THAT’S HOW SOME PEOPLE ARE by Debbie Urbanski

The parents of Max Salazar stand, posed and uncomfortable, in the Lily Room, in the spot between the glossy coffin and the bouquets, which is exactly where, hours ago, the funeral director instructed them to stand. They have not moved from their assigned places, not to go to the restroom nor to take a sip of water. Looming over them is an oversized portrait of their 18-year-old son which could only be called creepy. In the portrait Max poses in front of a blue curtain and he is smiling, his left arm raised like he’s welcoming you to this grand place. All afternoon sad people come and go hiding crushed tissues in their hands, and at a quarter to five, when the flow of mourners appears to be winding down, one final visitor, a woman, rushes through the doorway. Max’s eyes appear to follow her, in particular, around the room. Maybe I’ll tell, his eyes say to her, or maybe I won’t.
The woman, Kate Benson, did not plan at first to attend the viewing. She thought it might be improper considering the circumstances. Instead, she hastily arranged that morning for flowers to be delivered, the florist’s most expensive bouquet – “Do you understand what I said, cost is not an issue here” – along with a sympathy card that read, We are praying for your loss. The Bensons (Kate, Danny, and Alex). On the back of the card, she made the florist write, Alex was Max’s classmate awhile back and spoke fondly of him always. But by the afternoon, she finds herself pulling out a somber navy suit from the back of her closet. The suit is lined, heavy for summer and somewhat tight, but as long as she leaves the gold buttons undone, it would do.
It is obvious Max’s parents have no idea who Kate is. She has to remind them how their kids rode the bus together for years, for at least three years. “Oh, you’re the one who sent those nice flowers,” says Beth Salazar, wiping her eyes. She is dressed in a gray tunic and her skirt has a bell sewn into its hem. The bell tinkles whenever Beth turns to look at Max’s portrait, which she will not stop doing. While Max’s father stares down the entire time at his enormous black shoes, refusing to meet Kate’s gaze. With herculean effort, Kate manages to keep a conversation going: the heat wave they’re in, the inordinate amount of birds in the sky that summer. She does this because it makes her feel helpful, like her presence can somehow postpone the room’s collapse into misery.
The next morning, she leaves Max’s prayer card beside her son’s breakfast plate. The front of the card shows a comforting angel robed in soft colors. The wings of the angel are curved around a young man who resembles Max, except you can only see his back. The rest of him is hidden by the angel’s garments. On the reverse of the card, in a thin script, is Max’s name and a poem about how the dead never go away. They are actually always standing there, small and white.
“I thought you’d want to know,” she tells Alex once he finally comes downstairs. “It was a closed casket. I’m not sure why.”
Alex stabs into his eggs. “It’s like you always had a fixation with that kid. I barely knew him, all right?”

Kate would argue it was never a fixation. Better to call it an interest which, like any interest, may at times have gone a little too far. Such as that period in which Kate found herself driving back and forth past Max’s house, circling the block until she got a glimpse of the boy on his red bike. Or driving out again to his new school at dismissal time, to watch him throw black walnuts at the squirrels before he scurried into the back seat of his mother’s Volkswagen.
Danny asked, “Do you want to get yourself arrested?” So she stopped. She made herself stop, although she still allowed herself to look Max up on the computer. She wanted to see how boys like that turned out, and up until this point, he had been doing fine. Or better than fine. At that academy in the west suburbs (this was the school she drove out to, with iron gates circling the grounds, and winding paths, and rosebushes), he made the dean’s list and took up tennis. By 10th grade he played varsity and won tournaments. It was this big deal. In the photographs in the paper, a racket in his hands, he began to look like the other boys.
Each time she heard good news, she cut the article out, or printed the mention from the school’s web site, and left the clippings on Alex’s nightstand. These updates were the proof that everybody was fine, and the harmful things we do may, in fact, do no harm. She had been rooting for that boy.

This summer, Alex’s last before heading off to college, he decides to spend it working for the first time in his life. He finds a job at the new restaurant in town by lying on the application, claiming previous experience and promising he’ll still be around in the fall. The restaurant sells extravagant pizza and one kind of salad. What makes these pizzas so expensive, Alex explains, is the quality ingredients: tomatoes canned in Italy, the flour also from Italy, the cheese from a Wisconsin micro-dairy, and the sausage from grassy Indiana farms. The menu makes a point of listing where every single item comes from. Such detail strikes Kate as obsessive. Must we know and understand everything now? Yes, apparently. The answer is yes.
She imagined the summer differently. Wouldn’t it be nice to see some mountains, she asks, picturing the three of them on a family road trip, where they would play word games and sleep in highway motels, driving west until the land transformed itself into something really astonishing. But Alex says actually he needs to stay home and earn spending money for college. “Did your dad tell you that?” Kate asks. “Because I can increase your allowance.” Where Alex is going in the fall, the sole place he got into, the buildings look like concrete bunkers. Their campus tour guide had raved about the frat houses. Kate pretends to be proud, despite the fact that the school accepts practically everybody who can pay.
“But I want to work,” Alex insists. He has a uniform now, a polo shirt embroidered with a grinning wolf, and he stinks like onions. The restaurant can not survive without him. His job duties include kitchen prep and the filling of water goblets.
As it is summer, and a drought, everybody’s grass is dead – or dormant, Danny corrects her. Still, there are the flowers, and all those birds in the trees. The birds go around flashing their red breasts like they have a secret. What? Kate demands. What are you telling me? What do I need to know? With Alex working evenings, and Danny, calling to say he’ll be late again, something about the server, or its code, exploding – “don’t bother trying to understand this” – Kate, on many nights, finds herself alone in the house, staring out into the backyard, where the goldfinches are fighting the sparrows over the spilled seed from the feeder.
On one such alone night, she ventures into the basement to sort through several boxes markered with Alex’s name. Pushing aside the curled paintings and the book reports and math worksheets, she finds the piles of photographs, and under the crappy fluorescent lights, she scours every picture, setting aside any that show a brown-haired and freckled child appearing to be Max. When the pile seems substantial enough, she calls Beth Salazar and invites the woman over for coffee the following Wednesday.
A good deal of time is spent on the details of the visit: whether to cut tulips or day lilies from the garden. What to serve alongside the coffee. Should they sit in the kitchen or in the front room, and what to wear, a linen dress, or is that excessively formal. Should Kate remove some of Alex’s photos from the walls (she decides to do this, lugging a stack of frames into the attic).
Then there is the letter.
Nobody writes things down anymore, but a confession – and this letter is a confession – seems an occasion for writing in one’s own hand. The ballpoint pen feels clumsy to her. She makes many mistakes and, each time, has to start over on a clean sheet of paper. Every evening she works on it, picturing, as she writes, this substance leaking out of her, out of her eyes and from under her fingernails, a condensed stream of ugliness which has ruined a lot of things.
The letter is addressed to Beth. She does not plan on handing the letter over but instead wishes to read it aloud when Beth is standing in front of her. The letter begins, “You must remember when you came that day knocking on my door, and you asked if I knew who did that to your son,” referring to when the boys were ten, it had been the spring, and something happened: Max’s “accident,” that’s what everybody wanted to call it, like it was an unavoidable occurrence, like two cars colliding on a slick road, an event that couldn’t be helped, suggesting no one was to blame, nobody at fault.

It hadn’t been too bad. This was the first thing Kate heard that day, that spring. She heard it during the dinner hour from Tina Gallins: Max had been knocked down on the way home but it could have been worse. Yes, certainly a safety concern. No, boys should not wear dresses to school. Yes, shocked it happened in the daylight at the park. Let us work together to keep the neighborhood a safe one, and so forth.
Kate told Alex after she hung up the phone: there had been an accident. Max was hurt but he would be okay. It was Tuesday night and, as usual, Danny was working late. Alex shook his head then he did something Kate had not known him to do before: clutching his fork, he shoved the prongs into his hand, into the soft area of flesh below his thumb. “What are you doing?” she demanded. He shoved harder, his skin nearly breaking. She grabbed at the fork. “You stop it,” she ordered.
Again, the phone rang.
Jeanie Berry, another mom from school.
Sorry to call during dinner but had Kate heard?
Kate repeated the story she knew: it wasn’t that bad, it could have been worse, Max knocked down, Max running home, but Jeanie said whoa, who the hell had Kate talked to? It was worse, a lot worse. Max had been pissed on. There was feces, shit – shit! – smeared around his mouth. There was a video. Jeanie found out about the video because her son was sitting in the basement, in the dark, watching it on repeat. It made her sick what they did. Literally, Jeanie had vomited all over the computer. Nobody knew who did it. In the video, most of the boys wore handkerchiefs over their faces. From around here? Or not. They took his clothes, his dress off. They left him naked there on the road.
Kate rinsed the rest of her dinner into the sink. She took Alex’s plate away as well although he hadn’t finished. He watched her with his blue eyes which were the same as her eyes.
The following day, Beth Salazar began walking solemnly through the neighborhood, looking in the garbage cans and beneath the park benches for clues. Eventually she went banging on people’s doors, harassing everybody with her questions, not understanding it was dinner time and people had things to do. Tina Gallins told Kate, “Sure, we all feel for her. Poor her, poor Max. But it’s like she thinks she’s a fucking Sherlock.” One evening, Beth appeared on Kate’s front porch, her wool cloak bulging in the wind. Kate looked but could find no accusation in the woman’s face, only sleeplessness, panic, how people look when they lose something.

Wednesday afternoon arrives. Kate decides upon a carefully casual outfit: capris, a neutral tank, what a person might wear while gardening. While Beth, on the other hand, appears at the door in a silk shift, her eyelids sparkling gold like the teenagers at the mall. The two women sit in the sunroom which overlooks the garden. “Am I making you uncomfortable?” Beth says, slipping off her shoes. The whole time the letter is right there, like a stone in Kate’s pocket.
The women talk over their childhoods while nibbling rye crisps from a platter. Beth’s: happy, comfortable, it was fine. Kate’s: endless, unpredictable, still sore. They share the memory of their favorite meal, and who they dreamed they’d become as a child, and where they would go if they could travel anywhere, the location made up or real – these are all Kate’s questions. “I’m glad I’m finally getting to know you,” Kate says, a box of tissues ready in case anyone needs them, though no one does, not even when she hands over the stack of photos held together by a yellow ribbon. The top picture is intentional: a group of boys at a birthday party, the cake already cut, the children coated with frosting, and they’re smiling, every one of them, including Max who is off to the left, hoisting up his purple fork. Not one specter of sadness surrounds him there. He could be any boy about to become any boy. Beth touches the photo with the tips of her fingers. “We don’t have many pictures of him,” she explains. “We’ve never been, you know, photo people.” Her voice sounds grateful and sad.
The next week, there is a pizza dinner at the new restaurant, their husbands in tow. Kate carries the letter to dinner in her sweater pocket but there’s no ideal time to read it. Instead she asks a lot of questions about Max. Did he have friends? When did he seem happy? What were his favorite books? Where did he picture himself going? “Okay, Kate, that’s enough of an interview,” Danny says. They eat arugula salad and charred pizzas topped with zucchini and roasted corn. Alex is supposed to be working the evening shift. They don’t glimpse him once. “Does your son often hide from you?” Beth inquires. Kate mentions a party that they’re hosting the following weekend. “For my work,” Danny says. Kate adds, “But we’re hosting. So anybody can come, obviously.” Next weekend, there Beth and Brian are at a party of people from Danny’s work, Brian in the same suit he wore to the funeral, while Beth wears a sky blue blouse as if it’s a dress, and a pair of delicate slippers. Everybody knows who Beth is: the woman who bought her son those panties then found him hanging from the ceiling fan. “I won’t be ashamed of my son,” she announces at one point to the suddenly quiet room. The letter remains upstairs in the top drawer of Kate’s dresser and already, that night, she is planning for the week after, a stroll through a forest preserve, a woman-only outing, as Danny refuses to come. “What are you doing here Kate? Because we don’t even know them,” he says. “You never even liked them.”

Immediately on the walk, they have to step through a lot of mud and horse shit. They climb through it to the top of the hill, where you used to look out and see the roads below intersecting like toy roads. That was before the buckthorn took over. Now the overlook appears to be a party spot with condoms poking out from under the dead leaves and initials carved into the oaks.
Kate has led the conversation around to Max again. It feels as if talking about him here, in such a way, can be a form of incantation. Beth drags her fingers over the carvings on a tree. There are some hearts. She touches the hearts. “He looked like he wanted to drive the car into oncoming traffic. I was terrified to drive anywhere with him. He kept saying, Mom, I think I’m going to turn into a unicorn. I told him no, I don’t think you are. Is that some kind of code word – a unicorn?”
“I think it’s beautiful how he thought that,” Kate says.
“It wasn’t beautiful, it was weird. I said you knock it off. He wouldn’t. He kept going on about it. Unicorns don’t actually exist. They’ve never existed. How can you be something different than what you are? I said come on, Max, you are practically a grown-up. You have to start thinking about your future. Men don’t wear dresses for a living. He said actually some men do. I told him well you don’t need to be one of them.”
The wind has changed direction to blow more viciously, scooping up the leaves and hurling them against the tree trunks, and flinging dirt into their eyes. Off in the woods a moaning sound begins, deep and off-putting. It feels like, at any moment, something more might appear in front of them in the trees. Are you hiding somewhere? Are you there? Are you there still? Are you watching over us? Have you been to see some other place? Do you never want to come back now? It’s okay if you never want to come back, no one is going to hold you down and make you stay.

“Guess what, I fell in the mud.”
“Is that why you’re half naked?”
“I didn’t throw away my shirt.”
“Then what did you put out there in the garbage?”
“I didn’t put anything in there, okay?”
“I was standing in the kitchen. I saw you.”
“Maybe you think you did but that wasn’t me.”

The video was not difficult to find. However that wasn’t the first thing she did after Alex was asleep in bed, the lamp in his room switched off. The first thing she did was go outside with a flashlight and dig through the garbage. Hidden beneath some kitchen scraps she found Alex’s shirt, the one with the bicycle on it, an old favorite. Blood all over it. Handprints visible on the front and then various smears. It wasn’t Alex’s blood. Alex hadn’t been hurt. There hadn’t been a scratch on him. She buried the shirt back in the trash and went downstairs to the study.
Somebody had posted the video to YouTube. In the video, the boys wore baseball caps and black bandanas knotted around their mouths. It was hard to see their eyes. They formed a circle and Max was put in the middle of the circle. He kept stumbling, or slumping down, or turning the wrong way, and they would grab him, or pick him up, and make him face the camera. He didn’t cry at first, then he cried. They made him look ridiculous, forcing him into certain poses. They made him crouch like a dog and crawl on the ground, licking their shoes. They made him piss like a dog against a tree or try to. At the beginning of the video he was wearing a dress, the red dress, though by the end, they had taken the dress off and removed his underwear. Certain boys were younger and stood on the outside of the circle. Sometimes the younger boys threw rocks which missed, or not. It was like they were monsters or pretending to be monsters.
Kate, relieved, did not spot Alex in the crowd, although she continued watching the video, which was shaky, most likely taken with a phone or some similar device. In the beginning, whoever was holding the camera would point it up to the sky, or at the empty baseball field, or at another boy’s shoes, until an older boy shouted, “Asshole, you’re supposed to be recording this.” After that, the camera steadied somewhat. Everyone was told to chant, “Fags eat shit.” They sounded like boys shouting. The voice of the boy holding the camera was the clearest because his mouth was positioned closest to the mike. At first she told herself how could she be sure, so she watched the video over. But she knew who that voice belonged to. If you listened carefully, you could hear the additional things Alex said. You could see, at one point, how he shifted the camera to his left hand and picked up a rock in his right, then he threw the rock, aiming for Max’s head. She watched the video again. Soon she knew when Max would cry, or not, and what they would do next to him, and at what point he looked into the camera with his pleading eyes, and when he looked away. His face seemed a slip of skin placed over who he actually was.
There was not a proper ending to it. The camera jerked up to show the top portion of a tree then the video shut off. Kate studied that tree. What could be its importance. It was an elm. It looked like any tree, branches, green leaves – what was she missing here? She watched the video again, wondering this time what would Danny’s reaction be. Would he approve a little bit? Would he say how, even in this country, people can’t be whoever they want to be? That there are consequences and bad choices, and Max had been making some bad choices lately.
She did not tell Danny. As far as she knew, there is no rule that says you have to tell everything to everybody.

Beth says to Kate, “The first time Max asked for a dress for Christmas, I told him no way, but the second time, I was prepared for it. I had done my reading, and I did what you’re supposed to do. You go along with it. Your son wears dresses now, so what. Pretty soon after that we started receiving phone calls. Did you know that? People – grown-ups – they said in these deep voices, these pretend voices, how they were going to cut a part of Max off, or they would find a way to take him from me. ‘I’d like to see you do that. I’d like to see you do that to a child,’ I yelled back. But I was thinking he is the smallest boy in his class. Brian was talking about us leaving, only then what are you teaching your kid – that there will never be a place for them?”
“Honestly we thought Max would outgrow it. Instead as he got older he wanted to do different things. Max wanted – you probably read it in the paper – he wanted to wear my makeup and also to wear girl’s panties. He had been doing things to himself. Cutting himself, and the doctors, everybody, each one had something different to say to us, so I went ahead and bought him the underwear, a few cheap pairs from Marshall’s. He was so happy for a while. Brian didn’t want me to do it so I didn’t tell him. But the makeup – I said not until he was older and he moved away. I was worried what would happen to him if he went out wearing my lipstick. To be honest, I didn’t want to see my son looking like that. Everybody tells you something different you’re supposed to do only it turns out they don’t know.”

In fact Max had received two dresses that Christmas: one ivory, with taffeta under the skirt and a rich velvet sash, a dress obviously meant for parties, and the second longer and scarlet with buttons of pearl along the back. To give the people in their town some credit, a lot of them tried in the beginning to pretend it was no big deal: there was Max in a dress, okay? It’s not like he wore a dress every day of the week. He wore the ivory dress on Tuesdays and the scarlet dress if it were a Friday.
The problems began when certain boys in Max’s class came home begging could they wear dresses also please: first Brian Gallins, then Tony Berry, then finally Alex, who described Max twirling at recess as something otherworldly, like a doll sparkling to life. “First of all, you don’t play with dolls,” Kate told Alex, “and secondly, I don’t believe it was that beautiful.” She said actually it must have looked pretty strange and also wrong. Alex ignored her and the next day, during his evening bath, he asked his father whether he could also wear a dress to school.
In the family room downstairs, Kate had been sprawled out on the couch finishing a crossword puzzle – “Not to be satisfied, perhaps,” 7 letters, ends in K – when she heard shrieking above her followed by wild splashes. In the bathroom, where she ran to, Danny was shoving Alex underwater as if considering whether to drown their son. She pushed Danny out of the way so she could lift the boy from the tub and into her arms. Alex wouldn’t allow her to comfort him. He howled for his dad, swinging his arms wildly in Kate’s direction as if she had been the one who wanted to inflect harm. “Buddy,” she said softly. Eventually she let Danny back inside the bathroom, she had to, Alex having grown more hysterical, and the boy clung to his father, his wet arms circling Danny’s neck.
The next morning Kate woke up early to cook Alex his favorite breakfast: soft-boiled eggs, toast with grape jelly, no crust, orange juice, a bendable straw. “Howdy, partner,” she said and sat beside him while he ate. She planned to explain, or try to explain, what might possess a father to half-heartedly drown his son in a bathtub. “Listen,” she wanted to say, “you have been given a dad who, because of his past, is sensitive about certain things, about boy things. He believes there are these rules. That’s the way he is. If boys don’t follow the rules then they won’t turn out like they’re supposed to. The reason your dad did that to you last night is because he loves you the way you are at this very moment. He doesn’t want you to change into somebody you’re not.”
Only she didn’t say this to her son because Alex appeared fine, unhaunted by the previous evening’s events. He ate quickly, hurried to school, returned home, ignored Kate’s questions about his day, got out his cars, then drove the cars around the family room, growling out realistic noises for the motors. All of it forgiven or forgotten. When, after dinner, Danny announced he was going out back to play some ball, Alex asked to tag along.
It was dusk by the time Kate finished wiping the dishes and the countertops. Alex and Danny hadn’t yet come back inside. She peered into the yard. Crows were all over the trees. You knew they were there even in the dark because of how the branches looked wrong, movement where there shouldn’t be. She spotted Danny and Alex huddled near the garden beds. They weren’t playing catch. She didn’t know what they were doing at first. Danny had formed fists out of both his hands and he was punching the air, one, two, one, two. Then it was Alex’s turn to make a fist or try to. Danny corrected Alex’s hands and motioned to his own stomach.
Kate hurried out onto the deck.
“Your turn,” Danny said.
“No,” said Alex, rubbing at his eyes.
“We’ll stay out here all night if we have to.”
“Danny, can I speak with you?”

He glanced up at Kate. From the trees, the crows screeched, sounding as if hurt, as if the birds were getting hurt, though they weren’t. That was just the noise they made.
“It’s boxing. You know, boxing.”
“Since when did you box?”
“I’m cold,” Alex whined. Danny said it’s not going to get any warmer, let me tell you. In a sudden rage of action, Alex propelled his fist into Danny’s stomach.
“Good. Now harder,” Danny said.
Later, in their bedroom, Danny told Kate, “You don’t need to say it. I know what you’re going to say so don’t bother. You’re wondering, what am I doing with Alex? But you don’t get how boys are, do you? You haven’t been a boy, Kate. Have you?” They had not yet closed the drapes for the evening. All they could see in the windows were their own reflections, which looked fine. A man and a woman in bed. Fine!
“I don’t think that’s who he is,” Kate said.
Danny asked why, suddenly, she should know who Alex was. Kids change all the time. They grow up and become who we couldn’t imagine. Alex might find out he likes to blow things up. He might join the air force and drop bombs on top of civilians. Not every child turns into a gentle herbivore petting the rabbits. “Listen, if I don’t teach him stuff like this, you bet it’s going to happen. I’ve been watching him, all right?”
Kate asked what exactly was going to happen. What. And Danny, to his credit, tried to explain it as best he could: how the world wasn’t this innocent and clear place, this tra la la place she thought it was. Temptations were abounding. In the way a person, a man, might wear their hair, or tilt their head, or in a hand extended from the car window. A wave or an invitation? Kate wanted to lean over him and kiss him, to show him they were fine, he was protected from all that because of her. It felt good, protecting someone. Although the last time, when she kissed him, it must have been weeks ago, her hands also reaching under the covers, and perhaps it had been this combination, the kiss, the reaching, a little much, a little too much need, or perhaps bad timing after a long day, because Danny had twisted his head away and said, “It’s like you’re obsessed with it,” ‘it’ meaning sex, “but Kate, there is more to a marriage. A whole lot more.” So this time she touched his arm, the spot above his wrist where he used to wear his watch. He went on about how you could not see through everything. “You’re safe, remember,” she reminded him, rubbing her fingertips along his wrist.
That was the night Danny suggested a necessary change and Kate agreed to it. This is important to remember: she was not forced into anything. She agreed this was how things would work from then on. Danny said, “Your job right now is to give Alex what he needs, and guess what, he needs me.” There were rules to follow. They would have to be extra careful. The reason being how particular genes determined one’s attractions. “We already went over all of this,” Kate said, “remember?” But he wanted to make it perfectly clear. You could be born with undesirable genes because a parent had them. These genes were turned off when you were born though certain things – like dresses, like boys in dresses – might flip them on like a lamp switch, but instead of illuminating a room, it illuminated something nobody wanted to see. Danny considered himself an expert because, when he was younger, he had been gay, and it was only after a lot of hard work that he wasn’t now. He could not, in good conscience, watch his son go through what he went through when there were alternatives.
If he is crying because he bumped his foot or something like that, let me take care of him.
If I’m talking to our son let me talk to him, don’t interrupt us.
Allow me to play rough with our son.
We will put him in sports.
In front of our son we will not discuss my history. You will not ask questions about it. I will make up stuff if I have to.
You will be okay with me having father-son activities, just us two, camping or going out to a game, just our son and me.
Alex gets his hair cut at the barber when I get my hair cut.
We will only keep boy things in our home.
Her friend Jeanie thought Kate was crazy for stepping back like this and surrendering, hands up in the air. “Danny is full of shit, Kate. All children need their mothers.”
But you didn’t have to hover all over a child to love him. You could love a child, or a person, from a distance, from in fact great distances.

Her dreams have changed. She wakes Danny up to tell him the one where her mother intends to kill her. In the dream, her mother is trying to convince her to go someplace with Alex where they would both die, up in an elevator to the top floor of this complex where people are dying, you know it from the sounds coming down the shaft, voices moaning no no no, that sort of thing. “I know what she’s doing. My mother knows I know, but she keeps pretending the whole time she’s sending us to a party.”
“Your mother doesn’t want to kill you. Go back to sleep,” Danny mumbles.
“I ask my mom, so what happened to you? She tells me, ‘Jump in there and head on up! It’ll be fun, Katie. Alex, don’t you want to have some fun at the party?’ She takes hold of my hand and makes me press the buttons.”
In another dream, Kate gives birth to a grimy fish-like creature with scales along its back and she has to find a way to love it.
Or a boy is walking toward her. At least, she thinks it is a boy, though she is less sure the closer he comes.

There was no big expose. Max wouldn’t talk. The video disappeared. It turned out no one else had any useful information to share.
During the months that followed, Alex spoke little to Kate. She asked questions on the ride home from school, questions so stupid and small and easy, like, “What did you do that was fun today?” Alex would pretend not to hear her. Instead of responding, he looked out the car window at the rows of houses. “Look, I am not your fucking chauffeur,” she told him once. New rules appeared. Such as anyone must knock before entering the boy’s room. She forgot and walked in when he was changing into a clean shirt. He squealed and covered his naked chest with his arms. “You know what, I gave birth to you,” she said. “I used to give you baths.” She reached out to put her hand onto Alex’s pale shoulder, onto his skin, and he flinched.
Even his language felt unfamiliar.
“I’m not riding that gay bike.”
“He’s a sissy, that’s why we don’t play with him.”
Kate said actually we don’t talk like that here.
Danny corrected her. “You mean you don’t.”
At this point in his life, all Alex needed was his father. They played ball in the backyard after dinner. They lay in bed together, reading books about boys who lived among dragons. Alex rested his clean damp head on Danny’s shoulder. In the morning they tackled each other like animals.
She told herself had anything more happened, had Alex gone on to terrify little girls, or torture cats, surely she would have taken action then. Apparently it was an isolated incident. All the neighborhood cats ended up fine and safe. The little girls were fine, Alex was fine. He always had lots of friends at school.
“You’re staring at him again,” Danny said.

In that newborn year, every day of it, she had given Alex a bath. Crouched over the plastic tub, Kate would narrate what she was doing, like the books told you to, while he tracked her voice with his new eyes. “I’m washing your tummy. Next I’ll wash your toes. These are your toes! One, two, three, four, five!” It had all felt shaman-like, the tepid water, the sponge, the drowsy heat of the room, like peering into a different world, one in which you loved things for no explainable reason. There were shadows even then behind his eyes. She saw, in her tiny son, an unfamiliar place she wasn’t allowed to go yet. Or places. There were places. Who are you, she wondered as his arms waved dreamily out in front of him. Then one evening she knew. In a single instant, with such certainty, as if someone, some generous force, had carved it into her mind, she thought she knew. Looking into his still dark eyes, she told him who he was, and who he would become, as if we might be the ones to determine such things.

You are filled with goodness. You are good. You will love, and be loved, and wherever you go, I will go too.

Max continued to wear dresses to school after the accident. Nobody thought this was a good idea. These dresses were new, the first with white ruffles cascading from the waist, the second with a sequined bodice. Kate overheard Beth Salazar tell a grocery clerk, “I’m not going to let them win,” like her son’s life was a contest. Certain churches, including Kate’s church, held the boy up as an example of retribution. “God does not make mistakes,” lectured their pastor, ordering the congregation to stop reinventing themselves.
Every single recess, Beth stood guard outside the playground fence, making it clear she held a camera. In the morning she walked Max to school and in the afternoon she waited at the building’s entrance to walk him home. This was not enough. She couldn’t sit next to him in class, nor could she accompany him to the bathroom, nor walk with him through the hallways to lunch. The bullying continued, although in smaller ways that the staff claimed were harder to keep track of. Eventually Beth pulled her son out and he was homeschooled for a while. You’d see Max around town carrying a clipboard while Beth stood very close beside him, pointing to the trees or to the clouds.

Also, Kate dreams of Max. She has dreamed of him off and on over the years. There is nothing weird about that, as she dreams about a lot of people she used to know. In her dreams, the world is usually ending. There might be zombies gathering outside the compound, or some evil leather-clad leader wants to infiltrate her mind. Whatever the problem, she is incapable of saving anyone except herself. Usually she is packing a small suitcase while a crowd of bystanders looks on with envy. Often Max is in the crowd, one of the people she is leaving.
He is not how you’d expect a dead person would look. His neck is not lolling about at a strange angle, nor is he very pale, or thin, or transparent. He is there in the crowd like he always has been, although this time he’s dead. Some might say he appears a little bored, as if he couldn’t care what happens next to anyone or to her. Kate tries to tell herself his presence is a sign letting her know that dead people don’t just disappear, and he is all right.

The whole mess of it was only brought up once more. It was Alex who brought it up. Home from school one afternoon, he had taken his shoes off at the door without Kate nagging him. He went straight into the bathroom like he was supposed to do and washed his hands with soap and hot water. Then he came to the kitchen where she was keeping busy waxing the wooden spoons. “Care to help?” she asked. Alex paused in the doorway as if he wanted to talk with her and Kate, pleased and startled, set aside the ladle she had been sanding. “Are you hungry?” she asked, bringing a bowl down from the top shelf. Into the bowl, she sliced two Georgia peaches. All the peaches that season were a disappointment, enormous but mealy. It could have been a year after Max left their neighborhood school.
Alex said, “You think I did a bad thing to Max.”
“Now why would you say that?”
“Gee, I don’t know, Mom. You won’t leave me alone. You’re always watching me with that look on your face. But you’re wrong. I didn’t. Max made that story up.” Alex slumped onto one of the island stools and Kate sat beside him, bringing the bowl with her. No one ate the peaches. Alex’s hands were crammed into his pockets. Who knew what his hands and fingers were doing there out of sight.
“Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?” Kate said. Her heart felt wrong. Her heart was filling up with strong and unpredictable beats like it was somebody else’s heart. There was a video, as Alex probably knew. The video showed what happened to Max that day. It showed Max very clearly getting hurt. Some boys had hurt him. She had watched the video plenty of times.
In this video, she said carefully, she could hear Alex’s voice.
Alex said, “That was somebody who sounded like me.”
Kate explained she would like to show him the video only she couldn’t. They didn’t leave footage like that up on the internet because it disturbed people.
In addition, there was Alex’s bloody shirt. “Do you remember? The one with the racing bike?” The shirt had gotten blood on it the same day Max was attacked.
“I want to see that shirt.”
“You didn’t keep the shirt. You came home and threw it away in the garbage, remember?”
“You’re making this up.”
They went back and forth like that. He never had a bloody shirt. He hadn’t hurt Max. He would never hurt anyone. They could have kept going back and forth for hours, or forever. As they talked, she searched his face for one recognizable thing to anchor herself. His lying, hopeful face. Each lie a pinprick of light.
“Alex,” she said, reaching for his arm, which was very cold.
She said, “Okay. I believe you. It’s okay. You did nothing wrong.”
It was as if the room brightened with an artificial glow.
Alex turned toward her with love on his face.

And once, in a dream, when they all were strangers, how it was a relief, she remembers, to not know.

There are additional outings. Kate plans most of them, or actually every one, but that’s how some people are. Some people like to plan outings and other people like to go on them, Beth obviously belonging to the second group. They drive to the outlet mall to stock up on discount sandals and towels. They learn how to grill tuna with olive oil and lime in a class at Williams-Sonoma. Kate allows herself to forget the letter, or rather, to forget about reading the letter to Beth. There seems no reason for it anymore. The letter remains buried in her dresser, at least she believes it does, but one evening, when she goes to dig it out, planning to burn it in their backyard fire pit, it’s gone. She upends the drawers and searches beneath the bed and in both closets, finally finding the letter in Danny’s nightstand, crumpled beneath some old National Geographics.
The summer breaks records with its heat. In the morning, before the day turns sweltering, Beth and Kate drive out to a new development and stroll along the pristine sidewalks, staring into the model homes where you’re supposed to imagine real people reside. The weather station has issued warnings: drink plenty of fluids, wear loose clothing, stay indoors. It feels like they’re living in another city, someplace desert-like and foreign, a haze in the air. The saleswoman at the open model says, “You two must be sisters, right? Am I right?” Upstairs, while they peer together into the cavernous closets, the kind with chandeliers and rotating shoe racks, Beth explains this is getting a little intense for her here. She suggests, for their next outing, that Kate invite some different people along. Kate must know more people, correct? “It’ll be fun, Kate. Other people can be fun!”
Beth becomes very busy soon after. It’s the final weeks of August. There are so many things to do. That is how it’s explained at least. Kate continues to call anyway. Soon her calls forward directly to voice mail. Unable to hang up, she leaves rambling messages about her day: the fruit flies have invaded the compost. The setting sun is so pretty on the kitchen wall. Even to her own ears, her voice sounds needy and panicked.
They, Kate and Danny, are leaving town next week for a cabin near the lake. The cabin has multiple bedrooms. Alex was to come, as he did every year, but this year there is the restaurant, which will not survive a day without him, so Kate had invited Beth and her husband along instead. The invitation was given weeks ago. She calls again. “Don’t you think this is getting ridiculous,” Danny tells her. Kate motions for him to shush, as she’s about to leave another message. “Look, Beth, I hope you’re still coming up this weekend. I already bought the food and planned for the whole thing. I know, we’re all so busy, but you might as well stay with us for the day or the weekend like you said you would.”
Beth calls back the following afternoon. She has never been one to break promises, okay? She and Brian will drive up Saturday.

When Alex was very young, there was a time when all the good nannies were claimed and Danny too busy to take an afternoon off, so Alex was always with her. There were days Kate couldn’t shit by herself, Alex demanding to stand beside her in the bathroom, sometimes needing to rest his hand upon her knee. Had anyone bothered to ask, Kate would have described her daily routine as suffocating. “I don’t mean to be dramatic,” she would have said, “but it was like someone, like Alex, was wrapping up my life in gauze.”
Looking back, she can see how wrong she’d been. To be needed like that. Alex’s need for her not even partially submerged. Those were probably some of the best days of her life, full of undeniable purpose. How would she have known it couldn’t last? No one is needed like that forever.
Alex had been a relatively well-behaved child, able to occupy himself with the tote bag of toys she lugged into the doctors’ offices, or to the stores, or to the shop of a seamstress, Mrs. Tadsworth, whom she visited every few months. Though it wasn’t really a shop, it was actually the woman’s basement, terrifyingly cramped, pins all over the floor and ruffled prom dresses hanging from the ceiling by hooks.
Kate lectured Alex beforehand: how this was a fragile place where hands must be kept to themselves. But when he saw all the pastel dresses in a row he dashed into the room, reaching to pet the hems and fondle the lace. “Stop that right now,” Kate ordered him. Mrs. Tadsworth laughed. Oh it’s nothing. Oh but he has good taste.
The seamstress clearly missed her own children. “You know how young people are,” Mrs. Tadsworth explained. “Home has no meaning to them anymore. My daughter tried to tell me, Mom, you can plant your roots wherever you want these days, and I told her, bullshit, honey, your home is where I am, and I’m staying put. She moved out west anyway.” Family portraits covered an entire wall, the children in them at first small and beautiful, then mischievous, one boy making funny cross-eyes for the camera, then bewildered and angry, the eyebrow rings, the tattoos, then emerging beautiful again somehow. Mrs. Tadsworth went through everybody’s name, including the grandchildren, several of whom were Alex’s age.
While Kate was in the changing room, hidden away behind a curtain hung on a pole, she could hear the woman rummaging through their toy bag and talking to Alex in what had to be the voice of a finger puppet, a funny high voice. When Kate emerged wearing the newly hemmed skirt, she found Mrs. Tadsworth with her hands in Alex’s hair, running her fingers through his hair in a greedy and inappropriate way. “But you’d feel bad for her too,” Kate later told Danny. “I mean, she’s all alone, practically underground, surrounded by young people’s dresses.”
Mrs. Tadsworth said, “I love it when kids come to see me. Look, here,” she told Alex, placing an amber sequin carefully into his palm. “Look at what treasures you can find here! A client of mine had to run an errand one time and you know what I told him? I told him you leave your boy here, and we had the best time. I brought out my colored pencils.” Alex understood what she was saying. He threw the sequin onto the carpet and rushed to Kate, terror on his face.
Mrs. Tadsworth was not the best reader of children. This is what Kate also told to Danny. The woman kept thinking Alex must be hungry, asking did he like peanut butter sandwiches, or would he rather have cheese on bread that you put in the microwave with a slice of tomato? Or did he like to play in sandboxes? Did he like water? Kate found herself wondering what would happen if she left Alex there. “You mean, for good?” Danny asked. This was, after all, how it had been done a long time ago, when parents abandoned their children at the local blacksmith or at a lord’s estate in order to learn a trade. How did one survive such a separation? “I suppose you make things up,” Kate mused. You have to imagine your children are off living these better lives. It used to happen all the time, she remembered reading once in a textbook.

The cabin is nothing fancy but that’s the point. The mustiness seeping out of the carpet, the dirt paths, the single cooking pot hanging from a hook above the mini-fridge, the square windows that barely allow in any daylight: every rustic detail Kate adores. If this was their actual house, the place would have been gutted long ago, or razed, some airy monstrosity built in its place, but this is not their actual home. It’s merely a pretend home.
They aren’t the only people there. Their cabin is part of a row of identical cabins crowding in on either side. Behind the cabins is a pond. They’ve seen real fish in the pond before and a family of deer grazing on the far side. There’s a yellow rowboat pulled onto the shore that anybody can use. Most of the time the boat sits empty. In the evening, couples drag their deck chairs off their cabin porches and everybody sits beside the lake, like people must have done a hundred years ago, lazy and contented, making small talk about the bugs, and will it rain that night.
Danny has made it clear they can afford an actual vacation home, but they’ve been coming to this cabin for years. It has to mean something when a place reoccurs like that in one’s life. Memories of their earlier selves haunt every room and every space; it’s not always this bad thing to be haunted by what you wish you still were. There is Alex under the front steps surrounded by piles of stones, building an imaginary world of heroes. There he is in the bathtub, so terrified of the shower curtain she can’t let go of him. Kate is rowing him in the boat across the water while he pesters her with questions. When will I become a mom? When will you die? When I grow up, can I keep my eyes open? He is beside the pond, in the mud, lunging after a frog. In the journal on top of the mantel, she can look back and find what she wrote during that initial summer, when Alex was one and she was sure motherhood had turned her into a better person. This is the first time he isn’t there with them.
Friday afternoon, Danny and Kate arrive for the long weekend. The cabin door is intentionally left unlocked so they can walk in like the place has always been theirs, Kate flicking on the lamps, pushing aside the thin drapes. “My God, the heat,” Danny says, as if expecting Wisconsin to be this cool oasis. Dinner is take-out from an Indian restaurant. Kate scoops the rice and dals onto their plates, it takes less than a minute to prepare, so easy! They eat outside on their picnic table using paper napkins. The neighbors wave. Everybody looks familiar and also older. After dark, bugs swarm the porch light. They sleep on top of the sheets, a fan pointed at their naked bodies.
The next morning, the morning Beth and Brian are to visit, Kate prepares the lunches ahead of time. Cut bagels, smoked salmon, a little jar of capers, and carrot sticks which she arranges in a chipped blue bowl. The sky is open and clear. The morning shadows appear friendly and calm. Nothing seems to be hiding; there is nothing to hide. When Beth’s Toyota pulls into the lot, Kate rushes over to meet them, hooking her arm through Beth’s arm as she leads them along the paths, taking the long way back, the way that hugs the woods. She points out their cabin, the third one from the left. “A lot of people think they’re all alike, but there’s these little differences. There’s no way I’d be able to stay in somebody else’s. You’ll see.”
Lunch is early, Kate spreading a yellow dishtowel across the center of the picnic table. “Grab whatever you want. There is nothing formal whatsoever about this,” she explains. “Eat with your hands or whatever. It’s all about relaxation.” After lunch, they attempt to build a fire in a pit beside the pond. When the wood refuses to catch, nobody acts disappointed. The sun balances above them. How about some quiet time under the oaks, Kate suggests. They could take naps out there and afterwards jump in the pond to cool off. “I feel like I’m back at summer camp. Is there a printed schedule?” Beth asks. The men return to the cabin to scrounge up beers while Kate searches for a shaded spot.
It’s true, the rest of the afternoon has already been imagined. Beth should be lying at the moment beside Kate on the ground. They’re supposed to be looking into the same clouds, or leaves, or whatever might be up there, birds or whatever. It doesn’t matter what exactly is in the sky. What matters is they finally will be having a heartfelt conversation about regret, and guilt, and how such things can eat you up. “I know exactly what you mean,” Beth will say. But what would be the good of getting eaten up like that by such things. Just let them go. Let go of them. There they drift off into the sky to somewhere far away where no one will know what to make of them. Above the two women, branches are supposed to be intersecting each other like a form of protection. Each time the wind blows, the leaves should shake in the sunlight.
Yet none of this is happening. Instead of lying down, Beth is crouched uncomfortably, complaining about her knees. “You look ridiculous sprawled out like that, you know,” she says. “We’re not 18 anymore. At least I’m not.” She takes out her phone and begins to tap rapidly on the screen. It appears she’s playing a game. In the game, there are bananas falling out of cartoon clouds and you are the monkey, scuttling to catch, then eat, the fruit. “I’m not angry at you in case you’re wondering. I’m not angry at anybody. I’ve given up being angry. I’ve put my anger in a box then I buried the box.” Her distracted, distant voice. Each time the monkey catches a banana, he does a ridiculous dance, shaking his hips around and squawking. But the next bunches begin falling faster, and also more of them begin to fall. If you miss the fruit, the bananas grow arms and tear at the monkey’s fur. There doesn’t seem to be an end to it. The less fur the monkey has on him, the sadder he appears.
Kate says, “I’ve been thinking about Max a lot, you know? I’ve actually been dreaming about him. This is going to sound crazy, but I don’t think it’s an accident how he keeps appearing in my dreams. But I don’t want to be dreaming about him without you knowing. I don’t want to feel like he’s visiting me in secret. Does this happen to you? He looks at me and I swear he wants to tell me something. Sometimes his lips are moving but there isn’t any sound coming out of his mouth, so I can’t figure out what he’s trying to say.”
“Kate, who are you talking about?”
“Max. Your son, Max.”
At last Beth looks up from her phone, her face startled and furious. “Why the hell are you dreaming about my son?”
“He seemed like such a great kid. That’s all.”
“You didn’t actually know him, Kate. Jesus, my therapist said people will try to do this. Look, it’s my grief. It’s not yours. You had nothing to do with it.”
“Forget it. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Beth has forgotten to turn off her phone. As they talk, the dancing monkey is getting pummeled by more and more fruit, his face growing increasingly alarmed, until the point comes when he dissolves into tiny fragments of color, meaning the game is over and somebody lost. Beth shoves the phone into her pocket. “I’ve been meaning to tell you this for awhile actually. I’m supposed to tell you that you don’t get to claim Max because of your own issues, whatever they are.” She refuses to look at Kate. Instead she’s staring over at the pond, where a bird – what kind? White, long neck, an enormous wingspan – has landed in the water. It’s the sort of bird a person should comment on, although neither woman mentions the creature’s appearance. “This is what I’m supposed to tell you. I think you’re nice and everything. But I don’t need a new friend.” She bites her lip until there’s a little blood, which she blots with a tissue from her pocket. “In fact I think it’s time for me to go.”
But she doesn’t go. Not yet anyway. Kate pulls herself up so they both are facing the same direction: the pond with the solitary bird in it. They appear to be waiting. Are you there? Are you hiding? You can come out now. Everything is all right, you won’t have to stay. No one cares how you’ve changed or if you can’t be recognized. It seems the kind of place and time, the sun finally beginning its descent, the squirrels leaping across the growing shadows, the birds in the woods repeating themselves, that other bird alone in the water, when something more should be happening right in front of them. There is a certainty about the moment. Their husbands have disappeared, who knows where, as have the remaining cabin guests, and the cars, the cabin road, the cabins, they have all gone away and what’s left is a simplified scene, water, bird, sun, wings, where the only thing that can happen is a harmless action, the bird dipping its head then stretching itself open.

Is it cold where you’ve gone? Is it beautiful? Is it like being inside the northern lights? Are there people like you there? You can tell me. Or are you different now, do you get choose who you are, to be someone new and different? Just tell me wherever you’ve gone to, that place, it must be better there for you, where you’ve gone.

It could be all of us have these other lives. This is what Kate begins to believe, that everybody has a parallel life, or lives, running alongside their own like a separate story – what could have been, or what you thought you were getting – and sometimes you can catch glimpses of it. All you need do is look over there and at any moment, it might look real to you. Or more real. They, and their son, are better people in that other life. They are who they had expected to be. In one parallel life, Beth turned to Kate and said, “I have forgiven you.” In another, Alex walks into the room and lets Kate hold him as long as she wants, without a single shrug, or stiffening of the shoulders, and as she holds him, she spreads love and absolution around him, as her other self, her better self, whispers, “I will let you be something else, whatever you want to be.”
Perhaps parallel is not an accurate word. As there could, at moments, be intersections.
That first night at the cabin, the night before Beth and Brian drive up for lunch, Kate is tidying the kitchen, wiping the surfaces, when Danny strides into the room and gathers her up in his arms. She has read somewhere that marriages have seasons, that all relationships, with your son, or whomever, have seasons. Already she and Danny had been through their summer. That was when they first met, after Danny told her about his past then reached under the tablecloth – they were at some fancy French restaurant – to carefully stroke the inside of her thigh, wanting to see her blush. “God, I need someone like you,” he said. Danny the rock. The foundation of Danny. Solid Danny. I will tether myself to your arms and protect you forever. Now, simply, they are in their winter. So his hands, enormous and rough, surprise her. As winter is all about the absences. At first she pushes him off, thinking of Alex, but Alex isn’t there. In her hands she holds a plate, one of the cabin’s ivory plates which she lets slip to the floor. It breaks against the tile into many pieces. “Leave it,” he says. They have not had sex for a long time. The soapsuds all over her wrists. She laughs, “Wait. Wait!” On her hands the stupid yellow gloves she brought with her for the cleaning. He carries her over the broken glass, glass in his feet in fact but he doesn’t care, leaving obscene footprints across the carpet leading to the bedroom. “You have to keep the gloves on,” he whispers.
Any disconnect, or revulsion, or attraction, or unattraction to their bodies, or the bodies of others, is irrelevant for a little while, for at least that night. The revulsion is pushed away out of sight. Danny tosses her onto the bed and turns off the lights.
“I want the light,” Kate murmurs.
He does not turn them back on.
Everyone can hear them. The cabins are crowded together and the point is you sleep with the windows open so you can hear the water lapping in the lake and the birds at sunrise. The next morning, a neighbor will high-five Danny. One of the wives will give Kate a knowing smile.
If there was a bit of performance to it all, why must that be seen as a bad thing on either of their parts? And as to who is pretending what here: it doesn’t matter, not really. Kate says to Danny, “I never doubted you,” she actually says that to him. To love someone, you don’t have to be staring into their eyes. In fact, the lights can be off. In fact, it can be so dark you can’t see who the other person was, or is, or is about to become.

Though, in fact, she left Alex there. This part she didn’t tell Danny. Not for the afternoon, as the seamstress suggested, but for an hour, or not even. Probably it was less though it’s not as if she checked her watch. Across the street from Mrs. Tadsworth’s shop was a simple park, a fountain bordered by petunias, and that’s where she sat. If something terrible happened, she would have heard it, or seen it, and she could have easily rushed over. She slipped off her shoes and lay on a bench, stretching her legs out in the sun. It wasn’t like right away the world fell apart. Look at everything that continued on when one’s child was gone. The nice sky. The pretty clouds. The clean ground. A man approached her to inquire was she feeling okay. He held onto a paper sack containing his lunch. “What, do I not look okay?” Kate teased, tugging her skirt over her knees.
When she finally pushed open the door to the seamstress’s shop, Alex rushed sobbing to her, snot dribbling from his nose. Mrs. Tadsworth complained he had not been much fun. He refused to eat his cheese sandwich. He broke the tips to her colored pencils. The pencils were still there on the floor where he threw them. Kate asked, did you think I could really leave you? She picked up the pencils, paid Mrs. Tadsworth for the skirts, then carried her son up the stairs to the outside.

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Debbie Urbanski’s stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, The Sun and in the anthology New Stories from the Midwest 2012 (Indiana University Press).