Parts Per Million

by Julia Stoops

  Nancy and Clarissa, bless those women. They’d cleaned up Deirdre’s apartment and brought in rented chairs—the nicer, padded kind—plus tables, food, burner things to keep food hot—you name it, it was there. Except alcohol. Turns out Nancy doesn’t drink. Didn’t occur to her that we might want to approximate an Irish wake for Deirdre. Sylvia—bless her, too—went away and came back with good beer, better wine, and a bottle of smoky Lagavulin. It was before noon, but we needed to mourn, and getting maudlin was the route of choice. Sylvia poured with a heavy hand.

  The scotch stood me up and opened my mouth to tell the room what had hit me like a goddamn rock when I had looked down into Dee’s plate-still face.

  “She gets to lie there while the rest of us run around like headless chickens,” I said.

  Jen emerged from under her hair, and watched.

  “She gets to take off, while we stay behind and pick up the pieces.”

  Everyone looked at Nelson. Nelson looked into his glass. Nancy flapped around me, shushing.

  My feet took it upon themselves to sidestep Nancy. “She gets to rest up, while we reconstruct our lives.”

  Nelson nodded at his glass.

  “She gets to be at peace, while we watch a war we tried to prevent.”

  Kate put an arm across Nelson’s shoulder. Sylvia had her chin in her hand, her sad eyes on me. Brian said, “It’s normal to be angry.”

  “I’m not just angry,” I barked, and scotch splashed from my glass. “I’m fucking jealous.”

  That’s when Franky took the glass out of my hand and sat me down hard on the sofa. “You’re on a time-out.”

  Sylvia giggled.

  Nancy swung around to face her. “What is wrong with you people?”

  “We’re fucked up,” said Jen, like there was nothing to be done about it. “We are seriously fucked up.”

  Nelson nodded at his glass again.

  Mr. Nguyen stood and raised his beer.

  “Miss Deirdre was a beautiful lady.” He smiled at Nelson. “And when she met you, she was a lucky lady. But she was a sad lady. And now, she is free.” Then he said quickly to me, “Don’t be jealous. Your turn coming.”

  “We all got our turn coming,” said Nancy. She lifted her root beer. “To freedom, whether you find it in this life, or some other.”

  We raised our glasses, drank to that.

  There were more toasts. There was reminiscing. Nelson listened, wiped at the corners of his eyes. Clarissa kept Deirdre’s CDs spinning on the boombox. Nelson opened up boxes of photos and we each found our favorites to keep. There were no hours passing on the clock, just food and talk and drink and pictures. At some point Mr. Nguyen left. Later I noticed Brian wasn’t around. Nancy and Clarissa left in a clattering parade of burners and bowls and serving spoons. Kate took Adrian home to sleep. Franky left for a work gig he had to get to. Dusk was in the sky, and it was just us and Sylvia, and a room full of quiet.

  “Sorry I lost my cool earlier,” I said.

  Nelson shook his head. “It was all true.” He was stretched out on the sofa, his hands under his head. There was a wistful note to his voice. “She doesn’t have to worry about anything anymore.”

  “Sunny side of the street,” said Jen.

  Sylvia sat on a folding chair, her feet up on another. Her drink was clutched close to her chest, her chin tucked in so hard it was doubled. I’d never seen her so inelegant.

  “Well,” she said, “If the heaven stuff is true, which I don’t think it is, but if it was, she’ll be with Sophie.” Sylvia burped. “Oops. So that’s good.”

  Nelson looked up from the sofa. “Who’s Sophie?”

  Sylvia slowly lowered her feet to the floor. “Oh, god. I thought—I assumed you knew.”

  Nelson stood up. I didn’t particularly care who Sophie was. What hurt right then was the betrayed confusion in Nelson’s face.

  “Was this another girlfriend?” he demanded.

  Sylvia shook her head. Sophie, said Sylvia, her eyes everywhere but Nelson’s face, Sophie, as far as she could tell because she’d never seen a picture, didn’t know a lot of details, Sophie, said Sylvia, was Deirdre’s daughter.

  76: JEN

  “Dude,” I say, “it WAS BAD.”

  Franky takes the freshly burned DVD from me, tucks it into its case. “I kind of wish I’d been there, but I’m kinda glad I wasn’t.”

  “Uh-huh.” I put in another blank DVD. “We were, like, blindsided.”

  “Did Sylvia say how old it was, the baby?”

  “Nope. She doesn’t know much. Just that she thinks it was an accident.”

  Franky’s hand pauses above the address label. He looks up. “Hey, what about those diaries? Remember when she first moved in, you guys looked through her stuff, and there were those diaries?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She apparently burned them. In a fit of wanting to ‘start over.’ She and Nelse did a little ‘ceremony’ in the back yard one day. He never saw inside them.”

  Franky peels the label from its backing, positions it across the mailing box. “Does Nelson know anything about it?”

  “Nothing. There was a credit card, too, remember? In probably her married name. None of us can find it.”

  The crossing bells start up again. Jeez, some days it’s almost no trains, others it’s like one an hour.

  “Did you check the internet?” says Franky.

  “Yes.” Pause for effect. “I checked the internet.”

  Franky makes a face at the address label. “Just asking.”

  The train shrieks. The house shakes. The DVD burner chugs away. “Shoulda done this years ago,” I say.

  “DVDs?”

  “Yeah. People who were at the San Francisco conference want them. Not a bad profit at ten dollars a pop.”

  “Cool.” Franky’s marker squeaks block capitals across the label. “So Sylvia was the only one she told?”

  “Looks like it. She ever say anything to you?”

  Franky shakes his head.

  “What a secret to carry around,” I say.

  Next thing I know, Franky’s got his fingers pinched into his eyes.

  “Dude. It’s okay.” His shoulder is square and hard under my hand. He keeps his fingers in his eyes and draws sharp breaths through his teeth.

  “It’s okay,” I say again.

  “The father. He’ll never know,” says Franky. “Even if they split up, he should know.”

  “Yeah,” I say. Don’t know what to say. Never in my life have I comforted Franky about anything. The main thing is just not to fuck it up.

  After a minute, he does a big sniff and straightens up.

  “I really miss her.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  “Funny. The way you hated her when she moved in.”

  It burns all around my chest. It’s not even a little bit funny.

  “I wouldn’t say hated. It just took me a while to adjust.”

  He looks at his watch. “Yeah. Hey, I need to get going.”

  “Sure. Thanks for helping out.”

  “No problem.”

  He sits there with his hands on his knees. “Hey, uh. She had an email address, right?”

  “Yeah. I guess I should delete her account.” Something about that seems extra sad.

  “No, leave it open. Like, it could become a memorial guestbook or something.”

  My knee-jerk response is to tell him that an email address is not remotely the same animal as an online guestbook, but I say, “Yeah. I could set that up.”

  Franky slides his palms down over his knees and back up again. “Do you think she’s got any emails, you know, since?”

  The idea gives me a chill. “Probably. She was getting random emails from time to time. Oh shit, and I should check on those New Western Light people. I was thinking, with the DVDs, the fundraiser, and if there were book royalties, maybe all together it might get us going again.”

  Franky looks up. “That photo book. Yeah. That has got t
o happen.”

  He watches over my shoulder as I open Deirdre’s mail window. Four unread messages, and one’s from New Western Light, wanting to discuss moving forward with the book project. The other emails are from random people liking her photos.

  “Nice,” I say. “Going to gather these puppies into a mailing list for when the book comes out.” And for some dumb reason Franky and I high-five.

  Then we’re just staring at her mail window for a while.

  “I looked everywhere,” I say.

  Franky says, “Huh?”

  “I went though all these Australian newspaper archives. Searched all these different spellings of her name. Irish news archives too.”

  I close the email window. Nothing to do but shake my head at the strangeness of everything.

  77: NELSON

  The sun is white; the air is blue. Johnny-jump-ups—Viola tricolor—nod from cracks in the concrete, and Jen seems to be taking care not to step on them. The world is clearer, thanks to his new glasses. He hadn’t even realized he needed a new prescription.

  The bandage is finally off, but the fingers were set a little crooked. That’s what you get with no medical insurance—a rush job. But they still work fine, so it doesn’t matter. He brushes his hand over the weeds and they caress his wrist. His basement-pale skin feels the sun. The Cecile Brunner rose by the porch is bursting with soft new leaves. Jen spins around, walks backward till he catches up.

  “Better today?” she asks.

  “Today’s a good day,” he says. On bad days he stays in his room, swamped with tinnitus from the car accident and an overwhelming sense of the futility of everything. Those days are coming less often. And today there’s something satisfying about climbing the chain-link fence with freshly healed fingers and landing on the other side in donated thick-soled boots that feel sturdy enough to last the remainder of the century. In the long grass there’s a cigarette packet, a smashed pencil, and a tangle of heavy wire.

  “Shortcut,” says Jen, and she leads him between two buildings until they’re under McLoughlin and trucks are roaring overhead. “I brought Dee here once.”

  “Yeah? When?”

  “Near the beginning. She was still sick. Well, not all the way well.”

  He’s become a pig for details about other people’s experiences of Dee. “Anything,” he’d say. “Even if it seems trivial. I want to know.” So now they tell him little things, and he tucks them away like treasures. Because it means she wasn’t just a dream, a figment, a prolonged hallucination. Other people saw her too.

  “She told me she grew up near peat bogs.”

  “Uh-huh?” The river is getting close. He can see the city on the other side.

  “It would be cool to visit one,” says Jen.

  “I looked up Edenderry on the internet,” Nelson says. “It’s just a small town with these little houses. A canal. She always said it was nothing special. Nothing for the tourists.”

  There’s a faded stencil on the sidewalk, the red paint wearing off. He stops, scrapes his boot over what’s left. “The peppers—The pepper spray babble? Oh. ‘They pepper-sprayed babies.’ God, that seems so long ago.”

  Jen stares at the stencil, her hands in her pockets. Whispers, “Yeah.”

  She turns, and he follows her past a flowering cherry tree in a lumpy parking lot labeled Bridge Employee Parking ONLY.

  At the river they scramble down a steep track to the water’s edge and sit on boulders. The smell is moist and weedy. The water is a dark, impenetrable olive, and floating on top are clusters of tiny bubbles and the occasional stick or leaf. Flakes of something white hang suspended just below the surface. The stereo roar of traffic on the freeway and bridges fills the air like fog, obscuring the smaller sounds they would otherwise hear, like the lap of water on stone, the grit crunching under their shoes. Across the river is the condo development and the marina. He can just make out the alternating colors of the condos: a dusty apricot, a beige, a taupe. The river is high from spring runoff. They pulled her out of the water near the north end. He visited the spot, and it became clear that she would’ve been found a lot later if a guy hadn’t fished his dog’s tennis ball out from under overhanging bushes. The ME said she’d only been in the water an hour or so. A clerical error meant the news came to them late.

  “You have a choice,” Mr. Nguyen had said to him last week. “Every moment. Every moment.”

  Nelson had been drinking Nguyen’s weak diner coffee, sitting on a stool in the diner kitchen while Mr. Nguyen cleaned up, and the new girl was out front taking care of customers. Nelson imagined Deirdre loading the giant dishwasher and filling the glass-doored storage fridges.

  Mr. Nguyen had wiped a cloth along the stainless-steel counter. “You can let it rule your life. Like her baby die rule her life. Or you take a different road.”

  “I can’t see any roads,” he’d said.

  “You walking in dark. But road is there. You take a jump of faith. Then light comes.”

  “Leap of faith?” He’d smiled, and Mr. Nguyen smiled back with his long gray teeth.

  Nelson had said, “I used to scoff when Deirdre talked about fate. But now I’m humbled by the idea. I don’t know anything. I don’t understand anything.”

  Mr. Nguyen rinsed the cloth in the sink. “Good.”

  “Are you married, Mr. Nguyen? I hope you don’t mind me asking.”

  The cloth stopped halfway across a countertop. “Yes. Mrs. Nguyen die, nine year ago.” He finished the countertop, then started on the microwave.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I glad she die,” Nguyen had said, and it sent a jolt through Nelson.

  “Her pain over and my pain less.”

  “I’m so sorry,” was all Nelson could manage.

  “She burn by napalm when she was young woman.” Mr. Nguyen wiped the microwave window in fast circles. “Hospital in Vietnam not good then, too crowded. She suffer whole life from burn. Her thumb stuck to her hand. Then cancer. Doctor here try to help, but she too damage. She in bad pain. But most peaceful person I ever know.” Mr. Nguyen then opened a fridge and started rearranging sodas. “She with God, even before she die.”

  Nelson’s coffee had gone cold. The dishwasher rumbled. When he looked up, Mr. Nguyen’s dark eyes were staring into his.

  “Don’t be sad, Mr. Nelson. Is only life. Only one life.” The old man’s hand moved like he was pushing away the idea. “Many million before, many million now, many million in future. Important not to take life too personally, eh?”

  Nelson gripped his coffee cup.

  Mr. Nguyen said, “Heh heh. We get so many, job is to learn right lesson to prepare for next one coming.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  Mr. Nguyen chuckled again, then made his voice deeper. “Your mission, should you choose to accept.”

  Now, on the rock next to Nelson, Jen says, “It was at sunset.” Jen wraps her elbows around her jutting-up knees. “She was so new she didn’t even know the name of the river.”

  Nelson says, “She was so alone.”

  Jen gazes across the water. “I wish I’d been nicer to her.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “But maybe—” The words have a hard time coming. But there’s no sore place now. It’s like there’s been an all-out fire in there, and the coal burned to ash and blew away.

  Jen turns. “Maybe what?”

  “We should have listened to you, too.”

  78: FETZER

  The landlord’s insurance fixed the windows and also got the porch replaced. Franky and I were sitting out there on a balmy evening, munching on corn chips, swigging beers, watching the crows fly over, and wondering why the landlord had chosen sunflower-yellow paint.

  The next show was coming up, and Franky asked if he should start researching news items.

  He’s such a great kid. A few weeks earlier I’d suggested that he didn’t need to stick around out of a sense of loyalty. That if he wanted to move to Seatt
le, be with his new girl, steer his life onto a different track, he had our blessing.

  He looked so hurt, and I spent the next half hour reassuring him that I wasn’t trying to get rid of him. I just didn’t want him to feel trapped with us fogies. Turns out he was tired of the girl, her friends, and their callow lives. He wanted to save the world more than ever, he said. “And I was thinking, if it’s okay with you, what if I, like, moved in?”

  Of course we’d said yes.

  And on the porch I said to him, “Some extra research would come in handy, thanks. Nelson might sit this one out, too. But boy, people want him back. The emails, sheesh.”

  “I know, Fetz. I’ve been replying to most of them.”

  His profile was clear and sharp in the golden light. A classical face, Deirdre said once. “Praxiteles could have carved him,” she said. I remember because I Googled Praxiteles and saw what she meant.

  “Of course you have. Sorry.”

  Franky waved a hand and smiled at the street. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No. Really.”

  He looked at me with those classical eyes.

  “You have to understand,” I said. “We appreciate everything you’re doing. Everything you’ve ever done.”

  “Gee, Fetz,” he said. He looked down at his beer. “Thanks.”

  “Please tell me that isn’t a surprise.”

  He smiled. “Nah,” he said, and lifted his bottle, and I clinked mine against it.

  We went back to staring at the street. The sun raked deep shadows off the overhangs and pallets, and drifts of pink cherry petals gathered in the gutters.

  He said, “You know, when I first saw her there?”

  “Deirdre?”

  “Uh-huh. At that bus stop. I had to stop, you know? My body said, ‘turn the car around,’ you know? It was sort of a big deal, but it was no big deal, too. It was easy. Natural.”

  “Okay.”

  “And even though things turned out so bad—it was the right thing to do.” He turned to me, that classical, straight nose, those curvy lips that’ve always looked girly to me, but then I’m not an ancient Roman.