Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  She knows so little of him, and he must have believed there would always be more time.

  She misses him.

  It’s been two months since Bowen and Wright rang Julian’s doorbell. News of the wreckage is still reported, not daily, but once or twice a week. The last bodies have been identified, the black boxes recovered. Pieces of metal and glass continue to be salvaged. Lawyers collect families for the impending court battle, while the airline frantically attempts to woo the same loved ones with large settlement amounts.

  The public loses interest in pain, moving on to the next sensation, leaving those who mourn behind. For those only watching the crash on the television, life continues forward. People have short attention spans, or perhaps they become overwhelmed by one tragedy after another, one more request to give, one more photo of someone else’s devastation, one more mess to clean up when they have plenty of their own, thank you very much. There is only so much emotional energy to spare. Those within the tsunami of loss have one focus; they are trapped in that one, terrible moment forever. It fades, yes, like the newspaper clippings from the event, the print lighter, the page more brittle each time they flip through to read it again. But it doesn’t matter how pale and distant the words become; they were memorized a long time ago, imprinted on the soul. That’s Ada, in the fading, the pain and immediacy of it all bleached slightly by the light, but still very much there.

  There are times now when it doesn’t hurt—minutes, even hours. However, the longer she goes without thinking of Julian, about what she’s lost, the more violently it pounces on her when she does remember, the famished attack of a grief unfed. It’s in those moments when she wonders if what her father said is true, if she killed Julian by choosing to run away with him and abandon the way of the righteous.

  She’s here in town to see Sergeant First Class Terrance Brimworthy, the soldier in the photograph she pulled from the wall when she left the brownstone. It took her less than an hour to identify him from the picture, to locate him, and to phone his home, asking if she could visit. He agreed once she told him who she was—Julian Goetz’s widow. He seemed anxious to meet her.

  The cell phone rings. She reads the screen. Hortense. Again. She keeps calling. Ada keeps ignoring. She texts every few days to say she’s fine and not to worry. Hortense wants her to come back for Christmas.

  Ada has never had a Christmas. Too pagan, her father said. Too Roman. A foothold for ha-satan.

  She won’t this year, either.

  Time to go. It hasn’t snowed in days, so the plowed mounds at the side of the street are dingy with soot and gravel. The computerized navigator directs her to a trailer park, rows of aluminum houses on wheels, some with builton front porches, or sheds, or carports. Terrance Brimworthy lives at number fourteen, strands of colored Christmas lights wrapped around the three tree trunks in his yard and the eaves of his home. Ada knocks on the door and a woman answers, waving her inside and then hurrying to pluck a wailing infant from the high chair. “I’m Sara. Terry will be out in a minute.”

  From the hallway, Terrance lumbers into the living room, prosthetic feet poking from the bottoms of his running pants, and shakes Ada’s hand. “Sit, sit,” he says, and she settles into a pink-and-yellow chintz armchair, decidedly out of place with the overstuffed brown sofa and recliner, the trampled beige carpet, the orangish wood dining set. He plops onto the couch, Sara beside him, the baby rubbing its face into her shirt. She dangles a bottle above the little one’s mouth, and the child opens and gulps toward it like a fish; Ada can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl.

  Terrance is rounder in the stomach and face than six years ago, his hair longer and his neck tattooed with NO FEAR in bruised lettering. But his eyes boast the same deep, shaded circles beneath them and his nose is identical to the high-bridged, aquiline one captured in Julian’s photo. She holds the picture out to him.

  “I don’t smoke anymore,” he says. “That habit stayed over there, where you couldn’t tell the difference between ash and sand.”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “Yeah.” He pulls the loose skin at his jawline. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.”

  The infant bleats, kicking its legs and arching its back before pushing the rubber nipple from its mouth. “Hush, Mirabelle,” Sara says, laying her belly-down on the couch. She pats the baby’s diapered bottom.

  “How old?” Ada asks.

  “Almost ten months. She’s a peanut, like her mama. Not me,” Terrance says. “You got any?”

  Ada shakes her head.

  “How long were you and Goetz married?”

  “Five months.”

  “That’s rough.” His fingers find Sara’s, and they shift into one another in the glow of the Christmas lights, skin pink, and then green, and then aqua and gold as the colors oscillate on the plastic pre-lit tree.

  “Can you . . . tell me something about him?”

  “Oh, sure, yeah. He was quiet, you know. Over there, I barely noticed him. I can’t remember him taking my picture that day. He didn’t pester us or anything. Just did his job, I suppose. And I can’t say I took much notice when he was gone, either. One day I looked up and realized the dude with the camera wasn’t the same one as before. That one after him, he liked to gab, who-yeah.

  “I don’t remember much about the explosion. Some routine day and bam, IED goes boom while we’re making the rounds. I woke up in Landstuhl with my legs blown off and biggest cow pie of a headache ever. They sent me back to the States and I was a mess. Depressed. Angry. Just one big blob of pity and sh—well you know. Always been—what’s they say?—the glass empty kind. I saw all those other amputees at Walter Reed, the ones who were fighters, with their positive rah-rah, we can do it attitudes, and I wanted nothing more than to break their faces.” He swears, absentmindedly drumming his metal legs. “And to die. I wanted to die.

  “So I wake up from a nap one afternoon and some guy is sitting by my bed. I don’t know who he is, but sometimes the local churches send their people to visit the patients who don’t got family around. But I wanted no part of their charity and told the guy to f—to go away. He just asked if I remembered him, and when I said no he told me he was Julian Goetz. The name sounded familiar and he told me like I should know, but I didn’t and I said nothing ’cause I didn’t want anyone to know my memory was screwed up too. The guy just sat while I ignored him, then told me he’d be back. I didn’t think I’d see him again but the next week there he was. And then the next week. He would read to me from his Bible, not the pansy garbage but all this stuff about battles and warriors. Gave me some Twix bars and I couldn’t figure how he knew they were my faves, and when I asked him, he told me ’bout some poker game over there in the desert, where I won the pot and there were some Twix in there, and I said how much I liked them. Don’t know how or why in blue blazes he remembered that.

  “My folks are dead so I didn’t have anyone ’cept a deadbeat brother who I hadn’t seen in years and couldn’t tell you where he is now. Probably prison. There was no Sara and Miri, then. Goetz told me his parents were gone too. He had a sister. They were close. He tried to find my brother for me. No dice.”

  Ada shifts in the chair, uncrossing her legs at the knees because her foot begins to throb, then lacing her ankles because it’s what she’s been trained to do. The warm scent of simmering tomatoes grows with the temperature in the trailer, and something else, a perfumed smell, spicy and flowery. She doesn’t know what it is or where it comes from, but it makes her nervous, along with the woven, feathered circles hanging in all the windows, the paintings of wolves and eagles on the walls, the purple streaks in Sara’s hair. Her apprehension isn’t based in fear, but unfamiliarity. She’s not been around people she doesn’t know in alien surroundings, not without Julian. She also knows what her father would say of those like Terrance and Sara, with children born out of wedlock and Native American spiritualism and odd smells and alcohol. Ada doesn’t know if she’ll be co
mpletely free of Abram Mitchell’s voice in her head, ever. At least while Julian lived, he spoke louder and more lovingly, and covered over the years of the community’s teachings.

  “Babe, get me a Coke, will ya?” Terrance asks.

  Sara moves gingerly as to not wake the baby, places a pillow on Mirabelle’s back. “So she think I’m still here,” she explains. “Want a soda too?”

  Ada shakes her head.

  “Anything? Water? Bud Light?”

  “We have Bud?” Terrance asks. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Picked it up yesterday when we were in Walmart.”

  “Get me one of those instead.”

  Terrance watches his fiancée reach deep into the refrigerator to find beer, eyes soft upon her. Sara opens it and takes a sip, stirs the pot of sauce on the stove. “Bring that here. I got no spit, darling,” he says, snapping his fingers. “Can’t finish telling Ada my story with this dry mouth.” So she does, and sits again, close to Terrance, the baby’s toes twitching against her thigh.

  “I was in that hospital for three months,” Terrance says, after swishing a mouthful of beer. “Julian was there to see me every single week until discharge. Friends ain’t the right word for us, but we were something, whatever it was. I didn’t find out until he died that he lived in New York. I figured he must have had a place in DC, since he came so often to visit. He emailed every little bit or so, to make sure I hadn’t offed myself, I think. When I told him Sara and me got engaged, he said he’d take our wedding pictures. Now we got no one.”

  Sara elbows him in the ribs. “Don’t say it like that.”

  “She knows what I mean.” Terrance shrugs, holding his hand out to her. “You know what I mean. Just that who could we possibly get, after him?”

  Ada nods. She understands.

  Who, possibly, after him?

  “When is the wedding?”

  “June,” Sara says. “Hopefully Miri will be walking well enough that she can be the flower girl.”

  “She’ll walk better than me, sure as eggs is eggs.” Terrance laughs. “I barely had coordination when I had two feet.”

  “Just stop.” Sara turns toward Ada. “We’ve been taking ballroom lessons, for our first dance as husband and wife together. He’s good as anyone else in the class.”

  They’re in love, these two.

  “Can I take your picture?” Ada asks. The words startle her. She doesn’t know where they come from, hadn’t thought them before they hatched from her lips. But the request pleases Terrance and he says, “Heck, yeah,” before she can apologize for her rude request. She sways to her feet, wrapping her jacket over her shoulders, and tells them the camera is in the car and she’ll be back in a minute.

  Evening divides the sun, bottom half smeared red atop the horizon, raspberry jam on bread, top half subdued by the late winter hour. She unlocks the trunk and reaches for Julian’s camera bag, a spare one he left in the Jeep, just in case. Unzips it. The camera is smaller than his Nikon, the one he had on the plane with him. A Canon. She turns it on and nothing happens. Of course the battery is dead. She knows he keeps others, though, and finds three more in the front right pocket, the same place he kept them in his everyday bag. Her mouth folds with a sad smile. Creature of habit; she has this much about him.

  She blows on her hands to warm them, opens the door on the bottom of the camera and slips the new battery in. Spins the wheel to on. This time it powers up with an electronic sigh, a few dolphin-like clicks and whistles, a sly wink from the bitty green light on its backside. Despite the camera’s sleek design, it feels blocky in her hands, angular and ill-fitting; she’s a toddler trying to jam a rhombus into the circle hole of her shape-sorting toy. She takes it back to the trailer where Terrance and Sara wait, the baby awake, chewing on her fists.

  “Where you want us?” Terrance asks.

  “There, I guess. Where you are.”

  She doesn’t know what she’s doing, having used a camera only once before, Julian’s camera, heavy and mysterious in her hands, tapping the shutter release a few times before passing it back to him. She didn’t even look through the viewfinder, though she could see what she was shooting on the back screen. She does the same now, centering the family in the window—Terrance laughing, Sara grimacing as Mirabelle pulls her hair with spit-covered fingers—and capturing the image with a press of the button. She does this two more times, before Sara says, “What if Terry holds the other picture?”

  Ada shrugs, shakes her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “A picture of the guy holding the picture he’s in.” She laughs. “It will be cool. Ya know?”

  So Terrance holds Julian’s photo, a shield in front of his chest, and then his girlfriend and the baby join him, all three of them partially protected by the image of a soldier with bandaged hands, on his smoke break in Afghanistan. And Ada captures the moment within the memory of the camera.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Evan feels more displaced than ever, trapped in a transparent corridor between the way his life used to be and the way it is now; he can see both playing out but no matter how frantically he pounds the glass, no one acknowledges him. At home, he and Bryce occupy their own small corners while their parents are loud and clumsy in their attempts at marriage. In school, the students pass him in the halls, making obscene gestures or tossing out snide comments about his mother. The girls whisper. The guys make grunting sounds. Small school, small town, and a very angry soon-to-be ex-wife who isn’t shy about sharing her story with every bank teller and Avon associate she knows. There are no secrets here.

  Evan’s friends have stayed with him, with as much emotional support as fifteen-year-olds can muster and not without the occasional joke at his expense, which he can forgive. He buys lunch today, chicken patty and tater tots, which the lunch ladies call rounds. “You want rounds with that?” Of course he does; they’re the only thing worth eating, and he gets an extra, à la carte helping in one of those red-and-white paper hotdog holders. An apple. Chocolate milk. He’ll get an ice cream from the machine, probably Nutty Buddy, or a Neapolitan sandwich if the cones are sold out. And an iced tea, since no eight-ounce carton of anything is enough for a high school sophomore. He slides his Styrofoam tray onto the table and sits between Andrew and Clayton, his sentinels, as one fills his cheeks with potato rounds, like a squirrel, and makes little chirping sounds, and the other frantically copies someone’s math homework.

  And he thinks, what’s the point of all this?

  In that moment, something snaps in Evan, so loud in his soul he’s sure everyone in the cafeteria hears it. No one looks his way. But he picks up his tray and, one part of his mind screaming, you’ve lost it Evan, you’ve gone crazybrains, he manages to get over to that table, where the First Baptist kids eat lunch—girls in long skirts, boys in button-downs and the kind of creased, shiny pants most teens only wear if forced by a parent—with their Bibles open.

  “Hey,” he says. “Can I sit?”

  They stare at him, all seven of them, faces various shades of dumbfounded, until one boy says, “Uh, yeah, I guess.”

  “Cool. Thanks.”

  No one knows why he’s joined them, not the Baptist kids—also known as the Fundie Dundies—nor Evan’s friends, who he sees making faces and waving and mimicking gunshots to the head three tables away. Nor Evan, who felt the same pull in his gut he felt the night he tried to find Ada Goetz, and feels it still, knotting his feet so he can’t leave. If he wanted religion, he only needed to wait until school ended and he could have called Pastor Ray from the anonymity of his own bedroom. He is already on the fringe of social suicide given the now very public affair of his mother and Seth’s father. This move puts the coffin in the ground, and there is no lack of people to shovel dirt over him.

  The Fundie Dundies (stop calling them that, Evan tells himself, but each time he looks up at them he hears Andrew singing fundie dundie fundie dundie fundie dundie in the voice of Scooby Doo) g
lance at one another, and at him, and then at the pages of their Bibles. The first boy who spoke, Evan doesn’t know his name because he’s a senior, says, “We’re doing our study now.”

  “Are you talking about Jesus?”

  “We’re in Philippians,” a girl says.

  Evan shrugs. “Is that about Jesus?”

  Someone snorts, and the girl rolls her eyes. “No.”

  “The whole Bible is about Jesus, in a way,” the first boy says. “But this part isn’t about him in the way I think you mean. Nate, share with—” He snaps his fingers twice and opens his hand toward Evan.

  “Evan.”

  “I’m David. Okay, then, Stephanie, you’re reading still. Verse seven. Why don’t you go through twelve.”

  The eye-roll girl begins. “ ‘But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.’ ”

  Evan understands none of it. He hears the words, and as individual dictation entries he could define them, but all together it’s a mass of children’s play slime, formless, dripping from his hands. Except for the word dung, which surely can’t mean what he thinks it does.

  David bites his lip, and says, “Hold on a sec.” Then he opens his eReader tablet and swipes the screen. “Maybe this will help, Evan.”

  He reads aloud. “ ‘I thought things like that were for my benefit. But now I consider them to be nothing because of Christ—’ ”