The basket began to tip but bumped an outcropping and righted itself. The silk flapped out as if trying to inflate, but failed.
For a moment, Bradley hung there in space with his arms around his dead little boy.
He stuck his hand out to me. I reached and he clutched my right forearm. I had maybe five seconds to haul him out of the basket before it flopped over the rim.
I stared into his eyes and thought, He’s just as insane now as he was a half-hour ago. Maybe more so. He still blames me. He’ll never see it any differently, especially after the kid falls into the chasm and his body is lost forever.
You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right.
I kept thinking, Here it is.
I kept thinking, One last chance.
I wondered if Bradley could see the same things in my face that I saw in his — the foolishness, the screwed-up attempts, the ridiculous efforts and disappointments.
I never should’ve let the stalker scare me out of New York. I shouldn’t have lost my dream. I could’ve made it through the fire if only I’d held strong.
I snaked my free hand into his pocket and snagged the locker key.
It’s where the money would be. Thirty grand would help me get home again. A little start-up fund to make something right happen for once. A demo reel, time to write another book. One that would sell well enough that I could feel vindicated for all the hours I wasted glaring into the abysmal white of the endless empty page.
I leaned in closer and said, “You’re an idiot for putting your kid in a stolen hot-air balloon, you bastard.”
I had to snap my forearm hard aside twice before I broke his grip.
The basket dipped another foot over the edge, the silk whispering like a child. Bradley could’ve done something — made a wild dive the way I had the afternoon I caught the rope — but I could see he just didn’t have the resolve for it. He really had lost the will to live. Imagine.
He stood there with his lost son in his arms, no expression on his face, as he tipped out of sight.
The key chimed faintly in my hand, like the final small toll of every man’s wasted life. I still hadn’t seen the boy’s face, but it would be with me forever, on every page of my life and work from here on out.
I figured I could handle it.
Split/Brain
by Joyce Carol Oates
© 2008 by Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, was released in June 2008 (Ecco Press); and of particular interest to readers of this magazine, the Ontario Review Press recently reprinted in trade paperback her 1984 Mysteries of Winterthurn, in which detective hero Xavier Kilgarvan is confronted with three baffling cases.
In that instant of entering the house by the rear door when she sees, or thinks she sees, a fleeting movement like a shadow in the hallway beyond the kitchen and she hears a sharp intake of breath or panting, it is her decision not to retreat in panicked haste from her house but to step forward sharply calling Jeremy? Is that you? For she’d seen her sister-in-law’s car parked on the shoulder of the road some fifty feet before the driveway to her house, she is certain it must be Veronica’s Toyota which Jeremy often drives, it occurs to her now that she’d expected to see Veronica at the clinic that morning but Veronica hadn’t turned up, like buzzing hornets these thoughts rush at her even as she calls out more sharply Is that you? Jeremy? For the boy shouldn’t be here in this house, at this time, uninvited, she’d left the rear door unlocked as frequently she did driving into town to the clinic, returning and later in the day driving back into town to the clinic, a distance of precisely 2.6 miles, of which she has memorized each intervening property, driveway, intersecting road and street, to be played, replayed, and run backward in her mind as she drives into town, to the rehab clinic, to see her husband, and returns to the house in preparation for driving back to the clinic, which is, she has come to realize, but the preparation for returning home. For much of this morning she has been at the clinic, tries to arrive precisely at eight A.M. when the clinic opens its front doors to visitors, for she is an early riser, both she and Jim are early risers, rarely sleep past dawn on even bitter-cold sunless winter mornings. And at the clinic, at her husband’s bedside, usually she will remain until seven P.M. when, exhausted, she returns home for the remainder of the day. At Jim’s bedside she reads to him, checks e-mail on her laptop and reads to Jim those messages, ever decreasing in frequency, that seem to her important for Jim to hear; with childlike logic she is thinking If I am a good wife, if I am good, God will spare us, God will make him well again, and so far her prayer which she understands is both craven and futile has not been entirely scorned, for Jim has been transferred from the hospital to the clinic and there is the promise that one day soon he will be sent back home to recuperate and to recover his lost strength. Already he no longer needs to be fed through a tube, already the color is returning to his face that had been deathly pale. Though still he tires easily, nods off in the midst of speaking, friends who come to visit have learned to disguise their shock and discomfort at seeing Jim Gould so changed, poor Jim who’d once been so vital, so energetic, smiling and good-natured and much-loved and now his body seems to have shrunken, he has lost more than fifty pounds, his hands are weak, legs useless, the once-powerful muscles atrophied and now his legs are reduced to bones beneath thin hairless skin, terrible to see. And so she has learned not to see. And so she has learned to disguise her fear. And so she has learned to smile as nurses learn to smile. And when he has asked her please massage his legs, his legs hurt, she smiles and kneads the bone-hard legs, thin now as the legs of a young child, massaging these legs she jokes with her husband, she loves him so, she would die for this man, she believes, and yet: how fatigued she has grown in the past several weeks, how exasperated with her husband’s demands, Jim has become unpredictable in his moods, quick to become angry, this morning hurrying to get to the clinic she’d forgotten to bring with her the latest issue of a professional journal for which her husband has been an advisory editor, seeing she’d forgotten it Jim was visibly disappointed and sulky and she’d said, Darling, I’ll drive back to get the journal, it’s no trouble, and immediately he said no, it isn’t necessary, you can bring it next time, and she insisted yes, of course she would drive back to get it for him, she has other errands in town that need to be done this morning. And anyway, Jim was scheduled for tests this morning. And she kisses his cheek, tells him she will return within the hour, in secret she’s childishly relieved to be able to leave the clinic so soon after arriving, this dour dark dimly lighted place, the smells, don’t think of the smells, the accumulated smells of decades. And the other patients, and the other visitors who are mainly women her age and older, whom she has come to recognize at the clinic, as they have come to recognize her, and dread the sight of one another outside the clinic. She is one of the few who takes pains with her appearance, not a vain woman but a woman well aware of her face, her body, how men regard her, or once regarded her, with more than ordinary interest. On this weekday she is wearing an attractive creamy-pale yellow pants suit that is flattering to her shapely body, she thinks, and around her throat a peach-colored Italian scarf. Through her life she has been a big-boned beautiful girl yet never what one would call fat, the word fat is offensive to her ears, obscene. Her face is round, full-cheeked, her skin slightly flushed as if sunburnt, a classic brunette beauty her husband has called her but now, seeing herself in the rearview mirror of her car on the way home she is shocked by her creased forehead, feathery white lines bracketing her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, the coral lipstick she’d so carefully applied that morning has been eaten off, a little cry of distress escapes her