by Dan Chaon
“Well,” Troy said, and he sat there, puzzling, trying to find some coherence in what Jonah had said. “I guess I just don’t get it, Jonah. I mean, I don’t even understand what you’re doing here. You didn’t even try to defend yourself or explain yourself, and I guess that troubles me. Even if you were trying to kidnap Loomis, which I don’t think you were, why didn’t you just run away when you got caught? You just sat there with Loomis and those two people and waited for the police to come. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
And Jonah had only shrugged. “I was depressed,” he said. “I really didn’t intend . . .” he said, and then he stopped as if checking himself. “I don’t know what I intended, actually. It was just that—I didn’t have a lot of energy left.” He looked down at the table for a moment.
“You know,” he said. “I don’t really think I can explain myself to you, Troy. I’m sorry.”
——
Perhaps that should have been enough. Does it matter that he’ll never know what really happened?
He’s not sure—but he nevertheless has found himself going over the small mysteries of his life—following rumors he hears from time to time about Carla’s whereabouts, talking to detectives in Vegas and Lake Tahoe, sorting through the little scraps of information he has gathered about his biological family. It’s become a kind of hobby, trying to put things together, these empty blocks in his life like squares in a crossword that he can’t complete.
They keep him occupied, these projects. They are the sort of things that keep him up late at night—“worries,” Loomis calls them, but Troy finds it interesting, and he’s even had some successes over the years. He knows, for example, a little bit of the truth of his biological family. He has seen the grave in Little Bow, South Dakota, where Joseph Doyle was buried, and he has read the obituaries and death certificates. He has a copy of the article from the Little Bow News: “Boy Attacked by Family Dog,” which he had taken along with him the last time he’d visited Jonah in jail.
They had maintained a cordial if distant relationship up until then. Mostly, Jonah would send him short, oddly formal letters, usually talking about the books that he was reading. He had gotten a job in the prison library and seemed very pleased about it. “I’m in the process of really learning a lot about myself,” he had written, and he signed his letters: “All the Best to You and Yours.”
But when Troy had shown him the Xerox of the article from the Little Bow newspaper, he had grown silent for a long time. He turned his hands over, palms up, and stared at Troy.
“I think I told you about that once,” he said, coldly.
“You did?” Troy said. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s not something I really want to talk about,” Jonah said, and a few days later Troy had received a short letter in the mail.
“I’d like to take some time away from our relationship,” Jonah had written.
——
It has been almost four years since that last letter, and after Loomis has disappeared into his room, Troy sits for a while in his easy chair in front of the television with the sound muted, turning the Christmas card over in his hands. The return address is printed on the back in Jonah’s tiny, neat cursive: 2210 Hickory Street, Kingston, Jamaica, which seems as if it could be a joke. Troy had been a big Bob Marley fan, back in the day; Troy and Carla and Ray used to fantasize about living in Jamaica. But it seems to be serious. He turns the card over, and there is a Jamaican postmark over a Jamaican stamp.
And when he opens the letter he sees that it’s not a Christmas card after all. It’s just an ordinary card, a photo of a gnarled tree and a beach and a sunset—a scene from Jamaica, he guesses—and when he opens it he finds an old Polaroid: a picture of him and Loomis from years ago, the two of them standing in the backyard, Troy bent down on his haunches with Little Man beside him, his arm thrown around his father’s shoulder. Loomis looks to be about five, and though the color has washed out a little, though there are some smudges along the edges, the two of them look brilliantly happy. He turns the photo over, then looks at the small block of carefully inked letters in the center of the card.
Dear Troy,
I have settled here in Jamaica for a while, perhaps permanently. I am doing graduate work at University in Information Science though I also am seriously considering the possibility of pursuing Medicine.
I found this photo while cleaning out some old files and notes and thought that you should have it back. I have changed a lot over the years but I am still not very good about saving pictures.
I hope you are well.
My Best to You and Yours,
Jonah
He sits there for a while, reading it over a few times, aware of a vague discouragement settling over him. What had he been expecting, after all? Some kind of confession? An explanation? A reconciliation? No, he thinks, and it occurs to him that all Jonah had wanted was evidence that his unhappy life wasn’t his own fault—If he’d had a different mother. If he’d grown up in a different place—some kind of proof that he was unlucky, which was not what Troy could give him.
Still, despite everything, Troy can’t help but feel that he’s luckier than Jonah understands. I’m a lucky man, he would tell Jonah.
Lucky. He was a man who’d almost lost the person he loved most in the world, but he got another chance. The most amazing thing in the world. Don’t worry about me, he wants to tell Loomis. I got you back. The best thing that could ever happen to me has already happened.
36
March 18, 1971
When the second baby comes, Nora is better prepared. She is in a hospital in Chicago, and no one is planning to take her baby away. She is safe. The doctor is a gentle, balding man who wears a clownish bow tie and calls her “Mrs. Gray.” She has a house, and even a little room where they will put the new arrival, the crib they assembled together a few weeks ago, the tiny blankets and stuffed animals and rubber-nippled bottles lined up on a shelf. She isn’t alone. Gary is sitting outside in the waiting room, nervously smiling at the mounted television, and even though he isn’t the biological father, he will protect her because he loves her.
This is almost the way it is supposed to be.
——
Through most of her pregnancy she has been able to focus her thoughts on this new baby; she has been able to project herself into a happy future, to slide into the brightness of it as if she herself is being born, the elements slowly unblurring like a developing photo: child, husband, house, tree, mother. She promises herself that she is capable of having a happy life. She promises this new baby that it will be fine, it will be fine, she will be careful. She will steer their lives as neatly as she can.
But once the contractions start, she finds herself losing hold of the path that she has been trying to follow. It seems that she is shrinking: her fingers growing shorter, pulling back into her knuckles like a turtle’s head into its shell; her hands withdrawing into her wrists, her wrists withdrawing into her shoulders, her entire body slowly gathering itself toward a central point. A shimmering nurse orbits along her line of sight, and she squeezes her eyes shut, pulling a stream of breath through her teeth. A force gathers at her middle and grips.
She had thought that she didn’t remember anything about that first birth, but she remembers these pains clearly. Hard to believe they’d ever left her, and for a moment she is back in that hospital, back in the Mrs. Glass House, giving birth to a baby she will never see. I’ve changed my mind, she thinks. She remembers whispering it, I’ve changed my mind, I’ve changed my mind, pressing her head from side to side against her pillow, even as they wait at the edge of the room to take her child away.
She is crying a little, and the nurse’s hand appears above her face to run a cloth across her forehead and eyes.
——
There is still a little space between the contractions. They are far enough apart that she can cling, briefly, to the single line that she’s been following: the future, the new
baby, the house, the tree. But it’s hard to stay on track. Even as she dozes fitfully, even as the nurse’s hand touches her wrist, adjusts a tube.
It’s hard to believe that this is how it’s done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident or design, the microscopic pieces of ourselves borne by fluids and blood and growing into a tiny kingdom of cells inside someone else’s body. It seems so difficult to become alive. So improbable.
Something cold is pressed between her lips, and her mouth works soundlessly. How can it be possible? she wonders. How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face, the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments, each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives, shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.
For a moment, she can feel it. She can sense herself dividing, multiplying, splitting into particles. She can feel the baby inside her, and the absence of the baby. She can sense the child that she had given away, lingering curiously over her, even as its physical body sleeps dreamlessly in a warm bed, in a pretty house at the edge of the sea. She thinks again of that house in the Winslow Homer painting, that landscape that had struck her so suddenly when she’d seen it: Oh, that’s where my baby lives, she thought.
The child would be four years old now, almost five, and in the second before the next contraction she walks up the path toward that house. Wayne Hill is sitting in the grass with their child—a girl? No, a boy. A sturdy little guy with dark hair and Wayne’s blue eyes, who waves when he sees her. Wayne and their son are sitting there eating Popsicles, and Wayne grins playfully, his mouth blue from the food coloring. He’s wearing his navy uniform, and she lifts her hand, swinging her knapsack full of books. She works part-time in a small library. She takes courses at the college when they can afford it. But they are happy, and he sometimes tells her how grateful he was that she trusted him. He tells his buddies about the day he’d rescued her from the Mrs. Glass House, how brave she’d been, in the middle of a snowstorm, five months pregnant and climbing over the fence where his car was waiting.
——
And then her body clenches again, and for some reason she finds herself thinking of a memory from her childhood. That balloon, she thinks, squeezing her eyes shut. That yellow balloon her father had bought her at the fair when she was six. Babygirl, he said, this is for you, because you’re special, and he tied the string around her wrist. She had never seen a helium balloon before, had never known that something could float like that, like magic.
She was standing in the yard when the knot around her wrist had unloosened. She remembers it clearly—the balloon, unmoored, lifting up. She’d clutched for the string but missed, and it kept rising and rising, shrinking, listlessly disappearing into clear expanse of sky.
She couldn’t believe, back then, that things could be lost forever, that they could be irretrievable. She stood out there in the yard for most of the afternoon, shouting at the sky, commanding it, stomping her foot.
“Come back!” she called, and held her arms up, pleading. “Come back! Come back! Come back!”
She just wants a second chance, she thinks. She just wants to be able to think a moment before she takes another step into her life, to pause and trace along the edges of the people that she might become, but already they are putting a plastic mask over her face, already they are talking to her about breathing and bearing down, and she doesn’t know what she wants yet. She doesn’t know.
About the Author
Dan Chaon’s book of short stories Among the Missing was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. In addition, the collection was listed as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the American Library Association, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, Las Vegas Mercury, and Entertainment Weekly. It was also cited by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. The collection has been translated into several languages.
Chaon’s stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and have been included in The Best American Short Stories for 1996 and 2003; The Pushcart Prize for 2000, 2002, and 2003; and Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards, where his story “Big Me” was chosen as the second-prize winner. His first collection of short stories, Fitting Ends, was published by Northwestern University Press in 1996 and has been reissued by Ballantine Books (2003) in a revised edition.
Chaon lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two sons, and teaches in the creative writing program at Oberlin College, where he is the Houck Associate Professor in the Humanities.
By Dan Chaon
Among the Missing
Fitting Ends
Thanks due: Noah Lukeman, Dan Smetanka, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, Steve Lattimore, Tom Barbash, Sheri Mount, Gilly Hailparn, Marie Coolman, Martha Collins, Sylvia Watanabe, Michael Byers, John Martin, Brian Bouldrey, Peggy McNally, Scott McNulty, Heather Bentoske.
This is a work of fiction. No characters in this novel are based on real people, and I have taken some poetic license with the facts of law, history, medicine, geography, and weather. While there is, in reality, a city named Chicago, the Chicago of this novel, as well as the towns of St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, Little Bow, South Dakota, and others, exist wholly in an alternate universe of the author’s imagination.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Dan Chaon
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of chapters 3 and 9 are from “Where Is Your Mind,” a story commissioned by Stories on Stage, a live dramatic short story reading series, produced by Chicago Public Radio.
The quotation on p. 104 is from Ascent to Civilization:
The Archeology of Early Man by John Gowlett (McGraw Hill: New York, 1984).
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chaon, Dan.
You remind me of me / Dan Chaon.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3553.H277Y68 2004
813′.53—dc222003063776
eISBN: 978-0-345-47871-9
v3.0
