Stories: All-New Tales

He was aware, as he walked through the door, that he looked like a poor man’s Charlie Chaplin, with a rope holding up his pants. He was aware that he hadn’t been to a bar during the day since he’d been a drummer a lifetime ago. There were five people at the bar, even this morning, and they weren’t the sort of folks you found in bars at night. These were the hard-luck cases, the ones who needed whiskey (a dram!) to get through another few hours of an ordinary workday; or the call girls who needed to forget before they went home to sleep off last night’s memories; or the old men who only wanted to find their youth in the bottom of a bottle of gin.

Abe climbed onto a stool—and climbed was the word; he must have been more exhausted than he thought, for all the effort that it took to get onto it. “Have you got Jameson?” he asked the bartender, and the guy looked at him with a smile as crooked as lightning.

“Nice try, kid,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

The bartender shook his head. “You got any ID?”

Abe was forty-two years old, and he could not remember the last time he’d been carded. He had gray hair at the temples, for God’s sake. But he reached for his wallet, only to realize that it was back at work, in his locker, like usual. “I don’t,” he said.

“Well, then,” the bartender said. “I ain’t got Jameson. Come on back when you turn twenty-one.”

Abe stared at him, confounded. He jumped off the stool, landing hard. The whole way back to work, he searched for his reflection in the shiny hoods of Buicks, in plate-glass windows of bakeries, in puddles. When you lost a child, did you lose the years you’d spent with her, too?

A WEEK AFTER THEIR daughter’s death, Sarah could not stop thinking about her. She would taste the skin of the little girl, a kiss, the moment before the chicory of the coffee kicked in, or the sweetness of the muffin blossomed on her tongue. She would pick up a newspaper and feel instead the rubbery band of small socks between her fingers as she folded them over after doing the wash. She’d be in one room and hear the music of her daughter’s voice, the way grammar leaped through her sentences like a frog.

Abe, on the other hand, was starting to lose her. He would close his eyes and try to conjure up his daughter’s face, and he still could, but it was unraveled at the edges a little more each day. He found himself spending hours in her bedroom, inhaling the smell of her strawberry-mango shampoo still trapped in the fibers of the pillowcase, or poring through the books on her shelves and trying to see them through her eyes. He went so far as to open her finger paints, stand stripped to the waist in front of her tiny mirror, draw her heart on his chest.

ALTHOUGH SARAH’S MO WAS usually to do the opposite of whatever her mother told her to do, this time, she took her advice. She showed up at the church, shuddering as she remembered the hymns that had been played at her daughter’s funeral, steeling herself for the absence of the coffin at the altar. She knocked on the pastor’s office door, and he ushered her inside and gave her a cup of tea. “So,” the pastor said, “your mother’s worried about you.”

Sarah opened up her mouth to say something snippy and typically awful, but she caught herself in time. Of course her mother was worried. That was the job description, wasn’t it? That was why she had come.

“Can I ask you something?” Sarah said. “Why her?”

“I don’t understand…”

“I get the whole God thing. I get the kingdom of heaven. But there are millions of seven-year-olds out there. Why did God take mine?”

The pastor hesitated. “God didn’t take your daughter, Sarah,” he said. “Illness did.”

Sarah snorted. “Sure. Pass the buck when it’s convenient.” She could feel herself dangerously at the edge of breaking down, and wondered why on earth she’d thought it was a good idea to come here.

The pastor reached for her hand. His were warm and papery, familiar. “Heaven’s an amazing place,” he said softly. “She’s up there, and she’s looking down on us, right now, you know.”

Sarah felt her throat tighten. “My daughter,” she said, “can’t ride a ski lift without hyperventilating. She panics in elevators. She doesn’t even like bunk beds. She’s terrified of heights.”

“Not anymore.”

“How do you know that?” Sarah exploded. “How do you know that there’s anything afterward? How do you know it doesn’t just…end?”

“I don’t know,” the pastor said. “But I can hope. And I truly believe that your daughter is in heaven, and even if she does still get scared, Jesus will be there to keep her safe.”

She turned away as a tear streaked down her cheek. “She doesn’t know Jesus,” Sarah said. “She knows me.”

ABE FOUND HIMSELF DEFYING gravity. He’d be standing in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, and he’d find himself rising to the balls of his feet. He could not walk fast down the street without starting to float between strides. He started to put stones in the pockets of his pants, which were all too long for him now.