The Melting

by lize Spit

  A few minutes later, a helicopter flies by overhead. All I can do is keep pedaling and hope that no aerial photos are being taken. That the landscape isn’t being immortalized at this very moment to be hung on the wall in somebody’s living room, with me as a dot, Penny as a dot, both of us moving in opposite directions.

  Two-Chair Restaurant

  JAN DISAPPEARED TWO days before his sixteenth birthday, on December 28, the last Friday of 2001, not long after Laurens asked me which superpower I wanted.

  Christmas break was almost over. Laurens and I were in his backyard, hanging out on the swing set. He was sitting one step lower than me. His hair had grown longer. I looked down at the crown of his head. Laurens had always had the same part, but now that his hair was longer and heavier, the line down the middle of his head was wider, more pronounced. The split made him vulnerable, revealing the exact spot where I could break him. Those last few days, we’d hardly done anything but sit on the swing set. The living rooms contained balding Christmas trees, still decorated with lights and pompoms.

  For the first time, Laurens’s parents had more orders than they had neighbors. They were very proud of this fact. Customers were driving in from all over the place—there weren’t enough parking spots in front of the shop.

  “I’d pick teleportation,” Laurens said, answering his own question before I did because I was taking too long to think about it.

  “Where would you want to go?” I asked.

  “An island,” he said.

  “What island?”

  “Any island.”

  People who want to go to an island don’t necessarily want to go anywhere, they just don’t want to stay where they are.

  The church bells rang three o’clock.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  Every time the shop bell jingled, he would look out into the courtyard, hoping it was Pim. He’d promised to come over at two o’clock. We were going to set up the old restaurant.

  “Two-Chair Restaurant” was a game Laurens had invented. It combined the best of his two worlds: food and competition. We placed two kitchen chairs in the middle of the room, where Pim and I would sit blindfolded. Laurens would play the chef. He would concoct a strange, never-before-seen combination on a teaspoon and feed it to us. Whoever guessed the ingredients correctly was appointed the new chef, switched places with Laurens, and created the next item on the menu. The restaurant went bankrupt the day Pim served us a raw rabbit kidney with chocolate and cayenne pepper.

  Now, looking down at the part in his hair, I remembered the look on Laurens’s face and felt sorry him all over again.

  I tasted the blood and immediately spit it out.

  “It’s a kidney,” Laurens guessed, but Pim wanted to know from which animal. So Laurens took another bite of the organ, chewed it slowly, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  “Rabbit?” I guessed. I won.

  It was quarter past three. “Come on, let’s go call Pim.” Laurens got up and walked towards the house. I followed him so I could press my ear against the phone.

  “Where are you?” Laurens asked, turning away from me. He frowned as he listened to the answer. “Should we come help look? Or can we help you with the cows?”

  He sighs, says goodbye and hangs up the phone.

  “Jan left this morning without milking the cows and now Pim has to do all Jan’s chores and help them look for him,” he said, summarizing the conversation. “He doesn’t want our help.”

  I doubted whether Pim had really suggested that having to take over Jan’s chores was worse than his disappearance.

  We went back out to the garden; this time I sat on one of the lowest steps. I missed the view I had before, being able to look down on Laurens.

  “Don’t you think it’s unfair? Pim’s the one who didn’t come, but he’s the only one who knows what to do,” he complained.

  I nodded. “Where do you think Jan went?” I asked.

  “Beats me,” Laurens said. “My stomach’s growling.”

  He tapped my head with the top of his shoe. Was I supposed to say I was hungry too, so he could suggest we play One-Chair Restaurant?

  “Go eat something then,” I said.

  Laurens sighed, got up and dragged himself through the backyard again. I watched him get smaller and smaller, until he was swallowed up by the back door. That’s how easy it was to disappear. Sometimes a sudden hunger attack was all you needed. One time, there was a story in the newspaper about a man who went out for French fries one day and was found years later at a holiday park in Sweden working as a gardener. He was wearing glasses with fake lenses in them.

  “Mom, what’s for dinner?” I heard Laurens yell from the garden. I knew what kind of answer she’d give. It was busy in the shop, so she’d say something like “shit with stones” or “bear puke”. Laurens had never seen the value of a mom with a sense of humor.

  He marched all the way back with a bag of shrimp crackers and a leftover chocolate Santa. He set the bag of chips in his own lap and tossed the chocolate figurine into mine.

  I bit off Santa’s head—a quick decapitation—like Tessie always did. “People who start with the feet—they’re the ones you’ve got to watch out for,” she said.

  The shrimp crackers crackled and crunched on Laurens’s tongue.

  At half-past four, Laurens’s mother walked out into the yard. The bag of shrimp crackers was almost empty. Laurens quickly hid it in the hood of my coat. Laurens’s mom was carrying a large, thinly sliced sirloin steak on her arm. Her face was as pale as the ring of fat around the meat. Her hot breath should have formed little clouds around her this time of year, but I didn’t see any. Her panting didn’t match the aimlessness of the rest of her body.

  As she came closer, she reached out her arms to grab us, and only then did she realize she was still carrying the piece of meat. She looked around and balanced the steak on one of the steps of the swing set, then she put her hands around Laurens’s knees and hugged his legs. When she saw me, she hugged me too. She pressed my head into her chest; it was the first time she’d held me since the night I made the flatfish on the wall. I inhaled the sour smell of her apron. The almost empty bag of chips crinkled in the hood of my coat. She didn’t say anything about it.

  “Children, my sweet children,” she said. “They found Jan.”

  I knew right away what this meant. Why hadn’t I picked a superpower a few minutes ago, when Laurens asked?

  “He’s gone.” We said nothing. “Dead,” she added, as if that somehow made it more specific.

  “How?” Laurens asked. I was wondering the same thing.

  “The priest didn’t say. Most likely an accident.”

  The shop bell rang intrusively. Laurens just stood there.

  It wasn’t the words sinking in that hurt per se, but everything else, everything that was still there, all the futile things that would simply have to go on.

  “Pim needs us,” Laurens concluded. He was already on his feet.

  “If I were you, I’d leave him alone for now. We can give him a call later. Are you coming inside?” she asked. “I’ll warm up some milk.”

  She walked back to the house with firmer steps than the ones she came out with. She wasn’t going to heat up milk. She had to help spread the news, that’s what had to happen now—there were so many more people to inform.

  I wondered who she’d call first. Events like this had a way of revealing how people in this town were connected, how the social structures worked, like the way heavy storms revealed the root structures of trees. Who would call my parents? Would anybody think to tell them at all?

  I stood up. The fatty steak was still hanging on the swing set. I sat down on the swing so Laurens wouldn’t see me crying. He just sulked, but maybe that was already a lot for him, more than enough.

  I looked down at my shoes and then back at the steak. It wobbled back and forth as I swung. Laurens stood up and came over to me. He pulled the bag of chips
out of my hood, took another shrimp cracker and sat down in the grass. I couldn’t speak. The chocolate Santa was melting in my hands. I bit off the feet. Now he couldn’t run away.

  “What do we do?” Laurens asked. He sank down in the grass.

  My stomach instantly rejected the chocolate feet. I threw up in my mouth, just a little bit—it tasted sour and bitter. I quickly swallowed it again. Now was not the time to barf. People were going to die, people I knew a lot better than Jan, people I saw every day, and I’d have to be a lot sadder than this. I had to leave a buffer, for Jolan, for Tessie.

  “Monopoly?” Laurens suggested.

  I nodded only because I wanted to get out of the backyard, away from the steak.

  We went inside, not into the shop, but upstairs. I hadn’t been up there in a while, and under different circumstances, I would have liked nothing more than to sit on the soft couch next to Laurens’s mom and watch TV.

  Now all I could think of was Jan, but I didn’t quite know what to think about, which details. What kind of accident it was, how it happened, who found him, where.

  I didn’t know who to feel sorry for either. Jan—though it’s not like he was suffering, not anymore at least—or the people who found him. Maybe it was Pim’s parents, they’d always refused all forms of help, and today was probably no different. They probably went looking for him themselves.

  Laurens unfolded the game board. I just sat there. He distributed the pieces, the Chance cards, the money. He counted it all out quickly, sloppily.

  Should we be doing this right now, playing? Wasn’t there something else we should be doing? But I couldn’t figure out the right response, so I just kept rolling the dice.

  The store was right below the living room. Every few minutes, between doorbell rings, I could hear Laurens’s mother spreading the news, the cries of disbelief, the dinging of the cash register.

  There was a big chance that at the moment Jan died, Laurens and I were sitting on the swing set in silence, that the cash register was dinging then too. We might not have been able to prevent the accident, but we could’ve at least done something besides sitting on a swing set.

  I rolled double sixes three times in a row. Laurens sent me to jail. I leaned back in my chair for a moment and thought about the furniture in Jan’s room.

  It was easier to picture that room than it was to picture Jan’s face. Ever since I found out he thought I was pretty, I hadn’t really looked at him. One time, I hid in his bed while we were playing hide-and-seek. For a half an hour, I just lay there, next to a couple of hard tissues, under his boyhood bedspread with a tractor on it. There were ironed sweaters on a chair and an unused candle on his bedside table. Never had I been so close to a boy that I knew liked me. I pressed my face into his pillowcase, pushed my tongue out of my mouth and left a kiss for him.

  After a few turns, Laurens lets me out of jail.

  How much was going to change now? It would start with the little things: the rags around the farm, most cut from Jan’s old shirts and used to wipe off greasy hands and mop spilt milk off the floor. Those rags had been around for years and never had any value—I took one home once so I could smell it—and now everybody would cherish them.

  By the sixth round, I couldn’t afford the rent for Nieuwstraat anymore.

  “Count your money,” Laurens ordered. He fanned himself with his five-hundreds even though it wasn’t even hot.

  Was it because of people like him that, in times like these, when grief ought to be shared, people like me feel obliged to feel everything twice as intensely?

  At home that night, we didn’t have dinner until eight o’clock. The timing of the meal had nothing to do with Jan’s death but with the meat that had been set out not wanting to defrost.

  I wasn’t sure whether the news about Jan had reached my house or not. I didn’t think so. When Mom came home, she was no more drunk than she usually was around that time. The moon was small and high in the sky. Our reflection in the sliding door in the kitchen was crystal clear. Eventually the meat was thawed in the microwave, which just made it tough—since Christmas, when she had to eat dinner with the dog, Mom hadn’t been putting much effort in her cooking.

  I could tell by Jolan and Tessie’s silence, the way they held their forks, that they’d heard the news. It didn’t feel right to eat. Someone had to say it.

  “It might snow,” Mom said. Behind her, the lights were flickering on the last Christmas tree we’d ever have.

  I chewed my meat very slowly. The bite lasted forever.

  “Jan drowned in the slurry pit,” I said after I finally got it down.

  On the counter to my right were Tessie’s untouched chocolate Santas, standing in a row. She’d turned all four of them to face the wall. It still felt like they were staring at me too.

  5:00 p.m.

  I RECOGNIZE JOLAN right away, even with his face hidden behind the collar of his winter coat against the icy wind that occasionally whips between the stalls. Siblings, you can always pick them out immediately—whether you want to or not—because you see part of yourself in them.

  He walks past the base of the mound I’m standing on, dawdling in front of the barn doors before walking in, in a way that only he can. He closes his eyes; for a moment he’s the insect waiting to be examined. He turns around, looks back in the direction he came from, at his brand-new Range Rover parked in the driveway. Then he straightens his tie, smooths his vest and enters the barn.

  The last time I spent the holidays with Jolan was two years ago, in 2013. That year, just like the years before, we had our Christmas together—Tessie, him and me—not on Christmas Day itself but a few days afterward because Tessie celebrated the holidays with her foster family, and Jolan had a girlfriend at the time. It was some girl from his lab who he had stolen a bicycle from and then played the romance card with to save his own skin.

  Jolan picked up Tessie first, and then they came to Brussels together to get me. We drove to a restaurant in the city center that I’d picked out. Along the way, we made a major detour around the Atomium, mostly because Jolan liked to drive, Tessie liked being driven and I liked telling them which neighborhoods I liked. I always picked the same restaurant—a place where a lot of people ate alone. That way we’d feel more whole.

  This year and last year, we didn’t celebrate Christmas together. Tessie decided she couldn’t do it anymore. “I’d rather have no party than one behind Mom and Dad’s back.” She couldn’t stand the thought of them sitting at home alone without us, not knowing they weren’t missing anything.

  On Christmas Day, I got a text message: “Merry Christmas, Eva.” Jolan sent me an online Christmas card with two singing reindeer. After that, the envelopes of money started showing up.

  I’ve received more than thirty of them by now. None of them—except the first one—came with any kind of message. No letter, no explanation, it was supposed to be self-explanatory. Inside was just cash with a Post-it note folded around the first and last bill stating the amount: “200 euros” or “100 euros”.

  The first time he sent me an envelope, Jolan wrote: “To be used wisely (and sometimes not). No need to pay me back.” What he meant by “wisely” and “sometimes not” still isn’t clear to me. I also don’t know what to call it. Is it a donation, a contribution, an allowance, a compensation? I decided that as long as I’m not sure, I won’t spend it.

  Sometimes we message each other on WhatsApp. A while ago, I scrolled back through our chat, trying to figure out who initiated contact the most. I saw that, in one year, I had started a conversation with exactly the same question seven times.

  “How are things there, and how are the grasshoppers?” The “there” referred to Tessie, to her new house, her new sister, her new mother, and “the grasshoppers” were meant for Jolan; he runs a lab where they research something related to the digestive system of insects. Sometimes both Tessie and Jolan replied, sometimes only one of them did.

  I couldn’t help but re
gret that I hadn’t asked other questions, more original ones, and more often.

  I saw that they asked me questions too sometimes. “How’s it going in Brussels?” “How’s your apartment?” They always asked me, same as I did them, about my relationship to certain places, never how I was doing as a person. I think they were afraid I might tell the truth.

  I didn’t know Jolan was coming today. He hadn’t marked himself “Going” on Facebook.

  I guess it makes sense that he was invited though; he knew Jan better than I did. They were in the same class. He was one of the few kids who actually liked going to Jan’s birthday parties. They both had a fascination for animals. But unlike Jan, Jolan managed to keep the bullies at bay. Not that he got much credit for it later—he steered clear of anything that didn’t have at least four legs, and even to them he wasn’t always friendly: one time, he smoked a walking stick after it died. He held it between his fingers like an elegant cigar.

  Through the gap between the stalls, I see him milling through the crowd. He stands off on his own, takes a few chips, rubs his hand over his head and pats down a few more hairs to hide the fact that he’s going bald.

  I never had the same relationship with Jolan that I did with Tessie, maybe because we never shared a bedroom. There were times when our sisterly bond cost him dearly, like when the poodle vase got broken.

  Dad called us all down to the living room.

  “Who did this?” he demanded, pointing to a cabinet he’d made himself. On it was an ugly little vase, broken on one side. It was this color that there’s not really a name for, something between blue and brown, not khaki. It wasn’t meant to hold flowers. The edges were fragile and thin and bent outward.

  It was a failed version of a vase, like a poodle is a failed version of a dog. Some friend of theirs had made it before eventually disappearing from their lives. That made it even more fragile. Now, the time had come—we were about to pay for the lost friendship.