Souls Worn Thin

Six months after the lost baby my mom found herself pregnant again. Every utensil she ate from was first sanitized by being soaked in bleach, and then placed in boiling water for no less than 20 minutes. She wore disposable latex gloves whenever she touched anything, and she did not drink or smoke for the duration. She was, however, completely insane and it was the top priority of both Sophie and myself to stay as far away from her as possible. Jake filed for a divorce before the baby was born. Her name was Raelyn Michelle. I delighted in her.

I applied that summer for my first job. It was the same Dunkin Donuts where Jamie worked. When I walked in to pick up an application the man there asked me to stay for an interview. I sat at one of the tables and filled in the application. When I was done he came over and sat down across from me. He glanced at the application then put it aside.

“I’m Mac,” he stuck out his hand. I shook it.
“Jane.”

“Why do you want to work here, Jane?” he asked. I had no idea.

“Because I like donuts and coffee?” I said it like a question. He stared silently at me.

“I learn fast and I’m good with people,” I said. He picked up my application again.

“This be your first job?” he raised his eyebrows.

“Yes,” I said.

“You honest?”

“Yes.”

He put down the application and leaned forward, elbows on the table. He sighed loudly and ran his fingers through his thin, puffy hair. “I need someone good and honest, Jane. I got too many kids come in here steal from me. You gonna steal from me, Jane?” eyebrows raised.

“No, sir. I don’t steal.”

“You’re hired. When can you start?”

I started that day and within a month had my own keys to the place. I was a hard worker, a quick learner, and I didn’t steal, all the ingredients for management material at D&D. Jamie and I worked the same shift whenever possible and passed the coffee pouring, donut packing hours in the same comfortable silence we always enjoyed in one another’s company. Sometimes, when I opened the store, I was there alone for several hours before my boss came in.

One bright morning, I was sitting on a stool by the front window reading War and Peace (which had been assigned by my advanced placement English Literature class as part of my summer reading list) when a man came in and asked for a chocolate glazed.

“That’ll be 36 cents,” I said as I set down my book and bagged the pastry for him.

“That’s some book for a girl your age,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, I guess it is.”

“Why you reading it?”

“I have to for school. But I don’t mind; it passes the time.”

“Your boss let you sit and read while you at work?”

“My boss isn’t here yet. I have the place to myself mornings.”

“That right?”

He looked around and out the window before looking back at me. I looked back at him, beginning to feel uneasy.

“36 cents?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, well― ” he pulled out his wallet and unfolded it, flipping out a $20 bill. “Can you break this?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said and popped open the register. I was counting out his change when he reached behind him and pulled a handgun from his back.

“Can you break this?” he asked, pointing it directly at my chest, just above the counter. I stood motionless, staring at the gun.

“Move back, away from the register.”

I was paralyzed, staring at his hands. I couldn’t budge. Black hairs sprung out from the back of the strong, wide hand gripping the gun. The other hand extended out toward the register. His fingernails were chewed to the quick like mine, and the tips if his fingers were almost black with dirt.

“MOVE!” he shouted. I jumped and stumbled back against the donut display case. Several donuts tumbled from their trays to the floor where I stepped on them. Jelly and cream fillings mashed out and slipped under my shoes. I inched closer toward the back room where the phone was. He was bent over the counter pulling cash from the drawer and stuffing it in the inside pockets of his jacket.

“Stay right there!” he said pointing the gun at me.

He spilled the change on the counter and floor as he stuffed money in his pockets. There was only $40, maybe $50 in the register. When he emptied the tray he ripped it out of the drawer, sending it soaring across the store and crashing into a poster on the opposite wall that campaigned for the customer’s right to unconditional satisfaction. Realizing there was no more money, the man’s brow furrowed tightly.

“Where’s the rest of the money?” he demanded.

“It’s deposited every night. We never keep more than a day’s earnings in the store.” He jammed the gun back into his waistband and ran out the front door without another word. I stood for several minutes looking out the window, frozen in place, plastered against the display case, donut carcasses scattered around my feet. Pigeons fluttered down and perched on garbage cans and fire hydrants. Every now and then, a car passed, a person strolled by. Didn’t anyone see?

Finally, I called my boss. My voice wobbled and my breath fell heavy as I related the story as if I had just finished running up several flights of stairs. He told me to sit down and not to move; he would be there shortly. He arrived 10 minutes later, followed by the police. What I felt when I saw the bleary red and blue lights flash across the peeling wallpaper was not relief, but fear. For no logical reason, I wondered if they were there to arrest me. The police officers walked in along with my boss. He held the door for them and then locked it behind them, flipping the sign to display

“CLOSED.” I was seated in a metal folding chair in the back next to the phone.

“Did the girl leave?” a tall male police officer asked. They hadn’t spotted me from where they stood. Next to him was a hard-faced, stocky woman, who answered.

“She’s in there,” she said in a raspy voice. My boss rushed over and, to my great surprise, hugged me fiercely.

“Thank God you’re all right, are you all right?” he gasped, sighing relief.

“I’m fine, really,” I said, wiggling out of his awkward embrace.

The police questioned me for 15 minutes. They asked if I had ever seen the man before, what did he look like, sound like, what was he wearing, and how much did he weigh? The truth was, I didn’t know. As hard as I tried to conjure his complete image, I could only recall his hands. The pressure by the police to deliver a detailed description was too great to be honest, so I made things up. I told them that he had blonde hair and blue eyes, was tall and on the thin side, and was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans with a stonewashed denim jeans-jacket. The part about the jeans-jacket was accurate, but I’m now certain that his hair was not blond nor were his eyes any shade of blue. And I could not say at all what he weighed; I just couldn’t remember. It was as if I didn’t even see him outside of hands, gun, and pockets.

I sat down to write my statement on the single sheet of lined, white paper the small, gruff officer gave me. I was describing how the donuts had squished under my feet when Jamie walked in. His shift started later that day but he had come in early to keep me company. After hearing from our boss what happened, he approached me, looking more shocked than I was. He hugged me tightly, pressing my face into his chest.

“Thank God you’re all right, Jane!” he gasped. He held me there for several moments, his relief audible in his breathing.

“I’m fine, Jamie.”

“I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you.”

I pulled away from him.

“Jamie, relax. I’m fine. It was just some bum who got away with maybe 50 bucks,” I said, suddenly hardened in response to the vulnerable embrace. He sat down and looked at me with the expression I used to call the mushy look. I turned away and started gathering my things to go home.

“I gotta get home, Jamie. Come by later if you want.” I walked out without waiting for an answer.

I arrived home to an empty, messy house. Sophie left me a note that she and Raelyn were with Aunt Nancy, my Uncle Joe’s wife, and would be home soon. Mom had not come home all night and I would be left to feed Raelyn and put her to bed, as I did most nights. Our mom was almost never home anymore and when she was, her presence was more of a hindrance than a help.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of mom’s voice and a man’s voice, trying in vain to be quiet, shushing each other in loud, hoarse whispers. Sophie could sleep through anything, but I woke at the slightest off noise.

“I wanna show you my baby!” she said, guiding different strange men into Raelyn’s room night after night. She turned on the light, picked her up and started her crying, then screaming, then she placed her back in her crib and left with the man.

“Shhhh, let’s go. She’ll cry herself to sleep.”

But I didn’t let that happen. As soon as they were gone, I went in and picked her up, held her, and rocked her until she fell back asleep.
That was what I thought of the day I walked in to the empty mess of a house after being robbed at work that morning. It caught up to me all at once and I was furious. Where was she and why was she so crazy? What was she doing?

These questions combined with my anger drove me to snoop in her bedroom, first carefully, then frenzied. I opened drawers and dug through her underwear, shirts, socks, and bras. Coming up empty-handed in one drawer, I moved to the next, ripping through without concern about leaving things the way I had found them. In the bottom drawer, the last one I checked, I found a gun, black and small, discreetly tucked in the corner, wrapped in a pair of pants. I saw the robber’s hairy hands, his dirt-caked fingernails.

I smelled the sweet stench of donuts and felt the 20-dollar bill in my hand. I heard the words again, “Can you break this?” I looked. The gun, the hand, hair, dirt. I looked up. There was his face, real and sharp. It materialized before me in my mother’s bedroom. I remembered exactly what he looked like and it was a striking likeness to my father.

Why hadn’t I recognized that at first? Was I making it up? No. The dark brown hair feathered over his ears, the mustache and goatee. Even the green-gray eyes with flecks of brown were the same. Not too short but not too tall, stocky yet slender, built like a high school wrestler. Everything from the jeans jacket down to the way he moved; it was just like my father.
I picked up the gun and fitted it into my palm. I suspected my dad killed himself, but I never knew how he did it. I envisioned him with a gun just like this. What was he thinking about? How was he feeling? Was he high? He might have been sitting on the floor against the wall, legs stretched out in front of him. I could see his shoes; beat up Converse with the soles worn thin, as if they were my own. I could feel the gun in my hand, see the thick hair on my arms, smell the scent (beer mixed with sweat and Old Spice) of my skin, as if I were there experiencing it as him. So disturbingly clear was this hallucination that I shook my head forcefully to come back into myself.

When I did, I was sitting with my back against the dresser and my legs stretched out in front of me. I looked down to find that I had the gun pointed at my stomach, with both my thumbs resting against the trigger. I jumped and tossed the gun away, out in front of me where it slid across the hardwood floor and disappeared under the bed, colliding with a metallic clank against something hidden from view.

I crawled across the floor to the bed and reached under. I pulled out a metal box with an open padlock hanging through a latch. I pulled out the lock and opened the box. There was money, maybe a few hundred dollars, and some papers. The name “Bobby,” written in my mother’s hand across the front of a manila envelope folded in half caught my eye. I pulled it out from under the cash and opened it. Inside I found an autopsy report. I scanned over the medical jargon until I came to the words: Cause of death: internal hemorrhaging due to the ingestion of large amounts of cocaine into the stomach.

The doctor’s hand-written notes in the space below elaborated that my father seemed to have swallowed a cellophane bag full of cocaine, and that this was determined to be a deliberate act of suicide. I read the words over and over again until they became a blur. I was surprised to see the drops of water falling on the paper in my hands. I didn’t know why I was crying; I hadn’t felt it come. The answer we had given people when they asked was that he had died of a heart attack. I had said it so often that I almost started to accept it as truth. There it was in black and white. Official proof of what I always somehow knew in my heart to be the truth; and still I wished I could believe otherwise.

I put the paper back in the envelope and returned it to the box. I closed the lid and put the lock back through the latch just as I found it. I then retrieved the gun from under the bed and gently placed it back in the bottom drawer, covering it with garments and arranging them to look naturally jumbled. I did the same with the rest of the drawers I had tossed and left her room, closing the door behind me. I never talked about the gun or the autopsy report. I never told anyone about the robbery. I suppose I thought there was nothing to tell; it merely confirmed what I always knew.

Born, Still

Sophie and I didn’t mind Jake as much as some of the other men who had passed through our door before him. He was nice to us and he made enough money from his motorcycle repair shop to support us and even upgraded our lifestyle by a few degrees. There was the house and the school; then Sophie and I got our first new bikes since we were little when our dad had gotten us each one for Christmas. The bikes Jake got for us were better, more expensive bikes then the ones our dad had given us, but they weren’t our favorite colors. Sophie’s was a pink Huffy with a banana seat, a shiny, chrome back bar, and silver and gold tassels off the handgrips. Mine was a Huffy, too, but it was a green 10-speed. I had always wanted a 10-speed and was grateful to get one, but our dad had known what our favorite colors were.

My mom was pregnant within the first few months of their marriage. She seemed so happy. She cut down on smoking, had only one cocktail per day, ate nutritional foods. Her condition seemed to have the opposite effect on Jake. He grew quiet and nervous, spent a lot of time smoking out in the back yard, drank coolers full of beer, even stayed out all night a couple of times without calling. Then they screamed at each other until Mom’s crippling rants would force him to succumb, pledging never to do it again.
When my mom found out she was going to have a boy, she started buying boy everything. At about the same time, Sophie came down with the measles and I soon followed. Our condition grew rather serious and lasted over two weeks. We had measles everywhere, even inside our mouths, and our eyes were too sensitive to be exposed to any light. We stayed locked inside our room and kept it very dark, our mom avoiding us for fear of contaminating the baby.
We needed water. I called through the door for ten minutes asking Mom or Jake to bring it to us. Sophie was burning up.

“OK. Just hold your horses; I’ll get Jake,” my mom called to me from down the hall. “Jake, get in here and get the girls some water!” she called from the window. He was in the back yard smoking. “Jake, you hear me?” she called again. “Jane, he can’t hear me. I’m getting my boots on; I’ll get him,” she yelled. I went to the window and saw him standing at the far end of the yard by the fence. I unlatched the lock and pushed open the window.
“Jake!” I yelled as loud as I could. My voice was too hoarse; he didn’t hear me. I leaned out the window as far as I could. I saw the back door open and my mom step out. The cold air bit my nose.

“Jake!” I shouted again, louder. He turned and looked at me. My mom slipped on a slick patch of ice just outside the back door and fell forward directly onto her stomach. She screamed. Jake ran. Her skirt had flipped up and she was curled on her side clutching her middle, the bottom of her oversized underpants facing me. A gush of liquid burst from between her legs, soaking the cotton and the ground beneath her. She moaned. I screamed. Jake lifted her off the ground and carried her into the house. I ran from my room to the kitchen.

“Get back to your room!” Jake shouted when he saw me. He laid my mother gently on the floor and dialed 911. I ran back into my room, slammed the door, collapsed against it and sobbed. Sophie began crying too, asking what happened. I heard the ambulance come, saw the red lights flash across the snow. I heard them carry my mom out and listened as they pulled away. The house fell silent.

When she gave birth to a soundless, motionless baby boy, the astonishing pain thwarted all zeal for living and wrapped her in a dense gloom. She named her lifeless baby Samuel. His small, flaccid body was cremated and presented to her in a small, bronze urn.

Jake did what he could to soothe her, but to no favorable end. She wept often, carried around Samuel’s ashes, and stayed permanently in bed for months to follow. When Sophie and I started in our new school, I discovered that my homeroom teacher, Sister Angela, had also been a teacher at the school my mom attended growing up. My mom’s reputation, particularly with Sister Angela, cast me in a less-than-flattering light to start out in. Apparently, my mother had gotten into a physical altercation with Sister Angela while in her charge; she said something inappropriate, to which the nun responded by slapping her across the face. My mom promptly slapped the nun back, landing a solid smack along the side of her head before being physically restrained and prevented from striking her again.

On my first day back to school after the death of my baby brother, Sister Angela set me in front of the class and asked me to tell the story of the tragedy that had befallen my family and further provide an explanation of how it related to the sermon we had all heard in mass on Sunday. My family never attended mass, and Sister Angela knew as much. Sitting in a chair in front of the entire class, I felt my bladder expand and bulge while my hands began to sweat and my mouth turned my tongue into a sticky kind of cotton. All the eyes fixed to my face were lasers penetrating my mind and incinerating all coherent thoughts.

“I was supposed to have a baby brother.” I said, almost too softly for even myself to hear. I don’t know how much time passed before my next barely audible utterance: “We had him cremated.”

A few gasps escaped some of the kids and I saw some mouths drop open and stay open before I realized I had said something very wrong. Hot embarrassment rose lava-like up my neck and face and my hands were damp against my lap.

“The Catholic Church is seriously considering cremation as an acceptable alternative to traditional burials now,” Sister Angela offered, addressing the class. I burst from my chair and flew out of the classroom into the hall. Sister Angela was right behind me, catching up to me and grabbing me by the elbow as I headed away. She whirled me around and thrust my head into her, my face smashed sideways against her bosom and her large hands tangled in my hair, holding me there in a confusing, perverse embrace.
During the weeks and months that followed, Jake had been fighting with my mom so much that he got himself an apartment away from us. He was there only about half the time, retreating to it only after a fight with my mom, which took place about once a week.

When I tried to give my mother the measles, it’s as if my life had been spent in a state of simmering. With my skin red and hot to the touch, I sought out vengeance. History is like water, how on the sandy bottom, black objects like holes, magnified four times their size, move and mash in slow shapes. A closer look, just shadows, quivering reflections. If there had ever been a plan for us, this was part of it. I will write what happened exactly as it happened.

A little over three months after Samuel was born and died, I confronted my mother. I came home from school and found the house a wreck, just like every other day. This time it made me angry.

“What if I wanted to bring a friend from school over?” I spoke out loud to the empty room. I found her in her usual place―lying in bed with the covers pulled over her head.

“Mom, I need to talk to you.”

No answer.

“MOM!”

The covers flew off and she bolted upright, hair wild, eyes bloodshot, glaring at me.


“What, goddammit?”

“Get up and help me clean this house!”

“Jane, I don’t need this right now.”

She lay down and started pulling the covers back over her. I walked in and ripped them off the bed.

“You can’t keep doing this! You have to move on!” I felt hotness spread across my neck and face. She stared at me.

“You can try again. You can still have a baby with Jake if that’s what you want. But you’re never going to have anything like this!” I gestured at the disaster area around me. “And I can’t keep doing everything for you! I have to concentrate on school now. It’s important!”

“Oh, Jane!” she shouted, and started crying, “If you and Sophie hadn’t gotten the measles while I was pregnant—”

“Don’t!” I cut her off. She stared at me accusingly, her wild eyes swimming in a red, streaked face framed by a tangled nest of hair.

I walked out, slamming the door behind me.