One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  “Aren’t you all smiles?” said Gracie, and she was right. I was smiling like crazy.

  She asked me how things at home were going, and I said, “Not so good. I think I’m leaving.”

  “What do you mean? Where will you go?”

  “Jamie is talking to Fuck You Frances,” I said. “He says we can crash with her.”

  Gracie narrowed her eyes. “So that’s why you were asking all those questions. What the fuck, Adam! Why are you still messing around with Jamie Marks? He’s dead! Don’t you get it?”

  “I’m not messing around with Jamie,” I said. “God, you sound like my grandma. He’s had it rough. You of all people should understand that.”

  “Don’t guilt-trip me,” said Gracie. She got out of bed and started putting her clothes back on. First her underwear, then the pants and T-shirt. Snip snap, just like that, my nakedness was the only remaining evidence that anything extraordinary had happened here. “I don’t need anyone to tell me who to feel sorry for.”

  “Don’t feel sorry then,” I said.

  “I won’t,” said Gracie. But she hesitated, folding her arms across her chest, peering toward the window where the light was failing from late afternoon to evening. The tree out front was bare, its branches black after a cold November drizzle. “But why the Wilkinson farm?” she finally asked.

  “I have to get out,” I said. “I have to get out or else I’ll go crazy.”

  “Why don’t we go somewhere worthwhile, then?” she said, casually inserting herself into my plans. “Why shack up at that run-down farm? It’s stupid.”

  “Well, where would you go, Miss Know It All?”

  “Somewhere I’ve never been before. Someplace wonderful,” said Gracie. “Where haven’t you been before, Adam?” Her face lit up as she asked and suddenly it was like a game of Three Wishes. What would I wish for? Where would I go?

  “California,” I said without having to think too hard or too long. “My aunt Beth lives there, but she always comes here to visit. She says it’s like another country. There are all sorts of people there. From China and Mexico and Russia. From all over. Going there would be like going to Disney World, I think, only realer.”

  “Let’s go then!” said Gracie. And the next thing I knew she was on her dad’s computer, looking up train schedules. “My dad works for Amtrak,” she said. “We can buy tickets through his account.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” said Gracie. I leaned over her shoulder while she typed in our names, addresses and telephone numbers. I wasn’t sure if she knew what she was talking about, if we could actually just order tickets like that, but I figured at least it was another possibility. “We can leave this coming Sunday,” she said.

  “Are you serious? You’re a genius,” I said, and bent down to kiss her.

  “Why, thank you, sir,” she said, putting on a Southern accent.

  I said, “My pleasure, missus.”

  Then we got naked again and everything was sunflower sunflower sunflower for a good half hour.

  Before Gracie’s parents came home from counseling, I was on my bike and pedaling back to my house like a madman. I whirred past farms and fields and falling down barns, calling things out as I passed.

  “Crows!” I shouted as I sped past three of those black scavengers wandering in a pasture. “Maples!” I yelled as I passed a line of maple trees, buckets strapped to their trunks, collecting sap to be steamed into syrup. “Cows!” I hollered as I spun past the Morgan’s dairy. “Telephone pole! Clouds! Pond! Broken down Ford Escort that has sat in that same damned ditch for over a year now!” I was delirious with naming, my head so filled with words that when I got home I trudged in through the door sort of singing them.

  My mother was in the kitchen making lasagna. When she heard me come in singing she turned her chair away from the stove and laughed. “What’s got you happy all of a sudden?”

  I said, “Nothing in particular,” as if I hadn’t just had a little sex with Gracie, as if I hadn’t just felt the word sunflower open up inside me and face the light. I passed through the dining room, where my father sat at the table reading the sports section, rattling and harrumphing, not looking up or saying hello, and continued back to my room.

  Andy was asleep in his bedroom. He took three-hour naps because school was such a huge drain on him, or so he told my parents. Really he was just coming off the high from the joints he smoked after school. I never said anything because I liked him like that, down for the count, drooling. This way I didn’t have to hear his comments about how I was a troublemaker and how everyone at school thought I was a freak, and how did I think our parents liked having a psycho for a child? I suppose he had his own best interests at heart when he poisoned them toward me. Then they didn’t notice all of his own fuckups. Like D’s and F’s on report cards and after school detentions. It didn’t matter. Even if they knew, my father would just say, “Boys will be boys,” and my mother would look skeptical, but she’d never disagree.

  I, on the other hand, had “problems socializing.” I had “difficulties with healthy interactions.” I “appeared in a constant state of melancholy.” I “rarely engaged teachers in discussions.” The guidance counselor was spying on me for Dr. Phelps now, who preferred to have observations of my behavior outside of our sessions. Although I wasn’t told I was being spied on, I figured it out pretty quick. On those first few days back at school, after the fight in the locker room—which the coach never reported but everyone knew about—the guidance counselor always seemed to be in the periphery of my vision, notebook in one hand, pen in the other, staring. With all the focus on me, Andy’s bad grades and general disinterest in attending classes were forgotten.

  When I looked in his room, I found him asleep on his back, arms draped over the sides of his bed, head tilted back on the pillow, snoring. His jean jacket hung on the doorknob. This is when I got the idea to pay him back for busting my lip and making things worse for me with my parents in general.

  I slipped my hand into the front pockets. First one, then the other. But I found only gum wrappers, cold coins and grit. I took the jacket off the knob and searched the inside pockets until I felt the cold metal of my grandfather’s lighter. Jackpot. I took it in the hot palm of my hand and set the jacket down before going on to my room.

  Jamie was waiting at my computer, his head cupped in one hand, staring at the screen-saver fish floating back and forth. I closed the door and locked it before sitting down on my bed and asking, “How was Frances?”

  “Frances was Frances,” said Jamie. He moved the mouse and the screen saver disappeared. “She said we can stay as long as we want, but she’s not happy about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said. “You’re not dead, Adam. She’s a little skeptical.”

  “Not dead?” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means she thinks you’re probably not very clued in, that’s all. Ignorant, is how she put it. ‘The living are so ignorant, Jamie,’ she said. ‘How can you stand them?’”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said she was generally right, but that you’re different. Don’t worry. Just be yourself and she’ll find out she’s wrong.”

  “Well, she’s wrong in more than one way,” I said, remembering what my grandma had told me. “I’m on my way to dying, and that has to count for something.”

  “That’s true,” said Jamie, apparently not impressed. I suppose to a dead person, dead is dead is dead. “In any case, she said we can stay there. Are you ready to go yet?”

  “I’m ready,” I said. Even though I’d made plans with Gracie, I wanted out now. “But we should wait until everyone goes to sleep. Then we’ll have a head start.”

  Jamie nodded. Then we didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at each other, him at the computer, me on the end of the bed, one foot tapping. He tilted his head to one side and his eyes shifted down then up. He seemed to b
e searching me for something. His nostrils flared as if he could smell a change. He adjusted his glasses and stared at me like I was an obscure painting in a museum until I finally said, “What the hell are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” he said calmly. “You just seem different. Are you okay?”

  “Sure I’m okay,” I said. “I’m completely okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  “I don’t know. But if you’re okay, I’m okay.”

  “Okay!” I said.

  He rolled his eyes, got up and came over to lie on the bed beside me. He took his glasses off and frowned. “I suppose I don’t need these anymore,” he said, his voice like ice melting. He looked so desperate, staring at those glasses, the one lens busted out by whoever murdered him. He folded them and placed them on my nightstand. “I see the same without them anyway,” he said. “Everything is equal now. Nothing is getting worse or better. This is how things are going to be forever, aren’t they?”

  “Don’t think like that,” I said. “Things are going to be good again. We’ll make them good again. You and me, okay?”

  “How can we make them good again? It’s over,” he said. “It’s all ruined.” He turned to face the wall, breathing heavy like he was trying not to cry, so I put my arms around him and curled my legs to fit behind his and held him until he stopped hyperventilating. When it was over, he turned to me and said, “What would I do without you, Adam?”

  I just shrugged. “You don’t have to worry about that. You’ll always have me.”

  “We’ll have each other,” he said, and we hung on to each other like that until night came, and it was safe for us to go out into the dark.

  FUCK YOU FRANCES

  WHEN IT WAS TIME TO LEAVE, WHEN THE HOUSE WAS quiet and everyone asleep, I grabbed my backpack with the two changes of clothes and the supply of food I’d foraged from the kitchen, and left through the side door farthest from everyone’s rooms. As I inched the door shut, as I crept down the gravel driveway, as I stopped at the mailbox and turned around to take one last look, I whispered goodbye to everything as I passed by. The mercury light attached to the garage was on, casting everything in its purple-white light. My shadow stretched out on the gravel drive before me, tall and narrow, a bigger me than I was used to. “Are you me from the future?” I asked, but it only shook its head.

  “What do you think this is?” it said. “There’s no door number three. No growing up now. That’s the path you’ve chosen.”

  “Whatever,” I told it. “Fuck you too.” Then I hopped on my bike and rode toward Highway 88.

  As I rode from Highway 88 to Fisher Corinth Road, I looked at all the farms and houses, their windows dark, the creeks in the pastures shining in moonlight, and imagined I was the last man on earth and all of town was just the left-overs of the world I once lived in. At the end of a dust-stone back road off Fisher Corinth, it was waiting for me, the Wilkinson farm, gray-blue under moonlight, shambling, rotting, ready to fall over or else in on itself.

  Moss grew over the base of the house and the porch sagged in the middle. The barn off to the side had fallen in so that it looked like one gigantic funeral pyre waiting to be lit. The family cemetery lay off to the side, headstones chipped, worn down by years and weather. They tilted toward each other, off center a little. The wrought-iron fence surrounding them was rusting, its gate on the ground in front, and a weeping willow grew in a far corner, the branches draping everything in shadow. A cold wind came and stirred the leaves, making me shiver. Then voices, soft voices, drifted out from beneath the willow tree. I walked closer and saw them, two silhouettes beneath the branches: Jamie and Fuck You Frances.

  I cleared my throat and the talking stopped. Jamie looked over and waved. “Hey!” he called. “You made it! Come inside the gate.”

  I was a little nervous. I wondered what she’d be like. Mean and crazy? Sweet and disturbed? Personable or more of a bitch? Most kids had done this before turning fifteen or had avoided it altogether. I’d been an avoider, mostly because I’d thought visiting Frances’s grave was stupid. It didn’t seem much use to come here and call her up just so she could spit on you.

  Jamie met me halfway through the cemetery. Frances hung back at the edge of the tree, her dress blowing around her legs, her hair lifting in the night air. She held her hands clasped near the sash at her waist, the way Gracie described her mother standing in the photo. I couldn’t see her face in the tree shadows. I imagined a death’s head, a skull covered with a thin layer of skin, an emaciated concentration camp victim. I tried to make her out over Jamie’s shoulder, only half listening to what he said, but at the words, “We’ll stay in the barn,” he caught my attention.

  “The barn?” I said, turning back to him.

  “Yeah. The barn. It looks fallen down, but there’s plenty of room in there and it’ll be shelter from the wind. Wouldn’t want you catching cold. Also no one will see you from the road if someone drives by.”

  “Okay,” I said, then turned my attention back to the girl in the shadows. She was silent and still. “Are you going to introduce us?”

  “Sure,” said Jamie, looking over his shoulder. “Sorry. She’s shy, so give her a break.”

  “I’m shy too,” I said, and Jamie raised the eyebrow near his damaged temple.

  “Come on,” he said. And we walked back to where Frances waited.

  No death’s head stood beneath the tree like I’d imagined. As I came closer, I saw a small girl, face round, lips full, her hair tangled from not having combed it in years. Her dress was in rags, just like the story Gracie had told me. But other than that, she looked normal. Just poor and dirty. I guess I was a little disappointed. This was the crazy girl who had murdered her parents? She didn’t look scary. She just looked sad.

  “Frances,” said Jamie. “This is my good friend Adam. Adam, this is Frances.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, but her sad face suddenly turned into a scowl.

  “Enchanted,” she said. “I’m sure.” Jamie told her not to start anything and I decided right then she was mean and crazy, not strange and disturbed, and I would sleep with one eye open unless I wanted her to gut me like she did her parents.

  She didn’t say she was sorry, just sat down on the ground in front of her headstone and picked at the hem of her skirt. You could tell it had been pretty once, with a light floral print and a lace collar. Now, though, it was yellow-gray like the paper in my grandma’s old Bible. The little flowers on it had faded so you couldn’t tell what color they once held.

  Jamie sat down beside Frances, crossing his legs Indian style. The grass was damp. When I sat down the wet seeped through my jeans. I didn’t want to appear ungrateful, so I didn’t say anything. Frances looked at me, measuring, before finally saying, “So. I hear you’re on your way?”

  I could tell she was ready to pounce on any evidence of my stupidity so I said, “Yeah, I’m not sure how far along, but I’m not smelling things so well, and my mother’s friend’s shadow keeps harassing me.”

  Frances shrugged. “Not that far,” she said. “You’ve got some time left to enjoy living. After that it’s all downhill and then you’ll be stuck like me and Jamie.”

  “I’m not stuck,” said Jamie. “I mean, Adam and I aren’t stuck, are we?”

  “No way are we stuck,” I said, and he smiled.

  Frances sneered.

  “The two of you have a lot of unjustified optimism,” she said. “Oh well, it’s your funeral.”

  “Famous last words,” I said, realizing even as I said it that it was somehow wrong. Frances blinked and looked puzzled.

  “Sure,” she said. Just that. “Sure.”

  “It’s cold out,” I said, changing the subject. I opened my backpack and pulled out the blanket I’d stuffed in there. Even though it was thick, the wind whipped right through, making me wish I’d stayed at home in bed.

  “Isn’t that nice?” said Frances, getting up, circling me like a drill sergeant. “I wish I could
feel the cold. Go ahead. Complain. Poor baby. So cold out, isn’t it? You have no idea how good that even feels, do you? You don’t know what you’ve got there, the cold. Ignorant. The living are so stupid. Really, Jamie, I don’t know why you insist on playing with him like this.”

  Jamie stood up and said, “That’s enough, Frances.” He dusted off the back of my pants—I mean his pants, since I’d given them to him—which were wet like mine, and said, “Come on, Adam. I’ll build you a fire.”

  He ducked his head under the former entrance to the barn and I followed him into the dark, where my eyes were useless and all I could sense was the sound of small animals shuffling. It reminded me of dead space. I shivered. The ground was lumpy and uneven. I tripped on something, a rock probably, and told myself to remind Gracie she might find rocks for her collection out here.

  Jamie said, “I’m just gathering some of the drier wood and hay.” His voice boomed and echoed, as if we were in a cavern. “Come on,” he said. He grabbed hold of my hand and I let him lead me out.

  We went behind the barn where he went about instructing me on how to set up a plank of wood with a groove in it. He had me tie a shoelace to both ends of a bowed stick. Then I put hay in the middle of the plank and stuck a stick in the groove of the wood and spun it using the stick with the shoelace tied to both ends. After a few minutes, a small plume of smoke rose from the hay and an orange glow grew in the center. Jamie said, “There you go. Finally. A fire.”

  I was impressed. I’d forgotten he’d been a scout and knew about survival tactics. Maybe the Boy Scouts weren’t so lame after all.

  I gathered hay and made the fire bigger, then put planks from the barn down so we could sit without getting wet. I also made a litter from the boards to lie down on. We were pretty efficient, he and I. Survivors. We could have gone on that television show on an island in the middle of nowhere and lived happily ever after. Or as happily ever after as you can be when you’re dead.

  After we’d spent an hour or so trying to make the place comfortable, Frances wandered back to join us. Jamie sat on one side of the fire, I stretched out with my blanket on the litter, and Frances looked back and forth between us, smirking like a cat. “Playing house, are we?” she said, sitting down beside Jamie.