The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  To My Children,

  Your mother always smiled more than I did and I never understood why. She planned trips we knew we weren’t going to take. She bought old photos at yard sales of people we didn’t know and she told me the fictitious narrative of their lives in her best storyteller’s voice. In the mornings she assigned me the most interesting horoscope she could find, regardless of what sign it fell under. We lived in a small apartment that she turned into a home. She filled it with items rooted in the both of us. The scarf she wore on our first date. A fistful of sand from a night shared on a beach. She always found a way to present these small things like holy relics so that we were never far away from the things we love.

  By the end of the first month of knowing we were bringing a child into the world I couldn’t sleep. At night I sat up reading while your mother snored in that catlike way of hers. I reread old books, certain I had missed something important but never exactly sure what. When the morning came, I had slept for maybe two hours. My eyes stung and my body felt as though it belonged to someone else. Then your mother would roll over and kiss me—she was always touching, always trying to prove to me that we were connected—and my body would become my own once again.

  At work, I wrote a personal interest column. “Keeping hope alive” is how Clarence, the old man who owned the paper, referred to it. It was my job, he felt, to stem the dismal tide that seemed to be rising. I was supposed to undo everything that was being done in the world.

  Clarence—a stout man with wide shoulders, round glasses and an even rounder bald head—told me one day, “It’ll never matter more than it does right now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s all knocking on the front door. And we’ve got to answer it, for better or worse. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Like hell I did.”

  Whenever possible, “Like hell I did” was how he ended conversations. There was nothing those four words couldn’t do. They made him enigmatic and wise when, only a moment ago, he had been just a fat old bald man with arthritic knuckles and a newspaper that was draining his life’s savings.

  That night in bed, I told your mother about Clarence and what he’d said.

  “I think he’s right,” she mumbled. It was early still but she was already half-asleep.

  “Right about what?” I asked. “What he said didn’t make any sense.”

  “Wise words coming your way,” she said, just as she fell asleep.

  It was that morning’s horoscope.

  It felt like everyone was talking about something but had forgotten to clue me in on the conversation.

  Meanwhile, the world and the things that happened in it made my job a little harder every day. But still, I did my work, and each and every Sunday, Clarence’s newspaper came out with my byline and some story that made it seem as if everything in life made sense. And all the while insomnia was my friend and I felt like a fraud because there you were, growing, next to me in the bed inside your mother, and I was just perpetuating a lie. I was saying that everything was okay and that everything would continue to be okay. Parenting 101: The Art of Hopefulness.

  Then one day, Clarence came in and canceled my column. “It’s all just getting too big,” he said.

  “That’s no reason to cancel me,” I said. “I’ve got a kid on the way.”

  “I know,” he said. “I didn’t say I was firing you. I’ll still find something for you to do. Sports maybe. Or crime. There’s enough of that to spread around.”

  I didn’t want sports and I didn’t want crime. I wanted people. I wanted to write about the fair that had just arrived. I wanted to describe the way the lights lit up the sky until they reached the clouds. I wanted to talk about the laughter that could never drown out the familiar and strange music that seemed to rise up from everywhere at a fairground, sounding unlike anything else over the course of your life. I wanted to tell people about the Whirl-and-Twirl, the Teacup ride, the Rocking Ship and the Rocket Ship, the Bumper Cars, the cotton candy that promised heaven and diabetes at the same time. All of it mattered just then. It wasn’t hope anymore, it was doctrine. People needed to know it still existed just like they needed to know that there was someone who heard their prayers in the late hours of the night.

  And that someone, in a certain type of way, was me. By writing it all down I was saving everything. Preserving the moments that can be easily forgotten. Saving them not for me. Not even for you. But for everyone.

  Clarence published me only once a month after that. He added crime. He added sports. He added terrorism. He added politics. He poured it all on. Milk onto cereal. But once a month people got better news. They got to hear about that fair. And after it had come and gone, I wrote another piece on it, so that they would know that just because they couldn’t see it anymore didn’t mean it wasn’t still out there. Still alive. Still pouring light up into darkness.

  We changed the title of my column to The Art of Hopefulness not long after that. It was your mother’s suggestion. “Hope,” she said, “is just imagination put into practice.” I couldn’t tell if it was my horoscope for the day or her own idea.

  FIVE

  “Keep walking,” Tommy said. He nudged me in the back and got me going again. I didn’t know that I had stopped walking. I only knew that I was cold and tired and that, in spite of myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about Gannon and his father.

  “Do you think they’re okay?”

  “Of course they are,” Tommy replied. “You wouldn’t have let us leave them if they weren’t going to be okay.” He looked off into the distance. “We need to find a ride before they find them.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I know you know,” Tommy said. “But do you know your hands are shaking?”

  I looked down and found my hands trembling. “When did that start?” I asked.

  Tommy took my hands in his and held them like small birds. He took a deep breath and exhaled over them, then rubbed my fingers and blew on them again. “Come on, you Ember. Let’s get you warmed up.” My warming fingers felt of pins and needles.

  “Don’t call me that,” I said.

  “Why not? I think it’s a cool name.”

  “Jesus, Tommy.”

  “Did I ever tell you the one about the Ember who walked into the blacked-out bar?... He asked for a light beer.” Then he smiled but, as usual, didn’t laugh.

  “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

  “Whatever,” Tommy said. “How about this, then: What’s hypothermia?”

  “What?”

  “Just tell me something about it,” Tommy said. “The weirder the better. There’s always something weird in that brain of yours.” He smiled, still rubbing my hands together like kindling.

  “Hypothermia,” I began, my words shivering just a little, “is when the body core reaches a temperature below thirty-five degrees Celsius or ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Ain’t it always like ninety-six or something?” Tommy interrupted.

  Whether he was doing it to annoy me or didn’t honestly know, I couldn’t tell. “No,” I said. “Normal body temperature is ninety-eight-point-six.”

  “Well, ninety-five isn’t too far off,” Tommy said. “Hardly anything when you really think about it.”

  “Can I finish?” I asked, more than a little annoyed at the interruption.

  “I mean, think about it,” Tommy said. “Three degrees? Just three degrees? Come on!” He laughed a goofy, ignorant laugh that arched his back and seemed to show all thirty-two of his teeth at once. It was the first time I’d seen him laugh like that in over a year.

  When we first got into the foster care system Tommy had become obsessed with telling terrible jokes. Jokes like, “Two flies are on the porch together. Which one is the actor? The one on the
screen.”

  When they didn’t get a laugh, they got a grimace. Either reaction gave Tommy the same amount of delight. He would throw his head back and laugh and show all of his teeth just like he was doing now and those were some of the few occasions when Tommy seemed to forget himself and be happy.

  But then I stopped laughing at his jokes and so he stopped telling them and I got to see him smile less and less often because, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t smile. Somewhere along the way I had forgotten how and, in doing so, I had stolen my brother’s laughter.

  But he had somehow found it again in the days since receiving his draft notice. Maybe waiting to die is something we should all be able to laugh about.

  “I’m ignoring you,” I said.

  “Not very well,” Tommy replied. “Now keep talking.”

  “Hypothermia symptoms depend on how far the body temperature has fallen,” I said. “It usually starts with shivering in the extremities on account of how they lose temperature the fastest and exhibit vasoconstriction.”

  “What’s vasoconstruction?” Tommy asked. “Is that like building something out of Vaseline?”

  “Vasoconstriction,” I corrected him.

  “That’s what I said,” Tommy fired back.

  “It’s when the blood vessels constrict in order to reduce blood flow,” I said. “Basically the body begins trying to hoard all of the blood...” My voice trailed off. I took a deep breath. The cold was suddenly swelling up around me like a fog.

  “Don’t stop now,” Tommy said, managing a smile. “That vasoconstruction thing’s got me on the edge of my seat.”

  “Vasoconstriction.”

  “Again: that’s what I said.”

  Tommy’s smile was wide and proud.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Handle me. Don’t handle me like this. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine, Ginny,” Tommy said. “You’re freezing and I’m just trying to remind you that you’re smart enough to know it. The first symptom you mentioned was shivering, right?” He let go of my hands. We both watched. For a moment they were okay, but then the trembling returned.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. I shoved my hands into my pockets and started walking again. Though the sky was still dark the thin light I saw in the distance began to grow, backlighting the trees. They became ghosts, beautiful and eternal.

  After a few steps, Tommy was at my side again. “Okay,” he said. “You’ll be fine. But in the meantime, where’s my weird fact? You still owe me one.”

  “You’re still trying to distract me,” I said.

  “Yep,” Tommy replied. “Now come on.”

  After a few more steps, I began, “Okay. Two things: terminal-burrowing and paradoxical undressing.”

  “Is that like getting naked at a party?” Tommy asked.

  “Neither has been studied very much,” I said, ignoring the interruption, “but basically in the late stages of hypothermia there’s a thing called terminal-burrowing. Basically, people will try to dig a hole and curl up, even if that might not be the best thing to do.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Tommy said. “It’s like digging one of those things in the snow for yourself.”

  “An igloo?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No,” I replied. “It’s totally irrational. People will crawl under beds, behind desks, under couches. And to make it worse, a lot of the time they’re naked when they do it.”

  “How’d they get naked?” Tommy asked with a smirk. “Because that seems like the best part of the story and you skipped right over it.”

  “Paradoxical undressing,” I replied. “Somewhere around thirty-five percent of people that die of hypothermia are found naked. It’s believed that what happens is the vasoconstriction—”

  “Vasoconstruction.”

  “That’s what I... Screw you, Tommy.” I cleared my throat to drown out the sound of Tommy’s laughter. “The blood vessels eventually get exhausted, like a muscle that’s been tensed too long, and so they suddenly stop constricting and let all of the blood flow. The body warms up all of a sudden and, even though you’re literally freezing to death, you feel hot. Sometimes people even start sweating.”

  “So people start taking their clothes off?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And then sometimes, after they’ve taken off all of their clothes, they get that burrowing instinct. They’re found naked and frozen in some hole someplace.”

  “Next time I ask you for a weird fact,” Tommy said, “just stop me. Or better yet, just tell me something to do with numbers. Numbers can’t be as bad as people getting naked and dying in a hole someplace.”

  “You’re going to be okay,” I said.

  “I know,” Tommy replied, no small amount of pride in his voice.

  “I mean you’re not going to die in some hole,” I said. I felt my voice soften.

  We walked several steps before Tommy answered. His eyes had narrowed and his chin stuck forward like the bow of a tugboat. It was obvious he knew that I was trying to tell him something subtle. Trying to make a point without hammering him over the head with it. I could almost hear the gears working in his mind, grinding in their slow, methodical, limited way.

  “I hear you,” Tommy repeated. A patina of doubt clung to his voice.

  “I can’t get along without you,” I said.

  “I hear you,” Tommy repeated.

  “Hey, here’s another weird fact for you.”

  “Oh no,” Tommy said, palming his face.

  “No, this one’s fun. So in ancient Greece they used to believe that, in the very beginning, men and women were one creature. Two heads, four arms, four legs, all of that.”

  “First naked people digging holes and now this,” Tommy said from behind his hand. I could hear him holding back a laugh.

  I reached over and pulled his hand away and, sure enough, there was Tommy’s wide, toothy smile. The one he didn’t show nearly as much as he used to. “Don’t interrupt me,” I said, and I was smiling too, even though I hadn’t intended to. “So men and women were one and then the gods threw down lightning bolts and split them into two. But the thing was that it split the soul in half. So men and women are always trying to find the other half of their soul.”

  “That sounds like some weird kind of horror movie.”

  “No,” I said and laughed. “The thing is, the story is about dating and marriage. It’s about how people fall in love. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was about brothers and sisters? What if you’re the other half of my soul and I’m the other half of yours?”

  Tommy’s toothy smile faded, replaced by a warm, contemplative grin that bordered on embarrassment. “Leave it to you to think of a thing like that at a time like this,” he said.

  “If I could be half of anybody, Tommy, I’d want it to be you.”

  The words came from somewhere I hadn’t intended. But I meant them all just then. Looking back now, I wonder how I ever drifted away from believing them. I wonder how I betrayed my brother, who really was the other half of my soul, like I did.

  * * *

  The miles came and went. I counted off each footstep as a way of keeping my mind from drifting back to the cold that was always gnawing at the edges of me. I followed in Tommy’s shadow as the wind came down from somewhere in the world far, far away and poured over us both. No matter how hard the wind, Tommy never wavered. It was easy to follow him if I let myself.

  Without speaking Tommy reached back and took my hand and pulled me off the road and down into the large ditch bordering it. When I started to ask what was going on he put a finger to my lips and slid closer to the grass and turned and looked up at the sky and seemed only to wait. After a few seconds I heard the sound of the car coming.

>   I held my breath and waited as the sound hissed closer. The wind pushed and pulled the sound so that the car seemed to be coming from all directions at once, like standing inside a bell after it’s been struck, but the glare of the headlights showed that the car was coming from the direction from which we had just come. There was no reason to believe that it wasn’t Gannon.

  The seconds stretched out long.

  The car came and the car passed, giving no indication that it had ever seen us.

  After it had passed Tommy lifted his head and watched the car recede into the dark. “We should get off the road,” he said. “At least for a while.”

  I only nodded and followed my brother’s lead.

  He led us down the embankment toward a wall of dark trees that grew up along the road in dark, scruffy shadow. The bark shone in the dim starlight and bounced a reedy light off the cold, hard earth. The air inside the forest was denser, warmer. The sound of our footfalls and rustling of our clothes bounced around from tree to tree and came back to us sounding like the movement of a dozen other people. As if, at any moment, we might turn a corner and find our own faces peeking out at us from behind some tree.

  “Stop,” Tommy said.

  After a few seconds of standing in the cold, dense forest, I heard the sound. It was a gentle rustling at first, like canvas rubbing flesh. And then came the low, rhythmic thud of footfalls followed by young lungs pushing and pulling at the cold, thick air.

  A light flared in our eyes, blinding us both.

  “Who are you?” a hard, female voice hissed. “What are you doing out here?”

  She held up a hand to beat back the light just as Tommy did the same. Then he took a step forward, putting himself between me and whoever was behind the flashlight.

  Tommy lowered his hand and looked directly into the glare. Then, having nothing productive come of it, he shielded his eyes and over his shoulder whispered to me, “Who do you think they are, Ginny?”

  I already knew who they were, even before the light was lowered and our eyes were able to adjust so we could finally see them.