See How Small

by Scott Blackwood

  The two men told him they’d be inside the ice cream shop ten minutes tops, but they are edging into twenty already. A wave of nausea breaks over him and passes. He hadn’t eaten before taking the pills. He feels in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and finds the conch shell. He’d broken it off the art car earlier when they were casing the shop and the art car man had tried to tackle him in the parking lot. Knocked him back against a car hood. The man had blubbered and sobbed, making no sense. Michael punched him. Busted his lip. Chipped a tooth. One of the ice cream shop girls, tall, freckled, had come out to calm down the art car man. A Mexican-looking girl passed a bag of ice through the drive-through window for his mouth. A few random people from the parking lot bunched around them, not knowing what to do. The art car man blubbered to Michael about returning the shell to its legal and rightful owner. His teeth were flecked with blood. “Shame on you,” the freckled girl said, turning to Michael. “Shame.” Michael stammered out something about self-defense. The girl said, “Just look at what you did.” Michael shrugged. “He started it,” Michael said, feeling small. He glanced around at unfamiliar faces, felt his own flush with hatred and embarrassment. The parking lot seemed to stretch out in the twilight. The girl’s eyes burned. Standing on the curb, holding the ice pack to the art car man’s mouth, she had a kind of self-righteous grace that made Michael want to kiss her and hit her all at once.

  Above the Volvo, pecan branches lace low, silvered clouds. A billboard for a radio station with a large lipstick kiss rises over the florist shop next door. Michael lights a cigarette, examines the conch shell under the lighter flame. He decides that it looks like a vagina. Its undulating pink folds. He tries to put it out of his mind, tries to concentrate on the back roads he’s memorized, the drop-off street for the car. A job well done, he hears the younger man tell him. He claps Michael on the shoulder, hands him a beer. Even the older man Michael hates is impressed. Never flinched, he says. I was dead wrong about you. The younger man gives him a look that bridges the gap between them until it hardly seems there at all. You are not a child, the look says. And then—and the change is only noticeable at the drifting edges of things—it’s not the young man at all but Michael’s dead brother, Andrew. He’s sitting on top of a picnic table near the pecan tree, a hand pressed to his face where his jaw used to be before he was shot. It’s a tender moment, Michael thinks, Andrew thinking of him while he thinks of Andrew. Blood summoning blood. Concern flickers over Andrew’s half face. Then he smiles with what he has left, smooths out the edges. Well, look at you, he says. He walks to the car, bums a cigarette from Michael. Andrew fumbles a bit to find the corner of his mouth, lights his own cigarette from Michael’s. Steps back in a kind of appraisal. Michael still remembers him like this, shambling and slouchy, in a movie antihero kind of way.

  You are one doomed motherfucker, Andrew says matter-of-factly.

  In the dim glow of the shop’s back door light, his fleshy opening looks like the raw insides of the conch shell. Michael is thinking of the implications of this, Andrew’s return, his own seething hatred and love for his brother’s absence, when he hears the first muffled gunshots inside the ice cream shop.

  6

  AT THE FRONT door, one of the officers tells Kate that there’s been a fire. Their breath streams in the porch light. Kate thinks of the small fire at the ice cream shop earlier, the acrid burnt sweetness. Smoke. How it is hardly worth the drive over to tell her this.

  “Where are my girls?” she asks.

  “Can we come inside, Ms. Ulrich?” the second officer asks, his body hunched against the cold, but also against something imminent. Something that hasn’t happened yet, she thinks, but will when it leaves his smoking mouth. She resolves not to listen.

  “Who’s at the door, Kate?” her husband, Ray, the girls’ stepfather, yells from the bedroom. She can hear the jangle of Ray’s belt buckle as he lifts his pants from the foot of the bed and pulls them on. In his pockets, the keys to the ice cream shop, where he’d stopped by just after closing to pick up the night deposit. A movie, he’d said when he got back home late and crawled into bed. The girls were headed to a midnight movie after locking up at eleven. “Didn’t you ask them which movie?” Kate had said, because you always ask which one, always. Good old feckless Ray. She lay there beside him, blood drumming in her head, listening to his raspy breathing, thinking, I will go away. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too. Then, a little later, after she’d tried their cell phones and gotten their chirpy voice mail greetings, Kate woke startled from a dream in which her dead mother was combing her hair with an ear of corn. She couldn’t smell the girls in the house.

  At the front door, the first police officer tells her something brutally quiet and small about her daughters. Something so dense that it makes everything—the cold, smoking air, the officers’ ashen faces, Ray’s raspy breathing—constrict to a singular point.

  Past the officers framed in the doorway she can see the squad car outside, its headlights illuminating the cedar tree beside the driveway. In the fogged back windows, she thinks she can make out Elizabeth and Zadie, their bare feet propped on the metal grill between the seats. Cocksure, dismissive. Playing the parts assigned to them. Certain they can talk their way out of anything.

  7

  AFTER FINDING THE dead girls in the fire, Jack Dewey didn’t know what to think. At first, he seemed mostly fine, having gone to see a department-provided therapist for a few months. Bad dreams and cold sweats were nothing unusual, the therapist told him. It was a process he’d need to work through. The firefighters at his station seemed to understand his woodenness at work and offered encouragement—a few of them had been on tours in Iraq and seen bad things happen. Whole families burned. Children’s arms, legs, heads, blown off. But to Jack, this all happened in vast, incomprehensible cities and deserts, places with guttural-sounding names he’d never visit. Still, several of the firefighters made sure, on his four days off a week, to check in or invite him to play softball with some city league team that needed a sub, or to grab a beer in the evening. They had done this too after his wife died ten years before, in his second year with the department. They’d made an effort to fix him up with blind dates—usually nervous, mid-thirties friends of their wives or girlfriends, who had decided they were too old for the music clubs or didn’t like online dating sites.

  But things had not gotten better after the fire—if better meant getting along with his girlfriend, Carla, and his daughter, Sam, or having a few moments of stillness in his mind. He often drank at Deep Eddy Bar until he couldn’t feel his face, and would wobble home on his bike down the expressway shoulder. This was after the DUI, when he’d fallen asleep in the car while idling in line at Mrs. Johnson’s Donuts. Now he’d occasionally glimpse himself in the bar mirror, his hands adjusting his helmet for the ride home. His head gargantuan and grotesque. Whose head and face were these? He often thought now, nearly five years later, how the firefighters at his station, or even the detectives on the case who’d questioned him, thought he was drinking to forget the girls. But the truth was, the more he drank, the more stove-in he became on the outside, the more inwardly alive he felt. He doesn’t see the images of the girls’ naked burned bodies anymore, as he once did, stacked upon one another, their open opaque eyes staring at nothing. He doesn’t wake up on fire and thrash in the bed, frantically trying to rip off his burning helmet and airpack. Once he’d flung his arms so violently that he’d broken Carla’s nose. Carla, out of sheer terror, had begun to toss a quilt over him and pretend to smother the fire, and sometimes that would break the spell. He’d gone to see a therapist again after the broken nose, trying to restore some trust between them. Over the past five years, though, the dreams had become more vivid, sharper around the edges, and, to his great shame, even more real to him than memories of his dead wife. To his astonishment and confusion, in these dreams he sees, and even speaks to, the girls from the fire, as they would be now, five years later, i
n their early twenties, near the same age as his daughter.

  “What kind of dad are you?” Jack’s daughter, Sam, said into the phone in a voice that seemed to understand exactly the kind of dad he was. He’d said some things, accused her of some things he shouldn’t have. This was four months after she’d come back home, a year and a half after the fire. She was calling him from Brackenridge Hospital to tell him she and her boyfriend had had a wreck. Sam was a little banged up—some cuts from the glass. The new boyfriend had a concussion. But when the cops and EMS crew found his pickup in the culvert, they also discovered some cellophane-wrapped hashish stuffed into the fingers of a single leather glove in the console. Now the boyfriend needed an attorney and some bail money.

  “I guess I’m the kind of dad who comes when you need me,” he said on the phone, trying on a kind of casual bluster because, as she often pointed out, he was afraid of her.

  Later, in the emergency room, he sat near a large tinted window and could feel the day’s heat through the glass. Another man sat nearby, cupping his limp arm at the elbow as if cradling an infant’s head. He signed in at the desk and a pregnant Hispanic nurse wearing slippers helped him navigate the maze of cubicle rooms.

  Sam was born in this hospital. She’d developed an infection from breathing meconium during a long, difficult delivery, so they’d put her in the neonatal ICU for two weeks to treat it, strapped a tangle of wires to her chest and head to monitor her vitals. She was stout compared with the other babies there. Premies not any bigger than potatoes—they were even swaddled in aluminum foil to keep their heat in. It scared him to think something so tiny could still be a human being. Some of them had been there for months because of heart ailments, kidney problems, or congenital defects that wouldn’t allow them to breathe on their own. The terrible, contingent life of these infants, the wires, the constant beeping and buzzing alarms, warning of some impending failure, made him constantly on edge. Everything in the neonatal ICU—a room festooned with the false cheer of newborn blues and pinks—seemed to partially negate the future. The thought of Sam forever dependent on machines and nurses and catheters made his throat constrict at night. He heard her raw-throat crying in his dreams. His wife, recovering in a nearby room from a torn cervix, would ask him for a report after the midnight feeding. “How’s our sweet baby girl?” she’d ask from beneath the tide of sedatives. “Dreaming of her momma,” he’d say.

  A number of the premies wouldn’t survive. An intern had told him this while eating a sandwich at the nurses’ station. There was a point at which the parents—often sleep deprived, living in a fog—had to make a decision. Jack also remembered the hospital chaplain, a chain-smoker, telling him that one of the premies—his heart malformed and too weak for surgery—had completely baffled the neonatologists. Miraculously, the chaplain said, his body had “learned” to reroute his oxygenated blood to his brain through a system of collateral arteries. But to Jack this seemed only a reprieve, a story of deferred grief that made the later one even harder to bear. He remembered his grandfather’s stories of families during the 1918 flu pandemic waiting to name their children until it was clear they’d make it to their first birthday. When Jack would take bottles of his wife’s breast milk into the ICU to feed Sam, he’d see the parents of the critical premies coming and going in their ill-fitting visitor scrubs, their bright, haggard faces. They seemed like castaways who didn’t know they’d been abandoned. And seven years later, in the weeks leading up to his wife’s death from a brain aneurysm, he knew he’d worn that same expression on his pilgrimages. He’d made any bargain, buoyed any false hope, explained away, even at the end, the inevitable signs of his wife’s body shutting down.

  Jack knew now that luck was unearned—arbitrary, even. But in the ICU with his daughter those early weeks, surrounded by premies swaddled in aluminum foil, he’d studied the tiny maps of capillaries on Sam’s eyelids and considered himself a fortunate man.

  In the emergency room, Jack found Sam tucked away in one of the cubicles, sitting on the lip of the bed. He hugged her before she could get up, and she stiffened, then gave in. She was shaking.

  “It’s just the adrenaline after the accident,” he said. “It goes on awhile.” She held up a trembling hand and laughed. Shiny flecks of glass were embedded in the reddened skin below her knuckles.

  Jack’s heart rattled in his chest to see her scared.

  She looked at him. “The deer just leaped out in the road.”

  “How fast were you going?”

  “Not fast. No faster than normal.”

  “Were you smoking hash?”

  “Jesus. Dad. No.”

  “I have to ask that.”

  “You don’t have to ask.”

  “Where did the stuff in the console come from?”

  “Who knows—one of Adrian’s friends, probably.”

  “The one-handed man.”

  “I have broken glass in my hand.” She waved it in front of him.

  “It should be a reminder,” he said, and thought of her plunging headfirst through the windshield, hair and blood. His legs weakened.

  “Is that what you tell burned people? This should be a reminder?”

  “If they’re the ones who started the fire, sure.”

  She was suddenly silent, and he knew she was thinking of the ice cream shop. He leaned forward and kissed the top of Sam’s head. She’d always been lucky. Always favored. Which made him worry all the more.

  8

  THIS IS WHAT Rosa Heller, a reporter covering the murders for the Chronicle, remembers: She’s seven years old, walking hand in hand with her dad toward the Lab School on the South Side of Chicago. She’s tall for her age, and in fifth grade she’ll begin to slouch to hide it. It’s early morning, still, and a fog off Lake Michigan clings to the yards and stoops. They stop at a corner grocery that sells the Wacky Packages stickers that she’s obsessed with, and her father gives her money to buy some because she loves him so much. When they turn the corner they walk alongside a vacant lot with a billboard for NuGrape soda and beneath it there’s a large blackened oval in the grass where someone set a fire. She wonders who would do something like that and decides that boys would, just to see what happened. She sees something shiny in the grass that she thinks is a bottle cap for her collection, and so pulls away from her dad and scuffs the dirt and grass with her shoe. She finds a half-dollar-size hoop earring. In the weeds near a metal fence, not twenty feet away, she sees a mustard-colored jacket. Then a brown leather purse, a string of toiletries, a pair of panties, a hair pick, and a compact mirror. Near the compact mirror, a brown hand that once held it. At first Rosa thinks the face staring back from a clump of weeds is a Halloween mask. She looks at her dad to be in on the joke, but he just stares. She can feel her skin prickle, but it takes a while for her to realize that it’s a woman’s face, missing nose and ears.

  Rosa’s dad, Peter, was a politics reporter for the Chicago Tribune. They lived with her mother in a partly rehabbed two-flat surrounded by run-down rentals, used car lots, and liquor stores. The area was segregated, but a number of liberal white families, like hers, had moved into it in the late sixties, even given all the turbulence. Even partly because of it. Her parents had participated in freedom marches and seen violence up close. Her dad had had his nose broken. Someone had hit her mother in the head with a D-cell battery. On her dad’s desk at the Tribune she remembered a photo of him between the writer Alex Haley and the actor and activist Ossie Davis, smiling broadly.

  Occasionally in their neighborhood someone would overturn a car and set it on fire, which secretly thrilled Rosa—she could often see the glow from her upstairs bedroom window. Her dad took great pains to explain to her that this was a symptom of an illness. Like the chicken pox or a rash? she asked. That’s right, her dad said, a warning on the surface about what was going on inside. There was so much anger that maybe it couldn’t be contained. Better a car than a passerby, he said. Better things than a person.


  She doesn’t think it happened that way. Her dad wouldn’t have allowed her to get so close to the dead woman. She would have heard about the nose and ears most likely from someone at school, or maybe her dad talking to one of the local politicos on the phone. Or possibly she’d imagined it. She’d even looked in the Tribune archives to find the story, but couldn’t find any mention of mutilation. She wondered if this was like her memory of her dad one day cutting the TV power cord with a pair of gleaming shears while she was watching it, or the time she was forced to leave for summer camp while her Labrador, Ali, was dying on the living room floor—memories she suspected she made up to confirm what she already believed about her dad. Some lack in him. What had she believed? That he was high-principled but cruel. A gifted journalist who abused his talent. A secret racist who helped black people so that he could feel better about bitter feelings he harbored against them. He was guileless to a fault. He’d eventually driven off Rosa’s mother with his various lost causes and under-the-table funding of his younger brother, Bill, who was constantly strung out on back pain medicine and running from creditors. Much of what she’d accepted about her dad when she was younger she was unsure about now, which had both helped and hurt their relationship, she suspected. She can see her dad’s hands, their neatly trimmed, milky nails, the lump on the outside of his left hand where a benign tumor made the bone brittle and caused him to break the hand half a dozen times. How could the tumor be benign, she wondered, if it ate away the bone? On a recent visit to Chicago, she’d asked him if he’d had his checkup, his scheduled colonoscopy and PSA blood work. He said to be honest, he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen a doctor. He smiled a little boy’s smile that pretended not to know. On the table in front of her, his left hand seemed frail, the lump more pronounced. She loved his guileless eyes, the way they took in everything and denied it all.