The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

  “I’m not a brain surgeon, but I’m still a doctor,” he said. “I know a thing or two about the way people work.”

  After two weeks, Reggie was permitted to go to something called Group Circle, which was a time once in the morning and again in the afternoon when people talked about why and how they came to the Stay. May led every Group Circle, beginning by saying that she’d been a heroin addict who turned tricks for money. She had a child named Alice whom she lost to a man who threatened to kill May if she ever came after them. There was a man there whose face was tight with clay-looking scars because he’d burned himself cooking meth. There was a teenaged girl there who’d eaten balloons of cocaine to smuggle them from New York to Canada.

  “We’re all sinners,” May said, “and we’re all drawn closer together in our willingness to purge ourselves of our sin.”

  They didn’t make Reggie tell his story in Group Circle until he realized he wanted to. He talked about his momma going away and his dad taking him to Hot Sauce Williams. He talked about the fights he got into with the cops. He talked about stealing from corner stores when his dad drank the rent money. He talked about Cookie and the block, the postal service, seeing Tasha in the window. He talked about Sunny, the money, the people he’d killed. He figured he’d killed at least ten people in his life, all men, none innocent. He was a murderer and he was a druggie and he was a sinner, he said, and it felt good to say it.

  “You’re welcome here, Richard,” May said, and Reggie felt bad for still lying about his name. But maybe Richard was a better name. Maybe Reggie was dead and now Richard would live a good and virtuous life.

  The farm produced soybeans, corn, beets, arugula, milk, cheese, eggs, and butter in the warm months. In the cold months the pigs and a few of the cows were slaughtered and the meat was preserved. May said it was best to eat in cycles of vegetarianism: cleansing one’s body of meat was beneficial, but only for short periods of time. The doctor checked on Reggie daily, removing the stitches from his wound, applying ointment to it, breaking it to Reggie that his head would never heal right. When he saw himself in the barn mirror, he saw a man with a caved-in temple, a slightly slanted face. So this was Richard. He began to think of himself as Richard Edwards, a God-fearing farmer who was redeeming himself through hard work.

  There was a rule against having sex on the cots in the communal barn, but there was no rule against having it elsewhere. After a few months at the Stay, Richard and a girl named Audrey, younger than Tasha, would go into the woods next to the farm and fuck from all angles until they were dirt-covered and exhausted. Audrey had run away from home at thirteen and joined an anarchist gang in Indianapolis: they blew up buildings and beat up the racists who beat them up. But then one of the men in the gang had gotten her pregnant and she’d given herself an abortion with a coat hanger. She’d bled for days and almost died, and she hadn’t been able to get pregnant since. Of all of them, Audrey was the one who reminded Richard the most of himself: doomed to suffer while young and repent while old, the best years of her life wasted as his had been on antics that could easily have resulted in their deaths. Audrey was too young to know about the music he liked or the movies he’d watched, but they would lie together naked in the woods, legs threaded, talking about the things they’d seen and done before The Stay.

  “May drives all over the country on special missions rescuing people,” she told Richard. “You’re so lucky she found you when she did.”

  “I am,” Richard agreed, and tickled her foot with the bottom of his.

  He wasn’t in love with Audrey: he didn’t think he could ever be in love again. He liked her very much. He liked having sex with her. She was shorter than he was by just a little and had broad, flat feet that she always said she thought were embarrassing. He kissed them and told her she shouldn’t be embarrassed. When May saw them holding hands, she didn’t say anything, just smiled. Audrey worked the fields with him in the warm months and slaughtered the animals with him in the cold ones. He liked the way she could chop off a chicken’s head in a single, swift stroke. He liked the way her back muscles strained and swelled as she lifted hocks of slaughtered livestock and bags of grain. He liked the way she found something new to work on every day: some sin buried so deep in her past that she hadn’t even thought to uncover until the moment some sunlight through the window or the lowing of a cow or an expression he made triggered the memory, and her eyes would brighten and she’d say, “I remember something I did when I was twelve that was absolutely inexcusable!” That’s what they called sins: absolutely inexcusable. It had been absolutely inexcusable of him to use drugs, to put the lives of his family in jeopardy, to conspire with thugs and pimps as though they were his friends and brothers. But with the help of Audrey, who had ropy legs that squeezed him like a soft vise, he was getting better.

  May performed marriages for couples at the Stay who were sure of their commitment. When Richard and Audrey had been together for five years, she married them. The ceremony was large, with all the Stay members in attendance, even the doctor, and a great white canopy hanging from the ceiling of the sleeping barn. They said their vows, pledged their ever-enduring love to Jesus Christ, danced, and ate a steak dinner. While the Stay members danced and drank May’s fresh-pressed cider, Richard and Audrey snuck into the cow barn and made love in the loft. Audrey called it making love, at least, because they were married—another sin struck from their earthly records. As they lay naked hand in hand in the hay, he was sad for a moment that none of these efforts would ever turn into a child.

  Years passed. He and Audrey were allowed a private room, which they built themselves. He made love to her and worked the fields and went to Group Circle. He felt like he was swimming upstream toward his salvation. It was the longest he’d gone in his life without seeing a cop. It was the longest he’d gone in his life without getting in a fight. “Sinning is violent, and visits violence on the heads of those who practice it,” May said. He hadn’t realized until then just how right that was. The other members of the Stay had their children, the children learned to speak, learned to walk, learned to run. They became teenagers, then young adults. Richard and Audrey were known for their ability with kids: the childless couple who could always be counted on for fun and a handful of the toffee treats they sometimes picked up whenever they were in town buying supplies. The children loved him so much that May suggested he lead his own Group Circle for them, which he did, but there was so little to confess among them because they’d all lived such pure lives. So they spent hours discussing how Sammy coveted Courtney’s carrot patch in the garden, or how Julia had stolen a toffee from the jar in the doctor’s office when nobody was looking. May said Richard was a regular example for the children, a miracle man who’d survived a bullet to the head.

  “It’s because I think I always had love for God in my heart,” Richard told the kids. “And that love, even if you don’t know it’s there—it protects you.”

  Nobody ever left the Stay. Some first-timers tried to run away, but they always wandered back, hungry and delirious. Richard became co-leader with May, in charge of intakes and supervising physical examinations and first induction rites if the person in question hadn’t been baptized (and like him, they often hadn’t been). He got his own truck, his own set of keys to every room in the barn, a pair of overalls with Stayer stitched over the heart. Sometimes new residents tried to demand use of the red rotary phone May kept in her plywood office, and Richard always had to explain that calling the sinning world was counterproductive to the healing process. If they became antsy or angry, Richard let them try to run away, knowing they’d never get far.

  He’d been at the Stay a little over a decade and he’d never driven with May to Ohio. That life was gone. There was no use dwelling on what he’d lost. Cookie was gone, his momma was gone, his dad was dead, and so was his family. May thought his decision to stay behind was prudent and congratulated him on his self-preservation. But every time she went to the city, he aske
d her to bring him a copy of the Plain Dealer. While Audrey gardened, he sat splay-legged in the grass reading it, everything from the front-page news to the obituaries. He told himself he wasn’t looking for anything in particular. And then in the fall of 1985 May gave him a copy that had his son in it.

  His son Caleb was alive.

  Caleb was fifteen, the article said, and he had a face that looked a little wider than Richard’s, long-lashed eyes that looked womanly. He wore a zippered sweatshirt with a T-shirt underneath. There were words on the T-shirt. He tried to breathe in and out slowly, tried to focus on what the words might say until a dam broke in his brain and he began sobbing. He turned away from Audrey so she wouldn’t see him. His son had won a chess championship. There he was in the photo in the paper, pumping his fists in victory. There he was holding the trophy with his mother and his twin brother.

  Tasha and Aaron. Tasha had aged. Her smile was forced, her eyes tired. His heart thumped. What had happened to her? Aaron offered a little grin, wore his hair in a hi-top fade. She had her arms around both of them.

  How had he brought these kids, these almost-men, into the world? This long-lashed one and this grinning one, both of them in sneakers, both of them posing for a photographer? How had he managed to marry a woman that beautiful, with eyes that shone even when she was tired, with a face that kept the purity of her child’s face? He was remembering her baby photos now, the box of them her momma sent her when they were living in University Circle: he was looking at this recent picture of his wife, the love of his life, and remembering the photo of her standing in a cotton romper in the grass in front of her parents’ house in 1950. They’d photographed the boys in similar rompers years ago.

  He pounded his chest as another sob shook his body. Audrey was down on the ground with him, holding him by the shoulders. He turned the page to the obituaries.

  “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  He pointed to the obituary for a woman named Pureena Mace. “She was my neighbor in Cleveland,” he lied. “She made me cookies when I was little.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Audrey said, nestling her head between his chin and his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  May 8, 2009

  Independence, Indiana

  He had gotten old: they had a sixty-fourth birthday for him at the Stay. The party was as big as their wedding, and Audrey sat next to him the whole time, her graying hair in a loose bun, shouting at the kids so they wouldn’t run into the vegetable garden. May and the doctor had set up a corn maze and they all wandered through it, Richard holding Audrey’s hand, imagining he was finding his way from earth to heaven. He would be there soon—everything reminded him of his mortality: his swollen joints, his fragile memory. His wound still made a cave of his left temple, and his smile was still crooked, but now both looked appropriate on his gaunt old-man’s face. He’d finally aged into himself. They ate cake—the adults slowly, the young ones hungrily, asking for seconds and thirds. Audrey squeezed his hand and told him she was going to go run through the sprinkler with the kids, left him sitting alone at the massive table with the doctor. The doctor moved chairs to sit next to Richard.

  “I meant to say, I got you a present,” he said. “You’ve been so busy all day I haven’t had time to give it to you.” He pulled something wrapped in a napkin from a pocket in his overalls. Richard unfolded it to find a blood-stained silver bullet.

  “I never buried it,” the doctor confessed. “I knew maybe you’d want to see it someday.”

  Richard thanked him and pocketed it. The concavity in his head twinged, as it often did when he thought about his injury.

  “You’re a miracle, Richard.” The doctor stood up to get a second serving of cake. “Your entire life’s a miracle.”

  Now Richard was alone at the table. He wondered, as he had for the past sixteen years, whether Tasha and the boys still thought about him on his birthday. He’d died on his twenty-eighth birthday, just months away from the boys’ third. He doubted the boys remembered him at all, much less remembered his birthday. Tasha would. They’d celebrated his twenty-eighth a day early because he’d told her he had a big job coming up. She’d gotten him a cake in the shape of Bruce Lee, and he’d eaten Bruce Lee’s forehead while she hummed the theme song from Enter the Dragon. They’d stayed awake until dawn while the boys slept in their cribs. Would she remember that on this day?

  His life without them had been much longer than his life with them. A saner man would have simply accepted that returning to them would mean returning to Cleveland, would mean returning to Shondor, who would find out and kill all of them if he knew Richard was still alive. A saner man would have moved on, kept his nose out of the Plain Dealer, thrown himself into his life with Audrey. But Richard was Richard and as much as he wanted to devote his entire being to Audrey’s soft and sensitive one, he couldn’t keep himself from taking the newspapers May offered him. He couldn’t keep from reading them cover to cover, carefully scanning the obituaries at the end. Aaron never made it in the paper, but Caleb would sometimes show up: a finisher in a citywide track competition, one of several finalists in a science fair.

  When the Stay got a computer, Richard looked them up online. They’d grown into handsome men. Aaron was a real estate developer in California, wearing a tux at a benefit dinner next to a long-legged woman in a gold dress. Caleb worked at a small law firm in Cleveland and posted a list of all the cases he’d won on the firm’s webpage.

  And Tasha. She kept a blog, “Black in Academia.” She posted less as the years wore on, and Richard could barely understand what she did post. A picture of her and the boys on Christmas in an apartment that looked like Cookie’s old place. Aaron standing in front in too-big shoes and Caleb clinging to his mother’s side. And then just photos of Tasha and Caleb: Caleb’s graduations from college and law school, Caleb visiting Tasha in Canada for Thanksgiving, Caleb and a woman who could’ve been his girlfriend hugging Tasha on her birthday. The posts were about “interpretive texts” and “the performance of respectability.” He could believe that the words were Tasha’s, but he couldn’t believe that she’d written them. He couldn’t believe that she was alive somewhere without him.

  Even on the days he managed not to think about them, he still dreamed about them at night. In one dream, he was struggling to see through gauze and Aaron was trying to talk to him but he couldn’t talk back. In another he was having sex with Tasha and she had no face. In another he was trying to pick up the boys, swaddled babies, but they kept dissolving through his fingers like water. He woke up crying more often than not, and Audrey woke up with him. Sometimes she massaged his shoulders and reminded him that he was safe and a good Christian and she’d always be with him. Sometimes she threw her pillow over her head and demanded that he stop crying so she could get some fucking sleep. He would sleep again, dreamless, and awaken into dazed anxiety, watch the sun rise through the barn window. Then he would fake sleep as Audrey awoke and got out of bed, would guiltily receive her kiss on his forehead and wait until she’d left to open his eyes to their room full of pale white light. On the mornings after the nights he dreamed of them, he wouldn’t be able to leave the bed for hours.

  Audrey worked to keep what she called his “disturbances” secret. He figured they troubled her because she couldn’t explain them. They weren’t linked to any material sin and he described them in terms too vague for her to understand. She asked him to please not bring them up in Group Circle. He didn’t need any convincing—admitting to those types of dreams would reveal that he’d been lingering in the past, an offense that could get him booted from the Stay—but it was painful to keep them to himself, painful like a piece of glass in his foot. He once admitted to Audrey that some of the disturbances were about his old family.

  “The family that got killed by Shonda?”

  “Shondor,” Richard said.

  Audrey sighed. He saw her eyes go glassy with tears.

  Then she was shaking in misery an
d he was comforting her. “Sweetheart, you know the dreams weren’t, I mean…”

  “I don’t care what kind of dreams they were,” she said. “I just don’t want to hear about them anymore.”

  She stood from the bed without looking at him and ran out the flimsy door he’d built for their room. It didn’t even slam shut properly. He pitied her fragility and envied her love for him. Why couldn’t he feel the same way about her?

  He turned the bullet over in his hands. He felt his blood surge, then settle. Why couldn’t the doctor have buried it? What use was there dredging up the past?

  Now Audrey was running through the sprinkler with the children, stepping her foot on the sprinkler head to angle the water in their direction. She waved at Richard. He waved back. Her hair was soaked. Water ran down from her forehead, between her eyebrows, off the tip of her nose. Her white dress, wet, hugged her form, revealed patches of her skin. She had accomplished a staggering amount in her time at the Stay. He remembered her as a scared kid who sat hunched over in Group Circle, who wouldn’t speak about her past unless coerced by the Circle leader (“Audrey, you’ve been quiet for two weeks now. Maybe it’s time you shared?”), who cried during meals and barely ate. Now she was his wife and he’d spent the better part of his life with her. She was vibrant, fifteen pounds heavier than when she’d arrived emaciated, a mother to every child on the compound. She believed in God.

  And he didn’t. It occurred to him just like that. After years of thinking he did, he didn’t. Holding the bullet, he was now certain there was nothing meaningful and beautiful and Christian about a bullet in the head. Audrey and May and the doctor could pretend there was, but there wasn’t. Nothing happened for a reason. Nothing was won by hard work and abstaining from sin. Nobody could redeem themselves through suffering. He was a part of nothing greater than his pathetic life, which had begun in a water-stained apartment and would end on this farm in Indiana. The greatest thing in his shitty little life had been taken from him.