The Last Remembered Intersection by Robert Glick

Grace laid out the ultrasounds of the miscarriage over her legs. Three stills, captured at intervals, crooked on their tulip bedspread. The TV tuned to whatever.

“See?” Grace said to Chuck.

Their daughter Jess, only 14, had driven her to the hospital. It had happened too quickly to call Chuck, who had been working late, hunched over his magnifying glass, rhodium-plating some heirloom necklace.

“Yeah,” he said. No change in angle from photo to photo, no shift in pixels from what would have become a foot.

The undeveloped beauty of tiny arches and soles and heels.

“We knew it was possible, probable,” she said. “We did.”

They hadn’t planned this non-entity that their older son Russell had called Sprocket. When she had read the stick, Grace had smiled, yes, and she had hugged Chuck, softly digging her nails into the nape of his neck, yet she talked mostly about the somewhat overstated dangers of a “high risk” pregnancy-she was 39-and the energy required to dispel blowouts and spit rags, to run a hamper full of clean onesies up the stairs.  

“This time I’m having a C-section,” she had said. “Extract it, no fuss.”

She hadn’t jumped from couch to couch, as he had.

Now he touched where its heart would have grown. To restart, to listen, as if his finger had become the flat, circular surface of a stethoscope.

“I wanted it so much,” he said.

Grace pulled a tissue from the pocket of the neon-green husband pillow and gave it to Chuck, who blew his nose, let the tissue fall to the floor. She popped two Vicodin. Chuck hated taking pills, couldn’t swallow them without water. It always made the kids laugh, watching him tilt his head back like a Pez dispenser.

“And we’re off,” she said, closing her eyes, “into that wilderness feeling, where everything’s blanketed in snow.”

He leaned against Grace until her breath drew out, got regular. He had never been so tired, and still too tired to sleep, and the tears running down his gritty whiskers.

That day, so long ago, when Russell ran a Matchbox dragster up the side of Chuck’s face, after he had told his kids to imagine his whiskers as a row of tire spikes protecting a parking garage.

It surprised him, that he cried at all. He hadn’t even cried after his father died of a heart attack, a widowmaker, at a Rockies game, a scorching doubleheader in the exposed bleachers. How helpless he felt, and ridiculous, sweeping the peanut shells from his father’s lap before trying to resuscitate him.

The infomercials, the captioned hawking of pseudo-rubies and battery-powered airblowers, fulfilled the singular purpose Chuck had assigned to them. They flickered light to keep their bedroom from melting, from coating them with a Pompeii of drywall. Then a commercial for Smile Island: an animation of sparkling teeth rowing safely through a desert of malicious sugar. This fantasy of perfect bicuspids enraged him. As if a diligent toothbrusher could prevent every incursion of random or environmental influences. If you do everything the right way, everything will be right, right? That was what the pen-clicking obstetrician had said. That at 11 weeks, everything tested perfectly, and therefore there was nothing to fear.

He wanted to ransack the obstetrician’s office, to hold the entire tank of goldfish hostage in his cheeks until they suffocated.

In the waiting room, every single cover of every single magazine had a rectangle cut out. The doctor’s home address excised, an abscess in the page, a windowless maw in a derelict house.

Chuck turned off the television at the source; Grace, most likely, was lying on the remote.

Only with the exhaustion of toddlers had he ever slept soundly. Last year, Chuck had finally bought blackout curtains, which, he supposed, helped in some incremental way.

On the far wall, the green ping of the smoke detector ready light. Behind it, behind the wall, Chuck couldn’t stop imagining a bulbous, asymmetric bee hive that blew up like a boil, like an acid balloon, and burst through.

*

“I’m staying home from work,” Chuck said the next morning. He had helped Grace downstairs, made her tea.

“I’m not an invalid, okay?”

“It drives me crazy that I couldn’t help.”

“Look, the little light-comets aren’t streaking across my eyes any more. And the bleeding, it’s more of a trickle now.”

“I have no doubt that you’re fine without me. But let me do the little I can do.”

Chuck’s heart was raw, had the pink chewiness of a steak tossed to a Doberman. Sure, he could drive the kids to school, pick up necessary supplies: fabric softener, lip balm, peanut butter. Otherwise, he felt an almost desperate pull to be tethered to Grace. And he certainly couldn’t bear a conversation with his boss, Mr. Karczinsk, owner of Master K.’s Jewelers, whose comb leaned forward in the breast pocket of his white, palely striped dress shirts, who had a permanent loupe mark around one eye. He’d take one look at Chuck, at some missed detail of personal hygiene, the wiry hair sprouting from the ear whorl, and he’d say, “Talk, why don’t you? Aren’t we second family here?”

So Chuck would take sick time, because Chuck couldn’t imagine telling Master K. that Sprocket would have been exactly thirteen weeks in the womb today, from conception.

And that he wanted to eat ground-up glass.

Russell ran downstairs with his backpack, which he opened too wide and too fast and everything blurted out onto the kitchen table.

“Pick that stuff up!” Chuck said.

“I was planning on leaving it there,” Russell replied.

“Three minutes,” Grace said.

“I only wanted to show you this cool graph,” said Russell, “that I made for my chemistry report. 3-D modeled molecules.”

“Later,” Chuck said. “I’m sure your mom doesn’t have the brainspace.”

“Okay,” huffed Russell. He seemed slightly hurt.

“Can you get Jess?” Grace asked Chuck. “She’s always where she’s not supposed to be.”

Both kids sat in the back of the minivan. Jess was coding an assignment on her iPad-something about the internet being structured like an ocean, with shallow and deep items. Sound bled from Russell’s headphones; Chuck could only hear the drums. Grief was indiscernible from indifference. It was all headphones on and headphones off and Russell tugging at his eyelashes on the beat and it all seemed exactly the same as last week, when the pregnancy hadn’t been quite real, Jess thinking aloud through shades of hair dye and Russell crudely lifting the plate to drink the juice from the chicken cacciatore, which Chuck had made, using the special olives he had bought from Dean & DeLuca, which made Grace gag and sprint upstairs.

That nausea, Grace had said, beyond any previous memory of nausea.

The air in the minivan didn’t want to circulate, as hot and dense as a lead blanket, and so Chuck put down the windows. Jess might have grunted; that was about it for reaction.

“Come home on time, little fledgelings,” Chuck said at the high school; they had already trudged off.

*

Trader Joe’s was nearly empty, and no air-conditioning, not this early.

If he had come home on time, what? He would have been able to take Grace to the hospital instead of Jess. What else, if anything, would have changed?

He felt the Reckless as a heat in his fingertips, as cayenne in the back of his throat.

Everything embittered him. A wheel on a kids’ cart wobbled too fast for his eyes. A group of checkers did a dance-off around a table of peach cobblers. Even their Hawaiian shirts, which made him think of cell phone towers, their metal skeletons made organic by the bark of palm trees.

In one of the frozen foods aisles, Chuck shoved his hands down, hard, fingers spread, into the bags of fish nuggets. Under no circumstances would he submit to the Reckless, who was whispering: Fling your basket at that pyramid of spaghetti sauce jars. Give yourself this one gift: a cascade of shattering glass, the ooze of marinara.

He got the fabric softener, forgot the lip balm, bought crunchy instead of smooth.

*

When he came home, he found Grace in the bathroom, on the seat-down toilet, reading a book on pulse oximetry. The book had something to do with the cartographer, her patient, who had died two weeks ago during surgery: unforeseeable complications from an anesthetic she had administered.

“The 1 in the 1 in a 100,000,” she had said.

True, Grace and Moreland, the attending surgeon, were obligated to present the case next month to their colleagues, to answer the difficult questions about cause and effect and culpability. But, Grace had said, it was a formality, not even worth prepping for, since they had done nothing wrong. Independent contractors had examined the data from the monitors; the airway clear, the dosages accurate.

Now she stuck out the tip of her tongue, concentrating hard, though Chuck doubted whether she could read anything through the blurriness of her tears.

“Goes okay?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“I got you some of that chocolate peppermint bark stuff-won’t that help a bit?”

Grace started crying harder. Chuck couldn’t bear to look at her; he didn’t want to cry himself. There, on the bathroom wall, was the framed piece of construction paper, the kind that preschoolers drew on, on which there were two jagged, childish words: “gotta AIM!” To this day, it mortified Russell, though he never took it down.

“Did I do something wrong?” Chuck asked.

“Do you want a special treat for going shopping?” she asked. And with her foot, she closed the door on him, locked the push-button.

“Grace!” he yelled. She didn’t respond. “Grace!” The Reckless flared up in his foot-he had hung this door, knew its lack of thickness-and the Reckless subsided. There was, he remembered, that branch that kept tapping so irksomely against the laundry room window.

The decapitating snip of hedge shears, the branch he’d go chop down.

*

He hacked at the branch, butchered an overgrowth of oleander. No gloves, no goggles. The bright, gusty weather decentered him, a swarm of ions at his ears. It was almost Kansas, after all. In such weather he felt the kindling of something supernatural and faintly malicious, where funnels of tornadoes swept rocking chairs up and away.

He went to the garage to stow the shears. The garage, the delicate balance of foresight and hoarding, had always made him feel softer, less angular. He thought about hard water, the unseen minerals. He sniffed a gas cap to an old lawnmower. He shook a mason jar full of finishing nails. Yes, given the circumstances, he’d cave in to Russell, who had been begging him to have a yard sale, clearing space for Russell’s free weights. Yes, it might be a relief to sell the radio-era leaf-blower and swamp cooler, all noise-polluters and fossil guzzlers.

So naive of him, to think she was more or less okay. Last night, in bed, she seemed well enough. She had rattled off her schema to taper from her painkillers. Lucid, matter-of-fact, as he had always known her, had always, perhaps, needed her. Since date one, when he had dropped his fork and she had, without fuss, pulled a new one from the adjacent table, she had kept the permeable boundaries of their world from extruding.

Given Grace’s relative indifference to the baby-no, not that, not exactly, rather her emphasis on the brute, unpleasant materiality of her prior pregnancies-was her sadness simply an involuntary, reflexive response to the physical trauma? Or was she, in mourning, making an admission how badly she had wanted it?

It was true, when planning vacations, she wouldn’t show excitement until she stepped onto whatever new soil.

The neatly modular shelving of the garage, the tennis ball descending from the twine, they couldn’t possibly pacify him. He threw darts like a baseball pitcher, with an exaggerated wind-up, darts that thunked hard and harder into the corkboard until one struck the magnetic base to an old spice rack and the metal tip snapped off and the Strongbow Cider flight, snowflake-slow, fluttered down.

*

Grace didn’t, as she said, “gather her appetite” until late; it was almost 9, mostly dark, when Chuck ran a bowl of lobster ravioli up to her and saw her scribbling frantically in her book on pulse oximetry.

He waited in the doorway; he wanted her to acknowledge him. There was the brass hook for the bathrobes. The dried, yellow roses in the two frames, set at a diagonal, and the Haeckel jellyfish, which reminded Chuck of psychedelic trumpet vines. A bra strap hung over the edge of an armoire drawer. Their bedroom, he had to say, looked normal enough. It smelled faintly of an eyemask, stuffed with sprigs of lavender, that Jess had made last year. Jess still seemed like a child then, still snuffing Red Hots up her nostrils for giggles, before the aggressive fade and the electric green hair, and that way she’d flick up one side of her upper lip when wanting you to feel the gale force of her apathy.

“It’s your room too,” Grace said, still writing, not looking at him.

“You seem almost obsessed with the case.”

“A man died because of my anesthetics. That’s important, don’t you think?”

He set the ravioli on her night table. “I thought this case was shut and shut.”

“It’s not, okay? It’s not shut and shut.”

“You’re angry with me?”

He couldn’t help the wounded, or cornered, animal in his tone. She was literally shutting up the book with her pen, writing directly over the body text rather than in the marginalia, and something about that violence hurt him.

“Do you honestly expect instant acceptance?” she asked.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t be upset. About the case, or, for that matter, about the baby.”

“The thing is, you are. You want me to skip steps.”

“It’s just-it’s not the end of everything, is it?”

“Can you at least attempt to let me have my emotions?” She tweezered a corner of a ravioli with thumb and forefinger, watched a glob of sauce fall back into the bowl. “And can you please go fetch the Little Scorpion already?”

Since the miscarriage, Jess, otherwise known as the Little Scorpion, had refused to speak to Grace, had stayed away from home entirely. The mother of her new friend Alicia had driven them out to the corn maze; Chuck would pick them up.

Chuck distrusted Alicia, who liked lipstick, as a fashion statement, on her front teeth.

“I just wanted-“

“Don’t,” she said.

“I love you,” he said. Grace didn’t respond. He went downstairs, fishing in his pocket for his oversized key chain. Paradise, he was going to tell her, the name of the town close to where the corn maze complicated the dirt.

*

Why did Grace’s emotions so deeply unsettle him?

He was somewhere near Arley, annoyed. On top of everything else, the minivan’s Emergency Brake indicator light wouldn’t stop blinking. He put the windows down, felt the rushing, humid warmth. He heard the asynchronous cricket songs. It was always deer o’clock around here, so he turned on the brights, which created a narrow, blinkering tunnel in front of him, for which he felt grateful, as if cracking a path through the dark momentarily allowed him to think through things without clutter.

He knew he wasn’t being fair. Despite Grace’s strength, what she often called the gritted-teeth path, he couldn’t possibly be surprised at how deeply the miscarriage had wounded her. Could he not bear the sheer intensity of her suffering? Was it that she was so obviously distracting herself with the cartographer’s death, and not tending to him? Or even worse, did he actually resent Grace for failing to carry his, their unborn child to term?

How selfish and cruel and worthless.

He saw two large bones ahead of him, probably deer vertebrae, just before a curve. One of the bones rested on the soft shoulder, almost exactly on the edge of a drainage ditch. He floored the gas. Could he drive his right-side tires between the bones? If he could, things wouldn’t be okay-that would be too much to ask-maybe his skill would push the needle towards a semblance of okay.

The vertebrae were, however, much larger and sharper than he had estimated. He crushed one; the tire popped. He torqued the steering wheel, but the right side of the minivan was no longer on solid ground, no traction at all. Then the van was tumbling off the shoulder, into the ditch, then Chuck’s forehead slamming into the steering wheel.

*

“At 4AM,” Grace said, confronting Chuck as he limped in the next morning, “you know what I learned? That Girls Gone Wild is still on television! It’s 2014, Chuck! Where were you? Are you okay? What happened?”

Chuck closed the front door behind him, threw his sweat-stained t-shirt onto the floor of the family room. He took two steps upstairs and two stairs back down, deciding to remain bare-chested, so that Grace could see the bruises. “I’m fine,” he said, rubbing the cross-hatched imprint of the steering wheel on his forehead, “I think.”

“What the hell happened to you?” Grace sat heavily on the couch, pulled her knees to her chest, draped the red and black trappers blanket over her. A plate of buttered toast on the coffee table.

He explained the bones in the middle of the road, how he must have been knocked out for hours, how delirious he had been when he came to. Out of cell phone range, wobbly. How at sunrise he dragged himself to the service station, got the minivan towed, hailed his first cab ever from the repair shop.

“Why didn’t you call me from the service station?”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” he said.

“And it was nothing but bad luck? A freak accident?”

“Of course!”

Of course he didn’t deliberately crash the minivan in that distant tentacle of Clay County.

“You’re sure? Absolutely sure?”

In the taxi, he had vowed that, for once, when he got home, he would keep quiet, which would give Grace space to come back into herself. He had even prepared for himself a totem image, to focus on at the moment when he couldn’t help but spray his emotions all over the house. It was the image of a fire swallower, which he had seen on a photograph in Jess’s room, which initially looked to him like a woman with a bowl cut blowing out a flaming s’more.

Except he couldn’t keep quiet.

“I don’t know,” Chuck admitted sheepishly, “I guess it could have been the Reckless.”

“Could have been?”

“I’m not saying it was. It might have, I suppose, been operating at a sublevel beneath my control.”

“Jesus, Chuck, is it ever at a level you can control! What if I had started bleeding again? If there were complications?”

“I’m sorry,” Chuck said.

“You know that you’re supposed to take care of me?”

“I know.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was you with your insides scooped out!”

It was awful. Her beautiful face held an expression of pained disgust, like when you had to tug a hookworm from your own skin.

“What were you thinking?” she continued. “Were you were thinking, hey, crashing the van is the best way for me to be an abhorrent absent husband and a shitty father!”

Though Jess wouldn’t say how, Jess and Alicia had found their way back from the corn maze to Alicia’s house.

Chuck swallowed a lump of spit. He imagined the photo of the fire swallower on the wall above one of the stereo speakers; the vulnerability of her arched throat, the red bandanna tied around her wrist.

He kissed Grace and started up the stairs.

“What makes you think this conversation is over?” she yelled.

“I am thinking of you,” he said, “I promise. And I promise I’ll do better.”

“How?”

“Trust me.”

“I don’t, Chuck! Don’t you see? That’s the problem! I can’t count on you at all!”

This time he didn’t talk. He kept going up the stairs.

The required softness of throat muscles, he told himself, to accept the pain. The ability of an individual to absorb collective suffering, to transform it into resolution, how the shape of the flame looked like a genie escaping the bottle.

*

He had, despite what he told her, only blacked out for a moment. His ankle was already throbbing. The van sat at a 45 degree angle in the ditch. Why hadn’t the airbag gone off? He clasped his hands behind his head, as if to do crunches. “Fuck!” he screamed. The front grill of the minivan was folded up, and the engine was smoking. He would be super late to pick Jess up. Where was his phone? He fumbled on the floor between his feet; he found a wrapper for a strawberry watermelon Starburst.

When he finally picked up the phone, he saw that there was no signal.

He imagined a paper bag, expanding and contracting, to stop him from hyperventilating. Awkwardly, he pulled the long umbrella from under the passenger’s seat. One, two shoves to open the door, which made him think about the sequence from the Incredible Hulk, the 70’s version, where the Hulk overturned a car, possibly to save someone trapped beneath.

The smell of motor oil, still leaking onto the weeds.

He limped along, his weight on the umbrella, until he reached the vertebrae: one intact, one crushed. He started to bend over to get the bone, which he wanted, for some reason, as a souvenir, and felt a horrific pain to both his temples, what he would later describe to Grace as an empty jar of peanut butter in the trash compactor.

A cluster of halide lights, a gas station or country self-storage, maybe a mile or so away. He’d call Grace from there. He started towards the last remembered intersection. But what would he tell her? That he felt the miscarriage as a cold, damp skin on his skin, as an oil spill spreading at night, thickening over the black sea of their lives? That there was no baby? That he was no longer the man with a baby on the way. No toddler holding his hands, teetering down the stairs. The Cheerios, no scatter plot on the linoleum.

He would not pat the boy’s back at the first swallow of swimming pool water.

To take the boy to Royals games, to fill out a box score.

Goddamn the brightly colored pegs of Mastermind.

Each step became more and more painful. Was his ankle broken? His forehead was swelling to Neanderthal proportions; a few bruised ribs. And, he admitted to himself, he didn’t want to go home, not yet. So he turned back to the minivan. He’d sleep it all off. Even he understood that he needed to hibernate into what he wouldn’t become.

Robert Glick is Assistant Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing and digital literature. His work has appeared in The Normal School, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and The Gettysburg Review.