1967
Rather than being the place where his life collected itself, Randy’s sleep was like another life. He muttered, words that were recognizable and acronyms that weren’t. His hand shot out across the night table between the two beds, clearing lamps and Fay’s bangles and the rocks Wright had polished. He sat up and slapped his feet on the floor and gave low, brief grunts, affirmative answers to unheard commands, and then he crawled across the bed he shared with Fay, the points of his knees everywhere, the spread of his palms making the mattress spasm.
Wright woke at all of it, and he spent his days sick with lack of rest, always feeling a step behind his wants. The great plans he had for them aside, his Lincoln Logs stayed loose in his palm. He subjected everyone to the pain of his last adult tooth coming in, howling and pointing at his mouth, surprised they could not feel it.
He was the first to read the telegram, which appeared under the door one afternoon with the shadow of the person that pushed it in. He had not answered the knock. Though the euphemism typed there was beyond him, the message was clear from the context. Standing in his bare feet he took the dried flowers from the vase that Fay kept on the bureau and he emptied them out, breaking off the stems, placing them at a diagonal bias around the square of bad news. She returned soon after, her back pushing the door open and her arms full with rolled straw mats, the smell of her sweat moving with her.
Near the Fisher-Price record player he’d long grown out of, his paper planes and Randy’s stack of letters, ribbons in blues and greens that Fay kept to tie her braids, the thing kept its secret. He pointed. She gave an odd laugh, the kind made mostly of fear, and she picked it up with care not to displace the flowers.
Eyes closed, Fay twisted her body to the left and then the right, and then she crossed to the bathroom, where he could hear the anemic shower go on, the echoing thump of her footsteps as she shifted. She emerged in a towel knotted at her breasts, her hair so full with water that fat beads ran from it at every point, and fell face-forward onto the bed, her covering detached around her, her right knee bent and her left arm shot up as she let go her first sob. He didn’t know what to do, so he read it again, and then he lay down on the bed opposite her, thinking that she deserved to be watched.
CHARLIE PASSED
PER WILL
PROPERTY TO BE SOLD TO EDWDS
PROFIT YRS
NO FUNERAL
CONDOLENCES
PLEASE ADVISE RE: HORSE
SHE PASSED TWO WEEKS PROPPED up by pillows, receiving guests that way, things spread out around the shape of her body under the sheets, a postcard of Abbott and Costello squabbling, pale purple flowers, plates of chicken and rice, crucifixes of wood and Lucite and braided leather. Lucinda was there at least once a day, telling her again that her work would be there for her when she was ready. Rising only to use the bathroom, to place the occasional phone call in the front office, Fay nodded at everything said to her, would you like the curtains open or closed, what did you dream of. Her sleep was so fitful, so foul with sweat, that Wright and Randy shared the opposite bed.
He wondered when it would be over, but when it was, when she got up and spent all day conditioning the back of her head, when she mopped their tile floor with that flat and myopic look, he wished for that time back, the afternoons when what she had lost had made her soft and useless, and had not yet begun to change her.
She assured Wright, when he asked daily, that they would get back to the books they read together, things she assigned outside of his regular schoolwork. He was spending more time alone than he ever had, the money his mother gave him fat in his pocket, slipping in and out of the nearby restaurants that all served plantains and roasted chicken over rice. One day he returned from school to find Fay and Randy sitting in front of their room, propped up by the nubbled wall, tears slipping untouched down their faces, laughing a little every few minutes. It was Charlie’s horse, they said, it was Lloyd. Fay had arranged for a caretaker until something more permanent could be settled, but Lloyd had chewed through his reins and shit in the drained pool and escaped. A pilot flying over had seen him running like hell, across a landing site and the winding highway, and then he couldn’t see him anymore.