by Dan Chaon
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning, but he felt too worked up to return to his trailer, to sleep. He drove through the streets, and the October weather sent leaves raining down over him, swirling in the wind. He sat on the hood of his car outside Troy’s house, watching as a Styrofoam cup ticked hollowly down the street, clop, clop, clop. Ghostly horse’s hooves.
The house itself was dark, and the trees swayed back and forth in the autumn air, whispering. Troy, his brother, was asleep. Troy was sad and lonely also, but unlike Jonah he was a real person. He slept, dreaming of his solid life. His wife, his son. His job.
As for Jonah, he passed his flashlight through the tangled, gray-brown grass of Troy’s backyard. Here was a plastic army man, kneeling, holding a bazooka. Here was a tree with a frayed rope hanging from a branch, like the memory of a noose. Here was a large stone in the middle of a flower bed, and a little rubber ball, bright orange. He felt like an archaeologist of Troy. If he studied long enough, he could take each of these small details and create something whole.
Why couldn’t he do that for himself? Compared to most people, he barely existed—he was nothing, just a collection of random bits of history and memory he carried along, a series of shifting moods. A series of lies that he was forced to follow. It made him shudder: What was real, in his memory? He could picture his grandfather’s stockinged feet, twitching as the old man reclined on the yellowed sheets, watching television. He saw his mother leaning over him, flashlight in her hands, whispering, her voice slurred with drugs. He saw the baby, Henry, staring up at him, eyes utterly empty. He could picture the dog, Elizabeth, nudging her muzzle against his chest. But none of it fit together.
——
When he turned at last into the gravel roadways of Camelot Court, it was almost four, and he still felt tense and unnerved. He drove slowly. The tires crunched steadily against the gravel, and shadows emerged into his headlights as he approached, trembling echoes of dry weeds and branches and electrical poles, pinned suddenly in the middle of the road and then drawing back as he approached. A single leaf came twisting down and planted itself on the windshield in front of his face, like the palm of a hand pressed against the glass.
It startled him, and he put his foot on the brake abruptly. Up ahead, where the black shapes of a row of trailers were huddled, he could see a pair of red glowing spots moving toward him from out of the shadows. Eyes, reflecting his headlights. He could feel his heart freezing. Slowly, the figure of a dog slid out of the darkness into the glare of his headlights, sidling cautiously toward him, barking, its sharp-toothed mouth opening and closing against the air.
The sight of it made him panic. It was almost instinctual to press on the accelerator, as hard as he could. He could feel a scuttling, as if small insects were crawling over his skin. The dog held its ground for a moment, in a kind of wrestler stance, chest puffed out, head erect. At the last second, it tried to dodge away, but Jonah swerved as well.
There was a single scream, an exclamation of shrill, childish pain, and a soft thump as his tire passed over the body. He slammed on the brakes, then, his mouth quivering, threw the car into reverse, the tires spinning in the gravel, fishtailing. But his aim was surprisingly good. The back tire connected with the head, and he could feel the skull and snout collapse under the weight of the car, a small wet crunch.
He leaned his forehead on the steering wheel, not weeping but making a soft, deep, hitching sound in his throat that was almost the same thing. It took him a moment to calm himself, to feel his thoughts gathering out of the haze. And then to realize what he’d done, to remember the dog’s name. He sat there silently, staring at the illuminated gravel road in front of him, watching as the wind forced a few ragged leaves and scraps of paper around and around in a solemn dancing ring.
19
July 27, 1974
Nora wakes in the middle of the night and Jonah is leaning over her, staring.
It takes her a second to even register where she is. She has been sleeping soundly, and at first is only aware of a vague unease. In her dream she is in a room in Mrs. Glass House, and she can see the single tree through the window, lit by moonlight. A shadow moves below—something heavy, like the shape of a desk or a dresser, but it’s moving, sliding wetly along the floor like a snail would. And then she’s aware, little by little, of the humid, sour smell of expelled breath against her face. Her eyes flutter open and his face is looming above her, his large unblinking eyes, his thin, almost skeletal head, like the head of a baby bird. It is almost a reflex to strike out; she doesn’t even think. Her hand swings up and connects with the side of his face, knocking him onto the floor.
“Jesus!” she screams, and Gary, asleep beside her, flails his arms and legs wildly.
“What!” he shouts. “What!” swiveling his head in disoriented panic.
“Oh, my God,” she says. The blow has knocked Jonah nearly across the room, and he is crumpled on the floor, motionless. “I hit him,” she says to Gary, who is still blinking, dazed. “I was having a nightmare and I hit him.”
She stands there, naked, in a daze herself, staring blankly at the small, shadowy, huddled form of the child. She takes a step, and then another, very slowly, toward it, and then she sees that it is beginning to stir. The child makes the small, throat-clearing noises that are his version of crying—little hitching grunts, an uncertain, somewhat froggy sound. Jonah hasn’t wept since he was an infant, and now, at three, he rarely even makes his crying noises, even when he’s hurt. It is one of the many things she finds uncanny, frightening, about him.
“Jonah,” she says, and at last she brings herself to kneel beside him, to turn him over and put her arms around him.
“You hit me,” Jonah says—not even accusingly, but in a soft, almost matter-of-fact voice, and Nora shudders. The side of his face is already swelling—he should be heaving with sobs.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and rocks him a little. “I didn’t mean to. You scared me.”
And Jonah looks at her hard, his eyes wide and expectant. “I scared you,” he repeats. “Why?”
“I didn’t know it was you,” she whispers. “I thought it was . . . something else.” And Gary stands over them, watching as she slowly brushes Jonah’s fine, weightless blond hair.
“Geez,” Gary says. “You really socked him. What’d you do that for? The poor kid’s going to have a black eye.” She herself has begun to cry a little, and she looks up at him, a tear sliding along the bridge of her nose. She really didn’t mean to hit him like that, she tells herself, so hard that she’d knocked him across the room. Not on purpose.
——
He won’t leave her alone, that’s part of the problem. He follows her everywhere, watching everything she does, staring silently and expectantly, focused, deeply fascinated by whatever mundane task she’s performing—washing dishes, vacuuming, reading a magazine or a book. Now that he can climb out of his crib, it’s impossible to get away from him, to get a moment’s privacy. He won’t watch television unless she sits there and watches it with him; he won’t play with his toys unless he can bring them right under her feet, crawling his little plastic cars up her leg, walking his stuffed animals in a circle around her. She sits at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, feeling the soft taps as Jonah crouches below her, making the toys dance over her shoes.
He won’t even take a nap. She has spanked him, over and over, for getting up when he’s supposed to be sleeping, but he can’t be persuaded. He will sneak out of bed, and after a short period of delicious aloneness, she will begin to sense him. He will be peering around the edge of the door frame, spying on her, or hidden somewhere—under a chair, or in a closet with the door open just enough that he can see.
“I’ve never seen a little boy who loves his mommy so much!” the neighbor, Arlene, had said. Arlene was a homely young housewife of about Nora’s age, almost always in curlers, with a two-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, and pregnant with another. For a while af
ter Arlene had moved in, she would come over to drink coffee with Nora, to exchange innocuous and boring conversation. But Jonah wouldn’t play with Arlene’s children, and Nora could see that Arlene was as unnerved by Jonah as she was, despite her polite praise of Jonah’s quiet vigilance. “He just can’t take his eyes off you,” Arlene said, giving a pinched smile that said What’s wrong with your child? He’s abnormal. And after a short period of shallow friendship, Arlene had found another mother down the block whom she liked better.
In the last few months, Nora has been trying more and more determined measures. The bedroom doors have push buttons that lock from the inside, rather than the out, and the doors open inward, so it isn’t possible to wedge a chair against the doorknob to hold him in. One day, when it was sunny, she put him in the yard, and locked the door so he couldn’t get back in. “Just play out there for a while,” she had said. “Play with your toys in the grass.” But he had only stood by the door, rattling the knob for a while, before he had begun to call to her. “Let me in! Mom! I can’t get in!” Yelling loud enough that it threatened to bring Arlene or one of the other neighbors running to his rescue. Once, not long after that, she had locked herself in the bedroom. He had stood at the door for a long while, knocking and knocking. And then, after what seemed only a moment’s silence, there had been a crash in the kitchen, the sound of shattering glass, and the steady “huh-huh-huh” of Jonah making his crying sound. She had to come out then, to find that he’d managed, somehow, to climb up on the counter and bring down an entire shelf of knickknacks, beloved little things she’d saved over the years. Almost all of them destroyed.
——
She’d beaten him then. She’d turned him over her knee and brought one of Gary Gray’s belts down on his buttocks, over and over, until she was afraid she’d leave marks on him. But the effect of this beating actually made things worse. For the next few days, and in fact for over a week, Jonah apologized at regular intervals. He would say, “I’m sorry I broke it, Mom. I’m sorry I broke it. I’m sorry I broke it.” Apologizing sometimes two or three times in an hour. Finally, her nerves on edge, she had slapped him in the mouth.
“Stop apologizing!” she had cried. “I know you’re sorry. Now stop! Stop! I can’t stand it anymore.”
She can’t help thinking that Jonah is her punishment. That Jonah is what she deserves, a girl who gave her own baby away without even looking at it, who blithely relinquished a piece of herself, a part of her own body. This is her lost baby’s revenge, this constant observation—as if Jonah knows by some instinct that she is untrustworthy, that she is an abandoner.
And she can’t help but feel that Jonah is crafty beyond his years—calculating, even, for when Gary Gray comes home at night from work, he is much calmer. Much more like a normal toddler. He doesn’t watch her in the same way, so that when she complains to Gary about her difficulties, Jonah shows no signs of his obsessive watching and following.
“He seems all right to me,” Gary says. And then he looks at her steadily. “What about you?” he says. “Are you okay, honey?”
Even during the period when Jonah was apologizing over and over, Gary didn’t see anything strange about it. “God!” he said, and laughed. “Poor kid! He’s really conscientious, isn’t he?”
——
And this is another punishment the world is meting out. In the beginning, when they’d first met and she was pregnant, Gary Gray had wanted to be Jonah’s father. He’d offered—he’d been willing to have his name on the birth certificate, to make everything official. To marry her.
And she’d refused. She didn’t really know what she’d been thinking, except that it was the kind of falsehood, the kind of hypocrisy, that reminded her of the Mrs. Glass House. Gary was not Jonah’s father, and at the time a kind of possessiveness overcame her. She didn’t want the baby to be named “Gray.” She wanted him to be a Doyle—hers, only hers. It was this vanity that had driven her to make them write “Father Unknown” on Jonah’s birth certificate. Many times she felt that if only the child’s name were Jonah Gray, she might have saved herself, but Gary Gray didn’t ask again in the years they lived together.
“You still love that guy, huh?” Gary had said when she’d turned down his offer, and she’d only shrugged, shaking her head.
“I don’t even know his name,” she said. It was an act of bravado that she knew Gary both loved and resented.
“You’re crazy,” he would say. “Crazy, crazy girl.” And he meant this both as a criticism and as a declaration of love. The fact that she would turn him down, and yet still live with him, only made her more desirable. Elusive. Moody. A bit dangerous.
These days, she is aware that these attractions are beginning to fade, just as she is aware that her insistent ownership of her baby has faded. Jonah is not hers alone, and in fact, often it doesn’t seem possible for him to have come out of her body. His corn- or silk hair, pallid skin, his sturdy, skinny, awkwardly unchildish body—it is always clear, when she and Gary and Jonah are out together, that he is not their son. Gary, part English and part Armenian, is thickly built, dark-haired, with a prominent nose and a dark, curly beard. She has copper-colored skin and long, straight black hair, thick eyebrows, an angular face.
As they all sit in the International House of Pancakes, it seems unlikely that they belong together. Jonah rolls on the seat beside her, pressing his feet against her thigh, singing softly to his hand. An old white woman observes them sternly. It is clear that Jonah is a Caucasian child, while Nora and Gary are “ethnic.” Puerto Ricans? Arabs? Dark-skinned Jews? Nora can feel the woman trying to figure it out, her mouth pinched as she tries to decide. It reminds her of childhood, when people would observe her pink-skinned, Scotch/Irish father and her tan Sioux/German mother with distaste. But at least it was clear that she was their offspring. Jonah, on the other hand, seems like a cruel joke of science—that a man she barely remembers should have managed to implant his genes in Jonah so powerfully that her own are almost completely overshadowed. Here is another little punishment for her.
——
The morning after Jonah woke her in the middle of the night, he is much more subdued than usual, and it would almost be a blessing if she didn’t feel so guilty. The side of his cheek where she slapped him is swollen so that his eye is almost squeezed shut, and nearly half his face is black and blue. It seems as if she can see the shadowy imprint of her hand in the shape of the bruise, a Rorschach of a hand. After breakfast she fills a dish towel with ice and has him hold it against his cheek, and he does this without protest. He leans over the kitchen table and watches as the melting ice drips from the cloth and pools on the table. “You are a nice lake,” he says to the water, and gazes at her sadly when she wipes it away. But he has stopped staring at her—at least for the moment.
She would like to go somewhere, like she used to when Jonah was smaller. When he was an infant, they would take a bus to the el train, and from there they might go to a museum, or to a park along the lake, or a store that sold shells and postcards, wandering, while Gary was at work. It made her feel calmer, to lose herself in the throng of people on Michigan Avenue, to feel the city of Chicago spreading out around her, so that even if she walked along the sidewalks for years she would not be able to exhaust its possibilities.
But as Jonah has grown, it has become increasingly difficult to make such trips. He is now too heavy to comfortably carry for very long, and too big and restless for the stroller, which he will try to clamber out of while she is pushing it. And walking with him, even with his hand clasped tightly in hers, is impossible. He always dawdles and tugs and resists when she tries to hurry him along. “Come on,” she’ll say, as he crouches stubbornly to look at an ant on the sidewalk that has captured his notice. “Come on!” she’ll say, as he longs after the coins in the instrument box of a shaggy street saxophonist with frightening, filmy eyes, or strains to pick up a deflated orange balloon on the el-train platform, even as the train’s doors
are about to close. “Goddamnit, come on!” she finds herself snapping, pulling his arm sharply, and once, an elderly black man had reproached her. “Young woman, don’t pull on that child’s arm like that,” he had said, in a soft, courtly southern voice, as if he were gently scolding a child himself. “You yank on him like that you going to hurt him.” And she had blushed, she felt as if she would start crying.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and the old man had observed her sternly, his hands folded over the crook of his cane as if it were a scepter.
“You need to pray for help,” he said. “That’s all we can do. Pray for help.” And for the rest of the day, whatever small pleasures she might have gathered in downtown Chicago had been ruined by the man’s sorrowful, judgmental eyes. It had been a long time before she tried to take Jonah anywhere after that.
And now, with his face so bruised, she doesn’t dare leave the house. People will know, they will suspect, that she hit him. He might even tell on her, if some friendly stranger asks him. “Jonah,” she says, and he looks up from a new puddle of ice water to stare at her. “Don’t tell people I hit you,” she says.
“Why?” Jonah says.
“Because,” she says, “it will make me feel sad.”
“Why?” Jonah says.
“Because it was an accident,” she says. “You know that it was an accident, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he says.
“If you tell people that I hit you, I might have to go away forever,” she said. “I might die.”
And he looks at her, solemnly, his large eyes almost painful in their focused intensity. He doesn’t say anything, but she thinks he understands.
——
Why does she always end up trapped? she wonders as she peers out the window at the narrow, West Chicago street, with its rows and rows of identical, tiny one-story houses, cheaply built “starter homes” that most of the residents will also finish in. She thinks of the place where she’d grown up, the miles of flatland surrounding her; she thinks of Mrs. Glass House, with its spike-tipped fence and locked doors. And now . . . what is she? A housewife to Gary Gray, who she isn’t even married to. A prisoner to her child, who doesn’t even resemble her. She puts her hand to the glass of the window and it is cool, almost permeable.
