Unknowing (Revised)
Reworked draft, recipient of the Ginny Wray Senior Prize in Fiction
(Trigger warnings: mentions of suicide, brief depictions of sex.)
“My brother’s in rehab again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He wouldn’t care if I died. Would you?”
“I’d be devastated,” Lucille says. “Do you want to die, Joe?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Seems peaceful.”
“Well,” she pauses to bite the remnants of polish from her right thumb, “that doesn’t seem like a very good reason to kill yourself. Peace isn’t happiness. Peace is nothing. And maybe it’s also everything.”
“Everything is nothing,” Joe says.
“Exactly.”
She pictures Joe peering over the ledge of his apartment building. He forms an O with his lips as smoke slithers into the frosted air. Maybe the grey proof of his breath cements him to the living; perhaps the cigarette in his right hand is flameless because the sky is weeping for him.
Seconds pass: his coat is probably drenched, his thick beard most likely stinks of sweat and mildew. She presses an ear to the receiver and searches for his breath above the droning of the A/C unit. It hangs precariously off the edge of her office window.
This is Joe’s sixty-first phone call to the Washington Suicide Hotline. Lucille has taken forty-five of them since she began her part-time position as an operator last May.
She learned that Joe calls when he’s lonely. He feels the most lonely when it rains. He is 54 years old, addicted to cigarettes, and lives with his mother, who is also addicted to cigarettes. His older brother became hooked on meth a decade ago and pockets Joe’s disability checks to buy it.
A thought suddenly occurs to Lucille: Joe might not be breathing anymore—he has tossed himself into empty air and exploded into a flat sludge of tattered skin and gore. The rain carries him into the sewers, rinsing his skeleton clean, leaving behind the compounded meat of his heart.
Finally, he coughs. The sound is beautiful. She can nearly smell the spit and phlegm emerging from the back of his throat.
She slumps in her chair and presses two fingers to her neck, palming her stomach with her other hand.
“Are you happy?” Joe asks.
“I’m… at peace,” she says.
“Well.” He coughs again. “Isn’t that something?”
Her roommate, Dana, is crying. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence. Last week, a man she met on a dating app asked her if she would fuck raw, and when she said no, he rolled over and started playing a poker game on his phone. That night, Lucille returned home to find her sobbing next to a half-empty bottle of red wine.
“It’s like I was invisible!” Dana cried. Then she burped. “My tits were out, and I’d shaved, and he didn’t look at me once.”
This time, a thirty-four-year-old bouncer she met at the club started ignoring her texts after he learned she had dropped out of college to act in an off-Broadway production of Oklahoma! that tanked after six performances.
Lucille rubs her heaving shoulders and wipes her tears. Dana’s dollar-store mascara tracks down her cheeks and forms a heavy ring around her slightly uneven eyes. Lucille tries not to imagine her as an animated raccoon. She fails.
“He’s a dick,” she says. “Whose name is Ralph, anyway?”
Dana lets out a garbled laugh. Lucille looks down at the pint of ice cream on her lap and realizes it has melted into a puddle on the sofa. She decides not to care.
“His parents hate him,” Dana says. “They named him Ralph and conceived him in Long Island.”
“On Long Island,” Lucille corrects. “He’s also kind of ugly. Huge ears.”
“He has a giant tattoo on his back.”
“Of?”
“A realistic portrait of his childhood dog.”
They watch reality television. Dana doesn’t ask about Lucille’s day, which is another common occurrence. She doesn’t mind it, though. She likes listening. She believes that listening is love.
Once, when she was having trouble sleeping, she called Dana into her bedroom to tell her about high school. Even though she graduated a decade ago, her face lit up as she regaled Lucille with stories about her boyfriends, two of whom she dated simultaneously.
“It was like polyamory,” she explained, “but Jack didn’t know about Shawn, and Shawn knew about Jack; they were both on the water polo team.”
Lucille must have nodded off. When she woke up, Dana was still speaking.
“Isn’t that insane?” she asked. “Like, Ashley knew he was cheating on her, and she still dated him for another six months.” She looked down at Lucille. “Why do women stay with men who hurt them?”
Lucille blinked heavily. “It’s all they know how to do.”
“That’s so true, Luce.” Through her haze of half-sleep, she watched Dana smile. “How do you always know what to say?”
Her eyes closed again on their own accord.
Lucille’s older sister, Megan, flung herself off her eleventh-story balcony nearly two years ago.
At the time of her death, their mother stood at her kitchen stove and sliced fresh sourdough into contained squares, speaking to Lucille over the phone about her recent vacation to Hawaii. In between sentences, she hummed a sweet, airy tune beneath her breath.
“I gotta go, Mom,” Lucille said. “I’m running late for an interview.”
“Oh, do let me know if… Chad? I think his name is Chad— anyway, Chad can set you up with a job in your father’s office. It’s very peaceful work, Lucille.”
“Thanks, Mom. Will do.”
Ten minutes after they hung up, her mother called again.
“What, Mom?” Lucille huffed in annoyance. “I just said good—”
Her mother screamed. It was a warped, elongated vowel, a chorus of a low oooooh and ohhhh— a discovery, it seemed, or a sudden understanding of something already known but hidden deeply away.
Lucille could not make out a word. She did not know what had taken place until she arrived at her childhood house an hour later, skidding her car so abruptly in front of her mailbox that her tires rested partly on the front lawn. She found her mother sitting outside in the pouring rain, her soaked bathrobe clinging to her thin legs. Her father stood behind her and rubbed her heaving shoulders. His face contorted into what Lucille recognized to be sorrow.
They raised their heads to look at her. Lucille took a shaky step towards them, her heels catching on the damp soil.
When she approached, her mother dropped to her knees. She grabbed onto Lucille’s bare ankles and dug in with her nails. “Why?” she shouted. “Why?”
And yet, no one knew. Even still. Even now. After the mass and the burial, Lucille moved into an apartment two miles away from her parents’ house. She quit unemployment and, against her therapist’s wishes, found a job working the phones at the suicide prevention hotline. She then quit therapy; all she could ask on that rickety couch was why. She found it easier to pose the same questions on her own, slightly more comfortable couch.
She found herself asking her callers why they wanted to die.
“To get rid of my mortgage,” one said.
“To be with my husband again,” another supplied.
Joe did not have any sort of answer.
“I guess I’m tired,” he said. “Man, maybe I still won’t get any sleep when I’m dead anyway.”
“Does your brother make you want to die?”
Joe laughed. “Nah, he makes me wanna live out of spite.”
So now, Lucille visits her parents once per month and spends the rest of her time watching television with Dana. She stopped asking questions she couldn’t find answers to. Outside of work, she had mostly stopped speaking at all.
“Why’re you so quiet?” Dana once asked.
“I’m trying to solve a hard equation in my head,” Lucille said.
Dana raised perfectly-plucked eyebrows. “Okay, nerd.” She laughed. “Geez, you remind me of my sister. She’s, like, a math whiz.”
“I’m not a sister,” Lucille said. “I’m not anyone’s sister.”
“But you’re literally like my little—“
Lucille stood up from the table, flicked the lights off, and disappeared into her bedroom.
Every other week, Megan’s husband calls Lucille at two in the morning and begins to cry into the phone. He speaks about his dead mother, his dead wife, and his dying Great Aunt Martha. She tries to console him the best she can, which takes the form of silence wrapped in small hums of agreement.
Sometimes, when she agrees to drive the forty minutes to his one-bedroom in the outskirts of Seattle, they fuck silently. Their inability to find words can only be explained by their new and foreign realities.
Suddenly, they are so lonely. Suddenly, the only connection between them is Megan, and their desperate utterances of why. Suddenly, they must anchor themselves to skin and bone. They must grow hot enough to cauterize their wounds.
He only spoke once during sex, and it was to tell Lucille he loved her.
“Don’t say that. Pull out right now.”
He hung his head. She was glad he felt ashamed— he didn’t love her, and he loved Megan, and he used Lucille’s body to prove that to himself. And he did pull out, but not quickly enough.
She visited him at Walgreens last week to tell him she was pregnant.
“You keeping it?” he asked. He scanned her carton of half-expired milk and box of Dots.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I just wanted to let you know. Also, I needed milk.”
Megan probably hates Lucille for housing her husband’s child in her womb.
Before she jumped, she stuck an envelope in the alcoves of her bedroom pillows, sealed with her spit and addressed to no one in particular. She informed the world that she believed in reincarnation and wished to come back as a baby with no ties to anything but an umbilical cord.
Lucille’s not sure what appealed to her sister about repeating life, but she imagines Megan’s soul in a newborn body popping out of her vagina in the form of their shared kin. She becomes so frightened that she pops a loose Benadryl floating at the bottom of her purse.
At work, a woman babbles to Lucille about the death of her dog. In the extreme process of chasing a squirrel, he careened off the steep edge of a cliff behind her house.
“He might come back,” Lucille tells her. “With a brand new body and a fear of heights.”
“What’s your favorite color?” Joe asks.
“Blue,” Lucille says, “but you already know this.”
“Yeah, but what kinda blue? Cerulean? Navy?’
She pauses to think. Megan’s prom dress was teal. At the time, Lucille was twelve and thought it to be the ugliest concoction of fabrics she’d ever seen, but at the funeral, she slung a teal piece of fabric over the closed casket to hide scuff marks she accidentally dug with her nails.
“Teal,” she says.
“Mine’s yellow and red. Can’t choose.”
“Are you safe, Joe?”
“I reckon I am when I’m talkin’ to you.”
“That’s good,” she says, “but since you’re not in danger, we have to hang up in a few.”
“Well, that doesn’t make any damn sense, does it?’
She releases a laugh that startles her. She forgot how her voice sounds when someone tugs something out of it that isn’t just breath.
“Bye, Joe,” she says. “Call me tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain.”
When she cannot sleep, Lucille’s fingers will trace across her stomach. She will listen to owls hooting on YouTube. She will cup a palm-sized amount of fat and hum the songs she learned in childhood. She will swear she can hear small whines escape through her belly button.
It is crying out for me, she’ll think, begging me to let it open its eyes to the harsh light of a new world.
In her dreams, Megan’s crushed body is sinking into the soil, but the gravediggers don’t stop at six feet, and they etch a hole deep enough to reach the center of the earth, and they toss Lucille and Megan and the fetus into it, and they are all falling into a portal that shrinks them into nothing, and they can still see and hear each other, but they can’t feel, not at all, not even when they reach the bottom and explode into particles.
For moments at a time, they look like raindrops. They are screaming so loudly it startles the life in hiding.
* * *
“You should really find something less morbid,” Lucille’s mother tells her over the phone. “Dad said he could hook you up with Jonah— no, wait, James— yes, James?” She often speaks with question marks tacked to the ends of her sentences. “James can get you a job at his bank. Busywork, you know? Office work.”
“I like my job, Mom. And it’s in an office. I even have my own cubicle.” She digs her nail into a pimple on her forehead. “It’s really peaceful, actually.”
Her mother is probably leaning down in front of a hot oven, beads of sweat collecting on a wrinkled forehead. She is baking something that wafts a sweet smell into the living room where her elderly cat basks in the sun beside framed photographs of the family’s old beach house in Maine, of Megan graduating from college, of her lean frame in a sleek wedding dress.
There are pictures of Lucille, too, scattered along the edge of the doily-covered countertop, but they were taken when she was much younger. She has not accomplished anything important like her sister, who married and then died before she was thirty.
“Well, just think about it, okay?” her mother asks. “I worry about you, Lucy. I can’t lose…”
“Okay, Mom,” she interrupts. “I’ll think about it.”
As she bids goodbye, Lucille hears the oven door slam shut and paws scurry across wooden floorboards. She imagines her fetus sleeping atop her father’s lap as he sips beer on the couch.
Drops of precipitation land on its bald head. He erases them with a laugh and a gentle swipe of his thumb.
Joe kills himself on a Monday morning.
Her coworkers point to his name at the top of the newspaper’s daily “Obituaries” section. She glares at them from across the conference table until someone shoves it over to her awkwardly. Through the thick lens of her glasses, she squints down at the black-and-white type: Joseph Berman, 54, is survived by his mother, Sharon Berman, and his brother, Allan Berman.
When they spoke, she pictured him with a beer belly. He might have been bald with three or four wisps of hair stuck to the outside of his temples with gel. When he sat down on his recliner, the cushions shifted beneath his weight. Wine glasses trembled from the cabinets.
But in the photograph, Joe is lean, his legs thin and bony. He is smiling at the camera; his hands crossed under his head. He lies in the grass of a random backyard, or a park, or a field. He was handsome, even with the wrinkles etched under his eyes and the dark, pointed glow of his pupils.
It never occurred to Lucille to imagine Joe’s smile or his near-perfect white teeth. In the blank spaces of her memory, she must have conjured an image of rotting yellow.
The woman whose cubicle shares a corner with Lucille’s pats her on her shoulder. “It says the memorial’s on Thursday,” she says. “Are you going?”
“Maybe,” Lucille replies.
“You should,” the woman says. “You were, like, his friend. At the end, at least.”
“He wasn’t, like, your friend, right?’ Dana asks.
Lucille hands her the newspaper and points to the section she underlined in Sharpie. “I don’t know,” she says, “what even is a friend?”
Dana gasps and gestures to herself. “I’m your friend. You know, like, everything about me.” She stares down at Joe with a creepy, subdued smile. “And you also know I probably would’ve let your patient buy me a drink.”
“You would have slept with him,” says Lucille. “You would have ruined him.”
Dana sighs. “You’re being dramatic,” she says. “He could’ve ruined me, too.”
Lucille bites into a mushy banana and lets it sit on the edge of her tongue. Dana draws circles around Joe’s face with a manicured nail. They sit in silence, having nothing in particular to do.
By the time she finishes the banana, Lucille realizes she dislikes the fact that Dana saw Joe’s face the same day she finally did. Dana didn’t know him. Maybe Lucille didn’t, either— it’s impossible to know anyone over the phone. He didn’t know Lucille; Dana doesn’t, either. Maybe no one does.
Lucille doesn’t speak very much about important things.
To grapple with this unknowing, she drives to the edge of Seattle and lets her dead sister’s husband turn her over and fuck her in the ass.
“God,” he says. He lifts a hairy hand and slaps her lower back. She doesn’t tell him he missed his target. “You’re so fucking hot.”
“Are you inside?” she asks.
He comes before she can finish her sentence, his legs tensing and trembling. Then, with a gentler hand, he rubs her shoulders and squeezes one of her ears. His breath hits her neck in sour spurts.
“She never let me do that,” he whispers, positioning his body behind Lucille’s in a tight embrace.
She shuts her eyes and pretends he is a stranger she met at a bar. As he strokes the small of her back and drools into her ponytail, she pictures him sliding a gin and tonic over a long counter.
Would she give in and drink it like Megan did?
Lucille sat beside her sister four years ago when she met him at an Irish pub. Their unification was simple: His pool ball jumped over the table and landed in Megan’s lap. She cradled it in her palms and stared up at him with drunken wonder rimming her pupils.
For the rest of the night, Lucille downed lukewarm beer while she watched them press open-mouthed kisses onto each other’s necks, sneak away to the restroom, and stumble into the graffiti-covered walls.
But during Megan’s eulogy, he told everyone they had met through a mutual friend.
Lucille never asked him why he lied about something so trivial. She knew that their narrative was thick enough to be bent at its edges and still exist as a whole. After all, Megan was not there to confirm that the only thing that brought them together that night was shit luck.
Lucille was the one left to remember the pub and its piss-soaked bathroom stalls; she holds her memories beside her grief. It all tangles together in a web of mostly truths and little lies. It’s something tangible. She feels as if she can turn it over in her hands.
“I’m going to a memorial on Thursday,” she whispers into the dark. “Would you like to come with me?”
He answers with a guttural snore, which wakes his roommate’s Pomeranian, who then begins to howl in desperate vowels. Oooooo, it cries. Ohhhhh.
In her head, she joins in. She discovers that they are both creatures who can only scream when the whole city is asleep.
Dana drops her off in front of Joe’s mother’s house. “I can’t do funerals,” she says. “I cry like Kim Kardashian.”
“It’s a memorial.”
She gags. “Call me when it’s over.”
The house is a one-story with barred windows and broken shutters. The roof slants a little too far to the left; it makes Lucille wonder how long they’ve lived in fear of it caving in. She walks the gravel driveway and tramples overgrown weeds with her heels.
Soft music seeps beneath the crack of the front door. When she knocks, it swings open to reveal a pile of mail on the ground and a living room barren of guests. Cigarette smoke permeates stale air. From the small, tattered sofa, a cat stares up at her and bares its teeth.
“Hello?” she calls.
She takes a hesitant step through the entryway to find an old woman and a younger man. They sit at a table littered with ashtrays and crushed cans of beer, a deck of cards piled in the space between them.
The woman grins up at her. Her front two teeth are missing; the rest are a checkerboard of crooked yellows and browns. Her wiry hair is wrapped into a bun that perches atop her head.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Lucille says to the woman.
She takes a puff of a long cigarette and holds it out— a greeting, of sorts. “Are you Lucille?”
Lucille straightens her back. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, call me Sharon,” she says. “And this—” she points to the man opposite her, “—is Allan.”
Lucille takes the third and last chair. It shakes beneath her weight.
Allan considers her with his grey eyes, an inscrutable gaze. She smooths her hands over her blouse and tries not to shrink.
“How did you know my name?” she asks.
Sharon clears a wad of phlegm from her throat and spits it into a tissue. “Joe never got around to introducing us, but any best friend of my son’s is a friend of mine.”
Before Lucille can react, the cat from the sofa leaps into her lap. He nuzzles his head against her breasts, purring softly. The vibrations of sound feel warm.
“Oh, he likes you,” Sharon says. “Doesn’t he, Allan?”
She watches him shuffle a set of cards, turning them over in his dirt-stained palms. They fall into each other in a seamless sheath. He doles out three piles and shoves one of them over to her.
“Gin rummy,” he says. “D’you know how to play?”
Glancing around the conjoined kitchen and living room, she knows that no one else will come. Still, she peeks down the hallway for mourners in the shadows, or pictures of Joe strung up on the walls. The only sorrow she finds is laced in her own reflection, illuminated against the smooth surface of a long black urn that sits on a dusty bookshelf.
She realizes she is meeting Joe for the first time. She stares into her own empty eyes and imagines they’re his. Beneath the table, she shakes hands with air.
“We’ll teach you,” Sharon says. She flips over the queen of hearts and smiles. “It’s not too hard.”
After four games, she excuses herself and steps outside. Cold air greets her bare ankles and elbows. The other houses lined up on the block are positioned away from this one, their wooden bodies basking in the glow of broken streetlights. She wonders when it would be appropriate to leave. Sharon retired to her bathroom to piss and smoke, tiredness hollowing her cheeks. No one is left in the kitchen, she thinks. It would be so easy to just—
“Why’d you show up?”
She spins around to find Allan. He leans his gangly torso against the railings of the porch, flicking a lighter with a calloused thumb.
“I wanted to share my condolences,” she says.
He takes a puff of his cigar and laughs, his voice catching in his throat. “You weren’t actually friends, right?” he asked. “Like, you met him at a bar once, and he harassed you into giving him your number?”
“Why do you think that?”
Allan blows smoke into the air, but he doesn’t cough. He gestures to the empty driveway. “‘Cause Joe never had any friends. No one knew him except for Ma and me.”
A sharp blade of anger lodges itself below her ribs. It scrapes up the inside of her neck and escapes through her mouth. “I knew him well enough to know that you must’ve gotten permission to come home from whatever rehab you landed yourself in this time.”
At her words, Allan takes a rickety step back. He opens his lips but doesn’t speak.
“And we were friends,” she continues. “The best of friends. We spoke every day, but he especially liked to call me when it rained because it reminded him of me. And— we weren’t just friends, either. We were lovers.” Her words rush out in a burst of energy. Her tongue tastes like metal. Somewhere, a dog is panting and attempting to speak. “We met at the pub on Hazel. His pool ball landed in my lap.”
“He never mentioned,” Allan says. He doesn’t look at her. “He would’ve told me.”
With a sharp yelp, Allan slams his beer bottle against the ground, purple veins bulging from his scarred wrists. Dark blood sprouts from his toes.
They stare at each other with open mouths. Inside the bathroom, Sharon coughs loudly, the harshness of it reverberating through the open air.
“That ain’t true.” Allan steps backward and stares into a grey sky. A flock of birds swarms above his head while, behind them,— just once— lightning strikes.
Hard rain falls, and Allan begins to weep, snot bubbles bursting from his nostrils onto the oil-stained front of his shirt. In the dim light of the sun’s departure, Lucille thinks he looks like Joe— the crinkles under his eyes, the dark points of his pupils.
“I’m pregnant with his baby,” Lucille mutters. She does not know why she says this. “It’s due in March.”
Dana skids her car into the driveway behind them, honking the horn twice. Over the low hum of the engine, Allan continues to blubber into his hands.
Lucille backs away, digging her heels once more into the dead weeds. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. “It’s so hard to lose… just— ” She stops, thinks. Takes a breath. Remembers the wet grass, the mailbox, the jab of her mother’s nails. “There’s never a clear reason.”
She climbs into the car. When they reverse, she gives his retreating figure a small wave through the mirror. He shrinks to the size of a pinprick.
They turn the corner, and he disappears from view.
“How was it?” Dana asks.
Lucille shrugs. “It was… peaceful.”
Lucille thinks about Allan and Sharon and the sad, empty memorial. She considers the futility of telling the truth when no one is alive to remember it. She remembers that everyone is predisposed to becoming ash.
She presses her hands to her stomach and searches for a sign of movement, willing the fetus to rearrange a limb or push against her womb. It’s old enough now to move on its own. She urges it to become angry and restless.
Finally, the fetus kicks. It’s all-consuming. It’s as powerful as a cough.
She sighs. Her breath fogs the window, blocking the world outside of it: the trunks of the trees, the dirt of the road, and the rain.