My sister has taken over the floor of my living room to repack for her trip. She’s only allowed one duffel bag on the boat, she’s told me, along with a laptop and a day pack. So, sitting cross-legged and surrounded by her things, she’s consolidating. I manage to work myself down into a sitting position next to her. Some scientific-looking devices are sitting on top of her laptop bag, and I examine what appears to be a shiny stainless-steel measuring cup set. It’s a series of nesting rings, each one with a progressively finer mesh screen inside.
“Is this for…for sifting sand?” I ask.
“Mmhmm,” Katie says, without really looking up. “They’re graded. Sometimes I catch little bugs in with the sand.”
“Do the bugs screw up your results?”
“They have no impact on my research. They are cool to look at with the microscope, though.”
“You have a microscope?”
Katie gives me an exaggerated “duh, of course I have a microscope” look, and we both laugh.
“What is that for?” I say when I see Katie put a fleece pullover into her duffel.
“It might get chilly at night.”
“You’re going to the South Pacific, though.”
“New Zealand gets chilly. Rainy. It’s winter there now.”
Mom sticks her head out from my bedroom, where she had been putting away the clothes that she washed for me in the coin-op at the bottom of our stairs last night.
“I think you should bring the fleece,” Mom says.
“See?” Katie sticks out her tongue at me when she says it.
“It’s practical,” Mom says.
Katie pokes at the fleece in her bag. “Mom says it’s practical.”
“I have something for you to take,” I say, and Katie cocks her head and gives me a funny look as I go to my bookshelf; when I pull out the road atlas her mouth drops open.
“You still have that?”
“Of course I still have it,” I say as I hand it to her. She laughs when she sees our names on the cover, and she laughs again when she flips to one of the pages.
“Oh my God,” she says. “The trip we planned to Texas—”
“You wanted to follow the theater teacher guy.”
“You wanted to follow the theater teacher guy. I wanted to follow the theater student guy.”
Katie looks through some pages and laughs again, then lifts the atlas up and looks beneath it as if she expects to find something there. “This doesn’t really, you know, cover where I’m going.”
“You can take it,” I say. “If you want. It might just be fun to look—”
“No,” Katie says, and she thumbs the book open to Ohio for a moment before closing it. “You should take it with you.” And she hands it to me.
Patrick is back, and when he peeks in at us sitting on the floor, he nods and says simply, “Ready.” He’s pulled Mom’s car up on the sidewalk in front of our building, and he ferries our bags down to it—one trip, two trips, three—and Katie walks at my side as we go down the stairs. I’m feeling even better today; the stiffness in my back is more like a memory, and descending the stairs feels almost easy.
Mom stands next to the car with a tissue clenched in her right hand. Patrick slams the trunk closed, then comes and puts his arms around my mother.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.” Her eyes are wet. Pat gives Katie a hug; she opens her mouth as if she’s going to say something, but just ends up shaking her head.
“Have a good time on the boat,” Patrick says, and now Katie nods.
Patrick stands in front of me, and Katie and Mom get into the car. My arms are at my sides.
“You’re okay?”
“I don’t know?”
“You’re okay. Call me when you’re there?”
“Yes.”
Patrick reaches to me and touches my left arm and strokes my shoulder. Then he kisses his fingertips and presses them to my mouth.
“Call me,” he says, and all I can do is blink and say
Yes.
Patrick stands on the steps of our building with his hands in his pockets, and I watch him from the passenger window as Mom drives out over the curb and onto the street with a thump.
“Tell me which way, Jess,” Mom says.
“Left up here. Stay left. Get on 101 South, and we’ll see the airport signs.”
“Are you going to have time to get your phone and still make it through security?”
“Oh, shoot. We can go…Ah, forget the phone.” Josh did well enough without one, didn’t he? “I don’t need it. I’ll take care of it when I’m back.”
The Cincinnati airport, where I lay over after my long, boring flight from SFO, seems completely populated by frat boys and boob-job blondes and thick-bodied families coming home from some theme park vacation. I’ve never been to the Midwest before, but I may as well be on another planet. And the stares, the stares, I feel like everyone is looking at me, the frat boys and the fat women; I remember my black eyes and wonder if they know I’m the one who made it off the bus?
Does anyone even care?
The gate for my flight to Columbus is close, and I proceed there immediately—no magazine, book, or coffee shop—as my punctual mother has trained me to do. I’m looking forward to sitting down and trying to make myself invisible, but the monitor says “SEE AGENT” and when I do see the agent I find out that, due to mechanical trouble, we are waiting for a replacement plane and won’t be taking off for another four hours. Now I’m wishing I had gone to the phone store this morning so I could stand now amidst the constellation of businessmen and college kids and call someone too and say sorry, sorry, I’m going to be a little late.
I should call Emily, though, who is supposed to be picking me up. It would be the nice thing to do. I have her number written somewhere, and I dig through my bag and eventually find it scribbled on the back of my itinerary along with Alice Hadden’s number and the airline’s number and some other unknown number I don’t even remember writing down.
Emily does not pick up when I dial from a pay phone, and I leave a borderline coherent message about the plane being delayed or late or changed and well I’m just going to be late and I hope you get this message. In the event she doesn’t get it, though, I try Mrs. Hadden, who does answer.
“I’ll get ahold of her,” she says. “You were nice to call.”
We’re about to say good-bye, but there’s a hesitation, an opening, and I ask what I’m really wondering. “Mrs. Hadden, are you okay?”
“We’re doing fine. We are.” In her voice, there is something of my own mother. “Are you?”
“I don’t know?”
“I understand,” she says. And in the way she says it, I believe it.
I try to wander and watch the coming and going; the fat, sagging faces, the elderly conveyed on electric carts, the tee shirts from chain restaurants. I’m feeling too obvious, though, with my black eyes, so I make my way back to my gate and try to make myself one with a torn vinyl chair and an abandoned magazine.
It’s dark outside when we finally board the little commuter plane, and I watch the lights underneath us as we lift into the air. We’re hardly up before we come back down again into more orange lights. The airport in Columbus is quiet and I’m surprised when I pause in the nearly empty terminal to move my watch back and see that it’s almost eleven o’clock. There’s hardly anyone at security when I walk through, just a couple bored soldiers and a cornrowed TSA woman slumped down in her chair, texting someone on her phone. She doesn’t look up as the handful of passengers from my turboprop walk past her.
I follow the overhead signs to baggage claim, towing my little roller bag behind me, and before I’ve rounded the concrete pillar, I see Emily next to the first carousel. Even though she’s facing away from me I know it’s her—she has the same shoulders as her brother, and her hair is the same straw color but longer, down past the collar of her shirt. She’s shorter than me, and delicate-looking. A white-blond child i
s asleep on her shoulder, and she rocks very slowly from side to side as I approach them.
“Emily?” I say, and I’m shocked by how much she looks like Josh when she turns to me. His nose and the eyes are there, the eyes especially; maybe her mouth is a little fuller in the lower lip, but he’s right there in her face.
“Jessica. Hi.” She looks like she’s going to say something, but instead she shifts the little boy up higher on her shoulder. I catch a glimpse of his openmouthed slumber.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” I say. “I hope you got the message?”
“I did, thanks.”
“No, thank you for picking me up. I didn’t check any bags, so…”
“Let’s go,” she says.
I follow her through some automatic doors out to the parking garage and the night air feels warm and damp and the first thing that comes to my head is that the air smells like dirt and sex.
“Who is this with you?” I ask.
“This is Caleb. He wanted to stay up to meet his uncle’s friend.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Sleepy guy.”
We come up to a big white car, it’s something between a minivan and an SUV, and when Emily repositions her son to get her keys from her bag I see that her hands have slender artist’s fingers. No great surprise, I suppose.
“Can I help you? I can take him.”
“I’ve got it.” Emily presses a button and the car chirps and flashes before the door on the side magically hums open, and she works her sleeping little boy into his car seat while I stand and watch. Then she withdraws and straightens out the front of her jacket and touches the wet drool spot on her shoulder. She looks at me, and I look at her, and at that very moment I want to ask her everything, everything there is to know about her brother. I want to ask if she thinks he could have done it. But I don’t.
I snap down the tow handle of my bag instead.
“Should I put this in the back?”
“Sure,” Emily says. “Sure.” She presses another button on her keychain, and, with no chirps, the rear hatch of the van swings open.
27
It takes me a moment to remember where I am when I open my eyes in the morning—there are peach-colored walls and nice clean carpeting and a tidy computer desk with matching dresser and nightstand. A benign guest room. In Josh’s sister’s house. Emily’s house. And her husband’s, whose name I have forgotten on this sunny morning.
The place is mostly silent as I rise and dress, a condition I ascribe to some sort of reverence for the upcoming events of the day, but as I make my way out of the room toward the scent of coffee, I begin to get the feeling that the quiet of the house is more like a permanent fixture—as much a part of it as the pale yellow walls in the hallway or white painted chair rail in the dining room. Emily is in the kitchen, and the black dress she’s wearing makes her body look more slender and her skin seem paler than when I met her last night. She looks at me with an almost-smile, and I see Josh’s face in the expression.
“There’s coffee,” she says. “Mugs are up above.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Can I do anything?”
“I’m fine. There’s half-and-half if you need it.”
“I’m okay.” And this is the extent of our conversation on the morning of her brother’s funeral. Maybe she’s grieving. Or maybe she just never talks.
I get myself some coffee and stand at the sink, looking out the window into the treeless neighboring yards of the houses around us. I’m about to say, for the sake of saying anything, something about the fact that every single yard I see seems to have the same matching wooden swing set with a yellow plastic slide and canvas awning, but there’s a noise and at my side is a little blond boy, older than the one last night, wearing a white polo shirt buttoned up to the collar. His face is rounder than his mother’s.
“Are you my uncle Josh’s girlfriend?” he asks. I can see a broad gap in his front teeth when he talks, and there’s something contemptuous in the way he says the word “girlfriend.”
“Well, yes, I—”
“Justin, stop it,” Emily snaps. “Please go wait in the front room.” Justin slinks off, but looks back at me from the hallway for a moment.
“Justin! Go to the front room.” Emily looks at me and makes the almost-smile face again. “I’m sorry.”
“Kids are kids,” I say.
“I’m sorry.”
There are more footsteps, heavier ones, and Emily’s husband, thick-faced and scowling, comes into the kitchen. He’s wearing a dark suit that may have fit better sometime in the past, and I see his eyes go up and down over me before he turns to Emily.
“Let’s get in the car,” he says. These are the only words he speaks to us before going back off down the hall. “Justin!” I hear him call. “Come on, bud, let’s load up! Caleb, let’s go!”
“Tim?” Emily calls. “Tim?” But he’s already gone.
I take a big swallow of my coffee, then another, and pour the rest down the sink, and Emily takes the mug from my hand when I try to rinse it out.
“Don’t,” she says. “I’ll get that.”
“It’s not a problem.”
“Really, I’ll take care of it.” She places the mug in the bottom of the sink and guides me by my elbow to a door, and when we step into the garage I’m shocked by the sudden humidity and stink of gasoline and lawn clippings and trash cans. I stand back as Emily buckles her kids into their car seats in the big white car, and I stop her when she starts to climb up between them in the backseat.
“Why don’t you sit up front?” I say.
“You don’t want to be back here between these two.”
“I can handle kids. You sit up front.”
I squeeze my way over the younger one, Caleb, and into the space between the two car seats. As we back out of the garage, I catch a look at their second car, a tan sedan of some sort. I know nothing about cars, but I do see a bumper sticker that says, in thick blue lettering, “WE VOTE PRO-LIFE.”
Katie, if she were here, would combatively bring this up. I will certainly not bring it up. Not today.
Caleb is to my right, looking at me. And Tim, even though he’s wearing sunglasses and probably thinks I can’t tell, keeps peering at me through the rearview mirror. He’s creeping me out.
“You were kind of sleepy last night,” I say to Caleb. He holds out his hand, but doesn’t smile.
“It was a late night for Caleb,” Emily says, twisting to look at us. “That was a special thing, going to the airport.”
Caleb blinks, but says nothing.
“You don’t talk much, do you,” I say.
Justin, to my left, leans forward. “He just doesn’t want you to know he had a pee accident in his bed last night,” he says. He’s sort of smiling as he says it, and his mean gap-toothed smile grows when sweet little Caleb’s lower lip goes out and his eyes fill up with tears.
“It’s okay,” I whisper to him as I squeeze his bony knee. “I understand.”
I can tell that Justin hates me for saying this, but this is not a problem because I’m already beginning to hate this bratty little kid right back. More troubling, though, is the look I get from Tim in the mirror.
We drive away from the houses, into more trees. The spaces are older, storefronts are older, and we slow to join a line of cars turning into an older parking lot in front of a brick building surrounded by big trees. I see the words “Memorial Gardens” on the sign as we go past.
The funeral is outdoors, held in a place that seems—appropriately enough—to be designed exclusively for the pur-purpose of hosting funerals. Chairs are arranged, there’s a table set up with coffee and Styrofoam cups and bottled water, and the people arriving segregate themselves into two main groups: a gathering of family to the left, populated at the center by a cluster of tall, lean men, gray at the temples but still bearing a resemblance to Josh, and a younger group of friends to the right, more casually dressed and speaking in low voices. There are a lot of people her
e, but Emily and her husband and children don’t seem to align themselves with either group, and I feel seriously awkward standing with them, so I make my way toward the table to grab a bottle of water for some cover. As I do this, though, a man from the younger group comes toward me. His head is shaved and beaded with perspiration and he’s wearing two small hoop earrings, and I gasp when I make the realization that this is my old high school friend, the giver of my bedroom-hanging lithographs, Greg Murrant.
“Oh my God,” I say.
“Jess Zorich,” he says, and he wraps me in a respiration-stopping bear hug. “How are you? I heard you might be here.”
“You look so good, Greg.” It’s the first thing I think to say, and I feel like an idiot for it. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re nice. You haven’t changed. I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“Thank you.”
“When I heard what happened, I thought, oh Jesus, but then I saw the pictures of you online—”
“I don’t think I can talk about this, Greg. I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t. Stop. How’s Katie?”
“She’s good. She’s in the Southern Hemisphere.”
“That’s awesome,” Greg says, and he asks for no further clarification.
“You always liked Katie better,” I say.
“Not true. Actually, there really was no better or worse. Both Zorich sisters were equally unattainable by us mere mortals.”
As Greg is saying this, I see a woman go to Emily and give her a hug, then hold both of her hands as they nod and talk. Tim stands off a bit with the boys. Then Emily points to me and the woman looks in my direction and nods, then they embrace again and she walks toward me.
“That’s Josh’s mom,” Greg says.
She comes to me, a middle-aged woman, built like her daughter but carrying herself with certainty like her late son. “Jessica,” she says, and when I nod she takes me in her arms and says “thank you, thank you. I’m so sorry. I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“No,” I say, and for the first time today I feel like I might cry. “I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry for Josh.”
Jessica Z Page 26
