Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth

by the shoulders, not the neck .
    Late that night Myers would wake, hear a sound, think he heard a sound. Gray? he would say in the dark, the word coming out of his mouth. Gray? He switched on the lamp. No, he didn’t. His arm gave a groan and he held still. There was no lamp beside him anyway because he wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t in the first hotel, or the second hotel, because he was in the hospital, and when he opened his eyes, which turned out to be shut, it was dim, not dark.
    Late that night the sound wasn’t Gray but it wasn’t anything else either. There were sounds but they had nothing to do with him. The contents of the room—cots, people, pathways—spread out in regular intervals. He lay, the barrenness within him and the clutter without. A thought was pulling at him. It was just under the surface. He was forgetting something. It would come, he needed to wait. Out the window, the trees or whatever those were, bushes, the stack of housing, the ash and the human hum. Nearby were bodies taped to metal and given a wheel to steer. The utterly empty bottle of his soul. He waited for day.
    Gray had ridden the bus to the city on the day of a cold February parade. He stayed for four and a half months, during which time his thoughts moved with the sluggishness of words being formed with alphabet blocks, one letter at a time, a small fat boy lining them up gracelessly. People move through that city with awe and expectation, but Gray felt nothing but oppression and pain, his interior arrangement a clogged river. He could see no future for himself. But he could not stay where he was. The despair wasn’t over the marriage but the child. She was just over a year at the time he left, a little squiggle in a diaper.
    How could you love something so small and for no other reason than that it belongs to you? He didn’t know. He walked all over that city and each day he came back to the fact of her at one end of the state and him at the other. The news that came from the top half of the state was grim. Threats of only two supervised visits a year due to unfitness, mental abuse, his wobbling around with temp jobs.
    His lawyer sighed on the phone. It’s a woman’s world, he said.
    When at last Gray’s thoughts organized into a simple sentence, it read: I can’t lose that little girl.
    So the day he got on the bus and left was not a day of defeat but of triumph. Without alerting anyone and without being told to, without a person on earth as witness (or so he believed), one afternoon instead of trolling around in circles and squares, he walked to the bus station and left, went back to fight for his daughter.
    A man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were wrapped in air and light.
     
    Chapter Eleven
    MARIA
    He turned up and checked in and that is it. He was already dying when he arrived. It wasn’t what I did. He arrived late one day and hasn’t left. At first he walked all over, went around town. I don’t know where he went. Maybe he started dying after that. He doesn’t speak any Spanish. Who knows what he’s doing here. After a while he stopped walking and he got into bed and barely gets up. So I come in and turn on the light in the morning so he knows it’s now day and it’s time to keep his eyes open, and then I come in at night and switch it off so he knows it’s bedtime and now he should sleep. That’s my main job. My other job is to holler at my son to bring the poor man something to eat. If he found himself dying, wouldn’t he at least want someone to come around with a sandwich now and then, or a cup of juice? Shame on him that I have to remind him.
    I have no idea who he is or if he has