The five-year anniversary: he has just learned the word, testing the waters of each syllable. Ann, ih, verse, sir, ree. Jacob asks his father if this is that, an ann-ih-verse-sir-ree, though he still does not quite understand what it means.
No, Jakey, not an anniversary. This is just August, again, and five years. Since.
❂
Jacob watches the other kids from afar. They run around the edges of the clearing before the service, chasing each other into the brush and between the trees. Like him, they have doubtless been told what this place really is, at least in part. They giggle, they play tag, pushing each other into dead leaves and dusty earth. Black suits and grayscale dresses that will be outgrown in a year, streaked with dirt; Jacob has been instructed to keep his spick and span. It will be returned to Sears next week.
Jacob cannot help but want to join them. And feels shame. Here he remains with the solemn adults, with his father, instead, who gently mingles with other mourners and rememberers. Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.
All words above Jacob’s head. He cannot watch the other children without that pang, to run free with them despite his father’s stern instructions, and so he largely stares at the earth. Grass pokes up sparsely, the earth under the blades visible, and cracked. As though the plants aren’t even sure of this place, if the ground is ready to move on yet.
Countless well-wishes, restrained tears, concealing sunglasses. First a general eulogy, then speeches from a priest, a rabbi, first responders, a grief counselor, and then, finally, a representative from the airline.
Jacob watches the ground — he could dig his fingers into that cracked mud. He could coax the thin grass aside and worm his fingers into the fracture lines, wriggling deeper. The dirt teemed with unseen life; he was sure of that before he even learned it in school.
The speeches finished, the affair drawn to a close, Jacob is guided around for final goodbyes, a palm between his shoulder blades. Lockstep with his father: The Palmer Boys! Here they are, Phil and Jacob Palmer, and now they must take their leave, so sorry to disappoint.
But — a commotion. Heads turn in chain reaction; Jacob sees this first and then follows their sights, drawn again to the other children, who sprint back to their various parents, giddy and shouting.
“We found teeth!” says a grinning boy to his mother, blonde hair wispy and sun-bleached above his head. “Look!”
A murmur among the remaining mourners.
“Oh, honey, that’s…”
The mother’s voice fades; his father’s palm steers him down the old first responder’s path, since overgrown. To the car, spinning gravel out of the makeshift parking lot, and then the winding roads home, his father quiet in the front seat.
Jacob does not mind the silence. He sits in the soft sanctuary of silence often, in fact, even at recess. His nanny calls him a thoughtful child — that he is just brimming with thoughts over there — to the muted concerns of his father.
The other children, they were not thoughtful, like him. They did not know what that place was, as he did; they would not have laughed. And, further — they did not grasp quite what those teeth meant. Where they came from. There are many things that sprout from the dirt, he knows, but not teeth; they had belonged to those on the airplane.
One or two might even have belonged to his mother.
“How about we stop for Arby’s,” says his father.
“Okay,” says Jacob. Scarce of word, ever thoughtful.
Those children. Thoughtless. Of course they would run shouting over teeth. They did not know how to keep a secret, to slip a secret into their pocket, and act like it had never existed. To act thoughtful. And then stay dumb until home, in the bathroom, faucet running, before even daring to feel the hard lump of a secret in their pocket.
❂
Jacob keeps the tooth under his bed, nestled within a gap in the wall molding. He knows of every crevice to conceal treasure in his room, and which might best fit what, as all children.
In the morning, Jacob eats his toaster pastries with dutiful efficiency, and only extracts the tooth from its hide-hole once he has been sent upstairs to get dressed. He works its grooves with his fingertips, turning it over and over. There must have been many teeth, to have found one so far from the others, but this was his mother’s. It had to be. He places the flat edge in his mouth and bites down, shooting electricity along his jaw nerves. Jacob pulls it out and marvels, ears still ringing — how strong, how hard. What had his mother eaten with it? What had she cracked apart?
He rides the bus to school, alone in his two-seat bench. What to do with the tooth, safely squirreled in his wall back home. Another kid — one of his classmates, even — they would probably leave it under their pillow. Expecting money without realizing what it meant, what possibilities it contained. Just like the other kids yesterday, at the forest and cracked earth, at the thing that wasn’t an ann-ih-verse-sir-ree. They had not yet been made to grow.
It was not as though the other children hadn’t noticed this gulf, either; his seat on the bus had been his and his alone for so many years now.
Jacob cannot manage to keep his attention in class, so distracted as he is by the tooth. Each period, almost, he is called on by a teacher to explain his homework, or solve a problem on the board, each time met with silence. The teachers are used to this; Jacob has not put on his “talkative” pants today, and thus they ignore him until the bell rings.
At recess he plays by himself, as always — this time deep in the bushes, which line the cement path to the school building. They are squat, piney things, with stubby sharp needles and plump red berries. Jacob has played this game before; he examines the berries until one calls out to him. Perhaps its shape, or its ripe, vivid color. He plucks it, cradling it carefully, and with one of the many fallen needles, slices an incision. Careful, now, careful. He uses the needle to pry apart the wound, which begins to ooze a clear, sappy substance, and delicately extracts the hard green seed at its center. And then, the most revered ritual of this game: he scoops out a hole in the earth, the dirt sticking to the sap on his hands, and lays the seed to bed. Then, brushing it over inhumed, he runs off to the end-of-recess bell and the annoyed teachers who will march him to Wash Your Hands Jacob, My God!
The rest of the day passes in quiet contemplation.
If his bus is running on time, as it seems to be today, Jacob will find himself with a tight 20 minutes before his father arrives home from work. It will be enough, if he hurries. He bounds off the bus at his stop, swinging his blue hard-case lunchbox with each lunging step. Whipping up the doormat to find the spare key in its dirt-silhouetted outline, he unlocks and races through the door, up the stairs, throwing the lunchbox to clatter against a wall as he scrambles under the bed. Squirming deeper, and deeper, until his fingers brush the wall, and feeling around, settling on a gap in the molding. And then, within, the smooth little pearl. His secret.
Ten minutes left, Jacob sprints down the stairs with the tooth clutched in his hand, circling around the staircase, crashing through the swinging door to the kitchen. Out onto the patio, down the wooden steps, to his father’s tomato garden, the hairy vines held upright by rigid metal cones. Jacob kneels between the contraptions, among the hanging green eggs not yet ripened to pluck. He scoops a hole in the earth, there, and lays his secret to bed.
His father returns home some short minutes later to find Jacob at the kitchen island, reading a book emblazoned with biology diagrams and shouting block letters. Quiet, ever thoughtful.
“Jacob,” says his father, “how did your hands get so filthy?”
❂
Jacob visits the patch of dirt each day, in those precious minutes after leaping from the bus, to check on his slumbering tooth. At least, where he thinks it is — in truth, the dirt has smoothed over, and all looks more or less the same. What matters is that this ground is for growing, for bringing life; it is ready to move on with each change of season.
September rolls to October, to rotting pumpkins. And, eventually, to a soft mat of wet, dead leaves, which wallpaper atop his patch of dirt. Then November, its sharp winds dissolving the leafy parchment seemingly overnight, and then December, the trees bare, the ground dark and firm. In time, Jacob forgets his garden, its ivory seed, as any child will forget such long-term plans. They do not possess the patience required. Even the thoughtful ones.
The ground thaws, in time, the ice and snow melts, the trees crack open a sleepy eye and unfurl their young buds. Eventually, Jacob is done for the school year; many days he will play in the woods behind the house, out past the tomato garden. The only place he can escape his nanny’s watchful gaze, who has gone full-time as Jacob is home each day.
And such it goes, the day that Jacob sees the lump of dirt, and remembers. He is returning from the forest with new treasure, a fossil imprint of some ancient leaf, when he spots the small mound between two tomato vines. And his new treasure is immediately forgotten.
So long ago, it had been, that Jacob cannot quite recall where he had planted the tooth, but this protruding bit of dirt, it makes sense. He entertains digging into it, for a moment, and shudders. It feels revolting, somehow. Like prying into a cocoon — scooping out the innards of a berry not yet ripe, and watching the thin yellow liquid spill out.
Jacob hurries up the back-patio, into the safety of his house and his nanny’s watchful eye. So practiced is his quietness, his thoughtfulness, that she does not see him shaking as he reads at the kitchen island.
It is late July, and Jacob wakes up each day thinking of his garden. He loathes taking his walk out back, but he trudges out no matter the weather, sometimes tugging on his little black galoshes. The mound appears to get a little bigger each day; his father has forgone the tomatoes this year, and so it seems to be that only young Jacob notices what is transpiring in their backyard.
Soon enough it is August, and his backpack is filled with new school supplies, when Jacob dutifully plods to the garden and finds a single, great crack atop the mound. Like a berry that has reached ripeness, perhaps overripened, now threatening to rupture with clear ooze.
Jacob sits before the mound.
“Mom,” he says. The word feels unsure on his tongue; he has not spoken it much in his life. “Come inside when you’re ready.” Never much for speaking, Jacob leaves it at that.
Tomorrow will be the not-anniversary. That word, finally smoothed at last. Anniversary. Anniversary.
Late that night, Jacob rolls in his bed, unable to sleep — there is not as much room. She stretches an arm of dense, packed mud over his small body, and draws him closer, and closer, till he can smell the earth itself.
Elliot Alpern is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, and a Founding Editor at nocontactmag.com. He writes from Virginia with his wife and their intern, a young dachshund. You can find more of his work on his website. Twitter: @high_fidelliot Instagram: @high_fidelliot
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