James Smythe - No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

‘What will it achieve?’ she asks. That’s what she worries about. She wants the family to be what they can be: as normal and whole as possible. She has lost her son already and now there are the four of them. She will do anything to preserve what she has and Laurence would likely say things to Lane that could irreparably harm their relationship. She begs him to calm down. He spends the afternoon looking at the tattoos through his sunglasses, quietly seething. In one of them, there is a toy dinosaur that Laurence recognizes as the one that Lane buried. He thinks, by the end of the day, as the sun is setting around them, that the print on her skin is, in some ways, even beautiful.

At the end of the week, Deanna realizes that Alyx hasn’t been talking to herself. One night as she’s tucking her into bed she asks about it, asks outright if her daughter has been seeing Sean since he died.

‘Sometimes,’ Alyx says.

‘Not this week though?’

‘He can’t come on vacation,’ Alyx says, and that seems to be enough for Deanna. She holds Alyx for a while on the little girl’s bed and they both fall asleep, because there’s something about Alyx’s smell that’s calming. The next day they go walking and there’s a moment where it seems as if Alyx has reverted, but she’s singing to herself. And when they get home, after a week that they all needed, and that they are all desperately sad to say goodbye to, Deanna watches for it, but the Sean-fantasy isn’t there. Alyx cries in the kitchen when she can’t find him – or, at least, that’s what Deanna supposes. They don’t talk about it. Alyx is sick from school for a few days and she watches cartoons and eats Pop-Tarts and lies on the sofa where Sean used to lie. She takes up the whole space.

Birthdays come and go. Alyx’s is quiet, and they think about Sean, because there’s no other choice. They try, though. The therapist tells Deanna that it’s important that they don’t ignore it, but that this is Alyx’s birthday. There are ways, she explains. So they have a cake, and a party, and they try to distract themselves. They don’t know how else to do this. For Lane’s birthday, they ask what she would like. She asks for money to extend her tattoo. Laurence gives it to her, on the condition that she talks to them about it as it goes. She agrees.

His campaign begins in earnest. Laurence goes out on the road, around the state, drumming up votes. He speaks at conferences. He does everything that’s required. On the calendar, his name is blocked out on almost every single day. There’s a gap, a week where there’s nothing booked in, and none of them can avoid it because it’s the anniversary of Sean’s death. A week of nothing at all, even though there are major events he’ll be missing. It’s a countdown, they all know, as the weeks before it are ticked off. He flies home on the last day with something written in it and the very next day they all wake up early and drive to the graveyard.

There was a time that they visited it a lot, at the start, but Deanna had to stop herself. She worried that if she kept coming she would become too used to this place: to the faded glory of the more ancient headstones, the manicured grass, the wrought iron fencing that blocked some plots off from others. As if it wasn’t all the same under the soil. So now it’s once a month, or less. It’s been so long since they were all here at the same time. Grass has grown all over the plot and they can’t see where they buried the toys that day. Deanna puts flowers down, which is ridiculous, she thinks. He didn’t like flowers and here I am, having spent nearly a hundred dollars on them. But she puts them down because they make her feel better. Around them, some plots don’t have flowers at all, and she reads the headstones. Some of them were young; nearly as young as Sean was. She plucks some flowers from his arrangement and leaves them on the other graves and she says a little prayer to them as well. Alyx cries and Lane holds her close. The little girl buries her face in her sister’s stomach.

In the car on the way home, Laurence says how quickly the year has gone. He says, ‘I can’t believe it’s been a year.’ The girls are silent. Deanna thinks, I don’t know if it’s been fast or slow. Everything has slipped into an expanse. Sean might as well have died a year ago, or yesterday, or tomorrow. It can never be undone.

She sits in the back, between her daughters, and she holds them close and kisses their heads: the soft child’s hair on one side, the harsh brittle bristles on the other.

Laurence brings all four of his favored news shows up in different corners of the screen and sits at the breakfast bar and eats his bacon and drinks the revolting milkshakes that Amit insists he has every morning. A blogger made a GIF from pictures of him that had been taken over the last thirteen months, showing his decreasing weight, a morphing slideshow sold as somewhere between comedy and tragedy; and that set the other blogs to speculating what it could mean. They touched on his personal traumas, of course, but also mentioned the S word: sick . They asked if there was maybe something wrong with Laurence that the public hadn’t been told about, and that made Amit flip out. He called in the middle of the night after reading something that speculated with actual medical terms and told them – told Deanna, in no uncertain words – that it was something they had to change. They must never, ever use the S word and they weren’t to let others use it either.

‘As soon as people start asking about the health of any normal candidate, their campaign is essentially screwed,’ he said. ‘Somebody can go from weight-loss to cancer in two or three posts and all of a sudden they’re out of the running. Laurence can take that even less than any of the others. Better a fat candidate than one who looks like he’s the S word, Dee.’

So she began to cook pasta for dinners. She made rich sauces, with real cream, and she started baking breads with cheese running through the dough. Amit bought them an old Paula Deen cookbook as a partial joke, along with a packet of real butter, and he told them to deep-fry everything. She sets the cooker to fry the bacon rather than griddling it, and she takes it out when it’s done and puts it into a thick-cut doorstep sandwich with full-sugar ketchup. It’s not helping. His belts are new, and his trousers. He has to tuck his shirts in more; in the worst cases, Deanna pins them at the back to make them taut again across his new frame. When he undresses for bed, she sees his ribs, a ladder of loose skin. He’s seen a doctor, quietly, to appease her – in case there was something wrong, the S word again, uttered privately – but he’s medically fine. He’s just thin. He’s not eating enough, was the diagnosis. That and stress, but one is an easier fix than the other.

He’s been away working for a fortnight, and only came back last night. Today, he’s off again. This, he’s warned them, is pretty much how it’ll be for the next year of their lives. So breakfast with him feels rare, suddenly, as if it’s a special occasion. His face appears on Fox, top right corner of the screen, and he selects it and maximizes it. He jacks the volume up to hear a man talking to camera as if it’s his friend, casual and smooth. His name is Bull Brady, the front wave of a new type of shock-pundit for the political channels as they attempt to make something dry considerably more popular. They’re met a few times. He doesn’t like Laurence, is the recollection.