the table as if to straighten loose papers, to announce the end of his visit.
You wonder if he thinks you are awful. But you also wonder if it makes him feel better to know you, to lessen his own guilt for the bad things he has probably done.
“Okay, then,” Dubno says, “We’ll talk soon.”
Particulars. The weeks before your arrest are proving the most problematic to your defense. You were your other self then. The Charles who was separated from you, leaving a space, an airshaft, between you and your actions. When you drove around the next day, certainly you were aware of a presence, a heaviness to the smell inside the car, a sense deep in your bones that somewhere in the corroded folds of your cerebral cortex lay the horror, the reason why you refused to look at the tarp-covered mound in the trunk.
With your eyes you trace the ridges and pits of the cement ceiling of your cell, back and forth. It is like when you were little and you pretended the ceiling was the floor and you had to step over the chandelier, which bloomed up like a huge bejeweled flower.
CHAPTER 11
T he A train car is fairly full, but Grace gets a seat next to an empty one and pulls her suitcase close. Across from her are two junkies wrapped in mangy army coats despite the warmth of the afternoon.
“I love spring on the subway,” one says.
“How come?” the other answers.
“Because of all the nipples. Especially when it rains,” he says.
His laugh gets tangled in a phlegmy cough.
“Right on, man, right on. It’s paradise.”
Grace crosses her arms across her chest and looks at the floor. A leaking can of root beer rolls by, only to get stuck on a wad of neon green gum. It’s humid and rank and the open window only lets in the dirty, subterranean air. Her stomach muscles strain to hold everything down.
The junkies nod off like lovebirds, one’s head nestled on the other’s shoulder.
###
She is so small. That’s the first thought Grace has when she sees her mother, hanging back from the gathering of happy people greeting the arrivals in Cleveland. She is still pretty—that face that Grace would recognize through the cosmos—with her bobbed silver hair swept back from her face in a tortoiseshell headband, standing there in a pale pink cardigan, khakis, and cream-colored driving shoes. As the professor would say, now there’s a fine-looking woman. No one would ever know that she is in the midst of crisis. Grace wants to take her narrow shoulders in her hands and shake her.
“Hi, honey,” she says. Grace has to lean down a little and her mother hugs her with her elbows tucked in, not wanting to get too close. When she lets go, she holds her daughter at arm’s length and says, “You’re too thin, Grace. You need to eat more. There’s leftover pork roast at home.”
Grace rolls her suitcase and follows.
“How’s Dad?”
“He opened his eyes today. And nodded his head. But they don’t really know yet.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she says.
The view of Cleveland is brief. Smokestacks against the horizon. Terminal Tower, once indicative of a thriving industrial city. Despite its incessant efforts to revitalize, the city continues to crumble.
Grace somehow expected to see the bare, black tree trunks of winter, but as they drive east swiftly away from downtown, she is met with a Midwestern spring—the deciduous trees awash in pale green buds, daffodils crowding the bases of trees and signposts, the white bursts of apple blossoms. Even though she wishes it didn’t, this place feels like home. The statuesque silhouettes of oaks. The gnarled branches of buckeyes and elms. She cracks her window for the smell, that mix of damp dirt and new grass and honeysuckle. She resents the beautiful veneer of where she grew up, its lie of tranquility. Nice and pristine on the surface, messy and angry underneath. Part of her would like to take a bulldozer right through the middle of every well-groomed lawn.
Her mother is
You wonder if he thinks you are awful. But you also wonder if it makes him feel better to know you, to lessen his own guilt for the bad things he has probably done.
“Okay, then,” Dubno says, “We’ll talk soon.”
Particulars. The weeks before your arrest are proving the most problematic to your defense. You were your other self then. The Charles who was separated from you, leaving a space, an airshaft, between you and your actions. When you drove around the next day, certainly you were aware of a presence, a heaviness to the smell inside the car, a sense deep in your bones that somewhere in the corroded folds of your cerebral cortex lay the horror, the reason why you refused to look at the tarp-covered mound in the trunk.
With your eyes you trace the ridges and pits of the cement ceiling of your cell, back and forth. It is like when you were little and you pretended the ceiling was the floor and you had to step over the chandelier, which bloomed up like a huge bejeweled flower.
CHAPTER 11
T he A train car is fairly full, but Grace gets a seat next to an empty one and pulls her suitcase close. Across from her are two junkies wrapped in mangy army coats despite the warmth of the afternoon.
“I love spring on the subway,” one says.
“How come?” the other answers.
“Because of all the nipples. Especially when it rains,” he says.
His laugh gets tangled in a phlegmy cough.
“Right on, man, right on. It’s paradise.”
Grace crosses her arms across her chest and looks at the floor. A leaking can of root beer rolls by, only to get stuck on a wad of neon green gum. It’s humid and rank and the open window only lets in the dirty, subterranean air. Her stomach muscles strain to hold everything down.
The junkies nod off like lovebirds, one’s head nestled on the other’s shoulder.
###
She is so small. That’s the first thought Grace has when she sees her mother, hanging back from the gathering of happy people greeting the arrivals in Cleveland. She is still pretty—that face that Grace would recognize through the cosmos—with her bobbed silver hair swept back from her face in a tortoiseshell headband, standing there in a pale pink cardigan, khakis, and cream-colored driving shoes. As the professor would say, now there’s a fine-looking woman. No one would ever know that she is in the midst of crisis. Grace wants to take her narrow shoulders in her hands and shake her.
“Hi, honey,” she says. Grace has to lean down a little and her mother hugs her with her elbows tucked in, not wanting to get too close. When she lets go, she holds her daughter at arm’s length and says, “You’re too thin, Grace. You need to eat more. There’s leftover pork roast at home.”
Grace rolls her suitcase and follows.
“How’s Dad?”
“He opened his eyes today. And nodded his head. But they don’t really know yet.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she says.
The view of Cleveland is brief. Smokestacks against the horizon. Terminal Tower, once indicative of a thriving industrial city. Despite its incessant efforts to revitalize, the city continues to crumble.
Grace somehow expected to see the bare, black tree trunks of winter, but as they drive east swiftly away from downtown, she is met with a Midwestern spring—the deciduous trees awash in pale green buds, daffodils crowding the bases of trees and signposts, the white bursts of apple blossoms. Even though she wishes it didn’t, this place feels like home. The statuesque silhouettes of oaks. The gnarled branches of buckeyes and elms. She cracks her window for the smell, that mix of damp dirt and new grass and honeysuckle. She resents the beautiful veneer of where she grew up, its lie of tranquility. Nice and pristine on the surface, messy and angry underneath. Part of her would like to take a bulldozer right through the middle of every well-groomed lawn.
Her mother is
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