The Grand Ballast (43 page)

Valen started taking odd jobs. Mostly
construction and landscaping. Alone in the house each day, Bode
floundered. He saw movement through the cracks under doorways.
Heard the clink of plates in the kitchen even when no one else was
home. The sound of breath through a microphone.

One weekend, he told Valen he was driving to
his hometown to visit his parents. He took the car they’d bought
together—used, nothing flashy—and he passed over miles of highway
without so much as the radio to distract him. Every now and then he
glanced out the window, imagining he could see a circus train
gliding along the tracks in the distance. He arrived at his
parents’ house late in the afternoon.

He didn’t know what he
expected. If he thought he could walk into the house and have it be
just the same—his mother on the floor with her marbles, his father
gazing down at the yards of scarf in his lap, his needles clicking.
What didn’t occur to him until he was on the doorstep was that they
might be ashamed of him. That they might know
stories about the Grand Ballast, might have seen pictures or
videos of him performing.

He doubted that. Doubted they paid enough
attention. But he was nervous anyway.

The front yard was overgrown and a small
wheelbarrow had rusted in some bushes. He grew jittery as he walked
up the front steps. Wished he had a cigarette.

He knocked.

A woman answered. She was tall and
long-limbed, her dark hair streaked with gray. “Can I help you?”
she asked.

Bode stared. Had his parents moved out?
Died? He should have checked before coming all this way. He gave
the woman his parents’ names.

The woman’s mouth twisted slightly to one
side. “You're a friend?”

“
Their son.”

Her eyes grew softer, infused with a deep
sympathy that could only mean bad news. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Come in.”

He wanted to turn and leave. Instead he
stepped over the threshold.

The living room was the still robin’s egg
blue, but the curtains were different—a ruffled peach that didn’t
look as good with the blue as the old white lace curtains had.

“
Your father, I’m afraid,
passed away last year,” the woman said. “He was sick a long time.
Your mother is upstairs. I’m Stephanie, her caretaker.”

“
Her caretaker?”

“
We think she might be sick
too.”

“
You
think
?”

“
Physically, we can’t find
anything very wrong with her. But she doesn’t want to do anything
but lie in bed.”

“
I need to see
her.”

Stephanie took him upstairs.

Bode’s mother was in Bode’s former room. The
bed had been moved to the corner where she’d told Bode his crib had
stood when he was a baby. She looked smaller than he remembered.
And her eyes weren’t as blank as he’d feared. Her expression was
gentle rather than distant. She looked at him with a sort of shy
expectancy as he approached.

A wave broke over him. It wasn’t just old
memories, old feelings. It was a sense of opportunity, a warmth
that seemed to wrap him, cling to him. He’d been foolish, and he
had done bad things, but his mother was alive and she was here and
maybe there was some connection here that went deeper than words or
blood.

Please hold me. Please hold me and don’t
give up on me and don’t be sick; don’t die. Don’t ever die.

He wished he remembered
being new to the world. Being held against her and rocked. She
couldn’t have been completely indifferent to him. She must have
loved him, because he’d never felt
abandoned
. Never felt that the world
was a cold place. He’d simply wanted more than what had existed in
his house.

He couldn’t go all the way to her. He
stopped a few feet from the bed. “Hi,” he whispered.

She gazed at him.

“
Why won’t you get up?” he
asked gently. “Hmm? Stephanie says you’re not sick.”

She smiled a bit slyly.

From somewhere in the house came Stephanie’s
humming. His mother murmured.

“
What?” Bode sat next to
her

“
Here comes the train.” His
mother turned her head wide-eyed, and then laughed—a small, bubbly
sound that made her shoulders jerk.

“
Ah.” Bode smiled at her
and rubbed her back. He glanced at the ceiling. Closed his eyes.
“Here comes the train.”

He sat with her as the afternoon faded. A
couple of times he felt his phone buzz in his pocket.

“
I ought to go,” he said at
last.

She murmured again.

He squeezed her hand. “I want you to know
that I saw you at my show that night, a few years ago. And I was
glad you were there.” She didn’t respond. “I’ve been gone a long
time, haven’t I?”

She nodded.

“
Well, listen. I ran away
to join the circus. But I’m back now, and I’ll try to see you
sometimes. If you want to see me.”

She nodded again, a small movement. Her lips
twitched. Her voice was thick when she spoke. “I miss you.”

He blinked, his eyes stinging. “I’ll leave
my phone number.” He stood. “I live pretty far from here, but I can
make the trip.”

He started toward the door. She surprised
him by climbing off the bed. She arced one arm above her head and
held the other out to the side. Slowly, shakily, she began to turn,
jerking like a ballerina in a music box. A rough imitation of a
sequence he’d done during his show years before. She stopped and
offered him a tiny smile.

He smiled back. Then he walked over to her
and swept her into a hug. Her body felt fragile and too small.

Fuck the idea that whatever didn’t kill you
made you stronger. It wasn’t true. But it was possible for cruel
people to give you gifts, for good people to limit you, for smart
people to make poor choices.

“
I
love
you,” he told her. “I always
have.”

***

For weeks, the sun was out nearly every
day.

Bode took walks in the neighborhood and
counted the iron rails in front of the narrow stone townhouses.
Silently thanked the people who maintained flowerbeds and window
boxes. Who cared for dogs and cats. Who played games with their
children. There were still traces everywhere of what had been—a
world of fragile connections and unbent dreams. Unrehearsed dances
and beautiful stories.

Sometimes Kilroy walked beside him. A
cane-twirling ghost with a tremendous grin. Bode would look back at
the sidewalk and see dark drips in a trail behind them. He’d look
at Kilroy and search for the source of blood, only to have Kilroy
fade maddeningly before he could find the fatal wound. Bode would
look back at the sidewalk and find it pale and clean.

One day, the gentle
plat-plat-plat of a bleeding ghost became a rhythm. Kilroy hummed,
a pleasurable, absent tune. Somewhere, a basketball bounced.
An
oofing
collision with pavement. Soon Bode was moving to the music,
gliding across the sidewalk, stopping to spin or to roll his
shoulders.

People watched.

He tapped the pavement with a toe, then a
heel. He bent and shifted and spun. Sent his joy, his anger, out
into the space around him. Closed his eyes and felt the sun on his
skin; moved from the sidewalk to the grass, whirling and stomping.
Delicacy and precision be damned. The story he had to tell was a
slaughterhouse—blades through flesh and a stinking spray on
everything.

He moved until he was exhausted, and then he
sank against the tree and listened to the tentative clapping around
him.

He began dancing outside
every Saturday. People tossed coins and Bode left them where they
fell. Children tried to mimic his steps, and he taught them how.
Parents too. One evening, half the street waltzed clumsily,
drowning music with laughter. Bode remembered Bettina’s
words.
“We want love in the world. A
wiiiidespread love.”

So he tried for joy. Tried to let the bad
memories go and offer something else.

“
You certainly make
Saturdays more fun,” a woman told him once.

All that suffering. All
that fear. All those hours in a coffin, lost in the Haze. The
hurtling of the train through chilly nights. The days at the Little
Comet. Marbles.

All of that, so that one
day he could make a stranger’s Saturdays more fun.

He wanted to laugh. But it
helped. Each week, he threw himself into dancing with more abandon,
his happiness growing. It wasn’t that he forgot about the past. But
the shadows stayed at the edges of his mind. He drew on memories of
his childhood. The first time he’d stepped into the Little Comet.
Danielle and Garland laughing and clinking glasses at the bar on
that opening night years ago. He even drew on memories of Kilroy,
of the things they’d dreamed together. Of Valen, when they’d
emerged from the water. When they’d made their promise in
Harkville.

Maybe it was worth it.
Maybe we are all here for the simplest reasons.

Maybe I am—and always have been—in love.

***

Bode was in the kitchen
filling a glass with water when he paused. For a second, the glass
appeared broken, the rim glistening with blood. He watched the
light hit the jagged red edge. He couldn’t drink out of this. But
when he looked again, the glass was intact, perfectly smooth. From
upstairs, he heard calliope music. He set the glass down and walked
to the hall. Took the stairs slowly so they wouldn’t
creak.

He opened the bathroom door
and felt a moment’s quiet wonder, like he was standing on an empty
stage. Then terror settled in.

Sibyata stood by the sink
with her back to him, the gray afternoon light yoking her naked
shoulders. She turned slowly. The muscles of her thin arms bulged
and her skinny chest appeared streaked with ribs. She tilted her
head.

She had a terrible scar on
her leg, pink and shiny and S-shaped. Bode couldn’t speak. She
rolled her head, making her neck pop. Bent one arm behind her back
and stepped toward him. He waited for her to disappear, but she
didn’t, and the room grew colder.

He wondered how long ago
she’d died.

He didn’t remember life
seeming this way when he was a child—one death, then another. No
goodbyes, just a gust and sudden darkness.
Then you waited for someone whose lit match of a heart nudged
yours. Who curled up in your lonely days, a fine and
mostly-peaceful companion, troubled by dreams you only ever got to
see the skin of. Bode had that now.

It wasn’t that he missed
Kilroy, exactly. But in the same way he might look at an old house
and silently ask the years to fall away—for the windows to shine,
the paint to brighten, and for young and lovely ghosts to step onto
the porch—Bode sometimes caught sight of his scars and wished,
perversely, for their toughness to peel away, for the wounds to
open and bleed afresh.

A soft sound. Bode looked
down and saw the scar slip from Sibyata’s leg and coil on the floor
like a snake. He watched it, half convinced it would strike. Where
the scar had been, Sibyata’s skin was new and smooth and almost
seemed to pulse. She smiled at him. Her whole body flickered once
like an image on a screen and was gone.

The floor was bare. No
scar. Nothing but strands of his and Valen’s hair collecting at the
base of the wall. A damp washcloth balled in one corner.

He needed to get
out.

He went downstairs. Took
out his phone and called Valen. “Can you meet me somewhere?” His
voice shook and his breath was wet and harsh behind the
words.

Noise on the other end.
Clanking and men shouting. “Are you okay?” Valen asked.

“
Yes,” Bode said.
“Everything’s fine. I just want to see you.”

“
I have to finish something
here. Then I’ll be home. Okay?”

Bode stared at the mantle,
at their paltry decorations. Neither he nor Valen had keepsakes.
But Bode had tried, over the last few months, to make this home
feel more like theirs. He just never knew what to buy. Branches in
a ceramic vase. A small brass horse. A painting of bread loaves. He
listened to the
clank-clank-clank
in the background on Valen’s end. “Okay. Okay,
I’ll see you then.”

“
Are you sure
you’re—”

Bode hung up.

He stood and put on his
shoes and walked out the door.
The wind
rattled birds’ nests and made trash skitter down the streets.
Knocked the chimes on neighbor’s porches an
d blew dry leaves around his feet.
The
sky was an unvaried gray, and
brick buildings rose into that colorless space, solid and
dark-windowed, with iron gates and old, splintering doors. Cats
skulked under cars and squirrels scurried up telephone poles. Bode
walked faster.

Before he reached the
field, he saw a woman in a small, patchy yard. She was trying to
hang a plastic skeleton from a tree. The skeleton had gold
fasteners holding its joints together, and a loop of twine
sprouting from its skull. Every time the woman tried to toss the
twine over a branch, the wind caught it. Before Bode knew what he
was doing, he’d stepped into her yard. She held the skeleton, he
bent the branch downward, and together they hung it.