The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “Shoulder,” said Arturo, pointing.

  The arm that wasn’t holding the cloth to her head dangled, as though she had no shoulder at all.

  “Bet any amount of money that’s dislocated,” said Arturo. “Head, shoulder, let’s don’t touch her.”

  “Linda,” said Jack. He couldn’t stand to look at the wrongness of arm. “I’m going to call an ambulance. Then I’m going to call Sadie.”

  After a moment Linda said, “If you must, call the ambulance.”

  “For the record,” said Arturo, “I wanted to call both.”

  What record?

  “Sadie’s terrible in situations like this,” said Linda.

  “Is she?”

  “Tell her afterward, when I’m all patched up and home.”

  “You don’t think that will hurt her feelings?”

  “Tough if it does,” said Linda. “I mean, maybe. Jack, don’t call her. I know you think I spoil her, but—of course, you understand, you were basically an only child yourself. Sadie told me—what with your sisters grown and out of the house, I’m sure your parents coddled you.”

  He was thirty-six years old and had never been coddled a day in his life. Even when he went out with Linda, he paid for everything: the movie tickets, the museum admissions, the garlic soups and strong coffees at Café Pamplona.

  “All right,” said Jack.

  Arturo squatted by one of the boxes, knees apart to give his stomach room. “I called nine-one-one.” Then he pulled a newspaper-wrapped lump from a box. “Might as well, while we’re waiting.” Inside was a blue-and-white vase with twisted handles, a scowling profile painted on one side—Breton, Jack knew. He’d grown up with pottery like it, though nothing so fine as this. That old notion: a thing of beauty. Jack wanted it.

  “Tim had good taste,” said Arturo to Linda.

  “That thing,” said Linda. “I haven’t seen it in years. Plenty more like it, from what I remember.”

  The EMTs rang the bell then came with their stretcher down the corridor, three bland young people, all with lank ponytails. “What did you do, Linda?” one shouted at her. Another said, “This place is cute.”

  “It’s not cute,” said Linda. They lifted her to the stretcher.

  “It’s cute,” said Arturo, “you’re cute, it’s very cute.”

  “I’m a grown woman,” said Linda, rolling out the door.

  “For sure,” said Arturo. “And now you live in a schoolhouse, in the principal’s office, like a storybook mouse.”

  Once they’d taken her away, Arturo said to Jack, “Come on. I’ll drive you to the hospital. Where you from? You got a little accent.”

  “Upstate New York,” he said.

  Arturo had a set of keys; he locked the front door. “Oh. I thought Linda said you were British. Look at the bubblers!” he said, coming down the hall. He tried to operate one of the low water fountains with his foot.

  In his mind Jack saw first Linda’s shoulder, then the Breton vase, then all the boxes around, then Sadie. “What’s she doing with all those boxes?”

  “Unburdening herself?” said Arturo, elbowing open the Schoolhouse’s front door. “Past twenty years she’s had them in storage. When Tim died she just—packed ’em away. She’s been paying monthly ever since. Crazy. Here you go.” Arturo unlocked the passenger side of a pristine old Mercedes-Benz. Jack had imagined a piece-of-shit car, filled with old books. “It’s all her husband’s stuff. I think she thought she and the kid would move. You know he died in that house. Somehow, they got stuck. Stuck in Swampscott. Nice girl.”

  “Sadie? She is.”

  “I’m not asking you she’s a nice girl, I’m telling you: she’s a nice girl.”

  “You’ve met her.”

  “I knew her when she was a kid. Lived across from them in Swampscott. I did see her awhile, Linda, till she moved away, another thing don’t tell Sadie. Last week she—Linda—called me up to say she’s clearing out the storage, did I want to look at some of Tim’s stuff, I say sure, why not. Mostly I deal in prints, but you know: overlap. Newton-Wellesley’s up this way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know a lot,” said Arturo.

  Inside the ER, Jack was trying to orient himself when he heard what he understood, though he had never heard it before, was Linda making a long animal noise of pain: a bay, a caterwaul. It did not sound like something you could live through. Instinctively he began to run, toward the source of pain or past it. The little area where he expected to find her had been closed up with blue-gray curtains. He stood outside of it trembling, and then one medical professional drew the curtains and another stepped out, and there was Linda, forehead spangled with sweat.

  “Ah,” she said, “that’s better. They put my shoulder right. Arturo knew what he was talking about. You shouldn’t have bet him.”

  “I didn’t bet him. Jesus.”

  “They call it reducing a shoulder,” said Linda.

  Because of the head injury they wanted to keep her overnight; they wanted to keep an eye on her foot, too. She would stay in the ER till a bed was found on some distant floor.

  “A bother,” she said.

  “You’re not a bother.”

  She said, “I need to ask you something.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sadie was nine when her father died.”

  “That’s a bad age,” said Jack, trying to sound sage and empathetic.

  “They’re all bad ages,” said Linda. “Let’s not rank them. I have a friend who says, if you lose a parent early, there is part of you that stays that age forever. And of course it’s worse for Sadie. Because of the trauma. Of being there.”

  “Oh,” said Jack.

  “She saw her father die. You know that.”

  He did not, but he couldn’t say so. “Yes,” he said. Then, “I will.”

  “Will what?”

  “Look after Sadie.”

  “Not after Sadie,” said Linda. “Me. I don’t know that she could do it, worst comes to worst. Your parents have all those daughters, so I don’t feel too bad about asking. Will you?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Don’t worry too much,” said Linda, though he was already worried and planned to worry for the foreseeable future. “I have every intention of dying in my sleep.”

  Then there Sadie was, in a linen jumpsuit against the heat, billowing and flowered and wrong for her, beige and bright yellow—who would put an empire waist on a jumpsuit?—and they both loved her so dearly in it. She’d taken the afternoon to get a haircut, an old-fashioned bob when all the other hair of Greater Boston was pulled back into ponytails that day, or shorn into buzz cuts.

  “Mom!” she said. “How are you?” She went to the opposite side of the bed.

  “Furious, you want to know. I told Jack not to call you.”

  “He didn’t. Arturo Vitale called me, that weirdo. What’s going on?”

  “Tripped over a box and now they want to do surgery on my foot, if you can imagine such a stupid thing.”

  “Well, I guess you should get surgery,” said Sadie. “Good grief.”

  “They wanted to put some stitches in my scalp, but I said no.” Linda touched her hair. “Most things they offer in hospitals you don’t really have to do.”

  The dog in Jack wanted to leap over the bed. He wanted to find somebody in the hospital to marry them—there must be a chaplain, people were always getting married this close to mortality, though Linda was fine: she would live through this and go back to her storybook apartment, or so they thought. Everything seemed fine then. Everything seemed absolutely ordinary, Sadie in her terrible jumpsuit with the empire waist, looking like an ottoman, Linda intact. He stayed where he was. He didn’t leap.

  Later, as Sadie drove them home, he said, because there was no right question, “You saw your father die.”

  “My mother told you that.”

  “It’s not true?”

  “No, it’s—I mean, it
is true.”

  “Oh, honey,” he said, because it was a moment for endearments though they never used endearments. Her new haircut matched her Weimar Republic eyebrows, the thin lines she’d plucked them into years ago, expecting that they’d grow back. Her lipstick was red. It suited her. It was only from the neck down that she looked clownish.

  “Oh, honey,” she repeated. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. He had an aneurysm.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Not a freak accident.”

  “I never said a freak accident.”

  He was sure she had—

  “A freak thing,” she said. “A freak thing.”

  * * *

  Her father was crinkle-faced with bad teeth; he wore short-sleeved polyester shirts with black neckties; she loved him. He liked to show her card tricks. He was showing her one when he died.

  “Look,” he’d said. “There were once four thieves, and they decided to rob a department store.” Jack of Clubs, Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Spades, Jack of Hearts. “And they landed their helicopter on the roof of the building.” He put the jacks on the top of the deck of cards.

  She was sitting in her bed, a little white Eastlake bed frame he’d found at a yard sale, such a long narrow shape they’d had to have a mattress made for it.

  “The first thief went to the basement, fine china,” he said, pulling a card from the top and inserting it in near the bottom. “The second, to the ground floor, perfume.” Another card. “Third, lingerie. Fourth, jewelry. Then they heard the police outside, and they ran up—”

  At this he riffled the cards but lost control of them. They flew into the air, then he himself folded up: he fell to his knees, as though surrendering to the imaginary playing card police force, he sat, he had a dopey expression on his face, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, and his hands made funny giving-up gestures. She had laughed. Her father was very funny. Look at his hands, I give up, I give up.

  That was the thing about her father’s death, what she never told anyone, that she had thought it was a joke. It was not the sort of secret that explained everything, or even anything, though she knew that was what Jack believed: a key for a lock. Something architecturally essential that couldn’t be disturbed without the help of professionals. A spell of the Snow White variety that might awaken her to a different life. Better? Worse? Probably not worth the risk. Maybe the beast preferred being a beast, the swan brothers the power of flight, the boy kidnapped by the Snow Queen the ability not to care about the feelings of others and also the luminous cold.

  A knot on a vital net. An undiscovered organ. A tumor left alone for fear of rupture.

  None of these. It was merely a thing that belonged to her.

  There was a certain emotion that she’d felt, when she was looking at her father, thinking it was a joke, then understanding it wasn’t, but not knowing yet the right response, what this meant for the rest of her life. Not shame: she’d hate for anyone to think that. Not sorrow, though sorrow was nearby. It was an emotion she’d never felt before and never would again, close to a religious conversion: deep certainty over a mystery. She couldn’t bear another’s interpretation. Couldn’t imagine converting any of it into words. The memory—not of the facts of her father’s death but of this one moment—was hers, only hers, like one of those morbid Victorian lockets with a dead beloved’s woven hair. How strange, to use the dead matter of a person’s head to stand in for all of a dead person. How right, too. Put it behind glass. String it on a chain. Wear it close to your heart. Don’t submit it to anyone else’s unraveling.

  Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark

  They had come to Galveston, the boy and his fathers, to look at the ocean and chaw on saltwater taffy, but Galveston was solid November fog. As they drove down Seawall Boulevard, the Pleasure Pier emerged from the mist like a ghost ship: first the multicolored lights of the roller coaster and Ferris wheel, then a billboard for a restaurant: BUBBA GUMP SHRIMP CO.

  “Good God,” said Bruno, the older father, the old one. The sky was mild as a milk-glass rabbit. He would have said this aloud, but nobody else in the car would know what milk glass was. Instead he tried, “I hate the seaside. Where are we going?”

  “You know where,” said Ernest, the younger father, who was driving.

  Bruno had understood—when he fell in love with a young man, when they bought a house together, when he agreed to children (one child at least)—that his life would become narrower and deeper, fewer trips to Europe, more moments of surprising headlong love. He had never imagined that family life would mean this: a visit to an indoor German-themed waterpark in Galveston, Texas. The fog had done it. They were headed to a location called Schlitterbahn, where there was an artificial river, for their river-obsessed son.

  “You’ll feel at home,” said Ernest consolingly. “Being German-themed yourself.”

  “Darling, I’m German-flavored. German-scented. Only my mother.”

  “A mother counts double,” said Ernest.

  Bruno inclined his head toward their son—born to a surrogate, with an anonymous donor egg—in the back seat. They had forbidden him video games, so the boy had fallen in thrall to a pocket calculator, which he carried everywhere, calculating nothing: he could count, reliably, to six. “Well,” Bruno said.

  “I mean, your mother,” Ernest said. “Your particular mother.”

  But that was something Bruno and their son had in common. Bruno had an adoptive German-born mother, and a presumably English biological mother who had left him at a public library in Nottingham, England. Not in the book deposit, as he liked to claim, but in the ladies’ room. In this way Bruno and the boy had the same mother: Anonymous. As in anthologies of poetry, she was the most prolific in human history. This particular Anonymous—Anonymous Nottingham—had left him behind like a beseeching letter to strangers; his parents had adopted him; his parents had divorced; his mother had brought him to America. That was his provenance. He cataloged manuscripts for an auction house in Houston, other people’s beseeching letters, other people’s diaries. Provenance was everything and nothing. The point was not to stay from whence you came, but to move along spectacularly and record every stop.

  Still, he did hate the seaside. His beloved worked as a PR person for a technology company that specialized in something called cloud services, but Bruno was a person of paper, and the ocean was his enemy. The seaside turned books blowsy and loose. It threw sand everywhere. Its trashy restaurants left you blemished, oil-spotted. It drowned children, according to Bruno’s mother. She had few fears, but drowning was one, and she had handed it down to her only son, like an ancestral christening gown that every generation must be photographed in.

  The fog made them drive slowly, as though not to break their car upon it. Down on the beach a wedding party walked toward them: bride, groom, six blue-clad bridesmaids, two men in tuxes, all of them overweight, one whippet-thin photographer walking backward. In the lactic light they looked peculiarly buoyant on the sand. Above them, a line of large khaki birds flew parallel to the ocean, heads ducked to avoid the clouds.

  “Pelicans!” said Ernest, then, in a hopeful, accusatory voice, “A wedding.”

  “Pelicans?” said Bruno. “Surely not.” But there they were, single file and exact, military even, with the smug look of all pelicans. “Pelicans flock!”

  “Well, sure,” said Ernest. “What did you think?”

  “I thought they were freelancers,” said Bruno. “Pelicans!”

  “They looked like brother and sister,” said Ernest, “the bride and her groom. Like salt and pepper shakers.”

  “They did,” said Bruno.

  The three people in the car, on the other hand, looked nothing alike, though strangers could tell they belonged together. Strangers were always trying to perform the spiritual arithmetic: the tall paunchy goateed near–senior citizen, the short hirsute broad-shouldered young man, the otherworldly child, who called now, from the back seat, in his thrillingl
y husky voice, his dreams filled with artificial rivers, “Schlitterbomb!”

  “Bahn,” said Ernest, and Bruno said, “That’s right, darling, Schlitterbomb.”

  Ernest and Bruno had not married, not legally and not, as Ernest would have liked, in a church, or in a friend’s backyard, or on a beach. Bruno did not believe in weddings, though he’d been married once, once for fifteen years, to a woman. He’d been the young husband then. Now, when Ernest brought marriage up, Bruno said, “I’m an old hippie,” which was true insofar that he, unlike Ernest, had been alive in the 1960s and had done some drugs.

  Why marry, after all? The boy stirring in the back seat was their marriage, even though, from the start, it was Ernest who had summoned him up, first as a dream and then as a plan and then as a to-do list. It was Ernest who’d wanted a child, and then specified a biological one, who’d found the donor egg, and the surrogate, and then offered what he thought was a compromise: they could mix their sperm together. “Oh God, how revolting,” said Bruno, and Ernest had pointed out gently that it wouldn’t be exactly the first time. “But not in a laboratory,” said Bruno, who ordinarily was the one with a sense of humor. And so the boy was Ernest’s child by blood, and Bruno’s by legal adoption. Ernest was Daddy and Bruno was Pop; Ernest believed in vows, Bruno in facts and deeds. The important fact was four years old. The fact was named Cody. The fact had never-cut red hair that hung to his shoulders and was so fair-skinned as to be combustible. Every day he was slathered in sunscreen; the first freckle would be a tragedy Ernest might never recover from. God knew when they’d manage a first haircut. When Cody and Bruno were out in the world together, they were generally taken for grandfather and granddaughter, and this thorough wrongness incensed Ernest, though Bruno had learned over the years not to take the mistakes of others too seriously, not when his own mistakes required so much analysis. He couldn’t explain to Ernest the real trouble with a wedding: Ernest’s shocking taste, which he, Bruno, would have to go along with, and smile, and declare himself happy. “I like peach,” Ernest would say, displaying a napkin. Or, “My family loves disco music.” Or, “We could have beef Wellington.”