Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There’s no one beside her when Katherine wakes; she thinks first Thomas should be there, then Will. Yes, Will. He was to come to get her, driving from New York to Ohio, meeting her at Jennifer’s house. She remembers returning from the hotel, swallowing down two glasses of wine, and closing herself in Jennifer’s guest room. Despite the alcohol, she woke often during the night, waiting for Will to appear. But the pillow beside her remains perfectly puffed. Katherine punches the center of it, denting the goose feathers. She draws it against her body, curls around it, her face pressed against the sateen pillowcase until she can’t stand breathing in her own hot breath.

  She turns her head, gasps for air, and smells bacon.

  She dresses before going downstairs, wears her smart clothes, her shiny shoes, the fashionable garb she puts on when she wants to be more than she thinks she is. She stops on the bottom step, presses her body against the wall so she won’t be seen. Listens to the conversation from the kitchen—Jennifer talking about ungrateful patients and long nursing hours, Will talking of basketball games and new construction jobs. When Katherine enters the room, both become so still the only sound is the snapping grease in the pan. Then Will stands and hugs her.

  Within his arms she’s taut as rawhide, counting the ways he irritates her, the things she finds distasteful. His shirt is too rough, missing a button, worn at least three days without washing. His forty-something stomach is too large. There’s a bit of dandruff on his shoulder. His hands are awkward on her torso; they don’t remember where to touch her since it’s been so long. She wants all these things to add up to a reason to leave him, or at least an excuse for her affair with Thomas. She cheated death. Now is the time to dump unwanted baggage and grab hold of her second chance to do what she wants.

  Instead, she remembers the home she and Will have created together, with the tumble of stinky teenage boy sneakers at the front door, the aqua toilet he’s been promising to change since they moved in eleven years ago. The strawberry patch by the front door Bryce helped her plant when he was six, overgrown with clumps of dandelions and clover, and enjoyed more by the chipmunks than the human residents of 18 Birchbark Road.

  She hasn’t been happy in her marriage for years. But she’s not been unhappy, either. They’ve both been wandering quietly through their own worlds and those of the boys, nodding at one another as they pass, no hostility, no fireworks. They live in the dry spell, as she imagines so many other married couples must do. When did the rain stop coming?

  Thinking back, it was after Evan had healed and they settled into their new normal. When she and Will first married, it was all passion and shouting and spending more than they made. They were young and had no idea how to be husband and wife, their examples while growing up quite broken: his parents fiery and violent toward one another, her mother cold and her father absent. When Bryce was born, things between her and Will smoothed down, their first son’s smiles a balm softening both of them. And then another boy, Evan. Only hours after his delivery Katherine noticed a blue tinge to his lips. His breathing grew labored and he was rushed to the PICU. Tests found a misshapen heart, beginning six years of surgeries, extended hospital stays, feeding tubes, doctors, therapies, appointments, sleepless vigils, fast food, and more worry than most parents have in a lifetime. They survived because there was no other choice, managing with the bare minimum, constantly exhausted and never allowing themselves the smallest hope things would get better. But things did improve. Evan’s heart began functioning well enough to keep him from needing a transplant, and their marriage functioned well enough to keep the family from splintering. Wounds scarred over and grew numb to the touch.

  And life continued on.

  She allows her body to relax into him. Will feels it, says, “Let’s get you home.”

  “I’ll get my things. Upstairs.”

  Katherine leaves the bed unmade. Let Jennifer deal with it. She dumps her cosmetics bag into the suitcase, throws her toothbrush in the trash can. Zips her luggage, does what Will calls the idiot check, looking in drawers she didn’t use for things she never unpacked, under the bed, in the closet—“Just in case,” he’d say. She has everything except her white coat. Looking at it makes her swell with the guilt only a survivor can feel. Wearing it again would be like buttoning into a body bag. And his card. In the pocket.

  Jennifer can keep the coat.

  She offers to drive but Will says no, despite making the eight-hour trip for the second time in less than a day. He’s always the one to drive when they’re in the car together, a pattern from very early in their marriage, and she wonders if most couples fall into this, the man in control at the wheel, the woman submissive by his side. Katherine hates being in the passenger seat. It bores her, staring out the window at road signs and burger joints. She and Will aren’t much for conversation, though they try. Life has moved beyond small talk. They’ve been very good at it previously, giving the boys and friends the illusion they communicate about everything, and without conflict, but the teeth never break the skin. Their relationship has shifted on its axis, both of them wanting to reconnect but not knowing which words to begin with. The airplane crash hasn’t been mentioned yet, but it fills the inside of the Subaru as if the wreckage had fallen around them.

  Katherine reclines her seat. Closes her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Will asks.

  “In one piece, at least.”

  “Kate.” His voice breaks.

  “I know.”

  “I was so ticked you got off that flight. I thought, why doesn’t she put us first for a change? And then this.”

  She doesn’t put them first? She hears this and her mind reels. She always puts everyone else first. She changes her schedule to drive Bryce to every sport practice and pick Evan up from yearbook club. She shows dozens of homes each week so her family can have money for vacations in Florida and new car payments. She does the majority of the housework, the laundry, the cooking. Will comes home from the job and sits his gypsum-covered rear in his recliner, not bothering to change his dirty clothes, eating in front of the television and falling asleep there most nights.

  “That’s right. I’m the selfish one.”

  “I didn’t say selfish.”

  “Last time I checked, not putting others first is the definition of selfish.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Katherine.”

  They were bloated with the adrenaline of the past day, the pressure cracking the mortar with which they patched their marriage—for her, Thomas and her business; for him, food and gadgets and cable news—and years of unspoken wormwood seeped through the gaps.

  “Then what did you mean?” She pauses a moment, and then for emphasis, “Will.”

  “Nothing. Forget it.” And then he sighs. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be fighting now. I’m . . . tired. And unsettled. It’s like after we found out about Evan’s heart. Everything’s spinning. I can’t make sense of it.”

  “I was just thinking of that. When things were so hard, I mean.” Every stress point brought them back in time to the worst of their son’s illness. Whatever problem they were going through was held up and squinted at in the light of those days. Always, always, the problem was found to be so much less than Evan’s fight for life. But this situation came close to eclipsing it, at least in the immediacy of it. She adjusts her seat, bringing the back up so she’s no longer reclining. “I’m sorry too.”

  Will steers the car onto the shoulder of the highway, switches on the hazard lights. He curls his fingers around her chin, as if she’s wearing his fist for a beard. “We’ll figure it out.”

  “Okay.” She draws out the word in uncertainty. To her, there is nothing to figure. She wants only to get home to the boys and begin living as if the past twenty-four hours never happened. She’ll gladly take her not-so-wonderful marriage if it keeps her guilt away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Morning comes and Julian is still dead. Ada has the briefest of se
conds to consider it may have all been a dream, but then her eyes open and see the television, still broadcasting images of the crash site, of divers beginning their work again now that the sun is up, interviews with nosy bystanders and frantic loved ones. She moves slowly, one continuous spring of rigid muscle from spending the night in the chair. Each movement brings another shooting pain somewhere in her body. Her feet are numb. Her neck turns only to the right. A shower may unravel it all.

  Hortense is on the telephone. Mark snores on the couch. She limps upstairs and sits in the hot water, skin turning red, reality seeping in. She’s in a crash-induced limbo. Julian was her one connection with this strange world she’d been birthed into five months ago. She’s hardly learned to sit up on her own, to crawl. How can she navigate life without him?

  This is my punishment, isn’t it?

  Not a prayer but a moan of defeat.

  Her father’s God takes vengeance—it is his, he has said so—smiting the wicked and those who veer from the way of the righteous. He is the God Ada continues to go back to because he is the God she recognizes, and the known is safe even if it brings blows of judgment. Julian’s God of grace, who is he? Surely no one Ada has ever met.

  She dries and dresses in yesterday’s long-sleeved tee and favorite cargo skirt that falls midcalf and is full of pockets. She keeps her hair wrapped in a towel, for now. She hates the ends dripping against her shoulders. As she brushes her teeth she remembers someone else who needs to be called—Julian’s pastor. Hers, too, she supposes, though it’s difficult to think of Ray Washington as something other than a son of Ham, as her father would call him. Cursed with dark skin.

  The first time Julian took her to Holy Zion, she had nearly fainted upon seeing a congregation comprised mostly of blacks, with a sprinkling of college-aged students here and there. In fact, this was the demographic of Julian’s entire neighborhood, three universities within walking distance of his inner-city row house, which is why Ada rarely ventured outside alone. When Julian asked her about it and she told him what her parents had taught her, his face grew so dark with anger Ada feared he would strike her; she’d seen the same look come over the prophet and end with someone backhanded for their rebellion. She cowered and apologized, and Julian had reached out for her slowly, as if offering his hand’s scent to a frightened street mongrel, and then pulled her against him. “That man has the devil in him,” he told her. She never mentioned her father again. Neither did he.

  Her phone is stuck in the cushion of the chair where she slept. She digs it out and takes it back upstairs into the bathroom, despite Hortense waving for her attention. Dials. The church secretary answers and puts her through to Ray Washington.

  “Ada, good to hear from you, sister. What can I do you for?”

  She has to say it. “Julian’s dead.”

  “Oh, sweet precious Jesus. That plane.”

  “Yes.”

  Ray’s chalky baritone calls on the Lord again, and he prays in his rapid-fire way, his words sometimes indistinguishable from breath, perhaps not even English. He continues and Ada lets his voice wash over her, as soothing as a teacup of hot honey lemonade, and while her sadness and fear haven’t been at all diminished, she almost feels as if she can stand up under it.

  “What can we do for you?” Ray asks after his, “Amen.”

  “I’m not sure right now.”

  “We’ll start with meals.”

  “No, please don’t. It’s just me. I couldn’t finish one casserole in a week. Food would only go to waste.”

  “Do you need some folks to come sit with you?”

  “Julian’s friend Hortense is here now. And her husband.”

  Ray clucks his tongue. “Sister. Sister. Let us come alongside you.”

  “I will. I honestly just don’t know what’s next.”

  “I got that. I’ll ask here and there and call you later tonight.”

  Ada nods even though Ray can’t see her. She finds Hortense waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. “Do you want to go to the hotel where the families are meeting?”

  What good will it do, sitting in a room with strangers, waiting for news she can get from the television? “I don’t think so.”

  “We should fill out these forms, then.”

  “What forms?” Ada asks.

  “From the envelope they left yesterday. It’s to help them . . . identify people.”

  They sit together at the table, Hortense rereading the papers, not turning toward Ada even as she stares at Hortense in profile. Her silky, black hair is short as a boy’s. Her pixie chin. Her eyes, shaped like teardrops with large red-brown irises. Her complexion, smooth as onionskin and nearly the same color. The genetic roulette of her Korean mother and Haitian father.

  “Okay, we’re supposed to draw any identifying marks Julian has, you know, in the spots he has them. Scars, birthmarks, tattoos, previously broken bones. Any sort of dental work, those sorts of things,” Hortense tells her.

  Ada looks at the paper, two simple black-line drawings of bald, androgynous figures—face up and face down—and watches as Hortense clamps the pen between her wrists and draws a jagged line across the left shin, labeling it with the number one. Broken leg, she writes on the first line. “From that incident in Darfur. You know, when he was attacked.”

  Ada doesn’t know. She can’t even say with certainty what Darfur is. A place, yes, obviously. But where? And what happened there? Hortense knows an entirely other Julian.

  “Okay, we good?” Without waiting for an answer, Hortense folds the paper.

  “Wait, no,” Ada says. She shakes the form open and smoothes it against the table. Slowly, she adds a short, dark line on the left side of the figure’s abdomen, just beneath the navel.

  “What’s that?” Hortense asks.

  “A scar. He had some sort of surgery when he was a baby. On his intestines, when they got twisted up. He used some name for it but I don’t remember what it was called. Do you?”

  Hortense sucks her lips together. “Just write a two by it and call it a surgical scar.”

  She doesn’t know about it. Ada fills in the information as Hortense directs but she feels enlarged. This is a part of Julian only she has, a place only a wife’s eyes have seen. Touched. How many times had they been in bed, her fingers tracing that fine, ghostly line? It doesn’t matter if they were married five months or five decades. Her relationship with Julian is beyond friendship. It’s mystical, spiritual, the very image given by God of Christ’s love for his own body, the church. It doesn’t matter how many common experiences or inside jokes Julian and Hortense and Mark shared.

  He’s mine.

  Ada caps the pen. Rushing now, Hortense more rolls than refolds the form, tries to cram it into the envelope but can’t quite manage it in her haste. She sweeps the papers into her open tote bag, slinging the straps over her shoulder. “I’ll fax it from the gallery. Mark’s there. We have some work we have to get done.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you need me to come back tonight? To stay?”

  Shaking her head, Ada says, “No, I think I’m good.”

  Hortense nods. “Yeah, then. I’ll check with you tomorrow.” Her footfalls are heavier than Ada has heard them before, her lithe body gawkily striding toward the front door. And when she goes, Ada turns on the television and watches strangers moving with ant-like frenzy over the crash scene, collecting the wreckage of her life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Even before Will turns the key and hustles her through the back door, Katherine hears a thunder of too-large teenaged feet on the stairs and then she’s consumed by boy arms and scent—Axe deodorant, pizza sauce, denim, Clearasil cream. She can’t breathe in the melee, dwarfed by both her sons’ bodies, but holds onto them as they migrate into the kitchen, one multitentacle organism of mother-child bond.

  “We wanted to come, but Dad wouldn’t let us miss school,” Evan says, still with his arm around her shoulder even as Bryce has taken two steps awa
y. “What’s so important about algebra when your mother almost died?”

  “I’m fine,” Katherine says. “It wasn’t all that close to an almost.”

  Bryce gives his younger brother a light shove in the shoulder. “That’s what I keep saying. Almost implies, like, actually being on the plane and surviving. This was more like potentially a possible almost, or something like that.” He’s the king of qualifiers, of precision in all things. He’s most like Katherine, which is why they have the most contentious relationship of the household. Eighteen, a senior this year, ready to be a man but still so much a child who will eat frosting from the container before heating up real food, and sleep on his bare mattress instead of changing the sheets.

  Evan scowls. Fifteen, bony, always smaller and weaker because of his damaged heart, he resents the correction and will have none of it. “She almost died,” he repeats.

  “Whatev,” Bryce says. “I’m starving.”

  “I’ll throw something together,” Katherine says. “Give me a few minutes to change and wash up.”

  “Kate, seriously.” Will flips open his phone, an ancient model he refuses to upgrade because he doesn’t want to learn a new system. “I’ll order pizza.”

  She wants to cook, wants to provide something for her family and return to normalcy in doing so. Will is already asking for mushrooms and green peppers, and she feels displaced, as if she’s not there in the house but still in Cleveland, in the airport, waiting to board her flight. She moves into the L-shaped corner of the faux–butcher block laminate counter, her corner, between the dishwasher and stove, where she prepares food, eats lunch, opens mail. This feels like home, she thinks, counter pressing into the skin below her rib cage. The kitchen is the nucleus, the most worn room, the last one to be updated. Peel-and-stick tiles curl in front of the refrigerator and in the threshold between the kitchen and living room, where it changes to wood; how many times has she tripped in that very spot? She despises the wallpaper, hunter green and dotted with apples and hearts. The cabinets are oak, dark and dated, but she has great plans to paint and antique them, once she finds some empty time.