“Sounds horrible doesn’t it?”
“Except for ‘hallelujah.’” He pauses, never breaking eye contact. “What about ‘verisimilitude’? Ever spell that one?”
Jason is staring, his fists still clenched. She will tell him everything. She will. She will take her time and hope that someday he will forgive her, that someday he might even understand how desperate she had been.
“V-e-r-i-s-i-m-i-l-i-t-u-d-e,” she says, and perches on the edge of the chair across from him. “It’s weird how well I remember that day so clearly but I remember almost nothing about the other one you read about.” She reaches and picks up one of the pages and moves her finger along the date: 1994. “I’ve tried. They questioned me for days, and I tried.”
She is about to say more, the fragments she did recall—broken glass, the sirens, the blood, how she remembers staring at that tag—sealy posturepedic, do not remove, 658939347—and she remembers her brother calling for her, looking for her when the rest of the house was suddenly quiet, saying over and over, “It was an accident,” and the way she saw his feet there by her bed, black Converse high-tops, his name inked in blue on one rubber toe, a star on the other, and there was blood where he had stepped and made his way into her room. She could hear him breathing hard. She could hear him whisper her name, telling her he was sorry, that it was an accident, that he would never hurt her. She is about to say all of that, to begin telling the story, how that was the last time she ever saw her brother, how as soon as she found a way to leave, she did, and how nobody looked for her and she never looked back.
The back door slams, and Harvey comes running into the house and down the hall, calling for her the way he sometimes does at night when he’s afraid—“Mom, Mom, Mom!”—but then when he sees Jason, he claps and screams and jumps on the bed, with slow old Peggy right behind him. “You’re home!”
“Hey, little dude.” Jason holds up his hand for a high five and then, without looking at Shelley, grabs and collects all the papers and stuffs them into his dresser drawer, all the while promising Harvey that they will go get pizza and maybe even add some more stars to the ceiling. Peggy, with slow, consistent paws, has made a nest of the bedspread, and both boys sit there hugging her tired old body. Shelley wants to spell probity, veracity, fidelity; she wants to come out from under the bed and make everything okay. She wants to promise them good things, to say something important that they will always remember, but there is no word for all that she is feeling, so she just stands in the doorway and waits.
Frank
Frank braves the rickety ladder and then is standing below and looking up into the trees and sky. Perhaps this is the view he needed most, one that feels untouched by time. There are no initials written in charcoal on the wall—no more matches or pennies—just some broken pieces of that old mason jar and the familiar earthy smell, the clammy walls, the view up and out into daylight and air. Right before he ran off, that strange kid asked if Frank wanted to see inside their house, and he heard himself say, “Next time.” He said that he needed to go soon, because he had left a note he shouldn’t have left; the kid said his mom had left a bad note and almost got fired, and then he asked if Frank thought he’d live to be real old—“Way older than you even,” the kid had said, “since so much stuff got mashed out.”
“Yes,” Frank had told him, “I think you’ll be way older than me.”
“I want to be as old as that turtle in China,” he had said, and Frank was about to tell him he knew all about that turtle, as well as the turtle from sixty million years ago—one of the pelomedusoides—found by someone in this very state. But another time. Next time.
“You’re just getting started,” Frank said. “You have so much to remember.”
And off the kid went, through the hedges and back into daylight, past the dogwood tree Frank’s mother had planted so long ago, past the view Frank looked out at as he sat by his mother when she was dying, her body embryonic as she curled inward, not unlike the slides he had routinely shown his classes, those earliest-discovered bodies on their left sides, in the fetal position, with their hands covering their faces, as if not to see what comes next.
He picks up one of the pieces of the jar, draws a circle in the dirt as he did many times when shooting marbles, then slips it into his pocket. People often need closure; they need to see certain people or say words they have meant to say and, for whatever reason, didn’t. His mother had apologized for taking him from his home, and Preston had to tell Frank what he had heard that night over seventy years before. Last words. People needing closure.
But not Lil. She just went to sleep and didn’t wake. There were no hiccups, no hearing voices or seeing people off in a corner, no smelling or hearing another place, as Frank’s grandfather had done. “Good night, Frank,” she had said, as she did every night, with a pat on his chest, a kiss on the cheek, and then she turned on her left side and went to sleep.
Perhaps she had said all she needed to say—in her notes and scraps and reminders—and maybe if he sticks around and pays attention, he will hear their private word; maybe she will still have something more to say. Becca keeps asking about their word and probably will again tonight when she brings his dinner, as she has done for the past two months while they go through things, and now he is filled with panic that he left that note.
Lil would be furious with him, both that he left such a burdensome goodbye in Becca’s hands and, more so, that he wrote their word for someone else to know. I don’t care if she is our daughter, she would say. That’s our word, our business.
The only thing worse than Lil mad was Lil afraid, and she had been afraid in this last year—a fear of loss, a fear of forgetting. He wants to tell her that he and Jeff have talked on the phone several times without a single argument, and he wants to assure her that he’ll check the weather in Boston every day, just as she always did. He wants her to know that recent articles offer proof that the Neanderthals were communicating with others after all, and that he’s sorry they didn’t get back to Florence, he’s so sorry, and he will never tell anyone their word and he will not hasten things. “Not today,” he says. “Not today.”
He looks at his watch and breathes a deep sigh; there’s enough time to get home before Becca arrives, enough time to stand here a little longer, the wall cool against his back as he breathes in the familiar damp smell and waits for that faraway whistle, waits as the train comes closer and closer—vibrations coursing through the earth as it passes—and then fades into the distance of the late afternoon and disappears on that northbound track.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to archival reports from the Boston Globe, the Fayetteville Observer, and the Robesonian for facts pertaining to the Cocoanut Grove Fire in 1942 and the train wreck in Rennert, North Carolina, in 1943, as well as the 1959 publication Fire in Boston’s Cocoanut Grove by Paul Benzaquin. Thanks to Chick Jacobs for directions to the train site, and immense gratitude to Bob Fisher, the former director of the Robeson County Library, who immediately searched the archives when he learned what I was working on. Thanks to the regulars in the Wesley Pines writing group for your shared stories and the inspiration you bring. For hometown memories, I want to thank Bill McLean, as well as the late Ann Culbreth, and the late Horace Stacey, who as a teenager ran telegrams in the aftermath of the crash. Invaluable thanks for feedback and conversation along the way to Wilton Barnhardt, Emma Beckham, Barb Bennett, Matraca Berg, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Belle Boggs, Marshall Chapman, Charlie Cuneo, Lisa Cupolo, Stephanie Donahue, Linda Dunn, Betsy Giduz, Marianne Gingher, Amy Hempel, Susan Irons, Elinor Lipman, Maureen Macneil, Louise Marburg, Allyssa McCabe, Jayne Anne Phillips, Steve Yarbrough, and Lee-Ann Yolin.
Thanks to my dear friend, Cathy Stanley, who has read my work in its roughest versions since we were fifteen. (Not enough thank-yous for that!) And to Lee Smith and Betsy Cox, who have generously given me their wise insights since 1977 and 1984, respectively.
Thanks to my sister
, Jan Gane, for her continued love and support, and to our mom, who is an inspiration. The train wreck was a vivid memory from my dad’s boyhood, and I have wished thousands of times that I could hear him talk about it—talk about anything—just one more time.
Thanks to Claudia and Rob—always—and to Alexander and Julian, Caroline and Julian, for the joys of family.
Great appreciation to my agent, Henry Dunow, and eternal thanks to my editor, Kathy Pories. What a pleasure and honor to get to work with you. Thanks to Elizabeth Johnson for her amazing copy editing and to Brunson Hoole and the entire Algonquin Staff.
And finally (but never least) thanks to my husband, Tom Rankin, whose love and support on our shared journey bring more joy and thanksgiving and adventure than I ever would have allowed myself to imagine. I am grateful.
Also by Jill McCorkle
Novels
The Cheer Leader
July 7th
Tending to Virginia
Ferris Beach
Carolina Moon
Life After Life
Stories
Crash Diet
Final Vinyl Days
Creatures of Habit
Going Away Shoes
About the Author
Jill McCorkle’s first two novels were released simultaneously when she was just out of college, and the New York Times called her “a born novelist.” Since then, she has published six novels and four collections of short stories, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories several times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her most recent novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, the Atlantic, and other publications. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2020 by Jill McCorkle.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059067
eISBN: 978-1-64375-053-8
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