Free Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman Page A

deep.
    He had been tender with Mom, but Mom didn’t need a protector, except on that day the Fleetwood slid on ice, skipped the sidewalk, and flew toward her. I was in school. Kurt was at work, breaking frost off a freighter. Mom died in a snow pile, surrounded by the faces of neighbors and strangers that hung like lanterns in the late-morning winter light. I went with him to O’Malley’s Funeral Home the night they delivered Mom from the morgue. We sat in two big chairs, both of us stone-still, every creak and sound in that old house striking through us. O’Malley called us in to see Mom. A white sheet pulled to her chin, lilies in a clear vase on a table. I waited, and I think Kurt did, too, for her to wake so we could carry her home and she could finish the cake she was baking, but she didn’t stir, and O’Malley rubbed his small, speckled hand over Kurt’s back and Kurt put his arm around me and I felt the snow in my boot treads melt into the gold carpet. Kurt bent over and kissed Mom. I kissed her, too, on the forehead, and as I pulled back my eyes caught the tunnel of a lily, white and winter-cold, tiny crisscrosses of veins alive with water from O’Malley’s tap.
    We walked home. Snow fell, yet the sky was clear, and the moon was a fuzzy light and the footprints of the day were gone and streets and alleys lay before us like uncharted territory. Kurt reached down and held my hand. It was warm and wide as a mitten. We walked to the church and stood outside beneath the stained glass, peering through snowfall to amber, red, blue, burgundy, and the palest white, the bone-white of Christ un-nailed from the cross, His body draped like linen, His wounds, dried red slits, marking hands and feet and the place where the lance drew water and blood from His side. Kurt said he was confused. He said being a father and a husband were a singular thing to him, and he didn’t know if he could be one without the other, but he would try. He wanted to stay out in the snowall night. He didn’t want to return to the house because it would be like coming home from a late shift and Mom’s apron would be on the table and the scent of her would be there and there’d be a plate of something in the oven and the TV would be murmuring, or maybe she’d be in the bath or maybe out of the bath and reading in the backroom, her feet in those thick gray hunting socks she wore, or maybe she’d have fallen asleep and he’d have to tiptoe and stay quiet like a ghost, like he did on so many nights when she fell asleep, and he’d slip under the blanket feeling the trapped warmth of her burn through him like whiskey. Kurt didn’t want to go home and not find that.
    We left the church and walked past Veterans Stadium and all the way to the docks, where the ships floated like gray, rusted mountains on black water streaked with a few lights. Kurt told me about each ship, where it had been, the seas it had sailed, the repairs it needed, the clunk and steam of its engine and how he swung from ropes, painting its sides, his feet tap-dancing over the water. He spoke until dawn, never letting go of my hand. The sky that brought the moon was gone; the sun broke clear on the horizon, and the ships in the new day were less majestic than at night. We walked home.
    Vera stopped crying and laughed into Kurt’s chest. He pushed her hair back and wiped her eyes. They left the balcony. The muslin white curtain floated out of the sliding glass door and blew in the breeze. I didn’t ask Kurt why he chose to sleep in Vera’s room. I knew. Vera didn’t remind Kurt of Mom or the house or our alley or his job; she was magic in the lamplight, with clothes and scents and stories from other places that allowed Kurt, and me, to leave behind, at least for a moment, the inklings of who we were. I stepped off my balcony and sat in the dark of the bed in Room 503, tasting cinnamon and bubble gum and waiting for Kurt’s knock to go get something to eat.

eight
    Eva