by Stephen Antoine Viau
In the beginning, and very briefly, everyone was alive, due to some miracle, I guess, that neither of us were born with disease, malnourished, hurt beyond repair, or, thankfully not more gruesomely, taken from our homes in our sleep, and Mom was there in some of them, without Dad, of course, since he’d gone to work on the oil rig right before I was born—for the life-changing paycheck that was promised but never panned out when he was carried off into the ocean during a storm—the photographs seemed to speak to me like this now that I was looking at them, now that I was recollecting pieces of the puzzle and trying to pinpoint when the turn must have happened, but my sister and I couldn’t really fathom what may have changed in Mom’s mind in the short time we lived away from home, which, we did mention to one another, left her alone for the first time since the beginning, and, we were left imagining, may have been what powered her foot on the gas as she drove the car into the hole—that hole in the suburb of Montréal we had grown up in called Chateauguay, which was cordoned off in the abandoned parking lot of the bank across the street of our house since as far back as I could remember, where weeds broke through the cracked asphalt in any attempt to reclaim life in the place; was that it, then, that brought along the phone call from Auntie, to inform us that Mom had disappeared with the car, and that the only sure sign of where she’d taken it was the torn yellow tape and traffic cones knocked over—the sure fire skid marks leading from the driveway of our childhood duplex lot one hundred yards straight to the bank parking lot—we wondered—could it have been for dad, for a chance meeting that may exist on the other side of life, at the end of the hole, however deep it must go, and, naturally, we were devastated—my sister especially—to hear of Mom’s disappearance, but it was still difficult to believe that she had passed since nothing conclusive had come from the police search, as they had refused to go beyond the perimeter of the hole and even remarked that it was never tested for radioactivity or carbon monoxide, but we heard from one of the lieutenants that a flashlight of theirs had been dropped by accident and no sound of it hitting the ground was ever heard on the other end; so for two weeks my sister—who is named Emma—and I fought against streams of tears for our mother that kept breaking through the days, like the intermittent rain showers in summer, which was the season when all this happened, yet I couldn’t shake an anxious chill that made it feel like winter was supposed to come on any day, and I’m sure Emma felt it, too, since we often found ourselves in each other’s arms while going through those photographs, which we had now worked to stack into neatly separated piles—ones where Mom, who was pregnant, Dad, and a tiny Emma were together, and ones where there was Mom, a slightly taller Emma, and me as a baby—but, we were finding out in our misguided detective work, there wasn’t much emotional change we could trace across the photos, since Mom had a habit of always pretending to smile for any picture—at least in those that were staged—and, so, I tried to study her eyes in some of them, or the color palette showing in her clothing across the two piles, but Mom seemed to always read as “Mom” to me, and Emma said to her, too, so we kept the photos in piles, though they were sort of just symbolic of an emotional string we could pull on while we contemplated why Mom decided to leave us, and—ultimately—I told Emma, we weren’t the only ones Mom decided to leave, and, actually, it was likely, we had been the only two people keeping her from getting in the car for the bank sooner, which Emma agreed with, and she suggested maybe Mom had been waiting for us to be just old enough and out of the house before she pulled this kind of lingering trigger, as though she might have made a plan a long time ago and was just executing on a horrible deal she had made with herself, and I said that would be awful, to have only known Mom when she had promised herself an expiration date, and I added that it put a sudden cloud cover over every memory of Mom now that I thought about it, and it hurt to think about, so I cried out loud, and Emma cried about it, too, but before long, we had made it out of that episode and into a cup of coffee while looking out of the window of our childhood duplex at the bank parking lot across the way, which was really just a couple of blocks from the apartment we had moved into together while Emma finished college and I kept working at the corner shop and did some writing—and, for how close we were to home, we often recounted what we were doing the day Auntie called and even some days before that to see if we remembered hearing any kind of speeding car, screeching tires, or a wreck of some sort when Mom would have, inevitably, hit the bottom of the hole, but the memories, though it had only been three weeks now, were already vague and barely recollectible—having been, undoubtedly, overwritten with all of the panic and grief that had come since those days, and, like the flashlight of the policemen, we feared the strange possibility that the hole bore no real end, and, even though it was a laughable possibility, we found a compulsion, after our cup of coffee, to go back to the hole, to find what we could see in it—to, though it would surely be painful to be there again after our numerous visits the first days and weeks, set to rest our hesitancy to believe Mom had actually driven in, and come to the conclusion that it was undeniable that the tire tread marks went right up to the edge of the hole until they vanished over the precipice, and, it was there, after our slow walk over, following the treads, that Emma complained of hearing the ocean in her ear, like what you might hear in a seashell you’ve taken home from the beach, only louder and crisper, and, she said, when we approached the hole that the sound was quite strong and asked couldn’t I hear it, too, but I told her that I couldn’t, to which she replied it was definitely there though it hadn’t been there before, or, at least, she had not noticed it there on the previous times we had come to see the hole, but, at any rate, I was quick to dismiss the sounds as a biproduct of being overly stressed, which, it was evident, we were, despite some of our endeavoring to reason through and persist with what we felt was our responsibility to Mom; this, Emma said, was one of the strangest aspects of the hole, as we looked over the sides into its depth, where the air seemed to have a sudden, different pressure, as if it was almost undetectably and gently pulling everything in, and I mentioned to Emma that it was eerily comforting to look into, as though its depth was unquestionable but not treacherous, and, in a way, not a depth of physical length, but more like being in the presence of someone loving you’ve known your whole life, and Emma didn’t seem to want to agree, but she said it did, really, feel unlike it should to stare into the abyss—the hole that I felt never spoke so strongly when we were younger, or maybe it was that Mom had never let us get so close during those years, and it had been just a kind of dilapidated feature of the neighborhood, one which we had quickly grown familiar with and never questioned nor looked directly into until now, but it was alarming—alarming that everyone knew so little about it, that no one had insisted it be filled or built over, that Mom, having lost Dad, did not voice concern to the city about raising children with such an incredible danger so close by, but, rather, decided to live with it and resolved to treat it like simply a puckered blemish, or, it could have been, that everyone in the city had already perceived the hole as Emma and I perceived it to be now–to be emanating a bizarre warmth—and, so, decided to leave it to be dealt with later, all of which I ventured to Emma while we gazed into it, but Emma was distracted by an intense focus on the hole and never replied; in fact, the time we stayed by the opening in the cement, studying its cracks and edges, trying to notice any unique spots or lesions in the ground around it, past before our eyes and the sun began to set while the crickets and katydids held sustained notes in the air to remind the world of the oppressive heat, so when their deafening sound finally registered to me I pulled back from the hole and told Emma I might sleep at this house that night, rather than go back to the apartment, to which she said she’d join me and started heading back in the direction of home, where I brought up, a little later over pasta boiling in a pot for spaghetti, that it was weird to never have known Dad and to only have been told about him, to only have seen pictures of him, to know a love from him that I never witnessed, and Emma said she knew what I meant, and, like any time I spoke about wanting to know Dad, said she was sorry I never got the chance, but that, for her, it was quite similar, since she had only been three years old when he passed, and when she said passed, for some reason, I laughed and mentioned that it was funny how both Dad and now Mom were both swept away into disappearance and didn’t leave us anything physical to cling to, but, really, it was a point that, especially in past conversations about Dad, could make us both furious with wonder as to where he ended up and would always conjure the awful possibility that he had somehow made it out alive but not found his way back, and, now, too this would be Mom’s cruel legacy for us, but Emma said, in reality, that was sort of the easiest way they could have gone because we keep in us the perpetual chance that they’re still with us, as a kind of de facto override to needing to believe in God or Heaven, and I said, yeah, I guess that’s true and began preparing the plates and silverware for dinner—which was quiet between the two of us, I remember, as I kept trying to think back on childhood memories of Mom, though all of them seemed to be polluted with this idea from earlier about her staged smiles, and it all sort of leaked or blended into a version of Mom that was quietly sat at the kitchen table in the early dark of an evening when I was five or six, where she was sewing up the torn leg of a stuffed cat I had, then she played pretend with him across the table when he was all fixed up, playing his voice and answering back to all of the questions I asked him about his leg until Mom, as the cat, told me he knew my Dad and that he knew my Dad loved me because he met him a long time ago when he was still Emma’s stuffed cat and not mine; these memories tortured me over dinner and broke up the silence between Emma and I as I would suddenly start to cry, then the same would happen to Emma, until we got ourselves together enough to place the dishes in the sink and expressed it felt right to sleep on the floor in the living room, rather than each in our own childhood bedrooms, so we dug out spare blankets and pillows from the hall closet to spread out and lay on, all while a cough or sniffle would break the silence and spell of our movement around the house, up until Emma asked if she could turn off the lights, to which I said yeah, but I stayed sitting up on the sofa, where she joined me and we talked for a bit longer before, it’s hard to recollect when, we fell asleep on opposite ends, or at least I thought we had, until I woke up and noticed Emma missing, so I began to search for her in the various rooms of the house, expecting her to be perhaps looking at the photographs, or going through more of Mom’s things to try to discover a diary maybe we had missed that could give us a clearer picture of her pain, but I couldn’t find her in any of the rooms, so, in another rising pit of panic, I looked outside across the street at the hole, which was as we had last seen it, only it seemed oddly loud—not because it actually made noise of any kind, but its presence felt heavy and the way my eyes grew to mimic the size of the darkness as soon as I looked at it made it difficult to concentrate or to take my mind anywhere else until I stepped out onto the balcony and heard Emma roll down the window of the passenger seat in her car and call to me, which, in a way, broke the trance I was in, but after I slipped into the car, where Emma was in the driver’s seat, my eyes turned back to follow Mom’s tire tread marks all the way to the hole, and I felt a hand on my hand that was cold and shaking, as Emma said she wondered if it was an inevitability of life, and I asked her what she meant, but she stared straight ahead at the hole and started the engine, which startled me until I told her I couldn’t believe Mom was dead, and she said me neither as she floored the gas and added you can close your eyes if you want, but, as much as I tried, I couldn’t–not until we knew.
About the Author:
Stephan Antoine Viau holds an MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. He is the winner of the 2019 William Jay Smith Award for Poetry, judged by Douglas Kearney. His work has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, The Colorado Review, HASH, New Delta Review, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family.