Esther Stories

Initials Etched on a Dining-Room Table, Lockeport, Nova Scotia

THE GIRL was young when she did it, and she didn’t live there. This was in 1962. She was eighteen. She’d been hired to tidy the place. It was three, maybe four years before anybody noticed. The letters were so small, and they always ate in the kitchen. And when they did discover them, she was already gone to Halifax. By that time the girl had a reputation to escape from. So when they put two and two together and figured out it was she that did it, they weren’t surprised. Of course she’d be the one to do something like this, they said — shameless girl, not shocking at all.

A cod fisherman, a captain, lived in the house with his wife, one of the original Locke mansions on Gurden Street overlooking the harbor. They never had children, but dust collects nonetheless in a house so huge. The girl had never been in a place that grand. At least that’s what they told each other when they found her letters. RGL. That she’d wanted to leave her mark in the world, something that would last, something that would stay. The family still lived in town, her father and brothers sold hardware, so they could have held somebody accountable for the damage if they’d wanted to. But the captain and his wife talked it over and decided not to mention it to anyone. Not that they approved — Lord no. It was defacement of property. Vandalism. Of course it was an heirloom; it had belonged to her mother’s mother, a burnished mahogany drop-leaf built in York in 1844. They could never approve. But they were quiet people; they kept to themselves in the hard times, and even in the good times they held their distance. Besides, what could anybody do about it now? What was done was done. Still, that didn’t mean the captain’s wife didn’t watch more carefully over the other girls who came to clean, and it didn’t mean the captain didn’t sometimes think of her sugar breath, that morning, the one out of a thousand when he was home and slept late — he’d startled her in the kitchen. Captain Adelbert! I didn’t have any idea you were home, me banging the pots down here to wake the dead. His only intention was to touch her sweater (Lucy was out, still teaching school then), but he couldn’t stop and kissed her, her hands at her sides. She didn’t resist or desire, and that had made him a fool for years.

Yet over the longer years — when the fish became scarcer, when they’d long since failed their vow to fill that house with children, when the silences between them sometimes lasted hours, when the captain’s wife no longer paced the house, waiting for him, or word of him — an odd thing. They still talked about the letters. RGL became a part of the table that had always been too good to eat on, as important as the deep swirls carved at the top of the legs. She. The simple fact of her once among them, among their things, dusting, opening closet doors, tracing her finger along the frames of the paintings in the front room. Taking a needle — she must have used a needle — and climbing up on the table, walking on her knees to a spot just off the center.

In the dark, now older, now retired, still in the house, they murmur: “She was a pretty girl, wasn’t she?”

“Curls. Yes, yes. Got in trouble with the boys early on, didn’t she?”

“What do you think the G stands for?”

“Gina? Gertrude?”

“Georgette?”

“Never came back here ever.”

“No, never heard of it. Family acts like she never existed.”

“Well. She was a disgrace, I suppose.”

“Yes, well.”

They both think of her. Sleep comes slowly. Now the captain coughs and twists. Age and too much time on land have made him restless, a man who was never restless, a man who had always slept the unmovable sleep of beached whales, now tossing and muttering, waking with sweat-wet hands, afraid. Now he dreams of drowning. And the captain’s wife stares at the ceiling in the dark and thinks of leading a child, Rachel Larsh’s child, an angry boy in new leather shoes, through the house, pointing out the captain’s trophies, the swordfish he caught during that trip to the Pacific (on the wall in the library), the hidden staircase behind the summer kitchen, and here, see, look, beneath the vase he brought back from St. John, your mother’s initials. And the boy not curious, shaking free his hand.

Thumbs

THEY FOUND HIM the same afternoon they found her (two days after her husband discovered her car in the parking lot of a supermarket in Galesburg). He was leaning against the ruins of an old corncrib, still weeping, his head between his knees. He’d broken both his thumbs in a rusty hinge. When they bandaged them up at the jail in Aledo, his thumbs were black.

Out near New Boston, Illinois, floods are so common that the land is soggy no matter what the season. Even so, people say the Mississippi moves slower in their part of the western edge of the state. To honor their dead towns, they say. Industry, except of course John Deere (you can’t kill John Deere, people say), has long since moved south, and even north, anywhere but here. In 1958, the National Park Service described New Boston as “a charming old town originally laid out by Abraham Lincoln when he was junior surveyor at New Salem.” Now a single store remains open on Center Street, a Casey’s Minimart, and if you want a tour of the museum (on the first floor of what used to be the Lincoln House Hotel) you can call one of two numbers written on a cardboard sign tacked to the front door and ask for either Debbie Shambrock or Eleanor Lloyd. On the river, at the end of the town pier, there’s a floating gas station for fishermen where you can buy Pepsi, ice, and lures. In the other direction, along route A-27 where it intersects the Great River Road, are the remains of an old Greek-revival mansion, grass growing up between the steps, the pillars gnawed like tossed-away corncobs.

Lock Dam Road is a gravel road that looks like many others northwest of town. It is not marked and the name appears only on the most detailed regional map, a map the sheriff had to consult before he informed the press where the body was found. He couldn’t have just said they found her in a hollowed-out tree in a field on the land Steve Matovic used to rent before he split up with his wife and stopped farming altogether. That wouldn’t have meant much to the out-of-town press. Unlike the other roads, which all fork, Lock Dam Road holds and eventually hits the river. At the end of it is Lock Dam #3, which the state stopped operating in 1975. The tree, which is about a mile from the river, stands alone and must for years have been a favorite target of the lightning that did finally get it. One jagged portion remains, blackened, a charred finger pointing up. People say it looked like a grave even before it happened. High school kids for years used it as a dump for empties.

Mostly it was the old naggy curiosity that made her drive out there. When she was a kid she would leap on her bike at the sound of a siren anywhere near her house and investigate until she found the fire trucks or ambulance or cops. And then sometimes she’d wait an hour or so for something to happen, even though usually it didn’t amount to much more excitement than the paramedics wheeling out an already stiff old cooter or, at other, rarer times, someone younger. The only noise the rattle of the gurney’s crazy wheels across the asphalt and the jounce of the fluid bottles above the head of the silent main event. She drove south to New Boston from a suburb of Davenport, Iowa. She crossed the river at Muscatine. Her name was Janet, and she was a senior in high school, already accepted into college at Ames. She had her own car, so she didn’t have to tell anybody where she was going. And if anybody asked, she would have lied, because what would people have thought if she told them she wanted to see the tree where they found the teacher that got hacked, the mother with the three kids. Her friends would call her completely morbid; her mother would call her lazy. She’d read about it in the Quad Cities paper. EX-STUDENT HELD IN TEACHER MURDER. Travis Oarly. No criminal record. Eight years ago he’d been a student in her class. He was known as being maybe a little slow, but never violent. The paper quoted a neighbor, who said he’d never so much as spat on a plant all the eighteen years she’d known him. “Travis was always gentle. He never said much after his mother died, but even so he smiled at you. I’m floored by this. A thing like this you can’t get yourself to believe.” The corncrib where they found him was three hundred yards away from the tree. They found his truck in a creek a mile southwest. And then there was that stuff about the thumbs, which the paper said the police were still investigating. The article quoted the county public defender, who hinted, though he insisted it was far too early to speculate, that the condition of his client’s thumbs “indicates the strong possibility of third-party involvement.”

It was after 8:30 on a Wednesday night when she stopped at the Casey’s for directions. The woman behind the counter had a kind, supple face and wiggly arms. When Janet pushed the door open, the chimes thwacked the glass and the woman appeared to wake from a nap she was taking while standing. Janet could tell from the way her jaw drooped a bit and then tightened that she was curious why a girl not from around here would want to go poking around Lock Dam Road at night, especially after what had happened out there not even ten days ago. But she kept it to herself, only gave directions as best she could. Janet nodded vigorously and pretended to understand. Then she bought a Coke and a chocolate doughnut and thanked her a lot. It was still light, the second week of May, but as she walked back to the car Janet could feel the heat of the day leaving quickly, as though draining into the river she could feel lurking down there at the end of the street.

She kept getting lost, driving to the last houses of dead ends. Kept backing up into long gravel driveways and turning around and trying other roads. It took another half hour before she found it, and even then she wasn’t sure the road kept going — twisting, then sharp-angling — four miles or so. The tree was easy to spot, all alone out there. By this time it was less dark than simply ash-colored, with streaks of white-gray light low in the trees that hid the river. She parked on the edge of the road and walked across the boggy ground. There was a strand of yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape bunched up on the ground. It looked like a leftover streamer. Other than that, no sign of what had happened there, only bootprints turned puddles in the mud. Standing before the tree, she thought about how perfectly innocent places take on meanings they don’t deserve: the empty lot where her grandfather’s store burned down (the rumors that he set the fire himself made the black cement remains of the basement even worse to look at); the spot near the Dumpster behind the granary where her sister did a bump of crystal meth and then almost got raped by Derrick Fanton’s brother Ty; the intersection of Gurlick and Seventh, where Maury Ravel got squashed. She figured the tree used to be an elm, but she really didn’t know. Maybe it was a sycamore. She’d always meant to get a tree book, but whenever she went to the library for things like that, she always ended up getting distracted by the towers of newspapers in the periodical room. She knocked on the bark and it felt wet against her knuckles. Inside, there was soil mixed with clean white gravel. With the bark pointing to the sky like that, the tree looked like a huge high-back dining-room chair. The opening wasn’t facing the road, so whoever found the teacher’s body must have walked around from the back and looked in. She laughed at herself for being Nancy Drew and for not being afraid even though it was getting darker now. God knows, everybody would think she was nuts, but all this is is a tree. And this is only darkness. Her father, who had been afraid of everything, once told her there was so much more to be scared of than darkness, namely people. People at night, people in the early afternoon, people who laugh too much. People who don’t tuck in their shirts. Her father terrified of everybody else, but when it came down to it, what had killed him started with him, spreading up from his pancreas.

They ran a picture of Travis Oarly in the paper. It was from the year he’d been a student in the teacher’s class. One of those school photographers must have had a hell of a time coaxing him to smile. Him sitting before one of those godawful cloud-blue backgrounds. His cropped hair looking like somebody had cut it with a thresher. They must have made a compromise: if Travis smiled, he got to close his eyes. His smile was more a twitch. His eyes pencil points staring out between nearly closed lids. So much retreat in those eyes it was impossible not to cry out for him in spite of the article that went with the picture. Well, maybe it was impossible for her not to. If her mother could hear what she was thinking, she’d say, Janet’s heart bleeds for every stranger, but her hands are allergic to work. Feeling sorry for a killer, what about those motherless children? Huh, Janet? A murder in some town in Illinois, people you don’t even know. Now let’s talk about how many jobs you’ve quit in the past year and how many cards you never sent to Grandma Danner. You think she grows Nordstroms in the yard?

Janet sat down and leaned against the tree, felt the wet seep through her jeans. She knows he did it, that the speculation about other people being involved was shit, a desperate attempt by a lawyer with zero to divert attention from the obvious. The newspaper passed it on to sell more papers. Fool cops and lawyers, reporters — any answer you want’s right there in the school picture. Anybody with half an ounce of humanity would have been kind to a boy who couldn’t force himself to look out his own eyes, and maybe he wanted that kindness back. Or maybe he hated her for it. Janet gazed out at what she could still see of the flattened boggy fields and the cluster of abandoned farm buildings. Somewhere over there stood the corncrib where they found him. The rusting equipment, blacker shadows against the darkening gray. To the east, behind her, the rectangled light of a single inhabited trailer in the distance across the fields. Soon the sky and the ground will turn the same dull black, the color of the tree itself. I won’t go back to the car, she whispered. Not yet. She took off her shoes and rubbed them in the soft slick of mud.

She thought of his seeing her, after so many years, seeing her.

Everything’s lonely today. Even his hands on the wheel are lonely today.

(And her mother asking quietly, but really shouting from the trees and darkness, What in God’s name does any of this have to do with you?)

Her white tennis shoes in the parking lot. And his jarring the door open and her leaning in to say hi, to shake his hand and say, It’s good to see you, Travis — and his taking that hand and yanking, the groceries falling, crushing bananas, a box of Cream of Wheat.

Please. A voice that used to say, Try it again, Travis. Take your time, Travis. Try it again, Travis. Now the voice says, I don’t know what you want. Him not knowing either. On the highway now.

And her mother watches her mourn in the dark of a town in Illinois nobody’s ever heard of — for a murderer, a cold-blooded heinous raper killer, and Janet whispers, but really shouts, Mom, the coroner found no evidence of rape. It was in the paper. Something else he wanted. She looks out into the pale nothing, the dark flat churned ground. She thinks about living here, about knowing this place well enough to see one mile different from another. She thinks of how her eyes often miss things, even in her own neighborhood. A yellow fire hydrant, paint-chipped, its foundry date 1971. A light-blue house around the corner. It took fourteen years for her to notice an old man pressing his nose to a window on the second floor. Travis knew every inch of this place. She sees him wandering here, his hands in his pockets, eyes to the ground, finding things. Steel-belted radials. Dead baby mongooses. A flooded field that looks like a swimming pool made of river. What if he only wanted to show her a pool made of river? She’s lying now, but what’s it matter? It’s all maybe now. She thinks of what he did after to his thumbs. How the peanut-headed prosecutors — dumber even than the defense — won’t see it as anything other than the incriminating (and lucky for them) remorse of an idiot. Wanted to kill your own paws for what you did? Didn’t you feel so bad? Isn’t that the way it went with your hands, Travis? No, something else. Out here where he stood and cried and looked at her and left her, no wind on his face, as there’s none now on Janet’s. Only this awful peace. Maybe he needed to feel the loss of something in his own hands. His mother died and maybe he didn’t feel anything. The rusty hinge squeals and he forces it harder. He has to use his face to crush the second thumb because his other hand hurts too much. And maybe as he is doing it, maybe he also knows it won’t do any good, that pain’s fragile, that it vanishes fast as kindness. Maybe he knows even the hell of what he’s just done to her will disappear, that he won’t be able to hold it, that even his hands will heal.

In the Walls

SHE SAID she had a theory about the places she’d lived: that she carried all her old rooms around with her, and that those rooms, in a sense, were her past. She’d been adopted, and for that reason had always felt a void in the back of her eyes. All that family lore she’d never know. But, she said, the fact of her adoption prevented her from having any excuses, from being able to blame her life’s failures on some baggage of the past. She’d seen too many people crippled by their family histories to want to go digging around to find out who she was, who she came from. She had the luxury of nobody coming before her. She wasn’t captive. She said she’d never be captive.

But she took the rooms she had lived in around with her the way some of us lug around our grandmother’s battered photo albums, leather-bound, with pictures pasted on black construction paper. She used to tell me about the room with the morning rainbow. How she’d wake up to a tiny rainbow in a corner of the ceiling. It had something to do with refracted light, the way the sun hit the window, causing particles of light to collide, smash, creating color. She said she didn’t want to understand it completely. She just wanted to take it. The rainbow wasn’t always there. When it was raining or cloudy or snowing, the corner trapped shadows. She said she could always tell the weather by first looking there.

Another room had a ceiling like the bottom half of a sawed-off pyramid. It was like sleeping in a coal freight car. At night in bed she’d be hauled across Nebraska through weeping crickets and dead-tired towns.

Another room, up a hill, in Spokane, was all windows, and she lived among the squirrels and the phone lines, and spent entire afternoons watching the old flowered-dress woman across the street. The woman, Helen, sitting in an unsteady folding lawn chair, crossing and recrossing her legs in a garden of tiger lilies and garbage.

She had fears. One night I woke up and found her on the floor of my room, naked, wrapped in my ratty army coat. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at anything. She said she was afraid of the fan. The incessant whir and blur of the fan. I said I’d turn it off. No, more than the noise. It’s a hateful thing. I’ll throw it out the window, I said. Just please don’t sleep on the floor like that.

We started staying at her place only. Her apartment was on the third floor of a rambly mansard-roofed house on Pond Street in Jamaica Plain. Her room was clutter and pillows. We squeezed. I dreamed of being strangled by ivy, choking on spiked leaves. She’d scissor-kick the covers off the bed and say, Now I have you where I want you, my den, my warren. I’d show up late for work, groggy, tugging on my collar, itching.

It was a small white room with heavy drapes. I looked around for rainbows and freight cars and asked her what of this room she would carry when she left. She said she’d think of the parts of the walls that smelled like smoke and the dried blood she’d scrubbed away from a spot near the door. But also that her memory of the place was not yet formed, that it would take time, that things would come to her later.

Sometimes in the mornings she’d tell me about other rooms.

I had an efficiency in Toronto. A little girl had been raped in the closet. I used to listen to her screams in the walls. You don’t believe me.

I believe you.

I’m not talking about ghosts. I’m talking about things that happened. Things that stay.

Go on. Tell me more.

At first she shrieked for only a few minutes every night. Then she started talking. That lasted longer. She kept me up at night listening to her. Sometimes she still does.

She kissed me. Then she left me in bed and went to work. I stayed there and listened and watched, waited and watched. Under the sweaty covers, I stared at the walls, tried to see laughter, moaning. Dinner-table battles, a slow caress. An old man haunted by fingers letting go of his wrist. Whose fingers? He can’t remember her face. And then it was dark, and I saw a boy in nothing but a light-blue pajama top looking out between the gaps in the blinds at the retreating taillights of his mother’s car. I watch him pull his hands slowly down his cheeks as he stands at the window.

Early November

SHE GOES to their tiny country house in the woods with her young daughter, ten days after the sudden death of her husband, and it isn’t the silence but the noise, the wind in the trees, the way the leaves whack the window. It’s fall, the height of fall, and it was a disease that took him with the blank force of a fist pounding on a door in the dead of night. It must have been eating away at him in secret for a long time, maybe even last summer as he worked on screening in this very porch, something she’d never wanted; she always said, Who screens things in? Don’t we have enough of that already? After years of this argument, she’d finally given in, though she insisted she’d sit on the steps, that she’d never drink her coffee in there. Now she remembers what her mother whispered to her at the train station, and she was only trying to be helpful. She didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but her mother had whispered, Don’t lionize him, meaning, You’re young, you loved him, but don’t fall so far into grief when — eventually, her mother didn’t mean tomorrow — there are men who can pull you up. Meaning: Don’t steel yourself out there. And now, standing on the porch he destroyed, it’s the noise that doesn’t have the common decency to wait awhile to begin.

At night she reads while her daughter sleeps. She’s surprised she’s able to concentrate as long as she does. This might have been a book he read, a book he may have even talked about. She can’t remember things like the names of books, the names of people, the names of places. She could never remember the name of one or another town they once loved. You remember? The one with the old guy and the singing dog? Little dog not much bigger than a mouse sitting on his shoulder oooh-oooohing. Used to infuriate him, and he’d seethe, Boone, Boone, North Carolina, in the parking lot of the state park. It was in Boone and the dog’s name was Rudy and the man’s name was Flynn and he kept telling us that his mother had wanted to name him Errol but his father had insisted on Richard. Richard Flynn, the guy with the dog’s name was Richard Flynn. Facts he never forgot. But he couldn’t remember tilts of a head, or impressive sneezes, or the way someone once said yes by doing nothing but breathing quicker. Not for anything could he remember the droop of a chin. She puts the book down because, yes, her mind has wandered like he always said her mind wanders. The light beneath the brown shade reminds her of the dying light she saw out the train window on the way here. They always took the same train at the same time, so she knew the light, the early-November burlap light, and she might have nudged him had he been on the train, the light, and he would have looked at it as if he were seeing it for the first time. She leaves the lamp on, stares at it awhile before half-sleep descends.

Pile of Clothes

THE LANDLORD didn’t know what to do with her clothes. The furniture he could either use or sell, but the clothes, some mothy, others pungent, mildewed, the cheap fur of one of her old coats like a cat he’d seen around a while ago. He puts on a pair of rubber gloves he found under the pipes beneath the kitchen sink, one yellow and one green, and climbs quietly, slowly, up the stairs, as if he’s afraid of waking her. The her who’s already been buried eight days now, at the expense of the county, in the scabbled yard out past Buffom Road, near the industrial park. He wants to run up the stairs and get this over with, but dread yanks him back, dread of opening the accordion doors of her closet. Her smell. She lived up there umpteen years; she always paid her rent on time, sliding it under the door in envelopes with scratched-out return addresses. She never complained about his plumbing, about his insistence on never replacing anything with a new part when an old one would do. For years it had been easy to forget about her. Even though her feet were always peckering around up there. That and the sound of her continually moving furniture. The jolt and scrape of her tugging a bureau across the floor, an inch, then another, then another. She went out two times a day. Once for a walk in the morning and once in the afternoon, down the hill to the L’il Peach for milk or cigarettes or an ice cream bar. The rest of her groceries were delivered. His ex-wife used to go up there and visit with her. After Ellen moved out, that was the end of that. He’d long known he had it coming to him; he never once complained about getting left to the dogs, didn’t lift a finger to stop her when Ellen stood in the kitchen and wrapped exactly half the dishes and glasses in newspaper — but to abandon the old lady? When she was the only person besides the kid down at the gas station who ever talked to her? He’d meant these past two years to mount the stairs himself. He’d meant to go up there and have a chat, as Ellen used to do, maybe even apologize for driving Ellen away, out of her life as well as his, but he never got to it.

Never a louder silence than when you stand in a room where someone lived for many years alone. He looks at the clean walls; she was meticulous, but even so, her smell remains strong. A blend of trapped smoke and what? Jergen’s? Burned butter left crusted on frying pans? Or simply that her body had begun to rot while she was alive up here? She never had many things. Not even a rug in the hall; only a bus schedule for the 112, long out-of-date, thumbtacked to the inside of the front door. (Where did she take the bus? Whom did she go see?) Three rooms: a kitchen, a cramped living room, mostly taken up by a couch that was once yellow but now bleached nearly white by the sun of the uncurtained window, a tiny bedroom made cave-like by the slope of the roof. He stoops and goes into the bedroom. He tries to avoid looking at the bed and fails. It is neat and hand-smoothed, except for a small furrow in the pillow. The afternoon sun has forced its way into this nook. There’s a glint of a spider’s thread reaching from the dresser to the window like a fishing line. Determined to stop lolling over this, he flings open the accordion doors and rams his face deep into the jackets and sweaters and coats and bear-hugs them together. Then he lifts all the clothes, as one, off the rack.

He and Ellen had been lingering forever at the kitchen table. In the bright kitchen glare of one or two in the morning (neither of them had bothered to look at a clock for hours), he stared at her warily. She’d already crumpled every bill from the basket on top of the refrigerator and flung them at him. Eastern Edison, City of Brockton (water), City of Brockton (late property tax adjustment form), Bay State Gas (urgent reply requested), New England Telephone and Telegraph, Delta Visa, another Eastern Edison, Sears Automotive, another City of Brockton. He used to call himself a restorer of houses. One year he even told people he was a “preservationist.” He had loved his falling-down wrecks, his albatrosses, but he can’t do the work anymore. He blames it on his knees and his lower back, but it’s really this tiredness he’s got. Ellen asking, always asking, “My God, what’s wrong with you, man as big as you, look at the size of you.” And his wanting to explain, but not knowing how, repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” This exhaustion that no amount of sleep or coffee could defeat. And like the clutch of houses he bought so many years ago, with the money that landed in his lap from the moon — an inheritance mailed from some lawyer’s office in New York City (when Ellen first said, “We can be landlords. We’ll never pay rent again!”) — he’s letting himself go slowly to ruin. Now he sits on rents. Now he won’t come to the phone when tenants call. Now he’s being sued. Now he’s being hailed before the Massachusetts Land Commission Review Board on property-neglect charges. It’s not the bills, Ellen once said, but that you think you can live without anybody noticing you. Even so — the overdue notices and the warnings were starting to kill her, and that night she was just about to open her mouth with more bad numbers when the old woman upstairs started pushing something across the floor. Ellen lifted her head and listened; then suddenly she spoke in her hushy curious voice, a voice he hadn’t heard in so long: “She’s blind, you know.”

“Who?”

Ellen pointed at the ceiling. “She told me the other day. She said she’d been going that way for years, and she might as well tell somebody it actually happened. No more sight. Just lights and darks.”

“The old bird? But she gets around fine. She’s got to be able to see something.”

“Memorized. Neighborhood’s all in her head. Potholes. The aisles down at the Peach.”

He looked up. “And all the redecorating?”

Ellen laughed and slid her cup toward him. Her cold coffee sloshed on the table. “I asked her finally. I figured if she was telling me things, why not? And you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said if I don’t make my apartment an obstacle course, I’ll forget I can’t see.”

“Huh?”

“I have so many pictures in my head, she said, so so many pictures.”

He took her hand and rubbed her long, thin fingers. “How long?” he asked.

Ellen let herself look at him before she yanked her hand away.

A purple cardigan with suede elbow patches, the brown coat with the fake fur like that cat, a ragged pea coat (where the buttons used to be are now only tiny rock-hard balls of thread), a sequined dress for a much bigger woman, enclosed in plastic, a royal-blue windbreaker with yellowed lining and a union local logo on the back, skirts clipped to hangers by rusty safety pins, four moth-eaten men’s suits, all charcoal gray.

Ellen had grown tomatoes and a few cucumbers in the backyard garden. The tomatoes were the children she always insisted she didn’t want, refused to burden the world with — she’d measure the vines as they grew up their plastic ladders and record the heights in a notebook she kept in the drawer with the car keys and matches. They’d eat them in salads, and sometimes just them, like apples. Ellen would pack up the extras in a shoe box and carry them upstairs to her.

After Ellen left, he began hearing shrieks in the night. He thought of going up there and knocking and saying, Is everything okay up here? I heard something. Some yelling. I was concerned. Was it you? But he never did go to her, and after a while he stopped worrying, because in the morning, as usual, he’d listen to her slow clack down the stairs right on time, between 7:30 and 8:00, and she was the same as always out the window, small but not hunched, curly white hair that looped up from her shoulders like a girl’s. It got to be that he’d stare at the ceiling and wait for her. The nights she didn’t shriek were the worst: that old hooter sleeping peaceful, fending off whatever haunted her, and him, never more awake, listening for his own breathing.

Six-thirty on a Saturday evening in July and the St. Vincent De Paul’s on Calvert Street is closed. A sign says PLEASE NO DONATIONS AFTER HOURS, but someone’s already left an old computer in the seat of a baby stroller, a microwave with no door, a box of waterlogged encyclopedias, a set of Santa salt and pepper shakers, a steering wheel, a tacklebox, and a cabinet that looks like somebody shot the back out with a pellet gun. He sets the clothes in a heap on the sidewalk next to the stroller and hurries away.

Another of Ellen’s ideas that they’d both believed in for a while was expanding the garden and selling their tomatoes right out of the driveway. He’d even found a good cache of lumber in the basement of one of their houses and hauled it over in the truck. He was going to build a small stand; Ellen wanted it to look like a puppet theater. The old lady upstairs was going to tend the counter on weekdays, when they were both away working. And there won’t be any problems, Ellen said, because she’ll figure out what to charge by the dip of the scale.

When she didn’t come down in the morning and then again in the afternoon, he called the fire department and said, Something’s happened to my tenant. She lives upstairs. I’m at 817 Strossen. When the two paramedics moved slowly, but absolutely, up the walk with their shoulder bags and cases and defibrillator, he handed one of them the spare key. An hour and a half later, as he stood on the lawn with the neighbors, the quiet lights of the ambulance, the two police cars, the fire truck, streaking across the windows — much more commotion than she ever made in life — they brought her down. The paramedic, the one with the sandy hair and different-color mustache, the one he’d handed the key to, stopped to talk to him. The paramedic might have asked, If you thought something wasn’t right up there, why didn’t you go up there and check on her? But of course he was trained not to get involved in anything personal, and God knew, he’d seen a hell of a lot stranger things on calls. For now the paramedic needed only her full name and next of kin.

“Husband deceased?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“So no grandchildren, cousins, sisters, anything like that? Anyone else?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Sunday early morning he wakes to shrieking, and he isn’t surprised that it’s himself, that the hollering and carrying on is coming from his own throat. Rain pecks at the window one tap at a time, as if someone out there is trying to get his attention. He’s at the bottom of the bed, in a gnarled wrestle of sheets and blanket. A place he used to find himself after long dreams when he was a kid, dreams he never remembered. But now he remembers the moment before waking, and it’s a vision that sweeps his old fatigue away, even as he continues to scream at the walls of his own room: himself, kneeling on the sidewalk in the rain, weeping over those clothes.

Papa Gino’s

THEY BLAME each other silently, and they’ve lived like this for years. Nearly a decade of silent eyeing. Here they sit at Papa Gino’s on a Friday night in December, across from each other at a tiny plastic table, so close their knees touch. Neither laughs as the other wrestles drooping cheese.

Barry and Diane Swanson lost a child nine years ago. The story is simple. Barry, Diane, and Gene, who was then seven years old, were window-shopping along High Street in Dedham, Massachusetts. Gene kept bouncing a small orange rubber Superball he’d bought from a machine at Cookie’s Table for a quarter. He was walking behind his parents. The ball ricocheted off a crack in the sidewalk and bounced into the street. Gene chased it. It’s happened before. A blue Plymouth going too fast for High Street on a Saturday. Screech and a dull thud. Diane shrieking. Barry’s already bloody hands holding Gene, and his pleading, God, please, no, no. And when eternity was over, and Barry was hovering over Gene in the back of an ambulance, Diane ran across the street and found the ball near the rim of a sewer grate. She stooped and picked it up. The slippery little ball, now worn down from years of rubbing, has remained in her purse ever since.

Barry tossed Gene the quarter to buy the ball.

Diane told him twice to stop bouncing. He was a spunky kid who’d liked to test his parents. He kept doing it. Diane did not take the ball away.

Barry was looking at a suede jacket in the window of Slaxon’s, and in mid-comment about the hideousness of its color when Gene’s ball sprang into the street.

The ball bounced just to the right of Diane’s shoulder. Couldn’t she have grabbed Gene as he bumped past her in pursuit?

Couldn’t Barry have put his foot down, said enough’s enough? Give me the goddamn ball, Gene.

Around and around and around. Four days after the funeral Barry went to work. It took Diane a full week, but then she too was back, back behind her desk at State Farm, taking calls, making referrals, seeing clients, listening to the void in her voice as she answered question after question.

Here they sit. Friday nights they eat out. They can afford better, but they feel more at ease in places like this. More anonymous. Less exposed. Silence is not wrong here. No one waits on them. Nobody chats them up. They place their orders at the counter and stand with a slip of paper that tells them their pickup number in red ink. You can see the lights of the highway from the window. I-95. The plastic tabletop has been made to look like a red-and-white-checked table-cloth. There are few sounds. The fuzzled ping-pang of a video arcade game playing itself in the corner. Muzak so low it sounds like somebody humming. Quick shout of a cook behind a red fake-brick wall—“Line on!” Soft yellow blankety light. Harsh if you look at the bulbs above straight on, but as a whole they combine to form a buttery glaze that drifts about the room. It is after nine and only two other tables are occupied, one by a counter girl on break. She is resting her chin on an outstretched arm and rattling her nails on the tabletop. A boy is mopping a closed section in a dark corner of the restaurant. Smell of tomato sauce and bleach. Barry and Diane eat a pepperoni with half mushrooms. Almost ten years ago, and that Saturday could just as well have been last week. Friday nights have always been tough.

They made love for a year after Gene’s funeral. They made love for a year and nothing happened, nothing. They saw two doctors who told them nothing was wrong, that Diane was getting on but that all the parts were certainly in working order. “Go home and do it” is what the second doctor advised. “What else can I say?” That night they slept at the Comfort Inn, but it didn’t make any difference. Then one morning, a few weeks later, Diane watched Barry come out of the shower with a towel loosely slunched around his waist, and she started to despise his body, his flubby folds, his thinning hair, his clumsy fatty hands, his sweaty naked squirming over her in the dark, like the wet glob of a seal. She could think of nothing but the man Gene would have grown into.

Barry didn’t fight her. He simply watched her recoil and endured the silence. He had lost his mother when he was thirteen, and there were afternoons in the weeks following her death when he would come home from school and creep around his parents’ room and steal things, a locket, an earring, even a bra once, which he kept hidden under his mattress. He was used to making do. So for years now Barry has been rubbing his big forehead, sighing, wandering the house, masturbating quietly in the bathroom, and reading.

Diane takes a sip of Diet Coke and clears her throat, but doesn’t say anything. She looks at her reflection in the big window. Barry wipes his mouth with the corner of a paper napkin and slides his left hand across the table, palm up. Some nights she covers it with her own.

On a Bridge over the Homochitto

MORE THAN HALF a lifetime away, and even now his mind wanders back to a weekday morning on a bridge in 1948. He was unemployed then, the only time in his working life that he wasn’t at a job on a weekday morning, and walking along Postal Route 31 with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, alone. Twenty-six years old and a veteran, still humbled by the things he saw in Germany and Poland at the end of the Hitler half of the war. He hadn’t seen much combat himself, but he knew then, as he knows now, that what he saw as part of the 222nd Infantry, “The Mop-up Crew,” as he called it, could never be compared to shooting at people or getting shot at. Human beings who didn’t look like people, shriveled hands grasping and fisting, like the tiny fingers of dolls, and sometimes, but not always, ditches of bodies. A place called Nordhausen, where he and another soldier found the corpse of a pregnant woman in a bloody latrine. An army interpreter told them that an SS had tried to force the birth by stomping on her with his boots. He and the other soldier, whose name he never knew, buried her. The other soldier said a prayer, which he repeated.

A year and a half later, there he was — amazed that such a thing as quiet could exist again in the world — rambling down Route 33 in Sibley, Mississippi, ten or so miles from his mother’s place at St. Catherine Creek, in the middle of the morning. He took long walks that year, mostly to think about the things he’d seen and to get out of the house, away from his mother’s hasty breathing and droning. Someone who’s done for country as you’ve done deserves to rest, and don’t for twelve seconds believe you’re lazy, or not worthy, or that you haven’t done your share. Fists jammed into pockets, surrounded by the desolation of home, the woods, the gurgle of the Homochitto River. He turns off the road and begins to cross a bridge. A simple, twin I-beam girder, wood-planked, unscuffed, about the width of a truck. Back then it was still some optimistic architect’s fancy. A little bridge to nowhere really, no houses up the hill that way, just a dirt road that ended a hundred feet from the end of the bridge on the other side of the river. Beyond the end of the road, woods and a steep grade upward, what his father used to call Steve Glower’s Hill. Maybe they’d planned to do some building up there, but that never came to pass.

Nothing is left now but the crumbled ruins of the two arches of a bridge that has fallen into a river.

But that morning long ago he’d stood at the railing of the little bridge, his chin resting on the backs of his hands, and looked down at the water and dreamed of a girl, not a particular girl, not one he could describe or name, but a formless one, hair and smile, quick-tongued and laughing. He saw her and didn’t see her, and it was safer that way. But then, as if nudged out of the woods by the finger of God, she came out of the trees upriver, naked and white as vanilla pudding, followed closely by a man, dark-skinned, but not black, Indian maybe, naked too. For a moment the girl looked familiar, a little like his cousin Jackie, the one with all the curly sticking-up hair everybody teased her about, but this one was older than Jackie, maybe a lot older. This girl could have been thirty. It was hard to tell from up there. He watched her step fast across the rocks by the water’s edge and plunge in with a wordless shout. With much more hesitation, the man followed her across the rocks and stepped off, without a peep, into the water. Neither of them looked up at the bridge. Maybe for the same reason he didn’t look away. Who’d have expected the other? Who’d be standing on a bridge that didn’t lead anywhere? Who’d be swimming, naked, in March? He watched her breasts float above the water; he watched the man watch her, not smiling, as though he was already counting the seconds he had left with her, with this woman who was so obviously — even from up there on the bridge — someone else’s wife. (Her flailing joy in the water too free to be everyday.) Which is why both men, the man in the water and the man on the bridge, stared with such useless desire. The couple didn’t speak. This he remembers — cherishes, really. That neither of them succumbed to the temptation of lying about what they didn’t have. Just the heavy pant and flap of swimming in the wrong season. He remembers the pressure of his erection and the awkwardness of walking away with it down the road. He remembers the man’s hands as they reached out over the water and how for a single moment he wanted nothing more than to murder him so those could be his hands.

And he remembers remembering this. In 1977, driving through a snowstorm in St. Louis at 2:00 in the morning, and he’s standing on the bridge. No trigger, no reason for her to come to him. Nothing in that blinding whirl to take him so far back. But there she was, amid the battering plunk of the flakes on the windshield: the way her wet hair twisted around her neck like a scarf. The sweep of her thin arms. The way she ignored men and the cold. Another time, eating with Manda and her father in some hoity-toity place in Atlanta, putting a forkful of steak in his mouth, and again, for no reason except maybe the happiness of that food, the river. Again her emergence out of the trees. His wish granted and ripped away the next moment; the dark man’s head and shoulders appear. What you wish for and what you can never have — both come out of the woods at the same time. You didn’t fight a war. You cleaned up after one. Still, you’re your mother’s hero. You don’t want to work right now. You want to wander the old roads. You want to stand on the bridge and watch.