Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  He shakes his head. “I’m good.”

  “Are you sure?” And the unspoken, I’m worried it’s your heart.

  “It’s just a cold. Really.”

  Two periods later, in lunch, he regrets not taking that pass. The babble of cafeteria noise tires him, and it’s too much effort to talk above it. He opens the bag of Doritos and eats one, holding the chip by its tip because he hates the feel of the cheese powder on his fingers. He sips his Arnold Palmer. Outside, snow falls in tiny, salty flakes. “Maybe we won’t have school tomorrow,” he mumbles.

  “What?” Andrew shouts.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Mr. Greene said he thinks we won’t have school tomorrow,” Andrew says.

  “Dude, watch this,” Clayton says, stuffing the turkey from his sandwich into the top of his milk carton. He turns it on its side, hammers the bottom of the container with the side of his fist. The turkey shoots out, down the table, landing in front of two freshman girls. They stare at him, disgusted, and then move down several seats, leaving the pale, slimy meat stuck to the tabletop.

  “Nice,” Andrew says, raising his arm for a high five.

  Clayton slaps the offered hand. “And that’s how we impress the ladies,” he says, laughing.

  Evan supports his chin with his hand, elbow on the lunch table, food ignored. He stares out the window, toward the playground. This building previously housed all students, from kindergarten to graduation, but as the district grew a new facility was built for the younger grades and the high school stayed here. The playground, after years of neglect, has disintegrated. As pieces broke down, they were removed, not replaced. There are supports without teeter-totters and half the swings have fallen off, monkey ladders with no crossbars and stairs missing from the slide.

  Someone sits on the last swing, swaying into view and then disappearing. Evan sees only the sleeve of a jacket but recognizes the bright yellow and neon green stripe. He calls it the parakeet jacket, made specifically for the ski slopes, but Seth wears it daily, his lift pass fastened to the zipper.

  Leaving his lunch, Evan asks the monitor if he may use the restroom. The lady smiles and gives him a pass. Instead, he hurries around the corner and pushes through the double doors closest to the playground. The snow bites his face. He huddles against the brick wall and calls, “Seth.”

  His friend doesn’t turn his head. “I knew you’d see me. You notice everything, don’t you?”

  “What’s going on? Why are you out here?”

  “My parents are getting divorced.”

  Evan sniffles; he wipes his nose with the cuff of his shirt. “I’m sorry.”

  “I always thought my mother was the problem. I figured if anyone would mess up their marriage, it would be her. Nope. Not her. My dad. He couldn’t keep his pants on, so Mom kicked him out.”

  “Wha—”

  “An affair, Evan. My father is having an affair.” Seth leans back in the swing, opens his mouth wide to catch the snow on his waiting tongue. “Well, he was. I guess it’s over now, but my mom doesn’t care about a little thing like timing. I don’t think I blame her.”

  He wants to be supportive of his friend, to say the right things, but all he can think about at the moment is how the cold gnaws at his bones. His fevers begin in his eyes, his back, and both those places burn. “Hey, come on. Let’s go inside. You can talk to Mrs. Wright. I’ll go with you.”

  “You’ll go with me? You’re gonna need her as much as me.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  Seth drags his feet in the patchy gravel covering, heels cutting two trenches in the accumulating snow. “It was your mother. The one my dad was sleeping with.”

  “No. How do you—I mean, that can’t—”

  “Yup.”

  Evan shivers against the wall, searching for warmth, finding none. He stuffs his hands in his back jeans pockets and leans on them, arms tucked behind his back as well. His teeth won’t stop shaking. “No,” he says again.

  “You know why she wasn’t on that plane? Your mom, I mean. Because she wanted another night with my father. They were both in Cleveland. Together.” Seth snickers. “Like together, together.”

  The bell rings. Evan yanks open the door, runs down the corridor, sneakers cheeping and sliding from their wet soles. He nearly falls once, crashing into a group of three kids who shove him upright and then shove him again, against a recycling can, for good measure. It tips over, sticky aluminum cans and plastic juice bottles clattering across the floor. “Spaz,” one of them says, and another barks at him, and they all laugh. Evan ducks into the boys’ restroom and locks the stall, breath puffing, esophagus thickening with the threat of tears. He waits for the second bell, and then a few more minutes, and goes to his locker for his coat and backpack. He takes no books. He simply leaves.

  He can’t go home. He can’t stay outside, wandering the snowy streets. He needs someplace warm and private, where he can think, where no one knows him or will notice him, or will think it funny some kid is out alone in the middle of a school day. Grace’s house isn’t far from here. They always leave the garage door open—Grace broke the key off in the lock years ago and it hasn’t been repaired—and the door into the mudroom. And Aunt Robin is probably at work.

  There are no cars in the driveway. He lifts the garage door, turning the knob with one hand and yanking the bottom-most handle with the other. The door groans, tenses, and then relents, and he slips beneath before it crashes back down. He sneaks into the laundry area. What to do now? He doesn’t know. Suddenly he feels incapable of making decisions. He slumps over the washing machine, still so cold. He checks the dryer; it’s full of towels. He starts it, high heat, and then tiptoes into the kitchen, to the cabinet where Aunt Robin keeps her Tylenol. He licks his finger and fishes inside the bottle; a capsule adheres to his wet skin. He does it again, sucks the two pills into his mouth and cups his hand beneath the faucet, filling it with water. Drinks. Swallows.

  He can go lie on the couch, and if Aunt Robin finds him, tell her he was sick at school and couldn’t make it all the way home so he came here. She won’t care. Instead he limps back to the mudroom, opens the dryer, and buries his face in the warm, floral-scented towels. He rolls one for a pillow and shakes the wrinkles from two more, and then climbs atop the laundry machine. He curls his body to fit, covering with the towels, the dryer top radiating heat, his terry cloth blankets losing it almost as fast. And he bangs his fists against the shiny white metal, hammering down blows while he shouts terrible, angry things toward his mother. He regrets his words and savors them all at once. When the pain in his knuckles finally catches up with his emotional anguish, he strokes the dent he made, the indentation fist-sized, heart-sized, and uncomfortably noticeable.

  He doesn’t consider his parents perfect. Seriously, he’s fifteen. It’s a total bummer they won’t let him have a smartphone with texting and data plan. The one he uses has a screen half the size of a business card and no keyboard; he can’t play games or take pictures, or get online. They’re overprotective, and when he protests, “You let Bryce do that at my age,” they wave him off with a, “That’s different,” and all three know what different means. But they’re cool about having his friends over—in fact, they want them there—buying plenty of teenage boy food and shuttling the pubescent, long-legged, and long-nosed creatures home at all hours of the day and night. They support his love of photography, attending the annual photo club’s show with too many black-and-white self-portraits shot at odd angles and streaky, ill-focused objects someone thought looked awesome rather than inept, all mounted on faded construction paper around the gymnasium. They rarely fight, and while he has noticed his mother’s and father’s paths intersect less than they used to, that’s common for busy families. Isn’t it? They go to church together, sometimes. He also knows they get along better than most of his friends’ parents, who scream and swear at one another, storm out of rooms, work long hours to avoid interaction, and liv
e vicariously through children and hobbies. Evan thought they were happy. He never believed either capable of an affair. Cheating is something only bad people do, the worst people; even when shown on television as the romantic, only-way-to-be-together situation, it always ends badly. Some jilted wife goes insane and tries to kill the mistress. Some kid runs away and turns to a life of drugs or prostitution—or both—in a cry of pain and a way to get revenge upon the offending parent. One of the lovers discovers he has a brain tumor. Blackmail letters arrive from a mysterious stranger. And inevitably, the offended spouses discover the affair.

  Yes, they always find out.

  His mother. No. Selfish people have affairs. His mother is one of the least selfish people he knows. When he thanks her for bringing to school his forgotten gym shorts or staying up late to help with the essay he waited until the last minute to finish, she says, “I’m a mom. That’s what mothers do.” But sleeping with his Boy Scout leader? Evan can’t wrap his mind around it all. What will his father say? What will happen to his family?

  He’s known real heartache in his young life. This feels nothing like those times, deeper and more piercing and unidentifiable. And pervasive, radiating from his chest and weighing down his body on a cellular level. All he can do is run conversation after confrontation through his mind, playing his mother’s responses, rewinding their expressions, watching it again as he tweaks his dialogue and writes her contrition. He does this until he falls asleep, exhausted from his imaginary interactions. When he wakes, the tiny laundry room is suffocatingly hot, and voices murmur on the other side of the door. As quietly as possible, he hops off the machines and hides the dent beneath hastily folded towels. Then he escapes through the garage, unseen.

  The snow falls with a fury matching his own. Evan plows through it, almost jogging, focused on getting home. His chest burns. He rests, panting, head dipped down. His kneecaps shift beneath his hands. Then he’s moving again, his open coat behind him like a cape. His house is ahead, front lights on, windows bright. All three cars are parked in the driveway. He bursts through the door, startling his parents and brother. “I walked home,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you call?” his mother asks. She tries to remove his hat. Evan twitches from her reach. “I would have come to get—”

  “Mr. Bailey, Mom?”

  “Evan.”

  “Seth told me. He heard his parents arguing. About you. About what you and Mr. Bailey . . . did.”

  His father comes behind his mother, threads his arm around her waist, protecting her. Choosing her. “Not now,” he says.

  “Holy crap,” Bryce says.

  His father glares at his brother, and then back to Evan. “That’s enough, both of you.”

  “They’re getting divorced, Mom.”

  “I said that’s enough,” his father shouts.

  “You know about this?” Evan rips off his hat and straightens as tall as he can, still eight inches shorter than Will. “How can you both just stand there and—”

  He doesn’t see the blow coming, but feels it, thick and meaty against his ear and jaw and cheekbone. He trips over his feet, flails, grabs the pan from the stove; it flips, spewing vegetables onto his jeans, the floor. Evan regains his balance, stares at his father with nostrils flapping, his hands cupped to his face.

  “Go to your room,” Will says.

  He does, slipping on the greasy linoleum, catching the doorjamb to keep from falling, and then takes the stairs two at a time to his bedroom. Slams the door, barricading it with his body, arms and legs spread-eagle. His breath rattles in his throat. Moments later, he hears Bryce’s door swing shut. He squishes his cheek up and down, as if it has bones to break, but finds only soft tissue and fire. Turning the lock in his doorknob, he flops on his unmade bed and stares at one of his three framed Julian Goetz photos, Still Life with Invisible Hands, Number 7.

  He knows the story behind it. For his senior project in college, Goetz showed a series of nineteen pictures, everyday objects engaged in their tasks. Eggs in a cast-iron skillet, sizzling on a 1950s stove top. Dishes in a sink, tap water disappearing into the foam. A paintbrush dancing over a wall, a line of gray trailing behind. A crisp man’s shirt on an ironing board. And number seven, a smiling glass Kool-Aid pitcher suspended in the air, pouring liquid over ice in a waiting glass.

  The brilliance of the series, though, is how the photographs are staged. The eggs are being flipped, the dishes washed, the shirt ironed, and each task is performed by a pair of arms without hands. And the arms aren’t simply pinching a spatula between them, or draping a rag over the handless wrist. No, in each picture the arms are positioned as if the hands exist, and the props—iron, pitcher, paintbrush, dirty ice cream bowl—are held in place by the invisible.

  He doesn’t know how Goetz pulled it off; had he not read the explanation of the series claiming otherwise, Evan would have simply thought the scenes were photographed in their entirety and the hands digitally removed. Goetz insisted that wasn’t the case, but didn’t reveal the secrets behind the pictures. He did, however, disclose his reasoning for the name:

  Yes, I know they aren’t still lifes in the strictest sense—there’s more motion than the technique usually allows, though you will notice I pulled visually and conceptually from traditional works like Diego Velasquez’s Old Woman Cooking Eggs and Joachim Beuckelaer’s Four Elements series. The focus here is twofold, however. Yes, there are the inanimate objects, mundane objects no less. Things we encounter on a daily basis while engaged in our so-called normal activities. Our “regular” living. That is to say, nothing special. So what is the point, then? People make grand pleas for carpe diem, and often that is just a code word for backpacking across Europe or learning to skydive or buying the expensive car you always dreamed of. Is being alive not enough? Is it not still life if you’re making fried eggs for your kids’ breakfast? What if the tasks are being performed by someone with no hands? Does it make them more fantastic? More worthy? Do we think, “Yes, it’s just washing dishes, but, wow, she doesn’t have hands so, you know, that’s pretty amazing.” How do we perceive all those in-between moments when we’re alive but engaged in something we esteem so little? Why are some labors acceptable for certain people, but beneath or above others, and how do we make those value judgments? These are some of the questions I’m trying to explore with these photos.

  Evan coughs, his throat raw, the illness he forgot about in his anger roaring again in the silence of his bedroom. He expected his mother to come to him by now, to apologize or explain. He still wants her, even though nothing she says can make things better. Those times in the hospital, she made no promises other than I will stay with you, no matter what. Through chest tubes, puddles of blood-spiked vomit like coffee grounds, those first torturous steps after surgery, headaches, fevers, sleeplessness, constipation, she stayed. Sometimes in the bed beside him, often in a chair, him in her lap, or with her head on his mattress, holding his hand. She was his constant. Even as he grew and separated, he still knew she would be there for him if he needed her. Now, he wasn’t sure. She went to see her lover—the word explodes in his head—leaving her family and lying about it. She’s only alive because she chose him, chose to stay an extra day with him. That, and because she overheard some man asking if he could please make it home for his wife’s birthday.

  And Julian Goetz was on the same plane.

  Evan throws his legs off the side of his bed, standing, the sudden movement curling his vision at the edges. He sways, sits until the vasovagal response passes, and then is at his desk, shaking People from old homework and PSAT practice handouts. Something Grace said when she gave him the magazine. “I guess someone won’t ever be able to celebrate her birthday again.” He didn’t understand, but stuffed the comment away with the glossy pages, deep into his backpack, and then purposely buried on his desk. He couldn’t look at the photos for fear of seeing his mother’s face in every one of them. But now he flips the pages, the back of his hand held aga
inst his forehead, blocking the images. He skims the captions until he reads this one:

  A love note, written by Goetz to his new wife, Ada. He was traveling home for her birthday from a shoot in Los Angeles.

  No. It can’t be.

  His mother gave her seat to Julian Goetz.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  He shakes the contents of his backpack onto the bed—pencils, folders, his biology binder, a crushed notice about holiday break—and crams clothes into it, random articles he grabs from the floor without thought to cleanliness. Dashing across the hallway, to the bathroom, he collects his toothbrush and medication. What else do I need? Money. He has his wallet, the credit card his father gave him—“For real emergencies, Evan. And being hungry isn’t an emergency.”—and four dollars. It’ll have to do, for now.

  He listens, hears nothing. He can be down the stairs and out the front door before anyone notices, but where’s the drama in that? Instead he opens his window, climbs on the roof of the front porch, and jumps down. He stumbles, snow attacking him, sneaking up his pants and down his collar, and he thinks, I should have put my boots on, at the very least.

  No going back now.

  It’s six o’clock, but dark. His breath is loud in his ears, magnified by the ski cap he wears, insulated, scratchy, the way it sounds in his underwater dreams. His thoughts are red, incoherent, a swirl of mist and hormones and upheaval.

  He needs to speak with Ada Goetz.

  Balling his hands into the sleeve of his coat, he walks with head down, and ten minutes later enters the first Cumberland Farms he comes across, the signs announcing today as FREE COFFEE day, any size. He half fills the largest Styrofoam cup, and then adds caramel creamer to the top rim. Dumps a little out in the garbage can so the lid will fit without overflow. Then he holds the cup up to the clerk, offering a toast to small blessings. “Do you have a pay phone here?”