Ad meliora, or “towards better things” combines hundreds of separate images that create a deep meditation on being, creativity and nature; a mandala of forms that becomes highly symbolic of life, death, yesterday, now, and the next moment. Flowers, plants and textures were photographed in places such as nature conservatories, cultivated gardens, vacant properties and parking lots. The familiar landscape appears molten, luminous and renewed. Ad meliora is suggestive of adaptation, resilience and transformation.
Category: Aquifer
Murphy’s Law
30 rabies shots, my uncle got
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, they
say—what can happen, will—Which is what
my dad was thinking when he passed the pub
so aptly named on the day they sawed
through my skull. This is the perversity
of the universe. You go outside
to catch your breath and butcher’s knives wink
in every window. Miles’ trumpet intones
So What while atom bombs dream of flouting
their dormancy. The night before surgery,
I lay on the plush hotel bed, staring
at a room service form. When I was
little, I was obsessed with opulence.
I wanted filet mignon, lobster
delivered to my imagined penthouse
as I watched cartoons: a toddler bobbing
along the steel girders of a nascent
skyscraper, pianos crashing down, turning teeth
into sonatas. Sometimes you have
to confront the world’s malice like a mouse
who’s been burned too many times by spring-
loaded-cheese. I remember assuming
the hospital’s food would be suspect.
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-
salted soup, but, I thought: that’s only
if they don’t slice into my temporal
lobe. If they don’t accidentally
give me a lobotomy, or cut my
head clean off. I’ll be lucky to gag
on pot pie while mom scrolls WebMD.
Two Poems
On Our Date I Forget the “Birds of Prey” Exhibit is Closed Sunday
Grace is just life
caught in the throat. Imprinted
and broken winged.
Crow hit by my Toyota, muddy.
Peace and rehab three-syllable words
when slurred. Grace of certainty
in the sun’s smallness—small enough
to set behind your hand,
yet still lift like a hand
on her waist while facing a dark nerve.
Her to touch, a crow
not very much a crow, wingless
who must hop from branch to branch
as crippled form of grace,
as chapel wind is pious, bows
in gospel like fletching
post-launch, inalterable flight.
Who dares claim the feathers
of such a fucked-up bird for
violence?
Rhetorical questions claim
power from the empty, ellipses
lit like street lamps, spacing
regular pools through dark.
Anyways you forgot
your walking boots. Leave
like the cut that gliding scissors
pass. You came into this life
like chains deliver the flightless.
Like silence delivers a stillborn grace.
Touchpoints
The wanting child breaks a bowl
before he loses his first tooth. Research says
we regress before moving forward
the way white tides marshal themselves
before they break. A circle
opens into a spiral and the trauma
opens into an echo. But I don’t wanna
echo. But despite the begging
watch the hitting segue into bars
and showers full of right heat. The way
washing becomes a sloughing
or a person becomes a lesson.
Brief Reflection on Sadness
Junior Steaks
We both order junior steaks, and she asks the waiter to turn on the fight. She says it just like that, “the fight,” and he understands. He’s got a lumpy, bald head, peppered with drops of sweat and he goes over to tell the guy behind the bar. We are seated beside a wall. Across the restaurant, people are seated beside windows.
She asks, “How’s your summer been?”
I say, “I moved.”
“Oh yeah? How was that?”
For my last month or so living in the old house, they played the same Tom T. Hall song every day and suggested I didn’t leave. “Call the whole thing off,” they’d say, “It’s not too late.” And I would say it was fine, that people moved all the time, people just moved. Anyone who found somewhere that cheap so much closer to the city would be stupid not to take it. Then I’d go up to my room, close the door, open the window, and cry. I give her a brief lesson on the geography of the suburbs. Bridges I drive over now.
She begins to tell me that her summer was fine, except that the guy she was seeing drowned. She glances at the fight, frowns, then back at me. Yes, it was pretty sad. Pretty shocking. Pretty tragic.
“The guy you were seeing drowned?” I repeat. I can see it clearly. I must be remembering a scene in a movie. The man is wearing a 1920’s style bathing suit and has center-parted hair. A British accent. British teeth. We have whiskeys and are pushing the ice cubes around with black stirring straws. I think of the Titanic. Now that’s drowning.
“We don’t need to dwell on it,” she says.
“How long were you two together?”
“A month and a half,”
“Oh,”
“See? It’s strange. It’s strange. I’m not sure what I’m grieving – a summer fling? A future? The children we could’ve had, I mean.” She looks down at her drink. It’s gone. So are the steaks. I wish we had just stopped talking long enough to enjoy them. We order more drinks, doubles this time, and fries to split. The sweat drops on the waiter’s head are bigger now, as if he’s crying from his scalp. “So now you’re on a trip?” She asks. That’s why I’m here. Passing through and staying at her place. Before we came out here for steaks, she laid a folded mattress topper on the floor beside her own unmade bed, then said “It’s like a side-car bed.” Her place is down the road from the restaurant, close enough to walk. She’s got a window box herb garden and a rabbit named Misty and the whole place, an unairconditioned studio, smells like it. Her linens are the color of surgical scrubs and I can tell, somehow, that she took them from the hall closet the day she left her parents’ house.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just, you know, to shake things up.” We were never very close. I realize this now, downing half my whiskey. It was only ever proximity and I try to conjure an image of it. There was the time we drove an hour away to see our professors present at an Environmental Studies conference. All I can remember is coming back, her maroon station wagon cresting a hill in the springtime. And I think we had discovered a commonality, lactose intolerance or left handedness, something that seemed to matter then. And now we are here, looking down at the wood laminate table, a little uncomfortable because lonely people are afraid of each other.
“There are three rounds,” she says, picking up her steak knife and pointing it towards the television, “and a one-minute break between them.” I nod but don’t turn around. I am not sure if I don’t care, or if I do care and that’s why I can’t look.
“So, tell me more about the house,” she urges, using her knife’s tip to draw a smiley face in the juices left on her plate.
“The house?” I ask.
“Yeah, the house, the one you just moved to.”
I stare at her and nod and think about the place. How all of the cabinets are labeled and none of the women wear bras and at night we sit around with our breasts falling in all directions and talk about dogs until one of us cries – cries about how good dogs are. Then we talk about talking, about ourselves and our habits. We talk about how we always talk about dogs until one of us cries. How strange this is. How special we are. Then bedtime, and we walk around the kitchen without looking into each other’s eyes. “There’s a big front porch,” I say.
“Hey, that’s great,” she says. Then I sigh and look at the wall. There is a small, framed map of the state. That’s all there is. If we were really friends, I would’ve insisted we sit by a window. I study the image of the state, floating on a white page, trying to remember the borders. Was it landlocked? Was that a lake coast, up at the top? “It was a long, Catholic service,” she says, through the ice cube she’s chewing. I turn in time to watch her wipe a drip of water from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. “Catholic with an open casket. And I hate open caskets and I hate Catholic services because all their songs sound like Broadway hits – I was raised Methodist, have I told you that?”
“No, you haven’t.”
“I was, and the music is better. Anyhow, I didn’t have anyone to sit with. None of my friends would come with me. I asked one and she said it wasn’t appropriate. She wasn’t family.” I finish the watery whiskey left in my glass. She does the same.
On my last Saturday at the old house, I said that Tom T. Hall’s voice had an adolescent quality. It was a particular note, a strain of startling, boundless grief – the sort we are no longer capable of feeling once we reach adulthood but might be reminded of in a plotless dream. None of the others agreed, “not quite adolescent,” they said, frowning, “not adolescent, something else.” But there wasn’t much debate before we put the matter aside and drank coffee in the yard until only two of us were left. The shadow of the house was beginning to creep across the tufty lawn when he started in on it again, with waning conviction, saying it wasn’t too late.
The whiskey floods me with affection for her – torrents of buoyant sympathy. I float on it like a lazy river at a waterpark, filled with Band-Aids and hair and timid children, too scared to ride the real attractions. The waiter wants to know if we want another drink. We don’t. He wants us to leave but doesn’t say as much. The droplets on his head are even bigger now, and they have multiplied. I take her hand. It is puffy and claw-like, with fingernails filed to points and I think of the man who drowned and wonder how it was to be attracted to a woman with hands like this. She’s going on in a stage whisper, leaning across the table, like a conspiracy theorist. She had nothing to wear to the service, she’d never met his mom, she didn’t know what to do – bring flowers? She’d been thinking of breaking up with him (actually, she’d decided on it). She wasn’t close with his friends, and they were grieving so hard (that’s the adjective she chose: “hard”), harder than her. Should she have tried harder, she wants to know, tried harder to grieve harder? Should she have made some sort of performance? The front of her blouse is dragging in the ketchup on her plate.
At church coffee hour as a child, I used to take the jelly donuts, suck the filling out, and then put them back on the platter. Their appearance was perfectly preserved, perfectly innocuous. But there was a backwash effect. With the saliva, I mean, if you can imagine that. It wasn’t kind.
“Why are you crying?” she asks, a little incredulously, withdrawing her hand and leaning back in her seat.
“I don’t know,” I say. She looks over my shoulder at the fight and I can see it reflected in her glasses, not in any great detail, of course – just flesh and bright lights.
A few months after I make it back home autumn arrives over the course of a single weekend and in advance of the first frost, I ferry all the tropical plants from the big front porch into the living room and she texts me late one night to say that she found a dead opossum at the end of her street, that it was sweet, that it looked like it was sleeping. Before I can reply, she writes more, she says: “At any rate, it made me think of you.”
The Other Side of Now
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than – this” The opening line of the poem touches on words by Fredric Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The 16mm film evokes the everyday-ness of life in the abandoned public spaces of the present-day city, colonised by nature and wakening to new possibilities after the long period of pandemic. Erased by the ebb and flow of urban regeneration, these repurposed sites are resonant with the city’s histories, rewilded by visions from past and possible futures.
Poem spoken by Ruth Mitchell.
A Creative Associates project for the Sustainable Earth Institute, University of Plymouth.
On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen
my body to a blade. Weapon for nothing. Recall my first diet, 66 pounds, my proud refusal of a fist-sized milk carton. My mother’s sister at 40, spooning Gerber peaches into her mouth at the family table. Recall the game my mother taught me when I was a teenager— —find someone on the street who has my body— Now without her how I will sharpen. Will be vapor. Smoke. Furious at the world for nothing. Rushing down the year’s dark corridor, street unspooling every morning, tracking miles. How I craved my mother’s judgement. Be vapor. Be smoke. Be blade. Remember how it feels to desire nothing, not even touch’s static. Remember why emptiness still comforts like nothing else. I will shrink myself down to where I don’t matter. Thumbelina, tight and safe in a walnut shell. Yet grief thickens everything. Even the imprint of my body. Who’s keeping count.
Interview: Bud Smith
Author Bud Smith’s recently released novel, Teenager (Vintage, 2022), creates its own absurd and passionate world. The book follows two teenagers in love, Kody Green and Teal Carticelli, who travel across the country to flee their violent pasts and find their own American dreams. The book is both beautiful and violent, both absurd and very real. It features passionate characters who livedifficult lives and seem to have the best view of the stars when they’re knocked down by life.
Bud Smith’s repertoire of publications is lengthy and diverse. He has published a memoir, Work (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017), and two short story collections, Doublebird (Maudlin House, 2018) and Or Something Like That(Unknown Press, 2012), and a poetry collection, Everything Neon (Marginalia, 2013), and two novels F250 (Piscataway House, 2015) and Tollbooth (Piscataway House, 2013). His short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, Wigleaf, and other journals. He lives in Jersey City and works in heavy construction, a profession which he is quite proud to represent. He is known for his blue-collar lifestyle and writing while in the trenches, punching out incredible short stories on his phone while on his lunch break.
In a conversation over iced coffee and follow-up emails, we talked about how absurdity in fiction can be used to abstract our lives and help us deal with our problems, and how it’s a key ingredient for imagining something better.
Denise Robbins for The Florida Review:
With all the crazy shit going on right now, it’s almost nostalgic to read a story about two violent teenage kids committing crimes for love. Many people think of fiction as an escape from the absurd. But when reading your work, it’s more like an escape into the absurd. How have you used fiction to process the absurdity of life?
Bud Smith:
Since the dawn of time, there’s always been crazy shit afoot. Life is just as absurd as it’s ever been. The science is correct, and the math is correct too, but people skew facts, it all gets blurred and harder to believe. If I switch on any news channel, I’m being told or sold an unbelievable story. At least with straight fiction, I choose the flavor of the skew and blur what I’m in the mood for. I use art to turn down the noise on everything else.
TFR:
How did the story Teenager come to you? Where did it begin?
BS:
I was at a poetry reading and the event organizer asked me to read something. So I wrote a quick poem on a napkin. I was thinking about this boyfriend shooting his girlfriend’s parents and them going on the run together. It started from there, as a poem. And I just kept thinking about it, and eventually, it became a short story, which I remember beginning after waking up on my friend’s couch—the kid who shot his girlfriend’s parents on the lookout on top of a water tower. But for what? And it wouldn’t leave me alone. To find out, for myself, it then became a novella, and then further investigation turned it into a novel.
TFR:
How did the story change in each iteration?
BS:
It deepened every time—became darker. Less hopeful. It became more realistic and more troubled in each draft. Trouble for the characters and their situation, and the gravity of their reality.
TFR:
So it made you feel less hopeful each time?
BS:
It made me feel more balanced each time. In the initial drafts of it, there was more of a “love overcomes everything” attitude. I think that’s still in the book, but in reality, there are many things that love cannot overcome.
TFR:
Although in total, the novel was absurd, it still felt more realist than most of your short stories. I’ve also noticed that your other previous novels seem more realist than absurd. Is that an accurate depiction — that your short form fiction veers more to the absurd and your long form fiction stays more grounded?
BS:
I start somewhere absurd and surreal because that’s how my imagination works. Over time and many drafts, I think out and apply logistics to my little cartoon. It has other dimensions to it. My shorter, surrealist stuff is some of my favorite work, probably closest to a dream I had. I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t develop a story called Tiger Blood into a 300-page book, because I said everything I meant to say in 1500 words. Magic or laws of physics, whatever works, I don’t care.
TFR:
Is there a physical limit to absurdity and surrealism? Is that the reason why it’s strongest in your short fiction?
BS:
When we look at our own lives, often we can’t abstract our own problems. But when we can do that, something bigger than us happens and we get to laugh at it. The author Tim O’Brien says, sometimes there’s no way for anyone to understand how something momentous feels to an individual except through abstraction. He has a story he tells about being at a seminar and telling the audience his child’s first words were quoting Macbeth. And someone in the audience called him out on it, “There’s no way his first words were ‘a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’” And he says something like, “You’re right, they weren’t his first words, but how can I ever explain to you how they made me feel if it wasn’t something that amazing? To you, it’s just a baby talking, but to me, it was doing this incredible thing that could never happen.” That’s how it feels sometimes to be alive, and to capture that in fiction, you don’t have boundaries. It’s okay if I lie, that’s the point. But we’re trying to convey something more than just the straight truth. I’m trying to elicit a feeling. That’s the goal. To elicit a feeling larger than life, and sometimes we go into the woods to get there, we’ll lie in the lie of the lie.
TFR:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how absurdity can be found in the mundane because I’m reading Catch-22, where these characters are dealing with extremely banal issues, like parade contests and mess hall seating arrangements, while they’re in the middle of a war and could die any day. You also do a great job of this in your story “Gling, Gling, Gling,” where a man gets hit by a car and, dying, wants only to go on his errands. I think often about how, even in times of crisis, we want so badly to keep things normal and to follow our little routines we’ve created for ourselves. It takes a lot to shock someone out of that. Are you trying to shock people out of what they expect when they read this?
BS:
No, not at all. This is just how my imagination works. I usually don’t think about that kind of stuff when creating, I’m just trying to keep myself interested. I tell a story to the best of my ability. Anything can happen in a story. If something is anarchistic in content or form, it stays recklessly interesting to me.
TFR:
Everything in Teenager certainly is interesting. Yet probable. Yet the sum of its parts — the way everything fits together — kind of brings it back to the absurdity level. Was that something conscious to you, for everything to seem realistic, or are you trying to acknowledge that the story is not real?
BS:
I just watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre before I came here. Everything is completely plausible in that film if you look at it in one light. And everything is a total implausible nightmare if you look at it in another light. It’s how you want to interpret it and how you’re feeling about it. Has a lot to do with how stories are presented. The folk tale John Henry vs. the Steam Drill. There’s not a guy literally racing a railroad steam driver, but of course, there is.
TFR:
What other books or stories have influenced your attitude towards surrealism in fiction?
BS:
Don Quixote, Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Arabian Nights, The Divine Comedy, the Old Testament, Hamlet, lots of other Shakespeare plays, Beckett’s plays and the novel Molloy, the Brothers Grimm Fairytales, on and on. Those are some of the most influential stories ever told and to read them and study them, you can’t help but see how they have been retold and reinterpreted time and time again in contemporary forms, which got compressed in the work of Donald Barthleme, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, on and on. Everyone should read the author Ben Loory, he’s an incredible storyteller.
TFR:
You mentioned Bonnie and Clyde. If this story follows a Bonnie and Clyde-like structure, were you trying to turn that on its head, or did you think about that at all?
BS:
I was a junior in high school when the Columbine school shooting happened. The copycats are still caught in that cycle of violence. I learned in that same high school that Manifest Destiny was this glorious thing. From sea to shining sea. Then I went to a different classroom where the teacher had served in Vietnam, and he told us not to believe everything our government said to us, what our school books said. Teenager is a story about young people breaking away from their families, and from society. A very old story that becomes new again each generation, across the world.
TFR:
Do you have personal experiences with violence that drew you to this story or these characters?
BS:
Anyone paying attention knows there is brutality all around, often behind closed doors, people being abused by loved ones, assaulted physically and sexually, emotionally, and it goes on for a time, until a person pushed too far, lashes back, and is taken away by the police. If there is a gun in the home where this abuse is taking place, sometimes it is used to end the abuse one way or another. You hear about it on the news. You hear about children taking those guns into schools. People getting shot in church. A friend of mine put a shotgun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Another friend of mine was shot by a friend of his, a drunk police officer. It went unreported, and the limp has almost gone away. Another mass shooting. This one sounds similar to the previous mass shooting. Missiles fly across the TV and explode in the dark. I’m not sure who is at war. Hospitals become rubble. It’s all so incredibly overbearing. I am surrounded by it wherever I go, but I have to look elsewhere. I wrote about these characters because they are in love. I am looking for love. But every love story— if you are telling the whole story—is a tragic story, with its own fair share of atrocity.
TFR:
The main character Kody is quite violent. He also suffers from a brain injury. Is that a signal that this is not ‘okay’? Do you worry about his violence being accepted? Or glorified?
BS:
The violence in the book is somewhat glorified. And I don’t think that his brain damage causes him to become violent. He just never had anyone to show him the way the world could be. He’s all alone, his ideas got misconstrued. He had no support system of people who love him and explained things. Teal is the first person who loves and believes in him, but she’s still completely aware that he’s a fool, and he thinks the same thing about her in a way. We’re just dealing with average people of average means who didn’t really have love in their life and got led astray.
TFR:
Kody is not a sympathetic character at the beginning. You start the book on a very shocking and surprising note, and then over the course of the story, I learned to love Kody and the way he saw the world. This seems like the opposite of most ‘unsympathetic character’ stories like in Breaking Bad, where you start out sympathizing with him and then see him descend. But here you start at the low point. Was that intentional?
BS:
I thought of Kody as a person who didn’t really have much of a chance to begin with. He doesn’t have far to fall. When you don’t have people who love you when you’re a little boy, and the best he had is his stepmom, Rhonda, who’s a slight friend but didn’t love him fully. It’s not far to fall when you’ve not been properly loved and nurtured. Usually, people make their futures in a way, but when something’s written out for you like that you have a much harder road.
Walter White from Breaking Bad is a character who had a lot of things going for him, and he squandered his own life—even before the cancer. He’s a miserable, washed-up guy. I’d rather read about somebody full of passion, even if that passion is misplaced. As an artist, it’s smarter for me to have passion for the story being told. So that’s why I’m interested in Kody and Teal. They’re two really passionate people. I don’t think I could write a book about someone like Walter White, who feels robbed, who’s dissatisfied, and hates his own life before he even gets cancer. He’s already dead before he has it. Those kinds of characters very rarely move the needle for me. I’m more interested in Levin from Anna Karenina, this person so imbued with life. And Don Quixote, who is on this wayward mission because he wants to make a difference.
TFR:
If reading about violence can inspire violence, can reading about something better help imagine it into existence?
BS:
An individual is just that, an individual. Free will belongs to each and every person currently drawing breath. That said, many people are trapped in invisible systems of control that takes great power to break out of. Pearl clutchers, and satanic panic Finders, and video-games-made-me-do-it, or Holden-Caulfield-loaded-my-gun theorists, are missing the point that we are in the middle of a great bubbling, melting, swamp of joy and pain, and our stories that we have been telling each other since we first created our languages have been inside us since the very beginning of our consciousness, and they aren’t getting any more wicked or twisted than they ever were. All our stories have ever been is a mirror held up to our culture and our place in it. If we are frightened by the stories we are telling, it’s because we are appalled by the world we’ve collectively created, little village to little village, slowly netting out to be the entire surface of this earth. Yes, a person has the power to hope for something positive, and they have the power to make that tiny positive thing happen in their home. They can share it with their family. Their family can share it with their neighbors. Their neighbors can share it, and so on.
TFR:
Did you start writing surrealist work when you felt stuck in life?
BS:
I’ve never felt stuck in life, and I’ve always told my stories with a heavy mix of surreal and real. I believe they belong together, and I don’t see much of a distinction between those modes of storytelling. The object is just to convey a feeling. Storytelling is already a hallucination, is already asking someone to step inside a dream with you and accept the dream. The earliest stories I was taught as a child were fairytales. A lot of them had some kind of lesson that was supposed to help a person navigate the worst perils of life, and find the rewards of that same life. If the story had to do that with a talking wolf, then it did it with a talking wolf. If Shakespeare had to send the ghost of the father to the parapet walls to send a warning, then so be it. If a poet has to be taken on a tour of Hell to find his way back to his true love, then the whole story becomes a metaphor we can use to make sense of our problems. I want to read something that is going to elicit some strange surprise in me. When it happens through abstraction and bent reality, brushing up against the proposed real world, and its supposed laws of order. There isn’t anyone to grant your magic wish at the actual supermarket, but really, there is. You’ve just got to ask around, ask the right questions. The genie can be behind the deli counter or stocking the yogurt, or any of the shoppers, it could even be you.
TFR:
You are so frigging optimistic. I got this feeling also when reading your memoir, Work. Just seeing what writing and art has been able to do for you and your outlook on life. If people are feeling depressed about the state of the world, what can they do?
BS:
Refuse to be idle. Even if you have to go forward in your lowest gear. Seek out people and places that do not seem ruined by impending doom. You can have fun, I’m saying, I’m advising, I’m begging. I’m begging both you and me to go have fun. It’s better to go outside and find it. The sun lights it up easier than any electric lamp can. But sometimes this fun cannot be seen in ordinary moonlight, and in those cases, I recommend a bonfire.
TFR:
Okay, I’ll have a bonfire. So there’s a narrator in Teenager who’s not Kody but has a lot in common with Kody. The narrator also has a lot in common with you—having a sharp eye that takes in only beauty. The narration seems to get more frenetic and beautiful as the story goes on, as the end is in sight. There’s a passage I want to quote:
That night, they closed the door and listened to the mules bray in the starlit yard. Dead Bob could be heard out in the living room, strumming a guitar, singing in a sonorous voice, evil sounding, and eerie gloom to it.
“He’s out there singing murder ballads.”
“Well, not to us. Not about us.” Teal called through the wall, “Bob?”
He kept strumming. “Yessssss?”
“Do you know any love songs?”
The minor chords switched to major and the same song carried on, but right there in the middle there was a turn, a new verse, his voice changed and rose in pitch and became saccharine and the miserable characters in the song canceled revenge and made amends, the knife was pulled out of the heart and the blood was wiped off the blade, the wound closed up and the wrong itself rewound like wire on a spool so the wrong was never done and the people were kissing in the daffodils, bluebirds swooping all around them and never a better match ever made in the history of the world.
“Thank you, Bob,” she said.
It makes me feel like the narrator is saying to the reader, “I choose to make you sympathize with my characters and agree that their lives are beautiful.” Is that what you’re saying here?
BS:
When things are desperate and dark, to survive, sometimes we focus on the sublime and the beautiful. That’s a lot of people’s experience in life—to transcend bad things that happened or are happening to them, they embrace anything that can give them a transcendent feeling. Drugs, sex, religion, music, climbing a mountain or two, whatever it is, they’re trying to find some escape from the bad things happening to them. I think my characters, hopefully, will always be like that. Looking to break away from pain, and seeking a cherry on top, even if they are absolutely fucked. Life and death is unpredictable. I hope the characters I write about will always get swept away, and sweep us all away with them too.
https://coolgoodluck.com
The Wounds of Childhood
We are the last to arrive. Jonathan parks on the gravel shoulder and is halfway out of the car before he remembers to help with Ellie. “Go,” I say, though I will cash in on his choice later. Jonathan is shouting greetings to his buddies who are lobbing sacks at the cornhole boards while I crate Ellie across the lawn to a picnic table covered in gingham. Here are the remains of the adults’ dinners, empty glasses and crumpled napkins, though the women, Peggy and Andrea, are still spooning puréed foods into their babies’ mouths. I leave Ellie in her carseat on the grass and reach for the open bottle of rosé.
“You made it,” Peggy says, deadpan.
“Barely,” I say. I’m allowed one glass of wine because I am nursing, so I must drink it slowly. “Why didn’t we stay in Duck again? This place took so long to get to.”
“It’s better up here. Quieter,” Peggy says. She looks tired. The skin under her eyes bags down like an old basset hound’s.
Andrea plays her part, like she did in college, smoothing things over between us. She reassures Peggy that the house is cute and super nice, ignoring what I can see from here, even in the dwindling daylight: this rental is a downgrade, old and unwanted. Its siding is worn and salt-baked. Spiderwebs glaze the floodlights while weeds eat through the driveway. I can already feel how damp the bedrooms will be, with loud ceiling fans that can’t compete with the humidity.
As Andrea praises Peggy for getting the house on such short notice—we hadn’t coordinated our schedules until late April, when most houses were already booked—her son sucks his thumb and stares at me. He is a dull, lifeless weight on Andrea’s knees. He wears a blue helmet that is reshaping his skull, which was mushed on its journey through Andrea’s birth canal. With his helmet and dulled expression, he looks like a stoned NATO peacekeeper.
“What’s so funny?” Peggy asks me.
Instead of sharing my thought, I say, “Remember the house we got after graduation? It had seven bedrooms and a hot tub. Remember that hot tub, Peggy?”
Peggy reddens and glances across the street, toward the sound of waves crashing on a shore that we can’t see. In her firm but forbearing, good-mother voice, Peggy says, “No thank you, Tommy,” to the child in her lap, who is trying to rip the buttons off of her shirt.
Peggy’s dutiful husband, Seth, appears then and picks up Tommy, throwing him in the air so that he squeals. Peggy is gearing up to lecture me, the last of them to get married, get pregnant, accept my fate.
“We’re not twenty-two anymore,” Peggy says, as if I could forget. “We don’t need to be close to the bars. We need a place that’s family-friendly. This house is small, sure, but there aren’t stairs for the kids to fall down or, heaven forbid, hot tubs to drown in. If you really feel cramped though, there is an extra bedroom between our rooms you could use. It’s got a crib.”
“Great,” I say. “I absolutely will. Ellie hasn’t slept in our room for three months.”
While Jonathan plays one last lawn game, I find our bedroom, which contains a musty double bed and a particleboard dresser. Ellie is fussing, as usual—she is always fussing—and the spit bubble between her lips and the blushing skin under her eyebrows tells me she’s hungry, again. The mattress sags and the frame creaks as I lower myself onto it, wincing at the scrape of Ellie’s single tooth on my nipple.
While she nurses, I take in the room. There are coarse wood planks, nailed diagonally across all four walls. I squint at one and notice black outlines, here and there, peppering the planks. At first, I mistake these half-circle outlines, upturned at both edges like crescent moons, for irregularities in the wood. Rotted whorls, maybe, or carpentry mistakes, but then I lean over and touch one and my finger is coated in ash.
When Ellie’s eyelids sink, I scoot to the edge of the bed and lug myself up, then walk through the door that leads into the extra bedroom, which is so tiny that a crib and rocking chair crowd each other like commuters waiting for a train. The odd planks cover these walls too, only here, the blackened crescent moons appear in uniform rows up and down the planks.
The room is cramped, but the crib looks clean enough, and Ellie, exhausted from the drive, is snuffed out like a match.
—
When I hear Ellie’s throaty cries just two hours later, I nudge Jonathan. He groans and rolls away from me, but I won’t let him win this. I had her all evening. He can deal with her at night.
“Your turn,” I hiss, before squeezing my eyes shut and trying for sleep. “Dammit, Jonathan, go in there before she wakes up the whole house.”
But then, the noise stops. Ellie has gone from hungry crying one second to complete silence the next. There is a void of sound, as if Ellie has disappeared.
I shoot up in bed, deciding that Ellie truly has disappeared: suffocated, fallen out of the crib, that she is suddenly, infantly, dead. I rush through the door between the rooms, and my hands are gripping the crib’s rail. I look down and see Ellie, and see that she is okay. She is so okay, in fact, that she is practically glowing in the moonlight that streams through the window’s wavy panes, her chest rising and falling with each breath.
I take a few steps back until I am standing in the doorway. I am watching her breathe and marking this night in my mind: the first night Ellie has soothed herself back to sleep.
Jonathan won’t believe it.
I have nearly turned away when a flicker of movement catches my eye and I realize that Peggy is here, in the room with Ellie. Peggy is standing in the corner, between crib and window. The black of her high-necked, long-sleeved gown has merged with the wall behind her so that I might not have noticed her at all if it weren’t for her pendant. The pendant hangs on a silver necklace and is big and gaudy, for preppy Peggy, wide as the palm of a hand, but curved like a crescent moon with sharp points. It is creamy white, its edges a garish red.
“Peggy?” I whisper.
In the shadow, I can’t see her face, but I see her hand as she lifts it to the pendant. I hear her as she breathes out, “Shhh.”
—
As soon as Jonathan hands Ellie to me with a grumble about missing tee time, she is clawing at my left breast. I shift her to my other arm and seek out Peggy among the adults in the kitchen. She is pouring coffee and humming softly. I touch her shoulder and say, “Hey, thanks for helping out last night. How did you get Ellie back to sleep so quick? She’s impossible.”
Peggy looks like a beachy angel in a silky white cover-up, her hair blown out. “What are you talking about?”
“You took care of Ellie,” I say, but I hesitate at her confused expression. “Remember? I went in to get her, but you were already there. You were wearing black.”
Peggy blows across the top of her coffee and rolls her eyes. “Who wears black at the beach?”
By evening, my woman in black is a joke. Around the picnic table, Peggy asks if the woman not only calms babies, but changes their diapers, too. Andrea wonders aloud how much ghosts charge an hour for babysitting. Jonathan shakes the ice in his glass and calls into the dusk that he could use a top-off.
I spray on more bug repellent and keep my mouth shut. I know what I saw. At least, I think I do, though surrounded by the nursing babies, the ball-busting fathers, the woman in black doesn’t seem so real. Could she have been a product of my sleep deprivation, of post-partum whatever?
When we all head inside, I change Ellie’s diaper and dress her in her pink pajamas, then pick her up and walk toward the door that links our room to hers.
“You’re letting the ghost have her again?” Jonathan says to my back, an audible smirk in the question.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say.
But hours later, I wake up sweating, the sheets tightened around my knees. I grope for Ellie, then remember that she is not here. She is sleeping in the crib in the little room because I don’t like to sleep with her. I relish the time that I am free of her; Jonathan does, too, though he won’t admit it.
That, and I don’t believe in ghosts.
When Jonathan rolls toward me, vapors from his ginny breath mist over my face. I prop up on my elbow and listen for Ellie.
After a few seconds, I hear the slightest whimper, or maybe it is a coo. Or it could be a whisper.
In the little room, the rocking chair’s runners creak against the floor as the woman gentles my baby. Ellie’s hand reaches up for the pendant, and the woman accommodates her, letting the necklace fall so that it almost touches the space between Ellie’s collarbones, her pink pajamas burnished in the moonlight. When the woman bends down, her gowned body covers Ellie up, blots her out, swallows Ellie into her shadow until I can see no part of her, not her cloth-covered feet or fisted hands.
Half of me is panicked, horrified by Ellie’s consumption into this woman’s shade, the other half embarrassed at the sentimental nonsense that is pouring from my mouth. “She’s mine,” I am pleading with the woman, but I am whispering too, because something about her demands that my resistance be quiet, like I’m negotiating with a nun or a grieving great-aunt.
“She’s mine,” I whisper again. “She’s mine.”
At this third plea, the woman’s torso rears back against the hard dowels of the rocker, and I am tripping over my feet, wrenching Ellie from her, not looking at the woman’s face, this woman who smells of dust and oleander.
When Jonathan sits up in bed, I am clutching Ellie like she is my purse and someone tried to snatch her. Her chest is so warm that it burns.
Dinner that evening is steaks on the grill, Peggy’s salad. I don’t help. I don’t pass out forks and knives, or pour the wine. I cuddle Ellie and sniff her hair. Instinct keeps drawing me back to the skin of her chest, which is the vulnerable shade of thawing ice, the blue blood coursing under it like a spring stream.
Across from me, Peggy is tipsy, urging Jonathan to tell it again.
As he tells it, I am the lunatic. I am the confused, attic-wandering mommy searching for her baby, one step from the asylum. “So then, she comes running into our room and tells me I have to scare away the ghost,” Jonathan says. “Only when I go in…”
“…No one was there,” Peggy finishes. “I mean, obviously.”
“Might explain why no one else had rented this place,” I snap back.
Peggy groans. The wine has loosened her. She is no longer tolerating me, even though we once shared a kiss, immersed in a rental hot tub. When I put the tip of my tongue on hers, Peggy moaned and reached for me. She liked it more than I did.
“It’s all in your head, and I’ll prove it,” Peggy says.
“Oh, yeah? How?”
“I’ll put Tommy to bed in there tonight.”
She smiles up at her husband, who is swaying, the yellow liquid in his glass threatening to spill over. “We could use the night off, couldn’t we, babe?”
—
That night, in the salt air leaking through our bedroom window, I dream of ovals that flatten and bulge and wane to become crescents, of the moon juttering through its phases so quickly that it catches on fire, causing typhoon, mud slide, hurricane. I dream of a naked woman who has captured the moon and held it between her lactating breasts, can hold it there even though it burns. I dream of threes, of fairy tales, of the third night, when the humans fail and the witch wins.
I wake up gasping, my throat burning. I yank off blankets to search for my asphyxiated baby but find her, soundly asleep, tucked against Jonathan. I breathe out, then ease myself back down, careful not to wake them, but I don’t sleep again, not for hours. Whenever I close my eyes, the phases of the moon whir by, full back to full again.
Toward sunrise, I think of Peggy’s little boy, quietly asleep in the crib.
I think of checking on him.
I think of these things, and perhaps the thinking of them alone pulls me back into sleep, because soon I am drifting on soothing black swells.
—
The next morning, Peggy looks fresh and free in a purple tank top. She looks like the Peggy of old, who used to grind against strangers at The Wreck, who used to be a wreck herself. I am fuzzy from my dream, which feels silly now, in the dazzling gold of the morning, with Ellie happy in my arms, full of milk and tenderness.
I am gathering myself to apologize to Peggy for a few things: for giving her crap about this sea-roughened house on the unfashionable end of this barrier island, for bringing her down with a ridiculous ghost story, for mocking her devotion to her son.
I am about to apologize when Seth rushes into the room, holding Tommy around his belly as the child wails and rubs his chest, keening, mama mama mama, an incantation that starts quietly and expands to coat the walls.
Peggy is a comet streaking toward them. She barks at Seth to put him down, and he does, holding him on the counter so that Peggy can unstick his pajamas from his body. When the little boy sees his own blood on his mother’s fingertip, he is stunned out of his wails. In the unholy silence that follows, the rest of us take in the blood and the charred, red-rimmed crescent moon now exposed on Tommy’s chest.
I slap my hand over my mouth and do not say what I am thinking, instead rushing to gather up what Peggy needs, her phone, her insurance card, her shoes. And in the aftermath—through Peggy’s anxious updates from the burn unit, through all of the disappointments about the failed skin grafts and infections, through the questions that the skeptical woman from child protective services asks all of us—I never say what I am thinking.
Mother and Child
Kyle is on her way home for Christmas. Home home, as in, where she grew up. She sits stiff in her bulkhead window seat, chewing on the teat of her water bottle and watching other passengers file in. She’s got her dog with her on the flight, her big retriever, the first time she’s flown with him, and she almost wishes a stranger would complain about it. Just enough for an excuse to get mad back at someone out loud. The only reason she didn’t take Iggy when she flew home last year was because her mom doesn’t like dogs, and this time—well.
A flight attendant presses a coffeepot button and Iggy whines at the beep. The attendant turns, looks maybe admonishing, and Kyle puts a defensive, ready hand on Iggy’s neck. The attendant just winks and says, “He knows the coffee’s bad.”
Kyle sighs. She grips Iggy’s collar’s leather strap. She could ask to have a drink before takeoff. Even at twenty-nine, airplane mini-whiskeys always seem riskily grown-up. She raises two shy fingers, but the attendant is looking away now. He’s smiling at the cabin doors. Another attendant escorts a young girl onboard.
The girl has stringy blond hair, and a backpack, and a plastic pouch of papers on a lanyard around her neck. An unidentified minor—isn’t that what they call it? She could be five or she could be ten. Older than Kyle’s sister’s twins, but by how much? Kyle’s girlfriends would be able to tell, probably. Those trivia games at baby showers these days when everyone else knows, without guessing, about diaper tallies and babies seeing in black and white. Last time she was home, when she’d just broken up with Saul, Kyle’s sister asked over dinner, Was it because he wanted kids? and Kyle couldn’t explain how it didn’t feel that simple.
That night, at that dinner, Kyle’s dad switched the subject on her behalf. He took her out for ice cream after and got her mind off things.
He’s in Reno this year, with his brother’s family through New Year’s.
Kyle prays the attendant will walk this little girl past her row—the airline has open seating—but the girl sees Iggy and her face lights up.
The attendant whispers, “Do you want to sit with the doggie, sweetie?”
The kid takes her seat slow. Her feet don’t touch the plane floor. She says, “Can I pet him?” and she puts her hand out carefully, calmly, settling her fingers on Iggy’s taut forehead. Kyle almost tells her, Be gentle. He’s anxious.
Iggy nuzzles, softening under the girl’s touch.
The girl says, “I’m Pearl.” She points at Kye’s wrist, the Series 6 Kyle bought herself as a holiday present. “I like your fancy watch.”
Kyle shakes her wrist to adjust the band.
Pearl asks for Iggy’s name, and then Kyle’s. “I knew someone named Kyle who’s a boy,” she says, not good or bad, the way Kyle’s nephews say, I am dancing. “Boston’s where my mom is and she had a dog Polka who couldn’t go with her when she moved.”
“What happened to her?”
“She went to live with Roger.”
Kyle nods, like, Okay. But, the mom or the dog?
The sky’s going dark outside the porthole windows. The aisle jams with elbowing passengers. A graying man in a safari shirt stops at the bulkhead row and asks Kyle if the aisle is free. “I like the legroom,” he says. He stows a camera bag in the overhead, leaves the satchel’s strap hanging down without seeming to notice. He’s about Kyle’s dad’s age, with crow’s feet and an easy grin, and a ring, the soft of his finger grown comfortably around it. His arms and legs fall lazy, splaying into Pearl’s seat space, and he registers Iggy with lukewarm surprise, as if, impossibly, obliviously, he hasn’t noticed the dog until now.
The man nods at the lanyard around Pearl’s neck. “You must be a professional flyer.”
Pearl grins. She tells him, “It’s my first time on an airplane.”
The man looks at Kyle, an impressed face. Why didn’t you say so! He assumes they’re together, Kyle can see. She wishes she could just read her book. She wonders about her own first flight, vaguely remembers some long-ago trip where she’s small in a middle seat, her parents on either side playing rummy across her table. The memory hurts.
“Pearl was just talking about going to see her mom in Boston,” Kyle says, to clarify.
“Well, Pearl. I’m Roy.”
When the plane lurches, beginning its taxi, Iggy cants forward unprepared. His nose bumps Pearl’s knee. There’s a rip in the knee of Pearl’s jeans that Kyle hadn’t noticed, a rim of dried blood on the denim hole and a scab on the skin underneath. Pearl sees Kyle looking and says, “It’s OK.” She touches the scab with a careful finger. “I was supposed to fly yesterday, but we missed it. I fell when I was running with my bag.”
And no one put her in a new pair today, Kyle thinks. That’s bad, right?
Pearl points at an old scar on Kyle’s elbow, as if to say, You fall too.
When the attendant asks for Kyle or Roy’s confirmation they’ll assist Pearl—in an emergency, with any big problems—Roy looks at Pearl and smiles and raises his eyebrows. He says, “I don’t know, kid. You can swim, right?”
Pearl frowns. “Like at the Y?”
It’s the same as when Shannon texts teasing, haha videos of the boys doing things they don’t get are funny. Kyle feels bad. She gives the attendant a nod, but he needs to hear her say it. “Yeah,” she answers. “Yes.”
—
Yes, Kyle’s mom has been seeing someone. That’s the sadness, the great Donne family drama. But the problem is that Kyle knew about Brian years ago, and her mom promised it had stopped.
One night, when she was seventeen, Kyle burned through a computer cord and went to her mom’s office after hours, to pick up a spare. She found her mom and Brian, the receptionist, in an exam room, on a table. Kyle’s mom was beside herself afterward. She apologized, profusely. She called it weakness. Her humanity. Something Kyle would understand when she was older, a frustrating cliché Kyle has kept hoping will come true.
Kyle’s mom said if the rest of the family knew, it would destroy everything, for nothing. And Kyle needed to believe her. She didn’t know how she could tell anyone—like, actually tell them. So, when it came out in June about her mom’s “mistake” with “Brian who she used to work with,” Kyle couldn’t say to her devastated father, her blindsided sister, that she knew more than they did. That she’d known, without knowing it, for twelve years. That it was so much more and worse than they thought.
If you’ve been long holding a bomb that goes off in a crowd, probably no one forgives you if you tell them, I’m hurt too, or, But I believed it was dead.
—
The plane wobbles going up. Pearl squeals and clasps her hands.
Most people settle apathetic into books or sleep or laptops. Roy puts his headphones in and snags his bag from the overhead—Pearl gasps, pointing at the seatbelt sign—and begins cleaning his camera with a little swab. The kind of leisurely routine you’ve perfected on regular flights to worry-free destinations, Kyle thinks, a little indignant.
Pearl tap-dances her feet across Iggy’s back and says, “Look at the clouds!”
Pearl asks Kyle how cold it is outside the airplane window. Cold enough for snow? Will Kyle do snowy things over Christmas with her family in Massachusetts? Kyle asks has Pearl ever seen snow before, mostly to bumper the talk away from her own family’s activities, and Pearl shakes her head no. “There was snow in Boston last night that Daddy said I missed because I made us late,” she says. “He drove me three hours to the airport twice. Yesterday, and today all over again.” She adds this proudly, like it was nice that he went out of his way.
That’s something Kyle’s dad always says—Need anything from the grocery store, Dad? What do you want for your birthday? Don’t go out of your way, as in, Let’s not worry about me.
Kyle keeps Pearl talking about herself. Pearl likes school. Her best school friends are Lee and Ty. She likes this school better than two others she’s gone to because they hold after-school outside, and her favorite school subject is science, because they did an animal unit last month—“Mammals are all different kinds but they all have fur and the mothers do nursing.” She lives with her dad in Louisiana, and they had to drive so far because Houston is the nearest airport.
When Kyle asks Pearl if she’s always lived in Louisiana, Pearl says yes, and Iggy sits up.
“Mom used to live there too, before she went to live in Boston. I stayed with Sasha and Jax for a while until Daddy found out and I went to live with him.”
Kyle asks slowly, “How long ago was that?”
Pearl is matter of fact. “Two years.”
While Kyle works out the sad math—never been to Boston, Mom’s in Boston two years—Pearl bends and stretches for a book by Kyle’s feet, the one Kyle planned to spend the flight reading. Kyle watches Pearl study the angry cover, a young woman smashing an old clock.
Kyle clears her throat. She tells Pearl, whispering, just the two of them, “My dad’s in Nevada for Christmas.”
Pearl considers this a moment. “Yeah,” she says, nodding. Understanding. “Las Vegas.”
The metal drink cart rouses Roy from his camera screen. He pulls out his headphones and reaches for his wallet, announcing to the attendant, “Ian, let me treat my friends here.” Kyle just wants a water, but her will to pick a fight has faded. When the drinks arrive, they’re chocolate milk for Pearl and cranberry soda for Kyle, with a little airplane vodka for Kyle on the side. Roy winks and says, “I took a guess.” He ordered a tea for himself, and he turns to chat with Ian as he dips the bag in the hot water.
The plane shudders. Iggy sniffs the rippling liquid in Pearl’s cup. Pearl whispers, “Kyle” and leans toward Kyle’s shoulder. “I only like strawberry. I don’t like chocolate.”
Once, in the grocery store, when they were picking out a cake for Shannon’s birthday, Kyle’s mom said kids who don’t like chocolate aren’t kids. She said it like a joke. Kyle’s older than Shannon, and she remembers thinking, If she’s not a kid then what am I?
Roy gets up for the bathroom. Kyle slips the tiny vodka in her purse. She hands Pearl the pink soda and tells her, “We can switch.”
Pearl twirls the soda straw. “Like what Daddy makes for Joy,” she says.
The surprising tastes and smells that evoke old memories are never the ones Kyle thinks they’ll be. She cradles the chocolate drink and takes a slow sip. She’s eight, at the kitchen table after day camp, drinking Nesquik with her pancakes. A nice morning. Simple. Black and white.
The first mouthful of flavor fades away, and she takes another sip to try and get it back.
—
Kyle has been mostly ignoring her mom’s texts and emails, after a few accusatory phone conversations right when the part-truth broke. So Shannon called, Mom’s envoy, to summon Kyle home for Christmas. She guilted Kyle for acting childish about the separation. “Marriages are long,” she said. “Mistakes happen.” Shannon, who’s twenty months younger than Kyle, and doesn’t know she doesn’t know the full story, and has only been married four years herself.
When Kyle said it wouldn’t feel like Christmas, Shannon said, “There’s more about Christmas than walks with Dad.” Normal Christmases since Kyle moved away for college have meant walks with her father around the old neighborhood, sometimes several loops a day. He gets sentimental over the holidays, calls her Kylie and waxes nostalgic about when she was young enough that he knew her friends. He always points out new construction and says, They must have just put that up! If he does it to make her feel like the place isn’t changing too much without her, or because he actually hasn’t noticed the changes before, Kyle can never tell.
Kyle sat on her couch, on the phone, Iggy nudging her with an orange boomerang toy. Shannon said, “Give me one good reason for staying in Houston by yourself.” Her tactic was, You are alone. You are not a girlfriend or a partner or a wife. You are not a caregiver. This was partly what Kyle was afraid of—face to face with Shannon for the whole Christmas week, Shannon taunting, Give me one good reason, and Kyle unloading what she knew about good reasons, making things worse just to prove Shannon’s insulting theories wrong.
“It’s not as easy as just blaming Mom. You not talking to her is making it worse,” Shannon said. “What am I supposed to tell the boys if you’re not here? They’ll say, Aunt Ky’s not here for Santa, and where am I supposed to tell them that you are? What do you tell kids about something like that?”
—
Kyle and Pearl share a bag of airplane pretzels and take turns feeding Iggy. One from Kyle, one from Pearl. Happy Iggy takes each bite like its own treat. Roy, watching over a magazine, smiles and says, “Poor thing doesn’t know they’re just pretzels.”
Kyle feeds Iggy a big piece. “I think it’s nice.”
Pearl cocks her head at Kyle’s brusque tone.
They all watch Iggy lick the salt from Pearl’s little palm. The dog’s loved salty food since he was a puppy. The vet said he’d grow out of it and he hasn’t yet.
The plane bumps over a surprise air pocket and Pearl says, “I bet my mom will pick me up from the airport in Boston.”
They’re somewhere above Charleston—the cartoon arc on the TV map says it’s just over halfway. Roy turns his magazine page, and laughs, like Pearl was kidding, but Kyle rummages in the pretzel bag for a few more broken chips. She hands Pearl a piece carefully. “Was there something that had you thinking she wouldn’t?”
“She was supposed to visit over the summer,” Pearl says. She holds her hand out for Iggy’s tongue. “We did the bed on the couch all made up for her. The other sheets because that’s her favorite, purple. And she never came and when we called her she said she had to take care of Mr. Petrezzi, but I know they were the days we planned because Daddy let me put the stickers on those days on my room calendar.”
Roy picks a pretzel piece from up off the floor. He crumbles it absentmindedly into a dust that falls back down. He says, “Your mom will come get you,” and Pearl says “Okay” so easily convinced that Kyle hates to think what will happen if Roy’s simple promise is wrong.
The guy Kyle really dated, Saul, said once toward the end that needing promises and being in love were opposite ideas, and Kyle asked him what promises he resented making. He told her she was proving his point.
Pearl says, “Iggy’s thirsty” and holds out her empty soda cup. Kyle pours it full from what’s left in her Nalgene and Pearl tilts the cup for Iggy like a baby bottle. Pearl tells Iggy, “You’re a mammal.”
Kyle wonders how old Pearl’s mom might be—Kyle’s same age? A Kyle-sized Pearl with Pearl’s stringy hair? Imagine Pearl walking into baggage claim and there’s no one there for her. Kyle hopes it would be true if she said to Pearl, Things shouldn’t be this complicated for you already. But what does she know?
—
Kyle’s dad’s car waits for her in airport parking. He left it when he flew to Reno and mailed her a key. It will be after midnight by the time Kyle finds the car, and warms it up, and drives it out to the house. She’ll park in her dad’s old spot in the driveway, by the tree her mom once planted.
Everyone will be asleep inside, so Kyle will try to be quiet, keeping the lights off, guiding Iggy upstairs in the dark—muscle memory—and slipping into her old kid bed. Her parents have never changed her room much at all. Still the same ratty stuffies and pre-teen wall posters and striped sheets from high school. The headboard has a worn patch where she used to rub her thumb when she went to sleep nervous, and she’ll try it, to see, but it won’t work like it used to. Iggy will take up the foot space, and Kyle will feel big in a small bed.
In the morning, Christmas Eve, Kyle will get up first. Before even her sister’s little boys. She’ll put on a pot of coffee and wait in the kitchen for people to come down, elbows on the island counter, studying the water as it boils. The twins’ rocket toys have been left out on the floor by the table, and a pot is soaking in the sink. She’ll have expected them to make a bigger deal of her arrival, but maybe this is better. More real. Maybe it’ll help that it almost feels like a regular day in the familiar house.
—
Over Baltimore, the pilot turns off the cabin lights. Roy pulls his camera out again. He scrolls Pearl through his bright pictures and talks to her about his Hanukkah plans, the gelt and video games he packed for his grandkids’ presents. Pearl squints at the glare of the digital screen in the dark. Before she can ask about one image, Roy is on to the next.
He describes his daughter’s farm in Sherborn where his family is gathering. “It’s like the Cape without the water.”
Pearl asks, “What’s the Cape mean?”
Roy smiles. He picks up his jacket and tosses it over his shoulders like a cape cape.
Pearl touches the jacket fabric.
Kyle says, “She’s actually asking.”
A man across the aisle falls asleep. His head tips back, and he starts to snore. Looking at him, Pearl points one finger at Roy’s camera and another at the overhead compartment and asks, “Am I allowed to get something out?” It’s clear by the way she receives her backpack from the attendant that the bag is light, and she extracts a single plastic folder. She lays the bag down on the floor and says to Iggy, “A pillow.”
Kyle reaches for the seat light so Pearl can see.
Pearl tilts the folder toward Kyle’s seat.
The folder looks empty at first. Pearl pries back the pocket to reveal an assortment of photographs tucked below the flap. They’re softened, worn, but clean. No fingerprints. Handled with great care. Like Kyle’s mom with Kodaks after childhood trips—By the edges! Pearl searches for a specific photo, filing through them individually, and about ten prints in she stops and says, “This one!” She positions it under the spotlight. An image of a man asleep on a couch, a woman behind him doing bunny ears. Pearl whispers, “Cody was sleeping!” and holds the photo up toward the snoring man across the aisle, like, They look similar.
Kyle says, “Can I?”
She accepts the folder as if it’s fragile. The photos are glossy, on professional stock. She can’t think when she last held a developed picture, and it’s unsettling. Time-traveling, almost.
There are school photos of friends, little rectangles with kid signatures on the back. The mismatched rectangle sizes and backdrop colors make what Pearl said about changing several schools feel real.
There are a few candid group shots. One of Pearl at a bonfire in a whole group of children, the rest of them older. Middle or early high school, even. The most teenaged-looking girl with a plastic cup in her hands. One photo in a raggedy waterpark, a young woman dangling a laughing, bathing-suited Pearl off a deep-end diving board.
“At night in the summer,” Pearl says. “Me and Nina at the pool.”
In the photos of Pearl by herself, she looks so eerily unattended. Alone in a field with a water gun, shot from across a busy street. Posing thumbs-up for a New Dawn “All Gave Some” plaque. Cutting her own hair with brown hedge shears. Kyle accidentally presses her thumb on the haircut picture and the oil of her fingerprint sticks to the picture gloss when she pulls it back, leaving a smudge.
Kyle tells Pearl, “I’m sorry.”
Roy reaches for the waterpark picture. “Fun in the sun!”
If Kyle could just shake him and say, You’re blind! You’re blind! Imagine Pearl packing all of these to bring with her, like show and tell. Mom, this is where I live. This is where I go to school. This is when they waved at me across a speeding boulevard. But, at the same time, who looks better—the mom-person who wasn’t there when these were taken, or the one who was?
Kyle says, “Thank you for letting me see.” She hooks a wary finger through Iggy’s leather collar and tugs. It’s not her business. If she disapproves, she can’t tell of who. She has Pearl walk her through each photo one by one until the plane lands in Boston, and still she isn’t sure she’s done Pearl’s unknowing vulnerability justice.
—
Christmas Eve morning, Shannon will come down first, and then her husband with the boys, and then Kyle’s mom. Kyle will hug her mom because it would look weird not to. Her mom will smell the same, the Baby Soft perfume her dad’s been gifting since forever. She’ll still have her ring on.
Other than asking about the trip, Kyle’s mom will mostly hang back, watching the twins wrestle with Iggy. Kyle will pour Shannon coffee and tell her, “I did the roast half and half.”
Shannon will say, “Two years ago we couldn’t get you up before noon.” She’ll point to their mom in the corner, mouthing, Talk to her.
Kyle’s nephews say Houston like Ooston. “What’s far away as Ooston? Santa’s far as Ooston?” The T-shirts Kyle gave them last year still fit, so she must have guessed their size too big before, which is funny—they seem like babies now, compared to the fresh idea of Pearl on the plane. Kyle will tell them they have to come visit Texas and see it’s not so far, her brother-in-law looking at her like, We’ve heard that before.
When the boys say, “Aunt Ky plays Duplos?” and Kyle’s about to say yes, Shannon will tell them, “Not Aunt Ky, boys. Go easy on Aunt Ky. What did we say?”
There will be a lull in the late morning, the time Kyle and her dad would usually take one of their Christmas walks. Kyle will think about driving his car around the neighborhood instead, but then the idea seems cheesy. Like what she might have done if she was mad in high school. She’ll go from room to room noting the persisting signs of him. She imagined the house scrubbed Dad-clean, cut and dry, but he’s still in the pictures on the wall. His cereal’s still in the pantry. Some of his coats are still in the closet, tucked toward the back.
Shannon will find Kyle in the Florida room, thumbing through an old Guitar World of his, and she’ll ask, “Where’s Mom?” accusingly, like Kyle’s banished her mother somewhere.
Kyle will say, “I’ll go look.”
—
They’re the first ones to deboard, because of their row. Pearl leads Kyle and Iggy down the jetway, saying, “You get to meet her now!” and Roy trails behind them, on the phone, unconcerned. The more Pearl skips and pulls her along, the more it convinces Kyle that even if Pearl’s mom does show up, she’ll be late or unexcited in a way that will complicate Pearl’s familiarity with disappointment.
They emerge from the passage and Pearl’s mom is there, beside a TSA agent, shifting from one waiting foot to another. She’s just different enough from what Kyle was picturing to be surprising. Despite her hard face, Kyle guesses the woman is a few years younger than her—around Shannon’s age. She has a lanyard around her neck that matches Pearl’s. She has well drawn-on eyebrows that have smeared a bit throughout her day, and a shoulder-bag that saddles her skinny frame. Her clothes are black shoes and black jeans and a white dress shirt that bows open between the buttons, the kind of outfit that is probably a uniform and makes Kyle guilty in her leisurely plane clothes. Pearl’s mom looks tired and nervous. She holds a pink milkshake, in a cup with an orange TSA sticker, like she went through special screening to get it past security.
Pearl sees her and runs forward. They hug, a tight hug, and stay holding each other for several seconds. Pearl’s mom says tenderly, “You’re taller,” and she wipes her cheek. She touches a finger to the knee rip in Pearl’s jeans. She hands Pearl the strawberry drink.
Pearl says, “You remembered.”
Iggy pulls his leash and Kyle holds him back, embarrassed at the choke in her own throat. Roy strolls past waving a contented, told-you-so goodbye.
Pearl calls Kyle over, saying, “Kyle’s from my flight! And her dog!”
Kyle inches forward, trying to keep a respectful distance. She snaps for Iggy to sit. She wraps her right hand around her left wrist to cover the fancy new watch, but then she’s afraid Pearl’s mom saw her do it. Pearl’s mom frowns and puts a protective hand on Pearl’s shoulder.
Kyle says, “She did great,” and it sounds presumptuous out loud. “I mean, the plane didn’t scare her is all I meant.”
Pearl’s mom says, “They assigned you to sit with her?”
“I think they just thought she’d like my dog.” Kyle coils Iggy’s leash tight around her arm. “All she talked about was how excited she is for Boston. For your guys’ Christmas.”
Pearl’s mom says, “I know.” She hoists the heavy purse on her shoulder, ready to leave.
Kyle stands there with them. She knows she should say goodbye, and she doesn’t understand what she’s waiting for.
—
Kyle will find her mom in bed, on top of the sheets, curled away from the door. Kyle won’t immediately step forward, but she also won’t back away. She’ll hold out her mug and say, “Do you need coffee?”
It will be clear her mom’s been crying by the careening way she says Kyle’s name.
Iggy, who follows Kyle in, will hop onto the end of the bed and sit, glancing between them. Kyle’s mom won’t shoo him off like she might have last year. Kyle will walk around to the other side of the mattress—her dad’s side—and get in. Face to face.
Kyle will scoot forward, reluctantly. Nervously. She’ll budge one hand between her mom’s head and the pillow, wrap it around her mom’s back. She’ll use her other hand to lift her mom’s top arm and drape it across her own shoulders. They’ll lie that way a few moments, each of them holding with one arm and being held with another.
“Iggy’s on my feet,” Kyle’s mom will say. “It’s warm.”
“She’s good at that.”
They’ll both wait for the other to say something more. Downstairs, the boys yelling something and Shannon yelling back. The metronome clock on Kyle’s mom’s dresser ticking. The stiff pillowcase cotton crinkling under the weight of their two heads.
Kyle’s mom will say, “I know you’re mad at me.”
“Yeah.”
The clock clicks. Her mom does look pretty when she cries. Have men told her that? Kyle will wonder. How many? And who? And where? And when?
“I’m mad at me too,” Kyle’s mom will tell her.
“I can see that.”
One of them squeezing the other one. Hard to tell which, their long, close limbs.
“The last time you climbed in bed with me,” Kyle’s mom will say, “you were small enough to tickle my shins with your socks.” A shaky breath. “It doesn’t feel like Christmas.”
Kyle will study her mom’s sad, pretty face. Up this close, it’s hard to tell the parts that have aged and the ones that haven’t. Kyle will say, “I miss him too.” She’ll wish her mom would say she’s sorry. She’ll want her to say it the two ways—I apologize, and also, I know you do sweetie. There, there. Child and mother, mother and child. Both, at the same time.
Kyle’s mom asks, “Will you let me talk to you about it?”
—
While they linger at the gate, Pearl’s mom says, “—Well.” And Kyle wishes she could apologize to this tired, unknown woman. For interrupting the moment. For having believed she might not come. But Kyle also wishes there was a way she could ask, What kind of mother are you? Half in the shameful, condescending way of still judging for the bits she does know, and half in the way of really wanting—needing—to understand about the give and take. The moving away, and the showing up. The strawberry milkshake remembered. The long road getting here. The full story.
—
With her head crooked on her arm on the pillow, Kyle’s neck will ache, but she won’t move. She’ll stay, hurt, listening, for longer than she would have thought she’d be willing to.