded her, P.J. hugged her, and I wondered if I’d ever grow boobies. And if I did, would they look like that?

Mom was afraid Grandmom had Alzheimer’s and told us we all needed to keep an eye on her. I looked up the ten signs of Alzheimer’s in the library, and except for the wandering, she didn’t have any of the symptoms described in the book, though there were other changes, like how she cut her wedding veil into strips and knit them into an afghan. I wondered if she just didn’t want to live in this world anymore.

But she still loved the beach, sitting in her chair under the umbrella, looking up to watch the Goodyear blimp or planes towing advertising banners. We sat with her by the water’s edge in beach chairs so low the water splashed our butts through the webbing when the tide came in. “Look at that.” She pointed to a boy flying a dragon-shaped kite that spit a paper tongue of fire as it swooped. “Marc did a kite painting, but that man is sitting on a roof when he flies his kite.” She drew some letters in the sand: Ox Bowe.

“What’s that?” I asked her?

“Och Bosheh. It’s Russian.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Oh God,” she sighed.

The second time Grandmom wandered off, we found her on the roof of the lifeguard house where they store rescue equipment. It was late, and the beach was deserted. Grandmom was leaning against the sloped roof, her feet resting on the gutter, which was all that kept her from sliding off. We begged her to stand still and stay calm, as Dad ran back to the house to call the police. She stared past us.

“Jesus H. Christ,” the cop said as he walked down the ramp to the beach. “How’d she do that? There’s no ladder or nothing. She musta swung herself over the boardwalk railing onto the roof.”

“Or she flew,” P.J. suggested. That’s the last time I saw Grandmom smile.

She was too high up to reach, and the lifeguard house was locked, so Dad ran back to the house to get a ladder. As he set the ladder against the side of the building, Grandmom sidestepped along the gutter to the front of the building, spread her arms, and flew. The sand was soft and deep, so she hardly made a sound as she landed on her side.

“Hip fractures can be deadly,” the doctor told my mother a couple days later. “She might never make it out of the hospital. We’ll try to keep her as comfortable as possible and move her to a private room when one becomes available.”

Mom and Dad filled her room with flowers, and we brought chocolate bars whenever we visited. P.J. spent as much time as she could at her bedside. That was P.J.’s gift to Grandmom. But there was something I could give her, too. Something I owed her since I’d tried to make her disappear, if only in my imagination.

They’d already transferred Grandmom’s belongings to the single room she’d be moving to the following day. Grandmom had lots of visitors that night, so no one noticed when I slipped out of the room carrying a canvas tote.

Walking into Grandmom’s new room I unrolled the pictures I’d ripped out of the Chagall book I’d “borrowed” from the library and covered the walls with them—flying cows, and couples, and fiddlers, and horses—til the room danced. Then I climbed onto the nightstand and taped the wedding picture to the ceiling over her bed, so when she felt lonely, she could look at herself floating high above the village that lived in her memory and in the imagination of Marc Chagall, who held her firmly by the hand.

Natalie Zellat Dyen is a freelance writer and photographer. Her recent fiction and poetry have been published in Willow Review and The Jewish Writing Project. Her essays and non-fiction articles have appeared in Global Woman Magazine, Intercom Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other newspapers. She has traveled widely and has recently returned from her second trip to India.