This is the first installment of a short story I have been working on. Enjoy.
Part one. White Box.
Originally Patty had moved out to New Mexico to find herself or something to that effect. The desire for self-fulfillment and the finding of ones soul sounded all too enticing, so she left. It was heartbreaking though because the summer that she left was our best ever. It was also the summer that I legitimately, intentionally and hopelessly had fallen in love with her.
At the crash site they found her red sunglasses and her scarf. Searching through the backseat they found her wallet and the camera and a couple of rolls of film. But they never found her body or blood or hair or skin. It’s like she was never even there for the crash. When the authorities called in her family to pick up her things they brought me along with them. To this day I am still unsure as to why they did this. Maybe it was out of their knowing that I loved her. Or maybe it was because I had basically been a part of the family since I was five. But I suppose at this juncture in the story it doesn’t really matter. But what did matter was the reality that I was in the car with her mom and dad and two brothers headed to the coroners office in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
They drove an old Chrysler station wagon with the backwards-facing seat in the rear. They let me sit in it alone while her brothers sat in the middle. I stayed there, sitting in that seat, for the entirety of the trip. It became my haven on a trip to hell. The trip from Marfa was about eight hours with stops. I didn’t speak one single word the entire way.
When we were younger, she and I would hide from everyone in the backseat of the station wagon and fall asleep until my dad would come pick me up and take me home. And as we grew older the seat became a place where secrets and kisses were shared and where my heart for her grew. She probably never knew about this fact. I never told anyone. Maybe she knew, I don’t know.
Right before she left I gave her my mom’s old camera that she had used when she was in college. Patty loved pictures and how, when you really looked at them, you could make up any story that you wanted about them. She loved how, in some pictures, you could tell people really wanted to be somewhere else or that they really wanted to be in that particular picture with someone else. I loved that about her. To thank me she kissed me on the jawbone and then jumped into the driver’s seat of the ’78 Chevelle, waved goodbye and drove away towards the west. I went home and cried in my back yard for fifteen minutes, wiped my face, then walked inside for dinner. I never made a big deal about again until today.
-
Alamogordo is not a place you would go to have a roaring Friday night. Well, neither is Marfa but that is beside the point. That is unless you like beer and talking to old men with fifty years of stories that have been told again and again. In that case, pack your bags.
When we finally did roll into the town I felt like I was entering a chapter of a book. In this chapter there would be a boy and a family and some grieving and some tears. There might be some yelling or something like that. But all in all, this entire chapter would be entitled something like ‘Grief ‘ or ‘The Lost Girl’ or ‘That Shitty White Box’.
Patty’s dad pulled into the coroner’s office parking lot, placed the car in park and turned it off. Once the car was off the silence was, in a very cliché way, deafening. We sat, quietly, for what seemed to be an hour in the warming heat of the New Mexico sun. Finally, Patty’s dad opened his door and stood outside the car. He stretched his legs and flexed his fingers back and forth. Dale and Charlie, the twins, followed suit and went and sat on one of the parking barriers near the car letting the sun thaw out their pale white thighs.
With hesitation I opened wide the huge back door of the station wagon and climbed out onto the gravel-strewn parking lot. Stretching, I surveyed the place that we had arrived in, stared at the sun and then went and sat next to Dale. Their mother was not so quick to exit the car though. I think maybe it was because if she did get out and go into that office then the fact that her daughter was gone or dead or some variation of the two would become factual and true. She couldn’t deal with that right now. So Patty’s dad told us to stay put and he walked slowly into the office to check out the situation.
-
When Patty’s dad called us in we all made our way to a cramped sitting room with metal chairs and linoleum flooring and a picture of a waterfall on the wall. A man entered with a half eaten sandwich in his hand and told us that we could come back. With hesitation Patty’s mom rose and the five of us walked through the heavy metal swinging doors and into a big examination room. There were five or six big metal tables, two of which had bodies covered by sheets on top of them. It made me feel sick. I wanted to leave. Knowing that Patty might be lying on a metal table somewhere made me nauseas. But she was not here. She was not in this room or in this building or in this godforsaken town.
The man with the sandwich told us to wait as he had a box of Patty’s things to give to us. We stood there waiting, no one saying a thing. I could see silent tears rolling down the face of Mrs. Bersham, Patty’s mom. She just kept staring out the one singular window that was placed at the far end of the room. She stared into it as if Patty was standing on the other side. I wish she had been so that I didn’t have to watch her mom cry anymore. I wish so badly for Dale and Charlie and their dad, but mainly for Patty’s mom. I loved her very much. She was a good woman.
Finally the man came out from a room in the back carrying a white box. He looked at Patty’s dad, mouth full of sandwich, nodded and walked back into the office. No one moved. Nothing was said. We just stood there looking at the box and wondering all of the things that should have been wondered. I wished that she had been in the box and that I would be able to just reach in and grab her and bring her back. But that wasn’t reality and this situation was the definition of reality. Finally Patty’s dad grabbed the box with both hands and told us to get in the car.
The box sat in the middle seat between Dale and Charlie while we drove. It was weird because Patty always sat there when their family would go on trips or out for the day. She liked that spot, it made her feel safe. Charlie just stared out the window, his eyes glazed over, his left hand resting on the box. I just sat in the back, watching the lines on the road run away from the car. I wondered if she was looking at something beautiful. I wondered if she had turned into something beautiful. I wondered a lot of things and wished for a lot of things but mainly I just missed my friend. I missed her very much. I missed her because she was the one female on earth that found me suitable enough to kiss. I was easily one of the luckiest boys on earth to have known her.
-
Mr. Bersham pulled the car into a rest stop on the side of the highway. It overlooked the desert and a couple of cacti. We all made our way to a picnic table and opened up some potato salad and sandwiches that Patty’s mom had made. It felt good to be in the sun again sitting on the bench next to her family. Lunch was good. I like potato salad.
After we were done we all just kept quiet and kept staring at the box that sat in the middle of the table. Patty’s mom finally just grabbed the box and opened it, throwing the top down on the ground behind her. She looked into the box and stuck her hands inside and rummaged through the things that the police had found. She told us to come and look, so we all stood up and huddled around her. There was a scarf and a pair of sandals that were worn down and her red sunglasses. Her wallet was completely intact and all of her money and cards were there. It was almost as if she just left these things at the crash and walked off into the desert. Mrs. Bersham lifted the camera out of the box and looked directly at me. She looked back into the box to find four other rolls of film and then handed it all to me. She knew that these things were not meant for anyone but me. So I took them and placed the rolls in my bandana and the camera in my backpack. I went and put the pack into the car and shut the big back door. Then, without saying anything I just walked over to the barbwire fence, fell to my knees and cried. I cried loud. I cried for the fact that my best friend was gone. I cried for her family. I cried for the world that would not get to know her or the things that she loved. I just cried.
Patty’s dad came over once everyone had had enough, lifted me up by my arms and told me we were leaving. I got into the back seat, held my backpack in my lap and slept the entire way home.
Part two. In the Purple Clouds.
I live in a house that backs up to a dry creek bed on a farm on the edge of town. I live with my mom and dad. Patty lived about a mile away. Our senior year we would walk together to school and talk each other or not. Either way we just liked walking next to each other and finding our way to school.
When the Berhshams finally dropped me off at my house it was about two in the morning and I was very tired. Patty’s dad came to back of the car while I was opening the big back door and grabbing my pack and bandana. He just stood there as I shut the door and when I turned around he grabbed me, hugged me and then walked back to the drivers door. We caught eyes one last time and that was it, they drove off.
I watched the red dot brake lights fade off and then walked up to my porch and opened the front screen door. Drudgingly I mounted the stairs up to my room, plunged onto my bed and fell asleep in my clothes.
-
I woke up to my mom cooking. She never cooks…ever. In reality she is not even my real mother. She is my dad’s wife. She is nice and she loves me but never cooks or cleans or plants anything in the ground. So I found it quite odd that she would be cooking. But this is severely beside the point. Once, when I was eight my mom (my real mom) got caught up with a motivational speaker that she went to hear speak in El Paso. When she got back home from the conference I could tell something was different. She started staring out of windows for long periods of time and reading romance novels. If you knew my mom, you would know that this was very outside of her normal character. After about a month of this behavior she told my dad and I that she was going to hear him speak once more in San Antonio before he left to speak on the west coast. She never came back.
-
I woke up and sat on the edge of my bed with my face in my hands. It was almost as if I didn’t stand a chance that day. I didn’t stand a chance against these feelings. I didn’t have the motivation to go anywhere or do anything or talk to anyone. So I went and did all of the above. I walked down stairs and talked with my dad and Jill. I ate her breakfast. Then I grabbed my bandana with the film in it and walked out the kitchen door and into town. I had to get the film developed.
The general store in town is run and owned by Mr. Billy Flannigan. He is a short man. He is very unpleasant. He wears glasses that his wife used to wear before she died. He wears suspenders everyday and the same pair of brown banking shoes with the broken laces. A local woman by the name of Roberta Robin went to him in the early 90’s and convinced him to let her open a photo lab in his store. For him the convincing factor was the revenue increase. Roberta was OK with this fact. I walked in, waved to the surly Flannigan and made my way over to the back corner of the store.
Ms. Robin was a very nice woman and I imagined that she was the older version of Patty. I suppose that this was why I loved going into the store and talking to her on the weekends. But, I gave her the six rolls of film and she said they would be ready the next day. This made my anxious but I told her that was fine and walked back home.
When I finally made the fence line a storm was just rolling in. You could see it for miles and miles across the chest of the land. It was like a deep purple blanket being draped over the fields and desert lands. I walked into the house, grabbed a coke and walked back out onto the porch and sat on the boards that my father had hammered. In the subtlest of ways the wind began to lightly brush the house and my face and the grass began to move ever so slightly. Light drops began to fall and lightning split the sky open so as to show the heavens that lurked behind the clouds of purple. I just rested on the planks of oak and drank my coke and watched as the land was washed clean and the dust was settled and the water collected. Finally my dad and Jill came home from town and ran inside the house, hiding from the rain. Jill and dad made dinner and we laughed about some old stories and ate and drank and then I went to bed. It was hard to fall asleep. I was thinking about the pictures and her.
The next morning I woke with my feet resting uncovered in the cool fall air of my room. My face felt warm and my whole body was in a state of sinking. I lay there, on my bed, thinking of the pictures. I wondered about what they would show and if they would tell the story of her last days. After about twenty minutes of dreaming and wondering and creating stories in my head I sat up and rubbed my face and scratched my eyes. I got up, put on my white t-shirt and my pants and my old grey shoes and walked down stairs. Without even acknowledging dad or Jill I walked out the door, down the porch steps and out onto the gravel road. Walking to the store I debated with myself as to whether I actually wanted to see the photographs. What if they shown things that I didn’t want to see? What if they were plain and uninteresting? What if, from them, I was unable to re-create any story at all? This scared me and I stopped for a second in the middle of the road. I looked at the store up ahead and then back towards my house then at the store and again back towards my house. Then, as if someone were standing right next to me, I heard a voice tell me to keep going and to see her story.
I got to the store, saw Ms. Robin, paid my money and walked out of the store. But just before I could get to the door Ms. Robin called my name and I turned around to face her. For a long while she just looked at me and then she just said, “Good luck with those boy.” And that was it. I walked out of the store and made my way back out to the road and walked back home.
-
Every summer Patty and I would wait for the rains to come sweeping across the west Texas plains to fill the creek behind my house. The creek would swell and bulge and groan with the pains of summer wetness. Once the rain would start to fall she would run over to my house and come grab me out of my room. She would always be wearing a dress of some kind. Usually something that made me fall in love with her even more. Everything that she wore resembled the sunsets that would fall to the west of us. Some of her white summer dresses were like the pure silk fog that would come in and sway across the land. She would come and tell me that it was raining and she would drag me down to the banks. As the minutes would pass and the creek would swell her anxiousness and excitement would grow in equal correlation. Finally, once the water was at the perfect height she would wade out and float on her back, letting the rain fall on her cheeks and lips. On occasion I would join her and I always loved the coolness of the water. But, for the most part, I just loved watching her. I think she knew how much I loved watching her in the moments where she felt most alive. This was the last thing that we had done together before she left. That day the rain was exceptionally warm and the creek grew rapidly. She laid face up for almost an hour in the warm, murky water. And when she climbed her way up the bank of the creek she made her way towards me. When she had clawed her way out of the mud she fell into my lap and kissed my mouth. We lay there for a long time, in the rain, wet from head to toe. She was still in her dress and I in my jeans.
She whispered in my ears and told me the sweetest of things. She kissed my neck and I hers and we talked about the future and God and friends. We lay in my father’s barn, hidden from the elements, speaking of things that deserve high places in the hearts of men. I learned the curves of her hip bones and she the arches of my feet. Then, as quickly as the sun rose she was gone. She had to finish packing and I told her I would come to see her off at her home. Once we had said our goodbyes and waved at one another I walked back to the creek. I sat looking at the scrape marks that her hands and fingers had made as she climbed the bank of the creek, the marks that led to me, to my lap, to my lips.
-
When I walked into the house from the store Jill asked me if I was OK; I wasn’t. I sometimes hated the fact that I was old enough to think and react and live and grow on my own but still not old enough to run away. I was still not at a place where my feet were free. O’ the free heart.
-
I did not want to open the small, white, paper flap that held those pictures. I do not want to know that she, in reality, had captured nothing. I didn’t want to find out that she had been lonely or that she was scared and I believed that these pictures might depict that. I did not want to know these things. I did not want to hurt for her any more than I already did.
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