See How Small

by Scott Blackwood

  “Thought you might retire, with the baby coming and all,” Michael said.

  “They’ll have to pry the props from my cold, stiff hands,” his dad said. He grinned.

  Margo came into the kitchen, leaned over Darnell, and cut a slice of pie. “The new movie’s a murder mystery,” Margo said. “Your dad’s an extra.”

  “No shit?” Michael said absently.

  “Credited as ‘Guy Peeping in Window,’ ” his dad said, cutting another piece of pie.

  “He hardly has to act at all,” Margo said.

  Darnell stood up, walked behind Margo, and kissed the top of her head. “The plot is so goddamned complicated. Doubt the writers know who the murderer is. Might end up being me.”

  Margo’s mother, Olive, eased her way through the living room toward the kitchen. She was eighty-six, nearly blind, and suffering from dementia. With the fingers of her left hand she followed the wood trim along the wall, pacing herself until she came on Alice asleep on the couch. She seemed confused. Michael wondered if Margo’s mother knew where she was. Whose house? What year? Was this her daughter?

  Michael got up from the table and said hello, took the old woman’s hand. She looked at him and smiled. Touched his face. “Are you from the planet of men?” she asked.

  “See? Mother recognizes you,” Margo said.

  Michael knew that Margo’s mother had been in the movies, like Margo’s dad. She’d been a Miss Texas runner-up in her late teens. “Quite the looker,” Margo had said. “Leggy and quick-eyed.” Just after World War II and before she met Margo’s dad, Olive appeared in some Italian films and was even courted by a former Italian submarine commander. “Should have taken that offer,” Margo had said. “Mussolini had softened him up.” Later, back in America, she had small parts in B movies. Science fiction mostly. The Unearthly, and Queen of Outer Space with Zsa Zsa Gabor. They’d watched them on video. Michael remembered the space queen wearing a glittery harlequin mask because she’d been horribly disfigured by radiation burns. They recycled all the props from earlier movies like Forbidden Planet, his dad said, so everything supposedly otherworldly seemed tawdry and familiar.

  “Sure, she recognizes him,” Darnell said, nodding at Michael. “He’s from the planet of men.”

  “Shush,” Margo said.

  Margo walked over and took her mother gently by the elbow, walked her to the table, eased her down in a chair. Olive’s movements seem to take an eternity, as if each film cell was advancing one by one.

  “How did you get past our sentries?” Olive asked Michael.

  “They just opened the door,” Michael said, smiling stupidly.

  Olive seemed to run this over in her mind.

  “Mother, would you like some pie? It’s mincemeat.”

  “Is that child yours?” Olive asked Michael, glancing at the couch where Alice slept with her mouth open.

  “Yes. That’s Alice,” Michael said.

  “My daughter has conceived,” Olive said. She had an excited, perplexed look on her face. She looked at Margo, and Margo smiled, putting a hand to her belly. Olive said, “No one knows how it happened.”

  “We have our suspicions,” Darnell said, winking, handing Michael a cup of coffee.

  Olive leaned in toward Michael. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Do you know what it is to be a woman?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “It means to be filled up inside yourself but to always feel empty.”

  “Ah,” Michael said. He looked over at Margo, who was staring at Alice, worry darkening her face.

  “That must be why the sentries let you pass.” Olive appeared to stitch it all together in her mind. “We’re a lonely planet.”

  Margo brought her mother a piece of pie, leaned over Michael’s shoulder. She had a sweet citrus smell, maybe orange rinds.

  “Of course, Queen Yllana will have to be told,” Olive said, with resignation in her voice. She patted Michael’s hand on the table.

  “It’s only right,” Darnell said solemnly.

  Michael sipped his coffee.

  “So,” Darnell said, turning to Michael, his head tilted with exaggerated curiosity. “You need some money?”

  Michael carried Alice upstairs to the guest room and put her in the bed. She was breathing heavily and talking in her sleep. He wandered down the hall to his dad and Margo’s room. When he flipped on the light, everything seemed brightly colored and foreign. A new painting hung over the bed. A fuzzy red cube coming out of a black void. On the dresser, opened boxes with pastel baby clothes under tissue paper. Framed photos of Darnell and Margo camping at Big Bend. Black-and-white Hollywood publicity shots of Margo’s mom and dad—his dark, high cheekbones like Margo’s. A photo of gap-toothed Michael as a kid in his baseball uniform. Alongside it, a photo of him and Andrew sitting together along the roofline of one of the houses his dad built back when he was a contractor. Andrew is smiling goofily at the camera but also thinking how best to show off, how to frighten everyone by pretending to fall and then twisting and swinging gracefully to the ground. Unhurt, whole. It might have been right after this photo was taken that Michael, trying to imitate him, had slipped off that same roof and broken his arm.

  In a wooden jewelry box on the dresser Michael found two pairs of gold earrings and a bracelet with diamond inset. A pair of vintage gold cuff links that he suspected were Margo’s dad’s. He went through the other drawers quickly. Surveyed the medicine cabinet and selected a small handful of Vicodin and Xanax. Just enough to get him by for a few days. Temporary. It was all temporary.

  “So, where you headed?” His dad asked after Margo had taken her mother to bed and they were alone in the kitchen.

  “Nowhere.”

  His dad studied him. “The detectives came by,” he said. “I didn’t tell Margo.”

  “What are we talking about here?” Michael asked.

  “They wouldn’t say what it was about. They just said they wanted to talk to you.”

  “Must have missed a meeting with my probation officer.”

  “Son.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call him. Sort it out.”

  “Son.”

  “What?”

  “How much money do you need?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What about Alice?”

  “She’s fine too.”

  “We can take care of her. Until you sort out whatever it is.”

  Michael tapped the table leg with the side of his foot. “No, see, Lucinda’s got lawyers involved now. She’d use this against me.”

  “Son.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  His dad rubbed his mouth, looked around the kitchen for something but seemed to forget what it was.

  “Do you talk to Mom ever?” Michael asked.

  “Not all that often. She’s still in Chicago with the ocularist.”

  “Never, you mean.”

  “Your mom seems quite happy.”

  “You don’t know a thing about her.”

  “For the longest time I thought she wouldn’t move past it.”

  Michael resettled himself in the chair, felt the tabs of Vicodin kick in, push the worry to the distant edges of things. His dad’s hand on the coffee cup seemed small and full of mischief. “I miss Andrew sometimes,” Michael said. He held his hands in his lap to keep them from shaking.

  “He loved you. He really did,” his dad said. “Brothers don’t ever say those things. But he looked out for you.” His dad was looking right at him but didn’t seem to see him.

  Upstairs something scraped across the wood floor. Margo moving furniture around. “So, which is it, boy or girl?” Michael asked.

  “Don’t know. We asked the doctor not to tell us,” his dad said. “It’ll be a surprise.”

  “Thought of any names yet?” Michael asked.

  “After we lost the last one we decided to wait on that.”

  They were quiet, listening to Margo’s feet squeaking on the floor above
their heads. It sounded to Michael like something straining, about to give way.

  “You’ve got a child of your own to look after,” his dad said.

  Margo’s citrusy smell was still in the kitchen. Michael looked out the window but all he saw were the reflected, indistinct faces of two men at a table.

  27

  BEFORE WE CAN make forgetful shapes with our mouths, Meredith is off, galloping toward her dad’s back pasture. He’s burning brush back there. Clearing land. A backhoe and several pickups full of Mexican day workers are parked nearby. Her dad speaks abruptly to them in Spanish. He’s paid these men to dig a fire perimeter along both fence lines, water down the stable roof and outbuildings. Maybe they respect him, maybe they don’t. There’s a county burn ban because of the dry conditions, thirty-mph wind gusts, but her dad is adamant. Today’s the day. The land already surveyed and sold to a wealthy high-tech couple who will perch their house high on the creek bluff. Her dad still has her sister to put through college, legal bills from land deals gone sour. But today is our anniversary (isn’t it always?) and his mind is smoldering with Meredith. He squints into the morning cold. The sun flares off the metal roof of an outbuilding. The burning cedar sends sparks and smoke above the tree line. A hawk circles overhead. In the air around her dad, atoms vibrate. He knows these are all loose affiliations, but thinks maybe there’s something to them. Signs. The horses, grazing in the neighbor’s pasture, look back at him as if to confirm it. Most things perplex him these days. A world in which things just happen is beyond hurt somehow, beyond redemption.

  Meredith’s breathing is the horse’s breathing, her rising and falling his. She imagines a fist-size space between her and the saddle and keeps her center of gravity just there, poised over an imaginary point, a point whose center is everywhere, bounded by nothing.

  We feel slippage, our hairstyles regress, teeth grow crooked and gapped, chests flatten. Horsey girl, come back to us, we say.

  Her dad, as always, conjures up Meredith riding alone through the blue stem grass, working her way down to the creek, where the air grows thick and damp below the limestone bluffs. Hooves clatter and slip on wet stone. There’s slippage in him, too, and he hears the grinding sound that has kept him up nights and makes him worry about his sanity. It rises from everywhere at once and he thinks for some reason of the earth’s tectonic plates moving against each other. He often smokes a joint and paces on the back porch in the middle of the night to rid his head of it. They can make a real ruckus, can’t they? our horsey girl says to him. But her face is dusky, indistinct.

  He realizes it’s the horses. They’re anxious, grinding their teeth. Maybe someone has cinched their girths too tight, he thinks. He looks over at the horses along the fence line chewing on some half-eaten apples the workers have given them. Unsaddled, unbridled. He feels a distance growing in himself, a permanent horizon that he walks toward but never reaches. A standing wave in a vast sea of tall grass. He turns around in the back pasture and for a few seconds has no idea where he is. The tree line is to the west, he tells himself. He notes this detail in blue ink on his palm.

  In a copy of the handwritten autopsy report, which Meredith’s dad forced himself to read, the medical examiner made note of the crescent-shaped scar on Meredith’s abdomen, where she’d had surgery after the mare kicked her. One of her kidneys lost. The examiner listed the scar’s measurements. The examiner described and measured, with a discreet tenderness, bruises, abrasions, bullet wounds, burns. There was a kind of reverence, her dad thought, even in the description of the ligature and bindings. Here and there, the examiner’s pen had seemed to hesitate on the paper, cross through ill-considered thoughts, as if he was lost in the miniature detail of cotton fibers, fingernail clippings, and hair follicles that made up the whole.

  Ligature (underwear) shows signs of wear; partly bitten through. Matching synthetic fibers found between left bottom incisor and canine teeth. Long coarse hair found twined in wrist bindings (brassiere). Ginger colored. Likely from the tail or mane of a horse.

  A tremor runs through Gumshoe’s withers, and Meredith knows he is worried for her. He doesn’t like the going back. “Meredith, don’t let this harden your heart,” her mother says to her now on the edge of her squeaky bed somewhere, and we know this was the night after Meredith had gone to the quarry and seen Melissa Sutfin blowing Marcus Bell in the back of his Jeep Cherokee. The quarry, which isn’t a quarry at all but only a long gash in somebody’s stony field, someone’s plans gone south. Meredith feels her own humiliation rising up through the fissures in the rock. The bed squeaks but it sounds like a leather saddle. Her mother’s hand touches Meredith’s cheek and her wrist smells of Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue perfume. He’s just a boy, her mother says, though it’s not her mother’s face at all now but some young woman dressed as a hotel maid, with a face that’s lumpy and indistinct like a feather pillow. Then her mother’s face emerges beneath it. Her mother’s nails are neatly manicured and painted sea green. You’re bound for better things, she says. Her mother strokes her withers, grooms her. Meredith nuzzles her hand. Vows to forget him. To forget everything. “Oh, Meredith,” her mother says, tilting her head. “Not everything. Just some things.”

  It strikes Meredith as strange that there could have been a time before she was, a time when she observed nothing and needed nothing, had no presence on the earth. The loud absence of herself suddenly surrounds Meredith, and it startles her.

  Horsey girl, come back! we say. We miss you so.

  She ignores us. Rides on.

  Along the tree line, the cicadas start up their whine. Here and there she hears the call of a chuck-will’s-widow. Meredith can smell the water in the creek. Along its eroded bank, she’s found clamshell fossils, spiraled mollusk shells, a nautilus. All of this a shallow sea once, her dad had told her. So far back that it had to be imagined. Meredith’s mother told her on a camping trip that she had imagined Meredith before she even became pregnant. How she made a kind of emotional space where Meredith would fit, like rolling aside in the bed for someone you know is coming. But her mother worried, too, because she and her own mother were so close that she was afraid their relationship would never measure up. Such foolishness, Meredith’s mother would tell her. As if you could proportion how you love. Strangers commented on how alike they were. How even their posture was similar, their pigeon-toed walks. Meredith knows now. People she loves become strangers and strangers become achingly familiar, as if she’s somehow misplaced the memories of their time together. (We don’t have the heart to tell her our heads are soggy from walking on the bottom of this shallow sea.) When they’d ride down to the cabin ruins near the property line, Meredith’s dad would tell her stories about settler children captured by Comanche who were adopted by the tribe and gradually forgot their life before. They lived a life of constant movement and deprivation, he said. Later, when these captives were recaptured or ransomed and returned to their relatives, they often found they had no life at all back in the civilized world. They’d forgotten the language, hated to be settled in one place. They would run away, trying to rejoin their captors, the very ones who’d massacred their families. Her dad looked bewildered then as he often did now. His how and why never adding up. People need to belong somewhere, I guess, he’d said, his face pinching into silence and distance. And it’s not always in the places you’d think.

  In her dad’s eyes, she can see a standing wave of fire poised over the land.

  28

  How can you make a story from what you don’t know? You just give us some ash and bits of drywall. A bridle. You say, well, there they are, see what you can do with them.

  Shame on you. Shame.

  Did my girls put you up to this?

  III

  29

  JACK HAD JUST gotten back from his run when he saw the note from Sam. She was on a date and wouldn’t be back until later that night. There was a plate for him in the fridge. Sam always felt she had to cook for him, tell h
im to eat. He’d lost nearly twenty-five pounds over the last four months, almost down to his college weight. He’d told Sam this and tugged at the waist of his new jeans as if it was a good thing. Skin and bones, she said. A Holocaust victim.

  His wife, an optimist until the end, would have said that he needed to right his ship, not take people down with him. She also wouldn’t have forgotten to make the house payment the last two months, or blanked on Carla’s birthday. He and Carla had split up three months ago. She’d had enough. He was talking in his sleep again, up at strange hours. It’s awful crowded in there, she’d said, motioning to his head. No room for me. They’d split up twice before, but this time she’d put a down payment on a condo near the park. In Jack’s mind, he saw Sam shaking her head like Carla did. Had it come to this? he wondered.

  He’d tried to right the ship. A few weeks before she left, Carla stood in this very kitchen while he made them breakfast, her breasts pushing at the V of her robe. In her hair, a sequined sea horse hair clip he’d gotten for Sam years ago in Islas Mujeres. Carla had found it among some old photos shoved in a bathroom drawer.

  “Let’s go to Mexico,” he said. “I’m thinking a couple of nights out of this heat would do us good.”

  “Right.” She held out her plate. “I can see you’ve put some real thought into it.”

  Spooning eggs onto her plate, he could see the slight crook to her nose where he’d hit her trying to put out the fire in his sleep.

  He leaned in, kissed her on the mouth. Sam could hold down the fort, he said.

  She seemed to think about this. “She’s dating someone, you know.”

  “She doesn’t tell me a thing.”

  “I met him. Seems nice. Thoughtful. Maybe a little old for her.”

  “Great. Older is good. But not too old.”

  “Says the man with the much-younger girlfriend.”

  “Twelve years apart? That’s nothing,” he said, setting down the pan. “In a few years it will seem more like fifteen.” He smiled, cupped one of Carla’s breasts with his hand, but she pulled away.