One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  “No, we’re not playing house,” I said. “We’re just trying to make things more comfortable. Excuse us for—”

  “For what?” Frances snapped. She already knew what I was going to say, though. She was just toying with me. “Excuse you for what, Adam? Would that be excuse you for living?”

  “You are such a bitch!” I said.

  Frances snorted. “I might be a bitch,” she said, “but you’re a sniveling bitch. A sniveling bitch boy who doesn’t know how good he’s got it! What do you think you’re doing? Face it. You’re just slumming.”

  “Shut up, Frances,” said Jamie. Unlike me, he was calm and collected. I was sick of Frances and hadn’t even known her for two hours.

  It was when she told Jamie, “No, you shut up. This is my property, and it’s me doing you a favor, remember that!” that I went off on her.

  I sat up and said, “You think you’re so much goddamn better than everyone, don’t you? But just because you’re crazy doesn’t give you the right to treat people bad. You can’t talk to people like they’re nothing!”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” said Frances. “I suggest you lie back down and speak when you’re spoken to, bitch boy.”

  “Fuck you, Frances!” I shouted, and she came at me with fists ready.

  I stood to defend myself, but before Frances reached me, Jamie grabbed her around her waist from behind. She struggled, kicking and screaming, her dress flapping, but Jamie held her tight.

  “You can go!” she shouted. “The both of you can just go to hell! I don’t need this!”

  Right then we heard a loud bang, then someone muttered a curse and we stopped fighting, all of us, to look where the cursing came from.

  It was coming from the house. Someone was in there. Things clattered, crashed, scraped across the wooden floor. A man’s voice, deep and sandpapery, shouting something I couldn’t understand. I flinched when he hollered. So did Jamie. The only one who didn’t was Frances. She narrowed her eyes like a hawk that’s spotted its prey. “It’s him,” she said. Her voice sounded like winter coming.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Her father,” said Jamie.

  “Excuse me,” Frances said, and headed toward the house. As she left, I noticed she held a large butcher knife in her hand. I had no idea where she’d gotten it. It was just there all of a sudden, like the knife was a part of her, a part that she knew how to make invisible if she wanted.

  She walked through the backyard and around the side of the house to the front. I asked Jamie, “What’s she doing?”

  “What she does every morning,” Jamie said.

  “What does she do every morning?”

  Jamie looked down at the shoes I’d given him and shifted from foot to foot. I could tell he knew what this was about but didn’t want to say. I started to wonder what else he knew that he wouldn’t tell me. Who else did he know like he knew Frances?

  “She kills her parents,” he finally said.

  Screams and curses filled the house now. Jamie and I moved closer and, as we came to the front, I heard water splashing. I figured this was the part where Frances finished off her mother. “Why does she do this?”

  “It’s her thing, Adam,” Jamie said. “Leave it be.”

  A moment later Frances stumbled through the screen door onto the porch, her dress covered in blood, her hands covered in blood, her face streaked with it. She breathed heavy, her mouth hanging open like a dog’s on a hot summer day. Her eyes were half closed, as if she were drugged, and she squinted at us as if she wasn’t sure if she really saw us. Then she took the bloody knife and plunged it into her own stomach. Heaving, she crumpled onto the fly-coated porch. And the longer I looked at her, the more she seemed to get smaller, curling in on herself, curling around the knife in her stomach like a piece of paper burning inward from its edges.

  “Jesus!” I shouted. “Why the hell did she do that?”

  Jamie put his hand on my shoulder. “Calm down,” he said. “It’s her own business.”

  “How can you say that?” I said. “That’s so fucked up!”

  “Give her time,” said Jamie. His hand moved to my back and he started to rub it. “I’m sure she’ll answer your questions.”

  An hour later Frances struggled up from the porch, pulled the knife out of her stomach, wincing as the metal slipped from the wound, and proceeded to the cemetery where she sat at her grave, silent until Jamie and I joined her.

  “Did you enjoy the show?” she asked.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” I said immediately.

  “That’s not the question you really want to ask,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you really want to ask,” said Frances, looking away from her grave, turning her gaze on me, “is an entirely different question. Go ahead,” she said. “Ask it.”

  “Why do you keep doing that?”

  She’d been smirking, but now she looked sad and desperate. “Well,” she said. “The answer is complicated. See, my daddy, he wasn’t what you’d call the most upstanding gentleman. In fact, he didn’t have one ounce of gentleman in him. Everyone around here was afraid of him. Even if my mother showed up at church with bruises, no one would do or say a thing. I didn’t have bruises, really. He didn’t hit me like he hit my mother. He’d touch me in other ways instead.”

  Frances looked down at her lap where her hands rested. Her knife had disappeared and I hadn’t even seen her move it.

  She returned to telling her story and the more she told, the worse the story got. I had a hard time hearing it. I won’t go into details because we know this story. We know this story better than we ought to. But I couldn’t have stopped her from telling it if I wanted. The words rolled off her tongue one after another and I could tell she’d been telling it for years, had turned it into something round and smooth, like one of Gracie’s streambed pebbles. As she talked her face remained smooth. No tears. No crack in her voice. Nothing. It was weird to watch her tell those things so calmly. So much that, when she finally finished, I said, “I don’t understand. Why aren’t you crying?”

  She looked up from her empty hands. Now it was her turn to ask, “What do you mean?”

  I said, “Why aren’t you crying?” again, and this time my voice started to quiver.

  Frances didn’t say anything. She sat there and smiled that cat smile again. After a while I said again, “Why aren’t you crying? If I told that story, I’d cry. I mean I’d really, really cry, damn it. Cry already, why don’t you?”

  “You know I can’t,” she said through gritted teeth. “Why don’t you cry for me? Why don’t you cry like a baby for me? What’s the matter? You only do that for Jamie? Is that it?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Oh really?” she said, grinning. When she realized how much she could bother me, she looked at me pitifully and said, “What’s the matter, boy? Can’t stand the heat? Maybe you need to get out of the fucking kitchen.”

  “I’ll show you heat,” I said, and stood up.

  “Adam, what are you doing?” Jamie said.

  I didn’t answer. I’d be like her, I thought. I’d play her game and see how she liked it. Miss Guided Tours of Hell, I thought. Let’s see what she thought of some real heat.

  My blood felt thick and poisonous, moving slow and slick like a fire was building inside me. And the more Frances smiled, the more I thought about what she’d said. And the more I thought about what she’d said, the more I burned.

  It was morning. The sun was on the horizon, the treetops flaring. Birdsong had started, doves and blue jays, a coo and a cackle. When I reached the front porch, I took my grandfather’s lighter out and rolled the sparker with my thumb. A flame came up, yellow-red, bending in the wind. I held it to a piece of wood dangling from the porch roof and kept it there until the wood started burning. I helped the flame move farther up the plank until it had a life of its own and, final
ly, there was a fire.

  Then Frances was running at me. “Stop!” she screamed. “Stop, you motherfucker! Leave my house alone!”

  She was too late, though. First the porch was on fire, then the front entry. Then the entire house sparked and fumed and went up like fireworks had been set off inside. The house was so dry-rotted, hardly a minute passed before the windows filled with smoke.

  “You son of a bitch!” screamed Frances. She pounded on me with her fists, her eyes scrunched up even though no tears would come. “That was mine!” she screamed. “That was the one thing that was mine!”

  Jamie pulled her away from me. When I met his eyes, they were dark and disappointed. He said, “You’d better go, Adam,” real soft. Then he put his arm around Frances, who shook and sobbed, to walk her back to the graveyard. Back to her grave.

  PLAYING HOUSE

  I GRABBED MY BACKPACK AND LEFT THE WILKINSON farm as soon as Jamie told me to go. Bastard, I thought as I hopped on my bike and rode to the end of the road. How could he side with her? I was fuming as I rode away, but soon after I turned down Fisher Corinth I heard sirens blaring in the distance and put my feet down on the road to stop. Someone had seen the billows of smoke rising over the trees behind me, a black stain on the morning, and called the fire department.

  Fuck. I hadn’t thought about that. I bolted into the woods, afraid of being seen on the road. All I needed was to get caught and subjected to further sessions with Dr. Phelps, not to mention the varieties of possible juvenile delinquency violations I was collecting. I could just imagine myself being shut up in one of those detention centers where all the bad kids went. No fucking way was that part of my future.

  An hour later I was waiting just inside the woods across the street from Gracie’s house. Her parents were still home, so I waited until they left for work to dash out of the trees and knock on her front door. When Gracie answered, still sleepy-eyed, I said, “Can you hide me?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Adam,” she said, her eyes widening. “Get in here. Quick. Before someone sees you.”

  I was being a burden, I knew, but I had something to give her in exchange for putting me up, a gift she’d cherish forever, like one of her precious stones. The true story of Fuck You Frances. So I didn’t feel too guilty as I slipped through the door to safety.

  “You’re all covered with mud and blood,” Gracie said as she walked me up the stairs to the bathroom. She wrinkled her nose, which made me feel bad, being someone people would wrinkle their noses at. I hoped Gracie just thought I smelled bad and wasn’t thinking I was a bad person. “God, Adam,” she said, turning on the shower. “What the hell have you been doing?”

  I was too tired to answer. My blood still lagged, heavy from burning down the Wilkinson house, so I just shrugged and let her take over. She stripped my sweat-soaked shirt over my head and unbuttoned my jeans, then said, “Take everything off and get in the shower.” Gracie left the room and I got out of my jeans, pulled off my underwear and stepped into the spray, leaning against the cold tiles for support.

  Closing my eyes, I listened to the water spatter, and after a while I started to feel calm. Too calm, I guess, because pretty soon it happened again. Suddenly I felt that—pop!—happen, and slipped right out of my body.

  Bumping up against the ceiling, I looked down at the body leaning against the wall of the shower. Mud and blood sluiced off the flesh as if it were a cow carcass hanging from its hook in a slaughterhouse. Some of the blood was maybe from fighting with Frances and some was from crashing through a thicket of thorns in the woods on the way to Gracie’s, but all of the blood came off together, turning the water pink as it circled the drain.

  The body looked ready to fall into a heap, but it stayed standing as I crawled along the ceiling, looking for a way out. Finally I gave a little push and drifted through the ceiling into the attic, which was full of boxes and dust spiraling in shafts of sunlight, and then—pop!—I slipped through the roof into the autumn morning air.

  I couldn’t feel the chill. I couldn’t feel the wind that stripped the last remaining leaves from the trees just days before Thanksgiving when people would give thanks for the food they must eat and the water they must drink and the love they must make in order to make the families they needed to protect themselves from death and being alone in the world. I couldn’t feel any of that as I floated above the Highsmith house, above the body I’d lived in for fifteen years.

  Up here, I was spreading, my arms stretching to both sides of the horizon, my head growing wider and flatter while my legs flipped around like a whale’s tail behind me. Looking down, I saw into the Highsmith house as if it were a dollhouse, the wall cut away to reveal the interior: the living room and bedrooms, the stairs leading from floor to floor, the different dolls in their different rooms, living their plastic lives out with their plastic dogs and their plastic cats and their plastic milk bottles and their plastic frying pans frying plastic eggs in the kitchen.

  In the basement of the Highsmith dollhouse, the girl was stuffing the body’s clothes into a washing machine. She threw in a capful of detergent and slammed the lid shut. Then she ran upstairs to the kitchen. Then she ran upstairs from the living room to the second floor hallway, where she ran to the bathroom, her tiny lips moving. She was saying the body’s name, she was saying, “Come on, Adam. Get out of there. You need to go to bed and sleep.”

  As soon as she said the body’s name, gravity took hold and I plummeted like a rock dropped from heaven. Down I fell, back through the dusty attic, back through the ceiling and into the bathroom, back into the body like an elevator jerking to a halt. I blinked and heard her calling. “Come on, Adam. Get out of there. You need to go to bed and sleep.”

  I turned the water off. Sliding the frosted door open, I found Gracie waiting with a towel. I stepped into it, drying my hair and face, then wrapping it around my waist. Gracie took my hand and led me to her room, put me in her bed, and left me there, clicking the lights off behind her.

  I slept more deeply than I had in weeks. But even in sleep I couldn’t shake what had happened. Over and over, I dreamed of burning down the Wilkinson house. I kept lighting that piece of wood dangling from the porch ceiling, Frances kept calling me a motherfucker, and Jamie kept saying I should leave. Each time he said that, my stomach clenched and I buckled, waiting for him to take it back. He never did. He’d just turn and walk Frances back to her grave again.

  I was grateful to wake in the late afternoon to Gracie’s face above me, wisps of her brown hair brushing against my face. “Wake up, Adam,” she whispered. “My parents will be home soon. Wake up.”

  I sat up, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, and asked what time it was. “After four already,” said Gracie. “I need you to be invisible when my parents get home.”

  “Where should I hide?”

  She pointed to her walk-in closet. “In there,” she said. “In case one of them comes into my room for something. It probably won’t happen, but better safe than sorry.”

  I didn’t want to hide in the closet. I didn’t want to sit in the dark and think about wet flesh or wolves howling, but Gracie was right. We needed to be careful or else we’d never escape. So when her mother pulled in the drive ten minutes later, I stepped into the closet. Before Gracie closed the door, she flipped a switch and a light came on overhead, so at least I wasn’t in the dark.

  I was in there for what seemed like forever, and to tell the truth it was the biggest bore of my life. No books, no music, no games. Since I had a lot of things on my mind and some time to burn, I started thinking about my problems, lining my ducks up in a row, as my grandma would say. Bing, bang, boom. I lined them up and shot them down, one right after the other.

  The first thing I thought about was how I was slowly but surely becoming a criminal. Not in any bad way, like a murderer or a rapist. But in ways that people don’t really understand or talk about a lot. I had committed the crime of not keeping things normal. I had committed the crim
e of not doing. Most crimes are when people do what they’re told not to do, but my crime was against not doing things we’re supposed to. I didn’t listen to my parents. I didn’t go to my appointments with Dr. Phelps. I didn’t stay at home like a good fifteen-year-old. I ran away from it instead of running with the track team. I was a not-doer, as opposed to evildoers, but somehow they got lumped together. And now, on top of all the not-doing, I’d burned down a house. Even though the house had been abandoned for something like seventy years, that was no excuse. By the standards of the living, burning down houses, even abandoned ones, is not good behavior.

  The second thing I thought about was how Gracie was so loyal. For a girl I’d barely spoken to for most of my fifteen years, for a girl who seemed to distrust people in general, who suspected the worst in every situation, she was quick to share secrets, quick to rub her body against mine, quick to understand from the right angle that my fuckups weren’t really fuckups. You don’t find people like that too often. Not so easily at least.

  It made me feel bad really. You know, hindsight being twenty-twenty. After I showed up on her doorstep, reeking of smoke and scratched up from crashing through the woods, I felt like the fool she’d been calling me since we’d met at Jamie’s grave. So far I’d stolen a heart-shaped rock from her, stolen Jamie maybe (I wasn’t sure about this, since he didn’t seem like he was going to stay with her anyway) and worse, I’d ignored her phone calls after we’d almost had sex. And all the while, she’d been opening herself up to me, making plans for a mutual escape, taking me in when I needed a place to hide. That’s friendship and love rolled into one really. Gracie was on my side, unlike some people. I’m not just talking about my family either. I had one more fact to add to the list of my education in death so I grabbed my notebook from my backpack and jotted it down while I hid in the closet: