Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

“Yeah, honey? You like the potatoes?”

I lower my voice to nearly a whisper. “Have you been contacted by anyone from New York? The cops? Or any Hasid people, Mom? Besides Jules? Think carefully. Has anyone talked to you about a painting? Did you ever go out there without me knowing?”

Her eyes pucker and she’s shaking her head. “I wanted to see you, honey. But I couldn’t. I go crazi on airplanes. You know that. I’m sorri I never came out. Please don’t be mad at me. Not about that. Be mad for other reasons.” Her breath quickens and her face turns a very pretty shade of red.

“I’m not mad at you. Calm down.” She has the words too. “I was never mad.”

She cries into her marionberry pie.

“I said I wasn’t mad. Don’t cry here.” I glance over her shoulder at the man. He’s pretending to look at the planes.

“I’m not crying,” she says through her tears. She wipes her runny nose with her hands and then wipes her eyes, which is gross. “I’m not crying, see?” She sniffles and smiles at me.

“Just be careful of strangers is all I’m saying. You can’t trust them. I mean it.”

“Don’t be silly. There are no strangers here,” my mom says. “Are you seeing Miles tonight?”

“Did you tell him about me being sick?”

In slow motion, her face starts to scrunch and morph again, invisible fingers pushing her flesh around.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I just want to know before I see him.”

Her face relaxes. “Was I not supposed to? He asked how you were and I didn’t want to lie. Should I have lied?” She looks at me intensely then, trying to read my thoughts. But I know she can’t.

Both Miles and Ralph are working at the mill these days. They’ll probably always work there, but who am I to say they should get out of town? They’re in a different department than my dad, though; he’s not trapped in the same way.

Outside Ralph’s crappy prefab, I can see their silhouettes in the window. They look like they’re doing the monkey dance with their arms, but probably not. I watch, missing the guys for the first time, even though I’m right here.

The door swings open and it’s Miles shouting, “Hey, buddy. What are you doing? Come inside.”

It’s me and Miles and Ralph at Ralph’s house. We drink homebrew from water glasses around a smudgy glass coffee table — Ralph and Miles in chairs on one side, legs splayed open the same, and me alone on the lumpy futon opposite them, smack in the middle. They look at me carefully, like I’m an extraterrestrial and they’re FBI agents who have to pretend they don’t know what I really am, and the whole scenario of this visit, them being so-called friends and this beer, is made up for my benefit. But the couch is safe enough. Yellow-level.

Miles asks what New York is like and jokes that I must be clubbing a lot, and I tell him I about my job. “But I’m not allowed to talk about it. Lots of big corporate secrets.”

“Yeah, like what?” Ralph asks.

Ralph was always the one getting in fights and Miles was always the one getting him out of them. Nothing much has changed, I don’t think.

I tell them everything. About and Mr. Fox and his oranges. Miles laughs at that. Even some more secret stuff about trends and the future of skinny jeans and orchids, which I’m not necessarily supposed to tell even though there’s no written contract. Three and a half beers later, I’m no longer pushing heavy stones around just to say a sentence.

“You should come visit sometime. I have an apartment in the city. It’s not that big, but—”

“Might have some vacation days.” Miles shrugs and tips back his beer. “Money’s tight.”

“I’d never live there,” Ralph says. “People are assholes.”

“And what the hell,” Miles says. “You’d have to be half-crazi to stay in the center of the Muslim bullseye.”

He turns bright red when he notices his word choice. But I don’t make any indication that it bothers me, because it doesn’t, just because that word is back and I don’t like it. And then I know: this room with Miles and Ralph — it’s another Rosetta stone to finding and unlocking the portal.

“Want another beer?” Miles asks. “Next I’ll try to make cherry flavor. For the girls.” He looks at my still-full glass. “You don’t like it? You think it’s too bitter.”

“No, I like it a lot.” I take another sip to prove it. “What girls?”

“Are you even supposed to drink?” Ralph asks. “With your meds.”

Miles slaps him on the shoulder, then looks at me sheepishly. “We heard,” he says. “You know, but your mom said you’re doing good.”

Before Ralph was my friend, Miles helped me beat him up. That was back in middle school, when Ralph stole my stick. We each had sticks that we took good care of, weapons that we used in epic recess battles against one another. Mine was curved at the end with a sharp hook. Ralph never let on where he’d hid it. I never saw it again.

I tell them to chill and that I’m totally fine to drink but can’t go nuts or anything. “I’m still me. You can ask me stuff.”

“Yeah, we know. That’s why we were wanting to ask you,” Ralph says, all serious. “Because you’re the expert. But if you’re not comfortable answering, that’s cool…how are those East Coast chicks?” He grins like

he’s so pleased with himself.

Miles says, “I heard they put out more.”

I decide to go invisible while they compare the girls they fucked since high school. I think of asking them about Nicolette, to see if they remember her like Jules does. If she inserted herself into everyone’s memory but mine. But I’m afraid they’d take her away from me if I do. Take away anything sacred about her.

Instead I ask them about Helen Morgan, the first girl I ever slept with, and they laugh until they remember something and then they say she got postpartum depression pretty bad, like as bad as you can get it after her third kid, and she tried to kill her baby but didn’t manage to and now she’s in jail in Seattle. And since we have someone with even bigger problems to talk about, they start to act like they know me again. They get comfortable, maybe too comfortable, and they’re on their sixth beer when they start trying to figure things out.

“So, are you sick like right now?” Miles says. “Right this second?”

I say no, but that “sick” isn’t really the right word.

“What is the right word?”

“‘Sick’ is just kind of loaded,” I say.

“What word then?”

“I mean ‘sick’ makes it sound like I have a cold and it’ll go away in a day.”

“So? What word?”

“I don’t know.”

Ralph is looking out the window, and it’s really dark outside, so he’s looking at nothing. “Were you sick when we were young and just didn’t know it yet?”

“He only got sick a year ago,” Miles says, then adds, “dumbass.”

But I don’t need Miles’s protection. Maybe Ralph is on to something.

I’m thinking about the time I pulled Jules’s hair. “Was that because I was sick?” I ask Ralph. He and Miles look back at me, too drunk to understand what I’m saying. We were fighting over a toy, I think, so I scribbled on a drawing Jules had made, and she got so mad she said I deserved to die. I pleaded with her, Jules take it back, say I’m not going to die . But she wouldn’t take it back. I tried to reason with her that if she didn’t, it might come true and wouldn’t she feel bad and she said, I want it to come true and I won’t take it back . And I pulled her hair so hard it came out in my hands.

I was just a kid then, but when I look back and remember that day, I’m standing inside the memory, and I look like I do now, hunched shoulders and glasses and scruff. A grown man pulling the hair of an eight-yearold girl.