There were benefits to knowing the answer to every question. For example, when Answer Woman’s brother said, “You know you can trust me, right?”
She knew the answer was No.
Edgar ran a hand through his greasy, gray-flecked hair and tried again. “Will you regret spending time with me?”
“No.”
The answers surprised her at times, but she had learned to trust unpredictability.
She had not anticipated that either of her brothers would find her that spring morning—she didn’t even know she had siblings then. She had emerged from her fusty, linoleum-floored apartment at dawn to take the number 5 Train to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But they found her somehow, sitting cross-legged, on the museum’s marble steps, holding a two-foot scrap of cardboard that read:
ANSWER WOMAN $13
She sold her ability to answer any question, and to convey it precisely. It was an ability she had discovered at the age of twelve, when her adoptive mother had asked her if she knew what adopted meant. Without thinking, Answer Woman had said, “It means you smothered your first baby girl with a pillow, and five years later you couldn’t have another,” and got smacked across the cheek with a spatula still sizzling from the hoecake her mother was frying, before being banished from the house.
On the sidewalk outside the museum, break dancers twisted and posed. A magician pulled a mourning dove from his sleeve. Their cries for customers clashed, adding to the clamor of honking horns and random shouting. Answer Woman was part of this community of street performers, and apart from them.
A man with wire-hanger shoulders approached. Lanky, and with cheekbones as sharp as an arrowhead, he stood so he shaded her from the sun. “Are you the Answer Woman?”
She lifted her head to face him and nodded.
A brown weed stem bobbed between his yellowing teeth. He looked like an extra from an old Western. Answer Woman hadn’t noticed it at first, but another man, both shorter and scrawnier, stood behind him. The smaller man was hunched over, his elbows dug into his gut. He smiled like he was caught in a daydream and hummed to himself.
The thin man smelled of whiskey. He wore a wrinkled, off-white banded collar shirt. “She’s prettier than I thought she’d be.” Dirt caked his ridged fingernails. He plucked the weed stem from his mouth and extended his hand to shake Answer Woman’s, wincing for a second, clutching at his ribs. “If you’re the Answer Woman, that would make us the Answer Men.”
He said his name was Edgar, and called his smaller, older brother Butch. “We’ve been searching for a missing clue that could help us understand something larger.”
Butch rocked and carried on with his melody, the buzzing from his lips growing louder. Answer Woman asked about his humming.
“I’ve asked him about that myself,” Edgar said.
“What did he say?”
“That they are answers to questions people haven’t asked.”
Answer Woman thought she saw Butch smile. He stopped humming for a few seconds.
“Have you ever asked yourself where your power came from?” Edgar asked.
“I don’t ask myself questions,” Answer Woman said. “I never know the answers.”
Edgar snapped his fingers. “Me too. And believe it or not, it’s better that way. That’s how Butchie got into trouble. He practiced until he could answer his own questions. Once you go down that road, it’s like standing at the edge of a cliff. Lean too far and there’s nothing to keep you from falling, and no way of climbing back up.” He swung his hand through the air, the motion of a judo chop. “You and me, we only go as far as somebody else asks us. But I can see you’re skeptical. You want proof that I’m for real. So go on, ask me questions. Unload on me.”
Answer Woman was more accustomed to the flip side of this proposition. As a matter of policy, she’d answer, free of charge, one question of little consequence in order to authenticate her ability. In the past two days, she’d told a visitor the name of his aunt (Carmen), a firefighter his buddies’ code word for an apartment grease fire that killed more than a dozen people (a skillet of fried chicken), a librarian the seventy-sixth word of Lord of the Flies (broken). When a customer agreed to the fee, Answer Woman would then answer the money question.
Now she focused on a man peddling knock-off Vera Bradley purses on the sidewalk, who had fashioned a pothole in the street nearest him into a sub-shelf for clutches. He wore an oxford shirt with a paisley tie. A red cloth hung from his back pocket. “There’s a man behind you selling bags. What color is his handkerchief?”
Without looking, Edgar said, “Red.”
“What color is his necktie?”
“Paisley. These are easy.”
“How many interlocking designs are on his tie?”
“One hundred and thirty-seven.” It was Butch who provided the last answer. He gnawed a strand of calloused skin from his chapped lips.
Edgar smiled. “How many designs, total, does he have on his tie?”
“One hundred and thirty-seven,” Answer Woman said.
“You’re as sharp as Butchie with that sort of thing,” Edgar said. “I can see colors, I can see words. But you ask me for a number—I see all of the designs, but I need to count them.”
Their abilities proven, Edgar went on to tell her that the three of them were blood siblings. “Butch always said we had a baby sister. I was too young to remember, but he knew someone was missing. Our parents had to give us up for adoption—”
“Stop.”
Edgar rubbed his jaw. “You don’t want to know where you came from?”
Answer Woman had wanted to know for a long time. She once took a lover from the same town where she had spent her early childhood—Shermantown, New York. She asked him about the place as though she’d never heard of it before, and listened to the rhythm of his speech and the way he applied short vowel sounds regardless of the vocabulary at hand: I lauv Shermantown, and I’d raz a family there. But for Chrisssack, I’m twenty-five, I ned a nit liff. Her lover told her about the way his neighborhood, Miller’s Plain, had transformed after the glove factory closed when he was in junior high. It used to be a place where neighbors chatted while mowing their lawns or shoveling snow from their driveways in the evening after work. Things changed when people skipped town, when they had to commute to assembly line jobs thirty or forty miles away, or when they worked swing shifts, mopping department store floors and restrooms, and didn’t arrive home until daybreak. Tack about a city that never sleps. Answer Woman knew from the start this man wasn’t a good match for her, but they drank Malbec and she bade him to ask her questions about her own experiences in Shermantown. Her eyes throbbed with every answer. She saw the glitter of broken glass and felt jagged edges at her fingertips and at her throat. She thought for sure she would bleed to death when her lover stopped asking her questions, when he showed her she wasn’t bleeding at all. They never spoke again.
The extent of what she knew for sure about her past was trapped inside the glass dome of a snow globe, the weight at the bottom of her rucksack for every move she had made. A town captured in miniature—with winding streets and open pastures beyond a glove factory, a tavern called Unlucky Ned’s, a redbrick elementary school, a Greyhound bus station at the edge of the town limits—pressed against the thick glass. A banner stretched across the bottom, identified the place as Shermantown, New York. Underneath, in pink cursive, read Rose Cakes, Inc. When she was younger, she imagined people wandering the halls of those buildings, and she wondered what Rose Cakes might be.
A few weeks earlier, after a particularly busy day on the museum steps, she’d bought herself a long-stemmed rose and a marble cake from the bakery across Fifth. When she got home, she crushed the bulb in her hands and pushed the remains into the cake. She scooped the pieces in her fingers and devoured the delicate petals, the swirly crumbs—a rose cake all her own.
“Some questions are better left unanswered,” Answer Woman said.
“So don’t ask them,” Edgar said. “Ask only those you need answers to.”
Asking Edgar about her past seemed safer when she didn’t have to depend on the answer alone, but on a person’s memory. “Why did our parents give us up?”
“Our father was a first-class scumbag.” Edgar pressed the weed stem with his fingertips, as if he were working out the notes on a flute. “That’s what comes to mind, not the answer I mean to tell you. From what I can gather, Mom and Pop thought Butch was a child prodigy. He knew the answers to every question he got asked at school, equations only a budding Einstein would’ve known. I’m talking calculus here. Big vocab words he couldn’t have learned. But Pop catches on that Butch isn’t really smart, but that for some reason he just knows things he has no business knowing. So the old man brings him to bingo at the Methodist church and asks him which card they ought to play. Lo and behold, they win the biggest pot of the night. He takes Butch to the trotters and asks him which nag he should bet on. Wins that, too. Then he takes him to the gas station to buy a lottery ticket.”
“He was exploiting him,” Answer Woman said.
“The prick claimed it was for the good of the family,” Edgar said. “Mom was seeing an expensive shrink and taking Pop to the cleaners with the bills. But she said no child of hers would be used like that. Then he started testing me, and Ma smashed a window—”
“That’s enough.”
Edgar nodded. “I get it. Baby steps. That’s good. We can come back to it later.”
“How did you find me?” Answer Woman asked.
“The truth is, we weren’t exactly looking—at least I wasn’t. I never believed we had a sister. Then we’re standing outside the museum, and my stomach’s grumbling. I’d spent my last dollar buying a stem from this crazy fucker in a cowboy hat. I see a guy playing three-card monte on a TV tray in the corner. So I ask Butchie boy, what’s the easiest game we can run to make ten, twenty bucks here on the street?” Edgar tapped Butch’s wrist. “He says we should do what our sister is doing at the foot of the stairs.”
***
The men left her alone. Answer Woman hadn’t expected they would, certain they were looking for money or a place to stay, their claim of brotherhood was a scam, or Edgar meant to sleep with her. But after another half hour of talk, Edgar asked Butch if they should continue. Butch said no. Edgar said she should take time to digest what had been said, and he’d see her tomorrow.
So Answer Woman went about her business. Five more paying customers had required her services by nightfall. After the last of them, she made her way home.
Two years earlier, the city had put bright orange traffic cones at either end of her street and then stripped the asphalt roadway to deep grooves for the purpose of repaving. They took the cones but never came back to resurface the street, leaving it full of uneven chasms.
Answer Woman stopped at the hot dog cart on the corner, where a skinny Jamaican in dreadlocks stood each day, compulsively clad in brown corduroy pants. She made her typical order. One plain hot dog. One with a dab of relish and a mess of hot sauerkraut.
When she first moved in, Answer Woman thought she would make friends with Miss Gwendolyn, the elderly woman next door, but her neighbor never returned her hellos, and the most she would say was for Answer Woman to mind her own damn business when she tried to hold the door for her so she could maneuver her walker into her apartment while she carried a bag of groceries. Miss Gwendolyn made her way inside, slammed the door, and turned a series of seven locks behind her. More often than not, they crossed paths when Answer Woman came home from her day’s work and Miss Gwendolyn made her daily pilgrimage to the hot dog cart.
When the City stripped the road, Miss Gwendolyn didn’t see the change. Indeed, it became clear her eyesight was shot, and she promptly fell in the street. Answer Woman helped her up. Miss Gwendolyn didn’t thank her, but neither did she take a swing or curse her out. She even let Answer Woman escort her to the hot dog cart and back up to her apartment.
Answer Woman started coming home a little earlier. Early enough to buy a hot dog for the old woman, repeating the order verbatim about “a dab of relish,” “a mess of hot sauerkraut.” She knocked on Miss Gwendolyn’s door and heard the old woman shuffle to the peephole, then ask her what she wanted. Ultimately, the old woman unfastened all the locks, leaving only the chain in place, so Answer Woman could hand the steaming frank to her. After the third daily iteration, Miss Gwendolyn said she didn’t want her stopping off at the cart just on her behalf, so Answer Woman started tucking her cardboard sign under her arm and getting a plain dog for herself. Weeks later, Miss Gwendolyn started inviting her to come inside and sit with her.
They ate in silence at first. Then, out of the blue, Miss Gwendolyn started asking her questions. Was Answer Woman married? What did she do for a living? Why did she eat her frankfurter plain? After telling paying customers they would come down with stage four inoperable melanoma that year, or that they’d lose their shirts in a certain mutual fund, Answer Woman found relief in these less-grievous exchanges.
The day she met her brothers, Answer Woman sat with Miss Gwendolyn by her window. She didn’t imagine the old woman could see much past the glass, especially in the fading evening light. Miss Gwendolyn’s hands shook as she clutched the tinfoil around the hot dog, crushing the bun between her fingers. “Tell me about your childhood.”
“Why do you want to know about that?”
“Is it such a strange thing to ask?” Miss Gwendolyn sighed. “I was thinking about my childhood today. I was the youngest of seven, if you can believe that, decrepit as I am now.”
“I believe you.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
“Two brothers,” Answer Woman said.
“Tell me about your home.”
“What do you mean home?”
“Where you came from, genius.”
From across the hall, a dog barked twice. A woman yelled back in nasal Cantonese.
“I need you to ask me questions,” Answer Woman said.
The old woman sighed again and coughed. “What was your neighborhood like?”
The answer tumbled from her lips, the way she’d expound on any question a customer had asked. “Everyone had a patch of grass outside. Our house was a little raised ranch. There was this big Spanish Colonial down the street. People called it the nice part of town, but it was only a block or so away from the dodgy part, where we lived. The people who lived in the big house ran the glove factory.” She could see the glove factory from the snow globe, magnified to life-size, and saw a woman, pale eyes identical to her own, hair the same chestnut brown, the shape of her chin much the same as Edgar’s. She clutched a picnic basket in front of her pregnant belly. She was young, and she was happy. Her hands smelled of coconut-based moisturizer her mother-in-law had given her two Christmases ago, a month after a Hawaiian vacation.
“Small towns with their small factories,” Miss Gwendolyn said, shaking her head. “The factory closes and the whole town gets thrown out of work and then everyone’s scraping to get by. That’s why I moved to the city. Didn’t want to end up like my sisters who stuck around, married deadbeats, waiting tables to make ends meet. I wanted to be a career woman.”
“Do you keep in touch with your sisters?”
Miss Gwendolyn clicked her tongue. “Can’t you see my bustling social life? Sisters and brothers and friends coming by every night of the week. And don’t get me started on all of my boyfriends.”
Answer Woman finished her hot dog and crumpled the foil into a little ball between her palms. “It was nice talking with you.”
Miss Gwendolyn stared out her window at a power line littered with streamers the past two weeks, the product of a party two floors above them, after which confetti and the shriveled remains of balloons had littered the sidewalk below.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” After Answer Woman had left, she stood in the hallway until she’d heard the last of the seven locks fasten into place.
***
Answer Woman shivered in the morning chill outside the museum. The street stunk, the air polluted with too many bodies and too much exhaust, the smells of a place that wasn’t so much for the living as for the decaying. She waited for a customer amidst the columns of people who made their way past her sign. Few paused, much less stopped.
When Edgar arrived, he didn’t hesitate to sit down on the museum steps beside his sister, while Butch paced the perimeter of the four squares of sidewalk closest to them. “The ability to answer these questions is a profound gift,” Edgar said. “I’m sure you’ve recognized that?
“Of course.” The answer arrived automatically, but it was only partially true. Answer Woman recognized her power. She rarely thought of it as a gift, though, so much as a set of unusual circumstances. Not so different from an unusually tall person who could reach the top shelf at the grocery store but had to endure cramped conditions on an airplane.
“When Butch and I were adopted together, we lived with a church-going family.” Edgar reclined on the steps behind him and stretched. He extracted a circular tin from the pocket of his acid-washed dungarees and scooped a pinch of tobacco between his thumb and forefinger. The packaging was red, white, and blue and read Baseball Snuff. He offered the tin to her. She waved him off. “I’m trying to quit, myself,” he said. “Ever since Butch there told me what would happen to my jaw and tongue if I kept it up.” He plugged the tobacco between his lips and set to chewing. “Our new daddy was some ex-swamp preacher from Kentucky, and he told us that whatever skills we had were a gift from the Lord. And what we did with them was our gift in return. Beautiful, right?”
Butch glided to his side, almost fluid, before resuming his normal gait.
“When Butch recognized his ability, he asked himself questions about Jesus,” Edgar said. “The answers rushed at him like riddles. Answers unlike any he gave in everyday conversation, answers in another voice altogether, if you get my drift.”
“Not really,” Answer Woman said.
“The thing is that Butch had started to reck-on from what he knew to arrive at an absolute truth. He went to the community college library and studied up on physics and astronomy and quantum mechanics. He plumbed the depths of infinity.” He tilted his head toward his brother. “I think he tried to figure out how the earth—how everything—is going to end one day. When all the stars burn out and the universe goes cold. All life vanishes everywhere. He went so far in his thinking and imagining that something snapped inside.”
“And he explained all that to you?”
When Butch’s orbit reached its nearest point to them, Edgar stood up and put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. He guided him gently to a position at the bottommost step, where he hugged his knees beneath his chin and stared at the passersby.
“Not in so many words,” Edgar said. “Bits and pieces. I think that other voice—the questions and riddles—is what he hears in his head now. He tried to talk to me more when he saw I knew the answers, too. Then I had the bright idea of trying again.”
“Trying again?”
“Infinity and the end of the universe was too damn much for one man. We asked questions back and forth. Made progress, too. Answered questions. I had visions and felt feelings unlike anything I’ve felt before. Then I got dizzy. Then everything went black.”
“It was still too much,” Answer Woman said.
Edgar offered her a weak half-smile. “We began asking all manner of questions, and I lost all sense of time. I existed in those questions and answers. I woke up in a hospital bed, and after I put it together, I realized we had been at it for five days straight—five days without food or water or sleep. We existed on ludes and cranberry juice. Whether it was the questions or the concentration or the exhaustion, my head ached for weeks afterward. And Butchie—he just moved deeper and deeper into himself.”
Butch pressed his fingertips into each other. His flat, bland face was expressionless.
“But now we have a third voice to spread the load, to speed the process. And a voice with keener abilities. A voice unaffected by the trials my brother endured, and more instinctually gifted than me.” Edgar scratched a mole on his chin. “I’ve found buried treasures, slept with beautiful women, seen things I had no right to see. I’ve committed all manner of sins and gotten away with them. But do you know what I want to know?”
“You want to know everything,” Answer Woman said.
Edgar lowered his lids flirtatiously and smiled at her again. “You, my lovely, are the missing link.” Edgar reached out to touch her cheek. She slid away from him, and when he leaned after her, he clutched at his side the way he had before, muttering a curse under his breath.
“What happened to your ribs?”
“He touched the boxer’s girlfriend here,” Butch said, threading his hand between his legs.
Edgar glared at his brother and coughed violently. With an effort, he propped himself upright again, looked at Answer Woman. “It’s nothing for you to be concerned about. It’s time you stopped whoring out your powers to these strangers and come back to our place so we can work.”
Answer Woman planted her feet. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Why? Because you need to make money to buy a hot dog for Miss Gwendolyn?” Edgar smiled, the spaces between his teeth wet with tobacco juice. He started to reach for her again, but stopped himself and reached for his brother instead, scratching him behind the ear the way he would a puppy. Butch dipped into the touch. “You’re our sister, and we care about you. We’ll give you another day to digest what we talked about.”
“You’ll give me one more day and then what?”
“One more day and you’ll make the right decision,” Edgar said.
He handed her a scrap of paper the size of a business card, but on taking it, she realized the material had been ripped from a napkin. The address for an apartment in the old meatpacking district was written on it. When Answer Woman looked back up at her brothers, they were already walking away.
***
While walking home, Answer Woman threw away the address Edgar had given her. She contemplated a new spot to peddle her answers the next day. But if Edgar wanted to find her, all he would need to do was ask Butch where she had gone.
To her surprise, her brothers never arrived. She had a good day on the steps, fielding seven customers, one of whom tipped her an extra twenty when she gave him the good news that his pregnant wife was carrying his child, not her former lover’s.
She climbed the steps of her apartment building, plain hot dog in her left hand, the one with sauerkraut and relish in the right. When she set foot on the mildewed green carpet of her floor, heard the first bark of the neighbor’s dog, and caught the first whiff of grilled pineapple from the first door by the stairwell, Answer Woman saw that the door to Miss Gwendolyn’s apartment was cracked open.
It wasn’t Miss Gwendolyn’s way to leave her door open, even if she expected company. Answer Woman dropped both hotdogs and ran.
Miss Gwendolyn was on the floor with both eyes open, one hand on her chest. Gathering herself, Answer Woman dropped to the ground and started chest compressions.
“Is she dead?”
Answer Woman recognized the voice. She blinked away tears as the answer came to her.
Edgar stood in the doorway. He took a bite of the hotdog meant for Miss Gwendolyn. “We figured the best chance that someone would find her was to leave the door open.”
“You should have called 911.”
“We don’t have a phone.” Edgar leaned against the door. On the doorframe opposite him, the connecting halves of seven locks waited.
“How did you get inside? She didn’t know you. She never would have let you in.”
Edgar pursed his lips, but Butch spoke up from behind him. “The window.”
The window was wide open, the screen on the floor by the radiator. “Did you kill her?”
Edgar shook his head from side to side.
“Yes,” Butch volunteered, a beat behind him.
“Shades of gray.” Edgar said. “We came to the window to talk to her. Guess we scared her, and she must’ve stroked out. I swear: I kicked in the screen thinking we might help her. But when I asked Butch if she was already gone—he told me the same thing you did.”
Answer Woman held Miss Gwendolyn’s hand. “Why would you come to her?”
“I thought you’d listen to her,” Edgar said. “Butchie tells me you don’t have other friends. I figured maybe the old bag could help you see you shouldn’t turn away family.”
Answer Woman let herself sob. “You pricks want to use me.”
“Can’t you see you were meant for this?” Edgar asked. “I’m not using you any more than I’m using Butch, or than he’s using me. We’re going to work together, and we’re going to figure out everything. Once we know it all, we’ll have accomplished something. We can be happy.”
“That will make you happy?”
“Fucking A, yes,” Edgar said.
“No,” Butch said.
Edgar elbowed his brother aside. “What do you say we go to your place and get to work?”
A minute later, Answer Woman sat on her ottoman with the worn velvet lining, directly beneath the crack in her ceiling she’d always feared would give way and send her neighbor’s living room crashing into her own. Sinking into the cushion of her best chair, Edgar sat cross-legged, swiveling from side to side, white Keds browned from the streets folded beneath him. Butch sat on a bar stool Answer Woman had taken home from a street corner years ago.
When Butch hummed, Answer Woman caught the melody this time. Recalled the lyrics.
Sing it loud so I can hear you
Make it easy to be near you
***
She lost the words after that.
“How about a cup of joe?” Edgar asked.
“I don’t have any.”
Edgar rolled his eyes. “Then what about a glass of milk? Or V8?”
She went into her kitchen and filled an unwashed glass with tap water.
Edgar didn’t look twice at the violet tint of the water. He gulped the water in one long swallow. “Are we ready?” Edgar explained what they would do in greater detail. Through questions, they would travel backward in time. They would do it in measured steps—asking what came before a certain moment, then what came before that. They would go backward rather than forward since the future held too many variables, might require too much calculation.
“What came before us?” Edgar asked.
“Our mother,” Butch said.
Answer Woman felt her throat stick at the words. “An un-ambitious start.” Edgar scraped his fingernail against the bottom of the tin of chewing tobacco, groping for the final bits. “Go on, ask me.”
She was supposed to ask him what came before their mother. “Is our mother still alive?”
Edgar looked annoyed. “That’s irrelevant.”
Answer Woman turned to Butch. “Is our mother still alive?”
“Yes.”
“We need to fucking focus.” Edgar rocked in his chair.
“Where is she now—our mother?”
“Gravesend Mental Hospital.” Butch said. “3942 Chestnut Way, Shermantown, New York. Room 247.”
Answer Woman bolted from her ottoman.
Edgar yelled at her to stop. He took a step forward, then tripped over Butch’s legs. Butch fell off the stool, half beneath his brother, half on top of him, howling in pain.
Answer Woman ran to her bedroom.
“We need to finish this.” Edgar knelt by Butch. She snatched at her money, ripping the bills from their hiding place in the slit of her mattress. She bundled a couple thousand dollars in cash and stuffed it inside a backpack with frayed white ropes for straps. She placed two fresh pairs of underpants, socks, and a clean blouse on top of the money and zipped shut the bag. She headed for the door.
Edgar moved much faster than she had seen him move before. He tackled her, then straddled her. He gripped her wrists and pinned her to the floor. “We aren’t done with you.”
Answer Woman fought. She planted her feet and pushed upward, bridging herself. Edgar budged at first, then he flattened himself, chest to chest, thighs on thighs, his face just inches above hers. She saw the flecks of tobacco in the cracks between his stained teeth. He swept her hair back, pulled it to the floor behind her ear. “How about a kiss, darling?”
He had loosened her left hand. She jammed it into his rib cage with as much force as she could muster and dug her knuckles into the space between two ribs. He rolled off of her.
Answer Woman ran. She felt the rush of the snow globe before she saw it explode against the door, before she heard it shatter. Broken glass, water, and tiny buildings littered the linoleum.
Now on his knees, Edgar screamed, “You walk out on us, and you’d better pray you never see us again. You walk out on us, and I’ll end you. Go ahead, ask me if I’m lying.”
***
Over time, Answer Woman had learned bits of her past. She hitchhiked after she left her adoptive parents. One driver slowed his truck, leaned down and asked her, “Where’s your daddy?”
“Some of him is buried in my mother’s yard,” she said.
Another time, at a coffee shop on St. Mark’s Place, in the East Village, she heard two hack writers debate whether their screenplay should have the father threaten his daughter with his belt or a broken bottle. They contested which was more frightening, which more painful.
“The belt’s scarier,” she told them. “But the cuts from the glass take longer to heal.”
After she left her brothers behind at her apartment, Answer Woman took a cab to the Port Authority. She knew her brothers would know where to find her, and she wasn’t ready to take Edgar at his word that he didn’t want to see her again. If she got a head start and put some distance between them, maybe she could tend to more important matters first.
She boarded a bus headed north and took a window seat toward the back. One of the last passengers to get on the bus was a broad-shouldered man with a red-gray beard, wearing a black-and-gold-checkered flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Answer Woman thought she recognized him, a poker buddy of the man she had dated, from Shermantown. Lowering her face, Answer Woman drew the drawstrings on her hooded sweatshirt tight. She meant to sleep through the journey, but the other passengers asked questions she could hear.
A bald man in a brown suede jacket asked a girl with tawny skin and pink-framed glasses where she was headed.
Home, to break up with her meth-dealing boyfriend, so she can stop feeling guilty about going down on her econ professor.
“Why are you scratching your head?”
He has lice.
“How long till we get there?”
Eight hours, thirty-five minutes.
“Did you drink this morning?”
Two shots of tequila and a mouthful of Listerine so you wouldn’t smell it.
People started watching Answer Woman. She had only thought the answers, hadn’t she? She pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt and drew the drawstrings taut to cover her mouth.
The bus parked at a rest stop. She bought a pair of headphones and a portable radio, then listened to a classical music station at full volume for the rest of the ride.
When she got off the bus for good, a wintry wind greeted her. Someone called her name.
The poker buddy had spotted her. In the same easy fashion of her ex-boyfriend, he transitioned effortlessly from salutation to conversation, and with the same belabored vowel sounds. “I had to come home because my ma’s sick. I begged her to come see a specialist in the City, but she insists on her country doc, just because the geezer lets her pay her bills in lima beans and squash from her garden in the summer.” He shook his head.
“Which way is Gravesend?” Answer Woman asked.
“The looney bin?” The man stretched his hairy forearm behind her. “Top of the hill.”
She left him standing there without another word, heading for what looked like a mansion atop a hill. In the fading daylight, she walked two miles at an incline. The air felt different in Shermantown than it had in New York. Easier to breathe. She passed the redbrick schoolhouse, unchanged from what the snow globe had modeled. She passed the factory, its windows boarded up with plywood. A large sign—what probably passed for a billboard in a town like this—advertising Rose Cakes. They were chocolate, it turned out, with neon-pink frosting. The last quarter mile, the road turned to cobblestone. She climbed until she had arrived at Gravesend.
In the softly lit lobby, Answer Woman folded her hands on the counter, took a deep breath, and said, “I came to see my mother.”
The freckled man on the other side of the counter positioned his fingers over a computer keyboard covered in protective plastic. “What’s her name?” His own nametag read Nelson.
“Abigail Wolfe.” The syllables felt strange on her tongue, the first time she had spoken them.
The psychiatric hospital wasn’t as clean and sterile as Answer Woman had expected it to be. In place of waxed tile floors and bare white walls, they walked over scratched hardwood and passed paint-by-number seascapes over peeling orange-and-white-striped wallpaper.
“We don’t want Gravesend to feel like an institution,” Nelson explained. “We find that the patients feel more comfortable if the place looks more like a home. We let them decorate and keep their personal things—as much as they can fit into their rooms, anyway.”
From the other side of the door at room 247, Answer Woman could hear a guitar, soft and low. Nelson knocked, but didn’t wait for a response.
An elderly woman looked out a window, perfectly still in a caned rocking chair. Her uncombed hair was gray-streaked, and her wrinkled skin sagged on her neck. Her hands rested open on her lap to reveal thick scars on both palms.
A record player spun in the corner. Answer Woman recognized the song, one she hadn’t heard for years. But she knew the melody and had heard pieces of it in wordless hums.
Who knows how long I’ve loved you?
You know I love you still
Will I wait a lonely lifetime?
Answer Woman stepped inside. “If you want me to, I will.”
“She loves her music.” Nelson stood sideways in the door. “Mostly Beatles, a little Dylan, some Judy Collins. If you catch her on a good day, she’ll talk about them.”
Answer Woman looked out the window. Nothing but the dark-blue eastern sky. Nelson retreated from the doorway, the jangle of his keys receding down the hall.
“Where am I?” the old woman asked.
Answer Woman recoiled. The old woman had startled her by speaking at all.
The old woman’s eyes remained fixed on the sapphire sky. “Who are you?”
Answer Woman looked for signs of familiarity, for features of the old woman, mirrored between them. “I don’t know.”
The old woman blinked rapidly. “What time is it?”
Answer Woman scanned the walls. A navy blue tapestry hung over one. Holes pock-marked the next, left over from long-gone nails and pushpins, cracked with the collisions of humanity against plaster. She couldn’t find a clock. “I don’t know.”
“Why are we here?”
Hot tears rolled down Answer Woman’s cheeks, bubbling over like broth left to boil too long, the pot too full. She couldn’t answer. She knelt at the old woman’s feet and kissed the scars on her mother’s hands.
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He is the author of the new novel My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours (Cowboy Jamboree Press), as well as three previous full-length short story collections: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue (Duck Lake Books), Circus Folk (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and The Long Way Home (Cowboy Jamboree Press). Chin won the 2017-2018 Jean Leiby Chapbook Award from The Florida Review and Bayou Magazine’s 2014 James Knudsen Prize for Fiction. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.
Photo by Charles Parker from Pexels