A short story! Courtesy of campiness. Or something. BE EDITING.

[gogollescent]

I didn’t know what to do with Derek’s remains. I hated people who displayed urns on their mantle pieces like trophies. Also, our house didn’t have a fireplace; it had a television set. I could have put the urn on that but it might not have stayed on. Plus, what a thing for our son to see on weekend mornings over his cereal. I didn’t want to dispose of it at the service, though, because -- well, it seemed morbid, I supposed, or something like that, to treat what his father had called intimate garbage disposal, laughing too hard as he’d said it, like a performance. The Magical Derek Eats Fire And Escapes This World.

So after talking it over with his mother and my son the Tuesday following my husband’s death, I walked to the riverside carrying a balsawood box provided by the crematorium under my arm. Nice and poetic, like. And in the shadow of a bridge I crouched down and flipped it over so that the lid fell open and the ash slumped out in a mess of dead matter after I tapped the bottom twice.

It dusted my fingers with gray, hit water without a sound, barely breaking the scummy surface. The spill so fast, but the sink so slow, as if through treacle, flakes lowering by merciless degrees.

I brushed myself off and leaned over the curb, the better to watch him ripple away.

It would have been a long wait, at that pace of dissolution, but then the rain started and the water sealed itself up; I told myself that if he was still there after the rain his presence was to be measured in parts per million, in saturation constants, not in something I could hold vigil over, so I got to my feet, feeling brittle. By that time my hair was as damp as the knees of my jeans and it clung to my cheek, painted on a scattering of droplets that stretched into lines when I shook it out of my eyes. My face ached under my clammy pinstriped skin. It might have congealed into an papier-mâché mask.

I thought: I do not want that mess of a woman I saw in the mirror caked on my bones like plaster; but rubbing at the lines with the heel of my palm made my wrist numb rather than softening the meat of my cheek.

Besides -- sometimes, after a shower, he’d dragged his bitten nails diagonally from the corner of my mouth to the edge of my ear while I‘d settled against his flank. Surely the analogue -- lines to lines -- counted for something.

I thought: I want to hold details of him like that in place, to sew his past to my eyelids, and it‘d be worth wearing a mess of a woman for; but the memory, so startling in its clarity, was already fading.

Two unfulfilled wants, those thoughts, that curled somewhere deep in my gut. Maybe they hurt: wobbling, familiar pains. I wasn’t too concerned, I was happy to keep my eyes raised to the high shop fronts, the peeling white paint and pinkish gray stone of the city’s upper levels, and I walked home in the rain, not listening to the echoes in my empty head.

Our son was in the living room where I’d left him, eating slices of cold salmon from the reception with his fingers while my mother-in-law threaded her hands through his thin fair hair. She was trembling and it made William’s head bob up and down like a toy, but he didn’t seem to mind.

They were watching a commercial for expensive shampoo, and at some point after I’d left they’d slid off the faded sofa and onto the floor, piled up against the foot of the coffee table, far too close to the screen.

“Hey, you two,” I said, turning on the light because the dimness turned the long beige room grungy, crowded with story-tale grief, although the humming of the fluorescent bulbs almost made me wish I hadn‘t. He looked at me with his big froglike eyes, pupils surprised by the shine, dilate. The rims of iris were so thin around those dark-swollen pupils that they didn’t look like his father’s at all, for all that they were the same pale blue, the color of deoxygenated blood.

There was a scrap of salmon skin on his full lower lip, dark brown and patterned against smooth pink. “Hi, Mom,” he said, and sucked it off, a flash of milk teeth.

His dear old grandmother said “Adelaide,” like my name was a greeting. She’d liked my name, when he brought me home. Such a pretty name, she’d said.

She looked much deader than her son did before I had him burned. Her face fallen in like a false partition before a back room cluttered with unwanted secrets. She‘d stolen my son‘s blanket, which was probably why he was hugging his knees. He hadn’t changed out of the flimsy blue silk shirt he’d worn for the reception, either.

“You all right, honey?” she said, sitting up, hand still on him. “It’s done?”

I wanted to tell her to get out, to stop caressing my son‘s skull. Gently, so gently, I said, “I’m all right. I… said goodbye.“ Again. There was no finality to funeral rites in this country. Just a series of small deaths like stones.

“That’s fine. That’s just fine. It‘s what he would have wanted, you know. Maybe he’ll make it all the way to the ocean, huh? Wouldn‘t that be nice?” she said, apparently to William. “The circle of life. Have you seen the Lion King, Will?” (She was one of those who believed that most important lessons could be taught via Disney animation).

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you like it?”
“Yes. I liked the bit with the bananas, and the big flaming balls of gas,” he said.

“It’s almost five,” I said, a little louder, my voice solidified by guilt.

“Oh,” she said. She let the blanket slither off her, pool in a haze of wool around her hips. It uncurled into a fat caterpillar. William edged away from it. “I should get back to the hotel. Richard will be waiting.”

“Yes,” I said, and helped her up, patting her on the back when she was vertical, palms polite. Her shirt was weirdly sheer. The calluses between my thumb and forefinger caught on the fabric as I steadied her. I’d meant to squeeze her narrow shoulder but I didn’t like that catching roughness, and instead I gave her a quick, awkward one-armed hug she seemed grateful for.

“Thank you for taking care of him for me, Mary,“ I said. Even I wasn’t sure if it was irony.

She stank of soap, detached herself from my ribcage reluctantly when I withdrew my arm.

“It was nice,” she said. “You should send him to see me more often. He looks so much like Derek, you know?”

“I know,” I lied. “I will.”

“I’m right here,” William whined.

“Yes you are,” she told him, and bent to kiss him on the forehead, thin mouth hollowing in a loving O that blew his bangs up ludicrously when she exhaled against his brow, and which did not leave any shining mark. She was not a proper fairy godmother, you see. “And we are all glad for that. Stay safe, darling.”

She unbent to kiss me on the cheek. “We’ll both be by tomorrow morning to say a proper goodbye before our flight, Adelaide.”

I nodded and clasped her hand. “Stay for brunch,” I said, because my husband would not have asked me to, because I would have done it for him. Habit like a second mind, a second mouth, which was just as well because my own faltered now like I breathed, often and desperately.

“We certainly will,” the old woman said warmly, and sidled out the still-open door, which she closed behind her, conscientious even as she teetered on her new (black) high heels.

She was the kind of woman who had never had a library fine and I envied her precise, fidgety recollection, her exact grief.

William scooted over to me on his bottom and hugged my leg. “I don’t want to go to Grandma’s,” he mumbled, burying his face in the soaking front of my jeans. My shins were bruised from kneeling and his sharp little nose hurt, but I looked at him affectionately, glad not to be alone in my unreasoned dislike, and picked him up. Hands under armpits, like a toddler, although he was eight years old and inexplicably heavy for all that his delicate bones almost poked right through the thin flesh of his wrists.

He buried his face in my collarbone, unperturbed by the altitude change, and snuffled against the hollow at the base of my throat, while I shifted his weight so that he was sitting over my arm and rocked him sideways, his toes skimming back and forth across my knees.

“You don’t have to go to Grandma’s,” I murmured, kissing the top of his head. Another time I would have made disapproving sounds and swatted him, but if there was ever a time to indulge him and me, it was now, right? Now, when I could feel his heart stuttering against my ribs.

“Thanks,” he said, or rather hummed; I felt it more than I heard it, vibrating through my chest. He seemed content to stay suspended forever. I was starting to feel like a set of monkey bars, though -- a sore set of monkey bars -- and he was milky-sour in my nostrils, I could see traces of sweat on his folded eyelids. I winced. There was indulgence, and then there was indulgence, although it took me a minute to work out what it was I had to do about it, a practicality that forced through the fog.

“You need a bath, kiddo.”

His mouth slanted unhappily while I rubbed small circles between his shoulder blades and made a grapevine for the stairs. “But Dad gave me baths,” he said, which was true, which is why I hadn’t remembered before, and which might or might not have been a clever ploy to avoid having his protective layer of dirt peeled off but either way stopped me there, halfway.

My husband had liked washing things: dishes, windows, countertops, kids. He’d kept bathing William long after he should have, really, claiming that he never got to spend time alone with him, otherwise. He babied William, always. We’d argued about it. And I wasn’t sure in the slightest that it was okay to recall the late-night arguments, the jittery images and broken dishes, that it was okay to use the fact that he wasn’t there to do it my way. If I even had a way. Christ, I hadn’t washed dishes since college. I’d never washed William at all, not even when he was nursing -- that was when I gratefully passed him over to his father. I wasn’t even sure I remembered where to scrub. Behind his ears? Hadn’t that been proven to damage hearing a few years ago?

The boy had pulled away to stare at me, trembling with a small child’s complex, helpless defiance.

Derek, I thought, and backed up against the wall and slid down until I was slouched across several blessedly carpeted steps and William was sprawled over me, his round arms wrapped around my waist, chin digging into my belt. I closed my eyes for a while. I’d cried, earlier, at the funeral, discreetly and with a paper towel that stuck to my lipstick, smudged a darker pink every time I excused myself to the bathroom; and the same pressure was building up behind my temples.

“Sorry,” William mumbled, when I opened my eyes.

“It’s okay. Let’s get you cleaned up, huh? You might have to help, since Dad isn‘t here to do it. Can you do that?” Can you tell me how to wipe off all this grief, I asked, with my fingertips, but I doubt that carried through his downed skin.

“Yeah,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “I can take a bath by myself, even. Honest,” he added, when I eyed him dubiously. “I was only being silly.”

“Thank you, William,” I said, while he straightened up and balled his left fist and saluted, sharp and ludicrous. “You know I’m proud of you.“

His eyes were fever-bright, and he shrugged at my intent expression, looked down at his socks. Blushed. That fragile stain of veined red, so lovely. He was paler than either Derek or I had been, as children, paler and more inclined to embarrassment.

I looked at our worried son and climbed after him when he trotted upwards. The back of his head -- where the hair stuck out -- was silhouetted against the light of the landing, and it rose like a balloon.

He was undressing when I caught up with him, short pants pooling lopsidedly on the broad tiles of the bathroom floor. He had one foot caught in the tangled trousers, and he stood balanced on one leg as he kicked at stiff corduroy, mouth bunched up around the frustration under his skin. He seemed reluctant to finish stripping off any one garment, though; he moved anxiously, uselessly unfocused, trying to undo his buttons and free his foot at the same time.

I stopped his small bird-shaped hands and said, “Let me help you with that.”

He flinched.

“I told you, I can do it, Mom.”

“I know you can,” I said, sketching smiles like fish on his breast pocket with my fingers as I dropped to his level. “But you don’t have to do it all.”

“Dad’s gone,” he started.

“And I‘m not,” I finished, before he could shatter the delicate equilibrium I’d arrived at by denial and hope with his terrifying eight-year-old logic.

He nodded, and let go of his collar without further protest. He didn‘t say anything more in all the minutes I spent stripping him down to his vulnerable skin. It was warm and bright in that small oddly-shaped roomful of porcelain and polished brass fixtures, and I could see the goosebumps on his calves, clearly delineated by heavy gold light.

“Why don’t you put on a towel while I run the water,” I said, carefully.

He did. The towel was too small for him, hanging like a poncho; it didn’t cover his skinny legs, but he didn’t shiver, and seemed content to perch on the closed toilet seat, drawing the rough cloth protectively up to his chin. He looked like a moth, huddled under its milky wings. I ran the water.

When he did speak up, it wasn’t what I’d expected.

“Where’d Dad go?” he said, as I rolled up my sleeve and dipped my arm elbow-deep the hot greenish water, luxuriated in how the warmth blotted out the soreness.

“Somewhere nice,” I said wearily, hating myself a little for it. “Heaven. Didn’t your grandma talk to you --”

“Not that,” he said, dismissing cupids and clouds and sugar-sweet metaphysics with a shrug. “The ash. After you put it in the water. Where‘d they go?”

“I don’t know,” I said, stunned. “What do you mean?”

He said, with an air of much-tried patience, “Grandma said it would go to the ocean, but my geography teacher taught us last week that the river flows from the ocean to the re-ser-voir. So that can’t be right. ”

“Oh.” He’d been wondering about that since she’d left? “So it’ll end up at the reservoir.”

“Okay. Mom?”

“Yes?”

“What’s a reservoir?”

I stuck my other arm in the water, too quickly, viciously, because I wasn’t sure how many more questions I could take. He was staring up at the ceiling, and didn’t pay attention when I pulled back as quickly and sucked on my knuckles. I added cold water until I suspected any more would make it lukewarm. “You can get in now,” I said, and didn‘t answer.

He hopped off the seat and padded over, pausing for just long enough to let me bundle the towel away before easing in. There was no hesitation. It was hard to tell whether that was because he trusted me or because he was eager to prove -- something.

“Is this okay? Do you want me to stay?” I said, while he lay back, liquid lapping around his armpits.

“I can do it,” he said, but continued speaking when I pushed myself to my feet. “So what’s a reservoir?”

I sighed. “It’s a man-made lake. Like Crystal Springs. Reservoirs are nice and clean, they’re where we get tap water. We went for a walk there once, you remember.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling a little. “Okay. We could go again?”

“Yes, we could. You‘d like that?”

“Yeah.”

The silence bloomed around that secret curve of a smile, reshaping the loose soft contours of his face. He glowed like a deep-sea jellyfish, there in the water, glowed like walking around an artificial lake would bring his father back.

“Will you be okay?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, not turning his head from where it was pillowed on a wash-cloth over porcelain. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Maybe I should.”

He blew on the calm green water, so like glass viewed at a slant, and his reflection turned glassy as it fell apart into faceted waves, distorted, then simply vanished. But in that instant of strangeness, the mirrored face elongated, and the wet mirrored hair was dark blond, almost someone else‘s brown, and the mirrored eyes were very blue.

“Tap water,” he said. “Is this tap water?”

“Yes.”

“Tap. Water.”

He stared at me, and I understood his immature horror that crept up my spine by inches and was so much less frightening than a future without traces of him to hold.

That our son had just named what I’d been hoping for the last several hours.

“William, there are filters they use before any water leaves the reservoir. You are not washing with your father’s ashes,” I said, slowly, articulating each word so that I would hear myself.

“I know that,” he muttered. “I’m not stupid. I just -- I don’t know. I thought maybe. His… ghost. Maybe he‘s not gone.”

And he was waiting, brimming with the question, his throat a-quiver.

“There is no such thing as ghosts,” I said (to myself), and left.

I had to catch my breath in the hallway. I had to cling to the paneled wall, a leaf betrayed by wind and sudden frost, thrown off-guard by just how much I wanted to live that fantasy. Ghosts. For fuck’s sake. I was desperate enough for Derek that it didn’t matter if he was present only in, in the water, as long as he was there. Somehow.

“I can’t do this,” I said to the landing as I descended. The landing made no reply.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I glared at the dirty dishes, stacked like crescent moons in the shade of a raised cabinet. I filled a relatively clean ceramic mug with tap fucking water, thank you very much, and drank too deeply, almost choking.

Please, I thought, coughing up phlegm.

Two facts:

The second swallow tasted quite ordinary but for the sweet edge of regret.

When I threw the cup at the wall, it cracked. Sounded like ripping silk. I watched the dust settle for thirteen minutes and seventeen seconds.

Then I went back to knock on the door, an apology in my knuckles if not my tone.

“William,“ I said, “are you ready to come out?”

“I guess,” he called out, though I came in to find that he was still rinsing out his hair; I glimpsed streaks of shampoo, white lacy foam in his hairline, blending in with the translucent blond roots. Eventually he wiped that off with his thumb, and turned to greet me with a gleaming face.

“All good?” I said. I was shaking.

“What?” he said, water dripping out of one ear.

“I said, all good?”

“Yeah.”

“You should get out now,” I babbled. “The water will be lukewarm, and then you’ll catch cold.”

“Okay,” he said, and obeyed. “I’m sorry I said that. About ghosts. I was sad, that’s all.”

“I know,” I said, handing him the towel. “You don’t have to say sorry. I was upset, but not at you. Never at you. What a stupid thing to get upset over, right? Tap water.“

“Right.”

He dried off while I pulled the plug and watched water spiral down the drain.

In our room, later still, I lay on the unmade bed and tried to find whatever peace William had seen in the ceiling. I counted three leaks, where the brownish water damage was shaped like other worlds, and one damp spot on my pillow, shaped like my skull. I’d taken my damper jeans off, and my jacket, with its zipper that dug into my stomach where my shirt had ridden up, the sleeves rolled painfully tight around my elbows. I’d even put aside the towel hanging off me. Discomforts so familiar, so reliable, that it was a shock to find I could rest without them, could disintegrate into a shallow sleep, sand in my eyes, the insectile clatter of rain on the roof in my ears.

Drowsing, I thought: Reservoirs. They’re where we get tap water. And bathwater.

But rain, too.

Drowsing, I dreamed:

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” I said. He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead.

“I’m melting,” he said. And he was.

When morning came, I touched the center of my forehead. My fingertips came away wet.

When morning came, I opened my eyes to see a new leak in the ceiling overhead.