The mother has moved from freelance to firm.
Lucy has a nanny. They spend hours at the park when Gibb is gone so Lucy’s father can sleep. It is hard to day-sleep. While waiting for the boy, I pretend unconsciousness, resisting assault on the senses. I curl among newspapers, eyes slitted. Quiet helps Lucy’s father. From the bags he tosses over me with a sound louder than clink and an odour its own brand of sour, I gather whiskey helps also.
My stay on the corner is brief. I kill another cat.
Such minor infractions are frowned upon but not verboten. We are presented with certain valves for our energies, which – to wield – take an intense will we are not free to wholly master. Beside my knobby spine, the slots of pain sear.
* * *
Lucy’s father leaves the mother a week before the wedding.
She told him to go. But in an endless string of abandonments, any loss is perceived as desertion. She tells herself she told him to go. She tells herself of course she did and she was right to. She wanted this, she tells herself – respect. The mother buries her face in Lucy’s belly. He left me.
During the next few months, she will take small but constant comfort in Lucy’s laughter, needs, squeals. The boy and I will not.
I am renting the third floor.
* * *
Gibb is not an able-bodied boy. It is difficult to see, but he is torqueing in upon himself. The crooked mile requires the crooked man: the rhyme misunderstands causality. One by one, friends have their parents refuse the mother’s invitations. Some game he played too rough. His loneliness is like a gun in the mother’s bedside table. He has been in there. There is no gun. He has asked me, the woman upstairs, do I carry.
* * *
The mother acts like a mother. She worries for me more than for Gibb. I do not eat with them though invited. I leave briefly every day, but she does not know where I go. If I work. She wants to ask. She has her job, but the nanny is expensive. Lucy’s father gambled so much of Nana’s egg.
My job is watching and, now, to listen. I appear, for once, as I would choose to. We don’t choose. I look genderless, although the mother thinks lesbian. The misapprehension allows me to stare at her, and the boy, unimpeded by decorum. Outsiders are given tremendous leeway, seen as they are as renouncers of all things the devout have secretly forsaken.
Lucy, a wet muffin, is heavier than bread should be. Yeasty. I do not volunteer to hold her but sometimes must. The mother and I are friends. This is a word women use when someone sits with them, more than once.
Disaster rots Gibb’s whole world, or he would pin his bad feeling on me, especially as he has attached to this body his first stirrings. He leers around corners. A pencil skirt I wear has lace that emerges below the hem like a mistake. I have watched him watching. For him – it is legs.
When Lucy’s father left, the boy thought things would be made right. This has not happened. His pain increases. He is my charge – it is up to me to reduce his extremity.
* * *
I go to him. We are advised to remain corporeal in these moments. The alternative can be devastating.
The mother and I share a bottle of wine she doesn’t notice that I do not share. I retire. After she goes down with her television on, I return to the second floor and enter Gibb’s room.
It is nightlit. A lava lamp. The walls swim in rose.
I wear the silken whites that have ever supported nocturnal visions.
I am an emissary. I lower myself onto the bed beside him. He is small in the bed.
“Do you know me?” I ask.
“Yes.” Remarkably clear, the boy’s elocution. Even in sleep.
“Would you like to feel better, Gibb? Because I can make you feel better.” I pause. “Even good.”
He is awake now, pretending not to be, squinting to peer between thick lashes, breathing shallowly. “Yes.”
This is a whisper.
The yes he has given me is a secret, as are the instructions I pass on. A deeper secret I have not told.
So close do I lean in that my lip grazes the red shell of his ear. I can feel his pulse there, and the words I expel, in whorl. I tell him what he will do. I give this information to him in fine detail. In smoke and filigree. He is barely breathing. His whole small body strains to listen. Were he like me, he might leave it there on the mattress. Behind him.
And then, as we do, I kiss him.
I lean over the boy. His eyes are wide. I kiss him on the mark so faint only the mother remembers it. It is at the very centre of his forehead. The birthbloom – the one I gave to him nine years before – trembles in kindling against my mouth.
“Sometimes we have to take back a thing that has been given,” I say to him. “Sometimes God asks us to undo God’s work, and we must ask for your help.”
Children find delegation deeply unfair. Why must they slave for those who know how and better? Nevertheless, they ache to be obedient. Especially the most awful ones long to be part of something greater, filled as they are inexplicably with awe.
It is this internal conflict that makes them such remarkable, friable pawns.
Gibb looks up at me. My request is too big. It is not actually a request, and I let this knowledge settle hotly upon his chest like a nesting alley cat. I knead my fingers into his ribcage to remind him of his Nana. Of what I did to her.
Of what I could yet do.
I see him thinking of her. The mother. It shocks me, his love. How it manifests even in this child. Even towards this mother. The softening at the jaw, the release of fisting muscles around the eyes. The intensity of Gibb’s love begins to darken the room.
It is getting darker. Darker. I turn away from the boy. The lava is stuck. A congealed layer has turned black and, watched, flakes away from the amorphous body imprisoned in the tube.
The substance begins to flow again, only now shot through with scabs. I look at the boy.
He cannot say his yes this time. He nods.
I envy this – what he is able to do in this moment – a thing he does not even recognise as choice.
* * *
The six-inch butcher blade was Nana’s pride and joy. A small woman requires precision instruments. She has no leverage.
Gibb leaves for school when the mother leaves. He meets his remaining friend on the corner and walks two blocks before turning to run back for a forgotten worksheet. The friend continues on. Inside the brownstone, the nanny is warming a bottle in a pan on the stove. I am waiting in my room, hands folded in this lap.
When I hear her scream, I discorporate. He is young. It may take him some time and I have never grown accustomed to these sounds, familiar as they are in the factory of my work.
I appreciate Mozart, and Motown. Certain Gregorian chants. Ive Mendes. Thelonious Monk.
* * *
I get the details as one must. I read the files.
He stabs her first just above the waist. Nicking her spine, not severing it. The blade dips deeper into her thighs than forensics might expect, given his size and weight. She grabs for the boiling water but it rains down on her. Welts. The blood, pooling thickly on the tile, likely causes her fall. She flails as she slips. Spatter. Once she is prone, he moves to the throat, and, again, the efficiency of the cut is technically remarkable. The defensive wounds – minimal. She does not grab the blade. He manages the carotid quickly. The team thinks this either lucky or studied.
Lucy was strapped into her high chair, during.
After.
Because he is a smart boy with a good memory, the twisted school-tie tourniquet holds, and Lucy lives.
Studied then.
Once he has gotten through the ankle, not easily, he takes the still-stockinged foot and inserts the blade up through the arch, between the third and fourth metatarsals, transpiercing it. He then walks with slow ceremony through dining and living rooms, leaving a trail of blood. Soon, I suppose, weddings will have flower boys. He places the foot on the sill while he opens the window. He hurls out th
e vanquished rose, with the blade inside. Lucy’s foot makes it, improbably, past the wrought iron and ivy and onto the sidewalk.
In the original instructions, before our game of telephone, Gibb’s excision ended Lucy.
I am allowed certain valves, half-truths, improvisations. Although they are minor, I am always punished.
There was nothing to do for the nanny.
* * *
On his eighteenth birthday, Gibb is transferred to a private institution. The mother pays with what remains of Nana’s egg but never visits. The mother and Lucy are inseparable, and Lucy would never think to come. With state-of-the-art prostheses, Lucy grows into a noted tennis player, a spokesperson for the disabled, a differently bodied model. In interviews she and the mother do not speak of Gibb. In interviews, if pressed, they leave.
They think the worst. They think him without a soul. But his soul is intact. It twists in him, like a dish towel, wringing.
Once every year or so, Lucy’s father drives upstate to see him. He is barred from Lucy’s life, blamed somehow. He never liked the boy, but knows what it is to be stricken. He talks to himself, and the boy sits close by as if listening. Over years the Dixie-cup cocktails have drained Gibb of much, yet not all, of his speech. Lucy’s father’s whiskey loosens his tongue, and blurs the sharp corners of the four-hour trip.
The man has sent Lucy a bouquet of single socks on each birthday since she turned three. He likes to shop for them, despite the eyes of clerks. She must have, by now, every color and pattern that exists. Plaids, stripes, polka dots, rainbows, skulls and butterflies, flowers and barbed wire, tie-dye and argyle and angels. She keeps them too. He has seen her wearing them at matches. He goes when he can – sits in the back and leaves early. “Not red, Gibb,” he says to the boy. “Never seen her dress that foot in red.” And then he laughs. “I believe that’s on you.” Lucy’s father is still a musician. He still plays jazz violin. Beautifully.
And he has kept all of the half-pairs.
At the end of this particular visit, his last, nearly incoherent at the end of the hour, he sticks his finger in Gibb’s chest. “You. You should have’m. I’ll tell you what – I’m gonna sendem to you.”
* * *
Gibb spends all the time outside that he is given. Once, in one of the rare lucid moments of his later years, he asks me about the book in the park – the one I nearly handed him.
I tell him the truth. That, like the bodies, it was a prop. A crutch.
And that I read it anyway.
The boy walks slowly these days, shambling, but he is no cripple, and he does not hate me for what I am – orderly, doctor, patient, or thrush on the fence – or for what God had me have him do.
He does not know he was my greatest disobedience.
The mercy I had him show was never God’s.
I was given Gibb to protect and to love – in the ways accessible to us – as a punishment.
As I will be given my next, more severe charge in censure for my handling of this case.
And so on.
Each spring, the owners hire a team of groundskeepers to tend the hedges. They all soon know Gibb. His interest is keen.
Until the boy dies, aged forty-seven, all but forgotten, I collect the socks. I intercept them, parcel by parcel, from the thick must of the mailroom. Lucy’s father does not mean to be cruel. No. Cruel is not what he means to be.
KIRSTEN KASCHOCK
Kirsten Kaschock has authored three books of poetry: Unfathoms, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, and The Dottery – winner of the Donald Hall Prize for poetry. Her debut novel, Sleight, is a work of speculative fiction about performance. She has earned a PhD in English from the University of Georgia and another in dance from Temple University. Recent work can be read at American Poetry Review, BOAAT, and Liminalities. She is on faculty at Drexel University and serves as editor-in-chief for thINKing DANCE, a consortium of Philadelphia dance artists and writers.
“I have always been drawn to stories and films of children who were somehow off or wrong – like The Bad Seed, The Fifth Child, etc. When I received in the mail a toddler-sized sock with a skull pattern, I began thinking about such a child’s caretakers. I wondered, was it possible to write a bad-child story and have blame NOT fall primarily on the mother? What kind of presence was necessary to shift that trope? I began writing from there, from inside that presence. It felt… odd.”
Dead Letters Anthology Page 32