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Authors: Patrick Somerville

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BOOK: The Cradle
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His parents came to Chicago for the funeral. Renee wrote about them—how his mother cried and how she wanted to talk to her
about Jonathan and how Renee found herself unable to give the woman what she wanted, and by the end had just walked away from
her. How the big father hadn’t said a word the entire time. She wrote about his beard and his gray hair, his immense body—nothing
like Jonathan’s—his suspenders, the passive sadness in his eyes as he sipped water at the wake and nodded to people. How uncomfortable
he was in Chicago. How out of place he felt in their home. She couldn’t remember his first name. She waited, pen poised on
paper, for it to come, but it didn’t.

It was as though, then, her heart had exhausted itself of Jonathan and moved on to the middle ground, the broken landscape.
What she scribbled sounded like a children’s story. The tone was altered now, all those stories she’d written, all the ways
of making the language simple, making it so any mind could come to it and read it. A transparency but something warm, and
then much farther down, something complicated. That was always what she had wanted. She thought of a boy—a boy-prince but
someone new, not the happily wry Thomas from her book but someone darker, older, angrier, silent, and she was writing scenes
of him traveling across this broken landscape, trying to get from one place to the next, from A to B to Z. Some quest. He
would meet with other travelers and speak with them and move on. She didn’t bother filling in what he was seeking, as that
didn’t matter in any story—instead she wrote about him alone in the mountains and then down in the valleys, always moving
forward, always intent on his path, but far above she was looking down at him, and she could see how impossible it was for
him to reach his destination. Terrible, terrible things happened to him as he went, but she brushed over them and didn’t let
herself show them completely. She couldn’t. From that high above, she could see that this distance he had to go was impossible.
But he didn’t know it. She did not allow him to ever get up high enough to see how arduous the journey was, because had he
known, there was a chance that he would have stopped. He had to not know in order to continue.

For hours this went on. She was not well. Her eyes felt twitchy. Bill would check with her and she would say she was okay.
Fine. He would look at the notebook, watch as her hand moved the pen and filled page after page. She would wait for him to
ask what she was writing, but he never did. Instead he read. A little later he went to sleep.

She kept writing, her hand sore. Her stomach was tight but she wasn’t hungry, she couldn’t imagine eating. Her mind was a
straight tunnel and there was only one clear circle of light ahead. She stayed with it and refused to leave it and kept writing,
even as the words made less sense, as she abandoned sentences altogether for an hour. The letters of her script began to sag
and angle. Her handwriting was falling apart. She was not tired, not in the least, when she leaned over toward Bill’s sleeping
face and looked out the window and down and saw that, far below them, what seemed like miles down, all you could see was the
ocean. Still she wasn’t through. She went back to who she had been in the weeks after the funeral, still going to class, still
reading. She moved back to her parents’ home, then blank. She wrote about the long month of December, and Christmas. Her father
gave her the Whitman book that year. She would not be going back for the spring semester, but he wanted her to have something
to read and think about while they waited. “Your imagination should be working,” her father had said. “Whatever happens in
there also happens in there.” One point to the head, one point to the belly.

They were on the ground. The notebook was nearly full. She packed it away into her purse. Bill asked her if she was all right
and she said fine and he asked her again at the luggage terminal and she said fine again.

Someone gave them leis. It was remarkably humid here, too. She couldn’t help but notice it as she stood beside her husband
on the sidewalk and waited for a cab to pull up. “What time is it?” she asked Bill. “It’s two o’clock,” he said. She thought
of telling him to take off his lei, that it made him ridiculous. “It’s like we’ve been going back in time,” she said instead.
“The way the time zones work.” As they waited, a woman beside her smoked a cigarette and talked on the phone. “I don’t know
and you don’t know,” the woman said. “He don’t know neither. That makes several of us.” Renee looked at the woman intently.
She was squat and fat, with dark brown hair. She was Hawaiian. She was wearing a white tank top and she held the phone to
her ear with her right hand and moved the cigarette away from her lips with her left. She had a tattoo on her left shoulder,
and when she turned and saw Renee watching her, she smiled.

The cab came. They loaded the luggage in. Bill asked if she was okay and she said that she was but that she wanted to lie
down. She felt sick when they started moving and she opened the window and closed her eyes, letting the humid air flow over
her face. She didn’t open her eyes, and at the hotel, Bill got into an argument with the man behind the desk, slick-haired
and young and obnoxiously professional. “Do you see, right here, my confirmation number?” she heard Bill asking, holding a
slip of paper up. “No smoking,” he said. “My wife is sick. We’d like to have our room. Our room that doesn’t stink like smoke.”
“I assure you, sir, it will not smell like smoke in your room. For tonight, I can put you there, and if there are any problems,
we’ll move you first thing in the morning.” “This is unacceptable.” “I’m very sorry, sir, but it’s all I can do right now.
We have the Pro Bowl.” “You have got to be kidding me.” “No, sir.” “What is a reservation for then, exactly? I’m curious for
future reference.” “There were some extenuating circumstances this year, sir. You see, there was a miscommunication concerning
a vacation package offered to fans of the Cleveland Browns.” “You have got to be kidding me.” Bill looked at her and shook
his head. She smiled back at him. The light here seemed very strange. She dropped her purse and looked down at it beside her
shoe. She looked up—Bill was coming toward her. She felt her hand reaching out but he was too slow, he was remarkably slow,
and when she collapsed, she tried to let her knees go down first, because any other way, her body said, there was the problem
of her head and the floor.

The world spun back, and everyone was up in arms.

At least five men were above her, fanning her.

“I’m fine,” she said several times.

They let her up into a sitting position. She told them she was okay.

“Just a glass of water,” she said, “and the room. I’ll be fine.” Someone had called an ambulance and she told Bill to send
it away and he spoke with the EMTs and persuaded them to go. They turned and trudged out of the lobby, looking disappointed,
carrying their big cases and their defibrillators.

When Bill finally got them into the room, she went straight to bed and closed her eyes. She heard Bill say from the bathroom,
“That was interesting,” before she fell asleep.

When she woke up, it was dark.

Bill was in the bed beside her, watching television, volume low.

He glanced down and saw that her eyes were open.

“Well, hello,” he said. “Elvis has returned to the building.”

She sat up in bed, her back against the headboard, and ran both hands across her face and through her hair.

“You have some kind of royal speed hangover?”

“I’m hungry,” she said. “I think. I feel like the last day of my life was a movie.”

“We have some food in the other room.”

“How long have I been sleeping?” she asked.

“Pretty long,” he said. “But tomorrow we’ll be fine. You’ve just redefined the whole genre of nightmare travel stories.”

“It was like I was...I don’t know. I felt like I was watching myself through a glass case.”

She ran her hands through her hair again, then turned and looked at her husband. His bare chest and face were both lit by
the TV. He had his glasses on. She imagined him here in the room with her for all the hours she had been asleep. She thought
of him at the phone, ordering food, trying to think of what she would like to have. Glass case or no glass case, she had written
all those things. Her mind was pushing her, over and over again, to relive everything. She wanted it to end. She needed it
to end.

“Bill,” she said.

“Renee,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

“Collapsing doesn’t count as your fault.”

She was silent.

“What?” he said. “That was a bad day, Renee. That’s fine. Forget it. Think of it as the extra cost of chasing the sun.”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I’m so sorry.”

Bill smiled, shook his head. “Stop apologizing and tell me what you’re apologizing for, Renee,” he said. He sat up and muted
the television. He turned to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Come on. Out with it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said. The smallest of steps toward it, and this
was happening.

He must have been able to see the whites of her eyes and the way she was looking at him sideways. She was crying. His eyes
changed.

“Oh God,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t even say it. The words don’t even sound—”

“What, Renee?” he said, louder.

She looked at him intently, hoping he would simply understand. Or that by some twist of fate had always known. Or had read
her notebook while she slept.

He didn’t know. She could see by his waiting eyes that he didn’t know. “When I say them in my mind, it’s like they can’t be
real,” she said, wiping at her nose. “The words, I mean. I have—there have been so many times when I’ve wanted to...”

“You have to tell me, honey,” he said. “I’m listening. Tell me. What is it?”

She closed her eyes.

“I have another son.”

6

Once, Matt went to jail. It was a bar fight. Up until about five seconds before it started, he didn’t have a clue he was about
to be involved. He was sitting at the bar with a woman whom he’d met that night. Things were not going well. She’d told him
that she was a hairdresser and had added nothing else, and that basically ended the entire line of conversation. You were
pretty much fucked in conversation if “hairdresser” was where you stopped. They’d already talked about his job. What was left?

Still, she looked like she wanted him to solve the riddle of the conversation and figure out a way to keep it going, and he
was trying to come up with something that would open a door. Typically he was not strong with such things. He liked her—he
liked the way she drank, the bottle a little to the side, and he liked her laugh, which was brighter and louder than what
he would have expected, based on the few dry comments she’d made since they started talking. She was not a down-on-her-luck
person. There was something a little bit brighter about her than anyone else in the place. She’s maybe five years older than
me, he thought. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a form appear, and he turned and looked up at the man standing
before him. “That’s a pretty girl you’re talking to,” he said, and then he punched Matt in the side of the head and knocked
him off the bar stool.

It didn’t take Matt long to stand up. The man was bigger—six three or six four, with shoulders like a horse’s—but he was old.
Matt knew that there was a special strategy to fighting older men. They could be like armored tanks and invulnerable, strong
in unnatural, limitless ways, able to endure any punishment. But then you found the right place to hit them, and they were
done. He looked about fifty-five. He had a silver mustache and his forearms were all tatted up. Everyone in the bar was silent,
watching to see what Matt would do. Matt picked his hat up, then touched his head and felt the blood in his hair. He said,
“She is pretty,” and the two of them went outside and about fifteen people followed. The big man walked in front of him, and
as they moved, Matt looked down at his opponent’s black sport sandals.

None of Matt’s friends were there, out in the parking lot. He looked over at his truck, thought of simply walking to it and
driving off. The man said, “I haven’t liked you for the last twenty-five minutes or so.”

“You don’t have much reason for that.”

“I don’t like the way you sit,” said the man. Matt saw that he made a fist with his right hand and let the left hang limp.
“I also don’t like the way you gesture.”

“Okay,” Matt said. “Work out your feelings.”

The man stepped forward, right arm cocked. It was all so slow Matt wondered whether the man was trying to trick him, but he
wasn’t, and Matt easily stepped away from the punch, to the side, and as the man went by, he stomped his right boot down with
everything he had on the man’s ankle and heard the whole thing crackle. The man collapsed to the concrete, hollering, and
Matt kicked him hard in the kidney, twice, punched him in the side of the head, right where he’d punched Matt, then walked
to his truck, got in, turned on his lights, reversed out of his spot, and drove away.

He got pulled over five minutes later.

“You broke quite a few of that man’s personal bone belongings,” the cop said to him through the window, and then he took him
in.

That was the only time he’d ever been behind bars, unless you counted the foster homes, and he didn’t, because there weren’t
bars. All throughout the fight, he’d felt nothing. The whole night in the can, he’d felt nothing. In the morning, after bail,
walking away from the building and driving home, he’d felt nothing. In his bathroom he looked a little closer at his head
and found that the cut was small, although the lump was large. He took a shower, washed his hair gingerly, then watched the
second quarter of the Packers game and scrubbed his toilet during halftime.

He crossed the Mississippi around noon, in La Crosse, and smiled to himself, thinking of Glen’s comment about the tornado
that had come through.

BOOK: The Cradle
8.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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