One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s probably fine now. I hope so.”

  We lay on the cot together, on the pillows and under the blankets Gracie had brought. They weren’t much use to us now, but we used them anyway, pretending maybe they were still something we needed.

  Jamie wanted to talk about old times. About school. When he said it, he looked wistful and happy, his stupid grin sliding up one side of his face. “Do something for me?” he said, and I nodded. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “then you tell me one, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What kind of story?”

  “A story about me,” he said. “Something you remember. Like this,” he said, and he started to tell me the story of the time he went to the track meet when I won first place and would go on to run in the state championship, how everyone on the team had lifted me up on their shoulders and I’d laughed and smiled. He’d never seen me look as happy as I had when I’d burst across that finish line. I asked him how he could remember that race and he said, “I was there. I used to watch you run.”

  “You did? I don’t remember you there. When did you watch me?”

  “I started coming when we had computer lab together.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “I didn’t want to bother you. You always had people around you at those things.”

  “You wouldn’t have bothered me,” I said. I put my arm around his shoulder and he turned his face to me and smiled.

  “I always liked watching you run,” he said. “You had this way about you. It was like reading a poem. You could run that way, like a line in a poem runs.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I hugged him. No one had ever talked about me like that before. It made me feel more important than when I’d actually won that race. I imagined him at my track meets sitting on the hill beside the track, leaning back on his elbows watching me run and thinking I looked like a line in a poem. He’d been in my life then, in the background waiting for me to notice. And I’d noticed. I just hadn’t said anything. Then it was too late to say anything.

  So I said something now. “Thank you,” I whispered into his ear as we lay on the cot, and as I said those words I knew they were mine, that I’d said them for the first time in my life and meant them. My collection was growing. The man with no skin had taken love from me, but I still had ad infinitum, sunflower, and now thank you. Maybe I could find love again, I thought. I’d just have to look around hard enough.

  “Now you,” he said. “Tell me a story.”

  So I told him about how I’d been running last spring after my grandma died and how I’d run past his house and saw him in the window of his bedroom, the room above the kitchen. How I hadn’t waved and he hadn’t either, but as I ran past we looked at each other and I didn’t turn away until I was so far past his house I had to turn around almost completely and run backward to see his window and him inside it still watching me.

  “I remember that,” he said, putting his face against my chest. “Tell me again,” he said. “Tell me as much as you can remember. What did I look like? What was I wearing? Did I look happy or sad?” So I told him again, trying to remember everything, and as I talked he held on to me and I smelled that hair burning smell and felt his body warming against mine. When I finished, he sighed long and loud and looked up, his cheeks pink, his eyes sparkling. “I liked that story,” he said. “Do you remember any others?”

  I looked up at Charlotte in her web. She was watching with her many eyes as if she were sizing us up.

  “I remember some more,” I told him.

  “Good,” he said. “Don’t forget them. Someone has to remember. Someone has to be the rememberer.”

  I slept that night, just a little. It was peaceful sleep, which I hadn’t had in a while, but when I woke up in the morning and sat up rubbing my eyes in the light, all that peace was gone. Someone stood in the door of my shack with one foot on my floor and one arm bent to lean on his knee. A man in a uniform. A cop. He nodded at me and said, “You might as well get your things and come along quietly. There’s nowhere for you to run now. Okay?”

  When he moved aside, I saw another cop waiting outside, hands planted on his hips. Mr. Highsmith stood beside him, staring in at me with a scowl on his face. And in front of Mr. Highsmith was Gracie, bundled up in a winter army jacket. When I looked at her, she looked away, unable to face me. Traitor. How could she give me away? That was even worse than Jamie telling me to leave the Wilkinson farm.

  “Come on,” the cop told me. “Don’t give us any trouble, kid. Just let me bring you down to the station and everything will be all right.”

  LET ME BRING YOU DOWN

  THE COPS LED ME OUT OF THE WOODS, ONE ON each side of me, while Mr. Highsmith and Gracie walked ahead, leading the way. Mr. Highsmith kept his arm around Gracie’s shoulder the whole time, like she’d been some sort of victim, but when we came to the road and then to his house where the cop car was waiting, he told Gracie she had to go with them, same as me. She looked up at him, eyes wide, shocked. “What?” he said. “You think you’re not in trouble, young lady? You’re what they call an accomplice.”

  “Daddy!” she said. I rolled my eyes—didn’t she get it? He was totally trying to scare her. He probably figured a trip to the police station and some firm questioning would make sure his little girl didn’t hang around any trash in the future.

  He nodded to the cops, and despite Gracie’s protests, they put her and me in the backseat together.

  We didn’t look at each other even though we felt the nearness of our bodies. Instead we looked out our separate windows as the car passed woods and dairies and pastures and the fields I’d known since I was a kid. It was a bleak December, everything brown, black and gray. Brown fields, gray clouds, black birds flocking in both of those places.

  Gracie said, “Adam?” but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was too angry right then. Everything I’d done, every step I’d taken to run as fast and as far away as possible had been useless. God’s finger was totally closing in.

  It was as we were driving to the police station that it happened again. Pop! I flew out of my body. The police car kept going, though, and I tumbled head over heels backward and upward until I was in the sky with those crows I’d seen. I was floating like a kite to heaven. It had been a while since this had happened, but when I found myself high enough to mingle with the clouds I wasn’t afraid. I’d been to death and back. I only worried about losing the body that hurtled away from me in the police car to the police station, where it would most likely be given a sentence to go to a juvenile detention center and then sent home afterward, where it would walk and talk and take showers and return to school to take tests and get good grades and continue to grow in death, its fingernails curling in on themselves, a saint, a saint of a body, better than I could ever be, a son anyone could be proud of, doing everything he’s supposed to, a son who would wheel his mother around and feed her broth by her bedside, who would rub her feet until she felt them, who would say please and thank you to the paralyzer, the woman who should be thankful the body kept its own counsel, who said nothing of himself. Nothing. Not a thing.

  For a moment I thought I should just let them have the body, to be rid of it, to be free to float above the lights of earthly cities. Goodbye! Glad to have been inside you! But then a strange sense of duty rose up from the center of my being and I thought, Don’t give him up. They couldn’t have me because I was floating free, high above them all, but why should I let them have the body? It was mine in this world, so I flew after it. Faster than the speed of light, I flew at the speed of thought and made it back just as the cops pulled into the station. Pop! I went back in, shrugging it on like a winter coat, just in time to hear Gracie whisper, “He caught me coming to see you. I didn’t mean to. I can’t lie anymore, Adam.”

  “You did what you had to do.” I shrugged.

  I could tell she wasn’t satisfied with that answer and wanted me to
be a big forgiver and tell her everything was fine, not to worry, but that was a bit much for me right then as I was being taken out of a police car and into a station where for the next two hours I would be questioned about a million things that had nothing to do with me and a few things that had everything to do with me. Mostly they wanted to find out why I’d run away and why I’d stolen the five hundred dollars they found in my backpack from Mr. Highsmith. But I wasn’t talking. So they called my parents.

  I’d seen Gracie sitting with an officer in a glassed-in office for a while, and then, while I waited with a cup of cocoa for my parents to show, she came out of the office shrugging her coat on, and Mr. Highsmith came around a corner where he must have been waiting the whole time to pick her up. I stood up and said, “Gracie,” but didn’t know what to say after that. It was hard with phones ringing and cops talking their I-know-what’s-going-on-in-the-world talk all around me, and Mr. Highsmith staring at me. I couldn’t say what I wanted, but I hoped the look I gave her would say what I meant. That I was sorry, that I did love her, even if the man with no skin took it when I said it. That this wasn’t the end of our story.

  I once saw a movie about two friends who were majorly tight. I mean, they were actually more than friends. They were friends but also lovers and they loved each other more than anyone else in the world. But it was like the whole world conspired against them and in the end there’s this scene where they’re being split apart by their parents. The friends keep reaching out for each other, kicking and screaming and crying, “You’ll never keep us apart! Never!” I’d imagined if my and Gracie’s parents ever tried to separate us, that’s how we’d be, screaming our heads off as our parents tugged and pulled.

  What I found when this happened, though, what I found when Mr. Highsmith looked at me with a stare that would melt polar ice caps, what I found when he said, “Stay the hell away from my daughter, McCormick,” through gritted teeth, was that Gracie didn’t say anything. Nothing at all. For a moment she looked at me and shook her head. Then she wiped her glistening eyes and walked out of the station with her father, without a word for me. Not even that one people say all the time. Goodbye.

  A few moments after they turned the corner, my family came around the same one. I saw my father first, his head swiveling back and forth until he saw me and glared. Then my mother’s feet came around the corner behind him, then her wheels, then my mother herself with tear-streaked cheeks, wearing a Christmas green sweater buttoned up to her neck. I almost ran to her, I almost shouted, “I’m home! I love you!” Because I did love her and I wanted her to love me back even though it was difficult, I knew. I wanted to fall at her knees and hold her lifeless legs in my arms and put my head on her lap while she patted my head with her hands, her good hands that still had life in them, to have this reunion that would somehow make all of the dead parts of me all better. I wanted to say, “I was just kidding!” and have her forgive me on the spot like the Highsmiths always did with Gracie. I took a fast step toward her, almost breaking into a run, but stopped before I took a second one.

  Behind my mother, her hands resting on my mother’s chair like the jointed legs of a spider, came the paralyzer. And seeing that hand, following it up to the arm, up to the head and shoulders, seeing the face of Lucy Hall, seeing the pink tip of her tongue slip out to lick her lips, seeing those lips slide into a grin when she looked at me, seeing how she was still a part of my family after all this time made my moment of hope shrivel to nothing.

  Just like that, I no longer wanted reconciliation. Right then I realized I had limits. I would have to negotiate for my demands. But for my family negotiations only happened in movies about terrorists taking hostages. I’d taken myself hostage, but I knew they still wouldn’t listen. It would be their way or no way. I’d failed to make a way out of no way like I’d planned.

  The cop who had been watching me from his desk said, “Looks like you’ve got some people who want to see you. Better go on over, son.”

  I looked at him and tried to glare like my father glared. I wanted to say I wasn’t his son. But I was outnumbered here more than I was at home even, so I rolled my eyes and nodded like he was majorly stupid and went over to them, not really sure how to go about saying hello.

  But it turns out that didn’t matter. As soon as I came to my mother, she held her arms out wanting a hug without saying a word, so I bent down and put my arms around her. I felt tears on her cheeks, but didn’t say anything. We just kept hugging and I was going to do it then, I was going to tell her how I was sorry and loved her and hoped she still loved me anyway, but right at the moment when I looked up at her, his hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around to face him. My father was staring straight at me for the first time in ages, his finger pointing in my face as he started in on me in front of everyone.

  “Listen here, boy,” he said, his voice filled with a tremor. “You’ve had your fun. You’ve caused enough trouble. Now you’re back and this is how it’s going to be. I’m in charge now, hear? And you’re gonna grow up real fast or find yourself in a heap of trouble. Got it? Do you got it?”

  “John,” said the cop who told me to go over to them. “What do you want? The kid to run off again?”

  My mother covered her face with her hands.

  “Fine!” my dad shouted to everyone. “Man can’t discipline his own child these days? See if I care!”

  I could tell that he didn’t. I could see him for the first time in my life. I could see how much he hated me, how he was no longer afraid to show it. I’d given him enough reasons to justify his feelings and now he could say what he wanted. He could tell me I was a waste and how he wished I’d never been born, and everyone else would understand.

  I narrowed my eyes, staring back to let him know I understood him better than he thought. To let him know he might have me in his power now, but not forever. I’m working on that wish, I wanted to tell him. I’m working on unlearning the life you gave me.

  We drove home in the van, my father and Lucy up front, my mother and I in the back. No one spoke. We just listened to a country music station on the radio.

  As we pulled into our drive, I waited for someone to say something, to do something extreme like I’d done that night my father pulled me out of Jamie’s grave, but no one said a thing. Not when we climbed out of the van and unloaded my mother, not when we trudged through the garage door into the kitchen. We were doomed to repeat ourselves, to be in a constant state of returning. I wondered if it was possible to ever really change. Could we ever break ourselves open and be different people than the ones who hurled beer bottles and called each other names?

  Mr. Highsmith was right, and I knew it even when his voice had come running up the stairs of his house to find me. We were trash. I was no good. Take one look at me. Take one look at my family. The evidence was stacked against us. I could run all I wanted, but I couldn’t outrun the truth.

  Lucy pushed my mother over to the table in the dining room, then came back to the kitchen side to turn on the stove. Andy wandered out of his room and stood in a corner, yawning through a drugged-out haze. He smiled to see me returned, proven wrong, just like my mother had been.

  Lucy handed out mugs of coffee and we all stood in the kitchen with our eyes glazed, as if we were a cult preparing to drink cyanide. Everyone but me drank their coffee in big gulps, then set the mugs in the sink before going off to do whatever they planned on doing next. Watching TV, hunting, smoking another joint out in the back field.

  No one said anything about where I’d been for the past month. I stood alone in the kitchen with my unsipped coffee, wondering why no one was talking. Because right then, even if it meant getting yelled at, I wanted to hear their voices.

  It was useless, though. My family didn’t have enough words. They hadn’t collected enough or they had stopped collecting at some point, and this was what we had to work with, this void.

  When I finally put my mug in the sink and wandered back to my bedroom, I
found Lucy folding her clothes on my bed. “What are you doing in here?” I said, and Lucy looked at me.

  “I moved in a few days ago,” she said. “I’m divorcing Doug. He was upset because I was never home and he thought I spent too much time with your family.”

  “You do,” I said. I didn’t move from the doorway.

  “Well, that’s gratitude,” said Lucy, stacking a folded towel on another. “And after all I’ve done for your mother. Now your poor father’s gone and lost his job and it’s all because of you. Not to mention that social worker who’s been sniffing around since you disappeared. She’ll be back, so get ready to do some fast-talking. Do you know the grief you’re causing? You’re a very selfish boy. Do you know that?”

  “You shouldn’t have tried helping,” I said. “You should have stayed with your husband, or at least not here.”

  My words came out without me having to think about them. They came out without sounding angry or upset. I just said what I felt and it started to make sense, even to myself. I felt bad that my dad had lost his job, but he’d lost jobs before and most likely it wasn’t because I’d run off. I’d heard things. Things like what Mr. Highsmith had said about what kind of worker he was. Taking long breaks. Being found far from whatever task had been set for him. He was a good worker when he wanted. It was the wanting my dad wasn’t good at.

  Maybe we had that in common.

  “You don’t understand, Adam,” said Lucy. “You’ll see what I’ve gone through after you’ve grown up and gone through some of the things I’ve seen.”