Meet Me Where I Can Find You

by Zoey Gringlas

I discover the body during the period of my life in which I feel that the world is ending. What I mean is that people seem to be dying all around me. Beatrice––a childhood classmate of mine––is killed in a freak accident, shot in the woods by a hunter who mistakes her for a deer. As kids we used to laugh at the way she ran, on all fours, so fast it was like she was never quite there.

A week after I find out about Beatrice, the house across the street from me burns to the ground. I watch it all from my desk on the second floor, where I work next to my bed with its ruffled comforter and my grandmother’s quilt. I see the smoke and the flames, and then the entire structure collapses into a red so deep I could not have imagined it. It is beautiful until it is not. But everyone is okay. Except for the dog, who later we are told was sleeping in the girl child’s bed on the third floor.

“It is lucky that the kids are at school,” I hear my neighbor say after the attic goes. She is standing on her front lawn, surrounded by three other neighbors on our street, all women, though this organization is likely accidental. With my window open and the screen out, the voices are slightly muffled. The smell of smoke hits me, so sour and intense it makes me nauseous. “It all happened so fast,” my neighbor says. “I don’t know if they would have made it out.” The others nod in agreement. One of them is eating a peach. I watch the pit fall out of her hands and onto the grass. When she bends to pick it up, I mistakenly think she’s engaging in a ritual of prayer. 

I listen to the women theorize that the housekeeper threw a lit cigarette in the trash can, but I know the housekeeper and she doesn’t smoke cigarettes. From my window I see the mother cradling a stack of framed photographs, gently, as if holding a newborn baby or the corpse of something just alive. 

Also, a day after the fire the man I am seeing tells me he will not be able to see me anymore.

I begin using Google Maps in an attempt to see his house, that of my ex-lover. I am worried I will forget the blue shingles and the little brick chimney and the pine tree in the front like a premonition. I used to drive by that house on my way to a discount store that has since closed down, before I knew he lived there. Maybe if I’m being completely honest I’m worried I will stop believing the house was real. I am trying to tell myself that what it looked like to me is what it looked like in some form or another to everybody else. This is partly because my existence in this suburb often feels like a performance, like I am assuming someone else’s life, and also because so much about our brief entanglement felt strange and inimitable, so specific that I began to wonder if I had imagined it all.

So I type in his address and I see a picture of his house taken before he lived there, which I surmise because the fence is painted red instead of white and there is a small girl in the front yard whom I have never seen before. Then I get carried away and I am going forward, clicking the same spot again and again to follow the road. I am seeing the other houses, almost identical, as if the first was replicated into infinity. I am studying the people frozen on their porches or on their driveways, looking amputated and indistinct, with blurred faces, like the ghost footage people capture on their camcorders and post on YouTube. 

I arrive at the intersection and see a man’s body, his face censored by computer pixels. The rest of him is blurry, his limbs outstretched, pants ripped open at the legs to reveal skin that, even obscured, is pale and identifiably bruised. There is purple on his calf that could be in the shape of a heart. He is surrounded by people and a stopped car. Black SUV and blue sky. A hit, but there is no running, that much is obvious.

I wish I could say I hold my head in my hands and I cry or I dig my knees into the floorboards until they bleed at the bone but I just stare, beady-eyed into his stomach. No, I am not regretful. What I mean to say is that it feels important to find this stranger's body, at the intersection of two streets with the names of flowers, but it is not shocking. It feels like some extension of the natural order of things, of life, to see the way his legs are bent, so crooked they appear disconnected from the rest of him, the way he is soft at the center. Like a baby bird, I think or I will later remember thinking.

The man is wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the Detroit Tigers, which was my ex-lover’s favorite sports team. My ex-lover wasn’t even from Michigan; he just saw the last fifteen minutes of a game on the TV and decided that he could love the Tigers as much as he could love any other team. This is what he told me, at least. At the time I found the anecdote endearing. This is what I remember when I zoom in on the screen, using my thumb and my forefinger.

I take a screenshot of the body and email it to myself. I make myself toast with Vegemite, return to the computer, and type in the name of the intersection plus ACCIDENT. Then I delete ACCIDENT and type in DEATH. Between ACCIDENT and DEATH my mother calls me on the phone and says she has the saddest news. She tells me, “In the morning after your father and I woke up and before I made the coffee I went down to the backyard and I checked on the nest in the birdhouse and only one of the robins had hatched. All the others were still in their eggs. Stillborn.” 

“That is very sad,” I agree. “Can you send me a picture?” 

“And also you must have heard about Beatrice. How horrible. She came over for a sleepover once, do you remember? You must have been thirteen or fourteen. She didn’t fit in with you and your friends, but I asked you to invite her, she was such a nice girl and I knew her mother, I would always run into her at the grocery store. Anyway, you stole beers from the fridge. Yes of course I knew, I always knew, we could hear you from upstairs, laughing, and we saw the cans in the trash outside. But Beatrice was such a quiet girl. I think she got nervous and she came upstairs and asked to watch television with me. We watched the Olympics. The ice-skating. I will always remember because she cried seeing the skaters. She said, ‘I don’t know why but I always cry when I see them spin.’ Isn’t that something? Anyway, it’s so horrible what happened. I’ve been having dreams about her. I’ve been having dreams about her on ice skates.”

“Wow,” I respond. Then I tell her about the fire. I tell her how everybody who was home came out and watched from their front lawns.

“It is important to honor impermanence,” she declares. Then she says she has to go finish the crossword and hangs up the phone.

When I return to my Internet search, I find out that the body belonged to a man named Stephen Francisco. Before this moment, I had imagined his existence to be unbound by space and time. Another search brings me to an obituary site, its margins adorned with tiny cartoonish gravestones. On Stephen’s page, there are only two comments, one from a user named BrotherInchrist11: I’M SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS OF YOUR BELOVED. I HOPE YOU FIND SOLACE IN THE SCRIPTURE AT REV. 22:3-4, THE GOD OF COMFORT.

I look up Rev 22:3-4 on the Internet and bookmark the page with the passage. It reads, “No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”

It feels so impersonal I have to wonder if BrotherInchrist11 even knew Stephen.

The other comment, from User92804773, says: I always will remember he took me to go birding he loved birds he would always tell me that you could differentiate between birds that looked almost the same by the tail feathers ill try to do that when I see two birds rest in peace big guy.

This comment changes everything, disrupts the foundation I have established. Because now I can imagine him looking for birds. Because now I can place him anywhere I want, in the forest or at sea, on a wooden boat. I can give him binoculars. It is the best objective thing to say about someone––that they loved birding––because it means they saw the world and found beauty in it, something completely separate from themself.

I think: When I die, I hope they say that I derived beauty from the world. It doesn’t even need to be true. Or it can be partly true. Or something along the lines of “She was generous of spirit, such that she forgave everyone who ever wronged her, with grace and acceptance.” When I find myself slipping too deep into my own brain, I decide to leave the house.

At Goodwill, where I go to purchase a swimsuit, I find a prayer candle that makes me think of Stephen, because it has a little lamb plastered on the glass. 

I have been buying prayer candles for years, because I think they are tacky and beautiful and I like lighting them when the sun seeps through my window in the late afternoon. The last one I bought was of the Virgin Mary and her son, the baby. I placed it on my bedside table, next to my little clock and my rolling papers and my plastic ashtray shaped like a heart. The first time my ex-lover saw the Virgin, he asked me if I was religious. 

“I’m Jewish,” I told him.

“I know,” he said, and I laughed. “But do you believe?”

“In God?”

“In anything.”

“Sometimes I worry I believe more in the idea of the thing than the thing itself.”

“That’s okay,” he assured me. “I think it’s better to try. Sometimes I don’t think I can believe in anything at all. I don’t trust that what I feel is real.”

“Life shouldn’t be so hard,” I responded. Iknew then that he would never be able to believe in the possibility of the two of us, but I could still lie to myself. Maybe I could believe for us both. That night we had sex and he came inside me and apologized. “It’s okay,” I replied, because there was nothing to say.

I pay seventeen dollars for a swimsuit, a lime-green one-piece with tiny white flowers where the nipples would be, and also the candle, and also a tiny ceramic bear, and also a Destiny’s Child CD even though I don’t have a CD player and don’t plan on getting one anytime soon.

When I get home, I put on the swimsuit and sit outside on my lawn with a bottle of Modelo and a plastic container of blueberries and the book of stories that my ex-lover said I should read that I never read.

I find every picture of Stephen that exists on the Internet, and I save them onto my camera roll. I look across the street at the ashy remains of the neighbor’s house, bury my toes in the grass, and feel my heart beating underneath the nylon.

The next day it is so hot outside I sit all day at the kitchen table naked except for my underwear. I have a roommate but she is not there, and when she is not there it is easy to forget about her completely. I again open the book my ex-lover recommended and I read the first five pages. I sketch the collapse of the once-house I see through my window with a pencil on the inside cover.

I feel some kind of emptiness. I find myself thinking of Stephen. I do not know if I am mourning his loss from the world or the fact that my knowledge of him makes concrete his absence from mine. 

I go to the Staples in the next town over and I print out ten pictures. Mostly they are somebody’s low-quality Facebook photos, from the image section of Google: one of Stephen holding a rod, one of Stephen holding a fish, one of Stephen holding a pixelated child. I print his headshot, which I find under a banner declaring EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK on the website of a local hardware store, and I tape it on my bedroom wall next to the window.

For the next three days I look at his face immediately upon waking up. Sometimes the sun hits the paper in such a way that he appears to be glowing.

On the fourth day I look him up on Whitepages and call the woman I assume is his wife.

“Hello?” she says.

“Hello,” I say. “Carolina?”

I tell her I am very sorry to hear about the passing of her husband. 

“It was a year ago he passed,” she says. “Did you know him?”

“Not well,” I say. I hadn’t planned anything past the condolences. 

“Who are you?” she asks. “Why are you calling me?” 

“You probably haven’t heard of me,” I tell her. “But I really admired Stephen. He was a great birder. He had a great eye.” 

She is silent on the phone and I begin to worry she distrusts me. So I continue, “We ran in the same circles, Stephen and I,” I say. “Professionally speaking.”

I remind myself what I am experiencing is like a cosmic connection, and I’m comforted by the possibility that in some realm this is not entirely a lie. 

“I’m in town for business,” I say. “For three nights only. I would love to meet you. If it is at all a possibility.” 

I hear Carolina take a breath. She says okay and tells me that if I am free I can stop by her house. Sometime in the early afternoon. 

The address she gives me is only three blocks away from the intersection. I hang up the phone and press my hands together flat.

On my drive, I pass by my ex-lover’s house. This is shocking to me until I remember how I got here. I see him outside mowing the lawn with an old-fashioned mechanical mower that he pushes in circles around the grass.

I slow the car, roll down the window, and take a picture on my phone. Then I think of the possibility of someone else seeing the photo so I delete it. He sees me in my car and stares blankly.

“I’m visiting a friend,” I say over the whir of the machine. His expression is not unkind but there is nothing in his face that I recognize.

When I arrive at Stephen’s house, Carolina is standing on the lawn, wearing a black cotton dress and a silver necklace with a cross at its center. I respect her immediately. 

She takes me inside the house. It is small but she has painted all the walls warm colors, deep oranges and reds. She says she did all the painting after Stephen died. She tells me that before the walls were white. I say, “It must be hard to live here.” I tell her that I admire the way she has reclaimed the space. She smiles and says thank you.

She gestures toward the kitchen table and we both sit down, arch our backs against the wood of the seats. There is a carton of milk sitting at the center of the tablecloth, the cap unscrewed so that the light can filter straight through. 

“How exactly do you know my husband?” Carolina asks me. 

“I found him on the Internet,” I respond, instinctively. “On the birding message boards. We found each other, I mean. We would talk about birds. And technique. Where to see the rarest birds and the most beautiful ones, and so on. The best time of day to see birds and where to go to see them.” 

“Did he talk about Florida?” she asks. 

“Florida. Oh yes. He talked about Florida all the time.” 

Carolina looks through the window at something I can’t see and murmurs something I am unable to discern. Maybe it is the kitchen sienna that is making her appear moldable, for suddenly I feel as though I could take my index finger and scrape into her cheekbone, take my knuckles and knead her cheek up into the shallow of her eye socket.

“And he talked about you,” I add, surprising myself.

At this she turns toward me. 

Carolina’s fingernails are purple and embedded with chunks of glitter. I ask her if she has any children.

Yes, she tells me. She says we and then corrects herself. “I have a girl, Esme.” I learn that Esme is seven years old and at a friend’s house. They are playing in the hose with the water, and she needs to be picked up in forty minutes.

I nod my head and we make eye contact so direct that when we do I see Stephen, see his smile in hers. In its softness and its knowingness, the way it dimples on the left side. And in the space the lips leave open, exposing a sliver of teeth. I’m not sure if I am imagining that her nose is his too, sloped and severe. The sun makes a crescent on the edge of her face, and I feel closer to her than I do to just about anything, and she is beautiful. I lean in. I kiss her, soft then hard. She tastes like laundry detergent. Carolina jerks away and slaps me across the face. I have never been slapped before and I experience a thrill, pure and intense and saturating my body in its wholeness.

“This is my life,” she says. She seems to me at once placid and full of rage. “What gives you the right?” 

I pull my head away. 

For the first time, I notice a pimple, hard and pink at the edge of Carolina’s eyebrow. She averts her gaze, gets up, and begins to walk off. Her stride is determined. I am scared of her. I follow her through the house. 

Carolina pushes open from the door and holds it for me, directing me to go out. She follows me onto her little square of lawn. I halt, feeling paralyzed. I am waiting for her to give me explicit directions to leave. She stands before her house, frowning, and untwists her right bra strap with her index finger, as if planning what to say. I think: It is even warmer than it was before. Together we watch a blue Volvo slow in front of the house. Carolina shakes her head again. “Sometimes they drive by,” she says. “Strangers. The accident made the local news. After that, people would drive by and slow down when they passed the house. They still do, a year later.” 

I check to see if she is looking at me, but her gaze is affixed to the street, where the car has come to a complete stop. The driver rolls down the window, and it’s my ex-lover. I map him instantly to the blue house and the little brick chimney and the pine. He seems even less familiar now. I remember driving by the house all those times, as I used to, thinking about how nice it would feel to be invited in. 

“Hello,” Carolina says, realizing he’s someone she knows. She waves and smiles. He waves back at her and notes me with a lack of recognition, nodding once before driving away. I look to the ground, bring my fingers to the pocket of my pants, and clutch. 

“Have you known him for a long time?” I ask Carolina. “No,” she says. “I just met him. He moved in last week from out of state. The house he moved into was for sale for so long I was beginning to think it was cursed. Darkness orbits darkness, like my father used to say.” She looks at me as if remembering why I am standing here. “You should go.”

My hands quiver. I recall the house standing vacant, the white For Sale sign out front, and now I am thinking in circles, seeing the house as I did for the first time, so bright and blue it was as if it was announcing itself to me. Even as the house remained empty, the lawn was manicured, with flowers in little pots organized like dolls on the front stoop. In time, the year grew colder and then warmer again, and my idea of the man who would live inside grew into a clear vision of who he could be––cutting onions, cutting carrots, wringing wet cloth, cutting his finger accidentally with the kitchen knife and sticking a Band-Aid over the wound. He closed the door to the medicine chest and opened it again. He closed the front door and opened it again, and he did so for me. The space was transfigured so that I could walk inside, and we were both wringing the cloth and pulling the sheets on the bed tight over the corners, and I could see the whole world from the living room window. 

Carolina clears her throat pointedly. I wipe the sweat from my brow. “Thank you for your hospitality,” I tell her, but she ignores this and folds her arms. I make my way to my car parked on the street, sit in the driver’s seat, and unstick the backs of my thighs from the hot leather. I drive in the direction of the Volvo, now long gone from sight. I glance back once to confirm that Carolina is really there.

Published March 28th, 2021