Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  A herd of boys runs from the trees, finishing the cross-country trail. He attaches himself to the tail end of the line, follows them into the locker room, and changes into his jeans without showering. Thank goodness for ninth-period gym.

  On the bus, Grace sits next to the window, her French horn beside her, saving a place for him. She moves it to the floor, propping her feet on it, knees against the seat back in front of her. She huffs on the glass, smeared with the handprints of dozens of other students, and draws faces in the condensation. This one with oversized ears. That one with rabbit teeth and a curl of hair in the center of its forehead. She rubs her palm through them and begins again. Hearts this time. “There’s a memorial service. It’s open to the public.”

  “I can’t ask anyone to take me,” Evan says.

  “I checked Greyhound. Forty-six dollars, round trip. You can walk from the depot to the church.” She blows on the window, filling in her doodles. “I’ll go with you. We’ll be back by like, eight or nine.”

  He shakes his head. “Thanks, though.”

  Grace twiddles with the handle of her horn case. “Whatev.”

  His stop comes first, and he waves as the bus passes, but she ignores him. He’s not bothered by it; her moodiness goes as quickly as it comes and tomorrow it will be as if this hiccup between them never happened. Evan doesn’t know what caused Grace to turn inward this time, but blames it on being a girl. He can’t think of any other reason for it.

  No one is home yet. Bryce has basketball practice and the parents are still at work. Evan kicks off his sneakers inside the back door and snags a two-pack of Ring Dings on the way past the pantry. In his bedroom, he drops his coat and backpack to the floor. He finds last year’s May/June issue of American Photo, in the bottom desk drawer, and it falls open to the interview, to the page with the highlighted passage, because he’s turned to it so many times before.

  Why am I a photographer? I ask myself that every single day. There’s always a moment, usually in those dead spaces when the mundane takes over—I’m driving through the McDonald’s window for a double cheeseburger, buying toothpaste, staring out at the potholed street while drinking coffee, wasting too much time clicking around the Internet—when the sheer absurdity of what I do for a living punches me in the face. I don’t perform delicate, life-saving surgeries on vulnerable infants. I don’t rescue people from burning buildings. I don’t even do simple, useful services like changing the worn-out brakes on someone’s car or unplugging backed-up pipes. I take pictures. So what? Any three-year-old with his mother’s cell phone can do that.

  Then I remember it is my God who gave me the desire and ability to do what I do. I take these photos so others can see imago dei in humanity. We must look deeply because we’ve forgotten it’s there. Some will never see it; they’ve lost it to the Fall. But for those who retain the ability to recognize God With Us, either by the Spirit or because he has graciously allowed it, I give them a window through my camera. I don’t capture landscapes or weddings or toddlers on Santa’s lap. My photographs—I hope—bring the viewer to the doorstep of the divine, stirring them not only to compassion but to action.

  “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

  “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

  “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ ”

  This is why I take pictures, so the housewife in farm country who’s never set foot outside a fifty-mile radius can see the hungry and thirsty in sub-Saharan Africa, or Flint, Michigan. Or the night-shift cashier at the Sunoco, working his way through community college, can see an overflowing hospital in Calcutta. We’re all of us too busy and too focused on our own needs to look up and notice the desperation of others. Or the laughter. If someone looks at one of my photographs and his heart is awakened by what is framed there—grief, loss, joy, poverty, peace, illness, ignorance, fortitude, grace—then perhaps he’ll be moved to respond when he comes face-to-face with those same things when passing his neighbor on the sidewalk in front of his own home.

  Evan finds Grace’s number on the contacts page of his cell phone and touches the green receiver icon to dial her. “What you’d forget? The Spanish homework?” she asks.

  “Still up for a funeral?”

  “Does that mean we’re skipping school?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Epic.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  They go to homeroom so they’ll be counted in the morning attendance, avoiding a phone call home by the office secretary asking their folks to please call the school if they’re home sick. The question is phrased so politely—This is Mrs. Spelling at Roosevelt High. I’m just wondering if Evan will be in to school today. Please call me as soon as possible and let me know.—but it’s only a ploy to identify students who are skipping and parents who are unaware. When the first-period bell rings, they stuff their coats into their backpacks and walk to the gymnasium, across it, and out the side door because it’s closest to the road and on the windowless side of the building. Evan zips on his jacket as soon as they’re out of eyeshot, the brisk November wind passing straight through his skin, but Grace is content to fight the gooseflesh and pretend she’s not cold in the slightest.

  Neither wore black. Evan owned one pair of black slacks, last worn in June for his choir concert, and when he uncrumpled them from the back corner of his closet, they had grown a pelt of dust and were three inches too short. Grace’s mother hated black and she didn’t want a lecture about turning Goth, which she endures any time she dresses in anything her mother disapproves of, despite Grace repeatedly saying her style choices slant Emo and not gothic whatsoever. So Evan wears his everyday clothes—nondescript jeans, though he chose his darkest wash ones, plain gray shirt, and his Nikes. Grace’s flamingo pink denim pants are bunched around brown-and-yellow plaid Converse high-tops, and her white hooded sweatshirt is decaled with glittery hearts and skulls.

  “Irish Larry’s is three miles from here,” Grace says. “That okay?”

  “Perfect,” Evan says, though he feels like he’s running to keep steady with Grace’s long-legged stride. Their small town has no real bus station, but Greyhound stops twice a day at a local diner, leaving this morning at nine. At the high school, homeroom begins at 7:40 and they were on their way twelve minutes after that, which is plenty of time for most people to walk three miles, but not someone with half a functioning heart.

  He can’t hide his wheezing from her, and she slows down, glancing at her watch every few seconds. “We’ll make it,” he says, urging his feet to move faster, toes catching the pavement because his oxygen-depleted limbs are stubborn and clumsy and disobedient. Grace checks the street and when the next car approaches, she waves at it to stop. It does, easing onto the shoulder in front of them, hazard lights blinking.

  “Are you crazy?” Evan asks. “They might know us.”

  “Who in this town doesn’t?” She runs ahead, sticks her head through the open passenger-side window, and then waves at him to come on while climbing into the car.

  Great.

  Evan does, indeed, know the driver, a friend of a friend of Grace’s stepbrother. He smokes cloves and doesn’t ask questions, and Grace gives him ten dollars when he drops them in front of the diner.

  They don’t talk much on the ride to Trent. Grace knows him well enough to leave him be,
twisting buds into her ears and switching on her iPod. He stares out the window, eventually nodding off, waking when the bus stops for a toll, Grace’s head on his shoulder. He lets her sleep until they’re at the depot, and then blows her bangs from her forehead. Her brows pull together and she opens her eyes, poking the corners on either side of her nose with two fingers, flicking away the sleep, and then straightening. “Sorry, I was totally out.”

  “I’ve heard you snore before.”

  She elbows him. “Jerk.”

  Neither is comfortable in the city, everything concrete and tall and unfamiliar. They walk close to one another, bodies bumping. Evan doesn’t make eye contact with the passersby; Grace jerks her chin at them with a quiet, “Hey.” Some nod back. Some smile. Others glare, or Evan thinks they do from what he can glean in his periphery.

  Two blocks over, two blocks down, then another three blocks. The service has already started when they arrive, the church offering standing room only, so they slip off to the side and lean against one of the open window ledges. All the bodies absorb the voices of those who speak; Evan understands little of what’s said. But he recognizes the photographs, shown one by one as a woman sings something he’s heard before, accompanied by a lone cellist.

  “What’s this song?”

  “ ‘Fire and Rain.’ James Taylor.”

  “The guy you like.”

  “Hey. He’s my Julian Goetz.”

  “Don’t even.”

  Grace tugs the zipper cord on his backpack, still strapped over his shoulders. “Camera?” she asks, knowing the pocket he keeps it in.

  He shakes his head. “Not here.”

  The crowd sways like reeds as the memorial ends, tilting toward the family as it moves up the center aisle.

  “Hurry,” he tells Grace, tugging her sleeve. He must see them, shoves through the mob, saying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” despite his rudeness, and manages to worm to the edging as the family passes. Later he won’t remember any of the faces except one. The hollow one. Julian’s wife.

  Death carves the insides out of people.

  He can’t forget the first time he saw it. He was twelve and at Children’s for his biannual checkup, between his echocardiogram and lab work, the nurse telling him and his mother to have lunch and report to phlebotomy in ninety minutes. Evan convinced his mother to buy him pizza, and ice cream, and a root beer, which wasn’t difficult; at the hospital, he got whatever he wanted. When they finished, with nearly an hour left before his blood draws, they crossed the street to a local bakery and bought all the remaining donuts, not quite four dozen, and toted them to the sixth floor—cardiology—for the Ronald McDonald family lounge.

  Sugar is the currency of survival in hospitals. Parents live from Coke to Coke, from late night trips to the vending machine for a Hershey’s to a cardboard box of Corn Pops from the cabinet of the nutrition room. How many times had his mother sent up a generic sigh of thanksgiving for the restocked basket of goodies in the lounge, donated by someone who understood a baggie of fruit gummies could take the edge off utter exhaustion, and free for the taking? So she and Evan left the donuts on the community food table with a sign—Help Yourself!—though no instruction was necessary, and when they stepped back out into the corridor, a young woman streaked by, wailing, followed by another woman in a silk blouse, and two male nurses.

  “Mom?” Evan asked.

  “Shh. Let’s go,” she said, nudging him beneath her arm and hustling him in the opposite direction. He looked back to see the sobbing woman collapsed on the floor, and the professional woman on her knees beside her, whispering in her ear.

  “Mom?” he repeated. “What—”

  “Her baby died,” Katherine said.

  And after his blood was taken and the needle prick covered with a Snoopy Band-Aid, and after the doctor proclaimed his heart looked as perfect as it possibly could look and he didn’t need to come back for another six months, Evan and his mother waited at the elevator. Next to them, in a wheelchair, sat the crying woman. Her flannel pajama bottoms were ripped at one knee. Her t-shirt stretched over her still-protruding belly. She wore Tweety Bird slippers, and hugged her overnight bag as if her dead child rested in it. She wasn’t crying anymore. And when Evan looked into her face, he saw two empty sockets and cavernous darkness descending into her soul.

  Hollow.

  For the first time, he considered why he had lived and this baby died. Why any one individual was allowed to stay on this earth, and another carried away. Who chose? Some white-bearded guy in the clouds named God? Fate? Happenstance? His family went to church sometimes, and he knew about Jesus and heaven and Christmas, though Easter confused him because there were too many days around it when different stuff happened. But the minister didn’t ever talk about the dying part, except to say perhaps God needed another angel.

  He didn’t buy that. Maybe he would if he still believed in Santa and the Easter Bunny, but not in sixth grade. He tried to talk to his mother about it, but she had shushed him and told him not to be negative. “Just be thankful you’re here.”

  “Come on,” he tells Grace, and shrinks into the crowd, mourners parting around him as he plants his feet and allows them to brush by.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” Minutes later the pack of strangers has loosened, and Evan moves in the opposite direction, toward the far door, and breaks out of the church into the street.

  “The reception,” Grace says.

  “I want to go back.”

  “The bus doesn’t leave until five.”

  Evan shrugs. “We can wait at the depot.”

  He expects Grace to argue but she trudges back the way they came, and he jogs a handful of steps to catch her. She reaches for his hand, holds it, and it’s awkward because of their height difference—his arm in front of hers, shoulder twisted and wrist bent upward to meet her fingers—and because the more he thinks about how clammy his palm is, the wetter it becomes. Grace doesn’t look at him; her fingernails prick his knuckles. He feels more like a child being led than a boy holding hands with a pretty girl.

  They kill time at the bus station, watching daytime television, the sets mounted at the ceilings so they crane their necks to see Judge Judy and the Rachael Ray Show. Evan wants to take some pictures but is afraid—perhaps unreasonably, perhaps not—he’ll be knifed by one of the several tattooed men who look like they could star in those street gang movie clips his English teacher made the class watch after they read The Outsiders. Grace buys a deck of playing cards from the snack store and they play war, and then eat Fritos and drink Mountain Dew while trying to solve the half-filled crossword puzzles abandoned around the depot, and then take turns playing Angry Birds on Grace’s phone until boarding the bus. And in the darkness, with Grace’s chatter and the buzzing of the highway in his ears, he’s faced with the question again. Why did Julian Goetz die and his mother live? Still without answer, but left with all the hollowed-out people—he stumbles over them all the time, in shopping malls and at garage sales and once while waiting in line for the Avalanche at Six Flags—and a longing he doesn’t understand, one to fill them back up again.

  He needs a reason.

  He thinks, if he could have asked Julian Goetz, he’d know.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  You see Seth today?” he asks Grace, passing her in the corridor. The sea of students washes him toward social studies and her toward art. She shakes her head and waves her phone. “I’ll text him,” she calls, and then is carried away, out of sight.

  He’s tired today, sluggish, one of those times something feels off and he knows he’s not ticking quite as he should. His throat itches and pressure builds behind the bridge of his nose, so he expects it’s only a cold coming on. He doesn’t dare tell anyone; it’s a sure trip to Children’s for half a dozen tests and probably an overnight stay. No thanks. He puts his head down on his desk while the teacher prattles on about the Indian caste system, comparing it to the hierar
chy of high school. His ear against the composite top, he hears the scrawling pens of the note takers vibrating down the metal legs of their desks, through the floor, and up his.

  “Mr. Walker, am I boring you?”

  He sits up. “No, Ms. Picardi.”

  “Good. I hoped not. Though I suppose I’ll be certain when I see the results of your test Friday.”

  She continues to mark the blackboard, drawing two pyramids, chalk squeaking when she tips it at the wrong angle. The first she labels with Brahman at the pinnacle, then Kshatriya, Yaishya, Sudra, and untouchables. She instructs the class to draw their own triangle and fill in the blanks with the so-called castes they experience at school. “Jocks, cheerleaders, geeks and nerds, Goths, student council, the smart kids, the drama club, however you see the social stratification of public education working out in real life. Don’t put your names on them. You’ll be handing them in at the end of class and we’ll discuss them tomorrow.”

  Evan flips open his spiral notebook, finds a clean page, and sketches his triangle. The pen feels weighted in his hand, swollen. He clenches his fingers, tightening them to claws, and then rotates his wrists, popping them. He doesn’t care about classifying the sophomore cliques. Perhaps he’ll write that on his paper. I will not participate in this assignment because it perpetuates the idea that some people are better than others. Obviously, that’s Ms. Picardi’s point, and they’ll talk about why his classmates decided to order certain groups the way they did. If he comes to school tomorrow. His throat aches when he swallows and his eyes feel gritty when he blinks. When the bell rings, he’ll walk out of class without handing in the assignment.

  Class ends. Scratching of chairs, snapping binders, and papery rufflings surround him. Evan slips his book atop his folder and mixes with the other students. “Evan, don’t sneak out yet,” the teacher says, and he waits for her to give him a once-over. “You really look like you’re not feeling well. Can I write you a pass to the nurse?”