The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

  “Yes, but I’d need to find someone who knows how to use the machine.” She doesn’t move.

  “Great. Could you please do that?”

  Her smile widens, a practiced way of scowling with no evidence. She disappears into the office behind the reference desk and procures an older, mustachioed gentleman. He eyes me up and down, and I remember we’re in a small town and remind myself to be surprised this doesn’t happen more often.

  “I hear you want to look at old newspapers. Why’s that?”

  I explain we’ve just moved here and I’m interested in researching some history in the town. He points to a thin volume with a poorly designed cover on the “Local Interest” display nearby. “That’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  I thank him and say I’ll check it out. “My interests are a bit more specific, though.” I smile more than I normally do to try to put him at ease. I wonder if all the teeth make me look like a maniac, the way Julie grinned at the high school student working at the hardware store.

  He leads me down to the basement, to a dim corner of plastic machines yellowed with age. “I keep pushing to have these files updated and backed up. If there were a fire, we’d lose all of these records. Not to mention, you’re the first one in ages who’s been willing to learn how to use this equipment. Usually people say, ‘Forget it!’ But the machines are actually quite easy to use. Now, what year did you want to look at?”

  I realize now that I don’t know. “The forties?”

  The librarian chuckles and pats me on the back. “You’ll need to narrow it down a bit, son. Where would you like to start?”

  I tell him I’ll start with 1940, and he goes to retrieve the reels. I find I can scan rather quickly with only fifty-two headlines per year. I browse 1941 and 1942 with no luck, but 1943 turns up what I’m looking for.

  KINSLER FAMILY TRAGEDY

  CASEVILLE, Wis.—An eight-year-old boy from Caseville died Tuesday after falling 50 feet from a tree. Kent County deputies said Alban Kinsler was playing with his six-year-old brother, Rolf, in the Harper Woods behind their home at 891 Stillwater Lane, 3:15 p.m., Tuesday. The brothers climbed a tree and Alban fell to the dirt ground below when a branch weakened by white rot gave way. Rolf was unharmed. The boys’ mother, Bette, happened to be watching from their kitchen window when it happened. Alban Kinsler was taken to Caseville County Hospital, where doctors were unable to revive the boy. He was pronounced dead at 4:10 p.m.

  A wake was held at Christ Lutheran Church, where mourners stretched around the block, waiting to pay their respects to Mr. and Mrs. Kinsler and the little boy’s brother. The family has requested privacy.

  I note the address as Rolf’s house, not our own, as I worried it might be. I think of the portrait above the mantel of his house that showed a son and a daughter and wonder if I’d misread the picture. Maybe it was two sons, and the baby was wearing a baptismal gown. I remember old photos of little boys with long hair and frocklike garments.

  I ask the librarian if I can print the article, and he shows me how. When he sees the page I’m interested in copying, he asks what I’m researching.

  “The house next door to ours.”

  “I see. You’re in the house almost identical to the Kinsler house, then? Eight ninety-five? I didn’t realize anyone had moved in there.” He opens his mouth to continue. I see the words reroute themselves. “Welcome to town.” He leaves it at that.

  He starts to unload the cartridge from the machine. I stop him. “I’d like to continue poking around a bit if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “None at all. I’ll leave you to it.”

  I scan through more slowly now, reading the headlines on the inner pages. I want to see if I can find anything more. No stories provide an update on the family in 1943. I ask the librarian if I can see the following year’s reel. He tells me I’ll have to come back another day. He’s heading out. No one else knows how to operate the machine. I’m irked that he won’t load one more file for me before he goes. I tell him I understand, though. I thank him for his help.

  I take my leave of the library and drive away. When I see the pull-off into the woods north of our home, I make a split-second decision and veer in. Three other cars are parked in the small lot. I notice a man sits at the steering wheel in each one. I wonder what they’re waiting for. I walk east to the shore and then south, hoping to find a path that will loop back west so I can explore more rather than retracing my steps. As the daylight fades, I’m about to resign myself to turning around when I realize I’m higher above the water than I think. I reorient myself. I figure out I’m above the cave we’ve noticed north of our beach. I step-slide my way down to the entrance. I don’t think about how I’ll get back up. I duck into the grotto. I hear the dripping around me and look back out, unsure I should go farther inside. A sheer drop leads to the surf below. The light travels only as far as the shallow parts of the cave. In the dark, I can see writing and drawings on the wall. The layers of scribbling grow denser as I venture farther back. I cannot make any of it out. My eyes exhaust themselves. I hunt my pockets for my phone, but can’t find it. I wish I had my camera.

  I look around the mouth of the cave to assess how I’ll get off the cliff. The trees above are spindly, held down by weak, rocky soil. I have nothing with which to lasso them. It starts to drizzle. I argue with myself if it would be better to make a go of the climb now, just as the rocks are getting slippery, or if I should wait to see if the rain clouds pass before the sun sets. I take a seat inside the lip of the cave. I lean against the rock. I close my eyes. I wait for an idea. When I open my eyes again, I am dozing in my rocking chair on the front of our wraparound porch. I ask Julie where I’ve been. She laughs. She tells me I haven’t moved from that chair since I got home from the library, even when she asked me if I wanted to go for a walk on the beach with her. I start to explain what I found out about the Kinslers.

  She stops me. “You told me all of this when you got home.”

  I am afraid to admit I don’t remember. Like a blacked-out drunk trying to cover for himself, I say, “Of course I did. I know.”

  23

  WHEN ANOTHER BRUISE appears down the length of my shin, I go to the doctor and he tells me I’m dangerously low on an array of vitamins. He writes down, “Iron, B, D, and E in concentrated doses,” and hands me the slip of paper.

  I buy the vitamins and swallow them down each day, but the bruises still come. My inner thighs look as if they’ve been pummeled so I stop going to the beach to walk or swim and start wearing sweatpants to work because everything hurts. I stop James on his way to the living room and lift up my shirt to show him the bruise leaking down my chest, bleeding from my sternum to my belly button, and James says, “When did that one show up?”

  “Today.”

  He reaches out toward the bruise, placing his palm flat against me, gently, the bronze of his hand contrasting with my pale stomach, and the spot gets warm, as if his hand were a heating pad, and he pushes against my ribs a little harder, and the hum in the air swells louder, and it looks as if the bones were folding in, as if they’d turned to clay, but they don’t feel that way. It feels as if I’m getting better, stronger.

  When he pulls his hand away, the ribs slowly rise again, like memory foam, and I tell myself the answer is breath.

  24

  “THEY SHOULD BE able to diagnose this, right? Bruises seem like a pretty straightforward symptom,” I say.

  Julie leans down to turn another shovelful of dirt. “But I wonder how many times a physician is certain of his diagnosis and it’s actually wrong. I’d prefer no diagnosis to a wrong one.” She tugs with all her might at a plant whose leaves look like the blade of a saw. “This is a weed, right?” She answers her own question and pulls.

  I glance around the yard. “Anything I can do?”

  “Out here? Not yet. You can mow the lawn later. For now, you can start painting or you can replace the hardware on the sinks.”

  �
��I can paint, but I think we need to call a plumber to do the other stuff.”

  “Fine. Remember to tape all along the ceiling and baseboards … doors … windows.”

  With one last tug, the roots of the plant show themselves. The fist of white tentacles is covered in dirt. It’s bigger, more bulbous, than I expected.

  I try to remember what paint color goes where. The cans and supplies have been piled in the entryway since we returned from the hardware store. “Maybe we could paint together, though? I worry I’ll do the tape wrong.”

  Julie stops for a moment, frustrated that I can’t take care of this on my own. She knows I’m right, though. “How about you finish pulling weeds, and I’ll get started taping?”

  She is missing the point. I want us to be together, but I accept her offer. Flora is something I do know. Julie hands me her gloves. She turns to head inside.

  “Wait.” I grab her around the waist. I kiss her. She kisses me back. When we pull away, her face shines ruddy with exertion.

  “Thank you.” The smile fades fast as she focuses behind me. “Again!”

  I follow her eyes to Rolf at his window, holding a mug. He looks as though he’s stopping on his way somewhere else. I wave. He doesn’t respond.

  “I wonder how long he’s been watching,” Julie says, staring back.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “He doesn’t matter.”

  25

  I TAKE AN afternoon off. I tell Sam and Kim I have a doctor’s appointment back in the city. I complain about not having found someone local yet. Really, though, I head for the art museum to see a photography exhibit I missed before we moved. I don’t tell Julie. She’d be angry I’m using a vacation day. She’d try to tell me that I shouldn’t take a day off so soon after starting this new job. She’d want to come along. But I need an afternoon alone. I plan to get there and back in the span of the workday. That leaves me about two hours of museum time.

  I spend the drive there clearing my head. I watch the rural farms turn to suburbs and then city gridlock.

  In the modern wing, I stand before a black-and-white photo of a gentleman wrapped in thick foam. The material is what you’d use as a mattress if you didn’t have the time to save for springs and feathers. His head cranes back as if he’s bothered by something. He smokes. A long clothbound electrical cord winds through his arms, draped on the foam. Concrete walls him in.

  I think about how smoking is a way of trying to satisfy each moment. It disregards the future. How many cigarettes must this man have already smoked? How many more will he smoke in his lifetime? Is there a way all the filters could connect end to end to bridge the gap between this man and me? This man—who I’ve assumed lives across the ocean because of the information on the placard—and I could be united by some superglue that would bind his cigarette filters together. They’d stretch up and over the ocean. Some magical force would suspend them. I know, though, that the shape of the earth would refuse this happening. I will never find this man. I will never ask him what was bothering him. My breath rushes in and out. Did this man make it through whatever issue caused his mouth to jack into such a sprawling smile? Neck strung tight. I want to tell that man that the smoke will never fill him up. Nothing will. The yellowing it leaves behind will get closer and darker. The thing he’s trying to expand will shrink into nothing. What he’s found is a way to close in on himself. I stand in front of that print. Sweat prickles my skin. A photo is reflections of light. Everything invisible comes together to show you something. My throat constricts. I start to laugh. My chest feels snug. A security guard comes closer. I lose my balance and vision and sound.

  I wake up on a gurney, but refuse to go to the hospital. An EMT says into my cell phone, “Okay, he’s coming to, I’m going to put him on.”

  It’s Julie. She wants to know if I’m okay. “What happened? Why are you all the way in the city?”

  It takes a little while for me to even think of what the truth is, let alone a lie that would make everything seem normal.

  I wait in the lobby for her to make it to me. She and Connie pull up. Connie will drive Julie’s car home so Julie can drive mine. As Julie climbs the big flight of stairs out front, I see her wave Connie off. Already Julie’s eyes search through the glass doors for me. She tugs them open and struts toward me. She pulls me up to standing. She hugs me. I hug her back. I can feel everyone watching: the guards and every set of eyes in every painting. I want to tell her, I’m fine. And It was nothing. And I should have eaten something more. I can’t lie. I say, “Let’s go.”

  On the way home, Julie talks nonstop. I try to listen. I still feel a bit woozy. My head aches.

  “Why would you do that?”

  In the question, I hear what she’s not asking: Did you actually go up to the city to gamble, to join the old crew at the bar, to lay what little money you’ve earned in the last month down? I feel the anger growing in me that her concern for my well-being is being overridden by her suspicion.

  “It was a bad idea. Okay? I don’t feel well right now. Can you save the lecture?”

  Julie keeps quiet then. She doesn’t apologize. She allows me to drift off.

  26

  AFTER WE RETURN from the museum, James sleeps for twenty-four hours until he wakes, distant and paranoid. He says he wants to change things, wants to get to the root of whatever it is that’s filling the spaces of this house. I think he means this abstractly, but then he begins unscrewing switch plates, he pulls out the stove, runs his hand under the cabinets, climbs onto a stepladder to remove the ceiling vents. Beneath the surface of it all, we discover more ligament than we imagined, but the rudiments of the house aren’t what James is looking for. It’s something else that I can’t figure out. “James, what is it you think you’ll find?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be looking.”

  James makes a precise cut along the edge of the box spring and inspects each coil. He removes the stuffing from the sofa cushions and rips open the seams on the pillows. He tries to settle the feathers in a neat pile, but they take flight in a panic when I enter the room. “I’ll put them back,” he says.

  James pulls up the edge of the carpet to show me the grime hiding between it and the floorboards, and I force the corner back down. I can’t let myself think about the dirt hiding where we can’t get to it. I heave at the thought of the filth caked into this old house. “You can’t make a shell of our home, James.” I try to trace this destruction to the way he picked horses and hoped they’d win. I tell myself people can have two problems with no common cause. He drills a hole in the wall between the two bedrooms, trying to get to that oddly shaped void we’d originally thought was a closet.

  When an opening big enough for a flashlight is formed, he shines the light in and tells me, “It’s just an empty column of space. It goes pretty far up and down.”

  I peek in. “Maybe it was a laundry chute or a dumbwaiter? Maybe they sealed it off when they stopped using it.”

  James says, “I don’t know where else to look. Where is the sound coming from? The moisture? Your bruises? I can’t find it.”

  I try to stay calm and stroke his back and tell him maybe there’s nothing to be found.

  That night, we lie on our mattress, tufts of stuffing pulled out and resting beside us on the ground, exhausted and uncomfortable, but unwilling to do the work of filling it back up, the springs digging into our backs more accurate, more true.

  27

  I WAKE UP early and feel nothing. I go back to sleep. I wake up again. I feel the pressure. Remorse stings through me, like a hangover without having had a drink. I remember slowly. I look at the seams sliced into all of our belongings. Screws balance on every surface. I see an exaggeration of some impulse that is familiar to me. I see what I’ve done with surprise, but unearth no doubt.

  I emptied everything I could find in the house. I worry Julie will identify this as a ripple of what I did with my bank account. I gambled enough away that the money still remainin
g only reminded me of what I’d lost and so I gambled that away, too.

  Now it is my job to refill what I’ve emptied. I sew it all shut. I drill every screw back into place. I make dinner: grilled fillets and asparagus, my only culinary talent.

  Julie returns home relieved to see order restored. We sit down at the table. Julie eats without a word. She doesn’t look at me until her plate is clean. “Well, that was a real fast one-two punch. First the museum and then cutting everything apart, but that’s it, right? We’re not headed down some irreversible path? Can I help? Do you want to talk to someone?”

  “I don’t know what came over me,” I say. “The incident at the museum unmoored me, but I feel better today.”

  Julie’s eyes are filling up. She shuts them lightly. She tries not to let the tears spill. “James, if it happens again, I need to tell someone. I need to get us help.”

  I feel incapable of facing the worry I’ve caused her. My mind insists that her recent transgressions have been more severe than my own. “We need to watch out for each other is all. I’ll do the dishes. You go relax.” I stand to gather our plates. Julie wanders to the couch. She stares at the television as if she can see something in its blank screen. I finish the dishes and hear the stairs creak.

  I try to make it up to her. I wipe down the counter. I take the trash out. The moon is low. I have to search for it. The woods seem closer than they had earlier that day. I count my paces to their edge. Fifty in all, though I swear it used to be a hundred.

  Back in the house, I shake my shoes off inside the door. I head upstairs. When I pass the guest room, I see Julie sitting in the dark wearing an old Mardi Gras mask we’d brought home from vacation once upon a time. “What are you doing in there?”

  She whispers, “Nothing.” I barely hear it. I exhale a short laugh. I keep moving to our bedroom.

  “What am I doing in where?” Julie says from our bed. She is tucked in tight, book in hand. I startle when I see her. I return to the guest room. The mask is back on the wall.