by Bret Lott
“Martin!” Grady shouted outside, out in the snow, his voice muffled, cloaked by that white.
I opened my eyes, the ceiling above me slowly spinning.
“Martin!” I heard again, faintly, farther away, but with that distant word, that name, a son’s call for his father, I heard somehow my own father; I heard in the pitch and timbre my father’s call to me the day I had stood at the chain-link fence, heard in Grady’s voice desperation and hope and love all at once, and I knew for a moment, an instant, the hope and fear in him, a boy outside in the snow, searching for his lost father.
I saw that Grady was me, a child of lost parents, stuck here and floundering, the color of his voice, that last call to his father, the hue of looking and loss, just as I’d listened for my father for so long.
“Martin?” Grady called out, this time even fainter, quieter, his father’s name now made into a question, the inflection a fear, and I felt again my mother’s fear, and saw her the day she had moved the cot into the kitchen, a day only two weeks before she died, as though settling herself into the innermost corner of her house and surrounding herself with the photos, she would somehow make working her way down to dying easier: the house was empty save for this one small room. That day I had asked her why, why she would not leave the house, hoping finally for some small answer from her, though I’d given up on waiting to hear any truth from her other than the one I’d been given the day I’d come home with my new word. The truth that she was comfortable in her fear.
She had taken my hand in hers, brought it to her cheek, let the back of my hand gently touch her skin, skin as soft as a mother’s face can be. But she said nothing. There were only her eyes, and in them the same old fear, the certainty of loss too much to bear.
And finally I knew her, my bones grown cold now, the floor against my face frozen and dirty. I understood her for the only moment I had in my life, though now she was dead. I knew her, knew in the sound of Grady’s voice my mother’s fear, the death of hope in her, because Grady had turned his father’s name into a question.
Then, for what I knew somehow was the last time, I heard “Martin!” and with that one, small, insignificant word, the ceiling still spinning above me, the snow still falling outside, the shapes against the wall still dead but still in motion, I finally saw what it was my father had tried to show me all along, what my father’s words meant coming to me after his death: it was my name I’d heard. Claire Shaw. That was me. Who I was. The name I’d been given by my parents when I was born. It was my name. All he’d ever wanted me to do, I knew then, was to know by my name that I was alive: tying my shoes, he’d only wanted me to learn to do it myself; walking me across Route 9, he’d only wanted me to learn to judge when to cross it myself; speaking my name that day when the bomber crossed the sky, and now, here against a cold floor, my hands clenched in fists of fear, he’d only wanted me to live. That was all.
I took in a deep breath, and I tried to hold onto my mother, to my father, tried to keep my understanding of them, the glimpse of them and who they were and what they’d tried to teach me, the opposite tacks they’d taken—my father’s courage, my mother’s fear—but then their images, their voices in Grady’s voice, disappeared, and I was once again alone in the room.
But now it was a different room. It was a different room, though nothing had changed: the paneling was heaped on the floor, the air cold, the outlines of Grady and Martin still there on the wall. But it was different. Only that.
Slowly, carefully, I brought up my left hand, the hand with the scar, from where it had been in a fist in my lap, and I looked at it I looked first at the palm, then at the top, and the red adhesions. I looked at my fingers, at my long, slender fingers. My father’s fingers, I saw, fingers much like those with which he’d tied my shoes, and with that hand I touched my hair, felt how fine it was, and I pulled a strand away from my head and down in front of my eyes, where I could see my father’s hair, the same brunette color, the same texture. And I thought of my mouth and my cheeks and my eyes, those features my mother’s, but my mouth and cheeks and eyes. These were what they’d given me at conception, I saw, pieces of themselves, pieces of them already here with me, here all along.
I blinked. I took in another breath, felt the cold ache of it inside me, and then, with whatever small strength I had in me, whatever synapses and neurons and axons and dendrites, each cell snapping to the next and on and on until my muscles took hold of bone, pulled one against another, I got to my knees, my hands on the floor, and I was sitting on my legs, and then I was standing, and I, too, was moving toward that window as if it were some source of comfort, some way out.
When I got there, I put my hands to it, my face near it. Here, here was evidence of my own life, of me living: my breath, pearl-white fog condensed on glass. My breaths were real. I was alive.
I looked out the window, saw what Grady and Martin had seen: the world outside, dusted with the simple gift from God of a light blanket of snow.
“Martin!” I heard again, way off somewhere, and I saw Grady. He was at the barn. He stood before it, back in those woods, back where I’d known I would be swallowed up, but now I knew nothing could happen. They were only woods, and the barn was only a broken-down structure where, many years ago, a woman had succumbed to hate. It was only a place now, snow on its roof, black holes here and there in the roof where boards were broken out, and through which snow fell.
I turned from the window and went through the room and down the stairs. I opened the stove door and put in paper, pine needles, kindling, and I struck a match, lit the paper inside. I watched the fire build for a few moments, and then put into it the biggest pieces of wood I thought the small flame might be able to stand until I got back. Until we got back.
Martin’s coat still lay on the sawhorse, and I picked it up, held it under my arm. I turned to the open door, where snow had blown in, making its way out onto the floor like spilled flour, and I thought of an officer in the living room of my mother’s house, thought of those images of my father’s death I had created—the glass like green jewels, my father glancing at his watch—so that I could see my father’s death, be there; and I realized that Grady’s story of Martin’s birth, and those details he had chosen—the brother tearing through woods to the sugar house, the hobo stoking the fire, then him, with that piece of oak raised above his head, ready to crush Clark’s skull—were only the same sorts of creations I’d made: embellishments, embroidering upon simple facts until the story lived in us, breathed, and kept us remembering, fiction becoming more real than any truth of the matter could ever be. Grady was me. Except that his father, his own blood, was still alive. He still had Martin.
I stepped out into the snow, and pulled the door closed behind me.
I stood before the barn. I was looking up at it, my hands in front of me, snow collecting on my shoulders and arms and hair, and I looked down. On the ground before me were two sets of footprints leading into the barn, one set crisp, new, the other dull with snow, only soft indentations.
I paused a moment, and I went in.
It was dark inside, near pitch black, the holes in the roof giving the only small light. I looked up to the rafters a moment, to the light up there, and I wondered which beam Martin had found her hanging from, his mother given up to the hate of a brother. I wondered, too, what Martin could have thought, could have known, a retarded child finding his dead mother, and then I realized I already knew: like any child, he would have felt love, and loss.
“There,” I heard Martin whisper, and I turned. My eyes had almost adjusted to the dark, and there, there in the corner of the barn, huddled up next to each other and against the cold, sat Martin and Grady: Grady silent, eyes closed, arms around his father’s shoulders, Martin looking up at the rafters, pointing to one of them, his body shivering in the cold.
I walked over to them, and I knelt before them, put Martin’s coat across his chest and over his shoulders.
I said, “Come. Come on.
Let’s go back inside.”
By the time we got to the Friendly’s parking lot, the snow had stopped.
I had made the two of them share with me the coffee once inside the house, the front room now warmed by the fire I had made, and I told them we were going back home. Neither one fought me; they only nodded, took last sips of the coffee, and then we put out the fire, tamped it down and out.
They both sat in the back seat on the way out, the two of them nestled next to each other. I could see them in my rearview mirror, could see them watching first Chesterfield pass us, then Williamsburg and the General Store, the store as always choked with customers, a place where one day next week I knew I would be, buying the wreath I wanted, the one that would be placed on the front door, on that gray and weatherbeaten wood, a wreath that would signal the place as being our home.
And a Christmas tree. Tom and I would buy a Christmas tree for the house, I knew then, place it in the front room and decorate it, no matter what the walls looked like, no matter what condition the floors were in. We would put up a Christmas tree, and some time after New Year’s we would cut it up, bum it in the stove to help warm our house, our home. We would burn it, use it, instead of leaning it against the foundation and forgetting it.
We passed the white fairways in Leeds, and came into Florence, the two strips of black pavement in the snow growing wider until here, at the Friendly’s, the road had been plowed already, the black-top merely wet, snow already melting.
I moved to climb out of the car, but Grady reached up from behind me and touched my shoulder.
He said, “That’s okay. We’ll ride back. We’ll be okay.”
“But we can put them in the trunk,” I said. “The bikes.”
His hand still rested on my shoulder. I had my door open an inch or so already. Cold air wrapped around my ankles, my calves. He said, “Tell you what. Tomorrow, when we go back up there, you just pick us up at the apartment. You know where we live. But just let us ride home today.” He smiled.
Martin leaned forward, put his hand on my shoulder, too, right next to Grady’s. He said, “You already know where we live.”
I smiled, and reached up and touched both their hands. “Tomorrow.” I paused. “I’ll be there.”
“Fine,” Grady said. “Tomorrow is fine.” He brought his hand down and popped open his door. “We’ll be looking for you.”
“We will,” Martin said, scooting across the seat. He got out, closed the door, and then stood at my window. I looked up at him, smiling, and he motioned with his hand for me to roll down my window.
I pulled the door to, rolled the window down all the way. Grady was already back behind the dumpster.
Martin leaned toward the window, his hands on his thighs. He had his wool cap down over his ears.
He said, “You’ll take good care of your house.”
I said, “I will.”
He smiled.
I waited until they had pedaled out of the parking lot and headed off toward their home, Grady still leading, Martin close behind, and then I pulled onto Route 9, headed back toward town. A minute later Cooley-Dickinson Hospital was on my right, red brick, the roof covered with quickly melting snow, and as I neared it I wasn’t certain what to do anymore, whether to look at the building, stare and remember back to when Paige’s child had been born there, and, of course, back to when I’d hoped for children of our own; or if I should do as I’d resolved, and force myself not to look, not to remember, try and forget that I’d held her baby only days after birth.
But I found myself driving more slowly as I approached the hospital, my foot easing up on the gas without my thinking of it. To the left, across the street, was a small strip mall: video shop, dry cleaners, package store. I saw a phone booth out on the sidewalk between two of the shops, and I turned left across the double yellow lines, pulled into the parking lot. Without thinking, without knowing precisely what I might do, I parked the car and took a quarter from my wallet. I climbed out onto the wet asphalt of the parking lot, went to the pay phone, picked up the cold plastic receiver, and dropped in the quarter. Then I punched in the phone number I’d known by heart for what seemed my whole life.
I heard it ring, and I turned around, leaned against the wall, the hospital across the street from me. Tires of passing cars hissed away water, melted snow.
“Neuroscience and Behavior,” I heard. It was Paige.
“Paige,” I said. I paused, and I could not help but remember holding her baby, feeling the warmth of that small life. Though I would have no children of my own, I understood, finally, that I could not deny the joy I’d felt holding that child. There was nothing wrong with hoping for life, or with taking joy in the life given someone else. And, I saw, there was nothing wrong with taking sorrow in a life lost by someone else.
“Hello?” Paige said, and then I closed my eyes, the sound of passing cars and the cold air filling me up, and I realized why I’d called. It wasn’t to talk to Paige, though I would. I would ask her sometime soon how Phillip was, how big he’d gotten in the month or so I’d been gone, how many new teeth were in.
But I’d called to talk with Sandra.
“Paige,” I said again, “is Sandra there? This is Claire.”
Later—I don’t know how much later, the day passing in its own time, the sky never changing its slate-gray color—I went to the newspaper, walked past rows and rows of cluttered desks and computer terminals, all those shiny green symbols flashing, all that clicking, all that noise. Faces turned up to me as I passed, some smiling the smile of faint recognition, others only glancing up and back to the green.
I made it to Tom’s desk against the far wall, a desk pushed back into a recessed cubicle. He, too, was clicking away. He glanced up at me, then back to his terminal before it seemed he recognized who I was. He stood. He looked at his watch, surprised, as though he had perhaps lost an entire day.
“It’s only eleven fifteen,” he said. “I thought you were at the house.”
“I was,” I said. “But I came back. Because I need you to help me.” I took a small step toward his desk, put one hand to the edge. “To go somewhere with me.”
“To the house?” he said.
I took my hand away, and held my pocketbook with both hands. I looked at his desk, littered with work.
“Yes,” I said. I did not know how to tell him, did not know which words I needed to explain to him the shapes on the wall. I wanted to take him there, show him those figures, those outlines. I wanted him out there with me.
“Are you okay?” he said, and started around the edge of his desk.
I could feel eyes on me, eyes of men and women around me who would imagine me insane. Tom was next to me now, his hand at my elbow.
I looked up at him, and I swallowed at the hard truth I knew I was about to speak.
I said, “I’m not. I’m not okay. You know that.”
He put his arms around me. He held me, and I could feel his arms encircling me. I could feel his face next to mine, warm and dry.
He eased up, and pulled away. He looked at me. He had his hand next to my face, and brushed back a tear with his thumb, a tear I hadn’t even known was there.
He was still a moment, and I looked at his face, unable to tell what he would do, his mouth straight, his eyes merely looking into mine, and I was terrified at living with a man this long, at loving him, giving up the hope for children of our own with him, trying to make a home with him, and still not knowing him, still being unable to see in his eyes what he would do.
He held me for a moment longer, but let go of me, moved back to his desk, looked at things there. For an instant I thought I had lost him, that he’d run from a house falling down around me, but then he gathered up his coat and gloves and muffler and hat from the chair beside his desk, and we were gone, headed for a half-finished house in Chesterfield. Headed for home.
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