One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  If it hadn’t been for my grandma, I wouldn’t have known even that much about my grandpa, which is still not a lot but better than nothing. My grandma was who told me most things about the world. After she died, I felt like I might not ever learn anything real again. I told myself I had to at least remember everything she’d already told me. Like how she used to worry away at how her life would end. She was keen on dying with nothing left undone here. If you died without being okay about it, she said you’d get stuck in this place trying to sort things out. “Not for me!” she’d shout, grinning, her wrinkles folding over one another. “I’ll have all my ducks in a row!” If my grandma were here walking into the wreckage of this city with me, she’d say, “All sorts of ducks out of place. What were they thinking?”

  I really missed her.

  “This way,” said Jamie, his voice sounding far away. I looked around and found him climbing a set of concrete steps built into a wall of the valley. He ran up them, hitting the iron rails on both sides of the steps with a piece of pipe. Bing! Bing! Bing! Metal on metal echoed through the valley. But the dead paid no attention. They had their own work to finish.

  I ran to catch him, racing up the steps until I reached the top where I found him squatting down on his haunches, twirling the pipe on his fingers like a baton. “There were a lot of dead people down there,” I said. “I thought we were out of dead space.”

  “Well, we are, sort of,” he said, dropping the pipe, standing up. “The world is thin here. You can come and go more easily.”

  A wind picked up as we started walking into town. Snow swirled around us and, as we passed under the flickering cones of streetlights downtown, the flakes looked like tiny galaxies spinning beneath them.

  We turned up Hazel Street, leaning forward against the steep incline. Pillars of steam rose from manhole covers and whenever snowflakes fell into the columns of steam, they melted in midair. A cathedral made of brown, grainy stone loomed above us, its bell tower still lit even this late. We pushed toward it until we were at the top of the street facing down a stone statue of some guy wearing robes near the cathedral’s front doors. He held one hand up as if he were in class, waiting to be called on; in his other he held a book, probably the Bible. He must have been some sort of saint. I didn’t know. My mom couldn’t tell saint from stranger either, but whenever she’d get into a car, she’d cross herself like she was Catholic, something she inherited from my grandma without realizing.

  We kept to the shadows the cathedral cast over the road, and walked up Elm Street only a little ways before Jamie stopped to say, “This is it. Home for the holidays.”

  I looked around but couldn’t tell where he meant for us to stay. No building on the street seemed livable. But I’d lived in a closet and a lean-to in the woods already. If I had to, I could handle pretty much anything.

  There was an old church that looked like it’d been burned up a long time ago, and a building across from it that seemed connected to the cathedral. Up ahead, at the next intersection, I could see a few newer buildings that were probably part of the university. Where was he talking about? Did he mean we’d stay right here in the street like homeless people? Like that kid I’d seen when Gracie and I had driven through the downtown. The one with my face. We were only a couple blocks away from that corner. I only had to run down the hill we’d just climbed and take a right on Commerce and there he’d probably still be, sitting on his haunches against the playhouse. I wished I’d never seen him. Thinking of him just reminded me of everything I’d been doing and if I’d learned one thing since I’d started running away from God’s finger, it was that the person who could frustrate your most well-laid plans because they knew all about you was yourself.

  Jamie pointed to the old burned-up church. I hated churches, even abandoned ones. I figured God might still be living in them, and the last thing I wanted was to run away from one home to live in one run by some other distant dictator.

  This church looked like one of the big Victorian houses Gracie and I had passed on our way into Youngstown. Smoke stained the outer walls, and there were cross-topped turrets on both front corners. There was a bell tower in the center of the roof between the turrets too. Some of the slats covering the tower sides had been broken out. The front doors were locked with chains, the windows covered with plywood. Except for in the smashed-up tower, the place was sealed tight so no one could get in.

  I turned to Jamie but before I could even say a word, he said, “There’s always a way in for us. Don’t worry.”

  We went around back, skulking like thieves, and at a basement window Jamie knelt down to remove the plywood covering. He didn’t struggle, just slipped it out of the frame like it was nothing. Someone must have pried it off and left it sitting in the frame to look like it was still covered, which made me think other people might stay here from time to time. Before I could say anything, though, Jamie slipped through on his stomach, feetfirst. Something splashed when he landed, and a moment later his face loomed in the window. “Come on,” he said. “Quick. Before anyone sees.”

  He placed a wooden crate under the window so I could step down without landing in the water that covered that corner of the floor. A bare bulb lit the basement from the center of the ceiling, and a worktable stood beneath it, tools scattered over the top like surgical instruments. I thought of mad scientists and insane asylums deep in the center of strange forests, bolts of lightning cracking open the sky. Not at the Wilkinson farm, not in the Amish logging camp, not even when I was lost in dead space and a man with no skin stole my words for Gracie had I felt this spooked. “It looks like maybe people are already using this place,” I said, hoping Jamie would change his mind, but it was no good.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s even a generator down here.”

  A large piece of machinery stood in one corner of the basement, taking up half the wall. It had buttons and switches and wires coming out of it, which Jamie flipped randomly until a flush of air came through unseen vents and light seeped through the spaces between the floorboards in the ceiling. He looked at me over his shoulder with his lopsided grin and said, “Come on. Let’s explore.”

  We ran up the stairs and turned a corner into the front entrance area, then went through what used to be a set of double doors into the chapel, which was nothing but a husk of what it must have once been. The floorboards had all been stripped, the walls stained black with smoke, the stained glass broken. There was an organ up on the altar, but when Jamie played his fingers over the keys, no sound came out. Just keys clicking. It had lost all of its notes. Lightbulbs in metal cages hung from the rafters on yellow cords and underneath them a bunch of sawhorses stood next to each other. There were no pews and no paintings of Jesus. There were no signs of life anywhere at all.

  Then a noise came from above us. Maybe I was wrong. Something was alive in here after all. It thumped around above us once, twice, a third time. Then fell silent. Jamie and I looked at each other, then up at the ceiling, as if it would have answers for us.

  “Probably just the wind,” said Jamie. “You know, coming through the broken shutters in the tower.”

  “Probably,” I said, hoping if we agreed with each other it would be true. But when the thumping sound started up again, I decided to investigate.

  There was a small door at the back of the room, next to the altar. I opened it and, sure enough, there were stairs in there that creaked the next moment as I started up them. There were no lights, so the way up was dark. I brushed aside webs and sneezed out dust as I breathed it. Then I lifted my foot to search for the next step, but I’d reached the top. A moment later my eyes adjusted and I could see the outline of the bell tower take shape in the moonlight coming through the broken shutters.

  It was just a little octagon-shaped room big enough for a bell and a person to ring it. Wind came through the broken shutters, and snow rode in on the current. A sliver of moon hung in the sky outside, silver on the dark. There was nothing else in the room ex
cept the bell hook and its pulley. The bell itself was gone, probably ringing in some other church tower. I looked around to see what could have made the noise we’d heard, but I found nothing. That made me even more spooked than I’d felt just being in the church to begin with, and suddenly I got a get-out feeling. The same feeling I’d felt when I saw God’s finger coming. I started to back up, slow and quiet, but before I could turn and go back downstairs, the thumping came again.

  A crow was hurling itself against the ceiling, fluttering blindly in the rafters over and over until it finally dropped to the floor in front of me, where it shook off the fall and picked itself up to hop onto a windowpane. The wind blew snow around its sleek black feathers and the crow opened its wings as if to fly off, then had a change of heart and folded them back under. Tipping back and forth on the ledge, it turned its beady black eyes on me and cawed, then flashed its wings open like a fan and flew straight at me. I ducked just in time to hear it buzz my ear before it circled back around to fly against the wind, out the window, into the night.

  A single feather floated back on the wind and landed at my feet. I bent to pick it up. “One for sorrow,” I said softly to myself, hoping another crow would appear.

  But there had been just the one. Just that one.

  I stood in the tower thinking of the picture of me and Jamie that I’d buried, thinking of the heart-shaped quartz I’d stolen from Gracie. Bad things come in threes. Jamie’s murder, my mother’s accident, and then we’d gotten in his hole together. Here was the result of my actions: a single black feather.

  While I stood there, wishing and wishing that time could go backward, Jamie shouted, “Find anything?” from down the stairs.

  When I looked, I couldn’t see him at the bottom—darkness came between us—but I still shook my head and called back, “Nothing,” knowing he was there.

  I dropped that word like a wishless penny, nothing, then slipped the feather in my front pocket with the broken pieces of Gracie’s heart and followed it down the stairs.

  We stretched out on the altar with my backpack and a bag of potting soil from the basement for pillows. We didn’t have blankets, but we couldn’t feel the cold anyway, and it wasn’t like Jamie could sleep. Even I could only get an hour or two each night, waking almost as soon as I drifted, unable to fall back even if I wanted. But we still found ourselves in familiar positions, nibbling on candy bars I’d smuggled from my mother’s kitchen, making up makeshift beds as if we were able to sleep like normal boys.

  Another thing to put down in my notebook:

  15. When you’re dead, you do the same things you did when you were living, so you can sometimes believe you’re still alive.

  Only a few weeks had passed since we’d separated at the Wilkinson farm, but Jamie made it seem like it had been forever. “I missed you so much,” he said, shaking his head and looking down into his lap as if he were embarrassed to admit it. “It was like you’d died and left the world. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But really, where could I have gone that you wouldn’t have been able to find me?”

  He shrugged, turning his head toward his shoulder to avoid my eyes. “Things happen,” he said. “Things you don’t have any control over. You might have died and crossed over for all I knew.”

  “You didn’t do that,” I said. I thought I was pointing out something significant, locating a flaw in his fears, but instead he winced as if I’d said something painful.

  “Yeah,” he said, sighing. “I didn’t do that.” Talking about himself seemed to bother him, and I let him change the subject. He wanted to talk about me instead. “You’re so good,” he said. “You’re so smart and brave. You ran away from them. You made it.”

  “I didn’t make it,” I reminded him. “And I didn’t do it alone. Gracie helped.”

  “Well, virtually alone then.”

  “She was just scared,” I said, feeling like I should defend Gracie a little. Even if she wouldn’t answer me when I called her name at the police station. Even if she walked away and out of my life without a word.

  “Still,” said Jamie. “What you did was great. It’s like when you’re running. Like that day. When was it? Something happened.”

  “I ran a race.”

  “You ran a race,” he said. “And then you won and they lifted you on their shoulders. It was like that day, running away, winning, wasn’t it?”

  “A little,” I said. “Yeah, it felt a little bit like winning.”

  I couldn’t help but take his compliments and slip them in a private pocket of myself and feel good about the things he told me. Each time he said something nice, I was flattered in a way that was both weird and wonderful. I wanted to hear more and more. Go on, I was thinking. Tell me anything good about me you’ve noticed. I couldn’t do that, so I swelled with his words when he gave them to me, when he told me I was good.

  “Adam?” he said before I fell asleep for a couple of hours.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “Thanks for bringing me,” I said.

  “No, really. I couldn’t have come without you.”

  “Sure you could have,” I said, trying to make him feel better about himself, like he was always doing for me.

  But he only smiled lopsidedly, staring across the space between us on the altar, and said goodnight before my eyelids started to flutter and fall.

  We wandered the city for the next few days, getting to know its roads and bridges, its dead ends and alleys, its drive-thru liquor stores and fast food chains and abandoned theaters, its scrubby parks with falling down fences and vacant lots and bars. This was a world of cracked concrete and buckling sidewalks, a world where the trees lining the streets rotted and buildings disappeared every day. Jamie said he felt like maybe he could be more alive here. “This is my city,” he said. “I feel stronger here. Stronger than when I ever visited home.”

  He meant his old house. He told me his mother still talked to him every night before going to sleep, calling him to come to her bedside so she could tell him all of the things she’d never said when he was alive. I love you, I miss you, you’re such a good boy, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, why didn’t I love you better, can you forgive me, will you give me a sign, just a little one, to let me know you love me still?

  It made him angry, but he went to her anyway. “She just feels guilty,” he said. “But it’s not because of how she feels about me. It’s because of what she used to do to me when I was little.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She used to get crazy sometimes. You know. She’d hear voices and sometimes get angry or sometimes crazy mad and come at me out of nowhere. One time she beat my head with a metal spatula until blood came down my face. I can still remember tasting it. I haven’t burnt that memory yet.”

  “A metal spatula?” I said. “Why would she hit you with a metal spatula?”

  “She’d been cooking hamburgers and I broke one of her figurines in the living room. She always had a nativity scene up on the shelf, even if it wasn’t Christmas. I’d been lying on the floor tossing a basketball at the ceiling, just tossing it up and trying to catch it on my fingertips. I wanted to play a sport like you do. But when I broke the third wise man she came out of the kitchen with the spatula already swinging.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “When I was twelve, I think.” He looked at me without blinking. His blankness made him more beautiful. I wanted that too, but I didn’t know how he did it.

  “She beat you over the head with a metal spatula when you were twelve?” I said, my voice climbing higher. “That’s fucked up. I mean, my dad hits me every now and then but he doesn’t like doing it, I can tell, and mostly he pulls his punches and is really just trying to scare us for screwing up at school or something. But I don’t get the spatula. What’s wrong with her?”

  “Something’s wrong in her head,” he said, tapping his temple with two fin
gers. “That’s all.”

  We were walking across Veteran’s Bridge, which spanned the valley where we’d entered the city. From there I could look down and see the wasteland we’d passed through on Christmas Eve. The dead still wandered down there, picking through rubbish, but from the bridge they weren’t as noticeable. They flickered in and out of sight, as if they knew how to slip through the cracks in the air.

  For a while we didn’t say anything, just kept walking, but the spatula incident kept running through my mind like a scene from a horror movie, so I finally asked what his dad had been like. For me it was his dad who was dead, in the past tense, and it was Jamie who was still alive.

  “He was okay, I guess. Not home so often. Mostly he was on the road. He drove an eighteen-wheeler for a company here in Youngstown. I don’t think he came home sometimes, even when he had time off. But when he did, my mother always ran around like a crazy person, trying to clean up the messes she’d made over the weeks he’d been gone. She loved him more than she loved me. She told me that once when I was eating breakfast before school and he was coming home that night. I didn’t think we were competing, but maybe she did. I don’t know. She’d get so sad when he left, she couldn’t get out of bed for days.”

  “She couldn’t get out of bed?”

  “Well, she could, but only if she made herself. It’s like this, you know, what do you call it?” He waved his hand around, looking at it like he didn’t recognize it. “You know, this thing that has your fingers?”

  “A hand?”

  “A hand,” he said. “Yeah. It’s like this hand is pressing down on her, keeping her on the mattress.”