FICTIONESE

Dying people sometimes get queer ideas in their heads. I remember my Mom in hospice talking about Archie. She wanted to talk about him every time I visited. She asked if I remembered her making him grilled cheese sandwiches on so many days, all those years ago. And tomato soup. I nodded. I didn’t really want to talk about Archie.

His mom had been dying all that winter. He used to hang with us, the usual gang of boys and one tough girl from the same few suburban blocks. But when his mom was dying, he stopped hanging out with us. He started visiting our moms when we were outside playing or down in the bowling alley or at Rex’s house down in the basement figuring out how to make homemade gunpowder with things we bought at the corner pharmacy store, one by one, to avoid arousing suspicion from the canny old pharmacist. Archie would use his pity routine to get all the moms to make him a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. He would even ask for ones to take home afterwards in wax paper. So he could heat them up later. Gross. He’d always be gone before you got home. I sort of just blocked it out at the time. You can’t pick a fight with a kid whose mom is dying.

My mom kept talking about Estelle and her cancer. One dying person talking about another person who died long ago. She didn’t even know Estelle all that well. She would just say hello to her at the pool club in summer, two ladies talking about next to nothing under those shadowy floppy hats. She used to have sharp things to say about Archie’s mom before she got so sick. Married women kept their eyes on her. But Archie’s mom had died so young. And she wanted to talk about how Archie would watch Wheel of Fortune with her. He’d sit in my dad’s old recliner and guess the puzzles long before she did. It made her smile. She said she always loved his red hair. She almost married a young man with red hair once, she added. Her tiny laugh was short on air.

She asked if I would do something for Archie.

Archie’s been dead twelve years. He only had his mom and no siblings. Still. “What,” I asked her, in the most sincere way possible, I thought, “could I do for Archie? Tell me, Mom. “

“Oh, I don’t know. It just seems you could do something for poor Archie.”

I didn’t ask her if she wanted me to put a grilled cheese sandwich on his grave. Although something dark and wicked inside me had smiled into that thought.

“He didn’t have any brothers or sisters, did he? No one. Maybe a pet dog. He had a dog, right?”

The morphine was taking its toll. Her voice had become so much frailer, barely breaking her whisper. I held her hand and it was almost inert. It forgot to shape itself to my hand. But it remembered after a while.

“Yeah.” I had to pull back the scrim of time. It took a moment. “Baxter. His dog’s name was Baxter.” Scruffy thing that was always getting loose and eating people’s trash. I felt a twinge of pathos for no reason. That the dog’s ghost was suddenly dragged back here, I guess. I could see Archie angrily walking him home, hand hooked under its collar. I heard its whimpering.

She was silent a while with her eyes closed, inwardly following the river.

“Baxter.” She smiled at the name. It gave her such deep pleasure. “He must have loved that dog. I bet the other grilled cheese sandwiches were for that dog.”

“Maybe.”

I remembered how Archie had changed not much longer after that. We had seen him getting in cars with older men. We knew he liked the sorts of drugs no one was interested in scoring from him or sharing. We grew apart fast. I’d still see his red hair across a room at a party occasionally, but less and less. These are things I couldn’t tell my mom. She had a cute little orphan waif in her mind. She was tending to him.

“I never told you this but I thought about adopting him. Archie. After his mom died. He could have been your brother. How different things would have been, eh?”

Her eyes brightened a moment and she turned and looked into me, to see everything I was or might be, before falling back into Morphine River. The look only a mother could give you.

“How about that?” she said, her eyes still closed.

“That would have certainly been…different.” I wondered if she knew how horrible he had ended, after all. It seemed she might. Or part of her might anyway.

“Do something for Archie,” she said. And she moved her right hand in the air as though she were drawing something. Then she fell back deeply into that thing like sleep. After a while, I stroked her hand and told her I was leaving and she nodded from deep under there. I told her I would be back later that night. She didn’t nod that time.

Driving home, after a while, I weirdly pictured Archie sitting next to me. Right there in the passenger seat, riding shotgun. He started to talk to me and it was just imagination but it started to hurt. Because ghost Archie was kind, not an asshole at all. He was fully adult, a brother, something he never had a chance to be. We had just been visiting our mother and he knew what to say. He knew her well.

When I drove past the river where they found Archie, it was still light but barely. I pulled over a moment to look at the choppy ice covering the river and drifting towards the bay and all the smoky colors in the western sky. All that ice but nothing solid and no crossing. The little islands in the river already treasured their darkness. I sat there and wished I was a painter like a fool. I wished I was a foolish painter who believed in things like this, totally believed. At least for a minute or so. It was a sort of scorch on the soul. The inability to translate what I thought I saw in hunks of ice drifting and the new dark of the little islands with their trees. I took a photo with my phone and it was ugly as fuck. Nothing like what was there. I threw it down on the passenger seat in disgust. Then I just drove home.