This had to be it. This was our one shot at parenthood. My wife turned to me as the baby was crowning and said so. She was adamant. The baby, we thought, was dead.

  A resident came in several hours earlier. He hadn’t been able to find the baby’s heartbeat. He told us the child was dead. That made the pain worse. For both of us. Then the awful waiting. Waiting in those moments where there is no delineation between night and day is the worst time to wait. I told my wife to be brave. I told her things would be all right. The child would be fine. She glared at me. Her anger was beyond words. I quoted Napoleon, that the rarest form of courage was four a.m. courage. She told me to go fuck myself, not loudly, but softly, with venom in her voice. I knew she meant it. Venom is the highest form of love between two devoted people.

  I think the baby had been the result of a very fine Valentine’s Day dinner. Counting backward from mid-October suggested that. My wife and I had our first date on Valentine’s Day four years earlier. The next year I proposed on Valentine’s Day. It was a family tradition on my side. My father gave my mother her ring on hearts and chocolate day, and every year after he sent her a red rose. I continued that romantic ritual in my marriage. Romance has nothing to do with making a child, but it is part of the necessary pre-amble of how people come into the world. It is the chorus for a Shakespeare play. It sets the scene. As my wife waited for the drugs that didn’t arrive because of the drunks, I understood that my chorus was the one in Henry IV Part Two: Rumor. Tongues wagging. No one knows what’s going on. No one cares.

  When the child finally pushed out, it was not a moment of bliss. My wife was still in pain. The pain didn’t go away. It got worse. Several hours later, I went up to the natal ward. The nurse asked if I wanted to give my daughter her first bath.

  Babies were bawling everywhere. They all looked like aliens, something kneaded and waiting to rise, lumps of dough about to become the future.

  I wanted to see my wife and had she been there, I would have said something stupid to make her grimace with anger and smile with happiness. I’d say, “Look what you did. We’ll have to work on her.” And the baby, her head misshapen, her body not yet proportioned like a human being, looked very homemade. Every baby looked homemade.

  The water was warm, though not too hot, and not too cold, and as I held her, her legs kicking, I kept thinking the first bath is confirmation that although things go wrong, there can be something that goes right. And after I lifted my daughter from the water and ripples became a smooth mirror with only the remains of her birth left behind, I could swear I saw my wife’s reflection staring back at me and the startled, surprised life I held in the towel.

  A Light Eulogy

  I’m well-traveled. I’ve gone everywhere by bus. I’ve met more people that way. I’d come home with stories about women with chickens and the army in Guatemala pulling the men off the bus, except me, and the bus driving on, leaving the men behind and a woman asking me to hold her hen while she wailed. One of the soldiers on that long, muddy, poverty-stricken road between Chimaltenango and Cóban reminded me of my father, and I thought, “Fuck it all. He’s following me, not as a shadow but as a presence casting shadows.”

  My mother said he was hard on me because he wanted me to be better than I thought I could be. He loved me. Where’s the love in rage? Where’s the goodness in brutality? There’s no excuse for what the soldiers did. There’s no excuse for what my father did, either.

  Of course, my brother breaks down. He sobs. It is unnerving but moving at the same time. My turn comes. I have the notes in my hand. I stand at the lectern in the funeral chapel. The organist has just finished playing an interlude. “Nearer My God to Thee.” They played that when the Titanic sank. My knees want to buckle beneath me but I hold on to the oak stand. There’s a tasseled drapery hanging from the front of it. I want to grab it and wave it in the air and sing “She’s a Grand Old Flag,” just to say I got the better of my father. But I don’t.

  I begin. I say I had a father and now he is gone. That’s obvious. He’s there in his box, mercifully with the lid shut, his hands folded the way he would stand in church to pray, a gesture of reverence, his head bowed to show respect to God. He caught me once looking up at the stained glass window during the Prayer of Confession. He reached over and hit me in the back of my head and dropped his chin to his chest as if to say, “This, idiot, is the way you’re supposed to do it.”

  But instead of continuing with the eulogy, I’d written a script vetted by my mother and brother to make sure I wouldn’t say anything wrong in front of everyone, I stare at the light pouring in the chapel windows. It is a warm day. The casements are tilted to let in a breeze, and birds outside are singing to the sunlight. I point to the light that plays through the windows and touches the opposite wall. The gathered turn to see what I’m looking at.

  And I ask them as much as I am asking him one last time. Goodbye is not entirely appropriate to someone who is left with wounds.

  “Is there a time for remembrance? Yes. Is there a time for forgiveness? Perhaps. My father believed everything he did was good. And yes, he did a lot of good for many people, but that good is the hardest thing to understand if two people cannot speak to each other in the same language, shining like the small candles they are. There’s light inside us all. And what I am about to say will puzzle you. It troubles me. During my wanderings, I found myself in a dense jungle in Central America. The bus I was on broke down. I was warned not to go into the jungle by the bus driver, but I was drawn into the shadows and the darker it grew around me the more I thought about my father. All I could see were fragments of sun, high and beyond reach in the treetops. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most because we lose responsibility for ourselves. I am blinded to my father’s love as much as he was to mine. And that’s what we must fear most. We must fear the light. And more so, we must fear the light that blinds itself.”

  Wax (Strands International, India)

  Did I remember the path beside the lake where the maples bent over the cinder path and reminded her of a cathedral she visited in France when she was ten?

  There was no path beside the lake.

  “Yes,” she insisted, “you were there. We walked slowly.

  You held my hand. Wind rustled through the leaves. You said it would rain by midafternoon and it did.”

  We had never been to such a place. I reminded her of the beach, the hot July sun turning sand into a frying pan in the late afternoon, and how she was afraid her water-puckered feet would blister if she walked to the cottage without her sandals.

  “Did we hear the ocean?”

  “All day,” I said.

  “Did I burn?”

  “No. I put lotion on your legs. I rubbed your arms and back with it, and you went back to sleep.”

  “Then? Then did we walk beside the lake?”

  “There was never a lake.”

  “But I remember the canoe, the paddle dipping in the water, the trail of silver droplets making haloes in the still surface, and how afterward we stood on the verandah of the lodge and looked up at the stars. There were so many stars.”

  I wanted to tell her that she could only live one life at a time in her mind.

  “You are thinking of a time I was not there.”

  “But you were there when you lit a taper and touched it to the wick of the candle. You passed your finger through the flame and I was amazed it did not burn you. You told me to try it, but I was afraid. And when a moth that had gotten caught between the screen and the inner window flew free when opened the sash to let in some night air, it headed straight for the flame. It frightened me, and to calm me down you told me to make a wish.”

  “What did you wish for?”

  “I wished that you would always be with me. We would walk along the cinder path beside the lake and listen as the wind moved through the trees.”

  “I wish there had been a lake.”

  “But there was, and I wished that if you could not be with me in that moment, that wonderful moment when I felt so alive with you holding my hand, that you would find me again, and you did.”

  Grains of Sand

  An elderly aunt advised Bert that if he wanted to see what his bride would be like in forty years all he had to do was look at her mother. The same was true for men. They become their fathers.

  Bert could still picture their first night at the resort. They had arrived exhausted from their wedding, from the long trip.

  He recalled how Angela sat up suddenly and opened her eyes. Saying nothing, she brushed the sand off her legs and walked back toward the motel. Bert’s arms were covered in white, powdery sand. People, he reminded himself, used to use sand to tell time. It would slip through a narrow aperture from one glass bulb to another, and when the bulb on top was empty time had passed. What the mind holds never grows old.

  Bert closed his eyes but when he felt the sun was burning his back, he looked up from his beach towel and saw a woman in her Seventies. Even though she wore a large sunhat and oversized dark glasses, she was still stunningly beautiful.

  Bert didn’t move. The woman held his gaze for a few moments, then nodded her head toward the motel, as if to say, “Come with me.”

  He followed her down a long corridor of rooms, but when she turned to look back at him, all he saw was Angela, still beautiful, brushing the sand from her cheek as if Time had no meaning for her.

  Ventriloquism

  What doesn’t come out of the mouth is the hardest part. The chortles, gasps, the word that doesn’t have a context – those things are heard while waiting around a hospital bed. We thought the brain tumor had crushed her thoughts inside her head, that she’d never speak another word, and then, right out of the depth of sleep, she prayed.

  That was frightening. She only partially believed, but there she was, in her final hour, not speaking to those who loved her or wanted her blessing or forgiveness but conversing with a distant masked being masked by belief, uncertainty, and faith.

  Everyone at the bedside felt love for her, but no matter what was said, she wasn’t hearing it. The monitor traversed her heartbeat. The systolic and diastolic numbers were dropping like the temperature outside. Winter entered her body. Rivers and streams were slowly freezing over. She was hearing something we couldn’t.

  About a year ago, she held a family reunion at the farm. Cousins who hadn’t seen each other in years went for walks across the field to the woodlot. At the far end of her stand of maples, larches, and birches, the small creek everyone had ignored for years was still alive though ice had formed around its banks and tried to pinch the flow. The crust only made the river run faster. It was trying to say something. She stopped where she stood.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked?

  There was wind in the trees. The brook was speaking as if it wanted to sort itself out. A few chickadees that stayed behind for the winter were nattering in the trees. Was she hearing those voices?

  “No,” she said. “If you can’t hear it now, you probably won’t hear it later.”

  Everard (Grattan Street Press Anthology)

  Everard is my hometown. Where the house fronts line up to face the world and the porches jut into the streets like stages on which the small dramas of promises and last kisses and cricket silences on summer nights have played.

  Designed in the shape of a wheel, Everard’s avenues led to a treed square where a crumbling gazebo at its hub was shelter for the town’s band long ago. If anyone takes a wrong turn and finds themselves at the heart of town, they drive around the green in circles because they have somewhere else to go and do not know how to get there from here. On summer nights when the sun sinks and lights up the golden leaves of sycamores it is almost possible to believe that Everard was once the promised land. And just before the sun sinks behind the abandoned First National Savings and Loan, the rays strike the gates of the town’s cemetery where I work and fill me with a vision of hopeless redemption.

  When the graveyard was established by the town’s stewards, the choice places were at the back. But as time passed and the sad homecomings of the bodies of men whose flesh and bones returned without their souls, their progeny moved on to better places on the coasts or the big cities where memory only lasts as long as polaroids left in sunlight.

  The few who remained in Everard now fill the front rows of the cemetery and so many buried close to the gates are the bodies of friends I knew and lost. There are white tablets of soldiers. There are the discreet low bronze plaques of girls and boys who met with misfortune as they attempted to seize adulthood by the hems of graduation gowns and rented tuxedos. And there are the stones laid flat on the ground for people who spent their lives working and saving so they would have a final resting place where the grass tries to grow over their names until their stones are almost swallowed by the ground. I keep those markers trimmed. I feel I owe it to them. They gave Everard life.

  For years Everard was a single-employer factory town. Most of the men on the assembly line and the women in the stenographer’s pool spent their lives caught up in what the factory made – and what it made is of no consequence now because there is no longer a use for the product of their labors. They took the secrets of gears and oil and order forms and remittance slips and finally closure notices to their graves with them. I have loved this place too much to love it less now that the town is beyond Sambation.

  My best friend’s mother teared up when I mentioned the factory to her before she passed on. She shook her head in denial without offering a word. Everard now meets the world with decaying billboard on the side road off the highway. The sign is overgrown with sumac and scrub pine. Its center is missing and it says, “Welcome to Everard. Home of the____________.”

  Her son, Bobby, was a brat and my best friend. He’d been named Bobby at birth. Then his name changed and he was called Rob in the lower grades until the other kids taunted him about being a bad guy straight out of the cowboy serials we watched on the local tv station on Saturday mornings before the ball games began and our fathers chased us outside. Then he became Bob, the guy who was everyone’s friend at high school but who considered me his shadow and told me I was dumb for wanting a simple life. And finally, as he was laid to rest, Robert, was the name written on the granite marker as an upright afterthought to all his names. His parents never thought he would exhaust all the variations of Robert and they never thought they would outlive him.

  We both got jobs for our summer vacations courtesy of the town. Sometimes we picked up garbage from the square or slapped a coat of paint on the gazebo to appease the rot and try to resurrect the band shell’s appearance where Sousa marches played on the Fourth of July. But most of the time we serviced the cemetery. Bobby would lie down on someone’s grave and watch me pushing a gas mower among the headstones.

  “You know,” I told him, “I could really get into this.”

  “You’re a fool. Is that all you want to do with your life?”

  “Yes,” I said because he didn’t realize the importance of keeping the town’s past sacred. I read in the Farmer’s Almanac how Homer was blinded as a ten-year-old and taken to an island where he became the memory of the populace. People need to remember even when there’s hardly anyone left who wants to know anything of the past. I could see history all around me. I could see it dying. History ought to be a living thing but all living things run their course and have to end sometime.

  Everything that happened to Bobby coincided with a moment in the death of Everard. We were born in the era of grand hopes. We were going to the moon not because it was easy but because it was hard.

  Bob earned high grades. He could have become anything he set his mind to. He won a scholarship to a university four hundred miles away where he studied sciences. Sciences were supposed to be the future. But then someone dropped a canister of science on a village on the other side of the world and burned the clothes off a young girl who ran screaming past a photographer. He protested the war and got tossed out of university. His parents said it was a disgrace he’d never live down.

  He moved closer to home, to a college, and managed to learn a technician’s trade that he took directly to the factory where he met the best-looking young woman on the assembly line. Then, the factory closed. It was a bitter day.

  The Legion bugler showed up and the flag beside the front steps of the executive building was hauled down for the last time as the Legion man played the Last Post and the sky darkened and heavy rain no one expected burst out of nowhere and drenched the men from the corporate headquarters who were there to offer meaningless plaques of merit to workers who realized they had forsaken their futures for a fruitless cause.

  Bob and his wife bought the grocery store, not the big box one that has been abandoned for ten years but the small one on the town square. They had enough money for a while to keep up the business but then a recession hit. The word recession means that things that are already bad are encouraged to get worse and the businesses – all except doctors and morticians – close up and go somewhere else but never leave word of where they go in case the faithful, their customers, try to follow them.

  When the recession was almost over or grew so familiar we got used to it, the pills arrived. At first, Bob took them for the pain, and when the pain grew too hard to bear there were more powerful analgesics, pills that would pull a cold winter night over a person instead of a blanket, pills that destroyed a marriage in three days, and pills that could take a person past the pain to the place where they never had to wake up again. That’s how Bob got his front row plot. I became his grass barber in the summer and shoveled the snow off him in the winter so he wouldn’t be forgotten.