Capillaries

The bruise beneath Elmer’s ribcage reminded them both of topographical maps, maroon with brown and purple tilts to denote ridges, peaks, and saddles, his capillaries like the earth’s scoured crust. “Don’t speak for him,” Chrissy had just said, and the Kovacs were still sitting in its echo, in the carpet in the living room, Jim nodding as if consensus might guard him. He did try to speak for Elmer too often. He knew that. Their boy was already six and knew enough words to express himself, even if he only used one at a time. His nodding did nothing to slacken Chrissy’s guilt and she rubbed her husband’s back first and then her son’s. She’d said it as much for herself, she decided. A projection of her own helicoptering? She didn’t know. He’d had surprisingly few bruises or cuts, and so the few could usually be traced to their origins. This was the biggest they could remember.

Jim asked again. “Was it the ball? From soccer?”

“Mhm.” He didn’t meet their eyes, still fiddling with his book. He liked soccer and running, so he said yes. He didn’t remember where the bruise had come from, either.

“Or did you fall?”

“Mhm.” He knew falling.

Chrissy asked, “Was it Trevor?” and it felt shrill to both her and Jim, each of them privately recoiling, then thinking of the same incident, the time Elmer wouldn’t give Trevor back his Spinosaurus, his grip always more determined than people thought a boy’s with Down syndrome could be, and so Trevor yelled a bad word he’d heard his dad say and shoved the hard plastic dinosaur into Elmer’s face, bestowing a spotted welt. Brenda, Trevor’s mother, had nearly tripped as she sprung to admonish him, shouting his full name, Trevor Matthew Parker, which of course reminded them all of Matthew and the divorce, and Chrissy had barely had enough time to reassure Brenda that Elmer would be fine before Brenda had taken Trevor back to their home that still felt too big for her and her two kids.

“Mhm. Yes,” Elmer said. “Dinosaur. Rawr.” There was no dinosaur on the page, but Jim and Chrissy had read this one and they knew it was coming.

They heard it for the next few days, too: Chrissy when she came to unzip Elmer’s tent bed before work; Jim in the van at the drive-thru waiting for a vanilla cone to reward Elmer for completing his worksheets while Jim had been on a work call. “Dinosaur. Rawr,” from the backseat between licks, milky drips on his knuckles. He said it again in the van, right before the roar of a 6.2L V8 passed them on their quiet street with no outlet, that black ‘09 Camaro Matthew had left behind for his and Brenda’s oldest, Karlie, before he’d taken off out west.

Jim felt a burning in his fingers and noticed he was squeezing the steering wheel.

He took Elmer inside and talked him through making dinner—break the pasta, let it sink into the water, open the tomato sauce. Elmer seemed to like the sound of talking, even if he didn’t recognize every word. He often fell asleep to them reading, though he shook his head at periods, frustrated by how they cut things off. There could’ve been more if the words had just kept it going, and he wondered what they were missing.

Jim tried to ask about the bruise again, but Elmer only gave refusals. “Some of the darker splotches have shrunk already,” Jim noted to Chrissy when she was back home, after she’d had a chance to change clothes and eat in some semblance of silence. She’d noticed it healing too, researched possible causes, read similar stories of mystery bruises, though she felt as frustrated as when she tried to research the best approaches to potty training, reading, writing, or speech. All paths seemed to meet at “Every child is different,” and it felt like starting at zero. Freeing but isolating. She’d seen people say it with the heftiest empathy, and others with glass-eyed dismissal. With all their online groups and communities and articles and videos, it seemed like they knew everything everyone else knew, but everyone could only know so much.

“It’s going to be gone before we know it,” she said as Elmer walked his plate to the sink. It came out anxiously and she realized she feared never learning where it had come from, as did Jim, and they made eyes as the distant clinking of Elmer’s plate in the sink met their ears in unison. “I’m just glad it didn’t happen during the school year,” she said. Years back, in their old district, an aid had been caught abusing a nonverbal first-grade girl. The aid had already been charged, convicted, and sentenced, and their old city apartment was nearly fifty miles away, but they still felt rattled whenever they remembered it, a single event with enough nightmare fuel to propel their departure. Chrissy was relieved when Jim changed the subject.

“I can’t believe Matthew left that car to Karlie. It’s almost as old as she is and it’s rear-wheel drive. She nearly hit us speeding down our street.”

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “You’re sure it was Karlie?”

“I don’t think Brenda drives it,” he said, plus he’d seen Karlie’s arm with the wings tattoo through the window. “I can talk to them about it if you want.”

It was a polite offer that Chrissy knew he hadn’t wanted to make. He’d known Matthew more, though neither of them incredibly well. They were coming up on their third year at River Bluff after a decade of saving, finally sneaking into the suburbs before interest rates spiked. They’d been determined to make it stick—hosting evening fires, snow-blowing the sidewalk for neighbors, trading play dates with the other parents—though their social standing still felt as precarious as their high debt-to-income ratio. “I don’t mind,” she said. “It’ll give me a chance to ask Brenda if they know where Elmer’s bruise might’ve come from.”

She walked to the end of the cul-de-sac, down a moderate grade she wouldn’t trust her mother’s arthritic joints on, beneath old oaks that predated Nixon, their deep etched bark reminiscent of their fifteenth anniversary trip to Badlands. She hated the selfish clomping of her flats this time. She was coming to a new friend who’d been nothing but welcoming, who’d learned signs to help communicate with Elmer and asked Chrissy genuinely about her father’s recovery from his stroke, all so she could complain about her distraught daughter driving too fast and ask about a random bruise Brenda likely knew nothing about, all not a month after her divorce had been finalized. Chrissy decided she’d offer friendship instead, and only mention the Camaro and Karlie and the bruise if she could find her way there organically, if it wouldn’t be too much. She knew Brenda cared, but as long as empathy manifested in kind words, thoughts, and actions, it would always be limited by their own capacity, by their time, something Brenda didn’t have much to spare these days.

She almost thought she had the wrong house when Amy, another neighbor, opened the door, her ice water clinking as she smiled, Brenda behind her in the living room. “It’s officially a party now,” she said, and Chrissy tried to chuckle charmingly, following them to the cotton sofas and settling into their conversation.

“So, the new development is that apparently I am the reason he felt like a failure as a husband and father,” Brenda said, “and ipso facto, the reason he felt he had to leave.”

“Which is the complete opposite of what he said before, right?” said Amy.

“It’s a total cop out,” said Brenda.

“You were so supportive,” Chrissy said. They all knew Brenda had been the sole provider for two years while shouldering the housework and parenting as Matthew struggled to find the right antidepressants, and then struggled through the side effects and the introspection during his job search as he tried to find what would be fulfilling, sure, but primarily what he felt he could succeed in, something to help him see himself anew, something he never found.

“I did keep asking him for help,” Brenda admitted.

“You had the right to.”

“And the responsibility. Karlie and Trevor needed more from him,” said Amy.

They all tried to breathe the frustration out and Brenda leaned back and told herself to recognize how fortunate she was. They’d keep the house, at least until Karlie graduated, and she had friends here who fought harder for her than she did. “How’s everything with you?” she asked, her sagging eyelids pleading for something different. Chrissy told them how Valley General finally agreed to start hiring to improve their nurse-patient ratio, then how Elmer had worked up to three sentences per page. “Elmer’s such a delight,” Brenda said, and it felt to Chrissy like Brenda could see Elmer’s bruise up the road, the dark violets fading to greens and yellows as they spoke.

“We’re a little worried about one of his bruises. We don’t know where he got it. It’s really big, right on his torso.”

“That’s awful,” said Amy.

“It just makes you think if something worse happens and he can’t tell us…I don’t know. We shouldn’t let it bother us so much.”

“No, of course,” said Brenda. “I’d be a wreck.”

“I wasn’t trying to make it a thing. I just wanted to see how you’re doing.” It was a white lie and she felt guilty, and Brenda knew it, and was pretty sure Chrissy knew that she knew, but it wasn’t like she’d accused her or Trevor, and Brenda was worried about Elmer, too. And of course, she also remembered the time Trevor had jabbed the dinosaur toy at Elmer and left the mark and she still felt horrible about it.

“Should we ask Trevor?” Brenda asked, standing, and Chrissy followed her lead. Amy hesitated but stayed seated, not wanting to be nosey or overwhelm Trevor. She opened her email on her phone and revisited the quotes to repair their leaky inground pool and found she hardly cared about the seemingly random disparate numbers or the financial strains. It was only a pool. She was relieved she hadn’t mentioned it.

The two found Trevor in the basement, feet propped, a videogame streamer jawing on his tablet. He paused, worried as his mom stood over him, Elmer’s mom waiting at the foot of the stairs. It seemed serious.

“Did you and Elmer play rough at all last week? His mom and dad found a big bruise.”

Trevor thought. “No.”

“You won’t be in trouble,” his mom said. “We’re just trying to learn where it came from. You know Elmer struggles to verbalize sometimes.”

That was very true, Trevor thought. Though they were nearly the same age, Elmer was always grabbing and whining and up-and-leaving in the middle of things. He was funny too—Elmer’s laugh was the funniest Trevor had ever heard and made him laugh every time, the two of them falling over each other—but he could be hard to play with and sometimes Trevor had to just climb up the half-finished treehouse his dad had built, somewhere he knew Elmer couldn’t go, and take a break. “No. I don’t think so,” he said. He didn’t really know.

“Did you see him fall or anything?”

“Well, he could’ve run into a door or table. Maybe he saw the stray dog that goes in our yards, and he got scared and he tried to run too fast and ran into a door. Or maybe the dog tried to get inside, and he had to push it away. The dog could’ve knocked him down and that could’ve given him a bruise.” He thought of other things too, like Elmer imagining a dinosaur was real and trying to climb it, or him finding a bike on the sidewalk and taking a ride down the hill and running into a tree. It would’ve been crazy if something like that had happened.

“Maybe,” his mom said. “Okay, sweetie. Thanks.”

“He’ll be fine,” Chrissy said. They tried not to apologize for Elmer; they had to advocate. But it was hard to know how hard to push it. Brenda waved her off, led them upstairs.

“Hey Karlie,” Brenda called, and Karlie emerged from her room, the sunsetting window backlighting her so she was half-silhouette, her shadow reaching toward them. Karlie tried to think if it were trash day or if she’d folded the laundry: nope and yep.

“What?”

“The Kovac’s are trying to see where a bruise on Elmer came from.”

“Okay.”

“So do you know anything about it?”

“How would I know?”

“This is important, honey.”

Oh, was it? she thought. Was it important? As important as her and Dad letting her know their marriage was crumbling? That he might leave? They hardly even fought in front of them and then he was just gone, her name on an envelope on the Camaro’s windshield, the note apologizing for him being such a deadbeat, that hopefully the car would make up for it somehow. But instead, the Camaro had made her teammate Grace jealous because Grace’s boyfriend Gavin was obsessed with the car and so Grace got the whole volleyball team against Karlie and the past month of practices had been nothing but cold glances and muttering and she felt like she was caged by plexiglass. Plus Gavin’s interest in the car had made Jayden jealous, even though she and Jayden had only been talking, and he’d been pretty chill at first but now he was being extra clingy and so she didn’t really want to talk to him anymore, and she couldn’t really talk to her mom about any of this right now and she couldn’t decide if she partially blamed mom for dad leaving and she sort of felt like she was losing everything all at once.

“I haven’t seen anything lately. I did see Elmer walking by himself once down the sidewalk for a few minutes, and Mr. Kovac ran out to get him. I don’t think I saw Elmer fall or anything, though,” Karlie said.

Chrissy’s words came out cracked. “Elmer was by himself?”

“Yeah, but it was a while ago. Like three weeks? Mr. Kovac ran and got him a few minutes later. I just thought it might be important.” She eyed her shaken mom to make sure it registered before she left and shut the door.

And it was true: it was what Karlie had seen, and this was the first Chrissy had heard of it and now Chrissy had a hard time knowing what she was feeling. Like expecting a stair to be there and slipping on its corner? Like betrayal? “I’m really sorry, Brenda,” she said as she left and Brenda tried to apologize too, though both wanted to say the other had nothing to apologize for as Chrissy’s flats slapped up the hill toward the day’s last hellish light.

They were reading on the couch, had been reading for thirty minutes, sounding out each word, and Jim was excited to tell her how Elmer had nailed STRIVE with the three tricky consonants in a row. Jim’s dad had never read with him, but he remembered bench pressing with him when he was twelve, squirming under the bar, the merciless weight refusing to yield. His dad’s stoic face let him learn firsthand that the world wouldn’t move unless you moved it.

Jim started to ask how it went but froze when he saw her face on edge.

“Karlie said she saw Elmer walking outside by himself?”

His body was already remembering the afternoon. It quivered a bit as he stood. “For a few minutes. Yeah.”

“Weeks ago,” she said, like she was trying to understand, to not explode, Elmer still flipping the pages. “How far did he get?”

He’d tried to explain to himself how it had happened, though none of it had sounded justifiable even then. There was always too much to remember, too many thoughts to try to have at once. He felt like he could only do half a task at a time, one eye always on Elmer. How quiet Elmer knew to be whenever he eloped, when he was exploring somewhere he knew he shouldn’t be. So, when Patrick needed that spreadsheet for their meeting with the CFO and he could only find the three-month old version, when it wasn’t in his cloud or folders or downloads, and he spent both eyes dumpster-diving through old emails, he knew as soon as he’d found and sent it and the whole house was soundless that Elmer was gone. He could still feel the hollow air that’d haunted the open doorway as he’d sprinted downstairs.

“A few houses. I should’ve told you.” He clasped his hands between his knees. “I’m really, really sorry.”

It wasn’t hard for Chrissy to put herself in his shoes—she’d lost sight of Elmer in grocery stores half a dozen times, once for a full minute as he’d escaped down the freezer aisle, turned the corner toward the kids’ clothes. She’d found him with a Bowser shirt around his neck as his arms tried to find their holes. But she’d told Jim that day. She kept picturing Elmer in the street, the Camaro, Karlie speeding. “This is…fresh for me, still.”

“Okay.” He wanted to apologize again, or tell her how much he loved them both, but he thought it’d sound selfish, like pleading. She deserved better than that.

He gave her some time alone with Elmer and made up the guest bed since she had to wake early for work. He wanted her to have space without having to ask for it, which she appreciated. Chrissy read the book with Elmer and was amazed by how well he pronounced STRIVE, blew right through it, and she loved how he loved the gleam in their eyes when he said something new or surprising, how he loved when they said the word back to him or added to it, walked their words in step with his. She checked his bruise, half its size already. Way too fast, like it could heal tomorrow and tempt them to forget about it. “Okay, Mom?” Elmer asked, like he did whenever they sneezed or coughed, and she hugged him, soothed by his small voice and the warm smell of his hair. She thought of capillaries, so fragile yet necessary. It was the smallest interconnected networks that distributed oxygen and nutrients, which wed the larger arteries and veins. It was the meek who sustained them.

She breathed in Elmer’s smell and felt love again. He felt a comforting chill and leaned into her.

She didn’t think Jim was responsible for the bruise. He could’ve been—they all could’ve been, it could’ve happened on any of their watches, it did happen on one of their watches. They were going to miss things. But they had to tell each other if they were going to give Elmer the best chance they could. They couldn’t let shame get in the way. She and Jim had regularly shared how bad they felt for not giving Elmer a sibling, for having him so late in life, both nearly forty, and for how long it took for Jim to work up to middle management, for Chrissy to finish her Masters in Healthcare Administration, for them to feel stable, the economy so bad when they graduated, all those bailouts going to yacht-owners. But their old cycle of self-blame had been one they shouldered together. For the first time in a while, she felt alone.

Jim spent way too much of the night on social media: stories about children with special needs running out, getting hurt, eating things they shouldn’t. It led to one couple getting divorced and then it was threads of infidelity and divorce court and the impossible dating scene, so many strangers’ collected nightmares. He returned to the first tab, finished reading another parent’s comment—”…We wouldn’t trade it for anything. Down syndrome is as central to Peyton as any of her other beautiful qualities. There is no Peyton separate from Down syndrome”—and pressed “Upvote” and the tab was still there when he woke, when he got Elmer up and made breakfast, when he decided to take a sick day and give Elmer his undivided attention. He took the next day too, gave Elmer hours at the park. When the guilt pressed deeper, he took him to their pediatrician, Dr. Alice, who assured him it was a common hematoma, that he was doing fine, that Jim and Chrissy were doing all they could to nurture and care for him and he thought he must’ve looked as ashamed as he felt and he tried to relax his face, singing songs with Elmer all the way home until they found Karlie’s Camaro on the side of their road with the hood open.

He felt something adjacent to fear. It surprised him. He thought he might’ve been angry about her speeding, or about her telling Chrissy about Elmer to deflect, but he realized he’d projected his own frustrations onto her, that he still hated himself for Elmer getting out. He’d pictured all the worst-case scenarios and had tried to keep them inside to not worry Chrissy. Now, he was strangely grateful that Karlie had seen him, that she’d noticed and cared enough to remember. He parked and hopped out. “Everything alright?”

She scratched her arm with the wings tattoo. “It’s leaking brake fluid,” she said. She showed him the reservoir, the fluid a hair below the MIN line.

“Mind if I look?”

Karlie hoped it’d be quick, didn’t really want Mr. Kovac to bring up what she’d seen, what she’d told Mrs. Kovac. Jim eased down to the pavement. He didn’t know a ton about cars. He did help his roommate replace a brake line once, the year before he proposed to Chrissy. Karlie would probably learn more about engines in the next six months than he’d learned in his forty-four years, he thought, picturing her pouring over every bolt and hose. But Karlie wasn’t interested in any of that. She got indigestion whenever she drove it and could never bring herself to pick up drive thru. She already knew its KBB value and she hoped to get $20k for it to cover her first year of tuition.

He studied the undercarriage until he found the drip under the rear axle, driver-side. He got a wrench, tried to tighten the connection, then gave her some brake fluid from the garage. “I’d take it to someone who knows more than me.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Hey, I’m really sorry about your dad. He was an idiot for leaving like that.” He wasn’t sure what to say, just wanted to smooth things over, though it was all worse than Karlie had feared. She didn’t want to hear any of this from him. There were things she wanted to hear from her mom and dad. But this was forced. Weird.

“I’ve got to go,” she mustered. She drove home, dumped the orange juice and eggs and brioche she’d got for her mom for whatever party she was throwing to make herself feel better, and then tried to drown her ears with some Laufey and let all the feelings she couldn’t describe just run their course. By the evening, she’d built up the courage to ask her mom why she hadn’t told her sooner about her and Dad’s problems, but when she got downstairs she heard her mom on the phone offering to watch Elmer so the Kovacs could catch up on work the next day and she decided against it, was a little relieved her mom and Mrs. Kovac were still on okay terms after she’d sort of ratted Mr. Kovac out, especially with how fragile marriage bonds felt to her now. Brenda felt good about the call too, like Chrissy still trusted her and her kids, though she still worried about all that Karlie was probably going through with Matthew leaving and couldn’t think of how to bring it up. And Chrissy felt better, like maybe they could still have the community here that they’d hoped for, though she still struggled to look at Jim for longer than a second, had only given him one quick peck of a kiss goodbye in the past few days.

But it was the day after, when she and Jim held each other a bit in the morning, when she was trying to forgive and feel comfortable, that she changed Elmer and found the second bruise, lower on his hip but just as haunting, not twelve hours after she’d picked him up from Brenda’s.

“What is this!” she yelled, a declaration like the ripping of a rope’s last hero thread, and she showed Jim, who didn’t know, who now felt so defeated that even after two days off, completely devoted to Elmer, he couldn’t stop whatever had happened to him, who struggled to speak as Chrissy took Elmer’s hand as gingerly as she could and walked to the front door. She opened it, peered outside, down toward the cul-de-sac. “Okay, Mom?” Elmer asked. His tiny palm pulsed in her hand. He depended on her: she needed to do this.

She marched him down the hill, steamed as she rang the doorbell and waited with no answer, her lower left molar stabbing her clenched jaw. Voices fluted from the half-acre back yard and she marched around to find ten adults with mimosas and toast and eggs benedict, most of them neighbors, Amy included, all of them staring at her and Elmer and she couldn’t throw up a polite smile or wave, nothing. She just stood there.

As soon as she say Chrissy, Brenda felt guilty. She hadn’t really wanted to not invite her. It had just been a lot lately and thought it’d be nice to have a social morning without having to think about the Kovac’s or Karlie speeding or Elmer’s bruise. But she felt bad now, immediately regretted it, and came floating over. “Come join us,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink. Karlie and Trevor are somewhere.” She bent down to Elmer, signed “play” with her thumbs and pinkies.

“Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

Brenda could feel the celestial pull of her guests, already felt bad for interrupting Aaron’s story about losing their IDs on their trip to Vienna. “It’s not the best time. Come sit down.”

Chrissy took Brenda’s arm with both hands. She felt like an id, like she was watching herself. “I need to show you something.”

“Not right now.” Brenda slid her arm out, trying not to let anyone see.

“What did you do with Elmer yesterday?”

Amy heard the name, said “This’ll just be a minute,” to the party and walked over as Elmer scampered to the grass.

“We were here. I watched him,” Brenda said as summer classes and the mortgage and Trevor’s dentist appointment and cavity and all the conversations she hadn’t had with Karlie yet spun like plates around her. She’d given them four hours she didn’t have yesterday, hadn’t she? “You’re welcome,” she said.

“I’m welcome?”

Chrissy hadn’t been sure if she was going to do it, here in front of everyone. They’d always be those people then, wouldn’t they? The crazy parents of the boy with special needs who lifted his shirt in the middle of their newly divorced neighbor’s party, the image of all those splotchy bruises impossible to shake.

“Hey, it’s alright. Let’s go inside,” Amy said, a hand on each shoulder, hoping they’d agree it was the best thing to do, but Chrissy was bracing herself, scanning the yard for Elmer, ready to fight for him and be his voice. How much pain he must’ve felt with no one to tell, to ask for it to stop. It killed her. But he was so quick and all she saw was the terrifying empty green grass. Gone. Aaron pointed at the trees in the back, thinking maybe he should’ve followed, though his bad knee was acting up.

If she could’ve split in two, she would’ve sent one of her after Elmer while the other stayed to address Brenda’s indignation. But she ran into the trees, just a few dozen, a miniature forest, her shoes crunching the brush. She felt so slow in there. At the fence, on the last looming pre-Nixon oak, Elmer was three rungs up on the makeshift ladder, chunks of one-by-four Matthew had nailed in, only one nail each so they shifted sometimes. “Elmer, stop!” she yelled, and Karlie and Trevor, at the top of the single-platform tree house, peered down. “No, Elmer,” Trevor said, scared for his friend, and Karlie reach down, grabbed his soft warm hands that were so triumphantly holding the wood, his grip like a man’s, his giggling infectious. They felt so calming to her, and she briefly forgot how angry she was that Aaron had said someday she’d understand, that she should forgive her father and support her mom, as if any of this had been her responsibility. She’d use it as a segue for her mom, maybe. Anything to get them talking about what mattered, to make the most of what the three of them had.

She held as tight as she could.

The rustling had already erupted before Elmer started to slip. But it was Jim who came first through the brush, who’d eventually followed down the sidewalk to try to support Chrissy and talk to Brenda and get some answers, who’d seen his son sprint into the woods and saw him see the treehouse. He caught Elmer from behind, and almost instantly slipped and fell himself, his foot on a gnarled root slicked from years of being stepped on joyously by children, so many generations of families and friends. Chrissy bent down to help take Elmer, and Jim mistook it for a hug. She didn’t pull away. Elmer loved the way they felt, warm and close, until it was too much for him, like being tangled in a blanket, and he rose to his feet.

Jim studied the knot, a protrusion of the tree roots, all its lifeblood circulating down below, like capillaries, intermingled with the others like an unseen family hidden underground. Inseparable. Later, after they’d apologize to Brenda for interrupting brunch, for almost saying and doing more they would’ve regretted, they’d decide together the knot was probably where the bruise came from, that he’d tried to climb and find Trevor, slipped, and fell on it. They’d decide it was enough for them, and later, over a dinner that led to more dinners and evening fires and easter egg hunts and playdates, Brenda would too, all of them swearing it’d been the knot, though all of them knowing that no one really knew.

And somewhere out there, Matthew was still driving, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain much about himself, where he’d come from or who might still love him, before he found someone with enough time and space in their life, willing to give him a chance.

Joseph Celizic

Joseph Celizic teaches writing at Bowling Green State University. His fiction and creative nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Liberties, Eckleburg, Indiana Review, and North American Review. His fiction has also received an honorable mention in Best American Mystery Stories.