by Paul Griner
The length of her hair (shoulder), its color (brunette), her body type (thin/athletic), approximate height (5’8”), weight (130), and age (close to mine), her blue eyes. The name was certainly fake, but I had several images of her, screen grabs from the videos, and when I uploaded those to TinEye, I found a lot more.
Some were ads, some were for causes. People liked her voice; that came up again and again in the comments. That and requests for her name and contact info, always unanswered.
Through The Years
OBGYN to pregnant May: Will you breastfeed?
May to OBGYN: No. I don’t like mixing business and pleasure.
Liam (6) to May: Tell me about breastfeeding. They talked about it in school.
Always straightforward about biology, May explained it.
Liam (after thinking it over): Did you ever breastfeed me?
May: No, honey. I didn’t.
Liam: Then how about you lift your shirt now and I’ll take a drink?
Our divorce final, May came by my apartment—the first one I’d had by myself since college—and said, Liam doesn’t want us to be apart.
I’d moved in months before, but with all my stuff still stacked in boxes in the rooms behind me, I didn’t let her in, though the visit wasn’t a surprise; my lawyer had told me to expect it. Not because he knew much of May, but because it happened often.
I know Liam doesn’t, I said.
No, she said, and reached through the open door and circled my wrist with her fingers, which had grown so thin, I wondered if she was even eating. I know we can’t be together, she said. But Liam wants us to talk. Let’s do dinner once a month.
Her face was hollowed, her arms sticks, her breasts gone. I said yes.
During this month’s dinner, May mentioned attending two town council meetings with Nash, which was unusual. White tablecloths and heavy silver in a converted barn, ancient adz marks shiny on the thick beams, a cold clear night with few stars and no moon. She had a new peach-colored wallet. A gift from Nash? Bit by bit she was becoming a stranger, though she never would be. I tracked back through conversations and memories, picking out Nash references.
She picked up on my retreat and switched topics to people she worked with.
Do you remember Carol? she asked, and fiddled with her silverware.
I must have looked blank. A short busboy cleared my salad plate, a man no bigger than a boy.
My co-worker? Her husband bought her a new pair of breasts for Christmas?
Yes, I said and laughed. The busboy hoisted the tub and left, plates clanking.
She used them to meet Zac Efron at some event. She had him autograph them. Now they’ve begun an affair.
It’ll end, I said. Everybody comes to Jesus at some point.
It will, she said. But I hope not until she’s had some fun.
She picked up on my surprise. What? she said, and drained her wine. If her husband hadn’t told her she wasn’t good enough with the fake tits, maybe she wouldn’t have been looking around.
I thought of May and Nash. Why was she looking around? But of course, why shouldn’t she be? Was she happy? She was, her figure fuller, she was eating, I was glad. Glad and jealous. I had no right to jealousy, but since when did right and wrong ever get in the way of emotions? I ordered another bottle of wine.
Faulty Memories
The Birds in my Back Yard
The birds in my backyard
fly so neatly the little
birds sing so sweetly
the little birds in my
back yard rol in a heap
Liam pottreey (age 3)
May thinks rol should be read roll, but I know it’s are all. That’s Liam’s reading. Unreasonable, I know, but it infuriates me that she won’t change her opinion; on this one, at least, there shouldn’t be two truths.
Letters
Want to know how I know it isn’t true?
In America, we file lawsuits. Every parent who had a child wounded or die at Columbine sued. You haven’t. Not one of the other parents of kids “wounded” or “dead” has either.
That’s un-American.
No. I don’t think you’re foreign agents.
I just know you’re a liar. The lot of yous.
My Benbow Hurts
NOVEMBER 1, 2015
More texts were coming from May as I got to Liam’s room. May’s blotchy worried face, and flowers stacked on the windowsill, shading the light, Liam restless in the bed. Hi, Otto, he said. My benbow hurts.
Your elbow?
That’s what I said.
May smoothed his hair from his forehead, which still hadn’t been washed, her fingers quick and dexterous as she tried to groom it, as if she was picking pearls from seaweed. Her face hovered next to his. We’d just hired someone to come wash it.
Is May? Liam said.
That startled me and drew a moan from May; it was how he’d asked where people were when he was two. It startled me all the more because his facial swelling had gone down and he’d been talking regularly, asking us about his friends. We hadn’t told him yet, no one had, his room didn’t have a TV, but he didn’t seem to mind and he was getting better swiftly, so what was this?
She’s right next to you, Liam, I said. Tell me about your elbow. I took his good hand but he yanked it away.
My benbow hurts so much. How come?
He was having trouble getting his breath and his glance darted around the room and he began to thrash. I’d become good at reading his bedside monitor; his respiration was down to four or five a minute and his O2 levels were low, the numbers dropping, his skin as pale as his twisted sheets, which looked like a shroud.
It hurts, Daddy, he said. He only ever called me Daddy when he was in real pain so I knew it did, and he said again, My benbow.
He began making odd sounds, vowels and consonants strung together in weird patterns, like bad computer speech. Was his tongue getting thicker? He seemed to swallow it and his chin tilted up and he arched his body from his bed and now his mouth was open, his throat straining, but even sound had deserted him. His respiration rate was down to one a minute, the green number flashing.
When it hit zero his eyes rolled back and his body became deathly still. Alarms went off on his flatlining monitors and doctors and nurses rushed into the room and shoved us aside, shouting Liam’s name, working on him, opening his gown and rolling his bed as they did, May and I trailing along behind, terrified. He was going, my body shrank, the air grew chilled.
Is he going to die? I asked.
A nurse pushed the bed by the rails. She said, He must have a brain injury, they must have missed it. I worked in the Neuro-ICU for years. I think you’ll get him back, but it’ll be a long process. Nurse Ernie, she said, and gave me her card.
They were taking him for X-rays and possibly surgery; we hurried through bright hallway after bright hallway past doctors and nurses and patients pushing up against the walls to let us through until we came to Radiology, where we had to wait behind the doors after they swung closed with a concussive, conclusive click. May and I leaned against one another for support, our throats closing.
Cheese
NOVEMBER 2018
I’d stayed up until three a.m. tracking Kate, which meant that the cheese wasn’t going well: flat, boring sketches of cows, of farmers and farms, which Cora and Henry wanted, which most cheeses advertised with.
I’d interviewed them at their farm, seen their fields of cattle and sheep and goats and how they made their cheeses, watched the goats run from their pen in the back of the house through its central hallway to their pen in the front. The craziest thing, I thought, as they bumped passed me in the narrow passage. You forget how strong they are.
During my brand immersion, I’d sketched, taken extensive notes, and made sure I understood the differences between sheep, goat and cow cheeses, about which Henry had been voluble, talking for an entire two minutes, when normally words came out of him as if he paid for each wit
h a rib. After, he’d been so upset that he’d had to walk away, his entire body vibrating.
I had everything I needed but nothing clicked, no matter how many times I rearranged looks and logos, which was usually a sign. Rearranging once was fine, multiple times meant something was off, something fundamental. But it might have been Nash; I’d ignored his call. If he had information, I’d hear it from May, unless it concerned hoaxers arriving in town; then, he called me directly. Or maybe he wanted to tell me why he was taking May to those meetings. I didn’t want to know.
It wasn’t just incipient jealousy. I don’t know why I’d grown weary of his calls, of calls from any cops, though they’d become less frequent over the years. Self-protection, my therapists would probably say, since some cops called to express their sorrow, which only increased mine. To some therapists, that was a good thing, to some it was self-defeating, and I listened to each and moved on to the next, but no longer. If I was going to get better, it wouldn’t be while sitting across a desk from them in a comfortable chair, though they tried to help. And perhaps had.
I pushed aside the work for Meron Farms and sorted through Liam’s collages and drawings and flipbooks, our erasure book, which I kept nearby. New School Composition, by Swinton, part of the Harper’s Language Series, 1881 edition.
We started that one together, after finding it on one of our outings. Short—only 113 pages—with beautiful handwriting on the flyleaf. Underlinings and parenthetical interpolations, some by its various owners over the years, some his, and small images of mine that he cut and pasted into the first and last pages. Two birds, a duck and a partridge, a horse and chariot, a cutout of a colonial-era soldier. All bright and somewhat smudged, as by time and erasure. And one of the first pages cut jaggedly, so that only part of the title page showed when you opened the cover.
Another of his contributions to the book, when he was angry at being punished for breaking his bedroom window. It made him sad at first, and always made me feel guilty, and then he came to like it, after which he wrote in some of May’s engineering jokes—What do you call a nerd in 20years? Boss!—and cut paragraphs from a 1921 book of conundrums to paste in the flyleaf.
3 Why is the letter T like an island?
4 What is that which occurs twice in a moment, once in a minute, and not once in a thousand years?
He liked the erasure book because it had been printed exactly a hundred years before I was born. I liked it because he’d chosen it and because we worked on it together each morning before school, deciding which words to erase from one page at time, to make the book new, to make the book ours. Adding drawings, clippings, doodles, Liam diligent and playful. May and I in his genes, how could it be otherwise?
Cora and Henry were the least playful adults I’d met. I tried to imagine them in their teens or twenties. Every time, they looked the same. And that was the issue, I understood: sameness. The logos I was drawing, the campaign, they looked like every other cheese brand, and people tended to buy brands they grew up with. I had to break out of that, get people to want to try their cheeses, the sharp creamy cheddar, a smoked Gouda served with apple chutney, a fruity Manchego paired with thinly sliced prosciutto.
In Liam’s flipbooks, hotdogs were being plated, dressed, picked up and eaten; a weird droopy-faced woman tried to walk; a balloon inflated only to be pierced by an arrow that sank into a bull’s-eye on the far edge of the pages. Movement and timing and spacing, the crucial elements of animation.
What if Cora and Henry didn’t change, though everything around them did? What if they had the same faces as kids that they did as adults, became the cheese masters they were? What if all that made people laugh, or smile, remember their product? Better than everything I’d so far done, I thought, and took out a new sketch pad and began again.
Walk On By
NOVEMBER 2015
A heavy, early snowfall. Seven pristine inches blanketing the town, though it had melted on the black roads when I drove to the school with the other parents, once the crime scene had been processed. Over a hundred of us. I stood next to them in the parking lot, our breath smoking as if we’d come from the underworld, their children either already buried or home. Liam was still in the Neuro-ICU.
A walk through, to see where our children had been shot or killed. Some parents were angry because their children had been left lying on the floor for more than a day after they died, before funeral homes and coroners came to take them away. You always thought your pain was unbearable and often it was, but then you heard of others’ pain that seemed worse. The narcissism of the present.
Inside, most of the lights were off—only sunlight through the windows—and, dazzled by the bright sun, I stood just over the threshold in the dim hallway to get my bearings as the other parents streamed past me like shadows and specters, like ghosts. They’d cleaned up most of the blood, though not all, the pools and big sprays of it, but here and there it speckled the spines of books or a chair leg. Strewn-about backpacks, some clothes, some books, a lot of SpongeBob and Frozen lunchboxes.
I entered each class. To imagine, I guess. Guns being cocked and shells clattering against the floor, screaming, crying, begging children, the smells of cordite and blood and fear. One teacher yelled NONONONONO before being killed; the school cameras recorded it, and most everything else, and some of the children had told reporters what they’d heard, so I had a pretty good idea. Liam told me a few things too. RunIwanttogohomeWherearemyparents. I was glad he’d then forgotten it.
Glasses and briefcases where teachers had died. One parent had been in to help with her special needs daughter; a sheaf of notes where she’d fallen. In the video, he came back into one room to shoot people again and wandered into empty rooms and shot up desks. Toward the end, he’d put a gun to one child’s head but let him live. Later, I learned that boredom was common to spree shooters.
From Liam’s classroom there’d been a long trail of blood, fairly wide, all the way to the bottom of the stairs. A ghost of it still existed, which I picked out as we walked, our footsteps echoing in the empty hallways. At first I avoided it and then I walked down the middle of it. The theory was that he’d been shot in the shoulder while standing beside Latrell, then hidden under a desk with part of his head sticking up and been hit by another shot. When he came to, he began to crawl, after the shooter had left the room but while he was still active. Through the classroom and down the hall to the stairs, dragging a yellow backpack behind him; not his. He’d fallen down the stairs, breaking his nose and cheek and orbital bone while the shooting was still going on.
One teacher had seen him sliding by and had wanted to run out to grab him, but she worried it might call attention to her classroom and that if she was shot trying to rescue Liam, all her children would die, so she watched him until he reached the stairs. She’d come to the hospital to check on him, to admit her guilt. To tell me she’d wanted him to have a witness.
Debbie Santo. Pleasepleaseplease she’d thought, over and over as she watched Liam sliding by, though she hadn’t been sure what she was asking for. I walked by her classroom, following in the steps of the shooter, who’d gone that way before Liam did. The door was closed, the shade drawn; I couldn’t blame Debbie. She’d lived and so had all her children, but already she’d said she couldn’t come back.
Such a brave boy, Lamont said as we stood at the top of the stairs. He was really the only parent I knew. He put his hand on my arm to steady me. Latrell had been among the first to die, and one the shooter had returned for; no one knew why. The bottom of the stairs seemed a long way off.
You okay? Lamont asked.
No. None of us are or ever will be. I didn’t say it. Since the shooting, most of my social inhibitions were slipping away, but the dim hallways spooked me.
When we were done, we streamed back into the light. Over the course of the walk-through the parents had sorted themselves into two rough groups, the parents of the surviving children in one, ahead of me, and those of the chi
ldren who’d died behind me. I looked back at them. Still in the school, they were specters again, shadows lingering in the scene of blood and horror, and the image filled me with dread. They didn’t want to leave the last place their children had been alive.
Why on earth did you look back, you idiot? I asked myself as I drove back to the hospital. Slowly at first, and, once out of sight of the others, as fast as I could.
The Price Is Right
NOVEMBER 2015
What? I said. No, it’s not for sale. I hung up, my heart beating. Three a.m., most of the world asleep; I’d stumbled through the darkened living room from the couch, thinking the ringing phone was the hospital to say Liam was fading.
Why would you think that? May said, after I told her it was someone who wanted to buy my car. It could have been a turn for the better, she said, and clicked off her light and yanked the covers up and rolled over to get back to sleep.
I stood looking at her. The room smelled damp in the dark and the woman on the phone and May had voices so similar they might have been sharing a voice box. Impossible, right? I couldn’t make sense of it and went to the kitchen for some banana bread. May’s co-worker Zhao had made it and though it was inedible it was also comfort food so I cut a slice to keep on a plate next to me and stumbled back to the couch and turned on the TV and muted it. When Liam was four he came into the kitchen and asked May for a slice of warm banana bread just from the oven.
Okay, she said, but just the one. She gave him two.
I knew you would, he said. I know how to arrange these things.
When she told me later we were both glad because the night before he’d been inconsolable. At the store he’d wanted a Playmobil model and we wouldn’t buy it, telling him Christmas was coming, and he said, But last year I asked Santa sixty days in advance and the elf who helps him won’t have time to make it this year! Santa’s note said, Made it myself! and Liam tucked it into the first wallet he got.