She starts walking toward the college, but stumbles on the holes she and Audrey made, tumbling to the ground, her gloved hands all that stand between her belly and another trip to the doctor’s.
“You OK?” asks the dad who rescued her two weeks before, on that day Gen and Audrey fought. He offers a hand to help her right herself.
“I’m fine,” she says, not thinking about the word until it’s already out of her mouth. She brushes herself off and gets back to walking, even though taking the car would be the wiser choice at this point. Her toe is aching, her big toe. That monstrosity. It will ache the whole way there, and the whole way back, and all the way through class, but she shouts back to the father that she is fine, just fine.
Parameters
The robot sat upon my grandfather’s stone wall, one clawed hand chiseling away at the rock while the other hurled pebbles at a nearby elm. It had been sitting there since the day Gramps trudged into the forest with his shotgun some eight years back, never to be seen again. Through rain and snow, it sat there. Through fallen leaves that choked its joints and creeping vines that clutched its spindly legs together with a child’s determination and ferocity. I passed it every day on my way to and from the bus stop for school, sometimes stopping to sit a moment and sometimes not. It didn’t seem to mind if I took a pebble or two and joined in its game, but whenever I tried to make friends, asking about the point of its exercise, the only thing it would say was “Two birds.”
The day of my driving test, the last day I might make my walk until I had children of my own, I took to our long driveway early. When I reached the end of it, I sat with my back to the robot, watching cars zip along the two-lane country highway that was our road. I was nervous, and something about the robot soothed me. I don’t know whether it was the pungent smell of lightly burning lubricant or the subtle scraping of one metal plate against another, but there was something comforting about this old machine. In the land of confusion that we call high school — Will Mr. Catmull realize I haven’t read Beowulf today? Will Natasha smile at me when she finds the note I shoved into the slats of her locker? — in this world of variables, the robot was my constant.
“Why didn’t Gramps ever give you a name?” I asked aloud.
“Two birds,” it said, winding up and chucking another pebble at the tree.
I shook my head and smiled, casting my gaze at the ground. Horse-chestnuts had begun to fall from the tree that stood at the corner of our yard and the neighbor’s, many of the spiked brown shells still intact. But a few of them had been cracked open, either by animals or by cars like the one that sped by at that very moment.
With hair whipping across my face, I plucked a fistful of nuts from the dirt and spun on the spot to face the robot’s elm. But just as I was about to heave one at my target, the robot threw its arm out in front of me.
“Stone,” it said.
“What?” I asked.
“Grandfather said stone. One stone, two birds.”
And then it went back to its chore.
“Wait!” I said. “What?”
“Play with you, he said. Keep you away until he can go. One stone, two birds.”
I wrapped my hands around the robot’s throwing arm and squeezed, the metal cold against my fingers on this October morning. It would not look at me. It kept trying to throw the stone.
“If gun fires,” it said, “Grandfather’s pain ends. If Grandfather’s pain ends, Grandchild’s burden lifts. One stone,” it said. “Two birds.”
“Wait,” I said, squeezing harder, as if that might make a difference. “No,” I said. That’s not how it works.”
“Grandfather says,” it said, standing, something cracking down below, though whether it was its legs or the vines that bound them I couldn’t be sure.
I hung from its outstretched arm as it rose to its full height. It tried one last time to throw the stone despite the encumbrance that was me, but then, realizing the futility of the exercise, it reached down with its chiseling hand and grabbed a stone with that.
I watched it hurl the rock at the elm, watched the rock hurtle toward the nest that was nestled into the V where the tree cleaved in two, and then watched in horror as the nest tumbled toward the ground, eggs falling from it as it fell.
The robot turned its face to me finally and smiled.
A Pun in the Punchline
We met in the conference room at the back of the building, a small room with a table that reminded us of a surfboard. It was the only room free at that time; inexplicably, every other room on campus was booked from 4 to 6 on Tuesdays. The professor had looked, had gone through each of the college’s ten buildings, across campuses on either side of the river that cleaved our town in twain. He had searched, room by room, and had found nothing. Not even the abandoned dance studio was free, its broken mirrors and out-of-tune piano fodder for this semester’s course in advanced art therapy. There was only the surfboard room at the back of the student center. And so, that is where we met. That is where we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into a past where our school gave two shits about us and our stories.
It had been six weeks since Cain had missed his deadline and we’d had to punish him, but we’d been coming back to the topic of our having gone too far with increasing regularity. Sure, we were honor-bound to defend the syllabus’ rules and regulations — it was a contract, after all — but even the professor seemed to be feeling a bit of remorse. While he waited for us to file in each week, he kept his gaze fixed on the twenty-sided die and weathered D&D manual that had decided Cain’s fate. And when the workshop reached an impasse that seventh week, when silence took the room, the professor, before saying a word to get us back on track, he ran his fingers over the foxed, dog-eared pages of the old tome and let out a sigh.
And so it was that we were each assigned a piece of Cain to bring back for week eight.
Jules collected the right shoulder and arm from beneath the newsstand at Pickett Square. Azar retrieved the left leg from the floorboards of the crumbling Episcopalian church at Philbrick Circle. Me, I dug up the torso and left arm from where we’d stashed it beneath the flower bed outside the provost’s window. Corey found out where the right leg had run off to, but never told us. And the professor, he collected the head from atop the science building’s dome, skedaddling out of there just as the seniors were getting ready to reassemble the car of the dean of institutional advancement as part of their annual prank.
“Where did the dean find the money for a Beemer?” the professor wondered. We would find out at an all-campus meeting the following fall, when that dean rode off into the sunset with his embezzled fortune and we all got shipped off to other schools to finish our degrees. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Heads turned and noses were pinched as we strolled through the student center that eighth week, each of us with our heavy, malodorous burden. We drew the shades, we laid out the pieces of our comrade on the surfboard table, and we looked to the professor for guidance on what to do next.
“Well, it’s such an exquisite corpse,” he told us, looking at me, “that I think you should decide what happens next.”
The Price
He delivered the bodies to the riverbank at sunrise, when the opposite shore was aflame in the light of a new day. And as he waited for the ferryman to arrive, he lit himself a cigarette and inhaled deeply the poison he hoped would soon make him a passenger on his cart instead of the driver. With the butt pressed between his lips, he fumbled in his pockets for the six coins he'd need. Presently, the palming and patting and clutching grew faster, more furious. The first five had been easy enough to find, but by the time he caught sight of the ferryman dragging her skiff ashore, the sixth coin was still missing.
He kept his eyes on the damp hem of the ferryman's robes until the woman had drawn to a stop and rasped, “They are not ready.”
Eyes still focused on the robes, on the sand that had clung there, he said, “I’m one coin sho
rt.”
“Which stays then?”
He looked now at the ferryman, at the pallid, gaunt face she kept hidden beneath her hood, and he pleaded for mercy.
The ferryman plucked the cigarette from his mouth and pressed it between her own lips, taking a long, slow drag.
“They all must go,” he said. “I am paid to make sure of it.”
She handed him back the cigarette, stained at one end by the paint upon her lips. “If you are paid,” she said, “should I not be?”
He pat himself down again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I swear I had it.”
She took hold of his arms, stilling him with both the strength of her grip and with the iciness of it. “We may yet reach a bargain,” she said.
“My soul in place of the final coin,” he guessed, shrugging off her grasp. “That is no bargain.”
“But I see it in your eyes,” she said. “I tasted it on that poisoned teat from which you suck. And besides,” she said, taking gentle hold of his hands again, “it is not the whole of you that I seek. It is just a piece.”
“And which piece might that be?” he asked.
She lowered her hood, squinting in the bright morning light as she did. And then she undid the clasp at her neck and pulled off the robes entirely, holding them out for him to take.
He could not help but gawk at the slight form before him, the waif in the white dress who looked positively diminished without her robes.
“For how long?” he asked, running the coarse fabric of the robes through his fingers, noticing only now the places on her pale skin that had been rubbed raw by her accoutrements.
She smiled at him, and in that smile he saw the truth of it.
“Until I am owed,” he said. It was not a question.
He watched her dance across the sand as he pulled the robes onto himself. Then he carried the bodies one by one to the skiff and set them inside. And it was only then, as he stepped back to give the cart one last check, one last goodbye, that he saw it laying in the sand, nestled into the print of one of his boots: the final coin.
He picked it up, held it above his head, and shouted for the woman who'd worn the robes, but she was gone. Long gone.
Visitation
Rain splattered through the screen on her window, and though I pled with her to shut it, she would not budge. “I am disinclined to acquiesce,” she said, smiling, quoting the film she’d been watching on her tablet in bed.
“I’ll take that away,” I told her.
“But I brushed my teeth,” she said, showing them to me, the whole crooked lot. “And I’m in my pajamas,” she said, pinching the fabric between her thumb and forefinger and pulling it away from her chest.
“It might get wet,” I said, pointing at the window.
With a frown, she jammed a finger against the screen to pause the movie, then handed it over. A skeletal monkey grimaced at me from the frozen frame before I clicked the tablet off. I wondered suddenly if my daughter might choose a capuchin for her familiar. Or would it be the chicken she swiped across the road on her tablet because dice and tabletops made no sense to her?
“Now,” I said, “will you please let me close the — ”
“But what if they come?” she said, waving a hand at the rain. “I can already hear the footsteps.”
She had given up on the jolly old demigods and cotton-tailed minor deities I’d told her (much to the chagrin of her mother) were nothing more than the servants of God Money, but the sprites and faeries of her storybooks — those she still believed in.
“All I hear is the downpour,” I said, clutching the window, ready to close it.
“The downpour means they’re close,” she said. “They’re almost here.”
I looked at her then, at the brown eyes her mother had bequeathed her, at the sadness there, the longing for something I couldn’t take away, and it hurt me to think of all I had robbed her of. I shifted focus, stared at an earring instead, the tiny amethyst stud her mother had bought her on the day she’d gotten her ears pierced, jewelry I’d refused to let her wear for a month out of frustration.
I sighed and stood. Then I pulled on the chain of her bedside lamp.
“What about my kiss?” she said.
I leaned down and pecked her temple with my lips, feeling a smile wrinkle her face.
“No souvenirs this time,” is what I said as I left the room.
* * *
The first time it happened, she toddled into my bedroom on a Sunday morning clutching a teddy bear to her chest, one that I’d never seen before. And after I asked her mother at drop-off that afternoon if she’d been splurging again, earning me the kind of dressing down I hadn’t faced since The Dissolution, I decided it was a gift from my mother. But the truth was that I’d never asked and made sure, and now I was too afraid of what the answer might be.
The second time was a few years later. I was sitting in bed, three chapters into a freshly cracked mystery, when I realized she hadn’t yet climbed into my bed with a brown bag of comics plucked from one of my long boxes. I swept into her room in a panic, nearly tripping on the long snake of the belt I never bothered to tie round my robe. But, as sure as I was in that moment that I’d lost her, there she was: in her bed, crumbs everywhere, a thick slab of gingerbread in her hands. There was icing tucked between her fingers, smeared all across her face, and caked into her blonde hair. And though I asked and asked where she got it as I stood outside the shower, all I got in the way of an answer was a sheepish grin as she poked her head out from behind the curtain to ask me for an extra towel.
Would tonight be the third time, I wondered. And what gift would she bring back if it was?
I stood outside her door and listened to her breathe, waiting for the rhythm to change. But it was hard to hear her over the cacophony of the rain, so I closed my eyes to focus. Soon, though, I couldn’t hear her at all, and I rounded the corner with haste.
But she was still there. She shivered, tugged at her blankets, and rolled so that her back was to the window.
I sat on the floor, leaned into the wall, and stood watch. And when her breathing grew shallow enough that I could no longer see her chest rising and falling, I held a hand to her belly until her body pushed me away.
I drifted off to sleep.
And then I was awake, my head aching from where I’d slumped against her dresser. I rubbed a hand across my face, then looked to my daughter’s bed to see if she was awake, to see if I’d have to apologize for being a creep.
She was gone.
The bed was empty, the covers pushed aside, and all that was left of her was a smear of blood on the sheets. I could only look for a second before seeking solace from the open window. But there was no absolution to be found there. The rain had stopped. There would be no gift this time.
Or so I thought, until the toilet flushed just beyond the wall.
I rushed to the bathroom door, listened to the rattle of pills in a bottle, the running of a faucet and its cessation. Then I heard a groan. A groan and the patter of bare feet across cold linoleum. I stepped back as the door opened.
“Dad?” she said, holding a hand to the place where I supposed it ached.
Though I knew I shouldn’t have, I gathered her into my arms and held her to me.
“Sorry about the sheets,” she mumbled into my shoulder.
“Do I need to run to the store?” I said, letting her go.
She shook her head. “Mom’s had me packing stuff for six months, just in case.”
I nodded, gave her a smile, and watched her trudge back toward her room. I couldn’t help thinking, as I listened to her strip the bed down, as I listened to the bundle of sheets hit the wall and her body hit the mattress, if I had lost her after all.
An hour later, she knocked at my door with a brown paper bag clutched against her chest.
“What you got?” I asked.
She pulled the first issue from the bag. On the cover, a capuchin sat atop the shoulder of a man in a
straight jacket. “I know it’s for mature readers,” she said. “But…”
I smiled at the hand I’d been dealt, at the card she was playing, and I said, “Okay.”
She smiled now, too. “Can I sit with you?” she asked.
“That’s not weird?” I said.
She rolled her eyes and climbed up onto my bed, sitting down beside me. “It’s only weird if you make it weird, Dad.”
I bent to kiss her forehead, hoping that I hadn’t, knowing that someday that I would.
“Read,” she said, pointing at my book.
And so, we did.
The Rest of the Ritual
They are rolling the car toward the river. Through the yellowing fields I once taught them to sow, they push the jalopy with heave after coordinated heave. Sweat has stuck their shirts to their backs. Or, well, it’s stuck the shirts of the two who bothered to wear shirts. The third, he’s bare-chested in the noon-day sun, his shoulders already redder than the lobsters their wives are stewing in the pot back at the house. When they break, he’s got one hand working the crusted-up snot out of his nose and the other down the front his pants, scratching at the spot where his drenched briefs have begun to chafe against his spindly legs. He asks, just as he did when they were boys and he was sucking down Cokes through a straw in the back seat, “Are we there yet?”
There is the hill, the downward slope that will send their monstrous burden over the cliff and into the churning rapids below. There is where they will say goodbye to what’s left of me on this earth, the body their wives have dressed in a suit that hasn’t fit for years and laid across the back seat.
“We’re laying Pa to rest,” says the oldest. “For Pete’s sake, quit your pissing and moaning.”
Out of the Woods Page 3