Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  Janet sat down and leaned against the tree, felt the wet seep through her jeans. She knows he did it, that the speculation about other people being involved was shit, a desperate attempt by a lawyer with zero to divert attention from the obvious. The newspaper passed it on to sell more papers. Fool cops and lawyers, reporters—any answer you want’s right there in the school picture. Anybody with half an ounce of humanity would have been kind to a boy who couldn’t force himself to look out his own eyes, and maybe he wanted that kindness back. Or maybe he hated her for it. Janet gazed out at what she could still see of the flattened boggy fields and the cluster of abandoned farm buildings. Somewhere over there stood the corncrib where they found him. The rusting equipment, blacker shadows against the darkening gray. To the east, behind her, the rectangled light of a single inhabited trailer in the distance across the fields. Soon the sky and the ground will turn the same dull black, the color of the tree itself. I won’t go back to the car, she whispered. Not yet. She took off her shoes and rubbed them in the soft slick of mud.

  She thought of his seeing her, after so many years, seeing her.

  Everything’s lonely today. Even his hands on the wheel are lonely today.

  (And her mother asking quietly, but really shouting from the trees and darkness, What in God’s name does any of this have to do with you?)

  Her white tennis shoes in the parking lot. And his jarring the door open and her leaning in to say hi, to shake his hand and say, It’s good to see you, Travis—and his taking that hand and yanking, the groceries falling, crushing bananas, a box of Cream of Wheat.

  Please. A voice that used to say, Try it again, Travis. Take your time, Travis. Try it again, Travis. Now the voice says, I don’t know what you want. Him not knowing either. On the highway now.

  And her mother watches her mourn in the dark of a town in Illinois nobody’s ever heard of—for a murderer, a cold-blooded heinous raper killer, and Janet whispers, but really shouts, Mom, the coroner found no evidence of rape. It was in the paper. Something else he wanted. She looks out into the pale nothing, the dark flat churned ground. She thinks about living here, about knowing this place well enough to see one mile different from another. She thinks of how her eyes often miss things, even in her own neighborhood. A yellow fire hydrant, paint-chipped, its foundry date 1971. A light-blue house around the corner. It took fourteen years for her to notice an old man pressing his nose to a window on the second floor. Travis knew every inch of this place. She sees him wandering here, his hands in his pockets, eyes to the ground, finding things. Steel-belted radials. Dead baby mongooses. A flooded field that looks like a swimming pool made of river. What if he only wanted to show her a pool made of river? She’s lying now, but what’s it matter? It’s all maybe now. She thinks of what he did after to his thumbs. How the peanut-headed prosecutors—dumber even than the defense—won’t see it as anything other than the incriminating (and lucky for them) remorse of an idiot. Wanted to kill your own paws for what you did? Didn’t you feel so bad? Isn’t that the way it went with your hands, Travis? No, something else. Out here where he stood and cried and looked at her and left her, no wind on his face, as there’s none now on Janet’s. Only this awful peace. Maybe he needed to feel the loss of something in his own hands. His mother died and maybe he didn’t feel anything. The rusty hinge squeals and he forces it harder. He has to use his face to crush the second thumb because his other hand hurts too much. And maybe as he is doing it, maybe he also knows it won’t do any good, that pain’s fragile, that it vanishes fast as kindness. Maybe he knows even the hell of what he’s just done to her will disappear, that he won’t be able to hold it, that even his hands will heal.

  In the Walls

  SHE SAID she had a theory about the places she’d lived: that she carried all her old rooms around with her, and that those rooms, in a sense, were her past. She’d been adopted, and for that reason had always felt a void in the back of her eyes. All that family lore she’d never know. But, she said, the fact of her adoption prevented her from having any excuses, from being able to blame her life’s failures on some baggage of the past. She’d seen too many people crippled by their family histories to want to go digging around to find out who she was, who she came from. She had the luxury of nobody coming before her. She wasn’t captive. She said she’d never be captive.

  But she took the rooms she had lived in around with her the way some of us lug around our grandmother’s battered photo albums, leather-bound, with pictures pasted on black construction paper. She used to tell me about the room with the morning rainbow. How she’d wake up to a tiny rainbow in a corner of the ceiling. It had something to do with refracted light, the way the sun hit the window, causing particles of light to collide, smash, creating color. She said she didn’t want to understand it completely. She just wanted to take it. The rainbow wasn’t always there. When it was raining or cloudy or snowing, the corner trapped shadows. She said she could always tell the weather by first looking there.

  Another room had a ceiling like the bottom half of a sawed-off pyramid. It was like sleeping in a coal freight car. At night in bed she’d be hauled across Nebraska through weeping crickets and dead-tired towns.

  Another room, up a hill, in Spokane, was all windows, and she lived among the squirrels and the phone lines, and spent entire afternoons watching the old flowered-dress woman across the street. The woman, Helen, sitting in an unsteady folding lawn chair, crossing and recrossing her legs in a garden of tiger lilies and garbage.

  She had fears. One night I woke up and found her on the floor of my room, naked, wrapped in my ratty army coat. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at anything. She said she was afraid of the fan. The incessant whir and blur of the fan. I said I’d turn it off. No, more than the noise. It’s a hateful thing. I’ll throw it out the window, I said. Just please don’t sleep on the floor like that.

  We started staying at her place only. Her apartment was on the third floor of a rambly mansard-roofed house on Pond Street in Jamaica Plain. Her room was clutter and pillows. We squeezed. I dreamed of being strangled by ivy, choking on spiked leaves. She’d scissor-kick the covers off the bed and say, Now I have you where I want you, my den, my warren. I’d show up late for work, groggy, tugging on my collar, itching.

  It was a small white room with heavy drapes. I looked around for rainbows and freight cars and asked her what of this room she would carry when she left. She said she’d think of the parts of the walls that smelled like smoke and the dried blood she’d scrubbed away from a spot near the door. But also that her memory of the place was not yet formed, that it would take time, that things would come to her later.

  Sometimes in the mornings she’d tell me about other rooms.

  I had an efficiency in Toronto. A little girl had been raped in the closet. I used to listen to her screams in the walls. You don’t believe me.

  I believe you.

  I’m not talking about ghosts. I’m talking about things that happened. Things that stay.

  Go on. Tell me more.

  At first she shrieked for only a few minutes every night. Then she started talking. That lasted longer. She kept me up at night listening to her. Sometimes she still does.

  She kissed me. Then she left me in bed and went to work. I stayed there and listened and watched, waited and watched. Under the sweaty covers, I stared at the walls, tried to see laughter, moaning. Dinner-table battles, a slow caress. An old man haunted by fingers letting go of his wrist. Whose fingers? He can’t remember her face. And then it was dark, and I saw a boy in nothing but a light-blue pajama top looking out between the gaps in the blinds at the retreating taillights of his mother’s car. I watch him pull his hands slowly down his cheeks as he stands at the window.

  Early November

  SHE GOES to their tiny country house in the woods with her young daughter, ten days after the sudden death of her husband, and it isn’t the silence but the noise, the wind in the trees, the way the leaves wh
ack the window. It’s fall, the height of fall, and it was a disease that took him with the blank force of a fist pounding on a door in the dead of night. It must have been eating away at him in secret for a long time, maybe even last summer as he worked on screening in this very porch, something she’d never wanted; she always said, Who screens things in? Don’t we have enough of that already? After years of this argument, she’d finally given in, though she insisted she’d sit on the steps, that she’d never drink her coffee in there. Now she remembers what her mother whispered to her at the train station, and she was only trying to be helpful. She didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but her mother had whispered, Don’t lionize him, meaning, You’re young, you loved him, but don’t fall so far into grief when—eventually, her mother didn’t mean tomorrow—there are men who can pull you up. Meaning: Don’t steel yourself out there. And now, standing on the porch he destroyed, it’s the noise that doesn’t have the common decency to wait awhile to begin.

  At night she reads while her daughter sleeps. She’s surprised she’s able to concentrate as long as she does. This might have been a book he read, a book he may have even talked about. She can’t remember things like the names of books, the names of people, the names of places. She could never remember the name of one or another town they once loved. You remember? The one with the old guy and the singing dog? Little dog not much bigger than a mouse sitting on his shoulder oooh-oooohing. Used to infuriate him, and he’d seethe, Boone, Boone, North Carolina, in the parking lot of the state park. It was in Boone and the dog’s name was Rudy and the man’s name was Flynn and he kept telling us that his mother had wanted to name him Errol but his father had insisted on Richard. Richard Flynn, the guy with the dog’s name was Richard Flynn. Facts he never forgot. But he couldn’t remember tilts of a head, or impressive sneezes, or the way someone once said yes by doing nothing but breathing quicker. Not for anything could he remember the droop of a chin. She puts the book down because, yes, her mind has wandered like he always said her mind wanders. The light beneath the brown shade reminds her of the dying light she saw out the train window on the way here. They always took the same train at the same time, so she knew the light, the early-November burlap light, and she might have nudged him had he been on the train, the light, and he would have looked at it as if he were seeing it for the first time. She leaves the lamp on, stares at it awhile before half-sleep descends.

  Pile of Clothes

  THE LANDLORD didn’t know what to do with her clothes. The furniture he could either use or sell, but the clothes, some mothy, others pungent, mildewed, the cheap fur of one of her old coats like a cat he’d seen around a while ago. He puts on a pair of rubber gloves he found under the pipes beneath the kitchen sink, one yellow and one green, and climbs quietly, slowly, up the stairs, as if he’s afraid of waking her. The her who’s already been buried eight days now, at the expense of the county, in the scabbled yard out past Buffom Road, near the industrial park. He wants to run up the stairs and get this over with, but dread yanks him back, dread of opening the accordion doors of her closet. Her smell. She lived up there umpteen years; she always paid her rent on time, sliding it under the door in envelopes with scratched-out return addresses. She never complained about his plumbing, about his insistence on never replacing anything with a new part when an old one would do. For years it had been easy to forget about her. Even though her feet were always peckering around up there. That and the sound of her continually moving furniture. The jolt and scrape of her tugging a bureau across the floor, an inch, then another, then another. She went out two times a day. Once for a walk in the morning and once in the afternoon, down the hill to the L’il Peach for milk or cigarettes or an ice cream bar. The rest of her groceries were delivered. His ex-wife used to go up there and visit with her. After Ellen moved out, that was the end of that. He’d long known he had it coming to him; he never once complained about getting left to the dogs, didn’t lift a finger to stop her when Ellen stood in the kitchen and wrapped exactly half the dishes and glasses in newspaper—but to abandon the old lady? When she was the only person besides the kid down at the gas station who ever talked to her? He’d meant these past two years to mount the stairs himself. He’d meant to go up there and have a chat, as Ellen used to do, maybe even apologize for driving Ellen away, out of her life as well as his, but he never got to it.

  Never a louder silence than when you stand in a room where someone lived for many years alone. He looks at the clean walls; she was meticulous, but even so, her smell remains strong. A blend of trapped smoke and what? Jergen’s? Burned butter left crusted on frying pans? Or simply that her body had begun to rot while she was alive up here? She never had many things. Not even a rug in the hall; only a bus schedule for the 112, long out-of-date, thumbtacked to the inside of the front door. (Where did she take the bus? Whom did she go see?) Three rooms: a kitchen, a cramped living room, mostly taken up by a couch that was once yellow but now bleached nearly white by the sun of the uncurtained window, a tiny bedroom made cave-like by the slope of the roof. He stoops and goes into the bedroom. He tries to avoid looking at the bed and fails. It is neat and hand-smoothed, except for a small furrow in the pillow. The afternoon sun has forced its way into this nook. There’s a glint of a spider’s thread reaching from the dresser to the window like a fishing line. Determined to stop lolling over this, he flings open the accordion doors and rams his face deep into the jackets and sweaters and coats and bear-hugs them together. Then he lifts all the clothes, as one, off the rack.

  He and Ellen had been lingering forever at the kitchen table. In the bright kitchen glare of one or two in the morning (neither of them had bothered to look at a clock for hours), he stared at her warily. She’d already crumpled every bill from the basket on top of the refrigerator and flung them at him. Eastern Edison, City of Brockton (water), City of Brockton (late property tax adjustment form), Bay State Gas (urgent reply requested), New England Telephone and Telegraph, Delta Visa, another Eastern Edison, Sears Automotive, another City of Brockton. He used to call himself a restorer of houses. One year he even told people he was a “preservationist.” He had loved his falling-down wrecks, his albatrosses, but he can’t do the work anymore. He blames it on his knees and his lower back, but it’s really this tiredness he’s got. Ellen asking, always asking, “My God, what’s wrong with you, man as big as you, look at the size of you.” And his wanting to explain, but not knowing how, repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” This exhaustion that no amount of sleep or coffee could defeat. And like the clutch of houses he bought so many years ago, with the money that landed in his lap from the moon—an inheritance mailed from some lawyer’s office in New York City (when Ellen first said, “We can be landlords. We’ll never pay rent again!”)—he’s letting himself go slowly to ruin. Now he sits on rents. Now he won’t come to the phone when tenants call. Now he’s being sued. Now he’s being hailed before the Massachusetts Land Commission Review Board on property-neglect charges. It’s not the bills, Ellen once said, but that you think you can live without anybody noticing you. Even so—the overdue notices and the warnings were starting to kill her, and that night she was just about to open her mouth with more bad numbers when the old woman upstairs started pushing something across the floor. Ellen lifted her head and listened; then suddenly she spoke in her hushy curious voice, a voice he hadn’t heard in so long: “She’s blind, you know.”

  “Who?”

  Ellen pointed at the ceiling. “She told me the other day. She said she’d been going that way for years, and she might as well tell somebody it actually happened. No more sight. Just lights and darks.”

  “The old bird? But she gets around fine. She’s got to be able to see something.”

  “Memorized. Neighborhood’s all in her head. Potholes. The aisles down at the Peach.”

  He looked up. “And all the redecorating?”

  Ellen laughed and slid her cup toward him. Her cold coffee sloshed on the t
able. “I asked her finally. I figured if she was telling me things, why not? And you know what she said?”

  “What?”

  “She said if I don’t make my apartment an obstacle course, I’ll forget I can’t see.”

  “Huh?”

  “I have so many pictures in my head, she said, so so many pictures.”

  He took her hand and rubbed her long, thin fingers. “How long?” he asked.

  Ellen let herself look at him before she yanked her hand away.

  A purple cardigan with suede elbow patches, the brown coat with the fake fur like that cat, a ragged pea coat (where the buttons used to be are now only tiny rock-hard balls of thread), a sequined dress for a much bigger woman, enclosed in plastic, a royal-blue windbreaker with yellowed lining and a union local logo on the back, skirts clipped to hangers by rusty safety pins, four moth-eaten men’s suits, all charcoal gray.

  Ellen had grown tomatoes and a few cucumbers in the backyard garden. The tomatoes were the children she always insisted she didn’t want, refused to burden the world with—she’d measure the vines as they grew up their plastic ladders and record the heights in a notebook she kept in the drawer with the car keys and matches. They’d eat them in salads, and sometimes just them, like apples. Ellen would pack up the extras in a shoe box and carry them upstairs to her.