First, Body

by Melanie Rae Thon

  First, Body

  Stories

  Melanie Rae Thon

  FOR THE CHILDREN:

  Hayley, Christopher, Kelsey, Bradley, Michael, and Melinda

  Contents

  FIRST, BODY

  FATHER, LOVER, DEADMAN, DREAMER

  LITTLE WHITE SISTER

  NOBODY’S DAUGHTERS

  1 In These Woods

  2 Xmas, Jamaica Plain

  3 Home

  THE SNOW THIEF

  BODIES OF WATER

  NECESSARY ANGELS

  About the Author

  If suddenly you do not exist,

  If suddenly you are not living,

  I shall go on living.

  I do not dare,

  I do not dare to write it,

  if you die.

  I shall go on living.

  — Joan Brady,

  Theory of War

  FIRST, BODY

  TWO NURSES with scissors could make a man naked in eleven seconds. Sid Elliott had been working Emergency eight months and it amazed him every time. Slicing through denim and leather, they peeled men open faster than Sid’s father flayed rabbits.

  Roxanne said it would take her longer than eleven seconds to make him naked. “But not that much longer.” It was Sunday. They’d met in the park on Tuesday, and she hadn’t left Sid’s place since Friday night. She was skinny, very dark-skinned. She had fifteen teeth of her own and two bridges to fill the spaces. “Rotted out on smack and sugar. But I don’t do that shit anymore.” It was one of the first things she told him. He looked at her arms. She had scars, hard places where the skin was raised. He traced her veins with his fingertips, feeling for bruises. She was never pretty. She said this too. “So don’t go thinking you missed out on something.”

  He took her home that night, to the loft in the warehouse overlooking the canal, one room with a high ceiling, a mattress on the floor beneath the window, a toilet behind a screen, one huge chair, one sink, a hot plate with two burners, and a miniature refrigerator for the beer he couldn’t drink anymore.

  “It’s perfect,” she said.

  Now they’d known each other six days. She said, “What do you see in me?”

  “Two arms, two ears. Someone who doesn’t leave the room when I eat chicken.”

  “Nowhere to go,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  He told her about the last boy on the table in Emergency. He’d fallen thirty feet. When he woke, numb from the waist, he said, Are those my legs? She lay down beside him, and he felt the stringy ligaments of her thighs, the rippled bone of her sternum; he touched her whole body the way he’d touched her veins that night in the park, by the water.

  He sat at his mother’s kitchen table. “What is it you do?” she said.

  “I clean up.”

  “Like a janitor?”

  Up to our booties in blood all night, Dr. Enos said.

  “Something like that.”

  She didn’t want to know, not exactly, not any more than she’d wanted to know what his father was going to do with the rabbits.

  She nodded. “Well, it’s respectable work.”

  She meant she could tell her friends Sid had a hospital job.

  He waited.

  “Your father would be proud.”

  He remembered a man slipping rabbits out of their fur coats. His father had been laid off a month before he thought of this.

  Tonight his mother had made meatloaf, which was safe — so long as he remembered to take small bites and chew slowly. Even so, she couldn’t help watching, and he kept covering his mouth with his napkin. Finally he couldn’t chew at all and had to wash each bite down with milk. When she asked, “Are you happy there?” he wanted to tell her about the men with holes in their skulls, wanted to bring them, trembling, into this room. Some had been wounded three or four times. They had beards, broken teeth, scraped heads. The nurses made jokes about burning their clothes.

  But the wounds weren’t bullet holes. Before the scanners, every drunk who hit the pavement got his head drilled. “A precautionary measure,” Dr. Enos explained. “In case of hemorrhage.”

  “Did the patient have a choice?”

  “Unconscious men don’t make choices.”

  Sid wanted to tell his mother that. Unconscious men don’t make choices. He wanted her to understand the rules of Emergency: first, body, then brain — stop the blood, get the heart beating. No fine tuning. Don’t worry about a man’s head till his guts are back in his belly.

  Dr. Enos made bets with the nurses on Saturday nights. By stars and fair weather they guessed how many motorcyclists would run out of luck cruising from Seattle to Marysville without their helmets, how many times the choppers would land on the roof of the hospital, how many men would be stripped and pumped but not saved.

  Enos collected the pot week after week. “If you’ve bet on five and only have three by midnight, do you wish for accidents?” Dr. Roseland asked. Roseland never played. She was beyond it, a grown woman. She had two children and was pregnant with the third.

  “Do you?” Enos said.

  “Do I what?”

  Enos stared at Roseland’s swollen belly. “Wish for accidents,” he said.

  Skulls crushed, hearts beating, the ones lifted from the roads arrived all night. Enos moved stiffly, like a man just out of the saddle. He had watery eyes — bloodshot, blue. Sid thought he was into the pharmaceuticals. But when he had a body on the table, Enos was absolutely focused.

  Sid wanted to describe the ones who flew from their motorcycles and fell to earth, who offered themselves this way. Like Jesus. His mother wouldn’t let him say that. With such grace. He wished he could make her see how beautiful it was, how ordinary, the men who didn’t live, whose parts were packed in plastic picnic coolers and rushed back to the choppers on the roof, whose organs and eyes were delivered to Portland or Spokane. He was stunned by it, the miracle of hearts in ice, corneas in milk. These exchanges became the sacrament, transubstantiated in the bodies of startled men and weary children. Sometimes the innocent died and the faithless lived. Sometimes the blind began to see. Enos said, “We save bodies, not souls.”

  Sid tasted every part of Roxanne’s body: sweet, fleshy lobe of the ear, sinewy neck, sour pit of the arm, scarred hollow of the elbow. He sucked each finger, licked her salty palm. He could have spent weeks kissing her, hours with his tongue inside her. Sometimes he forgot to breathe and came up gasping. She said, “Aren’t you afraid of me?”

  And he said, “You think you can kill me?”

  “Yes,” she said, “anybody can.”

  She had narrow hips, a flat chest. He weighed more than twice what she did. He was too big for himself, always — born too big, grown too fast. Too big to cry. Too big to spill his milk. At four he looked six; at six, ten. Clumsy, big-footed ten. Slow, stupid ten. Like living with a bear, his mother said, something broken every day, her precious blown-glass ballerina crumbling in his hand, though he held her so gently, lifting her to the window to let the light pass through her. He had thick wrists, enormous thumbs. Even his eyebrows were bushy. My monster, Roxanne said the second night, who made you this way?

  “How would you kill me?” he said. He put one heavy leg over her skinny legs, pinning her to the bed.

  “You know, with my body.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “I want you to explain.”

  She didn’t. He held his hand over her belly, not quite touching, the thinnest veil of air between them. “I can’t think when you do that,” she said.

  “I haven’t laid a finger on you.”

  “But you will,” she said.

  He’d been sober twenty-seven days when she
found him. Now it was forty-two. Not by choice. He’d had a sudden intolerance for alcohol. Two shots and he was on the floor, puking his guts out. He suspected Enos had slipped him some Antabuse and had a vague memory: his coffee at the edge of the counter, Enos drifting past it. Did he linger? Did he know whose it was? But it kept happening. Sid tried whiskey instead of rum, vodka instead of whiskey. After the third experiment he talked to Roseland. “Count your blessings,” she said. “Maybe you’ll have a liver when you’re sixty.” She looked at him in her serious, sad way, felt his neck with her tiny hands, thumped his back and chest, shined her flashlight into his eyes. When he was sitting down, she was his height. He wanted to lay his broad hand on her bulging stomach.

  No one was inclined to offer a cure. He started smoking pot instead, which was what he was doing that night in the park when Roxanne appeared. Materialized, he said afterward, out of smoke and air.

  But she was no ghost. She laughed loudly. She even breathed loudly — through her mouth. They lay naked on the bed under the open window. The curtains fluttered and the air moved over them.

  “Why do you like me?” she said.

  “Because you snore.”

  “I don’t.”

  “How would you know?”

  “It’s my body.”

  “It does what it wants when you’re sleeping.”

  “You like women who snore?”

  “I like to know where you are.”

  He thought of his sister’s three daughters. They were slim and quick, moving through trees, through dusk, those tiny bodies — disappearing, reassembling — those children’s bodies years ago. Yes, it was true. His sister was right. Better that he stayed away. Sometimes when he’d chased them in the woods, their bodies had frightened him — the narrowness of them, the way they hid behind trees, the way they stepped in the river, turned clear and shapeless, flowed away. When they climbed out downstream, they were whole and hard but cold as water. They sneaked up behind him to grab his knees and pull him to the ground. They touched him with their icy hands, laughing like water over stones. He never knew where they might be, or what.

  He always knew exactly where Roxanne was: behind the screen, squatting on the toilet; standing at the sink, splashing water under her arms. Right now she was shaving her legs, singing nonsense words, Sha-na-na-na-na, like the backup singer she said she was once. “The Benders — you probably heard of them.” He nodded but he hadn’t. He tried to picture her twenty-four years younger, slim but not scrawny. Roxanne with big hair and white sequins. Two other girls just like her, one in silver, one in black, all of them shimmering under the lights. “But it got too hard, dragging the kid around — so I gave it up.” She’d been with Sid twenty-nine days and this was the first he’d heard of any kid. He asked her. “Oh yeah,” she said, “of course.” She gave him a look like, What d’you think — I was a virgin? “But I got smart after the first one.” She was onto the second leg, humming again. “Pretty kid. Kids of her own now. I got pictures.” He asked to see them, and she said, “Not with me.”

  “Where?” he said.

  She whirled, waving the razor. “You the police?”

  She’d been sober five days. That’s when the singing started. “If you can do it, so can I,” she’d said.

  He reminded her he’d had no choice.

  “Neither do I,” she said, “if I want to stay.”

  He didn’t agree. He wasn’t even sure it was a good idea. She told him she’d started drinking at nine: stole her father’s bottle and sat in the closet, passed out and no one found her for two days. Sid knew it was wrong, but he was almost proud of her for that, forty years of drinking — he didn’t know anyone else who’d started so young. She had conviction, a vision of her life, like Roseland, who said she’d wanted to be a doctor since fifth grade.

  Sid was out of Emergency. Not a demotion. A lateral transfer. That’s what Mrs. Mendelson in personnel said. Her eyes and half her face were shrunken behind her glasses.

  “How can it be lateral if I’m in the basement?”

  “I’m not speaking literally, Sid.”

  He knew he was being punished for trying to stop the girl from banging her head on the wall.

  Inappropriate interference with a patient. There was a language for everything. Sterilized equipment contaminated.

  Dropped — he’d dropped the tray to help the girl.

  “I had to,” he told Roxanne.

  “Shush, it’s okay — you did the right thing.”

  There was no reward for doing the right thing. When he got the girl to the floor, she bit his arm.

  Unnecessary risk. “She won’t submit to a test,” Enos said after Sid’s arm was washed and bandaged. Sid knew she wasn’t going to submit to anything — why should she? She was upstairs in four-point restraint, doped but still raving; she was a strong girl with a shaved head, six pierced holes in one ear, a single chain looped through them all. Sid wanted Enos to define unnecessary.

  Now he was out of harm’s way. Down in Postmortem. The dead don’t bite. Unconscious men don’t make choices. Everyone pretended it was for his own sake.

  Sid moved the woman from the gurney to the steel table. He was not supposed to think of her as a woman, he knew this. She was a body, female. He was not supposed to touch her thin blue hair or wrinkled eyelids — for his own sake. He was not supposed to look at her scars and imagine his mother’s body — three deep puckers in one breast, a raised seam across the belly — was not supposed to see the ghost there, imprint of a son too big, taken this way, and later another scar, something else stolen while she slept. He was not to ask what they had hoped to find, opening her again.

  Roxanne smoked more and more to keep from drinking. She didn’t stash her cartons of cigarettes in the freezer anymore. No need. She did two packs a day, soon it would be three. Sid thought of her body, inside: her starved, black lungs shriveled in her chest, her old, swollen liver.

  He knew exactly when she started again, their sixty-third day together, the thirty-ninth and final day of her sobriety.

  He drew a line down her body, throat to belly, with his tongue. She didn’t want to make love. She wanted to lie here, beneath the window, absolutely still. She was hot. He moved his hands along the wet, dark line he’d left on her ashy skin, as if to open her.

  “Forget it,” she said. The fan beat at the air, the blade of a chopper, hovering. He smelled of formaldehyde, but she didn’t complain about that. It covered other smells: the garbage in the corner, her own body.

  They hadn’t made love for nineteen days. He had to go to his mother’s tonight but was afraid to leave Roxanne naked on the bed, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the last one. He touched her hip, the sharp bone. He wanted her to know it didn’t matter to him if they made love or not. If she drank or not. He didn’t mind cigarette burns on the sheets, bills missing from his wallet. As long as she stayed.

  The pictures of his three nieces in his mother’s living room undid him. He didn’t know them now, but he remembered their thin fingers, their scabbed knees, the way Lena kissed him one night — as a woman, not a child, as if she saw already how their lives would be — a solemn kiss, on the mouth, but not a lover’s kiss. Twelve years old, and she must have heard her mother say, Look, Sid, maybe it would be better if you didn’t come around — just for a while — know what I mean? When he saw her again she was fifteen and fat, seven months pregnant. Christina said, Say hello to your uncle Sid, and the girl stared at him, unforgiving, as if he were to blame for this too.

  These were the things that broke his heart: his nieces on the piano and the piano forever out of tune; dinner served promptly at six, despite the heat; the smell of leather in the closet, a pile of rabbit skin and soft fur; the crisp white sheets of his old bed and the image of his mother bending, pulling the corners tight, tucking them down safe, a clean bed for her brave boy who was coming home.

  Those sheets made him remember everything, the night sweats, the yello
w stain of him on his mother’s clean sheets. He washed them but she knew, and nothing was the way they expected it to be, the tossing in the too-small bed, the rust-colored blotches in his underwear, tiny slivers of shrapnel working their way to the surface, wounding him again. How is it a man gets shot in the ass? It was a question they never asked, and he couldn’t have told them without answering other questions, questions about what had happened to the men who stepped inside the hut, who didn’t have time to turn and hit the ground, who blew sky-high and fell down in pieces.

  He touched his mother too often and in the wrong way. He leaned too close, tapping her arm to be sure she was listening. He tore chicken from the bone with his teeth, left his face greasy. Everything meant something it hadn’t meant before.

  She couldn’t stand it, his big hands on her. He realized now how rarely she’d touched him. He remembered her cool palm on his forehead, pushing the hair off his face. Did he have a temperature? He couldn’t remember. He felt an old slap across his mouth for a word he’d spit out once and forgotten. He remembered his mother licking her thumb and rubbing his cheek, wiping a dark smudge.

  He thought of the body he couldn’t touch, then or now — her velvety, loose skin over loose flesh, soft crepe folding into loose wrinkles.

  His father was the one to tell him. They were outside after dinner, more than twenty years ago, but Sid could see them still, his father and himself standing at the edge of the yard by the empty hutches. Next door, Ollie Kern spoke softly to his roses in the dark. Sid could see it killed his father to do it. He cleared his throat three times before he said, “You need to find your own place to live, son.” Sid nodded. He wanted to tell his father it was okay, he understood, he was ready. He wanted to say he forgave him — not just for this, but for everything, for not driving him across the border one day, to Vancouver, for not suggesting he stay there a few days, alone, for not saying, “It’s okay, son, if you don’t want to go.”

  Sid wanted to say no one should come between a husband and a wife, not even a child, but he only nodded, like a man, and his father patted his back, like a man. He said, “I guess I should turn on the sprinkler.” And Sid said, “I’ll do it, Dad.”