by Reed Karaim
He was still standing in the doorway, his lanky frame outlined in the morning reflection on the glass door.
“You got me a card?” It was strange to hear my own voice sound so foreign, so uncertain and thin.
“Yeah. I sent it to your family’s. I didn’t know when you’d be back.” He shrugged.
“Okay. Thank you. Thanks.”
“Naah, it’s nothing. See you later, right?”
He waved and opened the door. A card. The tyranny of the greeting card industry and its reduction of every genuine emotion to a sub-five-dollar commodity had long been something I hated, even at twenty. And now this. A card. I squeezed my eyes shut to stop the tears.
I walked to the door that led to my apartment but realized I didn’t want to go up. I walked on down Main Street until I came to the railroad tracks. I stood there while the red light started to blink and the crossing guards came down. The train announced itself with a swelling thunder that shook the ground beneath my feet before it trundled into view, the engineer visible on high as a severe figure through a smeared gray window, then an endless succession of coal cars, slowly accelerating until they became a blur, a wall. The world divided and severed.
I turned and walked back to the office. Anna was sitting at her desk when I returned. She looked up and I could tell she had watched me coming down the sidewalk. My father had been dead for a week but I was already numb to the look of condolence that greets you when you see people the first time, the combination of sympathy and awkward uncertainty, the wish they weren’t facing this moment, the sense of inadequacy that left them feeling somewhat ashamed and hurried to get it over. Beneath all that was something else, a buried but inescapable sense of distance that came from the idea that they were still safely on the other side of a chasm. They stood in the land of the living, taking refuge in the idea they had permanent residence.
Anna swiveled her chair slightly to face me as I came around the counter, and this is one of those times I can see her so clearly. She was wearing dark slacks, a brown vest, and a long-sleeve white shirt, leaving her, as always, overdressed for the summer weather, but lending a kind of formality to her appearance. She did not stand. She didn’t say a word. Her dark brown eyes, almost obsidian in the day and always bottomless in the way they held light, watched me, and her look was one of stark, immediate pain. It enveloped me as I sat down at my desk and seemed the first true comprehension of where I had arrived. My own grief felt cradled and suffused in a larger sea of loss. Of course, I thought, it comes to us all in time. And there was something else in Anna’s look, a final acknowledgment. Welcome.
Chapter 16
SHANNON WAS BEAUTIFUL THAT SUMMER. I had lived there for months and never seen it as anything more than another gray prairie town, half blown away and barely there. But it was beautiful, leafy and gentle on somnolent streets where old houses stood in islands of shade even at noon. A furtive restlessness lived beneath the torpor of the long, hot days, as if people could feel the season passing too fast. Even the trains that rumbled through town seemed filled with a blood-rush of motion, an artery flowing into the body of the nation while Shannon beat on steadily at its heart.
I went back to see my family every weekend for the first month, but as I drove into Shannon on State Highway 18, the mirrored windows at the very top of the grain silos towering above the town welcomed me back with an understanding gaze. Home. I had come home.
Todd kept inviting me over for a Twins game or a game of pool at the Buffalo, but I knew he’d rather be spending time with Christine. Art and Louise took me out to lunch and people kept stopping by our table to say they were sorry. Everyone knows everything in a small town. Paul Strand and his wife had me over for dinner and I realized his oldest boy was the starting guard on the high school basketball team.
I suppose I did my job. I don’t remember. I remember working with Anna in the back shop on Thursdays and that she filled my silences by talking more than she had. I learned about her early fascination with Nancy Drew, not because of the mysteries, which were easy even for an eight-year-old to figure out, but because of the blue roadster, the distant, successful father (her own parents almost never left the farm), and the repeated tropes: the endless secret passages, how Nancy or one of her friends was forever giving their location away by stepping on a loudly snapping twig, how the threat of violence never turned into violence, and Nancy’s voice remained confident and smart through book after book. I learned about her later love of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Frost. She spoke of reading at night in the wilds of North Dakota, reading until she saw the light changing over the broken, blank land, with a distant smile, as if she could not quite believe she had been that girl. I remember being aware those long summer nights we worked together how beautiful she was, how she was part of the beauty of this place at this time. But all my emotions seemed to arrive from a distance, barely an echo of real feeling, and I felt her beauty not as a focus of desire, but as a balm, an object of healing contemplation, a quiet grace.
Often I was hardly there. We stepped out onto the street after a Thursday night and Anna’s car was parked in the direction of the bank, so we strolled down the sidewalk together. I had gotten a call from my mother earlier in the day and I’d had a hard time concentrating on work. My brother was having trouble at school and my mother wanted me to come home and talk to him. I had nothing to say to him except, “Stop screwing around at school,” which seemed unlikely to make a difference. He had never listened to me. I was not his father.
So it had been a hard night and at some point I had flatlined, not getting much done and saying less. Anna had worked silently beside me as she walked beside me now.
“My wrists,” she said.
I stopped, pulled abruptly out of myself.
“They’re rope burns.”
It took a moment to understand all she was telling me, and then part of my mind recoiled.
“They wouldn’t leave a scar like that. Not forever.”
“They do if you tear away the scabs.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To remember.”
We were standing by the window of the insurance office next to the bank and I realized we had walked a block past her car.
“It was a time of not thinking clearly,” she said. “You remember anyway.”
The streetlight reflected off the plate glass and Anna was a photogravure in its black-mirror surface, the dark pools of her eyes and the cupped line of her upturned chin a double image of the face turned toward me, and this was one of those times when she was just too beautiful.
“And now I have to wear long sleeves.”
I shook my head, not wanting to hear this, having trouble focusing.
“But . . . what . . .”
Her perfect stillness told me there would be no answer.
“What did you tell your kids? They must have seen them.”
“I told them I had an accident. I caught my sleeves on fire over the stove.”
“Really? They believed that?”
“Oh, Eric, when you have kids you’ll see—they want to believe what you tell them, especially about something that scares them. They’ll figure out it doesn’t make any sense when they’re older, but . . . ” Anna looked at her half-revealed self in the glass. “It felt necessary, but it was stupid. Don’t do it. Don’t make it worse than it is by punishing yourself. You have so much going for you . . .” She paused awkwardly, embarrassed, and shook her head impatiently. “Just let everything heal. Don’t make it into a badge. Don’t pretend it’s not there, but don’t hold on to it, okay?”
It was one of the longer declarations I’d heard her make.
“That’s a lot of don’ts,” I said.
She smiled, and the woman in the mirror smiled in a darker reflection.
“All my life lessons are don’ts.”
“This is the worst thing that happened to you,” I said. “You told me because it’s the worst thing that happened to
you.”
She closed her eyes and I saw with horror that it wasn’t.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Sure you are. You’re twenty years old. How could you be anything else?”
“I am,” I insisted. “I’m sorry I was so out of it tonight.”
“You were fine. The paper’s out. Go home and go to bed.”
In the glass her hand rose in a stark line. I felt it appear as a living thing as she gently squeezed my arm. Anna. It was a mystery to me how I had ended up standing on this street listening to her. This woman who had become my closest friend.
• • •
I OPENED MY APARTMENT DOOR and knew someone was inside as soon I stepped into the hall. I walked as silently as possible into the living room. Emily sat slumped in the chair by the window, pushed just far enough back she was invisible from the street.
“You should lock your door.”
“No one locks their door here.”
I turned on the light.
“Well, look what can happen.” She smiled weakly. “An intruder.”
Chapter 17
A WOMAN CHECKS INTO A CHEAP MOTEL; it sounds like the start of a tasteless joke. She sits on the edge of the bed. Has she brought the bleach with her, wrapped in a brown paper bag like some cheap whiskey, or does she discover it somewhere in the room, perhaps left beneath the bathroom sink by an inattentive housecleaner? Does seeing the bottle crystallize the vision that brought her here, or is the scene already formed—the room, the bed, the bottle, darkness, peace—simply waiting to be realized?
A woman sits on the edge of a motel room bed. She holds a one-quart white plastic bottle in her hands, perhaps the most banal vessel in a world filled with the cheap and disposable. Does this strike her? Does she think about this or about anything? How long does she sit there? Are there regrets or is this moment beyond regret? Is this moment already its own conclusion?
All these questions take refuge in false abstraction. This is not “a woman.” This is Anna, who had as keen an eye for beauty as anyone I have known. How could she have escaped the absurdity, the self-negating plainness of the instrument she had chosen to end her life? This is Anna, whose attention to the world around her so often seemed to come with a wistfulness at the perpetual disappearance of the now. How could she not have regret? How long does she hesitate on that bed? How close does she come to setting the bottle down, to walking back out the door?
I turn these questions over and over to find a different answer every time.
• • •
THE WHEAT FIELDS RIPENED, the sunflowers flowered, and the prairie grass dried and burned, the land turning various shades of brown and gold, even as the sky still reflected a perfect Mediterranean blue a thousand miles from the sea. Shannon merchants held their August Crazy Day Sales! and we ran an extra section to herald the event and reap our own harvest of advertising. Anna and I were working on the layout early in the evening when we realized we had a problem. We were half a page short, even running all the filler we had in reserve.
“We could run a house ad,” Anna suggested.
“It’ll look like shit,” I said. I was tired and couldn’t think and didn’t really care. “This is a publisher’s decision. Let me talk to Art.”
“He’s out of town. He left yesterday.”
August was the time of vacations, so I don’t know why this felt wrong.
“Art and Louise left town?”
“Just Art.”
“Really?”
Earlier in the evening Anna had tried to lighten the mood, reading me the social notes from the women’s auxiliary of the local Moose Club, which involved a break-dancing contest for women over fifty. I knew in some abstract sense it was sweet and I should respond, but I couldn’t. My desolation was like an electric field filling the room. For the last hour we had worked in silence.
“I think Art needed a getaway,” she said, her eyes too carefully focused on the notes she was scribbling on a design sheet.
“But Louise is here?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“I can do it.”
For some reason that irritated me.
“I’m the editor,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
I walked across the street to the Shoemakers’ small square one-story house, right next to the one Todd rented from them. I had never been inside, and when I came to the door, I knocked, waited, knocked again, and then cracked open the door.
“Louise?”
I heard a noise like a rustling of paper or the scurrying of mice and then a sound, not quite a word.
“It’s me, Eric. Can I come in?”
Her voice was again indistinct, but I thought I heard yes.
The door opened into a narrow kitchen with yellowed linoleum, once-white cabinets, an antiquated refrigerator the same faded color humming nervously in the corner. A doorway without a door waited on the opposite wall. I stepped through it into a forest.
A forest in the gloaming, thick white trunks crowding around me, oddly rough and squarish. My eyes adjusted and I was looking at stacks of newspapers, stack after stack piled toward the ceiling in a man-made glade, kept in perpetual dusk by pulled drapes. There was just enough room to move between them. I could make out what I thought was the corner of a couch on the far side of the room, but I couldn’t see anyone.
“Louise?”
“Ricky.”
I slid sideways between the paper towers, afraid what would happen if I knocked one over. I pictured both of us swimming for our lives in a bone-dry sea. Louise was sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, her knees up, her toes under the side of the couch. A handful of newspaper pages rested in her lap, propped up so they fell in a sliver of fading light escaping around the drapes. Beside her hip a paper cup stood next to a square-shouldered bottle of Old Grand-Dad. There was something tidy and domestic about the placement of the glass and the bottle, as if their positions had been methodically worked out over time.
“We’ve been meaning to clean up,” Louise said. “Sorry about the mess.”
I had forgotten why I’d come.
“Take a seat. Tell me you’re having fun.”
I sat down on the couch, and it was when she looked directly at me, and I saw that the solar furnace of her eye had gone out, that I truly felt the wrongness of it all.
“Are you okay?” I said. “Why are you sitting on the floor?”
“It’s comfortable. I don’t like . . .” She tilted her head, indicating something about the world above floor level that met with her disapproval. Her words were slightly slowed and slurred.
“There’s a problem with the layout,” I said, remembering. “Swanson’s is pulling its ad.”
“I’m sorry we don’t pay you more, Ricky. We don’t really make any money off the paper, you know. We’d like to pay everyone more.”
“It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t, but I had never seen her like this and I heard something small moving in a corner of the room, scratching or gnawing. I wanted to get done and get out. “The thing is, without it, we don’t have enough pages for the second section.”
Louise took a drink from the paper cup, setting it back in its exact spot without looking.
“What kind of newspaper depends on a weekly ad from a funeral home, anyway?” she said. “What kind of business plan is that?”
The room was too warm and had the dry, dead air of a space shut up for too long. How did they live like this? I thought about how much time Art spent in the office and how often Louise was absent, presumably here. Were these her stacks? Was she hoping to read all this someday? Why? To keep up, I could hear her saying. I want to keep up. A sense of the hidden landscapes that unfold into the infinite distance inside our heads, the towers gleaming on the horizon—tomorrow I will reach my destination, tomorrow it will be different, tomorrow I will accomplish amazing things—filled me with impatience. You’ll never get to it, I wanted to say. You will nev
er, ever get to it and then you will run out of time.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but we planned the second section for the Crazy Days sales.”
“Crazy Days, Ricky, can you believe that? We live in crazy days.”
“Crazy days, Louise. But right now we’re a half page short of craziness.”
“Why is Swanson [she slurred his name, Ssshwansson] pulling the ad?”
“Well . . .” I had just learned this from Anna a half hour earlier. “I guess we referred to a ‘dressed-up corpse’ being on display in an obit last week.”
She cocked her head to look at me.
“We did?”
“It came in from the family late and Edith was out. I don’t think anyone really looked at it.”
Louise’s laugh was like the rustling in the paper forest, only louder. “Dressed-up corpse. He does love his rouge, that sad little man.”
“It’s my fault,” I said, trying to hurry things along. She shook her head abruptly. “Anyway,” I said. “I know he’s a friend of Art’s, and I wondered if maybe he could talk to him. We could run a correction or something . . .”
“Art is on a trip with a friend,” Louise said, finishing the drink in the paper cup and letting it fall from her hand. I watched it bounce once and roll behind a stack of papers.
“And that friend isn’t Swanson,” she said. “That’s what this is about. He doesn’t read the damn obits. He doesn’t read anything. He’s just jealous.”
I sat on the couch. She sat in her corner on the floor. The light escaping the drapes was a narrow silver-blue bar that missed the papers in her lap and danced like a mocking sprite on her knees. I understood something. My mind swam through a small sea of confusion, but then I saw it: the way Art sometimes squeezed Todd’s arm, his hand lingering a little too long; the intensity of the friendships I had noticed with a couple of older men much like himself, the strange sense of ceremony and suppressed excitement when they appeared in the office, and the way the rest of the staff tended studiously to their desks at those moments. I thought about him and Louise, the way they moved down the street, everywhere, really, the small but respectful distance they kept between the two of them, as if they had learned this was the degree of closeness that worked. I thought about how much they depended on each other at the paper, two halves of a whole, and I felt another moment of confusion and then sadness. The world is better this way now, vastly better, but then, in the small-town Midwest, it was all a matter of quiet desperation and discreet disappearance. Art was on a trip with a friend.