“I am not a vindictive person, but I want him to be in pain. God help me. I’m a Christian, but I want him to suffer.”
“The interest rate is just too high.”
“I’m daydreaming.”
There was a fountain outside the courthouse. AGUA ESTA MALA FAVOR DE NO BEBER. A group of men in jean shorts and Polos set up a small amplifier and began to preach the Word. They sang hymns. The air conditioners in the bank building across the street dripped water on the heads of those skulking by, trying not to be noticed. Purple stretch pants, high-waisted, acid-washed, wrinkled, rumpled, untucked t-shirts, Sunday best, suits crisp and new, sport coat, tie tacks, pressed, tucked, contacts instead of glasses, tattoos revealed when coughs, wheezes, crutches, motorized wheelchairs. Poor surgery, poor thing, poor surgery. Young bailiffs lounged by the metal detector like young bathers at a pond in the spring, wands in lap. “So it was me and Chris and Hanglade.”
“Hanglade? What’s he doing?”
“Hanglade? Going to school.”
The sky was bunched and soiled batting, the contours of which are lit by some sun that cannot be seen.
“Would you send her a card? She’s really depressed. She feels alone. Just get a little one from the Dollar Store. Just a fifty cent one. She never gets to see her son. Just say a little something. For her…” The copy machine overwhelmed the rest.
The spine read: Dead Bodies through Declaratory Judgments. It rained and leaves gullied past. The telephone rang. Dead bodies broken waiting for names called broken waiting. Blood giving new life. The telephone rang and rang and rang. On a post, in the spring, two birds, one on another. The small tree with bark like peeling wallpaper sat alone and considered the snack cake wrapper at its feet, half-hidden in the dead leaves. The parking lot was empty except for a black Escalade half-hidden in back of the office of a lawyer who lost his license. Perhaps it waits for nightfall, which came soon enough. In the evening, a last light overwhelmed by flashing blue and red licking sidewalk and brick. A car stopped on the side of the street. Whir in front of a yellow-green hedge. Off-white Mercury Cougar full of stuffed animals. Purple bears pressed into taupe puppies and sun-bleached humanoids spilled on the backseat and dashboard. Nameless forms with splitting seams. When she was a young girl, Leah carried a stuffed rabbit with her to the summer camp and on the last day gave it to the deaf boy that had played with her all week. He had a large head, large eyes, glasses, and others yelled mean things at them while she made the rabbit dance for the boy. She gave it to him not because she liked him enough to give away her most precious possession, but because giving her rabbit away hurt not to have it. At home in her room, she would think of that rabbit and begin to cry and her mother would come in and hold her, feeling Leah’s warm tears and they would be quiet. In the dark, in her mother’s embrace, she would sink inside herself, past her own pitiful little sorrow, her room and the night and her mother and the rabbit glimmering smaller and smaller on the distant surface of his being, and then it was morning and her mother was gone and there were birds trilling in the branches outside of her window. The rabbit had been Jacob’s before and she’d always been jealous of it.
All is wonder as the bricks of the old train station are swallowed by the creeping feet of ivy and moss. All is wonder as the left turn signals of the three cars in front of her pass in and out of sync slowly, phasing through all possible combinations in sequence. It is night, she crept toward home and the courthouse bell sang some closing hymn.
“Leah! Leeaaaah!”
She woke in the void, forgetting where she was for a moment, and remembered the faint light from the hallway, Jacob sitting on the corner of his bed, saying, “Can you hear it? Can you hear it howling?” and there it was, the howling howling howling and they shivered in their beds and listened to the rutting and snuffling just outside of their room and she whispered something to Jacob, some apology lost in the howling and they could smell their missing blood.
In the morning, Leah, tired even with an extra cup of coffee, listened to a woman talking on her cell phone to her daughter in the break room. “Bless,” the woman said, implying judgment. Leah sipped her coffee, flipped through the local news section of the paper and listened to two other women talk about children vomiting. How far into the woods does the path by the stream go, Leah wondered as she burned her lips and walked to her office. What if she just kept walking?
“So, I guess I’ll never feed him that again, but it was just weird, but my mother said—”
When Leah first brought communion, the woman smiled and Leah read the prayer and the woman chewed the small wafer and sipped slowly the small plastic cup of grape juice. They talked for an hour, a talk that was mostly silence, but which was warm and left Leah feeling happy. The next time Leah brought communion, a month later, the woman smiled, but did not remember Leah. Leah repeated her name, louder, but the woman shrugged and smiled. They went through the same actions as before, the prayer, the body, the blood, the sitting and talking, the pause, and Leah, disappointed that the woman did not remember her, said she would be back in a few days.
Leah began visiting the old woman once or twice a week, spending an hour or two just sitting. Sometimes she brought groceries or small gifts. The woman began to remember Leah, or said she did. Sometimes the woman called Leah by other names, the woman’s daughters or granddaughters, perhaps. Leah didn’t know. There were pictures of children and grandchildren scattered through the house, a nice house, but Leah tried not to look at them.
And Leah would bring communion and she would bring groceries which she bought with her own money and they would sit and one day the woman said she wanted to do something nice for Leah, but Leah demurred. The old woman insisted. “You’ve done so much,” she said and Leah said, “No, no, no,” but the woman wrote a check to Leah. At first, Leah wasn’t even going to cash it, but then she didn’t want to insult the woman, who asked several times if Leah had cashed the check, so Leah cashed it, but used the money to buy something nice for the woman. Then the woman asked Leah to run some errands for her and Leah did, because Leah said she would do anything for the old woman, who must have been in her mid-eighties, and so the woman gave her a list of things she needed and Leah got them for her and the woman gave Leah her ATM card and asked Leah to go to the bank for her and Leah did. Leah did what she was asked. The woman offered Leah money and Leah took it because the woman wanted Leah to take it and she reimbursed herself for the purchases because that is what the woman would have wanted and when the woman said she wanted to leave Leah something, Leah contacted an attorney, but only because the woman wanted her to do so. Leah did what the woman wanted. And when the woman insisted on making the little figurines in the basement for the children in the church, little figures with little felt clothes that the woman made with her knobby, trembling hands in the poor light of the basement, Leah asked her not to because it was too hard for her to get up and down, but the woman never listened.