The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “I did,” I say, shocked. “It wasn’t the Pledge of Allegiance to me.”

  “It’s every day,” he says, impatience breaking in his voice. “You coming home, saying, What did you do today? I collated the quarterly report, what about you? I brought a dead person back to life.”

  He’s talking, finally we’re talking. I want all the details, I want to know everything. But another part of me doesn’t want to know any of it, and wants him to stop telling me about how terrible it’s been to know me.

  “I don’t want to feel this way when I’m forty,” he’s saying. “I want things to be easier.”

  We started in our twenties, at a party as he was coming in and I was leaving, and something about the way our eyes caught as we passed each other made me turn around and stay. That minute was the beginning. Minutes accumulate into hours and days and months and years. All those minutes have brought us here. Was there one minute among them that could have turned us onto a different path? He’s right, we did have fun once upon a time. We used to laugh a lot. When had our lives become such a terribly serious business?

  “I know it’s been difficult,” I say. “I don’t want it to be. I just—” I grope for the right words. “It’s been like standing so close to a mountain that the mountain is all you can see. You can’t see over it or around it, or even the sky above it. Just the mountain all the time.” He’s listening, eyes on me. “And the person you’re closest to, the person you love most, doesn’t even see the mountain.”

  “I think I’ve been on a different mountain,” he says.

  I put out my hand and he takes it. His guitar-callused fingertips, I’d know them anywhere. Our separate pulses beat against each other where our fingers lace together. He puts his wineglass down.

  The rest is very easy. We have done this so many times before. The sameness is overwhelming. The same body, the same smell. The same shoulders, the same furry chest, and the same knees knotted with football scars. This is the back I remember, the banks of muscle along the deep trough of spine, the mole just below the neck. It is all quite dizzyingly the same, and I close my eyes and let our hands, our skin, re-create us.

  When we are lying together afterward, I have a sudden cramp of ravenousness.

  “I’m so hungry I could die,” I say.

  “Don’t move,” he says, dropping a kiss onto my shoulder. He rises and goes into the kitchen. I lie on the sofa under the blanket and watch the patterns of light on the walls, listening to Joe clatter around in the kitchen, opening drawers and cabinets, then the tick-tick-tick of the gas igniting on the stovetop, the hum of the microwave. It all feels so right, so familiar, just the way it should be.

  I wrap the blanket around me and walk toward the window; the low bookcase under the sill is strewn with objects. It had always been a sentimental surface; Joe used to put mementos there, ticket stubs from concerts and wine corks from our meals together. They are still there. I am briefly warmed by this, until I look more closely, see the date on a pair of ticket stubs: just last week. The wine corks are less readily identifiable; maybe they are also new. He is a creature of habit; have I been that easily exchanged?

  I find my clothing in the nest of bedsheets, pull on my underwear, and drop my T-shirt over my head.

  “Brave is the man who cooks naked,” Joe asserts a minute later, putting a tray down on the bed. There are two bowls of pasta, some bread, and a little bowl of olives. He retrieves his boxers from the floor and pulls them on.

  For a while we eat, nothing more complicated than putting food into our mouths and chewing, the vacuum at my center filling slowly. I watch him eat. Is it possible that in this short time apart I’ve forgotten how he chews? How he lifts his fork? Everything looks strange yet also deeply familiar, as if I’m a castaway newly returned to civilization.

  “What?” he says, seeing that I am staring at him.

  “What did you do with the stuff in the drawer?”

  “What stuff?” he says, but then says, “Oh.” He puts his empty pasta bowl onto the tray with mine, moves the tray from the bed to the floor. “I threw it away. I’m sorry.”

  I had never considered that. Images play out behind my eyes: the drawer pulled out and held over the recycling bin, the stack of postcards falling with a solid thump and the Post-it notes fluttering after. The bin at the curb, the wind pulling out a few pieces and distributing them around the block before the recycling truck comes.

  “We can make more.” Putting his arms around me.

  “It won’t be the same.” We won’t be young like that, naive like that, new to each other or to anyone else like that, ever again.

  “It will be better,” he whispers. He pulls the blanket over both of us and snugs me little-spoon against him, his hand over mine. I close my eyes and try to climb up into sleep, against the backward schedule I’ve been on the last three weeks.

  “You’re not sleeping,” he says after a couple of minutes.

  “I’ve been on nights,” I remind him. He sighs and turns onto his back, pulling me with him so that my head is against his chest. “I’m thinking about this kid from work.” I’ve let my thoughts float free, and that’s where they’ve gone.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “His doctor’s trying to diagnose him as dissociative disorder. You know, multiple personality. He doesn’t have anyone to advocate for him. No family.” I swallow past the next words. “His mom was murdered.” A throb of pain in the center of my chest, a memory of the fear in my dream.

  “Which doctor? Aren’t you his doctor?”

  “No, his psych doctor. I saw him in the ER and admitted him to Psych.”

  “Does he have multiple personalities? Did you see that?” A perk of interest.

  “I don’t know. He’s amnestic from the trauma, he’s calling himself Leo. He doesn’t seem psychotic, though.”

  “Amnesia, is that really a thing?” says Joe.

  “It can happen.”

  Light flares around the curtains in the window: headlights from a car cresting the hill on the street below. A pale panel of illumination travels the ceiling as the car makes a turn. I’d forgotten that Australia-shaped stain on the plaster.

  “Mmm.” Joe’s drowsy again. “He’s not your patient anymore, right?”

  “No, but.” But what? I’m not a psychiatrist. Maybe Dr. Jellicoe is right, maybe it’s traumatic dissociation. Maybe hypnosis will help. Maybe they’ll try medication. I hear Karen again, I told them no fucking way. “He’s only six.”

  The half moon shows in the space between the window curtains; its light falls through the gap and glazes the things on the top of the bureau. We’re balanced right here, the two of us, between our past and our future. Joe’s measured breaths tell me that he’s asleep. I try to force myself to relax and follow. Listen to his breathing, inhale, exhale. I don’t belong here. I do belong here. I don’t. Like pulling the petals of a daisy, but with a real daisy the outcome is certain: always five petals, so you know you’ll end up back where you start.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  Clare

  A FEW DAYS AFTER THE APPLE incident, the boy they’d called Leo came back, walking up to the wall in plain view and climbing up to sit. This time I was tending to the Conroys, not ten feet from the wall; I could hardly pretend not to see him, but I paid him no attention. I listened for sounds of approaching compatriots, but it seemed he had come alone. He stayed there, facing my way with his legs dangling, for nearly a quarter of an hour with the only sounds in the air between us the varied trill of birds calling out their territory markings, and the scrape, scrape, thunk of my blade.

  I knifed some weed-bristled sod away from Nuala Conroy, wife of Treacher, 1863 to 1897. Died in childbirth, most likely. Left five live children behind, and as many dead ones, their little stones in a row stretching out to the side of hers, like ducklings following their mother. Her surviving daughters and sons had married and reproduced and come to rest in their own clusters in
other places across the field. No sign of Treacher, though. Either he married again and settled with his new wife in another place, or he’d done something unspeakable—suicide or Protestantism—and was barred from St. William’s. Or there simply hadn’t been room for him in the end, what with all the children in the Conroy plot. I brushed some dirt from Nuala.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” I said finally.

  “I’m supposed to be in the laundry,” he agreed. “They threw me out because I scorched a sheet. Not on purpose. I held the press closed too long. Brother Nicholas told me to get out. He doesn’t believe in caning.” His tone made it clear that not all the brothers agreed with Nicholas. He swung his feet, his hands tucked under his thighs. “I think he’s going to send me back to Folding.”

  I hadn’t heard so many words in a long time. It was like a wall of sound coming at me, the syllables tumbling past almost faster than I could understand them. During that period in my life, there were whole tracts of time—weeks, months—where if I hadn’t had to speak to the grocer on my biweekly visit to town, I wouldn’t have uttered a single word to anyone, nor heard a word in return. I moved over to Catherine, age three.

  “Where are your friends?” I asked.

  “They’re not my friends. Why do you do that?” he asked, watching me step on the metal crescent with one foot, driving it into the sod.

  “Keeps it neat,” I said. Scrape, scrape, thunk.

  “It’s a lot of work. If you do all of them.”

  “Yes, I do all of them,” I snapped, straightening up and looking him full in the face. “Just because some folks don’t have anyone living to remember them doesn’t mean they don’t matter.”

  He absorbed my irritation without flinching, leaning forward from his perch and pointing to the headstones below his swinging feet.

  “They look like teeth.”

  I said nothing.

  “Why are they crooked?”

  I said nothing.

  “Why are those ones so little?”

  I said nothing.

  He read the lettering on the Conroy stones aloud: Catherine, Sadie, Willie, Susan, James. The front curtain of his brown hair had a tendency to fall down over his eyes, so that he had to keep tossing his head every few minutes. He was wearing the St. William’s laundryworks uniform, the dark-blue serge trousers and the round-collared shirt; both were too large on him.

  With him watching, the movements I had made unthinkingly so often seemed more discrete. Foot on the edger blade, step hard to push it in up to the eye; slide it out, reposition at an angle, step again. Lift the wedge of sod, swing it over to the wheelbarrow, deposit it with a soft thud. After a few minutes, I stood back to admire the Conroys. Even if their stones were leaning this way and that, they looked better. I moved on to the next plot.

  “Why are those ones so little?” the boy asked again.

  I said nothing.

  “They’re baby graves, aren’t they. They’re dead babies.”

  I straightened up.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than bother people while they’re working?”

  “Not really. What did the babies die of?”

  “How would I know?” I said.

  “If you had to guess.”

  I bent to resume my work.

  A minute or so passed.

  “If you had to guess.”

  I gritted my teeth, said nothing.

  “If you had to—”

  “All right,” I said, cutting him off. Ignoring wouldn’t work on this boy, evidently; he would repeat himself at two-minute intervals, the same five words, until the sun went down or I answered, whichever came first. “They might have died of . . .” I paused, as though I’d never thought about it. The sweat was trickling down my forehead, a drop collecting on the tip of my nose. I lifted a hand and swiped my forearm across my face. “Diphtheria, maybe, or pneumonia.”

  “Dip-theria,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “A sore throat so bad it chokes you.”

  “I had a sore throat last month. Brother Silas put a bad-smelling scarf around my neck and I had to gargle. What happened to those bushes? There’s no flowers on them.”

  He was pointing to the rosebushes I was coddling after the previous winter’s killing frost. The others were in full flower, but these three had been slow to recover.

  “You should pull these up and get new ones,” he said.

  “And you should get back where you belong. Go on, shoo.”

  “Shoo isn’t something you say to a person,” he said, reproachful. “It’s something you say to a bird.”

  Scrape, scrape, thunk.

  “Or a bug. Not a person.”

  “Well, apples are for eating. Not throwing at people.” I wheeled the barrow a little distance, to the next plot.

  “A boy got eaten by the wringer last year and died. Is he buried here?”

  “He’s not here.” If he ever existed. “I know everyone here.”

  “Why does that one have a buffalo?”

  “That’s not a buffalo,” I said, looking up briefly to see where he was pointing. “It’s a horse.” Now that I looked, I saw that the carving on the top of the tombstone did look like the humped shape on the back of a nickel. Time had worn the ears and tail away.

  “Why does he have a horse?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Would Bradley have done this, I wondered, if he had grown up to be this boy’s age? Would he have pestered me with whys until I went mad?

  He jumped down from the wall and read from the headstone: “1813 to 1824. He was eleven. Same as me.” He interpreted my look of disbelief correctly. “I’m small,” he said, pushing his fists into his pockets; the movement bunched the fabric of his trousers and created a gap at the waistband, as if to emphasize his statement. “That’s the way God made me.”

  My blade sliced through a stand of dandelions. The Meehans tended to grow particularly nasty dandelions, with big, thick stalks that bled milk from their hollow centers when they were snapped.

  “Make yourself useful,” I said. “Pull that up.”

  He knelt, and I could see right away he’d never pulled a dandelion before: he put his fist around the stems.

  “Let me show you how,” I said.

  “I can do it.”

  I said nothing: live and learn.

  “Shit,” he said, falling backward onto his rear end.

  “What did you say?”

  “I mean shoot,” he said, showing me the sunny head of a flower on his palm.

  “Pulling the stems will never work. You have to get down to the root. The bigger piece is underneath. Here, use this.” I gave him the trowel from the loop on the side of my overalls.

  He knelt again, his forehead folding up between his eyebrows, his fingers creeping into the splay of toothed leaves at the base of the plant, gathering them up before pushing the trowel point into the soil. I edged Zed Meehan for a while, buried with his nameless wife.

  “Ha,” the boy said finally, showing me a clump of root-choked dirt. I inspected it.

  “You need to get the whole taproot. See how it’s snapped off at the bottom? You need to dig that out.”

  He crouched again, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, and a minute or two later brought out the wormy root. I nodded approval, and he dropped it into the wheelbarrow.

  “There’s another one over there,” he said, and ran to it.

  We worked for a while in peace, just the grate of tools on earth and stone and our separate panting in the heat. We tidied Zed and wife, daughter Anna, son-in-law William.

  “Why isn’t her name there?” the boy asked, dropping a dandelion cluster into the barrow. “She’s just called Wife.” He squatted by the headstone, put his hand out to the letters there. “If nobody knows your name after you die, is it like you never were born at all?”

  I chunked out the last bit of weed encroaching on baby Roger, and upended the edger with a harshe
r movement than I intended. He looked up at the noise.

  “That’s enough for today.” I ran my fingers over the metal, freeing the bits of dirt and grass that clung there.

  He looked around at the families of stone spreading out in every direction, his cowlick dancing on his damp-darkened head, the rest of his hair beaded with fragments of earth. How had he gotten so dirty?

  “There’s a lot more,” he said. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, leaving a streak of mud above his upper lip.

  It was true; the day’s work had made but a spot of calm in a sea of chaos. A field a hundred feet on each side looks small, except in its caretaker’s eyes.

  “Their turns will come.” I saw a peek of white flesh through the navy fabric below one knee. “You tore your pants.”

  He looked down at the rip and his face closed, like a curtain coming down.

  “Will you be punished for that?” I asked.

  He nodded, a tight movement up and down, not looking at me.

  “Well. Come on with me.”

  I wheeled the barrow without looking back, threading my way between the headstones toward the gate. He got ahead and was there to open it for me as I passed through. He closed it with a soft clang, then followed me up the path to the yard in front of the cottage.

  I pulled the pump handle up and down a few times to loose a warm cord of water and rinsed my hands.

  “Fill that bucket,” I told him.

  I went inside and got my mending basket, a bar of soap and a towel, and the three-legged stool from the kitchen. When I came back outside he had his head under the pump, taking a drink.

  “Give me your trousers,” I said, placing the stool on the grass and sitting down. He hesitated. “Oh for goodness’ sake.” I swiveled myself around on the stool so that my back was to him.

  A few moments later, the trousers came flying over my shoulder; I bent and picked them up.

  “Have a good wash while I see to these,” I said, and heard the squeak-rattle of the pump handle behind me. “Use the soap.” I turned the trousers inside out and stretched the torn leg across my lap. “I’ve been wondering,” I said, taking a spool of thread from the basket and pulling a needle from the pincushion. “Why didn’t you warn the boys I was going to dump the bucket on them the other day? You had plenty of time.”