How They Were Found (16 page)

This miniature imposter, he waves at her with a perfect copy of Jeff's overly enthusiastic wave.

Allison asks, Who are you? How did you get in here?

The tiny man shrugs. He's wearing a t-shirt that Jeff used to wear when they first started dating. Jeff had gotten it from a track meet when he was a runner in high school, and by the time they met it was threadbare and faded. She'd made him throw it out and yet here it was, looking the same as it had that day.

She asks, Can't you talk?

He shakes his head, turns back to the television. Allison doesn't know what to do, so she walks around to the front of the couch and sits beside him. He looks the way old photographs do: recognizable but not too, like someone she used to know but not the person she's just broken up with.

Little Jeff—she doesn't know what else to call him—he looks up at her with a smile as he takes another puff from his cigarette. It's been over a year since she's smelled smoke in the apartment, and the smell makes her both irritated and nostalgic. She opens her mouth, wanting to ask for a cigarette, then represses the urge, as she always does. It's one thing Allison is proud of: When she quits something, she stays quit.

It's a Sunday and Allison doesn't have to work, so she takes Little Jeff to the movies. It's where she and Jeff went on their first date, one of the few places where she can be reasonably sure she won't have to talk for at least two hours. They watch a comedy that Allison swears she's seen before, even though the ticket price assures her it's a new release. During the beginning of the movie, Little Jeff sits beside her, his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand making a perpetual motion from the popcorn bucket to his mouth and back again. He chomps loudly, irritating her, but before she can say anything he finishes eating, then reaches over and holds her hand, his small fingers cool and comfortable and reassuring in hers.

After the movie, Allison drives them to the chain restaurant closest to the theater. This is where she and Jeff went after their first movie together. She sits across from Little Jeff without saying anything, both of them smiling a bit too much while she tries not to embarrass herself by making a mess of her food. By the time Allison gets home, she's sure this has been the best day she's had in months. All weirdness aside, she's happy, and that's something.

In the apartment, Little Jeff strips to his underwear and climbs into bed, a development Allison isn't comfortable with. She doesn't know what to say, so she goes to sleep on the couch. She thinks again about her first date with Jeff, how she wanted to sleep with him but didn't want him to think badly about her. She wonders what Jeff thought that night. She wonders what Little Jeff is thinking right now.

The next day at work, Allison is supposed to be proofreading the newest edition of a calculus textbook, but there's no way she can concentrate. What she does instead is search the internet:
Doppelganger. Clone. Homunculus.
She follows the links from one site to the next, trying to find a description that at least approximates the person in her living room.

What she finds is nothing very useful.

She opens a new document and types CHARACTERISTICS OF LITTLE JEFF then makes a list: Smoker. Doesn't like health food. Chews with his mouth open. Watches too much television. Doesn't put his clothes in the hamper.

It doesn't take her long to recognize the pattern, to see that what Little Jeff is made of is all that she made her first Jeff quit or change or give up. She's lost her boyfriend and gained all the things she hated about him, and yet she wishes she could be home instead of at work. She thinks about calling Jeff but she knows she'll sound crazy, so she calls her apartment instead.

Little Jeff answers on the third ring but doesn't speak. Allison says, I just called to make sure you're okay.

Allison doesn't know what to say next, what she expected to happen. She holds the phone to her ear a little longer, listening to Little Jeff breathe, and then she says goodbye and hangs up the phone. She decides that on the way home she'll pick up a bucket of fried chicken and some mashed potatoes. Once upon a time, it was Jeff's favorite food.

Allison once again gets used to dirty clothes on the floor, socks under the coffee table, skid-marked underwear kicked beside the tub. After a week, she's used to the fact that even though she works all day she's still going to have to do the dishes when she comes home. Ditto for cooking dinner, for doing laundry, for making sure the rent gets paid on time.

The next cable bill that comes, she's furious at the seven dollars and ninety-nine cents she's been billed for a porno. She charges into the living room with the bill clenched in her hand, but then she remembers how she freaked out when Jeff did the same thing, thinking he wouldn't get caught, and how her yelling didn't do either of them any good.

During this same time period, she comes to understand that it's not only the bad habits Jeff quit that make up Little Jeff. There are also qualities that Allison forgot she even missed, because they've been gone so long or because they disappeared from her and Jeff's relationship without announcing their departure. She notices the long absence of these traits only when they reemerge: Little Jeff writes poems on the backs of take out receipts and on yellow sticky notes, just like Jeff used to do. She finds them in odd places, as if Little Jeff doesn't understand that it might be more romantic to put them on her side of the bed or on her nightstand. She finds a haiku—
freezer door left open / letting out the stark cold air / I am apology
—taped to a box of her tampons, then free verse tucked into the toes of her galoshes. The poems aren't good exactly, but she takes them from their hiding places and puts them in the scrapbook where she kept Jeff's poems, then, unsure if she should treat them as two separate authors, she removes them and starts a new collection. These new poems are written by someone who is like Jeff but is not him, unless she counts the leavings of a body as part of a person. Unless she counts the dead skin cells ground into her carpet or the sweat soaked permanently into the mattress, the one lone hair stuck in the drain of their shower because she is too lazy to dislodge it. She could count these things as Jeff but doesn't, and if these things are not Jeff, then neither is this other person.

The first time she has sex with Little Jeff is the best sex she's had in a year. What Little Jeff knows about her is what Jeff used to know, back when he cared more about her happiness than his own. Afterward, with Little Jeff curled against her longer body, she recognizes this is unfair, but she thinks it again anyway. She has always wondered why her friends are constantly falling into bed with their ex-boyfriends and now she understands. It is good to be known, to have your likes and dislikes already clear before the act even begins.

Three months after Jeff moves out, Allison is still learning to take the good with the bad, to put up with the boogers stuck to her furniture if it means she gets poems tucked in her purse. She hates that Little Jeff smokes so much, but she doesn't ask him to quit. She doesn't ask him to change anything, at first because she doesn't want to drive him away and then later because she is afraid of what will happen to whatever he quits.

Whatever she and Little Jeff have, it may end one day, and then what? What if another, smaller version comes to live with her?

This time, she'll let her man do whatever he wants, be whoever he needs to be, and she’ll decide whether to stay or go based on who he is, not who she wants him to be.

Together, they go to other places that Jeff and Allison went when they were new. They go to an art museum that Allison has wanted to see forever, and they go to a movie that Little Jeff picks out of the paper, some remake of an eighties cartoon that Allison never watched and still doesn't like. They go to the botanical gardens, a place people only go when they start dating or when they get married or when they are a thousand years old. Allison is glad that Little Jeff has so much facial hair or else she would have to worry that people would think she was letting her kid smoke. As it is, they hold hands and kiss and she learns to stop caring what other people think they see. She has often made choices because someone else told her she should, because she read about a new diet in a magazine or because her friends were all doing the same. Little Jeff is everything she took from Jeff by doing this, and it's enough for her to see she doesn't want to be that way ever again.

One day, Allison comes home from work with an armload of groceries, thrilled at the truly decadent meal she's making for the two of them for dinner. Nowhere in her bags is any organic fruit or wheatgrass or any labels with the words
high-fiber
on them. Instead, she's cooking footlong coney dogs, with chili out of a can and onions out of a plastic bag. She's frying French fries and making root beer floats. She knows eating this is going to make her sick, but she also knows it's going to make Little Jeff happy.

She sits her groceries down on the counter and calls for him but there's no answer. It takes her a minute to realize that the television is dark, that it isn't tuned to sports news or the endless reruns of crime procedural shows that always seem to be on. Walking through the apartment, she notices other things: There are no clothes on the floor of the bathroom, no wads of tissue crumpled along Little Jeff's side of the bed.

She's nearly in a panic trying to find him, but eventually she does. He's outside on the apartment's small balcony, somewhere she's never seen him go before. There isn't any furniture out there, so he's sitting on the concrete.

It takes her a minute to realize he's crying. In the years she was with the real Jeff, she never saw him cry, and so Allison doesn't know what to do.  She reaches in her purse and offers Little Jeff a cigarette from the pack she purchased herself a few days ago, after convincing herself that she'd been quit long enough that it was okay to have just one. Little Jeff shakes his head, his eyes brimming, and it's only then that Allison realizes what seemed different about the apartment. It hadn't smelled like smoke when she came in.

Little Jeff's quit smoking.

She drops her purse and scoops him up in her arms, and as he curls against her she can feel he’s lost weight, and although it takes a little longer to be sure, she sees he's lost height too, that he is even smaller than he was before. Even his facial hair is thinning, fading from a full goatee to a tiny triangle of soul patch.

Allison is furious, but not at Little Jeff, who she keeps rocking and reassuring that everything will be okay, even though she's sure that it won't be, that if she doesn't do something then he'll be gone soon.

She needs to call Jeff. Needs to tell him not to stop quitting everything she made him quit, because she's sure that's what's happened.

She wants a cigarette, craves it intensely, but she fights the urge. It's taken her months, but she's finally realizing that Little Jeff might not be the only thing leftover from the breakup.

Little Jeff falls asleep alone that night, pushed all the way over on his side of the bed, as if he recognizes that his diminishing size has changed the physical dynamic between them. He's child-like in a way he wasn't only a day before, and the idea of him as a lover is past. Allison lies awake, staring at him and wondering what her own counterpart might look like. She tries to remember all she quit while Jeff and she dated. Smoking is a given, but other things are vaguer. Which of Allison's haircuts would her leftover sport? She flips through the mental images she has of herself, eventually settling on the long perm she'd had when they started dating. Jeff had liked it, but had encouraged her to try something new, something more contemporary.

What else? Allison thinks about her job at the textbook publisher, about how she hates it but has never looked for anything else. She thinks about all the careers she wanted instead, and wonders if they count as things that she quit or if they were never what she actually was. She had wanted to be a gymnast as a little girl, and then an astronaut. She had played the flute in junior high, but gave it up in high school to try to date a different class of boy than what she found in the band. She owns a bike she never uses. Ditto rollerblades. Ditto yoga videos.

This Little Allison, she might wear hideous blue eyeliner or have terribly outdated tastes in clothing, but Allison doesn't really think that's all of it.

Most of what Allison has quit are good things, things that might have made her happier than she is. She doesn't have bad habits, just bad follow-through.

Little Jeff is snoring quietly, his tiny hands folded over his belly. She wonders if she is supposed to stop Jeff from starting up all his old bad habits, or if she is supposed to encourage him until this other vanishes completely.

Watching Little Jeff sleep, she wonders if he's dreaming. If he dreams. She wonders if it hurt when he shrank, or if it was just something that happened. She wishes he could talk so he could tell her what he wanted her to do.

She gets out of bed and reaches for her phone. Dials Jeff's cell. It rings and rings and then, right before the voicemail should click on, he answers, his voice groggy with sleep.

He says, Hello? Allison?

She hangs up by slamming the clamshell shut, then turns the phone off so he can't call her back. She sits in the dark with the phone clenched between her hands until she's sure of what she wants to do, and then she gets up and does it. Gets dressed. Puts her shoes on. Goes downstairs to the parking lot and moves her car close to the front of the building, then goes back upstairs with the engine running.

Quietly, Allison wraps the sleeping boy in his blanket and carries him down to the car. He's so small. She wishes she had a car seat for him but she doesn't. She'll have to be careful. He stirs when she buckles him in but doesn't wake up, only sticks his thumb in his mouth and sucks hard. She gets in the driver's seat and just drives.