“Do you miss John?”
“Yes.”
“Poor little John.”
Her hazel eyes were blurred for a moment and she looked away out the window into the rustling treetops of autumn, as though to conceal both emotion and knowledge from me. “Oh, my God,” I heard her say softly. Then she let forth one of her controlled breaths, annoyed at her own weakness as it lay embedded in the general condition of the world, and said with revived strength,
“Well, Richard, let’s be sensible. Come and pick out the toys you want in John’s nursery. What you don’t take I am going to send to Father Raker’s orphanage.”
She led me along the upstairs hall to John’s room. His toys were laid out in rows, some on the window seat, the rest on the floor.
“I suppose I could say that you should just take them all,” she said with one of her unwilling smiles, “but I think that would be selfish of us both. Go ahead and pick.”
With the swift judgment of the expert, I chose a beautiful set of Pullman cars for my electric train, which had the same track as John’s, and a power boat with mahogany cabin and real glass portholes draped in green velvet curtains, and a battalion of lead soldiers with red coats and black busbies and white cross belts tumbled together in their box who could be set smartly on parade, and a set of watercolor paints, and a blackboard on its own easel with a box of colored chalks. These, and so much else in the room, spoke of attempts to reward John for what he was not — and for what they were not, the parents, too. I looked up at his mother. She was watching me as if never to let me go.
“Your cheeks are so flushed,” she said, “and it is adorable the way the light makes a gold ring on your hair when you bend down. Richard, come here.”
She took me in her hungry arms. I felt how she trembled. There was much to make her tremble.
“Do you want anything else?” she asked, again becoming sensible, as she would have said. Her concealed intensity made me lose mine.
“No, thank you, Mrs. Burley.”
“Well, you can take your new toys home whenever you like. You can’t carry them all at once.”
“I’ll take the boat now,” I said.
“All right. Garsh, it’s big, isn’t it. John loved to sail it when we went to Narragansett.”
She took me downstairs to the door. There she lingered. She wanted to say something. She could have said it to an adult. How could she say it to me? Yet most grown people spoke to me as if I were far older than my years. Leaning her back against the door, with her hands behind her on the doorknob and with her face turned upward so that I saw her classical white throat and the curve of her cheek until it was lost in the golden shadows of her eye, she said,
“Richard, I wonder if you would ever understand — you knew, didn’t you, surely, that our poor little John was not like other children?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“His father and I suffered for him, seeing how hard it was for him with the other children; and then we thought of how it would have to be when he grew up — do you know?”
I nodded, though I did not know, really.
“We are heartbroken to lose him, you must know that. He was all we had. But do you know, we sometimes wonder if it is better that God took him, even if we had to lose him. Do you know?”
She looked down at me as if to complete her thought through her golden piercing gaze. When she saw the look of horror on my face, she caught her breath. Conventional, like all children, I was amazed that anyone should be glad of death, if that meant not seeing someone ever again.
“Oh, Richard, don’t judge us yet for feeling that way. When you grow up and see more of what life does to those who cannot meet it, you will understand.” She was obsessed. Without naming it, she must speak of the weight on her heart, even if only to me, a first-grader in school. In my ignorance, perhaps I might be the only safe one in whom to confide. “Garsh, when you see cripples trying to get along, and sick people who can never get well, you wonder why they can’t be spared and just die.”
The appalling truth was gathering in me. I stared at her while she continued,
“John was always frail, and when those horrid boys turned on him and he caught that chill and it went into pneumonia, his father and I did everything to save him, but it was not enough. We had to see him go.”
Clutching John’s beautiful power boat in both arms, I cowered a little away from her and said,
“You never sent for a doctor, though.”
A sharp silence cut its way between us. She put one hand on her breast and held herself. At last she said in a dry, bitter voice,
“Is that what is being said, then?”
“Dr. Grauer always comes when I am sick.”
She put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were afire like those of a trapped cat.
“Richard,” she whispered against her fingers, “what are you thinking? Don’t you believe we loved John?”
I said, inevitably,
“Did you have him die?”
At this she flew into a golden, speckled fury. She reached for me to chastise me, but I eluded her. I was excited by her and also frightened. Her eyes blazed with shafted light. I managed to dance away beyond her reach, but I was encumbered by the beautiful power cruiser in my arms. I let it crash to the floor. I heard its glass break. Escape and safety meant more to me just then than possession of the wonderful boat. I knew the house. I ran down the hall to the kitchen and out the back door to my own yard and home, out of breath, frightened by what I had exposed.
The Burleys never again spoke to my parents or to me. My parents wondered why, and even asked, but received no explanation. All of John’s toys went to Father Raker’s. In a few weeks the Burleys put up their house for sale; in a few months Howard retired from business and they went to live in Florida for the rest of their lives.
Anomalies
by Stephen Wasylyk
© 1993 by Stephen Wasylyk
Stephen Wasylyk belongs to that rare breed of writers who devote their time exclusively to the short story. He attributes this partly to having grown up “with a volume of 0. Henry’s works in one hand,” but also to the fact that with a novel one must live with the characters one creates for a much greater length of time. Mr. Wasylyk prefers to move on to entirely new creations, as he has done in most of the more than six dozen short stories he has had published, including this new entry for EQMM...
Deep in her lower back, persistent pain gnawed away, bringing the mental image of a TV commercial with twisting ropes and lightning bolts. Her job, the doctor said. Not so. The pain had been there ever since Allan had run off with that malnourished sex object with the big eyes. Sitting behind this teller’s window had nothing to do with it. Not being able to get her life into gear did.
Funny. Still thinking like Allan, who had always said cars came with automatic transmissions, but life came with a gear shift. You had to select the proper gear at the right time and do it smoothly. Great gear shifter, Allan. All she’d managed so far was loud grinding noises.
She squirmed, braced one foot against the partition under the counter to ease the pain, and smiled as she passed the deposit slip to the woman. The next patron stepped into view: elderly, gray hair curling from beneath a battered cap pulled low over his eyes. New. Never seen him before.
She glanced at the slip he slid toward her.
Oh Lord.
DON’T LOOK AROUND OR MAKE A SOUND. PUT THE MONEY IN THE BAG WITH THIS SLIP.