One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  My mother lay in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her nose. One of her eyes had swelled shut and was already black and shining. The other fluttered nervously while she slept. She breathed with her mouth open, a wheezing noise like snoring, and when I stood over her and looked inside her mouth, I could see blood had stained her teeth a pinkish color and that several were missing: one in the front and one of her canines. She’s not going to be able to eat, I thought, is she?

  We stood around watching while she breathed really loud and the heart monitor next to her bleeped out the proof that she was still alive. When she woke several hours later, blinking her good eye, she saw me first and said, “Baby, come here and give me a hug.”

  I wasn’t a baby, but I didn’t correct her. I figured she’d been through enough. A doctor came in a minute later to ask how she felt, and my mother told him she couldn’t feel her legs. He said that might be a problem, the not feeling, but that it would work itself out over time. “How much time?” my dad asked from where he stood in a corner, looking at the floor. When we looked back at him, he didn’t look up.

  “No worries, mate,” the doctor said, like he thought he was Australian or something. “It’s just swelling around the spinal cord, Mr. McCormick. It’ll be fine after a few weeks.”

  As soon as the doctor left, my father looked up and started talking. “We all have to pull together now,” he said. “We’ll get through this. Don’t worry.” He put his arms around me and Andy as if this was our regular pose and we both looked up at him, wondering what he wanted. It was one of his tricks, being friendly, to get us to do things for him. This time his fast-talking and family feeling added up to mean we’d bring my mother home together and put her in my bed so she could rest properly, and that I’d bunk with Andy. And for the next three weeks, my father would keep saying things like, “Don’t you worry, honey. It’s time the men took over,” as he ripped up carpeting and varnished the floors so the house would be wheelchair friendly. I did the dishes and Andy washed clothes. My father brought home pizza or fried chicken for dinner and we started eating in the living room, watching TV, instead of at the dining room table.

  My mother rested in my bed with the legs she couldn’t feel any longer. They stretched out under her blanket like they were extra people sleeping with her. I brought soup in on a tray for her, and sometimes I’d rub her feet. “Now?” I’d ask, hopeful. “Can you feel them now?” But she’d just shake her head and smile weakly.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she’d say. “I’m so sorry.”

  I didn’t know how to feel about anything, but I decided right away I wouldn’t be angry. That’s how my father acted whenever something didn’t go his way. I told myself that stupid stuff like this just happens. It happens all the time. One day you’re an average fifteen-year-old with parents who constantly argue and a brother who takes out his problems on you because he thinks it’s cool to belittle you in public and then suddenly something happens to make things worse. Believe me, morbidity is not my specialty. Sometimes bad things just happen all at once.

  My grandma had said bad things came in threes, and if there was any truth to that, I figured now was the time to start counting. Because two bad things had happened in less than a month: my mother had been paralyzed and Jamie Marks had been found murdered. If my grandma was still alive, she’d have been trying to guess what would happen next.

  I mentioned this to my mother while I spooned soup up to her trembling lips one evening. A few weeks had passed since she’d come home and she could feed herself all right, but she seemed to like the attention. “Bad things come in threes,” I told her. “Remember Grandma always said that?”

  “Your grandma was uneducated,” said my mother.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “It means she didn’t even get past the eighth grade, Adam.”

  “I knew that already,” I said, holding the spoon near her mouth.

  “Well, I’m just reminding you.”

  “Okay,” I said, and she took another spoonful of chicken broth. I decided I should keep my thoughts to myself after that.

  At school, though, everyone was talking. “Did you hear about Jamie Marks?” they all said. “Did you hear about Gracie Highsmith?”

  I pretended like I knew nothing. I wanted to hear what everyone else would say. Rumors filled the air. Our school being so small made that easy. Seventh through twelfth grade all crammed into the same building, elbow to elbow, breathing each other’s breath.

  “Did you hear about it?” a girl in first period asked. She looked around the room, apparently asking all of us. “Gracie Highsmith saw one of his fingers poking out of the gravel,” she said, “like a zombie trying to crawl out of its grave.”

  “So she pushed away a few stones and there it was,” said a kid getting dressed next to me in the locker room during second period. He stepped into his sweatpants and said, “His eye was still open, and it stared right up at her.”

  “So she screamed and threw the gravel back at his eye and ran home,” said a kid who washed his hands beside me in the restroom between classes. “And sure enough, when the police finally got there, they found the railroad ties loose and the bolts broken off.”

  “So they removed the ties,” said Marty Chapman during lunch, mimicking the removal of the ties with his French fries. “Then they dug up the gravel and found the body.”

  “It was so disgusting,” said the boy who took Jamie’s seat beside me in the computer lab. “I guess one of the cops had to walk away and puke.”

  I sat through Algebra and Biology and History, thinking about cops puking, thinking about Jamie’s body. I couldn’t stop thinking about those two things. I sort of liked the idea of cops puking out their guts, holding their stomachs, shocked into remembering they were human like the rest of us. But I wasn’t so sure what I thought about Jamie’s body, rotting beneath railroad ties.

  At the start of each class, the teachers all had the same spiel for us, as if they’d gotten together to make sure they had the same story: “I understand if any of you are disturbed or anxious, so we’ll spend this period getting out all of those feelings, but if you’re not comfortable talking, the guidance counselor can recommend a good psychologist to your parents.”

  The only teacher who left us alone was Mrs. Motes. She taught English. We were reading early American writers of short stories that autumn and, even though they’d found Jamie’s body, she kept teaching without making a fuss. Elizabeth Moore, who always had some smart-ass thing to say in class, asked, “Aren’t we going to talk about what’s happened, Mrs. Motes?” and Mrs. Motes said we could do that, sure, but weren’t we talking about it all the time already?

  Mrs. Motes scanned the room as if she were looking for someone who was a big talker about this tragedy. Her gaze finally came to rest on me. I wanted to tell her she had got the wrong kid. I was just a listener. But she kept staring at me and finally said, “I think this is all terrible, I do. And if someone wants to talk about how terrible this all is, I think they should do that. I think they should stay after class and talk to me if they like. But otherwise, I think we should talk some more about Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

  I sat at my desk with my chin propped in my hand, imagining Jamie under those rails staring at the undersides of trains as they rumbled over him. Those tracks hadn’t been used since the steel mills in Youngstown closed back in the eighties, but I imagined trains riding them anyway. Jamie inhaled each time a glimpse of sky appeared between boxcars and exhaled when they covered him over. When no trains passed over him, when no metal screamed on the rails, he could finally sleep. But in his dreams he’d see the trains again, blue sparks flying off the iron railing. A ceiling of trains covered him. He almost suffocated, there were so many.

  A few days after the cops were done with the crime scene, my brother said, as he drove us home from school, “We’re going to the place, a bunch of us. Do you want to come?” He didn’t have to explain.
I knew immediately where he was going. But Andy’s friends were seniors and liked to harass me, so I shook my head and said no. I told him I had to collect money from a friend who owed me. He probably knew I was lying, but he dropped me off at home anyway.

  After he drove away, I let the front window curtain fall away from my hand and started going through my school yearbook, flipping pages until I found Jamie smiling in his square on page fifty-two. I cut his photo out with my father’s X-acto knife and stared at it for a while, trying to understand him through the shape of his face, through his round glasses. Cut away from the yearbook, though, enough light shined through the paper to make the face on the other side blur with Jamie’s and, when I turned the square over, I found my own face on the other side.

  I wasn’t smiling. I never really was a smiler. I remember the photographer that day couldn’t make me. He tried and tried, but finally gave up. So this was the face that looked back at me now, black and white, hard as a rock, on the opposite side of the missing boy’s picture.

  I swallowed and swallowed. “I didn’t like that picture of me anyway,” I whispered. I had baby fat when it was taken, and looked more like a little kid. Still I flipped the photo over and over like a coin, wondering, if it had been me, would I have escaped? I decided it must have been too difficult to get away from them—I couldn’t help thinking there had to be more than one murderer—and probably I would have died just the same.

  I took the picture outside and buried it in my mother’s garden, between the rows of sticks that had, just weeks before, marked off the sections of vegetables, keeping carrots carrots and radishes radishes. I patted the dirt softly, inhaled its crisp dirt smell, and whispered, “Don’t you worry. Everything will be all right.”

  When my mother got out of bed and started using her wheelchair, she was hopeful. She said one day soon she’d walk again. But when her legs didn’t start getting better and the doctors said she’d need physical therapy, she just shook her head. “The damage has been done,” she said, looking up at my father, who looked away. She told us it was no big deal, she enjoyed not always having to be on her feet anyway. Even so, I started to sometimes find her wheeled into dark corners, her head in her hands, saying, “No, no, no.” Sobbing.

  Lucy Hall, the woman who paralyzed her, kept calling our house and asking for forgiveness but my mom told us to say she wasn’t home. “Tell her I’m out contacting lawyers this very moment,” she told us. “Tell her they’re going to have her so broke within seconds, they’ll make her pay real good.”

  So I’d tell Lucy, “She isn’t home, lady.”

  And Lucy would say, “My God, tell that poor woman I’m sorry. Ask her to please forgive me. Tell her I’ll do whatever she wants.”

  After each call I told my mother Lucy said she was sorry, and eventually my mother decided to hear the woman out. Their conversation sounded like when my mom talks to her sister, my aunt Beth, who lives in California near the ocean, a place I could hardly imagine, a place I’d never been. My mother kept shouting, “No way! You too?! I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?! Oh, Lucy, this is too much.” She smiled and laughed like a real person for the first time in weeks. I didn’t like her talking to Lucy Hall, who had taken everything away from her, but I liked hearing her laugh again.

  Two hours later, Lucy pulled into our driveway, blaring her horn over and over, as if once wasn’t enough. My mother wheeled herself outside, down the ramp my father had made for her, still smiling and laughing, even though she and Lucy hadn’t exchanged a word in person yet.

  Lucy was like her horn-blowing: way too much. She was tall and wore red lipstick, and her hair was permed real tight. She wore huge plastic bracelets, hoop earrings and stretchy hot pink pants. She bent down to hug my mother right away, then helped her into the car. They drove off together still laughing, and when they came home several hours later, I could smell smoke and whiskey on their breath.

  “What’s most remarkable,” my mother slurred, “is that I was on my way to the bar sober, and Lucy was driving home drunk.” She used her fingers to illustrate the directions their cars had taken, as if I didn’t know how the accident happened. They’d both had arguments with their husbands that day, she said. And they’d both gone out to make their husbands jealous. Learning all this, my mother and Lucy felt destiny had brought them together. “A virtual Big Bang,” said my mother.

  Lucy said, “A collision of souls.”

  The only thing to regret was that their meeting had been so painful. “But great things are born out of pain,” my mother said, nodding in a knowing way as she refilled her glass. She patted the hand Lucy had placed on her wheel. “If I had to have an accident with someone,” she said, “I’m glad that someone was Lucy.”

  I thought about the picture of Jamie and me that I’d buried. I’d been walking around bumping into things ever since. Walls, lockers, people. It didn’t matter what, I walked into it. Even though we were in the same class, I hadn’t known him as well as I wanted, and when I tried asking people about him, all they’d do was stare as if I’d stepped out of a spaceship. I stared at my mother and Lucy now and wondered, if he had lived would we have found a way to be friends? Would we be like them? Maybe he’d be a bit messed up in the head from everything, but still here, still breathing. Still possible.

  After my brother and his friends went back to where Jamie had been hidden, everyone thought they were crazy but somehow brave. Suddenly they were popular, which was a huge crossover for a bunch of burnouts. Girls asked Andy to take them there, to be their protector, and he’d pick out the pretty ones who wore makeup and tight little skirts. “You should go, Adam,” he said one day after we came home from school. “You could appreciate it.”

  “It’s too much of a spectacle,” I said, not wanting to talk about Jamie with him. But all of a sudden he grabbed the back of my shirt as I walked past and jerked me to a stop.

  When I looked up, he stared at me as if I’d turned into an ant. Something so tiny you had to squint to see it. “You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about, you little ass,” he said. “People are just curious.” He asked if I was implying that going to the place was sick and twisted. “Is that what you mean?” he said. “Cause if that’s what you’re implying, Adam, you are dead wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I’m implying. I’m not implying anything at all.”

  I didn’t want to hear his story. There were too many stories filling my head as it was. At any moment he could burst into the monologue of detail he’d been rehearsing since seeing the place where they’d hidden Jamie, so I turned to go to my room and, as I turned the corner, Andy said, “Hey! I didn’t get to tell you what it was like!”

  I sat at my computer and stared at my reflection in the blank screen. I was starting to think no one really knew Jamie Marks. But even so, it had taken only a few weeks for people to start claiming they’d seen him. He waited at the railroad crossing on Sodom-Hutchings Road, pointing down the tracks toward where he’d been hidden. He walked in tight worried circles outside Gracie Highsmith’s house with his hands clasped behind his back and his head hanging low and serious. In these stories he was always transparent. Things passed through him. Rain was one example. Another was leaves falling off trees, drifting through his body. Kids in school said, “I saw him!” the same eager way they did when they went to Hatchet Man Road in Bristol to see the ghost of the killer from the seventies, a man who lived in the woods around the road, who actually never used hatchets, but a hunting knife. Gracie Highsmith hadn’t returned to school since she found him, so no one could verify the story of Jamie standing under the maple tree outside her house. The story still grew, though, without her approval, which somehow seemed wrong. I thought if Jamie’s ghost was outside her house, no one should tell that story but Gracie. It was hers, and anyone else who told it was a thief.

  The stories didn’t matter, I told myself. Most of those kids didn’t know how to see themselves yet,
let alone a ghost. After listening to them every day for a week, though, I decided it was time to see for myself.

  Instead of going to cross-country practice the next day, I went to the cemetery. I’d wanted to go to the funeral, to stand in back where no one would notice, but the newspaper had said it was for family only. If I was angry about anything, it was that. How could they just shut everyone out? The whole town had helped look for him, had taken food over to Jamie’s mother during the time he was missing. And then no one but family was allowed to be at the funeral? It was just a little bit selfish, I thought.

  The cemetery looked desolate at the end of October, as if it were going to be filmed for a Halloween movie. Headstones leaned toward one another. Moss greened over the walls of family mausoleums. I walked down the drive, gravel crunching beneath my shoes, and looked from side to side at the stone angels and carved pillars and plain white slabs that marked the lots. I knew a lot of the names, or had heard of them. Whether they’re relatives or friends, friends of relatives, or ancestral family enemies, when you live in a town where everyone fits into three churches, you know everyone. Even the dead.

  I searched the headstones until I found his. The grave was still freshly turned earth. No grass had had time to grow yet. But people had left trinkets, tokens and reminders, pieces of themselves. A handprint. A piece of rose-colored glass. Two cigarettes standing up like fence posts. A baby rattle. And at the bottom edge of the grave, someone had even scrawled their name.

  I bent down and, tracing the curve of the letters with my fingertip, whispered the name. And it was as if reading it aloud had been some kind of spell, because suddenly I heard footsteps, and there she was, Gracie Highsmith, walking the path toward me.

  I was shocked. Besides his family, I’d thought I’d be the only one to come. But here she was, this girl who’d drawn her name in the dirt with her finger. Her letters looked soft and gentle; they curled into each other with little flourishes for decoration. Did she think it mattered if she spelled her name pretty?