Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  Amy stepped gently out of his arm. He told his wife, “I did,” as though she didn’t believe him. She held onto him as he walked away unsteadily.

  Amy was left alone, watching the drab, fat women offering her mother consolation. The cemetery was small and bordered by thick woods. Over the tree line the white spire stood against the sky like a pointing finger. North stepped behind her.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m really not.” She spoke briefly, because she’d found that if she spoke she started crying.

  “Where’s Kara?”

  She rubbed the bridge of her nose, taking a long, frustrated breath. “She’s in France. They said something about not being able to get a flight out so soon. Or something like that. I don’t know.”

  He shook his head. “That’s her all over, isn’t it? Who can’t come to her brother’s funeral? I’m sorry, but that’s—it ain’t right.”

  Amy felt a blush of hatred swarm her face. “You’re so stupid.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, do you even know how many times she cheated on you? The police brought her home one night ’cause she’d been doing some black guy in a car.”

  He stuttered, shrank back. “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.” She wiped her eyes. “Just—I don’t want to talk to you now, okay? Go away.”

  He tried to approach her, but she held up her hand as if halting a bus. “Please go away right now.”

  Hot tears were rising and she turned away. Her mother was still surrounded, and in the parking lot she could see Suzanne helping her father into the passenger side of their old Lincoln. Christian’s face in the coffin had looked too calm to be him. She remembered that when she was eight, she saw him washing blood off his hands in the hall bathroom. His eye was cut, and he’d stopped shaving. Amy had asked him, “Are you trying to make yourself ugly?”

  He hadn’t said anything, but slammed the door. Eventually, his eyes would become so stormy and intense that their father would shy away from physically confronting him. The mourners were dispersing. The fields of stones and flowers emptying people. Amy was supposed to drive her mother’s car to the wake, being held by a Mrs. Abrams, the old teacher who’d stood beside her mother all day. It was still too bright outside, the white, glaring sort of sun that makes a person squint no matter where they’re looking.

  Amy drove through Laughton’s small main strip, the grocery store, Dollar General, and three-screen cinema. She turned toward the high school. This group of six brick and stone buildings was the same school where Kara and North had met, where Christian won the writing award each year, and where Amy was beginning her final year with the same diligent anonymity she had long ago assumed as her chief characteristic. She felt as if the town and her family were a story that had already been told, and, their parts played, everyone had exited the stage, leaving her alone with the backdrops.

  She stood outside the car in the school’s parking lot. The large flat field where teams practiced was empty, goalposts laying solitary Hs on the ground. A flock of blackbirds erupted from the field, swirled upward in unison and held above the field like a swaying thumbprint. The gray dress she wore had a slimming effect. She ran her hands over her hips. She imagined her hips expanding if she chose to keep the child. Any thoughts about her body implied her sister’s body, but today when she thought of her sister, she imagined for the first time what it might have been like to be stared at your whole life. Amy knew how intrusive other people’s eyes could be. She understood it was those eyes, always staring, that had molded her sister. It suddenly made proper sense, the way her sister’s beauty had seemed vindictive, the way she spent half the year in France with her rich husband, even the way she could in good conscience miss their brother’s funeral. It wasn’t that she resented their family. Kara resented something about the world, something about the way it was always looking at her. The blackbirds hung above the field, swaying back and forth, and Amy wondered why they wouldn’t move on. The sun was setting behind clouds.

  She traced a circle on her stomach. She planned to gradually convince herself to abort the baby. Then she wondered if it might be possible for part of Christian to reappear in her own child. Was there a chance she could have a blond and dark son, a child whose dormant traits must exist somewhere in her own blood? She imagined her brother flickering like an electric current along the ladder of her own chromosomes. The parts of him that were her, the blood they shared. She imagined an explosion of stars, his life inside her like a small galaxy spinning itself into existence, and the thought made her belly warm. The flock of birds flew up and dove down, scattering, fading into the brush.

  III.

  THE LAST TIME AMY HAD SEEN KARA, HER SISTER HAD COME home to claim a set of luggage in preparation for moving to San Francisco. Their father had just moved out of the house, and Kara’s only comment on the divorce was, “It should have happened a long time ago.” “You’ll leave too,” Kara had told her. She’d squeezed Amy’s small hand as if the statement were meant to be encouraging. “You’ll see.”

  But Amy didn’t want to leave. She didn’t understand why everybody else did. Here was home. What else was there to find?

  Amy parked her mother’s car under the live oak in their yard. All the lights in the house were off. Inside kept the familiar stale smell of potpourri. The pictures in the hallway. The living room’s carpet was gray-green, two gray couches forming an L against one corner. Heavy shadows, blue light. A darkened lamp, a ceiling fan, two crucifixes, porcelain statues of the Blessed Mother gazing down in repose beside the exposed heart of Jesus. The answering machine’s light blinked rapidly, showing several messages. Amy breathed in the silence. She felt pierced by the house’s history, this weight that would not admit her. She didn’t turn on a single light.

  The kitchen. She remembered Christian scrambling eggs. He was maybe ten. He’d put jelly in the skillet and after he made her taste them, he threw the eggs away and they’d both laughed. It was hard to remember his smile, and she was grateful for the memory.

  Or Kara strolled through the kitchen in a long white T-shirt that hung below her underpants. She’d sat at the breakfast table and propped her golden legs on Christian’s lap while he ate cereal, his speech and gestures becoming awkward and nervous. That amused Kara. She maintained a feline regality in the house, frequently stretching, lounging with the bored look of a house cat. Sometimes she’d twist a finger in Christian’s hair.

  The counter was lined by tall glass containers of peppers soaking in olive oil, a porcelain goose that held sugar, red and white salt shakers.

  The phone rang out of the silence. She moved to the counter and lifted the receiver.

  “Amy?” North’s voice, deep, sorry sounding.

  “Hey.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to come over? Do you want me to come get you?”

  Amy pressed a palm to her stomach. She could imagine the vanished sounds of the family. Things remaining over time, voices accruing in the corners.

  She told him not to come get her. He apologized for what happened at the funeral, and she told him it was okay. She thought maybe it would be, that they would hang up and see each other later, but he broke the silence by revealing himself. “When you said, what did—you said she cheated on me. Do you know, I mean—”

  “She cheated on every boy she ever went out with, North.”

  “But you don’t know, I mean, as far as who with and all that? I always thought she’d done something with Matt Clark, but I couldn’t prove it.”

  Amy sat down on the floor, shadows blanketing her and a heavy glow deepening in the empty, muted kitchen. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore, North.”

  He stuttered, argued. He said it was just that today was a bad day.

  Amy thought of what she should say. She should tell him about the baby. She should explain to him that he
doesn’t even really like her, that he’s blinded by something that’s gone. She should tell him because he isn’t smart enough to realize it on his own. He’s not even the saddest man she knows. But he has given her a baby. He has given her a baby, and she will not see him again.

  She didn’t want to deal with that, then. She told him she’d call him tomorrow. He protested but she provided reassurance. “We’ll talk later.” She hung up the phone and sat back on the kitchen floor.

  She knew she would keep it, she admitted to herself, had always known. Because she deserves something that is hers, a purpose and family. She told herself that the birth might finally initiate her own history, that it might signal the arrival of her true life. She felt the lost ground of her family could be recovered. She felt she no longer needed to merely wait, like one of those war brides keeping watch at a window. This wait would pass, the way everything here passed.

  Amy stood and walked to the answering machine. She pressed the button just below the blinking red light, and messages played in the dark. Family friends, the parish monsignor offering his services to the woman who’d attended his masses for over forty years. Then a strange voice, female, that said one word in greeting: “Mom.”

  It was Kara’s voice, cracked and frayed by the old machine’s recording tape. She apologized several times. In the message she said “hi” to Amy and apologized to her too. She said they have to call her, to please call her, and she recited directions for how to make international calls. Her voice was brief, direct, then there was the low beep that announced the end of new recordings.

  She played her sister’s message twice more, trying to recognize the voice. She would’ve liked to phone her sister and hear her explanation for missing the funeral. She would’ve liked to tell her about the inheritance of haunted men she left in her wake. What happened, she’d like to ask. Tell me everything that happened. She sat on the couch in the dark, hands on her stomach.

  Once she graduated in May, she thought, she’d be able to get more hours at the drugstore. Her mother could watch the baby while she’s at work. Amy began to make plans, telling herself again, more sure this time, that yes she’d known that she would keep it, known from the moment the first test showed its blue dot.

  Amy stood up and walked to the living room. She turned on the light. She walked from room to room, turning on all the lights in the house.

  The child would depend on her, clutch her fingers with its tiny hand. The baby could sleep on her chest, coo softly at the sound of Amy’s voice as she talks about her day. Once a mother, she thought, certain vanities would disappear. She imagined her hips expanding, her breasts swelling and falling.

  She imagined her hair cut short, like most mothers she knew. An impulse toward prettiness was already leaving her. She will never allow herself to cultivate her own beauty. Amy knew she couldn’t let herself care about something like that, not if things were to be reclaimed.

  1987, THE RACES

  OAKLAWN DWARFED THEM, WHITE AND HAUGHTY AS A plantation, four tall stories with flags waving out front. Police directed traffic around the building, blowing their whistles in its shadow. His father drove an entirely red car that was eleven years old. The boy, Andru, knew this because his father bought the Continental the year he’d been born. A few black flies hovered around the floorboards of the big Lincoln, where french fries and pieces of trash trembled in the gutters. He usually saw his father two weekends a month, and from February till mid-April they usually went to Oaklawn. The building had a time-capsule quality to the boy, because he mainly associated Oaklawn with the mobsters who ruled it in the ’40s and ’50s. He liked the stories his father told about those gangsters: Lucky, Meyer, Bugsy, how they met in Hot Springs for conferences, dividing up fortunes during mineral baths and over rare roast beef in one of Oaklawn’s dining rooms. He pictured men in fedoras and long coats moving through the crowd, bearing violin cases furtively under their arms. It was almost one o’clock and they parked a few blocks away from the track. He wasn’t paying attention to what his father was saying, but later he would realize he’d heard every word.

  “Handicapping is predicated on the principle that the future will repeat the past. Okay? So all the numbers—you have to be mathematic. Okay?” The father, David, turned off the car and held a cigarette near the top of his window, where a thin breeze entered. Black, round burns spotted the red upholstery bordering the glass. Sometimes if the boy concentrated, one of the cigarette burns would become a black fly and circle their heads before landing in the same spot. “Do you understand?” The father’s voice was slightly hoarse. He squeezed his cigarette through the crack in the window and a small flurry of orange sparks burst into the car.

  “Okay,” the boy squinted as sparks died toward his face.

  David dusted ashes off his gray suit, picking shreds of tobacco from the white shirt whose seams were yellowing. The elbows of the suit were thin, but it was all neatly pressed and smelled strongly of Polo for Men, a bottle of which sat on the backseat next to some clothes. He smoothed back his hair. On his thick, hairy hand was a large gold ring that had his initials, DS, spelled in diamonds over one knuckle.

  “Hey, Dru?” he said. “Do you not want to be here?”

  The boy sat up and glanced at him, then toward the brick wall beyond the windshield. A long crack sprawled across the glass. “Sure. I mean, I don’t care. It’s fine.”

  “A lot of people would like to visit Hot Springs twice a month.”

  “I know.” His father’s voice made his face hot.

  “We’re having fun. We’re the guys, right?” He ruffled his son’s spiky brown hair.

  His son grinned.

  The smile was so forced it infuriated the father. The boy could tell because his father clenched his jaw, climbed out of the car and slammed his door. It was a panicked sort of anger, visible at moments like this, when faced with evidence that these visits were something the boy endured. The son sensed fear as well as anger, and he wanted to alleviate the pressure, but could not move himself to utter any words to placate his father. He wouldn’t realize until over a decade later that the fear was part of his father, a thing that lived in its own time, growing within him and needing nothing to engender it.

  People swarmed the racetrack, like Indians around a fort in one of the John Wayne videos his father rented for them to watch with a bucket of fried chicken or a pizza. Old people, families, single men, and the young girls, the debutantes from Little Rock in expensive dresses, hair shining in the sun, the sun in their teeth. The boy watched them like he always did.

  Now his father no longer seemed angry. He smoothed down his suit and ran a hand over his dark black hair, thick and swept back. “All right, my man. Day at the races.” He punched his son’s shoulder softly.

  “Yeah.” The boy watched his father, the energy that always gathered in him as they approached the entrance. Today it seemed stronger. He kept shooting his cuffs as they walked, fingering buttons at the ends of his sleeves, closing and stretching his fingers as if he were about to play the piano. He winked to a policeman.

  Inside people bustled, white slips of paper in hand, eyes absorbed in racing sheets, an electric voice speaking over the garbled din. Many people faced up, watching statistics play on dozens of monitors overhead. His father bought a form and began looking through it while they leaned against a wall. The light in Oaklawn was faded and artificial, inhabited by smoke and voices.

  “Isn’t this something? All these people.” Before his son could answer, David picked up his head and began looking around, scanning the crowd, it seemed. “Hey, let’s walk around some.”

  They walked to the other end of the first level, through the commotion of bodies, but when they reached the end, near a souvenir emporium, his father turned and directed Andru back the way they’d come.

  “Come on.” He strode fast, with a hand on his son’s back, racing form curled in his fist.

  They walked to the upper paddock, where more peo
ple were mingling and coming to see the horses. His father craned his neck slowly across the crowd, sucking his bottom lip.

  “Are you looking for someone?” The boy asked.

  “No, not really.” Then David studied his son, hand on the boy’s jacket, the boy calm, still preadolescent and smooth-skinned under his shocked hair. “Hey, pal. Let me ask you something. What would you think if I started seeing a lady?”

  “That’s okay. That’s great.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “No. Not any. Really, dad.”

  His father’s tone stiffened. “Well, yeah—I mean, why would you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother’s got Frank, right? I should have somebody. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” Looking up at him, again his father seemed to skirt the edge of that difficult energy he ran on, but then it was gone, and the man was smiling.

  He gave his son a complicated handshake and spoke in a deep, urban slang. “You bad, brother. You a bad man.”

  They left the paddock and went up to the mezzanine. Mezzanine was one of the words Andru had learned at the track. He liked it. It sounded like it had secret implications.

  His father led him through the crowds and across the mezzanine. Then they went to the lower and upper terraces, and after half an hour, when the first live race neared, David told his son they should grab some lunch, and they went down to ground level, where an oyster bar sat between a restaurant and the betting windows. When they got there, his father smiled with relief. Therese was standing in front of the oyster bar, sucking a shell between her lips.

  She was still some distance away when they stopped. David turned to Andru, emanating a feverish joy. “You remember Miss Therese, don’t you? She was with us one time.”