Matt Bell - How They Were Found

It doesn’t take her long to recognize the pattern, to see that what Little Jeff is made of is all that she made her first Jeff quit or change or give up. She’s lost her boyfriend and gained all the things she hated about him, and yet she wishes she could be home instead of at work. She thinks about calling Jeff but she knows she’ll sound crazy, so she calls her apartment instead.

Little Jeff answers on the third ring but doesn’t speak. Allison says, I just called to make sure you’re okay.

Allison doesn’t know what to say next, what she expected to happen. She holds the phone to her ear a little longer, listening to Little Jeff breathe, and then she says goodbye and hangs up the phone. She decides that on the way home she’ll pick up a bucket of fried chicken and some mashed potatoes. Once upon a time, it was Jeff’s favorite food.

Allison once again gets used to dirty clothes on the floor, socks under the coffee table, skid-marked underwear kicked beside the tub. After a week, she’s used to the fact that even though she works all day she’s still going to have to do the dishes when she comes home. Ditto for cooking dinner, for doing laundry, for making sure the rent gets paid on time.

The next cable bill that comes, she’s furious at the seven dollars and ninety-nine cents she’s been billed for a porno. She charges into the living room with the bill clenched in her hand, but then she remembers how she freaked out when Jeff did the same thing, thinking he wouldn’t get caught, and how her yelling didn’t do either of them any good.

During this same time period, she comes to understand that it’s not only the bad habits Jeff quit that make up Little Jeff. There are also qualities that Allison forgot she even missed, because they’ve been gone so long or because they disappeared from her and Jeff’s relationship without announcing their departure. She notices the long absence of these traits only when they reemerge: Little Jeff writes poems on the backs of take out receipts and on yellow sticky notes, just like Jeff used to do. She finds them in odd places, as if Little Jeff doesn’t understand that it might be more romantic to put them on her side of the bed or on her nightstand. She finds a haiku— freezer door left open / letting out the stark cold air / I am apology —taped to a box of her tampons, then free verse tucked into the toes of her galoshes. The poems aren’t good exactly, but she takes them from their hiding places and puts them in the scrapbook where she kept Jeff’s poems, then, unsure if she should treat them as two separate authors, she removes them and starts a new collection. These new poems are written by someone who is like Jeff but is not him, unless she counts the leavings of a body as part of a person. Unless she counts the dead skin cells ground into her carpet or the sweat soaked permanently into the mattress, the one lone hair stuck in the drain of their shower because she is too lazy to dislodge it. She could count these things as Jeff but doesn’t, and if these things are not Jeff, then neither is this other person.

The first time she has sex with Little Jeff is the best sex she’s had in a year. What Little Jeff knows about her is what Jeff used to know, back when he cared more about her happiness than his own. Afterward, with Little Jeff curled against her longer body, she recognizes this is unfair, but she thinks it again anyway. She has always wondered why her friends are constantly falling into bed with their ex-boyfriends and now she understands. It is good to be known, to have your likes and dislikes already clear before the act even begins.

Three months after Jeff moves out, Allison is still learning to take the good with the bad, to put up with the boogers stuck to her furniture if it means she gets poems tucked in her purse. She hates that Little Jeff smokes so much, but she doesn’t ask him to quit. She doesn’t ask him to change anything, at first because she doesn’t want to drive him away and then later because she is afraid of what will happen to whatever he quits.

Whatever she and Little Jeff have, it may end one day, and then what? What if another, smaller version comes to live with her?

This time, she’ll let her man do whatever he wants, be whoever he needs to be, and she’ll decide whether to stay or go based on who he is, not who she wants him to be.

Together, they go to other places that Jeff and Allison went when they were new. They go to an art museum that Allison has wanted to see forever, and they go to a movie that Little Jeff picks out of the paper, some remake of an eighties cartoon that Allison never watched and still doesn’t like. They go to the botanical gardens, a place people only go when they start dating or when they get married or when they are a thousand years old. Allison is glad that Little Jeff has so much facial hair or else she would have to worry that people would think she was letting her kid smoke. As it is, they hold hands and kiss and she learns to stop caring what other people think they see. She has often made choices because someone else told her she should, because she read about a new diet in a magazine or because her friends were all doing the same. Little Jeff is everything she took from Jeff by doing this, and it’s enough for her to see she doesn’t want to be that way ever again.

One day, Allison comes home from work with an armload of groceries, thrilled at the truly decadent meal she’s making for the two of them for dinner. Nowhere in her bags is any organic fruit or wheatgrass or any labels with the words high-fiber on them. Instead, she’s cooking footlong coney dogs, with chili out of a can and onions out of a plastic bag. She’s frying French fries and making root beer floats. She knows eating this is going to make her sick, but she also knows it’s going to make Little Jeff happy.

She sits her groceries down on the counter and calls for him but there’s no answer. It takes her a minute to realize that the television is dark, that it isn’t tuned to sports news or the endless reruns of crime procedural shows that always seem to be on. Walking through the apartment, she notices other things: There are no clothes on the floor of the bathroom, no wads of tissue crumpled along Little Jeff’s side of the bed.

She’s nearly in a panic trying to find him, but eventually she does. He’s outside on the apartment’s small balcony, somewhere she’s never seen him go before. There isn’t any furniture out there, so he’s sitting on the concrete.

It takes her a minute to realize he’s crying. In the years she was with the real Jeff, she never saw him cry, and so Allison doesn’t know what to do. She reaches in her purse and offers Little Jeff a cigarette from the pack she purchased herself a few days ago, after convincing herself that she’d been quit long enough that it was okay to have just one. Little Jeff shakes his head, his eyes brimming, and it’s only then that Allison realizes what seemed different about the apartment. It hadn’t smelled like smoke when she came in.

Little Jeff’s quit smoking.

She drops her purse and scoops him up in her arms, and as he curls against her she can feel he’s lost weight, and although it takes a little longer to be sure, she sees he’s lost height too, that he is even smaller than he was before. Even his facial hair is thinning, fading from a full goatee to a tiny triangle of soul patch.

Allison is furious, but not at Little Jeff, who she keeps rocking and reassuring that everything will be okay, even though she’s sure that it won’t be, that if she doesn’t do something then he’ll be gone soon.

She needs to call Jeff. Needs to tell him not to stop quitting everything she made him quit, because she’s sure that’s what’s happened.

She wants a cigarette, craves it intensely, but she fights the urge. It’s taken her months, but she’s finally realizing that Little Jeff might not be the only thing leftover from the breakup.