The Survivors

by Alex Schulman

  “And we were thinking…” Pierre paused for effect. “We were thinking her name could be Molly.”

  Benjamin shot Pierre a look. Pierre was nodding in satisfaction, looking at Mom. He didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a short circuit, Benjamin knew that, something he said in the moment, because he felt like the present was a success and that success could be prolonged, that the hole in his chest could be filled up faster with even more of Mom’s love, that he was about to reach even deeper into Mom’s heart.

  He didn’t mean to.

  Mom looked up from the cat. “What did you just say?” she asked.

  “As an homage,” said Pierre, his voice now tinged with uncertainty.

  “We never agreed on that,” Benjamin said sharply. He turned to Pierre, lowered his voice: “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what?” Mom said, looking at the brothers. She stopped herself, began to cry, someone in her dance group laid a hand on her bowed back. As she looked up again, Benjamin saw the pendulum moving, sorrow turning to rage. “You can leave now,” she said.

  Mom stood up, placed the kitten on the sofa, and left the living room.

  It was so quiet that Benjamin could hear Mom in the kitchen, hear her sobs, could even make out the scratch of the match as she lit a cigarette. He stayed put, in front of the furniture, his eyes on the floor. And then it just happened. It wasn’t as if he made a decision, it just happened. Quick as a wink everything went black, like in a movie when the diamond thief fumbles and the alarm goes off and iron grilles clatter down to block every exit. Benjamin felt his heart beat faster, the gates fell, one by one, and in the darkness he identified a feeling about his mother he had never in his life allowed to come out. Wrath. A tiny spark was all it took, one spark to ignite everything.

  He went to the kitchen and stood in the doorway.

  Mom was on a chair at the kitchen table. There were streaks of black under her eyes, smeared makeup.

  “You can’t forget Molly, but you forgot us a long time ago.”

  She looked at Benjamin in bafflement. He had never raised his voice to her before. He felt tears burning in his eyes, cursed himself, he didn’t want to start blubbering. He didn’t want to be sad, he wanted to be angry.

  “We are here!” he shouted. “Me and Nils and Pierre. We are here.”

  Mom didn’t say anything. And then came the sharp gasp and the tears, despite it all. He buried his face in his hands and headed for the door. He walked through the silence of the living room and left.

  Out on the street he found himself standing outside the building door. For a moment he thought he would wait for his brothers there, that they would probably come down soon. He waited a few minutes, then left, walked past the sidewalk cafés and through the crosswalk. On the other side of the street he looked up at Mom’s apartment but didn’t see anyone in the windows, just the helium balloons on the ceiling like sad eyes gazing down at the living room in distress. He looked at the door. Where are my brothers, he thought.

  He kept walking, alongside the insane traffic, plastic bags cavorting at the edge of the sidewalk, trash heading north, even the garbage wanted to get out of there. He walked toward the subway entrance. He turned around once more, gazing back at the building.

  Where are my brothers?

  | 20 |

  4:00 A.M.

  The room is closing in.

  He shuts his eyes and maybe he sleeps, he thinks so, because when he opens his eyes again the room is brighter. He looks at the window, he can see a scrap of sunlight on the very top of the building across the street. A tiny yellow corner of the gray concrete. He has seen more sunrises than sunsets in his life. All the early summer mornings spent lying in his bed and watching the dawn creep out of the darkness outside his window like a nightmare, first gray and then milky and then the first rays of sun appeared on the treetops. He would approach the window to look at it, amazed, because it was a strange thing to see at first, a backward experience—the sun was in the wrong spot, shining from the wrong direction and at odd angles. But these days the sunrise is associated with so many other things—it’s been fourteen days since Mom died and he still hasn’t slept through the dawn. When the therapist asked Benjamin how he felt after Mom’s death, he responded that he didn’t feel anything, but maybe that wasn’t true, maybe he felt so many things that it was impossible to distinguish a single emotion. He had to tell her his whole story, and she told him the brain is a remarkable organ. It does things we’re not aware of. Sometimes, when you experience trauma, your mind will alter your memories. Benjamin had asked why, and the therapist replied: So you can bear it.

  She said: Force yourself to think about your mother. And he countered with a question: What should I think about? Anything, the therapist said.

  His first memory of his mother. He is three years old. Mom and Dad are in bed one morning, and they call for him: “Come here and give us a kiss!” He crawls up, getting tangled in the sheets as he goes. He kisses Dad, can hardly reach his lips for all the beard. He kisses Mom. And then he wipes his mouth, a quick stroke. He is confronted. Mom and Dad saw what he did. Mom lifts him to her, says, “Do you think it’s gross to kiss us?”

  His last memory of his mother. Her grimace as she died at the hospital. The expression her face got stuck in, that wolflike grin. He has carried it with him ever since Mom’s death, and every time it pops up in his mind he is thrown back to his childhood because it reminds him of something he once saw. He used to lick his fingertips when the skin there got dry. Mom told him to stop and began to imitate him when he couldn’t quit. Each time he licked his fingers, she ran over and stuck her hands in her mouth and showed her teeth in a sneer. Benjamin searched her eyes for a hint of mischief, something to suggest that she was teasing him with love, but he never found it.

  Fourteen days since she died. The doctors said death had come quickly, but it wasn’t true. It took two weeks for her to die, from the time she felt the first stomach pains until it was over. But he supposed she’d received the death sentence one year earlier, when they discovered the tumor, the one she informed her sons of in a curt text and then refused to talk about. She never wanted company at the hospital and when they asked about treatment all she would say was that it was going well. She pretended she wasn’t sick, and a few months later, when she claimed she had been given a clean bill of health, Benjamin didn’t believe her, because he could tell that something was still wrong. She lost weight. Imperceptibly, seamlessly, deceptively, she lost pound after pound until one day Benjamin discovered that she was a different person. Her collarbones were sharp and angular, and the hollows beneath them formed dark pits. All the extra skin that folded around her. She became so frail and thin, susceptible to a breeze, that Benjamin had to hold her gnarled hands when they took walks. One time she mentioned that she had been to the doctor to discuss her weight. Her voice cheery, she told him that she now weighed eighty-eight pounds. “Can you believe it?” she said. “That’s what a baby pig weighs!” Mom was given a few jars to take home, nutritional supplements in powder form, and they stood untouched on the counter for a few months before she threw them out.

  The stomach pain came on suddenly. She was in a furniture store and it just exploded. The pain was so terrible, and she didn’t know what it could be. She told her children that she had pressed her thumb into her waist and lay down with her belly over the arm of one of the display sofas, doing the strange tricks she’d learned as a child. The pain vanished but was soon back, and it only got worse. She stopped going out, she couldn’t sleep at night, just lay awake in agony, and there were no painkillers that helped. Chasing sleep took over her life. She turned off the phone, because she wanted to sleep. It became harder to reach her, the phone turned off, brief texts in the middle of the night that seemed more and more confused. When Benjamin asked how she felt, she kept replying, “Tarzan.” Then contact c
eased entirely. Mom’s phone was always off, and there were no signs of life. After three days of silence, Benjamin went over to her place, even though he knew she hated unannounced visits. He rang the doorbell a few times until at last she opened it, her hair standing on end. The windows were open, even though it was chilly out. The smell of detergent and vomit.

  “Have you been sick?” he asked.

  “Yes, I don’t know why I’m throwing up so much,” she replied.

  She sank into her easy chair, took out a cigarette but immediately put it back. She hunched forward, her elbows on her knees. Her robe revealed scrawny legs, the skin hanging down on either side of her thighbones.

  “Shouldn’t we go to the hospital so they can take a look at you?” he asked.

  “No, no,” she said. “I’m fine. Just need to get some sleep.”

  He remembers how small she looked in the big chair. Mom leaned over and spat tentatively on the floor. This was a distinct signal for him—you only do that if you’re awfully sick. She didn’t protest, either, when he said they had to go to the emergency room right away, just stayed in the chair as he packed her a bag, and then they left. She was talkative on that first afternoon. She complained about her pain with what seemed like annoyance. Each time a nurse came into the room, she asked, “Do you know why I’m in so much pain?” Mumbled answers; they directed her to ask the doctor, who would be there soon.

  He saw it all, remembers every detail. He remembers the room Mom was in. On the table next to her lay her dentures, a glass of apple juice, the evening papers, and a plate of lasagna she hadn’t touched. She lay there with an IV in her arm and something that looked like a thimble on her index finger; it measured her oxygen levels. At regular intervals, a nurse came in to check her vital signs and make a note or two. He didn’t dare to ask whether everything was okay.

  He went home and returned the next morning. It was the last time they saw each other. Pierre and Nils were already there. They had given her morphine for the pain, and he sat at the edge of the bed and gazed into her confusion. She said she had had such strange dreams. She was in an airplane that was flying above a city, way too close to the rooftops, she tried to tell the flight attendants that they were too close, that it was dangerous, but no one would listen.

  It was Pierre’s birthday, and he joked about it. “Are you going to give me my presents now, or do you want to wait?” he asked. Mom’s confused look there in bed. She didn’t know it was his birthday. But her confusion was greater than that, as if she couldn’t quite grasp the concept of birthdays. She opened her mouth, then closed it thoughtfully.

  “I’m kidding, Mom.”

  Nils had brought the morning editions, and he read the news aloud to her, but after a while she wanted him to stop. She drank some juice, grimaced, screamed in pain, and held her stomach. And then she began to stare at the wall with her strangely deformed face. The brothers tried to reach her, but she didn’t say a word, just stared doggedly at the wall. She met death silently. Wouldn’t respond to questions; when you squeezed her hand she didn’t squeeze back. The brothers watched quietly. And suddenly, without warning, her heart stopped beating and she was gone.

  “The time is four twenty-five p.m.,” said Nils, and that was so typical of him, to be the grieving son and the keeper of order all at the same time.

  He has to sleep.

  He can’t face this day without getting some sleep. He won’t make it through. He knows what he has to do. He has to talk with his brothers about things they haven’t touched for twenty years. He flips his pillow over and lies on his other side. Catches sight of the framed photograph of the three brothers on the nightstand. It was taken at the water’s edge down by the lake at the cottage. Benjamin, Pierre, and Nils, sun in their hair, wearing underpants and boots, tanned little-boy bodies. Bright colors, orange life jackets against a steel-gray sky. They’re heading out to drop the net. Benjamin is in the middle, holding his brothers, one arm around each neck. Their bodies are relaxed, free. They’re laughing at something unexpected. It’s not that they’re smiling for the picture, it’s something else, as if Dad said something really funny right before he clicked the shutter, to catch them by surprise. They’re laughing so hard they can barely breathe. They’re holding each other. They’re luminous, the brothers.

  What happened to them?

  Right after Mom died. They were together in her hospital room, and yet they were alone. Not once did they hold each other that afternoon. Nils brought out a camera and began to take pictures of Mom. Pierre went out on the little balcony across the hall and smoked a cigarette. Benjamin stood where he was, in the middle of the room. Then he left without saying good-bye. They couldn’t help each other. It’s been this way as long as he can remember, as long as he’s been grown up. None of them really knows what to do, how to even look each other in the eye; their conversations take place with their gazes cast down at the tablecloth, quick spasms of communication. Sometimes he thinks about everything that’s happened to them, how tightly they pressed to each other when they were little, and how odd everything is now: they treat each other like strangers. It’s not just him, he thinks, it’s all three of them. He’s seen Nils pick up his cat as he comes to greet them, using her like a shield, an excuse not to hug them. One early morning, he suddenly saw Pierre coming toward him downtown. Pierre hadn’t spotted Benjamin, because his eyes were on his phone, as always, blind to the world, living his life bathed in pale light from below, and Benjamin didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything, walked straight past him without announcing his presence. Their jackets brushed as they passed. He turned around and gazed after Pierre, saw the shape of his brother growing smaller and more diffuse, with a rising sorrow that bordered on panic. What happened to us?

  What they’re about to do seems unthinkable. This journey back to the cottage no one talks about anymore. His and Pierre’s way of dealing with their childhood is to joke about it. He texts his brother that he’ll be late and Pierre replies, “I’ll pay for the taxi,” imitating Dad’s recurring, hysterical habit of trying to reel in his children when he was lonely for company. Pierre texts to say he wants to change the time they’ll meet up and Benjamin replies, “Know what, let’s just forget this whole project,” a sarcastic reference to Mom’s volatility. He has, however, never joked with Nils that way. Outside the window, the sun is slowly rising, the yellow spot on the concrete has expanded; now it covers almost the entire façade, burning over rows of blinds that shield bedrooms across the way. One window is open in the apartment, but he can’t hear anything coming through it. The city is sleeping. He gets out of bed, makes a cup of coffee in the kitchen. He walks out onto the small balcony. A small table and a small chair and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Hanging over the railing, a planter of forgotten tulips that are bent and yellowed in the dry soil. It’s early, but it’s already warm out. Clear sky, but to the east he can see a corner of the sea, and the sky above it is dark with clouds. It’s close, like before a big storm. He looks at the clock. The gas station where he’s going to pick up the rental car will open soon.

  And then he sets out. Closing the door to the apartment for the last time, locking it. And soon he’s sitting in the rental car. He leaves downtown by way of its empty streets, traveling high above the city on the raised concrete highways, the only car in all the five lanes.

  | 21 |

  The Gravel Road

  It was a couple of days after Mom died. He’d stayed at home since it happened, but now he was leaving for the first time. He walked through the city’s largest park, the one that led down to the pier. He observed the treetops above his head. He knew it was the beginning of June and that the leaves were dark green, but it had been many years since his eyes could discern such a thing. After the accident at the substation he had been taken to the hospital. He had burns on his arms and the back of his neck and down his whole back; the doctors who would pat
ch him up couldn’t tell what was clothing and what was skin. After a few days at the hospital, before he was discharged, Dad asked the doctor if Benjamin would have any lasting issues. Impossible to say, he replied. He could very well have lifelong problems. Nerve damage that might not show up for years. His muscles might wither away slowly; there was a risk of heart arrhythmias, brain damage, kidney failure.

  None of that happened. But the doctor didn’t mention anything about sight. He didn’t warn Benjamin that he might see colors differently after the explosion. There were some colors he couldn’t see at all anymore. He couldn’t see blue. He could lean down toward a thicket, get on all fours, and even if someone beside him insisted that it was full of blueberries, he couldn’t see a single one. Other colors were brighter now—a few hours before the sun set in the spring and summer, he could see an arc of light rising above the horizon, the whole sky turning dark pink. It was so beautiful, it was a shame it wasn’t real. When he was younger, he sometimes impressed one kid or another by staring straight into the sun without even blinking. His classmates would gather around him, shouting, drawing in others to come and look. Signal colors made him calm and he sought them out. He lingered near red traffic cones at road construction sites. Sometimes he went into sporting stores, to the fishing section, and rested his eyes on the lures, yellow and red, glowing like neon. But he remembers the trees of his youth, the weeks spent at the cottage in early June, leaves bursting with green energy. For a long time he missed being able to see them. Then he stopped caring.