Free Shelter in Place by Alexander Maksik

later would I be able to articulate.
    Later while he was in the shower, I sat on the front step with a cup of coffee.
    Now I lived in White Pine with my father, who had given up so much to live as close as he could to my mother, who had one day, with a hammer, without apparent warning, beaten a man to death.
    My sister was in London.
    Tess was in Cannon Beach.
    I considered each of these things. I was not happy, but I was calm.
    There was no circling bird. I was not burning with life. I was not pinned to the bed.
    I was even. My brain had slowed to a gentle pace. I found a brief peace in the sun, on the front step. And while it lasted, in those hours, I tried as best I could to work out a plan.
    I would see my mother. I would call Tess. I would take care of my father. I would find a job.
    He sat next to me. He smelled of soap and, as always, of Royall Lyme, a bottle of which his first girlfriend had given him before he left for Vietnam.
    â€œWhat do you do all day?” I asked him.
    â€œI work on the house. I read. Go into town. I’ve been looking for a job.”
    I nodded.
    â€œAnd I visit Mom.”
    â€œEvery day?”
    â€œOften as they let me,” he said.
    We sat for a while, neither of us talking.
    â€œI think I’ll come with you then.”
    He put his arm around my shoulder. “Sure,” he said. “All right. If that’s what you want to do.”

30.
    E ven today I hear sounds only my mother and those children would have heard.
    And, maybe, at first, Strauss himself.
    Two metallic clicks of the buckles.
    Her shoes on the asphalt.
    The solid steel making contact with Dustin Strauss’s skull.
    I have done experiments with bone. I have tapped a hammer against the back of my head.
    I have tried to know.
    I have been hearing these sounds now for nearly twenty years. Metal breaking bone. Metal moving through brain, the two textures. Hard and soft, a solid noise, a sucking noise. And those two children, four feet moving with my mother’s two. The back door opening. The slight give of the brown fabric beneath them, side by side. Scrape and click, scrape and click of the two seat belts. Male into female. Male into female. The solid slam of my mother’s door. Then the three of them waiting inside the sealed station wagon. Waiting while Mrs. Strauss cried over the body of her dead husband.
    After all these years, it is the sound that never recedes. The images fluctuate in clarity, but the sound only becomes louder.
    When I first arrived in White Pine, I did not ask questions. I did not read the papers. I did not watch the news. I didn’t know the man’s profession, or the names of his children. I had not yet seen the pictures. Not of my mother’s mug shot. Not of her hospital ID. Not of laughing Dustin Strauss, arm around his wife, grinning children by their sides. Not of my father on a bench at the courthouse hanging his head. Nothing in those early days had been filled in, so that morning with my father, I possessed only what I had manufactured. I was lonely and terrified, but I was not yet haunted by those photographs, that videotape.
    Tess though, she had seen all of it. I know that now. All of it. While I was lying blank in the motel room, she was out there reading about my mother and her crime. She came back to me each evening after work carrying all that information, all those images—victim, crime scene, father, mother, sister, me. The image of that bloodied hammer resting on the ground. For weeks she carried those images, those words—
brutal
and
horrific
and
senseless
and all the rest. And still she slid into our bed without hesitation, without fear, still she held me as we slept.
    Imagine this young woman, twenty years old, coming home and not saying a word. Having seen the photographs of my mother’s cold eyes, the way the papers added their dramatic shadows and sharp contrasts. Their cruel shading, doctoring the life from her face.
    Still