A Hole in the Universe

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Gordon stood in the middle of the poorly lit, chaotic storage area. He had already been back here on two previous futile missions for items customers couldn’t find on the shelves. Stacks of torn, half-filled cartons were everywhere. Some had fallen, littering the floor with cans and boxes. There were no plastic bags. He was about to knock on Neil’s door when he spotted them in a box by the walk-in cooler. He was filling a smaller box with bags when the wide double doors to the loading ramp swung open. Eddie Chapman pushed through a dolly piled with cases of milk.

  “Just the man I need,” Eddie said, and ordered Gordon to bring the cases up front and refill the dairy case. “There’s six more cases on the ramp, but I gotta go see a guy, so if you could just put them in the walk-in, I’d really appreciate it.” He zipped his jacket as he backed toward the door. “And for God’s sake don’t let anybody bother Neilie. He’s gotta get through this. But mingya, I got a life to lead, too. I got my own thing. I can’t keep doing this,” he said through the closing door.

  Gordon started to push the loaded dolly into the store, then realized he probably shouldn’t leave six cases of milk out on the ramp to spoil or be stolen. He brought in the cases but couldn’t see another dolly, so he carried them two at a time into the cooler. He was wheeling the dolly out to the dairy case when he remembered June and Serena. Hands flying, he got the milk onto the shelves in just a few minutes, then raced up front with the bags.

  Five customers were lined up at Serena’s register. June was gone.

  “Is she all right?” he asked, and Serena rolled her eyes as she counted change back for a teenage girl with black lipstick and bright-red eye shadow. The girl pushed her cart through. In the baby carrier was a sleeping infant. Its tiny mouth opened and closed. He leaned closer. He’d only ever seen babies from a distance in the visiting room.

  “Cute, huh?” Serena said.

  “Like a little fish,” he said, gazing down.

  “And what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” the girl snapped.

  His head shot up as she stormed by him. “I meant the mouth, the way it was opening and closing,” he said quietly.

  “Bitch!” Serena said, just loudly enough to be heard.

  At the door, the girl turned, held up her middle finger. Serena burst out laughing. Gordon’s face was red. He wasn’t used to hearing women swear.

  On the top step of the house across the street, the frizzy-haired girl was hitting a stringed ball with a wooden paddle. She had been out there doing the same thing late last night, until a woman called from a second-floor window and told her to go inside, it was way past her bedtime. The girl hollered something back. The woman leaned even farther out the window and threatened to call Social Services. With that, the girl ran onto the porch, then ducked down behind the railing. When Gordon went to bed, the girl was still crouched in the shadows, knees up, back against the wall.

  His instinct was to keep his eyes down, but he forced a smile and mumbled a low hello. The girl stared out from cold, dull eyes until he looked away. The paddle continued its steady beat. He paused by the roses. His father’s pampered shrubs had massed into a tangled hedge between his house and Mrs. Jukas’s. The inch of new growth made it easier to tell which were dead branches. Trying to avoid the thorns, thick and curved like black talons, he reached in and broke off a long dead cane. He broke off another, then more, almost lulled by the steady thwack thwack thwack across the street. His hands and arms were getting scratched, so he looked in the garage for clippers. A lump rose in his throat at the sight of all the empty hooks and shelves that had once held his father’s tools. The baby-food jars of nails and screws were gone, but their rusting caps were still nailed over the workbench. He went into the house and brought out scissors. Twenty minutes later, he had trimmed off enough to see which branch belonged to which bush.

  The lowering sun was still warm on his back. A fat bee buzzed drowsily near his face. He had worked the last six hours a free man. He could do whatever he felt like, go wherever he wanted, could feel it pulse in his fingertips, the soles of his feet, electrifying, the shock of living, of just being here. The anxious chatter of squirrels rose to a high, quarrelsome pitch. In some nearby house, a baby wailed. A door squeaked open, then banged shut. Mrs. Jukas stood on her front porch, white-haired, dour as ever, tinier than he remembered, maybe not even five feet tall. Mr. Jukas had been a registry inspector. When Gordon failed the road test for his license, his mother called upon Mr. Jukas, who took him out every day, parallel-parking all over the city. By the end of the week, he could parallel-park better than he could drive. His second road test had been scheduled the day he was arrested. When the police pounded on the door early that morning, his mother first thought it was Mr. Jukas’s idea of a joke, some kind of private road test he had arranged, until they shoved the warrant at her, decreeing not just entry, but their bounding surge up the stairs, five of them, guns drawn, shouting his name as they pushed open the bedroom door, then darted back, but needn’t have because he was lying there waiting, still dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before, eyes wide, waiting through the night, months, years to come, waiting for it to end, for it to finally be over. As they rushed him stumbling down the stairs, his mother’s face had turned old, her hair wild from tearing at it as she screamed at them. Leave him alone and get out! Get out! What are you, crazy? You’re at the wrong house.You don’t know what you’re talking about. My son wouldn’t lay a hand on anyone, much less murder someone. Not Gordon! No! No! No!

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Mrs. Jukas’s voice cut through the warm air. “You get out of here! If you don’t get off my property right now, I’m calling the police!”

  Gordon looked down at the base of the roses, wondering if the lot lines had changed.

  “Just passing on through.” It was the same young man with thick gold chains he had seen the other morning. He swaggered along the edge of her patchy lawn, grinning. Mrs. Jukas kept demanding that he hurry up. Gordon recognized the walk, the strut with its coiled, lethal bravado that could strike with pythonine force. The man crossed the street in slow, imperious fashion, looking neither right nor left, not even quickening his pace as cars bore down from both directions. He spoke to the girl who was sitting on the top step. The ball extended farther and thinner with each blunt whack. Suddenly he seized the ball, snapping it from its rubber tether. It rolled into the gutter. She shouted something. He grabbed her shirt and yanked her to her feet. She stumbled down a step, then caught herself on the railing.

  He darted past her and rang one of the buzzers. The front door opened onto a scrawny young woman in skimpy shorts and a leather bomber jacket. She held her head at a dazed angle, squinting into the light. She gestured as if she didn’t have whatever he wanted. She called to the girl. The girl answered back angrily. The man grabbed the girl then and forced her down the steps onto the sidewalk. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a large purple SUV pulled up to the curb. The girl tried to get back up the stairs, but the woman shrieked at her to go. With that, the girl headed toward the SUV in her own version of the walk. She got in and it sped off. The man followed the woman into the house.

  “Who is that? Who’s down there?” Mrs. Jukas suddenly called. “I can see you. I see you down there hiding!”

  “Mrs. Jukas.” He stepped out from the bushes. “Gordon Loomis, Mrs. Jukas,” he said quietly. He hadn’t meant to startle her. Dennis had told him to go right over and say hello, and he should have, he said as he hurried up her steps. “But I didn’t want to bother you.” He’d been dreading this moment.

  She hadn’t moved. Her faded eyes darted between him and the relative safety of the street. One of her legs was bigger than the other, enormous in its casing of elastic bandaging. Instead of shoes she wore wide, soiled slippers.

  “My mother used to tell me how after my dad’s stroke Mr. Jukas would always come over and help her get him into bed at night,” he said from the walk below.

  “She was always aski
ng for help,” the old woman said.

  “Well, it was nice of Mr. Jukas to do it.”

  “Your father had a hard life.” She looked straight down at him. Thanks to you, she didn’t have to add.

  “I know. I know he did.”

  Her dark eyes went to his arms.

  He nodded. “Well. I guess I better go. The thorns,” he said, and tried to smile. “They certainly did a job on me. Next time I’ll know enough to wear gloves. And long sleeves.”

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She’d seen him last, being led, pushed from his house with bloody gashes down both arms. She watched him squeeze between the bushes into his own yard.

  There had always been a constant glare in the cells from the corridor lights. He sat on the sofa, enjoying the darkness, though he still wasn’t used to sleeping in it. Or in silence. In the beginning he’d had a succession of cellmates, most older than he was. He had managed to bunk alone these last few years by taking the smallest cell. His cot had been the length of the wall, with no room to stretch his feet over the end. For that modicum of privacy he had slept for years in a cramped coil.

  A truck rumbled down the street, and he looked out the window. The sound of passing cars continued to be a strange sensation. Most of the tenement windows across the street were lit. Julia Kirbowitz had lived in the first-floor apartment. They used to walk to school together until sixth grade, when her family moved to a new house in Dearborn. The front door opened now, and a short, bearded man came onto the porch. He hurried down the steps and got into the old car parked below. As he drove off, someone rose up from the porch shadows. It was the same frizzy-haired girl. She ran to the window, looked inside, then ducked back. The door opened and another man emerged, then headed down the street, tugging his jeans over his hips as he went. The girl ran inside, wiggling as if she had to go to the bathroom. A light flashed on in the window, then quickly went off again.

  A white car came down the street. It pulled up in front of Gordon’s house. He watched from the side of the window as a stocky woman in a big purple shirt got out. Delores Dufault opened her back door and removed a large white basket. With the doorbell’s sharp ring, his hair stood on end. Go away. Please, just go away. He didn’t want her here. Didn’t want to see her. Not yet. Not tonight. No. Not ever. This wild panic was completely illogical, yet so sharp in his chest that he could barely breathe. On visiting day he’d always come down to see her, even when he didn’t want her there. But for this there were no rules, no assigned seats, no regulated time. He wasn’t prepared. What would he say? Where would he sit? What would she expect? What did she want? After a few minutes, the treads creaked under her footsteps. Her car door closed. He sighed with relief as she drove away. He sat back down on the couch, then waited a long time before he opened the door. On the threshold was a large basket of cookies, brownies, and still-warm banana-nut bread. She had written a note on the back of a checking deposit slip:

  “Welcome home, Gordon! Sorry I missed you. Call when you get a chance. Delores.”

  The telephone rang and he jumped. He groped along the coffee table for the portable phone, then pushed a button and said hello, baffled when the television came on and the phone kept ringing. He hurried into the kitchen.

  “Hello?” he shouted into the wall phone. “Hello?”

  “Gordon! You’re home? Where were you?” It was Dennis.

  “I couldn’t find the phone!”

  “Couldn’t find it? What do you mean, you couldn’t find it?”

  “It’s too dark. I couldn’t find it at first!”

  “Dark! Why’s it dark?”

  “The lights aren’t on!”

  “So turn them on, and why are you yelling like that?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered sheepishly. At Fortley he’d had to shout into the phone to be heard over the din.

  “Delores called. She said she was just there, but she didn’t think you were home.”

  “I must have been sleeping.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I told her.” Dennis sounded skeptical. “She said she brought you some things. You better get them in before somebody takes them. They’re out on the porch.”

  “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  “Oh, and Lisa says not to forget about Friday.” Dennis paused. “So are you going to call Delores?”

  “Well, not tonight.”

  “Look, just call her, will you? Thank her for coming over. Is that such a big deal?” Dennis sounded irritated.

  Gordon said he would call, but not right now. He was too tired. He wanted to go to bed.

  “So then they say, ‘Fine, Doe. Put in the extra time if you want, but we’re not. We’ve got lives to attend to.’ ”

  With every chuckle her ruddy face glowed more. Delores Dufault was an incessant talker, yet after she left, Gordon could hardly remember anything she had said. Their visits always began the same way, with his squirming irritation as she told him how glad she was to see him again and how much his friendship meant. The garish colors and wild patterns she wore made him feel dizzy. Her shirt collar glittered with jet beads. Her long, squared fingernails were purple with yellow stripes painted through them. Everything glistened—her hair, face, teeth—but with a jangly sparkle that made her seem silly and oddly sad.

  No sooner had he hung up the phone with Dennis than she was ringing the doorbell again. He was tiptoeing up the stairs when he thought of the long drive to Fortley. It was especially hard in winter along winding, mountain roads, as Dennis had told him often enough, though Delores had never complained. Once Dennis and Lisa had children, they couldn’t come as often. Before Delores’s first visit alone, he had written countless letters telling her not to come, that it was a difficult ride to an ugly, depressing place. Actually, he found any visits strained and unsettling. Small talk had never come easy, especially an hour of it with a woman he barely knew. Not wanting to hurt her feelings, he kept composing more letters, none of which he mailed. The few he ever did send were brief responses to questions asked in her letters. Silly rhetorical questions, like “What did you think of the bombing in Iraq last night?” As if his opinion mattered or made the slightest difference to anyone. And then one day, there she was in the visitors’ room, in a ruffled powder-blue dress with a bright floral scarf on her broad shoulders. He asked if she’d come from church. Oh, no, she said in her effusive honesty that always made him cringe with embarrassment for both of them. People didn’t get all dressed up for church anymore, she told him. It was a brand-new outfit she’d bought just for the visit. She’d wanted to look especially nice for him.

  Not knowing how to respond, he had said nothing. Just as he was doing now in his living room, bright with every lamp on. These lapses were easy with Delores, who could leave no silence unfilled.

  “So that way I figured I’d get the work done, then stop by here on my way home. I hope you don’t mind, Gordon. I know you’re trying to get reacclimated. Dennis said how he took you out to Corcopax. And like I told him—any time you need a ride there, or anywhere, for that matter, you should just call me. I’d love to bring you around and show you all the old places.”

  He looked away, embarrassed, as she readjusted her bra strap.

  “Even though most of the changes are all for the worst. I think, anyway. Which reminds me—I ran into Susan Karp the other day. Remember her?”

  He didn’t.

  “See!” Delores grinned, unpeeling a stick of gum. “Told you I’d quit.” Her last letter had announced that once he got out she would not smoke another cigarette. He didn’t say anything. She balled up the paper and put it on the coffee table. “Anyway, Susan and her sister were in our class. Annette, she started out a year ahead, but then she had some kind of, as they say, trouble”—she winked—“if you get my drift. Anyway, she stayed back. She was a really good basketball player.”

  “Oh.” He had no idea who she meant. He put the wrapper into his pocket. At least her voice was pleasant, warm, with a kind
of smile in it as if always on the verge of laughter.

  “Well, anyway, Susan starts telling me about Annette’s second husband, Eric. She said he works for some kind of food wholesaler. Cheeses, fancy jams, caviar, stuff like that. For, you know, delicatessens and all these trendy kinds of food shops that’re all over the place now.” She took another stick of gum from her purse. “And I’m thinking, Eric. Eric. I used to know an Eric. ‘Eric Reese?’ I said. ‘Yah,’ she said. And then we get talking about the past and everything, and she starts telling me how now that you’re out of jail, the family’s afraid you’re going to try and contact them or something. So I said, ‘Forget that! That’s the last thing Gordon wants to do.’”

  He had been staring at her. Eric Reese had been Jerry Cox’s best friend, but there had been an argument. Jerry had stalked off, then run into Gordon on his way home from work that night, that horrible night when Jerry kept telling him not to let Janine Walters see him. Because Jerry Cox had been sixteen at the time, two years younger than Gordon, he had been tried as a juvenile. His sentence for the murder had been five years in juvenile detention. A few months after his release, he hiked into the snowy woods behind his family’s house, put a gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Someone told Gordon’s father that Jerry had left a suicide note. Convinced the note would exonerate Gordon, he begged the family to let him see it. Alone at home all day, with little more to do than brood, the shy man became obsessed. He called them, wrote letters, even went to their house and begged Mrs. Cox to help him help his son. The Cox family took out a restraining order against Mr. Loomis. A reporter contacted them. Their long, front-page interview not only denied the existence of a suicide note, but reiterated Jerry’s sworn testimony that the break-in had been Gordon Loomis’s idea. Jerry had done everything humanly possible to stop him, they said, but had been powerless against gigantic Gordon’s rage that night. They blamed their son’s death on Gordon. They said poor Jerry never got over the shame and the guilt of being unable to help Mrs. Walters, who had always been so kind to him. To be again condemned and humiliated so publicly devastated Gordon’s mother. She took a leave of absence from work and for six months seldom left the house. She stopped writing to Gordon and visited him only once. Soon after came his father’s first stroke.