Seeing Him // R.A. Morean
When he died, he left his face behind. Not just in photo albums or in frames centered on walls, or in the soft feathery folds of early morning dreams, but concretely. Like now.
She stands in the aisle across from the cashier, trying to find a pen in the dark crevasses of a large chapped brown leather bag, digging through old receipts, a pacifier, used baby wipes, several crumpled prescriptions, a piece of granite, a clutch of creased cards with flowers or candles or doves or any combination thereof pictured on the front and inscribed with wide rolling script, a yellowed dog tooth, a scattered fistful of perfectly curled sandy sea shells and a wad of brown made-from-recycled-paper napkins from Chipotle.
Her concentration excludes the quiet toddler in the heavy shopping cart who is stretching over in his seat to grab anything brightly packaged on the candy shelf. She glances up quickly and moves the cart further away from his little outstretched arms with a push of her foot. In the next aisle over, a man is checking out as well, buying just a magazine with cash. She finds her pen, raises the checkbook to the counter, and then, in a breath, in a moment too minimal to even have purpose, she glances up. And there he stands.
It is not him, though. Of course.
But in that nanosecond—in that whisper moment—she sees him. There in profile, glancing down at the change in his hand, or something in the title of the magazine, or at their small son. Then he vanishes when the man looks up at her and meets her eyes. He smiles and nods goodbye to the ponytailed teenager who rang him up, and in another moment, the sound of automatic doors closing signals he is gone. She is left again, the pen pressing down hard on the paper, and as she signs her name, she sees both of theirs in print and reminds herself to order new checks.
He appears only when she is unprepared to see him. The first time was at the gas station around the corner. It was just a month after the accident, after the gas truck took the curve in the interstate too fast and plowed through a chain-link fence that was supposed to be replaced with a cement barrier, but the budget evaporated for that particular fiscal year. A shame. A tragedy. Just terrible. I am so sorry. We are so sorry. The driver, a man named George, was new and did not gauge the weight of an empty truck when he took the curve. She did not ever want to meet him. The attorney said his wife left him a week earlier—a week before the accident. She did not want to ponder how her life could be, how he might have lived, if a faceless woman had stayed in a marriage she knew nothing about.
Stepping out from the car to slip the nozzle into the slightly dented gray Subaru, she felt someone moving, and a sandy-haired man suddenly appeared on the other side of the pump, smoothly replacing the hose. That was the first time she saw him. Standing right before her, in the sun, looking away from her. But it was his cheek, his long nose, the same twist of sideburn, his strong throat. A whiff of gasoline scoured her nose, and she felt faint, and in the winter-cold, her breath came out uneven. She jammed the nozzle back inside the pump, tore the receipt as it was printing, and climbed back into the Subaru, dropping keys, grabbing them again, turning the engine over, pulling out too fast. Their son fussed in the back seat.
Since then, she has seen him at least once or twice a week every week for the last few months. Instead of growing tedious, each fleeting encounter leaves her drained and slightly more undone, as if a malignant purpose is guiding him back to her or her to him. It’s always the same, with him congealing in the periphery and then, as she turns, bringing him into focus, he vanishes. Completely—every single time. Street corners, the drug store, the children’s park, through a restaurant window, on the bus, in a doorway, in all these places, some force conjures him, and she is at a loss as to why. Or when it will end.
The only time she doesn’t see him is when she needs him. When Caleb is in the bathtub and someone knocks on the front door, or she’s finished loading groceries in the car and he’s strapped in his seat and she can’t return the cart, or he’s eating in his highchair and the phone rings upstairs—in each case, she doesn’t dare leave him even for a second because, now, anything might happen. And if it did, she knew she would be swallowed up by something so sinister in its anonymity that she herself would disappear. There would be no recovery from a toddler’s loss.
Her husband’s face never reaches her after a meal or in the car—even though in both cases she often glances to where he would be sitting, sure she will catch a glimpse of him. But no. He arrives only when there is a body present, another man, like a stand-in, or conduit.
In bed, in the dark, she can’t bear to roll to his place because she cannot picture his back. And, finally, in the deep night, just before sleep, after several months of waiting, when she can neither bear it nor stand it, when she is finally brave enough to try it, and her hands find the lost “v” of herself, she cannot summon him. She continues, caught in a perverse duty, and when she comes, the waves fan and oscillate interchangeably, rolling her over into an abyss of guilty betrayal and then the hopelessness of the betrayed. Afterwards, she cries, hard and long, and her face hurts for his complete and total absence.
Half of her life now is hidden.
“Come on, Caleb,” put your damn foot in the shoe.
“It’s time to go,” right now, right now, right now, I can’t believe this.
“I said no candy,” everyone’s looking at me.
“I can’t read. Mommy’s really tired,” get away, stop touching me.
“Just go to bed, go to sleep,” what the hell is wrong with you—go to fucking sleep.
The first half of her sentences comes out soft and measured, and everyone is amazed at what an incredibly resilient person she is. They shake their heads and say things like, “God only gives you what you can handle.” The inside of her head screams the second half. They do not know she does not sleep or still cries or is succumbing to a dark wave of hatred for her son, the source of which is unknown.
She does not believe in God. And not because of the accident. She has never believed in God. The crash, his death, her unspoken half-life, all lead her to believe she is absolutely right.
Caleb is growing fast now. It is late spring, and he is finding frogs in the early soft mud in the lot beside their apartment. She watches him running around in the side yard, knees muddy, fingers splayed, talking to himself. She fingers the number she wrote down from the grocery store kiosk on the back of another prescription she refused to fill. It was just this afternoon, and the last place she saw him. Coming up behind her to grab some vitamins, there was someone with his smell—sappy cut limes—and she turned, knowing she shouldn’t, and there he stood, for just a singular moment, his light windbreaker brushing her bare arm. It was all too swift to say a word, to think, to do anything but hold so still she could stop time. She placed the folded paper near the phone in her bedroom. It’s Not About Fault. Every Parent is a Loving Parent. Call Us—is what the notice on the kiosk said.
It was certainly not her fault. But she was still a monster. When Caleb went to bed, it was all she could do to tuck him in and leave. She resented not being able to go anywhere without him, wrestling with the stupid car seat, packing snacks, milk, juice, diapers. She didn’t want to change one more single diaper, make another meal, stuff boneless limbs into jackets or socks, get up every night for one reason or another: bad dreams, diaper rash, hunger, something invisible in an eye, a splinter. She couldn’t stand watching him anymore and did not take him to the park.
But the thing that made her write down the number from the Kiosk was the night before, when she kissed him, she bared her teeth and pressed down on his face so hard he started to cry, and she had to turn and walk away. Later that night, she cried into her pillow.
Summer was hot. And though the heat made records, there were no jackets to contend with, or cold drafts in the apartment, or runny noses. The apartment complex had a shallow pool painted aqua marine, and it opened last week for the season. He loved to go and splash. There was a gaggle of young mothers who came with their children after work in the late afternoon, and she joined them. She had quit her job when he was killed, nine months ago. They had bought life insurance when she found she was pregnant with him, and she quit work as an assistant at a big law office. She was not going to work when he needed her. She did understand he needed her.
The cement is burning, and small footprints evaporate quickly. There are four other mothers around the pool. One, the blonde, is smoking with her legs crossed on the lounge chair, looking very much like a 1950s movie star with bright red lipstick, a white one-piece bathing suit, and a matching big white floppy hat. The other mothers are talking about a reality show, while intermittently yelling directions at their children, some in Spanish. The children are older than Caleb, four girls, three other boys, all wet and slick like seals, and Caleb wants to play.
But that means getting into the water with him. The shallow end is still over his head, and she does not want to get wet. The bathing suit she wears is navy blue, a one-piece, and faded in spots. It gets loose in the water, and the straps fall down. She just managed a shower this morning, and if her hair gets wet, she’ll have to rinse the choline out later in the sink because Caleb isn’t sleeping well and has discovered how to climb out of his crib. And her hair will get wet. He will splash, and she doesn’t want to yell at him. He’s in a pool, for god’s sake.
“Mommy, go in. Mommy, go in now.”
“Mommy, go in, please?” Shit, shit, shit.
He is sitting at the edge, not looking at her, poking one chubby index finger into her thigh. “Mommy, please?” He quickly leans over and places his head in her lap for a second, and then darts to the water. She instinctively grabs his arm and relinquishes, slipping in quickly, the cold water making her inhale fast, and wrapping his arm over her shoulder. He turns fluidly and wraps his other arm around her neck, and gives a squeal. The other mothers look over. She has not gotten wet with Caleb since the pool opened, since he died at the end of last summer.
In the cool water, his small body is lighter than a bird’s. He is nothing. He stretches out one hand and slaps the water, laughs at the transparent chaos, turns at the waist, and slaps both arms against the surface, just delighted with himself. She walks around in a circle while he tests the surface tension again and again, and then, realizing she will have to rinse her hair in the kitchen sink anyway, heads out to the deep end, thinking she will tread water with him, that she can tread water with him perched on her hip.
Caleb grows wide-eyed, laughs again as the water curls between them, and then throws his head so far back that she has to stop, or he will arch into the water. She tilts like a balance so he can still extend backward, but misses the surface, and she sees his straight sandy hair ropey with water, fall and fan out, and hiccup on choppy little waves. She walks around with him in his upside-down world and tries to ignore the singular idea in her head. The phone number is upstairs. It would take almost nothing. She could just let go. He would slip under.
The sun glitters on the surface of the water, and she makes her circles wider so she is really beginning to tread water going out. He squirms and laughs, and she must hold him tightly as his buoyancy grows. It is as if he is not even there, floating. He senses he cannot arch back anymore and watches the world through two fists held up to his eyes. Water fills her mouth, and he climbs higher, squirming to stay above the surface. She can feel his toes on her chest, pressing.
She knows she can never let go, and this is how it will be for the rest of her life. She will always have to be vigilant, and she doesn’t trust that she can be so strong, so focused, so in love for so long. Making the loop coming back from the deep end, his weight grows more substantial with each step, and he shimmies back down, an arm returned around her neck, and he tosses his head back again, looking once more for that upside-down world.
With his throat creased with baby fat, she tickles him, and he laughs and tries to protect himself and pushes himself upright against her shoulder again. He lays a wet head of new lank curls against her hot collarbone, and she turns in a straight line back to the shallow end, noticing two of the mothers are standing and watching her, and the one with the cigarette is half out of the lounge chair, clutching her hat.
But she is not looking at them. His wet hand found her cheek, and he looked right at her. And she sees him. Not fleeting this time, but real. Caleb does have his eyes, blue and green and like the sea, and when he turns, like now, to wave at one of the seal girls dancing in the water, she sees a ghost of a dimple. But it’s not a ghost, it’s real flesh. In the sunlight, she clearly sees that his hands, resting on her forearm, are his hands, and broad—everyone says Caleb will have large hands. And then he turns to her again, and she kisses him, smells him, he is a wet little boy, her boy, not his father but a part of him, and she can bear it. More than that, she can see him now, clearly, outlined against the blue of both sky and water.
And, as she moves to the curved edge of the pool, she understands she will never see Mark again, except when he is enclosed in those wooden frames and shiny albums—there will be no more fleeting moments of love, or desperation, or bewilderment.
She lifts Caleb up, still light, and as he leaves the water, his weight becomes real. Then they sit at the edge of the pool and count each other’s fingers and toes.
R.A. Morean (Rebecca Morean) is a Pushcart nominee, an award-winning fiction and nonfiction writer, and professor. She publishes literary fiction, romance, and mystery, and has two screenplays represented under a dazzling array of pseudonyms. Her own work has earned a Strand International Short Fiction Award, starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Publishers’ Weekly. Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize finalist, describes her writing as “. . . spot on lyrical and full of grit exactly when it needs to be.” She continues to teach creative writing and publishing, and just recently relocated back to Vermont. A single mother of four amazing adults, she is left with one puppy and many empty boxes. Learn more about her and make contact at www.ramorean.com.