Any Bitter Thing (11 page)

His apartment, one half of a third floor on Hanover Street with chattering windows, contained few possessions. The neighbor-hood, an ethnic mishmash crammed between City Hall and the cove, felt both thriving and luckless, possessed of dented cars and gabled apartment buildings and municipal facilities and beautiful trees. I saw men and women carrying soft, thin briefcases, Somali immigrants with their brightly swaddled children, teenagers thickened onto street corners, and a few men like Harry Griggs, loosely stitched, looking only one way before crossing.

I liked it there. I felt gloriously invisible, a feeling intensified by the sheer quantity of air space in Harry Griggs’s apartment. It took me a while to make the stairs, but once inside he guided me into his one chair, a stuffed armchair, bone white. Next to it stood a floor lamp with a mustard-colored glass shade.

“A guy was loading a truck up on Cumberland,” he said, “and took off in too much of a hurry. I carried this home brand spanking new.” He peered down at me. “Feeling better?”

I nodded. “I’m not usually this emotional.”

“You’re entitled,” he said. “Cry all you want.”

I wasn’t crying, though; I was taking inventory. In one corner resided a seedy-looking guitar, a stack of
CD
s, andastereo that sat directly on the floor. There were curtains, sheer ones, that looked clean. Through an open door I could see part of a bed—neatly made up—and a small
TV
tray with a lamp sitting on it. The whole place emanated the futility of misplaced effort.

He offered me a Gatorade. “It’s all I drink when I’m not drinking,” he said. “It’s supposed to load you up with electrolytes.”
He went into the kitchen—clean and empty—and got one out of the fridge. He took down two glasses and divided the liquid.

“Cheers,” he said.

It was awful, but I drank it anyway, thinking a few extra electrolytes couldn’t hurt. I could see the water from where I sat, over a cascade of rooftops and a flat swatch of concrete where the city parked snowplows and dump trucks.

“What do I call you?” he asked.

I wiped my eyes. “Lizzy. You?”

“Harry’s fine. My friends called me Hank back when I had friends.”

Now that we were inside he looked caged, his feet moving in little forward-and-backs even while he was seated. “You having some kinda delayed reaction?” he asked. “The
VA’S
full of those.”

I shook my head. “I’m fine. You can’t imagine the relief. I was starting to think I was going a little crazy.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that I loved Harry Griggs in that moment, the way disaster victims are said to love their fellow survivors. I wanted to tell him the whole story now, to live through it again and again the way those same survivors are wont to do.

“I was out there running in black clothes,” I said to Harry. “Did you find that strange?”

“It’s a free country,” he said. “You can wear anything you want.”

“My husband was thinking about leaving me, and I didn’t want him to say it out loud.” I hesitated, surprised. “I was running from that.” What I wanted from Harry Griggs was beginning to form—a kind of witnessing, a confirmation, an accounting. What he wanted, besides gratitude, I couldn’t say, but if we were at cross-purposes our desire contained at least one mutual ingredient: confession.

“I got hitched four times total,” Harry said. “Technically I’m still married to the last one, Loreen. She’s a good egg, that Loreen. We fought like raccoons from day one. You hear of happy couples, happy trails. What a load of crapola.”

I nodded, glancing around his starved apartment. “He’s stuck with me now, my husband,” I said. “He thinks I’m not altogether—healed. So he’s stuck with me because it turns out he’s not the type to get out while the getting’s good.”

“Then he’s a stand-up guy,” Harry said. “He didn’t cut and run.”

Nothing I said appeared to surprise him. It was a feeling like drifting back down to earth after having been temporarily relieved of the force of gravity. I marveled at the unfilled space, how little there was here to touch. You could move very fast from one room to another here if you wanted to.

Eventually Harry got up and went into his vacant kitchen, returning with more Gatorade. He refreshed my glass, then set the bottle on the floor and sat himself next to it, his back to the windows.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Fourteen years, off and on,” he said. “I tend to hole up here between marriages. Me and the landlord are tight, ex-Army. I saved his sorry backside once or twice with our so-called superiors, so he keeps returning the favor.”

The water appeared nearly black from this far off and had begun to recede. The rain was beginning to look serious. Waiting there—and I did think of it as waiting—in the bare rooms of a stranger, a man of dubious scruples, a man who had done me an ill turn and waited six months to make good, I did not feel in the least afraid. I felt, if anything, safer than usual. Despite his raw skin, his flattened clothes, his insinuated past, there was something undeniably fatherly about him. He made me think of the men in gabardine shirts who came in for the early Mass on Sundays at
St. Bart’s all those years ago, the guys from the shoe shop working Sunday double time and clearing a bit of room in their day for God.

“So,” I said. “Harry.”

“Yeah.”

“Did I say anything?”

“On the road, you mean?”

“On the road. In my white light”

“Nope. Nothing.” “Were my eyes open?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? I keep remembering things, like how the rain looked from where I was lying.”

“Well, it was dark. Maybe they opened for a second. They could’ve opened for maybe a second.”

“I was on the yellow line.”

“Yeah. Lined up like you planned it.”

Each word reached me as a discrete, critical bit of information. Vital information, without which my connected parts could not function normally. It was like rehab all over again. Put your foot here. Contract that muscle. Step down.

“You moved me.”

“Course I moved you,” he said, suddenly defensive. “You were in the middle of the goddamn road.”

“And you moved me to the side.”

“Yeah.”

“To the shoulder. It was kind of muddy there.”

“There wasn’t really anyplace else to put you.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “I’m not complaining. Did you say ‘Jesus on a stick’?”

He shrugged. “Sounds like me.”

“Out loud? Or were you just thinking it?”

“Considering the circumstances, I’m gonna say it was out loud. Pretty goddamn loud.”

“I thought I could hear people’s thoughts,” I said. Again, he didn’t look surprised. “That’s why I’m asking,” I added.

The sky finally opened, and out poured a relief of rain. The windows shuddered, not hard. It was coming on dusk.

“My husband will be wondering where I am,” I said. “He had a wedding today. A big one up in Sidney. He’s a photographer.” I glanced out at the cove again, the tide fading into the distance.

“You can call from here,” he said. There was a phone sitting on the floor, a black rotary phone, no desk or stand, just the phone. “Cost me two-fifty this time to get reconnected. Can’t get a job without a phone.”

“What happened to the cell phone?” I asked.

“Well, you know,” he said. “They had it turned off.”

“Wouldn’t they have traced the calls back to you?”

“Not these people. I had them pegged.” He smiled sheepishly. “Not that I’m in the habit of stealing, I’m really not. It was a crime of opportunity.”

I sat there for a long while, too tired to move. The phone was in my lap, and therefore I thought I had called Drew; I was sure of it. I went over the brief conversation in my head.
I’m delayed, don’t wait dinner.
The conversations I conducted in my head were more or less permanently merging with the ones I had with actual people.

Harry got up at one point and made me a cup of instant coffee. I sipped at it as the evening encroached, a grainy darkness shaping itself around the lighter squares of window, the rain tap-tapping against the panes. I could no longer see his face clearly, but his shadow remained an attentive presence. The ice in his glass moved; he was on his third or fourth tumbler of Gatorade. He was still wearing his coat.

“So,” I said. “Here we are.” A veil dropped then, the faintest suggestion of secret.

His boots moved on the bare floor, but he didn’t speak.

“Can I tell you something?” I asked.

“Anything, sure, anything you want.”

“I had a visitation.” I blinked into the dark. “When I was in the hospital.”

“A visitation? From who?”

“From my uncle, who died when I was nine. And I have to tell you that ‘uncle’ is a small word for what he was to me. I was really, really glad to see him.”

“You saw your dead uncle?”

“I heard his voice, too, clear as yours.”

I had said this very thing to the doctors, to an orderly, to a nurse and chaplain, to my husband and my friend and my friend’s husband and my friend’s mother, all of whom initially responded in various patient and compassionate and ultimately cold therapeutic ways, but nobody, not one person, thought to ask what Harry Griggs now asked: “What did he say?”

I blinked hard. “He said, ‘my child.’”

“My child. Okay, sure. My child. That makes sense.”

“He was in the company of an angel.”

“An angel? Well, sure, if he’s dead, why not?” He nodded, agreeing with me. “It was just the one visit?”

“Yes,” I said, “although I’ve been wondering if he was also there with us, on the road. I was hearing so many things, everything felt so strange, so out of order. So
rearranged.
Maybe that was him. Or Heaven itself.”

“Oh. Whoa.” Harry’s shadow had angled somewhat, a full attending.

“But what struck me most,” I said, “what strikes me still, is how his voice seemed so present, so
in
the present, I mean. It was so, I don’t know how to explain it, so
in
the world.” Outside the lights along the cove appeared as apparitions out of the dark. “I saw his sleeve, the cuff of his sleeve, and it looked exactly,
exactly like his cuff, just the way I remembered it, a missing button and a little hole. It was so real.”

“Stuff like that happens. My old granny saw ghosts all the time.”

“Exactly,” I said. “There are certain things we can’t explain but it doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.”

“Goddamn right.”

I was trembling again, wholly unbuckled. Harry materialized at my side, removing his coat to wrap it around me, revealing a wrinkled white shirt. I let my face drop against that whiteness, allowed his arms to encircle me. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Steady now.”

We sat together in the dimming light for some time, not talking, as I felt myself being transported back, into the velvety between-place I’d inhabited just after my accident, that cushiony here-nor-there where my senses both blurred and sharpened.

“The weirdest thing,” he said quietly, “when I got out of the car to look, I thought you were Elaine. I thought it was my own daughter somebody’d run over.” He reached into the coat I was now wearing and fished out another cigarette, the feeble glow of the tip making the rest of the room seem darker. I snapped on the lamp to look at him, and we both flinched, blinking hard.

“Why on Earth did you think that?” I asked.

“You look like her, if you want to know,” he said. “She has red hair like yours. Skinny like you. It kind of kills me to look at you, if you want the truth.” He got up, looking for an ashtray, grabbed one off one of the deep windowsills and stayed there, looking out the window. “Course I knew right off, I mean after that first impression, you know, that it wasn’t her, couldn’t be her. But it was somebody. If it wasn’t my daughter that was all bunged up, then it was somebody’s daughter.”

“Except that I’m not,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“I’m not somebody’s daughter.”

He stubbed out the cigarette in the loaded ashtray. “Now there’s another goddamn shame.”

During my months of rehabilitation I came to accept the pitiful pace of range-of-motion, the futility of desire and the reality of anatomy. I took the incremental mercies visited upon my body—a receding pain, a small rotation—with an accumulating, grudging gratitude. Healed and whole and a stranger to my loved ones, I had another rehabilitation ahead of me, and right now Harry Griggs felt like step one in a range of motion that I was a long way from getting back.

“Do you have pictures?” I asked. “of your daughter?”

“Sure, yeah,” he said, whisking into the bedroom and returning with a creased snapshot in a frame. Despite her red hair she looked nothing like me except for a certain blunted look, as if she’d been caught in the moment between being hit hard and realizing she was going down.

“Any pictures of the baby?”

“I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Boy or girl?”

“I don’t know. She told me, but I forgot.”

“You never went back? You didn’t try again?”

“Nope.”

“Didn’t she wonder what happened?”

He shook his head. “Probably figured car trouble. I’m kinda famous for that.”

“You got your phone reconnected. You could call. Or write her a letter.”

He put the photo on the windowsill. “Coulda woulda shoulda. Listen, you want something to eat? All I’ve got is canned.”

“No,” I said. “I should go.” But I didn’t. Instead, I watched him for a moment, and—either because he had compared me to
his daughter, or because at the advanced age of thirty I was still looking for a father—I found something familiar in the set of his shoulders, the farm boy’s surrender that my uncle had also carried.

“Can I tell you about him?” I asked.

“Go ahead, deah,” said this shiny-coat heartwreck of a man with one chair. “I got nothing but goddamn time.”

TEN

From
The Liturgy of the Hours:
We all have secret fears to face,
Our minds and motives to attend
. . .

Of all his pastoral duties, marrying brings him the most pleasure. He loves engaged couples, especially the young ones who come to him ruddy and thrilled. For some, marriage occasions their return to a faith they have lost, or misplaced. When he utters the word “sacrament,” the engaged couple lift their faces as one face. The word is a poetic intrusion, crisp with consonants, the very sound of it both precise and evocative. He introduces the word with gravity, a hint of melodrama. Even the ones who come reluctantly, at the behest of Catholic parents footing the bill, or out of plain nostalgia for the rituals of their childhood, even they perk up at this unexpected word for what they are about to do and promise.