Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  That night, I walked around the reflecting pool and wondered about purpose. Why would a man light up the world around him and then die in a motorcycle crash, broken and bloody and alone in a hole? Did he fulfill his purpose? What was my purpose? It certainly wasn’t to serve fish and chowder. There was more in store for me, but I didn’t know how to find what it was. I tried again to pray, asking God not to let me down, to show me proof that Wagner was still there somewhere. I watched the pool for extra ripples. I watched the trees for a rush of wind. Nothing.

  At quarter to eleven I met Kami at the Nan Ling Restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue for some late Chinese. We planned to get a quick bite to eat then go to a house party some of his friends were having. I wore a miniskirt with black tights and flat shoes because I had nice legs and because, being the girl who was too tall to take home to Mother, I wore flat shoes wherever I went.

  It was no surprise that he showed up in a green Army jacket with an activity of pockets for stashing necessary urban things, such as a T pass, a wallet, maps, some extra cash, maybe a candy bar and some gum. He stood about six foot five with his big hair, which made me feel like a dainty flower—a rare pleasure—and he was as skinny as a stick. He looked like Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy, and I also wasn’t surprised to learn that he was a singer/songwriter. He was trying to break into the music business, like every third person I knew, and he worked at the Army Navy to pay the bills. We were the only ones in the restaurant. We ordered some food and talked fairly easily, ripping egg rolls and sipping cheap, bitter tea.

  We were dispatching with the getting-to-know-you part of the conversation that I dislike, but that always ends up being the easiest part of any relationship, when we heard a stunning crash of metal on stone, like a demon birthing itself out of the concrete of Mass Ave and rising up to bash buildings. Kami and I looked at each other. We jumped out of the booth and ran toward the front door, the way you run in a nightmare when a monster is after you—impossibly slowly, even though you are exerting all your efforts. When I looked out, at about nine o’clock on the north side of the street, I saw an upside-down car with wheels spinning, and at about two o’clock, about fifteen or twenty yards south, there was a dark heap on the ground. The road was shiny with recent rain, and the streetlights and wet air made a mist that hung above us. The only movement came from the wheels of the car, which spun freely in the air, and the changing of the stoplight colors reflected in the asphalt.

  I shouted for the waiters to call 911 and then ran outside. There was no one else on the road. I had never seen that before on Mass Ave at any time of day. Without speaking, I ran toward the heap on the ground, and Kami ran toward the car. My cheap flats slipped on the asphalt and I fell to my knees, then got up again, without the shoes, and ran across the road, which was shiny, covered in broken glass, I later found out. I slid into where the heap lay still. The heap was human, lying like a doll, facedown and twisted, and when I smoothed the hair back, I saw it was a young woman about my own age. She had jaw-length fluffy blond hair, and one side of her face was pressed into the asphalt, a place no face should ever touch. Her hands were above her, as if she were lying half on her stomach on her bed in a loose, tangled sleep. I crouched down by her to see if she was conscious. I asked her if she was okay and got no response. Then I noticed that her pelvis was twisted about ninety degrees past where it should have been, and the wrong leg faced up. I could see the rip in her back, like wet paper, that exposed one kidney and the bones of her spine. She was breathing.

  This was a girl like me, a girl with a mother and father and dreams and goals, a girl who was in the impossible position of suddenly being at the end of something she didn’t expect. I did not dare to move her, so I got down by her head and spoke to her. I took her hand in one of mine, and with the other, I stroked her hair back from her face. There was blood starting beneath her head, so I started talking. I said what I would want someone to say to me if I were facedown in the road, which was, “You are such a good girl. Your momma and daddy love you so much. Everything is going to be fine. We’re going to wait for the ambulance. They’re going to take you to the hospital and make everything better. It’s going to be okay.” I held her face and, on an impulse, said the only other thing that came into my mind, a song that bubbled up from childhood. I sang, “Jesus loves you, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” The girl’s hand twitched in mine, a fast twitching, like a deaf person’s finger spelling. She made a soft noise, like a breath but not quite, and when it finished, I suspected there wouldn’t be another, but I was afraid to move her to start CPR. I could see the red and blue lights coming up Mass Avenue. The sound of the sirens started to register, and when they drove up and the paramedics came with their backboard and bags, they had to pull me away, make me move. I had done all I could, which felt like nothing.

  I looked toward the upturned car, and I could see police officers restraining two men, one on the ground and one standing up against the wall of a business. The one standing was Kami. He was being uncuffed, yet two officers pressed him up against the wall and held him there. This confused me. I didn’t know what to do, so I gathered up the girl’s bag and shoes, which were scattered across the street and sidewalk. I handed them to a paramedic, then backed away and watched them drive off. I stood on the sidewalk until the police released Kami and he found me. We talked for a minute about the girl while our breathing slowed and reality came back to itself.

  “Was she conscious?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told him.

  “Was she alive?”

  “I think she died when I was holding her. What was all that with the cops?”

  “Yeah, well, when I went to see who was in the car, the driver tried to climb out and run off. He was wasted on something. He wasn’t taking no for an answer either, so I had to stop him and hold him until the cops got there.”

  “And they had you up against the wall because?”

  “I, uh, had a handgun. I pulled it on the driver to keep him from getting away. He hit the girl when she was walking on the sidewalk. He thought she was a pile of garbage. He kept talking about sideswiping the trash. I couldn’t let him get away.”

  “You carry a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” I said. “In your multi-pocketed coat. Why not?”

  “Well, I…”

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  “They took it. I don’t have a permit. They understood what I did but couldn’t let me keep it. I have to go down to the station tomorrow and get it back,” he said.

  “Okay, then. You carry a gun illegally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. I really don’t know anything about you.”

  “Everyone has to get past the first day. Where are your shoes?”

  My legs suddenly started to sting. I looked down at the softball-sized holes at each knee in my tights and saw that my kneecaps were angry and bloody and ripped up. My tights had split at the feet, and I was barefoot. We found my shoes in the street among the crawling police and colored lights and then decided to walk back to Kami’s apartment, which was close. When I put my shoes on, I noticed that the bottoms of my feet were cut and the shoes hurt, so I took them off and limped barefoot on the outsides of my feet. Kami’s house was off of Huntington Avenue, a short walk under ordinary circumstances, but it took us a while to get there. We were both shaky from the adrenaline. Kami threw up in a garbage can, and I had to stop twice and sit down because my feet hurt. When we got to his apartment, it was empty and colder than the air outside. There were guitars and amplifiers, a kitchen table and one chair, and a white grand piano taking up the entire living room.

  “Roommates?” I asked.

  “I live alone,” he said.

  He poured us some orange juice, then I sat on the kitchen table and he kneeled down on the floor and dug chunks of glass out of my knees and feet, then bandaged me up. It was a touching moment, the kind of moment that would otherwise appeal to a girl’
s heart, except it hurt, and half an hour before, someone had died in my arms.

  While I sipped orange juice, Kami picked up his guitar and started singing. He had a rich voice and a real talent. I sat on the kitchen table and wept hard while he sang, wiping my face and nose with my sleeve. It was my first cry in a long time.

  “You’re good,” I said.

  “My dad was a musician, too,” he told me.

  “Do you sound like him?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. I never met him.”

  “Maybe he’s Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy.”

  “Heard that one before. Maybe he is. You feeling better? What do you want to do?”

  “I guess we could go to that party,” I said.

  So we did. We hopped the Green Line outbound for a few stops and then went up three flights to a typical Boston party full of college-aged people. There was a lot of beer, plenty of Dr. Martens and ripped jeans, and people were already a little tilted by the time we got there. I walked around with my bandaged feet in a pair of Kami’s raft-sized flip-flops.

  At first, we had to talk about it to everyone we saw. It was spilling out of us. We tried describing it.

  “We just saw a terrible car crash. A girl got hit and died. We were there. We helped.”

  The partygoers did not care, but they saw the crazy in our eyes and listened politely for a few minutes before scrambling to change the subject or leave our company. We were wounded, too intense, killing the mood, and we realized that the experience was ours alone, and in some way, we had been set apart by it. We ended up drinking beer out back, on the archetypal triple-decker Boston porch with a hibachi, some dead plants, and an old lopsided plaid love seat with a slow fountain of stuffing coming up out of the cushions. We sat shoulder to shoulder on the love seat, and during the course of our drinking, a red welt on Kami’s left cheek asserted itself and slowly turned purple.

  “You have a bruise on your face,” I told him. By this time, I had drunk enough beers for my hands and feet and knees to stop hurting, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the accident.

  “Yeah, I figured. I could feel it coming on.”

  “What happened?”

  “Got hit.” He put the cold bottle up against the mark and held it there.

  “The guy hit you?” I asked.

  “No, the cop did. He said he was sorry once he had sorted things out, though.”

  “Well, that’s something,” I told him. Then I said, “That girl had a life two hours ago, and now she’s dead. She died in my arms.”

  “I know,” he said. “I wonder what she did. If she was a student, or had a job, or what.”

  “Where she grew up,” I added. “What her life was like. Did she do enough with it?”

  We both drank.

  “Maybe she’s in heaven and dying was, like, ‘Good riddance,’” I said.

  “Doubt it. Right here? This beer? Us? This is all there is and there’s nothing after it’s gone. That’s what I think.”

  “That’s what everyone I know thinks. But what if you’re wrong? What if she’s in heaven, happy as a clam? What if there is more and we just don’t know it?”

  He shrugged. “If you want to believe the epic myth, then go ahead. It’s a device designed to make people feel better.”

  “What do you think we’re here for, then?”

  “In general?” he asked. “Like in life?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s our purpose? Why were we created?”

  “I think we were created, by happy accident, to have as much fun as we can before we die, because when we die, that’s it. Skulls in the dirt. The worms eat us, then people plant vegetables in the dirt the worms made. They eat the vegetables, and we live on in future generations that way. Agriculture is our only contribution.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said. “That’s not enough.” A swirl of fear surrounded me, and I felt a swelling of panic in my throat.

  “It’s the only way I can see things,” he explained.

  “So, there’s no God?”

  “Nope. If there was, why would He let a perfectly good girl that age get killed like a dog in the street?”

  I had no answer. I thought of Wagner. This was the question I had been asking all along, every time I imagined Wagner, broken and dead in a construction hole with his motorcycle on top of him, or imagined my grandfather on his deathbed, or imagined myself on my deathbed surrounded by people giving me that look I dread, the one that says, I am terribly sorry but just a little bit relieved that it is you and not me. I realized that my struggle, my hypochondriasis, and my fear of death existed for two reasons: first because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do here, and second because I didn’t know what came after here. I put my head on Kami’s shoulder and took a pull from my beer. We sat on the porch and watched the traffic while people came and went, then the music slowly died down, and that’s when I noticed that the trains had stopped running.

  “What time is it?” I asked him.

  “Ten past two,” he said.

  “The T is done for the night. I’m stuck.”

  “I guess you have to come back to my place,” he said simply.

  “Well played,” I said.

  “Unless you have a friend nearby.”

  “No. We should go. They’re cleaning up.”

  We stumbled downstairs and out onto the sidewalk, blinking at the night. There we stood for a moment, staring down an empty street. I took a step.

  “I don’t think I can walk. My feet are killing me,” I said. I lifted one up to look at the sole and it was oozing fluid through the gauze.

  “I’ll carry you.”

  I doubted that he could, with his skinny musician’s arms, but he scooped me up and lugged me the several blocks back to his place. A sheen of sweat started down his mustache, but he pretended it was easy. He heaved me down on the porch while he dug through pockets for his key, then the sound of the key in the lock echoed inside the emptiness of the living space. When the door swung open, I felt like an interloper in a place I didn’t belong. I didn’t want to be there.

  “You can sleep in with me,” he said. “It’s a one-bedroom, so…”

  “Not happening,” I told him.

  “You have a better idea?”

  “How ’bout there?” I pointed to the grand piano. It was gleaming like bone in the dim light.

  “On top or under?”

  “Under.”

  “Done,” he said.

  He went into his room and came out with a pillow and blanket, and spread it out under the piano, then patted it and lifted his eyebrows. I kneeled and crawled under it, where he pulled the blanket around me and smoothed my hair, the same way I had done with the girl just a few hours before. I could feel my pulse in my feet, which were starting to hurt again.

  “It’s been a weird night, huh?” he asked.

  “About the weirdest I’ve had.”

  “Me too. Are you sure about…?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay. Sweet dreams. Tomorrow is a new day. That’s one good thing, anyway.”

  Kami walked to his room, his tall, lanky body stooped over and his shoulder blades poking through his T-shirt, and I had a simultaneous glimpse of what he must have looked like as a little boy and what he would look like as an old man. He closed the bedroom door, and I was left alone under the white piano, unbearably alone, with nothing but the faint city night noises dancing in the distance, far away, outside in the street. I had not slept to those sounds in some months. I thought about Wagner and about the dead girl, and I suddenly, desperately wanted God to be paying attention to me. Show me something, I thought. Show me that you know I’m thinking about Wagner. About the girl. That they meant something. Come on, God. Make it not be for nothing. I waited for a streetlight to flicker, for a filling of joy in my heart, for something. I waited for a long time. Nothing. I thought, I helped a girl die today. At least that’s something. She didn’t die alone. I eventually nodded off, sl
eeping lightly in that strange, dark place.

  At 5:15 A.M., when I heard the first train run past the house, I got up and limped my way out, closing the door quietly to avoid waking Kami. I had no interest in seeing him again, and in fact, I wouldn’t ever. It was like an early-morning walk of shame, limping down the dim sidewalk in my party skirt with my shoes in my hand, while newspaper delivery drivers and bakery truck drivers and cabdrivers drove past me, glad that I wasn’t their daughter. It was still dark and the streets were wet, the same kind of shiny they were the night before, but without the broken glass. I thought about saxophones, about what a fierce alto saxophone solo would sound like ripping through the last of the night on that empty street, blasting the dreamers awake. As I waited for the train, I saw something shiny on the ground and bent to pick it up. It was a subway token. I thought about the time Wagner had looked down by a gutter and found five shiny T tokens lined up in a row, and how he scooped them up like a gleeful child discovering a treasure. “What are my chances of those odds?” he had said in his Portugenglish, then, “Hey! Let’s take the train up to Gloucester for some clams, you! I’m buying.” I remembered him well for a moment, remembered some small essence of his life, not his death, and it felt okay.

  An inbound train, headlights illuminating the moisture in the air, squeaked, then stopped, and I stepped carefully up the steps, found a seat, and rode the train toward Park Street Station so I could catch the Red Line home. An old woman with a pastry box on her lap glanced at my knees, then wordlessly handed me a cream-filled donut. All along, I thought, I had yearned for signs that life was not pointless, that the dead are not gone forever, that there was a reason for being here and one day we would be reunited, and in that quiet time on the train, I thought, Be still. Just be still. Only that voice wasn’t my voice, and that thought wasn’t mine either. Okay, I thought, I’m listening, and then I felt another idea that said, You’re not alone, dumbass. Just relax and trust me.