The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  My tongue feels heavy, like I’m having an allergic reaction to shellfish, even though I have no such allergy. “I’m looking for Frank Latimer?” My voice doesn’t sound like it usually does.

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Frank Latimer.”

  A woman’s voice bellows from deeper inside the house. “Who?”

  “Frank Somebody,” the man calls back. “We are Dembrowski. There’s no such person here.”

  In my heart I knew there wouldn’t be.

  When I’m safely inside the car, I lock all the doors and turn the air conditioning up to full blast to keep me from overheating and prevent the windows from fogging again. I have only one need: to leave Milnor Avenue as fast as one humanly can.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “They’d never heard of him?”

  It’s Daniel. After a tuna melt at some ramshackle diner and a couple of hours to collect my nerves while kicking around town, I call him from—wait for it—another Super 8 motel.

  “No.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Then come home.”

  “I might still. Ask. I’m staying a little longer.”

  “You’re spiraling.”

  “I have to finish the book.” I look over at the manuscript, which I brought with me, looming on the dresser.

  “Then finish it! Stop dicking around looking for Frank.”

  “Wow. I could really use my boyfriend’s support right about now.”

  “I am supporting you, and you’re being too ridiculous to see it.”

  “Oh, I’m being ridiculous.”

  “In fact, you are. You think finding Frank is going to be the end of this thing, but it’s actually going to be the beginning of a whole other thing. You’ve jumped in with both feet without really thinking about the consequences. You’re conflating a deadline for the book with a deadline for blowing up your whole life!”

  I flop back on the bed dramatically like a teenage girl whose parents read her diary. Daniel and I have had some version of this conversation for days. I don’t understand his position on this. I don’t get why he can’t see the two things are related.

  “Go ahead. Finish your book. But, please, give yourself breathing room on everything else.”

  “I don’t have time!”

  “Yes, you do!”

  I can’t think straight anymore. “I’m not leaving this motel until I finish.”

  “You’re staying in Syracuse.”

  “Syracuse is my last stand.”

  “Then go back and ask, Custer. Go back and knock on the door. Then come home.”

  Who are you looking for? Mr. Dembrowski’s voice echoes in my ear.

  Silence.

  There are dead flies in the light on the ceiling. I can see them behind the frosted plastic. What a depressing place to meet your end, slowly rotting until some janitor comes to replace the bulb. Is that to be my fate? I never find my way out of this trap and some housekeeper finds my body while restocking miniature bottles of shampoo? Maybe Mr. Dembrowski is right. Who am I looking for? It really isn’t Frank, is it?

  “Soon. I’ll be home soon.”

  There’s one more stop I have to make.

  ◆ TWENTY-SIX ◆

  It’s dark when Scott and I turn onto my street, so I’m surprised when I look at my watch and it says only four-thirty. The solstice is still a week away and it feels like each bitter cold day suffers a failure to launch; the sun sets before it reaches its full height in the sky. The days are not different in that regard from things with Scott. Rockets ignite, despite our best efforts not to let them, and each time there is an unspoken dare, fueled by hunger, to go further. But an actual launch is always scuttled—for weather or safety concerns or whatever reasons these things are called off—and we have to disembark before getting anywhere near the stratosphere. As often as I promise myself this is the time we will talk about it, this is the time we will put words to our hungry teenage explorations, we don’t. We ride around as we do now, in total silence, two boys without a definition, unsure of what they mean or who they are to each other. Sometimes I ache so much for the sound of his voice, even if it announces nothing of consequence, that I might explode in a ball of fire if I heard it.

  Scott pulls his father’s sedan to the side of the road in front of my house and says, “Well, shit.” My entire body tingles as we roll to a stop and Scott puts the car in park. This is it. This is the conversation. This is when we will say out loud what we are. It’s not the most artful preamble, but now is not the time to critique his language skills. It’s me who wants to be a writer someday, not him.

  I make a noise, I think, not quite a word but a sound. A grunt. I’m embarrassed by this, so I swallow and ask, “What is it?” feigning concern and surprise like there weren’t oceans of unspoken things between us.

  He nods toward my house.

  I turn my head, and in the thick shadows of late December I see my mother step out the front door with a box and drop it on the lawn. It joins several others, making a kind of lopsided barricade. “What the . . .”

  “Are those”—Scott does his best to explain what’s unfolding in front of our eyes—“decorations?”

  I do not answer. When I was younger we had a gaudy plastic crèche. One with hollow characters that lit up from the inside. We would set it on the lawn about now, the week before Christmas, and, like dutiful Catholics, leave it up through the twelfth day of Christmas—nearly a week after our neighbors’ reindeer and snowmen came down. It sat in the garage in boxes for most of the year, and my father would set it up under my mother’s watchful supervision, usually cursing the cold and his numbing fingers as she took great pains to exhibit the manger just so. We sold it in a yard sale a few years back, the wisemen, the animals, the angel Gabriel. My mother protested, it seemed sacrilegious to mark them with price stickers, but the figures were worn and my father rightly argued discarding Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the trash would be a worse sin than rehoming them.

  “No, seriously, James. What’s going on?”

  I know exactly what this is, and I seethe with rage. Now? In this moment? Can’t I have anything? Can’t I just have this one little moment with a boy? “It’s my father,” I quietly admit.

  Scott squints and looks again, confused. “In the boxes?” he says, horrified, as if he’s discovered my mother’s secret identity as an axe murderer.

  I close my eyes as tight as I can and wish hard that when I open them, none of this will be happening. I know magical thinking will not make it so, but when I open my eyes the barricade of boxes seems exponentially bigger than it should be—like maybe I drifted off. “I’ve got to go.” I look at Scott and try to say a thousand things with a single look. My right hand on the car door handle, my left giving him a gentle punch on his thigh. Drive, drive away with me, I plead with my vigorous stare. But of course he doesn’t. He just looks back at me with his dopey smile; deep down I’m already imagining some future love, another man who loves me enough to clearly receive my telepathy, who would in this moment hear my soundless plea and hit the gas pedal.

  “Okay,” Scott says, and my grip firms on the handle until the car door opens with a surprising pop. I jump like someone reacting to champagne being uncorked.

  I look at Scott in his doofy Luke Skywalker T-shirt and unzipped coat, like this good-bye is good-bye forever, then my weight shifts and the door feels like it opens the rest of the way of its own accord. I tumble out. The cold air is a slap to the face; it actually stings. I stand in the cluster of birch trees, all of us like tall, pale ghouls against the dark winter sky.

  I hear the window roll down behind me and Scott shouts, “Call me later,” but I’m not sure if it’s because he’s desperate for the sound of my voice too or if he’s into salient gossip or bot
h. Before I can respond, his car tires spin in the salt on the road until they catch traction; in seconds he is gone. I fortify myself for the walk across the lawn just as my mother reappears with another box and tosses it on the pile.

  “Mom!” The ferocity of my tone startles us both and she peers in between the trees to make out my approaching form.

  “Francis?” She sounds wholly confused.

  Ugh.

  When she sees me, my mother huffs. I reach her and we stand in silence, like insurance claim adjusters walking through the scene of a fire.

  “It’s time” is all she says. And then I understand.

  We remain still and survey her handiwork. “Does he know?”

  My mother shrugs. “He’s about to.”

  I don’t understand why today is the day until I do, until it courses through my arteries to the point where even my toes understand and it starts its return trip to my heart. “It’s him or me, isn’t it? That’s the choice he gave you.”

  “That’s between your father and me.”

  That’s a yes. This is a bed my father has made and yet I’m filled with sudden regret that he has to lie in it. Like it’s somehow all my fault, and, I guess, on some very real level it is. It’s sad. A man’s life reduced to possessions, to boxes of things strewn across the front lawn of the house he, until this very moment, called home. If my mother made a different choice, the things in the boxes could just as easily be mine. Either way, our family has already forever changed. Naomi and Kenny have left to start their own lives and my mother and I now face life as a twosome. I’m overcome with desire to know exactly when the last moment was that the five of us were under this roof. Whatever the occasion, it was the finite end to something concrete. Something nuclear, something compound. We are divided, individual atoms now, and while atoms cannot be destroyed, they can certainly be scattered. Just as my father’s things are spread out across the ground.

  I place my hands on my mother’s shoulders; they are bonier than I might have imagined. “Are you sure? Are you sure about”—I don’t know what to call the mess around us—“this.”

  “I’m sure.”

  There are other ways, I want to tell her. This feels awfully hard to walk back. “I could help you carry everything back into the house. Before he gets home. Scott’s parents would let me stay with them. Until this blows over. Or maybe I could crash with Kenny.”

  “It’s already over, Francis.”

  I shove my hands into my pockets, wondering if my gloves are still sitting on the seat in Scott’s car. The crack of a twig makes us both look to the tree line, but not even a raccoon emerges from the darkness. “My name is James.”

  My mother drops her head. “You’re taking his side.”

  “I’m not.”

  “James.” She looks at the boxes as if she’s counting them, as if to double-check that she got them all.

  “If you’re doing this for me, Mom, I want you to see me. To see who I am. Francis doesn’t really exist.”

  “He does to me.”

  “Well, maybe you can say hello to him for me.” We stand in frosty silence, but I can’t let it go. “I’m leaving here too, you know. Kenny’s gone, Naomi’s gone, it’s my turn next. One more year. And you will be here. Alone. Let me go. I’ll figure it out.” I pick up one of the boxes as if I’m going to bring it back into the house myself. “You shouldn’t choose me.”

  My mother looks up, perhaps to wish on the evening’s first star. As if on cue, the clouds part just enough for Orion’s belt to shine through. “I already did.”

  I don’t know how to reply, not really, so eventually I just put the box down and say, “It’s cold.” I feel badly about my outburst, the stark dose of reality. I trace the box tops near me with my fingers and think of how to soften what I’ve just said. I make a silent vow.

  I will always choose you too.

  I already know it’s one of those promises that sounds easy to keep when you’re young and don’t yet know how long life can be. My mother has been a constant for just about every day I can think of. The rational part of me knows that it won’t always be that way, but there’s another not insignificant part that thinks, How could it not?

  I pull my hand out of my pocket and take hers in it. My entire life my mother has radiated warmth. To the touch, with a smile, with her time and attention, by things she made in the kitchen. But standing here in December among the bulk of my father’s things, a perverse Christmas if ever there was, for the first time I can remember her touch feels cold as ice.

  ◆ TWENTY-SEVEN ◆

  I pull the rental car down the driveway and find a spot in the far corner of the parking lot, away from the building that looks like an enormous ranch-style house with oddly placed windows and sliding glass doors that I’m convinced would be welded shut if it weren’t for some overriding fire code. In front of my windshield is an ugly, shrinking mountain of slush and grime—a winter’s worth of plowed snowfall. The trees are bare, rigid skeletons in formation in front of a soft blue sky. It doesn’t look a damn thing like the brochure my siblings and I were shown, which offered lusher, greener photos taken at the height of summer. I don’t remember how we found this place. I say “we,” but this was, of course, Naomi’s work—the only one of us able to function while the rest of us were in denial (or feigning indifference). The cars around me are as nondescript and unremarkable as the building, cars they give away on syndicated game shows, Buick Skylarks and Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais.

  Sadly, no one here is winning, on a game show or otherwise.

  I always felt it was sexist that it fell on Naomi’s shoulders to handle all of this at the time, but, truthfully, Kenny was ill equipped and, on top of everything, had two young kids. Me, I lived in the city. There’s no place like this where I lived, at least not one we could afford. And my father would have been unhappy and confused with the noise of New York, plucked from the quiet of upstate only to be confronted with screaming sirens and the endless mental jackhammering; it’s enough to drive even those of us in our right minds insane. Besides, I was persona non grata to him. Had been for many years.

  I sit in the car, stretching and contorting my legs until I hear a few unsettling pops. It would be more productive to stand and stretch, but I like the sanctuary, the security, that the car’s interior provides. I feel invisible, despite being surrounded by windows, a false confidence that is not uncommon based on the number of nose-pickers I’ve witnessed on this trip. I rotate my feet in circles, and when I get bored of that I flex my calves. I stretch my neck by looking over at the entrance, only to see someone who looks vaguely like Naomi exit the building, and I slouch in my seat to hide. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might run into family while here, and what I would say if I did. Fortunately, it’s not Naomi. She would never wear such a hideous coat.

  When I enter the building, I’m confronted with a whiff of depression and sadness, and of the meat of bodies stored in heat instead of refrigeration. The smell is poorly masked with some sort of citrus freshener meant to make it all okay, but somehow makes it worse, slapping a happy face on grimaces of tortured pain. It’s the smell of animal shelters (although not as pronounced), the faces here, too, hoping to be sprung with each arriving visitor but too broken to yelp and bark.

  “James Smale,” I say to a woman at the front desk, announcing both my name and the name of my father.

  She doesn’t even look up. “Room 124,” she says, with some sort of French Caribbean accent.

  His room number is the same as that of my creative writing classroom in high school. The irony. Room 124. The room that set my brain free is now the very one trapping his. “I can go back?” Surely they don’t just let people in off the streets. She finally pays me a glance and holds it a second longer than would be polite before nodding me through. I guess I don’t look dangerous, just neglectful. Which is probably true of all visi
tors here.

  I walk down the hall and smile at everyone I pass. A woman sitting in the hall in a wheelchair. She smiles back, all gums and no teeth. An older gentleman with dark lesions on his bald scalp propping himself up with a walker. A man in nurse’s scrubs carrying a mop; he nods back at me, both of us unsure who has the sadder task.

  I find the number 124 on the wall and trace my fingers over the letters of my name on the nameplate underneath as if I’m blind and reading Braille. I can almost feel Annie Sullivan spelling ASL letters into my hand: F-A-T-H-E-R. But I don’t know ASL, so maybe she’s spelling something else.

  The door is open. I take a deep breath and step inside.

  “Hi, Dad,” I whisper. I fight with the one annoying Demi Moore–style tear that always forms in the corner of my eye when I visit.

  There is, of course, no response.

  His eyes are open and he stares vacantly at Oprah on the television set on the dresser. I watch him for a while, before turning my attention to the TV. The episode seems to have something to do with a week in the life of a troubled family. I can’t imagine what their troubles are, but I doubt like hell they come close to equaling ours.

  Something looks different about my father. Maybe it’s just that he’s older than he was when I saw him last, two Christmases ago. Before I sold my book. Before I met Jackie. Before Frank Latimer. Back when I was somebody else.

  His hair is white where it used to be silver, but it’s more than that. Someone’s parting it on the other side. His face is sullen, sunken, vacant; I didn’t know skin could look gray. I turn away, it’s painful to see, and don’t look back until the show goes to commercial, then I pull up a chair beside him and sit down.

  “It’s James, Dad.” He doesn’t respond to that, so I say “Jimmy,” the name he often pushed in my mother’s face.