This Glittering World (2 page)

The police were quick. They sent only one car, and they took Ben and Sara’s statements without even coming inside the house. Ben was surprised by how soon he and Sara were alone again. By the time the paper boy finally threw the newspaper into the yard, it felt almost as though they had just woken from the same terrible dream.

They sat at the small oak table that used to belong to Sara’s grandmother, sipping coffee, staring at the pages of the paper. Sara said, “I wonder if he has family here.”

Ben looked up, grateful for her breaking the silence, for her willingness to set aside whatever it was that had transpired between them the night before. “I don’t know,” he said. “He had ID on him, so they should be able to find out pretty quickly.”

“What was his name?” she asked. Her eyes were soft with tears.

He thought about the kid sitting at the booth at Jack’s. Always alone. Ben had a problem with names. He blamed his job. Both of his jobs. So many people in and out of his life. At the bar, he had a talent for remembering the names of every single patron for exactly the amount of time they spent bellied up, drinking, tipping. But the moment they were gone, the second they’d slapped down a five or a ten and walked out the door, any recollection of what they called themselves was gone. It was like this at school too. He had anywhere between forty and eighty students a semester. He knew the first and last names of each and every one of them until the final exam. Then he’d run into one of them on campus
(Hey, Professor Bailey!)
and there was nothing but that white-hot shame of forgetting. Though maybe Ben hadn’t ever known the kid’s name. It was possible that he hadn’t forgotten at all, but rather that the guy had always been anonymous.

He should tell Sara that he recognized him, he thought. That he was a regular at work. But for some reason, he didn’t. Sometimes it was easier to keep things from her. To lie. And so he said, “I think they said it was Begay? His last name. I don’t remember his first name.”

“He was just a kid. Who could have done that to him?”

This was the Sara he loved.
Old Sara,
he thought of her. She emerged sometimes from New Sara’s body and face, like a slippery ghost. This was the true Sara, the sweet Sara, the Sara who wasn’t sarcastic and always rolling her eyes as if she were always, always disappointed. Sara without her guard up. Vulnerable Sara. Her hair was messy, in a pale puff of a ponytail. Her makeup from her witch costume last night was smudged under her wide green eyes. She was wearing the robe he’d bought her five years ago for Christmas. He’d filled the pockets with green-and red-foil-covered Hershey’s Kisses. It was pilly now, frayed at the cuffs.

“God, Ben. What the hell?”

He reached across the table for her hand. Her hands were small, like a child’s, with short fingers and tiny palms. He studied the ring on her finger, the one that had been resting there, waiting there, for almost two years. He could barely remember most of the time now what it was that had gripped him, what emotion it was that had assailed him two summers ago. He remembered buying the ring; he’d found it at an antique shop on Route 66. He remembered her happy
yes.
But ever since that initial moment of elation, sitting in the alley courtyard at Pasto, dizzy with too much wine, he remembered feeling almost nothing but regret.

He’d somehow managed to convince Sara that they should wait to set a wedding date. His reasons, at first, were good ones: They needed to save money if they were going to have the kind of wedding she wanted. Then his mother passed away, and he just needed time. Later, he suggested that he really wanted them to own their own house first, wanted them to be more stable. When her father put the down payment on the place in Cheshire, he couldn’t help but feel he was being bribed. Angry now, he became even more reluctant. Let’s wait until summer. Fall. No, winter. A winter wedding. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? And finally, they stopped talking about it altogether. By now, the ring had become a constant reminder of his biggest broken promise.

He hadn’t realized that he was playing with the ring, until she yanked her hand away and grabbed her coffee mug. “What time do you have to go in to work?” she asked.

“I might check at the hospital first, to see what happened,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Maybe he didn’t die,” he said.

She shook her head. “I really don’t think he made it. Couldn’t you just call? That way you won’t miss your shift tonight.”

“So
that’s
what this is about?” Ben said. “The fifty bucks I’ll make at work tonight?”

New Sara raised her chin, hard and sharp, and stood up, disappearing into the kitchen. “Do what you need to do, Ben.”

But he
wasn’t
dead. At least not right away.

If he’d died right away, if not for the body’s stubborn insistence upon living, then it might have ended here: the snow plow carrying away the crimson snow, Ben and Sara sipping coffee at the kitchen table. They would have gone on with their lives, and this man-boy, body frozen, breath stolen by winter, would just be a sad memory shared between them. They might talk about it sometimes, about the tragedy of this life cut short. Another casualty of winter. Just another sad disaster.

But when Ben closed his eyes, he could almost see time slipping backward, events unraveling … a woven Navajo blanket made by the boy’s ancestors, the pattern slowly coming undone, each thread revealed, the intricate design disassembled. He saw him riding a rusty tricycle in the dirt, a hungry rez dog nipping at his ankles as he pedaled furiously away, his face flushed with heat and joyful. Ben imagined him at his grandmother’s feet as she braided his hair. His soft moccasins. His small feet. He could hear the sound of her voice as she sang the boy to sleep. He watched his eyes close and then watched as he packed a duffel bag, as he hitched a ride to Flagstaff. Ben wanted to tell him not to come. To stay home. He wanted him to see the finished picture, this picture of himself, lifeless in the snow.

Sara might be able to let this go, to will herself to forget, but Ben couldn’t let it end like this, with the uncertainty of whether or not the boy had survived. He couldn’t just pretend it hadn’t happened. He couldn’t let everything just disappear into the new snow.

Sunday night was a shit shift. Hippo could handle the kitchen and the bar by himself until Ben got there later. He grabbed his coat and said good-bye to Sara through the bathroom door. Melanie was on her way up from Kachina with a bottle of wine and a movie. He knew that by the time he got home, Sara would be asleep; she had to work tomorrow. There were children with strep throat, kids with chicken pox, babies waiting to be immunized. And so he walked out the door and drove to the hospital.

B
en hated hospitals. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d been inside a hospital, and each recollection was still sharp and nauseating. The first time was when he fell out of a tree, snapping his elbow like a twig. The second time was when he was five and his sister, Dusty, was born, one month early, her head as small as a tiny peach. He’d been terrified of the wires and tubes and the blue veins running and pulsing under the transparent skin of her chest. The third time was when Dusty died. He was eleven years old then, and he remembered the hallways smelled like chlorine, cold chicken soup, and bleach. He could still recall something bitter in his throat and the swell of something awful in his chest. And so years later, when he was away at grad school and his mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, he’d only gone back east to see her in the hospital a couple of times. Each time he’d felt his pulse racing, felt his knees and spine melting into liquid bone. He’d been almost relieved when she was sent home, when she stopped the chemo treatments and opted to acquiesce rather than fight anymore. Hospitals made him sick, made his skin prickle. He didn’t know if it was ironic or masochistic or simply sad that he’d wound up engaged to a nurse.

Until now, he’d managed to avoid the hospital in Flagstaff as well. Even the time Hippo had nearly sliced off his thumb at work, he’d just dropped him off at the emergency room entrance. But now, here he was again.

He went to the visitors’ information desk and told the receptionist the story about the kid, asked if he had been admitted. He told her he only wanted to find out if the guy had survived, that he thought his last name was Begay.

She clicked and tapped at the computer without looking at Ben and said, “ICU. But you’ll need special permission to go in to see him. Down that hallway, then take a right.”

He hadn’t planned to actually go see him, but he found himself muttering, “Thank you,” and following her directions anyway. He tried to concentrate on his own breaths rather than the smell, the silence, the loamy green walls. By the time he got to the ICU waiting room, he wondered what he was doing there. He knew the kid was alive. Wasn’t that enough? He could go to work now. He could leave. But what then? Did he just go on as though nothing had happened? When you find someone beaten nearly to death in your front yard, what is expected of you? Are you tied to them, inextricably bound in some intimate way forever?

There was one old man in the waiting room. He was reading the
Daily Sun
but had fallen asleep. His chin rested on his chest, and he was snoring. Ben approached the nurses’ station and spoke softly so as not to wake the man, repeating the story he’d told the lady at the information desk.

“I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Begay is in grave condition, and only immediate family is being allowed in at this point.”

“Does he
have
family in town?” Ben asked.

“His sister,” she said. “She just went to get a cup of coffee.”

Ben felt his chest heave with relief. The kid wasn’t alone. Perhaps this was all Ben really needed. To know that if the guy were to die tonight, he wouldn’t be here, in this hospital, by himself.

“You can wait for her if you’d like. I’m sure she’d appreciate your being here.”

“Okay,” he said.

He sat down next to the old man and picked up a magazine to busy his hands. It was quiet here, just the ticking of the clock and the distant beeping and humming and buzzing of the machines.

He looked up when he sensed someone coming into the room.

The girl was blowing into the top of a Styrofoam cup. She was tall, thin, and her thick black hair ran down her back to her waist. She was wearing overalls splattered with paint and red high-top sneakers. She spoke to the nurse, who gestured toward Ben, and the girl turned to look at him. She scowled and then came over.

Ben stood up. He felt shaky, unsteady on his feet.

“Hi. I’m Ben Bailey. I’m the one who …” he stumbled. “I found him. This morning.”

She looked at him, skeptical, and sat down in one of the chairs and took a sip of her coffee. She gestured for him to sit as well.

“How is he?” he asked.

She shook her head. “He won’t live through the night.”

It felt like someone had punched Ben in the chest. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “We could keep him here, hooked up to these machines, and he would keep breathing. But his brain is dead. It’s too late.”

Ben took a deep breath.

“Do you know what happened to him?” she asked. Her voice was crackly, like timber just catching fire.

He shook his head. “No, I just … he was just out there. In the snow.”

She rubbed her temples. Her long fingers were stacked with thick silver rings. Her nails were clipped short, clean.

“
Somebody
knows something,” she said, looking up at him.
Questioning
him. “Somebody must have seen something.”

“I don’t,” he said, shaking his head, “know anything.”

His eyes were stinging, and his throat was thick. He hadn’t felt this sensation in so long, he barely recognized it anymore. A relic of childhood. This sorrow so big it fills your entire chest—he hadn’t felt that way since he was eleven years old. Not since Dusty died. It was déjà vu of the worst kind, like re-dreaming a terrible dream.
Somebody knows something. Somebody must have seen something.

This was not what he had expected. He just came here to make sure the kid had lived. That was all. He would check in and then make his way back to work. That had been his plan.

“Hey, are you okay?” she asked, her furrowed brow softening.

He nodded and looked at her. Her face was striking, with high cheekbones, amber skin, and eyes a confusion of brown and gold. She wore a thin leather choker around her long neck, a rough nugget of turquoise dipping into the deep hollow below her throat. There was a streak of white paint across her collarbone.

“You want me to get you some water or something?” she asked.

“No, I’m fine,” he said, laughing awkwardly. He stood up. His mind was reeling. “I should be going. Will
you
be okay?”

She nodded and stood as well.

As he turned to leave, she said, “If he does die tonight, the funeral will be in the next couple of days. If you give me your e-mail address or phone number I can get you the details.”

He turned to look at her. She was smiling sadly.

“Sure,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a slip of paper to write on. He found a grocery receipt and asked the nurse for a pen. “And I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t get your name?” “Shadi,” she said. “Shadi Begay.”

He nodded and scratched his e-mail address on the slip. “That’s an unusual name,” he said, looking back up at her. “I mean, it’s a beautiful name…. Is it … ?”

“It’s my nickname. It’s Navajo for
older sister.”
Ben looked back down at the receipt, felt his throat swell. “You’d really come?” she asked, taking the paper from him. Her eyes were warm and still. Something about her face made him feel calm.

“Of course,” he said, nodding.

A
long time ago, everything was whole. Ben remembers those times as if they belonged to some other Ben. A distant smiling happy Ben. A flickering black-and-white Super 8 life projected on a sheet suspended in a basement rec room. This was when he had a father and a mother and a sister. When he and Dusty made forts underneath the dining room table and chased fireflies while their parents drank wine out of fragile glasses in the backyard. It was a time of poison ivy and climbing trees. Everything smelled of cut grass and barbeque. Even the bee stings were good then. Even the cuts and bruises and humpbacked crickets and screeching cicadas.

Then he was eleven and Dusty was six, and in one moment, one sliver of a moment, everything changed. It was October, cold and sunny. The trees were alight in the bright autumn sun. They’d gotten off the bus after school and were walking home, and Ben wasn’t paying attention. He was cracking gum and cracking jokes with Charlie, the only other kid who got off at their stop, and Dusty lagged behind, dragging her ladybug backpack behind her, humming a song she’d learned that day at school. He and Charlie gave each other high fives before Charlie disappeared into his little brick house, and then Ben kept walking with Dusty following behind. Ben was thinking about basketball tryouts. About how to ask for new sneakers. About his math test. About what there might be to eat in the cupboard at home.

He imagines now that something beautiful caught her eye: a silvery dragonfly, a monarch with painted wings. Maybe just a falling acorn from one of the giant oak trees that lined the street. But that day, he wasn’t paying attention. And so when she darted out into the road and the car sped past them, into her, picking her up and then setting her down like just another autumn leaf on the pavement, he didn’t see anything except a blur disappearing in the distance. It happened so quickly, it was as though it hadn’t happened at all.

Later, when his father demanded, “You had to have seen something, Ben. Try to remember!” he hadn’t been able to remember anything. Not the color of the car, not the face of the driver, not even the song that Dusty had been singing.

For a while they tried to believe that someone would be caught. That there would be some sort of explanation, even if it was one they didn’t want to hear. They waited for the driver to come forward, for his conscience to kick in, for the guilt to overwhelm him. They waited for Ben to remember. But Ben hadn’t been paying attention. And Ben couldn’t remember anything. And so hope slowly turned into desperation and desperation into sad resignation.

That winter, when the trees were stripped of their leaves and their branches looked like blanched and arthritic bones against the sky, they cleaned out her room, and soon it was as if she’d never existed at all. It was also when his mother stopped making them go to church and stopped making pancakes on Saturday mornings and stopped playing her old records on the stereo. Eventually, she stopped speaking to his father. And so his dad left, moved into the city when Ben was fourteen. And then Ben graduated, left home, and his mother got sick. Since then, instead of feeling whole, Ben had felt slivered. His life fractured into
before
and
after.
And the chasm between was Dusty.

He never talked about her. Not even with Sara. There was no way to share that sort of grief with someone who had never known sadness. It would be like trying to explain the color red to a blind man. Trying to describe snow to someone who has never felt cold.

And so he held on to this secret, kept it folded into tiny squares inside his pocket. Sometimes he could forget it was there, on good days. But when he spoke to Shadi that night at the hospital, it was as though she had found it, unfolded it and smoothed the worn, soft creases. As though she were asking him to share this ragged grief.

He didn’t know how to tell Sara, how to explain this sudden urgent need to console a stranger. He could never have articulated the feeling that this was somehow serendipitous, that there might be a
reason
he was the one who found the kid. He knew Sara would never understand, was incapable of comprehending the new sense of purpose that swelled in his chest like a storm.

And so when Shadi Begay sent an e-mail with the details about the services, Ben lied. He said he was going down to Phoenix with Hippo to look at camper shells for Hippo’s truck, and instead drove two hundred desolate miles to Chinle for the funeral.