One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  13. The dead are just as untrustworthy as the living. They will close ranks when it comes to choosing sides.

  After I’d spent a few hours doing all that thinking, Gracie came back with a ham sandwich, which was the most wonderful thing in the world. I hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours and even though I wasn’t feeling too starved, I devoured it. Afterward we curled up on the closet floor, kissing, stroking each other before falling asleep with some of Gracie’s clothes bunched under our heads as pillows. Gracie set her alarm for five in the morning, so she’d be able to slip into her bed before her parents came in to wake her. She was always thinking of things like that. I was glad we were in this together; for the first time in my life, I felt like I could depend on someone.

  In the morning her alarm shot off beeping like there was no tomorrow, and Gracie staggered to her bed as planned. An hour later, also as predicted, her parents were moving around. The shower turned on and downstairs a kettle whistled. Then there were footsteps on the stairs and suddenly someone knocked on Gracie’s door and before Gracie could say anything, Mrs. Highsmith came in.

  “Grace,” she said. “Get up, Grace. It’s time to start the day. You need to finish your algebra lesson, and don’t forget about that essay on The Diary of Anne Frank. I want that before we go to your aunt and uncle’s. Come on now. Get moving, Grace.”

  Ugh. What a nagger. I mean, my mother woke me up too, but she just made sure I was up in time to catch a ride with Andy. She didn’t lay out the next three days like she was my secretary or something.

  After Mrs. Highsmith left for the library, Gracie opened the closet and before we started the day we got into bed and the word sunflower opened up again. By now the letters glowed gold and brown in my mind, and they had gotten bigger since last time I saw them. Sunflower was now the size of the letters on the covers of my schoolbooks. I imagined they’d just keep growing until one day they’d be the size of a billboard. There’d be a huge advertisement. Nothing else would be on that board except the word sunflower. People would drive past and suddenly have an urge to pull off the road at a place five minutes down the highway where you could park in a shaded semi-private area and take some time with whoever was with you to figure out what that word meant.

  Afterward we went downstairs and sat on the couch in the living room and talked. “They’re not that bad,” said Gracie, referring to her parents. “They just don’t get me.” Her mom worked as a librarian in the little one room library in our town square, next to the Rexall pharmacy, and her father worked at the Cleveland Amtrak an hour and a half away, where he was in charge of the mechanics. “My dad used to be a mechanic too,” she said, “but now he’s in charge of the others.”

  From the looks of their house they made a good living. They had leather furniture and this white carpet that left whiter footmarks behind when you walked on it. And all these plants and ferns in the corners, by the staircase and between chairs. They had paintings of landscapes hanging too. And the dining room was just one room, not split with the kitchen by a prep island. And their kitchen—everything in there was steel. Everything in there gleamed.

  My mom would have loved a kitchen like the Highsmiths’. Our kitchen was all fake blond wood cabinets with huge knobs on them from the eighties, which was the last time my parents could afford changing things, and the island dividing the kitchen and dining room was scarred up with knife marks. I hadn’t noticed these things the first couple of times I’d been over, but I’d really only seen the front entrance for all of two seconds before Gracie had rushed me up to her bedroom to look at rocks and learn each other’s bodies. Now, though, I had a chance to see the house while filling Gracie in on what had happened the previous morning. She said, “Details, Adam,” so I gave them, including the truth about Frances. The one thing I didn’t mention was how Jamie had sided with Frances. Whenever I thought about that, my throat swelled and my eyes felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets, so I left that part out.

  After I told her about Frances, Gracie just stared down at the carpet. “Wow,” she said. “How fucked up is Fuck You Frances.”

  Gracie was thinking about what Frances’s father had done, I knew, how no one had helped her or her mother, how our story didn’t even come close to the why of what she did. We called her crazy and never wondered what had made her that way. I could see the story changing in her. Her eyes shifted, her bottom lip trembled. Then Gracie said, “That poor girl.”

  “Don’t get too compassionate,” I said. “She was a bitch too.”

  “Well, that’s just because she’s been totally fucked over! I’d be pretty bitchy if all that shit happened to me and then on top of it I had to kill them every morning for all of eternity.”

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t hear me right. She doesn’t have to kill them. She does it because she loves it. It’s all she has, she said. She could stop if she wanted.”

  Gracie stared at me, then back down at the floor. A few minutes later, she looked up as if the conversation had never taken place and asked if I’d like some breakfast.

  She made toast, sausage and eggs, and we sat in the dining room to eat like we were her parents: me at one end of the long shining black table, her at the other end staring back. We were very quiet, the only sound our forks clinking against the plates and our glasses of orange juice being set down after taking a drink. There were place mats under our plates that matched the burgundy walls, and these little wooden rings that held cloth napkins until we slipped them out and unfolded them onto our laps. I did everything right, placing the napkin on my lap, eating small mouthfuls, taking sips instead of gulps, being considerate as I passed the salt. I just imitated how I thought people like the Highsmiths ate. And I was right. I matched Gracie manner for manner and she never blinked.

  After breakfast, Gracie took my plate into the kitchen. I followed and found her already washing things up. “Wow, you clean up fast.”

  “I don’t want to leave them. If my parents came home and saw two plates, they might wonder why I’m dirtying so many dishes.”

  “Would they really notice something like that?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “They’re big noticers. But they only notice little things. Don’t worry. I’m good at covering what they’d notice. They’d never notice a person living in their daughter’s closet.”

  We laughed at that. Then Gracie turned off the water and wiped her hands dry with a towel.

  “How did she do it?” she asked. She focused on wringing the towel through her fingers. “How did Frances work herself up to killing them?”

  “I guess she’d just had enough,” I said. “Everyone has limits.”

  “I know. But still. She was so young. It must have been horrible. She must have felt so alone.”

  “Stop,” I said, and Gracie looked up.

  “What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”

  “No. It’s just…Be careful. That’s the kind of talk that got us into this in the first place.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “I know. It’s not that. It’s the caring.”

  She nodded. “I know,” she said, turning away, looping the dishtowel back through the cupboard handle. “I know.”

  In the end it took only an hour for the Wilkinson house to burn to cinders. I read it in the newspaper after breakfast. The house burning was on page three. On page one, on the top half of the paper, was a picture of Jamie. “Possible Suspect in Child Murder Apprehended” the headline read, and my heart did a backflip. There was no real information other than what the headline said: that they’d found a man in his thirties who might have been Jamie’s killer and further investigations were ongoing.

  On the bottom half of the front page was a picture of me. That headline read, “Local Boy Goes Missing.” They mentioned Jamie too, about how my parents were afraid something could happen to me like him. There was also a lot of garbage about how I was messed up and seeing a psychologist and about how to con
tact the police if anyone found me. There was no reward. I didn’t expect one. My parents didn’t have enough money to reward someone for finding me even if they wanted.

  “Looks like you’re getting famous,” Gracie said, reading over my shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Famous for being a weirdo.”

  “You’re not weird,” she said, looking up from the paper. “It’s them. They’re the weird ones. There are just more of them than you. More of them doesn’t make them normal.”

  It was strange to have an entire day with no parents around to bother us. We watched TV, me at one end of the couch, Gracie stretched out so her head rested in my lap. She let me have the remote, which felt awkward. For the first time in my life I had control of the channels and it wasn’t even in my own house.

  We watched game shows and when the local news came on at noon we started making out. Then this anchorwoman began talking about the suspect in Jamie’s murder being apprehended and we broke away to listen. We wanted information that would change the way we understood his story. But the lady didn’t have much to say except it was a man in his mid-thirties who had been arrested, possibly a drifter, and that they’d let us know more as soon as possible. Same old, same old.

  Afterward they interviewed Jamie’s mother. She hadn’t been talking for the past two months, since all of this started, but now it seemed like she’d gotten mad and finally had something to say.

  They interviewed her at the Marks house, which I’d never actually been in—it was nice to put an inside to the outside I’d always watched while running past. At first the camera showed the gray unpainted house with all of those dog coops around it. Yellow straw spilled from the coops and the dogs ran back and forth in the muddy yard. They took a shot of the tire ruts from Mr. Marks’s eighteen-wheeler too, and it was all a sad sight, but even sadder once they went inside.

  She sat in the living room, which was about the size of my bedroom. In there was an old TV with an antenna on top, a ratty couch with a print of faded flowers, a chair that didn’t match and a bookshelf with nativity figures on it instead of books: Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in the manger. Everything seemed pushed together, like there wasn’t enough space in there but they were going to make everything that belonged in a normal living room fit.

  Mrs. Marks wore a gray sweater with holes in it, and as she talked you could hear the dogs outside, barking and howling. She said things that made me think she was questionable. She said things that made me wonder if she really knew her son.

  “So tell me, Mrs. Marks,” said the anchorwoman, “how would you describe Jamie?”

  “He was a sweet boy,” said Mrs. Marks. “He was always trying to help with one thing or another. I never had to worry about him doing things he wasn’t supposed to be doing like some kids do these days. He was a Boy Scout and always on a project, getting those badges. I confess I never understood why he liked the scouts so much. But I figured I was doing something right if all my son wanted was to be a Boy Scout.”

  “And how do you feel now that a suspect has been taken into custody?”

  “I’ll tell you this much,” said Mrs. Marks. She sat up and adjusted the folds of her hole-filled sweater. “I hope they’ve found the man who murdered my boy, because then God’s vengeance can be carried out. Jamie won’t have died in vain any longer. He would have appreciated that.”

  Mrs. Marks smiled real smug after that little speech. I rolled my eyes. “What a load of crap.”

  “What do you mean?” Gracie asked.

  “That woman is totally using Jamie’s death to give testament to her success as a mother. He was so sweet, she says, and of course we have to say, You poor woman. He was a Boy Scout, she says, and of course we have to say, What a shame. She might as well have asked everyone to take pity on her. Sure Jamie’s sweet, but what does that have to do with her? People are either sweet or they aren’t. And the way she talked about how his death could mean something if the killer was brought to justice. I mean, what a bunch of crap! Even if that man turns out to be the killer, it won’t make things meaningful. Jamie won’t have suddenly died for any good reason. He’ll still be dead. Big fucking deal. It won’t change his story.”

  “Okay,” said Gracie. “Calm down.”

  We spent the rest of the day eating potato chips and drinking cola, watching soap operas like we were my mom and Lucy. Playing house. I didn’t understand what was going on in the soap operas, but by the end of each episode, I had figured out everyone’s fucked up relationships. There were so many divorces and secret romances and children who were raised by one father but were really someone else’s. And people in comas who had been in comas like five other times, as if this were the normal course of events. Also every show had an evil man or woman who lived to ruin the lives of others, which made a kind of sense, I thought. This one evil woman named Gina reminded me of Lucy. She kept trying to bust up this all-American family at every turn, but they held strong against her plots to unravel their love for one another. She always looked like a fool in the end, which made me mad because I was like, Fuck. Soap opera people can keep their shit together but not my stupid-ass family.

  Around five o’clock, Gracie said her mom would be getting home soon and that I’d better get back in the closet. This time I took a book from the bookshelf in the living room so I didn’t have to think about things so much.

  I got comfortable in the closet and started reading the book I’d chosen, which was about this kid who goes to a prep school and is always getting into trouble and hating on the world, but he can afford to spend all kinds of money taking a trip into New York City, running away from his problems. It was interesting but I kept thinking, Why the hell is he complaining? It’s not like it was hard for him to get where he was going. He didn’t have to lie, steal or cheat someone out of money. He just left and no one missed him because it was a boarding school he attended and it’s Christmas break, and his parents don’t miss him because they’re used to other people taking care of their kids. So this kid has his own money and can break cash out whenever, for trains and cabs or to get drunk or to rent a room and get prostitutes to mess around with. Of course he’s sorry after doing these things, but then he just goes and does something stupid again and really doesn’t have to worry because he has enough money he can make a new life and forget about the one he’s just fucked over. At the end, he’s in therapy. Whatever.

  It was after I’d finished reading that I heard people downstairs yelling. I tried putting my ear to the floor but the sounds were muffled, so when the yelling didn’t stop, I got up and crept over to the door and opened it a crack. I could hear the voices better, but still not enough, so I pulled it open a little more and listened harder.

  It was Mr. Highsmith yelling at Gracie, and she was yelling back. It became clear in no time that they were yelling at each other about me. Mr. Highsmith’s voice boomed and echoed up the stairwell, clattering to a halt outside of Gracie’s door, and I had to just stare at it and keep quiet because if I made my presence known everything would be over. There’d be no escape into the unknown, where maybe things were better.

  These were some of the things he said:

  “If you know where he is, you had damned well better tell us, young lady!”

  And:

  “Just take one look at that goddamned McCormick family and you know there’s trouble. That Linda is a nutcase, always going around with Lucy Hall, who paralyzed her for God’s sake! And the father certainly isn’t worth a day’s work.”

  And:

  “I don’t want to hear it. No girl of mine is going to associate with a piece of trash like Adam McCormick!”

  Things like that are enough to make a person feel pretty bad, and I started to feel that way pretty quickly. I hung on the doorknob and twisted it as Mr. Highsmith went on about me and my family, his voice stumbling around like a drunk in the hall. Some of the stuff he said was true, which made me feel a little sick. I thought of myself as a good obse
rver of my flaws and hadn’t even noticed a lot of things he had, which made me think there were maybe even more things about me and my family that I didn’t know were wrong. The only thing that saved me from breaking out into a mad dash from the Highsmith house right then and there was all the stuff Gracie yelled back.

  “I have no clue where Adam is and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you!”

  And:

  “You’re just so ignorant you don’t even know it! You’re just a silly old train mechanic who thinks he’s better than other people!”

  And:

  “Adam McCormick is a good person. He has integrity, unlike some people. You don’t know anything about him. If you did, you’d shut your mouth and see everything those newspapers and these stupid gossips are saying is a load of shit. But it’s so much easier to judge others, isn’t it, Daddy? You’re so stupid! Sometimes I wish you weren’t my father!”

  Mrs. Highsmith broke up the argument. “Enough!” she shouted. “There’s no reason to fight. Gracie, your father simply asked you a question because he’s worried. That boy is on the loose. We’re concerned. There’s no reason to get angry.”

  “Adam is not on the loose, Mother,” Gracie corrected. I could hear her teeth gritting as she spoke. “He’s just another kid who people are pushing around because they can, like you guys are doing to me right now.”

  “You think you have it so rough?” Mr. Highsmith grunted. “You better learn respect for your elders, young lady, or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

  Gracie came thumping up the stairs suddenly, so I ran back to the closet. I clicked the door shut just as she was coming into her room. I pretended like I was sleeping, so when Gracie opened the door, tears staining her cheeks, I was able to wake up and say, “What’s the matter?”