Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  Katherine attended the support group meetings and received the daily emails as parents sought stories of experience from the ones who had been through it already. And at least twice a week, someone would announce her baby’s death—a baby with the same heart defect as Evan.

  She’s ashamed to admit it now, but she held her son so loosely those first years. Yes, she did what was necessary to meet his needs, to comfort him, to make sure he took his medication and made it to appointments. She slept next to him, her hand on his chest or back so she would know he was still breathing, not trusting in her constant state of exhaustion that she’d hear the monitor ding, ding, ding. She’d slept through other notifications, the pump announcing the end of a feeding, the oximeter warning his saturation level had dipped below 70 percent. Still, she built a wall—or she told herself she had—because she’d seen too many grieving parents, too many babies whose condition improved so much doctors encouraged optimism, and then who were taken off life support three days later.

  She didn’t want to know the soul-grinding agony of loss.

  As Evan’s health improved and with the immediacy of his illness behind their family, Katherine allowed herself to grow more furiously in love with her child each day. She watched him learn to tie his shoes when he was eight, and celebrated. Instead of scolding him for dragging a chair into the kitchen to stand on so he could reach the freezer and sneak the Thin Mints she stashed there, she poured them both glasses of milk and joined him in a feast of thanksgiving; two years prior he would have been too weak to push the chair away from the table. She had patience with him because in every moment of frustration she remembered, He could not be here. That patience eventually found its way into her relationship with Bryce as well; she understood how tenuous life’s hold truly is.

  How can she tell Evan she doesn’t care why some live and some die? He didn’t die. She still has him. That’s enough.

  “I don’t know. Honestly,” she says.

  He unscrews the cap from the soda without effort, drinks from the bottle. “I’ll finish it.”

  “Okay, then. I’m going to cook something up for me and your dad. You’re probably good with the pizzas.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  And as she leaves, her foot tangled in a pair of jeans on the floor, she kicks them back into the room and hears, “Mom?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You and Dad are gonna be okay. Right?”

  She nods. “It’s getting better. It will be better,” she says, closing the door. And she wonders if Evan has thought better would be if she’d never offered Julian Goetz her seat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Two days later Ada eats dinner from a vending machine at a rest area off the New Jersey Turnpike, all the food places dark and locked with metal gates. It’s Christmas Eve. She drops her coins into the slot and buys D4 and A7—a package of Chuckles and a bag of potato sticks. Then she pays two dollars for a bottle of water.

  Another hotel, a Marriott this time. She likes the solitude of the rooms, the luxury of someone else cleaning and bringing towels. She hates the king-sized beds. She gets lost in them, crawling in on one side and waking on the other, traveling the expanse in her dreams. Now she knows to ask for a double bed instead. If not, two double beds.

  A complimentary bag of popcorn hides between the single-serve coffee packages and the napkins. She sticks it in the microwave and washes her face while it tings and tangs for two-and-three-quarter minutes.

  She props the pillows around, four of them, all tucked so tightly into their cases she thinks of them as mini marshmallows. She’s finding she has her own names for many things now. Flipping through the channels, she bypasses all the Christmas movies. If she learned about the holiday wholly from television, she’d think it was about fat men in red, flying reindeer, and desperate attempts to secure a boyfriend before the clock struck midnight. Instead, she falls asleep to people renovating their kitchen, and then wakes with a fireplace scene flickering on the screen, an elevator’s rendition of “Jingle Bells” playing.

  Christmas Day. Hortense calls. She ignores it, again. She’s beginning to hate pity.

  Her stomach grumbles. She dresses in layers—two pairs of tights and knee socks beneath her skirt, a t-shirt, turtleneck, and sweater on top. The sweater is gray, cable knit, and she saw it in the store only the other day and bought it because it reminded her of Julian’s sweater, the one with which he dried the rain from her on their wedding day, the one he wore when he left for California two days before he died. She imagines he wore it home, too, was wearing it when the plane dove into the river.

  She checks the vending machine. A half-dozen selections are empty, leaving spaces, missing snack teeth. She can’t eat junk all day. Twenty-five years she went without eating any sort of packaged food and now she lives on it. Passing the lobby desk, she nods at the attendant, a young woman with a Santa’s hat pinned to her crinkly hair. “It’s cold out there,” she says. “Drive safe and Merry Christmas.”

  Ada pulls into a shopping plaza first, the one with the grocery store across the street from the hotel. Everything closed. She finally finds an open gas station with a convenience mart. Inside, the revolving warming displays—usually filled with foil-wrapped egg, cheese, and ham biscuits or sausage bagels—are empty, as are the pastry trays and the rolling hot dog griddle. She buys several sleeves of the bite-sized powdered Softee donuts, a box of cherry Pop Tarts, several bags of salty chips and pretzels, and a few frozen burritos. And apple juice. She pays too much for all her booty and, staring through the windshield of the Jeep, wonders, Where to next?

  Home.

  She doesn’t know what the word means anymore. Not Abram’s Covenant. And not the brownstone. She straddles two worlds, but can’t tell which of these worlds is on either side of the cavern. She can only stare down into the darkness of grief, dropping pebble after pebble, listening for some indication of the distance to the bottom, and hearing nothing.

  Limitless grief. Yes. Each time she thinks it’s stabilized and she can’t sink deeper, something happens—a news story about a new piece of evidence in the Flight 207 crash, a commercial advertising Julian’s brand of deodorant, the sound of church bells like on the day of the funeral—and she’s sucked down toward an abyss out of which she fears she won’t ever be able to crawl.

  So she drives.

  An envelope on the passenger seat. On it, her handwriting and an address. She will go by the house today, to make sure she can find it for her appointment in two days. It keeps her out of the hotel, for a while.

  The trip is twenty-five minutes, with little traffic. A car here, a minivan there. Most people are home, exerting all willpower to fashion this day as the only perfect one of the year. They’ve not yet changed from their pajamas and packed into the car, each kid dragging his new favorite possession, parents frantic to get to the grandparents’ house on time.

  She’s here, without the help of a computerized voice. A yellowed, nondescript ranch-style house with a FOR SALE sign in the yard, the only home on the street without some sort of light, either porch or window or stringed bulbs. Ada parks at the curb, stands at the mailbox, her booted toes crunching the frosted grass. There’s little snow on the ground, short frozen mounds along driveways and at roadsides, places where it had been piled a bit higher from plows and snow blowers and shovels. Otherwise, a brownish Christmas.

  A woman approaches, fur hat perched on her head, holding the leash of a wiry dog wearing a red reindeer sweater, several metal tags jingling on its collar. “Are you lost, dear?” she asks, frigid words puffing from her mouth.

  “I’m just looking.”

  “My mama’s place. Passed six months ago. Cute little house. Would be lying if I didn’t tell you it needed some updating. The realtor is on vacation ’til after New Year’s, but if you give the number a call, I know she’s got someone checking her messages to get back to folks, and to show houses while she’s gone.”

  “Joy Robinson?”<
br />
  “The one and only. Who’s asking?”

  “I’m Ada Goetz.”

  “We’re not supposed to meet ’til Thursday.”

  “I know. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t get lost.”

  The woman cocks her head. The dog does the same. “Okay, come on now. Let’s go.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You can walk along with me while Loretta Lynn here does her business, or you can take your car and drive ’round to my place. Turn right, then right again. It’s number five, right behind here, actually. My backyard touches this one.”

  Ada watches the woman waddle past, the dog obediently by her feet, jangling and wagging as they turn the corner, and then gets in the Jeep. She doesn’t have to follow, can simply drive back the way she came, with her donuts and burritos, and snuggle into the bed in the motel room. But the woman told her to come, and she still is unable to disobey a perceived order. So she turns the key and shifts into drive with her foot on the brake, checking the mirrors like Julian taught her, looking over her shoulder and into the blind spot. One of the first things Julian did was bring her to the middle school parking lot and tell her to get into the driver’s seat. She did. And he explained how the pedals and the shifter worked, but she had watched men drive her entire life and knew those things already. A few husbands or fathers did let their women—daughters, mostly—start vehicles on cold days or drive the tractor to the fields, especially the couple of families that had no sons, but her father would never allow such a thing. It felt rebellious to shift the Jeep from P to D, to remove her foot from the brake and creep forward. She drove figure eights around the lampposts and parallel parked between a school bus and a trash Dumpster. And after she passed her driver’s test, Julian took her into the country, to a long stretch of rutted farm road, and they rolled their windows down and she watched the speedometer quiver at eighty while the wind tickled her exposed neck. She felt uncaged, as if anything was possible to her now, and she could escape the boogeyman pursuing her. Then Julian yelled, “Slow down!” and she skidded to a stop as a stream of cattle flooded the road in front of them and then behind them, meandering from one pasture to another. The cows bumped their noses against the glass, licking and mooing, jostling the car as Julian snapped their pictures, and he and Ada laughed themselves to tears at the absurdity of it all.

  So she turns right, and right again, parking in front of number five and waiting for Joy to come around the corner with her dog, and when she does a plastic bundle swings in her hand. The woman waves her from the Jeep, and Ada responds, more dutiful than the terrier on the leash. Joy drops her plastic bag into the garbage bin beside her garage, waits for Ada to catch up. “It’s a bit chaotic in there, I warn you,” she says. “Grandkids are clamoring to open presents.”

  The home, a split-level, is narrow and decorated in mauve and blue. Geese dance around the wallpaper. Almost every inch of wall is covered with dried floral wreaths, knick-knack shelves full of bear figurines waving American flags and wooden angels with Spanish moss for hair, and folk art prints of milk cans and covered bridges. “Okie-dokie. Mimi’s back.”

  Everyone in the living room turns, the children’s cheers cut short by the sight of Ada. The adults’ smiles falter, and they shoot confused glances at one another. Joy says, “Oh, that’s enough of that. I’ve not gone off my rocker. This is Ada Goetz. She’s the wife of that fella Julian who took Grandma Nona’s picture.” She starts pointing. “That’s my daughter Nona-Anne, yep, named after my mama, and her husband Roger. Those two belong to them, Sam and Lila, in the striped jammies. Then that’s Pansy and her husband Graham, and the wonder boys Brian, Cody, and baby Ian. And this is my own better half, Vinny.”

  The man in the chair stands up and gives Ada a sturdy hug, surprising her. He pulls away and pats her cheek. “Welcome, welcome. Of course. Forgive our rudeness. My better half forgot to tell us you were coming.”

  “We ate our breakfast, but there’s plenty left,” Joy says. “Brian, start pulling those presents out from under the tree. Let’s see what Santa brought.”

  The kids whoop and dash across the room, the oldest boy reading names and directing them where to pile the gifts. Joy removes her coat and hat, draping them over the banister, and shoos Ada into the kitchen. Pans of casseroles and cinnamon rolls clutter the counter. “Help yourself,” Joy says, thrusting a plate toward her. Ada hasn’t seen home-cooked food in almost two weeks; she takes a bit of everything, pours a glass of orange juice, and settles into a chair at the dining room table, adjacent to the living room where the family now waits, each person with their own tower of wrapped boxes and gift bags.

  Vinny snaps pictures on a digital camera so small it’s lost in his fat hands. Joy whoops and encourages, “Another! Open another,” as her grandchildren tear the paper from their presents and hold them up briefly for everyone to see before tossing them aside for the next. The parents untwist ties and cut tape to free toys from their packaging, and the electronic blips and flashes add to the holiday cacophony.

  So much joy.

  It was not like this in Ada’s childhood. There were times of laughter and fun, hayrides and weddings and Thanksgiving. But she never abandoned herself to them because an undercurrent of foreboding remained, always, and she knew at any moment things could change. Someone might suddenly break a rule, spoken or unspoken, and discipline would fall upon him. A word from God might come to her father, and all would stop. Often these times would come while everyone gathered outdoors, and it didn’t matter if little children shivered as the sun dimmed and night came and they had no jackets, or the rain pelted them and they sank ankle-deep into the mud. They stayed until the prophet exhausted his given message, heaping coals upon their heads for hours and hours, until he was certain all had been properly communicated.

  And there was always, at the very least, one person forced out of the celebration, watching, outside the community due to some not-yet-repented behavior. That is, her father had not granted them restoration.

  More than once it had been her.

  A peppermint-scented sleepiness comes over the house. One of the little boys naps beneath the tree, clutching a brand-new Tonka dump truck. Vinny and his son-in-law assemble a track for the race car set. Pansy nurses the baby and talks quietly to Nona-Anne. And Joy ambles through it all, stuffing wads of paper and bows into a black plastic bag. She ties it and plops her gnomish body into the chair next to Ada. “You’re free for seconds,” she says, nodding to the plate.

  Ada shakes her head.

  “Well, then, we might as well do what we were gonna do Thursday.”

  “Oh, no. I can’t intrude any more on your holiday.”

  “Please, please, intrude. To me, Christmas is one of the most boring days of the year. Once you get the presents opened, what’s there to do?” She waves her hands. “Ah. The men will take the kids to the movies this afternoon and my girls and I will make dinner, but until then, it’s like snoozeville.”

  “My wife doesn’t know how to relax,” Vinny adds.

  “All truth there. I hate being idle. Gotta be doing and moving and keeping busy.” She winks at Ada. “So if you don’t talk to me, I’m going to start scrubbing my bathroom tile. And on Christmas. Tsk, tsk. Save me, Ada Goetz.”

  “Well,” Ada says, smiling a little, “I don’t really know what to ask. I just wanted to know about the photo.”

  “Hold it right there.” Joy pops up from the table, disappears for a few minutes, and then returns with a loose-leaf binder and a magazine. “Julian sent these to us. All the pictures he took that day, and then this, when the story appeared. The New York Times Magazine. Who would of thunk it?”

  Ada flips the pages of the binder, dozens of black-and-white photographs in transparent page protectors. Many feature a woman who looks like Joy, all roundness in every part of her, from cheeks to nose to belly, floundering in a house filled floor to ceiling with, well, everything. Boxes of clothing, newspapers, small appliances, shoes, b
askets, artificial flowers, empty pet carriers. Hundreds of lamp shades. Bags of old-fashioned golf club sets. Then images of others—Joy, Vinny, children, and grandchildren—with the woman, sorting, packing, cleaning, crying.

  “Your mother?” Ada points.

  Joy nods. “Sweetest lady in the universe. After my daddy died, she started collecting things. Going to auctions. Said she might start bringing things to the flea market over there on Route 70. My brother and I, we thought, ‘Good, something for her to do.’ Daddy was sick a long time and she took care of him day and night, never wanted a break, though we asked her.

  “We didn’t know how much stuff she had. She kept it in one back room, then another. Doors were closed. There was no reason for us to look in there. Then more things, in the hallway, in the living room. She said it was temporary while she was waiting for space to open at the market. Then it took over. Once it was in, we couldn’t get her to let go of it.

  “That day,” Joy taps the photos, “we were clearing everything out. We told her if she didn’t let us, we’d have to put her in a nursing home. She was out by the mailbox, just crying, and your husband drove by and stopped, and asked if she was okay. I looked out the window and my mama is clinging to some strange man, and I charged out there, ready to tongue-lash the blue blazes out of him, but I got close and saw this expression on his face. Like compassion, but, oh, I don’t know how to describe it but to say it was deeper than that.

  “He introduced himself and asked if he could take some pictures, and I asked my brother and we agreed. And he took these, but except for a few I don’t know that I saw him all that much with the camera to his face. He rolled up his sleeves and helped us pack and organize. The next day he came back early and set up the garage sale with us, brought lunch back to us, and then came back again to move all the leftovers onto the Goodwill truck. Three days this stranger stayed around.