The Passion of Jazz and Other Short Stories
Page 5
onward, but the plants appeared to close in around him, scratching him more, obstructing his path. Finally, he found a small clearing where he collapsed onto his side in the muddy grass.
After he had laid on the ground for awhile, he looked up in surprise to see Ernie walking towards him in his mailman’s uniform. What was Ernie doing in the forest? Ernie walked straight up and leaned down over him, saying, “Mail, Carl, mail—a letter from your grandfather, specially for you.”
“No, no, I don’t want it,” Carl said.
“But you have to, it’s for you, it’s my job to deliver this to you. Take it, Carl. Your wife wants you to.”
“My wife is dead.”
“Dead? But she’s right over here.”
At this, Carl jumped up, amazed. But as he stood and looked back and forth, he realized Beth was not really there, and neither was Ernie. They were both gone, he must have fallen asleep and started dreaming, while lying in the mud.
Carl began to run out of the wood, hoping maybe everything had just been a dream. It was such a relief that Ernie had not really been there, maybe he would similarly be relieved by returning home to find Beth reading, preparing for bed, with no knowledge of any violence whatsoever. But when he went back into the house and opened the door to his bedroom, he cringed to see the cold white corpse of Beth lying on the floor next to the bed. What had he done? This could not be undone. He had to do something to right the situation, but what?
Carl found the kids in the dining room, having come home from a friend’s house and made themselves an evening snack. Sally said, “We want some hot centers, but Mommy has to cook them. Where’s Mommy?”
“Mommy can’t make them for you right now,” Carl said, beginning to stammer a little.
“Why not?”
“Mommy is…is sick. She’s developed an illness and had to go to the hospital. I don’t know how long she’ll have to be there.”
Both of the kids started crying, wailing “Mommy’s sick? The hospital? Is she going to be okay?”
This broke Carl’s heart, that he had to lie to them and cause them pain. But what else could he say? How else could he overcome the truth? Would he in the end overcome the truth at all? With great resignation, he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s going to be okay. But we have to be ready for it, okay? Ready for anything. Now you kids better go off to bed, it’s getting late.”
“Okay, Daddy,” they said, tearfully walking up the stairs to their bedrooms.
After the kids went to bed, Carl returned to his bedroom and pushed Beth’s body under the bed, not knowing what else to do with the corpse. He just left Beth there, too scared to try to dispose of the body, not wanting to be seen, and not wanting to make a mess of it. Part of him wished the body would just go away, just decompose on the spot, so he would not have to deal with it any more. He could hardly bear the thought of looking at his wife’s pretty face, never to smile at him again, just a dead thing there for him to do as he would with it.
He wondered what Beth would tell him to do now, just as so many times in the past he had sought her wise counsel. But all he could remember now were her words about his grandfather’s gifts, “Accept them and be grateful.” Maybe if he had done that, he would not have strangled her with the necklace. But it was too late now for regret. What could he do with the body? He turned off the light and went to sleep, noticing already a distinct deathly smell coming from the corpse.
In the days following Beth’s death, people slowly started noticing her absence. The first one to comment was their next-door neighbor, Jane. One morning, she saw Carl in the driveway and mentioned she hadn’t seen Beth lately. They always went for their walks in the morning with Jane’s dog. Was Beth well?
“Oh yes,” Carl said, “she’s fine, she just had to get away for the week, went up to the mountains by herself to relax.”
“By herself? But isn’t that her car in the garage?”
Carl cursed under his breath, not having thought fast enough to notice the car. “Yes, well, she took…she took a train.”
“Oh, well, that’s nice then,” Jane said, smiling in an insincere manner and walking away, looking a little disturbed.
A week after Beth’s death, voicemails from friends began accumulating on the answering machine, friends calling repeatedly, asking Beth to return their calls. Two weeks later, another neighbor, Suzanne, who Beth had regularly met with to discuss literature in a book club stopped by. She walked up the driveway, seeing Carl, and said, “I haven’t seen Beth lately. It’s not like her to not show up.”
“Yes,” Carl lied quickly, “she’s been very ill.”
“Oh, well, could I see her? I’d love to wish her well in her recovery.”
“No, no,” Carl said quickly, “she can’t see visitors, she’s feeling awful right now, she’d only disappoint you.”
“Are you sure? I could just bring her some flowers.”
“She doesn’t want flowers, she just needs her rest now. No visitors, doctor’s orders.”
“Oh,” Suzanne said, nonplussed. “All right, well send her my best at any rate.”
“I will,” Carl smiled, tensely.
From behind the hedge next door, Jane had been watching furtively and listening. As Carl turned to go inside, he caught her eye just as she was backing away into the house.
The next day, two police officers showed up at Carl’s house. They explained the neighbors had reported a suspicious disappearance of Beth. Carl felt distressed, seeing his whole life spiraling down in the cops’ stern faces. He tried to keep up a good front though, explaining that Beth had just taken a vacation to help relax and recuperate from an illness she had. The cops nodded, acknowledging what he was saying. Their assent made him start to hope that maybe he would get away with it.
One cop said, “Since everything’s okay, you won’t mind if we just take a look around your house?”
“Yes, sure,” Carl said, afraid but wanting to appear calm, and not fully realizing what a search would mean. He was still high on the hope that maybe his story was appeasing them.
They walked through the living room, kitchen, and dining area, glancing around, looking under the furniture briefly, but appearing satisfied with what they saw. But then they came to the master bedroom. One cop said, “What’s that smell coming from here?”
The other cop motioned to go in the room. They entered and immediately tensed up, sensing death. The cop walked to the bed, sniffed more, and looked underneath. There he saw Beth’s decaying body. Immediately he made Carl’s arrest.
In prison, Carl learned to find rebirth. He had lost everything, his family, his grandfather, his freedom. All this had been replaced by the cold grey cell blocks, the dirt yard, the drab prison food, the tiny cells with their stainless steel toilets and sinks. He slowly began to learn to embrace life as it was right now, not hoping for what he had had before, or what he might have in the future. He would never leave the prison walls for the rest of his life, this was his new reality.
But when the first Christmas came around since Carl’s imprisonment, something new happened. He received in the mail a letter from Frank. Attached on the outside a receipt said $500 had been added to his prison bank account. Inside in Frank’s handwriting was the message, “Grandson, may you have the happiest of holidays and a terrific 2028. Love you.” For the first time, Carl did not balk at this, it did not fill him with pain. Instead, he began crying, but not tears of sorrow, tears of joy. He could use the money to buy commissary items, whereas he otherwise would not be able to purchase hardly anything, working as he did in the prison laundry for $1 an hour. His grandfather was the only one who cared enough to send him money to live on in prison. He had no friends or other means of support amongst the criminal population out on the yard or in their cells.
In this new world, this new beginning, his grandfather’s presence after death was no longer a curse but a blessing, a reminder
that he would be cared for for the rest of his days in prison, that he would never have to be truly alone there. He had had to lose everything to see that, but if he had not first lost everything, would he ever have known? Perhaps the great loss was the only way to learn about the beauties of life hidden in plain sight.
Lost in the Woods
Dublin had been a miserable trip. Six students from the University of California who were studying abroad in England, along with two of their English friends from the University of Kent, decided to go to Dublin for two days over Saint Patrick’s Day. From the start, the friends were not getting along. Doug, a trim American chemistry student, and Karen, a slightly overweight American drama major, were on the same flight from London. However, they had not seen each other on the plane and Doug did not bother to wait for Karen when they arrived in the airport. Instead, Doug waited with the others in their hostel lobby for her to show up. He explained to his American friend Robert that she had not so much as called or emailed him or returned his email, when he asked if she wanted to meet at the airport. She also had not invited him to her Thanksgiving party or on a Winter Break trip to Barcelona—even though in an ironic coincidence the two ended up staying in the same room in the same hostel on the same day, hundreds of miles from Canterbury in Barcelona. Doug did not know what he had