One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  After the service ended, I told Tia I had to go. She wanted me to meet people, but it didn’t look like they wanted to meet a dirty white kid wearing ripped up jeans and nasty running shoes. Even though the poor were people they were supposed to be kind to, according to Jesus, they still looked at me like I was trash. Just like Mr. Highsmith had looked at me.

  “Don’t pay them any attention,” Tia said, squeezing my hand. But I shook my head and told her it was time for me to leave.

  Tia walked me to the exit and thanked me for at least coming. “Thanks for taking care of me,” I told her. I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and when I pulled back I thought I saw sunflowers unfurling in her eyes. Oh God, oh God, oh God, I thought. Now I wanted to stay. I could see that possibility in her, a place to run to. She could be my light, I thought, like Gracie had been.

  But that wasn’t what I needed. Maybe the light someone else gives you can be enough to keep living, but I wanted to be able to see by my own light, not someone else’s. So I kissed Tia’s other cheek and hugged her, and pushed my way out the door. Out into the world.

  I went back to the abandoned church to grab my backpack, and to look around the place one last time. I whispered goodbye to the empty bell tower, I whispered goodbye to the congregation I’d almost seen with the reverend weeks ago. I ran my hands over Jesus hanging on his cross over the altar. I whispered goodbye to him, then left by the window with the crate beneath it in the basement.

  I made my way past the university to Dorian Books, but the place was closed. When I peered in the window between cupped hands, there was no sign of Kurt either, so I took a piece of paper out of my backpack and wrote him a note, telling him thank you for everything and that I’d try to stay in touch.

  I folded the note and slipped it under the door. Then I walked south, down into the valley again, where the world was thin. This time I didn’t step into dead space, even though that would have made the trip quicker. This time I walked down the rails that ran through the living world, heading home.

  BLACK SHEEP BOY

  IT WAS A LONGER WALK THIS TIME. A DAY, A night, another morning. When I finally found myself in familiar territory, a deer—a buck—crossed from one side of the tracks, stopping to stare as if I were a great evil trespassing on its property. Then, kicking its legs into a trot, it ran down the other side of the hill with its white tail lifted.

  The temperature had risen in the past few days, and snow was melting. It lay in heaps near the base of trees and in lowlands where water always collected; it dripped from branches and found its way to streams that ran toward spring. As the sky lightened to gray, doves woke and started morning songs. And after a while, squirrels came out to bark their chitchat.

  I felt out of place there. Usually I never thought anything of the woods—I’d always gone into it whenever I wanted—but here I was, thinking maybe it wasn’t a place to wander around in any longer. It was like this really happy place in some ways, with a bunch of different creatures all living together in it, sharing daily complaints and victories with each other. And me, I wasn’t a part of that. I passed through and just disturbed everything.

  And that’s when I saw it. The yellow police tape torn down, strewn around the hole where we’d gotten in together. When I came to the edge, I looked down, afraid of what I’d find.

  We weren’t in there anymore, but even so, I felt strange when I looked in. A mixture of longing and fear welled up inside me. How can you want something and be afraid of it at the same time? It had to be the most stupid feeling possible. It had to be the kind of feeling that made people lose their senses.

  Gravel and dirt still lay in piles around the place from when they’d dug out his body, bordering the hole like a fringe. Like a frame for nothing. The police tape hadn’t kept anyone out, and nothing had kept Jamie in there either, and the border of dirt around the hole made my head hurt when I looked at it. Useless. I want to erase it, to stop pretending.

  I didn’t have a shovel, so I used my hands to scoop the dirt and gravel and pour it all back in. It took most of the morning, handful after handful, but eventually I filled it. I couldn’t get it to be full all the way again, though. I tried, but it was still a few inches lower in that place than the rest of the hill. His body being there had changed things. Even the earth couldn’t go back the way it was before his murderer had slipped him in there.

  I thought of that man he’d forgotten, the man who’d taken it away from him. He’d been here too. He’d stood where I stood, looking down as he shoveled gravel and dirt over Jamie’s naked body. How could he have done it? And whoever did it was still with us. We had no way to know, and not knowing, no way to protect ourselves. It made me mad and sad and I started to cry. I could feel the tears warm on my cheeks already. I was about to tell myself, “Stop! No crying!” But I didn’t. I cried. I bawled like a baby. I made a fool of myself crying, and when I finished, I wiped my face with the sleeve of my jean jacket and thought about how crying isn’t all that foolish. It’s just something a person does.

  It only took me ten minutes to walk through the woods from that spot, back to the road my family lived on. And when I stepped out of the trees and hopped across the ditch to the asphalt, I landed right next to two fat crows pecking at the rotting body of a possum. They weren’t moving for nothing. Just cocked their heads up like they were saying, “Excuse us. We’re eating here. Move along, young man. Move along.”

  Two for joy, I counted. I thought of my grandma and hoped her rhyme and reason were right for once. It’d been right for all the bad stuff, I figured, so why not the good? I decided not to hold my breath, though.

  I walked down the road with my backpack slung over my back, and as I walked, the shoelace in my right shoe snapped, just like that, and the tongue flopped with each step that I took. I sighed, wondering if I’d make it home at this rate. Looking up at the sky, I searched out God’s finger, and even though I couldn’t find it among the clouds, I shouted, “Come on! Give me a fucking break!” It wasn’t nice, I know. But I figure God hears worse than that, and at least I was being up front about how I felt. God has to respect someone telling the truth, even if the truth is angry.

  And then there it was. The line of trees dropped away from the roadside and my family’s house appeared in its little square of cleared land. The ranch house my father had built with his own hands. The crab apple tree and red maple in the front yard, the pine trees poking up over the roof in the back like a ridge of green mountaintops.

  It was still early. I hung around in the drive for a while, playing with the tongue of my shoe, scratching any itch I could find, looking at the way the Petersons’ farm down the road seemed smaller than the last time I’d seen it. Used to be it’d seemed like a huge house and barn and two towering silos with endless fenced-off pasture. Now it looked like something you’d buy at a toy store. Plastic cows to put in the barn and pasture. A farmer and his wife to stand outside on the front porch. That sort of thing.

  Even though the Peterson farm looked smaller, my mom and dad’s house seemed like a place where giants lived. I kept taking a step or two forward, then stopping, then going forward again, like I was one of the wrecked people who wandered the streets of Youngstown, talking to themselves, hesitant to go forward or backward, because either way might have something dangerous waiting for them. A cop in one direction, a drug dealer in the other. Both are pretty much the same thing: trouble.

  But I made it to the ramp my dad built for my mom’s wheelchair. And I made it up that to the front porch. And then I was standing at the door with my hand lifted to knock when it swung open and there stood my brother with his nose wrinkled and one eyebrow cocked like he wasn’t sure about something. He looked smaller too.

  “Asshole!” he said. “You’ve come home!”

  “Hey, Andy,” I said.

  “You’re in so much trouble,” he said. “Everyone’s so fucking worried about you. But I knew. I knew you were okay and making everyone worried for
no reason. You’re such a dick, Adam.”

  “I didn’t come back to argue with you,” I said. “I just want to come home.”

  Andy blinked, looking stunned. Probably because I wasn’t playing along with his back and forth put-downs like I used to. It was a waste of time, I figured. It was a waste of fucking time bitching at each other for no good reason. Andy shrugged the shock off, though, and said, “Your funeral.”

  “I’m okay with that.”

  He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Mom! Adam’s home!”

  And from the back bedroom I heard her. I heard her call back, “Andy! Stop! That’s not a nice joke!” She wheeled into the living room then, still bitching, but when she turned the corner and saw me standing in the front door, her mouth stopped moving and her hands fluttered in the air, her fingers motioning for me to come to her. “Oh God!” she said. “Oh God, come here! Come here this instant!”

  I ran past Andy and knelt in front of her, like a knight returning to his queen. She put her shaking hands on my cheeks and tears rolled down her face and she smiled this sort of crazy smile. First a grin, then all wide open and joyful. I put my arms around her waist and my head on her lap and hugged her. I hugged the bottom half of her. She ran her hands over my messed-up hair and I could feel her tears drop against my face. Then I realized it wasn’t her tears, but my own. Again. Twice in the same hour. At this rate I figured I’d be institutionalized.

  “Where did you go?” she said. “Where have you been?”

  “Running away and dying.”

  “What are you talking about, baby?”

  I looked up, wiping tears away, and said, “I’m sorry, Mommy,” and burst out sobbing. My whole face crumpled. I could feel it melt.

  “Hush,” she said. “It’s okay. You’re home now. You’re home, baby.”

  “But I’ve ruined everything!” I sobbed.

  She said, “No, you haven’t.”

  “Yes, I have!” I said. “I have!”

  She said, “Stop this! You haven’t ruined anything,” and pulled me to her for another hug.

  “But you have a psycho for a son,” I said. “How is that not ruining everything?”

  She held me at arm’s length and gave me a good looking over. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said. “Besides, I love psychos. Who said I didn’t love psychos? Psychos are the easiest people to love.”

  After hugging for a while longer she said she was going to make us breakfast. French toast and scrambled eggs and bacon. “A big breakfast for my boys,” she kept saying. “A big breakfast for my boys.”

  When we went into the kitchen, everything seemed smaller there too, like the Peterson farm, like Andy. Only this was because everything was smaller. Also everything was a little fucked up. All the cupboard doors had about a quarter of their doors sawed off at the top, so my mom could reach down and open them easily, and there was this little plywood ramp that led up to a platform by the stove for my mom to sit at and cook. The ramp and platform took up half the kitchen, and I could tell my father had done all of this. It had the mark of his work. A little shoddy but heartfelt.

  Andy started to wander back to his room, saying, “Gonna catch a few more Z’s,” and my mother looked up from a cupboard with a shocked look.

  “You’re going to what?”

  Andy said, “Catch a few Z’s.”

  “You’re going to what?”

  Andy came back into the kitchen and sat at the table, his face smoldering. “Nothing,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” said my mom.

  I was thinking, What the hell’s happened here? But I didn’t even have to ask.

  “I suppose you’re wondering where your father is,” my mom said. She dropped butter into the frying pan and it started to sizzle.

  “Where?”

  “Away,” she said. “For now. Sit tight and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  So while she wheeled back and forth from refrigerator to stove to counter, she told me what had happened.

  What happened was, they kept on fighting as usual, and my dad kept getting on my mom to do her physical therapy, to stop moping around the house with Lucy, and she kept getting mad at him for telling her what to do, especially since, as she told him, she might not be in her situation if he hadn’t been so mean. So she stayed at home and didn’t try to get better. Or made it seem like that. It was her revenge, she said.

  Then my father got called back to the construction company. He’d only been laid off for a little over a month. I guess they hadn’t laid him off because he was a crappy worker, but because they really did have a slow month. So during the daytime he was gone again, and soon Lucy began to wake before my mother and go out for the day, sometimes to Abel’s to do her drinking and socializing, sometimes just out driving, looking around at the flat land surrounding her on all sides. “My prison,” she told my mother. “This place is my fucking prison.”

  “The thing is,” said my mother, “I’d secretly been going to physical therapy all along.” She’d called her doctor and said she wanted to do the therapy, but that she didn’t want anyone to know. The doctor asked when would be a good time during the day and my mother said, “Afternoons. He’ll be at work and I’ll get Lucy to go out and run some errands.” So the doctor agreed to help her.

  He sent over a van for people who didn’t have a way to get to the hospital, and four days a week my mother did her therapy religiously, and after a while she began to get a little feeling in her legs back. “It was just a tingle,” she said. “But it was there. I felt it. I almost tried to walk for you all at Christmas, but I was worried I’d fall.” She worked hard even after I’d run off again, though, and on the day that she was going to surprise my father, on the day she was going to stand up out of that chair on her own and shuffle out to meet him in the kitchen before he left for work, what she found when she got there was Lucy telling my dad, “Oh John. You’re such a hard worker. How do you do it?”

  And my dad saying, “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” said Lucy. “I understand. A person works hard for their family and what do you get in the way of love and respect? Nada. Just nagging and sulking and children who run away. Well, let me tell you, John McCormick,” she said. “Let me tell you, you’re twice the man my stupid old husband is, and you deserve a kiss.” She stood on tiptoe to plant a kiss on my father, wrapping her arms around his waist. Her lips were already puckered, but before she could kiss him, my father pushed her away.

  “Lucy,” he said. “Thank you. But I’m married.”

  And right then, right there, witnessing her friend’s betrayal, my mother’s legs turned to butter beneath her, and she fell.

  Both my dad and Lucy looked surprised and embarrassed, and what my mom said as soon as they came to her, their faces hovering above her, was, “Get out. The both of you. Get the hell out.”

  I didn’t understand why she threw my dad out. For once he’d said the right thing, not yelling or calling anyone names. So I asked and my mother said, “I didn’t throw him out because of what I saw, Adam. I threw him out because I needed to. I couldn’t take his belittling any longer. And I couldn’t take the way I was with him myself. He needs to learn how to talk to me. I need to learn how to stand on my own two feet. I can’t do that with him around. Not right now at least.”

  I asked where he was living.

  “With a friend from work.”

  “Will he come home again?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking flustered. “Maybe after he knows the right words to use when he talks to me. Maybe after I know how to make myself happy.”

  She didn’t look hopeful about either of those things getting done anytime soon, but she served our plates of French toast and scrambled eggs and bacon and the three of us sat around the table for the first time in I don’t know how long. Before I even stuck a fork in those eggs, though, my mother said, “And you, mister—even though I am so thankful you are home,
even though I will die if you do this to us one more time—you, sir, are grounded.”

  I didn’t say anything, just nodded, then began eating. God, how I missed her food! How I missed her and even Andy! And with my father not here like I’d expected, I found that I missed him too.

  It seemed like I’d made the right decision, coming home, but before long Andy said what neither my mom or I wanted to think about. “You know the social worker is going to want in on this,” he said, and we looked up from our food and sighed, our joy being sucked right out of us.

  “We’ll deal with it,” said my mother. Then she cut away a square of French toast and, midway to her mouth, paused to look at me. “We’ll deal with it right this time,” she said.

  I tried to smile innocently, but that didn’t work. I wasn’t innocent any longer. She finished eating, and after all of our plates were clean, she said, “You need to take a shower.”

  I said, “I know that.”