Everyday People Read online

  “You’re going to need to watch him. He could hurt himself. He was asleep the whole time.” Her voice was low and serious.

  “Olivia?”

  “What.”

  She stirred a packet of sugar into the mug and glanced at the Reverend when she tapped the spoon twice against the mug’s brim. Her face didn’t change—not a smile, nor a glimmer of softness. But she answered his unasked question. “I have to go. Exams.”

  He remembers the sound of her boots clicking across the hardwood floor as she walked from the kitchen through the living room, pulling her suitcase behind her. How much she looked like her mother—short, darker-skinned, but shapely, as she had been, with a head nearly shaved like hers. She stopped in the foyer and turned around, for a moment looking at him, eyes blinking.

  “How could you not have heard him screaming like that?”

  He closed the door behind her and slumped against it, his cheek sticking to the glass. Olivia had worn her mother’s perfume.

  • • •

  First the diagnosis: stage IV lymphoma. Then the symptoms came. Night sweats, weight loss, fatigue so severe that his wife was often unable to pick up her child, to keep up with his endless five-year-old energy. Coughing turned to vomiting blood. They did their best to hide her sickness from Davis and Olivia, but in a matter of weeks she was hospitalized for good.

  The Reverend didn’t want to bring Davis to the hospital, didn’t want him to see Adina like that, nothing more than skin and bones, cheeks sallow and sunken, tubes running in and out of her every which way. A five-year-old was too young to understand. But she repeatedly asked for her boy, and when it became clear that only hours remained, he sent Olivia home for her brother. He worried for them. The house was nearly an hour-long drive from the hospital, and Olivia was upset, emotional, had walked out of the ICU wiping tears on her sleeve, refusing her father’s offer of a handkerchief.

  When she returned with Davis, he looked terrified as he slowly entered the room. He held part of his blanket up to his mouth, so long it would’ve dragged behind him, train-like, on the hospital floor had Olivia not been holding it up.

  “Go on,” the Reverend said.

  Davis didn’t move. The boy was going to have to toughen up. The Reverend picked him up and placed him in the bed alongside his mother.

  “Sunny Boy,” Adina said simply, her voice squeezing out the words. She put her arm around Davis. There was light in her eyes like the Reverend hadn’t seen. He watched as Davis—on his knees, his feet curled underneath him, still in his yellow Keds—leaned closer to his mother, his brain trying to make sense of what he saw before him.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  Adina pulled him as close as he was willing to be pulled, kissing him all over his face, his plump cheeks, his forehead still shiny from the olive oil they used to anoint him every morning, covering him in the Holy Spirit.

  Mother and son needed privacy. The Reverend nodded at Olivia. “Let’s take a walk.”

  They walked in silence. Father and daughter, first around the hospital, listening to the machines beeping, the murmuring voices of the doctors and nurses. They’d used those same hushed tones to talk about his wife, and, by extension, his family, their life, their children.

  He led Olivia outside, where the warmth of spring was fading into the coolness of night. The wind had picked up, and the Reverend wished for a jacket. This walk was the closest his body had come to his daughter’s in years. He wanted to grab her hand, but it was better not to push his luck.

  Olivia looked at him as they passed a willow tree. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Sometimes you treat him as if you never wanted him.”

  “Olivia.”

  She didn’t look away. “It’s true.”

  They continued walking until it became too chilly to remain outdoors.

  • • •

  Night after night the Reverend and Adina had watched Davis sleep on his back as an infant in his crib, his little brown head dusted with loose dark curls, his chest bobbing up and down ever so slightly—often the only movement he made during slumber. Like a little old man already bored with the world. He was peaceful, quickly learning to sleep through the night.

  When the Reverend and Olivia returned to the hospital room, Davis lay stretched in the bed by his mother’s side, sleeping once more, his thumb in his mouth, his cheeks streaked with tears. Adina held him, from somewhere mustering the energy to stroke his forehead. She continued to kiss him every so often, even as the Reverend and Olivia walked in. She scrunched her face and brought a finger to her lips so they knew to keep quiet. Olivia settled into a chair and pulled a book out of her bag, but could not tear her eyes from her mother. The Reverend stood by Adina’s side and moved to pull his sleeping son from her arms, but she shook her head and gestured for him to come close. He bent down, put his ear by her mouth, the palm of his hand atop hers. She could barely speak.

  “Be different, John. He needs you to be different than you were with Olivia.”

  She kissed them both, first him, then Davis. Olivia rose from her chair and went to the side of the bed opposite her father. She placed one hand on her mother’s shoulder and with the other she held Davis, stroking the inside of his palm, which was turned upward to the heavens while he slept, as though he had an offering.

  Like that they remained: quiet, clinging to each other, praying that it might be enough.

  • • •

  His demons resurfaced.

  The Reverend did his best to forget the bottle of bourbon beneath his bed. Three nights in a row he helped Davis move stuffed animals from the rocking chair to the double bed where the boy slept all by himself. He needed company, it seemed. There were giraffes, pigs, monkeys, and a cherished koala bear named Wally, into which his wife had recorded herself singing Davis’s favorite song, “The Little Drummer Boy.” All Davis had to do was squeeze the bear, hold it close, and his mother’s voice rose, seemingly from nowhere. For three nights after the funeral the Reverend sat all night long watching his son sleep soundly, the same as he had always slept: flat on his back, his right cheek against the pillow and his right arm flung above him, bent at the elbow. Olivia had slept the same way until she turned thirteen. The Reverend enjoyed the nightly ritual of getting Davis ready for bed—helping him brush his teeth, setting out his pajamas, and watching him climb into bed and under the covers after plugging in his favorite night-light. It quieted the Reverend, shushed the constant traffic running through his head—visions of Adina, her full thighs, her sharp cheekbones, the three bangles she wore around her wrist. The way she always called him “my love,” whispering it in his ear when he woke in the morning, and when she kissed him good night. The way she called Davis “Sunny Boy,” because he had slipped out easy, like he was covered in Crisco, on the sunniest day of the year.

  Helping that child into bed. Watching him fight to stay awake. Three nights the Reverend observed with care. He paid attention to the ways Davis shifted in his sleep—to the right, the left. If he curled himself into a ball or turned his body around, the tops of his feet searching for the coolest patch of pillow. He slept with his mouth slightly open, his pink lips, always wet like a puppy’s nose, parted just enough to release a constant whisper. Nothing more than air passing through those lips, those lungs, that heart.

  Everything was normal. Davis’s screams from the night after the funeral seemed a fluke, a onetime thing. So for the next two nights the Reverend waited until Davis fell asleep, and then returned to his own bed, where sleep eluded him.

  On the sixth night he poured a drink—nothing much, a nightcap. Enough to conjure Adina flitting around the room as she always had, a single lit bulb on her vanity framing her face in a soft yellow bloom as she readied herself for bed. So many nights he’d watched her—lying on his back, feet crossed at the ankles, arms crossed behind his head, a Bible resting on his chest and his reading glasses slipping down his nose
—as he danced in and out of sleep. That night it was a plastic cup that managed to maintain its balance, even as his chest slowly bobbed up and down with each slow, measured breath.

  The next morning he woke, not remembering when, or how, he had fallen asleep. And he’d rolled over, the plastic cup crushed underneath him, the remaining drops of bourbon staining the sheets.

  On the seventh night he woke, thinking he had heard the wind careening through the valley, skimming the creek, screaming with reckless abandon.

  He stared at the emptied plastic cup, this time placed near the edge of the nightstand. It took seconds that felt much longer before he realized the awful sound was coming from the room across the hall where Davis slept.

  The Reverend’s vision blurred when he stood up. He ran through the room, across the hall, opening Davis’s door so hard it smacked into the wall, its knob crashing through the drywall, chunks and dust splattering to the carpet.

  There was nothing. No ghost in the closet. No monster under the bed. No intruder. Only Davis sitting upright, his little mouth stretched as wide as it would go, his body whipping around. Teardrops fell from blotchy eyes. The Reverend had never seen a body move like that—disjointed, uncoordinated, as though held together by nothing more than a piece of thread that might split at any moment.

  The Reverend was bewildered until he remembered what Olivia had done. He grabbed each of Davis’s toothpick legs with one hand and held them down. Then he mounted the bed and rested his left shin across his son’s ankles. He needed both hands to trap Davis’s arms. Palms open. Palms closed. Twice the boy slapped the Reverend before he caught both arms and brought them down against the bed, where he trapped Davis.

  From a window, moonlight poured in across his son’s face. Davis’s skin was honey-golden in that light. As his body calmed, he opened his eyes. They were the color of amber, filled with panic and confusion—as though the Reverend, this dark-skinned man not far from elderly, was somehow unfamiliar, someone threatening.

  The Reverend released him, leaned against the headboard, and motioned to his son, guiding him until the little one sat between his legs. Davis leaned back against his father’s bare chest. The Reverend wrapped his arms around his son and began to sing into his ear, “Hush Little Baby.” He felt his son relax into his body, heard his breath settle back into its normal rhythm. With one hand he wiped the boy’s tears away when he finished the song. Davis turned around and saw the Reverend crying. Davis placed a hand on the Reverend’s chest and pulled himself up until he brushed his lips against the Reverend’s.

  “No.” The Reverend jerked away. “That was only for your mother to do.”

  The Reverend peeled Davis from him and stood away from the bed. “Go back to sleep, boy.” He drew the curtain closed. “Under the covers. Now.”

  Davis slid under his comforter. He scrunched up his face, readying himself for tears once more.

  “None of that,” the Reverend ordered.

  Davis pulled the comforter up to his chin. The Reverend backed out of the room.

  “Good night,” the Reverend told him, shutting the door.

  He walked quietly to the bathroom. Moonlight peered through the window. He stood at the sink, turned on the faucet, and splashed his face with cold water. He studied what he saw before him, trying to see his face through his son’s eyes: the thick-skinned wrinkles of his forehead. His wide-set nose and fat nostrils. The mole on his left cheek with the hairs growing out of it.

  His wife had loved this face.

  He turned the water off. He went back to Davis’s room, pushed the door slightly open, and squinted in the dark until he could make out Davis’s shape under the covers, clutching a stuffed animal against his scrawny chest, quivering.

  Asking, quietly, for his mother.

  • • •

  “Sir, we’re going to get you out of here.”

  The Reverend knows a certain type of man is prone to making promises he can’t keep. The trooper will carefully remove his hand from the Reverend’s shoulder and pull it back through the damaged car until he can use it freely. The Reverend, unable to move his neck, will hear his boots crunching against the hardened snow as he moves away from the vehicle.

  “Don’t leave me,” he will say. But his voice will barely be audible. He will catch a few of the trooper’s words as he speaks with the other men, arriving in quick, successive brushstrokes:

  Assistance. Dangerous. Life.

  Hurry.

  Out of the corner of the Reverend’s eye, he will see the trooper return and kneel beside him once more. The image will come, quick as lightning, of Davis on his knees on a white rug in an apartment facing a floor-to-ceiling window, mouth open.

  “I have a son, too,” the trooper will say while breathing hard. He will bend down, bracing himself against the snow. “How old is yours?”

  “Twenty-five.” The Reverend will see that Davis’s eyes are closed, that his head tilts backward, that his right arm reaches around the front of his neck. Is he praying? Does he know?

  “You don’t look old enough to have a twenty-five-year-old son, sir.” There will be surprise in the trooper’s voice. The Reverend will try to smile. The only part of his body he will be able to feel is his face.

  Of course. Davis prays not for his father hanging upside down in a white Toyota next to a quarry.

  The trooper will continue. “Mine’s a baby. Seven months.”

  The white rug is not a rug but a quilt on a bed. The arm reaching around Davis’s neck is not his own but a stronger, paler arm. Their bodies move together, That Man and Davis’s, and the Reverend sees how that man presses himself against his son, wraps himself around his son, uses his hands to own his son.

  The Reverend will have never been so cold. He’ll have things he’ll want to tell this man, this young, gentle, kind-faced man who routinely holds a seven-month-old son in his large, pale hands. He’ll want to tell him how surprising sons can be, how they never turn out the way you want them to, or the way you think they’re going to. He’ll want to warn him not to get too used to being a father; it’s one of those things that just happens to you, and once it does, it becomes impossible to think of yourself as a person outside of fatherhood. He’ll want to tell him that moments will come when he will truly hate his child—never long-lasting moments, never yielding dangerous behavior—but they’re real, and it’s best to accept them, live in them, and let them pass. He’ll want to tell him that, in fact, it’s the moments when the love floods you, nearly erasing you, that you are most at risk of doing something you shouldn’t do.

  The Reverend will want to say these things but he will be too cold to move his lips, too cold to feel his tongue. He will close his eyes, hearing the panic in the trooper’s voice as he says, “Stay with me, sir! Stay with me,” because the other men are just beginning to work. He will try to listen, to tether his wandering mind, as the trooper continues to talk.

  In time, voices. Movement. Rubber boots clomping through the snow with the strength of hooves. More men arriving, all of them doing their part. It must be bad. He will no longer be able to open his eyes, but he will know the presence of the flashlights. From an emergency vehicle perched at the top of the quarry, a steady beam will shine upon him. The men will do their job. He will hear them. He will feel them as they tear apart the car, hope rising inside him. They will pull the Reverend free and he will tell himself, I can survive this.

  I will survive this.

  • • •

  Someone will come.

  The words repeat themselves for as long as possible in the Reverend’s head, washing over him like a current over stones smoothed, sand densely packed.

  Someone will find me.

  MOOSEHIDE

  Carleigh Baker

  IT’S THE MIDDLE of the day—who cares when exactly—gray on goddamn gray. According to the GPS, we just passed the Arctic Circle. People get out their iPhones to take pictures of each other—Sean takes mine, since we’re paddli
ng together—and when I smile for the camera I feel a little bit happy. Or I tell myself I feel happy. Technically, this is an accomplishment, paddling a million kilometers in the cold past an arbitrary line on a map that raises eyebrows when you mention it to your fellow urbanites.

  Sean and I both have to reach as far as we can across the canoe when he passes me the phone to get my approval of the photo. The skin on his hands is cracked and scratchy; not the accountant’s hands he had two weeks ago. The gaunt face glowing back at me from the iPhone screen looks pretty happy. I’ve lost weight. I guess that will make me happy when I get back to Vancouver and put on my skinny jeans. When I only have to wear one layer at a time, and people can see what I’ve become. For now, in all these layers, I’m a tiny face popping out of the Michelin Man. I take Sean’s picture with the phone. He looks handsome. Of course there’s no Wi-Fi, so I just save the photos. If you’re in the Arctic and you can’t Instagram it, does anybody care?

  I’m tired.

  Early in the trip, the river was all crusty whitewater. I was always paddling a canoe into a bunch of waves that looked like they were beating the shit out of one another. The water roared, and I could hear it all the time. I was excited by the noise at first, but I got used to it. In the evenings, it was a backing track for Sean’s banjo serenades. The guides had glanced sideways at each other when he’d added the bulky case to the packing pile, but everyone is happy to listen to him pluck away most nights.

  It’s all couples on the trip: three couples and the guides, Jan and Eric—also a couple. At night, in addition to the sound of the river, I can hear people rolling around in their tents, groaning like whales. Sean and I tried to get busy the first night, but my back muscles felt like they’d been run through a food processor. Same thing the second night, and the Therm-a-Rest deflated, so I was being pounded onto the rocks. Ugh. Around day six, I pulled Sean into the trees away from everyone and down into a valley dotted with little white flowers. There was this spot with moss so thick that we had to climb up onto it. The whole thing was so badass; we weren’t supposed to stray out of sight of the group, and we weren’t supposed to go anywhere that might mess up the nature. The tundra is fragile, the guides told us. We were stomping around, ripping out chunks of moss, and when I pulled him down to me, the sanctity of nature was the furthest thing from my mind. But the cold rose up from the ground, deep and penetrating. Sean put his jacket underneath me. We kept as many layers on as we could, his hard dick poking out of wool long johns, my own base layer pulled just low enough to let him in. But we couldn’t stop shivering. A hand job under the majestic northern sky just seemed sad, and besides, we’d forgotten to bring wet wipes.