November 26 - This is what was left when he was gone

The number 21. What could twenty-one possibly mean; it is only a symbol after all, and only we imbue it with meaning. It evoked the legal drinking age, a sort of honorary adulthood even once the threshold of eighteen was passed. More than that, it hinted today at a mark of greatness. The number 21. White outlined in gold, on a burgundy background. The jersey hung in his locker still, inert, no breeze here. That is how I imagined it anyway, that day, imagined that it hung and that on the stool below the peg were the cleats. There was dirt on them still, stains of white chalk; they had been used, lived in, propelled by feet running on their way to greatness. Yes. The hulking shoulder pads, the shining burgundy helmet, the protective armor that was meant to ensure safety. None of these things, of course, could protect him in the end. They still came in, dove in, to hamstring him, hungry wolves with teeth gnashing, the flesh ripping, tearing loose tendon from bone with their sharp fangs. No, not fangs; that is a butcher’s knife there, blade down in the mattress so the down fluffs up from the comforter in the first snow of the season and settles on the bed and creates an icy chill in the air before it should be this cold. He should leave, but he has never left the neighborhood; something said he still belonged here. Was his girlfriend scared? Yes, I imagine she must have been scared, but still he thinks, “I’ll tend to my home. The team can travel without me.” It is right, deems the coach, it is the honorable thing to do. And so today, the burgundy jersey hangs here, inert, unworn, and the teammates walk past and avert their eyes, strong men who have been reduced to staring at the floor like shy little children as they move past because sometimes truth hurts too much to look at. Burgundy to hide the blood, gold to adorn the spirit inside. Burgundy to mask the flood that gushed forth from the artery that sucked out his life.

Wrong, wrong, this “burglary” this. These few objects adorning this locker, this is what was left when he was gone, shapes not bubbled out without the man’s living form to fill them, the chest heaving with the exertion after the play that propelled his name to the greatness. The few objects, waiting in a locker that he won’t walk past again, while the teammates file out to practice for a game that won’t quite make as much sense this week. He would have wanted us to play, they say in consolation, clapping one another on the back, shoulder, slapping hard to hide the pain. Black upon black, I imagine the team wears, deep mourning for the stinking, black, heaving wrongness of this, this “burglary.”

This. Because it is not just these few objects in the locker left behind. This, because he was not just teammate. He was pere, fils, I think at the gym, because the words seem more innocuous in French, easier to swallow somehow, but the English translation marches inexorably across my brain. Father, son, they say. This, this, is what is left behind.

Half-man, half-beast, ferocious. Half-lived. Words used to describe more than a life, but a presence, a factor. Let us not idealize; no one has come here to read empty platitudes or exaggerations. Because it didn’t matter at the end of the day, that there were agents fired off, or that there was (or was not) that vicious spat of phlegm. These things can be wiped clean. Because nothing can be left behind when life is sucked out before it is time, no matter how empty or full that locker. This death makes strong men’s eyes weep, as they collapse against a woman for a hug that no one else quite knows how to give, as they gather around the virtual forums they have created to share in a grief they were not prepared to have. Strangers, words made into holding hands, ribbons fluttering on virtual chests. He flatlined, said the one in a panic. Once. No twice. The rumors fly back and forth through the cybersphere. Bated breath, updates checked at early hours of the morning when people should have found their beds, but all eyes now are on a hospital bed that no one can see. He gave a squeeze to the doctor’s hand! Woke up? Yes! Responded to doctors. Out of his coma. And for a moment, one, there is hope.

No, says another, he has just come to say goodbye.

So tell me where is sense in this: to be deemed number one in a county, to reap the honors, the awards, that hang now in a home wrenched open and gutted, the threshold crossed, these metal plaques the witness to what might have happened in the moment before a life was lost. Tell me where is sense in this: a fifth overall draft, destined for glory, destined to Live. Yes live. Where is sense in leaving the mewling eighteen-month old babe in her cradle, the girlfriend huddled under the sheets, the goose down comforter snowing where the knife blade still slashes a thick gash through the bedclothes, the front door open, the helicopter chopping its way through the night, the cell phone dialed with fumbling fingers because the phone cord was cut.

It is a sick joke that a simple injury, no career-ending pains here, sidelined him, flatlined him. I won’t fly this weekend, coach, we imagine him saying now, and home sweet home, home safe home becomes burgundy bloodbath. So where is sense in this.

Twenty-four. That is the number hanging bold and black now, only twenty-four short years that a man who should have been legend can now claim to his name. Things far worse than this bloodshed went wrong in those twenty-four years if they can render life into death, and lead to such burgundy blood spilling onto the carpet, such sickness this, such waste of a life before it is time.

November 20 - The booth in the corner

When Rose was little, her family would eat dinner at the diner downtown every Sunday. They always sat in the same booth in the corner, the father against the wall, the mother next to him, and the two little girls facing opposite, away from the diner’s door. The seats were upholstered in a cherry-red, and a small glass vase with one, sad looking, downturned flower slumping to one side adorned the tabletop. Rose and her sister would perch with their bums on the edge of the booth because otherwise they couldn’t reach the plastic top of the table. They loved the yellow and red squeeze bottles for the ketchup and mustard, and the placemats that the waitress brought over – often a different woman, but always with the same ponytail and same perpetual wad of snapping gum in her mouth, it seemed – along with crayons for them to color. Rose and her sister would ignore the dinner of hot dogs and French fries that their mother ordered for them, preferring instead to dig their spoons into the tins of jelly in the condiment stand. “Girls!” their parents would scold, as Rose and her sister stared with strawberry smeared smiles of delight at one another, and plunged the tips of their silver spoons back in for another taste of the flavored corn syrup.

When Rose got a little older, the diner was the place to go with friends after school. They felt big and daring for going out alone, even though in the backs of their minds they must have known their parents knew exactly where they were, and that the diner was a safe destination within one block of their homes. They would order milkshakes – or, on a double-dare, one of the gigantic sundaes – and sit in the corner booth and eat until their stomachs ached, from too much ice cream or too much laughter either one. They were rude to the servers because fifth graders always have an inflated sense of their own importance, and they laughed uproariously at their own cleverness when they tipped the waitress one penny, leaving Abe smirking up from the receipt on the tabletop. “It’s worse than not tipping at all!” they crowed with delight, scampering away in vindictive childishness, and the waitress – whoever she was – would pick it up and shake her head at the children’s behavior, her ponytail wagging back and forth like a tsking finger.

When Rose reached high school, she brought her boyfriend to the diner on their first date. Most of the girls were content to let the boys decide where to take them, but Rose insisted she was in charge, grabbing the boy – we forget his name – by his hand after school and marching him to the corner booth. They sat staring at one another awkwardly across the plastic table top. Rose tried to act as she imagined her older sister might, and demurely ordered an iced tea, but she also got a plate of mozzarella sticks. “You have quite the appetite,” her date said. He had never seen a girl order more than a salad on a date. They shared one of the chewy, bread-crumb coated sticks, the string cheese joining their mouths in a Lady-and-the-Tramp across the table, so that they held one another first through mozzarella, not through their flesh or their lips. “You’re not like the other girls,” he said in a strange, accusatory way, and Rose wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. She stared down at her hands on the tabletop. They looked suddenly strange; new, adolescent hands that had sprouted little hairs on the knuckles. Did other women grow hair this way when they reached their teens, she wondered, curling her fingers under and placing them in her lap. She hoped he thought it was just to rearrange her napkin.

When Rose was a senior, her cluster of girlfriends liked to go to the diner on Sunday mornings to cure a hangover from the night before. They ordered chocolate chip pancakes and heaps of hash browns, and sipped at coffee that was as black as mud and roughly the same consistency. They talked about how they wanted to keep having weekends like this and keep eating these chocolate chip pancakes like this right up until the end of their lives. “You mean you’re not moving out after graduation?” Rose asked, suddenly surprised to find she was the only one dreaming of such a thing. They stared at her a moment in silence before picking up where they had left off in midsentence, about who had kissed who the night before, and which boy had the biggest, well…. Rose would sip at her coffee black, and politely shake her head no when offered a bite of French toast/scrambled eggs/sausage/whatever. She mashed around the oatmeal in her bowl, stirring until it thinned and stretched out, and left without eating a spoonful. If any of the other girls ever noticed this, they didn’t say. As she tripped back out into the fresh air outside the diner, Rose would think fervently: of course there is more to life than this.

After graduation, Rose wasn’t really quite sure what to do with herself. She would go to the diner and scribble her writings in a notebook while sipping at cups of hot tea, her head bent down and her fingers aching until she was inevitably startled by the waitress who came over and put an apologetic hand on her shoulder and murmured that it was closing time. How long did she sit with her head bent like that? Long enough that she looked up and realized everyone else had moved away. Strange, she wondered. She hadn’t seen them go. She thought about leaving, but every time she tried, something stayed her. She would drive to the edge of town in her car, and then her stomach might rumble, and she’d turn back and park at the diner, and walk in and trudge to the corner, where the waitress would say, “Tea?” without prompting, and Rose would nod and find herself back where’d she begun.

The town changed slowly, but it did change, and Rose found comfort in the fact that the diner still stood on the corner with the bubbled letters of its sign out front and its metal-rimmed spinning stools at the counter; the same fat chef still called out the plates from behind his window, although now his hair was gray instead of black. The same chipped, thick white coffee mugs still were slammed down on the table by surly waitresses with ponytails. There was still the same menu boasting chocolate chip pancakes, and still the tins of artificial jelly.

“You new in town, hon?” asked a new waitress when Rose came in for dinner one night. The waitress was young, twenties probably, with a ponytail. She snapped her gum. Rose laughed. “I’m old in town, honey,” she replied. “I’ll be sitting in that booth over there.”

She started coming to the diner every night for dinner when arthritis wormed into her hands and she had a hard time cooking for herself anymore. She had long since stopped writing, long since stopped scribbling in her notebooks, but she would come and sit in the corner booth and read a book and smile up at whoever the waitress was to lay the plate down on the tabletop before her. She always ordered the same thing – a bowl of minestrone soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, of which she ate exactly half and asked the waitress to wrap up the rest for later. She never ate it later, and often wondered why she bothered making the girl go the extra step, so she tipped a little bit generously every time, which earned her smiles and good service when she came in the next day.

One day, one of the waitresses walked in and saw the corner booth empty around dinner time, and couldn’t exactly remember the last time she had seen somebody sitting there. She snapped her gum. “What happened to that old woman who used to eat in the corner booth every night?”

“Hasn’t been in for a couple weeks,” one of the girls offered.

“Must have kicked the bucket,” one of the other girls said crassly. Someone kicked her ankle.

“Have some respect.” The first waitress watched a family come in – a mom and a dad, and two little girls, and watched the girls squirm up onto the booth in the corner, the seat too large for them, their little chins barely reaching the plastic edge. One of the girls started to fuss, until the mother peeled back the foil from a tin of jelly and spooned some into her mouth, and soon the girls were all wide-eyed happiness. The waitress went over. “What will it be tonight?” she asked.

November 19 - Being lost along the way

Sally was sitting at the kitchen counter when Chris got home. It was Thanksgiving, and he had told his wife he was the only one who could work that day. Sally had whispered two weeks before that she wished they could ‘skip it’ this year. She couldn’t handle it, she said, her eyes begging please don’t make me go, so Chris had dutifully lied. “That works out great!” he said, feigning enthusiasm. “My boss will love it if I work on Thanksgiving, since no one else is around,” and Sally had smiled in relief. In fact, he wasn’t needed at the office, which was closed, so he drove around most of the day, sat in three different coffee shops over three, very long drawn out lattes, and came home when he approximated it might seem legitimate. The street outside was already dark; the sun extinguished itself early this time of the year. “The darkest day is over,” Sally would breathe like it was a prayer, after the winter equinox had passed. “From now on, every day until June is a little bit brighter than the last.” As if it were a mantra, words that propelled her onward when solar power ceased to provide warmth and energy. Tonight, she was slumped on her stool, a back that Chris remembered being stick-straight in the seminar classes of college where he had first met her reduced now to an arc, like the curve of a wishbone. Her lips were clamped together until they were white and her eyes were tight with concentration as she counted out almonds from the clear package at her side.

“Three, four, five…” he heard her hissing under her breath like a radiator leaking out gas. The almonds landed with precise clinks into the small glass bowl on the counter in front of her, and Chris froze in the doorway, watching the wrinkles deepen at the corners of his wife’s eyes with each successive almond, the whites growing larger all around like a spooked horse, as though she was afraid of the end she knew was coming.

“…Twelve, thirteen, fourteen,” she finished in a rush. She dipped her slender fingers – no; he remembered them as slender, now they were more properly bone with just a trace of flesh on top to add humanity to it – watched as those bony fingers descend greedily into the bowl and she lifted almond to mouth quickly, as though afraid someone might take it from her otherwise. He watched until this horror show was over, all fourteen almonds gulped down, her eyes closed, her mouth macerating the food, her lips working like she was praying. He knew better than to interrupt Sally when she ate. Such interruptions most often resulted in having things thrown at him, or Sally crying hysterically, or, more rightly, both.

“Hi,” he said when the last almond was swallowed with obvious pain down her throat, the esophagus bulging against the sinews of her neck. Her eyes snapped open and she glared at him accusingly.

“How long have you been standing there?” she demanded.

“Since I got home from work.” Only a small lie. Her eyes weighed his answer.

“You were watching me eat,” she accused.

“No,” he lied. She jumped off the stool faster than it seemed her frail body should have been capable, lunged at him and pushed – tried to push – him backwards against the garage door. “You were watching me eat! No one watches me eat. No one!” Small fists pummeled against his chest, a flurry of angry white snowflakes that melted on his lapels.

He grabbed a wrist in each hand; his fingers could easily have circled around the bone twice. “Sally. My love,” he said as gently as he could. “I wasn’t watching. I just now walked in the door.” She glared at him defiantly a moment more before her arms went limp in his grasp and she sank back from where she had been poised on tiptoe. He released her and she walked back to the counter, laying her forearms atop it and hunching over them. He remembered when his wife’s ass had been round and firm when she stood like that, sticking out and inviting him to caress the curve, but now there was no seat to her pants.

“God, Sally,” he said then without thinking. “What happened to you?”

He instantly wished he could take the words back when his wife’s head swung towards him and he found himself frozen under the dead, vacant look in her eyes. He remembered in that moment every hope she had had as a young revolutionary in their college days. The desire to enter politics, to go to law school, to become an investigative journalist – the ‘goal’ had a tendency to change daily, but it wasn’t what it was that mattered so much as that there was always something to be achieved, done, conquered. Then the years of their early marriage, watching her bang her head against disappointment after disappointment, stumble up against turned-down job offers, watching her uterus reject the idea of childbirth. (“Is your wife getting her period?” more than a few fertility specialists had asked, and Chris hadn’t known enough back then to ask about amenorrhea.) The next few years only brought more career disappointments, book manuscripts that never sold to agents, classes in graduate school that she dropped out of after a semester, wanderings around the house with a zombie’s gait and eyes that stared vacantly ahead at all hours of the day. Going to bed at night only to wake and realize his wife had never occupied the sheets next to him, her side still tucked up and unwrinkled, and finding the empty wine bottles in the recycling can (buried under plastic Evian bottles and soup tins so he wouldn’t find them, but he learned to dig). He couldn’t remember how long ago she had stopped cooking dinner or going out to restaurants with him, only that he would come home and see these strange rituals, this pagan worship of the fourteen almonds or the half a cup of oatmeal (unflavored) or the sucking on water crackers until they were pap in her mouth. The way she said, “I like eating them better that way. It gives me something to do,” and then instantly clapped a hand over her mouth, betrayed by her own words. And now, this crazed look in her eye, this wild rolling of the iris. Her hair was thinner, he realized. He had ignored the clumps that would collect by the drain in the shower, but there was no denying it anymore.

He couldn’t help it. “What happened to you,” he repeated.

A touch of the feral look drained from her eyes, and Sally slumped further forward onto her forearms, as if the little weight left on her bones couldn’t stand upright anymore. “I got lost somewhere along the way,” she said slowly, shaking her head, and began reciting, “I got lost somewhere along the way. I got lost. I got lost. I got. I got…”

* * * * *

Jackie opened the front door and found her daughter and her new boyfriend laughing hysterically, holding one another up on the doorstep as if their convulsions of mirth would knock them over otherwise. “What on earth is going on out here?” she demanded, wiping her hands on her apron.

Sally wiped her eyes. “Mom!” she crowed, throwing her arms forcefully around Jackie’s neck so the older woman took a step or two backwards. “We’re so glad we’re here.”

“So glad you’re here? So glad you’re here?” She looked from one to the other. “That’s nice and all, but I’m not sure I can ever remember you so enthusiastic for a Thanksgiving.” She ushered them inside. The scent of roasting turkey and candied yams, of cranberry relish and Brussels sprouts, of corn muffins made from a pre-packaged mix – all of it was thick in the air. The kitchen was at least ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Sally frisked her hands along her upper arms as they came inside, and her boyfriend – this one’s name was Chris, if Jackie remembered correctly – was smiling awkwardly and wrinkling his nose; Jackie wasn’t sure if that meant he enjoyed the smells coming from her holiday kitchen or not.

“Now, what’s all the mirth about?” she asked, planting her hands on her hips. Sally and the boy – Chris? Chris, she decided – Sally and Chris looked at one another and broke into fresh gales of giggling.

“Oh, Mom!” Sally said, hoisting herself onto one stool and sitting, her back straight. She began thumbing some of the cheese spread onto a cracker without even bothering to use the decorative knife provided. “We took a wrong turn!” she said around a giant mouthful. “We had just gotten off the highway but we must have missed a fork in the road and we got lost along the way! We were circling forever!” ‘Ever’ said as though it was a wonderful place to be. She and Chris howled with laughter as if this was the funniest thing. Jackie dug her fists into her hips until her flesh ached. She hated being lost. What joke, exactly, was she missing here?

“And?” she prodded.

Sally screwed her eyes up towards the ceiling and Chris took over. “We had the best time exploring the new roads that we discovered. You wouldn’t believe it, the excitement of only vaguely knowing where we were, but not really. The adventure involved…” He shrugged as if it all made sense. “Getting lost is the fun part. We knew we’d get here eventually.” And he popped one of Jackie’s bacon tarts into his mouth.

November 16 - The last night in the house

Alex heard the whistle of the tea kettle, the sound drifting up from the kitchen, and for a moment she imagined it was the muted sound of train whistle streaming somewhere through the night before she realized this couldn’t be and understood what she was really hearing. She sat up on the air mattress that served as her bed for the night and glanced at her watch. 3.30. She had yet to find sleep tonight. Throwing off the coverlet, her feet floundered about on the floor a moment before finding her slippers, and she tossed her robe around her shoulders as she pattered softly down the stairs.

Meg was at the counter, stirring a spoon absently in the cup of tea she had poured, making small tight circles round and round in a lazy fashion as though she had forgotten she held the implement in her hand. After a moment, she squeezed the belly of a plastic honey bear and watched the amber ooze into the cup, then clicked her spoon against the rim of her tea mug three times – one two three. It was an infinitely familiar sound to Alex, who watched as Meg completed the ritual and then replaced the spoon on the counter.

“You too?” she asked from the doorway. Meg gave a start and turned to look at her sister. She seemed upset a moment at being found-out in her nocturnal wanderings, but then her features softened. “Yeah,” she admitted. “No sleep for me tonight. Tea?” Alex nodded and eased herself onto one of the stools where, for so many years, they had eaten breakfast side-by-side: bowls of cereal from the boxes that Anna McGeehan would line up on the counter in order of ascending height, or packages of instant oatmeal, or triangles of toast that their mother dusted over with cinnamon and sugar.

“Where did you find the tea kettle?” Alex asked, stirring her spoon aimlessly just as her sister had.

Meg shrugged. “One of the boxes by the door. Right on top, so not so hard.”

“And the teabags?”

Meg gave a guilty laugh. “I always bring them with me.”

Alex nodded as if this made sense; Meg had always been the one who was prepared.

She wondered if her sister was more prepared for this moment than she. Although only older by eleven minutes, sometimes she felt that eleven years separated her and Meg. Meg had always known which school activities she would devote herself to, which friends she would pursue. She had selected her college major eight years before she arrived on a college campus, knowing that it was economics for her, followed by an MBA and a career on Wall Street. Meg had gone on to do exactly thus. For Alex it had always been different, choosing each option in life because it presented itself, not because she went for it. If you had told her as a young girl age eight sitting on this stool for breakfast that she would go on to be the pastry chef at an It eatery in Chicago, she might have laughed at you, but somehow that was what she found herself doing, a career that had fallen into her lap, not one of her choosing. It was the same for the tea, she thought with an internal laugh. It was Meg who liked this blackberry variety they were sipping. Alex would stutter whenever the tea cart was presented to her in a restaurant. “Uh, whichever you suggest,” she would say to the server. Likewise with desserts, dinner specials, clothing sales, anything really. The manager of her restaurant said he was thankful the dessert menu was set every night and didn’t depend on her making up her mind.

So the question she asked now was: “Were you surprised?” Meg sipped thoughtfully at her tea, her brows drawing down over the rim of the cup like two fuzzy caterpillars.

“Surprised? No,” she confessed. “Sad, yes.”

Sad. Such a funny emotion, to feel about a space, an inanimate object. Anna hadn’t told her two daughters that she was selling the house, not until the sale had gone through and nearly everything was packed in boxes and stowed away. She had asked them to come for these last few days, to help clean out closets that, once open, began to vomit out pieces of the past. Old artwork from their kindergarten years, pictures from proms, old bank statements and lost letters and useless pieces of wax and paper clips and packages of moth balls, all being spewed out by closets and drawers and crates in the garage that had hibernated peacefully for years and now were affronted by the human flood that was emptying them all. And now this, the last night in the house.

Alex winced as her tea burned the roof of her mouth. She had forgotten how hot Meg liked it. Or, not forgotten, precisely, but let it slip her mind for the moment. Her sister had gone through a ‘tea phase’ where she had to make scalding hot tea every night before bed or she couldn’t sleep; she said she liked making it that hot because then she could add an ice cube and watch it melt and once the tendrils of melted water had settled in the tea, it would be the perfect temperature to drink.

“Remember how Mom used to yell at us for making witch’s brew in this kitchen?” Alex asked of a sudden. Meg chuckled into her cup.

“Oh yes.” She pointed to where they used to sit on the kitchen floor, by the sink. “We’d perch right there and take her biggest pot and add every possible thing in the refrigerator until it stunk up the whole house.”

Alex giggled. “Yup.”

Meg’s fingers drummed against the ceramic. “Remember all the boys we brought home who were made to sit and squirm on that couch under Mom’s first-date interrogation?” Alex turned her head and could see the imprints of those boys’ bottoms still, one after the next, ankles crossed and nodding their heads with a, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and, ‘No, ma’am.’

“I remember,” she agreed. “Remember sledding down the hill in the backyard?”

“And crashing into the trees that time you got the concussion.” Both girls were grinning now. “I remember.”

The laughter faded and the only sound was the ice cube hissing its way into nothingness in Meg’s second cup of tea.

“You think Mom will be okay in a nursing home?” she asked finally. Alex nodded not because she believed it but because it made the empty house less frightening. It had been Anna’s decision after all. Alex shuddered at the idea of making such a final choice. “This place is too big for her now.”

Meg nodded without believing it, and they were silent for a while, sipping.

“Sleep?” her sister asked finally, draining her cup and setting it into the sink. She looked around a moment, as if for a sponge or a dish towel, any normal kitchen thing, before remembering these items had been put away.

“Sleep,” Alex agreed, doing the same. She ascended the stairs to her childhood bedroom for the last time.

November 15 - What's obvious

“Jess, Jess Milton.”

Jess froze with a canapé halfway to her lips, and half of the smoked Gouda and bacon bits on top fell into the cleavage of her dress. “Oh god,” she groaned, looking around for a server with a napkin. The man who had said her name raised his hand to produce one with a look of triumph, then paused, realizing that to be gentlemanly and solicitous would be to dig his hand in between her breasts. The napkin wobbled in mid-air for a moment, and Jess solved his dilemma by snatching the paper and digging out the cheese and meat herself.

“Ha ha,” laughed Tom Ward, watching a bit too intently as she flecked off the last offending crumbs. “Didn’t mean to surprise you like that.”

Jess felt a little sick as she smiled at him. She had harbored a crush on Tom the entire four years they attended high school together, so she probably should be thrilled that he was interested in her décolletage now (he certainly had never looked when she was fifteen), but at the moment all she could really think about was how clumsy she felt. She was amazed he had even remembered her name, much less anything else about her. “That’s okay, Tom,” she reassured. “You’re well? Where are you working? Do you still live close by? Gosh, you look great!” Too many words all at once, she scolded mentally.

Tom arched an eyebrow. “I’m the president of a hedge fund now. We’re doing quite well for ourselves in fact.” His chest did a good imitation of a blowfish. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard about us recently. A few very important acquisitions. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Oh, of course I do! I mean…” Jess avoided the business section like the plague. “I mean, that’s great. A hedge fund. Remind me what those do again? Gosh, all that financial stuff is such gibberish to me.”

The left corner of Tom’s lips tugged upwards slightly. How she had swooned over that half-smile as a teenager!

“And haven’t you met my wife, Meredith?” He changed the subject.

Jess gave a start, only at that moment noticing that a woman had been standing next to him the whole time. Meredith was short and buxom, with a smile out of a Crest Whitestrips commercial. She extended a slim hand that sported a giant emerald on the second finger. “So pleased,” she drawled with the hint of a southern accent. Jess waffled a moment, the half-eaten canapé in one hand, the dirty napkin in the other, and then inclined her head as a third option. Meredith’s mouth fell open a moment at the rude manners before she caught herself and was all frozen smiles. “Well, nice meeting you dear.” Dear. The woman was easily fifteen years younger! Jess watched Tom steer his wife through the crowd.

She was rendered into one of the pillars in the room for an instant, rooted to the floor, then shook herself off and hurried to the buffet table, where she forcefully hurled canapé and napkin both into a trash can.

Maureen Teasdale and Veronica Watkins were leaning over the class notes brochure – it had arrived in the mail a month before the reunion; Jess had studied it – just down the table from her, obviously reading it for the first time, oohing and aahing with disbelief at the write-ups on each of their classmates, and clucking whenever they read the word Spouse or Children under a person’s name. Jess pretended to be absorbed in ladling out some of the punch.

“Jess Milton, Jess Milton,” Maureen was saying, as if fishing for the name in a dark lake.

“Right, she sat by me in math!” Veronica cried. Jess snorted; they had done no such thing. They were on the cheerleading squad together.

“Right. I remember… I think. Says here that she’s… hmmm…. An artist.” Maureen giggled behind her hand. The giggle still belonged to her eighteen-year-old incarnation, twenty pounds lighter than the version in front of Jess now, and sounded garish coming from this older woman’s mouth. “Sounds like a euphemism for unemployed to me.”

“Watercolors, pastels… some photography,” Veronica read, skimming along with one finger pressed accusingly against the page. “Featured in a show last –” she laughed – “last year at the local elementary school art space.” Both women were doubled over now, holding their punch glasses out to their sides as if for balance.

Maureen wiped a tear from her eye. “It’s obvious she hasn’t done much for herself since graduation, isn’t it?” Jess felt heat rush into her cheeks, the capillaries threatening to pop through the skin. Her hand convulsed around her plastic cup and she hurried away before she upended the ladle over Maureen’s very obviously-dyed brunette hair. Obvious? Maureen had already gone gray; that’s what was obvious.

“Obvious, obvious,” she muttered, pushing past smiling husbands and wives and clusters of ‘friends’ who hadn’t thought to call or write one another in the last twenty years. There was an errant child or two in the crowd, always clutching with concern at a parent’s lower hemline and staring up at the adults with eyes too wide for their small faces, as children’s so often seemed to be.

What did she mean obvious? Just because Jess had chosen a career as an artist and couldn’t boast of husband or children or heck, sex partner – even pet goldfish might have made her feel less lonely – didn’t mean she hadn’t made anything of herself. Okay, so her art sold sporadically, and she still had to call home to her parents every once in a while to meet the rent on time or head off a sudden power outage in the middle of winter, but she enjoyed making her art, and she liked being independent and alone. Maureen’s voice dragged up every damp day in her studio, when she wanted to tear her from her scalp and ‘sell out’ and take the easier path, but always, always some spark of creativity would come along that would stiffen her backbone, remind her that she was on the right path. Lacking piles of cash or children with a fine pedigree didn’t make it obvious things weren’t going well. Some things were obvious, she thought, but this? She tried to make a list of the obvious in her head.

“Let’s see.” She quoted, “Obviously roses are red and violets are blue.” Obvious was sad facts like how gravity made tits sag down over time or how giving birth stretched out the vagina.

Or were none of these things obvious? What if a woman got implants, after all? What if she’d had a c-section? And roses were often pink. Come to think of it, who had ever seen a blue violet? Wasn’t violet a shade of purple? Jess made it through the throng to the door and exhaled with relief as she stepped onto the porch, a good fifteen degrees cooler than it had been inside among the press of bodies. She leaned against the railing, drumming fingers on the chipped paint of the balustrade, and sipped at the punch. The voices drifting out from inside sounded like a very drunken hive of bees.

“Jess. Jess Milton.”

She turned with a jolt, this time only just catching the punch glass before the pink liquid slopped over the rim and onto her dress. She squinted at the man in front of her, trying to smooth out the thin wrinkles on the forehead and add a bit more hair to the front of his scalp.

“Yes?” she asked, at a loss.

“Jess, it’s me. Bradley.”

She looked harder. Make the shoulders less broad, take away the muscle tone to his arms, make him perhaps two inches shorter and perhaps… “My god it is you!” she exclaimed. He laughed self-deprecatingly. “Is it so obvious?” he quipped. Jess turned a shade pink again.

She stared into her punch.

“I hear you’re an artist,” Bradley said after a moment, and she wait pinker, waiting for Maureen’s reaction. “Jess, I just wanted to tell you…” Here it comes, she thought. The ‘get a real job’ or ‘what are you doing with yourself.’ …”that I think that’s so great,” he finished.

“No, it is a real job. I mean, what? You do?” She gaped at him.

“I remember you up in the art wing of the school almost every day after class. God, I look at all those poseurs in there just making money or doing what they’re supposed to do,” (he added air quotes to this last), “but it seems like you’re one of the few who is following her heart. It’s obvious you’re a lot happier than the whole batch of them.” He jerked a thumb towards the drones, who seemed to be rapidly disintegrating into dancing the Macarena.

She tilted her head, about to tell him he had it all wrong, but stopped herself. She barely remembered Bradley, she was ashamed to admit. “Remind me what class we had together in high school?” she said instead.

Bradley lowered his head, swishing the punch in his cup. “Well,” he coughed. “We didn’t, exactly, but I… Oh this will sound silly, but I had such a crush on you, Jess.”

“You… you did?” She tucked back a strand of hair that had come loose.

His eyes went wide. “You mean you really didn’t know? Here all this time I thought it was so obvious!” His eyes narrowed. “What?” he demanded. “What’s so funny?” But Jess couldn’t stop laughing, grabbing onto his forearm for balance as she nearly leaned double with it. After a moment, Bradley started to laugh with her.

November 14 - Remember an afternoon

They kissed goodbye on the day that they broke up, because after five years of kissing goodbye, it wouldn’t have felt normal not to do so. Perhaps it was a way to say, no hard feelings, thanks for the sex, thanks for five years. She watched him board his train and waved goodbye with no rancor or ill will, and watched his frown deepen as the door dinged to a close in front of his face. She didn’t wonder whether or not he had found a seat, or whether he was comfortable; whether he chose to read a book or to listen to music on the departure. Instead, she wiped abashedly at the moisture that had accumulated in the corner of one eye before anyone could really say it had been there at all, squared her shoulders, turned her back, and walked from the station.

He did not listen to music, nor did he open the book that lay unread past page three in his luggage, nor did he even just stare out the window and admire (or ignore) the landscape that went by. Instead he wrote her a letter. It was about everything she had ever meant to him and everything she always would. He remembered that afternoon. The way the sunlight glinted on your hair that day we took the boat around on the lake in the summer, he wrote. I thought to myself that nothing on earth had ever looked so beautiful. He scratched it out, embarrassed, even though only his eyes had seen this profession yet, but he kept writing sentences like this, couldn’t stop himself even as the train chugged along and increased the distance from their starting point.

He wrote for hours, wrote until his hand cramped, because he was writing the old-fashioned way, on lined paper that he had in his luggage, not on his computer, as though the laptop was too stale and impersonal for these deep words. When his train reached his destination, four hours later, he regarded with satisfaction what he had written. His first stop, he thought, would be a stationary store, then the post office, where he would tie it all up in ribbon and put it in a fancy envelope, and mail it using a decorative stamp.

We have left her, meanwhile, squaring her shoulders and boldly leaving the train platform. My entire life has been in preparation for this, she decided, wiping away the beginning of a tear before it could crystallize. She was excited by the time she made it to the car.

She drove, using the directions on her GPS device. Turn right in One. Point. Three. Miles, intoned the robotic voice, and she obeyed. She loved driving down new roads, on which she’d never before explored, even though she was only a few towns over from where she had lived for the past twelve years. Nervous knots of anticipation tightened in her belly as she neared her destination.

It was the botanical garden, laid out over fifty lusciously landscaped acres, and she had come because it was an attraction listed in the area, and she had decided it was her duty as a citizen to make the most of the world in which she lived. If it was deemed an attraction, she would be there. Had he hated this pastime of hers, the way it ate into her afternoons, their afternoons together? She had forgotten these sentences by the time her car puttered to a halt and she exited into the parking lot, gravel crunching beneath her sneakers. After all, it was a warm, early summer day, mid-afternoon on a Wednesday, and the sun kissed her nose and the breeze was just right, and the sky a washed-out blue. Most of the people she saw, at this afternoon hour on a week-day, were elderly couples, almost always walking with the woman’s arm looped through the man’s as though they were entering church solemnly on a Sunday morning, or perhaps attending a wedding, or perhaps it was a funeral. So she saw elderly couples and she saw mothers – always the mothers, she noted with a frown – out with their children, but they always came in pairs, these mothers, pushing their strollers and lowering their voices, their heads wilting towards one another like fading daisies so they could gossip, while the children ran ahead, and the mothers talked about twenty-something secretaries and other motherly fears, and they liked that here they could talk without really having to pay attention to the children because they didn’t worry that the flower beds would abduct their offspring.

I am intoxicated by the beauty here, she told herself, walking among these mothers and geriatrics, inhaling a dozen different perfumed blossoms as she strolled the main path, detouring to observe the trees in the “forest” with respectful silence, and cooing over the tiny bonsai trees in the greenhouse, and making a foray into the rose garden which had just burst into all its glorious yellow-orange-red-pink-magenta-maroon-crimson glory. She winked at the roses and moved on.

She went out of her way, walking to the far extremity of the botanical garden, because the map in her hand told her the lilacs were in bloom and were a “must see.” By the time she arrived, her feet were blistered and her nose reddened from the sun, and the mothers with their strollers and their broods didn’t bother to come this far, just the intrepid elderly couples, who suddenly looked awfully happy and smug in their longevity. She stared at the clustered purple flowers of the lilacs, lavender dust mops, they looked like, and she stifled a gag.

“I don’t even like lilacs,” she muttered, her eyes going wide at the realization. She hated that cloying, thick smell and always had. She limped back to her car.

Meanwhile, he has gone about his errands at the stationer’s and the post office, and we have left off with him here, thinking the night would be endless. He walked slowly, his feet dragging, towards the stolid, constant presence f the mailbox on the corner from his home, the same one he had walked by every day he had lived in this city for twelve years now (every day except weekends, when he had traveled to visit her, fostering their long-distance love). “Guess I get to see you on Saturdays now,” he told the mailbox wistfully, and lifted a hand to pull open the drawer and deposit the beribboned (and perfumed, he was ashamed to admit; he had added a spritz of cologne) envelope.

“Hey!” called a voice, staying his hand. He turned to see his co-worker waving, running the last few paces towards him, a gait made awkward by her high heels. She stopped at his side. “So funny seeing you here! The girls and I were just going out for a drink. You’ll join us?” He looked back over his shoulder at the mailbox, still just patiently waiting for him, but his co-worker was already tugging at his arm and he let himself be tugged. He tucked the envelope under his other arm and assumed tomorrow was good enough. He drank five glasses of foamy beer at the outdoor beer garden with his co-workers, and by the time he stumbled home at three in the morning he realized he’d left the package behind on the wooden bench of one of the communal table. Something about this should have bothered him, but his brain felt as fizzy as the face wash he scrubbed on his cheeks – metrosexual stuff from the drug store, he acknowledged with guilt, but he liked the way it smelled – so he decided to forget about it until the reason he should care mattered more in the morning, and he let himself flop onto bed and fall asleep with his clothes still on.

She sat awake for hours. She had thought she’d be so busy – remember all those afternoons she had swatted him away, declaring, “You’re getting in the way of all of my projects!” How her body had cringed at his approaching footstep, if she was in the middle of a good book, or about to dive into another escapade about town seeing the “attractions” listed in her home city. How delightful the idea of a full free night – of hundreds more free nights to come – now seemed, as the GPS guided her home from the botanical garden. She cooked dinner, and she popped open a bottle of wine with a smart sound, like poppers going off on New Year’s Eve, and she relished her solo party and put on the jazz music that he hated and she adored, and remember that afternoon by the lake where he had refused to let her play her favorite records. She unbuttoned her blouse and she half-cooked, half-danced around her kitchen.

By the time she finished dinner – not so good, after all, she thought, with a sour twist to her lips – the meat undercooked, the potatoes lumpy, the green beans not fresh – she frowned at the label on her wine bottle with consternation. ‘I don’t even like Spanish wine!” she said bitterly, but the wine bottle didn’t look ashamed of itself.

She surveyed her apartment and already it looked awfully big for one person, and the books on her shelf looked like awfully quick reads, and boring ones at that, and she couldn’t quite remember why it was that the night alone had seemed like such an intoxicating proposition. She flopped onto her bed and lay there staring up at the ceiling, hoping the respite of sleep might come.

November 13 - The window had other views

Hannah knew the scene outside the window intimately. She had made up her mind from the moment they brought her here that she hated looking inside the building, inside this one small room, so her eye was almost always drawn outside, to the window panes, to what was past the panes of glass. She could see things there that she thought she had almost forgotten about. There was yellow sunshine, like rays of piss slanting on the grass; there was the grass, which she remembered as prickly about her ankles, spiking into her flesh when she ran barefoot as a girl, while the dirt caked onto the soles of her feet; there was the blue sky with its cumulus clouds that made shapes and stories, shifting with the mood of the wind. There! In that one she saw a dragon, no this time it was a bunny rabbit, here, still another time, was her own portrait painted by God up in the clouds. Hannah placed her chin on the window sill – grimy; seldom cleaned, these forgotten window sills – and smiled up at her portrait in the sky for hours.

Hannah loved to tell Bruce these stories when her brother came to visit. “I saw a dog!” she would cluck with joy, while his wife and the two children – Hannah could never remember which was which so called them both, “My niece!” with a beatific grin to appease for the lack of a moniker – while they stood by with smiles plastered onto their faces. “Smile, girls!” Bruce would instruct as he beeped the car locked in the parking lot and ushered them inside, his wife included in the word ‘girls’. They were instructed not to say a word, lest it tip Hannah over the edge.

It was the happy stories and goings-on outside the window that Hannah liked to tell Bruce about most of all. “A family,” she crowed with delight. “I looked out, and the mother bent down and took the child’s hand, and the father, he went down, squatted on his ankles so he was his daughter’s height, and the grandfather – he was the one in the wheelchair – he was smiling.” Bruce would nod encouragingly, sure that this story had really come to pass and pleased at Hannah’s perception. It was when she said other things that he scratched his head and turned to the nurse after he left Hannah’s room and said, “Are you sure her dose is high enough?”

“My husband!” Hannah cried. “My husband he was outside the window last night! He came and he recited poetry. Just like that man with the long nose. Oh dear, I can’t remember…”

“Cyrano de Bergerac?” Bruce’s wife supplied before gasping and clamping her lips shut, trying to glare at her own tongue as if it had betrayed her. Bruce shot her a warning look.

“Yes!” Hannah said triumphantly. “Like Cyrano de Bergerac. He came and recited poetry and threw flower petals up at my window. You see this one here now?”

The two daughters leaned forward, eager to pet the velvety petals of a rose; Bruce found his own fingers itching to do so, tantalized by that soft plush flesh that he had always equated with touching a vagina, but then he recoiled when Hannah opened her hand and revealed tissue papers from the bathroom instead. She beamed down at them. “You see the flower petals he threw up at me?” One of the daughters started to snicker and Bruce smacked her on the bottom and she stood stick straight.

“Hannah,” he reminded. “You don’t have a husband, dear.”

Even this didn’t trouble him too badly; there was only so much they could expect the medication to do, even in this day and age. But there were other things that Hannah said that worried him more.

“The window has other views,” she whispered one time – thankfully he had thought to visit alone without the girls – clutching at the collar of his shirt so he had to call for the nurse to pry loose her fingers, her knuckles white from the effort and her lips parted in heavy panting, spittle flecking at the corners. The nurse eased her back against her pillows, told her to close her eyes, but Hannah whimpered and looked pleadingly at Bruce.

“The window has other views,” she repeated.

“What do you mean, dear?” he asked carefully of his mad sister.

“Sometimes it doesn’t look out on the yard. Sometimes it’s a dark pit, and I saw a man out there. I saw a man with a knife. I watched him butcher….” She shuddered.

“Butcher…?”

“Animals. The squirrels. The squirrels don’t play outside on the grass anymore.” Bruce was ashamed of himself for looking quickly, to reassure himself, that the grass was still there and that the squirrels still jumped and cavorted on the prickly green grass, and felt a sinking thud in his gut when he didn’t notice one right away.

She’s crazy, he reminded himself.

The nurse nodded when he told her to up the dose, upon leaving.

Hannah started shutting the curtain on her window, even in broad daylight. “But dear,” Bruce reminded her gently. “You love the green grass and the blue sky and the puffy white clouds.”

“Those things aren’t there anymore,” Hannah shot back with an angry stare, and Bruce wondered how she knew that it was a gray, rainy day out there at that moment. Of course; she must have heard the downpour, she would have felt the damp cold. She’s crazy, he reminded himself.

The next week, she had taped the curtain shut around the window. “We couldn’t stop her,” the nurse explained, spreading her hands helplessly.

“What do you mean you couldn’t stop her?” Bruce thundered. “How does a frail eighty-pound woman move her bed to the other side of the room all by herself?” Hannah was lying there now, sucking her thumb. The nurse flinched at his tone but straightened her back.

“She said she’s scared of the window, and it doesn’t really do any harm to have her sleeping in the other corner, so what difference does it make?”

Bruce opened his mouth a time or two but couldn’t think of the correct answer, so he stormed into his sister’s room and patted her back and tried to move her vacant stare from the wall to his face, to no avail. Sighing, hands in pockets, Bruce wandered over to the window. Needing to reassure himself – hating that need – he peeled back the layers of duct tape – somehow she had found enough rolls to tape around the window a good quarter inch thick in every spot – and peered out at the prickly green grass beyond. Just a normal day, he promised himself.

A quick movement caught his eye, and Bruce saw a man – he thought it was a man; a shadow of a man – darting across the lawn, out of sight before he could really put gender or size or texture or anything to who or what it was. Just my imagination, he thought, and looked around at the squirrels for reassurance, but there weren’t any playing.