by Jake Wolff
I watched RJ wade into the wreckage, wincing as he trampled my memories. “You would … stay here?” he asked. He was showing his typical restraint, asking me questions about my relationship with Sammy in small, digestible doses.
“Sometimes,” I answered.
I’d been standing in the doorway, but I forced myself into the room, stepping over the coatrack and the little white computer desk Sammy used as a dining room table. The last time I’d seen Number 50, he’d been in his cage on the love seat, but Sammy could have moved him—perhaps to the bathroom, where it would be easier to refill his water and where the smell of his feces could be ventilated by the fan. On my way there, I stepped over Sammy’s long, colorful tennis racket and two cartons of tennis balls. On the floor on the other side of the bed, I saw two silk ties, sandy gray like cherrystone clams, and a pair of black dress socks turned inside out. Next to those, one ballpoint pen, cap missing, and a pile of ancient books: Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary (1874); Aging as a Disease, by Dr. Leopold Turck (1869); The Proceedings of the New York Society of Numismatics: 1887–1889 (1891).
Seduced by their unfamiliarity, I knelt to examine these books, ran my fingers over their deckle edges. Sammy’s apartment was truly, impossibly small, and over my many hours there, I’d helped myself to every inch of it. How had I never seen these before? I flipped through the first of them. In the margins of the dictionary, Sammy had diagrammed an early medical experiment in which the investigator swallowed sponges attached to threads and then pulled them back up through his throat. I was drawn to the soft pencil marks of Sammy’s sketch, the way he’d shaded the little sponge. I could feel him in the room.
RJ snapped his fingers and motioned for me to keep looking. I set the books aside and redirected my attention to the bathroom. Blocking the door, a box of Sammy’s papers had been overturned and searched through so quickly that many of the pages were torn. Sammy often left his quizzes and tests out in the open, and I always delighted in seeing the poor grades of my classmates. But these, like the old books, were papers I’d never seen before, filled with charts and diagrams and spreadsheets of indecipherable data. And there were thousands of these pages, piled so deeply in places that I could bury my arm up to the elbow. As I cleared a path to the door, I realized RJ was standing over my shoulder.
“Wow,” he said quietly, diplomatically. “What is all this stuff?”
I knew what RJ was thinking because I couldn’t deny my own thoughts: everything here—the papers, the destruction—made Sammy seem crazy.
I had cleared just enough space to squeeze through the bathroom door. Inside, I flipped the light switch, and as my eyes adjusted to the ultrabrightness of the neon overhead, I saw the sunny orange of Sammy’s shower curtain, the taupe laminate of the tub, and the open medicine cabinet, which had been ransacked, with several over-the-counter-pill bottles left open in the sink. I swept aside the shower curtain, and there, lying awkwardly on its side, was the cage of Number 50. His bed was there, and his water bottle, and his gray pellets of food. But the door to the cage was open. He was gone.
I was only beginning to register my heartbreak when RJ poked his head into the doorway.
“Quiet,” he whispered.
Below us, from the garage, I heard a woman mutter to herself, followed by a kind of crackling. A mechanical noise. It sounded like a fax machine or a dial-up modem—the ancient equipment a very old woman might store in her garage and sometimes use to connect with the world. Sammy and I heard her downstairs, occasionally. Back then it seemed funny, and we would hold our fingers to our lips as we listened to her shoo squirrels out of the garage with a broom.
It wasn’t funny anymore. RJ and I exchanged glances: There was still time to run. We could head back to school and no one would know we’d been gone. We had not yet committed any serious crimes in front of a senior citizen. We were still the good kids.
“What now?” he asked softly, gesturing with his hand to the empty cage, and it was clear what he meant by this: Let’s leave.
“Number Fifty could still be here,” I whispered. I imagined Number 50 hiding, hungry, as lost as I was. “I have to look.”
If I expected resistance from RJ, I shouldn’t have—he was ready, always, to help me. As quietly as we could, we continued our search, this time with our focus directed to the floor. RJ crept to Sammy’s bookshelves and rifled through the books and papers that lay in tatters and loose piles on the carpet. I checked the lower cupboards of the kitchen, hoping Number 50 had sought out their quiet, sheltered darkness.
RJ pulled a comforter off the floor, revealing Sammy’s writing desk, its little legs broken. He motioned for me to help him lift it, but I tripped on the way, the teeth of the coatrack biting at a hole in my jeans. I took several out-of-control steps and fell in a heap of limbs, my knees and elbows hitting hard against the furniture. We held our breath, waiting to hear movement from below.
“Shh and get up,” whispered RJ.
I lifted myself off the floor. The desk had been paid a particularly violent brand of attention. Notebooks in shreds. Desk calendar ripped to bits. A pen had exploded, and the blue ink gathered like an oil spill in a divot of the hardwood. Sammy’s papers had been turned to confetti, a collage of words and color, of nonsense and abstract meaning. His papers arranged themselves in random layers to create new, cryptic sentences like refrigerator poetry: around town Around below. I am. The floor, but—A+. The postcard from the Cooperative Republic of Guyana lay among the wreckage, its corners bent. I flipped the card over. It read, Dear Sam: Saw one of these eat a baby kinkajou. It sucks here. Miss you, Sadiq.
I held the card neatly and evenly between my fingers, in two hands. I used to read it when Sammy was in the bathroom. I’d obsessed over Sadiq, wondering whether he was an old flame, whether he was a better kisser than me, better in bed. Whether Sammy would lose all interest in me once Sadiq returned—at last!—from the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. Everything was different now. Lucky Sadiq, I thought, who doesn’t know Sammy is dead, who hikes and sightsees and dreams of their joyous reunion. Who fantasizes about Sammy from a canvas tent in the rain forest. Dumb, clueless Sadiq.
RJ put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. Since I’d told him about me and Sammy, RJ had been looking at me this way—as though I might, at any moment, hurl myself into an open grave. He was waiting for the tears to come, for the gnashing of the teeth. I wasn’t going to do that. I’ve always found that grief hits hardest in the light: when you can see clearly what you’ve lost, and why, and you can list all the ways you’ll never be whole again. If Sammy had killed himself, if he had chosen to leave me, that would be one kind of pain. If something violent had happened to him—the way something violent had happened to his apartment—then that would be another. An overdose? I didn’t believe it. Where was Number 50, and what the hell had happened here? My grief was a nighttime animal. I could hear it and smell it and see its yellow eyes, but it wasn’t yet upon me.
This was something I learned when my mother died: There’s no rush. She’ll be dead your whole life.
“Keep looking,” I said.
RJ nodded and lifted the desk, grunting, so that I could check beneath it for Number 50. There was no sign of him, but I did find something else: The Long Quiche Goodbye. I was picking it up when the door behind us swung open. I hoped it was only the wind, but I knew from the way RJ dropped the desk, no longer trying to be quiet, that we weren’t alone.
I spun around to face the widow. She stood in the open doorway, her flannel nightgown rippling in the breeze. She was much taller than I expected—I’d only seen her from a distance—but lean, so lean, with a mountain of gray hair piled loosely on her head. An emergency-response pendant hung from her neck, and she held a baseball bat in one hand, her grip choked up high. She’d wrapped duct tape around the meat of the barrel, as though she’d already cracked it once over some poor teenager’s skull.
She squinted at me. “I know you. You come around.”
Rather than seeing this as a possible way out, I took it as an accusation. “Nuh-uh,” I said stupidly.
She held up the pendant. “I’ll call the police.”
It was the first time I’d seen one of those devices used for the purpose of intimidation.
“We’ll leave,” I said.
The widow shook her head, though I couldn’t tell if it was in direct response to my promise. “I’ve got enough problems without teenagers breaking in.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I stared at the floor, where her shadow cast its asymmetrical shape over the wreckage of Sammy’s life. Had he ever seen in her what I saw in that moment—a dark future, my own dark future? At sixteen, I was already burning through loved ones. In another sixteen I could be just like her, alone and uptight, grabbing my Louisville Slugger to check on strange noises in the attic.
Some of the rubble shifted behind me, and the sound of it helped the widow remember herself. She moved out of the doorway. “Just get out,” she said.
As we tried to leave, my foot caught again on the coatrack, and I stumbled. The Long Quiche Goodbye slid from my waistband and landed with a thud on the carpet.
The widow’s eyes went wide, and she steeled herself back in front of the doorway. I’ll never forget the look she gave me: such betrayal! She pressed her emergency pendant.
“Connecting … hold for operator,” said the device.
RJ put his hand on my back and pushed me toward the door. I stepped over the book and advanced on the widow, palms out, the way I would approach a feral dog. She remained steadfast in front of me, the bat resting on her shoulder as if she were posing for a baseball card. As I drew near, she reached out for me, grabbed at my sleeves with a wrinkled hand. I waved my arms, trying to shake her off. The widow bounced off me and went hard to the ground.
“Uff,” she said.
“Hold for operator,” said the device.
As we left the apartment, the widow didn’t get up.
“Thieves,” she said simply, damningly, as RJ turned to slam the door shut.
* * *
When I was four, maybe five years old, my parents took me to Santa Clara for a wedding. It was my first time out of New England. On the way back to the hotel, we drove our rented sedan through the Santa Cruz Mountains. I remember the headlights catching in the fog, the way the road bent, like a river, like a jet stream—like something with a current. There’s no way my father could see, but he kept his speed up, refused defeat.
“Ned Aybinder,” said my mother. “Use your brakes.”
“Nasya Aybinder,” he said. He craned his neck to look back at me. “Conrad Aybinder.”
I adopted his tone. “Dad Aybinder. Mom Aybinder.”
“Ned!” my mom screamed. An animal appeared in the road. This, we would argue about later. My parents said it was a deer—“that poor, tsetummelt deer”—but I maintain to this day it was a mountain lion. I saw its eyes in the lights.
The car spun out and hurtled toward the guardrail. None of this really matters—we almost went over the edge of the mountain, and a truck almost hit us, and my mom said “Fuck!” so loud that she didn’t swear again for six months. But we lived, and my dad steered us back onto the road and drove the rest of the way to the hotel with his hazards on. What felt important to me, even then, was how wrong this felt—this cold carrying on.
“We should go to the hospital,” I said from the backseat.
My mother turned to make sure she hadn’t missed a head wound. Seeing me safe, she asked, “Why?”
“Because we almost died,” I said.
My parents laughed, but I still wanted to know why life was proceeding as though nothing had happened. We’d teetered on the edge of a mountain. A truck almost hit us. We should need weeks of therapy. We should leave the country, take a long vacation from school and work. We should buy all new clothes. What did it say about life if we could come so close to disaster and my parents would act as if it were nothing?
* * *
RJ dropped me off at my aunt’s house, the air in his car thick with the heat of a cloudless sun. Since I’d left that morning, the place had shrunk in size. If this was grief warping my view of the world, it was only the beginning of my reenvisioning of Littlefield, of my life there, without Sammy. The house was still white with gray shutters, the cream-colored curtains still fluttered in the open window of my bedroom, but nothing was the same.
Dana was sitting in the kitchen, home for lunch. The room smelled of yogurt, granola, and more faintly of her lavender perfume. She was small and tan, with pointy, birdlike elbows, so she always seemed more perched than seated—as though she’d only landed for a minute. But after my visit to Sammy’s apartment, I found myself labeling her with a word I’d never applied to her before, even though, literally speaking, it had been true: widow.
My uncle Jeff had died less than a year after I arrived, following a short, ugly battle with breast cancer. (Every seventy-four seconds, someone dies of breast cancer.) To me, his death was such a natural extension of my arrival that I lived for months in a state of constant over-apology, begging forgiveness for even the smallest transgressions, before I realized that neither Dana nor Emmett seemed to blame me. Still, despite their kindness, I couldn’t help but feel like a visitor, as if I were living the wrong life. Sometimes when she would hear me refer to “my aunt’s house,” Dana would say to me, “Can’t you please call it your house?” And I would say it for her sake, the words feeling clumsy in my mouth.
She was licking her spoon clean and working halfheartedly on a crossword, the pen held limply between the fingers of her free hand. “Home for lunch?” she asked, only vaguely concerned, and I searched her face for whatever it was I’d seen in the widow. It was the beginning of a habit I would carry throughout my life, to wonder about people’s second selves, their widow selves—How would you look, how would you be different, I’ll wonder about the gum-snapping girl in the checkout line, about my postman, who wears women’s glasses, if everyone you loved went away, and you were alone? What kind of ugliness would reveal itself?
“Free period,” I lied, hugging her with one arm.
“Your dad just called.” She looked cautiously at the phone on the counter, as though she was afraid that mentioning my father would cause him to call again. “He was rambling about tombstones. I think he was trying to upset me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and that was true.
“I found a package for you on the back porch. I put it on your bed.”
I shuffled, exhausted, to my room. The box was there, filled with the supplies I’d ordered for my rat study, which I certainly wouldn’t finish now. I slumped on the floor and pulled my laptop from under the bed. The e-mail icon on the computer screen jumped in its tray—Dad had written. He was still going on about his tombstone:
How’s this for an epitaph: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” Look that up. The guy who said it was a REAL alcoholic. They’ve got plenty of those here. Make one joke about drinking and they all just frown at you. This might be hard for you to understand, but it’s very unusual for adults to openly frown at each other. —Dad
I deleted the e-mail without responding. The science fair project I’d completed before I met Sammy had been my final, sad attempt to impress my dad, to win him back in my life as someone who loved me and who could show me love. I even thought I could save him, maybe—that I could discover a way to help him reverse the damage he’d done to himself. The centerpiece of my study was the soursop—the fat, spiny fruit of the Annona muricata. The con men of alternative medicine had been advertising soursop as a treatment for cancer, and I felt that medical research, in its efforts to debunk these fraudulent claims, had overlooked the real potential benefits for patients with cirrhosis. My results showe
d the promising but slow-acting effects of soursop on TGF-β1, and I made the national finals in Washington, D.C. When I returned from the trip, my dad never even asked if I’d won a prize—I hadn’t—and today, he was closer to death than he’d ever been.
Exhausted, I curled up on the floor, still in my school clothes. Mr. Tampari died. He died of an overdose. I shut my eyes and repeated those sentences in my mind until I knew, when the time came, I could say them out loud to Dana. As I fell asleep, I remembered that question I’d heard whispered by a student in the crowd: “Was it on purpose?” And I heard Beth’s casual, torturous reply: “I dunno.”
* * *
By the time I woke, it was nearly four in the afternoon. I heard, as my eyes adjusted to the light, a faint groan of pain rise from my throat. It seemed to outpace even my conscious memory of the day. Sammy.
I grabbed the bed frame and hauled myself up to the mattress. I hefted the box Dana had left for me and flipped it right-side up. There was no return address, no postage—it had been delivered by hand. These were not lab supplies. It was addressed to me, and I recognized the handwriting.
I ran to the door and checked and double-checked that I’d locked it. I ripped through the tape on the package with my hands, my stomach churning. I lifted the flaps. Inside were a key chain with a single key, a brief, handwritten note, and an enormous stack of notebooks.
The note had been scribbled hastily in dull pencil:
con,
use key at southern maine self-storage, unit 335
if trouble, call +1-202-555-0106
10 × ((0.957 × In(4)) + (0.378 × In(24.5)) + 1.2 × In(5))) + 6.43 = 50
—s
I squinted at the note, deciphering its faint letters and numbers. By the time he’d reached the end of the equation, the lead of his pencil was a thick, flat smudge. For most people, that equation might as well have been a foreign language, but to me it was recognizable—and also baffling. The formula wasn’t about Sammy, and it wasn’t about me. It was about my father.