by Lindsey James
(This story contains the death of a child.)
You walk into the garage, counting and discounting your steps in equal measure, as if the right can cancel out the left, can erase your progress, can sweep away the gritty prints sketching the distance between the door and the cardboard carton you pretend to forget. You know–the one that’s never on your grocery list but ends up in your cart anyway. Just in case.
You walk into the garage and act as if it’s accidental, as if you can weave a shroud of plausible deniability in real time, shedding knowledge before it solidifies to memory. Still, you know exactly what you’re doing when you reach the case and reach in. You clamp two bottles between your fingers, index to middle and middle to ring; the chilled glass bites straight to bone, and you’re fiercely glad of the pain. Just two bottles. Only ever two.
There are rules, you know:
Only two bottles–one for each of you.
Only Corona. Only light. The lime is optional. You had lime that night, but it doesn’t feel essential now.
Only at night, when you can shield yourself with shadows.
Never two days in a row. Not even two weeks in a row. Patterns get noticed, get you a folding metal chair in a weepy confessional circle.
Tell no one. See above.
Resist as long as possible. Only give in when the hoarded memories and guilt crush your internal organs (the way he did, so long ago, when you carried him inside you (but don’t think about that, don’t think about how his thrashing feet and butting head pushed parts of you aside, carving you into a new shape)).
There are rules, created not by committee or vote but through exploration: a slow walk in each cardinal direction, a long series of leans against the boundaries to discover which ones stretch forgivingly and which will slingshot you back on your ass.
Tonight what shoves you toward the box and to the car is a chill bite of autumn behind the late-summer haze, a peripheral snatch of lime-green basketball shorts (surprisingly heavy for their size, slippery like snakeskin when they slide off your hands into the washer) on a lanky frame rounding a corner, an echoing victory shout a few backyards over, a pair of motors revving outside the pharmacy drive through. Just a handful of nothing moments that knot themselves into inescapable significance and compel you to seek escape.
Dusk grays the world outside the windshield, narrows your vision to a halogen-lit swath of road rushing by too fast to track. Deer loiter in the dead and dying grasses, poised equally to graze or leap into the lane. The need for concentration is a relief. It pushes aside the shouldn’ts, the guilt, the red-hazed fury at your weakness for giving in (again). For those all-too-brief miles, there is only you and the car and a shifting stretch of road to navigate. But then you pull into the campground, the vibration in the wheel becoming a rattle, the tires hacking up gravel and dirt.
You turn off the engine. In its absence, everything you’d pushed aside on the drive rises up to swamp you again. Locking the door, you grip the bottles, listening to them clink in syncopation as you tread the faint trail, the one you’ve pressed into the kinnikinnik and stonecrop on the far side of the ditch, the one that’s a little more distinct with each trip.
Now that your feet are back on this ground, there’s no turning back.
Make your way to the flat-top granite slab that seems to have been placed here for this purpose. For you. Find the slightly-cupped seat and dangle your feet from the edge. Like he would. Use your keyring to pop the cap and let the faint following effervescence mingle with the grasshoppers’ chirr, the branches’ susurration, the waves’ sloshing: a dozen tones of hush.
Sip. Feel the bitter liquid trickle down your esophagus. Feel the carbonation fight gravity and rise back up.
Feel memory rise alongside it. Let it rise. Let it overtake you.
Let it choke.
Empties lean against the rusted campfire ring, catching orange glints and tossing them outward. Sparks rise, twist into ash, tumble into dirt. Footfalls pound the fallen pine needles and dust into resin-scented clouds.
“Can we have one, too, Mom?” Scott drapes his arms around Nicole like a necklace, pressing his cheek against hers, tempering his demand with affection. Jeremy spills himself at your feet, all long scabby limbs and sunburn, dust clinging in rings around his shins like high water marks.
Once each summer, the two of you fall back into your college selves for a delirious, time-defying week; the two of them fall forward, discovering each other anew. Still, resentment at their interruption scuffs the upswell of tenderness you feel.
“Nope. Skedaddle,” says Nicole, lifting Scott’s hands off her collarbone.
Jeremy tilts his head back into your lap. In the firelight, upside down, he becomes a Picasso of disconnected features and peach fuzz, abruptly unfamiliar and strange. “Please, Mom? Just one?”
“When you’re older,” you say, bending your face over his and bunny-wrinkling your nose the way that made him laugh when he was little. He laughs again, like always, but through a scowl. “Now go play. Catch some frogs. Skip some rocks. We’ll have s’mores when the fire’s burned down a bit.”
“When you’re older,” you say, picking up the second bottle. You raise it high, suspended in time and disbelief. You bring it down with the full force of gravity and rage.
The body splinters. The neck stays intact. Jagged serrations protrude from your fist, dripping beer. Blood wells from ragged flaps of skin where your knuckles scraped rock and drips into the spreading puddle, a darker patch on the darkening stone.
Your body reacts first, instinctively, before you know you’ve heard anything at all. You fill the path with flailing limbs in the panicked dusk, rushing blindly toward the incomprehensible noise.
What you hear: an engine accelerating around a far-off corner. A throat-ripping scream (hours later, Scott will spit blood, pink and frothy and obscenely vital next to the pool turning gummy brown at the edges). Scuffling footsteps. Voices beating senselessly around you. Sirens crescendoing in pulsing wails. You try to breathe, but the air is heavy with iron, with the fruity-acid stink of puke, with a whiff of offal, and the air sticks in your throat.
You try to look, but your mind revolts, so you let the black bleed in at the edges of your vision, let it tighten until all that’s left is his face. You sink to your knees in the gravel and blood. You suck in every detail, committing each hair and pore and freckle and bone to memory.
You try not to notice what’s missing: a squeal of brakes. The stench of rubber seared into asphalt. The driver who should have stopped instead of speeding away, who should be forced to bear witness to the wreckage. Last breaths. Last words (there were no last words, say the paramedics when they pull up far too late. There was no quickly enough–it was too late the instant you sent him away).
“Gone before he hit the ground,” they say, peeling your hands from his cheeks, tucking him under a sheet, bearing him away.
The beer bleeds toward the rock’s edge and trickles over. It seeps into crevices, its scent–provocative, sensual–mingling with the earth that drinks it in. It’s everything that was still ahead of him. The milestones he was rushing toward. You listen as the drips slow to silence, breathe until you’re empty, until the void he carved in you returns. You unclench your fingers from the bottleneck, let it drop into the shards, and sweep the pieces off the edge to join the glittering debris below.
Pulling out your phone, you swipe up. There’s no service here, but the flashlight shines bright in the dead zone, lighting your way to the roadside memorial. You let the beam play on the faded plastic flowers sagging under mud splatters, on the crooked cross. Run your hand over the scuffed red iridescence of a plastic pinwheel. Softly, first. Then you push it in a vicious spin.
You walk away. Alone. Again.
#
This time, you break the rules. It’s been less than a week. It’s still light out.
You snag the bottles anyway. You choose recklessness.
It’s Scott’s birthday: a harder blow than you’d braced for. You posted a card, tucking in a twenty. Liked Nicole’s Facebook picture with his cheesy grin and a learner’s permit pinched proudly between two fingers. You spend the day sending your body through the motions, but your lungs fill with seething, searing breath and the rest of you fills with absence.
This time it’s still the golden hour when you speed down the country road; the low rays catch the fuzz on a spike’s antlers and the last petals clinging to the slump-necked sunflowers, casting it all in an amber glow. This time, as you approach the dip in the rock, something has shifted. At first you think it’s only a change of angle. At first you think it’s only light. After all, in the low-slung swaths striping the ground between trees, you can see the stretch of ditch where it happened. In the light you can see the grit on the cross and how shabby those blue and green flowers have grown. So it takes a moment to register the new fixture spinning in the wind: copper-edged pinwheel petals filled with clear resin, the clear resin filled with chips of clear glass.
Abandoning the bottles on your rock, you walk gingerly toward it, this beautiful interloper, this handcrafted tribute. You cup one of its blades in your left hand, stilling its spin. Even the welds joining the wings have been buffed to a burnished glow. You run your thumb along the edge. Glints of orange rest on your skin like transient freckles.
Tearpricks burn before you fully know why, before you recognize the arc of ridges stamped in one of the glass fragments, the scrap of foil from a label in another: remnants of what you’ve left behind. Sense catches up to your senses and you sink to the dirt at the base of the pinwheel’s stem, your knees turning to water. You trace the outline of a shoe print with a finger: larger than yours, with a rugged border of inverted triangles. Whose? You stare through a wing of the pinwheel at the fragmented road and the field beyond it, picturing people watching back, seeing the bottles, seeing the memorial, seeing you.
Because of course there had been other feet there that night. Other, larger soles imprinting the dust. Other fingers dialing 911, summoning the sirens from a landline. Other eyes shattered from seeing the wreckage. Other hands sweeping away the shards of glass. Others then. Others since. Who?
Looping your arms over your knees, you lean back, bracing against yourself, propelling yourself back to that night.
You peer into the murk, swiveling to see the crowding feet, the horror-distorted faces. But for all their voices and shuffling footsteps, still they hide, clinging in the corners of blackness. Allowing you to be alone in your grief.
You open your eyes. You simply cannot see what you didn’t see. The loss of it knocks more wind out of you. You didn’t know you had more wind to lose; your ribs and lungs collapse into each other with the force of the blow.
The sun dips below the trees. The light through the pinwheel fades to silver; the orange-cast freckles dissolve from your skin. You tilt your head back and stare into the damning sky. Swallows careen in the increasingly gritty dark. You watch as Saturn appears, as a satellite tracks the horizon, as the three stars of Orion’s Belt emerge. The moon hangs low in a Cheshire-grinning crescent, smoked red from distant fires. You notice the night sky’s everything and berate yourself for everything you failed to notice then.
You let imagination plug tufts of story into memory’s gaps: hands, calloused and wind-chapped, brushing broken glass into a cardboard box, washing blood and beer from the shards. Rugged shoes and Carhartt cuffs dragging tracks across the ditch, returning for trip after trip, stage after stage in the creation.
It’s nothing but a figure to fit the evidence, a tale to fill the void. It’s cold comfort, and cold already threads from the autumn-chilled earth up through your tailbone. With a sigh, with nothing left to see, you reach out to cup the pinwheel again.
Through the glass-filled blade, there’s a sudden mosaiced square of light. You stand to see more clearly: across the road, there’s a glow in a farmhouse window; in its frame is a silhouette. Caught, exposed, you freeze like a deer in headlights. Your pulse rises, filling your ears with the thrum of rushing blood. You tense, tightening in on yourself as if you can will your way to invisibility.
You tread backward toward your rock. Grab the bottles. Shrink into the depths of the sheltering shadows. You remind yourself it’s too dark to be seen and too late to care: you’ve already been noticed in the light.
With shuddering breath and trembling legs, you step toward the glow, into those other shoe prints. Into the marks of someone else’s memory of that night. You look across the road; you don’t look away.
Despite the blackness, despite the distance, you swear you see the silhouette raise an arm.
Bottles still clenched in one hand, you lift them up in reply.
Category: Featured, Short Story