writing project for the day

When it happened, no one wanted to say her name. I think maybe her parents and the news media were the real exceptions.

The pool on Carnegie Avenue was the most popular place for kids in the summer. It was bustling with activity:  a non-stop river of small bodies leaving the water or going back in or exiting for good, with complaints that the water was too cold or not cold enough. That it smelled like pee, that shit had been found floating in it.

“Chlorine kills everything, though!” parents (or more conscientious siblings) would chide in return. I kept my mouth shut. My kids didn’t seem to care too much.

Her name was like a ghost walking on the tiles. No one wanted to say it, but it was on everyone’s mind, like the words “Spanish flu” would have been if it was 1918.

He had been a longtime resident of the apartment complex up the street, I don’t know the name off the top of my head. It wasn’t the nicest, six or seven stories, windows that reminded you of New York slums. It was a favorite of college students and drug addicts, or, as some would say, “same difference.”

I wonder how long it takes for people to notice this stuff. Sometimes you can see one step leading right into another and so forth. Then, after the big event (whatever that happens to be) people are so quick and insightful to pick out the contributing factors.

“This all could have been avoided! He should not have been that close to children!”

Hindsight is 20-20. I had nosebleeds every night for a week.

“On the pillowcase again,” my wife said in the morning, dabbing her fingers over the dried rust colored stains.

“I’m sorry.” I felt like I failed her because I knew she’d never be able to completely wash it out. A silly thing.

“Don’t be. You can’t help it.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s probably the air quality. It’s probably allergies.”

“No it’s not.”

No one wanted to say her name but I went over it at least once a day, like a fine-toothed comb:  Hazel Winters. It was a name that should have belonged to an old woman, a troll of a librarian who never went on dates and owned a herd of unstable felines. The kind that never washed her hair and favored cardigans that went back  to World War Two. But Hazel was 14, barely 5’3 and just on the cusp of becoming a proper woman.

Who knew how far that would go back, now? Her parents pulled her out of school; my kids said she never came out of the house and if you stood outside her front lawn long enough, you could see her figure (like a specter) standing sadly at the window, watching everyone outside with, what one could imagine, were big innocent eyes. The eyes of a doe framed in traffic.

I watched my kids sleep for a while. I couldn’t sleep myself. I put my hand on my knee and rested my chin in my palm.

“Dad? You gonna be all right?”

I nodded, respectfully and silently. Like I’ve seen better, bigger men do in films.

“In time I’ll be fine.” But I looked into their faces and thought about all the times I had turned my back to them at the pool. Or the supermarket. Or even just on the way to school. I couldn’t be everywhere at once, no. On some level, though, some level I didn’t understand, I was thoroughly ashamed of myself.

I walked past Hazel’s house, once. For myself. I felt the blood sliding down my nostrils.  I apologized to air and shadows.