NINTH LETTER
NINTH LETTER vol . 18 no. 1 spring/summer 2021
Contents vol. 18 no. 1 Spring/Summer 2021
fic tion Alix Ohlin Development, 1 Jad Josey Everything Eventually, 13
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“Sure. Thanks—you too.” Between them on the table rests a clutter of items: a salt shaker, a curl of butter in a white dish, jampots sunk with tiny spoons. He lifts each in turn, takes a spoon—elfin in his giant hand—and licks it, then puts it back in the pot. Then makes a grimace and recoils in his chair, as if horrified at what he’s impulsively done. Devon knows better. There are few species of rich person eccentricity to which she hasn’t been exposed. “What can I get you to start, coffee, tea, a drink?” Important to clarify that she won’t judge any choice he’ll make. She smiles the waitress over. “Do you have, uh, oolong tea?” he asks. “Of course.” “And raw sugar?” “Of course.” This too is typical: a rich person may perform awkwardness about their requests, but will not refrain from making them. Devon orders coffee and smiles again. Morris Pine has given to: —the children’s hospital —the heart society —the fringe theatre festival He has not yet given to the university. She asks about his preference for oolong tea. She asks about his university days. She coaxes diffident anecdotes from him. By the time he’s finishing the last of his eggs, his posture has relaxed. “Those were protest days,” he says. Above his watery eyes the brows wave, mad scientist-ish. “We locked the dean out of his office and put him in a cage on the quad. I heard he was never the same after.” Devon nods. “Exciting times,” she says. “Change in the air. Not unlike now.” He snorts. “Nothing like now! These kids—oh hell, what do I know.” Folksy, humble. But not too humble to catch the eye of the waitress and snap his long fingers for the check. Devon shakes her head. She has paid in advance; this too is part of her job.
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She folds him into her car and drives him up the hill to the university entrance. The gates at the top, with their wrought iron logo and ivy-wrapped finials, are meant to summon nostalgic memories from alumni such as Pine. But he misses the moment—instead staring moodily down the hillside, at the mixed-use development that has been constructed in the past five years. Tall pines and rocky outcroppings edge townhouses, a grocery store, a restaurant franchise that specializes in mussels and craft beer. “Used to be a whole lot of nothing down that ravine,” he comments in sour wonderment. “We ran naked in there, tripping on ecstasy.” “The university has preserved some of the old growth forest,” Devon says, “while still making available much-needed housing for incoming faculty and graduate students.” “You talk like a brochure,” Pine says. “That,” she says, “is my job.” “I don’t know why places can’t be left the way nature made them.” “Is that what you do?” she says, thinking of the words resource management in his file. A glance transacts between them. “You make good money doing this?” he asks. For the first time she feels herself become real to him, a being with defined borders. Morris Pine, according to a ten-year old profile in the local newspaper, grew up not far from here, on the outskirts of an unlovely town called Minter, the only son of a single mother who cleaned homes for a living. He attended the university on a scholarship earmarked for local residents, dropping out several times before finally completing his degree. “You have a family?” “I live in that development you don’t like,” she says, and smiles her no-teeth smile. She parks the car in the visitor lot and suggests he might want to walk around campus before the event begins. There will be an abbreviated performance of a Shakespeare play— Pine, according to the file, was a theatre major—followed by a reception to dedicate a Shakespeare garden. Wildflowers, wooden benches, sparkling wine. The hope is that something in the calibrated beauty of this day calls to Pine about the promise of his youth. Devon will be by his side re-filling his champagne flute whenever it dips below half full. If everything goes well, he won’t remember
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this, or her, at all; what he’ll remember is his own feeling of uplift, the glint of sunlight through leafy branches, the idyll only the university can provide. Morris Pine stands and stretches his arms fully above his head. “I could use a walk,” he says. “See you in a few.” She’d meant to accompany him, but doesn’t push. “Enjoy,” she says, and watches him stride away towards the quad, his long legs slightly bowed, snapping a bloom off a dogwood as he goes. Two caterers in black pants, setting up, their arms laden with glassware, dodge awkwardly out of his way. And that’s the last the world sees of Morris Pine. The performance has ended; the champagne glints and fizzes in the late afternoon sun; beneath the dogwood is a string quartet. When Morris Pine didn’t return in time for the play, Devon assumed he was blowing it off, in the spirit of his anti-authoritarian student days. But she thought he’d be back in time for the food and booze. People rarely skip the food and booze. Cee Cee, her boss, sweats furiously in the late afternoon sun. “I can’t believe you lost him.” “I didn’t lose him,” Devon said. “He ran away.” “What is he, a dog off its leash? Devon, you had one job.” In fact Devon has five jobs. In the crowd are a corporate executive, a cardiac surgeon, a lawyer, and a person who runs a foundation tending to his inherited wealth. She has read all their files; she has greeted them all by name. But when anything goes wrong Cee Cee turns livid with blame. She once accused Devon of stealing her insulated coffee mug, which she never cleans and smells of mold. Later she found it under the passenger seat of her car, but didn’t apologize. Why would I want that thing? Devon had asked her, and Cee Cee narrowed her eyes. Everyone around here wants things, she’d hissed. The president, circulating, chats with them about the weather, makes a joke about how as an economist he’s still studying the value of Shakespeare. At the museum fundraiser he made the same joke about sculpture. Answering his unspoken question, she directs him to the cardiac surgeon. “Ask him about his trip to Morocco,” she advises. 4
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The president is delighted. “I once did some research on Moroccan trade policy!” “I know,” Devon says. The president too has a file. Cee Cee is still vexed, her red lipstick askew, one hand fiddling with her earring. “You better find him, Dev. We’re about to announce the new campaign.” Devon doesn’t move. She believes that too much chasing undercuts the needed tension of the enterprise, its essential mystery. The people here know they’re being courted; they know a campaign is coming. But only they know what they’re willing to give away. The next day she receives a call from the President’s office, which has received a call from Morris Pine’s office, asking about his whereabouts. He hasn’t returned home. The day after that, a police officer interviews her at her cubicle. “Was he acting unusual?” “I wouldn’t know—I never met him before.” The officer narrows his eyes at her, like Cee Cee. “Did he seem in good health?” Devon says, “He ate all his eggs.” There is surprisingly little press. Devon isn’t sure whether it’s the university that doesn’t want to broadcast what has happened, or Morris Pine’s own company. Or whether this is simply another prerogative of the rich: to disappear at will. She sends an email to the address in the file, but receives no reply. As the days pass she searches for news online, and finds only a small item in a business magazine, mentioning his absence from a scheduled board meeting. A week after that, she is in the backyard, in the evening that, for this fraction of the year, still holds silvery light. The property backs right up against the ravine, and its back portion is half-wild and neglected. The dog noses around the fence while she walks around with her hands in plastic bags, picking up his poop. It’s been a while since she last took care of this chore and the grass is dotted and funky. Inside, her children sleep fretfully. They haven’t stopped complaining since their father, who is a professor at the university, left for his long-term ecological research site. Every summer he leaves them—the moment classes are over he boards a plane—but, despite expecting it, she and the children are always upset by his absence. ali x oh li n
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The house, too, protests; there’s always a plumbing issue, a crack in the foundation, squirrels trapped in the insulation. The backyard grows patchy and clouded with gnats. Any suggestion that he cut back his research travel is met with volatile anger. “Do you want me to get tenure, or not?” he snaps. “We could lose all this”—his arms stretched wide as if to encompass the whole development, the pale stone campus looming above it like a moon. The dog whines. He’s desperate to break through the fence and rampage through the ravine, browsing for chicken bones and pizza crusts the students have flung there. She shushes him but he won’t stop. At last she looks up, and there on the other side of the fence stands Morris Pine. They examine each other. His eyes are wary, alert, and he seems both attentive and poised for flight, like a deer. He’s still wearing his green Army jacket. Bits of leaf litter fleck his grey hair. Behind him, the dark tangled undergrowth of the ravine. Gnats swarm her eyes and she slaps the air, startling him and herself. A crash of movement, twigs splintering, and he is gone. She doesn’t tell Cee Cee, and she doesn’t call the police. It seems to her that whatever Morris Pine is doing in the ravine is his business. Once, she read about a woman on a trip to Iceland who wandered away from her group on an expedition. She changed her clothes, and then learned that one of the group was missing. Not recognizing the description of the person who was lost, she joined the search party for herself. She doesn’t think Morris Pine is lost, at least not in the literal sense. At work on Monday, she finds another article about Pine Inc.: a stock devaluation, presented in trade news without comment or context. She still doesn’t know what the company does—holdings in mining, says the trading report she locates, without specifying what kind of mining or where. She pictures Morris Pine bulldozing a massive pit in the ground, staring into its epic depths. She pulls up his file and adds the DNC code—do not contact—to the top. She labors through reunion season, summer festival season. She attends receptions in a tasteful sundress. In the evenings she mows the yard messily, leaving stripes of tall grass. Her children go to camp and hate it; they don’t want to do orienteering, or musical theatre, or learn to code. When they hear their dad’s voice crackling 6
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on his satellite phone, they launch their accusations. “How come you get to have a better summer than we do?” “I’m working,” he bristles, which fools no one. They’ve all seen the pictures of the hammock he sleeps in, his cooler of beer, the pink-orange sunset at the research location too remote to house a family with children. He begins telling them about the earthworms he’s studying, an explanation so lengthy and stultifying that they wander off. The earthworms have their own cooler, next to the beer. Devon can’t blame the kids for being angry, since she’s angry too. Not because she has to do all the work when her husband is gone; but because he’s freer than they are, and he won’t even admit it. Sometimes she finds gifts on the porch, as if left by a cat, although they don’t have a cat. A bright blue feather, perhaps from a jay. Then a whole bird’s nest, perfectly round, a tiny broken egg inside. A cluster of dark red pebbles, almost uniform in shape and size. Then a six-pack of beer with one can missing, the plastic ring that once held it empty and white as a ghost. She has taken the dog into the ravine, let him loose and charging through the trees. She has visited the firepit at the western overlook where students go to party. She’s left gifts of her own—a loaf of bread, a bunch of bananas, some bottled water. But when she returned later she found them untouched, the bananas shriveled and black, the bread mossy with mold, shredded by squirrels and birds. She decides to take the kids camping. From the basement she pulls out the tent, foggy with mildew, and sets it to dry in the backyard. At the grocery store she stocks up on supplies for s’mores and other bribes. After packing everything into the trunk she turns the key in the ignition and glances up to see a boy on a bike in the parking lot, screaming at her. Or, not a boy: a young man with a beard and a bandanna around his neck, his face suntan-grizzled. She rolls down the window to hear him. “You hit me!” he accuses her, and she frowns in puzzlement, checks—she’s still in park. “I wasn’t even moving.” There’s something off in the way his mouth twists, spittle flying. “You bitch,” he says, and she sees how he likes the word in his mouth, the sharp exhale of it. “In your SUV. You don’t care who ali x oh li n
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you hurt. Boomer!” “I’m not a boomer,” she says, laughing, but instantly wishes she could take the laughter back—it makes the situation so much worse. “Boomer! Bitch! Boomer bitch!” He drops the bike and pounds on the hood of the car, scrabbles toward the front windshield. She rolls her window up, clicks the locks. He won’t stop. A small crowd gathers and he appeals to them. “She was going to drive right over me!” he says, pointing at the bike. Inside, muted, she shakes her head. She can’t tell, from the looks on the bystanders’ faces, what they believe. They look like faculty members, with their groceries in tote bags, and they’ll spend forever analyzing the situation before they commit to a side. Five minutes pass, then ten, and he’s still yelling, hammering his clenched fists down on the car. Then: a rush of movement in front, Army green and grey hair, and the angry guy slams to the pavement. His yelling subsides into howling, high-pitched and feral. Confused muttering from the crowd. Devon isn’t sure what she’s just seen, and when the police arrive moments later—someone must have called them—she gives a garbled statement. It’s the same officer who interviewed her about Morris Pine, but she can’t tell if he remembers. “This individual says that you hit him.” “That’s impossible. I was in park the whole time.” “He has abrasions and possibly a concussion.” “A concussion—from what? From being tackled and hitting the pavement?” “What do you mean, tackled?” “By—a man,” she said. “He came out of nowhere.” She can’t see what the officer writes in his notebook, only the look of skepticism on his face as he does. “You’re saying that rather than you hitting the cyclist, a man came out of nowhere and tackled him to the ground? Do you see that man here?” Devon shakes her head—she’s shaking all over. “Aren’t there other witnesses? There was a whole crowd here.” But as she looks around she sees the bystanders have drifted away, not wanting to be implicated. The officer ignores her question. “What do you do, ma’am?” “I work in development. At the university.” “And what does that mean?” 8
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“I interact with donors.” “So you get people to part with their dollars?” His tone makes it sound like larceny. “Only if they want to,” Devon says. He veers now from skeptical to hostile. “And how do you get them to do it—turn over their money?” “We just ask nicely,” she says. Her voice wavers unconvincingly, and she winces. In truth, Devon’s prospects rarely culminate in gifts. It’s only because of her husband’s position that she is kept on. Although she is pleasant, although she is polite and warm, she believes that the people she talks to can sense the underlying truth: if she were a rich person, she would give nothing to the university. She would hold on to as much wealth as she could amass. She would clutch her gold coins to her chest, bury her treasure in the backyard. North of the city she and the kids set up the tent at a campsite a short walk from a waterfall. The weather is lovely, the sun a soft balm, and they take hikes and then play cards and word games. Although she hadn’t planned to tell the children about the incident outside the grocery store, word spread through the development, and once they heard about it their behavior changed. Now they are subdued and protective. Their father, on the other hand, couldn’t wrap his head around what had happened. “Some rando yelled at you?” he said. “Why didn’t you just drive away?” “He was right in front of me,” she said. “You should park closer to the entrance next time,” he said. He was a problem-solver; his suggestion was always to run the experiment a second time with a different variable. Sometimes he cooked four different versions of the pasta sauce and quizzed the whole family on their preferences. He couldn’t understand that all they wanted to do was eat. At the campsite her daughter weaves a chain of wildflowers and places it on her head. Her son makes a scavenger hunt for them to follow. It is a weekend of contentment, and Devon isn’t sure why, then, she is so relieved once it’s time to pack up and go home. In August her husband returns and their household shifts on its axis as it always does. They eat the meals he likes, she takes the ali x oh li n
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kids shopping for clothes and school supplies. The weather is still warm during the day but chill bites the evening. It’s been weeks since she last saw Morris Pine. His company, a news alert informs her, is being sold, with little explanation in the business news. A larger mining concern with an acronym name will take it over. There has never been an obituary, no family pleading on the news for his safe return. She entertains a hedge fund manager for lunch and allows him to place his hand on her knee. She looks at pictures of a lawyer’s grandchildren on his phone. She hosts a reception for the former members of the lacrosse team. The lacrosse players have raised funds in memory of a dead teammate, in whose name a beechwood tree is planted on the southwestern corner of campus, a tasteful plaque at its base. She stands in front of it with the former team captain; the air smells of alcohol and freshly upturned dirt. The captain, very drunk, is weeping. “I think it’s a beautiful gift,” Devon says. “What’s a gift,” asks the captain, “when the motherfucker is still gone?” When she pulls into the driveway that evening, all the rooms but one in her house are dark. The children are asleep. The one with a light on is her husband’s study in the attic, where he is writing up the results of his summer research. Though he’s home now, he may as well not be. He’s working long hours and cannot be disturbed before an upcoming deadline for a grant that will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He needs to purchase DNA sequencing equipment, massive computing power, travel for himself and others to the long term ecological research site. He needs to purchase freedom from teaching so that he can do more research; he needs to buy time. She sits in the car with the windows down, listening to the sounds of the development: garage doors groaning open and closed, the lengthy rattle of recycling bins being dragged to the curb. Her husband has explained that earthworms play a vital role in ecosystems because they maintain soil resilience in the face of environmental degradation. He describes them as ecosystem engineers, a phrase that has always made her picture them in in miniature hard hats, 10
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miniature clipboards beside them. She thought it was a cute image, as in a children’s book, but ever since she shared it with her husband, he doesn’t talk to her about his research much anymore. She knows he thinks she doesn’t understand his work, is even jealous of it, and he is right. But she has always respected that of all the possible research subjects he chose to study worms, wrinkled and faceless, doing their tiny work underground. It’s November when the cheque comes, mailed to the university but addressed to her in a plain envelope with no return address. Although it’s more money than she can comprehend, laid at her feet like a bird feather on the porch, she understands that it’s real and not a joke; although the check is paid out from a fund she doesn’t recognize, she knows who it’s from. She could pay off the mortgage, settle the kids’ education, pay off her own student loans, which have always felt like they will follow her until the day she dies. She could buy her own freedom. Cee Cee, passing by her cubicle, makes the tut-tut sound she uses whenever she catches Devon staring into space, which is often. Devon turns back to her computer screen, pretending to check email. Her search shows that Morris Pine Industries no longer exists; it has been fully absorbed into the new company with the acronym name. Perhaps the check in her hands represents the amount of the sale; perhaps it represents something else entirely. She tucks the check into the back pocket of her jeans and stands up. She’s due at a staff meeting in half an hour; the kids have soccer practice tonight. Leaving campus, she heads instead to the ravine, making her way along a dirt path to the lookout point. The day is cold and blank, the sky opaque with clouds. Around the university and its surrounding streets the maples and birches and oaks stretch brown and empty of leaves, but conifers still slant the ravine with green. There’s no sign of Morris Pine. She knows he isn’t there waiting for her; the gift is arbitrary. She looks down at the shingled roofs and parallel driveways of the development, the bagged leaves at the curbs waiting for collection day. Although she knows it must be there somewhere, she can’t see her own house at all.
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“It could be your younger brother then.” He stared at the floor like he was studying a topographical map. The blush was on her quick, a feeling like she was turning out of herself, the center of her chest blooming. She steadied herself and thought of the medical pamphlets stacked on the dining room table, the glossy dermatology one-pagers, the colonoscopy reminders. Lately she’d found herself obsessing over the way the earth was taking her back. The land out here was stronger than she was. It was stronger than everyone. There were acres of worms churning the dirt beneath their feet at this very moment. But here they were, the two of them existing on the crust of the planet, atop the worms and the seeds and the soil, the floorboards below them still buzzing with the echo of the trees they’d been decades ago. “How much to hire you?” she asked. “Just here?” “I don’t follow.” “I won’t go anywhere else that’s burning. I’ll only be here.” “How about five hundred a week? All year long.” He gave her an earnest look. “Alright. Double that,” she said, and his face relaxed. When she’d juiced lemons earlier in the day, she’d planned to throw the rinds to the chickens. But here they were on the counter. She chose a bowl and found the grater. She zested each of the peels in turn. “What are you making?” he said. “Something that needs lemon zest.” She worked a section of peel until the pith shown through, then turned the rind and did it again. The kitchen smelled like sunlight. “I guess I’m all yours then,” he said. She looked up at him and dragged her knuckle across the tiny scooped blades. The bite made her wince. Lemon juice sharp and bright in her brain. “I’m fine,” she said. “I am.” She drove the lakeshore road into town, muttering under her breath at the hopscotch of potholes. The hillside oaks were a dingy green, dusty from the dry summer. The lakefront was littered with drydocked boats, most lying on their side in the gray-green film coating the shore. The summer assholes who could afford to come and go 14
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had already gone, moving away like an echo from the receding water. The radio was tuned to the Christian station, to a molasses-voiced man preaching about grace. It was hard to find, he kept saying, hard to pin down. It wasn’t something earned, but something given. She kept waiting for his inevitable anecdote, but he was slow to the punchline. At last, he spoke about the time he’d been running homeward through the pear orchard with a frog in his hand. He could feel the pulse of the fat bullfrog drumming against his palm, like he was holding a beating heart. He’d finally reached the paved road, hotter than the dickens. And that’s when it happened: the floppy sole of his shoe snagged on the soft asphalt. You’d better believe he fell—he fell like a thunderclap, like a stone from a mountain, like a prayer from the heart of a heathen on his deathbed—and the frog smeared beneath his skin, just as awful as it sounds. He fought back tears—okay, look, he didn’t fight them for long—he cried like his dog had died. As he was getting to his feet, he heard the throaty call of a toad. He moved his eyes instead of his head and spotted it there, right there in the ditch beside the road. A dark-green slug of a toad. Grace. Now that’s grace. “Jesus Christ,” she said. She rounded a corner and hit the cougar dead on. She didn’t have time to react. She saw the lion, registered the creature in her brain. She knew exactly what it was, how it might die or might live. She imagined its paw held up to the sun, the hook of those claws translucent against the silhouette, nearly as big as her face. She imagined jerking the wheel to the left, back to the right, doing exactly what people told you not to do in a situation like this, the old Cherokee plowing into the thick red dirt of the hillside, the cougar not watching at all as she died. But the cougar did see. He saw the lurid metal grille bearing down, his muscles twitching and ready, his brain jammed with choices. Nothing like nostalgia welled up inside his chest. He was sinew and synapse and meat and muscle, all of it faster than anything living on the lakeshore, but not faster than the vehicle bearing down, the chunky rumble of it. The car slammed into him without braking, and he was dragged and churned beneath it and then it was gone and the world grew still and his remaining eye grew fuzzy and the sounds and smells of the world fell away from him, jad j osey
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swelled up around him without his knowing, like they would for everything eventually. She kept driving after she hit the lion, but she could not force herself to keep her eyes off the rear-view mirror. The big cat’s body tumbled in a way that made her think, however briefly, that it might have been a human. Then the body yielded to the pavement and it was a cougar, and it was a corpse. It was gone from this place. She kept driving because there was nothing else to be done. She knew this world was only for the living. There was a new preacher on the radio, the register of his voice so low she couldn’t make out most of what he was saying. She cranked up the dial, but the jouncing of the Cherokee and the vibration of the tires sunk him from her consciousness like bentonite. She thought, instead, of Bryan, about the shivers he gave her. About how he’d thin out the shrubbery, fell the dead trees, stack the woodpile far enough away to be safe, clear the gutters and the roof. Maybe she’d even patch his threadbare Carhartts. She drove past the place her third grade teacher had taken them to find owl pellets in the soft tuft of grass beneath the tallest bur oak in the county. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t used that tree as a landmark, as familiar as the powder-sweet smell of grape Kool-Aid in the summertime. The first pellet she’d found and cracked open was a revelation, the perfect skeleton of a field mouse curled in fetal position, the white bone of its rib cage flat, a cave painting sunk into some river-claimed narrow. She realized that inside her body was the same thing, that everything in her head, all the swelling noise in her mind, was different than these bones. For the first time, she’d been aware of her heels pressing into the earth. She pulled into the misshapen parking lot, blacktop teetering and neglected. The parking blocks had been tipped over, rebar stretched backward in junkie rainbows. The clinic was peeling yellow stucco and red tile roof, wrought-iron gate compassing the concrete to the edge of the lot. There were window boxes stuffed with fake flowers. Not a watering can in sight. Light sluiced the world around her. It made the place seem more beautiful than it was. She dialed the front desk on her cellphone and rested her head against the steering wheel. Maureen, her favorite receptionist, answered in a voice made unsteady by all this desolation. 16
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“What kind of day is he having?” “Popcorn,” said Maureen. “He’s been up and down a hundred times, and it’s not even dinnertime.” “I should’ve called first.” Her voice shuddered, the hurt wobbling up from somewhere deep. “I like to be here in case it’s a good day.” “It could’ve been,” Maureen said. “So don’t stop trying.” She pulled out of the parking lot and pointed the truck east. Later that night, long after the patients and the rooms have grown quiet, meds pulsing through too many veins to count, the sky above will rattle with Quadrantids, the earth turning through ancient dust, and not one of them will see it. For now, she drives home beneath the paling sunlight, the world not as it should be, but as it’s always been. The osprey had discovered the hole in the tree almost serendipitously, one moment holding the writhing squirrel in its talons and the next watching it fall toward the dark earth below, surely gone forever, but the way it fell was slow and predictable and the bird’s feathers calibrated without mindfulness, trimmed without conscious impulse, and it snatched the warm mammal from the air just in front of this dark maw of warmth and safety and rest. The hollow became home, the place to return again and again as the sun moved over different quadrants of the sky. When its wings silhouetted in the radiant light of a cloudless day, it would not consider what it meant to live in the sky, to exist in the space between the earth and its closest star. None of these things mattered. The osprey watched the man. It preened and watched while the man dug a great vee into the earth, his shovel ratcheting dirt from its place and the tree vibrating with each blow. The bird left the nest and returned, rose like a kite on the thermals jouncing above the rim of the lake, plunged into the clear water for a flash of silver. The man kept returning, kept digging. It watched as the man stopped digging, reached down into the earth, shook dirt from a pack. Clouds clipped the wan sun and the wind rose. The osprey no longer watched the man but hunkered onto the nest and pressed heat into the thin shells beneath. Bryan always knocked, even though she’d told him it was unnecessary. She snuck a look at the mirror in the hallway, frowned at the jad j osey
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lines near her eyes. He stood at the door flocked in dirt. Even his eyebrows were dusted. The backpack he was holding was even dirtier, and he shook it at her loosely. “I wasn’t going to look,” he said. She noticed his knuckle bleeding when he handed her the backpack. She almost reached out and touched it but stopped short and took the pack instead. It was surprisingly heavy, unwieldy in a lumpy way and stiff with age. “I found an old grow while I was cutting a fire line,” he said. “Did you know about it?” “A pot farm?” she said. “How old?” “Ten years. Maybe more. The pack was buried out there.” She tugged on the zipper and looked inside. “I didn’t count it,” he said. She zipped the pack closed and steadied herself. “I’m not counting it, either.” She opened the pantry door and shoved the bag inside. “Wait here,” she said. She returned with gauze and hydrogen peroxide and a roll of medical tape. She nodded toward a kitchen stool. Bryan sat down and rested his hand on the counter. She’d expected his fingers to be long, but they were stubby, knobby around the knuckles. “I’m allergic to the tape,” he said. “To the adhesive in it. The rash will be ten times worse than the cut.” “So, you just... what?” “I wait for the scab.” She poured the hydrogen peroxide onto his hand. The wound foamed white instantly. He grimaced almost imperceptibly, but she saw. It pulled a string taut inside her. She wanted to rest her hand on his face, to see herself in his pupils. He clenched his hand into a fist and pushed back from the counter. “It’ll rain later. I’ll put the chickens away,” he said. “Okay,” she said. “Good.” She moved toward him like they might embrace, but he turned and she faltered and the light was somehow different in the room, darkness turning out from the corners. He shut the door quietly, like always. She’d never seen him pull a door closed without keeping his hand on the knob, shutting it carefully, thoughtfully. 18
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She retrieved the backpack from the pantry and took it upstairs to her bedroom. Inside the closet was a safe she’d never opened. When her husband had driven off the frontage road with an almost-empty six pack resting in the passenger seat, he took the safe combination with him to his grave. She set the backpack on top of the safe and smiled. For the first time in three years, what was in that safe didn’t matter at all. Or it mattered less in a way that felt unnaturally light, as though the density of her worry had vaporized. She cast her eyes east, her gaze soft against the bedroom wall, out in the direction of the hills where he’d capsized the truck, where his rib cage was collapsed against his lungs by the steering wheel, where he gasped for breath against a seat belt too taut to release, the smell of gasoline and flame, the smell of rubber smoking hard, his own flesh and then the blackness. She raised both fists toward those hills and lifted her middle fingers. It was enough for now, she thought. It was the first time anything had been enough in a long time. There had always been money. They weren’t the kind of people to vacation on a beach in Hawaii or traipse off to Europe in the springtime. They didn’t have that kind of money. But her husband did whatever needed doing to the house, and the cupboard was full of food and tools and special spray to clean the stainless appliances. She didn’t want for much, but she’d realized recently this was because she had nearly everything she needed. She went downstairs and put a pot of water on the stove to boil. She lugged the heavy stand mixer to the countertop and dug the pasta attachment out of a drawer. The flour was infested with saw tooth beetles, so she sifted it and washed the small creatures down the drain. When her skin began to crawl, she shook her head and rolled her shoulders and inhaled through her nose. The water rumbled on the stove, hissing as she dropped in a palmful of salt. When she ducked into the fridge for tomatoes, she wouldn’t allow herself to look at the photo of her son. So much time had passed since he looked like that, cheeks full and flush with happiness. The garlic in the pantry had sprouted, long green tendrils now gone yellow, but it was all she had so she trimmed it and minced it and reveled in the smell of her fingers. She made a simple dough and kneaded it with her warm hands, rolled it out and fed it through the flat pasta roller of the mixer, then again. The linguini attachment was buried deep jad j osey
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in the cabinet, but she found it and caught the rapunzeling strips in her hand, ringlets that she laid carefully into the boil. She watched the noodles turning slowly, dicing tomatoes and mincing basil. At the back of the refrigerator was a bottle of champagne she’d given her husband for their twentieth wedding anniversary. She thought he might save it for a year, maybe a bit longer so the element of surprise would be intact. He might pull it from a leather satchel sweating from the bags of ice shoved inside or press the chilled bottle to the back of her neck while she was weeding the vegetable beds. Instead it migrated to the back of the fridge, a burden when she was prepping for dinner parties or stocking fresh groceries for her son’s rare weekend visits. She’d thought about tossing it into the recycling bin myriad times, but she was trained to give him the benefit of the doubt long past whatever he might deserve. She pulled the bottle out of the fridge and set it on the counter. She paused and thought about putting it back, saving it for some other time. But fire season would be here soon enough, and maybe this would all be gone anyway. She stepped outside and rang the rusty dinner triangle, the sound clean and bright against the gathering dusk. She was prying the metal cage from around the cork when she heard the clomping of Bryan knocking dirt from his boots. She kept a cloth rack of house slippers hanging on the door in the mudroom, something she’d picked up from her father’s second wife, Kuriko. She’d always kept the softest white slippers near the front door for guests to use. Her father had scoffed at first, but the custom was something he grew to love, and she did, too. Bryan shuffled in, looking down at his slipper-enclosed feet as he moved across the wood floor. “I will never get used to this,” he said. She rocked the cork back and forth until she felt the hiss. She was not a cork popper, someone who shot the thing across the room or into the sky. She was not going to be remembered as someone who wasted good champagne. Or bad champagne, for that matter. “What will you do with it?” he asked. “Drink it,” she said. He smiled. He was the age before smile lines started sticking around the eyes. “Not the champagne,” he said. She finished plat20
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ing the pasta and handed it to him. “Let’s sit at the dining room table for a change,” she said. The table was a long run of black walnut. Her husband had spent every New Year’s Day oiling the wood, polishing it with a damp cloth he only used once a year. By the end of each year, as she was setting the table over and again during the holidays, the wood had lost its sheen. The light that fell upon it rebounded softly, quiet like the winter. Maybe it was the quality of the light, the thinness of it— something about it made her feel like a ghost. “Are you okay?” he said. She could feel the way he meant it, different than the way she meant it when she asked the same question. When she said are you okay she was really saying I am not okay and so the question wasn’t really a question at all. “I haven’t been okay for a long time.” He turned his fork in a slow circle, noodles looping around the tines. “This is something else,” he said. She smiled and immediately thought about the wrinkles next to her eyes. She’d swear on her death bed that she knew how fortunate she was to have those wrinkles, how they marked a lifetime of laughter, of happiness that far outweighed the bad times. She understood her privilege. But she still wanted to smooth those lines like she’d watched her mother try to do. “I haven’t made—” He set his fork down hard. “Look,” he said. “You made something good. You have to let yourself be happy.” The romaine was wilting beneath the vinaigrette she’d put together. She should have cracked some black and white pepper into the dressing. “I’m not sure what to do with the money,” she said. “I don’t know that I trust it.” “What’s trust have to do with it?” Her phone buzzed on the kitchen counter. They both fell silent, listening to it hum. “I don’t know where that money came from. It has a story I don’t know.” jad j osey
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“I think you know.” Ding. Then her phone started buzzing again. “I should get that,” she said. He spun his fork through the noodles, chewed quietly and slowly. Ding. She stood to retrieve her phone, but then his hand was on her wrist, her fingers splayed atop the polished walnut. “You don’t have to get it,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Not anymore.” His eyes were dark, but they weren’t wicked. She twisted her wrist from his hand and looked at her phone, reading the series of text messages and missed voicemails. She retrieved her flute of champagne from the table and set it back down empty. “I have to go,” she said. Bryan leaned back in his chair, his thighs bumping against the underside of the table, the table hovering off the ground for a moment. His plate rattled when the table clunked back to the floor. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed. Her tail lights scooped red across the wall, and he was alone in her house. When she reached the clinic, there was no one behind the counter. The waiting room was in disarray: chairs toppled over, magazines flung about the place. There was a crumpled copy of Rolling Stone on the ground, the one with Barack Obama on the cover, and she felt a sudden pang of missing his wan smile that she hadn’t felt until this very moment. She heard a muffled commotion from behind the double doors. She imagined her son gone. Not gone from this place, but gone from the world. She knew that keeping him here would be an act of deliberateness, of drawing depth from memory. She was already thinking about what she might say at his memorial service when she heard his voice, quiet where it found her but loud where it was. She wondered, for the first time maybe, if he felt unlovable. She’d spent the last eight years of her marriage feeling unlovable. She’d started seeing things in the mirror she’d never seen before. She was plagued by an animal smell, sniffing everywhere around the house until she realized it was her own scent. She’d stood balanced on the crust of the earth, the land dying and clawing its way 22
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back and dying again relentlessly. For so many years she’d expected this life to be different. When her husband died, she wasn’t sad. She worked hard to seem like she was, and maybe the sadness grew into something real for having pretended at it so earnestly. She was lighter, unburdened even with the burden of new things to accomplish each day. But his death did not erase the absence of love. The missing of it only grew more resonant. Her son, however, was not gone. Not yet. She strode through the double doors and moved toward the unraveling, a disturbance that shuddered through the fluorescent glow of the hallway. She followed it like a breadcrumb trail until she reached its apex. Until she reached her son. His face was pressed against the linoleum, the veins in his forehead thumping through his pale skin. One of the male nurses had his knee pressed hard between her son’s shoulder blades, wrists pinned behind his back. The other nurse was flicking a syringe, her hands shaking so badly that it seemed she might prick herself with the needle. Her boy strained his eyes upward. She imagined him peering into the front of his skull, watching the synapses twinkle like some night sky. His eyes were pale blue with a dark blue halo. The sound he made was not words, but she felt it in her chest just the same. What welled up inside her was unnamable, immutable. “Please,” she said to the nurse. “Please do it.” The nurse nodded and the syringe galvanized in her hand. She jabbed the needle into her son’s shoulder, and it was a miracle she was able to lower the plunger, an animal with an animal smell bucking and writhing on the speckled linoleum beneath her. She watched as his fingers unclenched, the heat moving out of him, the whole of his body sinking down in stillness, an eddy emptying into the deep. “He needs something more than we can give him,” the male nurse said, climbing off her son and shaking his hands loosely around his waist. “I know,” she said. “I see.” Together, the three of them lifted her son onto a gurney. They buckled the leather straps around his wrists. She splayed his slack fingers and pressed her palm to his. She hadn’t held his hand in so long. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d held anyone’s jad j osey
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hand. She thought of Bryan sitting alone at her dining room table, noodles spun around his fork like a honey stick. “I’ll be back for him tomorrow,” she said. “For good.” She left the room with her head high, tears burning in her eyes. On her way out, she righted a lamp that had been knocked over in the scuffle and grabbed the issue of Rolling Stone with Obama’s eyes staring back at her. She took the lakeshore road toward home. The sun had set behind the hills to the west, and the lake was purple and still. She recognized the gloaming like a mood, a synchronicity between the world and the way she felt. It eased something inside her. It was not dark enough for stars, and she couldn’t have seen them anyway from beneath the cover of hillside oaks. As she rounded the corner past the Carver’s dock, she spotted the turkey vulture and knew exactly what it was eating. She pulled alongside the bird and stopped. It didn’t seem to notice her presence, even as she rolled down her window and leaned her head out, her brow furrowed so deeply her temples ached. “Get away from it,” she said. The bird shuffled around the carcass to keep her in sight, then dug its head into the wreckage of the lion’s middle. She sounded the car horn, the swell rising so dramatically the air seemed to quiver. The vulture looked at her and spread its wings wide, scooping the air several times, puffed up and threatening with its size. “Son of a bitch,” she said quietly. She reversed down the deserted lakeshore road, keeping an eye on the vulture the whole time. She idled there, watching it, willing the bird to grow restless under her gaze and move along. After a while, she stopped wishing it would leave. She closed the distance quickly, surprising herself and the bird. The impact was like hitting a mailbox. It reminded her, in fact, of the time she’d steered her mother’s Buick into Owen Pardini’s birdhouse-shaped mailbox after he’d felt her up at the debutante ball. The car lurched to a halt and there was a hard scrabbling beneath the driver’s side wheel. She sat in the silence for a moment, noticing by increments the noises creeping back into her periphery. The rumble of the Cherokee. The swell of frog song returning. And then the scratching commenced, and the bird emerged under her window, its bald red face turned up toward the sky. The vulture 24
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shrugged its plumage and spread its wings wide. She reached for the horn but stopped when the vulture left the earth and bounded across the lake, wingtips a parabola against the gloaming. She backed down the road until her headlights found the lion. It was swollen, every part of it bulging. She might not have recognized it as a lion under different circumstances. She thought about how different a thing seems when you look at it unknowing. She put the lake on her right shoulder and drove through the fading shadows, wondering if there was a word for the melancholy that followed the sadness of the gloaming. The house was dark when she parked the truck. She was three steps up the porch when she thought of the backpack. The cold that pushed through her veins was crystallizing. She moved quickly to the front door and stopped with her hand upon the knob. She almost sobbed but caught it in her chest, did not let it make its way to her throat. She thought of a bird and a hand squeezing it quiet. Then she opened the door and stepped inside. She could smell the vanishing of him like wood smoke. In the kitchen, the dishes were stacked neatly on the drying rack. He had wiped up the bread crumbs from the crusty loaf she’d cut on the butcher block counter. The photo of her son stared back from the fridge. What she had become seemed inextricable from the things she had lost. She climbed the stairs like an intruder. She felt, all at once, like a stranger in this place. She had been a wife here, a mother. And now she was a widow. Like a boomerang, she thought, unexpectedly wealthy and then wealthy no more, flung out antipodal before she’d had a chance to collect her bearing. She felt new to herself with every passing moment. When she entered the bedroom, the smell of him was everywhere. She left the room in darkness mostly out of self-preservation, a way to stave off the inevitable heartbreak. She found the closet and opened the door slowly, the tired hinges creaking. She thought to close her eyes, but it was dark enough not to matter. She was thrown akilter when the knowing came, her hand finding the backpack on top of the safe where she’d left it. She was a boomerang once again. The bedsheets behind her rustled, and she jad j osey
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turned to see the dim white triangle of the covers peeling back. “Let yourself,” he said. She stepped toward him, hands unclenched and no birds in sight. She stepped out of her clothes, out of the life she’d worn only moments before. Moonlight would have flooded the room but for the curtains being drawn. She pressed her heels into the floorboards, into the trees that were no longer trees. She gathered herself above the strength of her bones, and then she allowed herself to sway until she toppled.
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anur ag andr a c aryn c ardello c aroline chavatel ryan choi chris forhan alix ohlin michael holt ale x andria hall es ther lin james longenbach hugh mar tin michael mar tone jennifer militello michael mlekoday jad jose y sk yler osborne mir a rosenthal charlot te rut t y sanki saitō dennison schult z mar tha e. snell s tephen tut tle