A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  “No,” she said. “Well, yes, but it’s for cranes, look.” And there she was, on her knees, gathering up paper cranes, holding them up to Michael like a gift, like an offering, like a fool.

  He said, “What happened to your hand?”

  “Nothing. I burned it.”

  He took her bandaged hand in his and looked at it. The adhesive tape was coming loose and there was chocolate on the white gauze. He wound the adhesive tape back around her thumb. So gently.

  “It hurts like the dickens,” she said.

  “We have to go home for Christmas,” he said. So softly.

  “Okay.”

  He hadn’t shaved, and there was blue shadow on his face.

  “We have to talk,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  His hair was longer than he liked it to be.

  “I have to go to bed.”

  “Okay.”

  She didn’t know why she kept saying that, because it wasn’t okay. He was here instead of back there with his family, and she was afraid to ask why. She wiped the stove, rinsed the cups. She ate some crackers. When she heard him get in bed, she went in there, in the dark. She undressed, and he breathed and wasn’t asleep, just breathing.

  They made love without a word, and then they lay there wrapped up together until her arm was numb under his shoulder, and she could hear his eyes blinking in the dark, and it was almost light when she heard far off sirens, a train.

  The morning was clear and fine. She got up when Michael went into the shower. She unwrapped the sticky gauze and poked at the blister that ran across her palm that hurt like the dickens when she grabbed empty blue light boxes and rolled up the wedding paper and shoved about a dozen white paper cranes into the bag with the poinsettias stenciled on it. She was dragging the sleeves of the Loretta Young robe through the butter by the time he came out into the kitchen ready for school.

  He stood behind her for a moment. He kissed her hair. There was barely a breath of space between their bodies, and that breath of space was what it was all about, and she didn’t know what to apologize for, but she said, “I’m sorry.”

  More space between them, and he said, “I want you to come with me.”

  “Now?”

  “Oh, please, Pattianne.” He took the coffee cup she had ready for him, a little too much cream, a touch of sugar, and he said, “Of course not now.” He sat down at the table and sloshed coffee on his shirtsleeve and said, “Damn it,” said it softly. He set the cup carefully on the table, and she handed him a dishtowel, and he blotted his sleeve.

  “When?”

  “When we go back,” he said. He rubbed at the coffee spot on his sleeve. “I want you to come too. I want you to talk to Deacon McMann. I’m worried. This weird behavior is freaking me out.”

  “You haven’t even talked about how your father is doing,” she said, using a knife on him, knowing it, doing it anyway. “You come home without telling me, you don’t call while you’re gone. My weird behavior? What weird behavior?”

  “Rick told me about coming over here and you and Angela were drunk, and your faces were painted and all. And last night, what was that? Joseph is about to be fired, the school may try to bring criminal charges, and you’re getting Frankie drunk? Making them paper cranes out of wedding paper?” His voice went up a notch. “They were kissing.” Another notch. “In the window.” Shouting.

  “Our faces weren’t painted.” It felt like a growl, like, You don’t get to sit across the table and shout, even if you are Michael Bryn. “The cranes are for our tree. And why would I want to talk to a deacon? I’m not the Catholic around here, remember?”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Yes,” he said. The shout gone from his voice. He was the exhausted husband who’d flown home late last night and had to be at school ten minutes ago. “I remember.”

  The fine clear day outside was so quiet it was as if they were alone in the world. Then the heat vent rattled, and she jumped, terrified, and said, “Don’t go to school today.” And she didn’t even know why she said that.

  He said, “He’s a doctor.” Looking right at her. “He’s a deacon at Christ the King. He’s a specialist. I want us to see him.”

  Her face seemed to move on its own then. It felt like a snarl. She clenched her burned palm into a fist, and both sleeves drooped into the butter. “You want me to see a specialist?”

  Then it was different. Everything was.

  “About why we can’t get pregnant,” he said. Quiet. In control. Somebody else’s husband. Maybe somebody’s father. “He’s a fertility specialist. Jim McMann. You may have even met him, maybe at my parents’ house, after the vigil.”

  A moment went by then. She saw it go by. She could have said something that was true. She sat there and stared at him, and instead she said, “You’re late.”

  “I know. We have to talk. I’ll be home right after school.”

  She said, “There’s a Christmas tree in the car.”

  Nothing was going to happen. She was not going to New Jersey to see a doctor. She was not going to have a baby.

  He said, “Okay,” and he walked out the kitchen door.

  She was not going to stay married to Michael Bryn.

  And she sat there for a long, long time.

  There were other thoughts, actual words, but they weren’t thoughts so much as Pattianne Anthony Bryn listening to how it would sound to say it, what needed to be said, and then how it would feel to be the one speaking those words. Saying, No thank you, Michael. I don’t want to be the one after all. She was sad all over sitting there. She opened her eyes, only then realizing that they had been shut. The sunlight shone into every window of their house, lighting up the blue lights around the window, a lone paper crane in the corner of the floor. The clean bare wood floor.

  The phone rang and the answering machine clicked on. Nothing.

  She would stay here, in this house, in this town that wasn’t even really a town, just a place on the edge of things, not New Jersey, in this chair, staring at this linoleum floor, in this ridiculous robe. Just not in this marriage.

  The newspaper thumped onto the porch out front.

  She got dressed. She smoothed ointment onto the blister across her palm and then wiped the ointment off with a tissue. There was the fact of the tree, the car still sat in the driveway, and she had to take a birth control pill, and she didn’t think she had to work at the bookstore until Thursday. And if she left the birth control pills out where they could be found, doors would blow open as if a small explosive had gone off in their little house. The wrong way to do it. There was no right way to do it. She didn’t know how to tell the truth. She never had known how to tell the truth.

  She stepped out into the brilliant morning, the air so cold it took away her breath, slapped at her face, made her eyes water, and she didn’t know how it could be so cold and yet so bright. She yanked the Mithras tree from its bungee cords one-handed, its green Christmas scent so pretty, and she dragged it to the door and leaned it there. Then she got in the car. She didn’t have any idea what to do next until she thought of the key, and went back inside and got it, got her purse, got her coat. Picked up the lonely crane on the floor. Shut the front door of the house.

  Just get through Christmas. Just get through until Mr. Bryn is home again, or back at work. She tried to imagine telling Mr. Bryn she wasn’t going to stay married to his son, and thought she couldn’t do that, not ever, not possibly, and instead she imagined him, back at work, organizing protests at abortion clinics. Just get through until Mr. Bryn is better.

  Her mother would say, “Oh, Pattianne.”

  Jen would say, “Don’t be a feeb.”

  She wouldn’t even tell her father, she’d let her mother tell him. Or maybe she would, and he would say, “That’s my girl.” But probably not.

  The roads west of St. Cloud were shiny black ribbons with the sun behind her, mist collecting in the dips and the sun laying down shine and no warmth. It
felt good to go fast. She slowed down past a grade school and then went fast again. She hated grade schools. It made her sick to remember being trapped in there on mornings like this, any morning. The whole trapped feeling of being a kid chased after her in the car, through fields sitting black and waiting, and past neat rows of houses with people like her parents sitting in breakfast nooks and dogs chained up in backyards. Small towns seemed about to begin and then just trickled down to subdivisions that jutted out into some field and, beyond the field, bare black trees, or the surprise of a stand of conifers on a bit of a rise, catching the sun and shining green. A crossroad every mile, with a gas station, a grocery store, and always something else, a nail salon or a day care center or an auto-body place or a dentist’s office.

  There were churches here and there, short stubby bell towers seemed to be the preference around here, churches without much presence, not like the tall, revolving A&W sign, or the red roof of Pizza Hut, or the big red K. The buildings and houses disappeared. She downshifted into misty dips and up over tickle-belly rises, and when she hit those rises the sun behind her might catch the beige plastic Virgin of the Dashboard, the road going straight one mile and then straight another mile. Or if you wanted, you could go left to Mizpah or right to St. Wendel, or another straight mile, then Kerkhoven to the south, and another mile and another mile, until there have been a couple intersections with no signs, only the gas station, the grocery store with the neon Espresso sign, and maybe a cluster of leftover election signs. The red, white, and blue one was the Republican candidate’s sign. Michael had a button in his desk drawer—Pattianne not paying attention, just looking for stamps or maybe the scissors—a red, white, and blue button that said Abortion Stops a Heartbeat. And there was that line, like on a heart monitor, like Mr. Bryn. Not a flat line, but living, beating. What hearts did instead of being in love, or maybe breaking, or maybe turning cold.

  The black ice was invisible, and inevitable, and driving west turned into a slow-motion stop jammed up sideways against a cement culvert abutment with the morning sun shining down now, onto the Virgin of the Dashboard. The windshield cracked slowly, all the way across, one long crack, and the rising sun caught there and made a prism. The car stalled and stopped. She rolled down the window. Stalled.

  She laid her forehead on the steering wheel and wished she could cry, but she didn’t even feel like crying. It had been so easy to decide to marry him, and now deciding to unmarry him was going to be hard and sticky and messy. Even thinking about it made her sick. She didn’t understand why it had seemed so easy to decide to marry him. She wanted to call Jen. She wanted to go back and read old horoscopes for back then. She looked up.

  A thick cloud of black smoke was rising into the ungodly blue eastern sky. Something worse than spinning out on black ice. It was the only thing in the sky, in the world, in the universe. Bad news, somebody fucking up, a big mess, rising round and boiling out of itself, the sky so blue, the cloud so black, the Virgin of the Dashboard so gently beige. Then there was a twinkle of red and silver in the sky, and another twinkle, white. Two tiny helicopters were up there.

  The car was going nowhere. It was jammed up right, front-end tight, against the cement culvert abutment, and the engine started just fine, but then the whole car just laughed at her.

  She could wait for someone to drive by and notice an orange Volkswagen that hadn’t ended up in the creek. She could watch the bad black smoke drift over good beautiful farmland dotted with simple modest steeples. Throw the Virgin of the Dashboard out the window. Then go get her. Smell the burning stink in the fine morning air.

  A county sheriff car came up from behind, brown car, yellow stripe, lights flashing. The siren let out a yelp and it screamed on by.

  There were chickadees down in the creek bed, and something red flitted in the weedy saplings across the road. The frozen creek was still, with banks of snow along the creek sides that were blue-white in the shadows, with words in the icy cracks of the banks’ undersides where it had begun to melt, maybe in the afternoon sun yesterday, or some other day, melted and then frozen again. Words in the wisping black cloud, too, and the long line across the windshield was a blank space where a dash had replaced an expletive above the Virgin’s spot. It just took the inevitable to read it all. The sky was clear, the wind moving the black smoke to the east. The west was clear. It took the inevitable to understand signs where there were none. It took the inevitable to do the wrong thing for the right reason.

  Just wait. Another car would come, one with a cell phone. Call AAA. Ask them for a tow. Anywhere.

  In the end, it was easy. The sheriff’s car came back, and the apple-cheeked young sheriff asked if she was all right. He radioed AAA for her. They came and got her out. She drove home. Michael came home and she said, “I slid onto a cement thing. Dented the car a little bit.” He said something back. They were both saying something, both not saying too much.

  10: RED WINE ON BEIGE CARPET

  She recognized the picture. The road worker. Emerson Paul. The news story on page one went from the headline all the way down the page. There was a picture of him, standing next to his wife, Annabelle, who was in a wheelchair. The three news stations all started out their broadcasts with the fire at the clinic that did abortions and had been the target of protests and threats and, once, a concrete block smashed through the door. The TV ran footage of the fire, and footage of the wreckage after the fire, and more pictures of Emerson “Bud” Paul, who’d died of smoke inhalation at St. Cloud Mercy, and footage of his wife, Annabelle, who’d had a stroke at the birth of their second child twenty years before, and their daughter, Mission, who was a security guard at the clinic. Graveyard shift.

  It was sunny, and five degrees.

  “Michael, will you go to the funeral with me?”

  Michael said, “Why are you going to this man’s funeral?”

  But she couldn’t say, and he would have to miss school, and he didn’t want to, didn’t seem to want her to go.

  She wrapped Aunt Shirley’s soft crocheted scarf around her neck. It was purple and royal blue. It matched the lining of her coat. She would leave it in the car.

  She prayed that it wouldn’t be open casket.

  Mizpahven Funeral Home, Family-Owned Since 1896. She sat in the car and thought of a hundred years, and wondered how that name was pronounced, and watched people moving slowly through the sunshine. The Virgin on the dashboard watched her until she took it in her hand and just held it. It was cold, and when she realized that the Virgin had grown warm, and that its sharp, plastic edges were digging into her burned palm, she put it in the glove box. There seemed to be a lot of people heading into the wide front doors. Kids. Two Asian men with long orange robes and shaved heads. A man with bagpipes and a kilt and cold knees, surely cold knees. Three people in white face paint with tall black hats and black-and-white striped shirts.

  She looked at her face in the mirror. “Don’t cry,” she whispered.

  She checked her purse for a tissue, found the white paper crane with a wrinkled wing. And one tissue. She waited in the car until it seemed like no more people were going in. And then she waited some more. And then she went in.

  Soft organ music played. It was that song from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  She had never been to a funeral before that wasn’t in a Catholic church, except one, and that was in an Episcopal Church.

  Rows of white wooden folding chairs were full of people, and a room off the side was full of folding chairs and people too, and she slipped into a chair in the last row by a gray-haired woman who held a big, blue, polka-dotted canvas purse in her lap. The three mimes standing in a still row off to one corner in the back. Way up at the front there was a map of the United States on an easel and a box on a small table. It was small, smaller than a shoebox, and square, and she was afraid to look at it. There was also a row of blue Christmas-tree balls. In front of the box was a row of tiny blue glass vials, too small to count from here, and they g
littered their blue in the light of tall white candles in the tall candle holders that were lined up all along the back of that space that would have been an altar except this wasn’t a church.

  Off to the side was a gathering of men in shirts and ties, each man standing as if at attention, each holding an orange hard hat in front of him, and that made sense, and the floor beneath her shifted.

  She stared at the small box on the table.

  There was a shuffle and a thumping, and the men with their orange hard hats went in a line up the aisle. When they got up to the front, they kind of jammed up a little bit, big men, small space, and a young guy with a long, black, braided ponytail stepped forward to the pulpit, which was probably called a podium here. He had big square shoulders that looked too big for his white shirt.

  He said, “I sat at the tavern writing a poem, about Bud and sandhill cranes and roads.”

  He set his hard hat on the podium.

  “He was always talking about Crane being Echo Maker, because of its sound.” And the hard hat started to slide down the slanted surface of the podium. He stopped it.

  “And how Bud might start a story first at lunch, and after the whistle blew at five, he’d start right up with it again, something like, So, if the door opened to the left instead of right, the first thing she’d see would be the catalpa tree.”

  The hard hat slid again, and he laid his hand on it again.

  “He drove the pilot car after running the paver for years, did it diligent, like it was hard, was careful, kept count of cars and stories going from one road to the next. How Crane took Rabbit to the moon, Eagle couldn’t fly that high, couldn’t or wouldn’t, and Crane was rewarded with that beautiful crown. Hard to come by, those red feathers.”

  He held his hand up. There was a small red feather in his fingertips.

  “Bud ate half an apple every day after lunch, so the seeds would have half a chance. He said half an apple got the peanut butter out of his teeth, and he’d wing the rest off into the trees because of the look of a wild apple in spring, a few reachy branches of white flowers in the messy woods, and in fall, the thick way apples would hang to the branch. And catalpa trees, even winter bare, with those seed pods.”