Foliate Oak October 2017

Fiction
​​
For The Best 
By Philip Goldberg

As Jim sits on his sofa, watching the Beatles’ Celebration on television, his eyes wander to the crack in the ceiling. He noticed it the first day he moved in seven months ago. It bothers him, digs into him like a splinter. Have to plaster that damn thing, he thinks. At the sight of it, he remembers the phone call 50 years ago.   
 
Lying on his bed, Jim, then 10, stared at the small crack in the ceiling. The phone’s persistent rings sounded like an alarm. A warning. His mother, Polly, snored in her favorite armchair. The television drama played to no one. His older brother, Seth, was visiting a friend. And Jim listened to his hand-held transistor radio. “She Loves You” by The Beatles filled the radiator-heated air.
 
“Ma,” he shouted. No voice replied back, so he rose from his bed and ran to the phone affixed to the kitchen wall. Lifting the receiver, he placed it to his ear and said: “Hello.”
 
Static crackled over the line. A hesitant voice, a woman’s voice replied: “Max there?”
 
The voice sounded unfamiliar. The name didn’t. It was his father’s.
 
“He’s at work.”  
 
After a few more static-filled moments, the woman uttered: “Who’s this?”
 
Jim hesitated, thought about ignoring her question, but in the end he wondered where this was leading. So he replied: “His son.”
 
“Oh,” she said.
 
“Can I take a message?”  
 
A click followed. The dial tone hummed.
 
It all felt like a blow to his gut. He felt shaken. His mind revved up at the call: Who doesn’t leave a message? Wrong number? No way! The woman knew his dad’s name. She wanted to talk with him.
He placed the receiver back on the phone. Glancing above it at the wall clock, he noted the time: 10:25PM. No one ever called this late. Turning, he stared at his mom, still sawing wood through her open mouth. Drool snaked down her double chin. A familiar sight each night, he shook his head and returned to his room.
 
Dive-bombing face first into his twin-sized bed, Jim quickly flipped over onto his back. The radiator clanked, a hammer pounding an anvil, as steam heat forced its way through the pipes. He eyed the ceiling, painted light green and listened to his radio and Frankie Valli’s powerful falsetto voice from “Walk Like a Man”. But the sweet tones could not block his churning thoughts. He knew his father, a customs’ inspector at the recently renamed JFK International Airport, had taken to often working overtime. This helped make up for his mother, an agoraphobe for as long as Jim could remember, who couldn’t work.
 
He’d recalled watching Max walk Polly out of the house and to the sidewalk, where she’d always hit an invisible wall. Her legs would shake. Her hands would flail. Her voice was shrill, protesting. A frustrated, angry Max would then march her back to the house with the bemused eyes of neighbors on their receding backs.
 
Jim stretched out across the length of his bed. He couldn’t shake the dreadful embarrassment he felt at witnessing that sight. Slowly he calmed down. Only then did he ponder the woman on the phone’s voice. He guessed she was young, younger than his father or mother. A bevy of thoughts continued unspooling in his mind, like frames of a movie. Fact was that over the past months, his father’s appearances at home had been like movie cameos.  And few words had passed between them.   
 
He studied the crack in the corner of the bedroom ceiling, small but growing. Bothered by the call, his father’s increased absence, the crack, he rose and marched back to the living room where he found his mother still asleep. He placed a hand on her shoulder and gently shook her.
 
With an emphatic snort, she roused, appearing lost. Slowly she cast her dark eyes on his thin freckled face. “What’s wrong?”
 
“Dad,” he blurted.
 
Her focus sharpened. Her voice registered concern. “What about him?”
 
He shifted weight between the balls of his feet. “The phone call I just answered.”
“Phone call?” She appeared confused.
 
“Ma, you were out like a light.”
 
“Oh?” Her eyes widened. “He’s okay?”
 
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “It wasn’t about him. It was for him.”
 
“From who?”
 
“Some woman.”
 
“What woman?” Her brow hardened. “She leave a message?”
 
He shook his head. “Just hung up.”
 
“Probably a wrong number,” she said, her lips tightening, her hazel eyes belying her words.
 
  He stepped back. Missing the expression in her eyes, her words made no sense. Hadn’t he told her that the woman had asked for Max? He knew his mother took pills for her condition, and that sometimes she walked about in a fog. But still, what could she be thinking? After a few moments, he said: “Dad’s changed.”
 
“Why do you say that?”
 
“’Cause he’s hardly home.”
 
“He’s working,” she said; her voice sounded defeated.  
 
“I know, mom. I get it. We need the money.” He felt his anger rising. “Still he never seems here even when he is.”
 
Pensive, she rubbed a hand across her drool-stained double chin.
 
“When he’s home, he hardly says anything,” Jim cried, knowing his father was tough, fearless and always spoke his mind. Hell, his dad had survived a bullet he’d taken in combat during Word War 2. Not only that, but the man had headed back into battle after he’d healed and had continued fighting for over a year longer.
 
“Guess he’s tired,” she uttered in a weary voice.
 
“Christ,” he exclaimed, “you don’t even fight anymore.”
 
She took his hand in hers and focused on him. “Guess we’re both tired.”
The next morning, Jim awoke to his parents’ loud voices. He pulled the blanket over his head.
 
“I’m sick and tired of living with a shut in,” Max barked.


“Fuck you.”
 
“Fuck me, right. Your errand boy. Your lifeline. That’s a good one.”
 
“Takes one to know one, considering where you spent time.”
 
“That was different,” he protested. “I’m better now.”
 
“So you say.”
 
“Shut up, shut up,” Jim whispered under his blanket.
 
“Face it, you’re a sick woman. You use people. You use me.”
 
“Believe me, you’re no prince,” his mother snapped.
 
“Maybe not to you,” Max retorted.
 
Polly let loose a sharp sarcastic laugh. “Believe me, she doesn’t know you well enough yet.”
 
“She knows me just fine.”
 
“She’ll wise up. Just like the last one.”
 
“So leave,” Max bellowed. “Be free of me.”
 
“If only I could,” Polly said ruefully.
 
“You can stay,” Max said. “I’ll go.”
 
“No, no, no,” Jim mumbled in his bed.
 
“You’re so full of shit.” Polly screamed. “Always making threats.”
 
“You think so,” Max snapped. “Watch me.” Then a door slammed shut.
 
All Jim heard was his mother’s crying. He lay frozen under the blanket. He imagined the ceiling crack spreading, widening until he found himself staring at a roiling void. Lying still, he feared he’d be sucked into it. Opening, closing his eyes a few times, he rid himself of the unnerving image.
He stayed in bed for hours. At times he pulled the blanket over his face. At times he popped his head out and stared at the ceiling. Had the crack widened? He couldn’t say.
 
Sometime later, he wasn’t sure when, his mother stopped crying. The house grew quiet except for an occasional dresser drawer opening or closing. Then approaching footsteps held the taut air.  His door opened. His father poked his head into the room. “Can I come in?”
 
“No,” he snapped, eyeballing his father with enough glare to blind the man.
 
Max entered the room anyway and sat on the edge of Jim’s bed. He placed a hand on his son’s covered legs. “We need to talk.”
 
Jim yanked the blanket over his head and said: “I don’t want to.”
 
“Well then listen,” he said in a voice as calm as a windless day. “I’m leaving.”
 
His reply jammed deep in his throat. At 10, he understood what those two words meant. It was 1964. None of his friends’ parents had split up. Divorce meant scandal. Whispers when he passed people who knew. Strange sympathetic glances cast his way. Something always present in the air like smoke (and where there’s smoke, there’s fire).
 
What about his mother? Seth and he would have to split the chores: grocery shopping, prescription pickups, taking her in taxis to and from her doctor.
 
“I promise we’ll see each other,” he father continued. “It’s for the best.”
                                                                                  
“Liar.”  
 
“Guess I’ve been,” his father confessed. His voice filled with remorse. “I’m sorry for that.” He breathed hard.  “I hope one day you’ll understand why.” Again he patted his son’s covered legs. “When I’m settled, I’ll call and give you my new phone number.”
 
Jim lay still and fought back the tears. He heard the bedsprings creaking, a weight lifting, his father’s footsteps receding. He threw off the covers and bolted from bed and into his father’s open arms. He hugged him hard and the return embrace was of equal strength. In complete silence both held on to each other.
 
Four years earlier, Jim had experienced the same embrace from his father. Right after Max had returned from Grandview Psychiatric Hospital, where he’d received electroshock therapy among other treatments for his severe depression. All had been preceded by the deaths of his favorite brother and father within a month of one another.
He raced into the man’s chilled arms (it had been winter) and hugged him, having not seen him in three weeks. Held onto him as if he never would let him go again.
 
The night his father left, Jim sat on the sofa next to his sad-faced brother and across from his armchair-seated mother, whose face appeared knotted in anguish. They watched The Beatles perform “All My Loving” on The Ed Sullivan Show. The song’s words were swallowed up by the orgasmic screams of the teenage girls present at the broadcast. The song’s words became meaningless to Jim, washed away by his own tears.
 
From his sofa, Jim, now 60, watches Paul and Ringo perform for the first time in decades, singing “All My Loving”. Unlike his late father who only left his mother, his brother and him, he walked out on his first wife and two sons and got thrown out by his second. Always, he thinks, it’s for the best. He lifts the bottle of beer to his lips and glances up at the ceiling crack. Uneasiness settles within. Guzzling down the beer, he knows that it’ll help dull the gnawing dread and that he’ll never plaster that crack.

Over forty-five of Philip Goldberg’s short stories have appeared in both literary and small press publications including The Chaffin Journal, Main Street Rag, and Twisted Vine Literary Art Journal. Three of his stories have been published in Best of collections and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is currently working on a novel.

* * * 

Life Lesson
By Anne Goodwin

We’d agreed not to mention the press conference until the plane was on the ground. We couldn’t predict what they’d do if they got overexcited. As it was, the girls abandoned us at the luggage carousel and rushed off to the toilets to reapply their make-up. All except Becca who leant against the wall with that same scornful sneer she’d worn the entire week; indeed, the entire time she’d been on my caseload. Jack shot me a sympathetic glance as suitcases paraded on the belt before us. Of course I was disappointed, but nine out of ten wasn’t bad.

The foster mothers waved as we emerged from the Nothing to Declare channel. I’d been worried one of the boys might be singled out for inspection – with their unlaced trainers and low-slung jeans they had the capacity to look shifty even when politely holding open a door – but we were waved through. Not that I thought for a minute they’d be carrying anything they shouldn’t. We’d checked them thoroughly on the way out and kept them too busy over there to have the energy for mischief.

The foster mothers held back as the producer positioned the kids for the camera. Jack and I held back also; entrusting the young people to speak freely about their experience had been part of the deal. I’m sure he felt as proud as I did as they spoke, boys as well as girls, about being moved to tears by the sight of the huts, the train tracks, the stripy uniforms and the mountains of shorn hair and shoes.

“What would you say to people who thought it a waste of taxpayer’s money?”

Only a week ago, they’d have dismissed the question with a stream of expletives. Even Autumn, who now brushed her hair back from her face and leant forward to respond on behalf of the group. “I’d say, I get where you’re coming from, obviously. But that was no holiday. It’s the most painful thing I’ve ever been through.”

“So more of a punishment?” 

“A privilege,” said Autumn. “Totally changed my life.”

“How’s that?” said the reporter.

“Like because we can’t live with our parents we sometimes feel sorry for ourselves? This showed us we’ve got lots to be thankful for? We’ve got food in our stomachs. We’ve got clothes on our backs.” Autumn flicked her hair again. “We’ve got hair.”

My gaze drifted from the teenager to her foster mother, Marie, positioned by the coffee concession. I wasn’t surprised to see her wipe away a tear. In front of her, the twins held a homemade banner: WELCOME HOME AUTUMN AND BECCA. The five-year-olds looked positively angelic in their cotton dresses, with matching bows in their hair.

“And how about you, Becca?” We’d given them name badges to make things easier for the reporter. Part of me now wished we hadn’t. “Do you feel the same as Autumn?”

“Why should I give a fuck about what happened to a load of Jews back in the dark ages?”

The journalist recoiled amid murmurs of revulsion. Of course, that was exactly the effect Becca wanted. “Okay, let’s wrap this up.” I managed to speak with authority, but Marie’s stricken expression reflected my real feelings. “Everyone’s tired and maybe a tad emotional.”

Jack sidled up to the producer as the foster mothers claimed their kids. “No worries,” I heard her tell him. “I’ll edit it out.”


Jack said I shouldn’t blame myself, but I’ll carry that guilt till I retire. The follow-up meetings were integral to the project, the cornerstone of our application for permission and funds. Visiting the camp was only half of it; processing it afterwards would make the lesson stick. But I wasn’t to know I’d be floored by a virus hours after our return from Poland. I wasn’t to know Jack would postpone the debriefing session till I got back from the sick. But every social worker is acquainted with remorse. There’s always something we haven’t managed to do.

I was still rather fragile when I took Marie’s call. Although my hearing was patchy, the quiver in her voice told me all I needed to know. Abandoning my coffee, I grabbed my coat and car keys.

Marie and Dominic were among our most experienced foster parents. If they couldn’t turn Becca around, no-one could. I’d placed Autumn with them as a conciliatory gesture, an easy child to compensate for the problem one, and in the hope her good sense might rub off on Becca. We social workers are suckers for the improbable dream.

Parking outside their gate, I raced round the side of the house to the back door. I knocked and, without waiting for a response, entered the kitchen. My hand flew to my mouth as bile bit my throat.

A green First Aid box lay on the table, a roll of cotton wool and a bottle of antiseptic alongside. Marie sat on a pinewood dining chair, one of the twins on her lap, the other standing beside her, clutching her leg with one hand and sucking her thumb with the other. At the airport the girls wore identical pastel-blue dresses and their wispy white-blonde hair reached to their shoulders. Now they were clad in pyjamas and their heads completely bald, the startlingly pale skin nicked with tiny cuts. 

Marie looked up momentarily. “She’s upstairs.”

There was nothing I could say or do to make it better. My hands in fists, I marched into the hallway.

Through the open door of the lounge, I heard the buzz of TV chat. Buying time to work out how to deal with Becca, I chose to check on Autumn first. Stepping into the lounge, it took me a moment to register that the girl sprawled on the sofa thumbing her phone wasn’t the one I’d expected. I snatched the phone from her while, on the larger screen, some Z-list celebrity cracked eggs into a bowl. “How can you sit there acting the innocent after what you’ve done?”

Becca flashed me her regulation sneer. “Nothing wrong with By Hook or By Cook. It’s educational.”

Every cell of my body ached to slap her. But getting me suspended would be another victory for her. “How could you do that to those poor little girls?”

“It wasn’t me what done it. It was that psycho upstairs.”

Autumn? How typical of Becca to pin the blame on someone else. I was about to challenge her when Dominic called me from the floor above.

On the desk in Autumn’s room, a disposable razor and a can of shaving foam. Her white school-shirt spotted with blood. When I walked in, she sprang at me, but it wasn’t for a hug. If her foster father hadn’t grabbed her, she’d have knocked me to the floor.

Still my mind fought against the evidence. “Did Becca put you up to this?”

Autumn smiled. “Can’t I have any ideas of my own?”

“But why? How could you be so cruel?”

“They were always moaning. Throwing tantrums when they couldn’t get their way.” She spoke calmly, her tone as sweet as ever. Explaining, rather than complaining, her facade of reason the most disturbing aspect of all.
“But that’s how young children are, Autumn.”
​
Autumn tossed her silky hair across her shoulder. “I was only sharing what we learnt at Auschwitz. Surely you don’t object to that?”

Anne Goodwin’s debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize. Her second novel, Underneath, was published in May 2017. Anne is also a book blogger and author of over 70 published short stories. Catch up with her on her website, annethology, or on Twitter.

* * * 

Come Get Me If I'm Still Out There
By Sean Jackson

It’s a drowsy oceanfront cottage, with a sea breeze that blows forever, where the sand creeps into anything and everything, and the sanderlings glide along the breakers, moving southward from Corolla to the capes. This time of year, the sun fires up every day, bringing out the bikinis and the gawkers, the early surfers and the mid-morning fishermen casting for speckled trout.

“I should get out there again,” he told Darcy, who is the same age but looked much younger there next to him, with his dry-mud weathered face and neck, and the dark liver spots on his hands and forearms. “Maybe I’ll catch us a few for dinner. I’ll clean them up. You won’t have to lift a finger except to eat them.”

She blew a gray slash from the corner of her eye. She wiped sand out of the silverware drawer, because it was all over a set they got in Mexico, when they worked for Oceana years and years ago.

“You catch them,” she said, “I eat them. I like the sound of that. I really like the sound of that, Randall.”

He gazed out the sliding doors, through the glass trying to blur from the salt air, at a pair of middle-agers in frightful shorts chunking lines into the surf. It was noticeable how they stood shoulder to shoulder, in unison casting and reeling, most likely never sharing a word because they had the whole thing worked out.

“Do you remember that mackerel I caught in Tampico? The chrome-looking thing with that ferocious mouth?”

Of course she did. She spent two days in bed, suffering through dry heaves, unable to join him in the skiffs working the beaches after an oil rig fire had scorched a biblical ring just offshore. She was so sick she nearly hallucinated.

“That one almost killed me, so I’ve tried to forget it.”

He rubbed his new beard, a spotty white snowfall across rough skin.

“Maybe that’s not the one I mean.”

“Maybe you mean the one you caught for us at St. Simons, our first trip there. That one was a sea bass.”

“I remember it being a red drum.”

“Or maybe it was a red drum. But that one was fantastic, Randall. If that’s what you’re driving at. Cooked to perfection. That’s the one I’d like to remember.”

She smiled at the back of him. His hands were stuffed in his shorts pockets and he stood shirtless, so that she could see the blemishes and the moles and the scars (two successful skin cancer removals). The splotch on his right shoulder reminded her of those Thanksgiving turkeys children draw in school, using their hands as templates.

“They’re catching something out there,” he said. “That one guy just reeled in something.” He put his nose to the glass. “Looks like a flounder. Could be a small sheepshead, though.”

“Are they good to eat?”

“I suppose they are, you’d just add the typical butter and garlic. I want to say we had one right down the road there in Hatteras, years back, an old soundside joint with red walls and flypaper strips. But I’m afraid you’d say it was something else, so I won’t say it. We’ve had it somewhere, though. Sometime or another, we did.”

She took the drawer out and blew into it, saw no sand or even dust fly away, and thinly smiled at her success.

“Great. I think we’ve got our day in order then. You go out and catch us some dinner, while I run to the shelter and fetch us a puppy. Sound good?”

He nodded, and turned so that she saw the wiry, white hair on his chest. His skin sagged like an old man’s does. On her shoulder was a vaccine scar that he once drew circles around with his finger, swearing to her that it glowed in the dark, sky blue like a ponyfish. He swore he’d be able to see it forever, in the afterlife, glowing so he’d be able to find her anywhere. But they no longer talk much about each other’s bodies, content these days to see what they see and let most things go unseen.

“Come get me if I’m out there,” he said.

She gave him a blank stare.

“When you get back with the dog, come get me if I’m still out there fishing. I want to see him as soon as he gets here.”

“Could be a she.”

“Totally could. Just come get me, if I’m still out there.”

…

She pulled into their shell-strewn driveway with the dog in the backseat, snug in its carrier. He was no puppy. There was a female pup, a cute terrier mix, but this scraggly mutt seemed he’d be a harder sell to other adopters, so she snatched him up, to save him from the adoption deadline.

She left him on the other side of the glass door while she climbed on the deck and called to Randall. Her voice didn’t carry well through the wind and over the dunes, with those hissing sea oats in the way. But he heard her. He turned so he can see her on the deck and waved his floppy hat. (Doctors have said he needn’t get any more sun, advising hats and long sleeves whenever possible.)

“Catch anything?”

“Not yet,” he said, breathing a bit from the walk over the dunes, his nose a white triangle of zinc oxide. “You look nice.”

“Thank you,” she said. “This is my new outfit from Terry’s shop.”

“What’s his name?” he asked as he stooped to pat the gray-brown head, a curly mess if there ever was one. The dog looked like someone built him from old socks.

“I don’t know.”

“He didn’t already have a name at the shelter?”

“They called him ‘number six.’”

He scruffed the head again, and the dog closed its milky eyes, which could mean cataracts. There was a lot of the quiet dignity that most old dogs have, a set jowl with sympathetic gaze toward its new, older owners who shared life’s prolonged frustrations and doubts. The man gave the dog a knowing wink.

“Thatsa boy,” Randall said.

Darcy bent down and stroked a floppy ear. “How about Muffins?”

He considered it, but said Muffins is close, yet not quite it.

“Stanley,” he suggested.

“Oh, god no. That’s a name for a doorman. What about Otis?”

“Hmm. As in, Otis, a son of Poseidon?”

“If that’s how you want to think of it, sure.” She rubbed the dog under its chin. “How you doing, Otis? You hungry yet, Otis?”

“Otis,” he said, like trying out the feel of it on his tongue. “He’s no giant though. Wasn’t Otis a giant in mythology?”

She squinted at her husband. She stood up quickly because she had a pain in her chest that immediately sent her right hand into a twitch. It’s something she won’t tell Randall about, like she never told him that she kept a few toys in her closet—stuffed inside shoe boxes—in case their grandson ever came around. Just a couple of plastic race cars, and one plastic spaceship.

“Our Otis has a very big heart,” she said.

Her doctor says she needs to address this chest-pain issue with him, that it’s got a good shot at being serious, serious enough to have The Talk. She should try to imagine it would soften the blow, with him in the loop, in a worst-case scenario.

“Enlarged?” Randall said.

“No.” She gave him a look. “I mean that he’s very sweet and loving.”

Randall plopped into a chair, a linen-draped affair that they’d had shipped all the way from Raleigh. It was so soft that they’d kidded around about giving it a name, too.

“Otis is also the dog’s name from that kids’ movie,” he said.

She took Otis over to the loveseat, and she sank into the gray linen, the dog at her feet like clouds of smoke.

“We haven’t seen little Ben in so long,” she said.

“He’s not so little anymore.”

“Just has one more year left in college.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Though I think it’s two.”

She shook her head.

“He graduates next May.”

Randall rubbed his face. The cries of seagulls pulled his attention to the glass where the birds spiraled above the small, shadowy waves breaking close to shore.

“They must be biting now,” he said. “I sure hope I can catch some later.”

“I hope you can, too. And so does Otis.”

Together they smiled at the dog.

“I’m going to doze off right here,” she said, patting the cushion, before she put her trembling hand away so he wouldn’t see it.

“Me, too. Right in this chair like this.”

“Wake me if you wake up first,” she said.

He promised he would. He encouraged Otis to curl up on the rug down there and join them in a nap. He said this was the kind of place where a lot of naps were had, so there would be no judgements from the humans, and likewise none from the dog.

…

When he awoke, she was still curled up, her hands in prayer pose under her cheek. He saw Otis there, under the edge of the coffee table, chin on paws, eyeing the glass doors.

“It’s four o’clock,” he announced. Otis looked up at him. “Darcy!”

Otis barked softly, a rattling grunt that only mimicked a real bark. To his relief, her eyes popped open.

“Oh,” she said. “I was so dreaming. Sooo, dreaming.” She sat up and spit a lock of hair from her mouth. When she was in her thirties, she wore braids to her waist. There was plenty of time for things like that back then, with no indulgence bringing so much effort that it couldn’t be abided, their energy seemingly boundless.

“I had a dream, too,” he said.

When he was young, he went snorkeling with her to the wrecks off Ocracoke. A Union ironclad had just been located, its tiny wood-burning oven still packed with a ham all bloated and pale from a century soaked in saltwater. Darcy was a remarkable diver and located bone-handled scullery knives and rare coins in the ship’s hull, despite treacherous currents and several lurking hammerheads. He hasn’t forgotten that first time she strapped a dive knife to her calf and said “for them sharks” in a way that made him love her more than ever.

“What was your dream about?” she asked.

“You first,” he said.

“Well, there was a lot going on in the dream. So … I was young. And you were there but you weren’t as young as me. You—” she looks at him, sees that he’s hanging on her words “—were your age now.”

“Old?”

“Well—”

“Just go on. I’m fine with old.”

“Okay, so we were down in Guatemala. It was that winter in the Bay of Honduras, when we were working with the sea turtle habitat. So, we’re there again, all of us, which includes Mike and Allie, little Ben, and Maria before she died.” She catches in her throat. They don’t talk much about their granddaughter. It’s too difficult. Mike’s never treated them the same way, and sometimes it’s more than Darcy can take. She denies that she tried to take her own life in Durham, right before they moved to the beach. (She says the clunky old garage door cut her wrist like that, but he knows better.)

They hoped the ocean would bring peace, but so far all it had done was bring them back closer to it.

She rubbed the still-healing scar on her arm. “Maria’s there,” she said.

He looked up and slapped his knee to get Otis to come over. “Was Otis there?”

“Of course he was. He was the center of attention.”

“Interesting.”

“Isn’t it? Though we’ve only known him a few hours, he’s already had a starring role in my dreams.”

“Hmm.”

“What? Why the hmmm?”

Randall scruffed the dog’s ears and considered its eyes, which were slightly green with a touch of gray, making it hard to pin down how he’d describe them if pressed to do so. The dog was like an old mop with moss for eyes. “He was in my dream, too. Front and center, like yours.”

“That’s so odd.”

“What else?” he said, wanting her to finish.

Maria was innocently wiggling her fingers over the edge of the boat when a lionfish stung her. Ow! she cried. They were all out together for a series of dives into a cave. Mike and Allie were underwater, the first pair under. Darcy tied a string around the girls’ finger to stop the venom from spreading. But it spread anyway.

“We all sat around this long picnic table, a table piled with steamed lobster and shrimp, and fresh papaya and breads like those Mayan women made, sweet breads and dark loaves baked with impossible-to-pronounce nuts. It was a true feast, Randall. And Mike rose to make a toast—”

Six years old was too young to be diving in caves, no matter how experienced the grandparents were. So, she sat in the boat. But Mike had to blame somebody. Even though these things happen in nature, somebody had to take the fall. Maria sat stone-faced in the zodiac while they raced toward shore. She wore a lime-green one-piece, her sun-kissed hair tied with a pink ribbon.

“—and that’s when Otis started barking. He barked and barked, and wouldn’t stop. Nobody could hear what Mike was saying. But Mike kept on talking. He looked angry there at the end, like he was shouting.”

“At me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Allie fainted at the funeral. It was held in Oregon, where she was from, because Mike said there was no need to involve his family more than they already were. (Blame, he called it. Responsibility. A needless tragedy.) They’ve learned what it means to be punished, to face guilt every day. Everything gets filtered through a blurry lens and comes out the other side with a hint of darkness, a well-worn sadness.

“But, eventually, everyone began to gravitate toward Otis. They all went around the table and petted him, even let him lick morsels from their fingers. Then they all began to smile. We began to smile, Randall. Us. Not like we do around here, these little smiles that we do to cover up how we feel inside. But real smiles, true happy-inside smiles.”

“I miss those days,” he said. He patted Otis on the nose. “You wouldn’t have recognized us back then, boy. We were a lean, mean, happiness machine.”

After the garage door incident, Darcy started an online group for grieving women, those tormented by loss, and those even exploited by close friends and family—not widows, but rather life’s old dolls flung to the ground by sons and sisters, daughters and brothers. She said some of the women were headed for destruction, sure as anything. Four have died in the past six months, both accidentally and on purpose. There’s only so much a person’s faith can accomplish, she says. Sometimes it’s simply luck that pulls you through.

“What about yours?” she said. “Tell me about your dream, Randall.”

His amounted to much the same thing. A bunch of people were gathered in a fellowship hall or something, like a VFW, with sad stringed lights all around. There were a lot of familiar faces in general, but specifically hers, and some friends and colleagues from their diving days. They were all in suits and dresses, though from various eras and styles, so that it confused the eye. Maria was also in his dream, sucking the wound on her finger. And she was not her usual sunny self.

“It’s pretty grim, until Otis comes in. And it’s like he knew who I was, and had known me for a long, long time. Everybody else seemed to know him, too, even Maria. She called to him as though he was our family dog or something.”

When Randall surf fishes, he often fantasizes about diving into the waves, going under, and seeing Maria. And she takes his hand and they float away together, just rolling out there, like driftwood on the open seas, bound to wash up in Spain or the Netherlands, as pale as thousand-year-old ghosts.

“He talked to me,” he added at the end.

“Who did?”

“Otis, he spoke to me.”

“In your dream, you mean.”

“No. He spoke to me just now,” said Randall. “While you were talking.”

“Oh, okay,” she smiled, curiously.

He looked at Otis, who turned away.

“He said the speckled trout were biting. Go out there and catch some, he said, it’s not your fault. Never was your fault. These things happen, terrible as they are. Accidents like this shouldn’t break up families, but they do. He doesn’t know why.”

…

He seared two good-sized trout in a skillet, serving them with black beans and a salad freckled with nuts and blackberries.

“Yum,” she said. They opened a muscadine wine.

“It’s going to be different now,” he said, “with Otis here.”

“He’s somewhat magical,” she said. “He provides us with options.”

They finished in silence, with the dog softly tapping his tail on the rug. Darcy dropped a pinch to him while Randall ferried their dirty utensils to the kitchen.

“We’ve got a deal,” she whispered to Otis. “You don’t tell him our little secret, okay? He’s—”

She looked up and saw him calmly adding more dish liquid to the sink. “—he’s so proud of himself right now. Let’s not bother him with this just yet. But promise me, Otis, promise me you won’t tell him where I’ve gone.” She remembered his heart beating in her ear one night in the bow of an island-bound sailboat, as if it would never stop. “I think he’ll know, though. He’s always known where our bright things go when they slip away from us. He has a good sense of tragedy.”

Randall finished wiping his hands in a towel.

“I’ll save the dishes for later,” he said. He caught a glimpse of light from the doors, from something out on the water, maybe a shrimp trawler calling it a night. “There’s no hurry.”

He brought the rest of the wine to the sofa.

Do we need tickets to go to Ben’s graduation?” he asked.

She sipped her glass and followed the lights outside as they passed slowly.

“Unfortunately, we do. It’s by invitation only.”

He tapped his foot on the rug so that Otis looked over.

“Then we’ll have to send something nice to him,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I was thinking we would.”

“Do you have any of those coins left from the ironclad?”

She remembered the heavy brine in the bones, as though she’d unearthed dreadful parts of the earth not meant to be disturbed. Those she’d never mentioned to anyone.

“A couple.”

He said, “Let’s make it a surprise. What do you think, Otis?” The dog settled its weary eyes on the floor and yawned. “Even better,” said Randall.

Sean Jackson's debut novel, Haw, was published in June 2015 by Harvard Square Editions. He lives in North Carolina and his latest stories have been published in Main Street Rag, The Potomac Review, Niche, and Cleaver, among other literary magazines. He was a 2011 Million Writers Award nominee.

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