Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  “And my mama loved him. He reminded her of my daddy.”

  “Was she able to stay, in the house, I mean?”

  “Funny you should ask that. Yes, she was. I think it broke her heart, though, watching her things carried off by greedy neighbors who argued to pay a quarter less. She didn’t go out much and went downhill pretty fast. Here,” Joy says, tapping her temple. “I was there, checking in on her every day, but she needed ’round-the-clock care and the good Lord knew we couldn’t pay for it. My brother and I were starting to look at options, and then we find an envelope in the mail. From Mr. Julian Goetz. Truth be told, I didn’t remember who that was. But Mama heard the name and says, ‘It’s that nice man with the camera.’

  “There was a check for twenty-five thousand dollars and a note telling us he won some contest with his pictures of our family. And he wanted us to have the prize money to use for Mama’s care. I nearly fainted dead right there. I had prayers answered before, but never like this, let me tell you. So we were able to hire a live-in for my mama until she went to be with Jesus eight months later. At home. In her own bed. The one she shared with my daddy.”

  Ada doesn’t tell her the Pulitzer Prize pays less than half that. Ten thousand dollars. She touches another photo, the one of Nona in a chair, surrounded by her things, eyes vacant, old skin brittle with loss. “This is the one that hung in Julian’s hallway.”

  “The cover of the magazine,” Joy says, flipping it to expose the matching image, a game of Memory. Then she turns to the next photo, the same woman in the same chair with Joy’s arms around her neck. They laugh and cry together. “This one is my favorite. I have it in my bedroom. On the table next to her chair. This chair. Come with me.”

  Ada follows her to the master bedroom. Cobwebs hang from the tips of the four-poster bed, unmade. The chair is in the corner, faded red fabric, all softness worn away. “I sit there when I read my Bible. Every morning and every night, most days.”

  “Why was . . . I mean, do you know why Julian happened by that day?”

  “Providence, my dear. That’s all I can tell you.” Joy hesitates, squishing her face toward the center, all of it, her skin wrinkling around her nose. “Listen, dear, I’m guessing you don’t have family, since you’re here on Christmas Day. And I can see you’re hurting something fierce. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how much pain comes from losing someone you knew so short a time?”

  “How—”

  “My first husband. Cancer ate him alive. He had it when we got married and didn’t know it. Was gone not two years later. I didn’t know he’d take half of me with him. That two becoming one flesh? It’s the real deal.

  “I didn’t think I’d get over it. But I did. And I met Vinny. I ignored him for months, though, ’cause my first husband was Vinny too. Vinny One and Vinny Two, we joke now. But the Lord stitched me up and healed me something good, so I could love again. It happens.”

  “I believe you,” Ada says. “Joy, can I take your picture?”

  She shrugs. “Sure, why not? Got a camera?”

  “It’s in the car.”

  So Ada makes the trip again, from stranger’s home to Julian’s Jeep, collects the camera and the framed photo, and finds Joy again, still in the bedroom, though she’s brushed her short, feathery silver hair and changed her sweater to a button-down jacket, free of baby drool and crusty white icing. The camera, cold from the car, feels less alien in her hands. Still heavy. Still his. But she’s not as intimidated by its shiny blackness, its lights and automated hisses.

  She tells Joy, “This might sound odd, but I was hoping I could take the photo with this.” She holds up the frame with Nona’s image preserved behind glass.

  Joy takes the frame, positions it on the red chair, Nona’s chair, balanced on the bottom corner and resting cock-eyed in the seat, sides of the frame indenting the fabric of the arms. Then she stands behind the chair, leaning over to hold the frame with both hands as if it is her mother, and it’s that day when Julian came, and what was best for her hurt her more than anyone should have to hurt. Ada snaps the photograph, and in the aftermath of the flash sees Nona’s tears evaporate from her chair.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  She knows she shouldn’t, but Katherine goes to see Thomas.

  He’s living at the Clearwater Motel, an extended-stay place where the social service department also houses displaced families and those waiting for rooms in assisted living facilities. Then there are the men who are between women, the women who are between men, those who are unemployed, who are unable to pay security deposits or have bad credit. And, probably, those who earn money in less than legal ways. Katherine parks beside Thomas’s car and locks her own, holds her purse more tightly than a running back secures the football, and climbs the outside stairway to the second-tier balcony. Room 230 is at the end.

  Thomas opens the door. “I didn’t think you would come.”

  She steps inside, the smell of take-out Mexican, shaving cream, Jim Beam, and unwashed clothing mingling in a haze of desperation, carried by the steam still lingering from a recent shower. “I didn’t want to.”

  “Then you wouldn’t be here,” he says.

  He’s left several messages for her since Susanna asked him to leave. She told Will about each of them, going so far as asking if he wanted to hear. He didn’t. So she says now, “I deleted it,” and he understands the code. Thomas’s voice in this morning’s call sounded so much more needy.

  Katherine loves to be needed.

  “How are you?” she asks, moving a pile of folded white t-shirts from the chair closest to the door, and sitting.

  “Well, my wife kicked me out. My son refuses to talk to me. I’m living in this crap hole.” He unscrews the lid from the half-empty bottle of whiskey beside the television, pours an inch into the glass. Swirls it. “My life is pretty much a punch line.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?” He gulps the contents of his glass. “That’s great.”

  “Thomas—”

  “You still have your family. How’d you pull that one off?”

  “I told the truth,” Katherine says. She won’t tell him about Will’s indiscretions, how their adulterous equality probably saved their marriage, or at least contributed to the lack of blame shifting and a willingness to be responsible for their own misdeeds. She doesn’t mention the crash, how it changed everything. How it still ripples through each day, Evan’s heart a second time, and becomes a thing to which all can be measured, and all is found insignificant.

  “How virtuous.”

  “I didn’t mean it—”

  “I know,” he says, and his body softens, rounding at the edges in a way only she sees because she knows him. He’s butter, left overnight on the kitchen counter, so solid looking until a knife cuts through it.

  She’s his knife.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “How’d she find out? Some friend saw you and I together a few too many times and told Susanna, so she asked.” He picks up the whiskey bottle again, but changes his mind and instead finds a Sprite in the mini-fridge. Holds it up toward her. She shakes her head and he closes the door. “My honesty didn’t pay out quite as well. But, I do have the Clearwater, so cheers.” He pops open his can, raises it to the room, and takes a long swallow.

  The cell phone buzzes in Katherine’s purse. A text. She ignores it.

  “You look nice,” Thomas says.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “It’s not a come-on.”

  “Fine, then. You look nice too.”

  He turns sideways and flattens his untucked oxford against his stomach. “And thinner, huh?”

  “Now that you mention it,” she says.

  “The divorce diet,” he says. “It should be patented.”

  She bites the inside of her cheek at the D word. “Are you sure there’s no chance you two can—”

  “Already heard from her lawyer.”

  Katherine’s phone vibrates
again.

  “I really am sorry.”

  “I know.”

  Tears ooze into her eyes. If she blinks, they’ll spill onto her face, so she tries not to, but her lids close on their own volition, and she’s left with two warm, salty rivulets on either side of her nose, slipping around her nostrils and converging in her philtrum before she licks the wetness away. If she had known beforehand, but that’s the nature of affairs—people don’t think of the consequences, but constantly sidestep them. Don’t be seen. Don’t get caught. Don’t let those texts be read, those calls be answered by your spouse. It’s unfair. Thomas has lost everything. She has more than she deserves.

  Thomas, as always, knows her mind. “It’s not your fault. I did it to myself. Sometimes you get what you deserve, you know? And when you don’t, that’s called grace. Or, at least that’s what they say over at this new church I’m going to.”

  Church. God. How many turn to the intangible in their nightmare times? She has no judgment over where Thomas seeks his comfort. Once it was beside her, in bed. Now it’s religion. It’s been such since creation. Feed the body or feed the soul. One helps in the forgetting, the other in the facing. She’s been there. She’d rather forget, too, but sometimes it’s not possible.

  Another vibration from her purse.

  “Kate. Do you still love me?”

  If she’s honest with herself, she knows she does. If she’s honest with herself, she doesn’t feel a fraction for Will what she does for Thomas. It doesn’t matter.

  “I need my family.”

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  Her phone rings now, Will’s tone, an obnoxious wha-wha-wha chosen by Evan, the sound a construction vehicle makes when it moves in reverse. She unsnaps her phone pocket and swipes the call on. “Hey.”

  “Where are you?” Will asks, sounding frantic.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Evan. The school called. He’s on his way to the hospital by ambulance.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. The nurse wasn’t clear. Something about his chest and trouble breathing. I didn’t wait for more. I’m on my way there.”

  “I’ll meet you. It’ll take me twenty minutes.”

  Will hangs up. Katherine jams her phone in her coat pocket—her new coat, still wool but gray this time, subdued and inconspicuous—and opens the door.

  “Kate?”

  “I have to go.”

  She skids on the stairs, the pointy heel of her boot catching on something unseen in the slush, grabs the metal handrail and continues to her car, starts it. Every light is red as she drives the main road through town; she shouts angrily at each one, “Come on, come on,” but they ignore her. She can’t help but consider this some cosmic punishment. She went to see Thomas. Something bad happens to Evan. She reminds herself of the favorite argument of her college classmates, applied to everything from laboratory reports to dating. Correlation does not imply causation. She repeats it, her invocation.

  Correlation does not imply causation.

  Correlation does not imply causation.

  Correlation does not imply causation.

  Another red light. She swears. And then she starts to pray, the way every child begins, with Dear God.

  She stops. She has nothing left to bargain.

  With Evan the first time, she made her promises and did her best to keep them, giving to this unknown God what all people give when they make such bargains—their goodness. But she doesn’t have any left, if she ever had it at all. There is no reason for God—should he exist, should he listen, should he act—to do a single thing to help her now. And yet, hope permeates her skin, warming her, a sensation so close to a lover’s touch she blushes. And when she parks the car in the emergency room lot, she opens her hands, rests them in the solid center of the steering wheel, and whispers, “Please.” Her prayer, one word sheathed around all she knows and doesn’t know to say.

  And she runs through the sliding doors of the hospital.

  “I’m looking for my son, Evan Walker,” she tells the intake nurse.

  “Katherine.” It’s Will, waiting for her.

  “Is he okay? What’s going on? Will, tell me—”

  “It’s not his heart.”

  She slides her fingers down her face, pulling, gasping as her eyes turn upward, toward the ceiling. Toward heaven. “Thank you,” she breathes, and then to Will, “Where is he?”

  “Come on. Back here.”

  He holds her elbow, steers her around a laundry cart, a blood pressure cuff on a stand, but it’s not necessary because she feels so easy here, in this place where milliseconds and plaid curtains separate life and death. The familiarity will never leave her.

  She finds Evan on a bed, and her eyes read the monitor above the bed, the only room in the small hospital equipped for cardiac patients, the one where heart attacks come, where her son must come. His oxygen saturations are bouncing around the mid-80s, an acceptable level for him but an indication of a serious problem in any one of them. His heart rate and respiration are normal. But his face. Bruised around his left eye and cheek, eyelid drooping, lip split and swollen. Blood in his hair.

  She brushes his knee, the top of his head. “Oh, baby, what happened?”

  “You happened,” Bryce says. She hadn’t noticed him in the corner.

  “I don’t—”

  “He got his head kicked in by a bunch of guys who called you a whore.”

  “Bryce,” Will says.

  “No, Dad. She did this to him. They kicked him in the chest, because they knew . . . they knew about . . . and he couldn’t breathe, and I . . . the nurse sent me in the ambulance with him so he wouldn’t be alone, and I thought . . .” He hiccups, chokes on his saliva.

  “Bryce, I can’t apologize more than I have.”

  “You’re not going to,” Will says. “Because this isn’t only about you.”

  “Will,” Katherine says, shaking her head.

  Bryce jumps from the chair, it screeching backwards, slamming into the wall. “She’s the one, Dad. She—”

  “Then I am too,” Will says. “Your mother hasn’t done anything I haven’t.”

  Silence, and then Bryce says, “What?”

  “You heard me. I had an affair too. Your mother didn’t want to say anything because she didn’t want you mad at both of us. She didn’t want you, both of you, to feel like you had no one. But you know what? You have us. We screwed up big time, but we’re here, and we’re going to put this family back together, piece by broken piece, no matter what it takes. You hear?”

  Bryce turns his head.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” Bryce says. He looks at both Will and Katherine. Blinks. Nods. “Yeah.”

  “Jesus,” Evan croaks, his enlarged lips hardly moving.

  “What?” Will asks.

  “Sometimes it takes falling onto Jesus.”

  Will scrapes his stubble with his fingernails, brows creasing, and he rattles the change in his pocket. “Uh, yeah. Okay. Well, whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

  Katherine rolls Evan’s hand in hers, and she remembers when she would kiss his knuckles, counting between each loud, sloppy puckering sound, making mistakes as she went. One, two, nineteen, eighty-seven. And he would giggle and say, “Nooooo,” correcting her math. “It’s three, Mommy. It’s four.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. You taught me. You can’t forget already.”

  “Oh, you’re right. Let me try again. One, two. Four hundred and thirty-six,” she’d say, bringing on another eruption of giggles.

  When Will and Bryce aren’t around, and he’s not on painkillers with wire tentacles sticking to his chest, she’ll ask him what it means to fall onto Jesus. But for now, she lifts his hand and gently brushes her lips against the nubbin of bone where his pointer and hand join, and Evan manages a wry half smile and whispers, “One.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  She
’s not driving to Wyoming, where the emaciated boy in the photo lives. He’s still alive; Ada found several stories in his hometown paper online, detailing his recovery. And Julian’s photo essay, painstakingly recording how his treatments ravaged both him and his mother—physically, emotionally, and financially, in hopes of saving his life.

  His name is Greyer DiGiulio, the youngest son of a single mother, never long with the father of either of her sons. His older brother Joshua was diagnosed with leukemia and died within a year. Doctors discovered Greyer with the same cancer at eleven, the same age his brother was. Natalie DiGiulio didn’t know how she would live through it all a second time. Ada had reached her on the phone.

  “Julian called and asked if he could chronicle Grey’s story, and I said yes, not because I wanted him there, but because I really needed money. I did my research. I knew who he was. Anything Julian Goetz did was going to get national attention, and I figured we’d have a much better chance of fund-raising with his name behind our story. I still had outstanding bills from Josh, my credit cards were maxed, I’d used all my paid leave so every day I needed to be home with Grey we had no income. Friends and family did the best they could to support us, but none of them were much better off than we were.

  “So Julian came and took pictures, and was as unobtrusive as possible. And then he was done.” Ada recognizes the romantic treble in Natalie’s voice; she’d fallen in some semblance of love with this photographer who was privy to the most intimate moments of their lives. She tells how, like Joy Robertson, she received a substantial check in the mail after Julian won the Pulitzer for Greyer’s story.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” she said. “I knew that was how much the Prize paid out, and I thought it was generous of him to donate it all to us. But when I went to put a little of the money on Josh’s back bill, the hospital told me his outstanding balance had been paid in full. Anonymously. I’m almost positive it was Julian, but when I asked him, he just told me to thank God.