Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,74

again, a kind of a song. I liked the way she pronounced it: a soft little “Sh—” at the start of

it all.

I searched for every possible combination of these names with no success.

So I have been feeling very low. It gets very dark very early now & some bad days I sit on my couch from sunup to sundown without moving, and on even worse days I lie in my bed. Except to eat.

Each night I tell myself that tomorrow it will be different and new—tomorrow it will be less bad, ever so slightly less bad. Tomorrow perhaps I will go for a walk, or jog in place, or pull out from under my bed the damned & dusty step-device that I once ordered from a catalogue, & step along to whatever Spandexed fitness expert happens to come on my television.

I never do.

Each night in bed I repeat the promise. I press my hands together up by my chest because they do not fit over my stomach—a stomach that flattens & expands when I lie down, nearly reaching the edges of my queen-sized bed—and pray to the same God I have prayed to since I was a very small Arthur. My God looks something like Santa Claus, white-bearded & starry & merry. Every night my prayer is the same. Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, it goes—I learned as a boy in Confirmation class that this was the way to start all prayers—Please let me eat well tomorrow. Please let me be healthy and good. Please let me lose weight. For it is still my intention someday to go out of the house. So I cross myself for good measure, & breathe deeply through my nose, & let my mind drift to places I have been or have always wanted to go to.

All in all I feel I am right back where I started in October, before Charlene Turner Keller called me, before I ever met Yolanda. I am one of the world’s lonely.

• • •

Arizona’s average annual temperature is 72 in the desert and 50 in the mountains. It leads the nation in copper mining. Its flower is the saguaro cactus blossom and its bird is the cactus wren. Phoenix is its capital. It is the 48th state. Celebrities with ties to Arizona include Curt Schilling, Danica Patrick, David Spade, Jordin Sparks, Kerri Strug, Phil Mickelson, and Meadowlark Lemon, the Clown Prince of the Harlem Globetrotters. Arizona has many ranches on it and many horses and cows.

As a younger boy I thought over and over again of running away to Arizona and when I found the Internet I used to look up images of Arizona and imagine my father the ranch hand. Whenever I was at a computer I would search for Kel Keller, hoping something about him would come up, but the only thing returned to me was me. Baseball stuff. And an artist, and an engineer, and a consultant, none of whom looked anything like the pictures of my father that I have seen. So then I would look up other things about Arizona.

There are homes on mountains in Arizona. There are deserts and flowering things. There are 2,210 miles between Yonkers and Arizona’s northeastern corner, according to MapQuest, and it would take 35 hours to get there. I used to think about that when I was very low. I could be in Arizona in less than two days. There is something very calm and beautiful about that state the way I imagine it. I have never been anywhere outside of New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—all of these for baseball—but I feel I know what Arizona is like. I used to have dreams about it. There was a class trip to the Grand Canyon when I was in eighth grade and I wanted to go so badly that I tried to raise the money myself when my mother said it was too much. But I couldn’t. I came close but I couldn’t.

My first thought upon reading my mother’s letter was Liar. You’re lying, I thought. Or crazy, or so drugged and so drunk that you didn’t know what you were saying.

I sat in the police station and felt like my legs were asleep. They felt numb suddenly and I thought maybe I was having a heart attack and dying. I waited and waited for somebody to come back and talk to me, to pick the phone up off the table, to take the letter out of