One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

“What hand?” I asked. I wondered if it might be God’s hand pressing down on her, the same way he pointed his finger at my family.

  “You know,” said Jamie, “this huge weight that can’t be lifted. That’s how she described it. I think it’s just in her head, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

  “My mom can’t get out of bed either,” I said. “But that’s because of Lucy.”

  “The accident,” Jamie said gravely. He was good about making me feel like I could be sad about it. He understood. Tragedies happen and sometimes you can live in them with the right person. He was that right person for me.

  Cars zoomed past as we walked the bridge, filling our ears with the roars of their engines. We walked with our heads down, steady against the wind that pushed through our clothes and past our collars. One thing I realized about Youngstown immediately was how the landscape buckled with hillsides moving like waves toward the Pennsylvania border, and although walking was the only way we could get anywhere, it wasn’t the kind of city where you could walk anywhere easily. Maybe back in its heyday you could find anything you wanted within a couple of blocks from your house, but now the place was mostly boarded up storefronts and abandoned buildings with faded signs in their windows that said, Your homes, your jobs, your dignity. I recognized those words. My grandfather had put one of those signs in his front yard when I was way little and everyone in his mill had gone on strike.

  Once in a while we came across a little market with a deli inside, but if you looked at the cans and boxes on the shelves, you found nothing but dust growing over everything, as if the cans and boxes had been sitting on the shelves for years, the same cans of soup and boxes of cereal that had been out when all the factories closed.

  Most of the shops were run by Arabic people, and every time I saw someone who had moved here from some faraway country, I’d wonder why they’d come. Not to America. I mean, I wondered why they’d come to Youngstown. It couldn’t have been for a money-making opportunity. I wondered how bad things in their home countries had been that they’d up and leave to settle in a city that looked like it had been occupied during a war.

  It was at one of these places that I got a little hungry and went to buy a candy bar from a woman who wore a white cloth over her head and didn’t speak much English, except to say how much I owed her. That’s when I realized I hardly had any money at all. I searched my pockets and came up with barely enough to pay. Other than the crow feather and the pieces of Gracie’s heart, my pockets were empty.

  I hadn’t thought about money when Jamie had me come with him, and the five hundred I’d taken from Mr. Highsmith had been returned when the police found it in my backpack. Real smart, McCormick, I thought. But it wasn’t so bad. One thing I had going for me was that I didn’t get as hungry as I did before I started on my way to dying, and after eating a candy bar I was usually full for a while. I’d make things work, I told myself. I’d get by somehow.

  Jamie talked through the nights with his arms beneath his head, looking up at the soot-blackened ceiling. “This is it,” he said a week or so after we’d made the church our home. “Now we’ll have some peace.” Peace sounded good, and I said as much, because the past couple of months had been getting harder and harder to deal with everyone trying to parent me or be my friend or lover or something else that required me to care about them. No matter what anyone says, don’t believe the lie that we’re told, that love is the greatest thing on this planet. It isn’t. Love only means you have something to lose.

  Jamie was concerned with his own plans, though. He wasn’t interested in love, just in living. “That’s where you come in,” he said. “Together, they can’t touch us. Alone, they’ll make me disappear.” He wasn’t making any sense, though, and when I asked him to tell me more, he struggled for the words. “You know,” he said. “This place will remember me if I have anything to, you know, what’s that word? Talking about it?”

  “Say about it?”

  “Exactly!” he said. “This place will remember me if I have anything to say about it.”

  When he talked like this, I didn’t say anything. I’d just listen and nod.

  I fell asleep with him still chattering beside me, and when I woke the next morning I expected to find him still going on about his future, but when I turned over I found only the bag of potting soil he’d been leaning against, the impression his head had made still on the bag.

  A moment later, keys rattled in the padlock on the front doors, and muffled voices drifted in from outside as the lock jiggled in its chain. I grabbed my backpack and jumped up, looking around for the nearest place to hide. The bell tower was that place, so up those steps I ran, even though I didn’t like going up there, and stood still as a statue in the shadows and dust, straining to hear if they’d heard me as the front doors squealed open and they came in.

  It was the church people. Their voices became clear as they entered the front room. One boomed loud, filling the room below, traveling up the stairs to reach me. “What’s all this?” it said. “Who’s been throwing candy wrappers on the altar? We’re trying to fix this place, not use it as a wastebasket!”

  Mumbles. Then someone said, “Wasn’t me, Pastor.”

  Footsteps came close to the tower door. Then someone pushed it all the way open, making it squeal on its hinges, and a small shadow appeared at the bottom of the stairs. I thought I’d been found and would be hauled home again, this time only days after escaping, but whoever owned that shadow didn’t see me standing at the top. Behind the shadow, the pastor said, “Tia, come here and help me clean up this mess. God knows I’m working with a crew of litterbugs.”

  But the shadow called Tia said, “Maybe it wasn’t them, Daddy,” and the pastor laughed and said if it wasn’t members of his own congregation throwing trash around, who was it?

  The shadow didn’t move. She kept looking up the stairwell in my direction. “I don’t know, Daddy,” she said. “Maybe we have ourselves a ghost.”

  THE RULE OF DOORS

  SATURDAYS WERE USUALLY WHEN THE REVEREND and his people worked on fixing up the church. They’d come at nine or ten in the morning and work until afternoon, banging and sawing and scraping the whole time. Often when I woke Jamie was already gone, so I started hanging out by myself, usually on the block that separated the church and the university, where the street was deserted on weekends, without students and people who worked in law firms and banks and downtown businesses to walk along its sidewalk laughing and smiling, making jokes or complaining about supervisors and professors. During the week they swung their briefcases with purpose, carrying their packs and bags slung over their shoulders, checking their purses for change as they approached the hot dog vendor who would greet them with a “How’s it going?” like good old Marty Chapman always did. Except when it came to me. When I passed by the hot dog guy, he’d scowl at me a warning not to approach, and after a while I realized I’d started to look like a street person. After that, when I looked around, I noticed a lot of people with faces determined to look straight ahead as they passed me by.

  It wasn’t everyone who pretended not to see me, though. Sometimes there were people who kept their eyes locked with mine and said things like, Hey, son, or Hey, young fella, or Hey kid, you okay? You need something? It was because of their words forcing me to respond that I began to realize I’d been leaving the body without even knowing it. They’d say, “Hey kid,” and I’d fall from the sky or outer space where I’d been looking down at everything happening around me instead of out at it all from behind my eyes like we’re supposed to.

  It was getting to be a regular event, leaving. I’d left my family, I’d left my town, I’d left everything I knew behind me. Now when I slipped out of my flesh, it didn’t shock me. I could be flying high above where nothing touched me, and when I looked down I couldn’t even tell which of the tiny humans moving around below belonged to me.

  It was in this way, swooping through the bell tower like the crow that left m
e its single feather, that I watched the work being done by the church people on Saturday mornings.

  The same ones came every week, along with the preacher, Reverend Taylor, who was a stumpy little black guy built like a barrel. He always wore a long, black wool coat and dress shoes shined to a gleaming polish. From what I could tell, he didn’t do any of the actual work. He would just boss around everyone else, going in and out the front doors hollering the whole time, Do this! Do that! No, not there! There! And everyone would run around, following his directions.

  A few middle-aged black guys and a couple of younger black kids around my age always came to help, and except for when the reverend brought his daughter, none of them looked happy. The reverend’s daughter’s name was Tia, and everyone said her name like it was holy. Even if the reverend was mad at someone for screwing up, he always said her name smooth as butter, or if Tia herself did something wrong, they’d all say it was nothing and not to worry, Tia, like if you said her name any other way but nicely you might get struck down by God’s lightning. She had black hair slicked back in a bun, and skin the color of caramel. She must have got that from her mother, though, because the reverend was way dark. Like the ace of spades, my dad would have said with a grin I never understood. He had lots of weird sayings like that for nonwhite people. I don’t know why. It’s not like he even knew anyone who wasn’t white.

  The reverend’s eyes were always roaming, assessing the work, surveying his property. You could tell that he didn’t even see the fire stains, that the broken stained glass windows and empty bell tower didn’t register for him. In his mind it was the same church he still preached in, large and Victorian, with gleaming white walls and a bell hanging in the tower, calling people in to pray. Never mind that it was gutted, the reverend heard the organ playing. Never mind that services had been held in a gym several blocks away for the past year, he saw nothing but crowds of believers filling his church with their voices. I almost saw it too; I almost heard the organ and all those prayers. Here is the church, here is the steeple, I thought on one of those Saturday afternoons in winter. Open the doors and there are the people.

  I was standing beside a fire hydrant painted to look like the university’s mascot, a penguin, watching the church people pack up their things and lock the chains on the doors before leaving. Jamie wasn’t with me. Like the past few Saturdays, he’d already left by the time I woke. Like my leaving my body, Jamie’s disappearances were becoming a regular occurrence. I didn’t know where he went, but every day it seemed I was more alone than I thought I’d be when I decided to come with him. It made me wonder why he said he needed me. I mean, things were bad back where I’d come from, and knowing I’d had to leave, I was still glad I’d left with Jamie. But I couldn’t understand why we’d come here, why we’d settled in this shadow of a city, why, if he needed me like he said, he was always going away.

  When he finally came back later that evening, he said we should go out looking for food. I wasn’t really hungry and to tell the truth I couldn’t smell much of anything anymore either, but he insisted. He said if I didn’t keep eating, I’d get sick and then what would we do? So I said I’d eat, even though it only reminded me of how my mom and dad made me eat after they brought me back home from the police. Being forced. Like my body belonged to them or something.

  We went into the Uptown, the part of the south side where the buildings were all two stories of burnt bricks and broken windows, and the houses were all barely able to stand. Even though it was run down worse than other sections of the city I’d seen, you could tell that it used to be well-off, full of life at some point. The streets were packed with ghosts that day, out shopping, returning books to the library, slipping through the rotted, chained-up front doors of the Uptown Theater with its rusty marquee that said, Close, because the d had fallen off who knows how long ago.

  Close, I thought, testing it, wondering if it had any meaning for me, whether or not it was a word I should take since it’d been left up on the marquee like that, abandoned. I didn’t feel close to anything right then, though. I felt as far away from everything as a person could get.

  In so many of those buildings that looked ready to fall over you had your pick of dance clubs, porn stores and strip joints. I’d never been in any of those places because I wasn’t old enough, but I’d passed by while drifting through the city with and without Jamie. Usually these were spots where I could hear people’s shadows clearer than usual. They were constantly complaining or arguing, picking fights, making pleas for their lives to complete strangers. They made me nervous, like maybe they would ask me to help them, and since I couldn’t even help myself that well I tried not to come this way too often.

  The houses here were almost all Victorians, some with their stained glass windows still intact. I couldn’t help but think of my dad when I looked at them. I’m sure he’d never worked on a Victorian since they haven’t been in fashion in forever and ever, but when I thought about how long they’d lasted—were lasting—through their breakdowns, I thought of my father’s hands. I heard his voice mix with the voices of the shadows. “Did the closets in that one,” he said, and I looked down at my feet as they carried me over the cracked and broken sidewalks.

  Heaps of dirty snow piled up against the curbs of Market Street, black from ash and salt spread during winter storms. As we passed the remnants of the Rendezvous Lounge, a drunk with yellow, bloodshot eyes stopped us. “Hey, fellas,” he said, his voice like an old recording with static in the background. He put his hand on my shoulder like he was my friend, but I pulled back. “Sorry there,” he said. “But can you spare some change, kid?” When I told him I didn’t have any, he turned to Jamie and said, “What about your friend?” When he really took a look at Jamie, though, his eyes grew round and wide. He waved his hands crazily, saying, “Ah, fuck. Ain’t a haint in this city has any money. Forget it,” then pushed his face into his collar and walked the other way.

  Jamie seemed slower than usual, like he was tired, even though things like exhaustion usually meant nothing to him. He stopped several times on Market Street as we were going back, our food foray a failure, and looked around as if he didn’t know where he was. “Is that a—you know? What is it? That sound?” he said, and I listened to hear what he heard but couldn’t name.

  “An ambulance?” I said, and he nodded, smiling with relief.

  “An ambulance,” he said. “Is that what that is?”

  I nodded.

  “Didn’t we go there sometimes?” he said as we passed by a diner we wouldn’t have ever had the money to eat at since we’d been staying here. I shook my head. “Really?” he said. “I thought they had really good apple pie.”

  “Maybe you’re thinking of the Wildwood Café,” I offered. But, no, it wasn’t the Wildwood Café. He was sure it was the diner on that corner.

  “Adam?” he asked a little while later, as we walked back through the downtown and up the hill to the church. He stopped suddenly and looked around, saying, “Are you still there?”

  “I’m still here,” I said. “Jamie? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning his face to me finally. “I just didn’t see you there for a moment. It’s nothing. Sorry.”

  Back in the church, we sat down on the altar below the picture of the Last Supper. The reverend had hung it the week before. It was a show of faith, a sign that it wouldn’t be just a picture of Christ hanging in this place again, but that soon God Himself would be returning. I looked at this picture some days and wondered why that man ever gave a damn about the world. He looked so alone at that table of people. I could understand that feeling, but what I didn’t understand was how he could be surrounded by traitors and still care about everybody. He was called the Prince of Peace, but I think that name is a little wrong. A lot of things are misnamed in this world. Peace might have been what Jesus wanted for people, but I think the proper name would have been if they’d called him the King of Sorrow, because really, eve
ry time I saw the guy, he looked so damned sad.

  The thing I liked about Jesus was that he wasn’t like his father. He didn’t send storms or plagues or angels to destroy people’s lives or test their loyalty. He just loved everyone. It gave me a little bit of hope to think that a son didn’t have to follow in his father’s footsteps. Even sitting right beneath his picture, I wasn’t afraid of him like I was afraid of God’s finger. Jesus didn’t seem like the finger-pointing type. I would probably have gotten along with the guy.

  We slept in the church; I ate food in the church, stolen from McDonald’s and Burger King garbage cans; we sat around and talked in the church, laughed in the church, remembered our families in the church, told each other secrets in the church. I watched Jamie’s eyes flicker to life as he burned fistfuls of memories—a birthday cake shaped and decorated like Batman his mom had made him when he was five; the Christmas his dad didn’t come home and he and his mom spent the night with an aunt in Bloomfield, a town even smaller and even more in the middle of nowhere than ours, with only a stocking of candy canes as a present; the day at school when he found out he’d got all A’s for the first time and then Matt Hardin and his idiot crew stuffed him in a locker. I watched his eyes fade in the church as the warmth of his burnt memories grew cold. Everything we needed to do and everything that wasn’t needed we did in the church, avoiding the rest of the world. Eventually I got over my fear that God was in there with us. Besides the crow I’d found in the bell tower the first night, after a few weeks it became clear that Jamie and I were the only ones living there. Or kind of living.

  I didn’t mind. I’d almost always felt alone anyway. At least this aloneness was more honest, I figured. The two of us being together defined the world; and as long as that existed the world would keep spinning. Even though we lived in a burned-out church in the middle of a city no one knew existed—even though we were kids no one cared about—it was enough, I thought, to have just him keeping me company.