by Robin Romm
Nick gets the belt off and the chair on the end falls to the ground, making a sharp clatter.
“Take two of them,” Nick says, grabbing three more off the end. The wooden stairs creak as we head back up.
“Thanks, kids,” Gray says. He’s holding a black plastic pitcher of coffee and three mugs. Anna still sits cross-legged on the small carpet in the weaving room, her eyes closed, her spine rigid. Gray doesn’t acknowledge her.
You wouldn’t know it was Anna who planned the dinner. She’s still very quiet, even after the guests arrive, and she’s careful to sit next to Gray at the corner of the table. She was young when she married him, twenty-six to his forty-one. Her face is still smooth, despite the hollowing of her eyes. She’s done something odd with her hair tonight, a princess Leia look with braided buns muffling her ears.
“I lost my baby,” the woman next to me says. I can’t remember her name. She holds her knife and fork above her plate and trembles slightly. Her bright blond hair is pinned loosely on top of her head so that it flops to one side and her gray eyes are as focused as a gun. She’s shockingly pretty. The smattering of color in her cheeks looks like a small, ragged continent. “He was only six months old,” she says. The rest of the guests talk loudly about Gray and Anna’s recent kayaking trip.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“And then I lost my husband,” she says. “To leukemia last year.” I can’t bring my knife down to the chicken on my plate, though I want to. A gesture of normalcy, cutting chicken off the bone. Nick hasn’t touched his food. I can tell he’s listening to the blond woman, but he doesn’t turn to help me out. He just grabs his bottle of beer and takes a purposeful swig. I set my knife down.
A peal of laughter erupts from the head of the table.
“That’s terrible,” I say.
“It changes you,” she says. Nick picks up the bowl of green beans.
“You want some?” he asks, handing it over to me. I take the bowl and hold it for a moment. It feels heavier than it should. I’m afraid I’m going to drop it.
“Thanks,” I mumble. I set it between the blond woman and me. The beans look oily. I can’t think. If I don’t leave, I feel like I might pass out.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, scooting my chair out. “I’m sorry.” It’s awful to do this, to let her words hang in the empty air over my place setting, but I don’t have it in me to respond. I don’t even know what a response would sound like.
In the bathroom, I sit on the lid of the toilet and focus on my breathing. It’s cold in here. Nick and I spent the afternoon helping out around the garden, drinking beer after beer, and then Scotch as we roasted the chicken with Gray, then more Scotch as we hovered around the crackers with the guests as they filtered in. I’m feeling less drunk than tired. Tired from the roof of my mouth inward, into the pockets behind my eyes, down in my windpipe and deep in my lungs.
We’ve talked about death, Nick and I. It’s like a secret we pass around at night but don’t dare mention in the light of day. Three years ago, Milo took a rifle out of the gun cabinet and went outside to shoot at the geese. He was fourteen years old. When Anna came home with a pizza from town, Milo was facedown on the grass in a pool of blood.
The day of Milo’s funeral I locked myself in this bathroom and cried until I was sick. I imagined Milo crinkling to the grass after the bullet went smashing through his temple. I imagined the bits of gray brain that wormed their way between the green blades, the dark black of his blood, the hose the medics used to wash it away, how his skin sank to his bones moments later. I’d been at the house a few months before and Milo would spend all day in the game room obsessively playing pool by himself. His unwashed hair stuck to his forehead in serpentine clumps. He was small for his age, with long eyelashes and a thin neck.
“We’ll show you how it’s done,” Nick told him, taking a cue down from the wall. But Milo shook his head. “I’m practicing,” he said. “Alone.” Every time we passed the game room, we could hear the clack of pool balls. We ignored him. It seemed to be what he wanted.
But what made me cry wasn’t really Milo. It was the hole that Milo left that frightened me. My mother had been sick for nearly five years. Her death was in every absence—in the quiet of the air when the phone didn’t ring, the emptiness of a white wall, the sleeping moments of the cat. It hung around my hands and hair like a fog.
The first year Nick and I dated, our freshman year of college, I lived in a dorm that used to be the women’s infirmary, back when the women’s college was separate from the men’s. It still looked like a hospital, each room complete with a sink and cold slate floors. The building was U-shaped and when the winds picked up in winter, they’d shriek against the stone. I had fevers that year, fevers and hives for no reason anyone could detect. And Nick sat up with me boiling water in the electric kettle, making me powdered soups and tea. He joked about the ghosts of the dead girls and made weird hoo-ing sounds before I’d fall asleep. In my fever dreams, they would appear, the dead girls, their cheeks sanguine, their eyes sad. They’d be dressed in plain cotton gowns and they would show me their hands, always too small for their bodies.
I put my hand on the porcelain sink beside me. It’s solid and cool and real, and I wish I could carry it out with me, sit it beside the table. I have to get back to the dinner. Nick isn’t going to come to find me, though I wish he would. I wish he would come down the hall and knock on the door and make hoo-ing sounds.
Nick still hasn’t touched his food. The blond woman talks with the two women on her right. She doesn’t turn to face me as I slip back into my chair. I put my hand on Nick’s leg under the table. He gives me a sideways glance.
“We haven’t seen Becky in years,” I can hear Gray saying.
“Becca,” Anna says.
“What?”
“It’s Becca, Gray.” Gray shrugs and leans closer to the bearded man. He sits on the opposite side of Anna and she leans away from Gray as he moves over her. “I think we’ve got a wedding in the future.” He’s drunk. Nick breathes in sharply and grabs at the beer again. I take my hand back.
After Milo’s funeral, Gray collapsed in my lap on the sofa and sobbed. I love you, he kept repeating. Never stop telling your mother that, Becca. Never stop telling your family how much you love them. When I told Nick, he was mortified.
After dinner, Gray suggests that we all go for a walk. There’s a trail that leads out near the pond, into the woods beyond, up a small ridge to a clearing. Nick and I spent many hours one summer with hoes and weed clippers, clearing that trail.
There’s polite talking as the guests get their coats on. The blond woman isn’t really dressed for a hike. She wears red clogs and a long camel-colored coat. I wonder if she’s new to these parts, if she came out here to forget. She’s not doing a good job, if that’s the case.
There are five guests. Two of the women have permed helmets of brown curls. One is tall and buxom, the other is short and slight, but they both wear boxy wool blazers and simple neutral pants with shoes that resemble brown bricks. And there’s the angular wife of the bearded man who keeps nervously reaching out to touch him as though he might vanish. Nick smooths my hair back, yanks on a handful until I’m turned to face him, then he leans down and puts his nose against my jaw.
Everyone else waits outside. Their voices are getting less defined as they walk down the lawn to the start of the trail.
“Sorry about this,” Nick says.
“About what?”
“About what,” he says, shaking his head. “Right.”
I can choose. He might be sorry about bringing me here, into this wound of family that can’t seem to heal. He might be sorry for Gray’s drunkenness, for Anna’s silence, for the blond woman’s confession, for the fact that we’ll have to spend the evening in the woods with five strangers. He might just be sorry. Sorry for leaving me when he did, sorry for returning with streamers of pain rustling behind him, sorry for my mother’s descen
t, for the fact that once she’s gone, I will be without family. Sorry for the tilted world. Or simply sorry for himself.
We trail along behind the group and Nick takes my hand as we pass the pond. How long did it take Gray and Anna before they could come out here again? Before they stopped seeing Milo on the grass, Milo against the sky, Milo in all the geese flying by? Or do they still see him, feel him in the night breeze, see his thin, gangly frame scurrying out in the distance, playfully dodging them?
I move my thumb over Nick’s thumb and feel a wash of tenderness.
The group has fallen silent. The wind blows through the boughs of the pine trees, rushes over the pond. Even the animals are quiet in the barn down the driveway.
There are a couple of benches by the pond, before the start of the trail, and Nick pulls me over to one. We sit close together. Behind us, the group continues to walk. Soon they’ll be in darkness, the woods lit only by Gray’s old headlamp.
I didn’t see her hang back.
“Can I sit?” Anna asks.
“Of course,” I say, gesturing to the spot beside me.
She closes her coat around her and hunches into it, sinks to the bench. The group’s footsteps disappear into the woods.
“How’s your mother doing, Becca?” she asks. I have stock responses to this question, depending on who asks it. Status quo, not well, very bad. No one ever really wants to hear about it, and so I try to keep the answers short. She’s dying. I could say this. Though they cut off her breasts, though her diaphragm is paralyzed from radiation and she can’t breathe without tubes, she’s still here. She still makes jokes about the dog and gets angry with the doctors. She can’t figure out how to use her cell phone or get the stains out of the grout in the kitchen. But when I touch her skin, the heat is different. Defeat and fury lie right below the coolness of it. A frightening combination—defeat that won’t do you in and fury that can’t save you. And sometimes I try to imagine the silence that will fall everywhere after she dies. I call her now with an offhanded question about taxes or recipes and I think that soon there will be no answers. And the question mark will lose its curve, will grow and straighten inside of my ribs, getting so large and sharp that it finally splits my body in two.
“She’s hanging in there,” I say. Anna nods. We don’t look at each other.
“Give her my love,” Anna says.
Only the whisper of wind through trees, only the distant throaty singing of frogs.
“Do you want to walk, Bec?” Nick’s voice is loud. Anna stands and takes a flashlight out of her jacket pocket. She twists the head of it until a dim nickel of light lands on the dirt.
She gestures with her head. “We should catch up.”
Nick walks quickly, gets ahead of us, and then stops near the trees to wait.
There’s something between Anna and me right now, something warm and desperate and sad. I want to ask her what she hears when Milo comes to her, when he materializes out of wind and light. Does he simply sit near her? Is it like she’s pregnant with him again? Does he get lonely? Does he tell her why he did it? How the gun felt? What that moment was like when his finger tightened around the trigger? Did he think about Anna, the powdery smell of her neck, the drugged feeling of sleeping near her when he was small? Was it brilliant, that smash of pain? Did he see colors? Did he feel love and sorrow surge up in his throat and go soaring out of him? Was that what death was? No longer needing to contain these feelings in your body? When suddenly, all the splitting song inside you is you. You are—finally—no longer a container—you are the things that once were contained?
Anna tried to kill herself a month after it happened. She took sleeping pills and locked herself in the bedroom. She took too many, though, and just threw them up. “I want to go with him,” she screamed at Gray, or so the story goes. She screamed this over and over until Gray loaded her up in the truck, took her to the emergency room, and had her sedated.
Anna’s flashlight shines uselessly on pieces of earth and rock. We walk through the woods mostly by instinct. I reach out and grasp Nick’s arm. He squeezes my hand between his arm and chest.
When we get to the top of the ridge, I can see the group at the far corner. Gray has a thermos and passes it between himself and the bearded man. The two permed women stand close together. The blond sits alone on a rock overlooking the property. Her chin rests on her knees.
Did the angular woman and bearded man have a child die, too? Were we all going to sit on top of this ridge and hum? Would the dead come floating off the tips of trees, would the girls come back in their cotton gowns, would their shrunken hands scratch at my face?
A buzzing begins in my head. I want to go tearing off down the path, across Maine, across this enormous country, back to that other ocean. But I just stand there, staring out into the night, Nick’s arm clamping my hand to his side. Anna walks over to the blond woman and sits beside her. Their bodies are darker and more substantial than night, and I can see Anna’s pale hand settle on the woman’s neck. The woman bends toward her.
Maybe it’s not Milo’s return that Anna’s seeking. Maybe she just wants the world to stop spinning for a moment. Maybe she’s looking for stillness, a place where the questions don’t haunt her, where Milo is actually gone.
At the end of the clearing, Gray laughs at something the bearded man says. Nick takes my hand in his and pulls me toward them.
THE BEADS
WHEN MY FATHER FIRST SUGGESTED SHE DONATE her body to research, my mother stared at him like he’d just grown a beak. Eventually, though, she relented. “It’s not like it’ll do me much good when I’m dead, dear,” she said to me, signing her name with a flourish. She straightened the edges of the forms with the flat of her palm and settled down to watch a movie. We never discussed her decision again.
About two weeks after her death, my father called me at home.
“Yael, I’ve got some strange news.” He was using his doctor voice, clipped and clinical. “I just got a call from the lab.” My heart soared. It wasn’t my mother who died! (I knew it!) The whole thing had been a bizarre mix-up—somebody else’s mother. My mother was alive, sitting on a park bench in Boise eating cherries!
“They’ve done some work on her cadaver.” My soaring halted. “It seems that your mother’s stomach was full of beads.”
“Beads?” “Yes,” he said. “Very strange.”
When my mom went into the hospital for what we knew would be the final time, my father packed his bags. He’d rented a furnished apartment in the foothills. “A blank slate,” he’d said as he showed me the empty cupboards. The apartment belonged to a large, beige development overlooking a man-made pond. I drove through the mechanical gates and found him pacing outside his front door. On the dining room table in a gallon zipper bag, the beads waited. They ranged in size. Some were like large pearls while others resembled popcorn kernels. And they ranged in color, too—blues, glossy green, bloody scarlet, others like bone or dirty stucco. I lifted a fistful and a few fell to the carpet. If my mother’s skin had been translucent, she would have looked like a cathedral window.
My father breezed behind me on the way to the kitchen. “I’m having a Scotch,” he said. “You want one?” We sat on the living room floor with the beads beside us, sipping from the tumblers in silence.
I couldn’t remember my mother ever wearing beads. She’d been raised in Brooklyn and despite my parents’ migration to California in the 1970s, she’d never gotten hip to the bohemian thing. She liked gold jewelry. Classy little hoops hooked into her ears. A delicate gold band on her ring finger.
My mother was a woman devoid of fancy. She felt no remorse as she threw out my childhood paintings or my father’s love letters. She bought tuna fish on sale and bulk flour. Were these beads her private code? Did she secretly long for color and excess? Did one bloom each time she fingered a silk scarf or expensive underwear? Or did the beads have to do with her disease? For every cell that went astray, her body produced a bead
as an apology.
Finally, my father spoke. “She must have eaten them,” he said.
My father was a doctor and so the world revealed itself to him in an orderly fashion. There were things that were possible and things that were not. I reached out for a green bead and held it to the light.
“Why would she have done that?” I asked.
“We’ll never know,” he said gravely.
I knew this was absurd. My mother disliked all things strange. She was a finicky eater and she’d been in the hospital for weeks before she died. Who would have fed her beads?
“I’m getting rid of them,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I’ll hold on to them.” My father nodded absently and rubbed the back of his neck.
When I got home, I rinsed them off and put them in a metal mixing bowl in my bathroom. My boyfriend, Mateo, stood over them and twirled a piece of his hair, something he did when he puzzled over crosswords or talked to a difficult editor on the phone.
“It’s got to be a sick joke,” he said, walking back into my bedroom. He sat on the bed. “That’s just too messed up.”
“A joke?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s some sort of pathology lab fraternity brotherhood or something.”
I got off the bed.
“What?” he said. “You think all those beads just magically appeared inside your mother?”
I walked into the bathroom, locked the door, turned off the light, and shoved my hand deep into the bowl. The knobby pressure on my fingers felt good—like shoving my hands into river gravel. If there were enough of them to fill the bathtub, I’d have slept in them.