Vital Signs

“Come with me to the store, Ry,” Faye sighed as she shoved a crumpled tote bag into his hands—like she used to do with jackets when he was little—stepping over the lasagna volcano’d all over the kitchen floor, still steaming archipelagos of ricotta and squiggly noodles. Had the dinner she made not dropped, had some of the neighborhood kids been over when it happened, preventing Faye from reacting like some monster, Ryan might’ve protested as he was wont to do. Instead, he packed the bag tighter into his fist, trudged toward the door with all the heaviness of adolescence, and complied. They stepped out onto their stoop into the early evening’s chill, and shut the noise and mess of the house behind them.

The big chain grocery store was three blocks away, the ugly, darkened way. When Faye was inspired at the beginning of the week, she walked the nicer way to the mom-and-pop grocer the other direction, ten blocks away, where the houses were bigger and the sidewalks safer, cleaner. At week’s and pay-periods’ end, or tonight in this case, the ugly way it was.

Faye and Ryan picked up their pace on the second block, Faye tightening her grip on her tote and jacket.

“Don’t talk to any of them,” Faye whispered.

“What? Why would I-?”

“Or don’t listen to them, whatever they say, they’ll say anything for attention.” It was a tick she couldn’t kick, warning him of what he already knew. Letting dumb advice leak out of her, hearing it echo back and cringing. Buckle up. Wash your hands. Be careful!

“Just don’t, please.”

As they stepped over their path’s growing detritus —soggy litter bombs, breadcrumbs from benders, and expelled insides—and ignored the shouting coming from inside one of the parked vehicles or tents they passed, they remained silent, eyes fixed unnaturally forward and down.

Only after the sliding door sealed behind them like a draw bridge, finally bathed in the fluorescent, safe glow of their destination’s well-lit interior with its labeled, homogeneous aisles, did Faye hear herself breathe and speak again. Her voice added to the chorus of singing barcodes and scanned coupons near the registers.

“So. What do you want for dinner then?” Faye initiated, pushing into her burning, reddening palm.

The beeping was not unlike the hymns of vital monitors in Faye’s past life—where the alert fatigue ballooned into banal background noise, where real cries and emergencies were first registered as no more than commercials to be muted—the beeping was omnipresent, and easy enough to tune out.

“I don’t care,” Ry said.

Beep.

Then noticing her forming blisters, he added, “Sorry about the lasagna, Mom.”

The evening's scalded dinner was baked over its allotted time; the set timer ignored for tens of minutes before Faye remembered the forgotten meal baking itself to a crisp.

Beep.

“No, I’m sorry I shouldn’t have yelled like that,” Faye said, dismissing the produce section altogether, her meltdown as well. “I guess I’m glad it gave us this chance to come here together, just us two. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

Ryan shimmied his hair off his face, wringing the tote’s straps.

Faye didn’t tell him he’d rip the bag’s stitching, to stop. Instead, she asked, “So! You want to tell me about this project you’ve been working on?”

“It’s not finished yet.” A no she need not translate as they passed ice cream castles and popsicle fortresses.

“I get that. Well, Mr. Croxall was telling me…” Faye lost her thought, tried instead to remember if the brand of yogurt stacked in front of her had always been spelled that way. Once upon a time, in a past life far, far away, a patient named Darla had asked Faye if she believed Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its label.

“Sure, yeah. I remember those ads when I was younger. The purple grapes sort of pouring out of the basket,” Faye answered, changing the liquid-filled bags dripping into Darla’s stalling circulatory system. Darla’s blood moved slow and blue inside her body, but Darla’s outsides had been morphing blue too. And yellow and green, some splotches purple or brown.

“Exactly,” Darla said. “Except there wasn’t one.”

“One what?” Faye asked, distracted by Darla’s chart.

“The cornucopia. You, along with almost everyone else, remember it wrong. It was only fruit.”

“No way. I could look it up, show you right now!” Faye answered, half in her work voice, half in genuine curiosity what Darla was on about. Faye could have sworn there’d been a basket, or this cornucopia, in the ads she remembered.

Faye should have listened to Darla more.

Years later, removed to this land far, far away from health care and intensive care units, Faye caught herself stuck in an imaginary parachute, struggling. Half her body would be wind-whipped. dangling out into the vastness of her memories and recall of useless props of her life—movie posters and brand labels and childhood imprints and medical jargon—the other half of her tangled and stuck inside the plane she was riding God only knows where, forgetting why she had the pack strapped on at all.

Beep.

Faye had lost what she’d been saying to Ryan in the dairy aisle. For a moment even, she couldn’t recall why she was looking at dozens of yogurt choices after 5pm with her son, nor how he had gotten so tall and grown. Where had it all gone?

“I forgot what I was saying but all I mean is, I’m always here to listen, you know.”

“I know Mom.” Ryan’s parachute was always ready to release, for him to jump free from planes and spaces himself, particularly when forced to be around his family. Faye and the world she’d built for him, brick-by-brick, step-by-step. Failed lasagnas and all.

As they began to turn away from one refrigerated aisle for another, two other shoppers backed up into them without warning.

Beep.

“Sorr—Ryan! Hey!” One of the colliders said. She was young—vaguely familiar-looking to Faye—small and peppy, all middle-parted hair and taut poreless cheeks, clutching a red box of cereal. A classmate of Ryan’s, a neighbor? Sara, Estelle…Nia?

The other collider was her father, apparently. The father knew Ryan, had heard about him of course, then turned his attention to Faye.

“Hey. I’m Sea’s dad, Nate,” he offered his hand, shifting a white cereal box under his left arm. “Nate Paux. Sorry about that, we’re kind of bad with situational awareness, and names apparently! I’m sorry, remind me of your name?”

She took his hand, “I’m Faye, Ryan’s mom. You two go to school together?”

“You’ve met Sea at school before, Mom.”

Faye could see now. The box in Sea’s hands was Fruit Loops.

“Ah no worries Ms. Bailey, it’s been a minute. Yeah! Ryan and I are working on writing the play together – an English/theater project they’re letting us do, we’ve been really busy! It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Sea looked towards Ryan, cheeks tauter, head bobbled in affirmation of her own words.

Wait. No. They were Froot Loops.

Faye grounded herself. “Sure, yeah. Well, we’re just running an emergency dinner errand, gotta get back to feed the littles,” Faye tried, using the word emergency too loosely, she knew, but always as a means to get out of something.

“Right,” Nate said. “Well, good to bump into you two, ha! Ryan, really excited to see how everything turns out with the play, Sea tells me such interesting stuff. Nice to properly meet you, Faye,” and as Nate started to walk away from them, shepherding Sea towards the frosty display of milks and milk adjacent cartons, he added, voice lowered, “At our place, we just grab cereal for our dinner emergencies. Sort of a tradition now, I highly recommend.” And he shook his box of flakes, then walked away.

Ryan said nothing else, just gave Sea an affirming nod before leaving the scene.

Faye took a moment, then looked back at that yogurt label one more time before letting it go.

“Hey, Ry? Sounded like Sea’s dad knew more about the project than we do?” They passed the altars of cat food and disposable aluminum trays without Ryan saying anything.

“Ry? You’re writing a play?”

“What do you want to know, Mom? Sea’s just one of those excited people. But I, I want it to be right before I, like, talk about it or share anything,” he pivoted a yellow box of tea within his reach, and Faye realized he turned the box around, it had been backwards on the shelf.

“No, hey, I get that. And I have no expectations or anything. All I ask is for little stuff here and there. Tiny life updates.” Any vitals would do, kid.

Ryan sighed. He slowed his already sauntering pace, and paused in front of multicolored microwave popcorn boxes as he started speaking.

“We’re working on the ending and a lot still but, it’s a play about school shootings. Well, it’s about a bunch of kids who want to write a play about school shootings and how, you know, messed up it is. And at the end one of the understudies comes to opening night and interrupts the play, jumping onstage and shouting he’s the wolf the kid cried about, and then… Or something. We’re still figuring things out,” and he shrugged, then started walking again, turning towards dry pastas and bags of rice.

Beep.

Faye remembered they came here tonight to get something quick and easy for dinner.

Faye remembered her husband and the little ones back at home.

Faye remembered walking through this grocery store when Ryan was a little one; when he’d been her only little one. She’d layer him up like a star fish in socks, all loose, useless knitted mitts or caps, in some grand effort to keep him safe, to stop the elements from huffing and puffing and making his tiny digits turn cold and blue.

Faye remembered cornucopias and patients walking out of the ICU and reading about crises averted in schools in other lands far, far away. Well. Kind of far, kind of never far enough.

Faye remembered fairytales and fables, always hoping for the best, dreaming of princes and peas and flying carpets. Neverland, or whatever it was called she misremembered. Lying to herself.

Beep.

Faye remembered she was still tethered to the plane, she needed to fly it, or maybe she was the plane, she didn’t know, parenting was weird.

She remembered what Ryan just said.

“That’s, wow, Ry,” she started. “I don’t know what to say.” Faye remembered her stinging hands not from the cold outside or inside the refrigerated sections, but the burnt Pyrex she branded into her flesh before screaming.

He kept walking. “We’re working with Mr. C, obviously, to make sure it’s appropriate and we can get credit for it. We’ll see. Everyone wants to try to use their voice for something, right?”

Faye reached out and rubbed the back of her son’s neck, now almost level with her, before he could wrestle himself away. She believed him, this boy who was telling her something, whether it scared her or not.

“Do you wanna do cereal, Mom? Like Sea? Jack and Mar may get a kick out of it, and Dad won’t care.”

Faye agreed, knowing they already had enough milk at home and carrying a few boxes back will be less laborious than anything else she’d considered. Less heavy. She wondered about walking out with a bag of frozen peas on her hands, then figured the walk home will be cold enough.

They finished beeping their boxes in self-checkout, tapping Faye’s phone, loading their wrinkled totes, and as they left the store, the doors and lights sealing up behind them, they heard someone crying out along their walk home in the now darkened night beneath one of many broken street lamps as the wind nipped their faces.

It wasn’t a true cry, but the societal blight sort of cry everyone had learned not to be alarmed or concerned by. The cry of someone not of sound mind, inebriated, mad for the wrong reasons, lying and acting out for attention. Nonetheless, Faye suggested they avoid their direct, ugly route home and go the longer, scenic way. Having weighed the inconveniences and tote bags, Ryan complied.

“It’s not that much longer and you know, nicer,” Faye said halfway into the walk, her burnt palm filling with hot clear liquid from her insides, her armpits sweating inside her jacket.

There were no crying strangers to avoid, no detritus to watch out for. Without insults and vulgarities hurled like grenades in a house of mirrors, Faye hardly knew which way to focus her gaze. She avoided Ryan, mostly looking forward, switching her bag from one arm to the other arm.

He never readjusted his tote bag, now so small on him it felt inconceivable he once wore it as an apron, covering his whole front.

They neared their block in quiet, all Faye’s unasked questions holding space in her imagination. One escaped, though.

“I just, sorry. One question please?”

“It’s not finished yet we’re—"

“I understand, baby. Just, why the wolf?”

Ryan kept walking towards their home, aglow with house lamps, abuzz with the sound of younger children crashing MagnaTile towers and pushing battery-operated dump trucks and drum sets, her husband presumably parenting them from some seated position, behind his phone.

“You should know why, Mom,” he said with more certainty than shown during their entire outing, its end within reach.

Faye waited, uncertain in his shadow beneath their front door’s light, covered in cobwebs and dust.

Ryan turned around, facing down towards her, in front of their brick house. “It’s always been about blaming the wolf in fairytales, even when it’s the boy who’s been lying the whole time. It starts with the kid, but it ends with the wolf.” He turned back around and began keying in their code to unlock the front door.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Light and noise poured out into the night from inside the entryway, the reality of a lasagna mess she’d have to clean returned to her horizon.

Ryan said something she couldn’t quite make out, before disappearing right in front of her. It sounded like he said, “We blame the wolf, even though it was us. Bang, bang, bad wolf, noone lives happily ever after. The end.” But Faye couldn’t be sure.

She didn’t ask.

Faye walked inside, shut the door behind her, pressing the lock, hearing it bolt them all in safely.

Once secured, Faye’s chute didn’t open, but she fell back into her routine anyway. Her returned to kitchen floor was an even uglier mess of molten, congealed, glass-riddled detritus, now cooled in the disaster‘s aftermath: all that exploded, wasted meat and cheese and vulgarities and a little violence. Even some hidden spinach she thought she’d trick the littles with, of course, now was all darkened and curled, dried up like ash blown across the ground. Black and red splotches tinged into grout.

She didn’t clean or avoid the mess she made, but walked right through it, Faye some giant sea monster stepping over islands like nothing, and fetched the milk from the fridge, calling out towards the living room as she clattered for enough spoons in the drawer, “Dinnertime!”

***

Weeks later, Ryan’s play would be rejected by the school leadership for being something ‘people aren’t ready’ for.

Weeks later, Faye would cut her bare foot on a piece of Pyrex that had rolled under a flimsy baseboard beneath the kitchen cabinets, and somehow huffed and puffed its way out from the insides of her home to prick her, leaving drops of blood all over the floor and glass in the sole of her foot, but, of course, it was nothing to be alarmed by.

Days and weeks and months and years later, someone would blame something terrible on a wolf, or so the story went.

Aesop would add a moral to the end, but, to tell the truth, he never had to make dinner for five plus people, or read the news, or do anything else forced down the ugly way for that matter.