Fiction – Page 13 – Philadelphia Stories

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.

Stripped, A Collection of Anonymous Flash (excerpts)

The following four flash fiction stories are excerpts from the latest title from PS Books, STRIPPED, A COLLECTION OF ANONYMOUS FLASH. This is an anthology of forty-seven pieces of short fiction whereby authors’ bylines have been removed. Readers are forced to engage without the lurking presence of "what they know of the author," which is usually, at the very least, the author’s gender as evidenced by a name. Stories might be written from a typically "female" perspective or with typical "male" sensibilites, but it might be that a male writer has inhabited his female character with such authenticity or that a female contributor has gotten inside the mind of the opposite sex so convincingly. Conversely, not every story that "seems" like a man wrote it was written by a woman or vice versa-things are mixed up, so guessing will be more of a challenge, and more fun. Enjoy.

– Nicole Monaghan, editor, STRIPPED

DOG BEACH

He sits out there in his rowboat, mouth half open, the Chicago skyline rising and falling behind him. I walk on my knees though the water. Inching closer, slipping farther out into the lake. There is garbage floating near the surface. Bubble wrap and empty plastic sleeves of crackers. I skirt around them, or try to. I want it to seem like an accident. Like I just drifted over, and then all of a sudden I am next to him and I can say oh, hey, how’s it going out here?

He is the lifeguard. Young and bored, probably Mexican, with smooth black hair and sunglasses that reflect the blue sheen of the lake. He wears a standard issue red tank top and his teeth are as white as forever. I am old. And fat, and I have the face of someone who has sustained some kind of injury, only I have not. It is just my face. My nipples are the size of coasters and I have no hair on my chest. He is very young. Possibly eighteen. That would be good, actually. But he is probably younger. I can feel the blood moving through my body when I look at him, even though the water is cold.

"Sir!" he calls out to me. I stare back at the shore and pretend not to hear, ashamed at being noticed. It is crowded here today. It seems like there are a thousand dogs on the beach, wrestling and shitting and chasing wet tennis balls.

"Sir," he says again. I can hear his oars cutting through the lake as he moves closer. "You really shouldn’t be out here if you don’t have a dog." He points to the beach next to us, the one for people. "It’s much cleaner over there." His voice is as dull as an old knife. I can tell that he hates this job, which seems strange to me. I would imagine that sitting in boat all day would be one of the most relaxing ways to make a dollar.

"I have a dog," I say. "He’s over there." I point vaguely towards the shore. "A German Shepard," I add, hoping that this will impress him. "His name is Larry."

He looks off into the distance like he is thinking about something very important. He wipes sweat off of his upper lip. I feel something crumple under my toes and pray that it is not a diaper. I do not own a German Shepard. I do not own any dog at all. I just like this beach because people are friendlier here. I can stand in the sand at the edge of the water, watching the dogs run in and out, back and forth along the shore. People talk to me like we are all in a club together, like I am part of something bigger.

"Alright," he says, starting to back paddle. His arms are skinny and brown, but they look strong, and they make me think about pretending to drown.

JERRY’S LIFE AS SUNG TO “I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW”

Children behave. "Will you relax, Deanna, so what if the kid breaks a few things?" dad would say. Mom often looked like the last Kleenex in the box and no one was going to use her and throw her away. Her favorite expression: Be on your toes. I was on my toes, I suppose. Up for school. Hardly ever "sassy" when told to take out the garbage. When she died I learned that she had been on her toes for seventy-seven years. Her feet were damn tired. I never got her a pillow.

That’s what they say when we’re together. When I met Jeff, I had already come out to my parents. Jeff hadn’t. He’d say, "They think that gay people are poison. We emit killing fumes." His family figured us out–we weren’t "buddies." His mother remains cold but sends me Christmas cards with messages like "Remember Jesus’s birthday. He remembers yours." His father thinks of me as another channel to change. I don’t think they fear poison. Is this progress?

And watch how you play. I knew I was gay young. It’s like I was a contestant on You Bet Your Life and the secret word, Gay, came down and yes, Groucho, that’s me. I’ve felt watched all my life. I met my first lover, Ben, at Polk Junior High School. We could do anything we wanted provided we said "We’re not gay. We don’t love each other. Only gay people can love each other." That freed us to do what he called "the snooky ookums." Watched. By parents. Neighbors. School. I’ve spent decades dislodging eyes from my skin. Eyes in my most private places.

They don’t understand. Ben and I were "gross, weird, sinful, and only kooks do that kind of thing."

And so we’re runnin’ just as fast as we can. I ran and ran but they kept moving the finish line. After two and a half decades I realized that the finish line was in their heads, not mine. I stopped running. Even now, so many keep running, faster, faster–how do they do it? Bare feet. Gravel.

Holdin’ on to one another’s hand. Jeff’s hand is my favorite part of his body. I don’t rank his parts, but his hand is tops. When I hold it, deep blue forget-me-nots cover the most barren ground inside me. His hand is a map of wisdom. I don’t read maps well, but I never feel lost as long as I have his hand.

Tryin’ to get away into the night. My friend Mitch tried to get away for years. Booze, drugs, a bunch of guys he slathered all over his body. He quit trying. I was a pallbearer at his funeral. How easily it could have been me in the box. Mitch wore out from the daily battering ram of hate.

And then you put your arms around me and you say I think we’re alone now. Alone is a rake standing by the garage door. It needs to be put to good use. Alone is sitting with Jeff watching My Three Sons, not saying anything, but knowing when he will laugh at Bub. Alone is being in a crowded mall and trying to start a conversation with a clerk.

Alone is finding a place to hide, you think no one will ever find you, you’re OK with that, kind of, but someone does find you. Hides with you. And emerges with you. Into light. And darkness.

When I first began tutoring Shin Chan-Hwan, I did not feel attracted to him. I found his shy sadness endearing, but his body repulsed me. He had the narrow bones and taut sinews of an unhealthy woman, and yet his face betrayed masculinity. I found this combination grotesque, perhaps because I did not yet know of my preference for it.

The Supreme Leader appointed Shin Taster of Meals because He believed nobody would feed poison to such a sympathetic figure. Shin was orphaned at ten when his mother, a prostitute, was killed by one of our Dear Leader’s bodyguards. He was raised by the Generalissimo and His staff. I volunteered out of pity to tutor him, convincing the Generalissimo that the more worldly Shin became, the better able to notice culinary oddities he would be.

While it was the boy’s mitochondrial response that mattered most to the Dear Leader, He could see the benefits of having one taster for as long as possible: familiarity with His favorite dishes, a well-practiced nose, and the social ease that comes with not having a stranger at the table.

Not long after we met, Shin introduced me to sexual passion. Although I taught him to read and to know his food, we figured out as peers how two men might lie together, and how, over time, their lust might give way to a stronger bond.

Shin became a national mascot, a symbol of the invincibility of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. If some callous usurper should manage to poison Shin and the Supreme Leader, the People would never stand for Shin’s sacrifice and would revolt immediately.

The General had always believed in a top-down sentimentality, but many of us in the Cabinet knew better. We knew how tenuous was His hold over the Premiers, let alone over the writhing passions of the People. We heard tales of our cousins’ cousins in China growing wealthy as we begged for moderate villas in the hills outside Pyongyang. Most worrisome, we watched as the Generalissimo grew both weary and furious-a dangerous combination-over constant criticism from other nations.

Soon, a few of us decided that no consequence of an assassination could be worse for Korea than the inevitable consequences of no assassination.

Because I had tutored Shin for so long, it fell on me to approach him. I insisted we give him the chance to be a knowing martyr, one whom the People would praise long after his demise. Perhaps I felt he deserved the chance to look in my eyes as I condemned him.

"Shin Chan-Hwan," I said as we began a lesson on European mushrooms, "I suspect you have waited for this day." I showed him the vial of thallium, a poison slow enough to wait for the Leader to eat before killing Him and His taster.

I held my gloved fingers to Shin’s mouth, to express the risk of discussing the matter further, to indicate the means by which the poison was to be administered, and, finally, to touch his lips before they parted one last time for our Korea.

When I removed my hand, Shin said "Yes, I have waited." His resolve brought tears to my eyes.

I could not watch as Shin tasted the tainted insam-ju. I do not know if he omitted his customary sniff of the gingery liquor, or if he took a larger sip than usual to steel himself against the effects the poison would later have. I must believe, though, that as the liquor passed over his lips, he thought not only of his loathing for his keeper, and not only of his country, but also of me.

AFTERGLOW

Crystal and her moon-faced children live upstairs. I live downstairs, alone. We both waitress at The Outback, and I take business classes at community college. Crystal doesn’t see a need for it. I tell Crystal that pretty soon, I’m going to own the damn place while she’ll still be washing the bloomin’ onion smell out of her hair each night. We’ll see, is all she says while she laughs and blows smoke. She tells me she’s not holding her breath. We used to fall for the same guys. I’m a lot younger than Crystal but she’s better looking.

Crystal, despite her baggage at home, made herself available to every guy who bought her a drink. To each his own. She said she’s settling down now, playing for keeps. Her kids, a boy and a girl scare me. I’ve never been good around kids. I just don’t know what to say to them.

I can smell their cigarette smoke from the back of the house, where they like to torture the large, one-eyed rabbit they named Pistachio. I’ve told Crystal it is a goddamn shame what they are doing to a living breathing thing. She always says, "Wait until you have your own, then we’ll see." But she never sees things the way they really are.

It’s hot out and I am feeling the cumulative effect of so many things. I take three aspirins with a glass of cold beer. I feel sick from the sounds of the rabbit squeals. Crystal and her boyfriend, a man my mother would have called "rogue," are thumping around in the bed, calling God down from his heaven.

Her son, throws rocks at the bedroom window that faces out into the back yard. I open my window. I yell "STOP!" They laugh hysterically. The rabbit is motionless, his only eye, blood red, frozen in fear.. I think of calling the police. I turn on the big fan in the house to block out the noise, and though my skin is moist, though I am shaking with cold.

The rhythmic thumping has stopped. I hear the murmur of their voices in the sweet afterglow before reality sets in. I want to go and rescue that rabbit, but fear grabs me by the throat. I tell myself I don’t know what to expect. But my heart knows. I stand at the door. I wrap my arms around my waist. Squeeze myself hard and think it might not be a bad thing to have a man of my own.

Basket Case

I pretty much knew the neighborhood kids, but I hadn’t seen this one before. Still living at home in the early 80’s, while attending a local college, I was in my parents’ backyard, looking through the open mesh of the cyclone fence surrounding the churchyard next to our neat brick Philadelphia row house. At first I thought he was just kicking a ball around, alone in the clean swept street, as if he was mad about something, until I heard that cracking sound. Dry matted black hair, unbarbered and uncombed, in a green and dingy white striped T-shirt so oversized it hid his arms, long khaki green baggy shorts that nearly swallowed the pencil-slim brown legs, dirty unlaced high-top sneakers, tongues wagging with each step, grimy shoestrings dragging the ground, he had the look of children who, when they don’t show up at home at dinner time, aren’t missed.

What he was kicking, with a ferocity more like assault than play, was a small peach basket. He stomped it savagely, until its cylindrical symmetry shredded to an inchoate scattering. Then he attacked the shards as though each splint of wood were an enemy deserving of his singular attention.

I bet he’s a mean one.

Lucky for him that Pop was still at work. Anyway, I was sure I could handle this.

"Just what do you think you’re doing, young man?" I shouted as I started up the alley toward the street, my pace quickened with righteous indignation. "Look at that mess you’re making in front of somebody else’s house! Who’s supposed to clean this up? Now you pick up your trash!"

He froze for a second as if struck, or waiting to be. He lowered his small head and stooped in what seemed to be meek compliance. Then he began to collect the splintered pieces of wood. But he kept dropping them back to the ground, as if in silent defiance.

Oh, so we have a smart ass.

I brought an empty trash can from the side of the house and approached the offender, resolved to personally supervise the cleanup. Pop was the traditional Atlantic Street enforcer, the bane of unruly children, alley weeds, and milk crate basketball hoops nailed to telephone poles in his domain, and I was my father’s daughter.

But once I reached him with the trash can, I saw his hands, such as they were. Worse, he had no arms to speak of, only misshapen stubs that sprouted from his shoulders like eyes on a potato. Attached to the end of each was a claw-like appendage, book-ended with two knobs that, according to the standard genetic codebook, should have lengthened into dextrous gripping fingers. One of humankind’s most distinctive characteristics is the opposable thumb, but he had none. I nearly dropped the can I was carrying. I had read about the thalidomide babies of twenty-some years before: His arms looked like those afflicted children – a "seal boy."

A thousand questions flooded my mind. How did he eat? Brush his teeth, comb his hair, blow his nose? Hold a pencil to write his schoolwork? Join his hands in prayer… did he pray? What would this child have to say to God? Who was I to deny him his anger?

"What-what’s your name?"

"Eddie," a soft voice mumbled.

"Well, Eddie, let’s you and me clean up this mess, OK?"

I helped him gather the fragile fragments, thin and delicate and formless as himself, and we deposited them gently into the container.

"Now let’s see about those sneakers."

I kneeled before him, folded the tongues smoothly back into the shoe tops, threaded the laces into a neat criss-cross, and shaped him a firm, tight bow. I spun him around slowly, full circle, brushing the dust from his clothes, and laid my hands upon his damp slight shoulders. As he turned again and at last shyly faced me, I finally caught his large deep brown eyes and held them.

"My name is Miss Hall, Eddie. Thank you so much for your help. You’re a good worker! I hope I’ll see you again, sweetheart." He nodded, returned my warm smile with a bright one of his own, and skipped back down the street, a bounce of affirmation. I was sure that I would.

A month or two passed before I saw Eddie again, in the Shop N Bag two blocks away. Standing at the head of the aisle next to my check-out line, he seemed to be waiting to bag groceries for customers, as other neighborhood boys frequently did to earn the odd quarter. While he wasn’t actually packing any bags, his face shone with the hopefulness of someone who’d bought a lottery ticket and awaited the outcome of the draw. I called to him by name and waved him over. He remembered me, and accepted with a big smile the quarter I gave him, his pincers gently probing my open hand. After several painstaking attempts, he grasped the coin and deposited it into his side pants pocket.

After that, I often watched for Eddie on Atlantic Street and in the neighborhood. He must have moved away, for I never saw him again, though his memory stays close to me even now. I had so wanted to be a friend to him, and I continue to wish for him better luck than the hands chance first dealt him.

Vernita Hall is a lifelong Philadelphia resident, a LaSalle College (now University) graduate, and an M.F.A. candidate at Rosemont College.

Two Wheels

Music from my iPod blares through a single, small speaker, almost drowning out the white noise of the always-on fan and my muttered swearing. My fingers are filthy, almost black, like those of a child who’s been playing in the dirt, like I’m young enough not to care again. The air in the shop smells like oil, industrial orange hand soap, and rust. I’m bent over a bike, wielding a pair of fifteen-millimeter wrenches, wrestling with a pair of nuts that have rusted onto an axle, waiting for oil to creep into the threads, wondering just how I got there.

There are the easy answers, or the smart-ass ones, at least. Wanting to do something different for my senior year of undergrad and needing a change from my job in recycling, spent sorting term papers from the beer bottles in every miserable sort of weather you can get in the mountains of western North Carolina, I had changed over to the Community Bike Shop. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Before I could even ride bicycles, my father was showing me how to fix them. He wasn’t a professional by any means, but he was handy with a wrench, and that’s good enough as far as machines are concerned. Whenever he walked his bike home with a flat tire when I was a boy, he would call me to his side as both a student and a helper, showing me how, with a pair of screwdrivers, to pry a tire’s bead free of the rim, asking me to hand him tools as they were needed. As I grew, he showed me more: how to install new cables and brakes; which screws I should turn to calibrate a derailleur; how to disassemble and grease a hub. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll never starve through ignorance.

Fixing bikes makes me happy. Back then, I would climb the steep, creaking stairs out of our basement workshop, hands black with grease, grime, and unknown gunk, smiling. I was a neat child, afraid of getting my hands dirty, but not with bikes in our workshop, where the bare bulbs overhead reflected their light off a dozen mirrors we’d found to brighten every dim corner. Even now, that stubborn layer of filth makes me feel young, whether I’m emerging again from my childhood workshop or from the shops in the mountains of western North Carolina and the streets of Center City Philadelphia where I’ve found employment.

Before we had books in common, my father and I shared bikes. I felt proud when I could do something the way he had showed me. I hoped he would be proud, too.

No, that’s not it either.

My father was disappointed by my inability to ride a two-wheeler by the age of six. He never said so directly, but I could tell. In 1944, when he was seven, he and his parents had fled their home in Riga, Latvia, never to return. He had taken his bicycle and all that he could carry on his back. Never a driver, my father found his freedom balanced on two narrow wheels. He only wanted me to have that same freedom. I, however, was content with my training wheels, wishing only for the freedom from falling.

What I found acceptable at six, when my kindergarten classmates were, one by one, announcing they could ride a two-wheeler, became an annoyance at seven, a social hindrance by eight. Even my younger friends could ride without training wheels. How was I to advance my social standing if I couldn’t go ride bikes with my friends? And yet, fear ruled me. Even with training wheels, even before, when I rode a tricycle, I had had my share of falls, but they were nothing compared to the imagined calamity of tumbling off a two-wheeler. I could break my head open. My brains might leak out through the vents in my helmet. Worse, I could skin both of my knees.

I tried to reason with Dad, asking if I could have just one training wheel removed. Nothing worked. My new two-wheeler – cobbled together, like all of my family’s bikes, from the best parts that could be found in the trash of the Squirrel Hill and Spruce Hill neighborhoods around my house and adorned with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo on the frame’s top tube – taunted me whenever I visited our basement workshop. It was everything that was cool for a second-grader.

The bike was both a reward and a practical consideration. At eight, I was getting too big for my training bike, my knees brushing against the tassels that hung from the ends of the handlebars whenever I pedaled. Dad knew that, sooner or later, I’d give in, and he wasn’t going to move the training wheels to another bicycle.

I did give in. Maybe some mental oil seeped in and freed me from my fear, a fear that had oxidized, and had me frozen like a rusted nut. One morning, I woke up from a dream about flying, ready to mount up and ride. Those first tentative jaunts only took me from one end of the basement to the other, but the ease with which I rode made me wonder, even then, what had been standing in my way. In that moment, I was in love. I knew my father’s freedom then.

Back in the shop, the nuts haven’t given yet. My muscles are burning and the wrenches have left grooves in my hands. I leave the wrenches hanging from either side of the axle and turn to the peg-board above the work bench, reaching for the hickory handle of the rubber mallet. The large, black head of the mallet makes it seem almost cartoonish, the sort of tool that I should pull from nowhere, but its reality is comforting. Returning to the recalcitrant bicycle, I give one of the wrenches a solid whack, making the whole bike bounce, though it’s clamped to a heavy repair stand, and shaking the other wrench loose. Another whack as the clang of the fallen wrench dies. The nut turns a few degrees. I move to the other side, picking up the second wrench, replacing it on the nut, and discarding an imperfect metaphor with another swing of the mallet.
Hilary B. Bisenieks is a lifelong Philadelphian
known far and wide (in West Philly) as "that guy with the kilt." He
recently returned north after a four-year sojourn in the mountains of western
North Carolina, where he completed his studies of Creative Writing and English
Literature at Warren Wilson College. In his free time, Hilary builds and rides
bicycles, both silly and sensible. Hilary can be found online at www.hilarybisenieks.com.

Souvenirs

Grace Churchill’s daughter died for the twenty-seventh time. It was the same room as always, bare white drywall under humming fluorescent lamps, a long wood table and stiff, squeaky chairs. The interview room, designed for discomfort. Grace listened along to the recording she now knew by heart, watching the lawyers across the table as they drummed their fingers and pretended to take notes and avoided her eyes. They never looked at her while it played – fear, she assumed, of seeing a mother in anguish.

There would be no tears. The lawyers heard Katie speaking from the grave in the recording. Grace just heard Katie.

Wilson Ross, the district attorney, had sat with Grace countless times to revisit the recording in the interview room. Today a younger attorney, a blonde woman named Emily, joined him. She wore glasses and a neat gray skirt and a serious expression as she listened. Grace knew it was the first time she’d done so when, twenty minutes in, Emily gripped the arm of her chair so tightly that her fingers grew whiter than the tips of her French manicure.

Twenty minutes in is when the shrieking begins.

They had offered at one point to give Grace a copy of the recording – a 911 call, captured from Katie’s cell phone nearly three months before, during That Night. Ross said it would be highly unorthodox (his words) to do so, but given her interest in hearing it repeatedly, he would make an exception. Grace came to the office three times a week, often more, asking to listen, drawn by the promise of her daughter’s voice. She wanted to understand why it happened. She needed to suffer with her child.

Grace did not want to bring the recording home. She thought it should never leave the interview room. There it was safe, stowed away in a small laptop computer, stored in a steel cabinet, and locked behind a sturdy wooden door. Outside of the room, she knew, it would follow her everywhere. Katie’s muted breaths, her shaking voice, begging to be heard, her mother obliging.

The tape faded to silence. Ross stood from his chair and hunched over the computer, closing the file and folding the screen down. He was unusually somber, moving with a tentativeness that was far from his normal head-high swagger. Ross was what her father used to derisively call Country Club, a man who lined his closets with monogrammed shirts, who whitened his teeth and darkened his hair and always had lighter skin around his eyelids from the tanning bed. He went to Stanford and mentioned it often. Whenever he’d approach Grace, he would briefly look down before meeting her eyes with a reassuring frown, as if recalling steps from the manual of dealing with Surviving Relatives. He thought of her as a nuisance, she knew, but he enjoyed seeing his name in the newspaper far too much to not be directly involved.

Ross sat down at Grace’s left. He gently placed his hand on her shoulder.

"We’ve got to give it to them," he said.

Grace said nothing. She looked from Ross back to the folded laptop on the table in front of her. Katie’s voice tucked away in its shiny black shell, marbles in a jar. Once released, it would spread uncontrollably.

"The judge issued her final decision this morning," he continued. "The tapes are public record. We’ve got no legal rights to keep them under wraps any longer."

"Who wants it?" Grace asked.

Ross paused. "All of them," he replied.

There are bumps, perpetual motion, as if the moment were recorded in a dryer at its lowest setting. The operator asks about the emergency, whether anybody is there, Hello? The dry rumble continues, then a muffled whisper, inaudible. Then, she speaks. Ray, please, she says. Ray, turn around. We can sit down and talk about it. You don’t have to do this. You’re not alone.

Ray says nothing.

There was a woman in a support group Grace attended whose daughter was abducted from a parking lot. She was a college student, and had been shopping at a department store for a television stand for her apartment. On security video, the girl could be seen walking out of the store and across empty asphalt, her outstretched arms wrapped around a large box containing her new assembly-required furniture. A man in a dark shirt and a baseball cap followed twenty feet behind her.

Grace remembered it well. The girl’s name was Libby Miller. Her body was found near a creek about a week after she disappeared from the department store. The last time she was seen alive was in that video when, in the far left corner of the screen, the man appeared to offer his help loading the box into the car. The grainy video of him grabbing her – the entire sequence, beginning with her leaving the store – played in an endless loop on television newscasts for weeks, always preceded by a stone-faced reporter warning viewers that what they were about to see was upsetting. An introduction designed to draw more eyes to the screen, to the tragedy unfolding on the blurred black-and-white security footage. Even after police caught the man responsible, the networks still found reasons to air the images, running stories about parking lot security or self defense or "stranger danger", but always – always – referring back to the video of Libby and her abduction.

The mother – her name was Sarah – said she no longer turned on the television for fear of seeing the footage again. Someone once told her the clip was on YouTube, under the title, "Abducted Girl’s Final Moments – Disturbing." It had received more than two million views.

"I couldn’t tell," Sarah said, "whether that last word was a warning or a suggestion."

Sarah couldn’t comprehend why Grace kept going back to hear her own daughter’s tape again and again. Neither could her family, her friends, the other parents in her group, or Ross, who only allowed her to do so because the psychiatrist said it would help her cope. When they listened to the recording, they heard only death. Grace heard it as well. Those final minutes, the screaming and fighting and choking, stained her memory the first time she heard it. Every quiet moment – at night in bed, or at home between the steady visits of condolence – it rang in her ears, inescapable as breath. She tried to drown it out with old VHS tapes from Katie’s school plays and cheerleading performances. But the voice from the 911 call shouted everything else down. When Grace thought of her daughter, the echoes of her murder smothered every other memory.

A week after first hearing the tapes, she asked to listen again. They sat her down in the interview room, set up the computer, and double-clicked the file. She closed her eyes and imagined herself in the backseat with Katie, where Raymond Jonas had forced her to lie after tying her hands and feet with strips of bed sheets from his room at the Gabriel Institute for Boys. Katie’s phone was in her front pocket, the investigators told her, and she had been able to call 911 by reaching around and using the speed dial. Grace whispered into Katie’s ear to stay calm, to relax, that her mother would protect her. She ran her hands along her daughter’s smooth face. She told her she loved her and that everything would be OK.

Grace returned the following morning and again a day later. Each time she listened, tense and nauseous, unable to turn away. She felt terror, anger, pain – what she imagined Katie felt while bound in the car. Joining in this suffering brought comfort somehow, as if her daughter hadn’t died alone after all.

"You’ll feel differently," Sarah once said after Grace attempted to explain her connection to the tape.

"When?" Grace asked.

"When the vultures get a hold of it."

No one responds to the operator’s questions, just a mild rumble, and the in-and-out fade of Katie’s voice. It’s difficult to hear what she says through the bumps in the road. The operator says to stay on the line, to be calm if you can’t talk, we’ll get you help, where are you? We’ll find you …

Grace and Katie had a tradition. On Sunday nights, the two put on pajamas and curled into the couch together, a week’s worth of reality television shows ready for viewing in the DVR. They made sundaes and hot chocolate, girls at a slumber party, gossiping and talking about their lives: Katie’s too busy with grad school and work for a boyfriend, Grace’s new supervisor is a bitch, did you hear about Linda’s daughter down the street? Grace secretly hated the television they watched so religiously – narcissistic garbage, she thought – but looked forward to Sundays regardless, to spending time alone with her daughter like they had when Katie was a little girl.

It had always been just the two of them. Grace nursed Katie, caught her after her first steps, taught her to ride a bike and throw a softball and braid her hair. The mom and the dad, rolled into one. Katie’s father was a man Grace had dated briefly and barely knew. She’d been past thirty, recently divorced and enjoying independence for the first time in her life when she realized one queasy morning that she was several weeks late. He did not have to know, she’d decided. Grace would love her baby enough for two parents.

She did once try to reach out to the father. This was after Katie began asking questions that couldn’t be answered with a simple sometimes god decides a mommy is enough. Grace made some phone calls and went to Google, uncovering an address about an hour away from their own. She wrote a letter, learned he had a family of his own, that he did not want to risk the turmoil Katie’s sudden existence might cause. Any further attempts at contact, he wrote, should be directed toward his attorney.

Grace told Katie she could not find him.

There was resentment – Katie rarely failed to mention her missing father during an argument – but Grace recognized it was never enough to damage the bond they shared. They were partners, working together on school science and home remodeling projects, splitting chores, seeking the other’s ear to vent frustration and air good news. They even looked alike: brown hair (Katie’s long and straight, Grace’s short and graying), chestnut eyes, tall and athletic. When high school began to pull Katie away – boys, cliques, activities, that first taste of teenage emancipation – Grace felt as if a part of her was being stolen away. Yet through graduation and college, through Katie’s taking the counseling job at Gabriel while weighing her grad school options, Grace could always look forward to Sunday evenings with her daughter.

That night in August, Katie called to say she’d be working her normal day off at the institute and would not be able to make it. Grace did not watch the shows they’d saved. She never would.

Ray? Ray, look at me. Where are you taking me? Ray?

The reporters first asked for the 911 tapes the day Katie’s body was found. She’d been left in a brown, weed-choked field behind an abandoned gas station on an empty road about 20 miles from Gabriel, where she’d last been seen the previous evening. Katie worked there for about eight months, her first job after graduating from college.

The rationale the newspapers and television stations used centered on the dispatcher who received the call. They said it was in the interest of the public whether the people answering emergency phone calls were doing their jobs, whether procedures had been followed. They wanted to know if Katie could have been saved, and if so, what could be done to prevent it from happening again.

This is what they said. Grace knew better.

The greater good was not their concern. Neither, she believed, was Katie’s well-being or memory. What they wanted was pornography, a sound byte with which to tease the 11 p.m. newscast, horror and violence and death their viewers could enjoy from comfortable couches, driving up ratings. Titillation. Like Libby Miller, unwitting star of cable and broadcast and World Wide Web, a life summed up in a cautionary tale, years of smiles and laughs and hugs and tears obscured by a blurred black-and-white video.

Grace understood the fascination.

Her father had been a soldier in Korea, and kept photographs from the war in a cigar box at the rear of his top dresser drawer. Inside the box, among snapshots of grinning young men holding guns and cigarettes and cans of beer, were photographs of dead bodies. Korean soldiers with gunshot wounds to the head. A pile of charred bodies near a ransacked village. A leg, attached to nothing, its foot wearing a sandal, lying undisturbed on a dirt road. She had discovered the photos as a child and returned to them often, unable to look away despite the horrors they depicted.

Once, when Grace was eleven, she slipped the old photos into one of her schoolbooks and secreted them to class. She showed them to her friend Mary on the bus, then Mary’s brother Robert when he saw the girls huddled around something in Grace’s lap. Robert, a seventh grader, brought two of his friends to see the photos once they’d descended the bus stairs into the schoolyard. A buzz soon electrified Walt Whitman Middle School, classmates and students she’d never before spoken with whispering during class and approaching her in the hallway, asking for a glimpse of the snapshots, the forbidden images burning between the pages of her history book. Some wrinkled their eyes and noses in disgust, looking away, then turning back for another peek, as if their first instinct required a second opinion. Others pulled the photos close, eyes widening, mouths slack, intensely studying the images. More than one grinned. Grace basked in the new found attention her father’s photos brought, eating with the older kids at lunch, standing by the basketball hoops at recess, where fifth graders never went. She laughed along with jokes about the people in the pictures. That’s the worst case of sunburn I’ve ever seen! You think he’ll be able to buy just a left shoe? She promised to look for more to bring the next day, even though she knew there were none left to uncover.

Grace glowed with celebrity as she walked home from the bus stop. She spotted a neighbor girl, Annie, who was a few years younger and went to a different school. Looking to maintain her high, Grace called the girl over, promising she had something amazing for her to see. They sat on a curb, Grace pulling out the book, opening its pages and slowly presenting the pictures, a ringmaster introducing the main attraction. She’d developed a routine, telling the jokes she’d heard throughout the day while unveiling each image. The burned bodies. The gunshot man. The leg. It wasn’t until Grace had finished that she saw Annie’s face: red, streaked with tears, mouth shut, choking back sobs.

"What’s the matter?" Grace asked.

"What happened to them?"

"They were in a war. My dad did it," she lied.

"Why?"

She couldn’t find an answer. Annie wiped the tears from her face and walked away, leaving her alone on the curb with the photos. When she got home, Grace placed them back in the cigar box, never to look for them again.

Grace hadn’t thought about those photographs for years before Katie died. Now, she couldn’t help wondering about the mothers of the men in the snapshots. Whether they’d been told how their babies died. If they’d had any contact with their sons in the weeks, months, or years spent off in battle. How they would feel if they knew that, in a cigar box halfway across the globe, photographs of their dead children were kept as souvenirs.

I don’t think she can hear me. Can you hear me, honey? I don’t understand …

Grace learned quickly what the reporters were truly after in the days following Katie’s murder. She spent nearly a full day about a week after it happened with Emma Stuart, a journalist from Channel 9 News in the city. They paged through yearbooks and photographs in Katie’s bedroom, reading her poetry, telling stories like the one where she skipped her junior prom because a friend was having a difficult time and needed support. Stuart held her hand, tears welling in her eyes. Grace cried at some point, and called Raymond Jonas a monster, a monster who should burn for what he did. It was a momentary lapse, words she wasn’t even sure she fully meant. But it stuck. After all that, the stories and keepsakes and memories, it was those tears and those words that made the two-minute clip on the evening news.

She stopped taking calls from the press, but the stories continued. They investigated how 16-year-old Raymond Jonas came to be held in a minimum-security facility like Gabriel when he’d been arrested for viciously attacking his female cousin. They questioned why it had been so easy for Jonas to slip past guards, across a lighted lawn and into the facility’s parking lot, completely undetected, and how he had gotten the knife he used to surprise Katie after she’d completed a rare weekend late shift. But it always came back to the tapes: Those 31 minutes that began when Katie reached her hand around to press a button on her cell phone and ended with her rape, stabbing, and strangulation. The police first offered a detailed explanation of the circumstances surrounding the call – how the operator was limited in her ability to send help because she couldn’t speak directly to Katie, that they tried to trace the call but couldn’t pinpoint its location. A transcript of the recording followed to give reporters a play-by-play account. When the press went to the courts, a judge offered a compromise: a pool of reporters could listen to the recording and describe what happened. The response was always the same. The public deserved the right to hear for themselves, they said.

Two months after That Night, in the interview room where Katie’s voice was safely locked away, Grace learned that the courts agreed.

Ray, are we stopping?

"I understand it’s difficult. But it’s the public’s right to know." Emma Stuart sounded surprised to pick up her phone and hear Grace’s voice. Grace had surprised herself by calling, in all honesty. She had left the District Attorney’s office only a few hours before, after learning the 911 tapes would be released to the media that afternoon. In her car on the way home, talk radio hosts discussed the court decision, with one promising listeners that portions would be aired later in the day. A friend called to tell her that an article had appeared on the local newspaper’s web site praising the tapes’ release as a victory for open government. They’d all be competing to get Katie’s terrified voice onto the airwaves first. Dialing Emma’s number was an act of desperation, Grace knew, but it was one of the few acts she had left.

"I’ve heard the call," Grace replied. "The woman did nothing wrong."

"Not everybody believes that."

"I do." Grace had met Shirley Jackson, the dispatcher who received Katie’s 911 call, at one of the court hearings. She’d been on a leave of absence since That Night, haunted, lying awake at night going over the scenario again and again, trying to determine what she could have done differently. Grace hugged her and told her she shouldn’t listen to what they were saying in the news, but the words slid right off the woman.

"I wish there was more I could do." Emma sounded like Ross, blowing Grace off under the pretense that she was trying to help. "The call will go to air. It’s not my decision."

"And if it were?" Grace asked.

She had no reply. Grace continued, "No good can come from airing that tape."

Emma remained silent for a moment, then briefly inhaled and held her breath, as if steeling to utter the next words. "I’ve been told you listen to them quite often."

The statement took Grace by surprise. There was an accusation in her voice, as if Grace’s desire to hear the recording somehow existed on the same plane as strangers in search of thrills. The judgment angered her – here was a girl not much older than Katie, who probably believed good was being done by putting that 911 tape on the evening news. Too young to know that ratings trumped public service every time.

"You’re not her mother," Grace said. "You couldn’t understand."

"Look, we’re not running the whole thing," Emma said. "They’ll cut it off before the … violent part."

Which is the violent part? Grace wanted to ask the question but stopped short, quickly ending the conversation and hanging up the phone. Even if Emma Stuart were on her side, she had been correct about one thing: She could do nothing to stop its airing. On Grace’s television, during the commercial break for an afternoon talk show, an advertisement for the evening news had already hyped the airing of the "dramatic" 911 call in the Katie Churchill murder case. The other stations were also likely doing so, as were the newspapers and everyone else trying to draw attention to their product. The anchors would warn viewers to prepare themselves for the disturbing footage, grim, studied looks on their faces that would disappear moments later during witty banter with the wacky weather guy. The recording would then hit the Internet, drawing millions of hits on YouTube and countless other sites, sometimes in snippets, others in full, unedited form. On the newspaper’s website, anonymous posters would use the comments section in the latest story about Katie’s murder to spout vitriol over illegal immigration and homosexuality and politics. Ross would hold a press conference decrying the judge’s decision, his suit neatly pressed, hair tailored, a practice run for his upcoming Senate campaign. Raymond Jonas would still be in jail. Katie would still be dead.

Grace turned off the television.

They’ll cut it off before the violent part. Her thoughts turned to another photograph, one that ran in newspapers across the country and won numerous awards when she was a girl. It showed a South Vietnamese soldier holding a silver handgun to the head of a Viet Cong prisoner. The prisoner was ragged, bleeding from the lip, hands bound behind him, wearing a checkered shirt that hung off his skinny frame like drapery. His face pursed in terrified anticipation, like that of a boy waiting for the doctor to prick him with a dreaded needle. A second after the picture snapped, the prisoner was shot. There were likely other photos taken after, showing the man’s lifeless body on the ground, a pool of blood and brain and skull. Images considered more violent than the look on a man’s face – the sound of a girl’s voice – when they know they’re going to die.

She wondered whether the boys by the basketball hoops at Walt Whitman Middle School had gotten a hold of that Vietnam photo. They’d probably invented more jokes as they passed it along in a circle, young hyenas smelling blood. It’s not good target practice from that close up! Snickering, pretending that there was nothing wrong with enjoying someone’s death. Their sons might gather in the same schoolyard tomorrow, pulling up Katie’s phone call on their iPhones, making the same cracks, ignoring the icy butterflies in their stomachs.

Grace wished she knew what happened to her father’s old cigar box with the Korean War photos. Maybe they were thrown away after her father’s death. Or, the box could have been lumped in with other junk dropped off at the charity donation center. Maybe it was resold to a customer who had no idea about its contents. That person could have had family in Korea, and recognized some of the bodies as brothers or sisters or fathers or neighbors, and packaged them into little envelopes and sent them across the ocean and back into the hands of the families who’d lost them all those years ago. Maybe they’d found their way home.

Gregory Kane teaches English and writing at a
middle school in Southwest Philadelphia. A former
journalist, his nonfiction work has appeared in numerous daily and weekly
newspapers. He was born and raised outside of Philadelphia
and currently resides in Haverford with his wife.
This is his first fiction publication.

Communion

[img_assist|nid=8232|title=House of Fog by Lee Muslin © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=297|height=396]Persephone Samaras can’t wait to escape the oppressive heat of the pizza ovens. She’s off to see her cousin Vasili in the hospital, that sterile, air-conditioned sanctuary. Before she’s out the door, her husband, Phillip, his thick dark arms already, at ten a.m., dusted with flour, can’t resist reminding her that she’s leaving him again, that he won’t be able to manage lunch today without her. This is his latest version of flirting-laced with resentment and provocation, which she pacifies with a smirk and a quick puckering of lips. "You’ll survive," she teases, knowing that in Phillip’s self-absorption there is no thought of Vasili-not that there is any hope.

When she enters Vasili’s hospital room, the doctor, ungloved, is tracing the unblemished skin on Vasili’s foot. Five nickel-sized lesions zigzag along the shin.

Persephone imagines Vasili’s secret, boiling beneath the purple skin that refuses to scab. Lately she’s been thinking that maybe the trick to healing is coming out with the truth, even though it wouldn’t be news to anyone, especially not to the men of the family, who laugh at the lie Vasili has invented for his mother, something about a woman in New York. He has never had to confess the truth to Persephone, not in explicit terms, anyway. Theirs has always been a special, unconditional bond that, for her, seems stronger for the miles and years that have separated them. Holding so much in for so long must have had some kind of damaging effect. But Vasili doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone-not even to Persephone; that’s what she’s always envied most about him.

This past Sunday at her cousin Spencer’s name-day dinner, the men of the family shared their wisdom. Before ringing the doorbell, Phillip, suddenly religious, said, "You don’t test God, Persephone," as if Vasili’s fate should somehow serve as a warning to her. "Remember the Korean fellow he was bringing home years ago?" he added. "Did he think we didn’t know? It’s hubris, is what it is." Persephone wondered whatever happened to Vasili’s Korean friend, Ted. She also wondered where Phillip had picked up the word hubris, not to mention when he had turned into such a philistine-a word she’d recently picked up from Vasili. Later, reaching for beer in the garage refrigerator, Spencer called Vasili’s illness "God’s revenge on the gays." Persephone had her hand on his back as she searched the freezer for ice cream. "I stopped taking Communion," Spencer boasted, and called the church "behind the times" for serving with the same spoon from the same chalice.

Persephone wants to tell the fools they can all go to hell-actually, she wants Vasili to tell them-but if he can keep his mouth shut, so can she.

Of course, she will never give Spencer the satisfaction of knowing that Vasili stopped taking Communion in church years ago when he was first diagnosed. Nor will she confess she’s been secretly careful herself, checking only the unmarked section of Vasili’s forehead for fever.

She is relieved, watching the doctor’s bare hands.

"You’re looking good," she says, approaching Vasili’s bedside.

"I’m getting eaten alive inside." Vasili sips from a glass of water. His eyes grow wide as he takes her in. "You’re looking good. My God. That skirt. Foxy!"

"You like it? It’s a hundred degrees out there."

"Like it? Am I not a man?" He grins.

The doctor pulls the sheet over the leg and offers a weak smile before exiting.

Persephone sets Vasili’s glass on the tray at the foot of the bed. Scrambled cafeteria eggs and honeydew melon remain wrapped in cellophane.

With the doctor gone, Vasili’s tone shifts. "I want to talk to you before Father Kosporis arrives."

"Father Kosporis? Why is he coming?" Persephone says. "I don’t want to see him today."
"I should think not-in that skirt."

"Funny," she says. "Is he bringing you Communion?"

"My last rites." He winks.

She shakes her head.

Years ago, the last time Persephone and Vasili were in church together, Father Kosporis made his Communion policy clear. "Let me ask you to consider again that this is truly the body and blood of Christ and that you should refrain from Holy Communion if you are not at peace with God. We are asked to stand here worthily. So, if you are in an adulterous relationship, a pre-marital sexual relationship, an unnatural relationship…" Persephone was shocked by this improvisation. Vasili grinned and said, "Well, that about covers all of us, doesn’t it?" She hesitated, and then rose to join him.

She wonders, now, what has kept his faith intact all these years, while something has been chipping away at hers.

“I need a walk,” she says.

"You’re not leaving me already."

She hears the echo of her husband and wonders why the men in her life must convey their affection with such unbecoming desperation.

"No. Just-some fresh air," she says.

"Out there?"

He is on to her, but she doesn’t bother to come clean.

"The cafeteria," she says. "Coffee."

He mirrors her strained smile.

Coffee is as obvious a lie as fresh air, given the heat.

When she reaches the door, he says, "Promise me you’ll be strong."

"What?" Persephone laughs. "I’m strong."

"I want you to be free, Phoni"-the name only Vasili still uses. "Let them know who you are," he cheers.

"Vasili!" She feels insulted. Why don’t you? she thinks.

"You’ve never really gone anywhere, or done anything. Don’t let Phillip-"

"Stop it. I’m free. You have no idea."

"I know, I know." He pauses. "New topic. My funeral dinner."

She grimaces. She can’t pretend-not about this. "Not now."

"When you get back. After you have your coffee," he adds, grinning, seeing that she has one foot out the door. "Foxy."

She rushes toward the cafeteria, eager for the relief that the company of strangers will provide. This has all come on so fast. But even that is a lie. She has had more than enough time to come to peace with this. It has been five years since the night he told her he was sick, in the kitchen, after Aunt Anastasia and Uncle Mike had gone to bed. It hadn’t occurred to her immediately what "HIV" was. He might have announced that he was off to Europe for a while. "A few months ago," he said, as if answering a question, "but I wanted to make sure. It’s dormant. Mom and Dad know. I’ve lost some weight." These were prepared pieces of information. "It hasn’t affected my playing." He contemplated his hands, his precious fingers. She remained dumbfounded, even as reality settled in. "The priest in New York gives me Communion in private." Then he answered the unspeakable question: "A friend from the orchestra, he had a house in the Hamptons. There were parties, after concerts, on the weekends. I’ve been careful since the AIDS scare."

The AIDS scare. She hadn’t shared in this fear that, to him, bonded everyone.

She has never been this close to anyone else-other than her husband. When they were kids, Vasili was the one who could make her feel buoyant and lovely.

Late last night, after returning from the hospital, she decided to assemble photographs of Vasili. She was heading to the family room, toward the cabinets filled with albums, when she stopped at the mirror in the vestibule. She took a deep, satisfied breath. Six pounds in six weeks. It was odd to feel so light, having just spent hours in the face of her cousin’s wasting disease-virus?-the two of them, together again, as thin as they’d been at eighteen. Standing there, hot-despite the air conditioning-she recognized Vasili’s imminent death as true, not just as a fact to which she had finally resigned herself, since he’d arrived home over a month ago, but as Truth, with a capital T, part of the flow of life and death that in recent years-since turning fifty-she had been trying to understand is neither good nor bad.

Phillip was asleep beyond the slightly open door at the top of the steps. The sound of his breathing heightened her sense of ownership-this body was hers to fatten or starve. She headed to the basement in search of old clothes, to test small sizes. She had always been what they call petite, but she’d puffed up after giving birth to three boys. With her two youngest moving out this summer, she’d decided it was time to return to form. Too skinny, Phillip would say. Still, in bra and panties she dragged boxes across the concrete floor, out from the cedar closet, and, fitting snugly into old shirts and skirts, felt not just a little bit, well, foxy.

After circling the wing, Persephone returns to Vasili’s room empty-handed.

"We must have strawberries," he announces.

It takes her a moment to remember where they left off. The funeral dinner.

"And asparagus," he adds. "Promise me."

He has said he is lucky to get closure like this-not everyone gets it, you know.

"What else?" she asks.

"At my viewing play Mozart’s Requiem. The Vienna philharmonic-you can find a recording of it."

She nods.

"I don’t mind open casket for the family, but then I want it closed."

Suddenly she wants to say: you ran off to be free, and now it’s killing you.

"Oh, and I want nice, fresh fish at the dinner. Snapper, I don’t know, whatever’s good now. And don’t worry about money. This will be the wedding banquet I never had."

She takes his hands into hers.

"Promise," he says, as he sinks into sleep.

He turns toward the metal box whispering to his right. She has barely paid attention to the thin tubes that curve out from his nostrils and disappear beneath the bed sheets; she recognizes them now for the job they are doing, thankful for their transparency and their discreet path to their source.

Strong. She will be strong.

"I promise," she says.

This morning Phillip asked where she’d found that old skirt.

"You don’t like it?" Persephone set her cup in the sink, her back turned.

"Yes, I like it. Are you kidding me?" He clasped her thigh, his thick thumb shocking her, sending her spinning like a schoolgirl. "How old is this thing, Skinny?" He slurped the last of his coffee.

He flipped up the skirt, and she welcomed the surprise, figuring-rightly-that for a few minutes she might forget herself and what was in store for the day. In this old skirt she was eighteen again-for better and for worse: she could see herself, newly married, in the Orange Street pizza shop, the first of the three they would own, kneeling on a booth cushion and setting a poinsettia on a windowsill, her hair falling from a small rounded cone, as Phillip surprised her from behind.

She knows she hasn’t changed much since then, or accomplished anything all her own. The restaurants don’t count. They are Phillip’s, though she plays partner dutifully and together they have thrived. Raising the boys-that’s her accomplishment-or at least Bobby, secretly her favorite, in his third year of medical school in Virginia. Phillip would claim the younger sons for his restaurants.

She has decided it is not too late to set her own path, and to revisit certain long abandoned ones.

Several days ago, Persephone raced from the hospital to her parents’ house-to get closure-to ask her father why he’d never protected his daughter from his wife.

"What can we do about it now?" he said.

She had planned to tell him the story of the night she nearly ran away-the night she’d lain on the couch, a box of frozen spinach pressed to her cheek. When Stephen Kouros had called after dinner, Persephone had stretched the phone cord into the dining room and whispered, "You may not call me here, Stephen," then quickly hung up and returned to the dishes in the sink. Persephone didn’t defend herself when her mother called her vroma-stupid whore.

Persephone planned her conversations with her teachers-all recycled lies: she’d been sick with bronchitis; it was impossible to stay after school because she had to work at her father’s sandwich shop. The excusal notes had become routine. She’d write them, faking immigrant English-Persephone no talk because she has sick throat. To the American secretaries, the notes seemed authentic if they were poorly written. Her father would sign them without reading.

Persephone picked up the pen from the coffee table. She doodled, making loops. She got carried away with the thought of being an artist, mused about what it would be like to paint pictures all day and get paid for it. She addressed the principal, Dear Mr. Gingrich. She wrote one sentence, then crumpled the first draft, not because she’d spelled bronchitis with a "k"-she knew how to spell it correctly; it was the immigrant spelling-but because she didn’t want to use the same excuse too often. She started again, stating first that the mark on my daughter’s eye is from my wife hitting her while I was at work. Persephone reread the sentence; it had felt good to write it, so she continued. Last night my wife told my daughter for the millionth time that she was a stupid whore.

Frank Sinatra albums leaned against the stereo-and-television cabinet, his sparkling blue eyes and shameless smile tempting her to think about love. She walked over and picked up Songs for Young Lovers and imagined filling the house right now with My Funny Valentine or, better yet, The Girl Next Door. Amused, she pictured her bewildered mother descending the steps.

Caught up in the world of the Young Lovers album cover-gas-lit streets, couples strolling-she decided to call Stephen Kouros. She picked up the phone on the corner table, happy, shivery, believing for a moment that she truly would call.

Instead, she called Vasili. He’d just finished practicing, he said. He was in the kitchen, eating chocolate-covered strawberries that his mother had bought at the market. The TV was on in the background. Vasili asked if she was all right, and she said, "Yes."

"Is anyone else home?" he said.

"Are you in the family room?" she whispered. The TV got louder-The Honeymooners.

"Friday I told Gingrich your throat was swollen and you couldn’t talk."

"Thanks." She pictured Vasili sitting on the step that joined the kitchen and the family room. She could see Uncle Mike’s belly rising with every breath. Aunt

Anastasia wore a white robe with pink roses and paged through Redbook, considering lipstick shades and listening for the rumble of the dryer in the basement to stop. Jackie Gleason barked. Vasili’s teeth cracked through moist chocolate.

Persephone lay on her side, eyes closed. She fantasized what her life would be like if

Aunt Anastasia and Uncle Mike were her parents-planning for college next year, winning scholarships, as Vasili was. She would be a dancer, performing in the kitchen, while Vasili, the prodigy, played the piano in the living room.

"You should call Steve Kouros," Vasili said.

"I should do a lot of things."

"What are you worried about? You’re the prettiest girl in school."

She loved Vasili more than anyone. "He must think I’m crazy," she said.

"You’re mysterious."

"Oh please."

"Trust me."

"What do you know about mysterious?"

He said, "I know about mysterious."

Her father’s Cadillac pulled into the driveway, then into the garage. The car’s hum filled the house. Her brother’s Mustang rumbled in the street. The engines stopped; the car doors slammed.

"What am I going to do next year?" she said.

"Vasili!" Father Kosporis beams, pink-faced and perspiring above his collar.

"Maybe we can do this before Mom gets here," Vasili says.

"As you wish." Father Kosporis sits down and unsnaps the locks of his briefcase.

Persephone waits for official papers to appear. Instead, on the tray at the foot of the bed, Father Kosporis sets a book, a miniature chalice, a gold spoon, a small bottle of red wine with a screw-on cap, and a hunk of thick-crusted bread in a sandwich baggie.

"You can take Communion with Vasili," Father Kosporis says to her. "But…" He looks at Vasili. "You understand she can’t be here for the Confession."

"I’ll wait outside for your mother," Persephone says.

In the hallway Aunt Anastasia is already approaching, a dark silhouette but for her pale face still featureless in the distance.

Last night Persephone called her cousin Spencer to ask him to bring their aunt to the hospital in the morning. She explained that it was difficult for her to be transporting their aunt as well as running back and forth between the restaurant and hospital several times a day. Spencer said he couldn’t take the smell of impending death; then he sighed and said, okay, he would drop her off.

"Father Kosporis is here." Persephone hugs her aunt. "For Confession and his last Communion."

She leads her aunt to the lounge, where they sit on a couch facing the hallway. Persephone recounts the morning’s events-breakfast, the nurse, the doctor, the priest-and describes Father Kosporis’s portable sacrament kit. Her aunt stares at the door across the hall. They sit quietly, holding hands.

"He always loved you," her aunt says. Her cheeks tremble.

"It’s all right, Ma." Ma-she doesn’t correct herself.

Vasili’s door opens. Father Kosporis steps into the hallway and looks both ways. A nurse hurries toward the speechless priest.

Inside, Vasili thrusts his head back into the pillow, lifting his chin as if to straighten his throat for air.

"What is it?" Persephone rushes to the bed.

Aunt Anastasia holds Vasili’s hand.

Father Kosporis stoops for his briefcase.

Vasili groans, his eyes opening wide.

Aunt Anastasia makes room for the nurse, who inspects the tubes and feels Vasili’s forehead. The nurse glances at the machines and whispers that Vasili should relax. The miniature chalice, spoon, and sealed baggie sit on the tray, apparently untouched. Persephone tries to read Vasili’s mind. His gray eyes shoot toward his feet, and she covers his toes. Vasili’s groan deepens.

"What is it, my son?" Aunt Anastasia strokes his arm.

"What happened, Father?" Persephone says.

Father Kosporis gathers up the chalice, spoon, and bread. "I’m sorry."

Air hisses from Vasili’s throat. He tosses his fingers, like wet flowers, toward the doorway.

When Father Kosporis leaves, Vasili begins to breathe more easily.

He confessed, Persephone realizes. Vasili knows the rules, and he knew Father Kosporis had no choice in the matter. Vasili never wanted Communion today-only the last word.

With his remote control, Vasili lowers himself a few inches, shifting his eyes back and forth between Persephone and his mother, who sit opposite each other on the bed.

"What was it, Vasili?" Aunt Anastasia seems convinced that Father Kosporis provoked in her son some grave revelation.

"It’s okay, now," Persephone says.

When the nurse turns to leave, Vasili’s arm shoots out to make a barrier.

Aunt Anastasia combs fallen strands from his forehead. "What now, Vasili?"

His eyes are nearly shut. He seems to be sustaining one last efficient breath-neither inhaling nor exhaling. He waves his arms, his fingers tangling in oxygen tubes.

"Okay," the nurse says, and folds his hands on his chest.

Vasili signals with closed eyes, grateful for her understanding.

Once the nurse leaves the room, Vasili turns his glassy gaze at Persephone, his breath a distant whistle of wind in a tunnel. She tries to smile for him. Aunt Anastasia’s hand remains on his cheek. Persephone leans her ear toward Vasili’s mouth, as he strains to speak: "Forgive me, Ted. I didn’t have your courage. You should have been here."

Persephone lifts her face to see his, and, in a moment, she forgets herself: "I’m here, Vasili. It’s me."

"Sweet Phoni," he says, when his eyes meet hers, "I wish you could have really known me."

She decides he must be delirious, or even nearly unconscious.

Aunt Anastasia’s tears vanish in the bed sheet pulled up to his chin. "Father and I will wait patiently," he whispers. "Mitera sighoreseh me"-Mother, forgive me. He strains to keep his eyes open. "Opos o Theos me ehei sighoresei"-Forgive me as God has forgiven me.

"Oh." Aunt Anastasia presses her glazed lips over Vasili’s mouth.

His eyes close.

"You were always a good boy," she whispers.

His lips are oblivious and dry. His eyes open briefly, shifting toward Persephone, then toward the ceiling.

Persephone is still replaying his last words to her: I wish you could have really known me. She raises herself on the bed and pleads, "Vasili?" His eyes absorb all they can of these last moments. "Shhhh," her aunt soothes, as Persephone lowers her face to Vasili’s cool, damp cheek, praying selfishly for words to form from his thick breath.

"You’ll visit me in New York," he said. "Then you can move there if you want."

She imagined the city at night, endless glitter surrounded by dark water.

Outside, her father called to Peter, who dragged metal trashcans to the street.

"California," she said. "Right now."

"I’m serious," he said. "We’ll meet at the Jersey shore in the middle of winter. We’ll have the boardwalks to ourselves."

"I have to go," she said.

"Okay, fine-no Jersey shore. Somewhere nice. Cape Cod, the Hamptons…" Places she’d never heard of.

"My dad’s home." Keys jingled at the door.

"We’ll rendezvous, ride bikes-"

"Bye," she whispered.

The doorknob turned, hinges squeaked.

"You’re lucky," she added.

"Call him, Phoni," he said. "You’ll break his heart if you don’t."

Persephone hung up the phone and peered into the foyer. Peter made his way down the hallway toward the kitchen. She stood up and froze, remembering her bruised face. Her father peeked into the living room and lifted his hat like a gentleman. "Oh, hello," he said.

"Hi."

After hanging up his coat, he sat on the couch.

She lifted her face into the light.

His eyes drifted toward the stereo. "You like Frank Sinatra now?"

Vasili’s silver-framed photograph, the same one Persephone sent to the newspapers two days ago, sits on the corner table, awaiting its place on the casket, which, for now, remains open, as he instructed. Mozart’s Requiem trickles through lush bouquets into the dim room lined with chairs. Aunt Anastasia places her black-gloved fingers to her son’s lips and closes her eyes. Faintly frosted by the photographer’s lens, the picture-of a younger Vasili at a piano, squaring his tuxedoed shoulders and his broad, cleft chin for the camera-strikes Persephone, as it did this morning, when she saw it in grainy, newspaper black-and-white, as a dreamed-up version of her cousin. Similarly, the reported cause of death-a heart attack-both annoyed and relieved her for its fuzzy truthfulness.

"He looks good," Peter whispers.

"They really did a great job," cousin Spencer confirms.

Phillip adds, "He looks terrific."

Aunt Anastasia turns from the casket, smiles, and nods.

Persephone can’t deny that Vasili’s layered clothes-the bow tie and ruffled tuxedo shirt, the black velvet jacket with satin lapels-and the mortician’s tricks have had an animating effect. Still, to say he looks good is absurd, but she has the sense not to argue with them.

"Is this him playing?" Phillip asks.

"No," Persephone says.

"Does anyone have a tape of his?" Peter asks.

"That’s what I was thinking," Phillip says.

"It’s Mozart," Persephone says. "Vasili wanted this."

"I’ll go out to the car." Spencer steps away. "We might have something."

Phillip nods to Spencer. "It only makes sense."

"It’d be nice," Peter says. "For people to hear his music."

Spencer rushes out, just as the undertaker enters the room. Persephone feels ignored, erased, but she won’t make a scene. She tells herself that Vasili’s music won’t be such a betrayal of his wishes-only his modesty would be offended. Before the double doors are sealed shut, she glimpses visitors gathering in the foyer. The undertaker, a blond man in a gray suit, walks slowly down the center aisle, inspecting the room. He nods considerately to Persephone’s parents, who are sitting in chairs against the wall. Beyond the ceiling, there is a rumbling Persephone realizes is thunder, not the dragging of chairs, or caskets, as she first imagines. She anticipates the arrival of her two youngest sons, who promised to be here, even if they had to close up the shops.

It occurs to her that some of Vasili’s New York friends must be out there among the attendants, including his old friend Ted-assuming he’s still alive. She wouldn’t recognize Vasili’s dearest friends from strangers.

Vasili was right. She didn’t really know him.

Her father rises slowly from his chair. He holds his hand out to his wife, who lifts herself. They trudge past Persephone and stand at the foot of Vasili’s casket. "He looks good," her father says. Her mother bows toward Vasili’s shoes.

The undertaker approaches Persephone. "We can start whenever you’d like."

Spencer, heaving, swipes a hand through his drenched hair, unbuttons his suit coat, beaded with rainwater, and, in triumph, holds up a cassette tape-"Got it!" -this man with arm outstretched over his head, so self-satisfied with success. He twirls his ring of keys on a finger as he hands the tape to the undertaker, who slips it into his suit coat pocket.

"We should leave it open," Peter says to no one in particular.

"No," Persephone says. "He wanted a closed casket."

"Leave it open," Spencer says.

Peter says, "What do you think, Dad?"

"It’s a nice idea," her father says.

"Very nice," her mother says.

The undertaker puts his hand on Aunt Anastasia’s shoulder. "It’s completely up to
you, Mrs. Manos."

"We should be proud," Spencer says.

Aunt Anastasia turns from the casket, nodding. "He looks so handsome."

As the undertaker bows and turns away, Persephone goes to the corner table and gets Vasili’s picture, which is to be placed on top of the closed casket. The undertaker approaches the sealed double doors.

The music has stopped, and for the moment, Mozart has been replaced by the murmur of people entering behind her, the faint thumping and fluttering of umbrellas shrinking. Her three sons enter first.

Aunt Anastasia waves for Persephone to join the family lining up next to Vasili.
As music-Vasili’s music-begins to play, Bobby rushes to her. "Mom, look at me." He grabs Vasili’s picture from her hands. "Mom, his goddamn boyfriend is out there."

"Bobby!" In a flash, she smacks her grown son’s mouth.

He raises his hand to his cheek. "What’s wrong with you?"

It’s the right question to ask.

Beyond her son’s reddening face, beyond the glistening mob, Persephone spots the sad familiar eyes of an aging Korean man. For a moment, she thinks of going to him. She could ask him to forgive her-as if he might know who she is and why she needs to be forgiven.

"I don’t know what to say," she tells her son. "I’m sorry."

His bewildered eyes press into her, the mark on his cheek refusing to fade. In the distance, Vasili appears ghastly, aglow, exposed. The family stands beside him, their faces full of sympathy.

The box of melting spinach and her horrible note sat there. In the mirror above the couch she saw her rosy cheek. Her father pulled his T-shirt out from his pants, about to snooze. He cleared his throat and leaned toward the coffee table.

He picked up the pen and signed his name to the note, then sat back and closed his eyes. "It’s cold," he huffed. She lifted the afghan from her shoulders and draped it over his chest and legs. "Good girl," he said.

She turned off the lamp. The room remained lit from the vestibule and the front porch light through the bay window. Her father was asleep. She stared at the note: his signed confession. A puddle had formed around the spinach. She would leave it all there until morning. God knew it would be there, waiting for her.

Jim Zervanos is the author of the novel LOVE Park. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including the anthologies Philly Fiction and Philadelphia Noir. He is a graduate of Bucknell University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is a teacher of English and creative writing and lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son. "Communion" was a runner up in the 2011 Marguerite McGlinn National Short Story contest.

Pincushion Letters

Seconds after my mother died, she began work in heaven on a little play titled "Naked in Bed with Eleanor Roosevelt." Or so the medium sketched. I only met with her because a childhood friend, who had eyes the color of pickle relish and on occasion called me Flinch, gave me a gift certificate good for three visits to a psychic. Our first Magic-8-Ball chat found her smooth, resourceful, so adept at improvisation, she could’ve been a veteran of Second City or SNL.

"You’re here to communicate with Deborah," began Miss Marintha. "I can tell you that she’s peaceful, even flourishes."

I coughed, "Flourishes?" She then launched the Eleanor rigmarole that drove me out of her storefront parlor. Through the window, I glanced back at her hoping a second look would clarify the lunacy. Instead, I saw an older man lift and carry her to a rear curtain. One arm beneath her shoulder blades, another under the crooks of her knees, he cradled her, inviting gravity’s press against her unsupported center—a kind force that accentuated the curve of her ass. The man twirled as he pushed through the drape, so that a pair of red culottes slung over gnarly veins was the last I saw of Miss Marintha that day.

I sped home. Distracted by thought, I sailed through a four-way stop and almost smacked a Saab. Came within inches of bleeding in the lap of a stranger. Once inside I squashed my impulse to trawl the web for Eleanor. Better: I downed Lunesta with a swig of scotch and proofed a syllabus to quicken the drowse. Dreams twittered and an old adage teased, politics makes strange bedfellows. I murmured something about understanding the so-called title. But writing a play? Wings under halo?

The next day Vaughn’s certificate pissed me off to no end. Normal people who read an obit donate to charity or send flowers or fruit; Vaughn created a game. But as awful as the first visit had been, I knew I’d go back to the cane table and chairs surrounded by dollar-store frames that hugged moons, stars, unicorns, and Sistine Chapel figures—sibyls, prophets, nude athletes plus two frames with identical reproductions of a woman breastfeeding her child.

After class I circled the South Street block on which my shaman in red jerked people round. In the afternoon rush cars bounced a tortured conga, rhythm set by brake lights. The line I joined a dozen times let me watch the action inside. A young woman and Miss Marintha sat rigid and compelled like spoons in steaming tea awaiting fingers to appear, grasp them, stir. Seeing another client settled me some. The idea that I was her only customer, gifted or not, had troubled me. On my last pass, both women were gone. I flipped my cell, called the parlor, requested an appointment at the voice-mail prompt, all with a sense of post-coital satisfaction appropriate to every South Street dance.

Come morning I entered as the old man pushed through the curtain and delivered the culottes to her chair.

"You left quickly the other day, Mr. Seldorn," she smiled, "I thought you had run off forever." Her eyes were younger than the rest of her face, darts of displaced child, precocious, looking down a well, peeps on high beam scanning waters for my beginnings. Slicked back, her dark hair fell to her waist, which added to the illusion of youth. She had to be in her forties. "So how can I help?"

"You can start by dropping the writing in the clouds routine."

"Done. What would you like instead?"

"Look, I’m only here because of a friend."

"I thought you came to learn about Deborah." She sucked in her cheeks, probably to emphasize her one-upmanship, certainly to slay me with high cheekbones. "Vaughn just set things in motion."

"Motion denotes progress. Not the creation of a floating loon tapping a keyboard."

"But everyone up there loves Deborah’s work. Up there you can’t go wrong." All this with a straight face.

"Once more: she’s not up in the sky. Sorry, not a believer. And Roosevelt, that title, c’mon, it’s twisted."

Marintha opened her palm and flashed a gold charm engraved friend.

I reached for the thing. "Where’d you get this?"

She drew back her hand and held it under the table. "Vaughn. Who else?"

"Bastard said he wanted something of hers."

"It’ll be yours again, relax." She jammed half a laugh into her promise. "Andrew," with her free hand she touched my forearm, "may I call you Andrew?"

A hard-on pressed into my pocket; I wanted blood back in my brain. "You dress—but don’t talk—like a Gypsy."

"Afrrrraid you’re a little off. Pop and I are Yugoslavian, on the cusp of exotic at best. At least that’s Pop’s story. And he sticks to it well." Her voice cartwheeled in the gravel between Eartha Kitt and Suzanne Pleshette. "Don’t bother your thoughts with wars and boundaries. Everything’s fluid. I was two when we emigrated. Pop had me tutored in English until I was sixteen and my language skills perfect. A regular xenophobe’s nightmare. Gypsy?" She smiled with Coney Island lips, all roller coaster climbs and falls.

To hide my admiration for her smarts, I folded my arms—then realized I looked like a schoolboy—sharp elbows held high—and unfolded. "Deborah was like a second mother to Vaughn. So he’s always said. When I was sorting through her things, he saw that. Wanted it. Stole it when I wasn’t looking. Maniac." I bit my bottom lip as I added fucker under my breath. "He shouldn’t have given, shouldn’t’ve let you touch it."

Before I folded again, Miss Marintha took my hand in hers and returned her other hand to the tabletop. She squeezed the gold. "Deborah was a complicated woman."

"Squeezing tells you that? Let’s forget the drama."

She scrunched her chin but relaxed it instantly. "Okay, Andrew. Let’s try simple skits. You, six years old, skinny as the row house you lived in. Terribly impressionable. Sneaking down steps with your pal to watch productions."

"My, my, you’re good." I pulled my hand away.

"Stepping down. Holding the banister. Lots of laughter in the basement. There’s a linoleum floor. A bar. The smell of sweaty bodies and alcohol: it scared you."

"All stuff my pal told you."

Marintha put down the charm. "It’s New Year’s Eve! With the Harowicks, Farkases, Browns, Ladimarts."

Although I knew Vaughn supplied the names, I looked to the side as if those mentioned had gathered to greet me. Instead, I greeted myself in a mirror. Fifty-seven, salt-and-pepper hair, a bit slouched in Marintha’s presence; I straightened.

"Your mother wrote skits for neighbors to perform at her yearly parties. The climax always was the entrance of Baby New Year in a diaper. Father Time was there, holding a cardboard sickle and wearing cotton balls on his chin. Scripts varied," she giggled, "yet typically turned into Punch and Judy shows. But in 1958 the group sideswiped Deborah. Started her skit but switched to another. Their surprise play mocked her because they’d uncovered an obsession. She had written to Mrs. Roosevelt months before and had gotten a personalized reply. Deborah chattered endlessly about it, nothing specific, only that she’d received a letter."

"She was proud of that letter." Proud was more lump in my throat than word, a tiny hunchback.

"Into the skit came a neighbor in drag. A big guy dressed as Eleanor. He sucked a pair of wax buckteeth and wore a hat, raked, mannish, pinned to a wavy wig. Under drooping breasts hung a sign that read ‘Eleanor Babe.’ Someone grabbed the 45 and blared Harry Belafonte’s ‘Cocoanut Woman.’ Down the babe stripped," here Marintha added deliciously, "stripped to freshly cracked milk. And as the whistling gang counted down midnight, voilà—in diaper—Baby New Year."

I admired the re-creation obviously authored by Vaughn. Every December 31^st he’d slept over our house. Loyal actors and willing to help clean up, his folks usually left around 4:00 a.m., too late to keep a babysitter. Vaughn’s stay was a given. Forbidden to watch parties, we played upstairs with my chemistry set and Robby the Robot. Eventually, we tuned-in Roland on "Shock Theater" and just once sneaked down to see the goings-on. Spied. Skedaddled. "You did your homework. Informer, whatever, forgiven," I lied. But the details made everyone live again, and I was hungry for Unruh Street, hungry for Mom’s once–a–year social effort. Even hungry for her Dead-Sea-Scroll distance, a coolness she seemed to reserve for me.

"Do you know that Deborah read Trollope?"

"Anthony Trollope? My Deborah?" I laughed at the idea, though George Eliot would’ve been a scream.

Marintha’s father, a few hairs standing on end like quills or beheaded stop signs, parted the curtain and tapped his watch. Marintha pushed the charm to my side of the table and as she was carried off, silently formed the word call.

I pocketed the charm, rose, and noticed a wood sculpture in the corner. It was an inverted pietà, a horror. Jesus, lips peeled back as if he were an astronaut in G-force training, held a lifeless Madonna. I moved closer.

Pop appeared and blocked me. "Bye-bye," he said.

I tore from the wood, pushed out the door, nearly toppled a family of crucible faces, clients whose torsos twisted this way, that, Gumbys startled by glass in swing. As I watched through the window, Pop removed the pietà. He returned and placed on a stool a portrait of a little girl. I jaywalked across South and turned to see Miss Marintha’s entrance in Pop’s arms, and the Gumby family, though now seated, bow.

"The third visit is often the charm," she winked, "and I hope you won’t run at the mention that we left off with Trollope"—Marintha’s opening gambit next morning.

"We left off with my laughter." My hand trembled, and I saw her glance at my fingers. "Caffeine and the cool of Starbucks and Saxbys." She didn’t buy my improv.

"Deborah read Trollope before she married. She was taken with the prime minister’s wife who spoke her mind and befriended many."

"Yeah, I know his novels, maybe too well. Never assign ’em."

"It’s interesting. You seem to doubt Deborah ever cracked a book, yet you—"

"Adjunct professor. Ain’t much."

"But," she pushed, "you’ve written a few things."

"Unveil your crystal and Google away."

Miss Marintha cleared her throat. "Deborah, being Deborah, was chilly regarding most of your work. But admired and was quietly pleased with one piece."

"With that you score a genuine boogey-boogey." I glanced off and spotted a new freak show in the corner. An unfired clay figure of a woman, draped head to toe, only her face and one arm visible. I pointed with my chin, "What’s that?"

"A tiny model of a statue Eleanor loved. She meditated in its shadow for years. ‘Grief’ is what she called it."

"A bit slapdash. I mean, look at it. Sorry."

"Pop had no time. The image came to me yesterday. I can’t claim a great coup: Eleanor’s devotion to the object is part of public record. I just thought it’d help. And yes, the Christ holding Mary is his."

"His pietà," I almost spit, "wasn’t done overnight."

"Or recently. You don’t think much of his talent."

I hated what I sounded like but pressed on. "He’s a prop master."

Her spine straightened. "He was a glassblower in Yugoslavia."

"And you want to see me—what—react to this crap? See me sniffle?"

"Why, Andrew," she gloated, sardonic, rich, "I can gyp a geyser out of anybody."

"We’ll debate that till ‘Grief’ does the Can-Can." This woman was buckling the knees in my brain. "So with clients, how should I put this, you try anything."

"It’s a business, yes."

"Fake it."

"Mostly. Absolutely!" She put her hand to the side of her mouth and with fingers that formed a kind of popsicle-stick fan blocked any view Pop might have of the whisper, "I’m almost always full of shit." Hand down. "Unless," she squinted at me, eyelids in tickle, "I’m sure."

"Faking aside, exactly what do you do?"

"I wrap gifts at Bloomingdale’s and attach bows," she tied an air ribbon and flicked it. "Whatever curlicues customers ask for."

"Then let’s top this little box with a squiggly R."

She nodded, "Okay. Deborah bared her soul in her first letter."

"First?"

"Touched Eleanor. Truly touched her."

"How many letters were there?"

"In my vision the number blurred, and their words combined."

"They had nothing in common. Mom wrote a fan letter. Got back a standard whatever."

Marintha shook her head. "Deborah knew her mail was just a curiosity to your father and you. She counted on that plus your dad’s assumption it was a form letter. She flashed it at you folded to show only the printed name up top, signature below. Then locked it away, and being human, told neighbors a few too many times about her prize. They thought her an autograph seeker, which actually helped her in the long run. If people perceived things as they did, privacy was assured. Rounds of letters never entered anyone’s mind."

I heard a little thud and out the corner of my eye saw the arm had just fallen off the figure. "Looks like ‘Grief’ is a one-armed bandit."

"You’re cold. Hypercritical."

I felt like a shit in swirl. "Like mother like son."

"Eleanor, too, was cool to her children and had a horrible childhood herself."

"You know, they cut out Freud’s jaw to shut him up about kids."

"Don’t cheapen what we’re doing."

"Cheap?" I threw my arms up, slashed the air, fingers, Punch and Judy. "I’m talking to a friggin’ fortune teller!"

And there was Pop. "I kick him out?"

Marintha picked at a fingernail. "Escort him."

I already was at the door when Pop caught up and pushed it open.

When I was halfway out, Miss Marintha called after me: "There were six or eight letters from Eleanor sewn into the dress Deborah was buried in."

Pop slammed and locked the door. In a rage I swung round, banged on the window, watched them talk a second. Pop unlocked the door but didn’t open it. He returned to the curtain, his millipede eyebrows ready to leap and wrestle me to the ground. Careful to stay by the door, I reentered.

Marintha studied me. "Go, Pop. Relax in back. I’ll handle him now."

Pop retreated, but not before he glared at me and arched his top lip.

"Glad you came back," said Miss Marintha. Her hand brushed the top of my chair.

"You’re mentally ill. You, Vaughn, your father. He is your father?"

"And sticks to it well." She flipped back some hair. "Since you and Vaughn were teens, there’s been nothing between you. He’s just had a thing about your mom."

"Then let the motherlover sit here."

She rolled her eyes. "Any mental illness—perhaps what I do is illness—would be mine."

"Sewn into her dress! I’d know."

"Did you dress her?"

"Of course not."

"Did you choose the dress?"

"Her choice was written out. And the dress set aside in a labeled garment bag. If she had letters from Roosevelt all over her body, wouldn’t the mortician have found them?"

"Letters pinned to clothing are common. Deborah just went further and sewed them into the lining. As she worked she wore the same thimble that fascinated you when you were five."

"You say you saw this."

She slid her head forward. "Clear as cotton balls."

"They had nothing in common."

"Try anguish over failing their children." The veins in Marintha’s forehead bulged in need of an additional head for blood to flow. "Both women needed profound friendships. To express whatever they could. Eleanor wrote back because there was a lack of guile, almost shocking, in your mom’s letters. Deborah wrote about your father’s other women. Eleanor never discussed her husband, but touched on many things. They wrote about the addictions that plagued their fathers’ lives. Your family whispered about your grandfather, but newspapers shouted every Roosevelt secret. The homeliness jokes both women endured were another theme. In appearance they weren’t Marilyn or Jackie O. It seemed there was nothing in the world more pressing than for everyone to remind them, remind. And their love of writing playlets, oh, they shared that in spades. Eleanor was even bound, gagged, and carried off by a pirate in a campy eight-millimeter adventure. There are published stills that anyone can see."

I massaged my temples. "A million women probably matched Mom’s profile, could’ve written letters."

"But," said Miss Marintha, "only Deborah would’ve written that since childhood she thought the satin in caskets was disturbing. Just the sight of it, debilitating."

"How’d you know that?"

"More important—"

"How did you know that? Vaughn?"

"—was Eleanor’s similar terror. Again, documented." Miss Marintha screwed her eyes into mine. "Eleanor begged her physician, the man she loved most in those years, to check repeatedly at the end for signs of life before her body was removed. Her words were similar to these: ‘You must be certain that I’m gone and give it time, David. Examine my body and examine it again. I know you’ll honor my wishes.’ Stop thinking I’m not real. Let this sink in."

"I thought the satin was a secret she shared just with me. One friggin’ secret. In a letter of introduction?"

"Possibly eight. Remember?"

"And all but one," I think I pulled at my hair, "undocumented."

Her face pushed up into the understanding look friends use to greet mourners at a funeral. "I only wish I could help you with that."

My chest heated up. I felt pressure, everything out of control.

"What’s wrong?"

"Chest’s gone crazy. Oh, man, awww shit. Awww."

"It’s a panic attack—breathe with me." She called, "Pop? Take a deep breath in. Count to seven as you inhale."

"Shit, oh shit."

Pop came and pushed her chair against mine. She rubbed my chest with one hand and touched my cheek with the other. "Now exhale slowly. Count to twelve."

"What if it’s not a panic attack? It’s moving into my jaw."

"Just breathe."

I asked how often she did this.

"Daily."

"God damn it."

"Breathe with me." She pinched my cheek gently.

"It won’t go away. I’m going to die here. Fuck. I am. I’m going to die in this fucking chair."

"Will you shut up and breathe."

"Son of a bitch." After five or six minutes, the burn and pressure broke. As it eased, I realized my eyes were wet and I felt betrayed: humiliated by my chest. Pop brought me cold water, moved his daughter’s chair back, and slipped behind the curtain. I turned to take a look at myself in the mirror. Spotted Pop behind us peeking out. I sipped the water and took another breath. "Okay. So. So, what happens now? Is this where I’m supposed to thank you?"

"Typical Andrew," she lilted, "undoing any chance of something cordial, while courting it at the same time. Has anyone ever called you Andy?"

"Couple cousins, friends. Ex-wife."

"Andy . . ."

I enjoyed her license and nearly cracked a smile.

"I’ve one more thing to tell you. It won’t hurt. Are you sure you’re all right, Andy?"

I nodded as though she’d placed a brick on my head.

She cupped my chin. "After Eleanor’s death Mom made secret trips to New York. She took the train at 30^th Street and walked from Penn Station to Eleanor’s house on East 74^th. Before the image matured, I saw refugees, dark and light women together, balancing everything they owned on their heads. Regardless. Deborah used to stand across the street from the brownstone and stare at it for hours. She found a calm she’d never known."

A calm not mine. I was uncomfortable with the idea of Mother looking for sanctuary ninety miles away, alone, defenseless. A woman in need of a woman who was gone.

"You seem to be doing well, Andy. You trust me now?" She released my chin.

"Some, a little, a little; a little, yes."

"Then you’ll know how to finish this. Now kiss my hand, it’ll bring good luck. Yes, it will. Kiss." She kept her eyes on her hand after I pressed my lips to it.

Insane with skin I said, "Vaughn knew everything."

Eyes dead on her hand and far from flinch, "Goodbye Andy."

I denied the name and corrected: "Adjunct."

Caught in an updraft, a sheet of paper swirled in the wind, meandered like Casper the Friendly Ghost. I stood across from the brownstone and watched the sheet sail. I thought: All right, Deborah. I found your true grave. You bled in the lap of an unlikely stranger, and the stranger bled back—corresponded. I’m happy for you. You snagged a woman, what you needed all along. I remember that when I was a child I opened a door and saw your breasts. The brown circles around your nipples were huge and puzzling to me, areolas big as traffic signals. Not red or green, but muddy indifference. Proceed as you please. I couldn’t imagine where you kept your heart, other than behind the rings. Gargantuan brown circles that kept me out. I never saw you naked again.

I gave the charm to a homeless Robby Robot outside the station. Then caught the train back and wrote my first letter to Miss Marintha. Thoughts of her and a loneliness that savaged my stomach demanded I report. That I apologize for my rude behavior and language. That I wanted to see her, would pay any price; knew her worth was far above rubies. I stuffed the letter into my pocket. Stuffed another.

In my mind, precarious as a passenger’s clutch in a bathroom on wheels, Marintha’s nipples lived in my mouth.

Please, I wrote, laid thanks at her sandals, painted her toenails culotte color, begged her to take Deborah’s bracelets, rings, Corolla. Did she know she got me excited once, and I didn’t mean the chest pain. I recognized Pop’s talent and asked for "Grief’s" arm. Told her about an ad for glassblowing in the Bowery. Would she and Pop join me there, be my guests?

The next day I mailed eleven letters, last one written 6:20 a.m. I pictured Miss Marintha surrendering to them and slipping them into her costume—forever clinging to prizes invisibly attached, moons, sibyls, breastfeedings looking on.

Barry Dinerman’s plays have been produced regionally and Off-Off Broadway by A Contemporary Theater, The Quaigh, GPC, and other companies. Two of his plays were short-listed for production at American Conservatory Theater. He was awarded The Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship to help support his projects. His work is housed in the Performing-Arts collection of The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center and further archived in Village Playwrights. He is the author of "The Kiss Me Stone."