Yannick Murphy - The Call

We were quiet for the longest time. Even though the windows were closed I could hear the cluster flies in the house buzzing in the corners of the window frames. They were active and happy with all the solar heat circulating in our rooms that faced south. I let my thoughts wander. I thought about gravity again-how it wasn’t really a force and how its effect was caused by the curvature of space-objects inside of space spun in the same way a marble would spin inside the curved sides of a bowl, always going down. I thought about Einstein, how only twelve people were left alive who understood his theory of relativity, and I thought how I would devote the rest of my life to understanding it, just so there would be thirteen. I felt grandiose. It would be my debt to society to understand it fully. Jen and the children might someday come to understand why I would do it. Why I would give up on the calls, why I would give up on the substitute teaching, why I… and then Bruce licked my face. It was horrible. His breath stank. His tongue was huge and slobbering. He then moved to my ears, using his front teeth very gently to nibble and clean out whatever wax embedded in my conch-like swirling cartilage he could find. Besides being horrible, it tickled. I laughed then, too. I could not help myself. I tried to push Bruce away, but the more I did, the more he pressed his 150 pounds into me, intent on my ear. When I caught my breath, I said, Damn you Bruce, get away!

WHAT DRIVES UP THE DRIVEWAY WHEN I AM AT HOME ALONE WITH SAM:A loud pickup truck.

WHAT COMES OUT OF THE TRUCK:A man.

WHAT I SHOULD DO:Go outside and greet the man, but I already know what the man wants. I already know who the man is the way his eyes are cast down, the way his wife remains in the truck, staring straight ahead. I already know who he is by the way he knocks quietly on the glass of our front door. This is the man who shot my son.

WHAT I DO:I open the door and the man tells me who he is. I am Jason Lane. This is my wife, Carol, in the truck, he says, and he motions toward his truck. I know who she is. I have seen her before in the post office. She has retrieved her mail from a box that is right next to mine. We are postbox neighbors.

Jason Lane has a mustache whose top hairs are lighter than the rest, probably bleached by the sun. He is a man who has spent most of his days outdoors. Jason Lane shakes his head. Even in coming here it’s like I’m doing it for myself, doing it because I can’t stand the guilt, he says. He smells like chain saw oil. I haven’t hunted since then, he says. I won’t hunt again. It’s not enough for you, is it? It would not be enough for me if I were the father of your boy.

WHAT I THINK IS FUNNY:That for so long I wanted an apology from this man and now I don’t want to hear him say anything more. His wife in the car, Carol, looks out over where our garden grows in warmer weather. Jason Lane nods his head. It sure would not be enough, he says, and then he says, Call the police now. His eyes are bloodshot and blue, the kind of blue that either goes right through you or the kind you think they are so clear blue there is nothing behind them, no intelligence in the man. Or I’ll call them, or she will, he says, nodding his head toward his wife. So where is the phone? he says and he makes his way past me into the house. Bruce and Nelly are on him in a second, wagging their tails, getting in his way, slobbering on his coat front because to them everyone who walks through our door is a friend. Then Sam comes downstairs. Sam is tall for his age and is strong from all the swimming he has been doing. His shoulders are wide, and he does not look like he has spent time in a hospital bed cocooned in a pale blue blanket with legs that were once as skinny as arms.

This is Jason Lane. This is the man who shot you, I say to Sam. Sam holds out his hand. I’m Sam, pleased to meet you, he says, and I know how Sam has a strong handshake, I have felt him practicing it on me before and I have felt the bones in my hand grinding against one another when he does it.

Jason Lane shakes his head. This is all wrong. This isn’t the way I planned. If you’d just give me the phone, I could get this over with the way it should be gotten over with. I could turn myself in, he says.

How did it happen? Sam says, excited by a hunting story. Did you hear the grouse first, did you lead your gun just by hearing where it was he flew up from and then there I was sitting in my camo in the tree stand?

Yes, that’s how it was. I lead the grouse right after I hear them, they are so loud when they beat their wings. I’ve been hunting all my life. I know just the right amount of distance to aim in front of them, he says.

Then Carol, his wife, is at the door. I open it for her but she does not look at me. She looks at her husband. Did you do it? she says to him.

Yes, he’s made the call, I say to her. Go on home now, I say to Jason Lane.

Go on back to the car, he says to his wife and she leaves.

Jason Lane turns to me. There is more he wants to say to me, but I don’t want to hear it. The day is warming up outside. Sam and I could take the dogs through the fields, we could breathe in the smell of last summer’s grass melting beneath the snow, warming up in the sunshine, and we could breathe in the smell of a milder wind blowing through the needles of the pines.

Go home with your wife, I say to him, and then he leaves and the smell of the chain saw oil is gone, too. I am glad to be free of the smell. It was the smell of a machine and there is nothing mechanical taking place. What is taking place is as layered as something in nature. I won’t ever be able to figure it out. It is the pond surface rippling, the meandering grooves of bark on a tree, the tall grass and milkweed leaning over in a strong wind looking like the form of a man lying down in it, only there is no man.

CALL:My wife, in summer. I can hear her voice. She is calling us into the house while the kids and I are by the stream. Sam, in his shorts, stands in the shallow water trying to catch trout in his hands, and laughing because he can’t, because Bruce and Nelly have bounded into the water with him, muddying the water, scaring the trout away, making them dart up under the shadows of the shore. Sarah is low on the bank, peering into the dark places between piles of brush, calling to foxes or voles, any creatures she hopes live inside. Mia rides on my shoulders as we head back to the house and my big hands fit all the way around her thin sun-warmed ankles. “Watch your head,” I say to Mia as we enter the house and Nelly and Bruce, wet from the stream, push their way past us, to be first through the door. Jen serves us casserole made with zucchini fresh from the garden and while we eat I look out at all of them, happy to see their faces, the steam rising off their plates making me want to wave it away, making me want to always be able to see them as clearly as I can.

YANNICK MURPHY is the author of the novels Signed, Mata Hari ; Here They Come ; and The Sea of Trees , as well as two story collections and several children’s books. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Chesterfield Screenwriting Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading and The O. Henry Prize Stories . She lives in Vermont with her veterinarian husband and their children.