Scraps Read online

  “Not true to the time period. Lose them.” He smiles, and several minions do their best imitation of bobblehead dolls.

  When you’re blonde, bombshell, and broke, you do what you have to do. But nothing stops you from reciting psychiatric diagnoses under your breath while you do it.

  I turn and head back to the set, imagining the many disorders of Hugh.

  But I don’t mean it. I’ll be as surprised as anyone by what happens next.

  The bobbleheads all turning to look in unison are my first clue. I follow their gazes and spy Melissa, Hugh’s office assistant and the only person on the set besides me who hasn’t slept with him yet, running up to us carrying a laptop. She waves it in the air like some kind of oversized surrender flag. “Someone’s posted a spoof trailer. For the movie.”

  I sigh. I don’t like anything that keeps lawyers busy. Unlike the rest of us, they make real money.

  Melissa sets down the laptop and turns it to face Hugh. She makes eyes at me. “You’re going to want to see this.”

  That doesn’t bode well. I slide in as gracefully as I can in a Kevlar vest and four-inch heels and hover behind Hugh’s shoulder.

  I catch most of the video as it plays. It’s not really a trailer—more a mash-up of outtakes and documentary footage, from someone very behind the scenes.

  The shot of my boobs getting duct-taped makes everyone laugh.

  The shot of me trying to run in four-inch heels and landing on my elbow pads makes everyone laugh harder.

  The one of me hopping across the sand, plastic bazooka in one hand, torture shoe in the other, makes me wince. My boobs weren’t duct-taped that day.

  Even I’m laughing by the time it’s done, though. It’s clever, sarcastic, and way better directed than anything Hugh has ever produced.

  And then I see the view count, and time does a weird, slow-motion folding thing.

  Twenty-six million views. In less than a day. I grab Danny’s arm, fake blood and all. “We’ve gone viral.”

  Melissa looks up at me, eyes still the size of plates. “More than that. Crusher picked it up.”

  The biggest movie blogger on the planet.

  She shifts her gaze to Hugh. “He says we’re going to be the next cult classic. Worst movie of all time.” She gulps, a kind of breathless I’ve never seen her. “And Sundance emailed you.”

  I watch the chaos erupting as heads explode. Even the bobbleheads know what that means.

  Bimbos and Grenades is actually going to make money. Big money.

  And every single person here has the same union boilerplate clause in their contract as I do. The unicorns-and-rainbows one that grants us a percentage of the take in lieu of actually being paid decently.

  The one that makes the actors and crew of some obscure movie rich every decade or so.

  We’ve just won the Hollywood lottery.

  Danny looks over at me, eyes huge. “What are you going to do?”

  I grin and pat the Kevlar and duct tape that has just made me famous. “I’m going to retire.”

  He stares at me, entirely uncomprehending. “But this is your big chance.”

  I can only imagine the follow-up gigs available to the best set of boobs in the worst movie ever made.

  He’s not wrong, though. My admissions letter to UC San Diego’s Graduate School of Neurolinguistics is still sitting on my coffee table, where it’s been taunting me every morning as I eat breakfast.

  Tuition’s not due until next week.

  Nobody will ever find me there.

  And just in case they do, I’ll liberate a roll of lucky duct tape on my way out.

  4

  The Day Before Fall

  That wailing—

  it can’t possibly be mine.

  My noisy, shrieking lament,

  hurled at the incoming lances

  of bitterness and hate.

  Zombie weapons,

  rising from the ashes

  over and over and over.

  Fall comes tomorrow

  with its brisk winds

  and defiant splendid colors

  and I shall rise to meet it.

  Today, I only weep.

  5

  Christmas

  I don’t remember when my son took his first steps, or ate his first authorized food, or slept through the night, even though those are the kinds of milestones parents aren’t supposed to forget.

  But I do remember the day I knew he was different.

  Not the early days of leaking suspicion, like the car trip when he was five weeks old and for two-and-a-half hours, I kept my beautiful boy calm by stroking the inside of his calf. One gentle finger, gliding from his ankle bone to the squishy parts of his knee and back again. Back and forth, like the tides or a heartbeat or a silent rocking chair in one of those old home movies with no sound.

  A child lost in sensation. Saved by it.

  There were more leaks as he grew. The baby who lay on my thighs, face a foot from mine, doing his very infant best to evade the smiles and coos and sweet, self-conscious lullabies that his sister had loved. An unwilling captive to the foolish games of a mother trying to love her son.

  Even then, I think I knew I would need to love him differently.

  But it was Christmas morning when I understood just how profoundly he didn’t want to be in our world.

  We were at my parents’ house. I don’t remember why—usually I avoided going home for holidays like the plague, allergic to the unholy lack of downtime for my introvert soul.

  There were cousins and packages and too many people taking pictures and too many voices trying to regulate what is meant to be chaos. Nobody controls Christmas morning, although certain members of my family have yet to be convinced.

  Twenty-three people. I know, because I counted them.

  My husband was taking time-lapse photography on a tripod in the corner. One picture every minute or two, kind of like flipping through one of those old Mickey Mouse cartoon books where you can see the mouse move across the page.

  In two hours and thirteen minutes, my son never moved. He was twenty-one months old, dressed in cute stripey pajamas and even cuter moccasins, ones that went all the way up to his knees. I’d opened a present for him early, one that I knew he would like. A set of stacking nesting boxes, simple cardboard ones.

  For two hours and thirteen minutes, my son sat in the center of twenty-three people and the uncontrollable chaos of Christmas morning and carefully stacked and unstacked his boxes.

  It still breaks my heart to look at that series of pictures. Not once, in two hours and thirteen minutes, does he look up. Not once does anything penetrate his bubble of nesting boxes and the simple motions of sliding one inside the next and then taking them out again.

  The final picture shows my boy, sitting in the middle of a desolate, alien landscape full of scraps of wrapping paper and gift tags that no longer say anything useful.

  Still stacking.

  -o0o-

  My son is still different.

  He still loses himself in sensation, and squirms if you try to look him in the eye, and cardboard nesting boxes are still one of his very favorite things.

  But I was wrong about him not wanting to be in our world.

  This past Christmas, he laughed when his sister unpacked his stocking for him. He looked in her eyes and lay down on her hands and giggled right from his belly in that way that he has, not understanding the strange ritual, but loving her all the same. It is possible that he thought his stocking was full of tickles.

  Mine was full of joy, and the peace that comes from understanding that the very special tourist visa between his lands and ours runs both ways.

  We’ve traveled, all of us. And we’ve learned.

  Loving him differently feels pretty normal these days.

  6

  The Grim Brother

  Some say children can’t be evil. I know differently.

  I stand here, looking at the fresh mound of earth in front of my sister’s gravestone, and know that I have buried evil in consecrated ground. For a priest, there is no greater sin.

  For the man, standing in the place where I commended her soul to God, I don’t know what to feel. If she had a soul, it had long since been promised elsewhere.

  It is not hell I fear, but rather, that my sister waits for me there.

  I am long past redemption. Perhaps all those many years ago when we returned from our disappearance—perhaps then the truth might have saved my soul. I’ll never know. I only know that as a boy of seven, I saw evil act, and she took my voice.

  My sister killed a woman. That’s no secret. People still tell stories about the two young children kidnapped and held hostage for an entire fortnight. How we suffered so terribly and escaped only when my sister fought to save me and killed the terrible woman who held us.

  My sister lived out her life basking in the deference that comes as reward for such a moment of bravery. I have lived in the quiet shame of an older brother who needed to be rescued by his little sister.

  It is not the only reason I sought sanctuary in the priesthood, but the Church’s deep relationship with guilt and shame were certainly part of my calling. As a priest, I seek to expiate the guilt of others and bring them closer to our God the Father. I do not expect the same for myself. Some things, even God can surely not forgive.

  My friend Gregor would say this is heresy. It is a conversation we have had for most of a lifetime, beginning when we were students with the Jesuits in Olomouc. With all those miles between me and my sister, it was easy to agree with him for a time. He was my first true friend, but even Gregor does not know the whole truth.

  It is a truth I have never told anyone, and now the only other who knows it is dead.

  In my defense, I did not expect people to believe my sister’s story. Who would believe that a small child killed a grown woman, even in self-defense? Or that we wandered around in the woods for days, but my sister managed never to drop the jewels clutched in her hands?

  It seems belief is not so hard when the tale is told by a small blonde child with traumatized eyes and a fortune in her grasp.

  Our father certainly never questioned her, not even when our much unloved stepmother sickened and died only days after our return, along with the unborn babe in her womb. The story people tell now says she was dead and gone before we got back. It’s not true. I don’t know exactly what my sister did. I only know that when she held our father’s hand at the funeral, her eyes were happy.

  No one else seems to see her eyes.

  Her eyes were happy when she watched the old woman fall, too.

  It was my fault, has always been my fault. I’m the one who took my sister to the house on the hill.

  We were hungry. There was little work for my father, and his new wife had a baby on the way. My mother died giving birth to my sister. Perhaps she understood that evil moved in her womb.

  The house on the hill was fancy, with flower gardens and real glass in all the windows. I thought the old woman who lived there might have some food to spare. My sister was pretty, so people often gave her scraps instead of the cuff to the head they gave me.

  The old woman answered the door herself. I sometimes wonder if that’s why my sister always made sure there were servants in her house. Living alone is dangerous—you never know what might come to the door.

  She was kind, the old woman. Perhaps my burden would be less if she hadn’t been kind to two hungry children. She seated us at her table, fed us bread with real butter and jam. I’ve never been able to eat blueberry jam since. It tastes of death and cowardice.

  My sister told the sad tale of our family, the new baby coming, and not enough food on the table. Our pittance of a house, small and very drafty in the cold of winter.

  We were blessed with a moment of uncommon kindness that day. The old woman had a house in the woods, she said. Just a cottage, but warm and dry, with two small bedrooms just the right size for two growing children. It had belonged to her family for generations, but only she remained.

  I remember when she smiled at me and asked if I thought we might like to come look at her cottage. I was certain we had met our fairy godmother.

  My sister shared my joy. Whatever evil stirred in her, it had not yet awakened when she took the old woman’s hand for a walk in the woods.

  I believe now that the presence of good simply triggered the need for evil to act. Gregor convinced me of this eternal truth. The forces of evil gathered for the birth of the only Son. It is a story humanity repeats far too often. At seven, however, I knew only that kindness faced down death and lost.

  The cottage in the woods was sturdy and well maintained, like the one I remembered from when we were very small, when there was still work for my father. It had a cozy, welcoming kitchen, and three whole bedrooms. Outside were sheds for animals if we had any, and a small root cellar.

  The path of some lives is determined by a single moment.

  Gregor reminds me often that the doctrine of predestination isn’t meant to be interpreted this severely. He wasn’t there when the old woman peered down the steps into the root cellar and my sister pushed her. He wasn’t there when my sister closed the door of the root cellar and led me back through the woods. He wasn’t there when we sat down at the table in the big house on the hill and ate more bread with butter and blueberry jam.

  If God intended for one such as I to go to heaven, such moments would never have happened. I do not know if the old woman was dead when she fell. That is perhaps the most heinous of my crimes—I might have saved her. I will never know.

  We stayed in the house on the hill for thirteen days. We left only once, in the dark of night. It took us a long time to drag the old woman out of the root cellar and into the cottage kitchen. She was small, and we were strong from hauling wood with our father, but it still took an eternity. I will never forget the cold, papery skin or her staring eyes. In death, they were no longer kind.

  I didn’t know why we had to move the old woman until my sister spun her lies after our return. I only knew that her eyes were very scary, and I did as I was told.

  I slept very little those thirteen days, and I ate a lot. Seventy years later, sleep still eludes me many nights, and food finds me all too often.

  When we had consumed everything edible in the house, my sister looked for something to sell. She found the old woman’s jewelry and we sat at the table, carefully taking the stones from their settings. Once you’ve been accessory to murder, the burden of theft hardly ripples your soul.

  Those jewels bought my sister a fancy life. You might think she killed for them, but the old woman had been dead for more than a week by the time the jewels were found. In seventy years, I have never really understood what turned my sister irredeemably from the light.

  After disappearing for a fortnight, our return was big news in our little village on the Rhine. My sister spun a story of witchcraft and kidnapping, insanity and escape. The old woman’s remains in the kitchen of the cottage in the woods seemed proof enough.

  I remember very little of the next year. Soon enough I was sent away to school in Deventer, and after that to the Jesuits in Olomouc, where I met Gregor. That my education was paid for by the old woman’s jewels is amongst the more minor of my sins.

  While I found some peace at school, happiness was not mine to seek. My small group of friends called me the grim brother. Gregor could often tease a smile from me. Few others ever managed.

  It was not an accident, I think, that my schools were too far to permit frequent travel home. I saw my sister but a few times before she married, and then again at the funeral that left her a young widow. She attended my ordination, perhaps needing to witness my vows of poverty and chastity—my obedience had already been well established.

  I am a good priest. It does not atone for my sins, but it sometimes gives small solace in the night. Not too many of my congregation fall asleep when I speak, and some come to the rectory to talk. The children listen to my stories, and one or two will often climb in my lap.

  My sister never had children. In my later years, this is something for which I have thanked God every day. My friend Gregor, after many years of work with his pea plants, believes that children inherit the characteristics of their parents. I do not know how much of my sister’s blood runs in my veins, but it is good the line will end with us.

  I was not there when she died. It was not in me to grant her final absolution. I don’t believe God wants her back. In my dreams, when He sits in judgment, Son of Man on His right, and the kind old lady on His left, He does not want me back either.

  I buried my sister today, and at the end of a lifetime of blackness and despair, I do not know what to feel. People nod and smile, and repeat the words she wanted etched on her gravestone.

  Gretel Nussbaum. Such Bravery.

  They have sent a small child now to fetch me back to the rectory. “Come, Father Hansel,” she says. “It is time for bread and soup.”

  Her eyes are kind, as a young girl’s should be.

  7

  Words for My Boy

  I look back at the pictures

  of your face as a small boy.

  Puzzled, vaguely unhappy.

  Maybe a little scared.

  And I wish—oh, how I wish—

  we had known

  how to explain the world to you.

  Or you to the world.

  -o0o-

  There’s a special kind of exhaustion

  that comes from knowing

  “easy” is years away.

  -o0o-

  When your child can’t speak,