How They Were Found

by Matt Bell

  She sits her groceries down on the counter and calls for him but there’s no answer. It takes her a minute to realize that the television is dark, that it isn’t tuned to sports news or the endless reruns of crime procedural shows that always seem to be on. Walking through the apartment, she notices other things: There are no clothes on the floor of the bathroom, no wads of tissue crumpled along Little Jeff’s side of the bed.

  She’s nearly in a panic trying to find him, but eventually she does. He’s outside on the apartment’s small balcony, somewhere she’s never seen him go before. There isn’t any furniture out there, so he’s sitting on the concrete.

  It takes her a minute to realize he’s crying. In the years she was with the real Jeff, she never saw him cry, and so Allison doesn’t know what to do. She reaches in her purse and offers Little Jeff a cigarette from the pack she purchased herself a few days ago, after convincing herself that she’d been quit long enough that it was okay to have just one. Little Jeff shakes his head, his eyes brimming, and it’s only then that Allison realizes what seemed different about the apartment. It hadn’t smelled like smoke when she came in.

  Little Jeff’s quit smoking.

  She drops her purse and scoops him up in her arms, and as he curls against her she can feel he’s lost weight, and although it takes a little longer to be sure, she sees he’s lost height too, that he is even smaller than he was before. Even his facial hair is thinning, fading from a full goatee to a tiny triangle of soul patch.

  Allison is furious, but not at Little Jeff, who she keeps rocking and reassuring that everything will be okay, even though she’s sure that it won’t be, that if she doesn’t do something then he’ll be gone soon.

  She needs to call Jeff. Needs to tell him not to stop quitting everything she made him quit, because she’s sure that’s what’s happened.

  She wants a cigarette, craves it intensely, but she fights the urge. It’s taken her months, but she’s finally realizing that Little Jeff might not be the only thing leftover from the breakup.

  Little Jeff falls asleep alone that night, pushed all the way over on his side of the bed, as if he recognizes that his diminishing size has changed the physical dynamic between them. He’s child-like in a way he wasn’t only a day before, and the idea of him as a lover is past. Allison lies awake, staring at him and wondering what her own counterpart might look like. She tries to remember all she quit while Jeff and she dated. Smoking is a given, but other things are vaguer. Which of Allison’s haircuts would her leftover sport? She flips through the mental images she has of herself, eventually settling on the long perm she’d had when they started dating. Jeff had liked it, but had encouraged her to try something new, something more contemporary.

  What else? Allison thinks about her job at the textbook publisher, about how she hates it but has never looked for anything else. She thinks about all the careers she wanted instead, and wonders if they count as things that she quit or if they were never what she actually was. She had wanted to be a gymnast as a little girl, and then an astronaut. She had played the flute in junior high, but gave it up in high school to try to date a different class of boy than what she found in the band. She owns a bike she never uses. Ditto rollerblades. Ditto yoga videos.

  This Little Allison, she might wear hideous blue eyeliner or have terribly outdated tastes in clothing, but Allison doesn’t really think that’s all of it.

  Most of what Allison has quit are good things, things that might have made her happier than she is. She doesn’t have bad habits, just bad follow-through.

  Little Jeff is snoring quietly, his tiny hands folded over his belly. She wonders if she is supposed to stop Jeff from starting up all his old bad habits, or if she is supposed to encourage him until this other vanishes completely.

  Watching Little Jeff sleep, she wonders if he’s dreaming. If he dreams. She wonders if it hurt when he shrank, or if it was just something that happened. She wishes he could talk so he could tell her what he wanted her to do.

  She gets out of bed and reaches for her phone. Dials Jeff’s cell. It rings and rings and then, right before the voicemail should click on, he answers, his voice groggy with sleep.

  He says, Hello? Allison?

  She hangs up by slamming the clamshell shut, then turns the phone off so he can’t call her back. She sits in the dark with the phone clenched between her hands until she’s sure of what she wants to do, and then she gets up and does it. Gets dressed. Puts her shoes on. Goes downstairs to the parking lot and moves her car close to the front of the building, then goes back upstairs with the engine running.

  Quietly, Allison wraps the sleeping boy in his blanket and carries him down to the car. He’s so small. She wishes she had a car seat for him but she doesn’t. She’ll have to be careful. He stirs when she buckles him in but doesn’t wake up, only sticks his thumb in his mouth and sucks hard. She gets in the driver’s seat and just drives.

  At Jeff’s new place, Allison peeks in the bedroom window, her toes digging into the soft dirt around his bushes. It takes a minute for her eyes to adjust, but thankfully Jeff’s sleeping with his television on, something she never would have let him do.

  Not that she cares. She doesn’t, for real this time, and anyway she’s not there to see Jeff, or at least not just Jeff. She’s there to see if she’s there too.

  And she is.

  There, like a doll tucked into Jeff’s arms, is a tiny version of her, complete with the long hair Allison predicted. On the nightstand are the bulky red glasses she got rid of in college, folded neatly beside a glass of water. It’s all she can see from the bushes, but it’s enough.

  The only other thing she sees—the very last detail before she turns away from the window—is how happy they both look. How contented. How like a father and a daughter.

  She wants to look like that too. Wants to look like that with them. Wants to look like a family, with him and him and her.

  She wants to stop quitting and then unquitting. She wants to stop hurting people by doing one or the other. She wants to stick with something and make it work this time, no matter what.

  Allison doesn’t know what will happen when Jeff meets Little Jeff, or when she meets Little Allison, but that doesn’t matter. She’s tired of all the warnings, all the shows and magazines and well-intentioned friends telling her it’s too risky to do this thing or that thing. All the voices telling her she can’t do what she wants.

  She walks back to her car and opens the passenger door, then crouches down and carefully unbuckles the sleeping boy. Little Jeff slings his arms around her neck like the toddler he’s becoming, and she lifts him with an arm tucked under his hips. Even in the dim glow of the dome light she can see how young he looks. His facial hair is completely gone, and he’s even a little pudgy, a little fat in the cheeks. Allison kisses him on his forehead, then carries him up the walk toward Jeff’s front door. She doesn’t know what any of this is or what it might mean, but she’s willing to try anyway, to trust that together they can make it work.

  She reaches for the doorbell. She rings it. She thinks of what to say, of the dozens of ways she might say what she needs to. She settles on one, and when the door opens she says it as fast as she can, trying to make a million new promises all at once.

  A CERTAIN NUMBER OF BEDROOMS, A CERTAIN NUMBER OF BATHS

  THE BOY CARRIES THE BLUEPRINT CATALOGS EVERYWHERE HE GOES. At school, he keeps them in his backpack, only occasionally looking inside to spy their colorful covers, comforted simply by their presence, their proximity. It is different at home. After school, he locks himself in the empty house and sits at the kitchen table, where he fans the catalogs out in front of him as he eats his snack. He compares the artist’s renditions on the left page with the floor plans on the right, then moves to the living room floor, where he watches television and turns the thin catalog pages. He mutes his cartoons so he can hear himself enunciating the names of the homes he hopes his father will build.

  Ranches
: Crestwood, Echo Hills, Nova.

  Split Levels: Timber Ridge, Elk Ridge.

  The Capes: Cod, Vincent, and Chelsey.

  Two-story houses, like the one they live in, in ascending order by size: Walden, Westgate, Somerset, Carbondale.

  The boy has not been reading long and wants to be sure that when the time comes he can spell the new house’s name, that he can say it. He pronounces slowly, then more confidently. He wants the new home to be built from the ground up, so it will not have anyone else’s history attached to it, so that he knows for sure that no one will have died in the garage. He often wonders if they would be better off without a garage at all.

  Only after his father’s obsession with the catalogs passed did the boy take them to his own room. He thought he’d get in trouble for claiming them but never did, not even later when he started sneaking them to school in his backpack. The boy is years away from the time he steals his first porno magazine from beneath his father’s mattress, but when he does he will remember the catalogs, remember the feel of their crinkly, hand-worn pages. Once again, he will find himself too young to understand what he’s looking at or why he wants it, the magazines reminding him only obliquely of this time in his life, when so much hope is invested in so little paper.

  At dinner, the boy tells his father about the houses he likes best this week, about how he is having trouble deciding between the Crestwood and the Cape Cod. The father glances at the pages as the boy presents them. A month ago he smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm, even joined in with comments of his own, but now he is less demonstrative with his opinions.

  Dinner: A meal consisting of brand-name hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. The father is not frugal with his shopping as the mother was. He buys what he recognizes, assured by television that he is making a good choice.

  The boy has been in so few other houses that actually picturing the interior of any other home means simply reconfiguring the rooms of their own house into his conception of the new one. The floor plans he likes best are ones he can most easily shoehorn his own into, using the homes of his grandmother and of the neighbor boy his mother once forced him to play with to fill in the bigger houses. The father does not say much in return, but the boy has become used to this. To make up for his father’s reticence, the boy talks more and more, more than he is comfortable with, not because he wants to but because he does not like the silence at the table, the reminder that there is something missing, that without her they are alone even when they are with each other.

  Suicide: Car running, windows closed, parked in the garage. No one would ever drive it again and two months after her death it would be sold at a loss. The boy was not supposed to find her. She did not know that school had become a half day, that everyone had been sent home early because of the impending snowfall. The note taped to the outside of the driver’s window was addressed to his father, not to him. The boy could barely read then, but decided to try anyway. He pulled the note off the window, leaving the scotch tape behind.

  Mother: Hidden underneath. Pressed against the window with her mouth open, the steam from her breath slowly disappearing from the cloudy glass. The last time he saw her.

  9-1-1: The boy had learned the number in school, but he had not been taught that it was not failsafe, that it did not save everyone. For months he thought about raising his hand and telling his teacher about her error, but they had moved on from health and safety and would not speak of it again.

  Extolling the virtues of the houses to the father, the boy lists the numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms. He wonders what half a bathroom is but does not ask. He explains that all the houses from American Homes have R-19 insulation, which he has been assured by the catalog is the very best kind. He shows his father the cross section of a wall and repeats from memory the phrase oriented strand board. The boy pronounces many of the words wrong. He does not realize that learning words by sounding them out alone has left him with false pronunciations, sounds that as an adult he will be constantly corrected for. No matter how hard he tries to hide it, he will not speak the same language others speak.

  Father: Quiet. Sluggish. Often watches the news from his easy chair with his eyes closed. A tumbler of melting, browning ice dangles from his fingertips at all times. Has apparently forgotten how to play catch or even how to get to the park.

  Father (previous): Fun. Loud. Told jokes the mother disapproved of but that the boy loved. Often rustled the boy’s hair, which the boy pretended to hate but secretly didn’t. Missing in action.

  Father (future): Defined by the loss of his partner in a way he was never defined by her presence.

  The boy reads the catalogs in the evening while his father naps in his recliner. His father rarely makes it to the bedroom anymore and so sometimes the boy sleeps on the couch to be near him. More often he goes to his own room, where he reads the catalogs until he is too tired to keep his eyes open. Each night, before he sleeps, he chooses the home he thinks they need, his decisions changing quickly, like moods or Michigan weather. Sometimes he falls asleep with the light on, and those nights are the ones he stays in his bed.

  On other nights, the boy wakes up shaking, then walks into the living room where his father sleeps. Standing beside the recliner, the boy tries to will his father to wake up before starting to shake him. Neither tactic works. The father snores on, even when the boy begins at last to talk, begins to insist that his father talk back, that he take them away from this home which is no longer any such thing.

  Eventually his teacher notices the black rings below his eyes and keeps him inside at recess. She asks him if there’s anything he wants to talk about, if maybe something is happening at home. He knows she knows, but if she will not say so, then neither will he. The boy does not show her the catalogs, hides their meaning from anyone who might accidentally see and ask. Curiosity is not the same as caring.

  The new house will end up being an apartment, a word the boy doesn’t even know yet, and then later the new house will be his grandma’s basement. The boy will lose the catalogs on one moving day or another, but by then he won’t need their physical presence. He will have memorized them completely. They will be part of who he is. As he grows, he will make friends and then lose friends, realizing a year or two later that he is unable to remember their names or faces but can still recount the number of bedrooms in their houses, how many bathrooms and a half they had. When he thinks of his old house, the one he had been born in and his mother had died in, he will picture it as a spread in one of his catalogs, imaginary fingers tracing the picture of the remembered home, the hard blue lines of the floor plans.

  Home: Three bedrooms. One bath. Storm windows and a thirty-five-year guarantee on the shingles.

  Family: Two parents. One child. One dead with two survivors.

  This is a home. This is a family. This is what happens in a home when a family breaks down a fault line, when a foundation suddenly shifts because once it got wet when it should have stayed dry, because that wet spot was sealed beneath the floorboards, because it hid there for years and years before cracks began showing around doorways and windows, before one day whole chunks of plaster fell from the ceilings and walls as something fundamental within gave way to ruin.

  THE COLLECTORS

  1A. HOMER STANDS, FALLS, STANDS AGAIN

  How long has Homer been sitting here in the dark? A decade, a year, a day, an hour, a minute, or at least this minute, the one where his eyes pop open and his ears perk up, listening to the voice howling in the dark. Somewhere in the house, Langley is yelling for Homer to help him, has, perhaps, been doing so for some time. Homer leans over the edge of his tattered leather chair—the chair that once belonged to his father and has been his home since he lost his sight—then sets down his snifter, the brandy long ago emptied into the hollows of his throat. He stands, legs shaky, and for a moment thinks he will fall back into the chair’s ripped excess. He finds his balance, takes a step or two forward, then loses it, crashing forward onto the dam
p floor covered in orange peels and pipe ash, the remains of the only forms of nourishment he’s allowed. Homer calls out for Langley, who calls out for him, and together their voices echo through the twisted passageways and piled junk of their home. Homer’s eyes long gone, everything has become touch, life a mere series of tactile experiences. He pushes himself upward, his hands sinking into the orange peels that litter the floor, their consistency like gums pulled away from teeth. He’s disgusted, but has been for so many years that this newest indignity barely registers.

  In a loud voice, he tells Langley that he is coming, but he doesn’t know if that’s true. There’s so much between them, much of it dangerous, all of it theirs.

  3A. INVENTORY

  Some of the items removed from the Collyer mansion include hundreds of feet of rope, three baby carriages, rakes and hoes and other gardening implements, several rusted bicycles, kitchen utensils (including at least four complete sets of china and several potato peelers), a heap of glass chandeliers that had been removed from the ceilings to make room for the piles and the tunnels, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, a room full of dressmaking dummies, several portraits of both family members and early-century presidents such as Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, a plaster bust of Herman Melville, a kerosene stove placed precariously close to the stacks of newspapers in Homer’s sitting room, a variety of children’s furniture and clothing, the chassis of a Model T Ford that Langley had apparently been trying to turn into a generator, hundreds of yards of unused silk and other fabrics, several broken clocks and piles of clock parts, one British and six American flags, piles of tapestries and rugs, whole rooms filled with broken furniture and bundled lumber. There was also the matter of their inheritance from their father, which included all his medical equipment, plus his thousands of medical and anatomical reference texts, greatly expanding the already large, impenetrably stuffed Collyer family library. All in all, the accumulated possessions of the Collyer brothers added up to over one hundred fifty tons of junk, most of it unremarkable except for the advanced state of ruin and decay that infused everything.