At the physical therapy clinic, sunlight poured in through the waiting room windows. In the corner of one, a “Harland Strong” sticker remained. After thirty-one weeks and four days, the signs of solidarity had started to fade and disappear, the stickers no longer visible on every store window or park bench in and around town.
The sun had burnt off the dark clouds that hung low at sunrise, leaving a blue so bright and clear it made Charlotte squint as she gazed out at the parking lot, watching patients arrive wearing the faint smell of smoke from the nearby tobacco barns.
She thumbed through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens while she waited for her physical therapist. Lined with chairs and a couple of tables with magazines, the waiting room had a cabinet in the corner displaying Biofreeze and other tonics and gels to alleviate pain. The hard, vinyl chair made her lower back ache. She slid down in the seat and tried to take her mind off of the pain by searching for the cover story on reducing clutter. A clutter-free home would help, perhaps.
She wanted to get the gist of the decluttering article before Trudy came for her. It talked about touching items in your house to see if they sparked joy—nothing new there. She looked at the date. Nothing she owned sparked any joy, and she felt guilty of all the clutter analogies. A cluttered attic meant you had stuff hanging over your head. A cluttered basement represented the subconscious. A cluttered garage meant you may have difficulty moving forward. She didn’t have a garage, but the rest applied. There was only one room in her house that could be called uncluttered.
She noticed the man across the room looking at her. His reddish-brown hair brushed his shoulders and half of a tattoo peeked out from under his short sleeve. Tilting her head slightly, she tried to see the rest of the female legs and flowery vines on his arm. He also had a dark, intricate tattoo that wrapped around his throat. She admired that level of commitment. The only location more outlandish would be on his face, a Post Malone sort of dedication to the art. It would be a shame to mar that face, though. He continued to steal glances at her. When she was younger, he was exactly the kind of guy she would have brought home to drive her mom crazy. She’d have slid over, pushed her cleavage together, and asked about his tattoos.
Those days were long gone, though, and besides he was half her age. She feigned interest in a moisturizer ad in the Better Homes but started to sweat under his scrutiny. He stood and picked up a Sports Illustrated from the corner magazine rack and sat down closer to her. Flipping through it absently, he turned to her and said, “You look familiar. Are you on TV or something?” He was soft-spoken. She realized she imagined him having an accent, since he was Asian, but it was pure Kentucky. She had committed a subconscious microaggression.
“No, not usually.” She looked back down at her magazine and then thought maybe her answer was rude. “Maybe you’ve seen my signs. I sell houses, or I used to sell houses. Do you need a house?” Granted, she had been much younger in those pictures—pretty, even. She’d taken a leave of absence and hadn’t sold a house in, well, thirty-one weeks. At this point, she probably could no longer consider it a leave of absence. She wasn’t sure anyone in Harland would want to buy a house from her anymore.
“Maybe that’s it,” he said, looking unconvinced. “But no, I don’t need a house.” He thought for a moment. “Someday though, a historic one with big rooms and tall ceilings.”
Normally that would have been all the invitation she needed to set the hook, convince someone to take a tour of available homes, just to see, but she nodded and turned back to her magazine. She thought of the house in her neighborhood which had just hit the market—1910, or thereabouts, two stories, tall ceilings, lots of light, even had an empty lot beside it. Was the lot included? She wasn’t sure.
She didn’t mention her spot on the local news a week or so ago, when they reported the celebration of what would have been her daughter’s eighteenth birthday—a celebration where the cake had sat untouched and the ice cream melted into white, curd-like lumps.
Molly’s fifteen-year-old assailant had appeared in court last week. His defense lawyers argued to send him back to the juvenile court. He’d be tried as an adult, but he remained in the juvenile jail on a $1.5 million bond. The reporters often interviewed Charlotte after the court hearings. She’d grown accustomed to the cameras, microphones, and to talking about her daughter. If she were honest, she actually looked forward to the opportunity to talk about her, since her friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers rarely mentioned her anymore. In fact, most people avoided talking to Charlotte at all. During the report, they flashed pictures of the three victims, including her favorites of Molly—Molly playing her French horn, her and Jacob at prom, her swimming at the neighbor’s pool, and the last one of her leaning over, laughing into the lovely curve of her arm.
✶
Weeks after the shooting, Charlotte had lain cradling the remote control, still in the state of numb disbelief at the silence and stillness in the house. Crumpled on the couch with a couple of boxes of tissue, crackers, a crusty knife, and jar of peanut butter, she had landed on a story about the baseball player, Randy Johnson, for the first time.
Not being a baseball fan, Charlotte hadn’t known about Randy Johnson’s pitch seventeen years ago, when a bird had crossed the field, heading home to nest or go look for food or whatever it is that birds do. That’s when Randy Johnson’s fastball caught her—the dove destroyed in mid-air, leaving a cloud of feathers, a shocked silence from the teams and fans. What are the chances? One statistician said one in twelve million.
Another video showed Randy Johnson complaining about the media’s emphasis on the bird incident. He thought they mentioned it too much. “If someone wants to interview me,” he said, “then fine, ask about my record, my achievements, the Hall of Fame, but don’t ask about the bird.” (They always asked about the bird.)
✶
Charlotte awoke earlier in the day, stunned that summer, with its balmy air and bawdy clouds, still had the nerve to arrive. She had managed to nab the first available appointment of the day at Heartland Rehab. Before getting dressed, she stood in Molly’s doorway. Her daughter’s room was once a perfect example of the life-changing magic of tidying up—the bed always made, the band trophies lining the shelves according to height, forming a pleasing half-pyramid. Although now a thin layer of dust had settled over her bone-handled brush, pale pink nail polish, and the feathers and shell collections arranged on her vanity. In the far corner a cobweb clung to the ceiling, glimmering in the morning light.
Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed, then lay back and counted the pale, green, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling fan. At night she sometimes lay on the bed and stared at them after she turned off the lights. They would glow softly in the dark, for a time, but only for a time. Of course, she understood, like so many things in life, they weren’t real. They absorbed light from other sources. They didn’t emit their own. They were still comforting though, even if they were a facsimile. She would lay awake, watching them fade slowly.
Molly emerged from the closet, her hair still damp from a shower, holding up two shirts. The sweet smell of lavender and vanilla filled the room. “There’s twenty-three stars, Mom. Which do you like?”
Charlotte pointed to the blue with cream flowers and elastic waistband.
“No, you know that one makes me look fat.” She held the rose one up in the mirror. It also had flowers but had no elastic at the bottom.
“Then why did you ask?”
“To know which one I really want.” She smiled, dropped her towel, and fastened her bra, before pulling the shirt on over her head.
“Which is always whichever one I don’t choose. I counted twenty-two,” Charlotte said. “Maybe one fell off.” The sunlight slanted in the window, lighting the tendrils drying around Molly’s face and casting a soft pink glow on her cheeks. “You look pretty today.”
“Trust me, there’s twenty-three. No, you know, they say to toss a coin, so you know the decision you really want to make. Heads or tails. You’ll either be happy or disappointed. Then pick the one that makes you happy—you always think I look pretty, Mom, that’s your job.”
“It’s a fact, not an opinion.”
Molly smiled and stepped back in the closet. The door clicked closed behind her.
Charlotte jumped, finding herself alone; she took a deep breath and counted the stars again. There were twenty-three.
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She and Molly had KonMaried their clothes last year. Molly’s OCD therapist, a miracle worker, had given her the tools to pare down. Molly discarded her past, thanking each item for its service as she relinquished it. She hugged her stuffed animals before she decided against them. This was supposed to help her overcome her scarcity mindset and hoarding tendencies, tossing everything she no longer loved or had never loved. Rolling her shirts and pants as prescribed, she had arranged her closet in her painstaking manner.
Charlotte had been less able to let go of the past. Even then, she had gone behind Molly and secretly reclaimed bits of her childhood—her space bunny onesie, the beloved stuffed animals, and three of Molly’s drawings. One picture, her favorite, recalled a short-lived art phase of Molly’s when she was around six—a pink house with birds flying across a big, blue scribble of sky.
✶
Today’s bright blue sky loomed outside the clinic window where the tattooed man was still talking, “…someday I would like a house with lots of light. With the right house, I could teach yoga there, instead of renting a space. It would need some parking and a big room with mirrors, wood floors.”
“Interest rates are rising now,” Charlotte said. “Are you a veteran?”
“Army, three years.”
“Then you could probably get a VA loan, no money down.”
“Oh, yeah?” Charlotte felt somewhat relieved when his loud and friendly physical therapist came and led him away.
Finally Trudy appeared, looking over her gold rimmed glasses at Charlotte, and said, “You ready?”
Charlotte nodded and smiled, determined to be quiet today. This was a business transaction, nothing more. They didn’t need to be friends. After watching YouTube videos the previous night and staying up too late, despite the sleeping pills and whiskey, she had little desire to make conversation. The videos included the usual—the students from another school shooting singing at the Tony Awards. The song was still in her head; the phrase, 525,600 minutes, kept playing and replaying on a loop. Lastly, she had pulled up the Randy Johnson video. With Molly’s dog, Delilah, snoring by her side, Charlotte replayed the baseball video over and over before finally passing out on the couch.
Walking down the clinic hallway, Trudy asked her how her shoulder felt. Charlotte recounted her week’s exercises and quickly filled the next silence with chatter about the embarrassing state of her closets, basement, and garage.
Trudy nodded dutifully and uh-huhhed noncommittedly in the right places, but she didn’t add to the conversation. Her blond bob, laced with gray, swung back and forth in time with the squeak of her tennis shoes. Perhaps her resident bad mood stemmed from her mother naming her Gertrude.
Charlotte passed a mirror and paused. Who was that sad, old person? Grief had settled into her pores. It had taken up residence in the lines of her face and the curve of her shoulders.
Her shoulders had been strong once, pulling her through lakes, swinging and connecting with the sweet spot of a racquet or bat, until that day. That day at the high school, she did as she was told and drove to Harland West to wait for Molly. They were transporting students there to escape the high school chaos. She stood with a throng of other parents, many she knew, some she didn’t. The buses arrived one by one, students filed out, crying and dazed, and found their parents. Charlotte thought Molly must be on the next bus, or the next. When there was no other bus, the principal walked toward her. “Ms. McFarland?” He took her hand. “Do you want to ride with me to the sheriff’s department?” He guided her to a black police car and opened the back door for her.
Molly could be injured, she thought. Maybe she’ll be in the hospital a few days. That’s what he’ll say. Probably just the policy—take parents off campus to tell them when a student has been hurt.
“Is Molly okay? Is she injured?” she asked him. “Where is she?” When he put his hand on her shoulder and didn’t answer, her knees felt weak and her ankle rolled out from under her. She looked up from the ground. She hadn’t remembered falling. Her shoulder hurt. Her stomach lurched. Someone gently lifted her into the backseat of the car. When they shut the door, she started screaming. The trees swayed outside the car window, tossing shadows. Then everything turned black.
✶
In the days that followed, the pain in Charlotte’s shoulder, sometimes a dull ache, sometimes fresh and sharp, refused to leave. Now, she followed Trudy into the bright and airy therapy area. With floor to ceiling windows, the large room always smelled of lemony disinfectant with a base note of sweaty socks. She waited for the tattooed man from the waiting room to finish his warm-up on the arm bike. The man stood up and pulled his t-shirt off to reveal a ripped torso and more tats as his therapist led him over to the net to throw a ball overhand. Charlotte sat down at the arm bike and warmed up her shoulder for five minutes. Nothing made her feel quite as old as using an arm bike. Even though the tattooed boy had been using it, too, she still thought arm bikes were for people like her mother—88 years old, bespectacled, and disabled with dementia and hearing aids—not Charlotte.
The first week or two of therapy had been novel. It gave her a reason to get out of bed, to get dressed, but it quickly lost its appeal. The tattooed man smiled at her as he moved to a weight machine. His therapist, a burly ex-football player type, demonstrated the movement.
She lay on the table with the three-pound weight held straight out from her chest in the air and drew ABCs, one of Trudy’s favorite exercises. She asked Trudy if she should draw lower-case or upper-case letters, cursive or print? “It doesn’t matter. It’s just a way to move your shoulder,” Trudy said. Charlotte decided on neat upper-case print letters in the air, spelling out, “It was a joke, Gertrude.”
The tattooed man sat next to her, talking to his therapist. She wished she hadn’t worn shorts, exposing her white, doughy legs with the purple web of varicose veins above her right knee.
After the table exercises, Trudy pulled another chair beside the TENS machine for Charlotte. She stuck the electrodes to her shoulder and turned up the machine until Charlotte said, “Ow, hey!”
“Too much? How’s that?”
“Okay.”
“Does it hurt so good?” the other therapist asked and winked. “Do you all call him John Cougar or Mellencamp? He’ll always be Cougar to me.” The tattooed man said “Cougar” and made a sort of scoffing noise. Charlotte looked down. Her socks didn’t match. Was he laughing at her or was he laughing at the therapist? Sometimes love don’t feel like it should, she hummed to herself, hoping it would knock the 528, 600 minutes song out of her head.
With the electrodes massaging her shoulder, Charlotte felt warm and sleepy. “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?” the tattooed man asked. “I hurt myself mountain biking. I can still teach yoga, but I need more range of motion. I’ve been taking too many pain pills. That’s why I decided to try therapy. You hear all the stories. I don’t want to be a headline. It’s so easy to become dependent.”
“Yeah, I try to stay away from those too,” she lied. She loved her Oxy, Hydrocodone, and Xanax, the pretty colors and shapes. She sometimes poured them all into her hand. Did she think about it? Of course, some days. It would be so easy—a glass of water, her favorite videos. She was almost out, and her doctor didn’t want to give her any more. Maybe this afternoon she would look into finding a new doctor.
Despite all the meth and heroin stories coming out of the public schools, she had never worried about drugs with Molly, her squeaky-clean girl, her dream child. Since Molly had been tiny, she worried whether she would get accepted by a good college or get a good job. In first or second grade Molly had begged Charlotte to buy a Gerber Life Insurance policy. Somehow seven-year-old Molly had understood the life insurance commercial to mean that if she had the policy she could get a job when she grew up, not that they would pay to bury her if she happened to die.
What specific parental failure accounted for a small child worrying in such an inexplicable way? Was it the divorce? Was that when Molly started to line her stuffed animals up on the bed every morning in the same order, refusing to leave the house otherwise? Was that when she started checking and double-checking her backpack to make sure she had three sharpened pencils in her box, two erasers, and her lucky SpongeBob keychain?
Charlotte couldn’t remember when she had become concerned. When Molly was in second grade, she spelled words in the air with her index finger over and over again, later her hands stayed by her side and only her eyes traced letters in the air. In public, Charlotte whispered under her breath, stop it, resisting the urge to slap Molly’s hands or shake her. When she found out Molly’s teacher actually taught them to write their spelling words in the air, she felt relieved. It was a technique, with a name: Kusho.
Looking for reasons, for connections, she often wondered about the day when Molly was a toddler and had been running in Lowes, where the long, smooth, concrete aisle proved too tempting of a track. She darted away so fast. Charlotte turned in time to see Molly’s feet leave the ground. For a moment, she had flown, suspended in air, rising and falling in slow motion. She came down on her head with a loud crack, an egg shattering on the edge of the bowl. Charlotte stood frozen, too frightened to move, paralyzed from the fear of losing her. The salespeople had rushed to Molly’s side. Charlotte did not budge until Molly sat up and looked at her. She was fine, a bump would appear but no blood. When Molly saw the look on Charlotte’s face, she screwed up her mouth, turned red, and let out an ear-piercing wail.
Eventually Molly became adept at hiding her compulsions from friends and teachers, but not at home. One day Charlotte pulled Molly’s bedspread off the bed, flinging all her stuffed animals into the air. Molly must have been in second or third grade. Charlotte dragged her screaming to school, forcing her to leave the animals where they lay. That memory often rotated through Charlotte’s dreams at night, waking her up. There was also the memory of the long, rambling letters from the boy at Molly’s school that they often found in their mailbox. She should have heeded these letters and his distraught, jealous tweets when Molly started dating Jacob. She could have reported this boy, gotten a restraining order. Molly had laughed and rolled her eyes at the notion—a band kid with a harmless crush. That was all. During the day, Charlotte thought it was just a fluke, like the dove, 12 million to one, but when she woke up in the middle of the night, she was convinced she should have seen it coming. She should have known. She should have stopped it. She would then lie in bed, reviewing all of her maternal shortcomings to see if they somehow added up to this.
✶
Charlotte focused on the feeling of the electrodes on her shoulder. The warm buzzing made her sleepy. Her head nodded and colors from the college brochures flashed through her mind, the peaceful campus in Vermont, her mother’s smile. When she opened her eyes, the sunlight had reached an angle where it shone through the large skylight and bounced off the silver equipment. Molly sat on the weight bench in front of her, swinging her feet, wearing her favorite black yoga pants and a colorful sports bra. She curled two five-pound weights. “Middlebury was your idea, not mine, Mom. There are gun-toting rednecks everywhere. You think I would be safer in Vermont or Connecticut? What about Sandy Hook? Did you forget about that?”
“No,” she said, exasperated. Molly could now read her mind.
“You think this is helping you? I’m not sure Trudy is invested in your recovery. She seems pretty worthless to me. I mean, you could do the exercises yourself. Why do you need her?”
“They have equipment.”
“So? And why haven’t you sold that guy a house yet? Give him your card. What are you waiting for? I’m tired of worrying about you, Mom.”
Trudy touched Charlotte’s hand, startling her. “Charlotte?” Trudy asked. “Are you okay?”
“Huh? Yes,” she said, looking around for Molly.
✶
Charlotte fished a card out of her billfold and handed it to the man beside her. “It never hurts to look. There’s a new listing on Maple. Ample parking, lots of natural sunlight, big rooms. It might work for you. Why pay rent?”
She doubted he would ever call, but at least she tried.
She and Mark had moved from Nashville to Harland when she found out she was pregnant. They bought a house. They bought a van. She was happy. Mark was not.
After the divorce he moved to Chicago, visiting Molly when he could, renting a room from a lady a few streets over. Molly cried herself to sleep for a year. Charlotte had been drawn to Harland because she liked the idea of living in a small town, a safe place to raise a family, a good bet. She and Molly walked Delilah at night. They left the doors unlocked.
✶
After the therapist removed the electrodes from his client’s shoulder, the tattooed man looked at her once more, then her card, and snapped his fingers, pointing at her. “I think…aren’t you?” He paused. “The mother? The mother of that girl?” He smiled brightly, proud of himself for placing her, then he looked embarrassed and tried to change his expression to one of sympathy.
Charlotte nodded. “My daughter’s Molly McFarland. I’m Charlotte.” She held up a clinched fist like a Black Panther. “Harland Strong.” She dropped her eyes. “Yep.”
✶
That morning at Harland High, ambulances and police cars looked like they’d been flung at the high school, parked at odd angles, some engines running, some not. Nothing made sense—children and teachers on stretchers—three women on their knees making the sign of the cross, SWAT men running this way and that.
An announcement said parents should go meet their children at Harland West. Buses full of students idled in the parking lot. On one bus, she saw Molly’s friends—Emma, Haley, Madison One, and Madison Two—their faces, swollen and out of focus, pressed against the windows. No Molly. She scanned the other bus windows for Molly’s red beacon of hair. She stepped onto the third bus and peered at all the shaken students, crushed four and five to a seat. She turned and walked to the sidewalk where other parents stood. Calling Molly’s phone, it rang and rang and kept going to voicemail. Maybe she had accidentally left her phone at home today of all days. Maybe, maybe, maybe, she silently prayed.
✶
The tattooed man followed the therapist toward the reception area. Stopping and looking over his shoulder, he said, “I’m sorry, so sorry for your loss.”
She nodded, smiled weakly. The electrodes continued, and she squeezed her eyes shut. She had tried so hard not to be ill-prepared, reading empty nest articles and books, knowing Molly would one day board a plane to some distant school, some distant life.
✶
That night Charlotte assumed her position in front of the TV again, with Delilah’s warm weight by her side. She scanned Molly’s Netflix profile and considered the Gilmore Girls, which Molly never finished. Instead, Charlotte watched the Tony Awards on YouTube, the surviving students singing about how to measure a year. While listening, she scrolled through the pictures on her phone, a chronicle of Molly’s life, holding her finger on certain “live” photos so they would turn into a few seconds of video—her hair moving in the breeze, a smile flickering across her face.
Wanting to hear the song again, she hit replay, turned off the lamp, rested her eyes for a moment, and listened. Molly came in with a bag of cheese puffs and a coke and plopped down cross-legged in front of the couch. She looked over her shoulder at Charlotte. The TV backlit her with its eerie, greenish light. “What’s up with you and YouTube, Mom? The drama club went to see Rent in Nashville. I mean I like that song and all, but enough is enough.” She popped the top on her can.
“Don’t spill that.” Charlotte reached out to touch Molly’s hair. “I know. You’re right. I should stop.”
“It’s not healthy. It’s blocking you from completing your emotions. Isn’t that what they said when Papaw died?”
“Yeah. You’re right, but aren’t they good?”
“I guess. They’re okay for a high school glee club. Opportunistic, but, whatever. At least they’re doing something.”
“I did something.”
“All you do is lie around and watch videos. You could pick up around here. This place is a wreck. Sell some houses, get your roots colored, start running again, do something other than lying around, feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I marched on the Capitol and the NRA. I testified. I’ve done stuff…did stuff.” She pointed to the students on TV. “Nothing changed.” She couldn’t or hadn’t stopped the Florida shooting from happening or any of the others.
She pulled up the Randy Johnson video with the hapless bird.
“Mom, I mean it. You have to stop watching this stuff. Just stop.”
“I will, Mol, I promise. I’ll stop, but doesn’t it remind you of that Bible verse, the one about worry, the birds neither reap nor sow, designed to give comfort, I guess.” And it was comforting, if not entirely honest. The bird video dissolved into the next, showing the groundskeeper in a large straw hat, the only one left on the baseball field, holding a red push-broom, bending down to gather the downy white feathers one by one.
Molly let her head rest on her mother’s lap. Charlotte stroked her hair the way she once did to help her fall asleep. “Are you tired, honey?”
Molly turned and wrapped her arms around her. “You have no idea, Mom.”
✶✶✶✶
K.C. Vance writes fiction and works as a medical librarian in Kentucky. Her stories have appeared in the South Carolina Review, New Madrid, Nelle, Passengers, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She graduated from the MFA program at Murray State University and has taken part in the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
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John Toomey is an artist and arts educator in Nashville Tennessee. He teaches art to elementary and middle school students at Abintra Montessori in Nashville, as well as art classes for children and adults at the Sarratt Arts Center at Vanderbilt University.
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