An old picture of two children, brother and sister, in church clothes standing in front of a fire hydrant, his hair bleached blond and nose sunburned and her arms around his shoulders and her face turned up, mouth open in song, eyes closed, arm out and palm up, cupping pools of sunlight and the boy looking directly at the camera, eyes small and black and wet, mouth set, small and angry.
Mrs. Shepherd couldn’t find the picture she was looking for, the one she wanted to frame and give to Leah for her desk. She called out to her husband who was in the garage, but he didn’t answer. She kept looking, but never found it and never gave Leah a picture for the desk in her office at her new job.
Wooden rockets on strings.
It had been an oppressively scented summer afternoon — lilac and manure in the air like the white seeds of a dandelion released by pursed lips. The brightly colored pictures of men, women, and children in fine clothes that shone like fires. She made up elaborate stories about each picture for Jacob — fantasias of child princes and glittering wooden attendants, parents dying of grief over the death of a child, a beautiful princess, bare and reclined, broken hearted, throwing herself into the hearth upon the death of her betrothed, her teeth small and smile endless, like a shoreline. Towers of pastel blue and orange light. Monstrous men in black robes, lurking in the shadow of crypts and tombs with bright eyes, singing softly in unknown modes, spiriting off young maidens and the young maidens escaping, bloody but free, fleeing across the edge of hills as night fell toward the very end of the kingdom, which is the end of everything, even Leah uncertain what exists beyond the last line of her story. All in a sunset of colors of which she could not even guess the names.
Jacob begged for more stories but Leah left to go find the neighborhood boys out in the streets and yards with hopes that they would let her play and listen to them curse.
When Leah moved back to Crow Station, she was surprised to find that she didn’t know anyone. She expected to see old classmates or people from church that she knew, but it was as though the whole of the town had been replaced. “Everyone you know probably moved away or died,” her mother said one evening when they met for dinner at the new restaurant built on the bypass. Her mother shrugged. Her father was looking for the waitress for a refill. Leah was relieved.
“I still have two brain damages they can’t fix.” Leah wrote and the woman smiled.
Leah was a listener. She would not say a good listener because that implied a level of active compassion that Leah felt she lacked, despite her job and despite her best efforts and despite all of the people who tearfully hugged her and thanked her and all of the people who wrote her letters, even years later, telling her how her help got them back on their feet, despite all of the people she knew who remarked upon her obvious compassion and tireless caring, despite all of this, she didn’t feel it. It didn’t come naturally. Her immediate reaction was something akin to terse irritation. The women wire thin or spilling out of too-tight clothing with rough-mouthed children or children quiet to the point of concern. Drugs, alcohol, men, their curses were the same but impossibly varied in their separate shades. Leah knew what everyone was going to say and listened with concealed impatience. And yet each time was surprised by some unexpected thorn, some quiver of fact that suddenly made the alien face before her real, and Leah crumbled before it, reaching out her hand and promising help. The twinge of pain in her eyes was misinterpreted by the women as gentle sympathy, and they felt relief that they’d been heard. One who left college to care for a mentally handicapped sibling. One who was left by a seemingly good man in the night. One who’d fought against disease. One who’d taken in these children that weren’t hers and just needed to get to her next paycheck so that all could eat.
She was able to keep these feelings in and to present nothing but the most generous smile and gentle touches on an arm or a shoulder and those non-committal grunts that signal to a speaker that she is listening, but she felt it and it bothered her that she felt that way.
“They’s just screaming and screaming but I ain’t never heard them.”
But she was good at listening. She listened to the women talk all day. She listened to their children. She listened to the staff talking idly at their desks to spouses on their cell phones or to catty chatter in the kitchen break room. She listened to people at tables next to her at restaurants and to attorneys talking to clients in the hallways at the courthouse and to children arguing in grocery stores and to old people talking to whoever will pause long enough to listen. Leah listened, whether she wanted to or not, and she wondered what it would have been like to be someone else.
“They traded breath all morning and then ate lunch in front of the television.”
She listened and she watched, everyone bleeding everyone else’s stories, even the ones they promised not to tell, all too good to keep to themselves.
“No one can hear us. Come on.”
At the school, ghosts spoke from the pipes in the winter.
Prior to the lawsuit, Leah Shepherd had nearly saved up enough for a down payment on a small ranch house, built circa 1968, in a small subdivision just outside of town called Streamland. She’d been renting a house within walking distance of work for years and saving what she could, but the suit took her savings and her retirement and she ended up moving not into a house of her own but into the one-bedroom apartment on the bypass, and at night with the window open, she listened to the trees and at dusk she walked in the woods and wondered about the woman she saw slumping around town. That filthy woman. Her long hair in greased tangles. Her face set in a sullen scowl. Her back bent beneath her backpack. Where was she right then? In a dimly lit room with walls ruined by rain, plaster buckling with veins of black mold. Behind a dumpster unsuccessfully holding out her hand for help getting up off the ground. Some place with the smell of damp. Some place with the smell of ripe bodies. Why not in a field in fresh air? Why not by a stream in fading light? Why not still in a small room? The woods drew in dark around Leah lost in thought.
Standing on the corner, before the judicial center, Leah Shepherd watched a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair bubble at the sight of a cigarette butt on the ground, between bricks. The exhausted nub contained a few happy puffs still. He bent to retrieve it, swinging long arms and rained joy. With the courthouse bell, it is time for work, so all went to work or to wait for the bailiff to unlock the doors so that they may go on in.
“Oh, honey, listen, just so morbidly obese…I don’t know why I looked it up on the Internet while at the house alone…but yeah, he died…but I can’t bring myself to make up his bed…I had the child with me yesterday…She wanted to see his father…I said to him, I said, What is your problem…yes it is my perception…a game, a whole big game…I am sick of being played for a fool…looking at women…smile…checking your house out…yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Some mornings, the sheriff’s deputies paraded prisoners to the courthouse for preliminary hearings tethered to one another. The deputies, four or five, in tan and brown, short cropped hair, shoulder CBs joshed and hummed, talked and joked. A cluster of coughing guffaws fluttering up. They called out to each other and their eyes wrinkled. The prisoners in orange jumpsuits, together waist-to-waist. Wrists bound penitently at the hip, fingers fingering fingers. They didn’t jaw. What would be worth saying? It all is what it is. So they sauntered, heads lolling on necks. They were a stream wishing for a single smoke in the morning air. Young men in no rush to get on with anything. The bell in the courthouse tower clanged the hour and they slipped inside the heavy glass door. Families stood by and watched. They rang with sorrows, their clapper tongues clapped lip, mouth, sounding waist, shoulder, head, and crown. They tolled: bring cousins, sisters, neighbors. Cell phones bubbled with incoming messages. Thumbs texted truncated tales to someone, somewhere. Outside on cement steps, they smoked, pitching butts to bricks, left to smolder.