Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  “…priest, false priest…”

  “…heavenly father, save her…”

  “…false priest…”

  “…father…”

  “…priest…”

  He started screaming.

  * * *

  It stopped raining just before the sun rose, and the pumps, which had been straining for days to keep up, finally managed to drain the water from the streets. Throughout the French Quarter, people were getting up, getting ready for work. Businesses were unlocked, lights turned on, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief that the rain was finally over. The sun beat down, evaporating the water, and the air thickened.

  “Have you tried to get the knife away from him?” Venus Casanova asked the beat cop as she sipped at her coffee, her eyes taking in the scene, the girl’s rain-soaked dead body, her shirt open to reveal the cross carved between her breasts, the rosary beads dangling from her left hand. Her eyes were open and staring up at the blue cloudless sky, her mouth frozen in a scream. Venus shuddered. You never get used to it, she thought as she turned her attention to the mumbling man holding the knife.

  “I haven’t tried, we thought it better to wait for you,” the cop, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, replied with a feeble grin. Two other uniformed cops stood safely out of reach on either side of the man, their guns carefully trained on him.

  “What is he mumbling?” she asked.

  “Prayers,” the cop replied. “Hail Marys and Our Fathers.”

  Religious mania, she thought, as she walked over and knelt down. “Michael?”

  He stopped mumbling and slowly turned his head toward her. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and empty.

  “Can you put the knife down?”

  It clattered to the ground.

  She breathed out a sigh of relief and nodded to the other officers, who moved in, grabbed him by the arms, and raised him to his feet. They cuffed him and moved him over to a squad car, and she could hear them reading him his rights. He was docile and didn’t say a word as they put him into the back seat. She waved the crime lab guys over, and they started their work.

  She glanced over at the body and shook her head. It was over.

  She looked up at the sky.

  It was going to be a beautiful day.

  Lightning Bugs in a Jar

  “No, no, no! The lightning bugs weren’t a metaphor for the family, they were a metaphor for humanity!”

  Each word came roaring out in an exasperated lisp, accompanied by the thump of the antique mahogany cane with the brass lion’s head at the top on the floor, undoubtedly leaving marks on tile supposed to look like hardwood but not fooling anyone.

  It was Aptos. No one here had real hardwood floors.

  Celia picked up a couple of abandoned wineglasses, dregs of white sloshing around in the bottom of one, red in the other. No one was paying any attention to her—no one ever did when the Great Man was talking, lecturing, gifting them with pearls of genius that other literature students would sell their mothers into slavery to hear in person.

  The party had gone on longer than Philip’s parties for the new students in his section of the MFA program usually did. Every semester the new students in his graduate seminar on Modern American Novelists were invited over to meet and genuflect before the Great Man who’d anointed them with oil, feeding their ambitions crumbs from his table while they fed his insatiable ego.

  Or maybe it just seemed like the party was running long. It wasn’t like she hadn’t heard his bon mots before at least a hundred thousand times, and if she had to hear the discussion about what the stupid lightning bugs in his best-known novel symbolized one more time…

  “We’re all lightning bugs in a jar,” she mouthed the words as he said them, “that some child has captured, watching. And that’s what they symbolize, man’s futile struggle against forces he cannot control, just like the lightning bugs flying inside the jar, unable to be truly free.”

  Just like that stupid wrecked concrete ship down at the beach is a metaphor for my marriage. Yes, kids, the Palo Alto is our marriage, me and the Great Man’s. Sunk just offshore and broken into pieces, something that once had value and now is just…

  No, that didn’t quite work, did it?

  That’s why he’s the Great Man and…I’m just the wife.

  Just the wife.

  There were murmurs of approval, and she resisted the urge to roll her eyes, reminding herself to be grateful they didn’t burst into applause.

  Couldn’t they tell they’d overstayed their welcome, were becoming unwanted pests? At least only three were left now, two men and a woman in their early twenties, eyes shining as they listened to Philip pontificate, drinking in his wisdom like the expensive wine they’d been slurping up like Kool-Aid all night. Drunk and stoned—the marijuana smoke hung in the living room like a fog rolled in from the sea in the early morning. I should probably care how they’re getting back to campus from here but I don’t. I didn’t choose to live out here in Aptos, she thought as she turned her back to the swinging door leading into the kitchen, pushing it open with her backside. His students, not mine. They’re not my problem. I’ve got enough problems of my own, thank you very much.

  Was it all that long ago I was one of them, when my biggest worry was my grades?

  “You don’t have to stay,” she said to Lupe, her cleaning woman. Lupe was washing dishes and ashtrays and glasses, her hands submerged in gray soapy water. Finger sandwiches on dishes wrapped in cellophane sat on the avocado kitchen counter. A large black trash bag was sitting on the floor open, red strap ties hanging limp. “I can finish everything from here, thanks.”

  “You sure, Señora Blackburn?” Lupe asked in her accented English, wiping her hands on a worn dish towel that had been a wedding gift a million years ago, maybe from the Styrons? She couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. “I don’t—”

  “You’ve already stayed later than I asked you to.” Celia forced a smile onto her face. She reached for her purse and pulled out the hundred-dollar bill she’d gotten from the bank that morning. She always paid Lupe in cash, in case she wasn’t legal—no paper trail in case ICE ever came after her.

  Lupe frowned. “You sure?” she asked, taking the bill and folding it, slipping it into her front pocket. She reached for her purse, tucked away by the microwave.

  “I’m sure.”

  Lupe nodded, flipping the backyard light switch as she started out the back door. The light didn’t come on, the backyard remaining wrapped in darkness. “I should change the lightbulb—”

  “It can wait. Can you see well enough?” Celia had switched out the lightbulb last week for a burned-out one she’d kept hidden away in a drawer. The yard had to be dark, she needed Lupe to tell the police the backyard light was burned out when asked. The light from the kitchen windows provided just enough illumination so the backyard wasn’t all inky blackness, but the gate at the back was still hidden in darkness. It opened out onto Trail Wood Way, where Lupe always parked her old Honda. “Do you want me to walk you out?”

  “No, no.” Lupe shook her head. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”

  She watched Lupe go, slinging her purse strap over her shoulder as she went. Celia bit her lower lip and looked at her Fitbit. It was almost a quarter till nine.

  He shouldn’t be out there yet. God forbid Lupe see him—the last thing they needed was someone to see him skulking on the road behind the house, something to remember later when questioned. She’d wanted Lupe to leave around eight, like originally agreed, but there was too much to be done with the grad students lingering, the little get-together meant to be a little happy hour with wine and simple mixed drinks and finger sandwiches and sliced vegetables with ranch dressing for dipping dragging out longer than she’d assumed it would.

  After all these years, she should know better.

  She’d have to hurry them out, and that would be remembered later, too.

  It was a chance she’d have to take
if they didn’t leave soon.

  She swore under her breath as the gate shut behind Lupe. If he was early…no, Lupe would be rushing, wanting to get home as fast as she could. But someone walking their dog or jogging…

  So many things could go wrong.

  The night was quiet, very quiet like every night in Aptos. She hadn’t wanted to move there, wanting something like one of the Victorians in the older part of Santa Cruz, close to the boardwalk and the funky shops, closer to the water.

  And as always, what she wanted hadn’t mattered. Aptos fit Philip’s pretentious snobbishness better, even if it meant surrounding her with soccer moms and women in yoga pants who drove SUVs and drank lattes while yakking on their iPhones.

  She hated Aptos.

  I’m going to sell this place.

  She closed the door and glanced back out the window again before letting the curtain drop back into place.

  They had to be gone by nine.

  She couldn’t use her cell phone, either.

  Who did you call at nine, Mrs. Blackburn? the cops would ask.

  She rinsed the wineglasses out, put them on a towel with the others to dry.

  She could hear them, laughing, in the living room, and gritted her teeth. They were gathered close around his well-worn easy chair, on the edge of their seats, wineglasses in hand, drinking in his wisdom, paying attention to every word coming from his lips like the sycophants they were. Chosen by the Great Man himself, after sifting through essays and applications and recommendation letters until the wee hours of the morning, every last one of them feeling special for being picked by THE Philip Blackburn.

  She had, in fact, been one of those wide-eyed, fawning, adoring, sycophantic students once, not all that long ago.

  It seemed sometimes like it had been at least a million years.

  Her welcome-to-the-program cocktail party hadn’t been here, of course. He hadn’t been at the University of California-Santa Cruz then. Philip was riding high on his National Book Award shortlisting and was writer-in-residence at Louisiana State University then, angling for the Robert Penn Warren chair. She’d been so thrilled, so delighted, so honored, to be selected for the Great Man’s program back then, having read every word he’d written, every short story and essay and novel. Bashful, with her own hopes and dreams, she remembered how she’d blushed when the Great Man had turned his attention to her, making sure she had wine and food, keeping her there talking about Art and Literature and the Written Word after the other students had long gone, just the two of them left in that big empty, dusty house just off the campus on Highland Avenue, just past the fraternities and sororities and hideous student apartment complexes that looked like something, he told her with a sad shake of his head once, like something out of Eastern Europe from before the Iron Curtain fell.

  She’d been the Chosen One that semester, and hadn’t she felt special?

  Special enough for him to marry, right?

  Special.

  Yeah, she’d been special, all right.

  She poured herself another glass of wine and walked to the door to the front room of the big house she’d hated almost on sight. Built as part of a development in the 1970s, houses for upper-middle-class professionals on streets with adorable names like Quail Run Road and Lori Lane and Trout Gulch Road. It was a bigger house, at the end of a dead-end lane, on a bigger lot than its neighbors, with the big fenced backyard opening out onto the sidewalk of another street with slightly smaller, less expensive houses. The creek in walking distance, the redwood hiking park perfect for jogging and getting back to nature, if you liked that sort of thing. She pushed the door open, standing in the doorway, looking at the tacky living room with the furniture he’d picked, the faux wood floor tile, the never-used fireplace. He was seated, of course, in the enormous thronelike chair carved from mahogany he’d found in a secondhand shop in San Francisco and always lied was a family heirloom. He’d filled it with overstuffed pillows, the matching mahogany cane with the brass lion’s head he had to use now leaning against the throne’s right arm. He’d had it when she had been his student, but back then it was an affectation, a prop he used for his role of Great American Author. He was good in his role, she had to give him that, even now that she hated him. Once she’d looked at him just as adoringly as the young woman in the blue cable-knit sweater, plaid skirt, black tights, and thick glasses was now, her unruly dark hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, leaning so far forward on the edge of her chair she was in danger of pitching face first onto the floor.

  The two boys looked impossibly young to her, not old enough to be in college, let alone MFA students. Was I ever that young? she wondered, as she took another drink. They didn’t look much older than Dylan had when he—

  She pushed away that thought. She couldn’t think about Dylan now. That would—no, she couldn’t.

  Unnoticed, she walked back into the kitchen. It used to bother her they never noticed her, didn’t pay any attention to her, when she was younger and first married to the Great Man. Of course, back then she still had hopes and dreams, when she spent hours hunched over the kitchen table writing in a notebook or later, at the keyboard, trying to make Art, and always failing.

  And then she’d gotten pregnant.

  She was three months along when the LSU Board of Regents made it clear that not only was he never going to get the Robert Penn Warren chair, they didn’t want him on campus anymore.

  Or in Baton Rouge, for that matter.

  She pushed aside the curtain over the window in the back door and peered through the gloom. Her heart was racing. Calm down, she told herself, you have to stay calm. That’s how people get caught.

  She wasn’t going to get caught.

  She wasn’t a fool.

  She let the curtain fall back into place. He was out there, like they’d planned, and he would just have to wait longer. Patience wasn’t Alejandro’s strength, but he wasn’t stupid.

  Not entirely stupid, anyway.

  That was part of his charm.

  The Great One was shouting, thumping on the floor with his cane again. She could hear his voice rising over the others. “David Foster Wallace was not a genius!” She didn’t have to see his face to know it was reddening to purple, his eyes were bulging, and there were flecks of spittle flying from his mouth.

  Maybe he’ll have another stroke. I should be so lucky.

  It had been two years since he’d had the first stroke, when he’d fallen off his throne while watching I, Claudius on DVDs from Netflix (“one of the only television shows worth watching”), unable to speak, his eyes open and staring at her, unable to respond to anything she said as she punched in the numbers 9-1-1 on her cell phone, her hands shaking, not believing this was happening on top of everything else, it was just One. More. Thing.

  That was the first time, really, sitting in the emergency room, waiting for the doctors to come tell her what was wrong with him, clutching her cell phone in her hand, afraid another set of doctors might call at any moment, that was the first time she’d wondered what would happen should Philip die.

  And actually, it seemed…pleasant.

  Sitting there in an uncomfortable chair with her phone in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of undrinkable coffee in the other, she lost herself in a fantasy of what her life would be like if the doctor came out and told her Philip had died. Not having to deal with his students, his tyrannical needs when he was writing another book or a short story or a book review, his desperate, childlike, narcissistic, constant need for attention and approval; the freedom to watch what she wanted and do what she wanted and eat what she wanted whenever she wanted…it was lovely.

  It was so lovely she felt a little cheated when the doctor came out to tell her Philip was resting comfortably, he’d had a stroke and would need some rehabilitation, of course, but there was no reason why he couldn’t make a full recovery.

  She’d nodded, followed the doctor back to the private room where Philip slept, thinking bitterly
of course HE is going to make a full recovery.

  Wasn’t that the way it always worked?

  She’d felt guilty enough about those thoughts to head down to Our Lady Star of the Sea on her walk the next morning before going down to the beach, to light a candle and ask forgiveness for her thoughts, to plead with God to not punish her through Dylan, but even as she said the Hail Marys and worked the ancient rosary beads she’d had since girlhood, she knew Philip would live and Dylan would die.

  She’d known Dylan would die the moment she heard the diagnosis.

  She never admitted it out loud, of course, to anyone. But the moment the doctor told her about the bone cancer, she knew her son would die. As she accepted the condolences of the other faculty wives and relatives and the people she knew that were just the Great Man’s fans and not her friends, she just felt numb. She wasn’t going to cry in front of any of them, not going to let anyone see her weakness. She just smiled a little bit and said thank you over and over again, the way she did at the Great Man’s book signings or launch parties or events honoring him, when strangers would tell her how amazing it must be to be his wife, to share his bed, to have borne his child.

  His child. The child he’d never lifted a finger to help her with. She was his mother and therefore that was her job. The Great Man’s was to create Art, hers to raise their child. “You can still write,” he told her after the baby came home. “He’ll take naps, won’t he?”

  Yeah. Naps.

  And then came the cancer diagnosis.

  She’d been too busy to realize how much she hated, resented, him as Dylan died, as he went through treatment after treatment, after he learned to not cry or scream or sob from the pain in his bones anymore, as his hair fell out and he lost weight and sometimes was so weak he couldn’t get out of bed. And then she had to take care of them both after the Great Man’s stroke. Dylan, so weak and in so much pain, sorry to be a bother, always saying he was sorry in his breathless little voice, as opposed to Philip, so demanding and needy and insistent and nasty to the home health workers she’d hired to help, complaining always about the cost and bitching about his physical therapist. The exhaustion she could feel deep inside her bones, her joints, the tiredness that never seemed to go away.