by Amy Hempel
“He can’t help it. The doctor said he has colic,” I said. I was making that up. I don’t know what made that baby cry so much, but I wanted to give Ty a reason.
He shook his head, then made a thick, grunting sound, turned on his heel and slammed his fist into the kitchen wall. The drywall buckled and a small pile of dust filtered to the floor. Kristen sat bolt upright on the couch, her mouth gaping. Ethan renewed his cries.
“Ty,” I said, staring at him.
His hands shook, and the one that had hit the wall was bleeding across the knuckles. A bead of sweat tricked down his face, though the house was cool and still.
“She needs to keep that kid quiet,” he said. He jerked his head, flipped his hair off his face. “I can’t sleep, didn’t you hear me?” Then he tucked his hurt hand under his arm, walked back into his bedroom, and closed the door.
Kristen and I stared at each other until she lowered her head into her hands and began to weep. My God, I thought. More crying. When do I get to be the one to cry? I held the baby to my chest, bounced on my heels until he quieted. I placed him in his car seat. I waited as long as I could before placing the car seat at Kristen’s feet.
“Kristen,” I said. She looked at me, red-eyed. “Keep him close to you. Do you understand? If he cries, take him out in the stroller for a walk. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
On the way back to work, the wings began to beat in my stomach again, but I held my breath and pinched myself on the wrists until they stopped. “Okay,” I said to myself. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
They say a mother can never have a favorite child, but I don’t know if that’s true. There is guilt in the name that springs to your lips, in the face that forms in your mind, when you hear the words “favorite child.” There is culpability. I know about words like that.
There is a balance sheet in your head of all the things you did, and didn’t do, for your children. There are debts that will never be paid. There are little things over-done, small excesses of affection, slight deficits, tiny omissions. There is the looking away from one child to watch for the other’s approach. There is the tender touch on the head. There is the slap on the cheek. There is the impatience and the frustration and the tolerance and the forgiveness, and there are the times when they are not evenly distributed. These things add up, over the years, and there will come a day when you hold yourself accountable. If you are a mother, then you know what I mean.
The sheriff’s deputy came the next day. It was Saturday. I’d gotten Kristen to take a shower and to eat some breakfast, but after that she’d fallen asleep again on the couch. I’d given Ethan a bottle and put him into his swing.
Ty was not home. He’d left the house at dusk the night before.
He’d said nothing about the hole in the wall. He’d simply pulled on his muddy boots and walked out the door, white tape wrapped tightly around his right hand.
Now, I stood at the door and looked at the deputy, a tall black man with gloom in his eyes. I’d seen him before, at the courthouse, but I didn’t know his name. He’d left his car running. A second cruiser idled in the driveway.
“Do you know where he is?” he asked.
“No.”
“You don’t have any idea?”
“No.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” he said.
“No. What is this about?”
“I need to ask him some questions.”
“About what?”
“About a snaker in Folkston,” he said. He paused for a moment, narrowed his eyes. “Fourteen stab wounds, one to the throat. Hanging on by a thread. We got another guy says your boy done it. You know anything about that?”
The wings were back, beating wildly in my stomach. I stared straight at him. “No,” I said.
The sheriff rolled his eyes, tired of mothers like me. He handed me a card. “Your boy comes back, you have him call me,” he said. “A heap of trouble only gets bigger you don’t face it. You know what I’m saying, mama? You have your boy call me.”
Behind me, in the living room, Ethan began to cry. The deputy stretched his neck to see behind me. “That your grandbaby?” he said. “Your boy the daddy?”
“My daughter’s,” I said.
He turned away, looked out over the yard, where the smoke from the swamp hung thick. “We ever gonna get this smoke cleared out?” he said. “Them fires ever gonna stop burning?” Something crackled through the radio at his hip, and he looked at me once more before walking to his car.
“You have him call me,” he said.
Before dawn, I woke to Ethan’s cries and went to him. His cheeks burned with fever. I fixed a bottle and poured a dose of Motrin in with the formula. I sat at the kitchen table with Ethan. His hair had begun to come in, blond and downy, and by the glow of the moon shining through the kitchen window, his small head was crowned with light. I stroked it. Kristen slept. Ty had not yet returned. The deputy had called twice the day before, asking if I’d seen him.
The house was silent. We sat together, Ethan and I, until the bottle was empty and his skin had begun to cool. His cheek rested against my breast through my nightgown, and he studied my face, silently, seriously, his small fingers closed around the thumb of my right hand. Then the corners of his mouth twitched into something like a smile.
I heard Ty’s truck pull into the yard. He walked into the kitchen and flipped on the light before realizing I was there. I blinked in the sudden brightness, and Ethan flinched.
“Sorry,” Ty said. He left the light on. His left eye was swollen shut. He wore no shirt, but his pants were stiff with something that could have been mud, could have been blood. A man’s smell came to me from across the kitchen, which always surprised me. Ty had grown up so fast. Ethan began to cry.
“Oh, Jesus, here we go,” Ty said.
I stood up, held Ethan up to my shoulder, started pacing.
“Well, if you hadn’t turned the light on,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“We got anything to eat?” he said.
“Where have you been?”
“Whigham.”
“You look like you been in the swamp.”
“That too.”
“What happened to your face?”
His hand reached up, touched the swelling around his eye. Then he turned away. “I fell on a stump,” he said. “Dumbest thing. I just fell right over and landed on a cypress stump. We got anything to eat?”
Ethan screamed. My arms ached from holding him, and I had an impulse to fling him down, take Ty in my arms instead, rock him on my shoulder and let him sleep. Instead, I called him a liar.
“Bullshit,” I said. “You been in a fight.”
Ty opened the refrigerator, leaned in. “I told you I fell.”
“Deputy came, Ty.”
He stood up straight, closed the refrigerator, looked around the kitchen.
“Where the fuck is Kristen?” he said. “Why are you always the one taking care of that baby?”
“Did you hear what I said? Deputy came.”
His chin was up, but his face was pale, and as he reached for a bag of potato chips on the counter, his hand shook.
“He was looking for you.”
“So?”
“Said a guy’s been stabbed. He’s in the hospital. Half dead.”
“So?”
He wouldn’t look at me.
“So, they think you did it.”
He snorted, looked out the kitchen window, to where the first fingers of dawn had begun to reach through the limbs of the oaks. Ethan was relentless, his volume intensifying. I switched shoulders, bounced up and down, patted him on the back.
“Did you?”
Ty stared at the wall, chewing potato chips, but a red flush had begun to creep up from his neck into his face, and when he finally turned to look at me his eyes were wet, and wide, and bright green.
And that was all I needed, and then I knew. The thing in my stomach exploded.
“If he di
es, you’ll be wanted for murder,” I said.
Ethan’s cry stretched itself thin and then stopped, and for a moment the kitchen was silent as his lungs emptied themselves and he contracted to draw another breath. Ty blinked.
“Oh, Jesus, Mama,” he said, his voice soft. “Ain’t no way he’s gonna live.”
The Okefenokee Swamp sprawls through the southeastern corner of the state of Georgia. Our town, Folkston, is to the east, and on the other side, across twenty-five miles of thick pinelands and nearly impenetrable marsh, trails the Suwannee River, which you could canoe as far as Fargo before picking up a ride on 94. If you made it as far as Valdosta, you could go on to Thomasville, and then drop down to Tallahassee, which is an easy place to pick up a lift on I-10 West and ride it as far as you can go. You could even get within striking distance of Mexico.
But first, if you know the land, if you’re good with a gun, if you’re young and strong and scared, you can lay low in the swamp for weeks, months if necessary.
We took every piece of food in the kitchen and flung it into plastic bags. We packed water, matches, bug spray, hand tools. We found a tent, a lantern, a rusted camp stove. Ty loaded his rifle. We moved quickly, not speaking, and when the phone rang we ignored it and went outside to load the canoe onto the roof of my car. Through all this, Kristen slept.
I drove fast as the sun rose, toward the smoke, until we could see the soft glow of the fire in the distance. Ty sat in the passenger seat. Ethan, quiet at last, rode in his car seat behind us.
“Go in my wallet,” I said to Ty. “Take whatever cash is there, and take the credit card.”
He did as I said.
“Don’t go into the preserve,” he said. “There’s a guard. Keep driving straight, and I’ll show you where to pull over.”
The smoke was thicker than I’d ever seen it, and it was becoming difficult to breathe. “Pray for rain,” I said.
“I don’t pray for nothing,” he said.
He lit a cigarette, drummed his fingers on his knees.
“Down there,” Ty said, pointing to a dirt lane off the road.
I pulled the car in until it was no longer visible from the road. Through the brush to our left, the land receded sharply into marsh, the still, silvery water just visible between thick reeds. When I closed the car door, something heavy moved in the brush and splashed into the water.
“You can skirt the fire?” I said. “You’re sure?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know where I’m going. Fire’s in the north—you can see it from here. I go south, I’m OK. And ain’t nobody gonna come into it looking.”
He pulled the canoe off the top of the car and dragged it through the palmettos until the nose was in the water. Then he came back to the car.
“I’ll call,” he said.
“No,” I said. “They’ll find out.”
The smoke stung my eyes and left a charred taste in my mouth.
“You go now,” I said. “The only way out of it is through it.”
He hesitated, then ducked his head and leaned into me. I put my arms around his back, drew him to me. His body was thin and taut, and his chest rose and fell against mine. When he pulled away I felt the separation of our bodies as clearly and as physically as I had on the day he was born.
Still strapped in the back of the car, Ethan began to cry.
“Well,” Ty said. “I guess you better get him out of the smoke.”
He stepped into the canoe and crouched down to clear the low-hanging branch of a cypress tree. I waited until he was completely out of sight, until the smoldering swamp had swallowed my son whole, and then I climbed behind the wheel of the car, and Ethan and I, we cried until the sun had cleared the tops of the tallest pines.
The deputy was at my house with three other cops when I got home. He said the boy died. I told him I didn’t know anything. He looked at my red eyes and at the baby in my arms, shook his head, and walked away.
And now we are three again, and we are doing the best we can. Kristen is better. She is back at work at AutoZone. Ethan goes to day care, and when we all come home at night we cook dinner together and watch reruns of Judge Judy, and most days the only one crying in the house is me, but I do it alone, after dark, where nobody has to see.
I know Kristen will do very little with her life. She will do even less than me, and for this, I must forgive her. She will raise Ethan, with a great deal of help from me and from the Charlton County public school system. She will be an adequate but never exemplary employee. She will always be forty pounds overweight. She will be a chain smoker. She will complain about things over which she has no control. It is all she was meant to do. It is all that is within her power.
I don’t look for foxfire any more. I stay away from the swamp, even now that it’s winter and the fires have gone out and the air is crisp and clear and you could see for miles in the swamp, if you wanted to, out across the open spaces, toward the pine stands and the tupelo and the titi shrubs. But I don’t look.
Laura Lee Smith lives in St. Augustine, Florida. Her fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Bayou, and other journals and received the 2006 Snake Nation Press prize for short fiction. She teaches creative writing at Flagler College and works as an advertising copywriter.
Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman” is about a cop who makes a decision to let his criminal brother escape. The song was on my mind when I started playing with this character, a lonely mother of two disappointing children. I knew that the introduction of a noisy, sickly baby could easily upset the tenuous balance of this small dysfunctional family. The decision to set the story in the Okefenokee came later, when I went back to the swamp after many years and was reminded of its beauty and mystery. And the final element, the ever-present fires, came from a period in 2008 when it seemed that all of north Florida and south Georgia was ablaze—acres and acres succumbed to wildfires, and the smoke hung everywhere. I fought hard against this story becoming too fatalistic, too dark. But in the end, it is what it is, and the story took its own turns. The hopelessness of the situation could not be resolved. I let it go.
Brad Watson
VISITATION
(from The New Yorker)
Loomis had never believed that line about the quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships. Then one day he’d decided that he should marry, have a child, and he told himself that if one was open-minded these things could lead to a kind of contentment, if not to exuberant happiness. That’s why Loomis was in the fix he was in now.
Ever since he and his wife had separated and she had moved with their son to Southern California, he’d flown out every three weeks from Mobile to visit the boy. He was living the very nightmare he’d tried not to imagine when deciding to marry and have a child: that it wouldn’t work out, they would split up, and he would be forced to spend long weekends in a motel, taking his son to faux-upscale chain restaurants, cineplexes, and amusement parks.
He usually visited for three to five days and stayed at the same motel, an old motor court that had been bought and remodelled by one of the big franchises. At first the place wasn’t so bad. The Continental breakfast included fresh fruit and little boxes of name-brand cereals and batter with which you could make your own waffles on a double waffle iron right there in the lobby. The syrup came in small plastic containers from which you pulled back a foil lid and voilà, it was a pretty good waffle. There was juice and decent coffee. Still, of course, it was depressing, a bleak place in which to do one’s part in raising a child. With its courtyard surrou
nded by two stories of identical rooms, and excepting the lack of guard towers and the presence of a swimming pool, it followed the same architectural model as a prison.
But Loomis’s son liked it, so they continued to stay there, even though Loomis would rather have moved on to a better place.
He arrived in San Diego for his April visit, picked up the rental car, and drove north on I-5. Traffic wasn’t bad except where it always was, between Del Mar and Carlsbad. Of course, it was never “good.” Their motel sat right next to the 5, and the roar and rush of it never stopped. You could step out onto the balcony at three in the morning and it’d be just as roaring and rushing with traffic as it had been six hours before.
This was to be one of his briefer visits. He’d been to a job interview the day before, Thursday, and had another one on Tuesday. He wanted to make the most of the weekend, which meant doing very little besides just being with his son. Although he wasn’t very good at doing that. Generally, he sought distractions from his ineptitude as a father. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of bourbon, and tucked it into his travel bag before driving up the hill to the house where his wife and son lived. The house was owned by a retired Marine friend of his wife’s family. His wife and son lived rent-free in the basement apartment.
When Loomis arrived, the ex-Marine was on his hands and knees in the flower bed, pulling weeds. He glared sideways at Loomis for a moment and muttered something, his face a mask of disgust. He was a widower who clearly hated Loomis and refused to speak to him. Loomis was unsettled that someone he’d never even been introduced to could hate him so much.
His son came to the door of the apartment by himself, as usual. Loomis peered past the boy into the little apartment, which was bright and sunny for a basement (only in California, he thought). But there was no sign of his estranged wife. She had conspired with some part of her nature to become invisible. Loomis hadn’t laid eyes on her in nearly a year. She called out from somewhere in another room, “Bye! I love you! See you on Monday!”
