One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

She said, “I’m just saying.”

  I said, “Thanks for the reminder.”

  She said, “No problem. Now get that hot water running.”

  I said, “Okay, okay,” and hightailed it to the bathroom where I could stand under the stream of hot water until it ran cold against my skin.

  Later my mom and dad talked on the phone and after work my dad came over. We didn’t hug and cry like my mom and I did, but he sat down next to me on the couch while we talked about how we needed to call Social Services and take care of making sure we did everything they needed so that maybe I wouldn’t have to go to a detention center. I mean, I came home on my own this time, and it seemed like instead of bickering and fighting we were all ready to work with each other on something. We were all using the word we. Probably because we were exhausted and ready to put down our shields and swords, because we were ready to be wrong about ourselves and each other for once in our lives.

  All of this kind of made me think everything would keep getting better, so when my dad got up to leave, I walked him to the front door. I wanted him to do something, to hug me like my mom did, or even tell me something nice. To look at me and say he was happy I was safe, something like that. It didn’t have to be revolutionary. Just something that would make me feel like he wasn’t sorry I’d been born. But I didn’t get that. Instead he got in his van, and I waited in the doorway and watched as he backed out and left.

  I sighed and behind me my mom said, “Adam, don’t expect any miracles,” and she was right. It was better, I figured, than him not being able to look at me at all, or telling me I didn’t understand anything about the world. It was better than him breaking me open. I suppose he could have done that instead of just mainly keeping his mouth shut.

  The next day my mom called the social worker and when she came a few days later I was clean and wearing nice clothes, and my mom had sent me to the barber to have my hacked-up hair evened out. I didn’t give the social worker a hard time this time. I told the truth, mostly. I mean, I still didn’t tell her I burned down the Wilkinson farm. That would have been a ticket straight to the detention center. I felt bad enough about burning it down already, so I cut myself that one break.

  The social worker was still sweet as pie, with her silky voice and her smile ready to smooth over anything she said that could come off as slightly offensive. I was able to appreciate that more this time, but it still seemed fake. She recorded everything and thanked us and said she’d be in touch, and that with our cooperation things could go better than if we held them up at every corner. I told her I’d do whatever I had to and she said, “Well, now. Someone’s had a change of heart.” She smiled when she said it, but I felt bad all of a sudden because she was right.

  I’d had a change of heart. I’d lost it. It was in a bunch of different places and pieces and I didn’t know what to do with all the pieces but hold them in my hands and look down at them stupidly and feel like a loser. Like I’d lost everything good, or nearly everything.

  I still had the pieces of Gracie’s rose quartz heart too. I’d taken them out of the pocket of the jeans I’d been wearing all winter, along with the crow feather, before my mom threw the jeans in the trash, proclaiming them done for. Gracie’s heart and the crow feather sat on my dresser now, the shiny black feather leaning against the rubble of rose quartz. They were my altar. I kept finding myself standing in front of it, staring, wondering how I’d let things get so fucked up. For Gracie, for Jamie, for my family, for myself. I know not everything was my fault, but it sure felt like it.

  Most nights I had trouble sleeping, like I had when Jamie first came to me. But now I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop my thoughts from racing. What if I’d done this differently? What if Gracie had said such and such a thing at such and such a time? What if Jamie hadn’t waited so long to cross the bridge? Regrets. Trying to figure out ways things could have gone better. I’d think about these things for hours, until I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. And then I’d usually fall into a dreamless black sleep.

  But one night, several weeks after I came home, I fell asleep after my regular hours of self-torture and immediately stumbled into a dream that, when I woke, I could actually remember.

  In the dream my mom and dad and I were standing outside on the front porch. In this dream our house was a split-level, not the one level ranch my dad built years ago. The change didn’t shock us. We’d all come from our separate dreams to meet here. We heard a lot of noise going on inside. Someone was in there, smashing plates and glasses, turning over furniture. On the second floor a window shattered and one of my running trophies landed at our feet. My mother said, “Your brother tells me this house is haunted.”

  My father said, “It is. It’s haunted. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” He said this matter-of-factly, but when I looked at his eyes, they were afraid, and I could tell he was paralyzed by his own knowledge.

  I said, “We have to go see it. Whatever it is. We can’t just ignore it.”

  My father wouldn’t go inside, but my mother agreed to come with me, so we opened the front door slowly and snuck in.

  Immediately all of the noises got louder. Someone was running back and forth along the hall above us. This someone sounded like they kept falling, getting up again, running and falling, over and over, crashing into things and growling.

  Then suddenly it appeared at the top of the staircase, a short, stocky creature made of hairy darkness, its eyes glowing red. Its hair dangled and swayed in its face like tendrils of shadow. It ran down the stairs and, as soon as it reached the first floor, fell on its face. It immediately picked itself up, though, as if the fall and the rise were one motion, the same movement, orchestrated like the creature was part of a strange ballet. It turned and ran into the kitchen and I said, “We have to stop it,” so my mother and I followed, hot on its heels.

  As we turned the corner to the kitchen, we saw it run toward the garage door, seeking a way out. But it could only jiggle the doorknob like an animal that doesn’t understand architecture. It heard us then, and turned around in a crouch, growling. A grin slid up one side of its face, and it ran toward us, sharp teeth bared.

  “Throw me at it!” I told my mother, who was frozen with fear in her wheelchair.

  “No!” she said. “I won’t let you do that!”

  “You have to help me!” I said. “Throw me at it, damn it!”

  She didn’t like the idea of me fighting this creature, but she stood up out of her wheelchair anyway. She stood up and grabbed hold of my arms and began to twirl in a circle like a discus thrower. My body lifted out and away from her, and I remembered her and my dad doing this with me when I was little, holding my hands and twirling me in the air like a doll. She spun and spun, finally releasing me. I flew at the creature, who was running full steam ahead, and when we collided—it grabbing hold of my forearms, me grabbing hold of its shoulders, our faces millimeters apart—it began to curse in a dark language that I only half understood. I didn’t need to know much in order to understand it meant to kill me, so I cursed back, my own teeth bared, my own spit flying as we wrestled on the kitchen floor.

  I woke up still gnashing my teeth and cursing, fighting my pillow, and couldn’t get back to sleep. It was still with me, I realized. Something dark and strange and deadly still lingered. A man with no skin maybe, or a shadow that had cut the cord to its person. I’d gone into its territory and it had followed me out. I’d never be rid of it, I thought. I’ll never be far enough away from that hole, I realized, to feel safe.

  After a while I started seeing Dr. Phelps again, who was a decent guy really, but I preferred calling Kurt at the bookstore to telling Dr. Phelps about my problems. He was glad to hear I was okay, and said I could call anytime I wanted to just talk about anything. I liked talking to him because he mostly just said things how they are, like my grandma used to. And he didn’t try to comfort me with false hope. He’d tell me I was doing fine and to keep going forward, but he wouldn’t l
ie by saying stuff like, “Everything’s going to be all right,” like just about everyone else in the world told me. Some things would be all right, I knew. But there were also a lot of things that were fucked for good, gone forever, pieces of me from before all of this started that I’d never get back. And the really desperate thing was that sometimes, oftentimes, I didn’t know if the me I was now was better than the me I was then. That was one thing I didn’t know if I could ever get over.

  I started going back to school again too. Only not to the high school. I had to have lessons with a tutor, and I had to go to summer school to catch up, which majorly sucked. All of that running around I’d done hadn’t gotten me anywhere once I came back to the land of the living. The good thing, though, was that I’m a good runner—I’d proven that—so I wasn’t afraid I wouldn’t be able to do the things I had to in order to catch up. I’d “apply myself.” I’d be a “model student.” In no time flat, I figured I could win back the faith of my teachers.

  And that’s what happened for the most part. I did summer school and rejoined my class in the fall, even though I still had a couple of courses I was behind in. I’d have to make those up on the side with tutoring and summer school again the following year. I was a part of things again, I guess.

  School was the same as I’d left it. A bit cold, a bit distant. I walked the hallways alone mostly. Occasionally someone would attempt to strike up something like a friendship with me, and I’d try my best to do that. It was hard, though. Hard to go back to after having seen what I’d seen, after having lost what I’d lost. Hard to try and talk to a kid from a small town in Ohio who’d never run away from home, or didn’t know what sunflowers and moonlight were all about yet. They had time. They had plenty of time. I wanted to tell them to stay a kid for as long as possible, because I didn’t feel like one any longer and in most ways it sucked. I was doing fine, like Kurt said, but the world didn’t always feel fine to me.

  I missed them terribly. I missed them with all of what I guess was left of my heart. It hurt a lot, this pain in my chest, to be back home again, to still hear my mom and dad bitching at each other, calling each other names, only now it was on the phone instead of in the house. It hurt to ride my bike past the remains of the Wilkinson farm. The old falling down barn had been burned down too, this time by the volunteer fire department. So what was left was the family cemetery, the headstones leaning toward one another behind the wrought-iron fence. It hurt to ride past the Highsmith house, with its For Sale sign out front, to look in the front windows and see the empty room where Gracie and I had once sat on the couch watching soap operas, listening to Jamie’s mother go on about her son’s death eventually meaning something. It was hard to go past the Marks place and see Mrs. Marks feeding the dogs under the weeping willow trees, alone, her husband returning with greater and greater gaps between visits. It was hard to ride through town square, past the Wildwood Café, and catch the stares of people whose shadows still speculated about my disappearance, about what had happened between my parents, about what part Lucy Hall had played in their separation. John McCormick kept telling everyone he and his wife would be back together one day, but the shadows had bets going. Most of them didn’t think the odds were in favor of the McCormick family. Maybe that was true, though. My grandma had seen it coming years ago. Our family had been picked out for sadness. But somehow we were surviving. Just in pieces. And even though the shadows set odds against us, I thought we hadn’t done so bad really. After all, we’d survived my running away and dying. After all, we’d survived Lucy Hall. We were strong in some ways. Like those families on soap operas who were always targeted by someone evil, in the end we came together. And for me this was a sign of something promising. I told myself to keep a lookout for more signs. My grandma hadn’t told me good things come in threes, but I figured if bad things did, good things had to also.

  I went back to spending a lot of time on the computer, playing online games like I used to. I didn’t play Nevermorrow. Instead I played things like Scrabble and Wordbattle, which was this game where you had to figure out the definition of a word before your opponent did. Lots of people got online in game rooms to kill time or socialize to the best of their abilities, and for me it was easier to do this than try too hard at school and attract a lot of negative attention.

  One night I was playing a game of Scrabble with several people, and I was winning until one of them spelled out a word so long it put them above my score and I came in second. The word was sunflower. And then a box popped up with a message from the winner: IgneousGirlinOhio.

  so ur alive, huh?

  who’s this?

  who do u think, genius?

  I froze up then. My fingers hovered over the keyboard in limbo. And then after a while another message popped up.

  arent u going to say anything?

  i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry

  As I sent the message, my eyes filled up. I hadn’t cried in a while. I thought maybe I’d cried out everything, but now I knew I could probably cry forever when I thought of either of them. And here she was, this girl, coming toward me out of the ether of words on a screen, asking me—me—if I was going to say anything.

  i’m sorry 2. i’m glad I ran into u. we should talk.

  where r u?

  cleveland heights. my dad moved us here after the whole closet incident.

  i turned 16 this summer. i’ll get my license after my driving lessons. i’ll come up & c u.

  i already have my license. i’ll come down 2 u.

  Like that we kept on talking. Words kept appearing on the screen, and with each one I felt a warmth grow inside me.

  I went to bed that night with my head full of words, hers and mine and his. They buzzed around in me like bees darting in every direction. I couldn’t sleep. I was used to not sleeping, but I wasn’t used to it being because of feeling something like happiness. And I wasn’t used to not sleeping because of too much noise in my head either. Usually it was too much silence, me staring up at the ceiling, the silence an ocean roar.

  But strangely enough, as my head started to clear, I realized I’d been hearing a sound all night, in the background of my mind’s ramblings. I’d thought it was Andy playing music in the next room, but after I listened hard I realized I was hearing my own heart beating. It was a familiar sound. It was a sound I used to hear as a little kid when I went to sleep. It used to lull me into dreams, into oblivion, into a different world. At some point it had faded. I always wondered what had happened, where it went to. But here it was again, beating, beating, thudding its crazy rhythm. I could hear the blood coursing through me. I could feel it again, my own life pulsing.

  Right then I thought, You can live again. You can take the steps toward the finish line without too much fear or sadness. And even if you sometimes fell in the process of getting there, it didn’t have to mean you were done for. It didn’t have to mean you’d fallen from grace, but that maybe you’d had the grace to fall in the first place. That you’d had the grace to get back up again. To go toward it. To cross the finish line without knowing what comes after.

  Right then I knew that for the rest of my life I’d have to remember everything. I’d have to remember everything so that, next time I saw him, I could tell him all about it. About this place. About the life that came after.

  AD INFINITUM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IF not for the help of a great many people. My parents, Donald and Joyce Barzak, have helped me to pursue my passion for writing without understanding why I do it, and for that I am eternally grateful. Where they were unable to help, teachers and friends were always there. Patricia Kostraba first encouraged me, and my professors at Youngstown State University gave me the guidance I needed in the beginning. Philip Brady, Michael Finney, Linda Strom and Rebecca Barnhouse took my writing seriously. The Imagination Workshop at Cleveland State University introduced me to writers who gave me direction. Karen Joy Fowler, Jona
than Lethem, Jim Kelly and Mary Rosenblum were all early encouragers. Without them I may not have found my way to the Clarion workshop in 1998. Thank you to Kelly Link and Gavin Grant for friendship and support, and all the books and disco balls sent over the years. Alan Deniro and Kristin Livdahl for taking care of me when no one else knew how. Elad Haber for his fierce loyalty. Mary Rickert for her deep-hearted friendship and understanding. Yoshio Kobayashi for befriending this foreigner. Terri Windling and Midori Snyder, for all their kindness and support. Charlie Finlay for inviting me to the Blue Heaven workshop. Maureen McHugh for telling him to. Chris Schelling, agent extraordinaire. Barbara Gilly, Richard Butner, Christopher Rowe, Gwenda Bond, Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbelestier, for their very treasured friendship. Matthew Cheney, for reaching out across the ocean. Juliet Ulman, for keeping me honest. Regina Donaldson, for all the hours. Ron Gause, for always trying. And Rick Bowes, who said it was time to write a goodbye letter. So I did.

  Thank you all so much.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHRISTOPHER BARZAK WAS BORN AND RAISED IN rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan and the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural junior high and elementary schools. His stories have appeared in many venues, including Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Trampoline, Interfictions, Nerve, Salon Fantastique and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches writing at Youngstown State University. One for Sorrow is his first novel.

  ONE FOR SORROW

  A Bantam Book / September 2007

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.