Matt Bell - How They Were Found

Little Jeff falls asleep alone that night, pushed all the way over on his side of the bed, as if he recognizes that his diminishing size has changed the physical dynamic between them. He’s child-like in a way he wasn’t only a day before, and the idea of him as a lover is past. Allison lies awake, staring at him and wondering what her own counterpart might look like. She tries to remember all she quit while Jeff and she dated. Smoking is a given, but other things are vaguer. Which of Allison’s haircuts would her leftover sport? She flips through the mental images she has of herself, eventually settling on the long perm she’d had when they started dating. Jeff had liked it, but had encouraged her to try something new, something more contemporary.

What else? Allison thinks about her job at the textbook publisher, about how she hates it but has never looked for anything else. She thinks about all the careers she wanted instead, and wonders if they count as things that she quit or if they were never what she actually was. She had wanted to be a gymnast as a little girl, and then an astronaut. She had played the flute in junior high, but gave it up in high school to try to date a different class of boy than what she found in the band. She owns a bike she never uses. Ditto rollerblades. Ditto yoga videos.

This Little Allison, she might wear hideous blue eyeliner or have terribly outdated tastes in clothing, but Allison doesn’t really think that’s all of it.

Most of what Allison has quit are good things, things that might have made her happier than she is. She doesn’t have bad habits, just bad follow-through.

Little Jeff is snoring quietly, his tiny hands folded over his belly. She wonders if she is supposed to stop Jeff from starting up all his old bad habits, or if she is supposed to encourage him until this other vanishes completely.

Watching Little Jeff sleep, she wonders if he’s dreaming. If he dreams. She wonders if it hurt when he shrank, or if it was just something that happened. She wishes he could talk so he could tell her what he wanted her to do.

She gets out of bed and reaches for her phone. Dials Jeff’s cell. It rings and rings and then, right before the voicemail should click on, he answers, his voice groggy with sleep.

He says, Hello? Allison?

She hangs up by slamming the clamshell shut, then turns the phone off so he can’t call her back. She sits in the dark with the phone clenched between her hands until she’s sure of what she wants to do, and then she gets up and does it. Gets dressed. Puts her shoes on. Goes downstairs to the parking lot and moves her car close to the front of the building, then goes back upstairs with the engine running.

Quietly, Allison wraps the sleeping boy in his blanket and carries him down to the car. He’s so small. She wishes she had a car seat for him but she doesn’t. She’ll have to be careful. He stirs when she buckles him in but doesn’t wake up, only sticks his thumb in his mouth and sucks hard. She gets in the driver’s seat and just drives.

At Jeff’s new place, Allison peeks in the bedroom window, her toes digging into the soft dirt around his bushes. It takes a minute for her eyes to adjust, but thankfully Jeff’s sleeping with his television on, something she never would have let him do.

Not that she cares. She doesn’t, for real this time, and anyway she’s not there to see Jeff, or at least not just Jeff. She’s there to see if she’s there too.

And she is.

There, like a doll tucked into Jeff’s arms, is a tiny version of her, complete with the long hair Allison predicted. On the nightstand are the bulky red glasses she got rid of in college, folded neatly beside a glass of water. It’s all she can see from the bushes, but it’s enough.

The only other thing she sees—the very last detail before she turns away from the window—is how happy they both look. How contented. How like a father and a daughter.

She wants to look like that too. Wants to look like that with them. Wants to look like a family, with him and him and her.

She wants to stop quitting and then unquitting. She wants to stop hurting people by doing one or the other. She wants to stick with something and make it work this time, no matter what.

Allison doesn’t know what will happen when Jeff meets Little Jeff, or when she meets Little Allison, but that doesn’t matter. She’s tired of all the warnings, all the shows and magazines and well-intentioned friends telling her it’s too risky to do this thing or that thing. All the voices telling her she can’t do what she wants.

She walks back to her car and opens the passenger door, then crouches down and carefully unbuckles the sleeping boy. Little Jeff slings his arms around her neck like the toddler he’s becoming, and she lifts him with an arm tucked under his hips. Even in the dim glow of the dome light she can see how young he looks. His facial hair is completely gone, and he’s even a little pudgy, a little fat in the cheeks. Allison kisses him on his forehead, then carries him up the walk toward Jeff’s front door. She doesn’t know what any of this is or what it might mean, but she’s willing to try anyway, to trust that together they can make it work.

She reaches for the doorbell. She rings it. She thinks of what to say, of the dozens of ways she might say what she needs to. She settles on one, and when the door opens she says it as fast as she can, trying to make a million new promises all at once.

THE BOY CARRIES THE BLUEPRINT CATALOGS EVERYWHERE HE GOES. At school, he keeps them in his backpack, only occasionally looking inside to spy their colorful covers, comforted simply by their presence, their proximity. It is different at home. After school, he locks himself in the empty house and sits at the kitchen table, where he fans the catalogs out in front of him as he eats his snack. He compares the artist’s renditions on the left page with the floor plans on the right, then moves to the living room floor, where he watches television and turns the thin catalog pages. He mutes his cartoons so he can hear himself enunciating the names of the homes he hopes his father will build.

Ranches: Crestwood, Echo Hills, Nova.

Split Levels: Timber Ridge, Elk Ridge.

The Capes: Cod, Vincent, and Chelsey.

Two-story houses, like the one they live in, in ascending order by size: Walden, Westgate, Somerset, Carbondale.

The boy has not been reading long and wants to be sure that when the time comes he can spell the new house’s name, that he can say it. He pronounces slowly, then more confidently. He wants the new home to be built from the ground up, so it will not have anyone else’s history attached to it, so that he knows for sure that no one will have died in the garage. He often wonders if they would be better off without a garage at all.

Only after his father’s obsession with the catalogs passed did the boy take them to his own room. He thought he’d get in trouble for claiming them but never did, not even later when he started sneaking them to school in his backpack. The boy is years away from the time he steals his first porno magazine from beneath his father’s mattress, but when he does he will remember the catalogs, remember the feel of their crinkly, hand-worn pages. Once again, he will find himself too young to understand what he’s looking at or why he wants it, the magazines reminding him only obliquely of this time in his life, when so much hope is invested in so little paper.

At dinner, the boy tells his father about the houses he likes best this week, about how he is having trouble deciding between the Crestwood and the Cape Cod. The father glances at the pages as the boy presents them. A month ago he smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm, even joined in with comments of his own, but now he is less demonstrative with his opinions.