Parts Per Million

by Julia Stoops

  We caught up with Nelson as he was being released from the emergency room. His jacket was missing, that tan corduroy jacket he’d lived in since I first knew him, back when Jen and I noticed him at town hall meetings in Salem. Back when he was a young Forest Service rank-and-filer. Back when he still had puppyfat on his face. He limped across the hospital linoleum and my heart just about cracked in two. He hadn’t shaved since the attack. There were bandages. Blood on his shirt. His glasses mended with tape. And nine months of ups and downs with Deirdre had left him gaunt. His pants hung off his hips.

  We couldn’t hug him because of his ribs. And we had to break the news.

  We got settled in at Kate’s again. To get through the next twenty-four hours I knew we were going to need soft furniture, windows with glass, a working coffee pot, and Kate herself.

  Dry clothes for us all, and hot drinks. I’d told Kate already, and she was doing her ultimate to keep it together while we got Nelson clean and dry and some hot tea in him.

  It was the five of us plus the baby crowded onto her sofas. Nelson was stiff with pain, cupping his tea in his hands, two fingers fat with white bandages.

  My heart was just about coming out of my ear. Franky’s panic eyes flicked to me, to Nelson.

  Nelson kept his eyes on his mummy fingers. In a croaky voice he said, “I know. What you’re going to say.”

  It didn’t make it any easier.

  The next day Jen and I borrowed Franky’s car and went to check out the Toro, but she’d already been stripped of the hard drive, the second battery, the GPS system, the monitor, and the Ear. And Nelson’s jacket was nowhere in sight. Back in the unheated tow company office the old guy there denied any knowledge. We walked out of that office with the black fingerprints on the door and the faded United We Stand flag poster and took another look at the Toro. The smashed lights. The wiring ripped and poking out. The crushed passenger side. I put my hand on her dull white hood and said thanks for the ride.

  On the way back we dropped by the house. I thought we should try and contact someone from Deirdre’s past, but no one could remember Deirdre’s other name, the married name that was on a credit card, or even the name of her hometown. We needed her passport.

  Deirdre’s place was cold and smelled sour. Water was trickling in her bathtub, a half dozen prints slowly spinning on top as the siphon drained to the sink. She must have set them in there to rinse before she came over for breakfast that morning.

  Prints of their wedding. One I took of Dee and Nelson before the ceremony, sitting on the benches outside the judge’s office, holding hands and looking in different directions like wide-eyed refugees. And then the five of us afterward outside City Hall, in front of the pink granite colonnade. Deirdre had smiled so much after the ceremony I thought her face would split.

  Jen crouched by the bath, the corner of a print between her fingers. A picture of her, moving past a window. A silhouette with motion blur.

  I disengaged the siphon and Jen turned off the water. She pegged the prints to the wire with such tenderness I had to step out of the bathroom. Near the bed was Dee’s dresser, and under some T-shirts was her passport. Burgundy cover with a gold harp and gold words. Eire. Ireland. And the European Union. Inside, there she was, younger, brighter, ready to take on the world. Deirdre Assumpta O’Carroll. “Edenderry,” I said to Jen when she came out of the bathroom. The inside pages had stamps for England, India, Australia, USA. “And it’s in her maiden name.”

  Edenderry. A place I didn’t know the size of, the smell of, the look of. So many things about Deirdre we didn’t know.

  Jen sat down on Dee’s bed and scrunched the sheet in her hands. I couldn’t see her face for her hair.

  Nelson spent the day lying on Kate’s sofa, his broken glasses on a side table, the unbruised side of his face in a pillow. At one point Kate put Adrian in his arms and they both slept hard. Years later Franky told me he and Kate made out in the kitchen. Nothing came of it and they were both embarrassed, more so afterward, because at the time there wasn’t much to feel except numb or gutted. But like I said to him, people do weird things when their world turns upside down.

  And on the way back from getting Dee’s passport, Jen told me what she’d tried to tell me the day we went to the morgue. That she felt responsible. That Dee had never gotten over her show closing. The goons wouldn’t have attacked if Jen hadn’t bugged Wellesley’s phone. She’d driven Dee to suicide.

  “Jesus,” I said, and slowed the car.

  “I’m the lowest life form on earth,” said Jen from under her hair. “I’m going to leave. Get out of you guys’ way. ’Cause you’re right. My impulsive shit is fucking everything up.”

  “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” I pulled over so I didn’t do something stupid with Franky’s car like drive it into a pole. Undid my seat belt so I could face her. “You are so not responsible, you don’t even know.” I slapped her knee and she lifted her broad pale face and stared into my eyes.

  “You are not responsible. If it wasn’t the show and the goons, it would’ve been something else. And what the hell is this ‘leave’ crap? You gonna go save the world on your own?”

  A pitying frown crimped Jen’s forehead. “No one can save the world, Fetzer.”

  I had no response to that. Instead I asked, “You think it was suicide?”

  In my mind’s eye Dee was simply drunk, and had slipped. And the Willamette is very cold that time of year.

  Jen shrugged. “She said some really weird shit to me the last few weeks.”

  “What kind of weird shit?” Then it hit me in the gut: Jen had tried to tell me, and I hadn’t listened. “That religious stuff?”

  Jen’s eyes were pouchy. “It was freaky, Fetz. Half of it I didn’t even understand.”

  “Did Nelson know?”

  Jen shrugged. “You’d think so. But I dunno. He seemed totally unfazed.”

  “It was weird how she suddenly started going to church.”

  “I know,” said Jen, and she gripped her head. “I mean, what the fuck?”

  “And I did see she was wearing a crucifix.”

  Jen’s hands became fists, clutching at nothing. “Fuck. See? Why didn’t we say anything?”

  “Well, plenty of people wear crosses and go to church, Jen. It doesn’t bear remarking on.”

  “Dee was losing her shit. She was losing her shit because of her show closing, then the attack tipped her over the edge.” Jen’s hands splayed, rigid and trembling. “And we didn’t stop her losing her shit. I tried, dude, I tried to make it up to her with the website, and I was trying to be nice and everything. But she was sliding away. And I just made it worse.” Jen dropped her head on her knees. “And I just let her go.”

  Like I was doing so often lately, I rested a hand between Jen’s shoulder blades.

  Deirdre had made me promise never to tell about the drugs. If I told Jen, then it would be two of us knowing and Nelson not knowing. Somehow that seemed wrong.

  “Nelson needs every ounce of support,” I said after a while. “He needs you. I need you. So don’t you dare leave, okay?”

  Jen nodded against her knees.

  “And don’t give him any reason to think suicide. Or that she was losing her shit. Okay?”

  Jen sat up and her face was so twisted it hardly looked like her. “But she was.”

  I pointed a finger and spoke slowly. “We can’t let him think—that there might have been— something more—he could’ve done—to save her.”

  Jen stared at me, desperate. “But maybe there was.”

  I shook my head. “There wasn’t.”

  67: NELSON

  “We’ll be back soon,” says Fetzer.

  Nelson’s inner eyelids are hot orange. His stubble rasps on the pillow, loud through the angry insects in his head. Franky and Jen’s footsteps pad down the hall carpet. There’s a tiny creak from Fetzer’s coat as he pauses in the doorway. The clock ticks.

  “We’ll be fine,”
insists Kate. Adrian hiccups. The elevator dings in the hall. No one calls for Fetzer to hurry up. Everyone is patient now. The only thing to do is wait for the next thing to do. Nelson keeps his breath shallow. His bones press into his muscles in abrupt ways. Kate’s door closes. The sound of Kate bending, putting Adrian down. Adrian’s knees on the carpet, little thumps. His hands hitting the door. “Shhh,” says Kate.

  Adrian whimpers. He hasn’t learned that the only thing to do is wait.

  Nelson’s ribs ache. He will have to turn over soon. It’s too bright to open his eyes. The headache zings in waves. “Look, Uncle Nelson is still here,” says Kate.

  He is still here.

  But it hits him again, in a percussive, ringing blast: Deirdre is not.

  The blast fades. Adrian’s gaze is on him; he can feel the striving eyes. Nelson stretches out one arm for the boy, but his shoulder cramps, and he has to shift onto his back. Carefully, carefully, like an old man. His clothes scrape across his skin.

  This is me as an old man.

  “C’mere,” he says when he’s settled. His eyes still closed. Adrian thumps in a fast crawl across the carpet, then his sticky hands are on Nelson’s arm, his face.

  “Kate?” says Nelson.

  “What, hon?” She pushes his feet over and sits on the sofa.

  She has put up with so much already. He says, “Would you mind closing the curtains?”

  A tiny, this-is-the-first-real-sun-for-days pause before she says, “Sure,” and gets up. “Your head bad?” she says.

  “Yeah.” He pulls Adrian close, infant breath and spit and a small finger poking his ear. The curtain rings drag along the rail. The orange of his eyelids turns sepia, and the squealing in his head softens to a drone.

  “I’ll get you an ibuprofen,” says Kate.

  “Promise me it’s just an ibuprofen.”

  “Promise,” she says, and squeezes his socked foot on her way past.

  It’s nice to be touched.

  68: JEN

  Kate says, “We should eat something.”

  Weird how she just took us in and we’re all practically living together. Hardly know this woman but she’s turning out to be very cool.

  Franky says, “I’ll go get some Thai. Anything else we need?”

  “Justice,” I say. And Deirdre back.

  “Band-Aids,” says Fetzer. He peeks under the one on his palm. “Big ones.”

  Kate goes into the living room and steps over the sleeping bags, looking for something. “How are you doing?” she says to Nelson on the sofa.

  “Ibuprofen’s helped,” he says. He has an arm over his eyes.

  “Whatcha looking for?” I say.

  “The remote.”

  “Adrian hid it again,” says Fetzer.

  It was actually me that hid it, but I’ll let them blame the baby.

  Kate turns over my pillow by the stereo. “Here it is.”

  Crap.

  She aims it at the TV, and a green-and-black night-vision cityscape appears. A voice says “. . . fragmentary reports of explosions in the suburbs of Baghdad just before sunrise.”

  Fuck. It’s started.

  Those poor people.

  Then it’s fuckhead Ari Fleischer acting all serious in front of the blue curtains of the White House press room. “Opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun,” he says. Text below him reads “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  Freedom my ass.

  And the words, “Terror Alert: HIGH.” The green-and-black Baghdad cityscape looks like the X-files. Iraqi birds fly across the screen. For god’s sake, fly away.

  A burst of antiaircraft fire flutters in the dawning sky like fireworks. A disembodied voice says, “We’ve been told authoritatively from the Pentagon that the massive air campaign we have been anticipating has yet to begin.” Then the screen splits in two, and on the other side is one of the retired generals the media’s dragged in to explain to the masses how necessary it is to kill people. People who have left you alone all your life and would likely leave you alone the rest of your life if they had the opportunity to live that long themselves.

  “You’ll see the lights are still on,” says the general. “We want every Iraqi citizen to know that we are not going to turn the lights off on him. We’re going to turn the lights off on Saddam. We’re going after the weapons of mass destruction.”

  Fuck you, you smug lying bastard.

  The ticker spells out, “Police . . . prowl . . . NYC . . . with . . . bomb-sniffing . . . dogs . . .” Bottom right is a mysterious three-letter word, NAS, with some numbers.

  “Can we turn that off?” says Franky.

  But Kate stands there, the remote slack in her hand, her gaze trapped by the screen.

  Write the follow-up whitewash, we said. Keep your job, we said. Enough’s been lost already. But instead she resigned.

  She is one righteous woman.

  “Nelson?” Franky’s voice is tight. “You don’t want to listen to this, right?”

  Nelson keeps his arm over his eyes. “Doesn’t matter. But could you turn it down?”

  Franky wrenches his shoulders into his jacket. His keys jangle. He’s gone and the door slams closed. Never seen him so ticked off.

  I catch up to him outside the elevator. “Dude.”

  He shakes his head at the elevator doors. “War’s the last thing I want to think about.”

  The elevator dings. The doors open. Franky steps in.

  “It’s the last thing I want to think about, too,” I say.

  Franky looks up at the fluorescent elevator ceiling. The doors start closing. I don’t want him to go so fast. His hands lift up, then drop and smack loose and helpless against his pants. Then the doors meet in the middle and he’s gone.

  The metal of the doors is cold on my forehead. Through my skull comes the vibration of elevator machinery.

  He’s got no reason to hang around with me. I’ve been mean to him all these years he’s been helping us out.

  I am such an asshole. In a world of assholes.

  Back at Kate’s the lights are off, and the TV’s the biggest thing in the room. And there’s Rumsfeld himself. “What will follow will be of a force and scale never seen before.”

  If there is a hell, you are going there, dude.

  Kate and Fetzer are side by side on the sofa. Glued. Nelson on the other sofa, maybe asleep. Adrian crying in his bedroom. Kid doesn’t like being left out.

  Bottom right it now says DOW instead of NAS.

  The markets. The fucking markets. And the DOW is up 16.49. It changes back to NAS—also up, 6.20. Rumsfeld’s gone and the anchor says, “The Pentagon now confirms that in fact cruise missiles have hit strategic targets in Baghdad . . .”

  Bottom right it changes to S&P. Up, too, by 1.15.

  “. . . targets of a surgical strike . . .”

  Nelson’s watching me through slits.

  Can’t figure this guy out. We’ve been expecting him to completely unspool. But he hasn’t cried, hasn’t flipped out, hasn’t done anything stupid. Well, except total the Toro, but that was before he knew. Instead, he’s just all quiet and tired. He draws up his legs to make room for me. The anchor says, “. . . as we continue to watch these pictures come in of the sunrise in Baghdad . . . ”

  “Tomorrow,” I say, and drop my ass on the sofa. “This city’s going to go ballistic.”

  69: NELSON

  Nelson lets a sliver of light into his eyes. Kate’s sitting at the kitchen table, doing bills or something. It must be after midnight. The sound of the others’ breathing surrounds him. Faint traffic noise bleeds in from outside, and a muffled TV is on next door. Even through the wall he can tell it’s the blow-by-blow bombing of Baghdad. Shock and Awe.

  Nelson’s chest is heavy and uneven like it’s stuffed with dirty damp towels. His head seems only partially connected. Moving so slowly it takes him nearly a minute, he turns his feet and lowers them to the floor. He holds his bandaged hand away fro
m the cushions and uses his other hand to push himself up to sitting. Somehow his head follows.

  His sleep has been dreamless. Each time he wakes a memory comes to him. A thing whole and complete that he can review and process. Then he sleeps again. It’s as if his brain is feeding him bite-sized chunks and letting him rest in between. He needs to take a piss, but he has to get used to sitting up first, so he waits for the pain in his chest to ease, and a memory to present itself.

  Kate turns over a page and moans in a small private way. In another context the moan could sound sexual, but over bills it’s just a moan of resistance. With Deirdre, sex sounded like grief.

  He closes his eyes and an image comes. He’s kneeling before her, crying into her belly. How did he get there? That’s right, it was their first big fight. The others don’t know about the fights. They mostly happened quietly. They mostly happened inside his head. But this one happened on the outside.

  It had come from above, behind, he didn’t know where. Not his usual righteous anger at the world, no, this was different. A flash that overtook him, made him backhand a bottle of photo developer off her darkroom table. It was blinding and strangely neutral. No thoughts or words, no rationalizing. A pair of wooden tongs flung at the wall. He’d hoped they would shatter, but they merely bounced off.

  She stared. Then she ran, and his skin washed hot with fear.

  He stopped her in the foyer. Her hand gripped the doorknob, already open to the metal stairs outside. He wanted her to notice how hard his knees hit the floor. How tight his arms wrapped around her waist.

  It was sunny outside. The sound of crows poured in. He lifted her T-shirt and kissed her stomach. She couldn’t leave. He couldn’t live without her. His vision was full of her smooth belly, the shine of his tears on her smooth belly. Her hand dropped from the doorknob. His voice was messy on her skin. Then her fingers were in his hair. The crows cawed. He had to focus. He didn’t feel nearly as horny as he was behaving, but she was liking it. He nipped at her belly and his fear ebbed with every little responsive movement from her. In a minute she would be moaning like it hurt. With his foot he pushed the door. The light muted and the crows faded. The door didn’t click closed, and he worried that someone might come up the stairs. And then, with his face on her skin, his toe pressing the door trying to get it to click closed, his focus stuttering, but his fear diminishing, she sank to her knees and her mouth bit into his. Her hair was like the crows: sleek and black. Desire tossed him up and over, and he didn’t have to pretend anymore.