by Monica Wood
“She was only fourteen.”
“She call you?”
“I got a letter. It was part of her sentence.”
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” he asked. “I would’ve asked you to my place, but it’s a shithole.”
“I wouldn’t have come to your place. You’re a stranger.”
He looked mildly offended. “You want a sandwich? How about a tuna sandwich? My treat.” He pointed toward a shopping center across the busy boulevard, one nicked-up hand darting from a too-short sleeve.
“No thanks,” I said, realizing that sending roses must have pretty much broken the bank. “I’d rather just walk a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Mind? Christ, no, why should I mind? Anything you want, that’s great, sure. We’ll walk. After you.” He swept his arm toward the water and I stepped ahead of him, my leg hitching badly even with the help of my cane. “I’m doing better than this, really,” I said. “It’s just when I first get out of a car.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said, gritting his teeth. “What a goddamn shame.” His eyes followed my body—head to shoulders to arms to legs to feet, then back up again, resting on my face. I could almost feel the trail of his gaze, a kind of shimmy over the places that still hurt.
There we stood, face to face, the water at high tide and lashing softly just below us. Strangers passed. “Let’s just walk,” I said.
“Sure, you bet, anything you want.” As we set out he hovered at my side, not quite touching me, but cupping the air around my shoulders.
The sky appeared dark and held back, the air moist, soft as cloth. We walked in silence for a minute or so—he was even slower than I was. Finally he had to stop, holding his wheezy chest. We’d gotten only as far as the end of the lot where the footpath began. “Cigarettes,” he said. “I keep swearing to quit.” We sat on a guardrail and gawked at the cove. A gull shrieked overhead, then spiraled down to perch on the banking.
I turned to face him. “I heard you, you know.”
“Say what?”
“When you carried me off the road. You said something like ‘Jesus on a stick.’”
He let out a long sigh and patted his pockets, a smoker’s impulse. “I don’t see how you could’ve heard that. You weren’t even breathing.”
“I did, though.”
He patted his pockets again.
“You can smoke if you want,” I said.
He glanced at me, then worked a cigarette pack out of his coat. “It’s a powerful yearning,” he said, his lips mushing together. He lit up and drew in a breath.
“You said ‘sorry,’ before you ran off. ‘Sorry sorry sorry.’ I heard you.”
He breathed out a trail of smoke. “Okay, so you weren’t dead. I’m a shit, first and last, a genuine class-A shit, and I swear to God what I did to you is the worst thing I ever did to anybody, I swear to God, leaving you there all alone in your dying hour.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to get caught with a suspended license, and that’s the truth of it. I didn’t need one more goddamn problem, so I ditched and ran.”
His chipped eyes flickered over my scraped face. How had I looked, lying there in the road?
September was barely a week old, but already fall seemed imminent. In the trees that lined the cove, stray leaves flamed prematurely in colors that intensified in the dampening air. “It’s going to rain,” I said.
He checked the sky. “Yeah.” Then we caught each other’s eyes for a second, and I found myself glad of the impending rain. It was just weather—I understood that rain was just weather—but maybe it recalled something for us that it did not recall for other people. You saw it, I thought. You saw exactly what happened to me.
“Was I on the yellow line?” I asked him. “When you found me?”
“Matter of fact, yeah. Lined right up.”
“You moved me from there.”
“Yeah.”
“To the side of the road.”
“Yeah, I remember thinking, What’re you doing, Shit-for-Brains, you don’t move somebody in this condition, she could get paralyzed. But it was either that or you get run over twice.”
“You were sort of crying. That’s how it sounded”
“I was sober, in case you wondered,” he said, smoking hard. “I was on my way to see my daughter up to Dixfield. I swear on her head I was sober.”
“You don’t have to swear on her head,” I said. “I believe you.”
“I wouldn’t believe me if I was sitting where you are. I wouldn’t believe a word I said. But I’m telling the truth anyway. I was sober as a judge.” He trembled the cigarette to his mouth.
“You’ve had some convictions, I take it?”
“Good guess,” he said, grimacing. “I’d just got myself cleaned up again, got my sorry backside over to AA for a couple of months. I was waiting to get my license back from the friggin’ State of Maine Department of Motor Vehicles. I’d even wangled my old job back.” He glanced at me. “I’m an electrician by trade.” He cupped the cigarette in his pink-raw palm and looked at it. “And I really wanted to see my daughter. She had a brand-new baby and said she’d see me. I hadn’t set eyes on her in years.”
“How many?”
“Eight, nine. Seven, I don’t know. I was a shitcan of a father. But I don’t know, the new baby softened her up some, I guess. Her candy-ass husband said forget it, but she’s a good kid, that Elaine, she figured to give me one last shot no matter what he said.” He sucked on the last of the cigarette and threw it to the ground where it landed with a hiss. “I never paid a cent in child support. I treated her mother like dirt.” He looked at me. “That’s who I am, and still, she said she’d see me, give me one more chance. She’s a good kid, that Elaine. I’m one lucky goddamn bastard.”
He didn’t look lucky, though; he did not resemble a lucky man.
“The thing is,” he said, lighting up again, “and I’m just telling you this so you know I didn’t leave you there and go on my goddamn merry way, I never got to Elaine’s that night. I mean, I left the goddamn scene, so to speak, because I didn’t want to fuck up —screw up, sorry—I didn’t want to screw up the big reunion. The first time in ten, twelve years she says she’ll see me, but I don’t want to get there all shook up and she says what’s wrong and I say nothing and she says I know there’s something wrong and I say well I just left some poor kid dying on the side of the road in the pouring rain. So I didn’t go. Too ashamed.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Instead I drove back home and drank myself blind for a coupla months. Then I checked myself in for the old get-better, same goddamn twenty-eight days. Went for the VA counseling, the AA, the whole goddamn alphabet, except I didn’t get my job back this time. I’m down at Barber Foods, which is rock goddamn bottom on the ladder of gainful employment in this town, let me tell you, me and a buncha Cambodians deboning chickens, nobody to talk to and nothing to look at but a conveyor belt splattered with chicken guts.” He took a drag and exhaled loudly. “And I got to thinking how goddamn great it might be if somebody I saved said thank you.”
“Oh,” I said.
He was waiting.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
I looked him over, his decaying boots, his secondhand coat too warm for the day. “Lucky you had a cell phone,” I said.
“I stole it off a job,” he admitted. “It was sitting there in this lady’s open purse, right out there on the kitchen counter. I was running wire in this gigantic goddamn kitchen, all slate this and copper that and a monster Jenn-Air and the whole jeezly shebang, and me with no phone at the time because the last time they cut me off it cost upwards of three hundred bucks to get the phone put back in, and I really wanted to call my daughter because of the new baby, which I found out about through her aunt who also never talks to me but ran into me in a 7-Eleven and spilled the beans. I figured there’s no time like the present, so I took the phone out of the lady’s purse and called, then stuck around for the rest of the day while she
asked this one and that one where was her phone, did she leave it at Nancy’s, maybe it was in the car, did Jeff forget to lock the car again. When I finished the wiring I waved good-bye and struck out for Dixfield, phone in the glove box, and it even rings once or twice but of course I don’t answer it, knowing it’s them calling themselves, thinking to trap a bonehead like me with their superior wits and ingenuity, but I figure I’ll use it just for the meanwhile, Elaine’s kind of squirrelly about saying yes, she wants me to call back at this time and that time, so I figure if I’m calling her from my goddamn no-heater dinged-windshield leaking-radiator shitpile of a car that’s on its way up to goddamn Dixfield maybe she’ll cave, and she does, it takes forever but she finally says all right as long as you’re halfway here, you can stay an hour, but that’s it, an hour, just to see the baby and no drinking whatsoever, which I wasn’t doing anyway, I swear.” He looked at me. “So, yeah. I had a phone. Their loss, your gain. That’s how things work, usually.”
The clouds began to move along in gray tatters, allowing weak breaks of light into the sky. “So you’re a guidance counselor,” he said after a while. “How do you like it?”
“A lot,” I said. “I like teenagers.”
He lit another cigarette off the end of the one he’d just smoked. “Nobody likes teenagers,” he said.
I smiled a little. “I do.”
“My guidance counselor was an asshole.”
“A lot of people say that. They have to blame somebody.”
He inhaled deeply. “I thought you were a teenager yourself, you know,” he said. “When I looked up the articles I didn’t expect you’d be a grown woman with a good job like that.”
“I’m back at work,” I told him. “I went back even though everybody said wait.” What came to me then was an odd little fillip of pride. I wanted him to think well of me.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirty.”
“That’s how old Elaine is. Somewhere around there. Thirty-five, maybe, now that I think about it. Time flies.” The water slapped against the rocks, and the gull lifted off again, circling out toward the bay. “Elaine’s a teacher, too. Little kids. It’s a good job, good benefits, time off to take care of the baby. She did great, that Elaine. Dental insurance and that. The works.” He set his elbows on his knees and looked at me sideways. “Why did you come down here?”
“The girl who hit me never even slowed down. You’re the only one who actually saw me.”
He shook out another cigarette, and I waited while he smoked it. It had begun to mist, but he seemed in no hurry to move. “I was in the United States Army for four years in the sixties, but I never saw a dead body.”
“Vietnam?”
“It was early on. Before the shit hit. I did my whole tour stateside, fixing radios.”
“What I want to know, what I wanted to ask you—” I swallowed, and it hurt, like ingesting a thistle. “I wanted to ask you what it looked like.”
He paused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you see anything. Something that you might not want to admit to the average person. To, you know, to the average person who wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Did I see anything?”
I nodded.
“Like what?”
“A spirit?” I said, embarrassed. “An angel? Something along those lines?”
His eyes rested on me in a way that showed not surprise, but something like what I felt—inevitability. “I—Christ, no, I didn’t see angels, nothing like that.”
“It’s just that I felt a certain—like I was waiting for something.”
“Waiting. Sure, okay.”
I looked at the ground. “If someone was there—an ambassador from Heaven, something like that—I’d kind of like to know for sure.”
“I wouldn’t know an ambassador from Heaven if he spit in my face.”
“What about light? You always hear talk about the big white light.”
He regarded me intently, for some moments. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
I hiccupped, or gulped. “You saw something?”
“Now that you mention it.” He stamped out his cigarette, frowning. “I did see a buncha light. I can tell you that. Buckets of light, just like you said, all around you.”
“What kind? What color?”
Harry Griggs jittered his hands through his film of hair. “White, I guess. Whatever color light is. That’s all I can tell you. Nothing more specific than that. But light, yeah, loads of it, like you said, all around.”
Looking at him, I saw a man in pieces, a heap of parts that had never quite converged, and I suppose I began to shape something necessary out of the broken bits. Maybe I was already making believe this was my father, or a version of a father, in any case a man who had left me and was now making up for his mistake. “Something happened to me, Harry Griggs,” I said. “You’re my only witness.”
“Hey,” he said, taking a step toward me. “Hey, now.” My teeth were chattering so hard I feared I might break them. I put up my hands and composed myself. He did not touch me. He was close enough, though, that his voice contained the properties of touch.
“Come on, deah,” he whispered—de-ah, he said, like the elders of my childhood—cupping my elbow, urging me back toward the car, my cane squeaking against the dampening pavement. “Let’s get you in out of the rain.”
His apartment, one half of a third floor on Hanover Street with chattering windows, contained few possessions. The neighbor-hood, an ethnic mishmash crammed between City Hall and the cove, felt both thriving and luckless, possessed of dented cars and gabled apartment buildings and municipal facilities and beautiful trees. I saw men and women carrying soft, thin briefcases, Somali immigrants with their brightly swaddled children, teenagers thickened onto street corners, and a few men like Harry Griggs, loosely stitched, looking only one way before crossing.
I liked it there. I felt gloriously invisible, a feeling intensified by the sheer quantity of air space in Harry Griggs’s apartment. It took me a while to make the stairs, but once inside he guided me into his one chair, a stuffed armchair, bone white. Next to it stood a floor lamp with a mustard-colored glass shade.
“A guy was loading a truck up on Cumberland,” he said, “and took off in too much of a hurry. I carried this home brand spanking new.” He peered down at me. “Feeling better?”
I nodded. “I’m not usually this emotional.”
“You’re entitled,” he said. “Cry all you want.”
I wasn’t crying, though; I was taking inventory. In one corner resided a seedy-looking guitar, a stack of CDs, andastereo that sat directly on the floor. There were curtains, sheer ones, that looked clean. Through an open door I could see part of a bed—neatly made up—and a small TV tray with a lamp sitting on it. The whole place emanated the futility of misplaced effort.
He offered me a Gatorade. “It’s all I drink when I’m not drinking,” he said. “It’s supposed to load you up with electrolytes.” He went into the kitchen—clean and empty—and got one out of the fridge. He took down two glasses and divided the liquid.
“Cheers,” he said.
It was awful, but I drank it anyway, thinking a few extra electrolytes couldn’t hurt. I could see the water from where I sat, over a cascade of rooftops and a flat swatch of concrete where the city parked snowplows and dump trucks.
“What do I call you?” he asked.
I wiped my eyes. “Lizzy. You?”
“Harry’s fine. My friends called me Hank back when I had friends.”
Now that we were inside he looked caged, his feet moving in little forward-and-backs even while he was seated. “You having some kinda delayed reaction?” he asked. “The VA’S full of those.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine. You can’t imagine the relief. I was starting to think I was going a little crazy.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that I loved Harry Griggs in that moment, the way disaster v
ictims are said to love their fellow survivors. I wanted to tell him the whole story now, to live through it again and again the way those same survivors are wont to do.
“I was out there running in black clothes,” I said to Harry. “Did you find that strange?”
“It’s a free country,” he said. “You can wear anything you want.”
“My husband was thinking about leaving me, and I didn’t want him to say it out loud.” I hesitated, surprised. “I was running from that.” What I wanted from Harry Griggs was beginning to form—a kind of witnessing, a confirmation, an accounting. What he wanted, besides gratitude, I couldn’t say, but if we were at cross-purposes our desire contained at least one mutual ingredient: confession.
“I got hitched four times total,” Harry said. “Technically I’m still married to the last one, Loreen. She’s a good egg, that Loreen. We fought like raccoons from day one. You hear of happy couples, happy trails. What a load of crapola.”
I nodded, glancing around his starved apartment. “He’s stuck with me now, my husband,” I said. “He thinks I’m not altogether—healed. So he’s stuck with me because it turns out he’s not the type to get out while the getting’s good.”
“Then he’s a stand-up guy,” Harry said. “He didn’t cut and run.”
Nothing I said appeared to surprise him. It was a feeling like drifting back down to earth after having been temporarily relieved of the force of gravity. I marveled at the unfilled space, how little there was here to touch. You could move very fast from one room to another here if you wanted to.
Eventually Harry got up and went into his vacant kitchen, returning with more Gatorade. He refreshed my glass, then set the bottle on the floor and sat himself next to it, his back to the windows.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Fourteen years, off and on,” he said. “I tend to hole up here between marriages. Me and the landlord are tight, ex-Army. I saved his sorry backside once or twice with our so-called superiors, so he keeps returning the favor.”
The water appeared nearly black from this far off and had begun to recede. The rain was beginning to look serious. Waiting there—and I did think of it as waiting—in the bare rooms of a stranger, a man of dubious scruples, a man who had done me an ill turn and waited six months to make good, I did not feel in the least afraid. I felt, if anything, safer than usual. Despite his raw skin, his flattened clothes, his insinuated past, there was something undeniably fatherly about him. He made me think of the men in gabardine shirts who came in for the early Mass on Sundays at St. Bart’s all those years ago, the guys from the shoe shop working Sunday double time and clearing a bit of room in their day for God.
