2008 Short Story Contest Winner

Water

by Tin Johnston

She was a good sleeper, a dependable sleeper, but that night Charlotte woke up with her heart whumping, like a young mother. There had been something.

She lay there in the dark, not breathing. At one window the drapes were shaped by faint light from the street, but at the other there was nothing, no light from the neighbors, no moonlight, and the effect was briefly frightening, as if the wall had fallen away into space, or a black sea.

She drew the alarm clock into focus: 1:36. She had a son who would stay out late, but when he came home he was like a cat, and if she heard him at all it was because she had gotten up to use the washroom, pausing by his door just long enough to hear him clicking at the computer in there, or humming to the iPod, or shhshing Ginny Simms, his girl.

She heard none of this now, nothing at all but the heat pumping invisibly, bloodlike, in the walls of the house. This was late October, two nights before Halloween, the first truly cold night of the season.

She closed her eyes and the dream she'd been having eddied back to center—a dream of hands, the feel of them, the smell of them; muscle and tendon, palm and finger. Her body, under the bedding, still hummed. She breathed, she slowed, she drifted down.

And heard it: Water.

Water was running in the pipes somewhere. Not the shower, or the toilet, or the kitchen sink: this was the distinctive 1-inch-pipe gush you heard when the boys were washing the truck, or the dog, or filling the plastic pool for the neighbor kids. She had been married to a plumber and she knew about pipes.

She got into her robe and went down the hall, past the boys' rooms—John's door open, no John; Dukie's door shut but him in there, a mound of sleep she could feel like a pulse—and down the stairs to the kitchen, where the noise was loudest.

John's truck was in the window over the sink, lit up by the worklight he used at night, a light usually manned by Dukie but now positioned somewhere out of view, like John. Two yellow smiley faces stared in at her, plastic hoods for the foglights, or whatever they were, he'd mounted on the cab. Her comment on the hoods—A bit cheesy, John—was still amusing him, apparently, when he and Dukie carved the identical inane faces into their pumpkins. She'd rolled her eyes but was secretly moved: they'd never done twins before.

Charlotte held her robe to her chest and leaned over the sink. She saw the truck's fender, the tire, a thin disk of water leaching into the gravel, and just then the spigot gave a squeal and the water stopped running and a face popped up before her so suddenly her hands flew up. John saw the movement, then saw her, and Charlotte's heart surged, as if he were hurt, as if he were washing out some great wound she couldn't see. In the next moment she heard the dog, Wyatt, shaking his hide, rattling his tags, and she understood: John would let the dog out in the park, and it would find some other animal's filth, or carcass, to roll in, and later it would stand there grinning under the hose.

The worklight snapped off and in they came, Wyatt shoving past to dive face-first into her carpet, driving his upper body along with his hind legs, first one side, then the other, grunting in ecstasy.

"Wonderful," Charlotte said, and John said, "I'll get a towel," but then just stood there.

"Did you get it all off?" she asked, and he flinched, as if she'd shouted.

"—What?" he said.

Charlotte gestured at the dog. "Did you get it all off?"

John looked at the dog but he wasn't really looking, she could tell; he was thinking of something else altogether. A year out of high school and there were bars he could get into, him and Mike Simms, and some mornings she'd smell the smoke on him like he'd slept in an ashtray. Other mornings she'd smell strawberries and know that Ginny Simms, Mike's younger sister, had been in the house. Charlotte did not approve of such things, of course—but the next thing you knew John was under the sink with his tools, or throwing the football to his brother, or fixing some neighbor kid's bike. A good boy, at the end of the day. A good son.

"I got it all," John said at last, and he turned for the stairs.

Charlotte switched off the lamp and followed.

"Now what are you doing?" she asked, at his door.

He went on shoving clothes into his duffle.

"Gonna go see Cousin Jer for the weekend," he said. "Shoot some birds."

"John," she said. "It's almost two in the morning."

He didn't reply.

"Does he even know you're coming?"

Of course he did, he told her—it was all set up: he'd be at Jer's in an hour, they'd sleep late and then head up to Uncle Martin's cabin. Back Sunday night.

Charlotte was confused and strangely heated, as if she'd done something humiliating.

"And all this is fine with—your boss?" she said, and John paused, they both did, as the idea of Bud Steadman came into the room: his smell of earth and copper, a certain kind of deodorant. His big good face. His hands.

Charlotte saw something on the switch plate, a dark fingerprint, and began to rub it. There'd been a few men over the years but there had been none for several years, and at forty-three, with two grown sons, she'd been ready to believe that all of that was over for her. But it wasn't, not quite. Bud had a nineteen-year-old daughter at home, Caroline, who didn't get along with her mother—or any older woman, so far as Charlotte could see—and the going was slow. But it was going. When the phone rang these days Charlotte's heart jumped. New bras and panties bloomed in her bureau. She'd lost weight.

The only reason John was out late tonight, with work in the morning, was because she and Bud had made plans for tomorrow night—Friday night, a date—and John had agreed to stay home with his brother.

"I'll call Bud in the morning," he now said. "Mike will cover for me."

"And me?" Charlotte all but yelped, swatting him lightly. "We had a deal!"

He shrank from her.

"You can still go out, Ma. I'll take Big Man with me."

"Oh, you will, will you? Hunting?" She stared at him, waiting for one of the Duke's howls to fill his head; most recently, it had been the torn heap of rabbit at Wyatt's feet. A smashed jack-o'-lantern could do the job.

"You got a point," John said.

A moment passed. The dog was on the bed, on its back, twisting and snorting as if in agony.

Charlotte shook her head. Uff da! her grandmother would say, venting the woe from her old Norwegian heart. The same pressure would build in Charlotte but she resisted, remembering the farm in Minnesota: Granddad pulling her off some piece of machinery with a swat; Grammy Moore whacking the neck of a chicken—the jetting blood, the headless, frantic life that didn't want to end. Nothing in this life comes easy, Charlotte had been told, and though it turned out to be true, she'd never said the same to her own children, in case it was the saying so that made it so.

She shook her head, she sighed. She would see Bud Steadman in the morning, at the Plumbing & Supply. A change of plans, she'd say. Home-cooked dinner instead. She'd get Dukie to turn in early. Like her, that boy was a sleeper.

But Bud Steadman wasn't at the Plumbing & Supply in the morning, his van wasn't there, and Charlotte followed the sullen Dukie into the store with something childish, something ridiculous and acute jabbing at her heart.

"Big Man!" Mike Simms called as they came in, and the Duke raised his hand for a gustoless high-five, then disappeared into the back, stranding Charlotte with no good-bye. It was her fault John had gone off to the cabin without him, was the message.

She stood there a moment amongst the pipes and fittings. The smell of the place was a smell she loved: pipe dope and PVC glue and sweated copper and men. She remembered the summer when Bud and Raymond had bought the building and began fixing it up. Sawdust in the nostrils, freckles of paint on all their faces. Charlotte and Meredith had fallen for each other like schoolgirls, the kind of gushy, overnight friendship men don't even try to understand. They both got pregnant the same month, and then, five months later, when Charlotte and Raymond learned there was trouble with the twins—one healthy, one not; they could terminate one to save one, or risk losing both—it was Meredith and Bud who loaned them money for more tests, a second opinion, the monitoring that saved John's life. He had his heart murmur, but he'd grown strong as a lion. And the Duke, well, the Duke was the Duke... No one had seen that coming.

Six years later, Raymond was dead. The cancer they'd been fighting in one lung had jumped to the other like a clever rat. Charlotte had to give up the business to keep the house. She and Meredith's friendship began to falter, and she realized that after all it was the men, not the women, who kept the two families close. She heard through other friends about Meredith's miscarries, but only called after the first. Both had been boys, she heard.

Then, when her own sons were sixteen, here came Bud again, with jobs: custodial duties for Dukie and the secrets of the trade for John. Bud had never gotten around to changing the Steadman-Moore sign on the side of the building, and a hyphen that had once said family to Charlotte, then loss (a minus sign), then another lifetime, suddenly said family again.

Now Charlotte asked Mike Simms if he knew when Bud would be back, and the boy replied cheerfully, "Can't say, Mizz Moore. He ain't been in yet."

"Oh," she said, puzzled—actually bothered by this answer.

"Anything I can help you with, Mizz Moore?"

And there it was: Mike Simms had opened up the store. Bud had given him keys.

She'd thought John was the only one.

*

In her car again, driving across town to the mall where she works. A brilliant, stunning blue day in October. Cars moving along in their lanes, catching the light. On the radio two women are talking in quiet tones: one has written a book about her childhood, her abusive drunken father, but it's the women's voices, more than the subject, that takes Charlotte back in time, to a night when she felt friendship land on her like a blow. They had all been working on the store and now she and Meredith sat alone on the deck with the wine. If they were pregnant, they didn't yet know it. The bellies of insects pulsed green in the dusk. Bud had taken Raymond to the basement to talk about turning it into something called a game room. The women could hear the low, manly voices down there.

When she was sixteen, Meredith said, refilling Charlotte's glass, then her own, she had slept with a teacher at her high school.

Charlotte picked up her glass. Took a sip. In her stomach she felt as if a notorious man had just grinned at her.

What kind? she asked. Of teacher.

Art. Mr. Beckman. Mr. B. He thought Meredith had talent. She thought he was a fairy. Everyone did. He passed her one day in his car, an Oldsmobile. She was wearing her best skirt.

Meredith was quite a bit smaller than Charlotte, tiny in fact, with the most extraordinary skin. At sixteen, Charlotte could not even imagine.

They talked about Dali, Meredith said. They parked. He had a mustache that tickled. He wanted to see her again. He stood behind her in class, as she drew. He began slipping her these little drawings—very good, very dirty. He was in an artistic fever, he said into her ear. She showed the drawings to just one person, her best friend, but that was enough. A substitute teacher came to Mr. B.'s art room one day, and stayed. The school was talking. Meredith's father heard it at the plant from some other kid's father, came home and slapped the living crap out of her.

My God, Meredith. Charlotte put her fingers on her friend's cool forearm.

Her dad had these brothers, Meredith continued after a moment in the same quiet, factual tone. Five of them. One, Uncle Donny, was a piece of work. In and out of jail, drunk at Christmas, fuck this and fuck that. About a month after the Mr. B. scandal, Uncle Donny came by the house. He was there just a minute, barely said hello, and two days later they found Mr. B. walking along the interstate. His head was cracked. His teeth were gone. All his fingers were broken.

Laughter came to them from the house, from the basement, making them both turn to stare. Meredith raised her glass again and Charlotte heard it clink lightly against her teeth.

She waited for the cops to come, Meredith said. She stopped eating. She typed a letter at school and sent it anonymously. No one ever came. No one ever did. Mr. B. was in the hospital a long time but he couldn't recognize you, they said, so what was the point of going up there? His parents came and took him away, finally, like a child.

My God, Meredith, Charlotte said again. She could barely see her friend in the dark. Her heart was beating with pity and love. After a while she said, What do you do with that?

There was no reply, a long, unnatural soundlessness, a black well of listening. Fireflies like little bombs going off at a great distance. Men coming up the stairs, loud and huge. Meredith's eyes flashed and she said, You bury it, Charlotte.

*

The morning passed. Charlotte in the back room tagging sweaters amidst tinny bursts of ring tone from the jackets and purses of the salesgirls. At ten o'clock she walked to the far end of the mall, all the way to the restrooms and the building's—maybe the world's—last payphone. (The little cellphone John and Dukie had given her for her birthday—"Look, it takes pictures!"—sat dead in a kitchen drawer, next to the dead camera.) She intended to call Bud, tell him the new plan, but at the last moment she dialed John's cellphone instead, got his voicemail.

"John, here. You know what to do."

She asked him to leave her a message at home, just to say he arrived at Cousin Jer's OK, then she hung up and began the long walk back to work. She would call Bud later, at her lunch break. It was Friday, and they had a date.

Back at the store, something had happened. Alicia stood alone on the sales floor, thin arms folded over her thin stomach. Ten years younger than Charlotte, she would talk about things like chakras and third eyes and orgasms.

Now she came from behind the register as if Charlotte were some girl with an Anne Klein blouse stuffed up her shirt. In the door of the back room Charlotte saw two salesgirls with phones to their ears, one listening, open-mouthed, the other moving her lips in a ceaseless rapid-fire.

"There's been an accident," said her boss, and the store rolled and Charlotte pitched backwards, sickly, into a scene on the highway, John's truck inverted on the shoulder, wheels to the sky, black smoke spiraling—

"No, no," Alicia said quickly, "not that, not one of yours. It's Caroline," she said. "Bud Steadman's girl," she said. "They found her this morning in the river."

*

The story was going around, cellphone to cellphone: Caroline had been walking home from her boyfriend's. No, she was walking home from the bars. She was alone; she was not alone. She'd been drinking. She was high. The girl had problems—she'd lost her license to a DUI the year before, that much was a fact. She was cutting through the park, along the river, and had fallen in. Jumped in. Been pushed in. She'd been there all night. Someone crossing the bridge had seen her, wallowing against the concrete piling below like driftwood.

Charlotte was in her car again, driving across town. A brilliant, cold blue day. On the sidewalk a young woman with long black hair drew a kite-tail of small children behind her. A man in tights ran by them, smiling. The sun, the blazing trees, the silvered bend of river, all exactly as it should be on a day in October, a pristine day. She tried to picture it: Caroline Steadman, this girl she'd known since birth, floating in the water with the branches. But all Charlotte saw clearly was the blouse, the one she'd given the girl on her nineteenth birthday, Bud looking on uneasily: a smart, semi-sheer blouse she had spent too much on, even with her discount, all night in the river under the black sky, the fabric wetted to skin except where air slipped in, raising white, tremulous welts on the water.

*

"Charlotte—"

He was startled, confused to see her. His pale face, the bruised unfocussing eyes, swept away anything she might've been ready to say.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I tried to call first..." Three times, from the store—three times got his service, three times hung up. What was the message you left for this? Go, Alicia said finally. He's going to need you.

But he was not asking her in, or even letting go of the storm door so she could put her arms around him. She wasn't surprised, she told herself, certainly not hurt—it had nothing to do with her. He had to handle things his own way, in his own time.

"I'm so sorry, Bud," she said into those eyes.

"They took me to her," he said. "The police. To make sure."

"Oh, Bud. By yourself?"

He didn't answer, he seemed to be listening, and she listened too: someone else was in the house, on the phone. A voice of calm, male authority. She glanced at the extra car in the drive, a black gleaming Lexus.

"Someone's with you?"

"Duncan."

"That's good. That's good, Bud." His brother Duncan, she remembered, was some kind of lawyer for the state. She'd met him once and had been struck by the cleanliness of his fingernails.

"Can I do anything, Bud, is there anything I can do?"

He caught her eyes, fleetingly, possibly by accident. He said, "Meredith's on her way. Her sister's driving her down. I thought it was them when you knocked."

Charlotte nodded, but couldn't speak. She hadn't seen Meredith in years, not since before the divorce. She remembered that night on the deck, with the wine, when her heart had filled with pity and love. They were going to be friends forever, old ladies, arm in arm in Mexico, Europe, after the husbands were gone. When the first crack in their friendship appeared, not long after Raymond's death, it was that story again, that secret—Mr. B.—that somehow widened the crack and made it permanent.

"They think now maybe she didn't just drown," Bud said abruptly.

"They—?" said Charlotte.

"The police." He dug at the black and gray whiskers on his face. "They think someone hit her with a car."

"My God." Charlotte had the sensation of dropping through space, her stomach rising.

"They think this person didn't see her maybe," Bud said. "Then tried to cover it up by pushing her in the river. Can't be sure," Bud said, "but it looks like she was still alive, then. When they pushed her in. Looks like she was still breathing."

*

"Mama," Dukie said when she came in, "the police men was here. One man and one girl police man." He was at the plate glass window, spritzing away smears and fingerprints. Mike Simms sat behind the counter, unsmiling. Charlotte looked at him and he nodded.

"They're going around talking to people," he said. "Anyone who mighta seen her last night."

Charlotte nodded, too. She thought a moment. She tried to think. She had meant to ask Mike about John, if they'd been together last night, but now she didn't want to look at him again. She couldn't seem to breathe.

"Dukie, get your jacket," she said, lifting her purse to dig in it, though her keys were already in her hand.

"Gotta do windows, Mama."

"Tomorrow, Dukie. Today's a short day."

At home she was barely in the door, had barely glanced at the answering machine—no blinking red light, nothing—before she saw the car outside, in the street. A plain blue sedan parked as if it had been there all day, when she knew it hadn't been there just seconds ago. Two men in ties and jackets were coming toward the house. She met them at the door, and the taller of the two, calling himself Detective Carson, watched her face as he made sure Charlotte was aware of the unfortunate news regarding...while the other man, Detective Something, brushed past her with his eyes and began tearing the house apart.

They were trying to learn as much as they could about the night before, this Carson was explaining. They understood that her son John had been at the bar where Caroline was last seen alive.

Charlotte wasn't sure if this was a question, but she said she couldn't say about that, she didn't know where he'd been.

The other man, chewing gum, looked and sounded as if his mouth had been invaded by some small creature.

After a moment—after Carson asked—she let them in.

*

There wasn't much she could tell them, as there wasn't much she knew, and just a few minutes after they left she had trouble remembering their names, their faces, trouble believing they were ever there at all. She tried to call John again. Kept trying until she heard, from her brother Martin, calling her, that he was in custody. They'd found him up at the cabin, and there was no trouble.

"In custody—?" Charlotte heard herself say.

"Not arrested," her brother said quickly. "Not charged."

"But in custody," Charlotte said.

There's a gray area, he told her—and he went on reassuring her, but Charlotte's mind was tumbling. She was at the kitchen window, as she had been the night before. Two yellow eyes looking in the window, the twin smiley-faces. Water, she remembered. The dog had rolled in something. She saw her son's face, the gust of white breath when he saw her in the window.

There was nothing out there now. No truck. No son.

In custody.

*

It's dark when tires crunch in the drive, and she quickly turns off the TV. A car door slams, the tires crunch the gravel again, and in walks John. Charlotte is up from the sofa but everything about him says Stop, don't touch me. Dukie comes in and lifts him in a bear hug until John says "Put me down, idiot."

"John," Charlotte says.

He ignores her, going for the stairs.

"Hey, where's Wyatt?" Dukie bellows.

"I had to leave him up there, with Jer."

"Oh, no!" cries Dukie.

"Who brought you home?" Charlotte asks, afraid to hear the answer—that it was those men, the detectives—and John stops on the stairs.

"Why are you even here, Ma?"

Charlotte stares at him.

"Why aren't you on your date?"

"John—" she says again, with purpose, but then falters. She has a feeling of choking, of drowning. His eyes burn into her a moment, then he turns again, and the two of them, her boys, disappear over the rise of the stairs.

She locks the doors and closes drapes. It crosses her mind to pull the phone line from the wall, and in that instant the phone rings.

It's Martin again, her brother. There's nothing for her to worry about, he says, he's been talking to the lawyer. He spends some time telling her things she hardly hears, something about physical evidence, the phrase "erratic, troubled girl," and Charlotte mechanically takes down the number of the lawyer.

There's a silence, and she asks, "Do you think he knows?"

"Who?" Martin says.

"Bud Steadman. Do you think he knows...about John?"

"You haven't talked to him?"

"Yes, earlier. Briefly. He wasn't—he..." She doesn't finish.

"He's a good man, Char," Martin says. "And he's been good to those boys. But what he's going through right now... Hell, I don't even want to imagine."

*

She waits for the detectives to return, but they don't—not that night, not all day Saturday.

She waits for Bud to call, although she knows that won't happen either, not as long as those cars are parked in his drive—the black Lexus, and now a white Volvo she knows is the car Meredith came down in.

And then it's Sunday night, Halloween. John emerges from his room at last, on his way to Mike Simms' waiting truck, and off they go. Charlotte sits home with the Duke, who sits in his Packers helmet and jersey, ready to dish out candy for kids if any come. None do; not one. It's a bad night for it, a bitter wind blowing, so no wonder.

Later, after Dukie's gone to bed, something sails through the living room window and lands on the carpet. A small stone out of the sky. It's surprising what a clean, small hole it makes, with only a few slender shards to pick up. The pieces are still in her hand when the phone rings.

"Hello?" she says. "Hello—?"

"Hello? Mrs. Moore?"

Mrs. Moore! The blood goes out of her, she steadies herself on the counter.

But it isn't him, it isn't Bud. It's his brother, Duncan.

Charlotte manages to give her sympathies, then listens while Duncan explains that Bud isn't going to open the store tomorrow, so the boys should plan on staying home.

"Of course," Charlotte says. She sees the scene over there, at Bud's house: Duncan at the phone and Bud beyond him, heaped in a chair, staring into coffee, Meredith on the sofa, their daughter, their only child, dead.

"But I wonder," she says, "is there any chance—"

"In fact," says the brother, "they should probably plan on staying home until further notice, Mrs. Moore."

After he hangs up, Charlotte keeps the phone to her ear, listening to the strange, enormous silence there, a sound from the windy blacks of space. She stands frozen in it, her chest emptied. There was a day, years ago, when something happened, or nearly happened, between her and Bud Steadman. A gray afternoon, the window panes ticking with bits of ice. She had come out of a bath and felt weak and had sat down on the bed. Before her was the cheval glass that had belonged to her grandmother, her mother, now her. Who would she give the mirror to, this girly keepsake?

Charlotte—?

A man in the house, downstairs. Her heart gave a kick.

His footfall across the living room, and then her name again, lobbed up the stairs. A stair tread creaked and she reached for her robe, but stopped.

Two days ago they had buried Raymond. This afternoon, Bud had picked up the boys and taken them to a movie so Charlotte could sleep. Now they were back.

Charlotte—? he said from around the corner.

Yes, she answered. That was all. He came anyway, into the frame of the door.

Oh— His big face filled with the shock of her there, on the bed. I'm sorry, he said.

She heard kids in the yard, boys and girls, already into some kind of contest. Caroline could be mean but John would keep things fair and good for the Duke.

Brought the boys back, Bud said, not looking away, looking her in the eye. He reached up and worked the flesh under his jaw with a coarse, sandpaper sound. He was a man who was sure before he acted, who didn't operate by guesswork or even intuition, but who held in his head all the hard facts of mechanical things. Over the years there had been moments, yes, when she'd wondered what it would be like to be with him instead of Raymond, to simply switch. Innocent, helpless thoughts such as every woman must have...

He took a step, then came certainly toward her. In the wash of movement she smelled the outdoors, the steely clouds and the wet, moldering leaves. Green buttons rode the flannel wave of his stomach down to his belt. The buckle was a little brass mouth with a little brass tongue. Her heart beat in her breast. She turned to the mirror and the picture there was incredible: this naked, wet-haired woman, this man beside her dressed for cold—the forward cant of his body, the emptiness of his hands.

Charlotte— he said, and in the next instant Caroline's voice, shrill and imperious, penetrated the room like a wind.

Hands off, retard!

Out there, in the cold, John said something low, and silence followed.

Bud's face was crimson. His jaw muscle jumped.

She knows better, by God.

It's all right, Charlotte said.

Nothing else happened. The day was going dark. In the mirror she saw Bud's arm drift toward her shoulder, then beyond it. She saw her robe rise up like a spirit, felt it brush her shuddering skin. In the mirror, as in the flesh, he got the robe over her shoulders and over her breasts without quite touching her.

There is glass in her hand, Charlotte notices, standing at the sink. Slender fragments pressed into her palm, and after a moment she remembers the broken window, the strange little stone. She dumps the glass in the trash and rinses her hand under the faucet. She had wanted to tell him something, that day—something true and unafraid, such as how she'd often felt, her secret thoughts. Caroline's voice had stopped her.

And if it hadn't? If everything had gone just a little bit differently? Meteors, they said, were on the way, right now, crossing billions of years of chance. If Caroline had not spoken and Charlotte had—would things be different? Would Caroline be alive?

It's late, almost midnight. Wind is moaning in a gap somewhere. She begins going around the rooms locking doors, switching off lights. She's halfway up the stairs before she remembers John is still out, but she doesn't go back down to turn on the lamp. In a few weeks, he'll be gone. He'll take off one day while she's at work, leaving just a note saying he's gone down to St. Louis, to work construction with a friend of his. The lawyer will call a few days later looking for him—John's cellphone number no longer works—but it's a social call, mainly, just checking in. John's a good kid, the lawyer will say before hanging up. Charlotte raised a good boy.

Not long after that she will see that Bud Steadman has finally changed the sign on the side of the building—white-washing out the hyphen and everything after—and that's when she'll decide to go, too. Her father still has the farm in Minnesota, where as a girl she learned nothing comes easy. It's a place, a life, she had left behind. But you never do. There's room for her and Dukie and the dog, Wyatt, which John has left behind. The first time she cooks for him, at the old stove, her father weeps.

John will come up for Thanksgiving and Christmas that first year, then just Christmas, then not even that. One day Charlotte will get a card in the mail, two photos inside. Here is her new daughter-in-law, Cheryl; here is her grandson, Grant—the very image of John and Dukie when they were born. But "healthy," John writes, "and normal."

When the dog finally dies—of cancer, like Raymond—Charlotte decides to call her son. She's remembering the day he found the dog, just this bag of bones down by the tracks. He'd fed it some licorice and when he turned to go it latched its jaw onto his calf muscle. Seeing the teeth marks in his skin—the skin unbroken, thank God—Charlotte got up to call the pound, the Board of Health, the police. But John had looked at her, and then at Dukie, who was studiously petting the animal's skull.

This was late November, maybe December. Raymond had not been dead very long.

John kneeled next to his brother and began stroking the dog's ragged spine. You know what they'll do to him, he said quietly, as if to himself.

What? said the Duke. What will they do to him?

Don't, Charlotte said. John, don't...

Well. He had been a good dog, after all. Smart, happy, devoted to John as if he'd never forgotten that piece of licorice, that sudden change of fortune. After John left, leaving him behind with Charlotte and Dukie, he was not the same animal. His heart was broken. Sickness saw an opening.

"What do you want me to do with him, John?" she now asks on the phone, her voice under control. It was the water, she remembers—the sound of water in the pipes. If he had never turned it on she would never have come downstairs. She would never have seen him out there with the hose in his hand, would never have seen the look on his face the moment he knew she was there, the moment he knew he'd been seen.

Of course, if she had not had a date with Bud Steadman—if she had never had feelings for Bud Steadman—John would not have been out at all that night. This is Charlotte's final thought on the matter, again and again, up there in Minnesota.

"What else can you do?" John says at last on the phone, in the voice of an older man, a husband, a father. "You bury him, Ma."

Copyright © 2008 by Tim Johnston.

2007 Short Story Contest Winner

Better Times

by Mark Wisniewski

There were at least thirty hornets in my medicine chest, which my landlord insisted I keep closed until the exterminator opened it, so I hadn’t brushed my teeth in two days. The exterminator, who my landlord said was a woman, didn’t show the day she was supposed to, and then she was supposed to show the following morning—before I left for work—and now, on that following morning, I was at work, which meant I’d needed to leave my apartment unlocked for her, which I didn’t like. Everyone knows an unlocked door means you could get robbed, but what got me most was I’d probably never see the exterminator—and there’d go a chance for me to talk to a woman other than the one who always came to the cemetery.

That’s where I worked, the cemetery. How the exterminator could have shown at my apartment before my shift still bothers me. My landlord knew I left home at four-thirty a.m. to get to the cemetery by five, when any excavation needed to start. My boss Rich believed no one wants to see digging in a cemetery, so we had to finish all excavation before six, sixty-thirty tops. Anyway as I’d showered before work that morning, I knew the exterminator would never appear before I left, but still I sort of hoped she would, which then left me grumpy, maybe even downright pissed at my landlord for messing with me like that. You know: How can you lie to a tenant as ideal as me when you know I’ll know you’ll be lying?

And then there I was, at work, still grumpy, though there was no excavation scheduled, just leaf and littered item removal until lunch and then, after lunch, probably weed-wacking, but John Monilon wouldn’t know until Rich rolled in and told us for sure.

John Monilon was one of those co-workers who’s almost a complete friend. I’d sometimes think, while we’d be for instance watering sod, that one day we’d do something together after punch-out, like bowling or watching a game at the minor league baseball stadium you could see on the cemetery’s highest hill, but somehow this never happened. You think you’ll do something with a person like that, since there, at work, you and this person discuss yourselves so much this person knows all about you, like how one of your big toenails fell off for no reason, and you can laugh with this person, hard sometimes, but when it comes down to the last minute of a shift, while you’re each holding a time card and waiting for the clock’s final tick, you realize you and this person will part ways again, John Monilon off to a bar to eat a burger and drink beer and try for sex even though he has herpes and went to jail for dealing drugs, you back home to eat tuna and rice before you might browse through your stamps. Yes, I keep stamps, and, yes, I know stamp collecting isn’t the best hobby for a guy who wants to talk to a woman other than one who always comes to a cemetery, but it’s a truth about me.

At least it didn’t help when I tried those over-the-phone dating lines. I should say right now that, through those lines, I actually have talked to women other than the one who always comes to the cemetery, but those conversations, when I’m honest with myself, don’t count. For one thing, none ever lasted for more than fifteen seconds, usually because I’d lose nerve and hang up, once because I said “I save stamps” after the woman, whose name was Cheryl, asked me to tell her about myself. I still think it was rude for her to answer my response with silence followed by the tiniest laugh, but my experience with her did teach me that, if I ever do get into a conversation, a real conversation, with a woman other than the one who always comes to the cemetery, stamps are a topic I should avoid.

Unless maybe the woman raises it. And, yes, I’ll admit I have wished for a woman out there, in the non-cemetery world, who loves stamps and wouldn’t mind talking to me, but this wish, I know, could prove undesirable.

Have you tried the internet? you might be thinking, and in fact that’s what John Monilon once asked, and my answer was (and will always be) that if I’d meet a woman through the internet, she wouldn’t count either, because what I want isn’t intercourse but instead the satisfaction of having physically approached a non-cemetery woman, talked with her, and parted with her knowing we were both on better terms than we were before my approach. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but that’s all I want. John Monilon says I’m what shrinks call asexual, which, if you ask him, means I’ll never have intercourse because my testicles won’t cooperate. Between you and me, John Monilon might be right about this, but I’d never tell him so, because saying “Yeah, I’m asexual” to someone could, as I see it, end any chance that I am sexual—and, as I understand things, if I really am asexual, I’ll probably never belong to any true family—not the one that got rid of me, not the foster ones I’ve lived with, not the theoretical one I’d create if I could father children with a woman who’d keep me.

Anyway what John Monilon and I did the morning the exterminator was supposed to show was leaf and littered item removal, which meant we needed to walk to the toolshed on the edge of the woods, unlock it with the key on John Monilon’s chain, each take a drab canvas bag with a shoulder strap, each take a bladeless hockey stick handle with a beheaded common nail hammered halfway into one of its ends, then both wander the grounds in search of every leaf and littered item that kept the cemetery from being perfectly green.

Rich, our boss, believed in perfectly green. Perfectly green, Rich said, was essential in cemetery maintenance. If you asked him, people with dead folks need to see as much green as possible when they visit—or even drive past—a cemetery, because green means life in general, and life in general, to such people, can mean a hereafter. These people need belief in a hereafter so they can hope to see their dead folks again, so the greener we could make our cemetery, the more people would pay to keep their folks in it, which meant more money for Rich, which was supposed to mean a raise for me.

But the thing was, on that day (the day the female exterminator was supposed to show at my place), all I’d gotten so far was a fifteen-cent raise—even though I always attacked any leaf or littered item in sight, stabbing it as close to its center as I could, making sure it ended up well inside my bag, jammed toward a corner so it wouldn’t escape into a breeze—and even though John Monilon and I, in the past few months, had been digging and sodding more plots than ever. If we’d earn more money, John Monilon once said, we’d meet more women—even if I was asexual, even, he also said, if we didn’t use our raises to buy sharp clothes. Women, according to John Monilon, can smell money behind a guy no matter what he wears, and money, he said, is the main thing women want. Once I told him he blew more hot air than our newest leaf blower—since no way did he know what every woman wanted—and he told me to try to prove him wrong, then added that, so far, he and I both were living proof he was right. “Maybe they just don’t want a guy with herpes,” was what I said then, and he said, “No one but you knows I have herpes,” which caused me to believe he and I could still be complete friends. But after punch-out that day, he hightailed it from the cemetery faster than ever, which made me wonder if, for me, complete friendship was a piece of pie in the sky.

Anyway John Monilon and I began leaf and littered item removal the morning the exterminator was supposed to finally show, and as usual, we started out side-by-side, with John Monilon telling me about what happened to him the night before, which this time was that he met a woman with large breasts. We walked all the way up and down one hill stabbing leaves as he focused my thoughts on her breasts, telling me how full they were, how she kept pressing the side of one against him because she supposedly couldn’t always hear what he said, how he kept talking more and more softly and shoving quarters in the jukebox to play louder and louder heavy metal songs. He also explained how she must have wanted the breast to keep touching him, because no woman, he said, accidentally lets a breast that size touch a drunk guy that long—and how she must have known the breast was giving him a hard-on, and how, after the hard-on remained hard for at least a continuous hour, she excused herself to go to the bathroom, which he took as an excellent sign, but then, when she left the bathroom, she walked right out of the bar. What got him most, he told me, was that she walked out alone: it was one thing, he said, for a woman in a bar to make you hard and then leave with her friends, but to make you hard and bolt on her own was just plain vicious. Then, like John Monilon often did, he said, “You know what that’s like, right?”—as if I always talked to friendless women who pressed large breasts against me, which he darned well knew I never did. And I said, “No, John, I don’t know what it’s like.” And he said, “Ah, come on, man,” and I said, “I’m telling you, John, I really don’t know,” and then he went off on a long speech, giving me the business about how certain it was that I was asexual. As usual when he did this, I didn’t say anything, just looked ahead for leaves and littered items. Sometimes when he’d do this, I’d want to tell him to shut up, but then I’d tell myself to keep my own mouth shut—because if I asked him to shut his, we’d never be complete friends. It’s better, I’d usually tell myself, to have anyone, even an incomplete friend, walk beside you giving you the business than it is to try to make a cemetery perfectly green by yourself.

And now, also as usual when John Monilon would tell me I was asexual, he tried a bunch of times to get me to admit that I was, but I didn’t give in, and then, after I walked quickly toward a leaf well to our right, I stabbed it and angled off even more toward another leaf without hearing John Monilon or looking back to wait for him. And then there we were, on obviously separate paths, which meant we’d stab everything faster and end up finding each other back at the toolshed sooner, but in the meantime we’d be alone.

And when I’d be alone during leaf and littered item removal, I’d just zigzag without plans from one non-green oasis to the next, and sometimes while I did this I’d think about some of my foster families, often about the last one I stayed with, the one that had me share a bedroom with my foster parents’ natural child, a twelve-year-old boy (about three weeks younger than me) named Thomas. One night Thomas told me that, because his parents were poor, we’d never get an allowance like some of his friends did, and he decided we’d need to make our own money if we wanted to buy things, so we tried all sorts of businesses for kids, including selling tomato seeds door-to-door for this mail-order company in Illinois, selling Christmas cards door-to-door for this mail-order company in Georgia, until we decided that we weren’t getting our fair share of the profits—and that we should start our own mail order company, which I suggested be a stamp company.

At first Thomas didn’t believe a stamp company could make money, but then I told him what I’d learned from a family services lady years earlier—that people collected used stamps and even paid money for them—and soon we were tearing every stamp off his parents’ mail, plus off envelopes we’d see in trash bins at our middle school, and then one night, while we lay awake in our trundle beds, we made lists in our minds of people who got lots of mail and might let us take torn-open envelopes from their wastebaskets. Nuns and priests at churches seemed like a good idea, as did dentists and doctors and insurance men, and the next day, after school, we asked quite a few of these kinds of people if we could look through their trash once a week, and most of them, after they asked why and we explained we were starting our own stamp company, said yes. Two of their secretaries even offered to put aside used envelopes for us so we wouldn’t need to get dirty digging through their garbage cans, and one thing I noticed was that the nicest secretaries always faced Thomas while they were being nice, which, I decided, was because he had shiny yellow-white hair. Of course, in order to sell the stamps, we needed to remove them from their envelopes, which we did by tearing off the upper-right-hand corners of the envelopes, soaking these corners in lukewarm water in soup bowls (cold water took forever to unglue the stamps; hot water caused any colored envelope paper to bleed and stain the stamps permanently), then letting the stamps dry on our linoleum bedroom floor. The library at school had a magazine for stamp collectors, Lynn’s Stamp News, and we put in a classified ad for $2.90 we made shoveling snow, and the ad said, “100 U.S. stamps in very good condition for one dollar postpaid—T & S Stamp,” with our address. T stood for Thomas and S stood for me, and I’d been fine with the T before the S because I made Thomas president of the company one night after he said he was bored with peeling stamps off wet scraps of paper. Maybe six weeks passed with us checking the mailbox for not only cancelled stamps but also letters addressed to our new company, and the day after Thomas asked why we didn’t just mow lawns for cash, the mail came with three one-dollar orders. And soon dollar bills were arriving almost every day, as well as a few checks for a dollar apiece made out to T & S Stamp, which meant we couldn’t cash them until we went to a savings and loan and explained we had a stamp company, walking out that door with an official savings account plus a new source of cancelled stamps. Yeah, we had to keep sending in $2.90 for ads, but we were making an actual profit.

Anyhow Thomas and his parents were the foster family I’d think of most when I’d zigzag away from John Monilon, maybe because T & S Stamp was the closet thing to a group of people I’d really belonged to. Other families I’d stayed with had never kept me feeling as alive. I’m not saying Thomas and his parents made me happy, but their house was at least cleaner than the other places that took me in, which sometimes, when I stabbed littered items in Rich’s cemetery, returned to my mind as a blur of cold fish sticks and the stink of reheated macaroni and cheese. In some of those houses I wasn’t the only foster child, and in those houses, you could actually feel the business of fostering going on, as if you yourself were a cancelled stamp to be soaked and removed and dried in a room and sent away for the profit of the parents, who’d argue about which of them was president. In none of those houses did the parents discuss my future beyond the next week, and in one I slept in the basement, where the pilot light in the boiler sometimes went out, and once in the middle of a night, when that landlord came down to fix the boiler, he asked me to take off my pajama pants, which I was old enough to know not to do. But then he told those foster parents I’d broken the boiler, and a few months later, I was off to a house where my bedroom was half of the attached garage—where a homemade curtain was supposed to keep me from knowing I was sleeping beside a car.

My mind still can’t get rid of the sight of that Fairlane’s muddy passenger-side tires, which I’d seen every night because the curtain wasn’t quite long enough. In fact it very well was a flash of those tires that stopped my thoughts as I bagged a gum wrapper and glanced up to see the woman who always came to the cemetery. She was singing this time, which she’d do now and again, only today she was also visoring her eyes with her hand, looking ahead of her, at the grass. The sun made the grays in her dark blond hair sparkle, and she was wearing baggy blue jeans, and she saw me and smiled and said, “Greetings.”

“Greetings,” I said, and I thought, here we go again, because as much as I wanted to talk to a woman, conversations with this one bothered me, sometimes even scared me.

“Seen any coins?” she said.

“No,” I said. “No coins.”

“I found two today,” she said.

Here it occurred to me to mention my stamps, but then I thought: What’s the point?

So what I said was: “Do you find many here?”

“Coins are everywhere,” she said. “You just have to be looking for them. And where you find one, you tend to find more.”

“But in a cemetery?” I said. “Maybe you should try—”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

Even right then, without considering that she might have collected coins, I knew she’d be better off in a parking lot. Still, I said, “I guess they could be anywhere.”

“People drop coins,” she said. “It’s just a matter of whether they hear them fall. And then whether they feel like picking them up.”“And you can’t hear a coin hitting grass,” I said, to make her sound more sane.

“And if you could,” she said, “who cares about coins in a cemetery?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“In a cemetery,” she said, “people have their minds on other things.”

“Probably so,” I said.

Her eyes floated toward the hill that hid the minor league baseball stadium. “Do you know any?”

“Any what,” I said.

“Dead people.”

“No.”

“So you still see your grandparents—that must be nice.”

“Actually,” I said, “I never knew my grandparents.”

“You were adopted?”

“Sort of.”

“Either you were or you weren’t.”

“I was in foster families.”

“I was adopted,” she said. Her eyes, my glance told me, were on my drab bag. “You didn’t miss much,” she said.

I wanted to tell her what I had missed: how, when you grow up in foster families, you’re basically guaranteed to end up poor, because your foster parents themselves are basically poor, because they tend to be down-on-their-luck couples who take money from the state while trying (unsuccessfully) to raise you on less than the state gives them—not to mention that, after you’ve been fostered and you reach eighteen, you’re all on your own, with no savings for college, no more laws that say you need care, so you end up with the kind of job no one else wants.

But this was the woman who always came to the cemetery, so why tell her this? Plus John Monilon had just crested the hill in front of the minor league baseball stadium on his way toward her and me, and that was one thing I liked about John Monilon: around him, I hardly thought about my childhood. As he walked toward us, we watched him the way two people watch someone else approach to silently admit they no longer want to talk to each other, as if, all of a sudden, they’ve decided to give up on each other, as if, all of a sudden John Monilon, as our current example, was about to say something that could put everyone present on better terms. Of course, three people on better terms after one conversation is less likely than two, which to me then meant it was impossible. But I still couldn’t wait for John Monilon to talk.

Now his eyes were moving back and forth between me and her, and he was shaking his head.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s about Rich,” he said.

“What,” I said.

“He was in a car wreck.”

“When.”

“A really bad wreck.”

“How bad?” I asked, even though I knew what he meant.

“He rolled his pick-up,” John Monilon said. “On the way home last night. His wife was just here.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“Dude,” he said as if now, finally, we were complete friends. “The guy’s dead.”

And here’s where all three of us—me, the woman, and John Monilon—stood looking at one another like blood siblings might. How long we stood like this is something I couldn’t tell you, but for however long it lasted, I believed each of us could have said anything about ourselves and the other two would have empathized. John Monilon could have said he had herpes; I could have said I saved stamps; the woman could have made her most peculiar statement about coins—and none of us, I was sure, would have minded. It was almost as if Rich had been our father, and then it was kind of as if every blade of grass around us had suddenly turned brown.

Then John Monilon said, “Do you realize what this means?”

The woman eyed him as if he always told the truth—which reminded me of how he always said I was asexual.

“What,” I asked.

“We’ll lose our jobs,” he said.

“Why would that happen?” I asked.

“Because Rich’s wife will inherit the cemetery. And she’ll sell it. And whoever buys it will probably decide to clean house.”

“Why would she sell it?” the woman asked.

“She hates this place,” John Monilon said, mostly to me. “Rich told me that once. She hated how much time he needed to spend here. And now she’ll also hate it because he was driving home from here when he left her for good.”

I saw an elm leaf behind John Monilon, and I walked over and stabbed it.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Leaf and littered item removal.”

“Fuck leaf and littered item removal, Steve. Your boss is fucking dead. We might as well burn these bags and go to McDonald’s.”

“For breakfast?” the woman asked.“For jobs,” Rich said. “I mean,” he told her, “for me and him.”

“I find coins in McDonald’s,” the woman said. “A lot of pennies.”

Rich gave her the kind of look strangers must have given her all the time, but she kept watching him like she and I had earlier.

“Why are you here, anyway?” he asked her.

“Because no one heard these coins fall,” she said, and she reached into one of her pockets and took out a dime. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Where’s my nickel?”

She pulled out all four of her pockets, which were empty. Then she studied the grass around her, made fists with her hands, shook both at the same time, then walked off, up the hill in front of the minor league baseball stadium.

“We won’t lose our jobs,” I told John Monilon, who stood perfectly still.

“Sure,” he said. “And you aren’t asexual.”

“John-Mon? Quit saying that to me.”

“I’ll say whatever I want,” he said. “And you can believe whatever you want. That’s your problem, you know. You never really face things.”

“That’s not true,” I said, and I wanted to tell him that all I’d done in my life was face things: one foster family after another, then one day after another of stabbing sod that covered thousands if not millions of bones of dead people. Just because I didn’t complain about what I faced, I wanted to say, didn’t mean I never faced it. And it didn’t help, I wanted to tell him, that all these days we’d worked together, he’d never been a complete friend.

“Like me,” he said. “I face the fact that I have herpes. I face the fact that I have a criminal record. I face the fact that I can’t get laid, and that now I’m going to need a new job—the lack of which won’t help at all when it comes to getting laid.” He cleared his throat, hitched his drab bag higher onto his shoulder. “But at least I try to get laid,” he said. “And...at least I’m a square-shooter with myself.”

“Go to hell, John-Mon,” I said, and right after those words left me, I knew I’d destroyed any last bit of friendship we’d shared. And sure enough, he walked off, away from the hill that hid the minor league baseball stadium, and as he walked he yanked his drab strap off his shoulder, shook out his leaves and littered items, tossed his bag behind him—then, after a short but very fast running start, threw his bladeless hockey stick nail-first at the sun, letting only me watch it complete half a circle and stab itself into a grave. He then walked slowly but straight off the grounds and into the parking lot and got into his Toyota and drove off, and as much as I’d known him, I now had to admit I’d never been attracted to him, or, as far as I could tell, to anyone. Sure, I’d hugged various people in my life, given hello and goodbye kisses to several, and even considered what it would be like to have sex with one or two, but I’d never felt urged toward those actions, certainly not in the way you hear about in song lyrics, or from normal people, like John Monilon, who consider intercourse on par with food as far as human needs go. Over my years I’d liked a few people, but never for longer than maybe thirty seconds at a time, and never so much that penetrating our bodies, or even just exchanging caresses over our skin, seemed like a pleasant idea.

Maybe, I told myself, you are asexual. Maybe it’ll always be like this.

But if it would be, I believed, I could still keep my job. After all, I didn’t have a criminal record. That was the problem with John Monilon: he always thought that whatever he experienced would happen to me, too. It’s different for me, I thought, and I kept on with leaf and littered item removal, figuring I owed it to Rich even though Rich was dead. And who knew: maybe Rich, wherever he was right then, needed to see perfect green in order to believe in a hereafter himself.

So I removed every leaf and littered item remaining on the grounds. Who cared about John Monilon anyway. Who cared about anyone. Then I re-policed the grounds all geared up for any new leaf or littered item, but there weren’t any. The wind had died, like everyone beneath me. In many respects it was a beautiful day. If any excavation would need to be done, I wondered who’d tell me to do it. I returned to the toolshed for a weed-wacker, but the toolshed was locked, and I realized the key for it was probably still on John Monilon’s chain.

Then, to avoid being seen by the day’s visitors—as Rich had always required—I walked up and over the hill in front of the minor league baseball stadium and stood slightly more than my height beyond the top of it. The woman was nowhere. Inside the stadium, an old man was pushing a small aluminum box on wheels that drizzled white chalk to make the third base line. He walked slowly, placing the heel of one foot directly in front of the toes on the other, and I wasn’t attracted to him, but all that really mattered was whether the line would be straight, which, as it turned out, it wasn’t. If I can’t work here, I thought, I can work there. Baseball needs perfectly green grass, I thought, and I felt better.

So I sat right where I’d been standing, just past the top of that hill, waiting for the end of my shift. Rich’s wife, I was sure, would never come back that day, which made me my own boss. I avoided picturing the Fairlane’s muddy tires by remembering T & S Stamp. Thomas and I had invested our profits in cancelled stamps you couldn’t find on envelopes in the mail—far older stamps from a wholesaler who was about to go out of business—and we’d resold them, through the mail, at even greater profits. We’d searched garage sales for all but abandoned stamp collections and bought them at below-catalogue prices and sold individual stamps in them to strangers all over the country, and one in Guam. From the beginning we’d always saved half the profits and reinvested half, so roughly four years into our partnership, we were receiving at least ten dollars a day in the mail. School began to look pointless. Thomas’ parents were proud of us, but they kept T & S Stamp secret from everyone he knew. I wasn’t at all attracted to him or his parents, and I could barely stand the girlfriends he met in our high school—or any girl in any high school—and never, not for one moment, had I felt anything for that landlord who’d asked me to take down my pajama pants. I couldn’t say, as I progressed through high school, that I was attracted to stamps, but I liked them. By my junior year, I’d sit looking at them longer than Thomas would.

The old man was now putting down the first base line. Then he made the two batter’s boxes, which took longer than you’d think. But they were perfect. Still, I wasn’t attracted to him. I didn’t miss the woman who came to the cemetery. I didn’t miss anyone.

Then I walked home. I was surprised to find my door unlocked until I remembered the female exterminator was supposed to have killed the hornets in my medicine chest. Maybe she’s here? I thought as I walked in, even though my apartment is only two rooms and a bathroom and she wasn’t in the main room. She wasn’t in the bathroom, either. The medicine chest was open, and the hornets were nowhere. How she’d killed them was a small mystery to me, as well as what she’d done with them.

I didn’t bother to look for her in the bedroom. If she’d been in there, she would have left my apartment immediately, because she would have seen, on most of the floor and much of my bed, open albums full of inventory that had once belonged to T & S Stamp—that is, before I’d given Thomas our savings account balance of $1,462, which I’d done the week before Christmas our senior year, five days after he said he didn’t want to sell stamps any more, even if he were president. At the time we’d made that deal, I thought we were both being fair, and in a way I sometimes still think we were. He had the money, I’d told myself back then, and I had an odd but growing business that would always stay with me. There would always be plenty of people who cared enough about cancelled stamps to pay ever-increasing prices for them—or so I’d thought back then. And the exterminator’s perfume, I realized now, was everywhere.

Copryright 2007 by Mark Wisniewski.

2006 Short Story Contest Winner

Harvest Cycle

by Marie Holmes

Cassie found her announcement one day on the medical students’ board. It was the first flier of hundreds she had read during lunch breaks that could possibly be directed at her. The paper was pale pink, free of distasteful clip-art, the bold text arranged in a simple, double-lined box: Loving Couple Seeks Openhearted, Caucasian Woman, 21-34. That was all. There were two numbers in small type lower down on the page. One was obviously a telephone number—a hospital extension—and the other, while not preceded by a dollar sign and not containing a comma, was, Cassie felt certain, a monetary amount. That figure was five thousand. She removed the pushpin and folded the sheet of paper in half and then again so that it fit inside her palm.

Cassie worked in medical records at the hospital, pushing carts of paper between high metal shelves, hopping up a stepladder to retrieve manila folders neatly labeled with colored stickers. It was not where she had intended to end up, with her bachelor’s in sociology. What exactly her intentions were remained a mystery to Cassie, and she dedicated great swaths of time to imagining the endless iterations of shape that could be created with her life.

Cassie pulled files, replaced files, silently singing the alphabet all day long. What made her job bearable was the loose paper, transcriptions of dictations telephoned in by doctors and e-mailed to her computer from someplace in India. These she hole-punched and inserted into individual charts. She read every page that she touched, and racked up volumes of anecdotal medical knowledge—fearing aneurysm every time her head ached, stomach cancer when her gut cramped. She became a repository of fascinating hospital gossip—a baby wounded during a caesarian section, an old man who had died of a heart attack while waiting in the emergency room—which nobody would ever ask her about. None of the other clerks read the files. Not like she did. Cassie had asked: her colleagues found the material in the charts indecipherable and dull. But these stories—plain, tragic, typical—were entirely responsible, Cassie believed, for keeping her from losing herself to her own mind in those gray, fireproof basement rooms.

“Gynecology,” answered a receptionist when Cassie dialed the extension from her cubicle that afternoon. She scanned the sheet of paper for a name, some other identifying word.

“There was a flier?” she ventured, “posted by the mailroom?”

“You’re calling about the donor ad?”

“Yes,” said Cassie, disappointed to think that she was not the first.

The woman transferred her call. A male doctor, a reproductive endocrinologist, as he introduced himself, said he was just going to ask her a few questions: date of birth, height, weight, skin color—he wanted a very specific description here. Cassie said she tanned easily, and he said, "Why don’t we say olive." He needed to know how far she had gone in school, her SAT scores, and whether anybody in her family carried a genetic disease—cystic fibrosis, Tay Sach’s, Fanconi’s anemia, phenylketonuria. Cassie was fascinated—what were those last two? But it wasn’t an appropriate moment to ask.

---

College graduation had come like a sudden, sheeting downpour that left her scurrying for shelter. Cassie had done well in school. But between the chalked protest messages and the poetry and the decadent discovery of her sexuality, there had been little time to contemplate her post-college existence.

The town she lived in wasn’t far from where she had gone to school. School, however, had been far away from the rest of the world: an overpriced oasis of the liberal arts in the middle of the desert. The job at the hospital had been listed with career services, and although the position was clearly in medical records, the language of description— oversee, liaison, confidential—had intrigued her. Her ex-girlfriend, Gwen, was going to be teaching on the nearby reservation, as part of a national service program, and she was looking for another housemate. Their unkempt two-story with the overgrown lawn was a kind of halfway house, a last pit stop before passing into the limits of adulthood. Teachers’ salaries were, inexplicably, generous, and Cassie’s roommates provided take-out burritos and beer and stories of maladjusted children and monstrous parents and tyrannical administrators that filled long, warm evenings on their peeling porch.

Cassie still cared for Gwen. Their relationship had been brief, but exhaustive, in its way. Gwen was androgynously beautiful. Tall and athletically slender, with the hint of some delicateness about her. Gwen and Cassie had gone together to a summer program in Italy, and when the course in Rome was finished they changed their tickets, squeezed every last cent from their credit cards and caught the ferry at Bari. For two weeks, they caught early morning boats between the least-visited of the Greek islands, where the black sand was so hot that you had to lay on thick straw mats in order to be near the water. They breakfasted on fruit and honey and thick yogurt and their skin crusted with salt from swimming topless in the sea. When the relationship ended—not long after their return to school—they met in Gwen’s dorm room to divide the photographs. The only picture that Cassie had really felt she needed was a shot she had taken of Gwen knee-deep in the ocean, walking towards her, her hair and skin glistening in the late afternoon sun. Something about the way Gwen’s body held itself up—as though still buoyed by the salty water—struck Cassie with a sense of openness, as though the memory of that moment could expand to fill landscapes past the edge of the picture.

Since becoming housemates, there had been glimpses of the intimacy that they had once shared, and this pleased Cassie. Gwen struggled with the young students foisted upon her in September, and found in Cassie an attentive audience. Their conversations provided Cassie with a focus beyond her own unsettling aimlessness and the incessant difficulties of maintaining her bank account. Cassie’s parents did send money, every so often. They were earnest, aged-hippie types who assured her that, with time, she would mark her own path.

---

On the day of the interview, Cassie wore a freshly washed shirt and sensible shoes. It seemed important to project an image of cleanliness. The doctor who she had spoken with on the phone met her, alone, in his office. There was no official egg donation program at the hospital, he explained, but they had the facilities—meaning the doctor himself, Cassie guessed—to perform in-vitro fertilization with a donor egg. If they could find a suitable donor, it would save this couple from having to travel out to one of the big city clinics for as many cycles as it took them to conceive.

He had pages of questions. Somebody brought Cassie a cup of coffee. First they went through her medical history—sexual, social, psychological. The doctor had big, prickly-looking white eyebrows, which he cocked cartoonishly. He could not suppress his pleasure at Cassie’s lesbianism.

“So you’ve never had intercourse with a man?” He pushed his face forward from the neck, leaning out from his cushioned chair.

Cassie shook her head, wishing that she had dressed a little less conservatively. She was a dyke, not a nun, after all.

“But I have—you know—in high-school—”

“You’ve performed fellatio.”

Cassie nodded.

“Did you develop any sores in your mouth?”

“No.”

Cassie was neither especially ashamed nor humored to say such things. She knew that the doctor had seen stories much stranger than hers. She wished, in fact, that her own history were a little more colorful, contained something for them both to ponder in that drab office.

As the interview progressed, the questions grew stranger. Cassie forced herself to pause thoughtfully before each answer. The doctor asked which hand she used to write with, whether she could sing on key, how she rated her athletic abilities. Did she consider herself especially agile, average, or clumsy?

Average, Cassie said. She thought of herself standing on one foot during a yoga class that she had taken at school to fulfill a physical education requirement and pulled her spine straight against the back of her chair.

She became slightly frantic, towards the end, certain that her answers could not have captured all that was genetically desirable about her. The doctor cooperated, duly noting everything that she rattled on about. There would only be one chance. It wasn’t a job interview, but rather a cross between a medical visit and some other type of evaluation— she felt the shadow of something beneath each inert question. Cassie was being checked out, by the doctor, on behalf of the infertile couple. The process of selection had been clinicalized, and she was sure that their rejection would come over the telephone like an unhappy test result. She was no med student, no athlete, no artistic genius. These people, Cassie thought, would not pick her, and she would return to her stacks of files, to a bedroom window overlooking a tangle of weeds, without any proof that she had done this, that she had raised to the top of a stack.

The last thing the doctor did was take her picture. It was a Polaroid—the hospital was for some reason full of Polaroids, as Cassie had learned from notices for missing cameras that appeared above the photocopy machine in the basement. The doctor didn’t offer to let her watch her picture develop, but as he was showing her to the door, he looked down at the white square in his hand and smiled slightly. After saying goodbye and thank you Cassie paused a moment in hopes that he would say something more, something silly and inappropriate, perhaps tell her she was the cutest one so far. But instead he wished her a pleasant day.

That night, Cassie asked Gwen if she was attractive. Cute was what she said. “Do you think I’m cute?”

Gwen was smoking a cigarette, flicking ash into the garbage can as Cassie washed her plate in the sink. “I still find you attractive,” Gwen said coolly. She looked to Cassie’s face and then held her gaze there. Cassie felt something gooey and warm spreading in her stomach.

---

Two weeks went by. Cassie told herself that she was resigned to rejection, but there was a fluttering in her chest whenever the telephone in her cubicle sounded. She had told no one of her interview, and this allowed her to hope that she had made a good impression on the doctor. When he called to tell her that the infertile couple was indeed interested in harvesting her oocytes, pride rose up and bathed her like a cooling salve.

First, she was to meet with a young psychologist who had been recruited, it appeared, to deem her fit to withstand the cycle and harvest. She went over the process with Cassie, who assured her that she had no ethical qualms about leftover embryos being frozen or discarded. Cassie had done some reading on the Internet, and she worked as much medical terminology as possible into her answers, calling her eggs oocytes and mentioning various hormones by name.

After a time, the psychologist put down her pen and closed the folder in which she had been taking notes. Cassie scooted into the front part of her chair, preparing to stand, but then the psychologist sighed, just loudly enough for Cassie to hear.

“I’m just curious, why do you want to do this?”

Cassie had hoped against this particular question, as she could concoct no response that would be both rational and seemly. The obvious incentive was money, and the obvious thing to say was that she wanted to help these people. No words and no reasons, however, explained the way she felt at that moment, clutching her bag to her chest. A strange heat fingered its way towards her face and neck.

“Because I can,” she said, willing her tongue to move in a manner that wouldn’t betray her. “I’m healthy, I have time, I don’t think I have the kinds of problems with all this that some women would.”

“And the payment?” The psychologist had tossed her rapport-building mantle. She was asking this one for herself.

“It’s nice. But I guess there are easier ways to get money. What I’d like is to make a down payment on a car.”

“You don’t have a car?” The psychologist seemed genuinely surprised.

Cassie shook her head slowly.

“That sounds perfectly reasonable. I’m sorry. I was just wondering—”

“It’s okay,” Cassie interrupted. “It’s all kind of fascinating—I mean, I think it is.”

“Are you a med student?” The psychologist squinted at her.

Cassie gave her best polite laugh.

She was quick to shut the door behind her. Medical school, she thought. Just one of a thousand options she had never contemplated. Yet there was a promise of forward motion. She would not be at this tedious job forever. She had written, she had read, she had traversed far-away waters. And there too was that round weight sinking, with its incessant threat of anchoring here. Cassie found it difficult sometimes to tell whether she was moving along or she was falling. She had a secret wish, nestled like a small, burrowing animal inside her chest, to be a part of something larger, to scratch somewhere and know it would be permanent.

---

She had passed muster with the psychologist, the doctor called to inform her. Cassie’s next task was to meet with the lawyer. He met her in the doctor’s office with some papers he had drawn up for her to sign, relinquishing her rights to the embryos created with her eggs and any children that resulted.

“They don’t want to meet me?” Cassie enquired. “Before?”

“It’s standard procedure,” said the doctor, who sat behind his desk and tapped on his keyboard while the lawyer unearthed documents from an overstuffed briefcase.

“Even if the harvest is successful, a pregnancy doesn’t always result—it’s best if there isn’t any contact between the donor and the recipient.”

Cassie didn’t entirely believe him—surely, some of the people who placed these ads selected their donors themselves.

“Don’t I get to know anything about them?” It seemed fair. They knew her entire medical history, had seen the Polaroid picture that she herself had not gotten a look at.

The doctor looked down at his desk, away from Cassie’s gaze. “These people want very badly to be parents. They’re grateful for your help,” he said. The lawyer handed her a pen.

---

Teresa Ankeley was thirty-four years old and her folder was as fat as the ones they sent stacked in carts to the transplant center or psychiatry. After days of carefully negotiated sifting in the files that were called up to the infertility clinic, Cassie had identified Teresa Ankeley and memorized her location: third shelf from the bottom, a few palm’s lengths from the back of the row. Every time she went into that gray, cinderblock storage room to pull or replace a cartload of charts, she would slip Mrs. Ankeley’s tome on the top of her stack, reading as she looped the shelves. One page per file handled. She longed to take Mrs. Ankeley’s story home with her, or to at least slip it away for her lunch hour so as to devour its pages in the privacy of a dark booth in the cafeteria. Cassie had lost the urge to eye other charts with anything more than a passing interest, and the thought of getting caught with her head in this one was too terrible to imagine. Nobody could know, not before she had fingered every page, every lab form, every physician’s scrawl.

Eight years earlier, Mrs. Ankeley, then Teresa Martin, came to the hospital for a colonoscopy. She was referred by a doctor at a private clinic across town. Patient complains of excessive fatigue, those records read. Anemia? The doctor had ordered blood tests and instructed Teresa Martin to provide a stool sample. Cassie envisioned Teresa Martin—just a few years older than Cassie—outside a stucco clinic building, sitting behind the wheel of her car, tired and sad and scared, staring at the plastic cup that she was to return with the next morning.

The doctor’s office had sent the hospital a photocopy of some lab results. Certain numbers were highlighted orange. The notes section from Teresa Martin’s visit to the GI clinic read, simply, Chief complaint blood in stool. Cassie examined the pictures taken inside her lower intestine—grainy images that she could not imagine were of any diagnostic use. Several growths were removed during the procedure. There was writing that Cassie could not decipher, and words she did not comprehend. She recognized, however, the term malignancy, which appeared several times. Cassie thought of a doctor in one of the clinics holding the pictures up to the light, circling things with his finger. He would have made the call himself. He would have told Teresa Martin that she needed to come in to discuss her test results.

---

After her period had come and gone, Cassie made the appointment upstairs.

In the exam room, there was a small bowl of smooth, colored agates, and photographs on the wall of newborn infants cradled in enormous flower petals. A lavender gown, which tied across the chest instead of in back, lay neatly folded on the padded exam table. Cassie imagined that this was what a beauty spa would feel like—it was impossible to think that she was still in the hospital. The slim women sitting in the waiting area, with their leather purses and their handle bags from upscale mall stores, were not the hospital’s usual clientele. According to the papers she had signed, it was the infertile couple who would be cutting Cassie’s check once her eggs were harvested, it was to their home that the bills for her office visits were to be sent. No insurance would cover any of this.

The doctor did an ultrasound to examine Cassie’s ovaries. He slicked up some kind of probe with a gel, inserted it, and pressed against her cervix. Her ovaries sat like round sacks on the screen, gray and giant. After, a nurse came and gave her an injection of Lupron. The initial puncture of the needle stung a bit. Cassie exhaled, as the nurse directed, and the pain faded, but as she pushed the fluid into Cassie’s thigh, her muscle began to ache and then pulled into a piercing cramp. By the time the nurse withdrew the needle, Cassie’s eyes were brimming, and when she wiped at them with her fingers she only spread the water across her skin.

“That’s a tough one.” The nurse handed her a tissue.

“I didn’t think it was going to hurt,” Cassie said. “Are they all like that?”

Cassie’s skin was bumpy with cold underneath the thin gown, the tissue damp and wadded in one hand. She felt suddenly small and stupid.

“It’ll all be over before you know it.” The nurse placed the palm of her hand on Cassie’s exposed knee and shook it gently.

---

The records from the oncology department begin two weeks after Teresa Martin’s colonoscopy. Patient eager to schedule surgery as soon as possible.

The brief “social history” section of the preformatted clinic notes pages provided little descriptive information for Cassie to add to the image of Teresa Martin. As Cassie would have guessed, Teresa Martin was a non-smoker who had never injected herself with drugs. She was heterosexual and single. She worked at a gym—a trainer, perhaps? or a masseuse?—and lived alone. It was this last detail that struck Cassie as she read standing between the shelves, pretending to work. She imagined Teresa Martin’s clean, quiet apartment—large, unused candles on square side tables and a refrigerator moderately stocked with vegetables and fruit. Who would stay with her while she was sick? Was there a sister?

A portion—it was impossible to ascertain how much, without an anatomy textbook, as the Latinate terms meant little to Cassie—of Teresa Martin’s colon had been removed during the operation. Then another phone call. Another office visit. More difficult news. The cancer had not penetrated the colon and spread to other parts of her body, and the surgery was to have been the only treatment. But there had been some complication, some unforeseen quality to the tumors.

Discussed removal of growths and possibility of cancer remaining. Patient requests that chemotherapy begin immediately. Concerned about nausea and hair loss. Says not worried about possible effects on fertility.

Teresa Martin’s thoughts about having children made an intuitive sense to Cassie. There was a demarcation, she saw, a line that circumstance could deepen into a chasm, between an obsession with the shape of a future and an obsessive focus on the having of one.

---

On the day that she brought home a paper sack of vials and syringes and dumped its contents onto her bed, Cassie decided to tell Gwen. To keep it secret seemed unnecessarily martyr-like. She thought she would say it that evening on the back porch, where she could watch the horizon as she spoke. She would pop the top off a bottle of beer, raise it to her lips, say, So I’m going to do this thing, and take a long, cool sip. But it had rained earlier so the porch furniture was still wet, there was no beer and it was just Cassie and Gwen making sandwiches in the kitchen.

“Guess what I’m doing,” Cassie said.

Gwen didn’t glance up from the tomato she was slicing. “Tell me,” she said. And Cassie wondered if she should. Gwen’s voice had a hard quality to it—she was tired, Cassie thought. Her students leeched something from her.

Cassie attempted to change the subject, asking Gwen about her day at school.

“Just say what you’re going to say.” Gwen tossed the remaining tomato wedge into its wet plastic bag.

Cassie described, as succinctly as possible, how her oocytes were going to be cultivated and monitored and finally harvested.

Gwen grabbed a head of lettuce from the refrigerator and began ripping off the outermost, limpid leaves. “You”—she watched intently as the look in Gwen’s eyes traveled and transformed into the words on her lips—“are fucking weird.”

Cassie eyed the kitchen door. Imagined the sound it would make slamming behind her. She told Gwen it was five thousand dollars.

“That’s more than a down payment on a car,” she added.

“But why?” Gwen’s arms hung flaccidly at her sides, the lettuce dangling from her fingers.

“I need the money,” Cassie said weakly. “I just need to do this.”

---

Teresa Martin’s chemotherapy was unique—new, possibly experimental. It required her to be treated in a series of three cycles. Self-conscious about thinning of hair read one note. Hair loss only noticeable to patient.

At another visit, Theresa complained to a nurse that her labia had grown so dry that they cracked and bled against the brush of toilet paper. Personal lubricant recommended.

A couple of pages later, there was a reference to a baseball cap, beneath a notation that nutritional drinks had been suggested. Cassie flipped back the pages to the first visits, and calculated that by this point Theresa Martin had lost nearly twenty pounds. Cassie imagined her striking, bony face, under the brim of a red cap, whittled to a gangly, teenage shape.

***

The first weeks’ worth of injections were relatively simple, the syringes small. But then the doctor gave her a new hormone, which was to be injected deep into the muscle covering her hip. Gwen did not hesitate when Cassie asked for help.

The first couple of mornings, Cassie thought for sure that she would scream before the needle was out. But Gwen quickly grew deft with her angling. Cassie found a prickly sort of comfort in their new, clinical routine. Gwen would enter Cassie’s room before seven, expertly pulling the fluid from the vial. She pressed the syringe until a tiny spray shot from the tip of the needle, wiped Cassie’s skin with an alcohol swab, pinched a width of her flesh then jabbed the needle straight in. Slowly she pressed the fluid into Cassie’s muscle and then a fast exit, with her fingers wiggling the skin as though to shake off the pain. There was no earthly reason for a band-aid; nevertheless, Gwen stuck a tiny, beige adhesive strip to the injection site, tapping it into place with the tips of her fingers. What amazed Cassie was that she kept trying so hard to be gentle, after each of her efforts had plumed up into purplish-brown bruises.

For the entire six-week cycle, Cassie took great care when lowering her hips into bus seats and chairs. She was bloated and her breasts swelled slightly, but otherwise didn’t feel that the hormones were affecting her. There was one evening when she opened the refrigerator and found the ice cream gone and before she could stop herself her eyes had filled with stupid tears. She was especially tired at night.

Mornings were the best times. Cassie would arrive early at the hospital and make her way to the clinic, where the nurse waved her into the usual exam room. Then the doctor arrived. He left other women waiting for her, Cassie was sure. Hers was a precious load. She would pull off her pants, lay back on the table, and within moments there would be the soft knocking at the door. Then the doctor would perform a quick ultrasound, tell her everything looked good, that at three weeks they’d be ready for harvest.

She came in on Saturdays as well, and by the time she arrived, the doctor would have turned on the lights, opened the window in the stuffy exam room, and set the bottle of ultrasound gel to warm in a sink full of hot water. It was a longer trip for Cassie, with the buses running on their truncated weekend schedule. The doctor was thoughtful. On Saturdays he brought her coffee with milk and sugar—from the store, not the cafeteria.

---

During her third round of chemotherapy, Teresa Martin made six visits to the emergency room. Unable to keep down water. Dehydration. The doctors gave her Compazine, IV fluids, and discharged her the same day.

Once, she arrived with chief complaints fever and shortness of breath, and was eventually admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. Her treatment was suspended for a time, so that the third cycle grew into what was practically a fourth.

By the time the chemotherapy was over, and test results pronounced her remission, more than a year had passed since her initial diagnosis. There were few pages left in her file. Some colonoscopy pictures, just as indecipherable as the first. And ink-jet printouts of laboratory results. Finally, the records from the infertility clinic began. They were the first to mark the name change. Between her remission and the search for an oocyte donor, Teresa Martin had become Mrs. Ankeley.

These latest records lacked the oncologist’s sense of detail, of language. The current doctor—Cassie’s doctor— left no sense of Teresa Ankeley’s transformation from a woman unsure she would want a child to a woman who needed a child so much that she went looking for Cassie. There was nothing about the marriage, the return of her health, all the years that had passed. No clue as to when she had changed her mind. Cassie wondered if the idea of the baby had come when there was no need for birth control. If the fact of the impossibility, the blank permanency of no children, had charged Mrs. Ankeley’s desires.

Cassie replaced the file in its spot, sorry to have finished it so quickly, with days to go before the harvest and nothing more to discover. She tried reading the files that passed across her metal cart, but there was no comparison to the story of Teresa Martin’s cancer and remission, and Cassie returned to the shelf each day to re-read a few pages. Her appreciation grew upon second and third readings. No other chart was so brimming with information, so complete.

The oncologist was, it seemed, a man after Cassie’s own heart, a literary type prone to full sentences and evocative descriptions in place of doctor shorthand. He had once written that Teresa Martin was crestfallen upon hearing test results. It would go on like this for pages, and Cassie came to see that something other than writerly instinct, something beyond clinical concern, moved the doctor’s hand. Even before Cassie finally deciphered the signature at the bottom of a lined page, she knew that what she had been reading was some kind of romance. Dr. Ankeley had stopped by Teresa’s bedside every day that she was hospitalized, not for the perfunctory task of examining her but to ask how she felt, to discuss the long course of her treatment. He wrote about the sound of her breath. He noted that she seemed revived, animated. Teresa Martin was bone-thin, balding, and seriously ill, and Dr. Ankeley wrote of her not in idealizations—she was clammy and depressed and coughing productively—but with a singularity of observation that could only be art, or love.

---

Dr. Ankeley’s first name was Clarence. Cassie looked him up in the staff directory on-line. His offices were on the fourth floor. Department of Oncology. The clinic hours were posted.

The next Tuesday, after her morning ultrasound, she looped the hospital corridors, passing through sets of swinging, windowed doors, until she finally spotted a sign for Oncology. As in most of the clinics, the waiting area spilled out into the hallway, where some chairs and tables and old magazines had been set. There was an elderly man with an oxygen tank, an old lady in a wheelchair, a teenager playing a handheld videogame. He was tan and full-bodied, and it took Cassie a moment to notice that, in addition to being bald, he had no eyebrows or lashes. There were a couple of women wearing head-coverings—a floppy red fishing hat and a scarf with purple flowers.

Cassie approached the reception desk and took hold of a clipboard, as though she had done this before. It was a sign-in sheet: name, physician, appointment time. There were two doctors listed, Ankeley and Miller.

“Need a pen?” offered the woman behind the desk. She eyed Cassie curiously.

“No,” Cassie mumbled, reading the sheet before her. “Here’s one.”

She picked up the blue ballpoint tucked into the top of the clipboard, and with the slow, deliberate motions of a first-grader, traced the neat cursive of Esperanza Sanchez, the last patient to have signed-in to see Dr. Ankeley. Then she sat, unsure for what it was she waited. For Dr. Ankeley to introduce himself? To emerge, name neatly stitched to his white coat, calling Esperanza’s name?

The next patient was summoned by a nurse. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, and Cassie thought that she might have to wait until Dr. Ankeley left for lunch to get a look at him. But then she heard a man’s voice inquiring, “Sanchez?” The woman with the purple-flowered headscarf stood and stepped away from her seat. Cassie stared into her lap, breathing hard, and then she looked up.

To say that he was not who she had been expecting wouldn’t be accurate. Cassie did not so much have a vision of Dr. Ankeley as an idea. For weeks she had imagined how it felt to look at Theresa Martin from his privileged, clinical vantage—and Mrs. Ankeley she could see. She had a height, a (recovered) weight. Cassie had selected for her a hair color (light brown) and eye color (blue). She had a birthday. Dr. Ankeley, until that moment, had functioned simply as her eyes and hands, observing and recounting his wife’s story. To look up and see anything other than a mirror image of herself was its own kind of shock.

He wasn’t wearing a white coat but a shirt and tie, with a stethoscope coiled around the back of his neck. He was of average height, and his belly hung softly over his belt, wrapped snugly in the fabric of the salmon-colored dress shirt. Wiry tufts of white hair seemed to have been stuck haphazardly around his crown, behind his ears. The skin of his face hung in creased folds, as if weather-beaten. Sixty, Cassie thought. He looked to be at least in his sixties. She stared, and he caught her gaze, staring right back at her for a long moment, longer than he should have been comfortable looking, as though it were a kind of pleasure, an entitlement. Cassie felt her blood swishing frantically in her veins, pumping up something inside her that would soon burst.

Dr. Ankeley motioned for Mrs. Sanchez to go on ahead back towards his office, the exam room, whatever it was they had hiding back there. When she stepped in front of him, he drew a hand to her back and ran it delicately down her spine, tapping his fingers against her tailbone. Cassie heard a strange sound, like a sneeze and a gagging. There were breaths coming fast, and she realized that they were her own.

She stood, steadied herself, and walked with long, swinging strides towards the set of double doors that led to the elevator. When she turned to glance back, Dr. Ankeley and Esperanza Sanchez were gone. The other patients had returned to their magazines. Forgotten the girl in the waiting room, her strange sound absorbed in the peripheral din of bodily malfunction and bizarre behavior.

---

The next morning, Cassie bit her lip and held her breath during the injection. When Gwen left, she lay a while on her mattress, lingering with her image of Dr. Ankeley and a trembling uneasiness in her gut. She felt as though she had been the one to cast him as the father, and now, finding him unfit for the role, she had only herself to blame.

She could back out at any time, Cassie reminded herself. The lawyer’s papers allowed for it. And she knew that she wouldn’t. It was for Mrs. Ankeley that she was going through with the harvest. She needed her.

---

Gwen surprised Cassie by taking a day off so that she could accompany her to the final appointment. She was supposed to have someone escort her home, lest she fall down the stairs or walk out into traffic in her anesthetized haze. In the softly lit waiting area, Gwen looked sleek and androgynous—perfectly out of place—and Cassie was sorry that she had come all this way.

It was a different room, on the day of the procedure—there were more tubes strung about, more bottles, brighter lights. Cassie changed into the requisite lavender gown. The doctor came in, accompanied by another young doctor, who would be administering the anesthesia.

“This is it,” the doctor said, with some measure of pride. Everybody—the two doctors and the nurse—had been reduced to heads hovering above her, and she felt suddenly exposed.

Cassie tried not to think about the forest of floating follicles blooming with round oocytes that she had watched growing on the ultrasound pictures, which was about to be snipped, or deracinated—she didn’t attempt to recall the details of the procedure, not while supine on the table. It would hurt, when she woke, in some way that she had never felt before. The nurse told her she might be sore for a day or so, and that she might be nauseated and dizzy from the anesthesia. Cassie felt her fingers begin to shake, and she looked up at the nurse, who was already reaching down for her hand.

“Whiskey,” said the anesthesiologist. His voice sounded like he was trying to take a picture of a kid.

“Here comes the whiskey.” There was a pinching at her arm, and his smooth pate was floating over her, his words soft and dulcet like thick liquor over ice.

“What do you like to drink?”

And Cassie remembered thinking: beer, but before she could push the sound from her lips her mind slipped into blankness.

---

It didn’t hurt, when she woke up. She was in the same room, her legs removed from the stirrups and tucked under a blanket. Sunlight shone in directly through the windows, reflecting off the glistening floor. Cassie struggled to form a thought through the haze enveloping her brain, and all she could come up with was, Time has passed. Her mouth tasted filmy and strange, and she remembered that she had not had anything to eat or drink since the night before. She felt the same down there, she didn’t even feel numb.

At one point, the nurse came in and asked if she would like help getting up, or if she wanted to sleep some more, and Cassie said, Sleep.

The light coming in through the windows became so bright that she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and the taste in her mouth grew more bothersome. A trail of bubbles passed ferociously through her stomach. She didn’t trust her legs to hold her up, and she hung onto the edge of the table as she stood.

When the nurse returned, Cassie was standing at the window. There was a white-haired lady bent over her walker inching towards the entrance below, making her slow, slow way to an appointment.

“You’re up,” the nurse said, with a note of congratulation. “How are you feeling?”

Cassie turned to face her, to tell her that she was fine, she was ready to leave. She looked to the stirrups, the steel sink by the wall, the glass jar of cotton gauze, the nurse’s face. She pulled the thin gown tight across her chest, and as she exhaled the tears came tumbling thickly down her cheeks.

“It’s over.” Her voice scraped against her throat.

“It’s all over now.”

The nurse was accommodating. She helped Cassie back into her clothes, handed her tissues, caught her shoulder when she stooped low into a sob. By the time she was dressed, she had regained enough of her composure. The borders of her world—the invisible measurements that held together a moment—had reconstructed themselves into something recognizable.

Gwen sat anxiously, waiting in the same chair Cassie had left her in. Not so much time had passed as she had thought. Cassie said that she didn’t feel sick. She said she wanted to get home and get something to eat. Gwen slipped her arm through Cassie’s elbow, fastening her there, as though she might shatter were she to fall.

---

Cassie followed Mrs. Ankeley’s medical record carefully, waiting for new documentation, for the implantation, for the pregnancy, to appear. But it often took days for charts to make their way from one department to another, or for copies of clinic papers to be sent down to the basement—sometimes these would arrive a month after an appointment—and there were as of yet no new additions to Mrs. Ankeley’s file. The doctor, however, was unexpectedly generous with information during Cassie’s follow-up visits: Seventeen eggs had been harvested and subsequently fertilized, he explained. After five days, there were left six robust-looking embryos, two of which were transferred into Mrs. Ankeley’s womb, and the remaining four cryogenically frozen.

When the lab results proving the fact of her pregnancy finally appeared in her chart, Cassie made herself a photocopy, which she folded into quarters and tucked in her back pocket. For weeks after, there was no more news. Nobody even called up her file. Cassie wondered if she had miscarried early, never bothering to return to the hospital.

She imagined fiercely and she believed that Mrs. Ankeley was still pregnant, that one of the fetuses had sloughed away and left the strongest to grow—a girl. She would survive this, too, and one day she would take her child and drive away. She would leave town and head off in some direction. Cassie knew she would keep going.

Copyright © 2006 by Marie Holmes.