She stood in front of the garish COMING SOON! sign, her whole body heavy and limp, though she was sure that had more to do with her 63-year-old frame than any latent trauma. It took two hours of driving in heavy traffic to get here. The houses around looked mostly the same. It even felt the same. Children were squealing and laughing and running. One could nearly hear the collective caps popping off so many post-dinner beers. There was a certain inherent trust here, the kind that lulled parents into letting their kids run around unsupervised because what was the worst that could happen? Beth hated neighborhoods this stupid.
She wondered if she were to knock on the doors today who would answer. Would it be the grandkids of the people who fed her when she went around begging with the other kids? Would it be other families entirely—ones who had no idea their children were running and playing and laughing on the bones of Native children? That COMING SOON! was a place their kids could gorge themselves on burgers and fries shiny with grease where she once gagged on stringy oatmeal crawling with worms? Easier to forget. It was always easier to forget when it didn’t happen to you.
Beth had tried to forget Henry. The good memories went first. She had no rosy recollections of holding him or being in awe of his newborn beauty. He only ever came back in sharp, stabbing pangs. Whenever Beth misbehaved she was compared to him. Within days after Mary’s visit to the school Henry seemed to have been eroded, his youthful imperfections buffed to a glossy sheen. At first this bothered Beth; she was a good daughter, a good student. Her mistakes were no more notable than any kid her age. But now that Henry was gone he never made any mistakes. His very absence invited imagined mythologies to crystallize into facts.
“Henry would have been on time.” Nope. He was five.
“Henry would have eaten his whole plate.” He hated everything but sugar.
The truth didn’t matter. There was no competing with a memory.
It took 20 minutes to find her daughter’s work number on her new cellphone, ten to work up the nerve to dial, then another ten to navigate the automated switchboard. She was both pleased and disappointed when Lindsay picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, Ma. What’s up?”
“Was I a good mother?”
“What?”
“Did I love you enough?”
“You never got me that Teddy Ruxpin doll I wanted for Christmas, so I guess not.”
“Lindsay, be serious for five minutes. It’s important. Did I make you feel loved?”
“You were loving in your own way—”
“‘In my own way’? What does that mean?”
“Calm down. Of course you made me feel loved. I still pick up the phone when you call me, don’t I? I don’t have to do that, you know.”
“Then why didn’t you have children?”
Lindsay let out a long, slow sigh. “Look, Mom, we’ve talked about this. My decision to not have kids has nothing to do with you. It’s between me and my uterus.”
“Maybe it does have something to do with me. I mean, I was thinking about it and I’m pretty sure I didn’t have any more children after you because of my mother. She was always comparing me with my brother; she had these impossible standards. I didn’t want you to feel… inadequate.”
“You have no reason to feel inadequate, Mom. You had an amazing career. You were a nurse—you helped so many people. Uncle Chris is nice, but to be honest he mostly sits around reading conspiracy theories all day. It’s not even close.”
“I’m not talking about him.”
“Then who are you talking about?”
“I had another brother. A biological brother. Henry. He disappeared when I was eight. I guess he died then, too.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“The police called. They just found his body.”
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Mom. Where did they find him?”
“The grounds of the Iroquois Residential School we went to. They’re building a restaurant there now.”
“Wait, you went to a residential school?”
“I barely went for a year. It doesn’t count.”
“It absolutely counts. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Beth had no answer she was willing to give. She stared out her car window at the old school grounds, trying to imagine five-year-old Henry working the fields.
“I don’t remember what Henry looked like. Isn’t that strange? I keep imagining him as that white and blue baby on jars of mushed peas.”
“The Gerber baby?”
“That’s it, the Gerber baby. I think he looked kind of like that when he was an infant, only he wasn’t white, obviously. Chubby cheeks, smiling and all that. But Henry was five when it happened. Five-year-olds look like themselves.”
“Are you okay, Mom? Should I leave work and come over?”
“Of course not. I’m fine. Have a good day at work, honey.”
The rez was a blur of green past her windows. Every so often there was a flurry of white: tiny trailers that had recently joined the increasing ranks of neon-signed smoke shops. BUY 10 GET 1 FREE. BUY 8 GET 1 FREE AND A LIGHTER. The further in she drove the more outrageous the deals became. It was like the Cold War of lung cancer. Nothing like the place she and her mother used to wander on weekends, gathering medicines and telling stories. She stopped at five smoke shops before she found one that could help her. ROLLIES 2 FOR 1 ON TUESDAYS. The cashier was surprisingly young. She told her exactly where she should go to buy white corn—lyed or dried, the cheapest place, the best place. Beth thanked her.
“You’re welcome, Istha.”
The word sounded vaguely familiar, like a song she’d heard long ago. “What did you say?”
“Sorry. I’m in the language-immersion program. Trying to practice. I just assumed you spoke Mohawk.”
“I used to. When I was a kid. What does that mean again?”
The woman gave a small smile. “Auntie.”
Beth nodded, then turned to leave. When she was at the door she turned back one more time, her eyes squinting behind her glasses. “How did you know I was Mohawk?”
She shrugged. “You’ve got that tough Mohawk look to you.”
Beth went stiff. Her insides felt like a painting doused in turpentine. Even though she’d had her hair cut and her tongue tamed, even though she’d donned pantsuits and pearls and spoke English as well as either queen she was named for, even though she let people think she was Portuguese or Italian or Greek, even though she’d left the scarred memories of her childhood in a dark, unattended corner of her mind—her people still recognized her. It was like they’d been here, waiting, all this time.
That night, she took the white corn out of the food processor. Much easier than grinding with mortar and pestle; modernity had its benefits. As she mixed the flour gradually with boiling water, she wondered if Henry missed their corn mush while he was at school, this treat their mother prepared so lovingly. Maybe he tried to pretend the stringy gruel they were fed was this corn mush, as she had so many years ago. Beth added a dollop of maple syrup, stirred it, then brought it to her lips. It tasted just like she remembered.
Danielle Evans
Boys Go to Jupiter
from The Sewanee Review
The bikini isn’t even Claire’s thing. Before this winter, if you had said Confederate flag, Claire would have thought of high school beach trips: rows and rows of tacky souvenir shops along the Ocean City Boardwalk, her best friend Angela muttering They know they lost, right? while Claire tried to remember which side of the Mason-Dixon Line Maryland was on. The flag stuff is Jackson’s, and she’s mostly seeing Jackson to piss off Puppy. Puppy, Claire’s almost-stepmother, is legally named Poppy; Puppy is supposedly a childhood nickname stemming from a baby sister’s mispronunciation, but Claire suspects that Puppy has made the whole thing up. Puppy deemed it wasteful to pay twice as much for a direct flight in order for Claire to avoid a layover, and her father listens to Puppy now, so for the first half of her trip, Claire had to go the wrong direction—to Florida from Vermont via Detroit.