Then you had to stand in line ignoring Mrs. Manzinotti staring at you from the dairy section, so you paged through the magazines filled with celebrities falling apart or falling in love or both, noticing that Mrs. Manzinotti was walking in your direction now and hoping that she still ignored you as she did the first few years, avoiding eye contact, flinching when you passed her in the market or downtown. But here she was, filled with determined good cheer, barreling toward you, as if all that was over with and we must go on as before, mustn’t we? It doesn’t matter if you’re ready; you got ready, fast. So you talked about how nice it was that it was finally feeling like spring today (as if you had even noticed) and you asked after Mr. Manzinotti and Ethan and Carol Ann and when she said, ‘And how’s Charlie doing?’ you said, ‘We’re just fine, thank you,’ as if your own story were an article in a magazine someone could flip through and put back in the rack, as if your sweet boy wasn’t (say it) somewhere in pieces under the dirt.
And while you paid the cashier, at that moment it occurs to you that there’s a man in Florida stopping at a gas station somewhere right this minute. You can see him clear as day buying a big bag of Doritos and beef jerky and a Red Bull, then leaving the bag there on the counter with the clerk as he heads to the toilet to pee before he gets back on the road. And the eyes of that man standing there, those unrepentant eyes staring in the bathroom mirror, they were the last eyes Tommy ever saw before—
No.
No, because: Tommy was alive.
Alive on this earth right now in all his Tommyness: his love of tomatoes and marshmallows and butterscotch, his inexplicable hatred of strawberries, the way he’d grab her hand as she was leaving his bedside at night, asking her to stay for a few more minutes (Oh, why had she loosened herself from his grip and kissed him good night? Why hadn’t she stayed for the few minutes he had craved?), the dimple in his cheek that came out when he gave that foolish and duplicitous grin after some piece of naughtiness, like that time he popped his brother’s balloon on the way home from the carnival and pretended it was an accident.
Tommy was alive on this earth and no one could tell her otherwise.
Tommy was alive on this earth, and someday they would see each other again.
It happened sometimes. That girl out in Utah, for instance. The one with the friendly, open face and the yellow hair, who looked like she had stepped out of the goat stall at the 4-H instead of crawling on her hands and knees up from purgatory. There she was on the cover of the magazine, Denise still had that copy in the drawer of her bedside table, she knew it by heart: the girl had disappeared from her bedroom one night and then five years later she was home again and the monster who did it was going to jail for forever and a day. There were the pictures of her with her family, sitting on the couch with her mother’s arm wrapped around her, her father’s hand resting on her shoulder as naturally as you please. She was starting up school again, that’s what the article said. Playing piano. A shy smile on her face, blue ribbons in her hair. The girl was intact. More or less. It could happen. Things happened. It wasn’t any more or less unlikely than a child going for a bike ride to his best friend’s house down the road one Saturday morning and falling off the edge of the earth.
But these thoughts, like the magazine’s pages, were almost worn through from too much use. Which made her go back to the other thought. Which made her think again that she couldn’t do it anymore.
I can’t hold on to hope and I can’t hold on without it, either, she thought.
She pulled out of the parking lot. When she reached the intersection, instead of heading right toward home she took a left and found herself driving out toward Dayton. She drove for a while past the even green fields, unsure as yet as to where she was going, until she saw the sign for the new Staples out beyond the mall. It was shining its big neon smile at her, as if it had been waiting for her, as if she was one of the devout who had found her way back home.
She felt a dim thrill when no one looked at her twice as she walked in the door. They kept doing what they were doing, a whole lot of nothing as far as she could tell. A girl with horrible fraying braids was paging through a magazine. A white boy with a knit cap on his head (why did they wear that indoors? unless they were bald, which this boy wasn’t) was ringing something up. She heard his nervous scales of laughter echoing through the store. She wandered for a while down the long aisles filled with dangling supplies, each with its own clear sense of purpose, soaking in the chilled air. In aisle 10 she picked up a new gleaming staple gun and walked to the back where the copy center was, feeling its heft in her hand.
There was a line of people, clutching their papers. Selling cars, maybe, or looking for piano students. She stood on line, another person with the need to multiply her longing exponentially, holding in her other hand the flyer she kept in the glove compartment for this very reason. She waited her turn and then she handed her flyer to a boy in his early twenties, a boy with deep brown skin and a smooth, amiable, bored face.
Maybe Tommy will look like that someday, she thought. Maybe Tommy will get a job at Staples. He could do worse for himself. She was letting herself think it. She knew that. It was as if her conscious mind was still back in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop and she was letting this other part of herself take over again.
“Two hundred, please.”