Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  I just need a yes or a no, he wrote. Please. Are you alive?

  He reached the bus stop just as his phone buzzed in his pocket.

  YES

  The wave of relief washed through his body, overwhelming him. He sagged against the bus shelter and wrote back, his fingers shaking.

  Where are you

  No response. He tried again:

  Are you okay

  Nothing.

  Suddenly he was angry at himself for even following up. He’d made contact, hadn’t he? That was all he had wanted. To know that Luke was alive. He didn’t care if Luke was okay. Luke wasn’t okay. That much was obvious. He had attacked his own mother, had wrenched bone from joint, had knocked the air from her lungs.

  He could have killed her.

  Alcohol didn’t do that to everybody. Whiskey made his father sleepy. Wine made his sisters giggly. Beer made Izzy and Brody horny. It never made any of them violent. It never made them smash bar mirrors or pee all over floors or take swings at their siblings or fail out of law school. Pup thought about how his mother had looked lying there in the mess on the dining room floor, clawing the air to pull it back into her lungs. How when she’d fallen, her skirt had flipped up and he’d seen the crackles of thin purple veins across her bare thighs. The way she had struggled to get up, her hair falling out of its bun, the twisted pain in her face and the odd angle of her drooping shoulder. And Luke’s suffering cry, how it had set Pup’s hair standing on end, and made him love his brother the most he had ever loved him at the exact moment he was hating him more than he’d ever hated anyone.

  Forget him.

  He could come crawling back when he was ready to stop being a drunk asshole, when he was ready to ask their mother for forgiveness. When he was ready to set things right. And if that day never came, so be it. Pup didn’t need Luke: he still had five siblings left.

  He turned off his phone and dropped it back into his pocket.

  24

  PUP LIMPED THE REST OF the way through his finals, scurrying from exam to exam down the most obscure corridors of the school, and this was how he successfully managed to make it to the last bell of his junior year without running into Izzy or Brody. He spent the first week of summer break looking at the world from behind his camera lens. Day and night he roamed Flanland, shooting roll after roll, shooting obsessively, relentlessly, throwing himself into his portfolio project with a single-mindedness that would have impressed even the most type-A Honors kid. His family didn’t know what to make of it. They weren’t exactly comfortable with the way he would suddenly appear, his stealthy entrance announced with the click of a shutter button, but they were so pleased and surprised that he had an interest other than Cubs baseball that they put up with it. Even when he wasn’t taking photographs, he was thinking about photography. He was reading about photography. He was talking about photography with Abrihet, in late-night marathon phone calls that were so long and intense and wonderful that for a while he could forget about the humiliating conclusion to his relationship with Izzy and the fear that gnawed at him whenever he let himself wonder for too long where Luke was staying and what Luke was doing. All of a sudden, art had become necessary: making it, studying it, thinking about it. Every press of the shutter release felt like a tiny refusal to accept that his life wasn’t completely out of his control, that at least part of his story was his to tell.

  Mr. Hughes had gotten special permission from the principal to allow Pup and Abrihet access to the darkroom over the summer to work on their portfolios. They had plans to meet there on a Saturday morning in the second week of break, and Pup couldn’t wait to stand beside her in that tiny space, working in absolute darkness in the belly of their summer-emptied high school, to drop their photo paper in the developing bath, agitating the liquid, creating soft ripples and watching together as their images began to come alive. Each chemical reaction felt like a miracle: With his own hands, he could turn a blank sheet of paper into a tiny mirror, a translation of life into pictures. It was the closest he’d ever come to saying a prayer and feeling like someone was actually listening.

  That Saturday morning, Pup arrived at school as planned, camera and film rolls weighing down his backpack, eager to get to work and forget everything that was happening in his real life. He waved to Anthony, the security guard, who glanced up from his Us Weekly magazine to wave back, and headed down the basement stairwell, down the long, empty art corridor toward the darkroom.

  But as soon as he opened the door and saw Abrihet working in the soft red glow of the safety light, he knew something was wrong. She agitated her photo paper through the developing chemicals listlessly, her head slightly turned, her gaze fixed on some faraway point. She didn’t even turn around when she heard him come in.

  “Abrihet?” Pup hovered near the door, unsure if he should even come in.

  “Hey.”

  “Are you all right?”

  There was a silence, amplified by their great solitude in the massive building.

  “My mom’s not coming.” Her voice was barely audible.

  “Oh no.” Pup closed the door softly behind him. “Why not?”

  She didn’t answer him. She just held the tongs and dragged the photo back and forth in the bath.

  “Was it something with the visa?”

  She shook her head. “I thought it was my dad. I thought it was his fault. I started screaming at him—I’ve never screamed at my father—and I was screaming at him and my auntie came in and she told me it wasn’t his fault at all. She said it wasn’t my dad and it wasn’t money and it wasn’t even the government or the documents or the application. It was her.” She turned to him suddenly, tears standing in her eyes. “The only reason she’s not here is because she doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t want to come. She says that some people are meant to go while others are meant to stay. She says she knows I’m in good hands, and that I should come visit her every year, and that she doesn’t want to leave her home, and her country, and all the family we have left there, and her mountains. Her mountains, James! Who wants to be with a mountain more than they want to be with their own daughter?”

  Pup just stood there. He didn’t know what to say. All he wanted to do was take the two steps across the room and put his arms around her. But he was held back by the memory of Izzy in the hallway after his Spanish exam. She had shrunk away from his touch with such complete disgust. Don’t touch me.

  “I don’t even know why I came here today,” Abrihet said, flicking away a tear as it skidded down her cheek. “I’m not going to regionals.”

  “What? But that’s crazy. Why not?”

  “I wanted to show her how well I’ve done for myself in this country. How hard I’ve worked, how much I’ve learned. How much the sacrifice was worth it.” She dropped the tongs and reached for her backpack. “But now that she won’t be here to see all that, it doesn’t matter.”

  “But that’s bullshit!”

  Abrihet froze, her backpack halfway to her shoulder.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s bullshit, Abrihet! You think I’m not going through some shit right now? My brother just . . . my family won’t . . . Izzy doesn’t . . .”

  “Izzy? You’re talking about that girl Izzy right now? This isn’t some silly little high school drama, James. This is my life. My mother.”

  “That’s not what I . . . I know it is.” He ran a hand through the tangle of his hair. “What about what Mr. Hughes says? About using art to articulate the emergency inside of you?”

  “We can’t all be Leonard Cohen, James. I don’t feel like articulating anything. I just feel like crying, okay?” She slid the strap of her backpack onto her shoulder, pushed past him, and opened the door.

  “So you’re just going to quit? Do you really think that’s going to make it better?”

  “You know what, James?” She turned to look at him, but the light from the hallway was flooding in all around her and he couldn’t make out the features of he
r face. “You have no idea what this feels like. You still have a mom in your life, okay?”

  “And you still have a brother in yours. You think I don’t know what it feels like to miss someone?”

  “I think,” she said quietly, “that you don’t even know me, or my family, or my life. I was stupid to believe that you ever could.”

  She stepped out into the hall and the door slammed behind her. Pup was alone again in the weak red glow of the safety light. He looked down at Abrihet’s photo paper, where it floated like a dying leaf on the rippling surface of the chemical bath. It was a picture she’d taken at the bus stop where they’d waited together the night of her aunt’s party. Across the street, centered in the frame, was the redbrick apartment building with its rows of grated windows that had been her first home in this country, where she had tossed and turned on her kitchen air mattress, reciting her English words in the strange American brightness, teaching herself to build a wall of language between herself and her mother. Pup picked up the tongs and lifted out the photograph, trying to salvage it, but it was too late. It had been so overexposed, it had returned to the white blankness from where it had started.

  Texture:

  the feeling of an actual surface

  25

  SEEING TEACHERS OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL always felt a little weird. At the beginning of his freshman year, Pup had run into his English teacher, Ms. Cole, at the public pool, wearing a bikini and running after one of her kids. For the rest of the school year, she’d be standing at the front of the room in one of her pink cardigan sets, talking about Edgar Allan Poe or whatever, and Pup would think about how awkward it was that he knew what her belly button looked like. But with Mr. Hughes, it was different, mainly because he didn’t really dress or act like a teacher even when he was in school, so you didn’t really expect him to dress or act like one outside of school. Which is why Pup was relatively unfazed when he went to meet his art teacher for coffee one afternoon in the middle of June and saw him leaning against the condiments bar looking like he’d just disembarked from a cruise ship: straw hat, Hawaiian shirt with big green macaws all over it, denim shorts, and a pair of sandals that looked like they were made out of rope.

  “Flanagan,” Mr. Hughes said, putting down his newspaper to shake Pup’s hand. “What are you drinking?”

  Pup looked up at the menu behind his teacher’s head. Americano? Mocha? Steamer? He panicked, scanning the board for an item he actually recognized.

  “Hot chocolate!” he read. “I’ll do one of those.”

  “Really? It’s ninety degrees, Flanagan.”

  “Oh. Right. What are you drinking?”

  “Iced coffee.”

  “Huh. Okay, I’ll have an iced hot chocolate.”

  Mr. Hughes stared at him, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “You’re an odd duck, Flanagan,” he said. “I like it. One iced hot chocolate, coming right up.”

  Drinks procured, they chose a table near the front window and sat down. Mr. Hughes looked at his watch.

  “I guess we’ll wait a few more minutes for Abby to show up before we start,” he said. “It’s not like her to be late.”

  “I don’t think she’s coming.” Pup stuck his straw between the fast-melting ice cubes in his drink.

  “Not coming? Why not?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  Mr. Hughes crossed his arms. Two bright-green macaws stared at Pup from the sides of his sleeves. “Tell me what?”

  “She’s not coming to regionals.”

  “What? Why the hell not?”

  “Well, she’s going through some . . . personal problems.”

  “Personal problems?” Mr. Hughes laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean? Life itself is one long personal problem!”

  “I agree.” Pup slurped his drink.

  “Well, did you try to change her mind?”

  “Yeah. When we were in the darkroom, we had a big argument about it and everything. But then she just kind of left.”

  “She left? Well, why didn’t you run after her?”

  “Because she didn’t want to talk to me!”

  “Well, have you tried calling her? Or, I’m sorry, I forgot you kids today don’t call each other. Have you tried texting her?”

  “Yes.” Pup peered into his drink.

  “Well? Did you get a response?”

  “No. And for the record, I also did call her. Four times, to be exact.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t answer.”

  “Well did you leave her a voice mail?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because voice mails are for old people!”

  Mr. Hughes ripped his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he stuffed them back on his face. The way he treated his glasses, it was a wonder he didn’t go through twenty pairs a year. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Let me think about this. We’ll talk about this later. For now, let me see what you got.”

  Pup took out the folder from his backpack and pushed it across the table. Mr. Hughes opened to the first page, tore off and replaced his glasses a few more times, and began to look through the stack of images. Pup sat across from him, drank his iced hot chocolate, and waited. Mr. Hughes took his time scrutinizing each shot. Sometimes he leaned back, other times he leaned forward, his face contorting into a series of squints, smirks, and scowls. At one point, he even reached into his teacher-satchel-man-purse thing and pulled out a magnifying glass to scrutinize the images even closer. Finally, when Pup was slurping up the last remaining granules of chocolate powder from the bottom of his cup, Mr. Hughes closed the folder and looked up.

  “Well,” he said, tearing off his glasses with a sense of finality.

  “Well,” Pup said.

  “I’m curious, Flanagan. What do you think about this portfolio?”

  Pup hated this teacher trick, when they turned the tables on you, asking how you’d grade yourself if it was up to you. But since it wasn’t up to you, the only reason they asked was so that you would insult yourself, saving them the trouble.

  “Well, uh, I mean, I’m not an expert, so I don’t know,” he answered. “But I thought some of the pictures came out pretty cool.”

  “Pretty cool,” Mr. Hughes repeated, skeptically rubbing his chin.

  “I guess.”

  “Well. I didn’t think they were cool at all.”

  “Oh, totally.” Pup spoke quickly, to cover for his sinking heart. “I get it.”

  “I thought they were remarkable.”

  “Sorry?” Pup, who’d been staring down at the boomerang pattern that danced across their linoleum table, looked up to meet his teacher in the eye.

  “Your attention to detail, your ability to trap a moment in time. Your mastery over lighting, over composition, over tension! And framing! And texture! Your point of view. The way you see people.” He was shaking his head, but not in the way Pup’s teachers usually shook their heads at him. It didn’t look like disappointment. It looked almost like . . . admiration?

  “Everyone in these photos, they’re people who are close to you, right?”

  “Yeah. Mostly.”

  “It’s like, you have found a way to honor them. All of them. To make the unremarkable extraordinary. This one, for example.” He pushed a photo of Pup’s mother across the table, the one he’d taken of her sitting in the kitchen after the dishes had finally been finished for the night and the counter wiped down with Windex. Her head was bowed, her gray hair was pulled back into a little bun at the nape of her neck, her colored pencils were lined up neatly on the table, and she was shading in the scales of a fish from the coloring book he’d bought her at the U of I campus bookstore. “I mean, my god, has the loneliness of motherhood ever been captured so well?”

  Loneliness of motherhood? Pup was fairly certain that his mom hadn’t been alone for more than ten minutes in at least forty years, if ever. How could she ever be lonely? He didn’t know what Mr. Hug
hes meant, but he certainly wasn’t going to argue the point. Besides, he loved that picture too, though he couldn’t have explained why.

  “And this one.” He tapped his finger on the corner of the shot of Luke and his parents at the beginning of that terrible fight. “This has so much emotional intimacy that it’s almost painful to look at.”

  Mr. Hughes shuffled through the rest of the pictures and then closed the folder.

  “You’re part of a big family, that right?”

  “Youngest of eight.”

  “Used to listening more than you talk?”

  Pup smiled. “I figured out a long time ago that in my family, if I try to talk, no one listens anyway.”

  “Well, that silence, that watching, that listening—it’s taught you to see like an artist. I’ve been trying to teach kids that kind of seeing for years.”

  He pushed the portfolio across the table.

  “I want you to hang on to this, Pup. Even after regionals are over. You’ll need it when you’re applying to art programs next year.”

  “Art programs?”

  “Yes, Pup. There are these things called universities. At them, you can choose to major in art.”

  James Flanagan, undergraduate. James Flanagan, bachelor of fine arts. He bit the inside of his cheek to control the stupid grin spreading across his face.

  “But don’t look too pleased with yourself, young man,” Mr. Hughes said, waggling his finger at Pup. “You’ve still got one more important job to do.”