Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Hortense looks again, the curious smile still there. “Julian would be thrilled,” she says, and once she’s out the door, Ada sags. Her feet, damp in her tights, leave footprints on the wooden floor. Not quite a month unlived and the house smells of must and emptiness. She opens windows, despite the chill outside. The cold air holds a similar solitude, perhaps because the molecules move so slowly, they never touch. Even the atomic world knows loneliness.

  She showers, notices a jelled lump of fat above each hip bone, testament to her diet over the past weeks. Her breasts seem fuller; she lifts them, drops them, and the bounce feels heavier than usual. She turns to the side, tugs the extra skin at her navel, stretches it as far as possible, and then she lets go. It snaps back with a jiggle, blotchy from all her pinching. She likes how she looks with the extra weight. She thinks Julian would have liked it too. He worried he was hurting her each time their bones ground against the other, pelvis and ribs mostly. She never noticed but he wasn’t nearly as pointy as her.

  She wears his bathrobe over her flannel nightgown. His wool socks on her feet. And instead of sleeping in the guest room, she turns down the blankets on Julian’s bed. Their bed. She hasn’t changed the sheets since before the crash, so his scent rises up to her, released from beneath the down comforter. She loosens all the tucked-in sides and rolls up in the layers of bedding so she’s surrounded by him. But she doesn’t cry. Camden is right, the tears are only for the living, and she’s done weeping over herself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  His face is almost completely healed, only a thick scab near the corner of his eyebrow that pulls his skin when he squints or wrinkles his forehead. His mother grabs him when he walks by and smears a blob of Neosporin on the spot. “You don’t want it to scar,” she says.

  “Like it matters,” Evan says. “I have a million scars.”

  “Not on your face.”

  He tries to remember what he can about the fight. He’d been going to Spanish, without Grace. Usually they walked together but they weren’t speaking, still, since the afternoon on the bus when he sat with the kids from First Baptist. It wasn’t a planned shunning; the next day she didn’t sit with him on the morning bus, and he ignored her on the afternoon route, and once through the weekend both had decided independent of the other they wouldn’t be the first to give in. So be it, and a week and a half later, neither had acquiesced.

  It was a few tenth-grade jocks. Not the upper-tier ones, who were smart and popular and the better athletes of the school. The fringe jocks, second-string players, the ones still on the modified or JV teams, with grades hovering at the eligibility cutoff and a referral every now and then to the vice principal’s office for unruly lunchroom antics. These boys searched out reasons to be angry and aggressive, which is why sports appealed to them, even as they lacked ability. Biggish fish, small pond, and all that. In another, larger district, the boys who beat up Evan wouldn’t have made the mascot team.

  They came down the hall, one of the three jocks stopping for a drink at the fountain and then spitting a mouthful of water at a girl passing by. The other two laughed and shoved and then noticed Evan.

  “Hey, Seth,” the redhead shouted, “here comes the home wrecker’s spawn.”

  Evan was startled. He didn’t see Seth at all, who was at his locker somewhere behind Evan. He’d gotten so used to keeping his head turned away and mind occupied with petty distractions while passing this area of the corridor, he’d intentionally forgotten his friend stopped in this area after every period—Seth one of the few students who refused to carry extra books for other classes because he regularly forgot them here and there, under chairs and on top of towel dispensers in the restroom.

  “Don’t start, McGowan,” Seth said, and Evan noticed him now, off to the side and equidistant between the boys and Evan, the third point of a triangle. Too much geometry, Evan recalls thinking, but didn’t have time to consider much of anything after that because the redhead sauntered toward him and knocked his books from his arms.

  “So, Walker, what do you think about your mama being a whore?”

  Evan had never been in a fight. He didn’t know how to begin, but when this beefy kid called his mother that word, Evan couldn’t ignore it. He lowered his head, an undersized, underweight linebacker in Pee-Wee Football, and rammed his shoulder into McGowan’s gut.

  He heard the Oof, and then swearing and stampeding, and the other two boys, one arm trapped by each of them, were holding him upright. McGowan punched him in the face.

  “Stop,” Seth said.

  “Shut up, Bailey. He has it coming. If you weren’t such a chicken we wouldn’t have to do it for you.” And McGowan hit him again, near the mouth this time.

  “Evan!” Grace now, and she pulled at the arms of the kid on his right, trying to force his grip to release. “Let him go.”

  “The girl has more balls than you do, Walker. Both of you.” McGowan laughed. “You still have that bad heart? Maybe we should check that out?”

  He saw the red-haired, red-faced boy coming at him, and his captors pulling him down, then he felt it, a crushing jolt as McGowan jammed the bottom of his sneaker into his ribs.

  The boys dropped him.

  Against his cheek, the floor felt cold and gritty and then slippery. With my blood. He moved his head the tiniest bit, feeling the wet warmth beneath it. Then he noticed he couldn’t breathe.

  Grace saw it. She screamed for help. Seth knelt beside him, rolled him onto his back. “Breathe, Evan. Come on.” Suddenly a crowd gathered around him and Seth tried to wave them back, but they pushed in and the heat of their bodies washed over Evan, a sauna of scented hair spray and chewing gum, and he clutched his throat, suddenly afraid, after everything, he’d die right here on the high school floor.

  Please, no.

  “Move, move. Move now.”

  The crowd jostled and opened, and the nurse strapped an oxygen mask over Evan’s nose. He drew a frayed breath, then another. It hurt, but he could manage it. Grace stood against the lockers, sobbing, Seth’s arms around her, and then Bryce was there, out of nowhere like Superman. And the paramedics. Then he was loaded into the ambulance with his brother and carried away to the hospital.

  He stayed home from school for a week, Grace visiting him every day, bringing his homework assignments and giving him the gossip. Seth called. “I just can’t come by,” he said. “Your mom. I can’t see her.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t want those guys to do that.”

  “I know that too.”

  “You know everything.”

  He doesn’t know if he and Seth will be friends again. He won’t ask, yet.

  The beating skews the social scales, again, sympathy tipping it toward his side, and he’s no longer a pariah. Grace had been right. Short memories. New scandal. Eventually no one has the self-discipline to care anymore.

  He doesn’t return to the Baptist lunch table.

  “Your room is worse than a sty,” his mother tells him. “Clean it.”

  “I’m injured,” Evan says.

  “Clean it gently.”

  He does still hurt, every move, every breath, but the pain is receding. He sorts his clothes into piles—probably dirty, mostly clean, and unsure. He fills his hamper with the dirty laundry, stuffs his drawers with the clean items, and hesitantly sniffs each article of clothing in the questionable pile, deciding most of those can be put away too. As he forces the last pair of jeans into the dresser, he finds a rumpled sheet of notebook paper folded in the back pocket. Opens it.

  daviddickenson@firstbaptistfirststreet.org

  555-4288

  For the parts of the Bible you want, that talk about Jesus,

  look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

  Evan has a Bible. The Methodist church gave one to every kid in his confirmation class. He hasn’t opened it in the two years he’s had it. It’s still wrapped in plastic in the bottom of his clo
set; he digs through the summer shorts he tossed in there instead of packing them away at the end of last season, the too-small shoes, his sleeping bag with the broken zipper, dozens of photography magazines. He bites a hole in the cellophane, pulls it open with his teeth, static attaching the wrapping to his chin, and then his hand when he brushes it from his face. He settles on his bed and flips the book open to the table of contents, figures he’ll start with Matthew since it’s listed first, and after skipping through the long list of names and the birth of Jesus—he knows about that already—he reads.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The doorbell rings as Katherine zips on her boots over her jeans, and then slips a stack of thin, metal bangle bracelets on her wrist. She figures it’s the UPS man because he’s at the front of the house, and everyone they know comes through the back door, directly into the kitchen. Which, at the moment is in utter disarray as she and Will have been removing wallpaper, and it’s tedious and messy work. The online videos showing how to painlessly take it down with a steamer and spray bottle of vinegar? Yeah, all lies. They’ve not finished one corner yet, each small section requiring scraping, soaping, sponging, more spraying, and some solution left overnight which dissolves the glue and also pocks the drywall behind it. Will suggests demolishing the walls and building new ones. “It’ll be faster, easier, and probably cheaper.”

  “Wait until we paint the cabinets,” she tells him.

  Earrings next. One on, and then the other, but she can’t find the back for it. “Evan, come on,” she calls, crouching on the floor. “We have to go.”

  The doorbell rings again.

  She swears, unable to find the bitty silver nut, so she takes out both earrings and, on the way through the dining room, drops them into the Depression-era candy dish on the sideboard.

  “Evan!”

  “Coming,” he shouts back from his bedroom upstairs.

  They have family counseling in twenty minutes. Will and Bryce are meeting them there.

  Whoever is at the door knocks now. Katherine groans and thinks, Give it a rest already. She opens to find a young woman there, dwarfed in a puffy, calf-length coat and faux shearling-topped snow boots. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb your evening, ma’am. My name is Ada Goetz and I was hoping I could speak with Evan Walker.”

  The world implodes, every scrap of matter spins, spins, spins as if trapped in a tornado, funneling down to the point of origin, until it disappears, sucked into another plane of existence, and all that remains is stark, white silence.

  And then vibrations. Evan, clattering down the stairs with his jacket flying behind him, his gangly legs, his sneakers on his hands as if they were feet and he plans to walk on them. And then he talks to her, his mouth moving without sound, and she has the sense he’s within a bubble she must pop before his words can be free, so she extends her pinky and pokes it toward him, into this invisible bubble, and her hearing returns.

  “Mom?” Evan asks, face contorted with concern.

  “Evan.” She clears her throat. “This is Ada Goetz.”

  “You’re on your way out,” Ada says.

  Katherine looks at her son, who carries the same expression she must, this blanched, tight-jawed kind of calm that appears on bodies in morgues, spread on gurneys in wait of their autopsies—stiff with rigor mortis beneath a disingenuous, sleepy ease. Only Evan’s eyes betray him, his lids pulled back as far as they’ll go, jerking his pupils to one side in communication. Her own eyes sting with too much openness.

  Ada hunches deeper into her too-big coat. “I shouldn’t have come unannounced.”

  “No,” both Katherine and Evan say at the same time. The young woman blinks at the forceful puff of the word in her face.

  “What we mean, is, you’re not intruding. Please, come in,” Katherine says.

  “Are you sure?” Ada feels the discomfort between them.

  “Yes, absolutely. I apologize. We were going out, to . . . the store, but it’s nothing that can’t wait.”

  “Yeah, nothing,” Evan parrots.

  “Thank you,” Ada says. She cautiously steps over the threshold, struggles from her boots, sheds her coat, and Katherine sees a girl, not a woman, someone who isn’t much older than Bryce, wearing a long corduroy skirt and oversized cowl-neck sweater, drowning in her clothes.

  “Come, sit down. Evan, take her coat,” Katherine says, an edge in her voice, the razor of a dictator. Ada flinches, smoothing her skirt beneath the back of her thighs before settling on the love seat, on the end closest to the front door. “Can I get you a drink? We have water and soda, tea. I can put on coffee.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “I’m going to make tea. Won’t take long. Evan, could you call your dad and tell him we won’t be meeting him at the store?”

  “He’ll want to know why.”

  “You’re right. Well, then come help me in the kitchen a minute. You know I can’t reach the tea bags.”

  They both hurry into the other room. Katherine runs the water and turns on the vent fan above the stove to mask their voices. Evan says, “You can’t reach the tea bags?”

  “It was the only thing I could think of.”

  He holds out his phone. “Dad’s called twice.”

  “Dial him back and give it to me.”

  She fills the teakettle and drops it on the stove, cranks the burner to high. The wet bottom sizzles, and a burnt smell fills the kitchen, some remnant of last night’s dinner still on the element. She takes the phone from Evan and says, “Hon, you and Bryce go ahead without us.”

  “What’s wrong?” Will asks.

  “Nothing’s wrong. We just . . . look, I’ll explain when you get home. I can’t right now.”

  “Kate.”

  “Ada Goetz is sitting in our living room.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly.” The kettle screeches. “Will, I have to go.” She hangs up.

  “That went well,” Evan says.

  She fills three mismatched mugs—each faded by the dishwasher, two with half-visible cartoon drawings of cows lamenting their lack of morning coffee, and one with a pithy saying about bacon’s perfection—with the steaming water, drops a tea bag in each, and nudges Evan. “Carry yours.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “Just take it.”

  He follows her back to Ada, and she says, “It’s super hot,” as she gives the mug to her. Ada nods and worms her cold fingers into the handle, pressing against Katherine’s tea-heated ones, the temperature difference shocking. That’s death, his death, Katherine thinks, soaked into her. The absurdity of it all comes over her as she shuffles coasters onto the coffee table. No amount of hospitality will resurrect her husband, and if it could, what has Katherine done but throw a mug of cheap Lipton at this poor woman, no sugar, no milk, pastry, not even her good teacups, displayed in the china cabinet across the room.

  “I did try to call before I came,” Ada says, setting her mug on the coaster. “It said the number had been disconnected.”

  “We dropped our house line,” Katherine says. She and Evan sit opposite Ada, on the sofa. “Just recently. We all have cell phones now.”

  “I don’t want to take up more of your time than necessary.”

  “Please, don’t worry about it. We have all night.”

  Ada glances back and forth between the two of them, absorbing their tension. “I think,” she begins. Hesitates. “I spoke with Ray White, Evan. He said you had spoken to him while I was . . . away. I promise you, he kept everything you said in confidence, but thought . . . well, he thought it might be good for me to come see you.”

  Evan looks at Katherine. She nods. Tell her. Tell her everything.

  “I was, I mean, I am a really big fan of your husband. No, fan isn’t the right word. He . . .” Evan scratches his knees, twitches, wading through his thoughts. “He’s been an inspiration. To my photography.”

  Ada smiles. “That’s really nice to hear
,” she says, and Katherine recognizes the dishonesty in the curve of her mouth, not intentional, not malicious, and most likely not even known to her. Katherine’s seen it so many times before, when mothers she’d met during her hospital stays with Evan, or through this support group or that fundraiser, smile at the memory of their children taken too soon and say things like Even though she was only here a short time, she taught me so much and He touched so many lives and I know he was put on this earth for a purpose. And they believe their words. But she knows every single one of them would trade almost anything for another five minutes with their child. So Ada smiles at Evan, taking comfort in yet another person inspired by her husband, another life he touched, but in places perhaps she doesn’t admit she has, she’d take a living Julian Goetz who did nothing but love her, over a dead Julian Goetz who touched a million people with his camera.

  Well, at least Katherine would.

  “I went to the funeral,” Evan continues, and she stops her head from spinning toward him because she did not know this. “I saw you there, leaving there, but I didn’t get to talk to you. So I just wanted to tell you that. How I felt. I wanted you to know. I thought, well, I know it doesn’t mean all that much, but maybe it would help somehow. Just a little.”

  “It does, Evan. Honestly.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to come all the way up here. It’s a long drive, and all.”

  “I’ve gone farther,” she says, and stands. “And I’ve also taken enough of your time. Thank you again for inconveniencing yourselves for my sake.”