NO PLACE LIKE HOME
It takes Marty and me a few minutes of fumbling before we work the door open and stumble back into the apartment, Marty going on about something Tolstoy once said. In the kitchen, I pour us a glass of water each. My largely untouched plate of hot dogs and potatoes glares at me with accusation. Marty collapses at the kitchen table.
He squints at something to the right of my plate, picks up the key I left on the table. “Is this—this is the one we stole.”
“It was in my mouth,” I confess.
“Oh.” He frowns in concentration. “I keep my keys in my wallet, because—” He breaks off mid-sentence to rush for the bathroom, dropping the key with a clack. I laugh. What a lightweight. I follow, bringing his glass of water with me. He’s hunched over the toilet. He lifts his head up long enough to give me a scathing look, before turning back to the pressing matter of throwing up his dinner.
“Better?”
His response is to retch more. Once I’m pretty sure he’s done, I try again. “Better?”
“Yeah.” He gets up, a little unsteadily, and rinses out his mouth. I hand him his glass of water.
“Noah—”
“Drink. You’ll want to kiss me thank you in the morning.”
He hands the glass back to me when he’s done with a Happy now? sort of gesture. I walk him up the stairs to his room, set a trash can by his bed. I can’t help noticing there’s a crumpled old F.L.Y. newsletter inside.
“Peter. Hey—hey—” Marty grabs my arm. “Can you tell Wendy—can you tell her—” His voice trails off.
“What, buddy?”
But he grows confused, closes his eyes. “Tell her—”
He doesn’t finish the thought.
In my room, I strip down to my underwear, leaving my clothes strewn across the floor. Sometime in the night, I will wake, I will reach for my phone, I will dial my old house number, and press the cell to my ear, and listen for the sound of Mom’s voice, prepared to thank her for her florins.
I will hear: “Welcome to AwayWeCall Wireless. We are sorry, but your number cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.”
DREAMS OF HOME
Noah is a boy made of raindrops.
He reaches inside himself, and picks one raindrop out.
It looks like this: o
Inside the raindrop are shadows lingering in a familiar doorway late at night. But the raindrop is small and slippery. It falls through his fingers, so he reaches inside himself again, and picks out a second raindrop.
It looks like this: o
Inside the raindrop is the creak of floorboards under the weight of woolen slippers.
Again, the raindrop slips away.
Again, he reaches inside himself.
With more droplets come more visions.
o: A soft voice that recounts fairy tales—“Three Little Pigs,” “Cinderella,” and so on.
o: Fingers callused from years of gardening work, callused but warm.
o: A beard going gray.
o: Lipstick the color of fire, a kiss the color of fire, on a cheek flushed pink with winter and embarrassment.
o: The tide of the ocean on summer days, rising and receding with the laughter of beautiful not-quite-adults playing volleyball on a long-ago holiday.
o: The feel of hair being tousled by—brother?
o: Dry turkey and canned cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving Day, giving thanks to God for family.
o: His older brother was Jonathan?—until Jonathan got sick, went away. His mother is still Sarah and his father is still Jacob. They will still be Sarah and Jacob, Jacob and Sarah, though maybe not Sarah and Jacob together, on the hour and the minute and the second that not-Jonathan and not-Noah are reunited, the hour and the minute and the second when they are not on a beach again, with the tide and the teenagers playing volleyball, and Jonathan doesn’t reach over to stroke his brother’s hair, the summer before college, doesn’t cough, doesn’t pull his hand away to cover his mouth, doesn’t say, through teary eyes, “Damn.”
o: A reflection of a nine-year-old boy left behind in the mirror of a second-floor bathroom in a nineteenth-century colonial. A real mirror, in a real bathroom, in a real house, far beyond the walls of Westing.
Droplet by droplet, let Noah forget the shadows and the lipstick, the summer holidays and ever believing in God. Let Noah forget Noah. The reflections he leaves behind are more real than he is, anyway. He is never more present than to those for whom he is absent.
So let Noah empty himself, little by little. It is whispered that the virus attacks the brain last, the memories