See How Small

by Scott Blackwood

  “Did she bring her beau? What’s his name? Phillip?”

  “Oh, yes, he was there. Phillip. Did you see that photo on his book jacket? He looks like a serial killer.”

  “She seems happy out in Phoenix. He treats her well.”

  Her dad was silent for a second. “Your car runs out of gas out in the desert and he’s the one who pulls to the shoulder for you in the unmarked van. And believe me, all his teeth are perfect.”

  42

  WHEN HE HEARD the shots from inside the ice cream shop, Michael’s first thought was to run away. He’d stay at a friend’s apartment for a few days, then make his way to San Antonio or Houston by bus. He thought of waving down one of the passing cars along Barton Springs Road, telling the drivers that something had gone wrong inside. Something terrible. As he walked around the side of the building toward the road, he saw, behind the drive-through window blinds, a bright, flickering light. The smell of smoke was already in the air.

  He didn’t do either of the things he’d thought of. The younger and older man came out the back delivery door before he could, he told himself. They were moving quickly but assuredly to the car and motioned him on. In one hand, the older man was carrying a black bag that said CHAMPION SPORTS and in the other, a light tripod. He was breathing heavily. The younger man had his long coat draped over his shoulder like someone from a magazine ad or TV commercial. He could be anyone or no one at all.

  Michael had trouble looking at their faces, knowing that they could read his thoughts. They had an agreement that was inviolable. What good are men without their word?

  He fingered the conch in his jacket pocket.

  Before he got in the driver’s seat, he asked the younger man what happened, why it had taken so long. He said he was worried they’d forgotten about him. The younger man gave him a disappointed look. “I would never forget you,” he said. “I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand.” Then the younger man plucked a leaf off Michael’s jacket, brushed something off his shoulder. And that was when Michael saw, on the younger man’s cuff, spatters of blood.

  Michael got a call on his cell phone from a number he didn’t recognize. He thought of the reporter, the terrifying curiosity in her voice when he’d called her.

  “Michael? This is Elise.” At first he drew a blank and then the name arranged itself into an image of a tall girl with dark eyes. A graduation gown, hat.

  “Your mom asked me to call,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s great,” he said.

  “She’s with my dad at the hospital. He’s got a—whadayacallit—heart arrhythmia. They’re running some tests.”

  “Who is it, Daddy?” Alice said sleepily from the backseat. “Is it Momma?”

  “Is he okay?” Michael asked.

  “They think so. They think he’s going to be okay.” Her voice wavered a bit. “I’m sorry to hit you with this.”

  He felt the heaviness from the long drive, wondered why they were even here.

  “Why don’t I meet you somewhere?” she said, her voice righting itself. “We can get you two out of that car, find you something to eat.”

  “Sure, we’re about past ready for that,” he said, again seeing her dark hair, eyes. She mentioned a pizza place near the hospital, off Broadway Avenue.

  He wondered how he might help Elise, his mother. They were in a fix. Chance had intervened and he was being asked to set things right. He looked in the backseat and Alice had fallen asleep. Her eyelids twitched, dreaming.

  He and Alice parked near the L station at Wilson and Broadway, not far from the hospital. Michael wanted to get his prescription filled before meeting Elise. He’d already gone through the few tabs he’d taken from his dad. It was lunchtime, and bundled-up people hustled back and forth, off buses and into the station. The L rattled overhead, and a dusting of snow fell on them. On Broadway, he saw a tall sign that read WIGS AND HAIR. They found the pharmacy a half block away. He told Alice she could pick out a toy, something small, while he did business with the pharmacist, who looked over her glasses at him with distrust after he handed her his forged prescription. “Texas, eh?” she said. He needed a cigarette. The front door bell chimed. Otis Redding sang over the intercom. Michael smiled stupidly, told her they were here for a visit with Grandma. “Long way from home,” the pharmacist said doubtfully, but smiled anyway. She looked off down an aisle where Alice was playing with some stuffed animals and a plastic dinosaur. Behind Alice, a large black woman in silver snow boots was talking with a stock boy. The pharmacist said she’d have to call the doctor for approval. Common practice for out-of-state script. It might take a little while, she said. The person who’d sold him the prescription—a bicycle mechanic with a radio voice—was supposed to answer on the other end of the phone, rattle off a combination of numbers that would lower the volume in his head.

  Afterward, they walked a half block away to the pizzeria, where they’d meet Elise. It was snowing more heavily now. He held Alice’s hand. The pizzeria was also a convenience store, which seemed right somehow. A Middle Eastern man with an impassive face sat behind a counter window. Small liquor bottles lined the shelf behind him. The room smelled of baked pizza crust. Chairs, tables, and a video arcade room were wedged into the back. Alice wanted to play the games, so he got quarters for her and struck up a conversation with the Middle Eastern man. Because of his accent, Michael didn’t catch much of what he said, only that his children were attending Loyola.

  The front door chimed. A young woman in a parka came in, and he went up to her, thinking she might be Elise, but she didn’t speak English. She looked away. She paid for her pizza and left.

  He felt the Vicodin begin to work away at the edges of things.

  The arcade games made pinging and squawking noises.

  He asked the Middle Eastern man if he’d seen a dark-haired woman, early twenties. Tall.

  “Your girlfriend?” the man asked without a smile.

  “No,” Michael said. “My sister, actually.” He looked off at Alice, feeling suddenly close to Elise but knowing it was the pills. “My stepsister,” he said, correcting himself. The baked warmth of the room pressed in. Alice made a disappointed sound in the little arcade room.

  “You have other siblings?”

  “Yes. A brother,” Michael said. “But he died.”

  “Unfortunate,” the man said, and nodded. He seemed about to say something else, but the phone rang in the little pizzeria window at the back of the room and the man held up a finger and went over to answer it.

  “Michael?” a woman’s voice said, and he turned.

  Elise was shorter than he thought she’d be—different from what he remembered of his mother’s descriptions. Her eyebrows dark, thick. Blue eyes. Her short hair and wool hat made her look boyish. Pretty in a way that made him uneasy.

  They ordered a pizza and sat at a table in the back. Alice joined them and said she was out of quarters. She sat beside Elise and drew on some stationery that Elise pulled from her purse. “How do you spell ‘My Little Pony’?” Alice asked Elise, and Elise wrote it out for her in purple-crayoned letters. Other customers gathered at tables. The room grew pleasantly warm.

  Elise filled him in while they ate pizza. Mentioned her father’s shortness of breath at her graduation the night before, his mother’s concerns. His mother’s hands shaking so badly that the cabbie thought she was the one who was ill. Elise had joined them both at the hospital. There was a vagueness to all of it, Michael thought, that only left-out people could feel.

  Elise said that there would be more tests today. Michael and Alice could come up to visit the hospital room this afternoon and cheer them up, she said. She looked off at people passing on the sidewalk in the snow, then back at Michael. She squeezed his hand on the table. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, and smiled. Alice looked up from her drawing and said, “What about me?”

  When Elise and Alice went off to play video games, Michael headed for the bathroom. Standing at the urina
l, he could hear thumping and groaning in the pipes. His piss had a sharp chemical smell. The lights made a buzzing sound like a living thing. He wondered where all this might be headed. What if the ocularist died? Maybe they could all start over. Maybe Elise would be a part of that.

  “Part of what?” his brother said from somewhere.

  The muscle in Michael’s cheek twitched.

  When he came out of the bathroom, he saw the Middle Eastern man behind the counter. His impassive face already granting him forgiveness. Across the room, he could see a couple had already claimed their table. The half-eaten pizza lay between them. How long had he been in the bathroom? He walked over to the video arcade, but it was deserted. Called into the women’s bathroom.

  “Where is she?” he said to the woman at the table, who looked back at him round-eyed. “Where’s the little girl? There was a woman with her,” he said. The couple stared back uncomprehendingly. The edges of the room collapsed toward its center. The man behind the counter looked at him strangely. Michael demanded to know where they were, and he shrugged. “Why don’t you know?” Michael asked him, pleadingly. The man said Michael was upsetting the customers.

  In the front window, unconcerned people loped past. Michael pushed out the door into the cold, then up Broadway, his lungs burning. At the corner of Broadway and Wilson, he called Elise’s cell but it went to voice mail. Called his mother’s home number and her message machine answered again.

  He was the do-right man. He’d stayed quiet, hadn’t told them anything. He looked along the street for a sign, any sign. Looked for the white Mercury. Gazed into passing car windows. Taxis. Buses. He bumped into people on the sidewalk. Someone called him a clumsy motherfucker. The L roared overhead.

  She was gone.

  V

  43

  ONE NIGHT, AFTER riding his bike back from Deep Eddy Bar, Jack found Kate Ulrich on his darkened porch. When she sat up suddenly, he’d thought of a bird. Alert. Watchful. It took him a moment to recognize her in his fuzzy bike helmet light. She was sitting in a patio chair, stiff, hands over something in her lap.

  The ride home had sobered him up some, but he felt unsure of what to do or how to respond. It was as if his muscles had atrophied.

  “Can I help in some way?” he said. The headlamp light trembled on the porch windows.

  “They are a great comfort,” she said in a low, unsteady voice that worried him. “What did you mean by that?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure I understand.” His heart thudded crazily.

  “I have these dreams. But they won’t talk to me anymore. They just argue. They’re glum. They want something but won’t tell me what.”

  “I see,” he said, stupidly.

  She pivoted suddenly, asked him about his daughter. He told her she was taking evening courses at the university, unsure where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do. She was working downtown. She’d moved back home with him.

  He stood very still.

  “They go through that, don’t they. All that indecision.” Her hands fidgeted over the purse or whatever it was.

  “Growing pains,” he said.

  “Some decisions are made for us, though,” she said. “You lost your wife.”

  “When she died I sort of lost my bearings for a while,” he said. “Got confused. I wasn’t the best father.”

  “We always let them down,” she said.

  “You’re right. Then we try to make it up to them.” He thought of the new sea green paint, bead board, the smoothness of the sanded floor.

  “You know something you’re not telling me,” she said. She held the purse against her thigh. A comfort, he thought, a totem. In the dim light, her face seemed to narrow, to rid itself of something. His legs grew weak.

  What could he tell her? He’d gone into the fire, found them. Our dream has no bottom. That was one of the surprises.

  “The not knowing is the hardest,” she said. “You think if you only knew, you could handle it.”

  He realized how inadequate he was to this moment.

  “You were there,” she said.

  “I was too late,” he said. “I’m always too late.” She’s tethered me to them in her mind, he thought. She thinks maybe I was the one.

  “Elizabeth was terrified of being naked,” Kate said.

  He found the rope in his head, groped along it. “She was brave,” he said.

  “I can still smell their hair after a bath.” Kate rose from the chair, moved toward the edge of the porch.

  “Zadie. She held her hand,” he said.

  He asked if Kate wanted to come inside, and she said she didn’t know. She didn’t even know why she’d come. They were quiet for a while. A car two doors down turned into the drive, its lights flaring off the porch. The purse she held had whorls and odd stitching in the leather that reminded him of something.

  Kate turned to him. “Take off that bike helmet,” she said. “You look ridiculous.”

  He removed his helmet, then moved around her and unlocked the front door, and she stepped inside.

  44

  What about the part where I find a video the girls made hamming it up on the stage in Zilker Park? The girls’ faces full of delight and mischief—and, sure, maybe they’re a little high. How just beneath I can see their adult faces, who they might have been, given a little more time?

  What about the part where the girls’ school photos arrived in the mail four days after they died? In the photos, they’re posed awkwardly, their chins resting on folded hands. Zadie, sensitive about her burn scars, tries to hide them. Elizabeth’s left eye squints a little. They’d already arranged to have the photos retaken the next week. The company called me to ask for the additional money. I said, They’re gone. You can’t have anything more. There was a long silence on the phone. Well, someone there needs to pay, the man said.

  45

  MICHAEL’S CAR WAS missing. Where it had been was a sign that said SNOW EMERGENCY ROUTE, TOW-AWAY ZONE.

  He’d call 911 soon, he told himself, but he needed to think things through first. He walked west on Wilson, toward Clark Street, near where he remembered his mother’s neighborhood was. Ravenswood. He liked the sound of it in his head. Something timeless. He dug in his pocket for the scrap of paper with his mother’s address. He took deep breaths to slow his heart. Found a corner store and bought a fifth of vodka with the last of his cash. On his way across Wilson Avenue, a passing car slapped his jeans with slush. He found a small park down a side street and drank from the bottle, tried to stop his trembling.

  The snow was a rumpled bedsheet in the road.

  People plodded by on the sidewalk, their heads gauzy with light from passing cars.

  He lit a cigarette and tried Elise’s cell phone again.

  “What’s up?” a man’s voice said. It was filled with curiosity. Michael was seized by the image of the older man forking migas into his mouth at Juan in a Million.

  “I need to talk to Elise,” Michael said. His jaw ached just underneath the pills and vodka.

  “Elise? Is there an Elise here?” the man asked someone away from the phone.

  “Why are you fucking with me?” Michael said, though he knew why. Knew somehow it would come to this. He saw his daughter curled on a bed in a wood-paneled room somewhere, the harsh glare of a corner streetlight.

  A man in a parka sidled up to him. “It’s wonderful weather out,” he said in a little girl’s voice beneath his hood. Michael held the phone tighter, tamped down what was happening.

  There was a commotion on the phone. Breathing. “Michael?” Elise’s voice said.

  “It’s me, I’m here,” he said. “Who was that?”

  “A friend. He thought you were someone else. I’m sorry that we got separated at the restaurant. I got a call from the hospital. Your mother was very upset.”

  “So you just left?”

  “I knocked and knocked on the bathroom door but you didn’t come out. So I took Alice with me. Didn’t th
e man behind the counter tell you?”

  “Nobody told me anything.” There was a clicking sound coming from somewhere far off. Like bird bones snapping.

  “My dad’s had some kind of relapse. His blood pressure dropped like crazy.”

  “Put Alice on the phone,” Michael said in a voice he didn’t recognize.

  In front of him, the man in the parka tilted his head and spread his arms wide in a gesture meant to calm Michael. Passing car lights burned in the fur of the man’s hood. “A light,” the man said, making a smoking motion with his fingers. “And maybe some of what you’re having there.”

  “Daddy?” Alice’s voice said on the phone. His legs went limp. “We are playing Zingo.”

  “Zingo?” His mind tried to pin down what this meant.

  “When you win that’s what you say.”

  “So Elise is taking care of you?”

  “We’re going sledding tomorrow.”

  “Daddy’s coming to get you.”

  There was a loud crumpling in his ear, and at first Michael thought it was him.

  “Michael?” Elise said.

  “Is my mom there?” Michael said.

  “She’s talking with the doctors right now.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said, feeling for a second like it might.

  “What room?”

  “What?”

  “Hospital room.”

  There was a rustling on the phone. “Forty-three twenty-one.”

  “I’ll head over. I’m not far.”

  “God, Michael, I’m so sorry about all of this.”

  He hung up, and the man in the parka was still there, looking at him from under the hood. Michael passed him the vodka and he drank a little. “Where you from?” the man asked, wiping his mouth.

  “Texas,” Michael said.

  “Thought I heard some Texas in there when you were talking to your lady.”