Aftermirth

by Hillary Jordan

  “That’s Izzy,” I said.

  I popped the trunk and went to get her luggage, which consisted of a backpack that weighed next to nothing. The sight of our two small bags sitting in the cavernous space of the otherwise-empty trunk put a hollow ache in my gut. Jess would have brought a couple of anvil-filled suitcases, a computer bag, a cooler crammed with food and a purse the size of a beer tub and considered it traveling light. What the hell was I doing, going on a road trip with this backpack-toting woman I hardly knew?

  “Look, Elena—” I said, but before I could tell her I’d changed my mind, I saw her reach out with her thumb and wipe the gritters out of Izzy’s eyes, and then just as casually wipe her hand on her jeans.

  She turned and looked at me, brows raised. “Yes?”

  I sighed. “We should get going. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

  IT WAS UNSETTLING at first, having a copilot after more than two years of flying solo. Elena was a smaller, quieter presence in the car than Jess had been, and her perfume was stronger and flowerier. I kept my eyes on the road, hyperaware of her beside me, but she seemed totally at ease, and after half an hour or so I started to unclench a little. She asked me about my family and I sketched the basics: second son of two Yuppie doctors, one an orthopedic surgeon and the other an English professor at NYU; Upper East Side, upper middle class, mediocre test scores and grades unbefitting a Larssen; cut-up and chronic underachiever until my early twenties, when I’d discovered comedy.

  “So did you go to college?” Elena asked.

  “Of course. I majored in beer and girls, but I managed to graduate.”

  “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Just the way you said that. So . . . offhandedly.”

  Good job, Michael, I chided myself. Elena’s father had been a factory worker. College wouldn’t have been an “of course” for her, and she wouldn’t have diddled her way through it like I had. “I must sound like an entitled jerk,” I said.

  “Not at all,” she replied, fairly convincingly. “That’s just how you grew up, in a world where college was no big deal.”

  “Were you the first in your family to go?”

  “Yes. I had a full scholarship to Wellesley.”

  “Wow. Your parents must have been incredibly proud of you.”

  Elena didn’t answer, and I glanced over at her. She was biting her lip, fighting tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like the world’s biggest ass. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”

  She shook her head. “It’s all right. I want to talk about him. If you don’t mind listening.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  And so she told me about her father, Julio Santiago, Santa to his friends. He’d grown up dirt poor in a small village in Puebla, where he’d met and married Elena’s mother. He’d emigrated illegally to the States in 1981, leaving his pregnant wife in Mexico, and worked whatever jobs he could get—busboy, farmhand, janitor—sending money home to support his wife and daughter. Elena hadn’t even met her father until she was six years old, when he became a citizen under the Reagan amnesty and was finally able to send for them.

  “He sounds like an amazing guy,” I said.

  “He was. He’d have given you the shirt off his back if you needed it. That’s one of the reasons everyone called him Santa, because he was so generous. That, and because he was always laughing. He was a small man, but he had this big, booming laugh. You couldn’t hear it and not laugh with him.”

  I thought of Jess and was silent.

  “I never understood that,” Elena went on. “His joy, I mean. He worked so hard for so long and had so little to show for it.”

  “He had you.”

  “Yeah, his malcontent of a daughter, who wanted things he couldn’t give me and a life that made no sense to him. How could I be happy without a husband, a family? He didn’t understand it, because he wouldn’t have been. My mother and I were the center of his universe.”

  “So . . . do you not want to get married and have kids?”

  “Sure I do, but I’m not even thirty. I’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Yeah, I thought that too, once,” I said, around the balled-up sock lodged in my throat.

  Elena touched my shoulder. “Hey—” she began, but I cut her off.

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay, then we won’t talk about it.”

  She retrieved her hand and sat back, but if she was stung I couldn’t sense it. The silence between us was surprisingly comfortable, and after a while I realized I was no longer brooding about Jess but thinking about Elena and how easy it was to be with her and what it might be like to kiss her, which set me to brooding again. She left me to it. She was so quiet and still that I thought she must be asleep, but when I stole a glance at her she was staring pensively out the windshield.

  “Penny,” I said.

  “What if she refuses to talk to us? What if she’s offended we came?”

  We’d debated and ultimately decided against calling Roberta Harbuck to let her know we were coming, figuring the risk of rejection would be less in person. We might be loco for doing this, but we didn’t look unhinged. We looked, it occurred to me, like a nice young couple.

  Shying from the thought, I said, “Then we apologize profusely and get the hell out of there.”

  Dusk was falling when we reached our destination, a two-story clapboard house in a middle-class neighborhood. It was a warm September evening, and people were out throwing balls with their kids, weeding their flower beds and sipping beers on their front porches. We walked and fed Izzy then put him back in the car with the windows partway down. He whined when I closed the door, and Elena reached inside and patted him on the head.

  “Sorry, Izcito. We won’t be long.”

  “He’s always like that,” I said. “He hates being left.”

  She gave me a bemused look. “Who doesn’t?”

  A Big Wheel missing its main attraction lay abandoned in the overgrown grass to one side of the walk. So, I thought, it wasn’t just Roberta Harbuck who’d lost her husband; a child or children were now fatherless. The house needed a fresh coat of paint, and one of the front steps was nearly rotted through. I felt a pang of sadness at these signs of masculine neglect.

  The door was open, and the sound of a television gunfight wafted onto the porch, which was littered with toys and debris. A recycling bin sat by the doorway, overflowing with Dr Pepper cans. Buried among them were several empty half-gallon bottles of Jim Beam. The sight of them made me want to turn around and head back to the car. I had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to go well.

  But Elena was already knocking on the screen door and, when there was no answer, calling, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  A teenaged girl appeared. She was fourteen or so, skinny and barefoot, with long hair that needed washing. She wore cutoffs and a Lady Gaga T-shirt that was a size too small. She squinted at us warily through the screen.

  “What do you want?” she said. Her accent made the “want” sound like “won’t.”

  Elena smiled at her. “Is your mother here?”

  “Who is it, Brie?” A little boy who couldn’t have been more than six or seven appeared in the door frame, sucking his thumb and trailing a ratty blanket. A vivid red smear ran across his chin. I hoped it was food and not blood.

  “Nobody we know.” The girl licked her thumb then knelt and wiped the red off him. I was reminded of Elena cleaning Izzy’s eyes. “Go on now and finish your s’ghetti before it gets cold.” She gave him a gentle push in the direction of the gunfight.

  “Sorry if we interrupted your supper,” Elena said.

  The girl, Brie, stood and regarded us with magnificent disdain. “I’ve told you people before, we’re Baptists. We’re not interested in becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses, so you can just hightail it on back to your Kingdom Hall.”

  I barely managed to turn my snort of laughter into a coughing fit. Were we that earnest
-looking? Elena shot me a stern glance, and I got myself under control.

  “That’s not why we’re here,” she said to the girl.

  Brie’s eyes narrowed. “You selling something then? ’Cause whatever it is, we’re not buying.”

  “No, nothing like that,” Elena said. “We just want to have a word with your mother.”

  The kindness and compassion in her voice would have thawed a wooly mammoth, but Brie was unmoved. “What about?”

  Elena hesitated, then said, “About something personal. Something important.”

  The girl’s face slammed shut. “Is this to do with my daddy?”

  Elena nodded.

  “Mama’s sleeping,” Brie said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Elena and I exchanged a look: at seven o’clock in the evening?

  “Brianna? Is someone there?” a woman called from upstairs.

  “No, Mama, it’s just the TV,” the girl answered, shooting us a glare that said, Don’t you dare say a word.

  “Well turn it down, honey, Mama’s got a headache.” Her voice was querulous and slurred. “And fetch me another glass of ice, will you?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Brie answered, with a forced brightness that was at odds with the despair inhabiting her young-old eyes. I wondered which was worse for her: being at home and taking care of her drunk, abdicated mother, or being at school and trying to act indifferent to the heartless snickering of the other kids.

  “I gotta go now.” Brie stepped back and started to close the door.

  “Hey,” I said. “Both of us lost someone too.”

  The girl went still.

  “And the way we lost them was kind of like how you lost your father. Not literally the same, but just as . . .” I trailed off, struggling to put it into words.

  “Just as random, and just as hard for us to accept and make sense of,” Elena said.

  Brie considered us for a long moment before answering. “Then I’m sorry for you,” she said quietly. “And you’ll understand why I’m asking you to leave now. My mama doesn’t need reminding. None of us do.” She gave us a little dip of her head and shut the door in our faces.

  But when we were halfway down the walk, we heard the door open and Brie call out in a loud whisper, “Hey, wait!” She ran over to us. “There was another lady came here about a month ago, wanting to talk to Mama about how she’d lost her brother. She left this. You can have it.” Brie thrust a business card into my hand.

  It read: CATHERINE FISHER, PH.D., PSYCHOLOGIST, and gave an address in Austin, Texas.

  “And did she speak with your mother?” Elena asked.

  “No. Mama wasn’t home, and I never told her.”

  “Did the lady say how her brother died?” I asked.

  Brie nodded. “He was butted to death by his pet goat.”

  “HAVE YOU EVER noticed how congealed egg yolk looks like ichor from some hideous, scabrous alien?” I said.

  It was two o’clock the next afternoon, and Elena and I were at a diner down the street from our hotel. My efforts to medicate my hangover with coffee and fried food were being hampered by our waitress, who’d been fawning over a biker type a few booths over for the last half hour, refilling his coffee, bringing him ice water and extra napkins, giving him an eyeful of cleavage when she bent over to clear his plate. He wasn’t sitting there staring at the repulsive remains of his lunch.

  “Eye core?” Elena said, sounding it out. “What’s that?”

  “It’s what scabrous aliens have instead of blood,” I said. “It’s like mucus, only slimier and yellower.”

  “And what’s scabrous?”

  “What it sounds like: covered in oozing scabs.” Elena made a face and set down the piece of toast that had been halfway to her mouth. “And if our waitress doesn’t come take this plate away soon,” I said, raising my voice and boring holes in the girl’s back with my bloodshot eyes, “I’m going to pretend it’s a frisbee and throw it at her.”

  “Are you always this impatient?” Elena asked.

  “Only when I’m this hung over.” I pushed the plate farther away, feeling my stomach roil at the sight of all that yellow goo. The waitress giggled at one of Harley dude’s witticisms and flashed her tongue stud at him. “Excuse me, miss?” I called. “Could we get some service, please?”

  “Men are such babies.” Elena picked up my plate, marched it over to the counter, then slid back into her seat across from me.

  “You will be too when you’re dying,” I said plaintively. “And how come you’re not, anyway?”

  Elena hardly seemed to feel the effects of our carouse the night before. We’d driven from the Harbucks’ to the first hotel we’d seen, confirmed they allowed dogs and had a bar, checked in, deposited Izzy and our stuff in our rooms and proceeded to plunge together into the river Cuervo—lady’s choice. It was the only sensible response to what we’d just seen and heard. After the fourth shot, Brie’s face and the whiskey-clotted voice of her mother started to recede to a comfortable distance, and after the sixth I stopped counting. When the bartender cut us off we staggered back to our respective rooms. I had a vague memory of standing in the hallway trying to kiss Elena’s mouth and managing instead to plant one on her naked eyeball, at which point she’d keyed open my door and pushed me inside.

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to do tequila shots with a Mexican?” she said now.

  “Obviously not.”

  She sipped her coffee, considering me over the rim of the cup. “Do you still have the card Brie gave us?”

  “I think so.” Reluctantly, I took it from my wallet and passed it to her. We hadn’t talked about next steps, but I for one had every intention of returning to New York. No way was I driving halfway across the country on another fool’s errand.

  There was a sizzle from the grill, followed by a waft of something so noxious I felt my breakfast surge up into the back of my throat. “Jesus,” I said, forcing it back down, “what is that smell?”

  Elena sniffed the air appreciatively. “Mmm, liver and onions. It’s one of my mom’s specialties.”

  “Smells like week-old roadkill with a side of unwashed jockstrap to me,” I replied, and took a breath—two fatal errors. My stomach rebelled, pushed over the edge by the combination of the smell and my own vivid imagery. I lurched to my feet and sprinted for the bathroom.

  When I returned ten minutes later, minus my lunch but feeling marginally better, Elena was on her cell phone, nodding and scribbling something on the back of the card.

  “Who are you talking to?” I asked, sliding into the booth.

  Shh, she mouthed, putting her forefinger to her lips.

  “Elena, please tell me you’re not on the phone with that woman.” She frowned at me and pressed her palm over her other ear.

  “Sí, sí,” she said, followed by an excited burble of Spanish. It should have reassured me; she could have been talking to her mother. But it didn’t, because I knew she wasn’t. “Muchas gracias. Hasta mañana, Catarina.” That much I understood: “See you tomorrow, Catherine.”

  “I’m not driving to Texas to meet some crazy grief stalker,” I said, the instant she hung up.

  “She’s not crazy.”

  “Of course she is, she’s a shrink. They’re all mental. That’s why they study psychology in the first place, to understand their own neuroses.”

  “Well if she’s mental, then so are we.”

  There wasn’t a damn thing I could say to that. It struck me then, that I had been on the verge of certifiable ever since Jess died. And that I was ready to be sane again.

  “Anyway, we won’t have to go to Texas,” Elena said. “Catherine’s flying to Charleston tomorrow. She found another one of us, a man who lost his partner, and they’re going to meet.”

  “I’m not going to South Carolina, either.”

  “She sounds really kind, Michael, and wise and . . . I don’t know, just . . . lovely. I mean, how incredible is it that we’d happen to call her
the day before she was going to meet this man, and that he’d end up living just five hours away from where we are right now?” And that she’d just happen to be kind and wise and lovely and speak fucking fluent Spanish. “It’s like it was meant to be,” Elena said.

  “Or not.”

  Ignoring me, Elena turned and raised her forefinger in the air. The waitress materialized instantly at our table.

  “What can I git y’all?”

  “The check please, and two coffees for the road,” Elena said, and then looked at me.

  “Woo, woo! The express train to New York will be departing in ten minutes. Any passengers who wish to go elsewhere will need to make other arrangements.”

  Yup, that’s what I meant to say, and that’s probably what you think you would have said if you’d been sitting in that booth instead of me. And then when Elena informed you she was going to Charleston with or without you, you think you would have told her she was on her own and left her there and gotten in your car and pointed it north, but you and I both know that’s a load of crap. No, you’d have done exactly what I did: heave a resigned sigh, turn to the waitress and say, “Milk and sugar for me, please. And a side of bacon for my dog.”

  “WHERE ARE WE?” I asked Elena groggily.

  “About seventy miles from Charleston. You’ve been asleep for a couple of hours.”

  From the shooting pain on the right side of my neck I hadn’t budged the entire time. And my mouth was dry—a bad sign. “Did I snore?”

  “No comment.”

  Wonderful. “Did I drool?”

  “Not that I noticed,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road.

  I looked down and saw a damp spot the size of a tennis ball on the right side of my shirt, just below my shoulder. “Well,” I muttered, “thanks for letting me sleep.”

  A contented groan sounded from the backseat, and I belatedly remembered Izzy. He was curled up in a ball, fast asleep. “He’s been out the whole time,” Elena said.