by Paul Griner
If I hadn’t said no, he wouldn’t have been shot, May says. You know that.
We fall silent, listening to one another breathe six miles apart. Then she says, You know what he said to me that day? After I’d already said he had to go to school? After I said, No hooky today? You’d gone out to the car.
He hoped you got a loose tooth?
She laughs, and I hear her shift in the bed, wood creaking. Beside her bed is a picture of me holding Liam after his first bath, his skin glistening. She says, He gave me that drawing of the red tulip. After, he stood in the doorway looking at me and it was the last thing he said to me in our house that morning.
I hold my breath, waiting. This is new information. I’ve asked about it but she’s never shared it, so I’m careful not to interrupt, even as I find myself sitting up.
What he said was, Mummy, you look so much like you today.
So I asked him, How so?
He said, That skirt, that blouse, those freckles, that lipstick, that toenail polish. When I close my eyes and think of you, that’s what I see. You!
Must be what Nash sees, I think, and feel shitty. We’re divorced, for fuck’s sake. My claims on her are in the past, but I have the soul of an arsonist.
Say goodnight to Liam for me, I say.
She says, I always do.
More Texts from Strangers
So the FBI comes out and confirms that your “school shooting” was a hoax! Where’s the outrage? What else are we being lied to about? Waco?JFK?
Letters
Your grief, which knows no bounds, will be absorbed in His love.
We pray, each and every one of the Carmelite Sisters, that it happens here on earth, soon. We have faith that it will happen in the hereafter. We pray you come to, too.
Another Beginning
DECEMBER 2002
Gretels, a monthly get-together with college friends. Vikings-Packers, dark wooden walls and high-backed booths, big-screen TVs, roars every time the Vikes score. My friends and I join in, even though I secretly like the Pack, and by halftime, my voice is scratchy. Flannel shirts and the smell of wet wool, New England staples, backslapping at jokes the more beers we have; the women hit the hardest.
I notice the brave lone woman cheering for the Pack, her beautiful Slavic face under her white cotton hat, then, as I’m heading to the bathroom, she elbows her glass and beer sloshes over her white mittens on the bar.
I wring them out and say, If you really want frozen hands, just dunk them in your water glass and step outside for a bit. Cheaper and faster.
Cheaper and faster? she says. That’s your pick-up line?
Been waiting my whole life to use it.
I want to see that smile again, so we talk while friends say goodbye; five minutes, ten, fifteen. We’ve already exchanged names and learned where the other’s apartment is, and she’s already told me her one superstition, inherited from her Swedish grandmother–not to wash sheets between Christmas and New Year’s, or the person who sleeps in them will die—when we have our first fight. Her ring tone is “Silent Night.”
All year? I ask. Evidently, I make a face.
You don’t like it? she asks. Everybody knows it’s the best Christmas carol.
Nope, I say, and shake my head. “Good King Wenceslas.”
You’re crazy, she says.
Could be, I say. Can I see your hands? and hold out my own.
She leans forward, elbows on her crossed legs, and rests them in mine. You’re not going to play that hand slapping game, are you?
Something better, but you have to close your eyes.
When she does, I take out a pen and begin drawing on them, a swift caricature of me on one, my phone number on the other, the letters O and M.
Okay, I say, and slip my hand back under hers. Take a look.
One foot beginning to bounce, she doesn’t seem pleased, which surprises me. What’s this? she asks.
I point them out with the pen. Me, my phone number, and our initials.
That M looks like an N. And if I mash my hands together, it reads NO.
She puts on her still-soaking mittens and leaves, and I guess I’ll never see her again.
A week before Christmas, I open my door to a traveling band of carolers and recognize May’s startling cheekbones among them. They all begin to sing.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay round about
Deep and crisp and even.
Nine months later, we marry, her most impulsive decision ever. I discover later her aversion to tattoos, that I’d nearly ruined everything at the start.
Liam at Eight
JANUARY 2015
I was working on shading. Slow, steady work, work I loved. Cold calling was tough, even though I was getting more and more local clients, but to get paid to draw, to spend this much time with Liam and May? I tried not to forget my luck.
Liam pulled the bird book from the shelf and leafed through it while I worked. Fifteen minutes, page after page. He knew my process, my need for quiet, how even so I liked having him beside me. Patience had been an issue, younger, but he’d worked on it. At the woodpeckers, he went more slowly still.
He stopped a long time at one page, then went on, then came back. He propped the page open with a smooth rock and nudged me aside and found the black feather with the white polka dots in my top desk drawer, where I’d put it three years earlier, where it had stayed throughout the move. He held it against the page. Got it, he said. He was right.
May didn’t look up from my phone when I tracked her down to tell her. I’d asked her to jailbreak it; she said she was almost done.
Well, good, I said. And you were right about Liam and the feather. I should have paid closer attention.
Thanks, Captain Obvious, she said, and handed me the phone. Get all the free apps you want, now. Share some with your son. And pay attention when you do, you might learn something.
Letters
Prove he was born.
Send me a copy of his birth certificate.
And not an unofficial one. Anyone can make one of those on their computer, especially you. You’re a graphic artist. Do you think I’m stupid? I was stupid once because as soon as I heard about it all the hair on my arms stood up. Little children! I gave money to the fund and I want it back, now that I know it’s not true.
$200.
That’s a shitload less than they’re paying you, isn’t it?
You can remit the check to this address:
Silent Night, Holy Night
DECEMBER 25, 2015
Fat flakes of snow drifting by outside the hospital windows. May decided to go into work after sitting with me in the waiting room for an hour.
Christmas Day? I said. Carols played on the speakers.
Otto. She touched my arm. I’ve missed so many days. Nothing seems to be changing right now. I need to catch up.
I was neither angry nor surprised. May wasn’t a particularly anxious person, but whatever anxieties she had she liked to distract herself from by working. And for the past couple of days, Liam had been stable.
Okay, I said. One favor only.
Of course, she said. What’s that?
Will you sing for me? A Christmas carol? You know which one, I said. I didn’t want to have to say it.
I’ll sing it at home, she said, and slipped her laptop into her new case, my Christmas present to her. I’d had it for months, the only reason she got one.
It’ll be my present, I said.
Not fair, Otto, she said. Not here. And certainly not now.
I was aware that as I asked again, pleaded, I sounded like a bully; I was also aware that, without admitting publicly how superstitious I’d become, I needed her to sing or at least hum a few bars, to insure Liam’s continued survival. I had no other means of convincing her. And even for my broken son, I wasn’t yet ready to do that.
So I kissed her warm cheek and told her to wor
k well and looked through articles on my phone. TBI, the Rancho Los Amigos Levels of Cognitive Functioning, Baylor and the Mayo Clinic; websites I refreshed again and again, looking for comfort, for specialized vocabulary: intracranial pressure monitor, the Glasgow Coma Scale, and on and on. When the doctors and nurses talked about Liam now, I knew most of what they were referring to, though the knowledge wasn’t necessarily helpful, and certainly not hopeful. Baylor’s site said that even two years out from a TBI, Liam was likely to show decreased function; to what extent changed with Liam’s days.
Sometimes he’d follow commands to lift his legs or squeeze fingers, and sometimes he slipped back into a coma; sometimes he was minimally conscious, sometimes he’d carry on a coherent conversation for hours. Once he bit a nurse so hard he broke the skin and had to be restrained, wrists and ankles. That was hard to see, and for an entire day I didn’t go in to visit him.
Then for one miraculous three-day stretch his cognitive functioning was up to Level 9, 10 being the highest, the best: purposeful/appropriate. His memory was working and he responded to the TV show above his bed—singing along to A Charlie Brown Christmas. Then he slipped all the way back to Level 4 for a week.
Go home, Dr. Wild said, at the end of it. You look awful.
Dark rings under my eyes, lank hair, she was right. The cycles of hope and despair were exhausting, but I stayed on anyway. One of us had to be there.
After reading a couple of articles, I thumbed through my phone. All my new clients had moved on. I didn’t blame them. Most told me to get back in touch once I could work again and I said I would, but I didn’t know when that would be. Several new texts. May’s sister, Lamont, a number I didn’t recognize.
It was a Christmas carol video, a children’s choir, so I played it, the volume unintentionally loud, the words spilling into the room around me.
Silent night, awful night, You have no peace, you’re full of fright, God’s righteous anger is close and near, His hate for this nation is painfully clear, Behold the wrath of the lamb, Behold the wrath of the lamb.
My ears burned with shame. Everyone had heard me pleading with May to sing a carol. This carol, they’d think. So at first I didn’t look up.
Who is this? I wrote back, thinking it was a hoaxer.
The reply was instantaneous. When Liam dies—and he will die, God is striking down children for a reason, and this is NOT the Lord’s birthday—don’t have a grave or a tombstone. Neither worship of the dead nor pagan idolatry will save you.
Not hoaxers then. Dexter Fenchwood.
You fucker, I said aloud, and everyone in the room looked at me. Sorry, I said holding up the phone. Someone’s bad idea of a joke.
I breathed deeply. Sighed. Held my tongue and my thumb. I wanted to forward it to Lamont, with just a few words. Take care of this for me?
But it was Christmas, and Liam was still alive; it wouldn’t do to opt for blood.
A Second Beginning, Folded and Doubled
Sawyer knew about this one too, the boy’s love of guns, that his mother wouldn’t let him have them. He was an exceptionally gifted photographer and artist. He asked for a camera and a sketchbook before his last Christmas, and his mother bought him the sketchbook, but his father, with whom he was now living, gave him money and bought him his first gun, a Glock G17 Gen4 MOS. Put those founding fathers to good use! he said.
He kept the gun at his house and warned the boy not to tell his mother. As a reward for his continuing silence, he took the boy shooting every weekend, and the boy began sketching the gun in his sketchbook.
The gun and his targets, people. One boy twice his size who’d pissed on him in the shower after gym class after rating everyone’s pubic hair. Marty. All around the shower room, other boys had stopped talking or laughing and were looking at him, and at first he didn’t know why. It was just another stream of warm water, splashing against his leg, and then he realized that all the other boys were waiting for him to respond, for a fight to break out. But he would have had his ass kicked; Marty’s arms and chest looked like a boxer’s; skinny calves but thighs like mailboxes, it would be impossible to move him. So he laughed like it didn’t matter, even as his face reddened, and soaped his legs, and his heart swelled with murder.
Letters
Why does your town’s tax assessor’s office website show that you and all the other “victims’” parents got free houses this Christmas—the Christmas only months after “the shooting”—when all government offices are closed? How would that be possible? Is this part of your payoff? Do you sleep well at night, knowing that you’re taking taxpayers money? Knowing that you’re lying? Knowing that we’re onto you?
And it’s your lies that have undone you. All the news stories say it was rainy the day of the “shooting,” but have you looked at any of the pictures that accompanied the news stories? Even a single one? None of “the parents” are wet in any of them, none of the “first responders,” none of “the police.” Even the National Weather Service says your town got almost ¾ of an inch of rain that day. But no wet clothes, no puddles, no dripping trees, no rainbow in the sky. You guys obviously had a lot of money to stage it, but you made mistakes. You always do. Thus begins the great unraveling.
That was one of the first letters, the first one I kept and the first I responded to; it reminded me of Liam at five. I told them the story of how he’d picked out a black backpack for school after trying on six different colors and ruling out others. How he took so long to make his choice it felt solemn.
It rained while we were in the store, the pavement smelled of it when we came out, and he stood on the curb looking down at the snaking oily sheen atop the long narrow puddle tucked into the stone gutter, the empty backpack on his back. He got in the car still wearing the backpack and wouldn’t take it off.
You sure about that? I asked. Might be uncomfortable.
I’m sure, he said, and I buckled him in as he leaned forward and we drove, mist thrown up by the cars in front of us, a rainbow arcing across the half-cloudy sky.
You see that, buddy? I asked.
I do, Otto, he said. And I have a question. How come black doesn’t live in the rainbow?
Roy G Biv, I said, and told him about colors as it started to rain again and I turned on the wipers and the rainbow disappeared from the sky. I don’t think he fully understood, but it didn’t matter.
That’s all right, he said, sitting back. There are other rainbows. Black can live in one of those.
Carjinx
JANUARY 2019
It didn’t turn over, so I popped the hood. One battery clip undone, scratches around the post. Fixed it, started it up, drove; when I braked, a car horn sounded.
At Otto’s Auto—Liam’s favorite business in the city—the serviceman showed me: someone had connected an old car horn to my brakes. Fifty dollars to remove it.
I texted Nash and sorted through my pictures of Kate, feeding my anger. Fucking hoaxers. I passed a gun shop heading to Cora and Henry’s farm and fantasized about buying one, a hoaxer following me as I did, what would happen after. A week later, when I hit the wiper fluid, blood red liquid spurted across the windshield. When I told Lamont, he laughed so hard he sounded like he was in his first heaven. Happy New Year, bruh.
It was you? I said. What the fuck for? You cost me money!
Practice, he said. For hoaxers. A couple of drops of red food coloring. He couldn’t stop laughing. I’ll pay you back, he said, his voice gravelly. A night of hard drinking, probably, one of many, though less and less often with me.
I could have had a gun, I said, wanting to ruffle him.
Nah, he said. Never gonna happen.
I’ll get you back, I said.
Nope. He laughed. ’Cause I got a gun. After a pause, he said, Just joking.
I laughed too, but I wondered.
Fallow Fields
JANUARY 2016
She was exercising Liam’s arms when he told her to stop.
I know yo
u’re here to steal my lunch, he said.
Linh giggled, but didn’t stop. A Vietnamese American PT, who always smelled of gardenias and came by three mornings a week, she was tender and rigorous.
Coherent, Liam coped by joking—It’s going tibia okay—but his voice told me that wasn’t the case today. He strained against her and said, You stupid bitch.
I blushed and apologized, but Linh shrugged it off with a rueful smile.
It’s okay, she said, and kept moving his arm. Happens in the Neuro-ICU a lot.
I didn’t tell May.
The next day, his breathing was shallower and when he saw me he said, Tell Latrell to stop using my Xbox.
We hadn’t told him Latrell was dead yet. Sometimes, he knew he’d been shot, and sometimes his speech made sense. I said, Latrell’s not using it, buddy.
You’re lying. He’s been in here all morning and won’t let me have a turn.
When my phone buzzed, Liam said, Quit spying on me, and I went out to the waiting room to talk to May. We’d established a routine, her turn to sit with him. I was going to get groceries; she needed to eat. I’d even begun working again, with long-term clients. I told her about Latrell, and then about the swearing and paranoia.
Let’s go talk to the nurse on duty, she said. They seem to know more.
I followed her back in. For a few minutes we both stood beside his bed, which wasn’t easy; the bays were narrow and usually we weren’t supposed to both be there at once, but the doctors said if we did it now and then, it might ease his anxiety. He moved his legs back and forth, as if he was swimming, and his O2 seemed dangerously low. I felt panicky, but May fiddled with the monitor.
Trece came over when he saw that.