by Sam Cooper
***{note: This story is comprised of two chapters from an abandoned novel I was working on last year. With a little more editing and some rewriting, I think it might work as an independent piece.}
Maureen Wolfe was awake long before the clock radio was set to go off, lying in the receding predawn and willing herself to go back to sleep. She was awake when Mark got up quietly from their bed to go to the gym and then to work, and, thinking she was still asleep, kissed her on the forehead. She was awake when the automatic coffeemaker downstairs turned on and filled the house with dark perfume. She gave up on finding more slumber, and reset the alarm before it could go off. Sitting up in bed, she folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes.
“Lord give me strength,” she whispered. “To get through this day.”
She reached under the shade and turned on the bedside lamp.
“Give me humility, give me patience.”
The wooden floor was cold on her feet when she swung them out of the covers. She rolled her head and stretched out her neck.
“Gimme gimme gimme.”
Maureen wrapped herself in a bathrobe and put on her slippers, and went downstairs to pour herself a cup of coffee. She opened the refrigerator and splashed some milk into the mug. The pincer tie from the bag covering the English muffin tray was removed, and fork was stabbed into one all the way around, and the halves were placed into the toaster. The sun was coming up. It cut a thick, oblique block of light into the air of the kitchen from the southeastern window. The tiled floor was harsh and icy and its cold drifted up into the legs of her pajamas. She turned on the little kitchen TV, adjusted its bent antenna, and switched through the channels to see, as Mark sometimes joked, if the world had ended yet. Not today. She switched it off, and it whined as the power drained from it. The English muffin halves popped up steaming in the toaster, and Maureen spread some apple butter on them and ate.
-
State Trooper First Class Caleb Simon was still riding the high of his graduation from Just Trooper Caleb Simon a few days prior, and had offered to take the night shift to prove it. His station mates were grateful. The middle hump of the month had passed; it was time to really start worrying about quotas, and the after-dark hours were the best for getting the old numbers up. But it was a horrible, cold night, a night to be spent inside with the family, with a warm meal and some tea and a movie or a magazine or some cats or dogs. Simon had none of those except for the warm meal, TV, and rags, and those could wait. The night was ahead of him. Nothing eventful likely to happen except maybe a speeding roadstop or two. Maybe some suspicious teenagers hanging around the loading dock of the supermarket, or at the very worst, attempting some petty act of vandalism. Not much escaped the eyes of the watchful community, and not much wrong was done. Especially not on a night like this.
No one called Trooper First Class Simon “Trooper First Class.” No one even called him “Trooper.” Those who knew his name called him Caleb, sometimes Cal, and those who didn’t called him “Officer.” Even in his own thoughts, he usually referred to himself as Officer Simon, a weirdly rigid habit that, in no insignificant way, made him feel like he truly inhabited the position of authority. Although it had been his lifelong dream to be a State Trooper, he had never liked the word. It felt somehow vulgar leaving the mouth. Officer was just fine. He was only Trooper (now TFC) Simon on his reports and to his superiors.
His badge seemed heavy with the official recognition of his three years of exceptional service. It felt good, even if the most exciting moments of three year’s exceptional service in somewhere like Tuscarora consisted mostly of breaking up barfights and being present on the scene for the benefit of overwrought, overzealous fender-benderers. Sometimes some theft to deal with, or loitering, or truancy. The vast majority of his time spent on speeding tickets, DUIs, trespassing. He hadn’t once in his service so far witnessed an unnatural death, a really thrilling felony. But that was fine by him, even if he admitted he was somewhat jealous of the dinosaurs’ war stories. It meant he, and the other guys, were doing their jobs.
Three year’s worth of anything added up. He was proud. On his way up. No one could argue against it. On the way to Sergeant now, and beyond. It was Fate. Every second of his life so far had existed to birth each new moment, and so it would be until the big messy timeline ended. This was something he had always remembered knowing, even if he didn’t always have the words put to it. It only got truer and truer. If his father was right about nothing else, as he likely wasn’t, he was right about that.
-
She put the mug down on the counter and went back upstairs, where she disrobed and stepped into the tub for a short shower. It was not relaxing, it was not energizing, it was simply routine. Looking in the mirror afterwards, Maureen rubbed a slender finger under her eye and stretched down the skin there. Not too bad this morning. She dried her hair and put on her clothes, an ensemble chosen solely for comfort: loose blouse, jeans, flat shoes. She sobbed briefly sitting on the edge of her bed, and then wiped away her tears and put on some makeup. She returned to her coffee, now lukewarm but still drinkable. The air was getting warmer. She downed the coffee, rinsed the mug out, and put it in the dishwasher.
The phone rang, but she did not pick it up. It was certainly the automated Central Substitute system, calling to inform her of an opening at some school or the other, and she refused to take any jobs today. She had, however, agreed to spend the first part of the day volunteering at Town Hall, helping to pack up some of the files into boxes before the Big Renovation that had been promised for years and was now finally peeking its head over the horizon. In reality, all it meant was a good thorough cleaning, and a new coat of paint on the walls inside and out.
She locked the heavy front door behind her and stepped out onto the wraparound porch, and the air was still cool enough to make her consider going back inside to get a jacket, but she didn’t. The trimmed grass around the stepping stones to the driveway was dew-wet and left little slashes of damp on the bottoms of her pant legs. She bent down at the flowerbed nearest to the house, and gathered up some black-eyed susans, and cut them close to the ground with a pair of gardening shears from the porch. The flowers were cold and wet from the night. She bent down again and plucked a long blade of fountain grass and wrapped it around the stems of the flower bundle and tied it in a bow in the front, something her mother had taught her in this very garden when she was a girl. She got in the van and put the flowers on the passenger seat and made the short drive to Main Street, where she parked in front of Town Hall. There were a few people out and about, and a schoolbus passed on the way to the high school.
Town Hall resided in the Old Bank Building, a crackled, white, two-story structure with a triangular roof at the south end of the western row of shops and business on Main. Maureen opened the door with the key Commissioner Stewart had dropped off at her house the night before and the little bell on the frame chimed. Inside, there were towers of cardboard boxes leaning amongst the desks. The vault’s ornate steel door was open, and inside were some of the Town Hall’s filing cabinets, whose contents she would be transferring. She took an empty box from the stack into the vault and placed it in the middle of the floor, and then opened the bottommost drawer of the nearest cabinet and began to pack its contents away. Soon the box was filled and she moved on to another, and then another. A small stack grew at the entrance to the vault.
She skimmed over everything she unfiled, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of a desire to kill time. Mostly the filing cabinet was filled with minor documents, deeds and licenses, some of them dating back to the thirties and farther. Placed seemingly at random among them were more interesting artifacts: a few yellowed death certificates, a green folder of newspaper clippings relating to Tuscarora’s now long-defunct baseball team, and a paper-clipped bunch of brittle photographs, each one placed in an individual plastic protector. There were some fuzzy landscapes and family gatherings, some nineteenth century daguerreotype portraits with the painted fabric backdrops and the name of the studio embossed on the border of the print, and a plastic envelope filled with around a dozen miscellaneous shots. The one that most intrigued Maureen was a small print, maybe from the twenties or thirties, showing an old man with a violin. He was dressed in a skinny black suit, with a high starched collar, and a bowler hat. The smile above his bushy white goatee was wide. His expression was one of pure joy as he held the fiddle to his chin, bow poised to strike. It made her smile, to wonder who he was, who took the picture, where he was headed all dressed up with his shining instrument.
In the back storage room of the building, taking a break to weep quietly, she considered stealing it; no one would miss it from this unmarked, unorganized wreck. But she would never do anything like that. It just wouldn’t be Christian of her. When she returned to the vault, the photo was placed in its own individual protective plastic protector. The whole bundle was placed in a cardboard box as the front entrance chimed.
Janet Hendrickson, from four houses down, came in through the door at noon, right on time, to relieve Maureen. “Here I am,” said Janet, and she looked around. Maureen came out of the vault to greet her. “Wow, this place is in a state.”
“Yes.”
“Wishing you hadn’t agreed to this at last month’s meeting?”
“No, it’s not too bad.” Yes. I am wishing that.
“That’s good.” Janet wound her way through a few box skyscrapers, and hugged Maureen tightly when she reached her. “How you doing?”
“I’ve been better.” Maureen hugged back.
“You going out there today?”
“Yes. I was about to go over to the hardware store and pick some new wire for the flowers.”
“We’re all thinking about him today. He’s in our prayers. So are you and Mark and Marie.”
“Thank you.”
Janet unwrapped her arms from around Maureen’s body and wiped a tear from her eye. “Well,” she said, sighing. “I better get to boxing if this place is gonna get cleared out by Saturday.”
“She’s calling home this afternoon, you know.”
“Marie?”
“Yes.”
“Well that’s good.”
“We haven’t heard from her since the week we moved her into her dorm. She’s very busy, and seems to be having a great time.”
There was a long pause. The women looked around at the cardboard chaos.
“This seems like a lot of trouble for a new coat of paint, if you ask me,” said Maureen.
“Agreed.”
They said goodbye, and Maureen gathered up her purse and walked outside. The bright sun made her glad she had not brought a sweater. She felt eyes on her as she made the short distance to the hardware store. They meant well.
She went in, and found the gardening supplies aisle. The wire she was looking for was not immediately visible, but she found it hanging on the rack behind a spool of thicker wire. When she brought it to the counter, she saw a display full of permanent markers, and picked out a black one, thinking it would be good to have with her in case the lettering needed re-touching. She would throw it away immediately afterward. At the register, Ken Edwards smiled at her with warm eyes and said today it was on him. She thanked him and left.
-
Simon’s cruiser was parked out of the way, in a wide pseudo-alley next to Town Hall, the windows starting to fog with his body heat and the steam rising out of the travel mug in the cup holder, drops of moisture forming and rolling slowly down the inside of the glass. Waiting like a crouching lion. Or a cheetah. Cheetahs are faster. Definitely predatory. Headlights off, like feline nightvision eyes half-closed in feigned safe sleep. Biding its time, ready to pounce and devour. Simon tried not to think like this too often; it made him feel like a child. But sometimes alone on patrol like this, his action-movie-raised id broke through and it was just too fun not to let it, especially when time passed as slowly and boringly as it did now. The radar was on, and registering nothing, as it had all night. No one really out tonight, at least not the kind of people the radar was interested in. The scanner scanned and its little sieve speakers droned with static and voices mostly just chitchatting over the line. The rain had slowed to a mist, and it made frosted glass out of the windshield. Simon switched on the wipers for a single sweep, when they returned to their ports at the hood of the car, nothing was revealed on the street beyond. Might as well close his eyes for a few minutes of sleep. But that would be unprofessional, unrepresentative of the now-heavy badge pinned on the cotton-poly blend of his uniform’s chest. The dispatcher’s tin can voice coming through the radio speaker was calling for him, and he picked up the talkbox and pressed down the button and said he copied
“We got an Eleven-Seventy-Nine on Route Six South outta Tuscarora. Nine-one-one call from male driver. Please proceed to scene and remain until ambulance arrives. Serious injury reported.” Well that’s something.
Officer Simon copied and put down the box, started the engine and turned on the flashers. He left the sirens off. Not needed, not at this hour, especially not on a night like this.
He pulled out onto Main and zoomed through town, the wheels’ shushing audible over even the engine and the scanner. The focus he had become accustomed to in the last three years crept in at the sides of his mind, a kind of tunnel vision that forced his view forward, and yet made him acutely aware of every tree and fencepost that whizzed by as the cruiser accelerated. Plant life on either side became a sequence of blurred and bleached-out still photos in the strobe of the cruiser’s light bar, and the road ahead existed only as a pool of warm asphalt in the Venn diagram of the headlights, leaking out of the voidal night. He had been driving for a few minutes before the singlemindedness let up a little bit and he was able to think a little ahead. This wasn’t going to be good. At the very best, a shook-up teenager (with overreactive parents just down the line) or a cranky geriatric. At the very worst… well, cross that bridge when he got to it. Wasn’t going to be good, that was for sure.
Simon saw the glow of the taillights before anything else: a diffuse hellish glow emanating unearthily through silhouetted trunks. The cruiser rounded the big curve and the car came into view: mangled amongst the trees. His breath caught in his throat and all the adrenaline pumping through his tight veins and the folds of his brain sank to his stomach where it remained bitterly. He was right; it was bad. He parked the cruiser across the road from the scene and left the flashers on, and their pulse mixed with the hellish red taillights and gave the woods a sinister funhouse double-vision shake. He opened the door and got out, puffing his cheeks and blowing air through pursed lips. He went to the trunk, opened it, grabbed three flares. This was a bad spot: both directions of the curve were completely blind. The road was wet. It was worth the miniscule temporal detour to throw a couple flares down and avoid being hit by some distracted rubbernecker drawn like the proverbial moth to the flashing blue lights. People respected flares, and always slowed for them. Something about the fire, caveman instinct or something. . The flares were popped on and sputtered bright and smoky. Simon looked both ways down the dark arboreal tunnel that was the country highway and trotted to each end of the curve, placing a flare there and at the apex on the center double line. Then he headed to the automobile in the trees. It was bad, all right.
-
She had now reached the point that the entire day revolved around, and the point she was most hesitant to engage. The van waited for her, almost goading in its parking space. Her hands were suddenly shaking, her eyes wild. She approached it warily, and then opened the door and got in. When the key was turned in the ignition, the radio swelled into full volume, but Maureen turned it off. It didn’t seem right. She put the van into reverse, backed it out onto Main, and her brain, sensing fragility, switched into a state of smooth self-preservation.
-
The car was small, a Camry maybe. It was hard to tell. The front was crumpled slightly off-center-to-the-passenger-side in a grotesque, rounded V, the concavity matching exactly the thickness and shape of a now-scarred tree about five yards from where the car rested: driver’s side against another, smaller tree. The crumpling was more like a gash; an ugly, wrinkled empty space reaching halfway or more up what used to be the hood, dripping metallic innards. The front wheels leaned drunkenly in towards each other, and the windshield was solid spiderwebs of crack and shatter. The roof was smashed in as well, although not nearly as extremely as the front. It was a mere widthwise dent in comparison. The front windows were blown out. It was a Camry, all right. Engine was still hot and steamed and sputtered in the misty atmosphere. No gas was olfactorally evident, which was pretty damn surprising, considering the damage. Still, best not to venture to close with any flare.
Simon, now self-proclaimed Old Hat at recreating, at least roughly, the timeline of an automobile incident, had a flash of what had happened:
Camry comes along, doing maybe sixty-to-seventy, driver goes into the big curve too fast, applies brakes, skids on wet pavement, loses control, goes head-on into first tree, severely damaging front of vehicle and probably causing most serious of whatever injuries may have occurred, car swings around tree and catches some kind of air and flips onto driver’s side, travels short distance to second tree, where roof hits trunk with considerably less force than initial first-tree impact but probably accounting for the absence of the passenger and driver windows, car crashes back down onto the wheels (or what’s left of them at this point) on the earth, kicking up a small cloud of steam, mud, and damp leaves. And then probably the quiet as the shock sets in, and the woods settle down and then there’s just the sound of the shredded vehicle hissing and maybe a groan or moan from the driver’s seat.
-
The drive to the sharp curve just outside of Tuscarora was automatic, vacant. She tried to avoid that stretch of road as much as possible, but it was hard when there were only three possible routes out of town. Sometimes she had to go south. She felt numb. Her eyes barely saw the pavement as it whizzed by. Her mind hardly perceived the town ending into the cornfields ending into the woods. Her hands worked in a blessedly mechanical way, guiding the van to stop in the clearing across from the spot. Her legs swung themselves out of the door. Her arm reached for the flowers, the wire, the marker, and her brain switched back on.
She looked down and up the curve, listened, heard nothing but the breeze and far-off birds and the groan of old wooden limbs. She crossed the road, breathing hard, her ribcage pounding.
The cross was radiant against the rough mud color of the treebark. It was nailed there at about heart height, and around its base were the faded remains of flowers, notes, balloons, photographs, stuffed animals. All the little objects from last year had been sun-bleached into the same bone meal color. They were dry and brittle with road residue. There were a few new offerings: a sealed letter, three roses, and a plush lion. Not as many as last year. The scene appeared soft to Maureen, as if observed through a Vaseline lens. She realized she had started to cry. Not sob. Her mouth was not twisted into a grotesquery of anguish, but her eyes were blurred and a steady stream of tears ran from their corners. On the cross was written: “In Loving Memory of Michael Scott Wolfe.”
-
Officer Simon came up to the passenger side of the once-Camry with flashlight out and pointed, and bent down, stomach flesh pressing into the sharp top of his belt as he peered in through the window frame. There were papers and trash and CDs strewn around the interior as if a tornado had occurred, ridiculously isolated, inside. It looked like something out of a gag, and would have been almost funny, if the debris hadn’t been covered in a droplet spatter of crimson. There was no evidence of any airbag deployed. The driver sat slumped in his seat, breathing wetly and moaning slightly with every exhale. Blood ran from his mouth and face and soaked the entirety of his shirt. He looked up slow and agonized into Simon’s flashlight.
He was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen. His hair was dark and matted and wet, and the one eye visible was brown. The word that came to Caleb Simon’s mind with regards to the boy’s face was “ruined.” All he could figure was that this fragile visage had come into sudden and violent conflict with the steering wheel. The left half of the face was literally concave, and blood flowed freely from split skin. It was already starting to swell; the left eye was puffed shut. The shattered nose was, somehow, horribly, both smashed inwards and bent into a ghastly angle towards the right side of the face. The mouth was pulled taut and open in a near-silent, painful grimace, over teeth oranged with blood and the pulpy places where teeth used to be. How the fuck did this kid make the 911 call? But there was the bloodied cell phone, still open and clutched desperately in a hand so still and tense as to suggest rigor mortis. There was a steady stream of black-red falling down into the kid’s lap and Simon followed it up to its source at the top of his skull. The dent in the roof translated into a solid sag in the ceiling of the interior, which reached its inverse peak in the space where the crown of an upright driver’s head would usually be. The dark and the hair made assessing the trauma to the skull impossible. How the fuck was this kid even conscious? Rivulets of blood ran from hairline and down over the unnatural, severe dimples of the mashed face, to the chin and dripped down. The air smelled metallic and corporeal. The overall impression was: meat. He could only imagine what horrors had occurred internally, as a human body, with all its organs and fluids and bones and tissues, came to an unmerciful halt after traveling happily along at a great speed, in all probability coming into contact with any number of automotive surfaces and objects seemingly designed to inflict as much harm on living flesh as possible. Meat.
-
Maureen went about her duties carefully and quickly. It wasn’t safe standing on the side of this shoulderless country road. Cars slowed as they passed. Dead leaves were brushed off the arms of the cross, and a chokeweed vine was pulled away. She was glad she bought the marker; some of the letters’ paint had chipped off, and she filled in the gaps. She pressed the flowers against the vertical board of the cross, and wrapped the wire around their stems and the cross and the tree. When she passed the spool behind the tree, she could barely reach around its trunk to hand it off from one hand to the other. Hugging the tree in this fashion, she felt nothing but a freezing revulsion, and nearly jumped back when the wire was safely in the front again. It was necessary to embrace the monster three times before the job was done. She had forgotten to bring the shears or some scissors, so she bent the wire back and forth on the spool until it snapped at the desired place. Taking a step backward, she arranged the black-eyed susans to fan out attractively under his name. She, if she was capable of such a thing at a time like this, admired her handiwork.
Closing her eyes and grasping one hand in the other, she prayed. But no sentences or invocations of His name were included. It was no prayer that could be learned in any church. It was the prayer that lies gestating inside every human being from birth, a seed of grieving meditation that sprouts once or several times in every life. Sometimes too early, sometimes late enough to transmit the illusion of being fair. Never expected or embraced. Maureen stood at the curve in the terrible road, sending bright warmth from her being like a weapon against the thick darkness that threatened to overcome her every, and especially this, day. She sent it to her son’s memory, and his spirit, and the warmth that reflected off his memory, his spirit, flooded reciprocally into her and was bittersweet comfort, and at the very least, she felt like somehow she could survive for another day. Every tear that fell from her face carried with it any one of the blackest moments in the last five years, and although she knew they would accumulate again, and soon, she felt lighter. She opened her eyes, pressed a finger to her lips, and placed it in the center of “Michael.” Then she walked back across the road, started the van, and drove to the house she called home.
Up in the room her husband and she shared, she took a half hour to collect herself. She removed the dripped mascara and the other makeup she had on with cold cream, and changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt. She rinsed her face in icy water.
Downstairs, she slid a voluminous novel off one of the bookshelves in the dining room, and, wanting her attention to be taken up by something other than the fact of her solitude in the empty house, drew her legs up onto the couch in the living room and read. More than two hours slipped featurelessly by, with only the sound of the hallway grandfather ticking and thin pages turning breaking the still of the air. Then, at three, as promised, the phone rang.
Maureen was not surprised or startled, and got up to answer it. “Hello,” she said.
“Hey Mom, how are you doing?” Maureen was startled, however, at how distant her daughter’s voice sounded. It was like an echo without the repeat.
“Okay. Well, no. Bad, really. But I guess I’m okay. So, yes, okay.” Her voice caught momentarily in her throat. “How about you, honey?”
“The same. It’s a tough day.”
“Yes.”
“Did you go out there?”
“Yes. I got back a few hours ago.”
“Anything new this year?”
“Yes. A letter, a stuffed lion, and some roses. Not much.”
“But something. This is the way it goes, I imagine. Less every year.”
“I wish you could have been there. Or your father.”
“Me too.”
There was a very long pause while two generations of women shared a near-psychic connection of sorrow over the telephone wires. The white noise on both ends was like the ocean, and came in quiet waves as mother and daughter breathed. Finally: “How is school?”
“Oh, it’s great. I never thought I would love it this much.” Marie’s voice lightened.
“I’m so happy to hear that.”
“I know it sounds cheesy, but all the ideas… it’s so different from Tuscarora. People think here.” There was a tiny note of gleeful sarcasm in her voice.
“Welcome to college. How are your classes?”
“Good. Critical Methods in the Study of Literature is a little rough, but I think I’m managing okay.”
“Are you keeping up your studies?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Sorry. I’m a mom. I have to ask.”
“Yeah.”
“Still getting along with your roommate? What was her name?”
“Rachel. And yes. In fact, she and I have become fast friends.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.”
“I’m thinking about getting involved with the theater department if I can.”
“Oh, Marie that would be wonderful. I’m sure I’ve told you, but when-”
“Shoot.”
“What?”
“There’s someone at the door. I think it’s John. We’re going out to a club tonight. I have to go.”
“Wait, who is John? What kind of club?”
“I’m sorry Mom, I have to go. Give my love to Dad. Maybe I’ll call later. Bye!”
“Alright, but Marie-” The line was dead.
Maureen hung up her end of the line and could only shake her head and smile as she walked back to the couch in the living room. Spreading her wings, indeed.
Sitting down and putting her feet up, she glanced around the room, and she felt unwelcome, small in the big old house. The angles of the corners were harsh and cold. She lay down, placed her head on a corduroy pillow. The walls’ planes and shadows were suddenly alien. There was no homely kindness here, no life anymore. The memories soaked into the paint and wood and plaster were now stale, and left the air tasting burnt. She knew now that she was completely incongruous with this space, this house that she used to call home. She drew her knees up to her chest, and squeezed her eyelids shut so tight that little concentric circles of light burst behind them. The day overwhelmed her and she fell asleep.
A few hours later, Mark came home and woke her up by lightly touching her shoulder. She started and bolted upright on the couch, looked at him like a wounded horse before recognizing him and placing a hand over her heart.
“You were asleep,” he said gently, sitting down on the cushion at her feet. His jacket was off, but his tie was still pulled to near-strangulation tightness.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry I startled you.”
“It’s okay. I was having a bad dream.”
“You were saying something, but I couldn’t make it out.”
“Hm.”
“Anyway, I’m glad I’m home.” He bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. She leaned into him automatically, accepted the kiss.
“Hm.”
Maureen watched his scarecrow figure disappear down the hall, and heard his light footsteps ascend the stairs. The house was dark, and the air was cool. She had forgotten about dinner; there was no meal planned, and honestly, she had no intention on planning any. She sat back in the couch and stretched her arms. Mark ambled down the stairs in jeans and a white t-shirt and stocking feet, and joined her in the living room.
“I could fix some dinner,” he offered, trying sweetly to bribe her. “Or we could get carry out.”
“Okay.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about Chinese?”
“Okay.”
He ordered their meal on the phone, getting for Maureen her usual, and then drove into town to pick it up at Oriental Dynasty in town. She waited with her book for a while, and then set their places in the kitchen with two paper plates, paper towels, and tablespoons for serving. Mark returned shortly, and arranged on the table several white cartons from the plastic bag they had given him to carry it all in, and set out the little plastic tubs of dumpling sauce and the two sets of joined bamboo chopsticks. They sat down and he dug into his cashew chicken, and she into her lo mein, and they dipped the pork dumplings into the thin oily sauce. It was silent for some time. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was; she hadn’t eaten since that morning.
“I wish you would have come today,” she said quietly.
Mark put his chopsticks down and wiped his mouth as if defeated. He sighed and looked into his wife’s eyes. “Me too. But you know it wasn’t possible.”
“It’s been five years. That’s a biggie.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Work, work.”
“Yes. Work. I miss him just as much as you do.”
“I know.”
“I was a mess all day.”
“I was too.”
“How was it out there?”
“Okay. Someone brought a few things.”
“I’ll drive by tomorrow.”
“I think we should move.”
Mark, who had begun eating again, interrupted his chopstick’s trip to his mouth. “What?”
“I think we should move.”
“I heard you. Why?”
“Look around.” He did. “This isn’t home. At least not anymore.”
“It looks like our kitchen, our home.”
“No it doesn’t. It’s a home. Its status as ours has been slipping away for some time now, and dissipated for good when Marie left.”
“Hm.”
“Lets move out farther in the country, where no one knows us. The next county, maybe out of state. A smaller house. This place is too big for us. It was always a little too big for us, this family. We can pick up and move tomorrow if we wanted to.”
“No, we couldn’t. I’m a manager at the bank now. I can’t just up and leave.”
“You have responsibilities.”
“Yes, I do. And I could do without the sarcasm. Not everyone has a job tailored for a nomadic lifestyle. I’ve built a career here.”
“Fine. Let’s not fight.”
She had caught it just before it tumbled down the precipice. They knew each other well, and both were secretly relieved, even if they projected chilliness for a few minutes of silence afterwards. The meal was finished, and Mark cleared the table. On his way back the trashcan, he stood behind Maureen and rubbed her shoulder apologetically. She leaned her head down to his arm in acceptance. She rose from the table and followed him into the living room to spend the rest of the night basking in the light of the TV, hoping to banish the darkness with the ghostly tricolor illumination.
-
“Jesus Christ,” breathed Officer Simon.
There was a sound coming from the split lips of the boy, something in the dead middle of the spectrum between a gurgle and a howl. But quiet, terribly quiet.
“Alright.” Simon had to fight back the urge to be sick. “Hang in there. An ambulance is on its way.”
“I…” the kid seemed to be saying, every breath now a sanguine sputter. Or maybe it was just ah.
“Don’t talk. Just hang in there.” The cop tried the door. Of course, jammed by the crumpled roof. The driver’s side would be as well, even if it wasn’t flush with the treetrunk. And if he somehow could get the kid out, what then? Who knows what kind of unspeakable damage had been done to his body. Moving him so impulsively would be idiotic. But it was maddening, to just bend by the window and watch the warm life drain out of this young body.
“I…” The kid was crying too, or at least Simon thought he was. It was hard to tell with the sweat and the blood and the mist coming in the windows. The one open eye was swiveling wildly, frantically, terrified. Moisture running out. The breaths were coming shallower.
“Just calm down, now. Everything’s going to be okay. You’ll be okay.” He looked desperately southward down the curve of the road, searching for any sign of flashing lights or the faintest hint of sirens. Nothing.
The eye stopped swirling in its socket and fixed on Simon’s face. The pupil’s aperture constricted in the beam of the flashlight “I…” The kid’s tongue pushed into the empty space where teeth had recently been. “…know.” Or was it no? Simon preferred the former. The lips pulled back again into the grimace.
“Shh.” Simon was going to puke. Not because of the blood or the meat or anything, but the feeling. He swallowed hard, tried to focus. Where the hell was the ambulance?
There was silence now for a few moments and Officer Simon and the young driver just breathed. The trooper allowed himself a short visual break from the gore in front of him. He stood up straight and scanned the darkness all around. The engine was cooling; there was less hissing from front of the car. Somewhere in the woods a twig snapped, under the foot of a deer or raccoon, or maybe just from the stress of some unseen pressure or the cold air. There was a sudden and malicious gust of wind that howled through the open spaces of the vehicle’s frame. The flares in the road sputtered, no passing cars for them to warn. Both human bodies shivered. The kid made a small sound and Simon leaned down to him.
“Th…” Again, the tongue in the bloodied gums. It was sickening. “This… hurts.” The s’s spraying a fine mist of red against the inside of the windshield.
“What does?”
“Ev-every…thing…” Breaths like Morse Code. This was getting real bad, real fast. The kid wasn’t going to last much longer. Simon could feel frantic acid bubbling in his stomach.
“Look, I’m gonna go see where the hell that ambulance is.” The one eye wide with terror. “You hang in there. Stay with me. I’ll be right back.” He straightened and turned towards his cruiser.
From inside the wreck, weakly, moistly: “…no…”
Officer Simon ran to the road and through the sulfur smoke of the flares back to the cruiser, and radioed dispatch and asked about the status of the ambulance just as the sirens became audible through the woods. The lights came into view, and when the ambulance pulled up on the side of the road and parked, the flashers mixed with those of the cruiser and the combined illumination was syncopated and disorienting. Simon and the EMTs hurried to the Camry, but when their flashlights met the boy’s eye, the pupil was unflinchingly dilated and still.
Sitting in his cruiser, watching through rain-beaded glass at the boy being loaded into the ambulance in a black zippered bag, Simon ran the license plates of the Camry. Actually registered to a one Mrs. Maureen Wolfe. There was a number listed, a number he was going to have to call in a moment. What was he supposed to say to her? That he felt so bad, he felt so sorry for her loss? He didn’t feel anything like that. All he felt was cold.
