Melanie Thon: First, Body: Stories

No one was inclined to offer a cure. He started smoking pot instead, which was what he was doing that night in the park when Roxanne appeared. Materialized , he said afterward, out of smoke and air .

But she was no ghost. She laughed loudly. She even breathed loudly — through her mouth. They lay naked on the bed under the open window. The curtains fluttered and the air moved over them.

“Why do you like me?” she said.

“Because you snore.”

“I don’t.”

“How would you know?”

“It’s my body.”

“It does what it wants when you’re sleeping.”

“You like women who snore?”

“I like to know where you are.”

He thought of his sister’s three daughters. They were slim and quick, moving through trees, through dusk, those tiny bodies — disappearing, reassembling — those children’s bodies years ago. Yes, it was true. His sister was right. Better that he stayed away. Sometimes when he’d chased them in the woods, their bodies had frightened him — the narrowness of them, the way they hid behind trees, the way they stepped in the river, turned clear and shapeless, flowed away. When they climbed out downstream, they were whole and hard but cold as water. They sneaked up behind him to grab his knees and pull him to the ground. They touched him with their icy hands, laughing like water over stones. He never knew where they might be, or what.

He always knew exactly where Roxanne was: behind the screen, squatting on the toilet; standing at the sink, splashing water under her arms. Right now she was shaving her legs, singing nonsense words, Sha-na-na-na-na , like the backup singer she said she was once. “The Benders — you probably heard of them.” He nodded but he hadn’t. He tried to picture her twenty-four years younger, slim but not scrawny. Roxanne with big hair and white sequins. Two other girls just like her, one in silver, one in black, all of them shimmering under the lights. “But it got too hard, dragging the kid around — so I gave it up.” She’d been with Sid twenty-nine days and this was the first he’d heard of any kid. He asked her. “Oh yeah,” she said, “of course.” She gave him a look like, What d’you think — I was a virgin ? “But I got smart after the first one.” She was onto the second leg, humming again. “Pretty kid. Kids of her own now. I got pictures.” He asked to see them, and she said, “Not with me.”

“Where?” he said.

She whirled, waving the razor. “You the police?”

She’d been sober five days. That’s when the singing started. “If you can do it, so can I,” she’d said.

He reminded her he’d had no choice.

“Neither do I,” she said, “if I want to stay.”

He didn’t agree. He wasn’t even sure it was a good idea. She told him she’d started drinking at nine: stole her father’s bottle and sat in the closet, passed out and no one found her for two days. Sid knew it was wrong, but he was almost proud of her for that, forty years of drinking — he didn’t know anyone else who’d started so young. She had conviction, a vision of her life, like Roseland, who said she’d wanted to be a doctor since fifth grade.

Sid was out of Emergency. Not a demotion. A lateral transfer. That’s what Mrs. Mendelson in personnel said. Her eyes and half her face were shrunken behind her glasses.

“How can it be lateral if I’m in the basement?”

“I’m not speaking literally, Sid.”

He knew he was being punished for trying to stop the girl from banging her head on the wall.

Inappropriate interference with a patient . There was a language for everything. Sterilized equipment contaminated .

Dropped — he’d dropped the tray to help the girl.

“I had to,” he told Roxanne.

“Shush, it’s okay — you did the right thing.”

There was no reward for doing the right thing. When he got the girl to the floor, she bit his arm.

Unnecessary risk . “She won’t submit to a test,” Enos said after Sid’s arm was washed and bandaged. Sid knew she wasn’t going to submit to anything — why should she? She was upstairs in four-point restraint, doped but still raving; she was a strong girl with a shaved head, six pierced holes in one ear, a single chain looped through them all. Sid wanted Enos to define unnecessary .

Now he was out of harm’s way. Down in Postmortem. The dead don’t bite. Unconscious men don’t make choices . Everyone pretended it was for his own sake.

Sid moved the woman from the gurney to the steel table. He was not supposed to think of her as a woman, he knew this. She was a body, female. He was not supposed to touch her thin blue hair or wrinkled eyelids — for his own sake. He was not supposed to look at her scars and imagine his mother’s body — three deep puckers in one breast, a raised seam across the belly — was not supposed to see the ghost there, imprint of a son too big, taken this way, and later another scar, something else stolen while she slept. He was not to ask what they had hoped to find, opening her again.

Roxanne smoked more and more to keep from drinking. She didn’t stash her cartons of cigarettes in the freezer anymore. No need. She did two packs a day, soon it would be three. Sid thought of her body, inside: her starved, black lungs shriveled in her chest, her old, swollen liver.

He knew exactly when she started again, their sixty-third day together, the thirty-ninth and final day of her sobriety.

He drew a line down her body, throat to belly, with his tongue. She didn’t want to make love. She wanted to lie here, beneath the window, absolutely still. She was hot. He moved his hands along the wet, dark line he’d left on her ashy skin, as if to open her.

“Forget it,” she said. The fan beat at the air, the blade of a chopper, hovering. He smelled of formaldehyde, but she didn’t complain about that. It covered other smells: the garbage in the corner, her own body.

They hadn’t made love for nineteen days. He had to go to his mother’s tonight but was afraid to leave Roxanne naked on the bed, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the last one. He touched her hip, the sharp bone. He wanted her to know it didn’t matter to him if they made love or not. If she drank or not. He didn’t mind cigarette burns on the sheets, bills missing from his wallet. As long as she stayed.

The pictures of his three nieces in his mother’s living room undid him. He didn’t know them now, but he remembered their thin fingers, their scabbed knees, the way Lena kissed him one night — as a woman, not a child, as if she saw already how their lives would be — a solemn kiss, on the mouth, but not a lover’s kiss. Twelve years old, and she must have heard her mother say, Look, Sid, maybe it would be better if you didn’t come around — just for a while — know what I mean ? When he saw her again she was fifteen and fat, seven months pregnant. Christina said, Say hello to your uncle Sid , and the girl stared at him, unforgiving, as if he were to blame for this too.

These were the things that broke his heart: his nieces on the piano and the piano forever out of tune; dinner served promptly at six, despite the heat; the smell of leather in the closet, a pile of rabbit skin and soft fur; the crisp white sheets of his old bed and the image of his mother bending, pulling the corners tight, tucking them down safe, a clean bed for her brave boy who was coming home.

Those sheets made him remember everything, the night sweats, the yellow stain of him on his mother’s clean sheets. He washed them but she knew, and nothing was the way they expected it to be, the tossing in the too-small bed, the rust-colored blotches in his underwear, tiny slivers of shrapnel working their way to the surface, wounding him again. How is it a man gets shot in the ass ? It was a question they never asked, and he couldn’t have told them without answering other questions, questions about what had happened to the men who stepped inside the hut, who didn’t have time to turn and hit the ground, who blew sky-high and fell down in pieces.