DS Levy
My wife’s artsy friends came over for a Christmas party, and while they were hanging around the island in our kitchen, laughing and helping themselves to Laurie’s famous wassail from her mother’s antique punch bowl, I walked into our living room and saw the kid filching one of our nativity figurines. Laurie had inherited the set from her great-great-grandmother, Analiese, from Alsace-Lorraine. I didn’t know what to say and was pretty sure the kid hadn’t seen me. I did, however, see him stuff it in his pocket, then go into the guest bathroom and close the door. I went over to our nativity. Sure enough, no Mary.
I wandered back into the kitchen and saw Laurie ladling herself another cup of wassail. She was standing next to the kid’s mother. The two of them always seemed to have serious chats, mostly about literature, though they were laughing now, and when the woman tipped her head back, I saw her perfect white teeth, which I’d never noticed before.
Her name was Carlotta Espinoza, one of Spain’s up and coming disabled poets, and a Guest Poet at my wife’s college for the year. She was all Laurie ever talked about—Carlotta this, Carlotta that. The woman didn’t look that young to me, but Laurie explained that in writing, “young” didn’t necessarily mean age, but rather the stage of a writer’s career. The poet, she’d said, was blind from an illness she’d gotten as a child. She’d told Laurie she could only see hazy outlines, but the world wasn’t completely dark to her. I had watched her off and on and noticed that she seemed to manage pretty well. The only thing was, when she talked to you, she never made eye contact, always looked off to the side.
Carlotta’s son, Pages, was ten years old and had black hair and dark eyes that, like his mother’s, darted around the room, though he wasn’t blind.
“He’s shy,” my wife whispered in the closet—we were getting more paper plates. “And it’s Páginas, or PAH-hayss, not Pages.”
“Really? I thought, you know, since his mother’s a poet.”
“Here,” she said, handing me a package of paper plates.
It was then I’d considered telling Laurie what I’d seen. But she was having such a good time, and I knew that if I’d mentioned the small theft, she’d get upset at me—as if I were the one who’d done something wrong.
We went back into the kitchen and Laurie decided to stiffen her bowl of Christmas cheer with a whole bottle of brandy. The glasses were dainty, and after a while, she laughed and said, “Fuck this,” and pulled out a stack of plastic disposable tumblers. After that, the party amped up, voices grew loud and brash.
Laurie had taught Freshman Comp at the regional college for ten years, as long as we’d been married. At first, she worked for peanuts, doing it “because she loved the challenge.” Then, a few years later, the department chair gave her an associate’s position, which included a small windowless office, committee work, and better pay.
Bev, from the Spanish department, began to recite a poem in English, which she handed off to Carlotta to finish. The room hushed. All eyes turned to the guest of honor, who humbly set her tumbler down, bowed her head, then lifted her face up to the overhead LED light over our island. Her face glowed. She continued the poem in Spanish, which only a few understood, and when she finished, everyone said, “Ah,” and “Yes,” and Laurie reached over and touched her arm and said, “That was so beautiful.”
Meanwhile, I hadn’t seen the kid come back and wondered what else his sticky little fingers had found. I stepped back and eased my way into the hallway, then slipped into the den, where I saw him touching my dad’s old Army pocketknife, and just before he slipped it into his front pocket, I cleared my throat.
He jumped.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The way he talked. If I said “midget,” Laurie would nail me in a second, but years ago I knew a midget, Lance, at the gas station, and when this kid talked, he reminded me of Lance.
“The knife and nativity figurine,” I said.
The kid’s eyes traveled the room—back and forth, up and down. “You know I’m blind, don’t you?”
The little shit.
“No, you’re not.”
“Am too.”
During parties, I always kept a set of keys in my pocket. I don’t know why, I just did. I pulled them out and hurled them at the boy. He reached out, caught them before he got hit.
“Pages,” I said.
“It’s Páginas.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your name, give me the shit back.”
Reluctantly, he took our Mary and the knife out of his pockets and tossed them on the couch. I picked them up and followed him down the hallway into the kitchen, where he slid up next to his mom, crying.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” She stroked his head, stared at the ceiling.
“I don’t feel good. I want to go home.”
Carlotta turned her skyward gaze to Laurie, who looked disappointed, but patted Carlotta on the shoulder. Bev, who’d brought the guest of honor and her kid, took a last swig of her drink, and got their coats. Laurie escorted them to the front door, and I tagged behind. Then Bev went to get the car, and my wife and Carlotta embraced, and the kid looked at me with an impish grin, grabbing a cheap coaster off the sideboard and slipping it into his pocket.
I let the little fucker go.
After they left, Laurie turned solemn. It was like she couldn’t wait for the others to leave. The party, over.
I don’t know why I never said anything to her about the kid. When we were cleaning up, she was quiet as she filled the dishwasher, and then said she was too tired and would clean up later. I watched her trudge out of the kitchen. While she turned in for the night, I cleaned up the rest so she wouldn’t have to in the morning.
After that evening, Laurie rarely mentioned Carlotta. I’d have to bring her name up, and even then, my wife only said a few obligatory things, as if she didn’t really want to talk about her. And Carlotta never came back to our house again. But I knew that Laurie was always texting with someone, a sort of desperate texting, and I often wondered if it was with Carlotta, which seemed odd, considering her blindness, but what did I know about disabilities?
By the end of the spring semester, the guest residency over, Carlotta and her son flew back to Spain one cold, rainy day. My wife, who’d been busy studying Spanish all that semester, drove them to the airport.
A month later, she told me she’d booked a flight to Spain. She was going over to visit Carlotta and her son. She said the timing was right—the decision had been made hastily due to ticket prices and the exchange rate.
I watched her pack her bags, a suitcase and a carry-on. She seemed excited, as if she had just received good news. And that seemed kind of odd to me since she’d always claimed to have a fear of flying. But people change, I thought, and if she really wanted to go visit her friend, maybe this trip would help her get over a fear, and that would be good in the long run. I pressed her about arrival and departure times. But she was vague, as if she hadn’t really considered such details, and I chalked that up to her excitement.
That next morning, I drove her to the airport. She told me not to bother parking, just to pull up in front of the terminal building. The airport was busy. I grabbed her bags out of the trunk and offered to grab a luggage cart, but she insisted she could get both bags on her own.
We stood under the terminal awning, cars picking up passengers and dropping them off. The overhead lights were so bright it felt as if we were standing under a spotlight.
“Well,” she said, looking down.
“Well,” I said.
Then I leaned over to kiss her good-bye. Our lips brushed, and I pulled back and looked into her eyes. That’s when I knew, she was never coming back.
DS Levy lives in the Midwest. Her fiction has appeared in many journals and has received Pushcart and Best Microfiction nominations. She has had work included in Wigleaf‘s Top 50 2021, and Long List 2022. She was a finalist in the 2022 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award at The Florida Review.