Rory's Truth
Art, Unfinished, and Damaged in Transit
Four houses sit on the south side of Clayton, where it dead ends into what used to be Fladung Junior High, then became an occupational rehab center and now it’s supposed to be a weed dispensary, but the Coming Soon sign has been hanging for so long one of the straight edge skate crews tagged it so it’s completely unreadable.
All four houses are identical in design, bland attached garage colonials.
You’d have no reason to walk down Clayton unless you lived there or delivered mail there.
If you did you’d notice something.
Three miles west of Clayton, Tobin Wallace stands on the corner of Vathro and Heeler, bumming change and unwanted Taco Bell from drivers stuck at the light.
Tobin lost his right arm, so his cardboard sign is usually taped to the streetlight.
Please Help, it says.
And underneath that it says “Thanks.”
On the cardboard there’s a design. A drawing.
Most people don’t pay attention to the sign, or to Tobin.
In that world on the fringes, in those places most Americans never visit, people think Tobin is an idiot for not claiming to be a veteran.
“You make five times the money. Maybe ten. And forget thank you. Tell ‘em God Bless.”
“You don’t know,” Tobin tells them “how much money I make.”
He’s correct, and so are they.
But he won’t lie and say he’s a vet, lost his arm in the war, whatever war.
He won’t say God Bless, because he doesn’t believe God will bless them for giving him a dollar or a cold quesadilla.
Drivers ask him how he lost his arm.
His hobby, if he has one, is never repeating the same answer in one day.
***
Over on Clayton the regular mail carrier has noticed.
So have a few delivery drivers and a pack of Jehovah’s witnesses.
The first three houses have a painting on the bay window. They’re abstract, what one might call geometric, and exactly identical.
A young lady, Rory, who lives in the corner house painted the windows.
She did her own family’s window first, without permission.
She did the Roth’s window next door, without permission.
The Roths knew Rory, knew that she was a sweet person who didn’t speak, liked to draw, wouldn’t trick or treat but liked costumed neighbors to bring candy to her porch, wouldn’t ride a bike but pedaled one on a kickstand often.
They kept the painting, happily, on their bay window.
Next to the Roth’s is the Stomers.
They have a niece on the spectrum. They told Rory’s mom that she was welcome to paint their bay window any time.
“That’s very kind,” Monique Deckler told them, “but I’m not sure it works that way in her head.”
The Stomers came home from Easter Mass three weeks later to find their bay window painted.
The fourth house, next to the Stomers…
Lots of neighborhoods have these houses. Someone buys it and then they foreclose, and another person buys it as their first rental, but they don’t really know how to screen applicants.
It’s not “ The Roth’s” or “ The Deckler’s” or “ The Stomer’s.”
It’s “The rental,” or “THE house,” or “The Problem.”
There’s noise, and junk in the yard, and the grass grows too long, and there’s parties, if you can call them that, and sometimes the cops come, though Emily Stomer swears she only called once, when she heard a gunshot.
The house has a bay window, just like the others.
***
Tobin Wallace has just accepted four dollars and a pamphlet called The Truth About Recovery from a woman in a blue car with cracked windshield.
She didn’t ask how Tobin lost his arm, but the last person who did got told that a school bus he was on rolled into a gorge when he was growing up in North Carolina.
Tobin’s not sure if they have gorges in North Carolina, because he didn’t grow up there, he’s never been there, and he’s never once told the truth about his arm to a motorist who asked. It’s none of their business.
He doesn’t have a drug problem either, lady, thank you very much.
Tobin wasn’t exactly honest in the ER, or with the surgeon who eventually amputated his mangled limb.
They prescribed him pain killers, and counseling, but he didn’t finish either.
Tobin Wallace could be forgiven for having a drug problem, but he doesn’t. He has other problems of various descriptions: anger, impetuousness, and some rather creative sexual proclivities that have led to other problems. All of those predated the missing limb.
***
Monique Deckler paints landscapes. Windswept shores that in her head are in New England and Nova Scotia. Lone fisherman in small boats on lakes that exist in her mind.
Her paintings hang in dentist’s offices, and residential bathrooms and in the waiting room of the doctor who first told her her daughter Dolores Margaret “Rory” Deckler was autistic.
Monique drinks wine when she paints, and takes maybe enough Xanax for an entire book club.
Steve is away “on business” a lot, and Monique is correct in her assumption that part of the business involves the 29 year old graphic designer with a jewel in her upper lip big enough to clog a sink.
Rory sometimes wanders. She has her own bucket of paint brushes and a set of watercolors and acrylics. She won’t paint on paper or canvas, just the basement walls or the fridge or Steve’s soccer club windbreaker.
After she painted the Roth’s window, Monique bought windows from an architectural reclamation studio on Broad.
Rory ignored them. They sat in the basement, on an angle.
Monique painted one of the frames Key Lime green, as far as she could tell, her daughter’s favorite color.
Nothing.
Deep into the silvery white of an ice dam sliding up on a lighthouse, Monique considered having someone frame the windows in the exact frames that existed on her and her neighbors bay windows.
Rory had wandered off with her bucket of brushes.
Kneeling in the dirt underneath the bay window of the fourth house from the corner, breeze ripping through the scraggly, browning fir trees on the north side of Clayton, Rory is painting the window of The House. The Rental. The Eyesore.
Rory concentrates, Rory is in a place of peace in her own head.
Then there is movement behind the glass. It is a type of movement that she has never seen in her own home.
Rory continues to paint the window.
As her brush slides horizontally across the window, she hears a noise she doesn’t like. The noise gets louder and she stops painting, holding her brush in place, waiting for the noise to stop. Before the noise stops she sees things that are unnatural to her, and do not have an explanation in her head.
In moments, she has gone from peace to terror. She does not understand what is happening, she only understands that she never wanted to see it.
She does not scream, because she doesn’t know what a scream is or what a scream does.
Rory clenches her teeth and runs toward the place where she sleeps.
When she sees her mother she is glad, but she cries. She sobs. She convulses. She does not know what she saw, she does not know the people she saw and the things she saw will not follow her.
The Stomers mentioned to Monique that Rory painted the rental house window, but the design is different than the others. She left her brushes and paints behind and the Stomers brought them over.
Monique walks over to the rental and looks at the window. The design is not different. It’s just incomplete. The part that is finished is identical to the other three.
Monique knows her daughter was scared off.
She knocks on the door because she’d like to know why. No one answers.
***
Tobin Wallace is at his corner, up thirty four bucks for the day, some change and half a sub from Cowney’s, smothered in onions. He hates onions.
In the three years he has been bumming change here, he has probably discarded three pounds of sliced onions and a gallon of scraped off mayonnaise.
A woman pulls up to the light and hands him two dollars. He leans down to thank the woman. She has a girl in her early twenties in the car with her. The girl looks at him. There is something different about her, her eyes… Tobin thinks she is going to ask him what happened to his arm.
He decides he will tell her that he had a parachuting accident.Recreational, not military, he would never lie about being in the military.
The girl does not ask. The light turns green and they drive away.
As Monique and Rory Deckler pull away from the light, Rory Deckler begins to scream. Monique has never heard her daughter scream.
She asks “what’s wrong?” knowing that her daughter is incapable of telling her exactly what’s wrong.
Rory Deckler knows how Tobin Wallace lost his arm. She’ll never tell, because she cannot.
*******
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I truly loved that. Started it when I shoulda gone to sleep . Not only did it hold
My attention tight, I may not be sleeping for awhile.
That is, in fact, a compliment.
"He won’t say God Bless, because he doesn’t believe God will bless them for giving him a dollar or a cold quesadilla." That right there, fiction boy. :)