The Summer That Melted Everything(89)

Sal looped his arm through her left and I looped mine through her right.

“It’s okay, Mom. We got ya.”

She sighed as she looked down at me. “I don’t think I can, Fielding.”

My mother’s tears always knew how to hurt. They could push you off balance and send you crashing down. Nothing breaks like a body falling. Nothing puts you to pieces quite like that.

“For Grand, you can.” Sal tugged on her arm.

“Grand,” she whispered as she stood a little taller.

“Your son,” Sal matched her whisper.

“My son.”

The son she always loved a little more than the other. The son she always held a little tighter. A little longer. The son who would bring her down from the porch and onto the dead, brown ground.

She looked unsure of what ground was. It’d been so long since she’d been on it.

Her first steps were slow and scared. Close things she tested the earth with. But more and more, they became bigger and bigger. And then suddenly she was off. Walking faster than us even. Eventually our arms slipped out from hers and the world found her walking all on her own.

Those out in the town stopped whatever they were doing. Conversation ended midsentence. Handshakes never got to where they were going. Food slid off spoons. Mouths gaped. Babies were left to cry. The mothers were busy watching mine. Everyone busy watching the woman who had not been seen outside for twelve whole years. Here she was, she who had been living like a curtain, never trailing far from the window of the house she was attached to.

“Isn’t that?”

“I believe it is.”

“Stella Bliss.”

“Maybe the world is really about to end.”

“It’s just beginnin’ for her.”

If only they knew, it was no beginning for her. It was an end she was walking to. What a day to come out. A rather beautiful day. Did she even see it? Walking hand in hand as she was with magnets and determination. Quick steps to the boy waiting on her. Was she even sure it was trees she was passing or just tall men? Did she look up at the sky, coming blue from the morning’s gray?

Pity the child in her path and who was not hers and who she pushed out of the way. Even kicked his ball into the middle of Main Lane. Pity the wasp who flew too close and who she swatted to a concussion. Pity the day she did not see, a day that had been waiting for twelve long years. A day that took but twelve minutes to walk.

The morgue was in the basement of the courthouse. The light dim and like a shedding of clay, dusty and browned. It was a place that smelled of rust and soil, of chemicals and clogged drains. Compared to the heat of every other place, it was cool. Basements are like that. Probably the coolest place I’d been all summer long.

When Dad saw Mom, the only words he could manage were, “What about the rain?”

She didn’t say anything, just threw her arms around him. It was like a cold burning between them. Their skeletons joined at soggy throbs. The space they filled before us, like twisted wire, embedding into itself. They were one grasp. One curve of flesh. One heart breaking in startled, flickering cracks.

When they finally separated, you couldn’t tell which tears belonged to her, and which belonged to him.

He tried to persuade her not to see the body. Said it was not a way for a mother to see her son. But she held up the magnets and said, “It is the way for a mother to see her son, if it is indeed the only way left.”

We stepped into the room with Grand, where he lay on a metal table with a white sheet beneath him. He looked the same as he had lain in the woods. Only the scenery had changed. It was as if no one knew what to do with the body of a god.

Mom approached the table with wary steps, as if she were walking across water and had to wait for the bridge to keep building. The tan nylon of her hosiery was dirtied and clung to by tiny gravels from the walk outside. Every time she lifted her foot, the nylons cased the strain of her toes as they pointed tensely in every step that took her to the table, where she circled his body, as fluid as the ripple around the dropped stone.

There was a wholeness to the silence that followed. A sort of totality that sucked in all sound, save for our breathing. I thought there would be noise. I thought she would sob uncontrollably. That was the mother I expected. The one who roared louder than the father in the woods. The one who banged her infinitesimal fists and screamed, Why? That was not the mother who circled her dead son in the morgue.

She ran her hand through his hair, the short strands going through her fingers in a rising and falling like the abstract summary of his short life. She smiled that slight smile all mothers give to the child who has always been their favorite.

Her apron pressed against the sheet as she leaned over him. I thought maybe she would hold the magnets down like he was a refrigerator and she was merely posting notes. A sort of up-and-down motion. Instead she slid the magnets across him, a different one for each part of his body. She believed each magnet only had enough strength in it to lift the metal from one body part, and after that, it was spent of its power.

When she got to his left arm, she paused at the wide wound stuffed with the gathered blood and leaves and dirt. She started to pick the leaves out, but Dad gently asked her to leave them. It was as if the leaves and dirt provided a foliage to the wound so he wouldn’t have to see the cut so naked and clear. She understood this, and merely moved the magnet around the wound, the drooping tip of one of the larger leaves gliding across the back of her passing hand.