by Paul Griner
In my lust to get her, I slammed the door on the seatbelt, though hurrying was foolish; she could only make her way through the store and back out. If I waited, she’d reappear and I could surprise her. Fewer witnesses, less likely to interfere. But I couldn’t wait, not now, she was devious, after all, a master at staying hidden, and perhaps she’d sneak out the back, so I grabbed a cart to remind myself to remain calm and ducked under the hanging baskets of fragrant French strawberries and pushed past the stacked bags of charcoal to find her.
A small crowd in produce, blocking my way, mothers with fidgety children, gleeful at being released from school, trying to decide which quart of blackberries was best, or whether to go with the green grapes or the red. Couldn’t they hear my pounding heart and slide aside, just enough for me to get through? At last one woman in a pink tennis outfit moved toward the apples.
And there stood Kate in black pants and a white blouse with an unbuttoned thin black cardigan, filling a quart bottle with freshly squeezed orange juice. I’d know that hair anywhere, though my certainty crumbled at the sight of her hands. Off somehow, her fingers too small, and when she turned and saw me staring and smiled, it sickened me. The same cheekbones, the same smile, even the same beautiful teeth, but miscolored eyes a little too close together and a turned-up nose. There must be a thousand women in the country who looked enough like her, I thought. Five thousand, or ten. Under the intimate intensity of my gaze, she pulled her sweater closed across her chest.
To make matters worse, she filled the juice bottle just like May, slowing, stopping, starting again, stopping once more, getting every ounce she’d be charged for; Kate as engineer manqué. I ditched my cart and hefted a bag of grapes and left.
Arrest me, I thought, put me in a cell with a blanket as thin as a Bible page, let the years pass over me like a steamroller, pressing me into the earth, but no one did, not even as I sat in my car eating grapes one after the other while they turned ashy in my mouth. I stared blankly at the tops of green trees visible above the store, at the blue sky crossed by a fattening jet contrail, at a pair of geese winging slowly across it, glossy in the sunlight. I wanted them to come for me, I wanted my obsession with Kate to be over, the view of the green trees to be enough. The green and blue and black and white, the world. Please, I thought. Prayed. Let it be enough. But I knew it wasn’t. I wondered if it ever would be.
Not-Kate came out and popped open her trunk and stashed her groceries and pushed the cart into the cart corral and drove off, and I followed her out of the parking lot down streets I didn’t really know, trying to rekindle my righteous anger, the bat rattling in the trunk on the sharpest corners. Maybe I’d been right about her, after all, I told myself, but my heart wasn’t in it, and, eventually, I let her go.
Missing May
JUNE 10, 2019
I waited fifteen minutes and ordered a drink, watched the chef and a line cook disagree about the size of the fire under the steaks. The line cook had three rolled dish towels strapped to her back under her black apron ties and kept insisting it was high enough, while the chef, who seemed to have chosen the red kerchief that held his hair in place to match his beard, insisted it wasn’t. He won: it was his kitchen. When I saw the line cook’s face after he left, I was glad I hadn’t yet ordered; the next few steaks were going to be blackened. Idly, I hoped that soon I could get back to a place that whether or not steaks were done enough was all that mattered.
I ordered another old-fashioned and resisted looking at my watch. I was going to tell May about seeing Kate in the store, the not-Kate, as a warning. To her, and to me. Already, I felt it wearing off, and I knew how rarely, recently, I’d missed the right opportunity to make the wrong decision.
At last I called, but it went straight to voicemail, which worried me, since she’d never missed one of our dinners, even when she was sick, even at her most depressed. On a hunch, I called Nash, but he hadn’t heard from her in a week.
I pulled up our texts and tapped her location and then stared at the phone while the waiter refilled my water from a sweating chased silver pitcher. What the hell was May doing in Oklahoma? I called a second time, hoping to find out, but it went to voicemail once again. What are you up to, May? I said. Call me.
Even after a roast turkey dinner, followed by a baked apple, she hadn’t.
Double Indemnity
JUNE 12, 2019
Purple redbud blossoms blew against my boots. I stood looking at them in the warm grass-scented breeze and at the broken glass on my driveway and the smashed headlights and the four flat tires on my car, the giant yellow Easter egg wedged into the back seat. It was filled with pictures, dead American soldiers, gay weddings, endless crosses in military cemeteries. I got a broom from a peg in the hallway and swept up the glass and some of the blossoms and threw them all out, the egg and the pictures too, and, inside again, I called to have the car towed and canceled the morning appointments and put my hands under cold running water to force the adrenaline out. I didn’t know if it would work, but I had to try. I drew.
At the bus stop, a gangly carrottop in his twenties stood too close to me. He smelled like the rankest weed yet had a cross shaved into the hair above his ear. He didn’t get on the bus and I forgot about him when I noticed a striking blonde woman sitting two rows up, with the smallest, most regular features. As we rode, I sketched her face and her arms after she pushed up her sleeves to reveal a series of black tattoos circling her wrist that at first I mistook for cigarette burns.
She was on the bus on the way back with groceries as well, greens jutting from the top of her bag. She didn’t get off at my stop so I chalked it up to coincidence, but when the gangly guy was there again, now wearing a camo vest, and followed my route home, I knew it wasn’t. I sat up all night but no one came.
The next day she took the booth behind me for lunch. Tag-team hoaxers, I thought, or Fenchwood aficionados, and when she sat three rows down from me at the movies that evening I’d had enough. Miss, I said, and approached her.
She stood and said, The Lord is my witness, I’ve told you I don’t want to see you anymore. If you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the police. She tugged at the silver cross around her throat in a convincing display of nerves and people looked up at us like a tableau. After a stunned few seconds, two men rose to stand between us.
Go ahead, I said, thinking to call her bluff as the bearded one pushed me back, stubby hands on my chest, but when she dialed her phone, I left, knowing how it would look. She’d say she’d been at the diner and on the bus first and now I’d followed her to the movies, and if they leafed through my sketchbook, they’d see her.
At the apartment, I called Nash, but when I told him I’d thrown away the Easter egg and its contents and the mental health checklist and the box with the coffin, he told me there wasn’t much they could do. You didn’t see what happened to your headlights, he said. No fingerprints, no proof, and it would be hard to track her down. Almost all of these come right up to the line but don’t cross it.
I popped Bubble Wrap with my X-Acto knife. What about the damaged mock-up? I asked, and drew the knife across my wrist. A red line but no blood.
Sure. If you could prove someone else did it, and not you on a bender. When I didn’t respond, he said, If something else shows up at your apartment, or in your car, or your car is damaged again, call me right away. And don’t throw anything out.
I housed the blade and said, Heard from May? What’s she doing in Oklahoma?
He hadn’t heard from her. He didn’t even know she was gone.
Letters
Why are you lying about a boy who’d never lived?
I didn’t bring the letters back to my apartment anymore, a vague feeling about them and where I lived and karma. I read this one sitting on a wooden bench with a copper dedication plate in a small park across from the library, where the daffs were out and had been out for a while. Drooping now, the color of old butter.
My thighs grew hot i
n my paint-splotched khakis. The jays in the serviceberries and the cardinals in the redbuds squawked about territories until a jay dropped from a branch and swooped at the cardinals before tilting his wings and swerving back to his own, where he called and preened on the trembling branch.
This letter included a picture of Liam’s grave in Vermont. The daffs were up in front of it too. Farther north, they were a fresher color, the color of daisies.
The library doors slid open and an old couple walked out, holding hands. The man held a DVD and they seemed in no hurry to get home. What might have been, I thought, and breathed in the scent of skunk cabbage down by the brook and looked at the picture that came with the letter. Scrawled across it in red ink were the words: Empty Grave!!! It was, though no hoaxers knew that. We’d figured that, sooner or later, they’d move on from attacking us to attacking him, and had set up a false target for them. At least it hadn’t yet been vandalized. Latrell’s had, and for a week Lamont had kept watch among the resiny poplars behind a nearby crypt, waiting for the vandals to return. I never asked, but I assumed he’d brought his gun. Perhaps I would too, if they knocked down Liam’s gravestone. I studied my pale hand, imagined my fingers curling around the grip of one.
The Valley of the Sun
JUNE 13, 2019
May had crossed Oklahoma to get to Phoenix, though I had no idea why. She broke her leg in the accident and had a gun and was in such a state when they arrested her that she was in the hospital for a few days. I used the voucher from the canceled Atlanta trip to buy a plane ticket and finished up work in the intervening hours.
My morning doodling had splotches of color and shade, a seated figure, the barest outlines of someone walking, a circle for the head and four small ovals for hands and feet, slashing lines to connect them and indicate movement. But mostly circles, nearly all the same size, one after the other after the other, next to one another and ranked one behind the other in rows, as if they were sitting in an auditorium. I counted fifty-three; it couldn’t be accidental.
I put my pencil down and listened, to passing cars and a pedestrian, to the tapping of her shoes on the pavement, to her low murmuring voice as she talked on her phone, to the distant buzz of a lawnmower. The smell of manure drifted through the window, the smell of renewal.
It was time, long past time really, so I pulled out a calligraphy pen and began to write.
Dear Mrs. Letts,
I hope this letter will be neither too painful nor too much of an affront. Years ago, in the aftermath of the shooting, you wrote May and I a heartfelt letter, expressing profound sorrow and shock. I never asked, but I imagine it was one of over fifty such letters you felt you had to write in the midst of your own loss, which was no less considerable, and compounded by what must have been horror. Horror and guilt and misery, because your son was gone too and yet had been the cause of horror for so many others, so many of us.
I could not bring myself to write you then, and only recently sent you a cruel painting by way of recompense. The reasons for that are immaterial. As a mother who lost a son, as a person who expressed remorse, as someone in pain who reached out to others in pain and did so with grace and honesty, you deserved better. I am profoundly sorry I added to your pain and hope that, someday, you will find your way to forgive me, and to forgive so much of the world that has shunned you.
I read it over and put it aside and got back to the work at hand, the logos for Cora and Henry’s latest gourmet offering, a triple-cream cheese, young and full of moisture. Three hours of solid work, penciling in the underdrawing, gestural lines, blocks, cylinders, wedges, my fingers tired from the overhand grip, then a dip pen with black India ink.
When I was done, I fixed myself a ham and Swiss sandwich, sawing off the stale first few inches of a baguette from Silver’s, and read the letter again as I ate. Imperfect, but passable. I pressed my thumb to the breadcrumbs sprinkling the paper and told myself I’d done enough edits and rewrites. Of Cora and Henry’s presentation, of the letter. There were other things I had to attend to, so I packed.
Letters
I found Otto’s “birth certificate” online. Note how it doesn’t match other state forms, here, here, and here. You say your kid died? Prove it. Exhume him. Let me film the entire process. If it’s real, let us see his rotting corpse. The world will listen to me, because, unlike you, I’m not a fucking liar.
Interim 13
Number of school shootings in the three years since:
&etc.
Number of school children killed:
&etc.
Phoenix
JUNE 14, 2019
I walked into the hospital through the yellow light and blue shade cast by the late-blooming palo verde trees and tucked my book under my arm as the cool air rushed out of the automatic doors and blew bunches of the dropped yellow flowers toward me. The plate glass windows were dusty from the wind.
Nash sat in the waiting room, yellow petals stuck to the sole of one boot. I thought of telling him but I liked the splash of color and thought May might too. I was glad he was there for her, though jealous he’d been called first. Across the street a swing hung from the big sign advertising a country-and-western bar and a woman sat on it, waving to passing traffic as she swung back and forth. It was 104 degrees, but she was dressed in an old-fashioned frock and a bonnet, big petticoats under the full-length black skirt showing every time she swung her legs up. Nash watched her.
I ignored my ringing phone and stood over him and said, No, don’t get up.
I wasn’t going to, Nash said. He looked up and didn’t smile. He had one ankle over the other knee and his polished boot began to bounce.
I thought, Irritated, are we? but said, Yeah, I figured. You talk to her yet?
No. That’s why I still have these. He held up a bouquet of pink tulips.
I didn’t tell him he had the wrong color; better he learn firsthand. I got a question for you, I said. You’re teaching May about guns, right? I thought you were supposed to travel with them unloaded.
His boot stilled but he didn’t answer, which I liked. He’d have had to denigrate her if he did, which was why I’d asked him, to see if he’d protect her. He’d lied to her, after all, and I wanted to see if he’d come through. He had, so my tone for the next question was a little softer. She didn’t get to Kate, did she?
Not even close. The address she had was all wrong. He tapped his phone with three fingers. But I talked to the locals. Kate’s real. She was only in it for the money. Not a true hoaxer. She doesn’t know any of the people who came after you guys.
You believe her?
Nash shrugged. Didn’t see the evidence myself, but they’re pretty sure of it. Phone records, computers. For what it’s worth, she feels bad about it. That’s why she stopped, she said. A couple years ago. She’s going back to school for something else.
For what? I said, my desire to confront her flaring.
He lowered his boot to the floor and shifted forward on the squeaky vinyl seat. You don’t need to know, Otto. Just let it go. If not for you, then at least for May.
I stood nodding. He was right. I hoped he believed me when I said I would. I asked, Are they saying it’s just family? Who can go see May?
Yeah. He switched the flowers from one hand to the other. I liked that his shirt looked freshly pressed. They don’t want her upset.
I’ll tell them you’re my brother.
Ha. I’m a little too dark for them to believe it. Plus, the different last name.
I shrugged and turned away, toward May’s room. She’d like the pressed shirt too. Over my shoulder, I said, How do they know what my mother ever got up to?
My phone rang again as I headed down the bright hallway through squares of warm sunlight past framed pictures of blooming cactuses. I put it on vibrate.
Letters
This morning I woke in fear, to bells tolling the hour. Dark still, and for a few seconds I had no idea where I was, and the bells seemed to toll fo
r me, alerting the world to my passing. I felt a bitter solitude.
Later, parsing my hubris—as if the world waited hourly to learn of my fate!—I realized that, in the midst of my fear and loneliness, I’d thought of you. How, as your dear Liam’s journey neared its end, you must have been afraid. For him and his approaching death, for your coming desolation.
After his death, perhaps other emotions took over. Anger, doubt, fear of other losses, the desire for revenge. Since in all your interviews, I’ve been struck by your kindness, probably a surge of compassion for the parents of other children at Liam’s school. No doubt those emotions still swirl through your mind, through your days and life.
Two years ago, several sisters and I traveled to China. Often we were served tea, in the smallest cups. In truth my hands are so large they looked like thimbles. Embarrassing, at first, until I passed through my vanity. Then I was able to note that the cups were never allowed to be empty. Whoever served us, served us attentively. Every few sips, the cups were quietly but assiduously refilled.
An apt metaphor for God’s love and compassion. Always present, always being refilled, but often unnoticed, distracted as we are by other emotions—vanity, grief, anger. Few of us have felt most of them as deeply as you. But even in the face of that, I maintain that God is there. Even when it seems He’s vanished, He hasn’t.
As my own journey nears an end, and as I wake some days in darkness and fear, I remind myself of that, and, newly calmed, awaiting the coming of the light, I am able to fully hear the beauty of the bells, to bask in it. No matter for whom, or what, they toll.