Hide

by Matthew Griffin

  The traces are almost entirely gone now, her blood diluted and pounded by rain into the dirt, the last little pieces of her flesh pecked away by scavengers. Every once in a while I catch another buzzard spiraling slowly down over the trees and hurry out quick as I can, shouting and clapping my hands. All that’s left, the only remnants, are little fragments of bone scattered in the dust, so small and dried out they could be pieces of wood splintered from the root. They could be bits of rock.

  I throw the bag into the huge county trash can, the one I am somehow, inexplicably expected to be able to tip back and keep perfectly balanced on two precarious wheels while simultaneously pushing it down the gravel drive without the whole thing falling over and crushing me. The bag lands with a dull smack, and I slam the lid shut so hard it bounces back up again, loud as a gunshot. A big flock of starlings scrambles up from the boughs of the oak across the fence, crying one cry from a thousand different throats. They flap so fast and disorderly their wings slip on the air, and they don’t get anyplace, just rearrange themselves over and over above the tree, one filling another’s spot soon as it’s vacated. There are so many of them, fluttering and dipping, their frantic wings blurring the sky, that it almost seems the birds don’t move at all, that it’s the sky itself that bulges and buckles around them, like water on the cusp of boiling.

  What it must have felt like to push his body beneath it, to feel the water resist and then give way, open then close around him, to watch it rise over his cheeks and stream into his nostrils, to hear it rush into his mouth and instantly strangle the sound of his crying. How blissful it must have felt when he finally stopped kicking, finally stopped churning the water up and splashing it all over her, in those few seconds, those few, quiet seconds before the full import of what she’d done set in. What a relief it must have been. No more wailing, no more crying in the middle of the night. Only silence and stillness.

  They look like tacks, the starlings, pinning the sky against some emptiness straining to push through, some emptiness always just behind it that swells and shrinks and stretches it thin. Slowly they get themselves under control and settle back in the branches, one by one unfastening the last bit of pale sky. It falls from the waiting darkness and heaps on the horizon.

  It’s just that I miss him so badly.

  The grass and the trees are still and quiet. Silence seems to move outward from the house, through the walls, through the glass of the windows, smothering everything. I walk toward it, toward the heart of the silence, and there at the very center of it, the very center, is Frank’s voice, murmuring low and serious, and so soft with tenderness and patience I have to turn my head away and take a deep breath. As I get closer, the sound of it swells, thickening, until all it takes is the slightest pressure of attention to shape the endless, edgeless noise into discrete words, like cells beneath a microscope, slowly dividing.

  “It’ll get warmer,” he says as I open the back door. “You’ve just got to get used to it, that’s all. Just move around a little. Get your blood going.”

  Inside, the growing dark stretches the floors, pushes the walls away. I undo the latches.

  “There you go.” His voice turns tender and warm. “There you go. That ain’t so bad, is it? Now lay back. That’s it. Spread your arms out and lay your head back. That’s it, that’s it, you’re doing great.” He stops talking just as soon as he sees me.

  I perch on the edge of the bed, facing him. The only light in the room comes from the television. It’s a relief after all that thick evening light. Television light’s better, clear and thin and cold, like the moon’s, reflected onto you by good-looking people who act much more wild and passionate and commit a bunch more murders than anybody I’ve ever known.

  I feel hot and feverish. I feel like I’m burning up. I press his hand to my cheek, the deep, whorled grooves of his fingertips cool against my eyelids. I slip his hand under my collar, against my chest. He watches me warily.

  The refrigerator grumbles, the bathroom faucet drips into the bathroom sink. It’s wearing away the porcelain, looks like rust underneath. The walls groan with cracks straining to part the panels. Feels like the whole place is coming undone.

  “It’s all right,” I say. “Go ahead and talk. You might as well do it while somebody’s actually here to listen to you.”

  He chuckles. “You think you’re the only one to talk to around here?”

  “I’m the only one you’ve had to talk to around here for fifty-odd years,” I say. “And I sure don’t see anybody else in this house.”

  “You’d better get your eyes checked, then.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  “Think?”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Lorraine,” he says, in shock and outrage that he’d have to tell me.

  “Who in God’s name is Lorraine?”

  “Our daughter,” he says.

  “Our daughter.”

  He looks at me with a mixture of confusion and downright, genuine pity.

  “You’d better go to the doctor,” he says. “And soon. Your mind’s going.”

  I drop his hand. Poor circulation, that’s all it is, all it’s ever been. Just his hands and feet not getting enough blood. They’re too far away from his heart.

  “We don’t have any daughter,” I say.

  “I’m getting real tired,” Frank says, “of you telling me what is and what isn’t.”

  “And just how old is our daughter supposed to be?”

  “You don’t know how old your own daughter is? She’s six. There’s no ‘supposed to be’ about it.”

  “Well, then,” I say, “if you’d care to explain the biological principles which brought her into this world, I’m sure I’d be interested to hear them.”

  He crosses his arms and sets his jaw in a hard-clenched line. “Not with her around,” he mutters, real low so she won’t overhear. “She soaks everything up like a sponge. She may look like you,” he says, louder now, “but she got my brains.” He taps his temple and grins at an empty corner of the room, with on his face the brightest look of earnest, canine devotion. And then, as if in response to something said, he raises his eyebrows in a way I’ve never, not in all these years, seen before: as if they were the lid of a box opening, and inside was the most marvelous surprise.

  “There’s not anybody else,” I say. The words get trapped in my throat. Feels like I’m pushing each one through a screen, comes out grated and raw and split into its crude component sounds, grunts and squeaks and chokes barely overlapping into syllable. “There was never anybody else.”

  He stares at me, real suspicious in the shifting glow. It flickers over him, digging shadows into the wrinkles of his forehead that well up and overflow and vanish.

  “There wasn’t your mama cooking us dinner, and there wasn’t a little girl. There was just you and me. Just the two of us, alone. That’s all there ever was.”

  He laughs a cold, condescending laugh. His eyes shine, not with tears but something else, something permanent, a viscous wave that never recedes. The television coats them in a silver glaze.

  If he looked up, through the water as it closed around him, how strange the world beyond it must have seemed, his mother’s dark shape always shifting, strings of light always melding and dividing, nothing ever just as it was.

  I open the closet and drag the footstool over to his side. It’s only a six-inch lift, but standing on top of it feels like I’m swaying back and forth way up high in the atmosphere, where the air’s too thin for your lungs to grab ahold. My own arm moves in the television light like something from a silent movie, strange and jerky, as I grope behind his crumpled blue baseball cap and shove aside a stack of sweat-stained undershirts he never let me throw away and take down the little cedar box, just big enough to hold a pair of shoes, full of all the pictures we took that first summer.

  I wipe the dusty lid with my shirttail as I carry it to the bed. The latch is so old and stuck in
its place I have to sit down and wedge one of my keys underneath it to pry it up. “Here,” I say, “here, you look and tell me if you see anybody else,” and hold it out as I open the lid. Inside it, crumpled fruitcake wrappers are piled high and loose. The light gleams in trickles that run along their wrinkles, washes dull across their smudges of grease. One, on the very top, spills over the side of the box.

  I dig through them—for the pictures, for his medals, for his mother’s rings—push the wrappers to one side and the other. The box’s unfinished bottom scrapes my fingertips.

  “Where are they?” I say.

  “Where are what?”

  The corner of another wrapper sticks up from the box of tissues on the table beside us, right out the slot, where I’d have plucked it the next time I needed to blow my nose. I tug it free, gummy and warm like he’d just now taken the cake out. The creases are neat and sharp, the plastic sticky and slick at the same time.

  “Sometimes,” I say, “I wish you’d died out there that day.”

  His face—what’s left of it, what hasn’t wasted away and disappeared, devoured by his own body just to keep him alive another useless day or two—hardens into something grim and immovable.

  Wouldn’t it have been easier on all of us? Wouldn’t it?

  “Don’t you move,” I say. “Don’t you dare go anywhere.”

  I look for them all through the house. I open every container, I throw wide every drawer. I pull the books from the shelves and the mirrors from the wall, I turn inside out every pocket of every jacket, every pair of pants. I dig through every one of our trash cans until my hands are sticky with garbage juice, and all I find, all I find is fruitcake wrappers, as if they were pushing themselves through every little gap in his memory, through every crack in the earth and torn-open word. I unzip the covers on the couch cushions and jam my arm inside and pull out whole wads of them from the corners.

  “All right,” he says from the bedroom. “All right. You’ve got to relax, now. Pretend it’s your bed. Pretend you’re just lying down for a nap. That’s it, that’s it. You’re a natural.”

  Not once, not one single time have I caught him hiding one. And still, when I’ve opened every tiny door and unscrewed every lid, when I’ve pulled open and pulled apart every little part of this house you can pull open and there can’t possibly be any more, still they seem to emerge from nothing, from places they weren’t just a moment earlier, glinting like stars pulled out of the darkness solely by your looking for them: one balled up in the beak of a pheasant on the wall, another rolled impossibly tight and thin and wedged in with the line of compounded dust and fur between the floorboards in the hall, so tight I have to lean down with one hand on the china hutch and pick it out with my fingernails, another almost entirely submerged in the soil of a dead poinsettia we should have thrown out three months ago, only its torn plastic edge breaking up through the dirt and curdled leaves. I yank it out. Crumbled soil spills across the floor.

  He would have been a good father. He would have loved that girl more than anything, and she would have loved him. Any child would. I try to will his words into shapelessness, to loosen my attention so they’ll spill out through their burst borders, but I can’t. I have to listen to every single one.

  “Now, what I want you to do is look straight up at the sky. Don’t look around, just straight up. You see all that sky? There’s just as much of it underneath you. The sun’s in it, and the clouds, everything. Remember? There’s just as much of it underneath you, and a sky that big has got to be able to hold up a little girl like you. Don’t you think?”

  He sounds young again. He sounds the way he did that very first moment, open and friendly and warm, excited to overflowing with all those best parts of himself, all those things he gave up along the way, left heaped and gleaming on the side of the road so what was left would be light enough to carry: the Frank he’d wanted to be, the Frank he could have been, if not for me.

  “Don’t be scared,” he says. “There’s no reason to be scared. I’m right here beside you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  I carry the wrappers to him, every single one, the wide, loose mass of them crumpled into hard, wrinkled lumps in my hands, and dump them in his lap. They unfold themselves bit by bit, like something living, like something waking up. And he sits there, just sits there in the bed with his head bowed, with his lips moving silently.

  “Are there any more?” I say.

  He looks up at me, his eyes bright and fanatical and bewildered.

  “Harvey?” he says.

  “I’m not Harvey. I’m Wendell. Harvey’s dead. They’re all dead.”

  “You’re my brother, ain’t you?”

  I turn on the lamp beside the bed. It shrinks the room to normal size, pulls the walls in from the dark deserts they’d wandered off to. I grab him by the shoulders and pull him close. “It’s me,” I say. “It’s Wendell.”

  “Ain’t you my brother?”

  “No. No, that’s just a story. It’s just a story we told.”

  “You ought not go off like that,” he says. “Without telling nobody. Mama’s been worried sick. You ought to’ve at least wrote a letter. Let us know you was alive.”

  His face softens. “It’s good to see you,” he says, holding back tears. “I missed you.”

  Something opens in my chest, sudden and wide and aching.

  “Are there any more?” I say. I have to whisper it to keep the words steady.

  “Any more what?”

  I grab him by the back of the head and tilt his face down toward the wrappers. He peers at them as if they’re very far away.

  “That ain’t how you’re supposed to do it,” he says. “You were supposed to let Lorraine find them.”

  “Are there any more?” I shout.

  He recoils a little and folds his hands primly in his lap. “Nope,” he says. “Nope, I do believe you’ve got them all.”

  The opening swells, fatted, pulling in just a little more of the light, a little more of the space around its edges: the void of time. Not a river, or a turning wheel, but the empty, ever-widening hole of the sun when you look at it too long: all those years, everything we loved, everything we gave up, finally disappearing.

  I grab him by the arms and pull him close. “Whatever life it is you think you remember,” I say, real slow and clear, shaking him a little with each syllable, “whatever life it is you think you had, I don’t want to hear one more word about it. You understand? Not one more word.”

  He nods, wincing. I’m squeezing his arms too hard. The skin’s already starting to bruise, the blood gathering into plum-colored pools beneath it, pinched against the brittle bone. All I’d have to do is squeeze a little harder, and it would break. For a moment—it passes quick, real quick, before the impulse could even move from my chest to my hands, but for a moment, I want to. I want to see him cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  I take his hands, gently, carefully. They rest on his lap, limp and still, wrappers scattered around them, while mine shake and shake and shake, as if the tremors had somehow passed from his fingers into mine.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  Slowly, so slowly she doesn’t even feel it, he pulls his arms out from under her.

  TWENTY

  I keep track of the time by his pill caddy. That’s how I know what day of the week it is, and how much longer I’ve got to go until the week is over. Each evening, after I’ve taken him his last blood thinner and cholesterol pill and antidepressant, and told him they’re candy to get him to take them, and he’s chewed them and grimaced at their bitterness, I leave the green plastic compartment labeled with the day of the week open and empty so I know it’s done, covered in its residue of chalky dust. The next one waits tiny and cramped and shut tight.

  Each morning, I take my shower, and make breakfast, and put a glass of nutrient shake by the bed, and put in a load of laundry. I keep the TV off and the curtains drawn. I don’t know w
hy. Before lunch I put the laundry in the dryer, and after lunch I fold it and put it away. Then I go in to check on him. He sits propped in the bed, alternately staring at nothing and nodding off to sleep. I sit in a kitchen chair beside the bed and play my solitaire video game until I start to do the same. I try not to. If I fall asleep, I’ll lie in bed awake for hours later in the night, listening to his loud, ragged breaths, but I can’t help it. I’m tired. I sleep hunched forward in the chair, with both hands folded atop his cane and my forehead atop my hands, until eventually I slacken enough that the cane falls to the floor with a crack and my whole body slumps forward. That keeps me from getting any good rest. I pick the cane up and do it again, usually four or five times altogether.

  After my nap, I unhook the bag from his toilet and take it to the trash. I dump out the contents of his urinal and wash it in the bathroom sink, with yellow rubber gloves and a soapy sponge, even when there’s nothing in it. I turn on the televisions, I open the drapes. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t change him, doesn’t wake him up or make the day any lighter. Doesn’t seem to be any reason, any point to it at all.

  But it’s important to stick to your schedule. It keeps the days moving one to the next. Holds them up from inside, like a good armature, so they don’t collapse in on themselves. Saturday nights I dread, though, every chamber thrown wide open: dumping the pills into my palm, dividing them out among the waiting days, and closing each one up again.

  In the afternoons, I work on Daisy, a little bit every day. I smear papier-mâché across the roof of her mouth and drag the tines of a big two-pronged fork down each side from its vaulted peak, I press cold wads of it into her eye sockets. The eyes are almost flat on the back, just a little concave curve to them. The others stare blankly up from their cubbies in the tackle box, the bobcat’s pupil a narrow slash like the slice of a razor blade through pale amber, opening up the darkness inside it, the pheasant’s a perfect black circle fringed with a thick corona of dark blood vessels like the crudely-drawn rays radiating from a sun painted on a cave wall. It’s hard to get good dog eyes, so I had to use coyote. They work well enough, I suppose, they’ve got the big pupil, and the pale brown iris leaks its color just a little past its black border and into the white, the way a dog’s does. I angle them to the side, in the opposite direction from the one her head’s turned, to look out from between the corners of her eyelids.