If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories

  If a Stranger Approaches You

  If

  a

  Stranger

  Approaches

  You

  Stories

  Laura Kasischke

  © 2013 by Laura Kasischke

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

  Managing Editor

  Sarabande Books, Inc.

  2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200

  Louisville, KY 40205

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kasischke, Laura, 1961–

  If a stranger approaches you : stories / Laura Kasischke.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-936747-51-1

  1. Short stories. I. Title.

  PS3561.A6993I34 2013

  813'.54—dc23

  2012029742

  Cover art: “Oh, happy day!” by Maggie Taylor. © Maggie Taylor, 2009.

  Cover and text design by Kirkby Gann Tittle.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  For Antonya Nelson~

  best storyteller and friend in the world

  How can I explain our reaction. We all recognized Toby. But it couldn’t be Toby. Still, it was!

  from “The Boy Who Didn’t Know He Died”

  Fate Magazine, June 1966

  Where I awoke I stayed not;

  yet where I tarried, that I can never tell thee …

  Wagner’s Tristan

  Contents

  Mona

  Memorial

  Melody

  Our Father

  Somebody’s Mistress, Somebody’s Wife

  Joyride

  The Foreclosure

  Search Continues for Elderly Man

  The Barge

  You’re Going to Die

  The Flowering Staff

  The Prisoners

  I Hope This is Hell

  The Skill

  “If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane”

  Acknowledgments

  The Author

  If a Stranger Approaches You

  Mona

  They’d all warned her not to snoop. Why bother to read a teenage daughter’s diary or rifle her dresser drawers since you’ll have no idea what to do with the knowledge you’ll gain if you gain it? Aren’t you better off not knowing if there’s something you don’t want to know?

  And, in truth, there’d been no real reason to snoop. No changes in behavior. No failing grades. No friends who seemed to be bad influences.

  But Mona was a mother who needed reassurance, and Abigail was a sixteen-year-old girl. Dear Old Dad had flown the coop, out of the picture now—living out a whole new life with a whole new family in another state—and it was a different world from the one Mona had grown up in. She’d read about huffing, about cutting, about meth. And of course all that sex, oral and otherwise. If there was something she should know, Mona was Abigail’s mother, and she should know it.

  And so much the better if there was nothing.

  That was the best case scenario, Mona thought as she opened the bottom drawer after the other three drawers, which had held nothing but the usual underwear and leggings, junk jewelry, nail polish, striped socks. She’d been a bit annoyed to find a half-eaten Hershey’s bar, unwrapped—and this after all the noise Mona had made about the ants last summer and how nothing, nothing, was to be eaten upstairs. But she just put it back where she’d found it, so as not to have to confess she’d found it.

  The bottom drawer seemed to be just more socks and bras and panties. (How had the girl managed to accumulate so much?) Simple things. Modest. No black bras. No thongs. Mona rarely saw her daughter’s underwear now that Abigail did her own laundry, folded it herself, put it away. She’d been so good about such things since Mona’s hours had been upped at work and some nights she couldn’t even get home until after eight o’clock.

  Abigail was a good daughter, an A student, had never been in any trouble. …

  But Mona also knew how wrong things could go when they went wrong. She’d been a teenager. She’d come dangerously close to the edge of something, herself, at that age. An older boy. Scott. That car of his. And the booze. And the pot. This had been 1977, and they were all getting stoned and drunk back then. Even the really good kids. Maybe even especially the good kids. It had been five years before Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No, and they were all saying yes, yes, yes.

  And her own parents had been oblivious. She and Scott would come home right on time on a Saturday night, looking like all-Americans. Scott would shake her father’s hand, make small talk for a few minutes with her mother, and then he and Mona would head to the basement, already stoned out of their minds, and proceed to polish off the bottle of Jack Daniels Mona had in her purse, and then have sex on the vinyl couch down there in the light of some innocent TV show, sound turned way up.

  Mona had gotten all A’s, too. President of the choir. Active member of her church youth group. Apparently they’d never bothered to look in her dresser drawers, where they’d have found the empties, the little pot pipe whittled into a hummingbird, maybe a baggie with a few buds, the box of condoms.

  It was because of this that Mona was now on her knees, sorting through the bras and panties in her daughter’s bottom drawer. Now, she was really feeling around, not expecting to find anything, but also not surprised when she found it.

  Later, Mona would wonder why this thing she’d felt had seemed strange to her at all. At first, it was just another silky handful of something among the other silky handfuls.

  But with a lump in it.

  Still, it wasn’t that solid.

  No larger than an acorn. Without even the weight of an acorn. How easily Mona might have passed over it, taken it for a scrunchie, or a dried rose saved from the Track & Field banquet, some Pep Club carnation, some other of the ten million floral keepsakes a girl that age will get.

  It felt like that. Ribbony, or botanical, or a little bunched bit of lace.

  But it was also wrapped up fussily in a square of silk, and—was Mona imagining this?—it seemed that great care had been taken to hide it. Bottom drawer, the back of it, in the corner, beneath a very precisely folded camisole.

  Mona brought it out and looked first at the square of silk, which was dotted with small, irregularly shaped blotches of brown. Sprayed like a handkerchief after blowing a vaguely bloody nose.

  Old blood. Something menstrual? Had Abigail left a used tampon in here for some reason?

  But why?

  No, this thing wasn’t large enough for that. Mona held the little package in her palm—and there was something else about it, too. A prickling, a weightlessness. Slowly, and already regretting her snooping (they’d warned her) Mona began to unwrap it.

  The thing at the center of the silk square was red, red which had dulled to brown. The size of a rosebud, she supposed, but this was not a flower. Although it was dried, this thing had never been a flower. There were no petals. It was more like—

  Like a clot?

  A swelling?

  A little tumor?

  The bulby tip of a tongue, the siz
e of a baby’s big toe, or something internal, some mass coughed up from the lungs? Some small bloody knob that had withered, almost to dust, held together with—?

  With pins.

  This thing in Mona’s palm could not have weighed more than an ounce, but stuck into it she could see the heads of what must have been twenty, thirty, pins driven deeply in.

  By then, her hand was trembling.

  She took it to the window to see it better.

  Jesus Christ, she thought. What is this?

  And then a moment of hope seized Mona when she realized that it might be some small, old piece of fruit. Apricot. Strawberry. Wild plum.

  No. When she held it closer to her face, in the brighter light near the window (noting that the pins were not stuck into it randomly but that, instead, they crisscrossed the lump in some kind of elaborate pattern—up, one, down, two, crossed, one down, one up, all the way around, and then a second row the same, and a third, and a fourth) she remembered what this thing reminded her of, and of the fetal pig, sophomore biology. Dissected. Chest cavity pinned back to reveal the tiny, perfect organs inside it. Jewels made of flesh. The pitiful little lungs. The stomach. And the heart.

  The heart.

  The severed arteries. One, two, three, four, five, and then the larger one (she turned the thing in her palm right side up)—the aorta.

  Then Mona dropped it onto the floor and stepped away from it, holding a hand to her throat. Oh my God. And then she was on her knees again, yanking everything that was left in it out of the drawer, tossing things around her. The pink silk, the white silk, the white cotton. She shook out each pair of panties, every bra, the tank tops, and the tights, in all the drawers. The sweet little daisies on the panties, the pink roses between the bra cups, all of it scattered around her until the drawers were empty. Then she ran her hands over the bottom, and the sides, and found that there was also nothing—not even any dust, not even a crumb. Just that one half of a pitiful chocolate bar. Such a good girl. Such a tidy, obedient girl.

  Slowly, carefully, Mona put everything back into the dresser—folding things carefully again, arranging them as her daughter had arranged them—before she tossed the rest of the room: the bedcovers, the bookshelves, the shoeboxes in the back of the closet, the coat and jacket and jean pockets, the bedside table, and under the bed—and when she was done finding just more nothing, she put all that back, too, and, holding it by a pin, feeling as if she might vomit, she tucked the thing, the mummified thing, the tiny mummfied heart, back up in the square of silk Abigail had wrapped it in, and she walked out the front door with it, set it down carefully on the passenger-side seat of her car, slammed the door closed, got behind the steering wheel and started it up, and pulled out of her driveway into the street.

  It seemed to Mona, driving away from the house, that the streets had been emptied of everything, everyone. Just shine. There was no traffic that afternoon at all. Just green shadow. It was glorious. Autumn. Another school year begun. Another day in a chain of such days, before, and to come. In a couple of hours Abigail would be home from school, homework still to be done, hungry for peanut butter smeared on a halved apple, and Mona would be waiting for her.

  But first Mona had to get rid of this thing, and she knew the very dumpster.

  The one behind the supermarket.

  Once, she’d thrown her ex-husband’s cell phone into that one, wrapped in an athletic sock.

  Another time she’d tossed his girlfriend’s (now his wife’s) wallet in there after having slipped it out of her purse in a coatroom after a party—back when the girlfriend was just a hunch.

  Before tossing it, Mona sorted through the business cards and licenses and credit cards and laminated club-memberships—back there in the privacy that was all hers in the fleshy stench behind the supermarket—and tossed these items in with the rotten melons and moldy bagels one by one.

  But this time she didn’t even get out. She reached out her car window and pitched the little satin-wrapped heart into the dumpster, like a letter into a mailbox, barely even slowing down, and went home.

  Later, Abigail called home on her cell phone to ask if she could study until dinnertime over at Kate’s.

  “No,” Mona said.

  Abigail chuckled at first. She must have assumed that Mona was joking. But when Mona repeated the word, Abigail said, without sounding particularly angry or surprised, “Mom, why?”

  What could Mona say? She tried to sound the way she imagined an authority figure would sound—firm, unemotional, paternal—“Because I want you to come home.”

  When Abigail walked in the door, she looked pale to Mona. Usually she just tossed her backpack down in the hallway before kicking off her shoes, but this afternoon she kept it strapped to her back, stayed standing still on the rug in the entryway without stepping into the room, and then, looking around, said, “Mom?”

  Mona kept her arms crossed over her chest to hide her trembling, and said, “I found something today. Something—”

  “Mom?” Abigail said, her eyes flashing wide and panicked. “Mom. What have you done. What have you done with it?”

  “It’s gone, Abigail. Abigail, what was it?”

  But her daughter didn’t answer. Abigail’s mouth was opening and closing now, and she was panting through her nose, and her whole body seemed in the grip of something that was shaking her, and then she began what sounded like a prenatal howl, hysterical but muffled, and something seemed to squirm inside her torso, and then she dropped the backpack behind her in a single shrug, and without taking her shoes off she ran for the stairs, uttering tiny desperate cries as she did, taking the steps two at a time, stumbling, but managing to go on, and Mona found herself frozen in her place, in her own horror, unable to move, as she listened to her daughter drop to her knees in the bedroom above her, and the sound of the drawer being yanked out of the dresser, thumping onto the wooden floorboards, and her daughter’s terrible animal wailing and shrieking that went on and on and on.

  Memorial

  There was a park at the center of a small town. In it, there was a memorial to the children who had been burned and killed in the town fire a hundred years before. Their names were chiseled onto the base of a statue of an angel who was kneeling in the grass, looking weighted down by her own wings, as if those wings had fallen out of the sky, as stone, and attached themselves to an innocent woman’s back.

  In memory of the children who died in the Fire of 1902 was chiseled above a list of names at her feet.

  The children of the town who were alive and who played in the park a hundred years later couldn’t have cared less why the angel was there. They crawled on her and said giddy-up. They poked her blank open eyes. They bounced a rubber ball off the side of her face, and no one blamed or chastised them. The people of the town were just happy to see the kids having a good time.

  But the angel. …

  After a century of this, she grew tired. She had never even wanted to have children, let alone so many. Summers. The heat. The bugs. The rowdy picnics. The beer bottles and Starbucks cups.

  Also, winters. The loneliness, the snow.

  These things plagued and tested her, over which she had no control. She was a statue, doubled-over, wings that did nothing but nail her firmly to the earth attached to her back, with a list of children’s names at her feet, and only three things in her power.

  Stillness was one of them.

  Attendance, another.

  And the third power—

  The fire had been intentionally started in a warehouse at the edge of the small town in 1902 by an orphan who was tortured by memories of an abusive father, who’d died—but also by the mother who’d slipped into another room and quietly closed the door when the boy was being beaten. She hanged herself in a barn after the father died.

  As the boy struck the first match, he believed that it was his father he was thinking of, getting even with, but as the warehouse went up, it was his mother’s face he saw in flames, as th
e sleeves of his jacket melted into a new skin on his arms, a flammable skin, so that when he ran from the warehouse his arms were fiery flapping things in the road—and, of course, into the wind, which blew the sparks of him and the warehouse into one house after another through that town, which was still made of wood back then.

  The children were in their beds, and their parents slept soundly. Being born had come so easily to those children—water filling a cup—but death.

  Well, a lucky few never stirred from their childhood dreams of animal chaos, impetuous toys, confused worlds in which puddles, stomped, would fill up with fish. Those children could continue their strange dreams forever.

  But others suffered. Choked. Writhed. Called out to their mothers. Became dark screaming offerings to the screaming darkness.

  Of course, adults died in the Fire of 1902, too, but they had a statue of their own in the cemetery down the road. Another angel, male, stood upright with a spear, and very few duties, and with no fear of time—which moved across the town, and the whole world slowly but relentlessly, devouring everything. That angel’s burdens were nothing like the burdens of the angel in the park, who was in memory of the children.

  Because, of course, who rescues a child whose mother doesn’t hear its cries?

  Who loves a dead child after its mother has died?

  Who protects the memory of a child, or a child, without a mother? In the blasting sun, in the dark of night, in the rain, under the moon, and as the snow is falling?

  That was her third power. The old man who’d made the angel and had chiseled the names on the plaque at her feet had seen to that. Without this power, she had no others. It was the most amazing power of the three. It was the power that granted the others. The power to forget about them entirely. To love them, or not. To stand by, walk away, close a door, die.