One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  Gracie nodded.

  “I thought you did all that stuff as a family,” I said. “The way you put it, that’s what it sounded like.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Gracie. “Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. That’s Saturdays. Mom and Pop and Aunt June and Uncle Eddie sitting around the card table with their drinkies.” She laughed, “Ha! Ha!” then shook her head, looking miserable. “I’m sorry, Adam,” she said. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never been to Youngstown. I’d say we were successful. We can save California for some other time.”

  She turned to me and I saw she was looking at me like kids at school did when I used to ask about Jamie. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “Right?”

  I shook my head a little, then looked down at my hands in my lap and pretended like they were really interesting at just that moment.

  “You mean,” she said, “you live approximately one hour away from Youngstown and have never ever, not even once, been here?”

  I shook my head again.

  “What’s wrong with your parents, Adam?”

  “That’d take all night,” I said, looking up again.

  She nodded, seeming to understand this more than anything else, and put the car in drive again. Before pressing down on the gas to take us back into the empty streets, Gracie looked at me and said, “We’ve got all night. And I want to know. So. You know. Why don’t you tell me?”

  As she drove us out of Youngstown and back toward home, I started talking, slowly at first, trying to figure out how and where and what to even begin with, and after a while it all started to flow into one story, all these threads I’d thought belonged to different ones, and then I was telling her things I’d never really talked about before except a little bit with Jamie.

  “My parents aren’t any better, really,” I told her. “They fight all the time and they’re really stupid. It’s like they don’t have any words or something. They just scream and holler and call each other stupid fucks and shit like that, and then they’re sorry about it later. That’s how my mom got paralyzed.”

  Gracie looked over for a moment, interested. “What do you mean?”

  So I told her. I said, “They’d been fighting that day, my mom and dad, all about how my mom didn’t work and sat around the house all day doing nothing and how my dad didn’t think that was fair since he slaved away at the construction company and for what? For a wife who kept getting fatter and two kids who were stupid and useless and how he wished we’d never been born and how he wished he’d never met her and gotten her pregnant like the cow she is. And then he went and said, You are such a waste, Linda, and my mom said, Oh yeah? You think so? Well we’ll just see about that. Then she got into her car and peeled out of our driveway. She was going to Abel’s, or so she said, to get a beer and find herself a real man.”

  “No way,” said Gracie, her eyes wide.

  “Halfway there, though, she got in a head-on collision with Lucy Hall, who was on her way home that night, drunk, it just so happened, from Abel’s. She’d had a fight with her husband that day too, and had gone there and drank her way into a stupor, rubbing up against any tub of country lard that came across her. And then when she left to go back to her stupid husband she hit my mom and paralyzed her. I hate her.”

  “Adam,” said Gracie. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?” She put her hand on my knee and kept the other on the wheel’s twelve o’clock.

  I shrugged. “I guess I thought everyone knew,” I said, remembering all the stuff Mr. Highsmith had said about my family.

  She shook her head. “No, Adam. Not everyone knows.”

  “Who cares about that stuff anyway,” I said. “We have each other. That’s what’s important.”

  Gracie smiled. It was the closest I could come to saying what she wanted to hear, I knew. She nodded and said, “You’re right. We have each other.”

  After a while of silence and me staring out my window as we passed the fields I’d thought I’d never see again a couple of hours earlier, I turned to Gracie and said, “What do you think he’s doing right now? Do you think he’s okay?”

  “Who are you talking about?” said Gracie. She wouldn’t look over at me. She kept her eyes on the road.

  “You know,” I said. “Him. You don’t talk about him anymore. What happened?”

  “I made a decision, Adam. I made a decision not to.”

  “Not to what?”

  “Not to see him anymore. I told him to go away. I told him I didn’t want him. I told him I chose something else.”

  “What did you choose?”

  Gracie looked over briefly, the sunflowers behind her eyes flaring, the petals unfurling. “You,” she said.

  “But you could have had us both,” I told her, and she turned back to looking ahead.

  “I don’t have what he needs, Adam,” she said. “And neither do you.”

  “He just needs to be loved,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “He needs more than love,” said Gracie. “You can’t give him what he really wants. No one can.”

  We didn’t talk for a while after that. I went back to staring out the window at the fields and town halls and maple trees and the brief flicker of Sugar Creek as we passed over one of the many bridges that crossed it, and when it was obvious that we were headed back home, I asked Gracie, “Now what?”

  “There’s only one thing to do now,” she said. “Regroup.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you go back in my closet,” she said, “while I pretend like tonight never happened.”

  “That’s a plan?” I said.

  Gracie nodded, spinning the wheel as she rounded a bend. “That’s all we’ve got right now, Adam,” she said. “We’ll have to wait until we can figure out something else. Otherwise they’ll know we left together and then we’re both screwed.”

  “Okay,” I said, “the closet.” I was sort of getting used to it anyway.

  We drove to town slowly, taking our time in case we passed a police car so we wouldn’t seem suspicious, speaking only when one of us thought we’d made a wrong turn or knew a better way. By four in the morning we were back in town sighing as we passed by the high school and town square and reaped fields of corn, the stalks broken and trampled. Gracie knew where all the local cops hid in order to catch speeders, so at those places—the volunteer fire department, the oil well drive right around the curve on Highway 88, the church parking lot—she drove extra careful. When we finally turned onto her road, we thought we were home free, but as we drove over the railroad tracks next to her house, we saw a police car sitting in the circular drive ahead of us. “Fuck,” Gracie said under her breath. “They’re here already. This isn’t happening. It can’t be.” She stopped the car and killed the lights.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll say I made you do it. It’ll be my fault. Just switch seats with me. I’m already in trouble for running away. This way is easier.” I was going to list more reasons for her to let me take the blame because I sure had enough reasons, but before I could get the next one out, she held her hand up and shook her head.

  “Stop,” she said. “I’ve got a better idea.” I looked at her, my mouth frozen mid good reason. She looked at me with the most serious face I’d ever seen before and said, “Get out of the car and run into the woods, Adam. Now. Quick. Before they come outside and notice us.”

  I stared at her for a second, then reached over the back seat and grabbed my backpack. When I opened the door, I turned back and said, “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to try and convince them I went on a joy ride by myself. They don’t necessarily know you were ever here.”

  “But then you’ll be taking all the blame.”

  Gracie rolled her eyes. “That’s right. But it’s better than both of us. Now go! Find someplace to stay. Then contact me somehow in a couple of days. Okay?”<
br />
  “How?”

  “How should I know?” said Gracie. “Just do it. I’ll be looking for you.”

  I went to leave again, but I didn’t feel right about it. I turned back and said, “Thanks.” Just that. What else could I say? Her plan would at least give me some time to figure out something else. So I leaned over and gave her a fast kiss. Her heart beat hard in my pocket as I pulled back and slung my backpack over my shoulders. It was a good thing I was ready to bolt because at that moment the porch light of the Highsmith house suddenly came on, lighting up the front lawn, and a second later a cop came out, followed by Mr. and Mrs. Highsmith.

  “Go!” Gracie whispered, all harsh. So I did. I went. I ran as fast as I could, looking back only once, briefly, to see Gracie pull the car into the drive as her parents and the cop hustled off the porch to meet her. Then I turned and ran down the tracks into the bitter November night.

  It only took me a few minutes of running down those tracks before I realized I was running directly toward the place where Jamie’s murderers had buried him, and thinking of that reminded me of the night I saw God’s finger coming at my family, which made me feel even more desperate. Now when I looked up I could barely see any stars, let alone God’s finger. I wondered where it had gone. It had probably reached earth by now and was seeking me out, just trying to get a good shot before it really let loose. It made me think of my dad the hunter and his survival tactics and strategies he always taught us while telling us what happened on his hunting expeditions and how when a deer realizes it’s been spotted it’ll run for the thickest cover possible to hide. I thought right then I better make like a deer before God had a clear shot at me, so I ran off the tracks and straight down into the blind dark of the woods below.

  It was so dark in there, it felt like when Jamie took me through dead space. I kept holding my hands up in front of me, pushing branches away as they scraped my face, starting at the sound of twigs snapping, stumbling over dead branches that lay scattered over the hills and hollows of the woods. It all made me want to stop and bargain, to say, Look God, you don’t need to use your finger with me, say what you want, just put the finger down and let’s talk peacefully. But I knew that was useless. My grandfather had been a bargainer and my grandma always said that it got him nowhere with his cancer and he was in pain until the very end. She tried to tell him her various tricks for outrunning misfortune over and over, but it only made him mad because he didn’t believe in washing the floors with salt water or burning something you loved in the oven so that something that was making you sick would go away. It only revived the same argument they’d been having since they married when she was sixteen and he told her she’d be Protestant now and she said no way, take the kids if he must, but she wasn’t setting foot in that place. She was Catholic, but like in this really weird way apparently, which my mom says Catholics are in general because they tend to believe in a lot of magical stuff that she doesn’t believe in, which to me isn’t the smartest argument in the world because she has no proof there isn’t magic in the world, she’s relying on an invisible faith that magic doesn’t exist, which is the same thing in my opinion as having faith that it does. In any case, it was an old battle in our family and I knew from my grandfather’s failed prayers that it did no good to bargain. God will do as He pleases. With my grandfather, it turned out He wanted him to suffer for months and months before He finally let him go.

  I was deep in the woods and had stopped running for a while because I had no clue where I was anymore and I was tripping way too much, falling on my face and picking wet leaves that smelled of mulch and insects off my cheeks so I thought I might as well slow down now. If the cops knew I was in here, they weren’t going to find me right away anyway. I mean, hell, it took them two weeks to find Jamie’s body. I wouldn’t call that efficient.

  But thinking that made everything just a little worse and I congratulated myself on making being in the woods late at night, unable to see, breaking branches and snapping twigs and rustling leaves around even more scary than it already had been. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about Jamie’s murderers, about Jamie’s murder, and how it was in here, who knows—maybe on the very spot I was standing at that moment—that they did whatever it was they did to him. Smashed the one lens of his glasses, made that deep carve into his left temple, dragged him around on his knees until they bled, and the bruises on his neck, their hands pushing the air out of him. If it had been me, I’d wondered, would I have escaped? I looked around now, not able to see two inches in front of me, and knew for sure they would have done me just the same.

  I kneeled down on my haunches, watching my breath steam a little. It was getting cold, but it didn’t bother me much. I could feel it, but for some reason I didn’t mind. Maybe I just had a lot of adrenaline pumping through me, and that was keeping me warm. What are you going to do now, McCormick? I couldn’t even find my own shadow in this dark to ask for its advice. Not that it had ever been any use to me before.

  After my mind began to quiet, though, I heard something. At first I thought it was light. I didn’t know what that even meant, but I thought, I hear light. Where is it? And when I stopped breathing for a minute to listen harder, I realized what I heard was the sound of water running. A small trickle. I stood, trying to hear what direction it came from, because the only water that ran through town was Sugar Creek and if I could find Sugar Creek, I could find shelter. A place only I knew about. That was what I needed. Someplace no one knew existed but me.

  Walking slowly, trying not to make any noise, I picked my way toward the sound of the stream. It grew louder and louder until eventually it seemed like I was surrounded by the sound of water and then the next step I took—splash!—I was in it on my hands and knees, saying Fuck fuck fuck, like Gracie had earlier, but happily. Once I pulled myself out of the creek and back onto the bank I waited there in the dark until the sun began to rise a while later, shooting rays of light down through the leaves that hadn’t fallen yet. And then I got up and followed the sunlight dancing on Sugar Creek’s dark surface until I came to the covered bridge where the old railroad tracks ran through and the creek went under, and there I crossed over to the other side and kept on going, farther and farther, until I reached the Amish loggers’ camp.

  The camp was just a cutout circle in the middle of the woods where a bunch of Amish men had been hired to cut down trees back when I was a little kid. After they were done, I’d come here and play in their camp a lot, imagining it was another world, that I was an astronaut on the surface of Mars trying to figure out a way to make the land habitable and make homes for people to live in. There was a lean-to shack the loggers had built to get in out of the rain and that had been my fort after they abandoned the place. It was still standing, leaning against an elm tree for support, and the three huge mounds of orange sawdust I used to climb and roll down were there too, only now they were browner and smaller and smelled more like rot.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d come, but I was glad to be here again, back at my old fortress in the woods where no one would ever think to find me. It wasn’t a place I’d never been, like we’d planned for, it wasn’t like California at all. But maybe it would be better, I thought, to come to a place where no one I knew had ever been instead.

  SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT

  THE SHACK WASN’T MUCH. MADE FROM PLANKS OF old, unpainted wood, now gray with age, it sagged to one side a bit more than it had the last time I’d seen it. That had to be five or six years ago, when I still came to the woods to get away from everything, before I started running. Other than the sagging, there was also no longer a door in the doorway, just a pair of rusty hinges where the old one used to be. The window cut out of one wall was still there, but its flap had been removed or more likely was probably torn off during a storm and blew away. The flat roof covered in tar paper was mostly fine too, except it was green with moss now. When I was little, I used to climb up there by sliding out the window and standing on
the sill so I could pull myself up and lie down to read comic books on the sun-warmed tar paper. I wanted to go up there now, but it was probably moist with all that moss, and I was pretty damp from falling in the creek already.

  I sat inside on a three-legged stool instead and thought about the tree house my father had built for my brother and me when I was six or seven. Andy and I would sit in it during the summers and read comic books, trading them back and forth. We were each allowed two comics monthly. I got Spider-Man and the Uncanny X-Men, Andy would always get Cloak and Dagger and the Incredible Hulk. It was the one thing we never fought about, the one time in our lives when we acted like real brothers. Even so, when I found the shack in the woods after the Amish loggers left, even though I thought maybe it could be another place for both of us to get away, I never told Andy. We knew how to share when it came to comics and the tree house my dad built, but I knew in the way that my grandma taught me how to know things that I’d need a space of my own to get away to someday.