After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  Bill snorted. “Well, to state the obvious, you could have woken her up, maybe given her a squirt of ice water with her own gun.”

  “I don’t know how to explain it, but she looked vulnerable lying there, like it was the first time she’d rested in days. Then, I went into the bathroom, and she’d made everything so neat, the towel folded perfectly, the bar of soap dried off.”

  “At least you didn’t leave her there sleeping and go off to work,” said Bill.

  “Actually, I thought about it.”

  “Because she reminded you of your mother?” Bill said. Two days earlier, he had told Bill about his mother’s disappearance and Bill had simply nodded, accustomed to stories like this. Aaron thought that maybe he had told him precisely because he would regard it as ordinary. “I can find her,” Bill said. “Aren’t you at all curious about where she got to, what she’s doing, whether she’s even alive?”

  “I am not,” Aaron said. He wondered whether this sounded like the truth. He wondered whether it was the truth. He knew that it was possible to push a thought so far away for so long that you did not even know whether you were lying to yourself. They drank in silence for a bit, and then Aaron said, “I have a picture.” He realized that this made it sound like he was agreeing, which was not his intention. He was just talking.

  “A picture’s good,” Bill said. “I need her name, her full name, date and place of birth, even better a Social Security number, and anything else you’ve got.” Bill picked up his beer again, and just before he put it to his mouth, he said, “No charge, of course. Since we’re, you know, friends.” He drank loudly, as if embarrassed to have made this declaration, but they were friends, unlikely friends, but perhaps that was what friendship always was: two people met and, despite themselves, despite their own fears and oddness and bad traits, somehow liked each other.

  “It’s my birthday,” Aaron announced. He meant to acknowledge the friendship also through this admission, but he realized that it sounded as though he were accepting the offer as his birthday due.

  “Happy birthday,” said Bill. They knocked glasses and drank. Normally, Aaron drank two beers while Bill consumed twice as many, but that afternoon Aaron drank four also. It was his birthday.

  The next morning, as Bill stood smoking on the doorless balcony, Aaron handed him a piece of paper with the information he had requested, everything but his mother’s Social Security number, which he did not know. During the night he had awakened with his stomach in knots and gone into the bathroom, where he stood over the toilet trying to vomit. When he lay back down, he finally acknowledged the truth: what he feared was learning that his mother had been living all these years in a town just like Mortonville, working at a place just like the Trout Café, which would prove what he had believed all along, that the reason she left was to be away from him.

  “At the bottom I wrote two questions,” he told Bill. “It’s all I want to know—nothing else. I don’t want addresses or telephone numbers or photos.”

  Bill unfolded the paper, his lips moving as he read through the information. Aaron could tell when he got to the two questions:

  1. Is she alive?

  2. Is she happy?

  Bill looked up. “Happy?” he said. “How the hell am I going to know if she’s happy?”

  * * *

  When Aaron was ten—almost ten—he fell into a coma that lasted two days, a coma that the doctors were never able to explain. It started on a Wednesday, after school. He went upstairs to do his homework in their apartment above the café, and when he did not come back down at four to eat a quick meal before helping his mother prepare for the supper crowd, she came upstairs and found him on his bed. When he awoke Friday evening, he did not remember arriving home from school Wednesday afternoon and drinking a glass of milk before climbing the stairs to his room, did not remember sitting at his desk and working out ten math problems (correctly) before going over to his bed to lie down. When his mother could not awaken him, she had run downstairs and across the street to Bildt Hardware, returning with Harold, who carried Aaron, wrapped in a blanket, down the back stairs to the Oldsmobile. Harold had offered to drive so that his mother could sit in the backseat with Aaron, but she had said no, so firmly that Harold turned without saying another word and went back to his store.

  Aaron knew these details, the blow-by-blow account of what had happened, because his mother, hoping to force his memory, had described it all for him later, starting with the moment she entered his bedroom and called his name, shaking him harder and harder. As she spoke, he had closed his eyes and tried to visualize it, but he knew that the images in his head were not memories. “Finally I lifted your shirt,” she said, “and put my finger inside your belly button.”

  He opened his eyes. “Why?” His mother knew that he could not bear to have his navel touched.

  “I just wanted to be sure,” she said.

  “Sure of what?”

  “That you weren’t playing a game,” she said, which made no sense because his mother knew he was not a boy who played games. “Now concentrate.” He closed his eyes again and willed himself to recall the swaying of the car and the blanket like a cocoon around him, but he could not remember any of it. His mother always ended the story at the moment that she sent Harold Bildt back to his hardware store, which meant that he would never know what she had done as she drove the eleven miles to the hospital in Florence, whether she had spoken to him soothingly or even sternly—“I want you to stop the foolishness this minute, Aaron”—or whether she had not spoken at all.

  The café had stayed closed while his mother sat beside his bed, waiting for the doctors to know something, waiting for him to open his eyes. When he finally did open them and took in his surroundings, she was there, sitting at the window, her head turned away from him so that she did not even know at first that he was awake. For several minutes, he had watched her stare out into the darkness as he tried to recall what had happened. He remembered walking down the alley to the café, stopping to feed the stray cat he called Clary that waited for him after school because Aaron always brought the cat leftovers from his lunch. The smell of tuna casserole and Clary rubbing himself against his legs—these were the last things Aaron remembered. Over his bed the nurses had stretched a length of string, on which cards were slung like tiny saddles. They were from his classmates, but when he read through them later, he could not reconcile the sentiments expressed—“Get well soon. We miss you!”—with the names printed after them, for these were the same children who rarely spoke to him and chose him last for their teams, even their spelling teams, though he was clearly the best speller in the class. On the table sat a pitcher of water, a vase with flowers, and a stack of books, his books. He turned back toward his mother, who was still staring out into the darkness, and whispered, “Mom,” and then, “Mother.” Neither sounded right, but she turned from the window, slowly, as though she had forgotten where she was, forgotten that he lay in a coma behind her.

  Three doctors came in and stood around his bed, unsure what to say about the coma or his sudden recovery from it. “Welcome back, young man,” said one of them finally, as though he had been on a trip. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Clary,” he said. “I was feeding Clary.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” his mother said, not to him but to the doctors. “Clary is a family friend, but Aaron hasn’t seen him in nearly three years. He’s a dwarf,” she added, as though it might be relevant.

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” said the doctor who had asked Aaron what he remembered. “There’s bound to be some confusion.” He leaned in close and looked into Aaron’s eyes with a small flashlight, then wrote something on a chart while one of the other doctors, a tonsured man named Dr. McFarley, fiddled with the water pitcher beside the bed before suggesting that the coma might have been anxiety induced.

  All three doctors seized on this. “Is he under stress at school?” they asked. “At home? Anywh
ere?” Aaron lay in the hospital bed listening.

  “His birthday’s coming up,” his mother said finally. “I told him he could invite only four friends. He looked upset. Maybe he feels bad about not inviting the others.”

  It was true that he had been upset, upset because he understood that four was not a restriction but a quota, even though his mother knew that he did not have four friends to invite. She glanced at Aaron, giving him the look that they had used to signal collusion against his father, a look that meant that his job was to play along. Later, when he was back home, she told him that the coma was a mystery and would always be a mystery and that sitting in the hospital talking about it would not have solved the mystery, that she had just wanted to get him out of there.

  In the end, the three doctors agreed that the coma was probably anxiety induced. They told his mother that she needed to find a way to accommodate all of his classmates, so the afternoon of his birthday, she closed the café and the party was held there, amid the booths and tables. All of his classmates came, though Aaron did not know whether they came because their parents had made them or because the coma had temporarily elevated his status or simply because they were attracted by the novelty of having the café to themselves. He received twenty-eight presents, most of them reflecting the tastes and interests of the givers—rubber snakes and magic tricks, various wheeled objects, and lots of bubblegum—but only one book, from Vickie, the messy girl who loved reading almost as much as he did. He knew that she had read the book before giving it to him because there was a thumbprint on each page, although the smudges stopped twenty pages before the end. He wondered whether she had grown bored with the book or run out of time. It did not occur to him that she might have washed her hands.

  In the year following the coma, his mother took him in twice for checkups. Both times the doctor said he seemed fine, that there was nothing to worry about. Still, he thought his mother did worry, and he took to making noise as he studied after school—dropping a book, stepping heavily from desk to bed—but later he decided that he had imagined her concern. There was no proof other than the comments from customers about how frightening the whole thing must have been for her, but their comments were not evidence of what his mother actually felt, and beyond taking him in for checkups, she said nothing. Over the years, when he thought about the coma, he thought about waking up in the hospital and looking around for his mother, how that had been his first response, and about seeing her there at the window, how he had wondered—but would never know—whether she was watching something outside in the darkness or just studying her own reflection.

  * * *

  The Ngs’ arguments were intensifying, in frequency and in volume. Aaron did not have the courage to address the situation directly, to go upstairs, knock on their door, and stand there explaining that he could hear them, that he had been listening to them scream for three months now. He could not get by on so little sleep, which meant he would need to move soon. This was what he was contemplating as he and Bill sat in the café ten days after his birthday, having a beer though it was not yet two o’clock because classes had been dismissed early, after a jackhammer started up in the street outside the school.

  “I found her,” Bill said. He was actually well into his second pint.

  Aaron did not reply. All around them people were writing essays, eating sandwiches, and talking loudly into their cell phones even though the café had a policy. Bill took an envelope from his coat pocket and set it beside Aaron’s beer. It was small, like the envelopes his mother had put Mr. Rehnquist’s rent checks in. Aaron recalled how she had placed the envelopes under Mr. Rehnquist’s coffee cup instead of handing them to him directly.

  “There was nothing in public records,” Bill went on. “No tax documents or DMV trail. She doesn’t vote or own property. I found a tax bill from 1983, unpaid. That was it. It was like she left that night and ceased to exist.”

  The envelope remained on the table. Bill finished his second beer, his face, which was always florid, becoming even more so. Three days later, on Monday morning, Aaron would arrive at school, where Marla would be waiting with poorly concealed excitement to announce that Bill was dead, that as he sat in his car Saturday night, conducting surveillance on a man who was cheating on his wife, he had suffered a massive stroke, his body eventually discovered by the very man whom he had been following, who would in this way learn that he was the focus of an investigation. “Can you believe it?” Marla would say, referring not to the fact that Bill was dead but to this strange final twist. Aaron would be one of five people at the funeral, and after the service, he would go home and open the envelope Bill had given him one week earlier, the envelope that currently sat, untouched, beside his beer.

  Aaron pointed at Bill’s empty glass. “Another?”

  Bill nodded and pushed his glass toward Aaron, and Aaron got up and stood in line, ordered Bill’s third beer, and brought it back to the table.

  “I found the Gronseth guy easy enough through public records,” Bill said, “so I called him. Said he hadn’t heard from her in years, but he was pretty sure he knew where she was. He’s a chatty guy.”

  They were both drinking fast. When you were drinking, you didn’t need to talk. “Did you speak with her?” Aaron asked at last.

  “No,” Bill said. “That’s not my business. I called and pretended to be working for the census bureau, just confirmed that she lived there.” He reached over and tapped the envelope. “It’s all here,” he said. “Telephone numbers and addresses. I know you think you don’t want it, but it’s here. You can decide what to do with it.”

  “Okay,” Aaron said. “Can I buy you another? Or maybe something to eat?”

  Bill’s glass was still half full, and Aaron could not imagine him eating beetloaf or quinoa fried rice. Bill looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ve got a guy I’m keeping an eye on. His wife’s suspicious. He gets off work in a few, so I better get going.”

  “Bill?” Aaron called after him. Bill turned. “Thank you.”

  Bill nodded. “See you Monday.”

  “See you Monday,” Aaron agreed, because there was no reason to think that he would not, and he picked up the envelope and put it in his pocket.

  April

  22

  * * *

  The grass around the bus was high, obscuring the wheels and even the black lettering on the side that announced the name of a school whose students the bus had once shuttled. Aaron supposed the school no longer existed, that it had been consolidated like those in so many small towns. He wondered whether there were still wasps living inside the bus but thought that Gloria had probably disposed of them after the attack, the way people put down dogs that were biters. He parked the car, an airport rental, got out, and slammed the door loudly, but no one came from the house to greet him. He shooed away three dogs that barked at him halfheartedly, climbed the porch steps, and knocked. After several minutes—during which he heard nothing from inside—the door opened.

  It was his mother. She looked old, not simply older, for of course she was older, but old. It was not just one thing—wrinkles or jowls or bad teeth—but all of them combined, years of ignoring dentists and hairdressers and doctors, of ignoring the expectations of the world. During the three-hour drive from the Twin Cities, he had worried about numerous things, including how they would greet each other, so he was relieved when she said, “Hello, Aaron,” stepped back, and motioned him inside.

  The doilies were gone, but otherwise the room was as he remembered it. His mother sat down on the couch, leaning back into it. She did not fill the silence with small talk, did not ask about his drive up from the Cities, whether he had eaten lunch along the way or gotten lost or seen anything of interest. He was thankful for this. Of all the scenarios he had imagined, the one he dreaded most was the one in which his mother spoke to him with casual familiarity.

  “What about Clarence?” he asked finally.

  His mother laughed. “Clary? He’s
dead. He’s been gone for a good while now.”

  He was not surprised to hear Clarence was dead. He had assumed he would be. “When did he die?” he asked. “How?” He did not ask his mother why she had laughed.

  “You were like this as a boy,” his mother said. “So serious. Always asking questions. You never had any friends because everyone was afraid of you.”

  “Afraid of me?” he said. It was he who had always been afraid: of his father and then of his father’s death, the memory of his father somersaulting through the air and the watermelonish thwack of his head; of his mother’s illness and the constant sound of her crying; of Miss Meeks and the other children; of being left alone. He had spent his adult life dismantling these fears, but he did not say any of this to his mother. She did not deserve to know who he was, who he had become. She had given up that right.

  Gloria came in and rushed toward him, chattering nervously, asking the questions about his trip that his mother had not. It was not how he remembered her. In fact, everything about her seemed different. Usually one confronted the past and it shrank down to size, but when Gloria held out her hand to shake his, it was the size of a man’s, her grip almost painful. Of course, she had been strong back then also. He recalled the way she had cracked walnuts open with her hands and then handed the flesh to his mother, shyly, while his mother talked about his father and cried. “Someday, you’ll enjoy irony,” Clarence had predicted. It was true. He had grown into a man who saw the world in terms of irony and symbol, who looked at these two women before him and thought of walnuts being squeezed together.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Clarence,” he said.

  Gloria nodded. “He lived longer than the doctors ever thought he would,” she said. “He fell out a window, you know.”

  “That’s how he died?” Aaron said. He pictured Clarence tumbling through the air as his father had.