There were other, simpler ones. Passed through the canal today, she’d written on a picture of Al Isma‘iliyah, at the southern end of the Suez. Hope you’re well. Love, Mom.
Dear Aaron,
This is the city of Al Aq‘abah. It’s in Jordan, it’s a port, and you’ll never know what either of those mean. Love, Mom.
Dear Aaron,
Your father’s on the couch reading his naval war books. He’s wearing socks and sandals and every so often he tilts his rear to the side and farts quietly like he thinks I won’t notice. I’m sure he misses you. Love, Mom.
Dear Aaron,
Blah. Blah blah blah de blahdedy blah blah blah. Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Blahblahblahblah. Love, Mom.
Dear Aaron,
Your brain is atrophic. You have a total lack of sulci and gyri in the coronal and transverse sections of your brain. The corpus callosum is absent. Your condition is the result of a de novo chromosomal aberration. You want to hear some more words you don’t know? How about these: fish, dog, sky, ice cream, sun, moon, mom, dad, child. Your dad and I were karyotyped and we were fine—no monosomy of the terminal segment of the short arm of the seventeenth chromosome, especially band 17p13. So no one knows what the hell happened to you. Love, Mom.
Dear Aaron,
Sometimes I think about giving you too much of the Depakote. I wonder how many you’d swallow. You’ve gotten good at it, swallowing. I think about these things and I’m four thousand miles away and I’m still thinking about them. I love you desperately.
Wil put them all back in order, the corners squared and the rubber band tight. He waited for his wife to wake and when she did he gave her two snack-size bags of potato chips and told her they had more. They didn’t, but he’d appointed himself head of rations, and she didn’t have to know. He dug through their bags and found a squashed granola bar, a bag of something called Meganuts from a market stall in Cairo, a spare box of TicTacs in Lucinda’s toiletry bag, a long rope of beef jerky in his carry-on from the plane. He piled the new food into the gift basket and held the jerky up like a trophy. “A whole new food group,” he announced.
“I’m staying in bed today. I’m conserving energy. A body at rest requires minimal calories.”
“Suit yourself. I’m thinking about swinging out over the edge of the balcony and planning a resistance movement with the neighbors.”
“Good luck. The Robertsons are what? Eighty-something at least and the Schullers are three thousand and six.”
Lucinda, as she said she would, napped most of the afternoon, and after sunset could manage only a confused doze, slipping in and out of dreams. She woke up at one in the morning certain that she was going to die. She would perish 120 kilometers off the Cape of Guardafui in the Arabian Sea, and her body would never make it home. She swung her feet off the side of the bed and felt in the instant they touched the floor that it had to be true.
“We’re going to die,” she whispered to her husband.
Wil exhaled, a burbling sigh that squeezed through the congestion in his nose. He turned away and did not wake up. His head tipped backward of its own accord, lengthening and baring his throat. The Adam’s apple was tight and round, pushing against the skin. He hadn’t shaved since the hijacking, and his throat bristled blond and white along and below his jawline, patches of rough scattering almost down to his collar. She had only ever known him meticulously clean-shaven. Lucinda looked down at her husband, asleep in the bed that was bolted solidly to the wall and floor. She wanted to ask him who he was. I’ve realized you’re a mystery, she wanted to say. I’ve lived ten years surrounded by strangers. My funny husband and my unknowable son.
Then she thought, the postcards. The postcards for Aaron. They were still sitting in a stack, neatly addressed to their house in Overland Park. If she and Wil had made it home, she thought, they probably would have beaten the postcards. They would have picked Aaron up from the Sunflower Home in Olathe and strapped him into the van and said, don’t worry, your presents are on the way. Postcards and magnets and a rubber model of the Sphinx and a plush camel and a plastic cruise ship. Baby toys, she would apologize. I know you’re ten but I don’t know what else to get for you. I don’t know what you want.
She picked up the cards on the vanity, separated out the ones to her son, and walked to the balcony. She ripped the postcards in half, one by one, and scattered them; they fluttered and fell, caught by the railings and walls of balconies below, by updrafts and breezes. They flew and sank and one by one they disappeared. She was going to die, after all, and did not want anyone to see these postcards, to read them or touch them or feel they knew then something about her, about the boy she meant to send them to.
If there was to be at some point a separation of sheep and lambs, wheat and chaff, the passengers who would be spared and those who would be executed, she thought she and Wil should volunteer themselves. They were qualified hostages, years of experience. They wouldn’t protest. They could be shuttled and shuffled and they would do it with, if not love, a numb contentment. In the language of her homecare support group, the cruise had had a special name, “respite care,” not for Aaron but for her, a term created to make the caregivers feel less guilty, to remind them that their own sanity was of importance. Sitting in another room and reading a magazine while someone else listened to your child scream was respite care. Going to a matinee while someone else suctioned out his aspirated saliva was respite care. Her support group had been jealous only of the money that allowed such an extravagant trip; they did not question the necessity of departure. Respite care, they knew, made you infinitely less likely to smother your own child, to hit them, hurt them, hasten them out of this world. Only Lucinda had looked askance at the idea, its implication of necessity, its acknowledgment of her darker desires.
Late the next afternoon, the fourth, the phone rang. Wil answered it, tried to steel himself for a piratical summons, for a foreign accent that would command his presence at a great slaughter of the rich and elderly. But it was only Kristina. “Arrangements have been made,” she said. “An agreement struck.” She came down hard, ringingly, on the “struck,” proud to know the word, to deliver such fine news to her huddled charges. “We are headed for the Seychelles, not Mombasa. A little farther east, perhaps thirteen hours. You will be able to disembark by tomorrow morning.”
“What happened? What’s the agreement?”
“I am afraid I can’t give any details, Mr. Voorhuis, and I have many more calls to make.”
“So it’s over, just like that?”
“More or less. We hope you understand that Gilded Hemisphere Lines is very grateful for your patience with the situation.”
Wil found Lucinda hunched over on the end of a balcony lounge chair where she’d spent most of the day, her hands wrapped under her elbows. He fit himself in behind her, his legs on either side, his chest pressed against her spine. “We’re headed for the Seychelles,” he said. “We’ll be off the boat by tomorrow morning.”
“Who called?”
“Kristina. We’re all going to be fine, Lucy.” She said nothing, and he wrapped his arms around her chest. She didn’t turn to look at him.
“We’ll be home day after tomorrow,” Wil said. “I’ll bet you anything. The cruiseline will be desperate to get us all back to our own countries before we can talk to the press. We’ll be in the Seychelles tomorrow morning, then a flight to London. A transfer to Newark, or a direct to St. Louis. A hop, skip and a jump to Kansas City.” Her silence pushed him on. “We’ll pick up the car at long-term parking, go get the kids. All eight of them. God, it’s amazing, the triplets—I have to say, I was none too excited about miming when they started it up, those glass boxes and invisible ropes, but by all accounts they’ve got real talent. Even in those little berets, striped shirts like a chain gang. And our youngest—”
“Stop, Wil. Please, stop.”
“You don’t want to, anymore?”
“It’s not fun anymore. It’s no
t funny.”
“Okay, whatever you want. No more kids.”
That still seemed the wrong thing to say, and Wil eased out of the chair to bring them a feast of leftover food, gummy worms, pretzels, two green apples and a bag of chalky dinner mints. Night came on, but the electricity hummed back to life, and in ones and twos and twelves the dark water was lit with rectangles of yellow light, a grid of windows and doors in the sea, the outlines of 316 people living safely in the side of a leviathan. “We’ll all be home in a couple of days,” Wil said. “All of us.”
“All of us,” Lucinda said. “Home.”
“Home.”
“Yes. We’ll be home.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These stories, sometimes in slightly different form, first appeared in the following publications:
The Southern Review: “Zolaria”
Blackbird: “It Looks Like This”
Passages North: “Zero Conditional”
Tin House: “Going to Estonia”
Epoch: “World Champion Cow of the Insane”
Prairie Schooner and The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses: “Steal Small”
The Cincinnati Review: “Embodied”
The Paris Review: “At the Zoo”
West Branch: “The Lion Gate”
Third Coast and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009: “This Is Not Your City”
The Gettysburg Review: “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui”
More people than I could possibly list have contributed to this book, in ways large and small. I’ve stolen punch lines, couches, fish tanks, translations, and more. Thanks to all those who have fed me with your friendship, your conversation, your wisdom, your humor. I hope you know who you are.
I’m especially thankful to everyone who read these stories and not only helped make them better, but made me a better writer:
To my teachers, including Ron Carlson, Melissa Pritchard, T.M. McNally, Erin McGraw, Kim McMullen, and Judith DeWoskin.
To the whole Arizona State University MFA crowd, but especially Beth Staples, Katie Cortese, Liz Weld, Marian Crotty, Elizabyth Hiscox, Douglas Jones, Matthew Frank.
To other writerly friends: Ander Monson, Austin Bunn, Sarah Stella.
To all the editors who published (and improved) my work in their literary magazines and anthologies, particularly Brock Clarke.
Effusive thanks to Sarah Gorham and everybody at Sarabande, who not only do amazing work, but came riding up as knights in shining armor for this particular book. Thank you to Judy Heiblum, trusted advisor and advocate, and to Pamela Holway, for patience and good counsel.
For their financial support, a deep thank you to Grand Valley State University, Arizona State University, The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, Theresa A. Wilhoit, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and The Paris Review.
Lastly, I’m grateful to my parents and my sister Mary, who have been there from the beginning with love, support, and good books to read. And to Todd Kaneko: great writer, great editor, and Master of the Atomic Heart Punch.
CAITLIN HORROCKS lives in Michigan, by way of Ohio, Arizona, England, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Her stories have appeared in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Best American Short Stories 2011, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Southern Review. Recently, she won the $10,000 Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. She teaches at Grand Valley State University.
© 2011 by Caitlin Horrocks
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:
Managing Editor
Sarabande Books, Inc.
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-1-936-74725-2
I. Title.
PS3608.O7687T48 2011
813’.6—dc22
2010050304
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This Is Not Your City Page 18
