Claiming a Body

The woman’s boyfriend agreed to go camping despite being called Needledick by her son. 

Driving across the Iowa plains, the woman broke their silence with stories of her high school ski trips. She recounted bumming a waiter’s weed and breaking her thumb in a collision with a ski instructor. She feathered a hand over her boyfriend’s neck and laughed.

Her son turned toward the window and slipped in his earbuds, making it clear he wouldn't be asked to ski or rock climb or alpine slide or any other outdoor activity she had in mind.

The next day at the campsite, they sat in collapsible chairs and ate eggs from foil pouches among the milkweed and lupine. They watched the sunrise without a word. Finally, her son said he’d like to see the river.

“Stay close,” she said. There were no other campers around, but last night the far off bawl of an animal had a quality like human weeping. And maybe the snap of branches and the pawing of earth meant a bear had been foraging nearby. She handed him bear spray and said to stay within 300 yards. 

The trailhead was beautiful, hemmed with the blinding bones of white aspen before disappearing toward the river.

 “He’ll get a kick out of it.” The boyfriend said this without conviction. “It might be fun to squeeze in a quickie”. He already had a hand under her shirt. Prior to the boyfriend, the woman had been celibate for a year. Since they’d discovered each other’s kinks, her desire had become unbearable.

An hour later, her son stumbled into camp, his cheeks smeared with dirt, his lips fluttering soundlessly. He'd uncapped the bear spray but hadn’t deployed it, or at least there were no capsaicin burns. She thought, thank god. But when she zipped his hoodie and their eyes met, she wanted to tear away her own skin. 

He said, “There's a sick guy in the woods.” His description centered on a foot, sweat pants, and “A horrible face”. The woman freaked. Was the face chewed by animals? Were the eyes torn open, the sockets reduced to meat? Had her son seen down through muscle to bone?

The boyfriend would go look. 

When he returned, he mumbled, “maybe the guy is passed out.” But his eyes were wide and unnaturally white.

“We’re calling the police,” she said.

The boyfriend dialed immediately, but with the phone to his ear, he sounded nervous, like he needed the officer’s reassurance. His neediness rankled the woman, since her son was now shivering and crying. 

When the police arrived, she held the boy’s reeking body close, and inhaled the sharpness of weeds and sweat. His bones seemed to melt and his rubbery arms slackened their hold around her waist. As the questions wore on, he wound down to monosyllables. She wanted to cram a hiking pole into the cop’s mouth, because with each answer her son retreated, his eyes unfocusing until he’d all but disappeared. 

The boyfriend brooded as they drove, and she sat in back, holding her son’s hand as he stared out the window. They passed the bright plus signs of dispensaries, and she wondered if a pot brownie would be okay for a nine-year-old. What a thought! She was such an asshole. Her feelings of inadequacy returned, the same self-loathing she’d experienced with her miscarriages, and she braced for the inevitable waves of emotional reflection, like an autopsy she knew would last months. 

 

At home, the boyfriend sat them on the couch. Here came all the clever ideas! He said he’d watched tons of forensic documentaries. He crouched forward, raised his hand, and sliced the air like a coach. He said hundreds of bodies go unclaimed for years. “People hike right by them in the woods. Lakes and ponds are filled with corpses, limbs inches from our legs as we’re swimming around on Fourth of July or Memorial Day or whatnot.” 

“God. We swim right over them,” said the boy.

The boyfriend was so sincere. But the woman gave him a look like--where is this going? He went on, “This guy’s family will get to see him again. They’ll have a service. They’ll bury him. You’re a hero.”

The woman willed him to stop talking. She wanted to grab a pillow and scream into it, until the reverberations shot the feathers and dust and detritus out the other side. She wanted to shatter the windows with her rage.  

 

The woman and her son were in a Walgreens shopping for allergy medicine and trying be normal. But her son was staring, eyes unfocused, at what? Maybe razors. Maybe adult diapers.

“What's up?” she whispered.

“Do you believe that hero shit?” 

Ignoring the word “shit”, she said, “sure”.

He half-smiled and said to the nearest guy in a red smock. “I'm a hero.” 

“Okay,” said the employee.

For weeks the son cursed at her and curled up on her bedroom floor whenever she slept alone. In the morning, he recounted detailed nightmares of dismemberment, drowning, a plane crashing into the side of their house, a man beating her to death in an alley. The scenarios felt like TV plots, but her son’s voice broke with each unburdening, and it bothered her that drama had become his reality. She missed the unremarkable days they passed together, before someone bludgeoned a man near his tent. 

One night, he was sitting up in his sleeping bag in the center of the floor. He asked how long it took a person to “fall apart”. The neighbor kid had a Cop Dad, and he said the weeds surrounding a corpse eventually absorbed trace amounts of blood, then secreted them out again in the cells of the leaves. “That’s why they use the dogs.” He said, “to find the scent even when animals pick the bones clean.”

“That’s unhelpful,” she said.

“I knew you'd say that.” He laid down again and pulled the zipper to his chin, cocooning himself in the nylon bag. “We’re always alone,” he said. “Other people have good advice, you know.”

She got out of bed and sat on the cool floor beside him.

In the light from the hallway, her son blinked slowly. He told her that Cop Dad found the name of the victim “Jay Fleming” in a database. “He was an only child,” said the boy. 

He repeated the name Jay four times like a ritual. “Do you think Jay’s soul hovered over our tents that night?” 

“Not sure I believe in a soul, Muffin,” she said.

“Aren't you afraid of going to hell?”

“Not at all,” she said.

“I am,” said the boy.

“Jesus. That’s dark,” she said. “If you went to hell, I’d rescue you.” 

“Mom,” he said. His voice was high, melting years from his life. Clearly, he pictured himself roasting in the flames of hell, skin blistering in the otherworldly heat.

She wished she could flog herself right there. She got back into bed and stared at the ceiling. 

Every night for a week, the woman handed him a Benadryl and he took it with milk. The boyfriend thought this was wrong. The woman reminded him he didn’t have children. Later, she would apologize for shouting. 

He said, “Women have told me worse.” 

She slammed the cabinet door in answer. 

A few nights of sleep made the boy less zombie-like. His energy returned and he began riding his bike obsessively--to the park, to play laser tag, to the green belt by the river. Sometimes the neighbor kid with frothy red hair and the cop for a father rode beside him. But often he would take off alone on Saturday mornings, and not return until dinner, his tires caked with mud. 

 

The boy sat at the kitchen table writing a school research paper he’d started with the Cop Dad. He told the woman and the boyfriend to “screw off” when they asked why. But then, as if unable to contain himself any longer, the boy excitedly told them the killer’s motive had been a Toyota Camry and seven hundred dollars. 

He used words like “sicko” and “scumbag” that the women felt sure came from the Cop Dad, and these black and white summaries of how people moved through the world seemed to make him both giddy and aggressive, and it pissed the woman off. 

A teacher had helped him email Jay Fleming’s family, and the family responded with their “deepest appreciation”. They even mailed Jay’s old belt buckle which read “TEXAS to the BONE” and the son began wearing it every day and saying Jay was a part of him now. 

“Disturbing,” the boyfriend called it. He’d moved a file box of clothes into the woman’s closet and now felt he had the right to an opinion. When she had opened the accordion doors, it stared at her like a deflated pair of forgotten underwear and she said “When did you get here?”

She found the boyfriend fixing the chain on the garage door. She looked up at him perched on the ladder. Each torque of the wrench revealed his soft white stomach and what looked like matted fur, which she found strangely appealing, and she thought of how he’d admitted to liking wax the night before, and that the trade off of control felt like a kind of intimacy she hadn’t known, maybe since college. For a moment she was grateful he was there.

The boyfriend noticed her smile, climbed down, and hugged her. He whispered that he wasn’t a religious man, but that her son should talk to someone, a pastor or long-time friend. She noticed he stopped short of saying a shrink, and she appreciated that. She hugged him back, letting her body release in his arms.

An old Chevy pulled into the drive, and they both turned to watch her son jump out. He was crying. 

The driver was 40-something, dressed in obscenely short cut-offs and a filthy sweatshirt. He gave her a look like Lady, don't let your son ride home with a stranger.  He popped the hatchback, pulled out a mangled bike, and handed it to the boyfriend. “I didn’t do this.” He directed his statement to the man and climbed back into his Chevy. 

In the garage, they inspected the bike. 

The son said it was a “piece of shit”. 

The boyfriend touched the broken safety mirror. She’d been meaning to get it fixed, and gave the boyfriend a warning look about judging her. She held the boy.

The boy told them a truck had nearly hit him, and he threw the bike off an overpass. 

“Was anyone hurt?” said the boyfriend.

“Me!” said the boy. “I am hurt.” 

The woman’s heart thundered in her chest, and she imagined walking slowly over the sloping shale bottom of a lake, her chin barely above water, a man clawing at the soles of her feet.

 

 

At Christmas, the boyfriend floated the idea of a new bike for her son, but she bought him an iPhone instead. The boyfriend found the new phone hidden in a bag of old wrapping paper and a stack of forgotten holiday cards from ex-boyfriends. She had been meaning to throw the cards away. 

He held out the bag and raised an eyebrow. 

She said, “I have a past. Don’t expect an explanation.”  

He shrugged and went to the fridge for a beer.

The woman wrapped the iPhone in bright red paper and gave it to her son early. She said if someone threatened him--point, shoot, record, all of the above. The boy looked satisfied and slipped it into his pocket like a talisman.

The boyfriend offered to drive him to school, and they frequently left at dusk, and she watched them from the front window.

When she first got the photos of a used condom, a broken tail light, and a thumb-shaped bruise at the base of a girl’s neck, she thought her son’s phone was stolen. Likely the images were taken during the commute or free period or just out a classroom window. But they seemed to be telegraphing a message she couldn’t understand. 

Her boyfriend said not to read too much into it. He was being “artsy.” Although the condom thing “was odd”, he had “seen far worse”. Once one of the boyfriend’s coworker brought in pictures of his passed out naked girlfriend. “That’s the shit a sociopath does,” said the boyfriend.

How did he know the mind of a sociopath?

Half-submerged in her bath, stomach and thighs slick islands, the mother replayed the boyfriend’s comment, and found new ways to detect violence in its subtext. 

When her son was younger everything was solved by plastic gates and outlet covers and nanny cams and oven locks and cordless shades. What if they eliminated everything that wasn’t just the two of them? What if they could create an environment where everything was known and anonymous bodies didn’t just float around in water waiting to be found?

In just her bathrobe, she grabbed a beer from the fridge, and walked outside to the porch swing and threw her body down, feeling as if she were tumbling into a ravine.

She sniffed a little, but she wouldn’t cry.

“He’s just commenting on the shit he finds deep,” said the boyfriend. He sipped his beer.

She was aware of the boyfriend’s heat, his weight on the swing, and she scooted to the opposite side and lay her head against the chain, allowing them to swing slowly to rest. “We could have had him stay in our tent,” she said.

Before the camping trip, her son had argued so often for his own tent that she’d come to hate the words “tent” and “gross”, which felt like a commentary on her as a person, an indictment of her roles beyond motherhood. But, ultimately, she gave him his own space. They’d bought an old Coleman tent from the Salvation Army, and it had glowed a beautiful green from a battery powered lantern, and framed the strange silhouette of his body as he watched a movie on the iPad, while yards away a man beat a stranger to death with a Maglite and left his devastated body in the marl of riverbank and weeds. 

“He’ll work past it. He’s seen bloodier things on TV,” said the boyfriend. 

“You think I shelter him?” She imagined how the boyfriend would parent based on months of comments. He used words like “honest” and “responsible”. He’d find a horseback riding camp or archery or football or field hockey. He’d have an answer. He’d definitely teach him to fix ham radios or gut deer or any of the other survival skills he embraced for the coming apocalypse which he believed was near. She appreciated that he was skeptical about god and hell, and that he didn’t see their intimate roles as fixed. But, still, he was an outsider.

“Don’t you shelter him?” he asked. “I feel like you’ve said this about yourself.”

Without a word, she went inside to lay down. She spread out on her bed, her hands and feet stretched to the corners. She thought about the dead man’s name in her son’s mouth. She really hated the dead man.

 

 

For a month, the boy flooded her phone with pictures--a van packed with trash, a dead cat, another boy’s purpled knuckles, two of them split. They came in intervals every three hours, just as the last ones faded from her mind. At night, the boy would ask if she’d seen them, and they’d exchanged a look that said she had. That was all they needed to say.

For a month, she weighed the contents of the file box in her closet. She tilted it, feeling the shift of the boyfriend’s clothing, but never opened it. So she could never decide if it was actually lighter, and she said nothing about it.

One night after sex, the boyfriend un-cuffed her and kissed her wrists, and for a while they made out, but then she kept feeling like she would drift off. She curled away from him in the bed. 

He traced the curve of her torso with his fingertip, performing on her what he liked best, to be touched in a way that was unsettling, yet tender. It was a touch that required her full acceptance, and she understood it had the type of discomfort that reminded one of being alive. He said, “It’s going to be alright.” 

It wasn’t. How could she expect him to understand? She was going to have to be better, stronger, more protective, ruthless even. She didn’t have the luxury of believing in ghosts or villains because all her son’s life was a negotiation, and by extension so was hers. 

She would tell him it was over, tomorrow. 

She thought her boyfriend was asleep when he said. “I don’t suppose you copied the keys?”

For a moment, she thought he meant the handcuffs, but realized he wanted keys to their house. 

“Oh right. I’ll do it tomorrow,” she said.

He got up from the bed to have a cigarette and did not return. She found him on the couch the next morning. He was sprawled over the cushions, a man swimming through their living room, half-clothed, mouth open.

Her son stood beside him looking worried. He extended his finger and gently poked the boyfriend’s bare shoulder. “He’s okay, right?” he asked.

They watched the boyfriend’s chest rising and falling, as the woman sipped her coffee. “I think so,” she said.

“Yeah. He doesn’t look like Jay did,” he said. “Still. It was better with just us.”

“Right,” said the woman.

She tried to tell herself she didn’t care if the boyfriend left, not at all. That everyone is remade over and over. And this is who they all were today. This was her son. This was her. Complicated, but alive. He could make of that what he wanted.