See How Small

by Scott Blackwood

  “My stepsister,” he said, and thought how funny that sounded.

  “Stepsister?” The man laughed in that mocking but sympathetic way that Andrew always did. Like he’d been there before and would again. Under the parka hood, the man’s face bloomed then wilted. “I bet she’s fine.”

  When he got to the hospital, a security man at a desk near the entrance stopped him, looked him over. He could see people waiting near an oncology sign. A couple of kids horsing around near the escalator.

  “You got a room number? I’ll call up,” the security man said. He kept glancing down at Michael’s jeans, which were blackened and wet with slush.

  He told the man the room number and the man looked blankly at him. “Maybe three twenty-one? That what you mean?”

  “Probably I got it wrong. Sorry. It’s been a rough night,” Michael said.

  The man sighed. “Last name?” he said, and dialed the number.

  “Stein,” Michael said. The ocularist’s name sounded strange coming out of his mouth.

  Down the hall, two attendants wheeled a gurney into an elevator. The air in the lobby smelled like mouthwash. He tried to remember the last time he’d been in a hospital, and then he remembered Alice’s asthma attack when she was two, the marathon evening in the emergency room, nebulizers, suppositories to stop the vomiting. Lucinda’s hand on his.

  The security man’s face hardened. “No Stein,” he said, hanging up the phone. “People in that room named Taylor.”

  “Must be some mistake,” Michael said, grinding his teeth. He tried to smile at the man.

  “Yes,” the security man said, “there must be.” He glanced off at the reception counter, where people sat upright but seemed asleep. He rested his hands on his belt, where a radio hung.

  “Maybe I could go up and speak with somebody.”

  “Can’t let you up there unless you’ve got a room. Unless you got family.”

  Where were they? What kind of game was Elise playing? He called her again on his cell but it clicked over to voice mail.

  Outside, in the semicircle drive, snow swirled.

  His jean pants legs had frozen stiff. He worried about hypothermia. He’d get warm at his mother’s place, dry off. What size pants did the ocularist wear? he wondered. At the corner of Wilson and Ashland, he saw a temple of some sort. Along its eaves, large banners strewn with a jumble of Chinese characters. A twenty-foot Buddha smiled an indecipherable smile from behind the wrought-iron fence, snow nestling in the crook of his raised arm.

  He turned left at Paulina and found the lit porch of his mother’s house. It seemed less regal than the one in his mind, a little run-down. A porch swing hung slightly askew. He knocked and rang the doorbell but no one answered. He couldn’t feel his hands. He looked in the front window. A light burned in the hallway. He thought he could hear a TV or radio on somewhere. He knocked again, louder. He went around the house, kicked at the back of the gate, which was wedged shut with ice, and when it gave way, he went around to the tiny square of backyard. Something in the backyard seemed to muffle the sounds of the traffic, the crowdedness of the city. He tried the back door but it was locked. He looked through the window of the garage, which was off an alley, but there was no car. His bowels knotted. He picked up a hand spade from a stone planter and broke out a window panel on the back door, reached in and opened it. He stepped inside and the grinding of glass under his feet seemed to echo through his mother’s house.

  46

  JACK DIDN’T KNOW what to make of it. The first night, he felt ashamed.

  In his kitchen, Kate Ulrich kissed him hard and pressed him up against the counter. Then they found their way into the living room, struggled with their clothes. She unbuckled his belt, he fumbled with her jean button, her top. They fucked on the floor rug until his knees were raw, then she straddled him in a chair. She shouted obscenities at him through gritted teeth. Bit his lip, drew blood. She panted so wildly, he thought she might pass out. Just before he came, she rose off him in the chair and went to hide from him in the house. Forced him to find her. They fucked on the laundry room floor, on a pile of dirty clothes.

  Sometime in the early morning, Samantha came home from work and Kate gathered her clothes, dressed hurriedly, and left.

  The next night, he left a key for her. The lights were off in the house when he got home. After searching the rooms, he found her naked in his bedroom closet behind secondhand suits his wife had bought for him. She demanded that he bind her hands to the bed frame with his neckties. She demanded that he strap his bike helmet light to the bedpost. Her leather purse with its whorls and stitching sat on the bedside table. There was a fierceness to her that made him afraid. Her arms strained at the bindings, though he knew he’d tied them loosely enough for her to pull her wrists out. Sweat gathered between her breasts. She panted and shouted. Blood thrummed in his head. The bed narrowed, collapsed into the backseat of a car lit by dashboard lights. Kate’s eyes fixed on him but on some singular point beyond him, too. And then it was as if he were looking through her eyes at himself, his tensed and baffled face. And everything inside him grew hot, dark, and wet.

  The next morning, Sam got up late as usual. She slunk into the living room in her robe, waved limply at him, rubbed her eyes. Jack was drinking coffee at the kitchen table when he saw her poke at something under the couch with her bare foot. She slid it out with her toes. A black lace bra. “Ooh-la-la,” she said.

  47

  IT WAS LATE when they got back to the house, and the first thing Kay noticed was a light on in the kitchen. She and her husband, Bob, had been downtown in the Loop all day, a celebratory lunch with Elise at the Gage and then graduation, which had run late, with Senator Durbin’s speech going on and on. Elise’s boyfriend, Josh, had come. Tattoos everywhere. The illustrated man. The beard made him seem older, more sure of himself than he was. Still, she thought, he was pleasant enough. Had his charms. A fiction writing student (unemployed). He liked South American writers. They’d talked a little at lunch about the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. She would introduce Michael to them after he and Alice drove in tomorrow, something low-key. Try to get Michael to focus on something other than his impending divorce. Life went on, she thought, despite everything.

  Coming up the back steps, she noticed the broken glass, the jagged opening where the pane in the door had been. She called to Bob. Over the summer, someone had broken into the garage, stolen their bikes. Even took the time to switch out one set of tires for better ones. “Don’t go into the house,” Bob said. “Absolutely do not go in.” He slogged through snow, went up on his toes, and peered through back windows. A short man, Bob, though she hardly ever noticed. At the back door, he poked his cell phone through the broken pane, shone it along the floor and wall. Glass on the floor, he said, maybe some blood. He stood there on the porch steps, chewed his lip. Detective Bob. Circumspect. Taciturn. Her protector.

  Through the broken pane, she could see their home phone’s green message light blinking in the hallway.

  They waited on the police for ten minutes or so. When the police finally pulled up in front, lights flashing, Bob said, maybe he should go in with them, take a look around. He started to say something else, something brave and useless, but she put a hand to his chest. He laughed.

  48

  WHAT ROSA KNEW:

  The man had worked at the Driskill Hotel for two years under the name Eugene Dudaev. He’d been a concierge for a time. Then he worked in hospitality, managing banquets and the like. Weddings, graduation parties, quinceañeras. Some people recalled that in the winter he wore a fashionable wool overcoat. Others said he was formal but not stiff. A few were struck by his knowledge of the hotel’s long history, Austin’s natural landscape. He seemed younger than he was, they said. A few others said there was some mistake, that the Dudaev they knew had a thick Russian accent, was in his fifties, and had immigrated from Chechnya during the height of the separatist war there. He had children, they believed, st
ill living there and perhaps that’s why he left the hotel, to go back.

  Still others on the hospitality staff (who refused to be quoted) said they had misgivings about him. That he’d taken up with two of the young Mexican housekeepers (he also spoke Spanish) and that both women had quit abruptly, without giving notice. Dudaev left the hotel soon after the second housekeeper quit five months before, leaving no forwarding address. When Rosa found a photo of Dudaev on the Internet, he was bearded, thick-necked, and balding.

  The two young women, the staff said, were unlucky.

  49

  ONE NIGHT WHEN Jack slept at the fire station, Kate used her key and swaddled her head in white wine and old TV shows in his living room. The Dick Van Dyke Show, her favorite, was on. She’d watched it with the girls years before on Nick at Night. In the introduction to every episode Rob would trip and fall spectacularly over the living room ottoman. They made an alternative beginning, too—at the last second Rob notices the ottoman and steps gracefully around it. Everyone laughs.

  “What are you doing here?” Sam said from the entryway. Sam was in her all-black waitress getup. A thief or assassin, Kate thought underneath her wine. Sam’s braided hair hung over one shoulder. Behind her was a tall young man with Civil War sideburns, dressed the same. They’d been groping and kissing in the hallway. Kate had heard them in the dark. “I should go,” the young man said, moving toward the door, but Sam grabbed his arm.

  “You two look like you’d steal us blind,” Kate said. “Or slit our throats while we slept.”

  “You’re up late,” Sam said, narrowing her eyes at Kate. She readjusted her shirt.

  “Insomnia,” Kate said. “My mother had it.”

  “Is insomnia hereditary?” Sam said, tilting her head in her funny assassin way.

  “Most things are,” Kate said. This girl, she thought.

  Kate grabbed glasses from the kitchen and poured the couple some wine, and they sat with her to watch an episode of Dick Van Dyke. Danny Thomas was in it. He was an alien. It was all a dream.

  The young man—his name was Lonnie—smiled conspiratorially at Kate and said he’d seen this one. He pulled at his sideburns. A good sport, Kate thought.

  Kate asked Sam about their night (terrible, Sam said, someone had stolen half her tips from behind the bar); what they were planning to do for the weekend (camping at Pedernales State Park); the film course Sam was taking (Cassavetes’s seventies work was so interesting); and if they thought she was crazy (Kate only asked this in her head).

  Sam played with her braid.

  In the dim light of the hallway, Kate could see her own brood gathering there on the wall, filling all the empty space. Their heads bent toward the invisible radio they spoke through.

  “How about you and Dad?” Sam looked over at the young man when she said this. He raised his eyebrows, smiled into his shirt.

  “We’re such homebodies,” Kate said. Shrugged an exaggerated shrug. “Your dad still has work to do around here. The bead board needs staining.” She tipped her wineglass toward the living room wall.

  After a while, the young man’s head bobbed, nodding off. Baby-necking, Kate remembered her girls calling it.

  Sam ruthlessly appraised her from the end of the couch.

  Lonnie was asleep now, his head back against the cushion.

  “He seems interesting,” Kate said, in what she thought was a whisper.

  Something softened in Sam’s face. Maybe just a tiredness creeping in, Kate thought. Tiredness made you open to more things. She and Sam had so much in common, hadn’t they? Sam always missing her mother.

  “He’s funny,” Sam said, and seemed to remember something Lonnie had said on the way that made her laugh. Color rose in Sam’s face and neck from the wine.

  Her girls would be about Sam’s age now. Making all her same mistakes. Everything contingent, everything forgiven, she thought. She wanted the unending worry back. She wanted to hurt in all the right ways.

  Her girls called to her from the hallway.

  Kate rose off the couch to head for bed. “Good night, good night,” she told Sam in a singsongy voice, and leaned in to kiss her cheek. But she held Sam instead, smelled her hair. Electricity crackled in the room. She would close the gap. She would love her as her own.

  Sam pulled away.

  50

  What about the part where a year after they died, late at night, I spray-painted their names on the Lamar Street Bridge? ELIZABETH. ZADIE. MEREDITH. (I’d stopped making her a white space on the wall.) Imagined people passing beneath in cars, speaking their names. Elizabeth. Zadie. Meredith. Kids in the backseat wanting an explanation. Who are these girls? What has become of them? And a story would have to be told, but it would be missing so many things because we’ve already begun to forget, and so we cling to all the half-remembered bits—a line from a song they’d sung, the smell of their skin, small bruises on their arms after a vaccination—and then we find we’ve bound them up in all these half-remembered things, and bound ourselves, too, and our heart keeps beating but only sends itself away and returns to itself, and then it isn’t a story at all but only beads strung along a necklace, a measuring-out of days.

  51

  ROSA IS HEADED north on the L to see an old friend from college. The wheels squeal on the track. The snow makes things seem quieter when they’re not, she thinks. The train crosses the bridge at the river, curves between buildings where you can see people from time to time in their kitchens, making dinner, or drinking alone, or kissing in a stairwell, lit from behind like in a movie. She loved this about Chicago. That it went on with its business, no matter. She remembered once, years ago, riding the L with her dad and the train stopping for twenty minutes on the tracks for a man who was threatening to kill himself. People eventually got out and walked and made a point of telling the man what they thought as they passed on the platform catwalk above. “Lesson number one,” a man yelled down to him. “You gonna do something, do it right. Don’t pussyfoot around.”

  Her dad was going to need someone here to help out over the next few months. Surgery and recovery and radiation. And then what? She’d be flying back and forth, she expected. She couldn’t be sure he was even being straight with her. There would need to be more consultations. It was hard to see very far ahead.

  The old friend she was meeting lived off Montrose Avenue, near a park. They’d gone to Loyola together. The friend, Jess, now had two girls, eight and ten. She still did some reporting here and there. Human interest stuff in the ’burbs for the Tribune supplements. Keeping a foot in the door, she said. Rosa had almost forgotten that her ex-boyfriend David had been the one who’d introduced them their sophomore year.

  David, who, a year after she broke things off and four months after she’d gotten a restraining order after all the calls and threats, had gotten into her Austin apartment building on false pretenses, made his way upstairs, broken into the apartment he assumed was hers, and lay down in the bed. Then he’d poured camping lantern fuel over himself and set himself on fire.

  Somehow he’d gotten her apartment number wrong. No one was home. Rosa had heard the banging and smelled the smoke, and they’d evacuated the building. Water from the fire hoses rolled down the stairs and pooled in the lobby. A fatality, the police said later. A man had set fire to himself. The next morning the building super, who knew about the restraining order, told her it had been David and she remembered the acrid smell.

  She’d been lucky, was all. A transposed number in his head, like so many other chance events in her life and in the lives of those she wrote about and cared for. Eventually these events—the good and the bad—would seem inevitable. Would be claimed, finally, as their own by those who lived them, like lost children.

  As the L slowed at a curve, she could see people moving inside the building next to them, dancing in gym clothes and leotards, and for a moment their figures were joined with the reflected figures and faces on the train.

  Twenty minutes la
ter, as she stepped off the train and onto the platform, she saw flashing lights below, a knot of cops and EMTs at the corner in front of a bakery. A half dozen police cruisers parked along the snowy street. Police tape. She was thankful she didn’t have to report what it was or who was hurt or what it might mean for those who would try to get beyond it.

  She thought vaguely of the blue crate at home in Austin, its photos, interview tapes, transcripts, and false leads. The person of interest who’d apparently fled the state. Hollis Finger, the young man in the coat, the anonymous caller. All separate but somehow tied to one another. Like elements from a collective dream.

  She saw the girls’ faces from the billboard. Her throat tightened.

  It was colder out now, and she was glad it was only a short walk to the restaurant where her friend waited.

  52

  MICHAEL HAD FALLEN asleep on his mother’s bed and then woken to men’s voices downstairs. It took him a few seconds to get his bearings. On the bedside table, old photos of him and Andrew. Alice’s school photo from last year. Several others of Elise, he supposed. She looked nothing like the woman he’d met at the pizzeria. Dark eyes. A slight gap between her front teeth. He thought of Lucinda’s threats. Had she hired the other woman to take Alice?

  The image of Alice in the wood-paneled room came back to him.

  Blue and white lights tumbled on the ceiling.

  He rose off the bed, thought about the bathroom, then decided on the closet, slid open the louvered doors and crouched in the back among his mother’s hanging dresses and luggage. Against his face, a gauzy dress fabric, a mask, a shroud. He could hear the heat kick on.

  He’d called his dad and Margo earlier but had gotten Olive, Margo’s mother. She said Margo was resting. “She has conceived,” Olive said. He said, yes, he remembered. “Is Darnell there?” he asked, something hard rising up in his chest. There was a fumbling on the phone. “Do you know what it is to be a woman?” Olive asked him. And then the phone went dead.