I walk through the display, and honestly, it doesn’t have much of an effect on me. It’s like looking at bodies in a textbook. Strata of muscle and bone. Bloodless. Clean. Whatever made these cadavers human was lost a long time ago.
KYRA
Macy’s still mesmerized by the stupid ship lady, so I tell her I’m going to go buy a bottle of water. And then I go stand for a while, looking up at the blue stairs.
Even as I’m walking up, I’m telling myself I could still turn around. I almost don’t expect I’ll get all the way to the top. But I do.
It’s just … I don’t know. As horrible as that memory is, it still means something to me, you know? I want to visit this spot the same way people visit graves. I want to be there again, even if it means I’m going to feel horrible afterward.
Right before I turn the last bend in the stairs, I suddenly wonder if I’m going to be the only one up there. And whether I want that or not. Whether it’s better to be alone with the slices of dead people that I’ve been dreaming about for a year and a half or to be in a crowd of people making jokes about how disgusting it is.
And then there’s my grandmother, standing right there where I need her to be. And I can’t help it. I just start crying.
LINDA
I know right away, as soon as I see her face. My God. My poor baby. How has she managed to keep this a secret all this time?
KYRA
I can’t believe it, after so long trying to fit in, but I actually feel better now that someone knows. I’m still not ready to tell anyone else, but she says she’ll keep it a secret until I’m ready for it not to be one. We’ve started having our own daily talks, happier ones, I think, than the ones she was having with Mom. She tells me that she thinks it’s important for people like us to be around. After a while, I may even start to believe her.
LINDA
And so it seems that the world is just as wide as it’s ever been, even if my granddaughter and I are the only ones who can see it. I’ve forgiven my son for being happy to spend the rest of his life squinting, and I’ve begun to shorten my evening storytelling sessions with Hope.
On the first truly sultry night of the season, we cook hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill and eat dinner in the yard. Macy has spent all afternoon making potato salad, and in a burst of festivity, she’s piled it into a cut-glass bowl that belonged to my mother. As she walks out to the picnic table, her foot catches on an uneven stone in the patio, and she trips. The bowl shatters. Potatoes and mayonnaise, shards of glass and pieces of hard-boiled egg spill across the grass.
I’m closest, and I stand to help her up. “Are you all right, Macy?” I ask.
She looks like she might cry. “Grandma,” she says. “I’m so sorry. Your bowl …”
Poor little bug. So soft and unprotected. As far as she knows, a broken dish is the worst thing the world has to offer.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” I say. “Forgive and forget.” And then we’re all laughing.
Excerpt from
THE HUMAN SLICE
By Octavia Frost
REVISED ENDING
KYRA
The morning after the cookout, I walk into the kitchen. Grammy’s sitting at the table, reading the paper.
“Monday’s Memorial Day,” I say, opening a cupboard to get a glass. “Will you take me to put some flowers on Jonah’s grave?”
She looks up, smiling. Her voice is pleasant and curious. “Who’s Jonah?” she asks.
“It was strange: I brought them their entrées, and they were laughing and holding hands, and by the time I came back to take away the plates, Bettina was crying and Milo was sitting back, looking … I guess I’d say annoyed.”
—Sean Bowers, waiter at Zana, as quoted on People.com, November 11, 2010
Chapter Six
I hold on to Milo. He’s taller than I am—has been for a long time, but it’s still a surprise—and he’s bent over, crying onto my shoulder. His smell is so familiar to me, and the plain, pure presence of him, his undeniable solidity, sets off a spit of recognition in my skin’s own memory. I’m left with a feeling of quiet elation that stands quite apart from the horror of the statement he’s just made.
Ever since the news of the murder broke, I’ve been thinking about how I would react if I were faced with some incontrovertible proof that Milo is guilty. I expected I might feel frightened, protective, sad. Some dusty maternal hope that I might still be able to make it all go away.
Now that the moment is here, it’s not what I expected at all. That’s the fundamental flaw in the illusion that writers like to maintain, the idea that we can craft anything approaching truth. No matter how richly we imagine, no matter how vividly we set the scene, we never come close to the unambiguous realness of the moment itself. Here’s how I feel, faced with my child’s confession that he has committed murder: I don’t believe it’s true. Not for a single minute.
Chloe comes into the room from the hallway, and she and I speak at the same time.
“What did you just say?” she asks.
“What do you mean, ‘I think’?” I say.
“He doesn’t know,” says Joe from the armchair where he’s sitting. “He doesn’t remember.”
Milo pulls away from me and wipes his wet face with his sleeve, like a child.
“What do you mean, you don’t remember?” I ask. “What don’t you remember?”
“A whole period of time from that night. A couple hours or more.”
“Were you on drugs?” I say. What a cliché of a mother I can be, given the right opportunity.
“No, but I had a lot to drink.”
Roland appears in the doorway. “I see you found your way,” he says jovially. He takes in the mood of the room. “What’s happened?” he asks.
“Sam Zalakis called,” says Joe. And to me, “Milo’s lawyer.”
“He got some of the police reports,” says Milo. He shakes his head.
“Tell me what he said,” says Roland.
The room seems suddenly very full, and I have an impulse to stop Milo before he says anything more. I don’t know the first thing about any of these people. Milo obviously trusts them, but that doesn’t mean I have to.
“Milo,” I say. “Can we just spend a couple of minutes together?”
“Oh, right,” says Roland. “Of course.”
Joe stands up. “We’ll be downstairs,” he says. I watch the three of them leave; as they go, I overhear Chloe whisper to Joe, “Do you think he really did it?”
I sit down in a vast armchair, the mate of the one where Joe was sitting. Milo sits down in the other one. He looks at me, confused, and for the first time slightly wary. “What are you two doing here, anyway? How did you meet Chloe?”
“She called me,” I said. “I guess Joe told her he’d seen me.”
He laughs humorlessly. “Right,” he says. “Face-to-face. I guess she told you?”
I nod. I have a grandchild, I think, astonished once again. Next time, maybe I’ll be able to hold her in my lap.
“Figures,” he says. “She’s been looking for an opportunity for years. I guess it wouldn’t occur to her that this might not be the best week. She can be a little … single-minded. She’s been trying to get Lia into this preschool, and Joe said she’s called the director every day for a month.”
“I met Lia, Milo. She’s beautiful.”
“She looks like Rosemary,” he says.
“She looks like you.”
There’s a pause. As important as this is, it’s not what we need to talk about. There will, I hope, be time for that later. I can’t stop looking at him. Four years, my God. There he is.
I pull my mind back to the issue at hand. “You can’t really think you killed her,” I say.
He looks at me evenly. “Why not? I think I’m capable of it.”
I shake my head. “You loved her,” I say, though of course I know nothing that I haven’t read in a gossip magazine. “Right?”
“I love
d her,” he says. “And she was leaving me.”
This is news. I’ve read that Milo and Bettina were seen arguing in a restaurant earlier in the evening, but I haven’t heard anything about a breakup. I don’t know if this is information the police don’t have or just information they haven’t released to the public.
“What happened?” I ask. “What’s the part of the night you do remember?”
“We went out to dinner,” he says. He looks annoyed with me, vaguely sullen, like he resents me for not knowing the story already. There’s my Milo, I think, then do the mental equivalent of biting my tongue.
“And I told her I thought we should get married.”
I stare at him. “You proposed?” I say.
“No, I didn’t propose,” he says, sounding exasperated. “I didn’t get down on my knees in the middle of the restaurant or have them hide a diamond ring in her salad or whatever. I said that it seemed like we were headed in that direction, and I loved her, and we should just go ahead and get married.”
Really swept her off her feet, I think. But what do I know? Maybe girls want different things these days. Maybe this one did, anyway.
“And what did she say?” I ask.
Milo looks down at his lap, and for a quick private moment I see his face soften. “She said yes,” he says. “For, like, ten minutes we talked about what kind of wedding we’d have and where we’d have it, like should we go to Bali or someplace and just make it really small and intimate, or should we do it here in town and have a big blowout …”
I’m touched by the poignance of these half plans; I imagine flowers, tears in my eyes, an aisle on a beach or in a city cathedral. But then I remember: I wouldn’t have been invited.
“So what happened?” I say. “When did you start arguing?”
“Oh, God,” he says. “We were having champagne, and she called her mother, and I called Joe …” He shakes his head. “God, she was just so happy. And then she said, ‘Are you gonna get me pregnant on our honeymoon?’ and I just thought, I have to tell her about Lia.”
I feel suddenly irritated. Of course there was no way for that to end well. What kind of denial, what shortsightedness, made him think that lying to Bettina for more than three years was a good way to handle things? “I have to say, Milo, I don’t really understand that whole arrangement—”
He puts up a hand. “Stop it, okay?” he says. “Jesus Christ. Just … stop it.”
I back off. Take a breath. “Okay,” I say finally. “So you told her. And she didn’t take it well.”
“No,” he says, his voice like a rock. “She didn’t take it well.”
I look at this man sitting before me with bloodshot eyes and a two-day growth of beard, and I think about a younger, more awkward Milo, fourteen years old and just beginning to date his first girlfriend. Her name was Melody, and she was a slippery, insecure little thing. In those years, young girls were windows for me, or crystal balls: Can I glimpse Rosemary in this one, or this one, or this one? What struggles would we be having now, she and I, and what shared pleasures? And when Milo first brought Melody to our house, I thought, If this were my daughter, I’d be worried.
This was 1997; Rosemary, if she’d lived, would have been eleven. Girls then (and probably now, though I’m not looking in the same way) were such a strange mixture of sheltered and worldly. Melody was brassy, trying hard: she had scarlet hair and a pierced eyebrow, but her face was the face of a baby. She could be opaque in that way that torments teenage boys—What does she want? I remember Milo saying. Why can’t it just be fun?—and she could turn sharp and vindictive in an instant if she felt she’d been wronged. I could see almost immediately that she was just beginning the process of growing up to be a damaged young woman.
Which is not to say that she was solely responsible for the unhappiness they nurtured between them. Melody was in and out of our lives for the better part of a year, and by the end of it, the relationship had become a study in miniature of many of the bad marriages I’ve seen from the outside. They made each other miserable. Milo was baffled and resentful to discover that romance could have rules, and Melody was hurt and angry that he didn’t already know what they were. They had gotten close very fast, and there was an almost immediate blurring that unnerved me and, I think, them. They were so bewildered, both of them, by the intensity of this thing they’d created, and neither one had any idea how to unbraid themselves back into separate strands.
Melody was too thin, and she smoked; I could smell it on her jacket, thrown across the arm of the couch. I remember at the time starting to wonder, what is my responsibility to these girls, the ones my son brings home? Was it my job to call Melody’s mother and tell her to intervene? I decided it was not, just as I decided, almost without thinking about it, that it was not my place to lead Milo step by step through his first romance. He needs to learn, I thought. He’d want me to stay out of it. But I see now that I was wrong. I never left my children’s shoes untied until I was confident they could perform the maneuvers with their own hands; what made me think that Milo’s education in adult relationships was any less my responsibility?
I think of Bettina, sitting in that restaurant on the last night of her life, newly engaged and heartbroken. If I’d been present in Milo’s life in any meaningful way, would I have done anything to prevent that moment? I imagine an alternate reality in which I make different decisions and these four years of estrangement never happen. In this version of things, I move to the West Coast and come to know Bettina. I go to their house for dinner; Bettina and I go shopping together when Milo is out of town. I stay back, not interfering but offering gentle advice when it seems appropriate. They invite me along when they have an extra ticket to something; my picture appears at the edges of magazine photos, half cut off because I’m not the important one. Perhaps I become friends with Kathy Moffett, that master of pithy and heart-tugging newspaper quotes. We would have been uneasy allies, not sure whether we were destined to be grandmothers to the same babies or strained acquaintances armed with intimate, unflattering details about the other’s child. (I’m sure that this current scenario, our faces on the same page of the newspaper, our eventual seats on opposite sides of a courtroom, would not have occurred to either of us.) But working together, like mothers whispering lines to their children onstage in a school play, we might have helped them navigate this course more smoothly.
Milo is sitting in his chair, worrying a small hole on the hem of his T-shirt. “Okay,” I say. “What happened next?”
Milo closes his eyes for a moment, pushes his hair away from his face. “She left,” he says. “She told me not to come home, she’d get a taxi. She was going to pack, and she’d be gone in the morning.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to a liquor store and bought a bottle of scotch, and I sat in my car and drank it.”
“In your car?” I say. I’m appalled, and I’m afraid it’s clear in my voice.
Milo raises one hand idly, palm up: a spare version of a shrug. “I can’t go to bars anymore,” he says. “I get recognized.”
Which would have provided an alibi. See? I’m thinking. He couldn’t have done it. He would’ve been smarter about it, if he’d known he’d need to account for his whereabouts. But that raises questions about premeditation and crimes of passion and people snapping in the heat of the moment. And that’s where I stop pursuing it. “What time was this?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” says Milo. “Ten, maybe. Ten-thirty?”
“And do they know … have they determined a time of death?”
“Yeah. That was one of the things in the coroner’s report. Between midnight and two a.m.”
“Okay.” I drum my fingers on my thigh, made newly anxious by the existence of this timetable. “How long did you stay in your car?”
“No idea. I listened to some music and drank about half the bottle of scotch, or maybe a little more. I tried to call Bettina about a million times, but she wouldn’t ans
wer.”
“So is that the last thing you remember, sitting in your car and drinking?” I’m waiting for the moment of relief, the detail that disproves everything.
“It was the last thing I remembered,” he says. “When the cops were questioning me, everything was really patchy in my mind, and most of the night was a blur. I had a clear picture of sitting in the car, drinking, and then nothing else until I was back home, trying to get my keys in the door. I guess I was making a lot of noise, because someone came outside and yelled that I should quiet down because it was two a.m.”
“And you remember more now?”
“Yeah, a little. Things have been coming back to me slowly, just bits and pieces. This morning, I was reading the news, and it said that someone saw me at the house around eleven, and I was just wracking my brain. It didn’t sound familiar at all. Then I took out my phone to see what time it was, and I had this flash from that night. This memory of looking at my phone and feeling really pissed off that Bettina wasn’t answering my calls and thinking that I should just go over there and talk to her.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know whether to trust these things, you know? Like my brain could just be inventing memories that match the other parts of the story.”
I nod. I don’t know much about posttraumatic stress disorder or alcoholic blackouts, but I did do some research on amnesia when I was writing The Human Slice. I wasn’t interested so much in the physiology of it as in its metaphorical possibilities, the way that its exaggerated lines can bring our more ordinary memory losses into sharper focus. Amnesia as we usually think of it, as we see it played out in books and movies—the man who wakes up in a strange city with nothing in his pockets and no idea of his own name—is rare. But we’re forgetting all the time; we forget more than we remember. It’s necessary for our sanity, for our self-preservation, to reduce the noise in our brains. But the haphazard nature of our recall, the idiosyncrasies of which details linger and which ones vanish, has always struck me as sad.
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