It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  Albert said he told Cuthbert all about it, in great detail, in a long letter. About how it didn’t even make the local paper. How the county police wrote it up as a disobedient child warned not to swim. Cuthbert wrote back from Paris, depressed but resigned. And impatient. They had fought in the war. How much longer? After that Albert stopped being surprised his brother didn’t come home.

  • • •

  I drove two hundred miles back the way I had come, and took a nap in the passenger seat when I got tired, and then I carried on again. I wanted to get to work. But when I did, I couldn’t. I felt ethically the story belonged to the French magazine. But it was a story I didn’t want them to have. Or any other nation. I wasn’t sure exactly why. Not washing dirty laundry in public, I guessed. United we stand, divided we fall. Clichés were clichés for a reason. I felt like a bad journalist.

  Then I realized Cuthbert Jackson had made the same choice. All through the political years. He was Socrates. He could have told a devastating tale. He could have leveraged his exile sky high. But he didn’t. He never said a word about Robert. I wondered if he knew exactly why. I wanted to ask him. For a minute I wondered if the magazine would fly me to Paris.

  In the end, I stayed home and wrote it up purely as a sidebar. I put, in effect, by the way, Monsieur Jackson has a brother, and this is where he’s living, and this is what he’s doing. I got paid enough to buy dinner for my friends. We talked about Cuthbert’s silence all night long, but we came to no conclusions.

  LEE CHILD, previously a television director, union organizer, theater technician, and law student, was fired and on the dole when he hatched a harebrained scheme to write a bestselling novel, thus saving his family from ruin. Killing Floor went on to win worldwide acclaim. His most recent novel is The Midnight Line, the twenty-second Reacher novel. The hero of his series, Jack Reacher, besides being fictional, is a kindhearted soul who allows Lee lots of spare time for reading, listening to music, and watching Yankees and Aston Villa games. Lee was born in England but now lives in New York City and leaves the island of Manhattan only when required to by forces beyond his control. Visit Lee online at LeeChild.com for more information about the novels, short stories, and the movies Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, starring Tom Cruise. Lee can also be found on Facebook: LeeChildOfficial, Twitter: @LeeChildReacher, and YouTube: leechildjackreacher.

  BRIDGET HAWKINS is a New Jersey native currently living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She was born in Philadelphia in 1996 and spent most of her childhood in the North Jersey community of South Orange. As a biracial black woman living in America, issues of race and gender are never far from her mind or her work. She’s interested in using graphic memoir to explore both the personal and political, making annotated storytelling from a variety of perspectives possible. Bridget is currently at Pratt Institute, earning a BFA in Writing and specializing in short fiction and poetry. She earned an Honorable Mention in the Academy of American Poets Prize.

  Tell Her Anyway

  Pencil and pen

  MARY HIGGINS CLARK

  * * *

  Veterans Day

  It’s a shame the weather is so bad for the Veterans Day Parade, Jack Kearns thought, as he settled in his chair. Because he didn’t march any longer, he was grateful that from the window of their third-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue, he wouldn’t miss a minute of it.

  “Are you all right?” Valerie asked as she walked into the living room. “Anything you want—coffee, water, a Scotch?”

  “No thanks to all three, and I’m absolutely fine,” Jack said cheerfully.

  “I know you’re disappointed not to be marching today, but at ninety-two, it was time to give it up.”

  Jack smiled as his wife dropped a kiss on the top of his thinning hair. “Just because you’re only eighty-five doesn’t mean you can start treating me like an invalid,” he warned. “In fact, you’re nearer to eighty-six than eighty-five.”

  “And you’re nearer to ninety-three than ninety-two,” Valerie retorted. “All right, I’m off to the hairdresser. Enjoy the parade.”

  Jack heard the click of the door closing, then gave his full attention to the scene in front of him. It sure does look pretty miserable outside, he observed again, as he watched the remaining World War II veterans waving gamely through the rain that was pelting down on the floats they were riding.

  • • •

  As always, his thoughts turned to his twin brother. “We’re missing marching in this one, Tim,” he said aloud. “But you can’t blame me. Val always was the boss in this house.” He was sure from the affectionate tone in his voice that Tim knew he was only kidding.

  And then his mind went back to that terrible day when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The words of President Roosevelt rang through his mind. “A date which will live in infamy . . . a state of war exists . . .”

  Tim, you and I were high school students. We couldn’t wait until we had our diplomas in our hands before we could enlist and be on our way. You in the army and me in the navy. I sang “Anchors Aweigh” and you tried to drown me out by bellowing “You’re in the Army Now.” And then we were off to war. A couple of kids who couldn’t even imagine what it would be like. You landed at Normandy and my ship got hit by a bomb in the Pacific. It was several long years before it was over. And then the whole country was jumping with joy.

  • • •

  We had always planned that we would go to Fordham together. It was there that I met Valerie. Of course, you always had eyes for only one girl. You met Jenny in kindergarten, and there was never anyone else for you.

  And after that there was never a time when you weren’t nearby. You were there the day I graduated from Fordham, and you were there again when I got my law degree. The days when Timmy and Rob and Johnny were born. You were always there.

  • • •

  Jack raised his hand and spontaneously waved to one of the oldest veterans in the parade. That poor guy better have a good stiff drink when he gets out of the rain, he thought. Oh, Tim, I wish we were watching this together. I can imagine the stories we would be telling.

  • • •

  But of course it wasn’t to be. I came home from service, and you didn’t. I remember the first time I went to Normandy and visited your grave. Sergeant Timothy Michael Kearns. You were lying between a captain on one side and a lieutenant colonel on the other. Right where you should be.

  • • •

  But you’ve always been with me. Every day of my life. Jenny waited ten years before she married. I know you would have wanted her to have a husband and children. But she told me long ago that a piece of her heart will always belong to you.

  • • •

  Jack stood up and reached his hand to touch the Gold Star in the window, the symbol of a serviceman who gave his life for his country. “You were proud to do it, Tim,” he said. And then as he looked down, he saw what seemed like a battalion of veterans looking up at the window and saluting Tim’s Gold Star.

  MARY HIGGINS CLARK’s books are worldwide bestsellers. In the United States alone, her books have sold over 100 million copies. Her most recent suspense novel, All By Myself, Alone, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2017. She also published a collaborative novel in November 2014 with Alafair Burke, The Cinderella Murder, All Dressed in White in November 2015, and The Sleeping Beauty Killer in 2016. She is the author of thirty-seven previous bestselling suspense novels, four collections of short stories (the most recent, Death Wears a Beauty Mask), a historical novel, a memoir, and two children’s books. She is coauthor, with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, of five suspense novels. Two of her novels were made into feature films and many of her other works into television films.

  MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

  * * *

  Atonement

  Yes, I’ve committed some of the crimes. The little crimes. Sure I have. Who hasn’t?

  Have I lied about love?

  Have I allowed others to believe
that it was all their fault?

  Have I flattered fools, pretended to have read certain books, claimed never to have received your messages?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

  Who hasn’t? Not those exact transgressions, of course, but others, we all have our litanies, some of which we talk about and some of which we don’t.

  I’ve learned to talk about mine, if only to myself. If only because no one else seems to be listening.

  The tricky part is determining which of the crimes was the one that mattered. Because (as I’ve learned, being here) almost all criminals, the people I once thought of as real criminals, consider their deeds justifiable, or inevitable, or, at the outer edges of the extreme, punch lines to long, bad jokes about childhood deprivation and abuse; about the eagerness of their victims to be victims (in the common area, a sultry-voiced man said, just recently, I made those people famous by killing them, they were nobody before I came along, and then they were in People magazine); about the smashup of civilization or the chip implanted in a molar by that emergency-room dentist in late-night Indianapolis.

  It’s one of the surprises. Nobody, no one I’ve met, looks into a mirror and thinks, Here stands a criminal. Not seriously. We’ve only committed the little crimes.

  The jacket you never returned, the falsified résumé, the affair with the kid who was really too young to know better. The rape, the bludgeon, the slit throat.

  We had our reasons, pretty much every time.

  Which means that all crimes are little crimes, or that no crimes are little crimes. Or that there’s not much difference between the two.

  But which of my own crimes was the one that mattered?

  We spend most of our time in our rooms, pondering that question. We call them our rooms. If we call them by any other name when we speak to one of the guards, we’re corrected. “You’re asking to leave the common area and go back to your room, is that what you’re asking?”

  It is. I tend to prefer my room to the common area, where people say things I don’t always like to hear.

  Once I get out of this place I’m going to slice up all her babies, right there in front of her.

  I just want to know where my husband is, I don’t understand why no one will tell me that.

  No other country’d have you, even if you could get there, asshole.

  I’ve finally begun my metamorphosis, wait until you see what I’m becoming.

  We’re here because we’re peculiar, they’re quarantining peculiar people, don’t you understand that?

  I don’t spend a lot of time in the common area partly because I dislike so much of what the others say and partly because I’m here to contemplate my crime, which is easier to do in the silence and solitude of my room. My room is immaculate, perfectly white, and devoid of everything I don’t need, everything that could divert me from concentration. Those are my instructions, those are everyone’s instructions. We live in our rooms, where we contemplate our crime. Those are our only instructions.

  I did, however, take note of the use of the singular, when I was brought here. Contemplate our crime.

  There was one, then. One that mattered.

  I’ve run through the obvious candidates. Who wouldn’t? My voting record, of course. Those posts online. The demonstrations (three of them), the words printed on that T-shirt (though I only wore it once), the tipsy argument I had at some after-hours party, with the stern woman in the green blouse.

  But some of the others here voted differently, or didn’t vote at all. One of them thinks private property should be confiscated, and redistributed across the population. Another believes that everyone with cancer, in any form, should be executed, because the only cure for cancer is the elimination of all the people who have it.

  We can’t be here for our opinions, then. Not when one of us insists that only black people should be elected to public office because only black people know what the world truly intends, and another maintains, with equal conviction, that black people have been praying collectively, for years, to melt the polar ice caps.

  Go to your rooms, all of you, and contemplate your crime.

  I’m always cheerful and obedient. Unlike some. One of the guards smiled at me once, I swear it—the quickest knick of a smile, an idea of a smile that passed across his face like a rampant, forbidden thought.

  Go to your room and contemplate your crime.

  I don’t ask questions. I occupy my situation. I think of myself as a member of the team. It’s easier that way. And I keep thinking about how, and when, and if, the guard might smile at me again.

  I contemplate my crime. I eagerly await confession. But first I have to remember what, exactly, it is that I’ve done.

  Some act or idea that had been legal must have been found to be illegal after all, and none of us knew about it. Laws change, what we mean by evidence changes, it’s hard to keep up. If you can’t believe what you see or hear, you really can’t believe what you don’t see or hear.

  Or should you be able to? Are we guilty of failing to know what we shouldn’t do?

  It’s a game I play, sometimes, with myself. A private quiz show. Okay, now, for the championship: What single, common act might have been committed by:

  a stocky, smiling man who killed seven college girls, all of them named Ashley;

  a wistful clairvoyant with an artificial hand; and

  a tattooed teenage boy who never stops laughing?

  What could these people possibly have in common, beyond the most rudimentary bodily functions? What could I have in common with them?

  I’ve been asking that question for months now. It must be months, though it’s hard to tell time here, even day from night. The lights are always on. The lights aren’t harsh, and the food isn’t bad. We’re not being punished, not exactly. We’re being held. We’re being held until . . .

  Here’s the funny part. I call it the funny part. I’m not sure what else to call it.

  I haven’t been asked to confess. As far as I can tell, no one has. We simply remain, contemplating. We can seem, sometimes, like monks and nuns, cloistered, living lives of atonement, meditating on a central mystery we’re meant to ponder but never, actually, to solve.

  That can’t be true, though. Not for us. Not for citizens of a country founded on all that can be discovered, all that can be forgiven, and all that can be repaired.

  Sometimes one of us tells a guard that we know what we did, that we’re prepared to admit to it, and suffer the consequences. The answer is always the same, though. Stay in your room and contemplate your crime.

  We feel confident—I do, anyway—that our confession day will come. Why would we be here if we weren’t working toward redemption, or punishment? Think of what it costs the taxpayers, just to feed and shelter us.

  When the guards come to take me out of my room and march me to . . . wherever it is they take us . . . I’ve decided that I’m going to confess everything. Everything I’ve ever done. I don’t mind about how long it’ll take, and—I feel sure about this—that the guards won’t, either. The guards will listen, their faces grave and forbearing as painted gods looking down on the faithful from a domed ceiling. And when I find my way to my crime they will hold me, they will welcome me back, they will stroke my hair as I soak their suit jackets with my tears. I will be forgiven. And I’ll travel on from there.

  • • •

  MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of six novels: A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as a story collection, A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and a nonfiction book, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. The Hours received the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, and was made into a film in 2002, featuring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. Cunningham’s fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Yale University.

  MARK DI IONNO

 
; * * *

  Intersections

  Nothing but green lights. Six city blocks’ worth, on a straight, empty, six-lane road at 3:33 in the morning.

  This is what my client saw when, tired from a long day, he came to the crest of a broad, main street that cuts through Newark, New Jersey, on his way home from late-shift work at a metal fabricating plant.

  I went to the site of the accident in the early-morning hours the day after I was retained by my client’s family. I had to see what he saw at the exact time the accident occurred. And I had to imagine what he didn’t see: a petite young woman, dressed in black from a night out, running across the street against a red light and outside the crosswalk.

  There were no skid marks before the point of impact. Only after. Thirty-two feet of them, indicating excessive speed for a 25 mph zone but nothing out of the ordinary.

  And then he drove away.

  It was 3:33 a.m. exactly when I parked at the hillcrest near the intersection where Francisco Duarte hit Megan O’Hara. All those green lights, a wide-open alley, beckoning him to move ahead.

  “He should have stopped,” I said to myself, then wrote it down on a legal pad, knowing it would be my opening before the jury when the case went to trial.