One For Sorrow

  She put her hand on my forehead and said, “I got some food.” She helped me sit up in my blankets and I noticed she’d set plywood against the broken windows to break the wind. She opened a thermos and filled a cup with steaming soup, handed it to me. I drank one cup, then another. My stomach clenched and I nearly threw up. “Slow down,” she said. “Slow it down, baby. You ain’t that well yet.”

  I took more of her medicine and a few hours later, she helped me downstairs to the altar where it was warmer. She had the heat and lights on. “Daddy won’t be back for a few days,” she said. “But he will be back. So you have to get better right quick.”

  “I’m trying,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

  She made a bed of blankets on the altar and left me there to rest. I stared up at Jesus on his cross. So sad. So sad about the world. He pressed his face against his shoulder like he couldn’t bear to look at things any longer. I can relate, I told him. I didn’t want to look at the world either.

  She came back the next day, and the day after that, and soon I was able to get up and around on my own. I asked why she would help someone who was squatting in her father’s church. “That reminds me,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll be working in here. You’ll have to leave like you used to. Can you do that?”

  I nodded. “How did you know I was here?”

  “Well, your candy and hamburger wrappers were the first clue, but it sure didn’t help you were always hanging around outside, looking all spacey and weird. You’re lucky my daddy didn’t notice.”

  “Why are you helping me?” I asked again.

  “I like the way you always looking out at something far away,” she said, smiling. “Like my daddy. He always got his eye on God.”

  “I don’t believe in that stuff,” I said. “Not how you do.” I didn’t want God thinking just because one of His people was helping me that He and I were on good terms.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “It don’t matter if you believe in Him. God believes in you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I remembered those words. Even though I’d given them to Jamie, they rushed to my tongue when I felt them now. I had them again. I knew what they meant.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Adam.”

  “Adam,” she said. “That’s a good name. He’s the first man.”

  I got up early the next day and walked out into a snow-covered city. I wore my yellow hood up over my head, my jean jacket buttoned up as far as it could go. My jeans had holes in the knees, though, so the cold still found me. And a hole had opened in the toe of my left shoe. I could see my dirty sock in there, my big toe twitching. Through the snow-laced trees and plowed parking lots of the college, abandoned on this Saturday morning in winter, I trudged, until I made my way up to the north side of the city.

  The street’s regulars were out already: the homeless, the nervous wreck people talking to themselves, muttering of their suffering, some asking for cigarettes, some for money so they could stop at the Red and White corner store to buy a forty ouncer and drown their sorrow. It was way cold out, the light yellow-gray, the air fused with diesel and grit. There was an edge to everything, like the world was tired and dirty but still trying.

  Snow fell in heavy wet flakes, spiraling, filling the air with down. I felt like I was in one of those glass globes, a little city inside a bubble of water. Before I could make it to Dorian Books, I was soaked clear through. My teeth chattered. Even through my yellow hoody and the T-shirt underneath, I was freezing. Part of me wished I was still on my way to dying, because then I wouldn’t have felt the cold. But I wasn’t on my way to dying any longer, and I had to give up that wish because in the end I didn’t really want it. I wasn’t sure what I was on my way to now, but it wasn’t dying. I kept telling myself, You have to take care of yourself. You have to start wanting.

  So I swung the door of the bookshop open and went in, wanting to find that book I’d read in Gracie’s closet. The doorbell jangled, and inside the place smelled like tea and cinnamon. I breathed it all in. I hadn’t smelled things for a while and now that I was getting my senses back I was shocked half the time by simple things. The scent of snow, the sound of wings fluttering. My heart would break into a thousand pieces just to feel the wind slip under my collar. If I’d had a rose quartz heart like Gracie’s, by then it would have been fine as sand.

  There were tons of books everywhere, and I started pulling them down one at a time to read a page or two at some random place, wondering what had happened to the people in these stories to make them do or say or think some of the things they did. Like this one woman had opened all the birdcages in her house and shooed the birds out the window into the winter, even the parrot who always told her he loved her. And this other guy got into a fight with his ex-wife and before he left the house (which she’d gotten in the divorce) he stole her ashtray. And then there was this kid whose father was drunk and told him he and his little friend looked like sisters, and then the father imagined Bessie Smith, this old blues singer from way back in the early 1900s, sitting on the bed with the boys, and the father told them they all looked like they could be sisters. That was pretty funny, especially since they were boys and white and Bessie Smith was a black woman, but it was true in this way I couldn’t explain. I just felt it.

  I was reading bits and pieces of books when I noticed a shadow fall over my shadow on the floor. When I looked up, I saw the guy who’d come out to greet me last time I’d been in here standing beside me. “That’s a great book,” he said. He still didn’t wear any shoes, just black socks. He had on a pair of jeans and a black sweater and square black-framed glasses. He looked like one of the professor types that lurked around campus, distinguished, clasping his hands at his stomach, his voice softly rising and falling as he spoke about the book I was holding, telling me it was a good read and how he’d read it back in the day and had loved it. At first I could only stare as he talked, but after a while of me not replying, he said, “Are you okay?”

  As soon as he said that, I closed my eyes and put the book back on the shelf. I felt shaky all of a sudden, as if I might puke. I didn’t want to say anything, but that one question made me think of Jamie, and right then I wanted to forget he existed. Because if he never was, then I wouldn’t have to feel bad about him not being here now.

  I had to get out of there. It was either that or else puking all over the black and white checkered floor, and then I’d feel real stupid and real afraid because something had come out of me in front of this guy and then everything would be real, would be that much worse if I acknowledged it.

  I shook my head, a little unsteady, probably walking like my dad on a hangover day, and went toward the door.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the guy said. “You look like you need to sit down and rest a little. You shouldn’t be out in this weather dressed like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he said, “you must be freezing.”

  I looked down at the floor and nodded. “I am,” I said.

  He let me sit in a big comfy chair and brought me a cup of tea on a saucer and put milk and sugar on the coffee table in front of me. He sat down on the couch opposite, blowing steam off his cup. I put my face over my cup and the steam misted my cheeks. He said his name was Kurt, and for a moment I thought maybe I should tell him I was Andy—you know, in case he figured out I was a runaway—but in the end I decided to be honest and tell him my own.

  “Are you in trouble, Adam?” he asked.

  I didn’t say anything, just looked down into my cup.

  He folded one leg on top of the other and spread his arms across the back of the couch. Then he started talking about his bookstore, which sort of made me feel better because it had nothing to do with me. He said it didn’t make him much money, but he didn’t care. He wanted to have a bookshop, so he did. He went on about it for a while, and then he talked some more. About himself mostly. He said he’d just turned forty a few months ag
o and that he lived with his partner, which at first I thought meant like his business partner, but it turned out he meant his boyfriend, who taught in the business college at the university, and how the bookstore probably would be a failure if it weren’t for him. When he brought up the university, I said how I didn’t like the campus and he wanted to know why. I told him it had all those fresh-faced kids with their clean clothes and their lives ahead of them and how they seemed pretty fucking blind. He laughed at that, but told me not to hold it against them. “I’m glad you’re finally talking,” he said. “I wondered why you ran out of here so fast the other day.”

  I shrugged. “No reason,” I told him.

  He got a little serious then, leaning forward to take his cup off the table between us. “Whatever it is that’s not good right now,” he said, “it can get better. You know that, right?”

  I nodded, but didn’t say anything. I was a little uncomfortable talking about me again. I wasn’t surprised he could tell something was wrong just by the way I was dressed in torn clothes and how I was probably the dirtiest looking kid he’d seen in a while. I wondered if he’d think things could get better if I told him about the shadows I saw, how they talked and talked and told me things about people that I didn’t want to know. It was like those activity books my mom used to get when I was little, the ones full of pictures and the activity was to find a certain number of objects hidden in them. Like, say, how many rabbits are hiding in this picture? So you look and look, and all of a sudden you start finding rabbits hidden everywhere in this seemingly innocent scene. They’re in the trees, they’re in the picnic basket. There are even rabbits in the goddamned food on the plates! And these stupid people in the picture are smiling like idiots because they don’t notice the damn things. After you’ve seen them once, though, you always see them. You can’t go back. Whenever you look at that picture afterward, you can’t see it without seeing the rabbits that the nice but totally oblivious family eating their picnic won’t ever see.

  I looked down into my empty cup, speckled with tea leaves, and wanted to cry. My throat started to close as I fought the tears back down and forced them to stay inside.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Kurt said. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine. Really.”

  I put my cup of tea on the coffee table and got up to leave. Before I left, though, Kurt said if I came back the next morning he’d buy me breakfast. Food sounded good, so I told him I’d come. I also asked him about that book I’d read in Gracie’s closet, but when he went to get me a copy, he couldn’t find it. “All sold out,” he said.

  “Oh well,” I said. “No big deal. He was just a whiny rich kid anyway.”

  “Would you have liked it better if he’d been a whiny poor kid?” he asked, smiling.

  “Probably not,” I said. “If he was a poor kid—”

  I stopped then, and tried to smile. I didn’t feel like I could muster a real one, though. It was probably one of those lopsided ones Jamie used to give me. “Probably not,” I said again, and went out into the cold.

  I went back to the church to find Tia waiting for me. She sat on a pew looking up at the altar, and when I came up from the basement, she smiled and said, “There you are! I thought I’d lost you.”

  “Where would I have gone?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not like abandoned places are hard to come by round here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But ones with heat and electricity are.”

  She laughed into her hand like maybe she thought the joke was sinful. I sat down next to her, not sure of what to say. It’s not like we knew each other, really. She’d helped me out, but other than that she was just this girl from Youngstown whose father was a minister of a congregation without a home. Well, not without a home. I guess their home was this place they were trying to fix up to be someplace livable again.

  “This Sunday’s visitors’ day at my daddy’s church,” she said. “He’s going to preach real good. He always preaches real good when we have visitors. Not that he preaches bad when we don’t, but anyway, I was wondering if you’d like to come.”

  She sat there, face intent, waiting for my answer. To tell the truth I didn’t want to, but I felt obligated after all she’d done, and if all she wanted was for me to visit her church, that wasn’t so bad, I guess. So I said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll come.”

  “Don’t say yeah out of obligation,” she said.

  For a second I thought she could hear my shadow because she’d read my thoughts, but I guess it was obvious from the way I answered that I wasn’t that into the idea. I said, “Why else would I come?”

  “For yourself. I ain’t never met someone in trouble like you are.”

  “I don’t have any trouble,” I said.

  “Everyone has trouble,” she said. “I have trouble, sure enough, and I’m the damn preacher’s daughter. Hell, if my daddy knew half of what I do behind his back, he’d have a heart attack. There ain’t no one not got trouble.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I’m warning you. I’m not so good with God.”

  “Fair enough. Besides, my daddy’s church ain’t what you think. It’s not like white people’s churches. All stuffy. Just give it a shot.”

  I nodded. I didn’t expect anything, but I didn’t tell her that. I mean, it’s not like I don’t believe in God or whatever it is that is life in this place. I’m just not sure anyone can describe what God is so easily. If I had my way, I’d take a bit of every religion and science and philosophy, because then maybe the picture of God would be more complete, like a mosaic. I think mostly people pick just one idea of God, but when they do that they end up looking at this one little speck of something that’s really big and amazing. They look at that one speck in the mosaic and say, “That’s God,” and don’t see the rest of the picture around it. But then there are people like my mom and dad, who don’t look at the picture at all, which is just as bad. Thinking about that, I figured it couldn’t hurt to at least go and look at Tia’s tile with her.

  I went to visit Kurt the next morning and he had a bag of McDonald’s waiting for me. It was greasy and salty and back when I was training for running I would have been like, “No way! That’s so unhealthy!” but I ate without thinking anything of it. It’d been a while since I tasted something as precious as grease and salt and cheese and sausage and pancakes with syrup, even if the pancakes did feel like foam in my mouth and the sandwich was a heart attack waiting to happen forty years from now.

  We talked some more. I told him a little about Gracie and Jamie and how everything happened over the fall and winter. And while I was telling, it occurred to me I had no idea what month it was, so I asked and he said, “End of March.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Way,” he said, totally mocking me, but I laughed. “That’s nice to hear,” he said. “You have a nice laugh.”

  I suddenly felt weird. I’d never thought about my laugh before. “I have a nice laugh?” I said.

  “Yeah. Very boisterous. Not self-conscious.”

  “My dad’s always yelling at me to wake up,” I said. “I guess that’s what I am. Not self-conscious. Unconscious.”

  “Fathers are like that,” said Kurt. “They don’t know what to say to their kids sometimes. Especially to boys. Especially boys like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “Well, you’re not typical.”

  “You mean how I’m not so good with people,” I said.

  “Well, sort of. And you’re different in other ways too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, to be completely honest, you’ve got some problems, Adam. People don’t always understand that, but they can sense it. They’re afraid it’s something they can catch, so they steer clear. You can hardly blame them. And well, you’re not typical in lots of other ways too.”

  I could tell he wanted to say what these other ways were, but I didn’t want him to b
e like everyone else, trying to tell me who I was and how I should think about myself. Everyone seemed to always be doing that to me. So even though I mostly appreciated his conversation and what he was trying to tell me, I told him I understood and didn’t need to hear anything else. He said I didn’t know what he was going to say, but I told him whatever he was going to say was more about what he thought than what I thought, and he nodded and said that was true. Even the most well-intentioned people don’t know what’s best for you. Sometimes you’ve got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.

  On Sunday Tia picked me up and we walked to the gymnasium where her father’s congregation was meeting until the church was ready. Everyone sat in wooden folding chairs in the middle of a basketball court. It reminded me of meetings in the gym before and after track practice and I felt weird and out of place, like I was visiting a me I’d forgotten.

  Everyone was black too, which also made me feel out of place, but definitely not forgotten. We got stares, but Tia didn’t seem to mind. She sang and raised her hands like nothing was the matter, even if some of the guys around our age looked like they wanted to vaporize us; even though some of the older women squinted at us suspiciously.

  Tia’s father stood behind a podium and the choir was off to the side. He wore a suit, not robes like a priest. His voice was loud, echoing through the gymnasium, making him sound holier than usual. He kept telling people what they needed to do, like when he was telling the work crew what to do at the church. Tia would nod her head and shout, “Yes!” or “Hallelujah!” and so did the others. They waved their hands at Reverend Taylor, they shouted, “Praise Him!” and would nod their heads at each other, so excited I thought they might even start high fiving. It was a little strange for me, really. I mean, in church I expected the minister to talk and everyone else to just sit there and listen.

  Tia’s father said some good things about how we all need to love each other, which is what Jesus said too, so it wasn’t like anything new or revolutionary, but he also said some dumb things too, like how we all have to get in close with God and live with him and forget the world. I was like, How do you forget the world? It’s the most impossible thing. You can’t just separate yourself from it like that. If you did, you’d have to live in a church day in and day out. Otherwise the world is all up in your face and you have to interact with it. Get in under God and stay there, he said. But I thought that was too easy, like sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich, pretending not to see anything. Plus, after I thought about how I’d lived in a church for months and hadn’t interacted much with the world, it made me even more suspicious. I’d done what he suggested. I’d lived in a church and forgotten the world, but it only made me more unable to figure out a way to live. I thought a better idea would be if everyone looked hard at the world and tried to figure it out instead of turning our backs and running away from it like it was something to be afraid of.