The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  * * *

  THE MILL MIGHT have been the end of my story, the place I stayed for twenty or thirty or forty years, breathing in the killing, choking fibers, before the coughing started. But that’s not what happened.

  * * *

  ONE SUNDAY AFTER Mass, I was passing the upstairs window above the bookshop and happened to spy a man standing across the street. Just standing, staring at the shop. Tall and healthy looking, in a wool jacket buttoned up to a bright blue knot of necktie, a parcel under one arm. He stared for another minute before seeming to come to a decision. As he stepped off the curbstone I moved closer to the window, looking straight down through the glass as he climbed our step and became a foreshortened cap with children clustered around below, calling up to him, Mister, hey, mister, you got a nickel? Whatta you doing here, mister? The cap moved and fingers ran over a blond head, then the cap was replaced. Finally, the bell rang.

  I heard my mother shooing my nieces and nephews into the back room, then calling up to me. “Coming,” I answered, but I stayed at the window, watching the cap pulled away again from the blond head, tilted to speak down into the opening door and my mother’s no doubt baffled face. Then the blond head disappeared and my mother called up to me again. I went down the back stairway and through the long bookshelves to the front of the store, where the man was standing, holding his cap.

  “There you are,” he said, seeing me.

  My mother’s eyes communicated a flurry of messages: Manners, and What have you done to bring this enormous American to our door and Your hair! I put a hand up to my head, feeling the flyaway strands, too many to conquer without a mirror.

  “Do I know you?” I said.

  He frowned, and then turned to my mother, who was wearing the neutral pretending-to-understand expression that she adopted during conversations in English.

  “May I?” he asked, gesturing. She gave him the cloth she was holding, and he held it up across the lower part of his face. “Now do you know me?”

  Yes, of course, it was the shift foreman from the mill.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at home,” he said, taking the cloth down. “I wanted to let you know that you probably shouldn’t come to work tomorrow.”

  “You’re firing me?”

  “No, no. There’s a rumor.” He leaned forward, whispered it: strike. “You heard about Saylesville.” Of course I had—the National Guard called in, shooting into the unarmed crowd, four dead. “I have reason to believe . . . it won’t be safe tomorrow.”

  My mother was watching, her eyes darting to mine and back to him: What is he saying?

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you.” I reached out, took the cloth from him. Ignoring the soundless push from my mother Why haven’t you offered him tea?

  “Well, I won’t keep you,” he said, going through the door.

  From the doorway, I called, “Are you visiting all of the workers at home today?”

  He turned at the bottom of the steps. “No,” he said. Waited a beat, long enough for me to notice that his eyes were exactly the same shade of blue as his necktie. Then he turned again and walked away.

  “How does he know you?” cried my mother when I shut the door. “Why were you so rude to him?”

  “He’s one of the foremen at the mill,” I told her, watching through the front window as he crossed the street, his collar turned up against the wind.

  “What did he want?”

  “He said that the weaving room will be closed tomorrow.” A lie to tell the priest next week.

  “He came all the way here to tell you that?” She looked at the place where he’d stood, then back at me. “Bien sûr.”

  * * *

  OH, THIS IS a love story, isn’t it?

  Shush. I’m not finished.

  * * *

  HIS NAME WAS Hugh. He’d been right about the strike; it began the next afternoon, and the response was violent, one worker killed and a dozen others injured.

  The following Sunday after Mass, the doorbell chimed. My mother caught my arm as I went toward the stairs. She touched my hair, pushing a stray bit back into its wave. “Ask him to stay for lunch,” she said.

  “I don’t want to encourage him, Maman.”

  “Why not? He’s handsome, and so young to be a foreman. Is he not Catholic?”

  “He’s a boss.”

  “So?”

  “Michel and I are workers.” Michel had gone to work on the day of the strike, although I’d warned him, but he’d escaped injury. He’d been on the picket line every day since.

  “Tssst.” A dismissive noise. “La grève, it’s nothing. It’s between men. The heart is important. The heart is women’s business.” Le coeur, c’est l’affaire des femmes. “Ask him to stay for lunch.”

  Hugh handled himself well at the table, discussing general news with my father, avoiding controversial topics, and speaking slowly enough, without being obvious about it, so that my mother could follow. I didn’t say much. He chewed my mother’s bread (a week’s worth of flour for that loaf!) with appreciation.

  “Tell him you made the fish stew,” my mother urged me.

  “I will.” While she smiled, I told Hugh quickly, so she would not understand, “My brother and father dug those clams at the shore.”

  “Point Judith Pond?” said Hugh. “I do some fishing myself.”

  My father brightened; fishing, although it was a necessity more than a pastime these days, provided him great satisfaction.

  “Have you tried the shallows at Rocky Point?” he asked, leaning forward. And they were off, discussing their favorite spots for clams, for scup, for bass.

  * * *

  “I THOUGHT WE’D have more time,” said my father after Hugh had left and my mother and I were clearing the table. “She’s just sixteen.”

  “I was sixteen when we married,” said my mother.

  “Chou-fleur, if Hugh speaks to me, what would you have me say?”

  “Why would he speak to you?” I asked, taking up the soup tureen. It had been scraped empty, not even a spoonful left. “He barely knows me.”

  “He has the look,” said my mother. “He’ll ask.”

  “Do you not like him?” asked my father.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” said my mother.

  No, there was nothing wrong with Hugh. He was both pleasant and pleasant to look at. Why then did I feel so cornered?

  “He won’t like it when he finds out about Michel,” I said.

  My mother went quiet for a minute, wiping down the long table.

  “You won’t tell him about Michel yet,” she pronounced. “Once he’s in love with you, he won’t care.”

  * * *

  “MY BROTHER IS one of the ones who started the strike,” I told Hugh at the next opportunity. He’d invited me for an afternoon walk.

  “The mouse speaks.” He smiled. “I know about Michel.” And at my look of surprise, “Before I was made foreman I was a worker. I know the stretch-outs are onerous, and the hours are long. But the wartime demand has dried up, and the mill is struggling to stay open. It can’t give all the things the strikers want. All it can give is work. Hard work, I know, but it’s work.”

  “If everyone strikes, we would win.”

  He raised his eyebrows at the we.

  “If everyone strikes, everyone will starve,” he said. “There are plenty who walk over the picket lines now for the jobs.” He tucked my hand a little more tightly under his arm. “You’re an idealist, and I’m a realist. Which makes us a good pair.”

  As he spoke, I realized that somewhere inside me, I’d cherished a fantasy: that someday, somehow, time might loop back on itself and deposit me where I’d left off, a girl on the cusp of high school and college and the future. I’d sent a mannequin, a husk, to the mill, while my real self had curled up inside, waiting. For something that could never happen.

  The reality was that I would need to marry. I didn’t want the life of a spinster, gathering whispers and
smirks as I aged, suffering pitying looks at christenings and confirmations. If I waited too long, my best hope would be a grizzled widower who might have me to raise his brood.

  “You’re so quiet,” said Hugh approvingly.

  The girl who arrived home that day was not the one who’d left. I let myself into the bookshop, walked between the shelves that my brothers had built, half empty now and dusty, the calligraphed cards faded and soft with age. I stepped over the bedrolls near the back stairs where some of the cousins slept. The beloved bookshop of my childhood was a shabby place. I would not finish school, or be a scientist, or travel the world.

  “Good, you’re back,” said my mother when I came into the kitchen. “Start the fire, please.”

  “Was it a nice walk?” asked my father.

  We’d lately been burning a copy of collected Shakespeare. I ripped the first act from Othello and fed the brittle onionskin pages into the stove. A line of typeface brightened against its paper backdrop—Let heaven and men and devils, let them all—before blackening with the rest.

  “If Hugh does ask,” I said, feeling my mother tense, waiting for my answer, “you may tell him yes.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  Lucy

  WHEN I AWAKE FROM MY day’s sleep, Giles has sent me a Google Maps dropped pin and a peremptory text: Dinner 7 p.m. It’s six now, five hours until my shift. I hate last-minute plans. You need to be more spontaneous I hear in Joe’s voice, and my retort: I get all the spontaneity I need at work. I send a thumbs-up emoji and then, with a sense of anticipation that surprises me, I shower, dress, and navigate toward the gray teardrop on the GPS screen. Driving past the electrical plant painting its reflection onto the dark, still water beside the hurricane barrier, then turning onto the cobbled streets of Downcity. When I get there, it turns out to be one of the quirky eateries that spring up all around the city each year as the culinary school sporulates another crop of graduates. They settle in widening circles: the arty blocks around Rhode Island School of Design, the gentrifying Jewelry District, the still-edgy West End. Even Elmwood, the neighborhood that provides most of our gunshots and stabbings, now has spots of haute cuisine.

  A listless waiter with gauges in his earlobes and a plump samurai topknot takes our orders, brings seltzer for me and a vodka tonic for Giles.

  “All right, you.” Giles pokes a straw into his glass, freeing a cataract of clinging bubbles from the floating lime wedge. “What have you heard from Bad Hubby?”

  “A text about pasta.”

  “Meaning?”

  “No subtext, just text. Pasta.”

  “What an ass.”

  “He was always quiet,” I say.

  “Like you,” says Giles, surprising me. My real friends would never describe me that way. “Okay, let’s talk stalking. Does he Instagram or Snapchat?” He makes a moue. “Facebook?”

  “He doesn’t use social media.”

  “Not old enough for Facebook, not young enough for anything else.” Giles takes a spray of fries from his plate. “Part of the Lost Generation.”

  “We’re the same generation,” I point out. Giles is the same age as I am.

  “Only chronologically. Singlehood keeps one fresh.” He doesn’t add You’ll see.

  “Enough about Joe,” I say. “I need a consult.” Giles raises his eyebrows and I tell him about Ben. “So what do you think? Is DID even a thing anymore? Is hypnosis considered a viable treatment?”

  “Dr. Jellicoe is well respected,” Giles says with professional caution. “And I’m not a child psychiatrist.” He takes a bite of hamburger, speaks around it. “That said, it does seem rather a reach.”

  “He’s totally alone in the world.” The boy’s rumpled brow, his earnest voice: I’m trying. “I feel like he needs my help.” It sounds so stupid, I wince hearing myself say it, but Giles nods.

  “He does. They all need our help. Helping doesn’t always mean fixing, though.”

  “Tell that to an ER doc.”

  We move on to talk about other, lighter things, a book we’ve both read and enjoyed, a movie he recommends. The conversation migrates naturally. He’s talking about his most recent boyfriend when I look at my watch: nine thirty. My shift begins in ninety minutes. The thought brings the anxiety buzzing back, like a swarm of gnats: get ready.

  Giles drains his almost-empty drink, the ice cubes sliding in a rattling clump against his lip and then rattling back down again when he sets the glass on the table. He puts an index finger up to signal for another.

  “The night is young,” he says. He scans the throng at the bar at the front of the room, lifts an eyebrow. “Who knows where it will end.”

  He is truly single, not faux single the way I am. When I was last single, people actually went on dates before having sex, not the other way around, and monogamy was presumed. A moment of vertigo: Am I really going to be entering this world?

  When we get up to leave, Giles kisses me on the cheek with a pleasant breath of lime. He takes my chin between his thumb and forefinger, waggles it. Chin up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  Leo

  I’VE SORTED IT OUT NOW, during the hours of chores, during the long Latin prayers in chapel. This must be Clyde’s doing. He’s told them lies about me, told them I need punishment. The monks would believe him, a grown man; he can be charming when he wants. I remember liking him myself, a long time ago. One thing I am certain about: my mother must not know where I am, or she would have come for me. The van ride wasn’t that long. It feels strange to know that home is so close. She must be worried; does she believe I’ve run away?

  I have learned a lot in ten days: how to grip the rubbery teat and roll my fingers down without pulling, until the milk jets into the pail with a tinny ring. How to dress quickly in the dark, how to eat fast before someone spits on my plate or grabs it away. The chapel bell makes the rhythm of life here; it goes nine times a day. Six of those are for the monks only. The other three times the bell is for everyone, and we all automatically stop what we are doing and walk toward it. I don’t know what the Latin means, but I learn the responses. Murmuring them in the candlelit chapel, I am thinking a different prayer: find me.

  By now, I know that stalls means mucking out the spaces where the cows stand at night dropping their filth, and that it is a punishment. I know what a runner is, and that Bedrick is one. I know what a toad is, and that I am one. Being a toad means I have to withstand all kinds of pranks, short sheets in my bed and piss on my pillow. This morning my toothbrush bristles were stiff with soap. I don’t know specifically who does these things, but it doesn’t matter. I know that whoever it is will tire of it in time, just the way my stepfather’s rages played themselves out if I didn’t fight back. Besides, I won’t be here long. I can’t be.

  Seven years, Gregory had said. But maybe he has nowhere else to go.

  “Really applying yourself,” says Brother Thomas with approval as I empty another foamy pail into the funnel-topped metal can at the end of the barn.

  “Suck-up,” says Bedrick when Thomas has gone. He shovels a fragrant load onto my shoe. He’s still on stalls, which means I see him every day.

  The first few days I fell asleep immediately, black nothing between lights-out and the morning clamor, but in the week since then I’ve had some time in the dark before unconsciousness overtakes me. Lying awake and listening to the sounds of the monks going to and from Compline, I’ve made a plan. Milking will be the best time, just two or three of us in the large barn, in the dark before dawn. Brother Thomas will leave as he always does before the bell, to see to the boys who are feeding the hogs and the sheep.

  When Thomas leaves this morning, I whisper, “Bedrick.”

  “Don’t talk to me, toad.”

  He hates me. He says it is because I am weak, because I am stupid. But I think it has more to do with my having seen tears on his face when we were in the van.

  Still, he is my best hope.
He’s the only runner I know.

  “I’m leaving,” I whisper. “Today. Do you want to come with me?”

  He stops his shoveling, turns, and looks at me.

  “Where you planning to go?”

  “Home,” I say. “My mother—”

  His features thicken with scorn. “Your mother doesn’t want you.” He turns away again and pushes the shovel into the heap of dung. “You wouldn’t be here if she did.”

  “She doesn’t know I’m here. My stepfather—”

  “For Christ’s sake, shut up. I don’t care.” He heaves another shovelful toward me; I jump my feet apart, so that it mostly misses.

  I abandon the hope of getting help from him; I am on my own.

  This is what I do: at the bell’s toll, I stumble purposely and kick over the bucket, bend to right it as the other boys make their way past me out of the barn. I go through a minute after they do, but simply turn the other way, push through the bushes and into the forest, aiming blindly toward the gravel path that we drove up when I came here. Ten minutes’ fast walking and I feel the gravel crunch under my feet. I am in the open now, and in the rosy-gray light I can see houses far down the hill: the outskirts of Waite.

  How long will it take to miss me? The milking barn is the farthest building from the chapel; slow milkers sometimes come late (once means a missed meal, twice gets a whipping). Matins and then breakfast are both just a jumble of boys, no one taking attendance. So I may have until the beginning of morning lessons, a good hour and a half at least. I head down the hill in the breaking dawn.