by Laura Ruby
Roza
THE DEAD
WITHOUT PLANNING IT, ROZA SETTLED INTO A ROUTINE, awaking each morning in her simple bedroom, greeting the iron-haired lady in the kitchen, eating the nutty toast hot from the oven, walking through town toward the hills, splashing through the streams, decorating Rus with flowers until he looked ridiculous. In the afternoons, the man would visit, and he would bring a lamb, and she would hold it, and kiss its soft woolly head, and smell the wool on her hands the rest of the day, the smell like a promise. He did not touch her, did not approach her. And the question he asked her when she was holding the lamb was not the same question. Now he asked her other things: her favorite food (jam-filled cookies), her favorite color (brown), her favorite game as a child (hide-and-seek). He even asked her if she wanted to play it, and she snorted despite herself, imagining this tall, strange man with ice-chip eyes crouching in the boxwoods.
So she asked him a question: Could she have a garden? The next morning, she awoke, ate her toast, walked into the field, and found a patchwork of the greenest, healthiest vegetable plants she had ever seen, beds of flowers so carefully arranged they could have been in the courtyard of an English manor. The sight of these things disappointed her so greatly that even the lamb couldn’t cheer her, so the man asked her what was wrong.
“I wanted to grow the plants myself,” she said.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, and nodded, and the next day, the vegetables and the flowers were gone, and in their place was a bare expanse of rich dark earth, sacks of seeds and tiny pots of seedlings, a shovel and spade, a watering can.
Roza had her garden. And if the earth smelled a little too rich, and the plants grew a little too easily and looked a little too vibrant, the worms in the soil too fat and happy, the praying mantises too pious and too plentiful, she told herself that she was surely dying in a hospital somewhere, and that the garden was a gift from her own wasting mind, a last vision of happiness, and there was nothing to fear anymore, as this was her last adventure.
But she could not help—as she dug in the dirt, and sang to the worms, and prayed with the mantises—comparing this garden, this field, with her other gardens, with Sean’s garden. For a farm boy, he was not a very good gardener. But he did everything that she told him to do and seemed just as happy as she when the tomatoes finally turned fat and red. Sean helped her hill the potato plants so that they didn’t get sunburned and helped her dig up the tubers once the vines died. When the fall came, and the garden didn’t need them so much anymore, she taught him how to make pierogi, to fill the purses of dough with potato and onion and pinch them closed.
“Must be tight or will leak in pan,” she said, demonstrating. “Now you.”
“Like this?” he said. But he was not looking at the purse of dough in his own hands, he was staring at her hands. Of all the things to stare at. Her hands were rough skinned, broken nailed, small but strong. Her hands had rolled dough and chopped potatoes and milked cows and prepared slides and made things grow. She’d even sewn stitches in his finger when he’d cut himself with a kitchen knife.
She liked that he stared at them. She liked him for staring.
She tucked a stray curl behind an ear, and his eyes followed the motion.
Soon, she was sneaking glances, too. At the pink scar on his finger. The curls on the nape of his neck. The furrow between his brows. The veins in his forearms. And the more she looked, the more she wanted to see. On a warm day in the late fall, they were adding compost to the garden to prepare it for the next spring, and he stopped to rest. He used the bottom of his T-shirt to mop the sweat from his face. The pale exposed flesh of his belly froze her. He dropped the edge of the shirt and there she was—gaping, humiliated—but unable to tear her eyes away in case he decided to do it again.
The next time he rushed into the kitchen, late for work, fumbling with the buttons on his uniform shirt, and found her leaning against the sink, coffee cup hovering an inch from her lips, he stopped buttoning, stood stock-still, let her look.
When she reached out with her rough-skinned hand and touched the dark hair that dusted his chest, he let her touch.
And when she stepped up on a chair and leaned down to kiss him, he let her do that, too.
And when she stepped down, stepped back, chewing hard on the inside of her cheek, terrified and overwhelmed by all that looking and touching and kissing, he buttoned up the shirt and tucked the chair under the table. As if he understood. As if, maybe, maybe, he was just as terrified and overwhelmed as she was.
She had been wandering around the spring festival, thinking about the weird combination of safety and terror she felt around Sean, when the man with the ice-chip eyes—the teacher who wasn’t a teacher, the man who wasn’t a man—had appeared out of nowhere. There was a tug on her elbow and he was in front of her, smiling the bland smile.
“Here you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking all over.”
“How . . . ,” she stammered, “how . . .”
“It might take me some time. Weeks. Years. Eons. But I’ll always find you.”
Behind the man, she saw Finn running for her. She would have screamed, she would have screamed bloody murder and never stopped screaming, but the man opened his fist and showed her a handful of white baneberry, white berries with black dots.
“Remember these? Doll’s eyes? If you eat them, they cause a heart attack. There are so many ways to die. A bit of bread lodged in the windpipe. A strike of lightning. A falling tree. A clean twist of the head. If you don’t come with me, don’t come quietly, those boys who took you in will die of heart attacks, or accidents, some ravenous parasite or flesh-wasting disease that causes the body to eat itself from within. I am creative when it comes to death. It is a science and an art. Do you believe me?”
He said all of this in perfect Polish.
She believed him.
So she’d smiled and she’d lied, she’d gone with the man to save the boys. But she’d wanted Sean to come and save her.
Sean hadn’t come. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe it was too much to ask of another person—I’m too tired to save myself, you do it! But the more she thought about it, the more wrong it felt. Had she gone with the man to save those boys, or had she gone with the man because he was like all the others wrapped into one—Otto and Ludo and Bob and and and and and, the men who wanted to use her, own her, burn her up—and they were everywhere, and escape was impossible, no matter how hard she ran? When she thought about it that way, Sean felt like a dream she could never hold on to. She was too used to running.
Maybe Sean was sitting next to the hospital bed, willing her awake right now, and here she was, standing in her kitchen, baking her favorite jam-filled cookies the way her babcia used to; the table was already covered with four trays of them. Later, she would pack up the cookies in her burlap sack, she would dig in her imaginary garden with the worms and the praying mantises and the dog. The dog would eat the cookies. The dog loved cookies.
The man came in the afternoon, holding a new lamb. He placed the lamb in her arms and she kissed the top of its woolly head. Before he could ask a question, she asked him one: “What is this place?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
“These are the Fields. They are everywhere and nowhere. I can make them look any way you wish.”
“Has anyone ever left here?”
He didn’t respond right away. Then he said, “Did he always answer your questions?”
“Who?”
He sighed, steepled his fingertips. “Once, a young man lost his wife and went to the Land of the Dead to find her. He said his life wasn’t worth living without her, and played the loveliest song to prove it. The song was so moving, the Lord of the Dead granted his request, though he had never done it before. He said the young man could go, and his wife would follow him, she would be right behind him. But he couldn’t look back at her, he had to trust she was there. But he didn’t. He didn’t t
rust, he looked back, and so the woman had to stay. Obviously, he didn’t love her the way he said he did. But then, I have found that people never love the way they say they do. They can’t. They are just people. Full of lies and sentiment and fear. There is no reason for you to leave here, and no way for you to go. No one will come for you, and even if they did, I am not the sentimental sort.”
A chill washed over her at the telling of this tale. She had heard this story before. But it was a myth. An old, old myth.
She was not in a hospital bed. And she was not in a garden.
“So,” she said, hugging the lamb close, “I’m dead, then, is that what you’re saying?”
“Of course you’re not dead,” the man said, chucking the little lamb under its chin. “That’s just a story among so many other stories. If that world ever existed, it doesn’t anymore. But the point is the same. You are not dead. But everyone else here is.”
“What—what do you mean?”
“This lamb, of course. These people. This world. All dead, all dead.”
The lamb wriggled in her arms and Roza squeezed tighter. The warmth of the creature, the smell of the wool, the tension in its body all said that the man was lying. How could this lamb be dead? But then, how could this man have built her a house, then a castle, then brought her here? How was any of this possible?
“But where did they all come from?” Roza said.
“I have lived a long time, known many people. You could say I collect them. But their hopes, their dreams, even their nightmares have become so tiresome. You can’t even imagine. It’s been a long time since I’ve been back to the Fields. I’ve been a visitor to so many places, I had forgotten what I was looking for. Whom I was looking for. You have made me want to come back. You have inspired me to build something new.”
“Why do you want me?” she said.
“Because you’re the most beautiful.”
“Stop saying that!”
“It’s true.”
“That can’t be the only reason.”
“People have gone to war over a beautiful woman. Why not move heaven and earth for one?”
“Because I don’t want it!” The lamb spilled from her grasp and tottered around the grass, bleating for . . . what? A mother butchered for sausage long ago? Roza clapped a hand over her mouth as if it could stay the words coming from his.
“You’ve been content here. You have your garden. And I have asked you all the right questions.” He stepped closer, and her heart froze around the edges. “I know what kind of foods you prefer, I know what color is your favorite, I know you like simple things. The house was an error, the castle was an error.”
“An . . . error?”
Rus began to growl, and the man regarded him with an amused expression. “You’ve charmed my most fearsome beast.”
“You have to let me go.”
“I wanted you to choose this. To choose me. But it isn’t always possible for two people to want the same thing. I want you, and that will have to be enough for both of us.”
“It is not enough!”
“If you cannot love me, you must accept me. There is nothing else.”
“I will kill myself,” Roza said. “I will kill myself.”
But the man only laughed. “I thought you understood. It’s all the same to me.”
Finn
PUNCHED
HE DIDN’T WANT TO READ THE PAPERS, HE COULDN’T STOP reading the papers. They yapped and murmured at him, telling him about themselves, telling him about himself:
Imagine looking into the face of your much beloved wife and not being able to recognize her. That’s what happens to thirty-seven-year-old Jack Donovan every time he sees Michelle, his partner of ten—
And:
For years, Wesley thought he was “bad with faces.” As a child, he wouldn’t be able to pick his mother out of photographs. He had trouble telling one classmate from another. When a favorite teacher shaved off his beard, Wesley no longer recognized him. Later, as an adolescent, Wesley recalls other teens marching up to him in the hallways, demanding to know why he didn’t say hi to them at lunch or—
And:
Things came to a head for Yolanda Hughes some four years ago, when her son Max was three. She’d taken Max to the store to shop for shoes. She bent down to try on a pair of sneakers, but when she looked up, Max had wandered off. An hour later, a frantic Hughes was approached by a security guard with a young boy in tow.
“He asked me if it was Max. And I didn’t know. I was so upset that I didn’t remember what Max was wearing that day. And Max was crying too hard to speak. I just couldn’t recognize his face. I just couldn’t. My own son, and I didn’t know who it was. The security guard thought I was a lunatic and said—”
And:
Edwards had to weigh things carefully before agreeing to do this interview. “I might be inviting potential criminals to take advantage of me if they find me,” she said. “How do I know if the person who tells me he’s a friend isn’t a stranger out to hurt me?”
And:
Beyond the social awkwardness are everyday issues that are not as obvious. Plots of certain movies and TV shows are too confusing to follow: “If I watch a movie with three dark-haired actors, I often think they’re all the same guy. And when the movie’s over and everyone else is talking about the bad guy, I say, What bad guy?”
What bad guy?
So he wasn’t just a careless, spacey, moon-eyed idiot who’d witnessed a crime and couldn’t identify the man who did it. It should have made him feel better. Of course he couldn’t identify the man, and here was the proof. He should bring these papers to Jonas Apple and say, Look! Here! Read this! He should bring the papers to his brother and say, Don’t blame me anymore! Don’t hate me anymore! It’s not my fault!
But this new idea about himself—face blind—didn’t make him feel better. He wasn’t going through a phase. He wasn’t going to grow out of his strange distraction. He had something wrong with him, wrong deep down in the bone.
Tell us about the day you discovered you were not like everybody else. Use a language other than your native tongue.
Either way, Roza was still gone.
Rain beat on the roof, thunder growled. Finn spread the photos Petey had given him out on the table, trying to guess who was who. He could separate women from men, young people from old, white from brown, but nothing more specific.
“I remember looking in the mirror when I was little and thinking, Who are you supposed to be?”
He went to the bathroom and looked at himself. He saw a mussed thatch of black hair. Dark eyes. Cheeks, nose, mouth. He’d never really tried to see the whole before, keep a picture in his head. Maybe it was a matter of effort? Of practice? He stared at his own reflection, memorizing every detail. If he tried, if he really tried, could he remember his own face?
After he’d spent five minutes with his image, he went back to the table. He mixed the photos like a little kid mixes playing cards, smearing them together with the flats of his hands. Then he stared at the photos, trying to pick himself out. A thatch of black hair, he told himself, brown eyes. He pawed through the photos looking for boys with dark eyes, found one. Out of habit, he scanned the clothes. Cap and gown. No clue there. His attention drifted back up to the face in the picture. The eyes were dark. His own eyes were dark. So was this a picture of him? Or was it just some other guy?
He pored over the photos, trying to latch onto something familiar, anything that looked like the face he’d seen in the mirror. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t.
He swept the photos off the table and slumped into a chair, but his leg felt stiff and awkward, and he popped back up and circled the table like a restless horse. He was still pacing when Sean came home from his shift, shaking the rain out of his hair. Sean raised a brow at the piles of papers and photographs and said, “Art project?”
“Right. That’s what it is,” Finn said.
“Make sure you clean up when you�
��re done.”
Like a robot, Finn bent and began gathering the pictures and papers. Here was his chance. He could show Sean all this stuff right now. He could explain. But what good would that do? What would it prove? That he was weird? That he was different? Sean knew that already, knew it better than anyone, even though he never talked about it with Finn, never asked the right questions.
Sean walked past the table and was almost out of the room when Finn said, “Is that the only thing you care about?”
Sean stopped but didn’t turn around. “What?”
“I said, is that the only thing you care about? Cleaning up?”
Sean’s head swiveled like an owl’s. “What the hell are you going on about now?”
“You can’t even look at me, can you?”
Sean turned, his broad shoulders a wall in the blue uniform, the gold name tag glinting. “All right. I’m looking.”
“You’re not. You didn’t.”
“I didn’t what?”
“You didn’t look for her. Everyone thinks you did. Maybe you told yourself you did. You held on to her stuff for two months, you pretended. But you gave up. And I—” Finn stopped.
There it was. The worst part.
His affliction, whatever it was called, hadn’t prevented Finn from helping Roza when she had needed him. He just hadn’t trusted her. Hadn’t trusted that she wanted to stay. Because of his mother or his father or the way she had appeared in the barn, Finn hadn’t believed in Roza. Or maybe he hadn’t believed in Sean, or himself.
Finn said, “I thought she wanted to go, too.”
“Don’t,” said Sean, voice low.
“That’s why I let her get in the car. Why I didn’t try anything or do anything until it was too late. I mean, who would want to be with us? Mom didn’t. She left you to take care of me. Poor, poor Sean, stuck with his weird brother, whole life ruined.”
