Site Fidelity

by Claire Boyles

  And then I woke up one morning and Jason was still there, and it was a Saturday, and I heard Mom awake upstairs, shuffling around.

  “Get out,” I whispered. “Go home.”

  “Stop freaking out,” he said, rushing into his clothes.

  He climbed out the window and made a run for it. It was full light, and I imagined Mom at the kitchen window, watching Jason's sprint across the yard scatter the birds from her feeder. I dreaded going up there. Also, I couldn't wait.

  It was worse than I had imagined, both Andy and Mom at the table. It was impossible to believe they hadn't seen him.

  “Mom,” I said. My voice caught on the tears in my throat.

  There was a long pause. Say something, I thought, let's do this. I wanted the dam to break. I needed flooding, aftermath, a cleanup effort.

  She wouldn't meet my eyes. She carried her plate and her mug past me into the kitchen. She ran water into the sink for a long time. She said, finally, “I'm not feeling well today,” and she disappeared into her bedroom.

  Andy looked me over—his face made me think he'd stolen all my anger, that if I had half his fire I could burn down the world. “Well shit, Lottie,” he said.

  I wish I could say that Mom's refusal to act taught me valuable lessons about how to handle my own business, that I managed to teach myself how to gracefully end a relationship, but it was Andy who took action, a story people started telling again when he went on trial. Jason was using the band saw. Andy struck up a casual conversation, and the next thing everyone knew, the tip of Jason's index finger was on the floor, the sawdust below it expanding, absorbing the blood that ran, then dripped, then balanced in a fat drop on the edge of the machine. Andy swore it was an accident, and that's where the consensus seemed to land. Mr. D, the teacher, put Jason's finger on ice and drove him to the ER, but they couldn't stitch it back on, so Jason was left with just half an index finger. It looked remarkably like a canned sausage. People started calling him “Little Smoky,” and he stopped calling me.

  Jason slipped out of my life after that, and now Andy has too, but that's not how it works with mothers. Mom and I have never spoken about that day, about any of those days. I'm stuck with my mother, which sticks me with the version of myself that I am when I'm with her, which swallows all the other, better versions.

  I TOOK THE JOB in Denver, moved Mom to a hospice facility across the street from the hospital where I had my baby. Leah took Tyler for at least one visit, a kindness for which I will always be grateful. Mom gave the nurses book recommendations, cheerful reprimands about their diet soda habits.

  I had only just found my own feet, the air of the city fresh in my lungs, when I delivered my Willa, alone, the doctor an efficient man I had never met before. All the nurses said Willa was a good baby, and I thought, Of course she is. She's the best baby. She latched onto my breast on her first try, didn't cry unless she needed changing. Even now, she isn't fussy, my Willa. She slept for four hours straight the night I spent in the hospital, and even though the nurses told me to sleep when the baby slept, I couldn't. Birthing Willa was thrilling, made me feel invincible. It took days to come down off the adrenaline rush. That first night in the hospital, Willa swaddled in a cotton blanket, her sweet head covered in a soft knit hat, I got out my computer to send Andy a picture.

  I was surprised to see an email waiting from him. Heard from Mom. Thought up some names for the bastard children of sad rodeo clowns: Giggles. Wally. Tex. LOL. Just kidding, sis. Congratulations, I guess.

  I didn't send a picture. I couldn't put my Willa next to that ugliness, wanted to shield her forever from any kind of cruelty, especially anything that would make her connect her sense of herself to my reputation, to any reputation at all. People will believe whatever they want to believe, about themselves and others both. I think the key is teaching her to see it without making her feel responsible for it, but for that I need an entirely other version of myself.

  They discharged us the next day, and I pushed Willa in her stroller across the street to meet Mom, too sick and weak now to leave her room. It hurt to walk. I was still in the mesh underwear, the supersized postpartum maxi-pad, but the sunlight was warm on my face, the world bathed in brightness. Even Mom had the blinds up, the sunshine glare through the windows obscuring the numbers on her monitors, illuminating the mysterious tubes that had been, for weeks now, working to make her death as comfortable as possible. I believe, even now, that Mom lived long enough to meet Willa out of the sheer strength of her will. Mom's love was never enough for me, not even at the end, but it was ever-present, which is something.

  I elevated Mom's bed to get her into a sitting position. She had oxygen tubes in her nose and an IV in her left arm, but she still held Willa, snuggled her close, clucked and cooed like a mother hen.

  “She's beautiful, Lottie,” Mom said, her tears flashing like silver in the sun.

  “Her name is Willa,” I said. “Like Cather. These things happen when your grandmother is a librarian.”

  Mom smiled then, a sincere smile, real happiness. The light hit Willa's face and she sneezed a delicate, tiny sneeze. Mom pulled my girl close to her chest so that her face was out of the sun.

  “Goodness,” Mom said, smiling. “Bless you, little one.” She was almost singing, her voice so soft, so loving.

  There, in her hospice room, I wrapped Willa in the quilt Mom used to haul me up the tree, all those years ago, nursed her in the rocker as Mom napped in the sunlight warmth. There was no deathbed apology, no dramatic airing of grievances, the same way we never saw the mama moose that day on the trail. There was no confrontation to settle whether I would have used my body to shield her from danger, whether she would have done the same for me. Mom had her flood story, and I had mine, and when I realized that I didn't have to reconcile them I could feel the air move again, let them both go with something close to grace. When I think of Mom now, when the heavy ache of missing her is hard to carry, I choose my images carefully. I picture Mom asleep in her hospice bed, holding Willa like a treasure, the light that was, on that one day, everywhere around her.

  Natural Resource Management

  LEAH HAD BEEN PROMOTED out of any requirement to drive through the Riverside Open Space construction site every morning—her job now more planning than boots-on-the-ground crew supervision. But her boy, Tyler, three years old, loved coming to Riverside, and she loved sharing it with him—the transition from neglected industrial landscape to half-wild, half-cultivated multi-use public land. It had been Leah's idea, years before, to convert the old quarry to open space, her map of the trail system and the accessible fishing piers, her list of native aquatic plants grown specially for habitat, her deal with the Colorado Division of Wildlife to stock the ponds with perch, with bluegill, with bass, to build launch pads for float tubes. In a few days, Leah would sign off on project completion, and the open space would fill with fishermen, joggers, dog walkers, amateur painters, birders and naturalists checking species off their life lists. Until then, she could arrive before the work crews and present the urban wilderness to her son like it belonged to them, like they alone owned this beauty. She could drink her coffee while the clouds morphed and shifted above her, while the moon faded and her own pride in this work glowed like the sunrise.

  This morning, she could see that the unusually steady rains of the past few days had been transformational—the cottonwoods and peachleaf willows bogged down as they took on fall color, sagged toward the river that ran high for September, brown and churning like the June rise, still well within its banks despite the flash flood warnings coming over the radio. The world outside was oddly hushed, rain muting the usual honking of Canadian geese, the rustle of rabbits scurrying into the brush.

  The wipers on her truck were high-speed manic over Tyler's soft murmuring from the crew cab booster seat. Leah was always relieved when he was in a happy mood. He'd been a difficult birth, a c
olicky baby, a toddler prone to run and hide in stores if she looked away for even one second, the kind of loud, at three, that made elderly women raise their eyebrows, purse their lips, the kind of loud that the teachers at his new day care frequently mentioned at evening pickup. Tyler jumped down from the truck and zigzagged from puddle to puddle, stomping his mud-booted feet, his broad smile all delighted sunshine. Everything Tyler felt—delight, frustration, joy, anger—he felt all the way and out loud.

  “Mommy! Fish!” Tyler pointed and shrieked. Leah looked up to see an osprey struggling with a fresh kill, gaining altitude until it finally made the nest. It had been Leah's idea to place a plywood board in the high branches of a dead cottonwood to lure ospreys to Riverside. In late spring, she had caught the white breast of a male making graceful, laconic swoops with a river fish in his talons, descending toward a haphazard nest built of sticks and twigs on her platform, his teakettle chirping attracting Leah's gaze easily as it attracted the female who eventually chose him. Now, she and Tyler monitored the young in the nest.

  Leah had a degree in natural resource management, spent her days considering ways to improve the collective quality of life—juggling the competing demands of resource extraction and recreation, considering fair allocation, providing access to nature so more people would come to love it as she did, work harder to protect it, take loud, passionate action to save the whole dying world. She'd grown up fishing these ponds as a girl, back when it was still an abandoned quarry. She'd learned to chase shots and kiss boys under the old cottonwoods in high school. She'd mummied herself into her sleeping bag and slept outside on the pond banks, dreaming of a future as bright, as dramatic, as the night sky constellations. She wanted to give her boy all the best she herself had gotten from this place, wanted him to know he had roots in this ground, wanted him to feel the way those roots could nourish and support him. In truth, Leah needed her own constant reminders of what these roots were worth. Roots were also binding, stuck deep, they kept her static through the aftermath of catastrophes past, an easy target for future catastrophes.

  “I'm hungry, Mommy.” Tyler had lost interest in the osprey, was pulling tufts of buffalo grass out in clumps.

  “Want me to get you a fish?” she said, leaning her own smile close to his, flexing her fingers like talons.

  Tyler copied her, but he grabbed both her cheeks with his talon fingers, squeezed too hard. He was always taking the game too far. Leah wondered how she should even begin to teach him to notice the boundaries people made for themselves, lines he was always crossing, without damaging his sense of himself in the world. She thought how small his heart must be. How fragile. “No fish. Treats!”

  “Okay, buddy. Treats it is.”

  Tyler helped her with his car seat straps, went back to playing calmly with his Hot Wheels cars. She turned the key in the ignition, took one final glance around the site. It took time and patience to calibrate the balance of a disrupted system, to discern which investments would yield an optimal outcome. She had spent years working through the Riverside project, which everyone agreed was a success, but she had yet to figure out a way to apply these principles to the tattered remnants of her family life. It had been months since she'd been to a coffee shop, since she'd been anywhere but Tyler's day care, work, the small courtyard playground in their apartment complex. People looked at her differently now—suspicious, judgmental, sometimes pitying. Leaving her apartment for any reason, she considered disguise—I could wear a mask. Pull a sheet over my head. Find a convincing false mustache—but the anonymity she craved more than anything was impossible to expect. Everyone in this town knew her business. Everyone was some kind of witness. Still, she wanted the sweet vanilla syrup, the creamy thickness of whipped cream on her tongue. She wanted the tiny vases of carnations—pops of color against the gray, clouded light, the local art like rainbow magic on the wall. Like Tyler, she wanted a treat, a small pleasure, a baby step back toward normalcy.

  THE COFFEE SHOP WAS just as she remembered it—cozy, half crowded, the layered smells of coffee and baked goods oily and deep. The baristas, a rotating cast of local teenagers with big-city aspirations and acid wit, were flirting for tips. Leah felt her heart rate slow, her breathing normalize. See? Nothing to be afraid of. Tyler pressed his face against the glass of the bakery display, his eyes glittery, overwhelmed at the choices in front of him.

  “Blueberry muffin,” he said, and his face registered such joy when he held the treat in his own two hands that Leah nearly laughed out loud. She ordered a latte and was feeling a sense of accomplishment until she saw Bobby Jackson and his dad, Elmer, staring at her from a corner table, and then the days and days of rain, rain near impossible for Colorado, rain like three monsoon seasons, seemed to dampen the whole café, everyone suddenly on edge. I could grab Tyler and run. I could just go and never ever come back. But Bobby was walking toward her, his face unreadable, and her body, gone stiff, did not respond to her brain's frantic flight signals.

  “Haven't seen you around, Leah.” She found it unsettling, Bobby's calm, like there was nothing difficult between them.

  “Can't imagine you saw the front page this morning.” Elmer joined them, handing her a copy of the local newspaper. “Can't imagine you'd be out in town today if you had.”

  “Dad,” Bobby said, but he didn't make eye contact, not with Leah, not with Elmer.

  “Can I have a donut?” Tyler's face was sticky, his shirt covered in crumbs.

  Leah lifted him onto a nearby chair. “Eat your muffin, buddy.” She looked at the newspaper and rubbed both her eyes. The feeling was familiar, half shame, half anger, an ache in her gut like a battered funny bone, a pain she couldn't keep herself from coming back to, over and over, even when she was alone. The article was an exposé of the case, a year ago, that had sent her now ex-husband, Andy, a police officer, to prison. Andy had become convinced that Bobby, an old friend of theirs from high school, a friend to everyone in town, was cooking meth in the abandoned sugar mill that Elmer had bought cheap at the auction after the bankruptcy. There had been months of surveillance before Andy finally called in the SWAT team, who'd found nothing but some old Mason jars full of suspicious powder and a room full of flea-bitten jackrabbit pelts.

  “That's sugar,” Elmer had said. “The whole place is full of sugar.” But Andy said the rapid test he did on-site showed meth, put Bobby in handcuffs, left every window in the old mill office Bobby had been living in shattered, the doors torn off their hinges. Bobby spent a week in jail until the sample they'd sent down to the lab came back positive for insect wings and dust mites and, yes, sugar, but not a single trace of meth. Bobby was released but he'd been shaken, gone jumpy. A junior officer reported abnormalities on the scene, and Andy was found to have rigged the rapid test. The investigation found planted evidence, missing evidence, irregular evidence in other cases Andy had been on, and he'd been in prison now for six months. Elmer had rented a crane, bought a bunch of paint, and written a life-sized message across the roof of the old mill: It was sugar, stupid!

  Bobby and Leah had been close since grade school, her parents friends with his. Even now, he hadn't blocked her on Facebook, which she considered some kind of miracle. Growing up, she'd had cake at Bobby's birthday parties, beaten him and Elmer both at horseshoes at her high school graduation party. When Leah first went to work for the city, Elmer hadn't seemed bothered by the fact that she was a lady with opinions and decision-making power, and the other men who might have resisted her followed his lead. Leah's own parents had moved to Florida—day-drinking on the beach, skin like leather purses—and Elmer and Marcia, his wife, had been something like backup parents. When Tyler was born, they'd come to visit with a card, a hand-knit baby cap.

  In the aftermath of everything, Leah had filed for divorce, been awarded full custody, and promptly gone into hiding. She hadn't seen Bobby or Marcia, only Elmer, at work, where he had become far less cooperative, if no
t openly cold. There was no way to quantify how much they blamed her. Leah, in the absence of other information, assumed Andy had ruined everything, and Elmer and Marcia, and Bobby too, probably, would never, ever forgive her.

  Tyler threw the empty muffin paper onto the floor of the coffee shop and started screaming. “I want a donut!” he shrieked. “A DONUT!”

  He crawled under the table, still wailing a deep harmonic undertone to the raindrops that tapped heavy, battered by wind, against the windows, the glass door. One of the baristas widened her eyes, shook her head slightly, and another covered a smirk. Elmer nudged Bobby with his elbow. Bobby turned his face away so that Leah couldn't tell what reaction he was hiding.

  A headache was building behind Leah's right eye. If I buy him the donut to shut him up, she thought, they'll say I've spoiled him. Tyler turned up the volume. “I hate you,” he said, snot and tears shining like glaze on his cheeks. “I want Daddy. I want a donut.”

  Leah tried to look competent—no, capable. She needed to look capable. Why did he have to behave like this? He's only three, she told herself, he can't help it. She put her coffee on the table, got down on all fours. Heat prickled up her spine, shame roared conch-noise in her ears. Neither can I, I guess.

  “Need help?” Bobby asked. Elmer snorted, shook his head. The other customers were staring, the baristas rolling their eyes, whispering.