by Amber Smith
Before I know what’s happening, I feel motion behind me, chairs shifting; they’re calling Caroline. She makes her way up the aisle and my mom turns to watch her. I wonder how long it’s been since they were in the same room. It takes her a while to get up there—the same shuffling gait she had at the funeral, like maybe one of her legs doesn’t quite cooperate.
Once she gets situated and swears on the Bible, Mr. Clarence asks about the first time she ever noticed that something was wrong between my parents. I expect her to tell a story like the one Jackie told me. But right away it’s clear that’s not going to be her story.
“Allison was a senior in high school—they’d been going together for a while at that point. One night she called me from this diner where the kids used to hang out. It was late for a school night. Eleven o’clock maybe. She wanted me to come and pick her up—which was strange because she never asked me for rides, she was always very . . .” She pauses, trying to find a word. “Independent, never wanted help with anything. She told me they’d gotten into a big argument. She said Paul suddenly started yelling at her, calling her names. And then he left her all alone and told her she couldn’t leave until he came back. She said she’d been waiting for three hours and the restaurant was closing. And I asked her . . .” She stops abruptly.
“Please, take your time,” Mr. Clarence tells her, something in his demeanor softening.
“I said, ‘Sweetie, why are you staying there?’ I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t just walk. It wasn’t very far, a block away; she used to walk there all the time. And I remember she whispered this part so quietly I could barely understand her, like it was too humiliating to say it any louder . . . she couldn’t walk home because he took her shoes and her coat. It was January.”
I watch the faces of the twelve jury members. No one looks impressed. Like maybe they don’t get how messed up that was. They look hungry and bored. Maybe Mom wasn’t so wrong about wanting to keep me away from this.
When the judge calls a recess, I rush out of the courtroom to avoid being seen. Outside I stand on the steps of the building and fill my lungs with freezing air. As I exhale, I watch my breath turn to fog. I can’t help but imagine what I might feel like if I were standing here without my boots and my coat right now. I try to take as many deep gulps of air as I can—that familiar old suffocating, straitjacket feeling wrapping itself up inside of me.
“Too cold to snow.”
I turn to my left. Caroline is standing there. She’s bundled in a puffy mauve parka and a knit hat and scarf, and the kind of gloves you buy at any drugstore for ninety-nine cents. Between her fingers she holds a long, slender cigarette.
“What?” I ask.
“The weather. It’s too cold to snow.”
“Oh.”
“Do you mind?” she asks, nodding at the space between us—at least the length of one tall person.
I’m not sure if she’s asking whether I mind her smoking or if I mind her standing next to me. I shake my head, because honestly, I have no good reason to deny her either. She takes a deep, long drag from the cigarette, her cheeks sucking inward and her eyes squinting against the wind.
“I was a weather girl,” she says. “For two years, when your mother was a baby. Channel four.”
“You were a meteorologist?” I ask.
“No. Just a weather girl—a weathercaster,” she corrects, bending her gloved fingers twice, air-quoting with a cigarette. “Never finished my degree, but I was close.”
“W-why not?” I ask, not sure if my stutter is from the chatter of my teeth or how surreal it feels to be standing next to this woman with whom I share DNA and not much else.
“I got pregnant in my last year of college,” she says matter-of-factly, puffing away. “So I dropped out and got married. Got myself hired for the news anyway. I was young then—pretty. I don’t think anyone cared that I actually knew what I was talking about.” There’s a wistful half smile on her lips that makes her look so much like Mom. “But then I started getting hit in the face too much to be on television anymore.” She shrugs, then side-eyes me, checking for my reaction.
I nod and mumble something that might sound like “Oh.”
“Well, it’s actually not that it’s too cold,” she continues. “You hear that, but it’s really all about the moisture in the air. The colder the air, the less moisture there is for the water vapor to form snow crystals, so that’s why it usually won’t snow if it’s this cold. But it has to do with moisture, not temperature.”
“Huh,” I mumble, finding it increasingly difficult to be verbal. I wonder if cold has an effect on speech, too.
“It all starts way up in the atmosphere,” she says, looking up into the thick gray sky. “A tiny particle in the air—dust, something like that, pollen, whatever—all it takes is for one droplet of water to stick to it. It freezes. Then it travels down, collecting the water vapor in the air, forming more ice crystals, more and more and more, and water does what it does . . . ,” she explains, as if there’s one obvious, known fact about what water does.
I nod.
“That’s why no two are alike—that’s true, you know, not just an overprecious metaphor—each individual snowflake has its own journey down to the ground. A million tiny factors make each one different.” She takes one long last inhale of her cigarette. “You’re planning on college, right?” she asks me, breathing out a thin stream of smoke after the words.
I nod again.
“Good.” She tosses her cigarette to the ground, stomping on it like she’s crushing a bug. “Well. Not sure if you like science, but . . .” She pauses, looking up at the thick layer of clouds sitting above us, as still as a picture. “If you ever get the chance to look at a snowflake under a microscope, you have to see it. It’s magical.” She bends over with some difficulty, wobbling slightly as she picks the cigarette butt up off the ground.
I look at the clouds too. I have a million things I want to know, but I can’t think of a single question. So I ask the only coherent one that comes to me: “Do you think it’ll snow soon?”
She raises her head to the sky, shielding her eyes with one hand, studying something there that I can’t see, and says thoughtfully, “Pretty soon.”
It’s silent in the space between us as we both look out at the traffic on the street. Out of the corner of my eye I see her breaths on the air, coming in quick succession, and it makes me wonder if she’s breathing heavy because of the smoking or because of me—if I’m making her as nervous as she’s making me.
“I do like science, by the way,” I blurt out, an afterthought.
She turns to me, stares for a moment. “Are you okay?” she asks. “Earlier. Inside.” She gestures toward the building looming at our backs and pantomimes her head dropping forward, like mine did in the courtroom.
“Oh. Yeah, I just—I get these headaches sometimes.”
She nods knowingly, sympathetically. “Migraines. I get them too. It’s the stress.”
“What did you mean, what water does? What does water . . . do?”
“Water,” she begins, shaking her head slightly, a deeper crease forming in her brow as she tries to put it into words, “water’s always seeking water. It’s like gravity, magnetism—water attracts water.”
She searches my face to see if I’ve understood, but I’m not sure I have.
“Well, think about rivers. Every river leads to the ocean—that’s their whole purpose, trying to find a way back to the ocean. They cut through rock, move mountains to do it, but they always carve out a path”—she moves her hand through the air, a zigzag line like a fish—“to reach that other body of water out there.”
“Right,” I hear myself mutter, agreeing, realizing how much sense that makes, vaguely remembering having learned that at some point.
“Funny thing is,” she continues, “people do that too, don’t they? But then again, look at what we’re made of.” She starts laughing but chokes out a deep, lung-rattling cough i
nstead.
I feel myself nodding. It’s strange, I feel like we’re having multiple disjointed conversations at once, yet they all make sense and I don’t mind. She doesn’t seem like the pill-popping, criminally negligent drunk that Jackie described. Maybe a little odd, but then again, so am I.
“Are you going back in?” I ask her.
“In a minute I will.” She reaches into her purse and pulls out a leather pouch that clasps like a change purse; from it she produces another long, skinny cigarette. “I never did mind the cold,” she adds. “Are you going back in?”
I look back at the building. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe I’ll see you here tomorrow, then?” She smiles, a hopeful lift to her voice.
“Yeah, maybe.” I begin to descend the stairs of the courthouse, unable to remember if the bus stop is to the left or to the right, like if I were a river, I wouldn’t know for sure which way to flow to reach the ocean.
STAINED
I CONSIDER GOING TO school late. But as I sit down on the couch, the warmth slowly returning to my body, I realize I’d rather just sit here and do nothing. I slink out of my boots and gloves and scarf and coat. They sit there, forming a puddle on the floor. Like I’ve melted away and all that remains is this small pile of personal effects.
I sink into the couch cushions, their soft, massive arms folding around me. My eyelids feel so heavy, like I’ve been drugged by the day. I try to keep them open, but they drift and set, as they often do, on that pesky faded grape juice stain, before closing.
When I open my eyes again, I’m ten years old. It’s Sunday morning. Cartoons on TV. I’ve just stashed Callie in our bedroom. I closed the door behind me quickly and stood there in the hallway trying to become invisible, trying to blend in like a chameleon, fading into my surroundings, becoming undetectable.
“What, you think you’re a tough guy, huh?” He pushed Aaron. Hard. “Big man, are you?”
Aaron had thrown his cereal bowl at Dad only seconds earlier.
If I was ten, Aaron was thirteen. Still small—too small, too scrawny—and Dad was like a giant advancing on him. I think Aaron must’ve been aiming for his head, but he never was particularly good at throwing things, so the bowl hit Dad in the back instead. It made a dull, soft thud and then clattered to the floor, sending the spoon flying across the kitchen.
Dad turned around. He let go of Mom, whom he’d already backed up against the wall. I watched soundlessly from the hallway as the scene unfolded in slow motion.
“Leave her alone!” Aaron yelled, trying to hide the trembling of his voice under sheer volume. I thought I might pee my pants, I was so scared for Aaron. But a small spark of hope flickered alive inside of me for just a moment—the hope that maybe this would work. After all, it wasn’t like anyone had ever actually tried to stop him before. Maybe it could be that simple. Maybe Aaron was onto something.
Dad shoved him again, though. Aaron stumbled backward, and as the two of them spilled into the living room, that little light inside of me was snuffed out, almost as soon as it had ignited. Because of course Aaron couldn’t stop him; Dad wasn’t going to suddenly flip a switch in his head and wake up and see all the damage he was doing.
Aaron tried to stand his ground. A stupid idea. He should’ve been running.
Mom was calling both of their names, yelling for them to stop, but it was suddenly like there was no one in the world but Dad and Aaron. Everyone seemed to fade into the background: Mom and her pleading; Callie humming quietly behind the closed door; and me, frozen there in the hall—even I had finally faded away. And there was no place else in the world except our living room, the space between the two of them, no sounds but Dad’s voice, shouting:
“Come on! You wanna hit me? Do it like a man. You get one free shot—do it now,” he demanded, this deranged smile distorting his face. He bobbed his head up and down, holding his arms open, beckoning Aaron forward, repeating over and over, “Come on. Hit me. Hit me. Come on. Now—now!”
Something in Aaron’s eyes went all steely and hard, and I wanted to scream, Don’t! It’s a trick! but I wasn’t even there anymore, so I couldn’t say anything. And it was too late anyway. Because everything sped forward, happening too fast to stop. The flat, sloppy sound of flesh against flesh: Aaron’s fist crashing into Dad’s face. But Dad had some kind of force field around him. He didn’t even flinch, didn’t miss a beat before he hit Aaron. It was so quick I barely saw how it happened; one second Aaron was standing and the next he had collapsed like that tiny, weightless bird from the hospital, smashing into an invisible glass wall—crumpled on the ground, wings broken.
By then I’d rematerialized in the hallway, still guarding our bedroom door. I flattened myself against the wall and tried not to make eye contact as Dad walked toward me. Didn’t matter, though; it never did. Because he just looked through me as if I weren’t there anyway, and I knew that was the best I could ask for.
And then the worst part.
He threw a glance over his shoulder as he walked away, and mumbled “Loser” under his breath, like Aaron wasn’t even worth enough for him to bother saying it to his face.
My legs trembled as I walked over to where Mom knelt on the carpet next to Aaron. The coffee table had been knocked over, and with it, Callie’s entire glass of grape juice, which was now sinking into the carpet fibers. Mom touched Aaron’s hair, saying, “Why did you do that? Why?” She looked back and forth, frantically, between Aaron and the growing purple stain, like she couldn’t choose which one to save. She said something to me, but all I could hear was that word echoing in my head: Loser, loser, loser. All I could see was Aaron lying there on the living room floor.
“Brooke!” she yelled at me. “Get something!”
“What?” I stood there, not knowing what she wanted me to do. “Get what?”
“A towel, something. Anything! Go, now.”
I ran into the kitchen, slipping in the spilled milk from Aaron’s cereal bowl, and grabbed the dish towel that was hanging from the handle of the refrigerator door. When I returned, Mom had Aaron sitting up, her hand on his back. I knelt down next to them and brought the towel to Aaron’s face, trying to decide how best to approach the blood coming from his nose, his mouth. But Mom snatched the towel from my hand before it touched his skin.
“Help him up!” she snapped at me. Then she grabbed my wrist, replacing her hand on his back with mine. She turned away from us, on her hands and knees, and folded the towel in half, pressing it down against the carpet, sopping up the grape juice. “Get him to his room”—she was crying hard now—“before he comes back.”
Aaron was out of it. I was glad. Because maybe that meant he hadn’t heard what Dad called him, maybe he hadn’t noticed that Mom seemed more concerned about the stain setting than his bloody nose and split lip.
“Come on,” I told him, struggling to pull him up. He wobbled as he got to his feet. We took a million shuffled steps to get to his bedroom. When we finally did, he fell onto his bed and bounced with the mattress, gasping like he hurt everywhere. His left cheekbone was already bruising up, his eyelid swelling fast.
Ice.
I ran back out to the kitchen, this time sidestepping the puddle of milk. I grabbed a bag of frozen peas from the freezer and wet a bunch of paper towels in the sink. I wanted to say something to Mom, but she didn’t look up; she just cried, and scrubbed and sprayed the spot with carpet cleaner. I closed Aaron’s door behind me and sat next to him on his bed. I tried to wipe the blood off his face with the paper towels, but he kept pulling away.
“Are you okay?” I asked, but that was a stupid question.
“My fucking hand,” he moaned as he sat up slowly, raising it, wincing as he tried to move his fingers. It was so swollen and bruised all over I was sure he’d shattered every bone.
“Does it hurt?” Another stupid question.
But as he inspected the damage, I watched his mouth twisting upward slowly. He was smiling as he said,
“It feels like someone strapped a firecracker onto my fist and it exploded.”
“Here,” I whispered, handing him the bag of peas. “Your face—it looks really bad.”
“Good,” he said, his voice tight.
“What?”
He laughed, struggling to focus his one nonswollen eye on me. “He did exactly what I wanted.”
“But, Aaron—” I began, but he cut me off.
“I can take it, all right? What I can’t take is just standing by, doing nothing, trying to stay out of his way. There’s no staying out of his way—he won’t let that happen.” He paused, gingerly cradling his hand in the nest of frozen peas. “I can’t pretend anymore.”
I understood. Sort of. He’d never thought he could win. That wasn’t the point. I tried to think of anything I could say to try to plead some sense into him. “He’ll kill you.”
“He’ll kill her if I don’t—it’s only a matter of time. You know that.”
I shook my head, my eyes getting hot, stinging with tears. No, no, no—we weren’t allowed to think those kinds of things. Aaron was breaking all the rules.
“You don’t have to be scared,” he told me. “I don’t want anybody to be scared anymore. I got this. I promise,” he added, holding out the pinkie of his good hand.
I couldn’t decide if I thought he was really brave or really, really stupid. Reluctantly I reached out and wrapped my own pinkie finger around his.
Something pulls me back through time, abruptly, tearing me away from Aaron and his bedroom and his promise. It takes me back to the day in the hospital—that bird smashing into that glass window. I hear the sound of it—that horrible thud over and over again. The crack and crash of it. My mind reverses, then fast-forwards. Now it’s Dad’s footsteps on the stairs as he leaves. Mom crying somewhere, muffled. Then a key in the door.
My eyes fly open. And it’s now. I’m still slouched on the couch. My things still sit in a pile next to the door. My neck aches, my head kills. I sit up straight. I reach for the remote and quickly turn the TV on.
