On the television they’re waiting for the judgment. The screen is split between the marble courthouse steps, slick and shining with rain, and the empty seats of the jury box. Fourteen hours now they’ve been deliberating.
Once a week, on Sunday evening, we make the trek to the bathroom. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, leans forward, and grabs ahold of the cane with wobbling arms, struggles to heave himself onto its one narrow point. The skin on the back of his neck is creased in deep, crisscrossing fissures like the dirt of a dried-up creek bed. I grab his elbow and haul. It takes us a little longer every time to get him standing.
He keeps one hand on the wall and with the other pushes his cane squealing and smudging black scuff marks all the way across the hall to the bathroom, never breaking contact with the floor. I have to help him raise it over the lip of the door, and keep one hand on his back, hunched and bony, to make sure he doesn’t tip over backwards.
I take him to the shower and help him out of his clothes, sit him down on the plastic seat I bought and turn on the water, put the soap in his hands and close his fingers around it, but he doesn’t clean himself at all. After a few minutes, the soap slips free and falls to the floor with a loud thud. Not that it matters much. Sitting under the spout like that, you can’t lather yourself up properly for the water washing the suds away. While he’s in the shower, I change the sheets. He never would turn the mattress like I told him to, and now he’s left a crater in the foam that never fills itself back in. I feel it in my sleep, the downward pull tilting me always toward him.
I try think of it all as charity work. Just showing the common decency you’d show to any orphan or invalid, any injured stranger on the street. It’s easier that way.
When I come back, he’s just sitting there, his hands in his lap and his head down like his neck’s too weak to hold it up, the water pouring over him, the soap plugging the drain so a flood rises over his feet. He looks up at me like he’s being punished. Sometimes he knows who I am, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s worst in the late afternoons, usually, and the early evenings, right as the sun goes down.
He doesn’t talk near as much now. Hardly talks at all. I’d thought it would be a relief.
I smear clay across her brow and forehead, my thumb leaving its imprint in little spiny ridges, pull her face back over her skull, and mold her features through the skin: pinch a lump of clay into each eyebrow, gather it into the ridges of good chewing muscle alongside her skull’s bony crest. The insides of her lips I brush with glue, pull their corners toward her ears until her jowls have just the right curve and the loose edges of her bottom lip, dark and scalloped like some creature you’d find at the bottom of the sea, fall perfectly away from her gums. All along her lips and eyelids, I drive insect pins through her skin, through the clay, until the point strikes bone. They’re the thinnest you can find, meant to fix the moth’s wings to the lepidopterist’s black velvet without crumbling them to dust, don’t leave even the slightest hint of a mark. I set her on the vent in the kitchen floor, to harden and dry.
At five, I cook some dinner, which I eat by myself at the table. After dinner, I take him in some food, hold it out to him on a fork. I try to slip it into his mouth in the moments when he’s far away, so he’ll chew and swallow it by instinct. I wash all the dishes I can by hand until it hurts too bad, and clutching each plate through the slippery suds feels like somebody’s pushed a sharp wire down each of my fingertips, along and against the bone, and trying to bend a finger means you’ve got to bend that wire, too, and you never know when it might snap and tear out through the skin.
The hours after dinner are the worst: those empty, quiet hours that instead of passing seem to just grow wider and wider, like bubbles rising to the surface.
I turn off the faucet and listen while I dry my plate: for a snore, for a mutter or a laugh, for the patter of a little girl’s feet.
I sling silverware into the sink just to hear it clatter. I throw the cabinet doors open and clang the pots and pans.
The pill caddy says it’s Thursday, and Thursday night’s the night I stay up late to go to the grocery store. I’m too afraid to leave him here awake, so I sit beside him in the dark and watch the news on the tiny screen and wait while he stares at something in the far, far distance, over the news anchors’ shoulders: at the buildings of the downtown skyline projected behind them, at the tiny yellow squares of lit windows where, here and there, you can just make out the blur of a shadowed figure caught in the moment the picture was taken, someone hunched over his desk, someone looking out toward you in the midst of pulling down the blinds, never able to draw them all the way shut.
And there’s Debbie Drowner, all dolled up in her prairie dress and blue bonnet, weeping big, glassy tears that roll down her rosy cheeks and drip onto the NOT GUILTY headline as it slides across the bottom of the screen in an endless loop. She falls to her knees on the courthouse steps, raises her hands to the sky, and thanks God for His infinite mercy.
I turn the news off and sit in the dark, listening to him breathe. Each inhale gurgles thick and wet. It catches in his throat, and for a few seconds there’s silence, absolute silence, and the whole house is still, waiting. Then the choking noise as it breaks apart, the heavy wheeze of breath barely scraping through it. I half expect salt water to spill from his lips.
Tomorrow, there’ll be dead boys floating in lakes and pools and bathtubs all across this country. Just you wait and see.
After a few minutes, I creep to the door, check one last time for the ripple and gleam of eyes open in the dark, and sneak out of the house. The grass has got so tall, thigh-high and waving in every breeze, that I found some people in the phone book to come cut it, called up every landscaper there was listed, and these boys came the cheapest. And they give you a first-time customer discount on top of that, and you don’t have to pay them or talk to them at all while they’re here—I just gave the woman on the phone our address, and she said she’d send them out next week and mail me an invoice. I don’t even have to be here.
I put the car in neutral and let it roll down the driveway, the wads of catkins gathered on the gravel muffling the tires’ rumble, before I start the engine and drive through the teeming dark. Feels like it’s trying all the time to spill into the headlights, to dent the bumper and crash its antlers through the windshield.
But I like it inside the store. Look forward to it all week. It’s nice and cool, and the floor’s polished so shiny and slick the reflections of the fluorescent lights burn away the lines between the tiles, and the lights themselves send a sort of numbing buzz washing over and through you. And the air is perfectly blank. All this food, and it doesn’t smell like anything at all.
That’s the best part. I’m tired of remembering. I’m tired of being reminded.
I should have started going to the grocery store at midnight years ago. There’s hardly anybody here this late, and no children at all, so I don’t have to worry about maneuvering my cart around their exposed toes while they simper over boxes of sugary cereal, though I am forced to listen to some nocturnal couple, neither of whom could be older than twenty-five, arguing over whether they need the low-fat or the no-fat cheese. I push my cart away from them fast as I can, back toward the produce aisle and all its waxy skins. Used to be, you went to the grocery store for some cheese, you ate whatever they happened to have. Now everybody’s got so many choices, two-percent or low-fat or no-fat, cheddar and Swiss and foreign names I can’t even pronounce. They think they get to decide everything: who they love, how much money they’re going to make, how many children they’ll have and how smart those children will be, when most of them can’t pick out their own clothes without looking like a clown or a streetwalker or some combination of the two. You don’t get to choose. Not anything that matters.
Sometimes now it seems like somebody else’s life. Like something I imagined.
The lights above the produce bins flicker, and hidden speakers rumble electroni
c thunder. A fine mist sprays from nozzles in the wall, coating the zucchini and peppers and parsley. They sweat and drip with the rain. When I close my eyes and listen, the storm almost seems real. I can see the flashes of lightning through my eyelids.
The produce doesn’t taste like a thing, though. It truly doesn’t. Every tomato looks seared clean, each blemish cut away and cauterized, every bruised, out-of-season peach big as a diseased heart, and just as bloodless.
I stay in the store a long time after I’m finished shopping, push my cart up and down the aisles, piling things in it, changing my mind and putting them back, until the skinny boys loading the freezer cases from plastic-wrapped pallets of waffles start looking at me like I’m some sort of criminal. The house is hushed and still when I get home, and when I carry the bags from the den to the dark kitchen and turn on the light, it feels like I’ve stepped into a whole other house and time, crossed from one place to another the way you do in dreams. None of it seems real or solid. One shouted word could dissolve the whole place, and me with it.
Before bed, I set the dishwasher to run, with the couple bowls and pots I didn’t get to earlier. I can hear it from the bedroom, and the hum and chug help me sleep. First I get a knife and scrape some leftovers from the plastic containers they sit and spoil in at the back of the refrigerator: chicken salad, deviled eggs, green beans. I haven’t learned yet how to cook for one. Even when I tried, I couldn’t do it. It felt all wrong. And I never eat the leftovers. That would open too big a chunk of time when I should have been cooking, and the biggest danger of all is an empty space in the day. It’s easy, then, for the whole thing to start collapsing inward, for the emptiness all around it to break through and rush in and join the emptiness inside.
The knife scrapes a little too loudly against the plastic. I stiffen, and pause, and wait for everything to shatter.
The dishwasher’s racks aren’t half full, even with all the containers, but I pour the powdered detergent into the cup, and close the door, and turn the dial to run it anyway.
You just go on living. You don’t have to have a reason.
TWENTY-ONE
The truck grumbles up the gravel early, right as I’m about to take my shower. You can hear it even from the back of the house with the bathroom fan whirring, these old walls are so thin. I check the curtains in the living room, in the bedroom, make sure they’re drawn all the way shut, and watch from the crack between them at the window over the sink as two young men wade their way through the gleaming, waist-high grass. They haul all the old stakes out of the garden—free of charge—and pile them against the fence.
I turn the water on hot as I can stand, so it hurts for the first minute or so and leaves my skin tender and pink—that’s the only way I feel clean anymore—and I’ve just stepped into it, haven’t even started to shampoo, when I hear beyond the thundering drum of drops in the basin a loud, cracking crash. I’m already hurrying out of the shower, toweling off, tugging my pajamas back on, before the crash turns into a clatter from the kitchen and the sound of wood splintering, but by the time I get there, Frank’s already out the back door. He’s left it wide open: shouldered his way out of the bedroom so hard the latch hooks have bent and ripped from their eyes, yanked out the silverware drawer and spilled it all over the floor in finding the hammer, and used the hammer’s claw to tear the doorframe away from the deadbolt, and now he’s staggering across the yard, fully dressed, rumpled shirt and pants hung loose from his bones like empty skin and one raised finger jabbing admonition at the boys hurtling heedless around on their riding mowers, so fast and reckless you’d think they were in a race. I grab his cane and head out after him, yet again.
He marches right in front of one of the mowers. It would serve him right to get run over, and the boy at the wheel doesn’t look like he’s entirely ruled out that particular course of action, grinds the thing to a halt so close the clippings spray Frank’s shins. I wade through the grass, still glistening and stooped with dew, and by the time I emerge into the stubbly strip they’ve already cut, the cuffs of my britches are dark and damp. Heavy, too. Feel liable to pull my pants down.
Frank’s still holding the hammer. It knocks softly against his leg as he walks around to the side of the mower.
“Frank,” I say.
He waves me back inside. “You get out of here,” he says to the boy. He’s a real unsavory-looking character, has dark stubble like patchy undergrowth all across his cheeks, and the hair on his head shaved down to the same length. The sleeves of his shirt are cut away to show the curved furrows between his ribs and the damp tendrils of hair curling from his armpit, stuck to his side with sweat. The line between the tanned skin of his neck and arms and the paler skin of his chest is so stark and sharp it hurts me just to look at.
He shoves his hands into the pockets of his orange basketball shorts, pulled taut over his thighs so you can see every muscle’s delineation, and pulls out a scrap of paper. He reads out our address.
“That’s here, right?” he says.
“It is,” I say, and Frank scowls at me, warning and fearful and, if I’m not mistaken, a little bit threatening.
“It’s all right,” I tell him. “Come on, let’s go inside. It’s all right,” I say to the boy.
The way Frank glares at me, I’m surprised the grass between us doesn’t shrivel up. “I ain’t going in the side of anything,” he says. “Not until I get all these hoodlums off my grass. Go on.” He shoos the boy with his hammer. “I know how you people operate. Just show up and start cutting anybody’s grass and then tell them they owe you. Get out of here.”
The boy gives me an impatient widening of the eyes, like he’s asked me a question and can’t believe how long I’m taking to answer. Grass clippings are stuck to his bare knee. Without even glancing down, he wipes them away, but their green stains his skin. Behind him, his oblivious partner’s still hurtling back and forth across the yard, gathering up vast swaths of grass in his huge, curved blades. A dozen tree swallows dart and dive all around him, gorging themselves on the swarms of exposed insects. A couple bear down like they’re about to attack him, graze right across the brim of his baseball cap, but he’s wearing big earphones and reflective sunglasses and makes no sign of knowing that anybody in the world exists but himself.
Frank squints at the padlock on the shed door, gleaming in the light. “Somebody’s locked me out of my own shed,” he says. “Who put that lock there?”
“So do you want me to come back later or something?” the boy yells at me over the whir and grind.
“You don’t need to talk to him,” Frank says to the boy. “You need to talk to me. He don’t even—”
“Look, I just need somebody to tell me whether to mow this yard or not.”
“Yes,” I say.
“No,” Frank says.
The other mower blows up from the dead patch a billowing cloud of red dust. Its top disperses hazy through the air; its heavy bottom sinks back to earth, spreads even across the dirt.
“Get out of here,” Frank yells. “You too,” he says, flicking the hammer at me. “Get.”
“You need to calm down,” I say. “Everything’s fine. I called them.”
“You called them? On the phone?”
“We’ll come back later,” the boy says.
“Don’t you go anywhere,” I say.
“You don’t even live here,” Frank says. “He don’t even live here,” he says to the boy. “He’s my brother, in town for a visit. He don’t even live here, he’s just—”
“Frank,” I say. “They don’t care. Nobody cares. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
I touch the back of his hand, lightly, to try to pull him back here, into his own body standing in his own yard, but he snatches it away from my fingers with the quickness and violence of reflex, lifting the hammer overhead.
“He don’t live here,” Frank says, desperate. “He don’t.”
The boy grimaces. He’s staring at the crotch of Frank�
��s britches. A tiny dark spot speckles the fabric next to his fly, like a drop of rain just landed.
“Frank,” I say.
“He don’t live here,” Frank says.
The hammerhead draws languid circles against the sky. The dark spot spreads slowly across the front of his pants.
“He’s sick,” I say to the boy. “That’s all.” I wrap my fingers around the hammer and pull it down from the sky. Frank lets me. The boy’s eyes widen.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go inside.”
Slowly, silently, the stain drops a tentacle down one leg.
I hold Frank’s cane out, the handle toward him. Reluctantly, dazed, he accepts it. I take another step toward him, and to maintain the distance between us, as if it were an unbreachable law of physics, he takes one step toward the house, my nearness swelling the empty space between us like the darkness between the stars when he shrugged his shoulders.
“So do you want us to keep mowing or not?” the boy yells.
I drive Frank away, step by step. He won’t pick his cane up, keeps trying to just push it through the grass like it was his walker. It tears up the yard and gets lodged in the dirt, so he has to twist it all around to work it loose, and then he goes and does the exact same thing all over again.
“Pick it up,” I say. “It doesn’t have wheels, you know.”
He stares at me like I’m speaking another language.
“Do you see any wheels on it? Pick it up.” I yank it out of the dirt.
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